Books Books Press imprint: 2592 books
Muslims in Central Asia
Expressions of Identity and Change
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Central Asia is distinctive in its role as a frontier region in which a unique diversity of cultural, religious, and political traditions exist. This collection of essays by expert scholars in a range of disciplines focuses on the formation of ethnic, religious, and national identities in Muslim societies...
The Brain's Body
Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics
Language: English
Release Date: January 28, 2016
In The Brain's Body Victoria Pitts-Taylor brings feminist and critical theory to bear on new development in neuroscience to demonstrate how power and inequality are materially and symbolically entangled with neurobiological bodies. Pitts-Taylor is interested in how the brain interacts with and is...
Parallax Visions
Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations at the End of the Century
Language: English
Release Date: May 4, 1999
In a work that synthesizes crucial developments in international relations at the close of the twentieth century, Bruce Cumings—a leading historian of contemporary East Asia—provides a nuanced understanding of how the United States has loomed over the modern history and culture of East Asia. By...
Who Killed John Clayton?
Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861-1893
Language: English
Release Date: February 16, 1998
In 1888 a group of armed and masked Democrats stole a ballot box from a small town in Conway County, Arkansas. The box contained most of the county’s black Republican votes, thereby assuring defeat for candidate John Clayton in a close race for the U.S. Congress. Days after he announced he would...
Working Out Egypt
Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2011
Working Out Egypt is both a rich cultural history of the formation of an Egyptian national subject in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth and a compelling critique of modern Middle Eastern historiography. Wilson Chacko Jacob describes how Egyptian men of a class akin to the cultural bourgeoisie...
by Devorah Heitner
Language: English
Release Date: June 12, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: June 12, 2013
In Black Power TV, Devorah Heitner chronicles the emergence of Black public affairs television starting in 1968. She examines two local shows, New York's Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant and Boston's Say Brother, and the national programs Soul! and Black Journal. These shows offered viewers radical and innovative...
Inherent Vice
Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright
Language: English
Release Date: May 28, 2009
In an age of digital technology and renewed anxiety about media piracy, Inherent Vice revisits the recent analog past with an eye-opening exploration of the aesthetic and legal innovations of home video. Analog videotape was introduced to consumers as a blank format, essentially as a bootleg technology,...
Parables for the Virtual
Movement, Affect, Sensation
Language: English
Release Date: April 9, 2002
Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian...
Social Choreography
Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement
Language: English
Release Date: April 8, 2005
Through the concept of “social choreography” Andrew Hewitt demonstrates how choreography has served not only as metaphor for modernity but also as a structuring blueprint for thinking about and shaping modern social organization. Bringing dance history and critical theory together, he shows that...
Utopia Limited
The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern
Language: English
Release Date: May 10, 2004
Utopia Limited is an original, engaging account of how postmodernism emerged from the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Marianne DeKoven argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the...
Essay on Exoticism
An Aesthetics of Diversity
Language: English
Release Date: January 3, 2002
The “Other”—source of fear and fascination; emblem of difference demonized and romanticized. Theories of alterity and cultural diversity abound in the contemporary academic landscape. Victor Segalen’s early attempt to theorize the exotic is a crucial reference point for all discussions of...
Belated Travelers
Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution
Language: English
Release Date: August 12, 1994
In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad offers a compelling cultural critique of nineteenth-century travel writing and its dynamic function in European colonialism. Arriving too late to the Orient, at a time when tourism and colonialism had already turned the exotic into the familiar, late nineteenth-century...
Mutual Misunderstanding
Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation
Language: English
Release Date: August 13, 1992
Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand...
The Insubordination of Signs
Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis
Language: English
Release Date: March 23, 2004
Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile’s neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), and she has continued...