Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. ...This music—one part in a greater process of instilling diasporic Zionism in American Jewish communities—represents an early and underexplored means of fostering mainstream American Jewish engagement with the Jewish state and Hebrew national culture as they emerged after Israel declared its independence in 1948. This evolutionary process brought Zionism from being an often-polemical notion in American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century to a mainstream component of American Jewish life by 1948. Hebrew music ultimately emerged as an important means through which many American Jews physically participated in or ‘performed’ aspects of Zionism and Hebrew national culture from afar. Exploring the history, events, contexts, and tensions that comprised what may be termed the ‘Zionization’ of American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century, Eli Sperling analyzes primary sources within the historical contexts of Zionist national development and American Jewish life. Singing the Land offers insights into how and why musical frameworks were central to catalyzing American Jewry’s support of the Zionist cause by the 1940s, parallel to firm commitments to their American locale and national identities. The proliferation of this widespread American Jewish-Zionist embrace was achieved through a variety of educational, religious, economic, and political efforts, and Hebrew music was a thread consistent among them all.
Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our ...society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are "gayborhoods" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future.
Drawing on a wealth of evidence--including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than one hundred original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America--There Goes the Gayborhood?argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways.
Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, this cutting-edge book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places. Gayborhoods have nurtured sexual minorities throughout the twentieth century and, despite the unstoppable forces of flux, will remain resonant and revelatory features of urban life.
The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with
a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed
as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and
...culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national
identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional
identities. In Region Out of Place , Courtney J. Campbell
examines how groups within the region have asserted their identity,
relevance, and uniqueness through interactions that transcend
national borders. From migration to labor mobilization, from
wartime dating to beauty pageants, from literacy movements to
representations of banditry in film, Campbell explores how the
development of regional cultural identity is a modern,
internationally embedded conversation that circulated among
Brazilians of every social class. Part of a region-based
nationalism that reflects the anxiety that conflicting desires for
modernity, progress, and cultural authenticity provoked in the
twentieth century, this identity was forged by residents who
continually stepped out of their expected roles, taking their
region's concerns to an international stage.
Kinethic California: Dancing Funk and Disco Era Kinships documents the emergence of new forms of black social and vernacular dance invented by youth living in 1970s California, who helped build the ...foundations of contemporary hip hop/streetdance culture. Naomi Macalalad Bragin weaves interviews and ethnographies of first-generation (1960s-70s) dancers of strutting, boogaloo, robotting, popping, locking, waacking, and punking styles, as it advances a theory of dance as kinetic kinship formation through a focus on techniques and practices of the dancers themselves. She offers that the term given to these collective movement practices is kinethic to bring attention to motion at the core of black aesthetics that generate dances as forms of kinship beyond blood relation. Kinethics reorient dancers toward kinetic kinship in ways that give continuity to black dance lineages under persistent conditions of disappearance and loss. As dancers engage kinethics, they reinvent gestural vocabularies that describe worlds they imagine into knowing-being. The stories in Kinethic California attend to the aesthetics of everyday movement, seen through the lens of young artists who, from childhood, listened to their family’s soul and funk records, observed the bent-leg strolls and rhythmic handshakes of people moving through their neighborhoods, and watched each other move at house parties, school gyms, and around-the-way social clubs. Their aesthetic sociality and geographic movement provided materials for collective study and creative play. Bragin attends to such multidirectional conversations between dancer, community, and tradition, by which California dance lineages emerge and take flight.
Island in the stream Lambek, Michael Joshua
Island in the stream,
2018, 2018, 2018-11-05
eBook
Island in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork ...between 1975 and 2015. Over this 40-year span Mayotte shifted from a declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practiced subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel regularly to metropolitan France and beyond. Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in the Stream highlights community members' ethical engagement in their own history as they looked to the future, acknowledged the past, and engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into the changing perspective of the ethnographer.
Using archival material and oral testimony collected during workshops in Nunavut between 1996 and 2008, Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten provide a nuanced look at Inuit religion, offering a strong ...counter narrative to the idea that traditional Inuit culture declined post-contact. They show that setting up a dichotomy between a past identified with traditional culture and a present involving Christianity obscures the continuity and dynamics of Inuit society, which has long borrowed and adapted "outside" elements. They argue that both Shamanism and Christianity are continually changing in the Arctic and ideas of transformation and transition are necessary to understand both how the ideology of a hunting society shaped Inuit Christian cosmology and how Christianity changed Inuit shamanic traditions.
Bryony Randall explores the twin concepts of daily time and of everyday life through the writing of several major modernist authors. The book begins with a contextualising chapter on the ...psychologists William James and Henri Bergson. It goes on to devote chapters to Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, H. D. and Virginia Woolf. These experimental writers, she argues, reveal everyday life and daily time as rich and strange, not simply a banal backdrop to more important events. Moreover, Randall argues that paying attention to the everyday and daily time can be politically empowering and subversive. The specific social and cultural context of the early twentieth century is one in which the concept of daily time is particularly strongly challenged. By examining Modernism's engagement with or manifestation of this notion of daily time, she reveals a highly original perspective on their concerns and complexities.
This first full-length study of women and the Fatimids is a groundbreaking work investigating an unexplored area in the field of Islamic and medieval studies.The authors have unearthed a wealth of ...references to women, thus re-inscribing their role in the history of one of the most fascinating Islamic dynasties, the only one to be named after a woman. At last some light is thrown on the erstwhile silent and shadowy figures of women under the Fatimids which gives them a presence in the history of women in medieval and pre-modern dynasties.Basing their research on a variety of sources from historical works to chronicles, official correspondence, documentary sources and archaeological findings, the authors have provided a richly informative analysis of the status and influence of women in this period. Their contribution is explored first within the context of Isma‘ili and Fatimid genealogical history, and then within the courts in their roles as mothers, courtesans, wives and daughters, and as workers and servants. Throughout the book comparison is drawn with the status and roles of women in earlier, contemporary and subsequent Islamic as well as non-Islamic courts.
The thaw Gilburd, Eleonory; Kozlov, Denis
The thaw,
2013, 20131028, 2013, 2013-09-20, 2013-10-28
eBook
"The period from Stalin's death in 1953 to the end of the 1960s marked a crucial epoch in Soviet history. Though not overtly revolutionary, this era produced significant shifts in policies, ideas, ...language, artistic practices, daily behaviours, and material life. It was also during this time that social, cultural, and intellectual processes in the USSR began to parallel those in the West (and particularly in Europe) as never before. This volume examines in fascinating detail the various facets of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s, a period termed the 'Thaw.' Featuring innovative research by historical, literary, and film scholars from across the world, this book helps to answer fundamental questions about the nature and ultimate fortune of the Soviet order - both in its internal dynamics and in its long-term and global perspectives."--Publisher website.
