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Scott Spector’s adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-centur...
Wastelands is an exploration of trash, the scavengers who collect it, and the precarious communities it sustains. After enduring war and persecution in Kosovo, many Ashkali refugees fled to Belgrade, Serbia, where they were stigmatized as Gypsies, consigned to slums, sidelined from the economy, and subjected to violence. To survive, Ashkali collect the only resource available to them: garbage. Vividly recounting everyday life in an illegal Romani settlement, Eirik Saethre follows Ashkali as they scavenge through dumpsters, build shacks, siphon electricity, negotiate the recycling trade, and migrate between Belgrade, Kosovo, and the European Union. He argues that trash is not just a means of survival: it reinforces the status of Ashkali and Roma as polluted Others, creates indissoluble bonds to transnational capitalism, enfeebles bodies, and establishes a localized sovereignty.
This text focuses on women's theorized experience of social class from a range of feminist perspectives, contextualized in relation to where they live.
This series of essays outlines a number of case studies from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia and provides first hand accounts of the experiences that planners, architects and politicians have had in reshaping cities. These insights provide a pragmatic assessment of the challenges and constraints posed by changing patterns of urban growth in a broad spectrum of urban environments. The reader will discover, through these multiple voices and views, the diverse forms of global cities, and will have a grasp of where the debate on urban design stands today, and where it may be going in the future.
In this chronicle of a fascinating people, Hugh Agnew offers a single-volume survey of Czech history, providing an introduction to its major themes and contours. Agnew presents a detailed chronology of the region, from prehistory and the first Slavs to the Czech Republic's entrance into the European Union. Taking into account both Western and Marxist insights—as well as the input of the newest generation of Czech historians—he furnishes a comprehensive fusion of three different aspects of Czech history: a political-diplomatic view, a social-economic view, and a cultural-intellectual view.
This volume visits death in children’s literature from around the world, making a substantial contribution to the dialogue between the expanding fields of Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and Death Studies. Considering both textual and pictorial representations of death, contributors focus on the topic of death in children’s literature as a physical reality, a philosophical concept, a psychologically challenging adjustment, and/or a social construct. Essays covering literature from the US, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, India, and Iran display a diverse range of theoretical and cultur...
An examination of the language of divination in the Hebrew Bible, particularly in 1 Samuel 28:3-25-the oft-called “Witch of Endor” passage. Kiboko contends that much of the vocabulary of divination in this passage and beyond has been mistranslated in authorized English and other translations used in Africa and in scholarly writings. Kiboko argues that the woman of Endor is not a witch. The woman of Endor is, rather, a diviner, much like other ancient Near Eastern and modern African diviners. She resists an inner-biblical conquest theology and a monologic authoritarian view of divination to assist King Saul by various means, including invoking the spirit of a departed person, Samuel. Kibo...
This volume contains three sections of essays which examine the role of commemoration and public celebrations in the creation of a national identity in Habsburg lands. It also seeks to engage historians of culture and of nationalism in other geographic fields as well as colleagues who work on Habsburg Central Europe, but write about nationalism from different vantage points. There is hope that this work will help generate a dialogue, especially with colleagues who live in the regions that were analyzed. Many of the authors consider the commemorations discussed in this volume from very different points of view, as they themselves are strongly rooted in a historical context that remains much closer to the nationalism we critique.