Ersatz America

Author : Rebecca Mark
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2014-12-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780813936277

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Ersatz America by Rebecca Mark Pdf

From the popular legend of Pocahontas to the Civil War soap opera Gone with the Wind to countless sculpted heads of George Washington that adorn homes and museums, whole industries have emerged to feed America’s addiction to imaginary histories that cover up the often violent acts of building a homogeneous nation. In Ersatz America, Rebecca Mark shows how this four-hundred-year-old obsession with false history has wounded democracy by creating language that is severed from material reality. Without the mediating touchstones of body and nature, creative representations of our history have been allowed to spin into dangerous abstraction. Other scholars have addressed the artificial qualities of the collective American memory, but what distinguishes Ersatz America is that it does more than simply deconstruct--it provides a map for regeneration. Mark contends that throughout American history, citizen artists have responded to the deadly memorialization of the past with artistic expressions and visual artifacts that exist outside the realm of official language, creating a counter narrative. These examples of what she calls visceral graphism are embodied in and connected to the human experience of indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and silenced women, giving form to the unspeakable. We must learn, Mark suggests, to read the markings of these works against the iconic national myths. In doing so, we can shift from being mesmerized by the monumentalism of this national mirage to embracing the regeneration and recovery of our human history.

Author : Robert Ji-Song Ku,Martin F. Manalansan,Anita Mannur
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2013-09-23
Category : Cooking
ISBN : 9781479869251

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Eating Asian America by Robert Ji-Song Ku,Martin F. Manalansan,Anita Mannur Pdf

Examines the ways our conceptions of Asian American food have been shaped Chop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food. Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asian American Studies that centers the study of foodways and culinary practices in our understanding of the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. It does so by bringing together twenty scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum to inaugurate a new turn in food studies: the refusal to yield to a superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation through the pleasures of food and eating. By focusing on multi-sited struggles across various spaces and times, the contributors to this anthology bring into focus the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, sexual and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production of Asian American culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images. This is the first collection to consider the fraught itineraries of Asian American immigrant histories and how they are inscribed in the production and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways.

Author : James D. Stone
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2017-10-20
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781476625560

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America Through a British Lens by James D. Stone Pdf

 As the British watched their empire crumble and the United States became the dominant world power, many British films warned of the dangers posed by American culture. Americans were frequently portrayed as disconcertingly ambitious, reckless and irreverent. Yet the same films that depicted the U.S. as an agent of chaos also suggested Britons might do well to embrace American-style energy and egalitarianism. Movies like Love Actually, The Quatermass Xperiment, 28 Weeks Later, Local Hero and Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent have delved into the storied “special relationship” between the U.S. and U.K. These films and many more examined in this first book-length study of British movies about America, reveal much about British attitudes regarding power, gender, class, sexuality and emotion.

Author : Robert B. McFarland,Michelle Stott James
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781571135865

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Sophie Discovers Amerika by Robert B. McFarland,Michelle Stott James Pdf

Cultural and literary historians investigate the unique literary bridge between German-speaking women and the "New World," examining novels, films, travel literature, poetry, erotica, and photography. In a 1798 novel by Sophie von La Roche, a European woman swims across a cold North American lake seeking help from the local indigenous tribe to deliver a baby. In a 2008 San Francisco travel guide, Milena Moser, the self-proclaimed "Patron Saint of Desperate Swiss Housewives," ponders the guilty pleasures of a media-saturated world. Wildly disparate, these two texts reveal the historical arc of a much larger literary constellation: the literature of German-speaking women who interact with the New World. In this volume, cultural historians from around the world investigate this unique literary bridge between two hemispheres, focusing on New-World texts written by female authors from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Encompassing a broad range of genres including novels, films, travel literature, poetry, erotica, and even photography, the essays include women's experiences across both American continents. Many of the primary literary texts discussed in this volume are available in the online collections of Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women (http: //sophie.byu.edu/). Contributors: Christiane Arndt, Karin Baumgartner, Ute Bettray, Ulrike Brisson, Carola Daffner, Denise M. Della Rossa, Linda Dietrick, Silke R. Falkner, Maureen O. Gallagher, Nicole Grewling, Monika Hohbein-Deegen, Gabi Kathöfer, Thomas W. Kniesche, Julie Koser, Judith E. Martin, Sarah C. Reed, Christine Rinne, Tom Spencer, Florentine Strzelczyk, David Tingey, Petra Watzke, Chantal Wright. Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James are both Associate Professors of German at Brigham Young University.

Author : United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Operations. Commerce, Consumer, and Monetary Affairs Subcommittee
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : PURD:32754078040460

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U.S. Government Trade Promotion and United States-Japan Trade by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Government Operations. Commerce, Consumer, and Monetary Affairs Subcommittee Pdf

Author : Alexander Stephan
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 454 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 184545085X

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The Americanization of Europe by Alexander Stephan Pdf

Using Germany as a case study of the impact of American culture throughout a period characterized by a totalitarian system, two destructive wars, ethnic cleansing, and economic disaster, this book explores the political and cultural parameters of Americanization and anti-Americanism.

Author : Richard T. Arndt,David Lee Rubin
Publisher : Transaction Publishers
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 1993-01-01
Category : Education
ISBN : 1412824249

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The Fulbright Difference: 1948-1992 by Richard T. Arndt,David Lee Rubin Pdf

The Fulbright Education Exchange program has given American and foreignstudents and scholars transnational educational experiences in every country in the world.The Fulbright Difference brings together twenty-seven ofthese participants, along with ten foreign alumni, in a collective effort to stimulate greaterawareness of the depth of the Fulbright achievement. Fulbright scholars show how the benefits oftheir participation extend well beyond their foreign study. Following an earlier volume,The Fulbright Experience, this second volume exploresissues of importance for historians of society, politics, culture, intellect, and diplomacy, aswell as administrators of the Fulbright program and policymakers in all nations. The collectiveportrait is a hard look at the overseas experience and its implications for publicpolicy.

Author : Kiran Klaus Patel
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 456 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780691149127

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The New Deal by Kiran Klaus Patel Pdf

The New Deal: A Global History provides a radically new interpretation of a pivotal period in US history. The first comprehensive study of the New Deal in a global context, the book compares American responses to the international crisis of capitalism and democracy during the 1930s to responses by other countries around the globe-not just in Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and other parts of the world. Work creation, agricultural intervention, state planning, immigration policy, the role of mass media, forms of political leadership, and new ways of ruling America's colonies-all had parallels elsewhere and unfolded against a backdrop of intense global debates.By avoiding the distortions of American exceptionalism, Kiran Klaus Patel shows how America's reaction to the Great Depression connected it to the wider world. Among much else, the book explains why the New Deal had enormous repercussions on China; why Franklin D. Roosevelt studied the welfare schemes of Nazi Germany; and why the New Dealers were fascinated by cooperatives in Sweden-but ignored similar schemes in Japan.Ultimately, Patel argues, the New Deal provided the institutional scaffolding for the construction of American global hegemony in the postwar era, making this history essential for understanding both the New Deal and America's rise to global leadership.

Author : Øyvind Vågnes
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2012-08-24
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780292742581

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Zaprudered by Øyvind Vågnes Pdf

Winner, Peter C. Rollins Book Award, 2012 As the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches, the traumatic aspects of the tragedy continue to haunt our perceptions of the 1960s. One reason for this lies in the home movie of the incident filmed by Abraham Zapruder, a bystander who became one of the twentieth century's most important accidental documentarians. The first book devoted exclusively to the topic, Zaprudered traces the journey of the film and its effect on the world's collective imagination. Providing insightful perspective as an observer of American culture, Norwegian media studies scholar Øyvind Vågnes begins by analyzing three narratives that are projections of Zapruder's images: performance group Ant Farm's video The Eternal Frame, Don DeLillo's novel Underworld, and an episode from Seinfeld. Subsequent topics he investigates include Dealey Plaza's Sixth Floor Museum, Zoran Naskovski's installation Death in Dallas, assassin video games, and other artifacts of the ways in which the footage has made a lasting impact on popular culture and the historical imagination. Vågnes also explores the role of other accidental documentarians, such as those who captured scenes of 9/11. Zapruder's footage has never yielded a conclusive account of what happened in Dealey Plaza. Zaprudered thoroughly examines both this historical enigma and its indelible afterimages in our collective imagination.

Author : Peter Conrad
Publisher : Thames & Hudson
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2014-12-09
Category : History
ISBN : 9780500772270

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How The World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere by Peter Conrad Pdf

From politics and war, to jeans and sneakers: a look at America’s influence on the world from an international perspective On the day after 9/11, foreign newspapers ran headlines announcing “We Are All Americans Now.” Though the sentiment was not new, it was also not quite the same as when Henry Luce announced in 1941, the inauguration of what he called “the American Century,” during which the US was to raise all men “from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist calls a little lower than angels.” When America suddenly emerged as a global power in the postwar period, the world—with pockets of resistance from France, Russia, and Japan in particular—was happy to be remade in the US image. America dazzled, and sometimes intimidated, older, staler, less innovative cultures. The affluence it placed on display was something to which most other countries aspired, and it was this fantasy that helped win the Cold War. Fast forward to today and the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, days before a possible financial default by the US government, calling for a de-Americanized world. A context for Peter Conrad’s grand tale is, inevitably, politics, war, and commerce, but for the most part he draws on his brilliant repertoire of cultural skills to assess, surprise, invigorate, and delight us with his kaleidoscopic presentation of the movies and music, jeans and sneakers, food and refrigerators, novels and paintings that have shaped so much of the world in our lifetimes.

Author : Chris Turner
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2010-05-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780307366092

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Planet Simpson by Chris Turner Pdf

A smart, accessible and funny cultural analysis of The Simpsons, its inside stories and the world it reflects. From Bart Simpson to Monty Burns, the Internet boom to the slow drowning of Tuvalu, Planet Simpson explores how one of the most popular shows in television history has changed the way we look at our bewildering times. Award-winning journalist Chris Turner delves into the most esoteric of Simpsons fansites and on-line subcultures, the show’s inside jokes, its sharpest parodies and its ongoing love-hate relationship with celebrity to reveal a rarity of literary accomplishment and pop-cultural import — something never before achieved by a cartoon. Complementing its satirical brilliance, The Simpsons boasts a beloved cast of characters, examined here in playful and scrupulous detail: Homer, selfish, tyrannical and not too bright, but always contentedly beholden to his family; Bart, pre-teen nihilist and punk icon; Lisa, junior feminist crusader; and Marge, archetypical middle-American mother, perpetually dragging her family kicking and screaming to higher moral ground. And while the voice actors behind the regular cast have eschewed celebrity, Turner considers why a stunning host of guests — Hollywood icons and has-beens, politicians, professional athletes, poets and pop stars — have submitted themselves to the parodic whims of the Simpsons’ writers. Intelligent and rambunctious, absorbing and comic, Planet Simpson mines this modern cultural institution for its imaginative, hilarious, but always dead-on, reflections on our world. Excerpt from Planet Simpson Three Fun Facts About “D’ oh!” 1. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “d’oh” as “Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish.” 2. The origins of “D’oh!” A Tracey Ullman– era Simpsons script called for Homer to respond to an unfortunate turn of events thus: “[annoyed grunt].” Dan Castellaneta, the voice-actor who plays Homer, improvised the exclamation, “D’oh!” It stuck. 3. The godfather of “D’oh!” Dan Castellaneta freely admits that he lifted Homer’s famous yelp from James Finlayson, a Scottish actor who played a bald, cross-eyed villain in a number of Laurel & Hardy films in the 1930s. Finlayson’s annoyed grunt was a more drawn-out groan — Doooohhh! Castellaneta sped it up to create Homer’s trademark.

Author : Erik Sjöberg
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2022-07-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9783031009327

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Internationalism and the New Turkey by Erik Sjöberg Pdf

This book examines international education in Turkey after World War I. In this period, a movement for peace and international education among American educators emerged. This effort, however, had to be reconciled with the nationalist projects of new nation-states emerging from the war. In the case of the Near East that meant coming to terms with the radically nationalist modernization project of Kemal Atatürk’s Turkish Republic. Using the case of Robert College, an American educational institution in Istanbul, which aimed to foster a future local elite of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious student body, the book sheds light on the negotiation between two conceptions of modernity, as represented by American internationalist ideals and the tenets of Kemalism the Westernizing, yet deeply ethnocentric national ideology of post-1923 Turkey. Based on recently declassified archival sources, this study addresses the educational intentions and strategies for adjustment of college faculty. It also offers a rare insight into the mindset of young students attempting to make sense of what internationalism and religious, ethnic and national identity meant in the Ottoman past and in the new republican Turkey. Focusing on Robert College and the forgotten case of its dean and social studies instructor, Dr. Edgar Jacob Fisher, it addresses the little-researched field of internationalism and peace education in interwar Turkey.

Author : Wordnik
Publisher : Andrews McMeel Publishing
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2011-05-31
Category : Reference
ISBN : 9781449408855

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Pocket Posh Word Power by Wordnik Pdf

Spiff up your vocabulary with these powerful words from the lexicographers at the Wordnik community! This Pocket Posh Word Power collection promises a gargantuan vocabulary boost, curating 120 words that can enrich your written and spoken communications. Each entry provides pronunciation, part of speech, definition, usage in a sentence, and etymology information. From propinquity to alacrity to farrago and beyond, you’ll find words worth learning that can liven up anyone’s lexicon!

Author : Harriet Pollack
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2013-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780820344324

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Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race by Harriet Pollack Pdf

Faced with Eudora Welty's preference for the oblique in literary performances, some have assumed that Welty was not concerned with issues of race, or even that she was perhaps ambivalent toward racism. This collection counters those assumptions as it examines Welty's handling of race, the color line, and Jim Crow segregation and sheds new light on her views about the patterns, insensitivities, blindness, and atrocities of whiteness. Contributors to this volume show that Welty addressed whiteness and race in her earliest stories, her photography, and her first novel, Delta Wedding. In subsequent work, including The Golden Apples, The Optimist's Daughter, and her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, she made the color line and white privilege visible, revealing the gaping distances between lives lived in shared space but separated by social hierarchy and segregation. Even when black characters hover in the margins of her fiction, they point readers toward complex lives, and the black body is itself full of meaning in her work. Several essays suggest that Welty represented race, like gender and power, as a performance scripted by whiteness. Her black characters in particular recognize whiteface and blackface as performances, especially comical when white characters are unaware of their role play. Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race also makes clear that Welty recognized white material advantage and black economic deprivation as part of a cycle of race and poverty in America and that she connected this history to lives on either side of the color line, to relationships across it, and to an uneasy hierarchy of white classes within the presumed monolith of whiteness. Contributors: Mae Miller Claxton, Susan V. Donaldson, Julia Eichelberger, Sarah Ford, Jean C. Griffith, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Donnie McMahand, David McWhirter, Harriet Pollack, Keri Watson, Patricia Yaeger.

Author : Jacob Agner,Harriet Pollack
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 165 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2022-12-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781496842725

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Eudora Welty and Mystery by Jacob Agner,Harriet Pollack Pdf

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Katie Berry Frye, Michael Kreyling, Andrew B. Leiter, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, Tom Nolan, Michael Pickard, Harriet Pollack, and Victoria Richard Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime. Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions. Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”