Today's Hours:
Her Cup for Sweet Cacao by
For the ancient Maya, food was both sustenance and a tool for building a complex society. This collection, the first to focus exclusively on the social uses of food in Classic Maya culture, deploys a variety of theoretical approaches to examine the meaning of food beyond diet--ritual offerings and restrictions, medicinal preparations, and the role of nostalgia around food, among other topics. For instance, how did Maya feasts build community while also reinforcing social hierarchy? What psychoactive substances were the elite Maya drinking in their caves, and why? Which dogs were good for eating, and which breeds became companions? Why did even some non-elite Maya enjoy cacao, but rarely meat? Why was meat more available for urban Maya than for those closer to hunting grounds on the fringes of cities? How did the molcajete become a vital tool and symbol in Maya gastronomy? These chapters, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, showcase a variety of approaches and present new evidence from faunal remains, hieroglyphic texts, chemical analyses, and art. Thoughtful and revealing, Her Cup for Sweet Cacao unlocks a more comprehensive understanding of how food was instrumental to the development of ancient Maya culture.
Gender Violence in Twenty-First-Century Latin American Women's Writing by
How do contemporary female authors in Latin America tackle gender violence in their writings?This book analyses the portrayal of violence against women in the works of ten contemporary Latin American female authors: Alejandra Jaramillo Morales, Laura Restrepo, Ena Lucia Portela, Wendy Guerra, Selva Almada, Claudia Pineiro, Diamela Eltit, Carla Guelfenbein, Lydia Cacho and Fernanda Melchor. Governments in Latin America have routinely failed to protect women from abuse, threats, censorship, repressive policies on reproduction rights, forced displacement, sex trafficking, disappearances and femicides, and this book beats a new path through these burning issues by drawing on the knowledges encapsulated by sociology as much as the visions articulated by literature. Through an exploration of works published in the twenty-first century by women writers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico, this volume reconceptualises positions of privilege and power in the region and provides new readings about the meaning of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.ing of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.ing of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.ing of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.
Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing by
A taboo subject in many cultures, homosexuality has been traditionally repressed in Latin America, both as a way of life and as a subject for literature. Yet numerous writers have attempted to break the cultural silence surrounding homosexuality, using various strategies to overtly or covertly discuss lesbian and gay themes. In this study, David William Foster examines more than two dozen texts that deal with gay and lesbian topics, drawing from them significant insights into the relationship between homosexuality and society in different Latin American countries and time periods. Foster's study includes works both sympathetic and antagonistic to homosexuality, showing the range of opinion on this topic. The preponderance of his examples come from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, countries with historically active gay communities, although he also includes material on other countries. Noteworthy among the authors covered are Reinaldo Arenas, Adolfo Caminha, Isaac Chocrón, José Donoso, Sylvia Molloy, Alejandra Pizarnik, and Luis Zapata.
Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema by
This first comprehensive English collection of the interviews of Jacques Rivette (19282016) documents his career through chronology, filmography, bibliography, and image stills. A comprehensive introduction places this work in the wider context of twentieth-century social change. Rivettes films, like many of the works of the French New Wave, seem to have avoided the aging process entirely, remaining as playful, fresh, and quietly spectacular as the day they were made. Indeed, his body of work may be the most impressive of the French New Wave. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) has been recognized as possibly the best film to emerge from the post-New Wave era, even as Paris Belongs to Us (1961) is one of the best pictures to emerge from the New Wave itself. Rivette was hardly the most prolific director, however, and the length of his films has often counted against him. Nonetheless, his clinical, self-reflexive essays in film form reveal him as a cinematic purist whose commitment to the celluloid muse hardly diminished from the heady days of the early 1950s to the end of his career in 2009. Beyond inspiring the New Wave movement and continuing to reflect, and reflect on, its central tenets, Rivettes enduring contribution to the history of film is unquestionably evident in his sensitive treatment of the histories and destinies of women, especially through strong roles for actresses. During the six decades of his career, nonetheless, he struck a subtle balance not only between female and male characters, but also between political and personal obsession, between myth and fiction, between theater and cinema, in films that, in addition to having influenced such contemporary filmmakers as Claire Denis, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Assayas, and David Lynch, continue to redefine the art of cinema around the world.
Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art by
Tracing corporeality and materiality across Cuban texts and images of the twentieth century This volume looks at Cuban literature and art that challenges traditional assumptions about the body. Examining how writers and artists have depicted racial, gender, and species differences throughout the past century, Christina García identifies historical continuities in the way they have emphasized the shared materiality of bodies. García shows how these works interact with ecologies of the human and nonhuman across diverse media, time periods, and ideologies. García examines corporeality in a variety of works, including the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and experimental writings of Severo Sarduy; transspecies drawings, paintings, and sculptures by Roberto Fabelo; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's popular queer film Fresa y chocolate; and contemporary narrative fictions by Ena Lucía Portela, Antonio José Ponte, and Ahmel Echevarría. Using the lenses of new materialism, critical race studies, critical animal studies, queer studies, and poststructuralism, García engages with Cuban cultural production at the intersection of diverse social issues. In this book, García explores how certain artistic practices focus on portraying ecological relationships instead of recognizable subjects or shared identity. Corporeal Readings of Cuban Literature and Art demonstrates that through their attention to the connections that different kinds of bodies share, Cuban creators have long undermined rules of classification and unification, reimagining community as shared vulnerability and difference. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters by
Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Author Cathy Yue Wang examines the processes by which modern authors and filmmakers reshape these traditional tales to develop new narratives that interrogate the ingrained patriarchal paradigm. Through a rigorous analysis, Wang delineates changes in both content and narrative that allow contemporary interpretations to reimagine the gender politics and contexts of the tales retold. With a broad transmedia approach and a nuanced understanding of intertextuality, this work contributes to the ongoing negotiation in academic and popular discourse between past and present, traditional and contemporary, and text and reality in a globalized and postmodern world. Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters offers an engaging interdisciplinary investigation of issues at the heart of these traditional tales such as gender and status hierarchy, marriage and family life, and in-group/out-group distinction. Beyond the content of these individual stories, Wang ties these narratives together across time using cognitive literary criticism, especially affective narratology, to shed new light on the adaptation of literary and cultural texts and their sociopolitical contexts.
Gender and Violence in Spanish Culture by
For the true exercise of citizenship to occur, gender violence must be eradicated, as it is not an interpersonal problem, but an attack on the very concept of democracy. Despite increasing social awareness and legal measures taken to fight gender violence, it is still prevalent worldwide. Even in a country such as Spain, praised in the UN Handbook for Legislation on Violence Against Women (2010) for its advanced approach on gender violence, the legal framework has proved insufficient and deeper sociocultural changes are needed. This book presents, in this respect, groundbreaking investigations in the realm of politics, activism, and cultural production that offer both a complex picture of the agents involved in its transformation and a nuanced panorama of initiatives that subvert the normative framework of recognition of victims of gender violence. As a result, the book chapters articulate a construction of the victim as a subject that reflects and acts upon his/her experience and vulnerability, and also adopt perspectives that frame accountability within the representational tradition, the community, and the state.
Women and Death by
Identifies and analyzes thematizations of women and death from the past five centuries, illuminating the present and recent past.The theme of women and death is pervasive in the German culture of the past five centuries. With the conviction that only an interdisciplinary approach can explore a typology as far-reaching and significant as this, and in accordance with the feminist tenet that images are accountable for norms, this volume investigates how iconic representations of women and death came about and why they endure. Traditionally, representations of women as agents of death -- when they have been considered at all -- have been considered separately from women as victims, as though there was no shared thematic ground. Here, familiar depictions of female victims are examined alongside the more unsettling spectacle of women as killers, exposing cultural assumptions. Essays explore, among others, the themes of virgin sacrifice and female infanticides, "Death and the Maiden" in art, female vampires in literature, and women killersin the media. Others compare cultural practices such as female mourning across historical contexts, examining change and the reasons for it. The authors'' judgments eschew the simplistic and programmatic, contributing not just to current research in German literature, but also to understanding of cultural history in general. Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker. Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.ature, and women killersin the media. Others compare cultural practices such as female mourning across historical contexts, examining change and the reasons for it. The authors'' judgments eschew the simplistic and programmatic, contributing not just to current research in German literature, but also to understanding of cultural history in general. Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker. Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.ature, and women killersin the media. Others compare cultural practices such as female mourning across historical contexts, examining change and the reasons for it. The authors'' judgments eschew the simplistic and programmatic, contributing not just to current research in German literature, but also to understanding of cultural history in general. Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker. Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.ature, and women killersin the media. Others compare cultural practices such as female mourning across historical contexts, examining change and the reasons for it. The authors'' judgments eschew the simplistic and programmatic, contributing not just to current research in German literature, but also to understanding of cultural history in general. Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker. Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.to understanding of cultural history in general. Contributors: Stephanie Knöll, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Anna Linton, Bettina Bildhauer, Mary Lindemann, Helen Fronius, Anna Richards, Jürgen Barkhoff, Lawrence Kramer, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Clare Bielby, Gisela Ecker. Anna Linton is Lecturer in German at Kings College London, and Helen Fronius is an AHRC Research Fellow and College Lecturer at Exeter College Oxford.
Gesture in French Post-New Wave Cinema by
«This fascinating study of gesture makes an original contribution to film studies through the persuasive insights it offers into the significance of gesture in its different manifestations in post-New Wave cinema. Meticulous analysis of an eclectic choice of examples and compelling meditations on wider questions of social conditioning, human memory and gender make this book essential reading.» (Dr Albertine Fox, Senior Lecturer in French Film, University of Bristol) Since the invention of cinema in the late nineteenth century, gesture has been a central preoccupation and source of innovation for early film pioneers and avant-garde filmmakers. A non-verbal form of expression and communication characterised by movement, gesture is a key theoretical concept in film analysis that raises crucial questions about the medium specificity of cinema. This book uses an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to read gesture in terms of its interplay with film technology and its relations with the visual and performing arts. The author examines the aesthetics of gesture in a selection of films made during a complex historical and cultural period marked by the disintegration of the French New Wave, the uprisings of May 1968 and the decline of postwar economic prosperity. The book offers an in-depth study of the works of major and often under-explored French and Francophone filmmakers, artists, writers and intellectuals, including Chantal Akerman, Fernand Deligny, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Klossowski, Anne-Marie Miéville, Georges Perec, Bernard Queysanne, Jacques Rivette, Renaud Victor and Pierre Zucca. While revitalising the expression of gesture in modern sound cinema, their films developed radical ways of representing and revealing the impact of sociocultural conditioning on the body.
Chocolate in Mesoamerica by
Winner of the Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award "A triumph of four-field anthropology. Botany, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, and a small bit of physical anthropology are seamlessly united. . . . Without integration of the fields, few or none of the interesting conclusions in this work could have been reached."--American Anthropologist "Contains a watershed of interesting and exciting information. . . . For those with a serious interest in food history and foodways, it is an invaluable source of up-to-date information on one of the most beloved and revered foodstuffs in the Americas."--Austin Chronicle "A unique, extremely useful collection on chocolate use in Mesoamerica that sets a standard to follow in the expanding field of cultural food studies."--Choice "McNeil has here assembled an impressive stable of scholars to examine all aspects of cacao development and use in Mesoamerica from its discovery to its use by the modern Maya."--American Archaeology "In this collection of 21 papers, the authors discuss the linguistic, chemical, agricultural, medicinal, economic and social aspects of the cacao plant, often in exhaustive detail."--Cambridge Archaeological Journal "I highly recommend the book for specialists as well as for the general public interested in knowing more about cacao; the reading is not complicated and is presented from an anthropological perspective."--Journal of Ethnopharmacology A volume in the series Maya Studies, edited by Diane and Arlen Chase.
Women and Death 2 by
Explores both constants and changes in representations of warlike and violent women in German culture over the past six centuries.Warlike women are a recurring phenomenon in German literature and culture since 1500. Amazons, terrorists, warrior women -- this volume of essays by leading scholars from the UK and Germany analyzes ideas and portrayals of these figures in the visual arts, society, media, and scholarship, always against the backdrop of Germany's development as a culture and as a nation. The contributors look for patterns in the historical portrayal of warlike women, askingthe questions: What cultural signals are sent when women are shown occupying men's spaces by dressing as warriors or in men's clothing? What can legitimize the woman who bears arms? From what is the erotic potential of images linking women and violence derived? Have recent feminist thought and political developments changed representations of warlike women? Contributors: Bettina Brandt, Sarah Colvin, Mererid Puw Davies, Peter Davies, ChristineEifler, Ute Frevert, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Ritchie Robertson, Daria Santini, Ruth Seifert, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Sarah Colvin is Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh. Helen Watanabe-O'Kellyis Professor of German at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford.ies, ChristineEifler, Ute Frevert, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Ritchie Robertson, Daria Santini, Ruth Seifert, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Sarah Colvin is Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh. Helen Watanabe-O'Kellyis Professor of German at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford.ies, ChristineEifler, Ute Frevert, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Ritchie Robertson, Daria Santini, Ruth Seifert, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Sarah Colvin is Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh. Helen Watanabe-O'Kellyis Professor of German at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford.ies, ChristineEifler, Ute Frevert, Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, Ritchie Robertson, Daria Santini, Ruth Seifert, Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Sarah Colvin is Eudo C. Mason Chair of German at the University of Edinburgh. Helen Watanabe-O'Kellyis Professor of German at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford.