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This book provides a case study of slavery and its abolition in Ottoman Tunisia, one of the smallest countries in North Africa and the first to abolish the longstanding institution of slavery in the Muslim world during the modern period. The book combines a range of Tunisian and European archival data, travellers' accounts, and Arabic legal documents and source materials, directing much-needed attention not only to the Tunisian elements within slavery and abolition discourses, but also to those in west and central Sudan and Europe, especially in the Mediterranean basin. It argues that the major force driving abolition was Tunisian rulers' pragmatic response to increased European economic and political intervention in North Africa—first with the 1816 prohibition against enslaving Christians for ransom and especially after the French occupation of Algeria in the 1830s. The urgency of safeguarding the independence of Tunisia, more than efforts at selective “modernization” or “reform,” triggered the move toward abolition and the emancipation of the enslaved black population, which was achieved in 1846. By assessing how European capitalism along with political pressure and dynamics in the western Mediterranean shaped the abolition of the trans-Saharan slave trade and slavery in Tunisia, this book attempts to bridge the historiographical gap that treats the Atlantic and Saharan slave trades as separate entities. It offers wider regional perspectives and shows how the Tunisian model of abolition is useful for viewing slavery in the Islamic context during the modern period.

This book advocates for what it calls African American aesthetic abstractionism—a representational mode whereby an artwork, rather than striving for realist verisimilitude, vigorously asserts its essentially artificial character. It argues that while realist representation potentially reaffirms the very social facts that it might have been understood to challenge (such as politically problematic racial regimes), abstractionism shows up the actual constructedness of those facts, thereby subjecting them to critical scrutiny and making them amenable to transformation. The book thus reconceives abstractive principles as a potential boon to African Americanist social critique, rather than as the antithesis to black cultural engagement that they are routinely taken to be. It further finds that literature is better able to serve an abstractionist function than either visual art or music, and that experimental prose is the literary genre within which abstractionism can be most critically effective. Ultimately then, the book argues for the displacement of realism as the primary mode of African American representational aesthetics, for the recentering of literature as a principal site of African American cultural politics, and for the elevation of experimental prose within the domain of African American literature. It makes its case by reviewing a variety of visual, musical, and literary works by artists such as Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Cecil Taylor, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and John Keene.

At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kauaʻi, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nuʻalolo Kai. First excavated by Bishop Museum archaeologists between 1958 and 1964, the site contained the well-preserved remains of one of the largest and most diverse arrays of traditional and historic artifacts ever found in Hawaiʻi. The house sites that are the focus of this book were built over five centuries of occupation and contained deeply buried, stratified deposits extending more than nine feet beneath the surface. The book details the work of the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa which has been compiling and studying the animal remains recovered from the archaeological excavations. The chapters discuss the range of foods eaten by Hawaiians, the ways in which particular species were captured and harvested, and how these practices might have evolved through changes in the climate and natural environment. Adding to this are analyses of a sophisticated material culture. Demonstrating that an increased preference for introduced animals effectively limited negative impacts on wild animal resources, the book argues that the Hawaiian community of Nuʻalolo Kai practiced a sustainable form of animal resource procurement and management for 500 years.

This book considers the politics of patronage appointments at the universities in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St Andrews. The book explores the ways in which 388 men secured posts in three Scottish universities between 1690 and 1806; from the purge following the Revolution of 1688 to the end of Henry Dundas's political career. Most professors were political appointees vetted and supported by political factions and their leaders. This study explores the improving agenda of political patrons and of those they served and relates this to the Scottish Enlightenment. The book argues that what was happening in Scotland was also occurring in other parts of Europe where, in relatively autonomous localities, elite patrons also shaped things as they wished them to be. The role of patronage in the Enlightenment is essential to any understanding of its origins and course. This book is based on much archival study and adds substantially to what is known about the Scottish professorial during the period.

The edited volume describes a multi-disciplinary model where students and faculty work with communities, learn from them, and contribute the fruits of theory and research to solving community problems. It is a model where theory and action span multiple ecological levels from individuals and small group to organizations and social structures. The communities of engagement range from local neighborhoods and schools to national policy and international development. These forms of engagement require carefully crafted institutional structures to support them. This volume offers examples of community-engaged theory, scholarship, and action, and the structures that foster them within a research university. The examples are drawn from the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, whose programs, from undergraduate service learning and internships to doctoral training in community research and action, embody the vision of The Academy in Action! The chapters document how authentic partnerships between the academy and the community result in meaningful research and praxis.

A daily battle for rights and freedoms in cyberspace is being waged in Asia. At the epicenter of this contest is China—home to the world’s largest Internet population and what is perhaps the world’s most advanced Internet censorship and surveillance regime in cyberspace. Resistance to China’s Internet controls comes from both grassroots activists and corporate giants such as Google. Meanwhile, similar struggles play out across the rest of the region, from India and Singapore to Thailand and Burma, although each national dynamic is unique. This book is the third volume from the OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and the SecDev Group in Ottawa), and it examines the interplay of national security, social and ethnic identity, and resistance in Asian cyberspace, offering accounts of national struggles against Internet controls as well as updated country reports by ONI researchers. The contributors examine such topics as Internet censorship in Thailand, the Malaysian blogosphere, surveillance and censorship around gender and sexuality in Malaysia, Internet governance in China, corporate social responsibility and freedom of expression in South Korea and India, cyber attacks on independent Burmese media, and distributed-denial-of-service attacks and other digital control measures across Asia.

Few works about the Middle East have exerted such wide and long-lasting influence as Edward William Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. First published in 1836, this classic book has never gone out of print, continuously providing material and inspiration for generations of scholars, writers, and travelers, who have praised its comprehensiveness, detail, and perception. Yet the editions in print during most of the twentieth century would not have met Lane’s approval. Lacking parts of Lane’s text and many of his original illustrations (while adding many that were not his), they were based on what should have been ephemeral editions, published long after the author’s death. Meanwhile, the definitive fifth edition of 1860, the result of a quarter century of Lane’s corrections, reconsiderations, and additions, long ago disappeared from bookstore shelves. Now the 1860 edition of Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is available again, with a useful general introduction by Jason Thompson. Lane’s greatest work enters the twenty-first century in precisely the form that he wanted.

When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines the development of sculptures, paintings, and prints associated with the cult of the Six Kannon, which began in Japan in the tenth century and remained strong until its transition, beginning in sixteenth century, to the still active Thirty-Three Kannon cult. The complete set of Six Kannon made in 1224 and housed at the Kyoto temple Daihōonji is an exemplar of the cult’s images. With a diachronic approach, beginning in the eleventh century, individual case studies are employed to reinstate a context for the sets of Six Kannon, the majority of which have been lost or scattered, in order to clarify the former vibrancy, magnitude, and distribution of the cult and enhance knowledge of religious image-making in Japan. While Kannon’s role of assisting beings trapped in the six paths of transmigration is a well-documented catalyst for the selection of six, there are other significant themes at work. Six Kannon worship includes worldly concerns like childbirth and animal husbandry, strong ties between text and image, and numerous cases of matching with Shinto kami groups of six.

Now synonymous with Sixties counterculture, LSD actually entered the American consciousness via the mainstream. Time and Life, messengers of American respectability, trumpeted its grand arrival in a postwar landscape scoured of alluring descriptions of drug use while lesser outlets piggybacked on their coverage with stories by turns sensationalized and glowing. This book offers the untold tale of LSD's wild journey from Brylcreem and Ivory soap to incense and peppermints. As the book shows, the early attention lavished on the drug by the news media glorified its use in treatments for mental illness but also its status as a mystical—yet legitimate—gateway to exploring the unconscious mind. The book's history takes readers to the center of how popular media hyped psychedelic drugs in a constantly shifting legal and social environment, producing an intricate relationship between drugs and media experience that came to define contemporary pop culture. It also traces how the breathless coverage of LSD gave way to a textbook moral panic, transforming yesterday's refined seeker of truths into an acid casualty splayed out beyond the fringe of polite society.

This book is a history of U.S.–French radio broadcasting in the twentieth century. Decades before satellite TV and the Internet, America and France interconnected regularly and instantaneously on a mass scale across the Atlantic. The book investigates how transatlantic radio developed into a dynamic field of cross-border circulation, cultural exchange, and geopolitics. Between 1931, when live broadcasts first linked U.S.–French listeners, and 1974, when France dissolved its public media monopoly, international broadcasting developed into a critical communication space that embodied turbulent interwar politics and the expansive tendencies of U.S. commercial networks; the cataclysmic events of World War II, including the German Occupation of France; contentious U.S.–French relations during the Cold War; French postwar international media expansion; and the effects of the 1960s on U.S.–French ties and media systems. The book examines the techno-aesthetics of radio as a technological medium linking two allied, but starkly different societies and cultures in new ways. The book complicates the paradigm of self-contained "radio nations" to demonstrate that throughout broadcast history, the challenges of developing and managing international interconnectivity required necessary partnerships that blurred lines of sovereignty, state control, and national cultural production. Radio’s development and usage prefigured the global, cross-border digital communication technologies, tools, infrastructure, and mediated geopolitics of today.

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. The book argues that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. The seven in-depth studies include a diverse array of forms (cinematic adaptation of literature, literary adaptation of film, auto-adaptation, and non-narrative adaptation) and a variety of genres (martial arts, melodrama, romance, autobiography, documentary drama). Complementing this formal diversity is a geographical range that far exceeds the cultural, linguistic, and physical boundaries of China. The directors represented here also work in the United States and Europe and reflect the growing international resources of Chinese-language cinema.

This book challenges the notion that advertising disappeared as a political issue in the United States in 1938 with the passage of the Wheeler-Lea Amendment to the Federal Trade Commission Act, the result of more than a decade of campaigning to regulate the advertising industry. The book suggests that the war experience (World War II), even more than the legislative battles of the 1930s, defined the role of advertising in U.S. postwar political economy and the nation’s cultural firmament. Using archival sources, newspapers accounts, and trade publications, the book demonstrates that the postwar climate of political intolerance and reverence for free enterprise quashed critical investigations into the advertising industry. While advertising could be criticized or lampooned, the institution itself became inviolable. During the war, there were ongoing tensions between advertisers, regulators, and consumer activists. It was advertisers who turned a situation, that should have been disadvantageous to them, into an opportunity to cement their place in a postwar society defined by advertising and the consumer products it promoted. The book aims to uncover the significant political and economic forces that shaped the industry and the use of advertising to bolster the corporate system behind the products.

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that demonstrate how race becomes visible or audible in the processes of inclusion and exclusion. From travelogues and records of speech to photographs, radio, plastic surgery, tattoos, postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks, these explorations of diverse media demonstrate the links between the apprehension of racial difference, the formation of social and political hierarchies, and the experience of everyday culture under an expanding bio-political realm of imperial sovereignty. By demonstrating the ways in which the politics of inclusion and exclusion worked through explicitly racialized modes of representation, this collection sheds light on affective strategies common to the creation and maintenance of subjectivity across imperial formations. It also resituates theoretical and historical discussions of race and empire within an East Asian context, complicating the history of this region in provocative ways.

In the American world, the presence of African culture is sometimes fully embodied and sometimes leaves only a trace. This book explores this presence, examining Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and Disney World, each of which repackages African visual culture for consumers. Because these cultural icons permeate American life, they represent the broader U.S. culture and its relationship to African culture. This study integrates approaches from art history and visual culture studies with those from culture, race, and popular culture studies to analyze this interchange. Two major threads weave throughout. One analyzes how the presentation of African visual culture in these popular culture forms conceptualizes Africa for the American public. The other investigates the way the uses of African visual culture focuses America’s own self-awareness, particularly around black and white racialized identities. In exploring the multiple meanings that “Africa” has in American popular culture, the book argues that these cultural products embody multiple perspectives and speak to various sociopolitical contexts: the Cold War, Civil Rights, and contemporary eras of the United States; the apartheid and post apartheid eras of South Africa; the colonial and postcolonial eras of Ghana; and the European era of African colonization.

Motivated by a growing need to address questions of transnationalism, female mobility, and citizenship, this book offers an in-depth study of selective texts of Audre Lorde (Barbadian-American), Edwidge Danticat (Haitian-American), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupean-American) and Grace Nichols (Guyanese-British). The book examines transnational migration or movement not only in terms of physical journeys, but it also employs the trope of migration as resistance, as dissent. Examining the pervasive circulation of bodies, this book challenges the pathologization ascribed to black female sexuality/body, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, and docile. Investigating how black female identities and sexualities circulate globally, it focuses on issues of embodiment, how women's bodies are read and seen; how bodies “perform” and are performed upon; how they challenge hierarchical constructs and disrupt normative standards. Furthermore, it depicts how female subjects not only discursively engender a parallel “migration” that disrupts and debunks hierarchical structures, but how they also engender a politics of resistance and subversion of mainstream/dominant discourse, a detour from normative categorizations and ideologies, a migration from and challenge of single, fixed, heteronormative, heterosexual definitions of self. In essence, it examines the politics and economics of migratory movements, re-examining and reconfiguring the definition of citizenship to reflect transnational movements and subjectivities, and the shifting definitions of home. The book's engagement with critical race theory, adds another layer to its uniqueness by engaging “disability” studies, albeit peripherally, as it challenges the construct of disease, wellness and able-bodiedness as configured by Western medical science.

A close study of six major public religious festivals, including carnival, African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil, explores the cultural politics of regional identity in the state of Bahia in northeast Brazil. The author shows how, after 1930, the festivals provided a platform for African-Bahians and their allies to re-formulate Bahian regional identity to allow for a greater degree of cultural inclusion for Bahians of African descent. The book emphasizes the agency of African-Bahians as samba, capoeira, and Candomblé ritual were performed during the festivals and describes how politicians, journalists, song writers, and public intellectuals came to celebrate African-Bahian culture as a defining feature of what it meant to be Bahian. The nature of this cultural inclusion, however, was such that, although it was an improvement on the prejudice and persecution of the 1920s, it led to very little, if any, improvement in the political and economic position of working-class people of African descent. As such, the book explores the possibilities and limitations of cross-class alliances based around cultural inclusion in a specific historical setting and the potential of cultural politics for the social inclusion of people of African descent in multi-racial, multi-cultural communities within Brazil and the African diaspora.

This book expands the Diaspora framework that has shaped much of the recent scholarship on Africans in the Americas to include Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Cuba, exploring the connections and disjunctures between colonial Latin America and the African Diaspora in the Spanish empires. While a majority of the research on the colonial Diaspora focuses on the Caribbean and Brazil, analysis of the regions of Mexico and the Andes opens up new questions of community formation diaspora framework that incorporated Spanish legal strategies in secular and ecclesiastical institutions as well as articulations of multiple African identities. This book is arranged around three themes: identity construction in the Americas; the struggle by enslaved and free people to present themselves as civilized, Christian, and resistant to slavery; and issues of cultural exclusion and inclusion. Across these broad themes, the chapters offer probing and detailed studies of the place and roles of people of African descent in the complex realities of colonial Spanish America.

Cuban Costumbrista writers reported the strong presence of African traditions developed by slaves and by freed Blacks as agents of a vigorous popular culture that was highly visible throughout the nineteenth century. In their handling of Black themes, Costumbristas addressed four main subjects: (1) the particularities of the sugar-cane plantation, rich in slave cultures (as performed in different formats of acculturation by both African and Creole or Cuban-born slaves); (2) the development of religious systems within rural and urban settings; (3) documentation of Black musical expressions; and (4) the incorporation of certain Black social types as literary characters, as workers of specific trades assigned to slaves or to freed Blacks, or as marginal outcasts living in slum areas of major Cuban cities. Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo intends to examine the special qualities that the nineteenth-century Costumbristas observed as eyewitnesses of the making of a new racial hybridity, known today as “mulattoness.” Although mulattoness was a racial concept handled in various types of documents (for example, in ecclesiastical and civil regulations against mixed marriages), it was in Costumbrista literature that the concept took on literary presence. Although Blacks as depicted by Costumbristas had little literary significance, their presence in these politically infused texts covertly addresses the influence of Black Creole culture on developing Cubanía.

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts traces the religious art created by four generations of Afro-Caribbean women from Havana, Cuba, to Spanish Harlem, New York, from 1899 to 1969. Through an examination of archives featuring photographs, notes, and surviving altar fragments belonging to Tiburcia Sotolongo y Ugarte, Hortensia Ferrer, Iluminada Sierra Ortiz, and Carmen Oramas Caballery, a history of women’s leadership roles within Afro-Cuban religious arts practices emerges. To this end, their work reveals the critical interaction between the arts of different Afro-Caribbean belief systems, particularly Espiritismo and Santería. With careful documentation of this work, these leaders created an impressive account of hybrid cultural identities that references African, native Caribe, and European cultural inheritances. This exploration of Caribbean Creole identity prompted critical dialogue among their audiences during highly turbulent social and political changes of the twentieth century. Such popular discourse proves to be exemplary of the dynamic exchange of histories that led to the explosion of African diasporic religious arts throughout the Americas and beyond.

This book compares Cuban American and African American religiosity, arguing that Afro-Cuban religiosity and culture are central to understanding the Cuban and Cuban American condition. The book interprets this saturation of the Afro-Cuban as transcending race and affecting all Cubans and Cuban Americans in spite of their pigmentation or self-identification. Building on a historical overview of the intersection of race, religion, and nationhood, the book explores the manner in which devotion to La Caridad del Cobre, popular religion, and Cuban letters inform an Afro-Cuban theology. This interdisciplinary study draws from various theological schools as well as the disciplines of history, literary studies, and ethnic studies. The primary discipline is systematic theology, with special attention to black and Latino/a theologies. Far from being disconnected subfields, they are interrelated areas within theological studies. The book provides a broad overview of the Cuban and Cuban American communities, emphasizing the manner in which the intersection of race and religion has functioned within the construction of Cuban and Cuban American identities. The Roman Catholic Church's role in this history, as well as the preservation of African religious practices and consequent formation of Afro-Cuban religions, are paramount. Also new is the collaborative spirit between black and Latino/a that underlines this work. The book proposes an expansion of racial identity recognizing the different cultures that exist within U.S. racial contexts—specifically a model of collaboration versus dialogue between black and Latino/a theologies.