Browse

African Art Reframed: Reflections and Dialogues on Museum Culture

Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J. R. Osborn

This book approaches the reframing of African art through dialogues with collectors, curators, and artists on three continents. It explores museum exhibitions, storerooms, artists’ studios, and ... More

This book approaches the reframing of African art through dialogues with collectors, curators, and artists on three continents. It explores museum exhibitions, storerooms, artists’ studios, and venues for community outreach. Part One (Chapters 1-3) addresses the history of ethnographic and art museums, ranging from curiosity cabinets to modernist edifices and virtual websites. Museums are considered in terms of five transformational nodes, which contrast ways in which museums are organized and reach out to their audiences. Diverse groups of artists interact with museums at each node. Part Two (Chapters 4-5) addresses museum practices and art worlds through dialogues with curators and artists examining museums as ecosystems and communities within communities. Processes of display and memory work used by curators and artists are analyzed with semiotic methods to investigate images, signs, and symbols drawn from curating the curators and exploring artists’ experiences. Part Three (Chapters 6-8) introduces new strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. Approaches include the innovative technology of unmixing and the reframing of art for museums of the future. The book addresses building exchanges through studies of curatorial networks, south-north connections, genre classifications, archives, collections, databases, and learning strategies. These discussions open up new avenues of connectivity that range from local museums to global art markets and environments. In conclusion, the book proposes new methods for interpreting African art inside and outside of museums and remixing the results.Less

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, ... More

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Rather than applying a pre-given philosophical framework to literature and visual culture, Becoming Human provides a model for reading African diasporic literature and visual art for the philosophical premises, interventions, and implications of these forms and traditions. Becoming Human argues that African diasporic cultural production does not coalesce into a unified tradition that merely seeks inclusion into the dominant conception of “the human” but, rather, frequently alters the meaning and significance of being (human) and engages in imaginative practices of worlding from the perspective of a history of blackness’s bestialization and thingification: the process of imagining a black person as an empty vessel, a nonbeing, a nothing, an ontological zero, coupled with the violent imposition of colonial myths and racial hierarchy. In complementary but highly distinct ways, the literary and visual texts in Becoming Human articulate being (human) in a manner that neither relies on animal denigration nor reestablishes liberal humanism as the authority on being (human). What emerges from this questioning is a radically unruly sense of being/knowing/feeling existence, one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of the current hegemonic mode of “the human.”Less

Children's Charities in Crisis: Early Intervention and the State

Alison Body

Following a decade of radical change in policy and funding in children’s early intervention services and with the role of the third sector under increased scrutiny, this timely book assesses the ... More

Following a decade of radical change in policy and funding in children’s early intervention services and with the role of the third sector under increased scrutiny, this timely book assesses the shifting interplay between state provision and voluntary organisations delivering interventions for children, young people and their families. Using one-hundred voices from charities and their partners on the frontline, this book provides vivid accounts of the lived experiences of charitable groups, offering key insights into the impact of recent social policy decisions on their work. Telling the story of how the landscape of children’s early intervention services has changed over the last decade, it provides crucial lessons for future policy whilst demonstrating the immeasurable value of voluntary organisations working in this challenging terrain.Less

The Criminology of Boxing, Violence and Desistance

Deborah Jump

There is an assumption in criminal justice that boxing will immediately work to reduce offending among young men. Many practitioners cite discipline and respect as the desisting elements inherent in ... More

There is an assumption in criminal justice that boxing will immediately work to reduce offending among young men. Many practitioners cite discipline and respect as the desisting elements inherent in a boxing gym. Undoubtedly, these discourses do exist, yet, what if the discipline and the respect garnered in the gym are used for other purposes that are not always conducive to the desistance process? This book will unpick how effective boxing actually is in reducing violent attitudes, and how to ensure that the messages in the gym environment do not support negative attitudes often found outside the ring. Using classic desistance literature (Giordano 2002; Maruna 2001), I make suggestions that are grounded in evidence and theory. Using case studies, and life history interviewing drawn from a psychosocial perspective (Jefferson and Hollway 2000; Gadd 2007; Maruna 2001), this book builds on techniques that uncover the more clandestine reasons for choosing boxing. Working within this psychosocial framework, the desire and the appealing nature of boxing, more often than not, comes from a place of anxiety rather than strength. I will present arguments that suggest boxing’s appeal lies in its capacity to develop ‘physical capital’ (Wacquant 2004), and prevent repeat victimisation. Using case studies, I will reveal stories of men’s victimhood, either via gang violence, domestic violence, or structural disadvantage. I will tell the story of how boxing reshaped their identities and self-concepts, and how the gym came to represent a fraternity and a ‘island of stability and order’ (Wacquant 2004). Additionally, I will present arguments that suggest that boxing is not a panacea for all social ills, and while it has its benefits, it also has a darker side that is coterminous with hyper- masculine discourses of violence, respect, and avoidance of shame.Less

Decolonizing Childhoods: From Exclusion to Dignity

Manfred Liebel

This book addresses key aspects of the post- and decolonial analysis of childhood, such as the scope and limitations of Eurocentric concepts of childhood and the impact of social inequality ... More

This book addresses key aspects of the post- and decolonial analysis of childhood, such as the scope and limitations of Eurocentric concepts of childhood and the impact of social inequality aggravated by capitalist globalization on children's life prospects. In this context, it discusses the specific modes of agency emerging in children of the Global South. It reconstructs the way in which the colonialization process and the ideologies that supported it have used the metaphor of childhood, and investigates the extent to which they are reproduced in processes of colonizing childhoods. The book presents some colonial and postcolonial policy approaches to modelling childhood in different regions of the world, and asks how, within the postcolonial constellation, children's rights are to be understood and how to deal with them to overcome postcolonial paternalism. Particularly, it discusses various forms of paternalism and asks how they can be overcome in the field of rights-based children’s protection and participation and how child-led movements in the Global South can be understood as a form of citizenship from below. The book explains theoretical and conceptional reflections by case studies from Africa, Latin America and Asia. Finally, the book portrays efforts directed against the invisibilization, marginalization and social exclusion of childhoods and the recuperation of a dignified life of children.Less

Ending Gender-Based Violence: Justice and Community in South Africa

Hannah E. Britton

South Africa’s democratization has been celebrated internationally for the remarkable advances of women in political office. Despite these visible steps forward, South Africa continues to face ... More

South Africa’s democratization has been celebrated internationally for the remarkable advances of women in political office. Despite these visible steps forward, South Africa continues to face exceedingly high levels of sexual assault, rape, and intimate-partner violence. This book is about this juxtaposition between women’s national political power and these egregious violations of human rights. The South African women’s movement initially pursued state feminism, specifically using insider strategies to construct institutions and enact policies for women’s advancement. Yet the most poignant measure of the shortcomings of state feminism is the persistence of gender-based violence. The recent turn toward carceral feminism, with its focus on arrests and prosecutions, also fails to address the complexity of interpersonal violence. Through fieldwork in nine local communities, this book contains the voices of service providers, religious leaders, traditional leaders, police officers, and medical professionals who address gender-based violence at the community level. Specifically, this book examines how community networks are created on a landscape that is still marked by apartheid legacies of racism, inequality, and violence. It is also a story about understanding how place and space affect policy implementation. Rather than becoming immobilized by this complexity, policy makers could support street-level workers who are at the cutting edge of the struggle to end gender-based violence.Less

Everyday Masculinities in 21st-Century China: The Making of Able-Responsible Men

Magdalena Wong

Everyday Masculinities in 21st-Century China: The Making of Able-Responsible Men argues that a moral dimension in Chinese masculinity is of growing significance in fast-changing China. The author ... More

Everyday Masculinities in 21st-Century China: The Making of Able-Responsible Men argues that a moral dimension in Chinese masculinity is of growing significance in fast-changing China. The author introduces the twin concepts of ability and responsibility as integral expressions of the dominant and hegemonic form of masculinity in present-day Nanchong. Able-responsible men—those who can create wealth and shoulder responsibilities—have replaced the 'moneyed elite' of the earlier reform-and-opening-up era as the dominant male ideal. The many case studies in the book vividly illustrate the coercive social forces that affect not just men and boys, but also women, and reveal that there is resistance as well as complicity. The book lays bare the socio-political context that nurtures the cultural expressions of hegemonic masculinity under the rule of President Xi Jinping, who has emerged in public consciousness as the embodiment of the ideal able-responsible man. There are new perspectives on many topical issues that China faces, including urbanization, labour migration, the one-child policy, love and marriage, gender and intergenerational dynamics, hierarchical male relationships, and the rise of mass displays of nationalism. The book is a rare effort to answer the question, 'Is there an indigenous Chinese masculinity?'Less

Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture

Simidele Dosekun

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively ... More

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.Less

Forgiveness Work: Mercy, Law, and Victims' Rights in Iran

Arzoo Osanloo

Iran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentences—according to Amnesty International, the country has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita. Less known to ... More

Iran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentences—according to Amnesty International, the country has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita. Less known to outside observers, however, is the Iranian criminal code's recognition of forgiveness, where victims of violent crimes, or the families of murder victims, can request the state to forgo punishing the criminal. This book shows that in the Iranian justice system, forbearance is as much a right of victims as retribution. Drawing on extended interviews and first-hand observations of more than eighty murder trials, the book explores why some families of victims forgive perpetrators and how a wide array of individuals contribute to the fraught business of negotiating reconciliation. Based on Qur'anic principles, Iran's criminal codes encourage mercy and compel judicial officials to help parties reach a settlement. As no formal regulations exist to guide those involved, an informal cottage industry has grown around forgiveness advocacy. Interested parties—including attorneys, judges, social workers, the families of victims and perpetrators, and even performing artists—intervene in cases, drawing from such sources as scripture, ritual, and art to stir feelings of forgiveness. These actors forge new and sometimes conflicting strategies to secure forbearance, and some aim to reform social attitudes and laws on capital punishment. The book examines how an Islamic victim-centered approach to justice sheds light on the conditions of mercy.Less

Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture

Amanda Phillips

Gamers have been in trouble as long as games have existed, constantly mired in controversies about violence, diversity, and online harassment. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond ... More

Gamers have been in trouble as long as games have existed, constantly mired in controversies about violence, diversity, and online harassment. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. This book excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that gender, race, and sexuality operate in their technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems. By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal, Bayonetta, Tomb Raider, and Mass Effect, Phillips adds necessary analytical tools to our conversations about video games. In the context of a political landscape in which reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.Less

Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games

Amanda C. Cote

In 2012, video gaming culture saw an interesting, paradoxical divergence. On one hand, game journalists and trade organizations testified that gaming had significantly diversified from its masculine ... More

In 2012, video gaming culture saw an interesting, paradoxical divergence. On one hand, game journalists and trade organizations testified that gaming had significantly diversified from its masculine roots, with women comprising nearly half of all gamers. On the other hand, gaming spaces witnessed increasing, public incidents of sexism and misogyny. Gaming Sexism analyzes the video game industry and its players to explain the roots of these contradictory narratives, how they coexist, and what their divergence means in terms of power and gender equality. Media studies scholar Amanda C. Cote first turns to video game magazines to assess how longstanding expectations for “gamers” are shifting, how this provokes anxiety in traditional audiences, and how these players resist change, at times employing harassment and sexism to drive out new audience members. She follows this analysis by interviewing female players, to see how their experiences have been affected by games’ changing environment. Interviewees reveal many persistent barriers to full participation in gaming, including overtly and implicitly sexist elements within texts, gaming audiences, and the industry. At the same time, participants have developed nuanced strategies for managing their exclusion, pursuing positive gaming experiences, and competing with men on their own turf. Thus, Gaming Sexism reveals extensive, persistent problems in achieving gender equality in gaming. However, it also demonstrates the power of a motivated, marginalized audience, and draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities in gaming spaces—and culture more broadly—can themselves be gamed and overcome.Less

Handmade in Cuba: Rolando Estévez and the Beautiful Books of Ediciones Vigía

Ruth Behar, Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, and Kristin Schwain (eds)

Handmade in Cuba is an in-depth examination of Ediciones Vigía, an artisanal press that published exquisite books crafted from everyday supplies during some of Cuba’s most dire economic periods. ... More

Handmade in Cuba is an in-depth examination of Ediciones Vigía, an artisanal press that published exquisite books crafted from everyday supplies during some of Cuba’s most dire economic periods. Vividly illustrated, this volume shows how the publishing collective responded to the nation’s changing historical and political situation from the margins of society, representing Cuban culture across the boundaries of race, age, gender, and genre. In this volume, poets and scholars reflect on the unique artistic work of Rolando Estévez, who oversaw the creation of over 500 handmade books and magazines between 1985 and 2014. They highlight the beautiful designs and unusual materials selected, including fabric, metals, wood, feathers, and discarded items. Through diverse perspectives, including an interview with Estévez himself, the essays showcase the unlimited inventive possibilities of books as objects, as sculptural pieces, and as installations. Even in the age of digital technology, Estévez generated enormous excitement and admiration for these hand-crafted books, and this volume offers the first inside view of this important alternative publishing space.Less

Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity: by Édouard Glissant

This book reproduces the texts of four lectures, followed by discussions, and two interviews with Lise Gauvin published in Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996); and also four further ... More

This book reproduces the texts of four lectures, followed by discussions, and two interviews with Lise Gauvin published in Introduction à une poétique du divers (1996); and also four further interviews from L’Imaginaire des langues (Lise Gauvin, 2010). It covers a wide range of topics but key recurring themes are creolization, language and langage, culture and identity, ‘monolingualism’, the ‘Chaos-world’ and the role of the writer. Migration and the various different kinds of migrants are also discussed, as is the difference between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’ communities, the art of translation, identity as a ‘rhizome’ rather than a single root, the Chaos-World and chaos theory, ‘trace thought’ as opposed to ‘systematic thought’, the relation between ‘place’ and the Whole-World, exoticism, utopias, a new definition of beauty as the realized quantity of differences, the status of literary genres and the possibility that literature as a whole will disappear. Four of the interviews (Chapters 6, 7, 8 and 9) relate to particular works that Glissant has published: Tout-monde, Le monde incrée, La Cohée du Lamentin, Une nouvelle région du monde. Many of these themes have been explored in his previous works, but here, because in all the chapters we see Glissant interacting with the questions and views of other people, they are presented in a particularly accessible form.Less

The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics and Community

Ayfer Karakaya-Stump

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East today. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the ... More

The Kizilbash were at once key players in and the foremost victims of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict that defined the early modern Middle East today. Today referred to as Alevis, they constitute the second largest faith community in modern Turkey, making up around fifteen percent of the country’s population, with smaller pockets of related groups in the Balkans. Historians have typically treated Kizilbashism/Alevism as an undifferentiated strain within the hazy category of “heterodox folk Islam.” Several aspects of their history therefore remain little understood or explored. This first comprehensive socio-political history of the Kizilbash/Alevi communities uses a recently surfaced corpus of sources generated within their milieu. It offers fresh answers to many questions concerning their origins and evolution from a revolutionary movement to an inward-looking religious order. Among other things, it argues for a readjustment in focus from pre-Islamic Central Asia to the cosmopolitan Sufi milieu of the Middle East when exploring genealogies of popular Islam in Anatolia, and of Kizilbashism-Alevism, in particular. While the Kizilbash constitute the focus of the book, its findings may open new avenues of research in the study of other “heterodox” communities in the Islamic world by alerting historians to the potential of Sufism to provide a basis for social order and give rise to distinct communities.Less

Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms

Angele Christin

When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience ... More

When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience metrics changed journalists' work practices and professional identities? This book documents the ways that journalists grapple with audience data in the form of clicks, and analyzes how new forms of clickbait journalism travel across national borders. Drawing on four years of fieldwork in web newsrooms in the United States and France, including more than one hundred interviews with journalists, the book reveals many similarities among the media groups examined—their editorial goals, technological tools, and even office furniture. Yet the book uncovers crucial and paradoxical differences in how American and French journalists understand audience analytics and how these affect the news produced in each country. American journalists routinely disregard traffic numbers and primarily rely on the opinion of their peers to define journalistic quality. Meanwhile, French journalists fixate on internet traffic and view these numbers as a sign of their resonance in the public sphere. The book offers cultural and historical explanations for these disparities, arguing that distinct journalistic traditions structure how journalists make sense of digital measurements in the two countries. Contrary to the popular belief that analytics and algorithms are globally homogenizing forces, the book shows that computational technologies can have surprisingly divergent ramifications for work and organizations worldwide.Less

The New Brazilian Mediascape: Television Production in the Digital Streaming Age

Eli Lee Carter

In this book, Eli Carter explores the ways in which the movement away from historically popular telenovelas toward new television and internet series is creating dramatic shifts in how Brazil ... More

In this book, Eli Carter explores the ways in which the movement away from historically popular telenovelas toward new television and internet series is creating dramatic shifts in how Brazil imagines itself as a nation, especially within the context of an increasingly connected global mediascape. For more than half a century, South America’s largest over-the-air network, TV Globo, produced long-form melodramatic serials that cultivated the notion of the urban, upper-middle-class white Brazilian. Carter looks at how the expansion of internet access, the popularity of web series, the rise of independent production companies, and new legislation not only challenged TV Globo’s market domination but also began to change the face of Brazil’s growing audiovisual landscape. Combining sociohistorical, economic, and legal contextualization with close readings of audiovisual productions, Carter argues that a fragmented media has opened the door to new voices and narratives that represent a more diverse Brazilian identity.Less

The New Technocracy

Anders Esmark

Setting a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, the book shows that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation. Esmark examines ... More

Setting a new benchmark for studies of technocracy, the book shows that a solution to the challenge of populism will depend as much on a technocratic retreat as democratic innovation. Esmark examines the development since the 1980s of a new 'post-industrial' technocratic regime and its complicity in the populist backlash against politics and political elites that is visible today. The new technocracy – a combination of network governance, risk management and performance management – has, the author argues, abandoned the overtly anti-democratic sentiments of its industrial predecessor and proclaimed a new partnership with democracy. The rise of populism, however, is a clear sign that the inherent problems of this partnership have been exposed and that technocracy posing as democracy will only serve to exacerbate existing problems.Less

Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games

Christopher B. Patterson

Video games vastly outpace all other entertainment media in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products, yet their very ... More

Video games vastly outpace all other entertainment media in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products, yet their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before them, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today and thus form an understanding for how war and imperial violence proceed under the signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. To understand games as such, this book uses Asian American critiques to discusses games as Asian-inflected commodities, with their hardware assembled in Asia, their most talented e-sports players of Asian origin, and most of their genres formed by Asian companies (Nintendo, Sony, Sega). Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic, reminiscent of the works of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Eve Sedgwick. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against the open world empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments, with grave attention to how games allow us to tell our own stories about ourselves.Less

Operation Pedro Pan and the Exodus of Cuba's Children

Deborah Shnookal

This in-depth examination of one of the most controversial episodes in U.S.-Cuba relations sheds new light on the program that airlifted 14,000 unaccompanied children to the United States in the wake ... More

This in-depth examination of one of the most controversial episodes in U.S.-Cuba relations sheds new light on the program that airlifted 14,000 unaccompanied children to the United States in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Operation Pedro Pan is often remembered within the U.S. as an urgent “rescue” mission, but Deborah Shnookal points out that a multitude of complex factors drove the exodus, including Cold War propaganda and the Catholic Church’s opposition to the island’s new government. Shnookal illustrates how and why Cold War scare tactics were so effective in setting the airlift in motion, focusing on their context: the rapid and profound social changes unleashed by the 1959 Revolution, including the mobilization of 100,000 Cuban teenagers in the 1961 national literacy campaign. Other reforms made by the revolutionary government affected women, education, religious schools, and relations within the family and between the races. Shnookal exposes how, in its effort to undermine support for the revolution, the U.S. government manipulated the aspirations and insecurities of more affluent Cubans. She traces the parallel stories of the young “Pedro Pans” separated from their families—in some cases indefinitely—in what is often regarded in Cuba as a mass “kidnapping” and the children who stayed and joined the literacy brigades. These divergent journeys reveal many underlying issues in the historically fraught relationship between the U.S. and Cuba and much about the profound social revolution that took place on the island after 1959.Less

Pablo Escobar and Colombian Narcoculture

Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky

In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s ... More

In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present.Less