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Jackson Jones is trying to decide whether to remain an anthropology professor in his small Midwestern town, or to return to doing fieldwork among the Mbuti people, in their African Garden of Eden. His ruminations are interrupted by the arrival of a late friend's niece, who has just been sprung from jail. Sunny admits that she shot her husband, an evangelical pastor from the Little Egypt region of Illinois, but he had it coming after forcing her to take on a rattle snake. As an anthropologist, Jackson is curious about Sunny's experiences with The Church of the Burning Bush; as a man, he is not immune to her backwoods sassiness. Although Sunny is pleased to be with a kind partner at last, she is also serious about her belated education--funded by her late uncle--at Jackson's university. French and herpetology compete for her attention, and Jackson's plan to take her to Paris to propose marriage are waylaid when she decides to travel to an academic conference with her biology professor instead. Jackson is crushed and heads for Little Egypt in Sunny's absence, to get to know her ex-husband and to study the snake-handling ceremonies at his evangelical church. Complications ensue, including Jackson's near-death experience and Sunny's murder of her ex, but fate is a positive force for all in the end. Packed with both information and emotion, Snakewoman of Little Egypt delivers Robert Hellenga at the top of his form.
In the early 1920s, nearly blind physics prodigy Mourly Vold finds out how to tap into the nation's long distance telephone lines. With the help of Alexander Graham Bell, Vold tries to warn the phone companies that would-be saboteurs could do the same thing, but they ignore him. Unfortunately, his taps do catch the notice of William Randolph Hearst, who hires Thomas Edison to get to the bottom of them—and the chase is on!
In 1984, Joyce Rockwood Hudson accompanied her husband, anthropologist Charles Hudson, on a 4,000-mile trek across the Southeast. His objective was to retrace and verify the route taken by Hernando de Soto four and a half centuries earlier. The effort would bring into question, and ultimately supplant, much of what was earlier thought to be the course of the Spanish explorer's journey. This is the journal Joyce Hudson kept during that trip. A kind of scholar's version of Blue Highways, the book is a warmly humane and almost daily account of the people the Hudsons met, the places they saw, and the things they did as they searched for De Soto's trail beneath railroad tracks and two-lane blacktops, along riverbanks and mountain ridges. Thus it is largely a travel story about rural and small-town life in eleven states, from Florida to Texas. Descriptions of the region's everchanging terrain, vegetation, and climate fill the book--colored at times by Joyce Hudson's troubled musings about Americans' increasing disconnectedness from the land and irreverence for the past. Conveying the rewards and frustrations of lives spent in painstaking scholarly inquiry, Looking for De Soto also offers a firsthand glimpse into the daily work of anthropologists and archaeologists: the exchanges of ideas, the ventures through swamps and down deeply rutted farm roads, the endless porings over maps, charts, and notes. As if writing a detective story, the author suspensefully paces the narrative with the accrual of geographical, artifactual, and documentary evidence, punctuating it with false leads and other setbacks, as mile after mile of the trail is redrawn. The story even has its villains--"pothunters" and private collectors; the builders of canals and dams that alter the courses of rivers and inundate ancient village sites; and the owners of corporate farms, who have leveled and eradicated ceremonial mounds with their massive agricultural machinery. Finally, a sense of the headlong cultural collision between Europeans and Native Americans pervades the book. De Soto and his six hundred conquistadores were the first Europeans to explore the interior of the southeastern United States and the only ones to witness its aboriginal society at its zenith. Hudson's evocation of this encounter so central to the history of the New World may well send readers on their own excursions into the past. Looking for De Soto is a fascinating journey through today's South, illuminated by a richly informed perspective on its earlier days.
Though outwardly successful, young Anne Christie's prominent midwestern coal-mining family is deeply troubled - Anne especially. While growing up during the late 1950s, Anne becomes convinced that her mother hates her. Emotionally isolated at home, she seeks love and approval in the arms of the many men who pursue her. As she embarks on a journey that will take her to New York in pursuit of a modeling career, Anne doesn't dream that one day her past will come back to haunt her. When Anne meets and marries Billy Kane, a jazz musician with an explosive personality, her mother makes it known that she does not approve. Anne and Billy move to the suburbs with their young children, but when Anne discovers that there are other women in Billy's life, the marriage disintegrates. Seeking a new romantic attachment in 1970, Anne immerses herself in Manhattan's wild singles scene. After two years she tires of this lifestyle and comes home to her children and the young man she will eventually marry. But though Anne works hard to create a stable life for her family, her painful relationship with her mother keeps interfering. As she attempts to unearth her true identity, Anne explores love, motherhood, and middle age and finds a new life at the center of a series of personal losses.
Grave robbers turn a Southern Illinois town upside down. Lou and Duke, drifting ex-cons, are arrested and prosecuted for the crimes. Retired Sheriff Sam Carter records a chronicle of events to keep his town, Greens Point, in a good light for the history books. Media covering the notorious crimes and trial pumps unforeseen money into this once sleepy town. From postarrest statements, Sheriff Carter learns about the defendants’ lives. From the witness stand, Lou yells at the jurors and spectators and shouts that they are the gold diggers. The shift to the criminals' perspectives gnaws at Sheriff Carter. Betsy, his wife, asks him a question from the book of John: do you know what Lazarus said after he was raised from the tomb? The question haunts him until the end of the ordeal—Betsy must tell him the answer. Beneath the retired sheriff’s wry narration of the investigation, arrests, and trial lies a fundamental question bound by neither place nor time. The truly good person is not the accuser but the accused, not the historian but the criminal, condemned between the pages of history in a tomb void of the dreams and hope of tomorrow.
A fascinating demonstration of how U.S. representations of veils, harems, and belly dancers have operated as nostalgic and exotic symbols to help rationalize dominant U.S. narratives about power and progress.
Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance situates the 1908 dance craze, which The New York Times called “Salomania,” as a crucial event and a turning point in the history of the modern business of erotic dance. Framing Salomania with reference to imperial ideologies of motherhood and race, it works toward better understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This study turns critical attention to cultures of maternity in the late 19th century, primarily with reference to the ways in which women are defined in relation to their genitals as patriarchal property and space and are valued according to reproduction as their primary labour. Erotic dance as it takes shape in the modern representation of Salome insists both that the mother is and is not visible in the body of the dancer, a contradiction this study characterizes as reproductive fetishism. Looking at a range of media, the study traces the modern figure of Salome through visual art, writing, early psychoanalysis and dance, from "hootchie kootch" to the performances dancer Maud Allan called “mimeo-dramatic” to mid-20th-century North American films such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Charles Lamont's Salome, Where She Danced to the 21st-century HBO series The Sopranos.
Fabulous yet fierce, imperious yet impetuous, boss yet bitchy—divas are figures of paradox. Their place in culture is equally contradictory, as they are simultaneously venerated and marginalized, hailed as timeless but then frequently forgotten or exhumed as cult icons by future generations. Focusing on four early twentieth-century divas—Aida Overton Walker, Loïe Fuller, Libby Holman, and Josephine Baker—who were icons in their own time, Moving Performances considers what their past and current reception reveals about changing ideas of race and gender. Jeanne Scheper examines how iconicity can actually work to the diva’s detriment, reducing her to a fetish object, a grotesque, or a figure of nostalgia. Yet she also locates more productive modes of reception that reach to revive the diva’s moving performances, imbuing her with an affective afterlife. As it offers innovative theorizations of performance, reception, and affect, Moving Performances also introduces readers to four remarkable women who worked as both cultural producers and critics, deftly subverting the tropes of exoticism, orientalism, and primitivism commonly used to dismiss women of color. Rejecting iconic depictions of these divas as frozen in a past moment, Scheper vividly demonstrates how their performances continue to inspire ongoing movements.
Feminist Theory and Pop Culture synthesizes feminist theory with modern portrayals of gender in media culture. This comprehensive and interdisciplinary text includes an introductory chapter written by the editor as well as nine contributor chapters of original content. Included in the text: • Historical illustration of feminist theory • Application of feminist research methods for the study of gender • Feminist theoretical perspectives such as the male gaze, feminist standpoint theory, Black feminist thought, queer theory, masculinity theory, theories of feminist activism and postfeminism • Contributor chapters cover a range of topics from Western perspectives on Belly Dance classes to television shows such as GIRLS, Scandal and Orange is the New Black, as well as chapters which discuss gendered media forms like “chick lit”, comic books and Western perspectives of non-Western culture in film • Feminist theory as represented in the different waves of feminism, including a discussion of a fourth wave • Pedagogical features • Suggestions for further reading on topics covered • Discussion questions for classroom use Feminist Theory and Pop Culture was designed for classroom use and has been written with an eye toward engaging students in discussion. The book’s polished perspective on feminist theory juxtaposes popular culture with theoretical perspectives which have served as a foundation for the study of gender. This interdisciplinary text can serve as a primary or supplemental reading in undergraduate or graduate courses which focus on gender, pop culture, feminist theory or media studies. “This excellent anthology grounds feminism as articulated through four waves and features feminists responding to pop culture, while recognizing that popular culture has responded in complicated ways to feminisms. Contributors proffer lucid and engaging critiques of topics ranging from belly dancing through Fifty Shades of Grey, Scandal and Orange is the New Black. This book is a good read as well as an excellent text to enliven and inform in the classroom.” Dr. Jane Caputi Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Communication & Multimedia at Florida Atlantic University “Feminist Theory and Pop Culture is destined to be as popular as the culture it critiques. The text plays up the paradoxes of contemporary feminism and requires its readers to ask difficult questions about how and why the popular bring us pleasure. It is a contemporary collection that captures this moment in feminist time with diverse analyses of women’s representations across an impressive swath of popular culture. Feminist Theory and Pop Culture is the kind of text that makes me want to redesign my pop culture course. Again.” Dr. Ebony A. Utley, Assistant Professor of Communication at California State University-Long Beach, author of Rap and Religion Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, Ph.D. is a professor of sociology at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. She is the author of Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (Scarecrow 2013) and the co-editor of Gender & Pop Culture: A Text-Reader (Sense 2014). www.adriennetrier-bieniek.com