In The Devil behind the Mirror, Steven Gregory provides a compelling and intimate account of the impact that transnational processes associated with globalization are having on the lives and ...livelihoods of people in the Dominican Republic. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the adjacent towns of Boca Chica and Andrés, Gregory's study deftly demonstrates how transnational flows of capital, culture, and people are mediated by contextually specific power relations, politics, and history. He explores such topics as the informal economy, the making of a telenova, sex tourism, and racism and discrimination against Haitians, who occupy the lowest rung on the Dominican economic ladder. Innovative and beautifully written, The Devil behind the Mirror masterfully situates the analysis of global economic change in everyday lives.
Tragically, violence and armed conflict have become commonplace in the lives of many children around the world. Not only have millions of children been forced to witness war and its atrocities, but ...many are drawn into conflict as active participants. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Sierra Leone during its 11-year civil war. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and focus groups with former child soldiers of Sierra Leone's rebel Revolutionary United Front, Myriam Denov compassionately examines how child soldiers are initiated into the complex world of violence and armed conflict. She also explores the ways in which the children leave this world of violence and the challenges they face when trying to renegotiate their lives and self-concepts in the aftermath of war. The narratives of the Sierra Leonean youth demonstrate that their life histories defy the narrow and limiting portrayals presented by the media and popular discourse.
Sierra Leone came to world attention in the 1990s when a catastrophic civil war linked to the diamond trade was reported globally. This fleeting and particular interest, however, obscured two crucial ...processes in this small West African state. On the one hand, while the civil war was momentous, brutal and affected all Sierra Leoneans, it was also just one element in the long and faltering attempt to build a nation and state given the country's immensely problematic pre-colonial and British colonial legacies. On the other, the aftermath of the war precipitated a huge international effort to construct a 'liberal peace', with mixed results, and thus made Sierra Leone a laboratory for post-Cold War interventions. Sierra Leone examines 225 years of its history and fifty years of independence, placing state- society relations at the centre of an original and revealing investigation of those who have tried to rule or change Sierra Leone and its inhabitants and the responses engendered. It interweaves the historical narrative with sketches of politicians, anecdotes, the landscape and environment and key turning-points, alongside theoretical and other comparisons with the rest of Africa. It is a new contribution to the debate for those who already know Sierra Leone and a solid point of entry for those who wish to know.
Originally published in 1973. This book uses the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as a starting point to investigate Soviet-American relations in the Kruschev period. The book first chronicles the timeline of ...the succession of events during the Berlin Crisis and their interrelation. It then turns to the close interaction between Soviet and foreign policy before situating the event into the broader timeline of Soviet history.
The Berlin Wall is arguably the most prominent symbol of the Cold War era. Its construction in 1961 and its dismantling in 1989 are broadly understood as pivotal moments in the history of the last ...century. InA Wall of Our Own, Paul M. Farber traces the Berlin Wall as a site of pilgrimage for American artists, writers, and activists. During the Cold War and in the shadow of the Wall, figures such as Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde weighed the possibilities and limits of American democracy. All were sparked by their first encounters with the Wall, incorporated their reflections in books and artworks directed toward the geopolitics of division in the United States, and considered divided Germany as a site of intersection between art and activism over the respective courses of their careers. Departing from the well-known stories of Americans seeking post-World War II Paris for their own self-imposed exile or traveling the open road of the domestic interstate highway system, Farber reveals the divided city of Berlin as another destination for Americans seeking a critical distance. By analyzing the experiences and cultural creations of "American Berliner" artists and activists, Farber offers a new way to view not only the Wall itself but also how the Cold War still structures our thinking about freedom, repression, and artistic resistance on a global scale.
Greg Egan (1961- ) publishes works that challenge readers with rigorous, deeply-informed scientific speculation. He unapologetically delves into mathematics, physics, and other disciplines in his ...prose, putting him in the vanguard of the hard science fiction renaissance of the 1990s. A working physicist and engineer, Karen Burnham is uniquely positioned to provide the first in-depth study of Egan's science-heavy oeuvre. She traces the author's career from his early short stories through novels like Permutation City and Schild's Ladder and the Hugo Award-winning novella "Oceanic," analyzing how Egan used cutting-edge scientific theories as a way to explore ethical questions and the nature of humanity. As Burnham shows, Egan's collected works constitute a bold artistic statement: that narratives of science are equal to those of poetry and drama, and that science holds a place in the human condition as exalted as religion or art. The volume includes a rare interview with the famously press-shy Egan covering his works, themes, intellectual interests, and thought processes.
Introduction : listening to the archives : Black lesbian literature and queer memory -- Desirous mistresses and unruly slaves : neo-slave narratives, property, power, and desire -- Small movements : ...queer blues epistemologies in Cherry Muhanji's Her -- "Mens womens some that is both some that is neither" : spiritual epistemology and queering the Black rural South in the work of Sharon Bridgforth -- "Make it up and trace it back" : remembering Black trans subjectivity in Jackie Kay's Trumpet -- What grace was : erotic epistemologies and diasporic belonging in Dionne Brand's In another place, not here -- Epilogue : grieving the queer : anti-Black violence and black collective memory
What Americans refer to as the Vietnam War embraces much more than
the conflict with North Vietnam. Milton J. Bates considers the
other conflicts that Americans brought to that war: the divisions
...stemming from differences in race, class, sex, generation, and
frontier ideology. In exploring the rich vein of writing and film
that emerged from the Vietnam War era, he strikingly illuminates
how these stories reflect American social crises of the period.
Some material examined here is familiar, including the work of
Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Susan Sontag, Francis
Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. Other material is less well
known- Neverlight by Donald Pfarrer and De Mojo
Blues by A. R. Flowers, for example. Bates also draws upon an
impressive range of secondary readings, from Freud and Marx to
Geertz and Jameson. As the products of a culture in conflict,
Vietnam memoirs, novels, films, plays, and poems embody a range of
political perspectives, not only in their content but also in their
structure and rhetoric. In his final chapter Bates outlines a
"politico-poetics" of the war story as a genre. Here he gives
special attention to our motives-from the deeply personal to the
broadly cultural-for telling war stories.
