Postcolonial London McLeod, John
2004, 20040802, 2004-07-30, 2004-08-02, 20040101
eBook
London's histories of migration and settlement and the resulting diverse, hybrid communities have engendered new forms of social and cultural activity reflected in a wealth of novels, poems, films ...and songs. Postcolonial London explores the imaginative transformation of the city by African, Asian, Caribbean and South Pacific writers since the 1950s. John McLeod engages freshly with the work of both well-known and emergent writers, including Sam Selvon, Doris Lessing, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Colin MacInnes, Bernardine Evaristo, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Fred D'Aguiar. In reading a select body of writing in its social contexts and exploring contrasting attitudes to London's diasporic transformation, he traces an exciting history of resistance to the prejudice and racism that have at least in part characterised the postcolonial city. Rewritings of London, he argues, bear witness to the determination, imagination and creativity of the city's migrants and their descendants. This is a superb study of the ways in which 'imperial centre' might be rewritten as postcolonial metropolis. It represents essential reading for those interested in British or postcolonial literature, or in theorisations of the city and metropolitan culture.
The first kibbutz was established southwest of the Sea of Galilee in 1910, but the vast majority of kibbutzim were established in the 1930s and 1940s, shortly before the creation of the state of ...Israel in 1948. Founders aimed to create a "new human being" who cared about the group more than about himself, a homo sociologicus who would challenge the selfish homo economicus. To an economist, steeped in thinking about incentives that self-interested individuals face, there are three reasons why an equal-sharing arrangement of this sort seems unlikely to last. First, high-ability members have an incentive to exit equal-sharing arrangements to earn a wage premium -- so-called "brain drain." Second, low-ability individuals have an incentive to enter equal-sharing arrangements so that they can be subsidized by more-able individuals -- so-called adverse selection. Third, in context of equal sharing, shirking and free-riding are likely to be prevalent.
Born in the late 19th century, jazz gained mainstream popularity during a volatile period of racial segregation and gender inequality. It was in these adverse conditions that jazz performers ...discovered the power of dress as a visual tool used to defy mainstream societal constructs, shaping a new fashion and style aesthetic. Fashion and Jazz is the first study to identify the behaviours, signs and meanings that defined this newly evolving subculture. Drawing on fashion studies and cultural theory, the book provides an in-depth analysis of the social and political entanglements of jazz and dress, with individual chapters exploring key themes such as race, class and gender. Including a wide variety of case studies, ranging from Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Louis Armstrong and Chet Baker, it presents a critical and cultural analysis of jazz performers as modern icons of fashion and popular style. Addressing a number of previously underexplored areas of jazz culture, such as modern dandyism and the link between drug use and glamorous dress, Fashion and Jazz provides a fascinating history of fashion's dialogue with African-American art and style. It is essential reading for students of fashion, cultural studies, African-American studies and history.
Recent advances in measuring cyclical changes in the income distribution raise new questions: How might these distributional changes affect the business cycle itself? We show how counter-cyclical ...income dispersion can generate counter-cyclical markups in the goods market, without any preference shocks or price-setting frictions. In recessions, idiosyncratic labor productivity shocks raise income dispersion, lower the price elasticity of demand, and increase imperfectly competitive firms’ optimal markups. The calibrated model explains not only many cyclical features of markups, but also cyclical and long-run patterns of standard business cycle aggregates.
Standard estimates of the NAIRU or natural rate of unemployment are subject to considerable uncertainty. We show in this paper that using multiple indicators to extract an estimated NAIRU cuts in ...half uncertainty as measured by variance and gives a 33% reduction in the confidence band. The inclusion of an Okun's Law relation is particularly valuable. The essential notion is the existence of a common cyclical force driving the macroeconomic variables. Model comparisons based on the use of Bayes factors favor the idea of a common cyclical component.
Entre 1954 et 1962, la guerre d’indépendance ou d’Algérie, selon que l’on se place du côté de la victoire ou de la défaite, marque durablement plusieurs générations d’artistes internationaux, tout en ...traversant et bousculant des questionnements esthétiques quant à la représentation de l’innommable. Cette thèse, qui récolte les traces de cette déchirure franco-algérienne au travers du prisme de l’art, révèle l’importance d’un sujet historique, ignoré par l’histoire de l’art, dont les répercussions sur la politique contemporaine de la France sont encore perceptibles. Terreau d’une génération d’artistes en devenir, qui confortera son engagement social et artistique dans les évènements de Mai 68, mais aussi d’artistes de l’hybridité postcoloniale, qui revendiquent une modernité non hiérarchisée et l’écriture d’une histoire du non dit, la guerre d’Algérie revêt des enjeux fondamentaux dans la construction contemporaine de la scène artistique française et algérienne. Or, alors que la prescription historique d’une cinquantaine d’années est maintenant révolue, il semble que les conflits mémoriaux inhérents à cette défaite française continuent à entraver l’écriture et l’exposition sereines d’une séquence historique, qui apparaît pourtant matricielle dans la construction de la France contemporaine. Aussi, cette étude se propose de porter un regard critique sur la place des représentations de cette « non-histoire » dans les institutions muséales françaises et tente alors de mesurer l’impact d’une histoire encore non consensuelle dans la création artistique actuelle, aujourd’hui percutée par des enjeux de mémoire et politique, et qui de fait interroge la notion même d’identité(s).
From 1954 to 1962, the Independence War or Algerian War — depending on whether the story is narrated from the perspective of the victors or the defeated — touched many generations of international artist, while also penetrating and pushing aesthetic questions about representations of the unspeakable. By tracing the scar of this break between France and Algeria through the prism of art, this thesis reveals the importance of a crucial historical moment, hitherto unexamined by art history, which continues to bear upon contemporary politics in France. Offering exploratory themes not only to a generation of budding artists who affirmed their social and artistic commitments during the events of Mai 68, but also to artists from postcolonial world who proclaimed a modernity without hierarchy and the writing of unsaid histories, the Algerian War produced some of the fundamental issues underpinning the contemporary French and Algerian art worlds. With the historic prescription of a fifty years’ deferral now being over, the conflicted memories of the French defeat continue to trouble the undisturbed writing and exhibition of this sequence of historical events, formative key to construction of contemporary France. Consequently, this study proposes a critical examination of the representation of this “non history” in the French museum. In so doing, it estimates the impact of a “non-consensual” history on contemporary artistic practice touched by issues of memory and politics, and which interrogate notions of identity(ies).
This collection offers a fresh interpretation of the Cold War as an imaginary war, a conflict that had imaginations of nuclear devastation as one of its main battlegrounds. The book includes survey ...chapters and case studies on Western Europe, the USSR, Japan and the USA. Looking at various strands of intellectual debate and at different media, from documentary film to fiction, the chapters demonstrate the difficulties to make the unthinkable and unimaginable - nuclear apocalypse - imaginable.
Have tax policies affected entrepreneurial activity in the U.S.? We extend the time series literature on this topic by using more recent data and modern econometric techniques to examine the ...importance of federal income, payroll, capital gains, corporate income, and estate taxes on self-employment rates. Regression results show that most of these taxes have significant but small effects on self-employment activity. A battery of cointegration and causality tests confirms the general finding that taxes can have significant influences on entrepreneurship, but they are likely to be ineffective tools for generating meaningful changes in entrepreneurial activity.
Poison in the Well Hamblin, Jacob Darwin
2008, 20080124, 2008-01-24
eBook
In the early 1990s, Russian President Boris Yeltsin revealed that for the previous thirty years the Soviet Union had dumped vast amounts of dangerous radioactive waste into rivers and seas in blatant ...violation of international agreements. The disclosure caused outrage throughout the Western world, particularly since officials from the Soviet Union had denounced environmental pollution by the United States and Britain throughout the cold war.
Poison in the Wellprovides a balanced look at the policy decisions, scientific conflicts, public relations strategies, and the myriad mishaps and subsequent cover-ups that were born out of the dilemma of where to house deadly nuclear materials. Why did scientists and politicians choose the sea for waste disposal? How did negotiations about the uses of the sea change the way scientists, government officials, and ultimately the lay public envisioned the oceans? Jacob Darwin Hamblin traces the development of the issue in Western countries from the end of World War II to the blossoming of the environmental movement in the early 1970s.
This is an important book for students and scholars in the history of science who want to explore a striking case study of the conflicts that so often occur at the intersection of science, politics, and international diplomacy.
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