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Urban forms and colonial confrontations: Algiers under French rule
No full textDuring its long history as the French colonial city par excellence , Algiers was the site of recurrent conflicts between colonizer and colonized. Through architecture and urban forms confrontations were crystallized, cultural identities were defined, and social engineering programs were shaped and challenged. In this pathbreaking book, Zeynep Çelik reads the city of Algiers as the site of social, political, and cultural conflicts during the 132 years of French occupation and argues that architecture and urban forms are integral components of the colonial discourse.Algiers' city planning, based on what Çelik calls "the trial-and-error" model of French colonial urbanism, included the fragmentation of the casbah, ambitious Beaux Arts schemes to create European forms of housing, master plans inspired by high modernism, and comprehensive regional plans. Eventually a dramatic housing shortage led all planning efforts to be centered on the construction of large-scale residential enclaves. French architects based their designs for domestic space on the concept of the "traditional house," itself an interdisciplinary colonial concept intertwined with the discourse on Algerian women. Housing also offered the French colonizers a powerful presence in a country where periodic resistance to the occupation eventually culminated in a seven-year war of liberation and an end to French rule.Extensively illustrated with photographs, maps, and housing plans, Çelik's book presents a fascinating example of colonial urban planning. Algiers comes alive as a city that reflected all the conflicts of colonialism while embracing innovation
Between marriage and the market: intimate politics and survival in Cairo
No full textHoma Hoodfar's richly detailed ethnography provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of Arab Muslim families. Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households
The fractured community: landscapes of power and gender in rural Zambia
No full textThis study examines the lives of the women and men living in two small rural communities in Zambia on the eve of the collapse of the one-party state in the 1980s. Moving beyond the limits of traditional ethnography, Kate Crehan traces the often complex ways in which local, day-to-day realities are linked to wider economic, political, imaginative structures of power beyond northwestern Zambia.Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Crehan examines economics and gender, politics and kin relations, state and local relations, and witchcraft. Situating her data within a sophisticated yet accessible theoretical framework, she uncovers the power relations that have shaped and defined these communities. Among Crehan's theoretical contributions is a deft argument for the use of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony to analyze ordinary life.This examination of a marginalized, rural society throws unexpected light on some of the concrete realities of capitalism in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. It also provides inspiring examples of how complicated theoretical viewpoints can be translated - without simplification - into clear starting points for research
Border matters: remapping American cultural studies
No full textBorder Matters locates the study of Chicano culture in a broad social context. José Saldívar examines issues of representation and expression in a diverse, exciting assortment of texts - corridos , novels, poems, short stories, punk and hip-hop music, ethnography, paintings, performance, art, and essays. Saldívar provides a sophisticated model for a new kind of U.S. cultural studies, one that challenges the homogeneity of U.S. nationalism and popular culture by foregrounding the contemporary experiences and historical circumstances facing Chicanos and Chicanas.This intellectually adventurous, politically engaged study applies borderlands and diaspora theory to Chicano cultural practices in a way that permanently changes our understanding of both the Chicano experience and the meaning of cultural theory. Defying national (and nationalistic) paradigms of culture, Saldívar argues that the culture of the borderlands is trans-national, constituting a social space in which new relations, hybrid cultures, and multi-voiced aesthetics are negotiated.Saldívar's critical readings treat culture as a social force and reveal the presence of social contexts within cultural texts. Border Matters maps out a new terrain for the study of culture, reshaping the way we understand migration, national identity, and intellectual inquiry itself
Guardians of language: the grammarian and society in late antiquity
No full textWhat did it mean to be a professional teacher in the prestigious "liberal schools" - the schools of grammar and rhetoric - in late antiquity? How can we account for the abiding prestige of these schools, which remained substantially unchanged in their methods and standing despite the political and religious changes that had taken place around them?The grammarian was a pivotal figure in the lives of the educated upper classes of late antiquity. Introducing his students to correct language and to the literature esteemed by long tradition, he began the education that confirmed his students' standing in a narrowly defined elite. His profession thus contributed to the social as well as cultural continuity of the Empire. The grammarian received honor - and criticism; the profession gave the grammarian a firm sense of cultural authority but also placed him in a position of genteel subordination within the elite.Robert A. Kaster provides the first thorough study of the place and function of these important but ambiguous figures. He also gives a detailed prosopography of the grammarians, and of the other "teachers of letters" below the level of rhetoric, from the middle of the third through the middle of the sixth century, which will provide a valuable research tool for other students of late-antique education
In the shadow of catastrophe: German intellectuals between apocalypse and enlightenment
No full textThese essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time.Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia , Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment , Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought
University of California Press eScholarship editions in process
No full textCalifornia's Napa Valley is one of the world's premier wine regions today, but this has not always been true. James Lapsley's entertaining history explains how a collective vision of excellence among winemakers and a keen sense of promotion transformed the region and its wines following the repeal of Prohibition. Focusing primarily on the formative years of Napa's fine winemaking, 1934 to 1967, Lapsley then concludes with a chapter on the wine boom of the 1970s, placing it in a social context and explaining the role of Napa vineyards in the beverage's growing popularity.Names familiar to wine drinkers occur throughout these pages - Beaulieu, Beringer, Charles Krug, Christian Brothers, Louis Martini, Inglenook - and the colorful stories behind the names give this book a personal dimension. These strong-willed, competitive winemakers found ways to work cooperatively, both in sharing knowledge and technology and in promoting their region. The result was an unprecedented improvement in wine quality that brought with it a new reputation for the Napa Valley.In The Silverado Squatters , Robert Louis Stevenson refers to wine as "bottled poetry," and although Stevenson's reference was to the elite vineyards of France, his words are appropriate for Napa wines today. Their success, as Lapsley makes clear, is due to much more than the beneficence of sun and soil. Craft, vision, and determination have played a part too, and for that, wine drinkers the world over are grateful
The culture of civil war in Kyoto
No full textHow do ordinary people respond to prolonged terror? The convulsion of Japan's "Warring States" period between 1467 and 1568 destroyed the medieval order and exposed the framework of an early modern polity. Mary Elizabeth Berry investigates the experience of upheaval in Kyoto during this time.Using diaries and urban records (extensively quoted in the text), Berry explores the violence of war, misrule, private justice, outlawry, and popular uprising. She also examines the structures of order, old and new, that abated chaos and abetted social transformation.The wartime culture of Kyoto comes to life in a panoramic study that covers the rebellion of the Lotus sectarians, the organization of work and power in commoner neighborhoods, the replotting of urban geography, and the redefinition of authority and prestige in the arena of play
The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914
No full textThis monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life
University of California Press eScholarship editions
No full textLinking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a "struggle for the breeches." The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity, the sexual division of labor, and sexual mores, changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history.Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness, Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire, Glasgow, and London, she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers, demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies.Workers faced a "sexual crisis," Clark claims, as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability, others might be homophobes, wife-beaters, and tyrants at home; a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women, instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class