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"This book was published to accompany the exhibition of the same title that was presented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from June 23 to September 2, 2013."--T.p. verso.
Drawing on a vast archive of world history, anthropology, geography, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, literature, and art, Susan Stanford Friedman recasts modernity as a networked, circulating, and recurrent phenomenon producing multiple aesthetic innovations across millennia. Considering cosmopolitan as well as nomadic and oceanic worlds, she radically revises the scope of modernist critique and opens the practice to more integrated study. Friedman moves from large-scale instances of pre-1500 modernities, such as Tang Dynasty China and the Mongol Empire, to small-scale instances of modernisms, including the poetry of Du Fu and Kabir and Abbasid ceramic art. She maps the interconnected modernisms of the long twentieth century, pairing Joseph Conrad with Tayeb Salih, E. M. Forster with Arundhati Roy, Virginia Woolf with the Tagores, and Aimé Césaire with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. She reads postcolonial works from Sudan and India and engages with the idea of Négritude. Rejecting the modernist concepts of marginality, othering, and major/minor, Friedman instead favors rupture, mobility, speed, networks, and divergence, elevating the agencies and creative capacities of all cultures not only in the past and present but also in the century to come.
With the urbanization of the world's population proceeding apace and the equally rapid urbanization of poverty, urban theory has an urgent challenge to meet if it is to remain relevant to the majority of cities and their populations, many of which are outside the West. This groundbreaking book establishes a new framework for urban development. It makes the argument that all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’, and crosses the longstanding divide in urban scholarship and urban policy between Western and other cities (especially those labelled ‘Third World’). It considers the two framing axes of urban modernity and development, and argues that if cities are to be imagined in equitable and creative ways, urban theory must overcome these axes with their Western bias and that resources must become at least as cosmopolitan as cities themselves. Tracking paths across previously separate literatures and debates, this innovative book - a postcolonial critique of urban studies - traces the outlines of a cosmopolitan approach to cities, drawing on evidence from Rio, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Kuala Lumpur. Key urban scholars and debates, from Simmel, Benjamin and the Chicago School to Global and World Cities theories are explored, together with anthropological and developmentalist accounts of poorer cities. Offering an alternative approach, Ordinary Cities skilfully brings together theories of urban development for students and researchers of urban studies, geography and development.
A look at how the 1931 International Colonial Exposition in Paris created hybrids of French and colonial culture.
With a Foreword by José David Saldívar Since its first publication in Spanish nearly a decade ago, Julio Ramos’s Desenucuentros de la modernidad en America Latina por el siglo XIX has been recognized as one of the most important studies of modernity in the western hemisphere. Available for the first time in English—and now published with new material—Ramos’s study not only offers an analysis of the complex relationships between history, literature, and nation-building in the modern Latin American context but also takes crucial steps toward the development of a truly comparative inter-American cultural criticism. With his focus on the nineteenth century, Ramos begins his genealogy of an emerging Latin Americanism with an examination of Argentinean Domingo Sarmiento and Chilean Andrés Bello, representing the “enlightened letrados” of tradition. In contrast to these “lettered men,” he turns to Cuban journalist, revolutionary, and poet José Martí, who, Ramos suggests, inaugurated a new kind of intellectual subject for the Americas. Though tracing Latin American modernity in general, it is the analysis of Martí—particularly his work in the United States—that becomes the focal point of Ramos’s study. Martí’s confrontation with the unequal modernization of the New World, the dependent status of Latin America, and the contrast between Latin America’s culture of elites and the northern mass culture of commodification are, for Ramos, key elements in understanding the complex Latin American experience of modernity. Including two new chapters written for this edition, as well as translations of three of Martí’s most important works, Divergent Modernities will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand development and modernity across the Americas.
In an exploration of the complex relations between women and the modern, this work challenges conventional male-centred theories of modernity. It examines the gendered meanings of such notions as nostalgia, consumption, feminine writing, the popular sublime, evolution, revolution and perversion.
This innovative book combines what most books separate: research as practical activity and research as intellectual engagement. It clarifies and makes explicit the methodological issues that underlie the journey from initial research idea to the finished report and beyond. The text moves the researcher logically through the research process and provides insights into methodology through an in-depth discussion of methods. It presents the research process as an engagement with text. This theme moves through the construction of text in the form of data and the deconstruction of text in analysis. Finally the focus moves to the reconstruction of text through the re-presentation of the research in the report. Following through each of these stages in turn, the chapters consider either a practical issue or a group of methods and interrogate the associated methodological concerns. In addition, the book also addresses the rarely explored issues of the researcher as writer and researcher identity as core elements of the research process. The book provides a range of insights and original perspectives. These successfully combine practical guidance with the invitation to consider the problematic nature of research as social practice. It is an ideal reference for those embarking on research for the first time and provides a new methodological agenda for established researchers.
Crossroads! Intersections physical and/or metaphorical demand processes of consideration, determination, decision and commitment. Stasis is no longer an option where convergence is poised before the unknown. Where categories such as gender, culture, ethnicity, socio-economic status, philosophy and religion clash, the multivariate process can reach such complexity that literary, sociological and psychological tools can have differing interpretations. Real-life intersections range from the mundane (choosing among food items on a menu according to taste preferences) to survival-determinants (evaluating the efficacy of various medical procedures). But such intersections are at the two ends of a very long continuum that takes in issues of form/function, and traditional vs.modern. For example, Home may be defined both as a physical place and/or a mental construct. In more esoteric contexts, artists chiefly known for visual production, representing their ideas with color and form, not infrequently cross media to paint with words. Philosophy, religion, art and literature cross paths via symbols and other visual and linguistic constructs. Writers deal with how and where their own or their characters multiple identities intersect. The Hispanic world is an extraordinarily vivid place to explore these crossroads. This collection of essays addresses a multitude of crossroads in numerous Hispanic contexts across the intersections of time & space/tradition & modernity. The contexts are wide-ranging; e.g., the visual, architectural: how Spains age-old oenological tradition meets modern technology, how the vestiges of long-term dictatorship lurk in the spaces of Spains democracy; and how space/architecture, and art/poetry cross in Latin America. Painters Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlos productions cross the visual to the written; and magical realism products of the twentieth century Latin American artistic movement defy nature, science, time and space.
The landscape of social theory has changed significantly over the three decades since the publication of Anthony Giddens and Jonathan Turner’s seminal Social Theory Today. Sociologists in the twenty-first century desperately need a new agenda centered around central questions of social theory. In Social Theory Now, Claudio E. Benzecry, Monika Krause, and Isaac Ariail Reed set a new course for sociologists, bringing together contributions from the most distinctive?sociological?traditions?in an ambitious survey of where social theory is today and where it might be going. The book?provides a strategic window onto social theory based on current research, examining trends in classical traditions and the cutting edge of more recent approaches. From distinctive theoretical positions, contributors address questions about?how social order is accomplished; the role of materiality, practice, and meaning; as well as the conditions for the knowledge of the social world. The theoretical traditions presented include cultural sociology, microsociologies, world-system theory and post-colonial theory, gender and feminism, actor network and network theory, systems theory, field theory, rational choice, poststructuralism, pragmatism, and the sociology of conventions. Each chapter introduces a tradition and presents an agenda for further theoretical development. Social Theory Now is an essential tool for sociologists. It will be central to the discussion and teaching of contemporary social theory?for years to come.
This innovative book combines what most books separate: research as practical activity and research as intellectual engagement. It clarifies and makes explicit the methodological issues that underlie the journey from initial research idea to the finished report and beyond. The text moves the researcher logically through the research process and provides insights into methodology through an in-depth discussion of methods. It presents the research process as an engagement with text. This theme moves through the construction of text in the form of data and the deconstruction of text in analysis. Finally the focus moves to the reconstruction of text through the re-presentation of the research in the report. Following through each of these stages in turn, the chapters consider either a practical issue or a group of methods and interrogate the associated methodological concerns. In addition, the book also addresses the rarely explored issues of the researcher as writer and researcher identity as core elements of the research process. The book provides a range of insights and original perspectives. These successfully combine practical guidance with the invitation to consider the problematic nature of research as social practice. It is an ideal reference for those embarking on research for the first time and provides a new methodological agenda for established researchers.