bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gendering Spatial Alterity
Authors: Davis Coralynn V.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the meaning of forests in Maithil women's tales. An examination of Maithil women's stories reveals that while forests and jungles represent a form of alterity to the settlement (village, city, kingdom, etc.) for both men and women, the quality of this alterity is not identical for the two genders. From a woman-centered perspective, the alterity to the settlement produced by the forest/jungle is a complex one that operates somewhat differently than it would from a male-centered perspective, particularly with respect to issues of mobility, access, and sexuality. The potential dangers and opportunities of the forest also take a particularly gendered cast in Maithil women's tales.
Jean Toomer
Authors: Foley Barbara
Published: May 2017

The 1923 publication of Cane established Jean Toomer as a modernist master and one of the key literary figures of the emerging Harlem Renaissance. Though critics and biographers alike have praised his artistic experimentation and unflinching eyewitness portraits of Jim Crow violence, few seem to recognize how much Toomer's interest in class struggle, catalyzed by the Russian Revolution and the post-World War I radical upsurge, situate his masterwork in its immediate historical context. This book explores Toomer's political and intellectual connections with socialism, the New Negro movement, and the project of Young America. Examining his rarely scrutinized early creative and journalistic writings, as well as unpublished versions of his autobiography, the book recreates the complex and contradictory consciousness that produced Cane. The book's discussion of political repression runs parallel with a portrait of repression on a personal level. Examining family secrets heretofore unexplored in Toomer scholarship, the book traces their sporadic surfacing in Cane. Toomer's text, the book argues, exhibits a political unconscious that is at once public and private.
Contiguous
Authors: Halle Randall
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores German–Polish film relations. World War II created a caesura between Germany and Poland. For years, the complex connectivity that existed in the region was broken and instead dissociation characterized relations. The chapter examines the tentative conciliation of the two regions, focusing on documentary film. It begins with the work of a few documentarists who headed east at the time of the Wende, the moment of the collapse of the East Block. In bucking trends and heading east they captured images that ultimately speak more to the future of Europe. They not only documented important moments of “first contact,” they literally envisioned relationships that are still developing today.
Interzone Dis/continuous
Authors: Halle Randall
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes how the German–Polish border became a new object of filmic representation and investigation. Subsequently, this space has become a regular region of cinematic exploration, and the contacts that began during this period have led to an expansion of Polish–German coproductions in general. The chapter argues that borders are first ideational before they are spatial geographical, demonstrating how the mobility of the apparatus is not simply a matter of technological indulgence. Rather, the liberated lens is an expansion of cinema's semiotic field. The cinematic apparatus provides a system whereby the imagination of spatial and geopolitical relationships comes together. As an aspect of the cinematic apparatus, the chapter considers how visual aesthetic strategies, technological innovations, and social policy result in images with particular angles and perspectives.
Restoring the Founding Purposes, 1862
Authors: Moore William F. , Moore Jane Ann
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Abraham Lincoln and Owen Lovejoy's commitment towards holding together the Union while restoring the Founding Fathers' ideology as articulated in the Declaration of Independence. It first considers the debate in the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War about who had the right to investigate whether Democratic generals were not sufficiently committed to the Union cause to engage the rebels in battle. It then discusses laws enacted in the Thirty-Seventh Congress with the aim of promoting the nation's welfare; Lovejoy's bill “to secure freedom to all persons within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal Government”; Lincoln's proposal for gradual emancipation in the four border states; and the growing friendship between Lincoln and Lovejoy. The chapter also analyzes the Second Confiscation Act; factions within the Republican Party in the House; Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation; and Lovejoy's reelection in 1862. Finally, it addresses the question of whether Lincoln was a radical.
Germaine Dulac
Authors: Williams Tami
Published: May 2017

Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac—feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema—made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac's passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth-century film history and theory. This book—making unprecedented use of the filmmaker's personal papers, production files, and archival film prints—is the first full-length historical study and critical biography of Dulac. The book's analysis explores the artistic and sociopolitical currents that shaped Dulac's approach to cinema while interrogating the ground-breaking techniques and strategies she used to critique conservative notions of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond the director's work of the 1920s, the book examines Dulac's largely ignored 1930s documentaries and newsreels establishing clear links with the more experimental Impressionist and abstract works of her early period. This vivid portrait will be of interest to general readers, as well as to scholars of cinema and visual culture, performance, French history, women's studies, queer cinema, in addition to studies of narrative avant-garde, experimental, and documentary film history and theory.
Conclusion
Authors: Williams Tami
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter explains how Dulac's cinema, in its aesthetic and sociopolitical complexity, is only beginning to be recognized and understood. Dulac studies until recent years had been limited to a few films, and predominantly to a feminist theoretical approach that launched a recovery of this great filmmaker in the Anglophone context. In contrast, in the French context, Dulac's work has long been subject to a depoliticized formalism, where identity politics and gender considerations have only slowly been making their way into film studies. Drawing on various archival materials (manuscript, printed, filmic) and secondary sources, and considering the environment's dynamic sociopolitical context, the chapter further reveals Dulac's films and her filmic ontology of a “pure cinema,” a cinema of suggestion and potentiality.
Dealing with Diversity, 1965–2012
Authors: Howlett David J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on religious diversity. Whatever their political or social outlook, religious groups in late twentieth-century America positioned themselves as arbiters of social morality related to race, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some temple visitors look at the Kirtland temple as a place of encounter where social questions can be explored, questioned, and argued. This is not totally without precedent. Before 1965, the social morality discussed at the temple dealt almost exclusively with nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy. By 2012, the issues were still about sexuality, but they had changed. The primary social issues that drew visitors' attention were the Community of Christ's position on same-sex relationships and gender roles. Ultimately, the Kirtland Temple was and is a platform for reinforcing the identities of various religious groups as well as a place where they can momentarily transcend their differences.
The Harlem Experimental Theatre
Authors: Whitmire Ethelene
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores Regina's involvement with the Harlem Experimental Theatre. Regina's participation in the little theater movement began with her involvement with the theater company founded by her friend W. E. B. Du Bois. Sometime during 1924, Du Bois contacted Supervising Librarian Ernestine Rose and asked for permission to use the basement of the 135th Street Branch for a theater group, named the CRIGWA (Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists) Players—which was later changed to KRIGWA. Du Bois wanted to use the basement stage to produce three or four plays in 1926 and from four to six plays in 1927. Both Regina and her husband Bill were members of the KRIGWA Players board.
Roots of the Revival
Authors: Cohen Ronald D. , Donaldson Rachel Clare
Published: May 2017

This book presents a transatlantic history of folk's midcentury resurgence that juxtaposes the related but distinct revivals that took place in the United States and Great Britain. After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the book explores the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. The book places the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over “authenticity” in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream. From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, the book offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.
Aaron Jay Kernis
Authors: Miller Leta E.
Published: May 2017

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Grawemeyer Award, Aaron Jay Kernis achieved recognition as one of the leading composers of his generation while still in his thirties. Since then his eloquent yet accessible style, emphasis on melody, and willingness to engage popular as well as classical forms has brought him widespread acclaim and admiring audiences. This biography offers the first survey of the composer's life and work. Immersed in music by middle school, and later training under Theodore Antoniou, John Adams, Jacob Druckman, and others, Kernis rejected the idea of distancing his work from worldly concerns and composed on political themes. His Second Symphony, from 1991, engaged with the first Gulf War; 1993's Still Moment with Hymn was a reaction to the Bosnian Genocide; and the next year's Colored Field and 1995's Lament and Prayer dealt with the Holocaust. Yet Kernis also used sources as disparate as futurist agitprop and children's games to display humor in his work. The book's analysis addresses not only Kernis's wide range of subjects but also the eclecticism that has baffled critics, analyzing his dedication to synthesis and the themes consistent in his work. The book gives a rare mid-career portrait of a major American cultural figure.
Looking to the Future
Authors: Miller Leta E.
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter evaluates Aaron Jay Kernis's music. Critics have made much of his embrace of diversity, noting the influence of tonality and atonality, jazz, pop, and Baroque music, modernism and minimalism, intricate counterpoint and static ostinati—or as Mark Swed put it succinctly in 1995, “extravagance and eclecticism.” Kernis, however, resists the word eclecticism because implicit in it is the image of collage. Inclusivity, yes; a welcoming of diversity, certainly: but never with the aim of creating a static mixture, however bold it might be. Rather, Kernis's music—even in its slowest and most introverted manifestation—always emphasizes directionality. Moreover, the element of narrative is always present in his music. Hence the importance for Kernis of the motivating stimuli, be they political events, mosaics, life-cycle experiences, poetry, paintings, or simply an emotional state.
Blue Ridge Breakdown
Authors: Spalding Susan Eike
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines African American square dancing traditions in Martinsville, Henry County, Southwest Virginia. It tells the story of African American dances in Martinsville from the perspective of four people who were central to it through much of the twentieth century: fiddler Leonard Bowles and his wife, dancer Naomi Bowles, and caller Ernest Brooks and his wife. The chapter begins with a historical background on African American old time dancing in the Appalachian region, along with Martinsville and its black community. It then considers the old breakdown, first in the 1930s and 1940s and then in 1978, as well as its connection to the agrarian lifestyle in which it thrived. It also discusses the relationship between music and dance in Martinsville, the decline of the old breakdown, and the factors that brought new life to old time dancing during the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the future prospects for African American dancing traditions, including the old breakdown, in Martinsville.
Women and Film Noir
Authors: Grossman Julie
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the relationship between classic noir and female-authored pulp fiction. Linking noir with its female-authored source material will help reorient gender associations with film noir so that male experience is not its exclusive focus. Moreover, such linkage renders the shared concerns of film noir and melodrama more evident and interprets the relationship between gender and genre more as a dialogue, less as an opportunity to rank texts in terms of an evaluation-laden hierarchy. The chapter then looks at 1940s novels written by women that were brought to the screens as “film noirs.” These works exemplify the nonschematic presence of gender issues in noir and the continuities between the treatment of gender in the genre and the exploration of gender in the source novels.
Periodizing Classic Noir
Authors: Miklitsch Robert
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter traces the history of classic noir by reflecting on the way in which the genre has been discursively constituted through its beginnings and endings, an act of periodization that typically entails nominating particular films as the first and last noir in order to differentiate the intervening films from, respectively, proto- and neo-noir. While the recent interest in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is one sign that Boris Ingster's film has supplanted The Maltese Falcon (1941) as the first, titular American noir, recent transnational readings of the genre have problematized the reflexive determination of classic noir as a strictly American phenomenon. In fact, the impact of Odds against Tomorrow (1959) on transnational neo-noir indicates that the end or terminus of the classical era is just as provisional—just as open to interpretation and therefore, revision—as its origin.
Hawaiian Music in Motion
Authors: Carr James Revell
Published: May 2017

This book explores the performance, reception, transmission, and adaptation of Hawaiian music on board ships and in the islands, revealing the ways both maritime commerce and imperial confrontation facilitated the circulation of popular music in the nineteenth century. The book shows how Hawaiians initially used music and dance to ease tensions with, and spread information about, potentially dangerous foreigners, and then traces the circulation of Hawaiian song and dance worldwide as Hawaiians served aboard American and European ships. Drawing on journals and ships' logs, the book highlights the profound contrasts between Hawaiians' treatment by fellow sailors who appreciated their seamanship and music, versus antagonistic American missionaries determined to keep Hawaiians on local sugar plantations, and looks at how Hawaiians achieved their own ends by capitalizing on Americans' conflicting expectations and fraught discourse around hula and other musical practices. It also examines American minstrelsy in Hawaii, including professional touring minstrel troupes from the mainland, amateur troupes consisting of crew members of visiting ships, and local indigenous troupes of Hawaiian minstrels. In the process he illuminates how a merging of indigenous and foreign elements became the new sound of native Hawaiian culture at the turn of the twentieth century—and made loping rhythms, falsetto yodels, and driving ukuleles indelible parts of American popular music.
Terence Davies
Authors: Koresky Michael
Published: May 2017

Called the most important British filmmaker of his generation, Terence Davies made his reputation with modern classics like Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Long Day Closes, personal works exploring his fractured childhood in Liverpool. His idiosyncratic and unorthodox narrative films defy easy categorization; though they would seem to exist within the realms of realism and personal memory cinema, the films lay bare the director's personal pain in a daringly abstract way. The book explores the unique emotional tenor of Davies' work by focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space. Through these contradictions, the films' intricate designs reveal a cumulative, deeply personal meditation on the self. The book also analyzes how Davies' ongoing negotiation of—and struggle with—questions of identity related to his past and his homosexuality imbue the details and jarring juxtapositions in his films with a queer sensibility, which is too often overlooked due to the complexity of Davies' work and his unfashionable ambivalence toward his own sexual orientation.
Bathed in the Fading Light
Authors: Koresky Michael
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis. These opposites reflect a certain struggle, for the filmmaker and his characters, to make sense of a confusing and sometimes violent world. For Davies, this struggle constitutes a reckoning with his past, a highly personal account of a fractured childhood; for the viewer it has resulted in one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the distinct emotional quandaries Davies' films evoke in the viewer and proposes that their tonal and political in-betweenness is a form of cinematic queering. Through the exploration of their contradictions, these films function within seemingly recognizable generic parameters only to then explode and thus queer conventional notions of narrative cinema.
Introduction
Authors: Mallapragada Madhavi
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the textual, institutional, and discursive politics of online media that target, speak to, and are shaped by Indian immigrant cultures. The main emphasis is on the idea of home, and its many reconfigurations online through the concept of the homepage. The book critically evaluates how homepages anchor the ideals and ideologies of belonging online in relation to two dominant imaginaries traditionally associated with the time–space of the home, namely the domestic, familial household and the public, national homeland. The book argues that online media play a crucial role in the ongoing struggles over belonging and citizenship for diverse groups within the Indian American community by representing, reconstructing, and reimagining the Indian immigrant household and homeland (which include India and/or the United States). An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Yankee Twang
Authors: Murphy Clifford R.
Published: May 2017

Merging scholarly insight with a professional guitarist's keen sense of the musical life, this book delves into the rich tradition of country and western music that is played and loved in the mill towns and cities of the American northeast. The book draws on a wealth of ethnographic material, interviews, and encounters with recorded and live music to reveal the central role of country and western in the social lives and musical activity of working-class New Englanders. As the book shows, an extraordinary multiculturalism informed by New England's kaleidoscope of ethnic groups created a distinctive country and western music style. But the music also gave—and gives—voice to working-class feeling. Yankee country and western emphasizes the western, reflecting the longing for the mythical cowboy's life of rugged but fulfilling individualism. Indeed, many New Englanders use country and western to comment on economic disenfranchisement and express their resentment of a mass media, government, and Nashville music establishment they believe neither reflects nor understands their life experiences.
Journeys through Contested Terrain
Authors: Kitch Sally L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents the author's account of her relationship with two Afghan women, Jamila Afghani, founder and director of an Afghan-based educational NGO then called the Noor Educational Center (NEC), and Marzia Basel, the judge and founder of the Afghan Women Judges Association. These women would eventually ask her to write about their personal stories and political perspectives on Afghan women's tumultuous and contested opportunities and responsibilities, a request that she honored as the core and inspiration of this book. She realized that their journey together—more metaphorical than literal but also involving much travel and change of scene—would take them over such contested terrain.
Constructing Women’s Rights in Afghanistan
Authors: Kitch Sally L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides a detailed look at women's rights in Afghanistan. The basic definition of women's rights has varied in Afghanistan according to region, social stratum, time, and educational levels, and it has rarely if ever been consistent across the country at any given moment. In the past few decades at least, many educated urban women (and some men) have understood the concept of women's rights according to two major referents. One is Islam, represented by the Holy Qur'an and hadith, understood and interpreted by educated people like Marzia and Jamila. The second referent for this group is the international understanding of human rights and the rights to which all the world's women are presumably entitled.
The Basics of Change
Authors: Kitch Sally L.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores Marzia's and Jamila's assessments of the conditions for Afghan women in 2010. After a five-year hiatus in their meetings, the author was curious to see what the women would consider progress for their countrywomen as well as their views of continuing needs. She was both encouraged by their reports of progress for women's status and opportunities and unsurprised that almost every advance they described had a caveat, usually one that acknowledged that advances in rights, literacy, public activity, education, and health care were partial, unreliable, and often limited to women in Kabul or in other cities. It was here that the different professional foci of the two women became clearest. Marzia's dedication to the law and the legal profession necessarily kept her eyes primarily on the cities, where the rule of civil law was most likely to count. Jamila's widely networked organization also worked primarily in cities and larger villages, but her emphasis on education and skills training for women had more applicability to nonurban settings. She was therefore in touch with many rural Afghans.
On the Physical Correlates of Timbre
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney discusses the physical correlates of timbre using the digital computer technique developed at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. His intention is to synthesize a large class of timbres, first by considering the physical properties of natural sounds as well as sounds produced by conventional musical instruments. He goes on to explore how many different ways that the quality or timbre of a sound may be made to vary perceptibly, and in how many ways the quality of one sound may be distinguished from that of another, given that the perceived pitch, intensity, and duration are held constant. Tenney also talks about certain transient phenomena and various kinds of quasi-steady-state modulation processes which, along with the spectrum, constitute what he calls the three basic parameters of timbre. He examines each of these three parameters into several subparameters.
About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

In his 1987 essay Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps, James Tenney explains his intentions in this work with respect to harmony. First, he wanted to investigate the new harmonic resources that have become available through the concept of “harmonic space” much more thoroughly than he had in any earlier work. Second, he wanted to study these harmonic resources within a formal context that would clearly demonstrate certain theoretical ideas and compositional methods already developed in his computer music of the early 1960s. Tenney also discusses harmonic procedures that to determine a set of available pitch classes before the actual pitches are selected, along with the hierarchical (or holarchical), recursive character of the program for segments and clangs.
On “Crystal Growth” in Harmonic Space
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney talks about his “crystal growth” algorithm, an idea that suggests a new “harmonic syntax” for harmonic space. As a quantitative model, it is both suggestively rich for future composition and plausible as a description of the history of tonal expansion. In this algorithm, sets of points are chosen, one by one, in some n-dimensional harmonic space, under the condition that each new point must have the smallest possible sum of harmonic distances to all points already in the set. That is, at each successive stage in the growth of the harmonic lattice, the next ratio added to the set is one whose sum of harmonic distances to each ratio already in the set is minimal. In relation to this algorithm, Tenney considers the Pythagorean pentatonic scale, which may be conceived as a pitch set that arises when extension into the 3,5-plane is just slightly delayed beyond the point where the algorithm would have begun that extension.
About Diapason
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney reflects on his 1996 composition Diapason. Near the beginning and the end of the piece, the “diapason” includes harmonics from the forty-eighth through sixty-fourth, whereas at the dynamic climax, it includes the first through the seventeenth partials. Tenney discusses some unusual procedures that are required to perform the piece, including: all of the string instruments are retuned in an elaborate scordatura; wind players are free to choose from the set of pitches being played at any moment by the string players nearest to them; and to facilitate this process, each wind player is seated between two string players or is, in fact, surrounded by from four to six string players whose pitches can thus be matched in this way. Tenney also claims that he produced these unusual pitches because of his belief that we have entered a new music-historical era during which there will be a resumption of the evolutionary development of harmony.
Afterword
Authors: Shome Raka
Published: May 2017

This book has examined the ways that white femininity, as an assemblage of power, is utilized in the production of a national modernity by using the case of Princess Diana. It has shown how transnational relations and contexts (even when they are not apparent) are always embedded in the processes through which white femininity and the nation articulate each other. It has also illustrated the complex and multifaceted role that white femininity (as a racial formation) plays in the management of contemporary liberal logics of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. The book concludes with a discussion of where white femininity is now—in these recession years—especially in the United Kingdom. It describes two salient operations of white womanhood in contemporary UK: white womanhood becomes a site through which economic austerity is glamorized and justified, and through that class and raced inequalities are obscured; and defiled white womanhood functions as a trope through which multiculturalism is being rendered a problem. The book ends by offering some thoughts on future directions for further work on white femininity and the nation.
Network Connectivity and Labor Systems
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the impact of network connectivity on labor systems, arguing that the response to the recession of the 1970s was a profound one and eventually led to the crash of 2008. It explains how the early to mid-1970s brought forward information and communications technology (ICT) as the heart of capitalist development and situates this shift into networks within trends in production, finance, and U.S. military activity. It also examines what Kim Moody calls the “great transformation,” when a basement-to-attic redesign touched everything from the content of specific jobs to the technical division of labor within companies and entire industries, to the location of discrete and now increasingly isolable production systems. This “Great Transformation” is analyzed from two vantage points. The first concerns the labor process, the second, the wider commodity chains within which labor has been mobilized.
Networked Production and Reconstructed Commodity Chains
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how networks led to the spatial restructuring of commodity chains during the 1970s. It shows how renewed intercapitalist competition, as Japan and Germany were rebuilt, as well as fluctuations in exchange rates and national policies—adopted to appease strong industrial working classes and to protect domestic capital—fed a new phase of capitalist globalization. In turn, capitalist globalization forged a variety of new links in commodity chains and radical changes in production and trade. The chapter also considers how the information and communications technology (ICT) industry helped pioneer the trend to parcelized production systems, intracorporate trade, and exports back to the wealthiest markets. Finally, it looks at the case of the automobile industry to illustrate how digital technology was repeatedly absorbed by the manufacturing industry and to connect capitalist globalization to a planetary recomposition of the wage-earning class. It argues that network-enabled reorganization of production systems and of the labor process contributed to chronic wage repression.
The Historical Run-Up
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines recent historical trends to better understand how the massive restructuring of the information and communications technology (ICT) sector sparked a shift into networks in capitalist development. Profound technical and institutional changes in the ICT industry, which lies at the epicenter of an emerging digital capitalism, caused commodity chains that had seemed stable to buckle and recompose. The result was not uniform growth but ragged unevenness: expansionary dynamism alongside devastation. This chapter discusses how communications and information processing became the largest sectoral source of demand for ICTs and whether this major axis of change around computer networks revived the growth prospects of the wider political economy. It also considers a series of developments that radically enlarged the interoperable internet during the late 1980s and 1990s.
Taking Care of Business
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the Commerce Department's free-flow policy as part of its power over internet policy. It first provides an overview of U.S.–centric internet and Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force, established to launch an inquiry into “the global free flow of information on the Internet.” The inquiry's purpose was “to identify and examine the impact that restrictions on the flow of information over the Internet have on American businesses and global commerce.” The chapter also considers Commerce's commodification strategies based in part on data centers and the place of cloud computing services in the department's free-flow inquiry. It shows that the Commerce Department's free-flow policy was a major component of the federal government's overall efforts to keep corporate data flows streaming without restriction as new profit sites emerged around an extraterritorial internet managed by the United States.
The Male Subject of Noir and the Modern Gaze
Authors: Pravadelli Veronica
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the transition between the classical war films of the early 1940s and the anticlassical film noirs of the later half of the decade. This period can be roughly described in terms of a dual crisis, seen at the level of representation and at the level of the subject's capacity to act and to know. The chapter then examines noir's visual and narrative regime, especially its ability to express in purely visual terms certain modern tenets such as the psyche's split nature, the notion of embodied subjectivity, and the failure of vision and seeing. Similarly, noir alters the function of verbal language: the protagonist's subjective narration is often the only key to knowledge and truth, and words seem to take up the role previously assigned to vision and action. Meanwhile deep focus photography alters the terms of visuality.
Cannibal Writes
Authors: Githire Njeri
Published: May 2017

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. This book concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the book explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As the book shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, the book ranges across the works of well-known and lesser-known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.
“Why do you want to go to Hawai‘i?”
Authors: Labrador Roderick N.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book follows the struggles of contemporary Filipino immigrants to physically and figuratively build community, where they enact a politics of incorporation built on race, ethnicity, class, culture, and language. It focuses on two sites of building and representation, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu. At these two sites, the book focuses on the narratives and discourses about “home” and “homeland.” In particular, it asks how immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) to which they have settled and, consequently, how these discourses shape their identities and politics.
Introduction
Authors: Manuel Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides background data on Indo-Caribbean history and situates that culture's development in the context of diasporic studies as a whole. It provides an overview of North Indian Bhojpuri music culture and of Indo-Caribbean music culture, with reference to traditional Bhojpuri aspects, creolized entities like chutney-soca, and the ramifications of exposure to North Indian “great tradition” musics—both pop and classical—since the 1940s. It argues that the various trajectories and the form of Bhojpuri diasporic music in general must be attributed primarily not to inherent features of particular genres or to the activities of particular artists but rather to intricate dynamics of diaspora culture—in this case, Bhojpuri Caribbean diasporic culture.
Redeeming Time
Authors: Mirola William A.
Published: May 2017

During the struggle for the eight-hour workday and a shorter workweek, Chicago emerged as an important battleground for workers in “the entire civilized world” to redeem time from the workplace in order to devote it to education, civic duty, health, family, and leisure. This book explores how the city's eight-hour movement intersected with a Protestant religious culture that supported long hours to keep workers from idleness, intemperance, and secular leisure activities. Analyzing how both workers and clergy rewove working-class religious cultures and ideologies into strategic and rhetorical frames, the book shows how every faith-based appeal contested whose religious meanings would define labor conditions and conflicts. As it notes, the ongoing worker–employer tension transformed both how clergy spoke about the eight-hour movement and what they were willing to do, until intensified worker protest and employer intransigence spurred Protestant clergy to support the eight-hour movement even as political and economic arguments eclipsed religious framing. A revealing study of an era and a cause, this book illustrates the potential—and the limitations—of religious culture and religious leaders as forces in industrial reform.
Eight Hours and the Financial Crisis of 1873
Authors: Mirola William A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter studies union efforts at putting the eight-hour system to work. As a new decade began, Chicago workers remained angry and frustrated by the lack of enforcement of the Illinois eight-hour law and by the ongoing resistance of employers both to the moral pressure of reformers' arguments and to their attempt to enforce the eight-hour law through strikes. Yet despite what seemed to be the general failure of the 1867 eight-hour campaign and the fragmentation of the movement into conservative and radical factions, Yankee, British, German, and Irish trade unionists kept the goal of redeeming time through the eight-hour system as the centerpiece of labor activism in the new decade. In the fall of 1873, Chicago experienced the first financial collapse of the industrial era. The collapse and the depression that followed inaugurated a new phase in the development of the labor movement: the rise to prominence of semiskilled and unskilled immigrants within Chicago's labor movement.
The bin Laden Tapes
Authors: Hill Andrew
Published: May 2017

This chapter looks back to the time before Osama bin Laden's death and then reflects on the period after his death. In particular, it examines bin Laden's video and audio appearances after the September 11 attacks in order to scrutinize both the means by which these appearances have allowed bin Laden to continue to intervene in the War on Terror, and the terms in which they have shaped perceptions in the West of the nature of the enemy faced in this conflict. Although bin Laden functioned “as a metonym for al Qaeda and the enemy more broadly in the War on Terror,” his death did not eliminate the threats posed by al Qaeda. Indeed, the West can be said to have “exorcised” Osama bin Laden by shifting the narrative from that of hunting for the world's leading terrorist to that of “Obama got Osama.”
The Myth of the Terrorist as a Lover
Authors: Mellor Noha
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on media coverage of bin Laden and how it depicted his relationship with his wives, particularly the sixth one, Amal Assadah, who was rumored to have shielded bin Laden when the American commandos shot him. It argues that the main difference between the coverage in Arab media versus Anglo-American news media is that the former focused on the issues surrounding bin Laden and his family, foregrounding the wives' support of bin Laden as part of their duty as virtuous Muslim women. Anglo-American media, however, chose to focus on the image of bin Laden as a sexual being, thereby contributing to the myth of bin Laden as a neurotic evil. Both regions focused on these wives as mainly emotionally or religiously motivated to follow bin Laden rather than on their political and ideological motivations. The chapter begins with a brief discussion about the role of myth in the news-making process, focusing on the myths surrounding bin Laden's sexuality. It then presents examples of pan-Arab and Anglo-American coverage.
Without Osama
Authors: Bose Purnima
Published: May 2017

Tere Bin Laden (2010), an Indian independent film in Hindi, written and directed by Abhishek Sharma, is a madcap comedy about an ambitious Pakistani journalist, Ali Hassan, who stages a fake video of Osama bin Laden as his golden ticket to immigrate to the United States. The film provides a trenchant critique of global media, the War on Terror, and the capitalist aspirations of lower-middle and middle-class Pakistanis. This chapter focuses on how Tere Bin Laden articulates a critique of the War on Terror. It first considers how the opening segments of the film set up its dual concerns with the nature of the U.S. national security state as a racial formation and with an idealized version of the American dream that constitutes the desire for upward mobility in the imagination of elite Pakistanis such as Ali. It then turns to the film's representation of the War on Terror and U.S. foreign policy to analyze how it draws on the speeches of the actual Osama bin Laden and spoofs the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan by literally rendering it into a cartoon. Evaluating the filmmaker's and lead actor's claims that the film provides a generalized South Asian perspective on the War on Terror, the chapter explores Tere Bin Laden's representation of Pakistani civil society as constituted by a range of classes and aspirations that can be persuaded to cooperate with one another only in limited ways and as existing in an uneasy equilibrium with the state.
Goodwill Ambassadors
Authors: Thomas Damion
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the “challenges, contradictions, and political nature” of African American sports emissaries during the early Cold War era. Recognizing the impact that Soviet declarations of American mistreatment of blacks were having on global public opinion about the United States, government officials planned goodwill trips that provided opportunities for people around the world to meet successful African Americans whose abilities on the playing field and loyalty to the nation represented a positive counterweight to the claims being posited by adversaries of the United States. The chapter devotes special attention to athletes' response to the program, most of whom were initially unaware of the underlying political purpose of their trips. There was an unintended politicizing effect for the athletes, as many used the forum to distance themselves from domestic policies, push for civil rights, and find common cause with subjugated peoples around the world. An increased unwillingness for citizen diplomats to “stay on message” resulted in the programs being scaled back in the late 1960s.
The Paradox of Jazz Diplomacy
Authors: Davenport Lisa
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the jazz tours that began in July 1954, which were sponsored by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The jazz tours created a paradox in U.S. Cold War strategy. The cultural expression of one of the nation's most oppressed minorities came to symbolize the cultural superiority of American democracy. Policy makers considered jazz, the “authentic expression of American life,” to be an apt instrument in U.S. efforts to contain criticism about America's cultural and racial identity. The tours were suspended in the early 1960s when volatile racial conflicts in urban America and the Vietnam War no longer made them viable. These were reinstated in the late 1960s, but with more conservative jazz musicians. The chapter also examines the “moral tension” experienced by jazz performers over whether to “affirm their heritage by struggling against racial oppression or seek acceptance into white society.”
Epilogue
Authors: Stith Charles R.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents former ambassador Charles Stith's reflections on the impact of African Americans on U.S. foreign policy during particular historical periods. He identifies four eras of impact that reflect an African American imprint on U.S. foreign policy. Those are the slavery era, the Reconstruction era, the civil rights era, and the post-civil rights era. Each era is noteworthy for its changes in status and power of African Americans and thus has implications relative to the question of impact. Each era also had its distinct foreign policy issues and challenges. Among his observations are that the foreign policy concerns of African Americans were both major and mainstream from era to era, whether the issue was the slave trade or the war against terrorism; that the unique contribution of African Americans to the foreign policy mix is to see America's geopolitical interests through the lens of human rights; and that the breadth of foreign policy interests by African Americans has reflected their position and power within the American body politic.
Men, Masculinities, and the Politics of Sexual Control
Authors: Aderinto Saheed
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines men's reactions to prostitution legislation. Different contours of masculinities informed by location and by political and economic power influenced the degree of condemnation of or support for anti-prostitution laws. Men's reactions also differed depending on the age of prostitutes. A question that seemed relevant for this discussion of men's sexual politics is what it might take for moralists to become defenders of prostitutes' rights. The change of identity from being a moralist to an advocate for prostitutes' rights underscores the fluidity of debates about prostitution and the shifting positions of moralists. In “defending” prostitutes' rights against the injustice of the colonial state, men deployed the vocabularies of political and cultural nationalism, as they highlighted the integrity of “traditional” customs or criticized the British for imperial failure.
His-Panic / My Panic
Authors: Godreau Isar P.
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the Hispanophobia of U.S. colonial officials and of those working-class Puerto Ricans who supported annexation to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. For both of these groups, Spain represented a backward, antidemocratic influence and—albeit for different reasons—a suspect source of whiteness. San Antón residents expressed disdain for Spaniards in various ways in formal and informal conversations, regardless of their political affiliation. These stories do not portray Spaniards as a civilizing source of national identity but rather as a barbaric people engaged in gruesome practices. However, opinions about Spaniards were less negative in narratives of older residents who were more specifically grounded in San Antón and who personalized stories through telling about their own families.