Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Rule of Sympathy
The Rule of Sympathy is a social and historical critique of sympathy in British discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Although initially associated with feminized or effeminate forms of sentimental discourse (the romance, the novel, the gothic), sympathy came to function as a key technology of gender and race in new evangelical social movements, such as abolitionism and missionizing. Amit Rai argues that sympathy was a paradoxical mode of power. The differences of racial, gender and class inequalities that increasingly divided the object and agent of sympathy were precisely what must be bridged through identification. Yet without such differences, which were differences of power, sympathy itself would be impossible. This paradoxical mode of power transformed the ways in which people came to think of how best to manage, order, and govern individuals and populations in the late eighteenth century.
Muslims and American Popular Culture
Offering readers an engaging, accessible, and balanced account of the contributions of American Muslims to the contemporary United States, this important book serves to clarify misrepresentations and misunderstandings regarding Muslim Americans and Islam. Unfortunately, American mass media representations of Muslims—whether in news or entertainment—are typically negative and one-dimensional. As a result, Muslims are frequently viewed negatively by those with minimal knowledge of Islam in America. This accessible two-volume work will help readers to construct an accurate framework for understanding the presence and depictions of Muslims in American society. These volumes discuss a uniquely broad array of key topics in American popular culture, including jihad and jihadis; the hejab, veil, and burka; Islamophobia; Oriental despots; Arabs; Muslims in the media; and mosque burnings. Muslims and American Popular Culture offers more than 40 chapters that serve to debunk the overwhelmingly negative associations of Islam in American popular culture and illustrate the tremendous contributions of Muslims to the United States across an extended historical period.
City Fictions of the New India
How does Indian fiction imagine urban transformation? India's cities were once maligned as places of economic stasis and deprivation but in the era of the so-called New India (2000-present) centres like Delhi and Mumbai have been recast as 'engines of economic growth' and reshaped by prestige infrastructure. Yet the provision of core infrastructures for all remains a major challenge for urban governance. City Fictions is the first study of its kind to read anglophone Indian writing infrastructurally: by taking account of the centrality of water utilities, waste-processing, residential architecture, and road, rail, and telephonic networks in contemporary representations of urban citizenship. ...
Jugaad Time
In India, the practice of jugaad—finding workarounds or hacks to solve problems—emerged out of subaltern strategies of negotiating poverty, discrimination, and violence but is now celebrated in management literature as a disruptive innovation. In Jugaad Time Amit S. Rai explores how jugaad operates within contemporary Indian digital media cultures through the use of the mobile phone. Rai shows that despite being co-opted by capitalism to extract free creative labor from the workforce, jugaad is simultaneously a practice of everyday resistance, as workers and communities employ hacks to oppose corporate, caste, and gender power. Locating the tensions surrounding jugaad—as both premodern and postdigital, innovative and oppressive—Rai maps how jugaad can be used to undermine neoliberal capitalist media ecologies and nationalist politics.
Criminalization, Representation, Regulation
What is a crime and how do we construct it? The answers to these questions are complex and entangled in a web of power relations that require us to think differently about processes of criminalization and regulation. This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged. It explores the dynamic interplay between practices of representation, processes of criminalization, and the ways that these circulate to both reflect and constitute crime and "justice."
Monster Culture in the 21st Century
In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.
Visualizing Secularism and Religion
An investigation of the role of religion in the formation of secular-national public spheres in the Middle East and South Asia
Cinematic Independence
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Cinematic Independence traces the emergence, demise, and rebirth of big-screen film exhibition in Nigeria. Film companies flocked to Nigeria in the years following independence, beginning a long history of interventions by Hollywood and corporate America. The 1980s and 1990s saw a shuttering of cinemas, which were almost entirely replaced by television and direct-to-video movies. However, after 1999, the exhibition sector was revitalized with the construction of multiplexes. Cinematic Independence is about the periods that straddle this disappearing act: the immediate decades bracketing independence in 1960, and the years after 1999. At stake is the Nigerian postcolony’s role in global debates about the future of the movie theater. That it was eventually resurrected in the flashy form of the multiplex is not simply an achievement of commercial real estate, but also a testament to cinema’s persistence—its capacity to stave off annihilation or, in this case, come back from the dead.
