When Alina Simone agreed to write a book about Madonna, she thought it might provide an interesting excuse to indulge her own eighties nostalgia. Wrong. What Simone discovered instead was a tidal ...wave of already published information about Madonna—and her own ambivalence about, maybe even jealousy of, the Material Girl’s overwhelming commercial success. With the straight-ahead course stymied, Simone set off on a quirky detour through the backroads of celebrity and fandom and the people who love or loathe Madonna. In this witty, sometimes acerbic, always perceptive chronicle, Simone begins by trying to understand why Madonna’s birthplace, Bay City, Michigan, won’t even put up a sign to celebrate its most famous citizen, and ends by asking why local bands who make music that’s authentic and true can disappear with barely a trace. In between, she ranges from Madonna fans who cover themselves with tattoos of the singer’s face and try to make fortunes off selling her used bustiers and dresses, to Question Mark and the Mysterians—one-hit wonders best known for “96 Tears"—and Flying Wedge, a Detroit band that dropped off an amazing two-track record in the office of CREEM magazine in 1972 and vanished, until Simone tracked it down. Filled with fresh insights about the music business, fandom, and what it takes to become a superstar, Madonnaland is as much a book for people who, like Simone, prefer “dark rooms, coffee, and state-subsidized European films filled with existential despair" as it is for people who can’t get enough of Madonna.
The Civil War (1861-65) and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln have been game-changers in the history of America predominantly because of the Emancipation Proclamation that provided freedom to the ...slaves. George Saunders' debut novel Lincoln in the Bardo extends the scope of the plot through the fictional depiction of Abraham Lincoln's personal and presidential roles. The paper seeks to focus on the in-between state/s of the fictional character of Abraham Lincoln influenced by the settings and situation that produces transitional attributes to the novel. Availing the 'processual framework' of liminality proposed by Victor Turner, the liminal existence of Abraham Lincoln in the novel caused by the demise of his son Willie Lincoln and the savage political situation in America is traced. The findings derived from the analytical interpretation of the text reveal the presence of multiple liminal experiences in the character of Abraham Lincoln.
Bama (born 1958) is considered a significant Dalit woman writer from contemporary India. In her seminal work, Karukku (1992), Bama records her most traumatic experiences in the Convent, Church, ...seminary, and the Christian community that become the centres of discrimination based on caste. Besides the narratives about the separate human settlement in the village, lower caste people working for upper castes on low wages, the tradition of leftover, hierarchical possession over natural resources like water of lakes, rivers or pastures showcase the mindsets of society. This research paper discusses how Karukku is a Bildungsroman while tracing the growth of the protagonist from childhood into maturity imparting moral and social values through this novel. Keywords: Bama, Karukku, Bildungsroman, discrimination, Convent, Church, seminary, Christian community.
As an acclaimed Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai has created numerous figures of mobile women, such as the martial artist in The Grandmaster (2013) and the lone traveler in My Blueberry Nights ...(2007). However, the issues pertinent to women in his films are often overlooked. In recent decades, feminists have examined women's mobility as a challenge to the gendered spatial division between public and private spaces. In society, popular media is powerful in constructing the notion of space, while cinema can question the fixed ideas of gendered space. However, feminist work in media geography is still relatively rare. By subverting the conventional elements of various genres, Wong repositions women in cinematic space and reflects the global trend of women's mobility. Wong's films demonstrate the geographical power of cinema by deploying the transnational elements of Hong Kong and Hollywood genres to negotiate the meanings of gendered space. By revealing the cultural significance of Wong's works in relation to gender and space, this article argues that the studies of genres and their variations are crucial at the intersection between media geography and feminist geography as an emergent research direction that could broaden the horizons of both fields.
"It's almost like ballet. Preflight. Starting. Warm-up. The voices from the control tower—the instructions. Taxiing. The rush down the runway. Airborne. There are names for every move. The run-up. ...Position and hold. Every move needs to be learned, practiced, made so familiar you feel the patterns in every other thing you do. It's technical, yes. But there is a grace to getting metal and bone into the sky." Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites readers to view the world from a pilot's seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground. Whether searching for the still-evident shores of ancient lakes, the dustbowl- era shelterbelt supposed to run the length of the country, or the even more elusive understandings of physics and theology, Olsen shares the unique perspective and insight allowed to pilots. Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot's seat of a Cessna. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic work Wind, Sand and Stars, Olsen's Prairie Sky reveals the heart of what it means to fly. In the grand romantic tradition of the travel essay, it opens the dramatic paradoxes of self and collective, linear and circular, the heart and the border.
Since the discovery of abundant oil resources in the 1920s, Venezuela has had an economically privileged position among the nations of Latin America, which has led to its being treated by economic ...and political analysts as an exceptional case. In her well-known study of Venezuela’s political economy, The Paradox of Plenty (1997), Stanford political scientist Terry Karl argued that this oil wealth induced extraordinary corruption, rent-seeking, and centralized intervention that resulted in restricting productivity and growth. What this and other studies of Venezuela’s economy fail to explain, however, is how such conditions have accompanied both growth and stagnation at different periods of Venezuela’s history and why countries experiencing similar levels of corruption and rent-seeking produce divergent developmental outcomes.
By investigating the record of economic development in Venezuela from 1920 to the present, Jonathan Di John shows that the key to explaining why the economy performed much better between 1920 and 1980 than in the post-1980 period is to understand how political strategies interacted with economic strategies—specifically, how politics determined state capacity at any given time and how the stage of development and development strategies affected the nature of political conflicts. In emphasizing the importance of an approach that looks at the political economy, not just at the economy alone, Di John advances the field methodologically while he contributes to a long-needed history of Venezuela’s economic performance in the twentieth century.
