Ripples of the Universe

Ask a random American what springs to mind about Sedona, Arizona, and they will almost certainly mention New Age spirituality. Nestled among stunning sandstone formations, Sedona has built an identity completely intertwined with that of the permanent residents and throngs of visitors who insist it is home to powerful vortexes—sites of spiraling energy where meditation, clairvoyance, and channeling are enhanced. It is in this uniquely American town that Susannah Crockford took up residence for two years to make sense of spirituality, religion, race, and class. Many people move to Sedona because, they claim, they are called there by its special energy. But they are also often escaping job loss, family breakdown, or foreclosure. Spirituality, Crockford shows, offers a way for people to distance themselves from and critique current political and economic norms in America. Yet they still find themselves monetizing their spiritual practice as a way to both “raise their vibration” and meet their basic needs. Through an analysis of spirituality in Sedona, Crockford gives shape to the failures and frustrations of middle- and working-class people living in contemporary America, describing how spirituality infuses their everyday lives. Exploring millenarianism, conversion, nature, food, and conspiracy theories, Ripples of the Universe combines captivating vignettes with astute analysis to produce a unique take on the myriad ways class and spirituality are linked in contemporary America.  

Posted on: 3 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Myanmar’s Education Reforms

Myanmar’s Education Reforms reviews the changing state of education in Myanmar as the country has dealt with a profound transformation over the past decade and a half. Education has served as a litmus test for judging the level of openness of any Myanmar government, especially those in place for the past seven decades. Marie Lall situates education within the context of the wider reforms and the process of making peace that began in 2012, using it as a case study on how these reforms have progressed and continue to progress. Drawing on data collected over fifteen years in the field, Lall argues that despite controlling the majority of the civilian government, the National League for Democracy is not delivering on its promise of social justice.

Posted on: 2 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Ruins Lesson

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

Posted on: 2 June 2021 | 12:00 am

As You Like It

Actor and director David Ivers presents As You Like It, as you’d like to hear it today. Presenting a new translation of Shakespeare into contemporary English, Ivers reimagines Shakespeare’s comedy from an actor’s point of view. Analyzing the play line by line to uncover the meaning of every joke, pun, and witty aside, Ivers repurposes Shakespeare’s language while maintaining an homage to the original rhythm, cadence, and structure. An accomplished actor and director, and a lifelong lover of the Bard, Ivers is the perfect writer to bring As You Like It into the present moment.   This translation of As You Like It was written as part of the Play On! Shakespeare project, an ambitious undertaking from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that commissioned new translations of 39 Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era. 

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Doña Bárbara Unleashed

Since its publication in 1929, the story of Doña Bárbara has continued haunting the collective imagination of people of Latin American descent and has been adapted on various occasions both for the small and big screen. Doña Bárbara Unleashed explores how Rómulo Gallegos’s original story has been kept alive yet altered by subsequent screen adaptations. The book illustrates how both the film and telenovela adaptations have reinterpreted the story of Doña Bárbara in order to mirror changes in societal norms, such as the role of women in Latin American societies, and audience expectations. Specific attention is paid to the way in which in the twenty-first-century the spectators have played a crucial role in influencing the alterations to which Gallegos’s original plot has been subjected. Doña Bárbara Unleashed offers an original way of studying screen adaptations by putting a number of adaptations of the same source text in dialogue rather than simply comparing the individual adaptations with the source text. By further intertwining more traditional theories of screen adaptations with approaches emerging from fandom studies, this book unearths completely new ground, as existing studies on-screen adaptations have barely touched on the issue of audience responses.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

On the Spirit of Rights

By the end of the eighteenth century, politicians in America and France were invoking the natural rights of man to wrest sovereignty away from kings and lay down universal basic entitlements. Exactly how and when did “rights” come to justify such measures?   In On the Spirit of Rights, Dan Edelstein answers this question by examining the complex genealogy of the rights that regimes enshrined in the American and French Revolutions. With a lively attention to detail, he surveys a sprawling series of debates among rulers, jurists, philosophers, political reformers, writers, and others who were all engaged in laying the groundwork for our contemporary systems of constitutional governance. Every seemingly new claim about rights turns out to be a variation on a theme, as late medieval notions were subtly repeated and refined to yield the talk of “rights” we recognize today. From the Wars of Religion to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, On the Spirit of Rights is a sweeping tour through centuries of European intellectual history and an essential guide to our ways of thinking about human rights today.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Primer of Libertarian Education

In this book Joel Spring traces the long tradition of libertarian opposition to established forms of schooling from Rousseau and William Godwin to A.S. Neill and Paulo Freire. He illuminates the central questions that have concerned radical educators: How can teaching encourage independence and self-reliance? Can rigid ideas and ideologies be avoided by radical educators? What is the contradiction between "schooling" and "education"? How does truly libertarian child rearing challenge the family structure? How can real learning free people so they can begin to change the world around them? Spring also discusses the ideas of several figures whose relevance to education is just beginning to be appreciated, including Max Stirner, Franciso Ferrer, Wilhelm Reich, and Tolstoy. Spring concludes with suggestions for what directions radical educational change might now take. 

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Race Gender And Work

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Navigating Normative Orders

Normative orders emerge and pollinate everywhere. Whether it be with Kant or among conservatives, posts on the internet, in environmental discourses, or in our raising of our children: Norms populate and spread. This book explains how norms are created, why they are adopted, how they can be legitimated, and how they are contested and disappear. Combining twelve contributions from a diverse range of disciplines, the book unites, for the first time, younger scholars from the Research Centre “Normative Orders” at the University of Frankfurt. Even as certainties are questioned, norms are shown to play a central and vital role in regulating our behavior and understandings. Together, these norms form normative orders, with and through which political authority and the distribution of rights and goods are legitimized, in criminal law, educational systems, the territorial state, the discourse on progress, and in the Anthropocene. As Navigating Normative Orders shows, these norms control our personal and political lives in ways we may not even realize.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Embodying Contagion

From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion, and a global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet, these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have now infiltrated how news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science, and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, Embodying Contagion aims to give readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Embodying Contagion

From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion, and a global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet, these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have now infiltrated how news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science, and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, Embodying Contagion aims to give readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern Resonance

The Danish Golden Age was marked by several key events: the Napoleonic Wars, the bombardment of Copenhagen, the state bankruptcy in 1814 and the ensuing financial crisis, the revolution of 1848, and the establishment of a parliamentary democracy in 1849. At the same time, there were peasant reforms, religious upheavals, and significant changes in class and social structures. The contributors to this volume argue that these different crises did not just serve as a backdrop for or as obstacles to the flowering of culture in the Golden Age, but were instead the catalysts for it. Despite their many debates and polemics among themselves, the leading figures of Golden Age Denmark were generally in agreement about the fact that their age was in a state of crisis. The dramatic events spilled over into the various cultural spheres and shaped them in different ways. The essays in this volume trace the different crises as they appear in literature, criticism, religion, philosophy, politics, and the social sciences. Drawing compelling parallels between the perceived crisis of the Golden Age and the acute issues of our own day, this book strongly makes the case for the continuing relevance of the Golden Age for readers today.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Ogooué Delta

Located in a sparsely populated stretch of wetland in the coastal West African nation of Gabon, the Ogooué is among the most well-preserved of the continent’s major river deltas. Home to large populations of hippopotamuses, manatees, long-nosed crocodiles, and fish—as well as the nesting grounds for terns and other sea birds—the Ogooué also hosts a complex mix of flora, from meadows and mangroves to swamps and forests. It includes populations of more than 150 threatened plant species, making it a crucial site for ecological conservation. ​This book presents a comprehensive and lushly illustrated overview of the biodiversity of this remarkable area, one that should appeal as much to scientists as to general readers. Coauthored by 21 international experts, The Ogooué Delta explores the rich multitude of plant and animal life that make this area such a singular site. The authors also detail the delta’s history of human settlement and interaction, as well as lay out a series of proposed conservation measures to ensure that the Ogooué remains a haven for natural diversity.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Affect of an Experience

Despite the contemporary trend to focus on personal experience in art and writing, there is very little critical analysis of the concept of experience within fine art. The overarching conceptual aim of the book is to examine the concept of experience as both content and as interpretative register in the context of fine art. It explores the reasons why experience, when compared to other modes of consciousness—such as understanding, knowing, perceiving, or recognizing—is more aligned with the notion of actuality and thus more likely to be viewed as authentic. It then discusses the idea of writing about experience as a practice in fine art—the idea that writing can be understood as a practice like painting, sculpture, video, etc.—and explores a viable methodology for the art writing practice.     The book seeks to provide a more fluid interpretation of experience. In so doing, it explores the following questions: Why does the reading of experience as self-presence predominate? What is the status and value of experience as evidence? How is experience written and seen? In exploring these questions, Kate Love creates a workable strategy for writing about experience.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Billion-Dollar Fish

Alaska pollock is everywhere. If you’re eating fish but you don’t know what kind it is, it’s almost certainly pollock. Prized for its generic fish taste, pollock masquerades as crab meat in california rolls and seafood salads, and it feeds millions as fish sticks in school cafeterias and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. That ubiquity has made pollock the most lucrative fish harvest in America—the fishery in the United States alone has an annual value of over one billion dollars. But even as the money rolls in, pollock is in trouble: in the last few years, the pollock population has declined by more than half, and some scientists are predicting the fishery’s eventual collapse. In Billion-Dollar Fish, Kevin M. Bailey combines his years of firsthand pollock research with a remarkable talent for storytelling to offer the first natural history of Alaska pollock. Crucial to understanding the pollock fishery, he shows, is recognizing what aspects of its natural history make pollock so very desirable to fish, while at the same time making it resilient, yet highly vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey delves into the science, politics, and economics surrounding Alaska pollock in the Bering Sea, detailing the development of the fishery, the various political machinations that have led to its current management, and, perhaps most important, its impending demise. He approaches his subject from multiple angles, bringing in the perspectives of fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, and biologists, and drawing on revealing interviews with players who range from Greenpeace activists to fishing industry lawyers. Seamlessly weaving the biology and ecology of pollock with the history and politics of the fishery, as well as Bailey’s own often raucous tales about life at sea, Billion-Dollar Fish is a book for every person interested in the troubled relationship between fish and humans, from the depths of the sea to the dinner plate.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Scientific Freedom under Attack

Recent years have seen an alarming rise in antiintellectual outbursts by politicians, documented threats against radical scholars across continents, and serious blows to the fundamental right of scientific freedom. Scientific Freedom under Attack is an edited volume that ties together proceedings of the international conference on “The Problems of Scientific Freedoms in Modern and Contemporary History”, which was held at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, on in November 2018. Covering a broad geographic and temporal span, stretching from the early nineteenth century through the Cold War and on to the neoliberal era, from Eurasia to China and to the United States, it presents an illuminating and important panorama of the political and structural challenges that scientific production and critical thinking continue to face. As these forces continue to attack scientific freedom, this volume offers necessary and critical analysis of their emergence.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Mercedes-Benz 300 SL

A lavishly illustrated tribute to one of the most beloved European cars of all time. For nearly seventy years, no car has moved the lovers of classic cars more than the 300 SL. A legend since its launch in 1954 as a gullwing coupe, the 300 SL has been seen as the very model of what a sports car can be, its style and beauty perfectly matched to its power and handling. This beautifully illustrated tribute volume brings together Hans Kleissl, one of the world’s leading experts on the 300 SL, and former Daimler historian and Mercedes-Benz archive manager Harry Niemann. The resulting book captures the magic and mystique of the car through history, photographs, insights into its technological breakthroughs, and firsthand accounts of its storied run. There’s no better gift for the passionate fan of the 300 SL.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Illiberal Politics and Religion in Europe and Beyond

Despite the broadly assumed institutional separation of church and state in contemporary Western politics, there is a trend towards renewed alliances between illiberal interpretations of religion and right-wing populist politics that challenge liberal democracy. This book explores the theoretically and empirically complex ideological, structural, and historical linkage between religion and illiberal politics within a broad range of European states. It shows how political actors apply Christian identity narratives to push exclusionist anti-Muslim politics, while simultaneously showcasing the ways in which religious actors evolve as illiberal players searching for political allies. This timely volume offers a critical look at a key contemporary issue that challenges assumptions and the reputations of current relationships between church and state.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Laurits Tuxen

Laurits Tuxen (1853–1927) was a phenomenally talented artist who, thanks to his skills within both painting and diplomacy, established himself as one of the most important European court painters in the nineteenth century—active, among other places, in Great Britain, where he created a number of memorable portraits of Queen Victoria and her family, and in Russia, where he depicted coronations and weddings in the families of the Czars. This book offers the first complete presentation of Tuxen’s royal portraits and paintings and shows both full and detailed views of familiar and by now iconic works of art, such as the 1887 group portrait of Queen Victoria and her family at Windsor Castle. The British Queen also commissioned Tuxen to depict important royal events such as the wedding of the Duke of York and Princess Mary of Teck in 1893, and he produced several masterful paintings on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.Laurits Tuxen: The Court Paintings is a must for students, scholars, and readers with a general interest in art and the world of the European courts. The book takes us one step closer to the great painter and his relations with the royals of Europe, not least those of Great Britain.  

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Aboriginal Peoples

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Kin, Clan and Community in Indo-European Society

This book analyses the latest trends in Indo-European studies, combining linguistic study with insights from archaeology, anthropology and genetics in an attempt to shed new light on the social structure of the pastoralist society of Proto-Indo-European speakers.An introduction on the benefits of approaching Indo-European studies from an anthropological angle precedes nine chapters representing the book’s two parts: one on kinship terminology and family structure, and one on wooing and marriage.Part one includes a lengthy overview of Proto-Indo-European kinship terminology, as well as five chapters on individual branches: Anatolian, Avestan, Latin, Germanic and Albanian. Part two comprises a chapter on consanguinity and marriage in early Indo-European societies, one on Anatolian marriage and marriage types, and one on the processes and rites related to wooing.Together, these form the first study of Indo-European family structure to draw on linguistics, archaeology and genetics, an important contribution to our understanding of how social and family structures developed in prehistoric and early historic times.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

1984 And After

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Legal Records at Risk

Why do so few institutions in the legal sector have professional records managers or archivists on their staff? This book is the culmination of a three year project by experienced archivist and records managers on private sector legal records at risk in England at Wales. It summarises the work of the Legal Records at Risk (LRAR) project and its predecessors, diagnoses the problems of preservation of archives in the legal sector in England and Wales and outlines a national strategy for such records.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Green Guerrillas

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am

Joseph Beuys—Manresa

The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Düsseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Björn Nörgaard. In 1994 those two artists performed a new version of the piece as Manresa Hauptbahnhof. The performance was carried out in Manresa, the city that both gave the name to the original action and also was where Saint Ignatius Loyola had the revelations that led him to write his Spiritual Exercises, which Beuys considered essential reading. This book, marking the centenary of the artist’s birth, presents never-before-seen materials from the two performances, including texts, images, scripts, and preparatory drawings, and contributions from scholars and critics offer further insight. Friedhelm Mennekes, an art critic and Jesuit priest, analyses the Ignatian imprint in Beuys’s work while explaining its spiritual complexity, looking beyond the popular vision of the artist as shaman. Pilar Parcerisas examines Beuys’s spiritual geography, explaining the importance the town of Manresa within it while also laying out the physical and mystical coordinates of Eurasia, a site that was always present in Beuys’s work. While reviewing the features of Manresa, Klaus-D. Pohl also addresses the paradoxical union between Beuys’s mysticism and the neo-Dadaists of Fluxus. Beuys’s collaborator Björn Nörgaard recalls his time working with the German artist and reflects on the paths he opened up. Finally, art historian Harald Szeemann considers the possibility of liberating politics through spirituality.

Posted on: 1 June 2021 | 12:00 am