bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Drumming, Language, and the Voice in South Asia
Authors: Wolf Richard K.
Published: May 2017

This book explores drumming and other instrumental traditions that are interconnected over vast regions of South and West Asia. The traditions considered here qualify broadly as functional music rather than concert music and include the public instrumental music of weddings, funerals, and religious holidays. The book examines patterns that pervade functional music of South Asia and to some extent North and South Indian classical music and how performed texts are related to their verbal or vocal models. It also considers what it means in particular contexts for musical instruments to be voicelike and carry textual messages. This chapter discusses the broad historical context in which voices and instruments have been co-constructed in the history of the Indian subcontinent and regions west. Many examples from South India are included to help create a picture that transcends the bounds of Muharram Ali's travels.
Beyond the Mātra
Authors: Wolf Richard K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the idea of classicism being connected with the counting of homogeneous time units, or mātras, and of local music being oriented to an irregular sequence of accents marked by syllables and claps. It considers the ways in which drum patterns might be linked to texts and accented syllables, as well as the importance of reciting drum syllables not only in the learning process but also in performances. Four principles for organizing drum patterns that do not depend on cycles with a fixed number of pulses are discussed: the number of stressed beats, repeating motives, tone melody, and verbal formulas. The chapter also presents four case studies: Kota and Aruntiyar (Cakkiliyar) drumming in Tamil Nadu; Dalit drumming in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh; Muhājir drumming in Hyderabad, Sindh, by men of Agra heritage; and Mamraj's dhol-tāshā group, associated with the Nizamuddin shrine in Delhi.
The Voice in the Drum
Authors: Wolf Richard K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes Muharram Ali's conversations with a dhol player named Hashim about the drumming rituals as well as the drummers and the drum patterns in Karachi. Hashim also talked about how he and the other dhol players would take turns beating the four tarzs: savārī, mātam, kalmah, and dhīmā. Ali raised for discussion the Bharatpur group's idea about the kalmah pattern. According to Hashim, those on procession get enjoyment (mazah) out of Muharram drumming in general and that such drumming alerts those in the area to what is going on. Ali also made notes and comments on Census of India report (1961) on Muharram in Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad. Finally, he acknowledged that the verbal meanings of the drum patterns were cloaked in clouds of subjectivity and hazy memory.
Independence Unpunished
Authors: Gates Philippa
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates how the 1940s female “private eye” complicates the conventional, dualistic representation of women in classic noir as either homemaker or femme fatale, “redeemer” or “destroyer.” Women in classic noir are never detectives by profession, whether working for the police or as private investigators, but a number of them serve as amateur investigators, seeking out the truth about a crime most often to clear the name of a man they love. The sex of the female detective complicates the traditionally male noir detective narrative as the narrative is driven forward as much by the female protagonist's personal desires as by her investigation, and the heroine's independence as a detective and exploration of her sexuality pose undesirable challenges to the masculinity of her husband—just like the femme fatale. Unlike the femme fatale, however, the female detective is allowed to enjoy her foray into masculinity and conclude the film unpunished.
Radio, Film Noir, and the Aesthetics of Auditory Spectacle
Authors: Verma Neil
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the relationship between 1940s radio and cinema. While classic noirs began to flourish at the cinema, most Americans listened to radio for about four hours a day over some nine hundred stations, most of which were affiliated with one of four large commercial networks that centralized content. During these years, drama formats were second only to music as the most common network offering in the evening; crime and mystery shows prospered especially well. Although constituting only 13 percent of evening drama in the mid-1930s, the category rose to 33 percent during the war, and by the 1950s crime stories could be up to half of all plays on air on a given evening. Seen in aggregate, noir on the radio adds up to tens of thousands of hours of material heard by tens of millions of listeners from 1937 to 1955, the most active years for auditory drama on American airwaves ever.
Detour
Authors: Sobchack Vivian
Published: May 2017

This chapter argues that rear-screen projection in Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) is just as critical to the film's audiovisual economy as voiceover and flashback. Not unlike the radiophonic “theater of the mind” projected by the 1940s noir sound track, rear-screen projection acts as a secondary screen for the protagonist's psyche. In Detour, this oneiric screen, in addition to mobilizing two of the dominant affective modalities of classic noir—claustrophobia and phantasmagoria—operates as a temporal signpost. The result is that even as Al Roberts (Tom Neal), driven by the romance of the open road, strikes out for California, the back-screen projection is a constant reminder that the past can rear up at any moment and dash his dreams.
Refuge England
Authors: Murphy Robert
Published: May 2017

This chapter traces the contributions of four directors to 1950s British noir: Edward Dmytryk, Jules Dassin, Cy Endfiled, and Joseph Losey. While Dmytryk and Dassin found success in the United States in the 1940s with a series of classic noirs, after being blacklisted, both directors were forced to expatriate to Great Britain where they helmed pictures inspired by specifically British elements—the serial killer and postwar, bombed-out London. Unlike Dmytryk and Dassin, Endfield and Losey sought political refuge in England for an extended period in the 1950s, during which they made a number of “noir-inflected melodramas” that brilliantly capture the haunted psyches of these exiled American filmmakers.
Conclusion
Authors: Mallapragada Madhavi
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter revisits the key arguments developed in each of the four chapters and points to key implications of undertaking a study of home in the age of networks. It argues for a reconsideration of the contours of belonging in contemporary contexts of new media and transnationalism through its specific study of Indian immigrant cultures online. It contends that the question of belonging must be applied more thoroughly to the institutional contexts of online media, for not doing so would neglect a very significant alliance between capital and citizenship in the neoliberal, digital age. Furthermore, in the United States, especially since 2001, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, women of color, and the working class have found themselves at the receiving end of the disciplinary practices of neoliberal states and globalization practices. These institutional contexts shape belonging as much as the textual and hypertextual practices that generate categories of exclusion and inclusion in online media.
Behind the Gas Mask
Authors: Faith Thomas I.
Published: May 2017

This book offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War I. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, the book explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles. As the book shows, the advocates for chemical weapons within the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life—and ultimately led to the U.S. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons.
Introduction
Authors: Corsino Louis
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the emergence of the Italian Mafia in one particular setting. It examines a long-standing organizational component of the Chicago Outfit—namely, the Chicago Heights boys. It looks at the Chicago Heights operation from its beginning in the early 1900s to the heyday of Outfit activities in the post-World War II era. Along the way, the book attempts to unravel the mix of social and cultural discriminations against Italians in the early part of the last century, the consequential group characteristics that emerged within the local Italian population, and the appropriation of these characteristics as social capital resources in the collective pursuit of social mobility. The remainder of the chapter discusses the personal, community, and public contexts of the present volume, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.
Chicago Heights and Organized Crime
Authors: Corsino Louis
Published: May 2017

Chicago Heights was a twentieth-century city. The defining movements of the century—urbanization, industrialization, and immigration—tell much of the city's history and provide an understanding of the social conditions leading to the emergence of organized crime. This chapter takes a brief look back at these historical developments as they played themselves out in the Chicago Heights context. Following this, it traces the history of the vice operations in Chicago Heights from their beginning in the early 1900s, to their union with the Chicago Outfit in the 1920s, to their ascendance and decline throughout the remainder of the century. The chapter suggests that the rise development and decline of the Chicago Heights Outfit run parallel in many ways to the fortunes of the city.
The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles’s Melodic Style
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney presents the results of some statistical analyses that he carried out with the aid of a computer to study the chronological development of Carl Ruggles's melodic style. Certain aspects of Ruggles's music—the general shape of the melodic lines, the ever-present dissonant sonorities—are so consistent throughout all of his compositions that they give an impression of singular stylistic homogeneity. Tenney's results suggest just the opposite conclusion—at least with respect to his melodic writing. He goes on to examine significant changes in Ruggles's melodic style that are manifested in three ways: a gradual shift in the distribution of interval frequencies; a more and more effective avoidance of early recurrences of pitch classes; and an increase in the frequency and proximity of dissonance relations within his melodic lines.
John Cage and the Theory of Harmony
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney examines some of John Cage's theoretical ideas and their possible implications for a new theory of harmony that he argues requires new definitions of “harmony,” “harmonic relations,” etc.; such definitions, he contends, will emerge from a more careful analysis of the “total soundspace” of musical perception. Tenney begins with a discussion of the current disparity between harmonic theory and compositional practice before explaining what a true theory of harmony should be: a theory of harmonic perception (one component in a more general theory of musical perception) consistent with the most recent data available from the fields of acoustics and psychoacoustics but also taking into account the extended range of musical experiences available to us today. Tenney outlines the conditions that such a theory ought to satisfy and goes on to consider a multidimensional space of pitch perception called harmonic space.
The Several Dimensions of Pitch
Authors: Tenney James
Published: May 2017

James Tenney explains the different mechanisms behind the simultaneous and consecutive relationships between pitches using ideas from evolution and neurocognition. He suggests that there are two different aspects of pitch perception and that one of those aspects can also be thought of as multidimensional. In considering such fundamental questions regarding the nature of auditory perception, Tenney refers to the evolution of hearing and considers two complementary if not contradictory things: distinguish between or among sounds issuing from different sound sources, and recognize when two or more sounds—though different—actually arise from a single sound source. The first mechanism is the basis for what Tenney calls the contour aspect of contour aspect of contour pitch perception. The other aspect of pitch perception has to do with the temporal ordering of the neural information. Tenney concludes by proposing a psychoacoustic explanation for contour formation based on the ear's temporal processing.
Racialized Maternalisms
Authors: Shome Raka
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores how ideologies of white motherhood function as sites through which shifts in a nation's sense of the modern is enabled by locating the Diana phenomenon in the social context of 1990s Britain. It also considers how visions of “bad motherhood” became articulated to Blairite policies of cutting welfare for poor families and lone mothers on benefits, and how representations of Princess Diana's motherhood (as well as many other [white] mothers in popular culture in 1990s and early 2000s) signal a neoliberal logic of motherhood, along with the racial implications of such logics. More specifically, the chapter contrasts such white maternal (neoliberal) logics with the conditions of black mothers in Britain during the period by focusing on Doreen Lawrence's 2006 book, And Still I Rise. It argues that models of white motherhood constantly contradict nonwhite motherhood, rendering it deviant and dysfunctional, and that images of a new kind of (white) mother are often needed by the nation to produce a vision of a modern family.
White Femininity and Transnational Masculinit(ies)
Authors: Shome Raka
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores the relationship between white (national) femininity and transnational masculinities, particularly Muslim men, in the context of the Diana phenomenon. More specifically, it considers how mediated images of Muslim masculinity are often secured in relation to images of white women. Before discussing the Muslim men–white women dialectic, the chapter provides an overview of the British national context of the 1990s with regard to Muslims. It then examines how sexuality, sexual relations, and mental perversity function as optics through which the Muslim male is depicted in relation to white women in the Diana phenomenon and popular culture at large, paying attention to the dichotomy of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim.” Given white femininity's role in guarding and preserving racialized borders of the nation, the chapter also analyzes how the nation manages the racialized and nationalized anxieties caused by threats to that role. It shows that contemporary visual structures in the West often give meaning to Muslim men through the structure of white femininity.
Networked Financialization
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how networked financialization exacerbated capitalism's crisis tendencies. Financialization, a formative aspect of the rise of digital capitalism in response to the crisis of the 1970s, evolved out of multiple impulses. One spur came as millions of workers who experienced wage repression were brought to depend on debt for immediate consumption as well as for housing and automobiles, education, and medical care. Another came from the fact that finance grew ever larger in the strategies of transnational manufacturers, retail chains, agribusinesses, and service suppliers. The chapter also discusses the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on financialization as well as the role of networks in the emergence of a high-tech financial system. It concludes by looking at three major trends, including the possibility that the financial crisis was unlikely to end without a profoundly conflicted restructuring of the global political economy.
Introduction
Authors: Pravadelli Veronica
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter argues that the existing literature on classical Hollywood could roughly be divided into two sets. On the one hand, there were those scholars who had analyzed the whole period arguing for continuities and similarities in most domains, from production to plot structure, from stylistic procedures to viewing experience, and so forth. On the other hand, critical work on Hollywood cinema had more often approached the topic by selecting a specific genre and period and making a statement about the peculiar relations between aesthetics and ideology. Often focusing on a specific genre, many investigated especially 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema in relation to cultural, artistic, and social dynamics. Indeed, for four decades, film noir, the woman's film, and melodrama have been the locus of such innovative research—from the theory of the “progressive text” in the early 1970s to “cinema and modernity studies” during the last twenty years or so.
The Early Thirties
Authors: Pravadelli Veronica
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the early sound period. From a formal perspective, the dominant film style has an affinity with silent cinema; it is filled with superimpositions, extended dissolves, elaborate optical effects, and a wide range of “attractions.” Consequently, the films of this period rely heavily on visual rather than verbal devices. The chapter then argues that between the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, American cinema privileges plots of female emancipation and images of the New Woman. The figure of the New Woman, combined with the aesthetic of attractions, can be interpreted in light of the “modernity thesis.”
Performative Bodies and Non-Referential Images
Authors: Pravadelli Veronica
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the 1950s musical. In contrast to melodrama, the musical combines spectacle with reflexive strategies and is able to comment in a sophisticated fashion on the fiction/reality dichotomy and on the relation between cinema and the other media, especially theater and television. While noir and woman's film used expressive techniques to emphasize the split nature of the human psyche—the opposition between conscious and unconscious realities—1950s musical goes one step further. Many films show that gendered identities are the product of a series of performances, rather than the expression of an intrinsic nature, and that the same character may well embody opposite tendencies and behaviors. In a similar fashion, other films suggest that the opposition between fiction and reality is no longer tenable, and that the performative register has started to invade both the realm of artistic production and of subjective experience.
Translated Fragments, Fragmented Translations
Authors: Nagar Richa
Published: May 2017

This chapter draws attention to the ways in which a commitment to radical vulnerability can enable and enrich politically engaged alliance work, and the particular ways in which affect and trust empower translations across borders. It presents excerpts of letters, conversations, poems, and narratives from contexts that might seem disjointed and disparate on the surface but that tell stories—of encounters, events, and relationships—that have enabled the arguments made in the rest of this book. These fragments also point to the intense entanglements between autobiography and politics, and seek to initiate a discussion on feminist praxis that commits itself to learning and unlearning by inserting one's body—individually and collectively—into the process of knowledge making and the generative challenges that such insertion poses for imagining storytelling and engagement across socioeconomic, geographical, and institutional borders.
Traveling and Crossing, Dreaming and Becoming
Authors: Nagar Richa
Published: May 2017

This chapter is based on writing that the author undertook with members of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS) in Hindi and English between 2004 and 2012, as well as on her own reflections on that writing. It traces the beginnings of the creative journey with sangtins that led to the making of the collaborative book Sangtin Yatra (Anupamlata et al. 2004, Sangtin Lekhak Samooh 2012), and analyzes the political battles that emerged from this yatra in multiple sites. It begins with a brief sketch of Sangtin Yatra and its meanings for the authors' intellectual and political growth as an alliance across borders. The two subsequent sections consider the effects of Sangtin Yatra, and how these inserted the collective into struggles around the politics of knowledge production in institutional sites that the collective had not encountered before. Finally, it reflects on the manner in which the transnational nature of the alliance has enabled critical engagements with structures and norms of professionalism and expertise locally, regionally, nationally, and transnationally, as well as the limitations and contradictions that remain buried in these engagements.
Building Filipino Hawai'i
Authors: Labrador Roderick N.
Published: May 2017

Drawing on ten years of interviews and ethnographic and archival research, this book delves into the ways Filipinos in Hawaiʻi have balanced their pursuit of upward mobility and mainstream acceptance with a desire to keep their Filipino identity. In particular, the book speaks to the processes of identity making and the politics of representation among immigrant communities striving to resist marginalization in a globalized, transnational era. Critiquing the popular image of Hawaiʻi as a postracial paradise, the book reveals how Filipino immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) where they've settled, and how these discourses shape their identities. It also shows how struggles for community empowerment and identity territorialization continue to affect how minority groups construct the stories they tell about themselves, to themselves and others. The book follows the struggles of contemporary Filipino immigrants to 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.
“What’s so p/funny?”
Authors: Labrador Roderick N.
Published: May 2017

This chapter critiques the idea of Hawaiʻi as a “multicultural paradise” and the production of Local by examining the popular practice of ethnic humor. It argues that Hawaiʻi ethnic humor is a space for the production of “Local knowledge(s)” and ideologies where identities are constructed and social order and racial hierarchy are enacted. It draws attention to the production of Local as a nonimmigrant identity, especially the ways in which Local comedians appropriate the voice of immigrant Filipinos through the use of Mock Filipino (or speaking English with a “Filipino accent”). Although understood as “innocent” and “harmless” joking in which “we can laugh at ourselves,” Hawaiʻi ethnic humor in general, and Mock Filipino in particular, simultaneously produce racially demeaning or “racially interested” discourses that uphold the positive self-image of Locals, especially their membership in Hawaiʻi's “racial paradise,” while lowering that of immigrant Filipinos.
Interview with Francis Ford Coppola
Authors: Menne Jeff
Published: May 2017

This interview was conducted by e-mail in December 2013.

JEFF MENNE:The party line on you has been that you were too much an artist to be a good businessperson. But it seems history will tell a different story—that is, that you have been responsible for creating different business models perhaps more than any other filmmaker in your generation. Do you think your artistic sense has opposed your business sense, or has it complemented it?...
A City of Industrial and Religious Extremes
Authors: Mirola William A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the case of Chicago and nineteenth-century Protestantism, the development of factions within the eight-hour movement, and the relationship between labor reformers, employers, and Protestant clergy in the city. Beneath the manifest economic and political conflicts that characterized Chicago's eight-hour movement was a debate between workers, employers, and clergy over the religious and moral significance of redeeming time through shorter hours for labor. In the development of their respective rhetoric in this debate, eight-hour advocates and employers fought over whether the hours of labor carried any religious significance whatsoever. Clergy responded to the struggles for reform from their positions as embedded community leaders. Indeed, Protestant values about work, leisure, and community relations shaped how clergy approached local eight-hour conflicts and provided the basis for initially opposing shorter hours but also for their later support for the movement.
A “New Consciousness” for Constructing a Morality of Leisure
Authors: Mirola William A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter details several key eight-hour campaign successes and losses in the 1890s and their impact on the religious framing among workers and clergy. As the 1880s gave way to the 1890s, arbitration was heard much more frequently as a solution to impasses between employers and organized labor. Prominent businessmen such as Cyrus McCormick and Marshall Field rejected the notion of bargaining with their employees on what they considered to be their right to conduct their business affairs free from interference. Nevertheless, finding ways to minimize class hostilities and prevent the production losses that inevitably accompanied drawn-out strikes and lockouts was becoming a priority for more and more employers. In 1893, Illinois enacted the “Sweatshop Act” that limited the workdays of women and children to eight hours. Moreover, the 1890s is significant as the period in which eight-hour support among Protestant clergy was strengthened as the result of a new social consciousness regarding labor reform.
Introduction
Authors: Misri Deepti
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter describes a cultural history of violence associated with widely divergent ideas of India after 1947—an India post-British Raj, post-Partition, post-Independence, and postcolonial. Communal violence, ethnonationalist insurgencies, terrorism, and counterinsurgent state violence have marked the postcolonial Indian nation-state since its very inception, often intersecting with prevailing forms of gendered violence within communities. These forms of violence have frequently indexed a serious disjoint between communally and regionally specific ideas of nationhood on the one hand, and the politically bounded, militarily enforced entity known as “India” on the other. In addition, the book is part of a wider feminist undertaking to critically examine how violence is conceptualized in the many discourses that shape public consciousness in the Indian subcontinent and its diasporic extensions.
Epilogue
Authors: Misri Deepti
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter reviews the violence of the oppressed, exercised against the juggernaut of the state and its favored caste and class constituencies. After briefly exploring an active feminist debate over the ethical valence of violence, the chapter indicates how one must be prepared to consider if such violence places a productive pressure on contemporary imaginings of India. Implicitly and explicitly, the book concludes by searching for an idea of India that escapes the prevailing discourses of Brahminical, neoliberal, and patriarchal nationalism that rule current articulations of that idea. To say that the violence of the oppressed gestures toward a more expansive idea of India is not simply to endorse violence, but rather to invite scrutiny of the long history of ideas of nation that have created these oppressed groups and their resistant violence.
Metaphorizing Terrorism
Authors: Spencer Alexander
Published: May 2017

This chapter shows that metaphors in the media actively take part in the construction of the world as we see it, think of it, and ultimately react to it. By projecting understandings from one conceptual area, such as war, to a different area, such as terrorism, metaphors naturalize specific countermeasures while placing other options outside of the mainstream debate. Metaphors are mechanisms for cognitive engagement by making abstract concepts and phenomena that are difficult to grasp, such as terrorism, comprehendible. The chapter begins by illustrating the concept of metaphors, reflecting on what metaphors do, and thereby outlining a method of metaphorical analysis. It then applies this method to tabloid news media discourse in Germany and the UK, and examines the four dominant conceptual metaphors that construct the terrorism of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden in these media. These conceptual metaphors are: terrorism is war, terrorism is crime, terrorism is uncivilized evil, and terrorism is disease. The chapter concludes by reflecting on some of the differences between media representations in Germany and the UK, and outlines some possible explanations for varying metaphor usage.
Obama bin Laden [sic]
Authors: Croken Ryan
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the cultural “confusion” that existed in the United States between Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama. It uses the cultural slippages (Obama/Osama), conspiratorial elisions (Obama is Osama), and religious assumptions (Obama, like Osama, is Muslim) that surround Osama and Obama as points for analyzing racialized dynamics that underlie narratives of U.S. exceptionalism, military power, and global dominance. It identifies some of the myriad streams through which popular culture effects its messages: T-shirts, web tools (photo morphing), memes, hip-hop, tweets, YouTube videos, and the like. Attending to these media formats is an essential component of examining sense-making across the complexities of U.S. cultures. The chapter argues that the “confusion” between Osama and Obama is more than just difficulty with name pronunciation, lack of familiarity with Islam, or merging of nonwhite skin color, but is instead a complex negotiation of racial intersections with national narratives.
After Bin Laden
Authors: Jeffords Susan , Al-Sumait Fahed
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the question of why Osama bin Laden's death did not seem to have the impact that was expected from the largest and most expensive manhunt in history. It looks at the debate about Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the film that chronicled the hunt and killing of bin Laden. The film's perspective is unmistakably American and Western, with assumptions that audiences would already know the back-story about who bin Laden is, why the U.S. government invested so much in finding him, and why his death should be an event for celebration. What is remarkable about the debates, the reviews, and the discussions about Zero Dark Thirty, however, is that they mimic cultural discourses that arose in the decade since 9/11 in an elusive dance with Osama bin Laden.
When Sex Threatened the State
Authors: Aderinto Saheed
Published: May 2017

Breaking new ground in the understanding of sexuality's complex relationship to colonialism, this book illuminates the attempts at regulating prostitution in colonial Nigeria. As the book shows, British colonizers saw prostitution as an African form of sexual primitivity and a problem to be solved as part of imperialism's “civilizing mission.” The book details the Nigerian response to imported sexuality laws and the contradictory ways both African and British reformers advocated for prohibition or regulation of prostitution. Tracing the tensions within diverse groups of colonizers and the colonized, the book reveals how wrangling over prostitution camouflaged the negotiating of separate issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies of Africans and Europeans alike. This, the first book-length project on sexuality in early twentieth century Nigeria, combines the study of a colonial demimonde with an urban history of Lagos and a look at government policy to reappraise the history of Nigerian public life.
“This Is a City of Bubbles”
Authors: Aderinto Saheed
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses the socioeconomic, gendered, and racial structure of colonial Lagos and reveals the identities of individuals and groups that shaped sexual politics. While the British were mostly responsible for the major physical infrastructure, they did not dictate or monopolize the accompanying social outlook that emerged out of Lagosians' quest to mold the city to their own taste. City life entailed maintaining a balance in the ways people lived their lives; the kinds of music they enjoyed; and how they socialized, dressed, and conducted themselves as they sought to maximize the benefits of colonial capitalism. The chapter then explores inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic relations and concludes that the politics of sex fit into the existing tension over urban citizenship, class stratification, and social privileges accruing from the pigmentation of the skin. It argues that the agitation against prostitution reflected a social ambivalence that can be termed as “selective modernity.”
Sexualized Laws, Criminalized Bodies
Authors: Aderinto Saheed
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how the criminal justice system assumed a prime position in the policing of prostitution. By differentiating between adult and child prostitution laws, the legal system played a significant role in molding public and official perceptions toward the identity of adult and underage practitioners of prostitution and the perceived menace each type of prostitution allegedly posed. Moreover, unlike the social interpretation of sex work, the new legal regime from the early 1940s institutionalized the criminalization of transactional sex as a component of social and public order. As such, prostitution became a component of the colonial state's maintenance of law and order, which was cardinal to the effective exploitation of the colonies.
Prostitution and Trafficking in the Age of HIV/AIDS
Authors: Aderinto Saheed
Published: May 2017

This epilogue links the colonial history of sexuality with the contemporary politics of HIV/AIDS and girl-child trafficking in Nigeria. The continuity and change in the institutional response to illicit sexuality mirrored the transformative process in the core structures of Nigeria's political and economic ordering. Unlike in the 1940s, when the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) and the CWO were chiefly responsible for policing prostitution, postcolonial Nigeria witnessed the emergence of new organizations like the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), which monitors sexual exploitation of underage girls. Indeed, the character, intensity, and composition of regulatory agencies have changed to meet the new challenges of urbanization, HIV/AIDS, underdevelopment, and the globalization of sex in post-independence Nigeria.
Introduction
Authors: Godreau Isar P.
Published: May 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the concept of “scripts of blackness” in Puerto Rico—that is, dominant narratives and stories that set standards, expectations, and even spatial templates for what is publicly recognized, celebrated, and sponsored as black and Puerto Rican. Racial scripts can be seen as a variant of processes described as racial essentialism, stereotyping, and stigmatization. However, racial scripts as defined in this book are closely tied to celebratory notions of nationalism developed under the rubric of mestizaje, or race mixture. Unlike most forms of stereotyping, which often assign negative qualities to groups, the “scripts of blackness” analyzed in this study essentialize black people and black communities according to attributes presented in the dominant discourses as primarily positive and often celebrated as exceptional qualities of the mixed-race nation.
Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands
Authors: Guzmán Will
Published: May 2017

In 1909, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. This book delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the man's own indefatigable courage, the book also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands—as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, this book explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.
Ray Bradbury
Authors: Seed David
Published: May 2017

As much as any individual, Ray Bradbury brought science fiction's ideas into the mainstream. Yet he transcended the genre in both form and popularity, using its trappings to explore timely social concerns and the kaleidoscope of human experience while in the process becoming one of America's most beloved authors. This book follows Bradbury's long career from the early short story masterpieces through his work in a wide variety of broadcast and film genres to the influential cultural commentary he spread via essays, speeches, and interviews. Mining Bradbury's classics and hard-to-find archival, literary, and cultural materials, the book analyzes how the author's views on technology, authoritarianism, and censorship affected his art; how his Midwest of dream and dread brought his work to life; and the ways film and television influenced his creative process and visually oriented prose style. The result is a passionate statement on Bradbury's status as an essential literary writer deserving of a place in the cultural history of his time.
Out of The Science Fiction Ghetto
Authors: Seed David
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines Ray Bradbury's creation of a kind of science fiction (SF) beyond the genre ghetto of the 1940s. The discussions cover his fascination with film; his early; his mentors; his attempts to write detective fiction and horror; his attitude toward technology; his exploration of time travel through dinosaur stories; his commentary on SF through a series of essays and interviews; and his repeated claim of a continuity between his childhood reading and adult writing. The chapter argues that Bradbury's surge of creativity in the late 1940s and 1950s coincided with the last years of the Golden Age of SF. In tandem with the publication of the fiction itself, more and more writers examined the nature of the genre. Broadly speaking, these writers all agreed that SF had emerged from its ghetto and taken up a socially central role as the literature of speculation.
Where Tradition, Power, and Gender Intersect
Authors: Sunardi Christina
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes performer interactions, bringing together many of the themes and issues discussed in previous chapters to demonstrate some of the ways that micro-moments of interaction on- and offstage are critical moments of complex cultural and ideological work. Building on Benjamin Brinner's attention to the importance of competence and authority in shaping interactions between performers as well as the ways such interactions affect what is performed, this chapter focuses on the relationship between the dancer and the drummer. It argues that contradictions between dominant ideologies that privilege the knowledge of a more senior male and a performance structure in which leadership roles are flexible provide spaces for men and women to negotiate their authority and articulate senses of gender in different ways as they negotiate the form and content of a dance.
The Village Emerges
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the tripartite nature of the settlement pattern that emerged at St. Louis during the 1760s: it consisted of a nuclear village, plowlands for sowing grain, and commons for pasturing livestock, gathering firewood, and shooting rabbits and squirrels. It begins with a description of the physical configuration of early St. Louis and goes on to discuss Indians' claims to the land on which St. Louis was built. It then traces the history of town planning at early St. Louis before turning to Louis St. Ange de Bellerive's conveyance of land grants in early St. Louis containing an explicit homesteading provision. It concludes with an account of French monarch Louis XV's promulgatation of a land ordinance for Louisiana.
Slaves: African and Indian
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the role played by African and Indian slaves in early St. Louis. Indians had practiced slavery long before European explorers, traders, and colonizers arrived on North American shores. Profitable, market-oriented agriculture developed in the Illinois Country as early as the 1720s, and slaves (especially Africans) were used as field hands. In French Illinois, Indian as well as African slaves had been present since the early eighteenth century, and especially at the founding of St. Louis in 1764. Slaves appear only marginally in most studies of colonial St. Louis, which tend to dwell on the fur trade and commercial relations with Missouri Valley Indians. This chapter looks at the village's slave population during the first decade of the settlement's existence. In particular, it considers how slaves became integrated into the life of the growing village. It also describes public auctions of slaves in the Illinois Country and the lives of early St. Louis slaves. Finally, it discusses the Grotton–St. Ange family's firsthand experience with the Indian slave trade.
Beyond the Laclède-Chouteau Legend
Authors: Ekberg Carl J. , Person Sharon K.
Published: May 2017

This book explores the importance of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive and Charles-Joseph Labuxière within the larger context of Illinois Country history and society. More specifically, it examines how St. Ange and Labuxière rose to prominence in a French colony that had existed for more than a half century before St. Louis came into being. It argues that these two men were more important than either fur traders Auguste Chouteau or his stepfather Pierre Laclède Liguest—Chouteau claimed that Laclède had foreseen St. Louis's immense prospects from the very beginning—during St. Louis's earliest years. This book also brings to life scores of other persons who played important roles in early St. Louis even though many of them have never before appeared in any history book—from woodcutters and carpenters to cabinetmakers, stonemasons, women and children, and African and Indian slaves.
The criminalization consensus and the right to sext
Authors: Hasinoff Amy Adele
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the consensus that teenagers should have no right to sext and argues for the decriminalization of consensual teen sexting. It begins with a discussion of two cases at the beginning of the moral panic about sexting in 2009: in the first, the American Civil Liberties Union supported three girls who were threatened with child pornography charges by an overzealous prosecutor; the second case is the development of Vermont's sexting legislation in 2009. The chapter then considers the main problems with the criminalization of consensual sexting: the uneven application of the law, punitive and unfair education programs, and the silencing of victims whose privacy has been violated. It also outlines arguments in favor of allowing teens to sext, contending that this could, among other things, confirm their right to freedom of expression. The chapter concludes by contending that it may be more practical to think about regulating consensual sexting as a sex act (rather than a speech act).
Origins of the Spanish Anarchist Movement in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Baer James A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter provides a short history of anarchism and the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin, giving an overview of the origins and ideas of anarchism and its impact on Spain. It discusses the turbulent late nineteenth century in Spain, the growth of the Spanish Regional Federation, and the beginnings of immigration to Argentina, demonstrating the movement of people between these two countries. By 1890, Spain's anarchist movement had become fractured and weak. By the end of the decade, the federation officially dissolved. But while the movement ebbed in Spain, it began to achieve importance in Argentina, in part as a consequence of the immigration of Spanish anarchist militants.
Changing Political Climates and Return Migration
Authors: Baer James A.
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents a history of the political and social climates of Spain and Argentina after 1930. A military coup led by General José Félix Uriburu created a new political climate in Argentina, as the new government hunted down, arrested, and deported anarchists. Abad de Santillán fled Argentina and eventually moved to Spain. Argentina deported hundreds of other Spaniards, most notably Manuel Villar, who became important in the anarchist movement in Spain before and during the civil war. At the same time, the end of Spain's military dictatorship, the abdication of the monarch, and the creation of a parliamentary republic offered new hope to anarchists there. Consequently, the changing political climate in Argentina forced some Spanish-born anarchist émigrés back to Spain.
Femininity: The Trap
Authors: de Beauvoir Simone , Timmermann Marybeth
Published: May 2017

The French have never been feminists. Of course, they’ve always loved women, but in the manner of Mediterranean peoples, which is the way ogres love little children—for their personal consumption. In the middle ages, the law denied French women the possession of land and separated them from the political scene. Later, the civil code denied them the same rights as men. It is also known with what stubbornness aging senators have consistently turned a deaf ear when the feminists claimed the vote and full rights of citizenship. Since the war of 1914–18, the situation has changed somewhat. Lack of manpower brought women into many fields to replace men, and they began to acquire economic independence. This war completed the evolution. In the Resistance, in concentration camps, women proved their right to participate in the reconstruction of their country on an equal basis as men. The civil code was modified in their favor and they were given the right to vote, to be elected; there are few jobs which are today forbidden them. It appears, therefore, that in France the old quarrel between feminists and antifeminists is settled, and there is no reason to return to it. But I ask myself if on the contrary it is not today that the question rises most ...
Introduction
Authors: Vintges Karen
Published: May 2017

Beauvoir’s short feminist texts from the 1950s and 1960s follow up on the main themes of her study The Second Sex, which was published in 1949. In this voluminous work, Beauvoir had already outlined all the major issues of the second feminist wave of the late sixties and early seventies, namely the issues of economic autonomy for women, women’s control over their own bodies, and the liberation of female sexuality. Two decades after its publication, ...