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Selected Bibliography Of Textual Analysis In Cultural Studies, Xianfeng Mou, Urpo Kovala

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

What Do We Do When We Do Law And Popular Culture, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

"What We Do When We Do Law and Popular Culture" establishes a theoretical framework for analyzing legal popular culture, taking as its point of departure Richard Sherwin's book "When Law Goes Pop." The article stresses what Professor Silbey considers to be three major stumbling blocks in the growing interdiscipline of law and popular culture. She argues that if we are to advance our understanding of the relationship between law and popular culture, we must follow at least three simple charges: (1) demarcate our beginning concepts, such as law or culture, so that amidst the vast phenomena that may be called …

Entropy In Pynchon's "Entropy" And Lefebvre's The Production Of Space, Jason Snart

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Entropy in Pynchon's 'Entropy' and Lefebvre's The Production of Space," Jason Snart examines Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" for the ways in which it deals with the kinds of disorder(s) associated with entropy as a thermodynamic and informational concept. Those concepts are installed as a framework within which to consider cultural studies work like Henri Lefebfre's thought in his The Production of Space and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory and themodynamics: disorder is rendered not as confusion, but rather as a state of potential energy and productivity and Lefebvre's and Bertalanffy's concepts serve to show how …

Books Noted: Recent Pacific Islands Publications: Selected Acquisitions, September–December 2000, Riley M. Moffat

Pacific Studies

This list of significant new publications relating to the Pacific Islands was selected from new acquisitions lists received from Brigham Young University– Hawai‘i, University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Univer- sity of Auckland, East-West Center, University of the South Pacific, National Library of Australia, Melanesian Studies Resource Center of the University of California–San Diego, and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Library. Other libraries are invited to send contributions to the Books Noted Editor for future issues. Listings reflect the extent of information provided by each institution.

Vol. 24 (2001): Pacific Studies Front Matter 1-2, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 24, No.1-2 March/June 2001 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Popular Culture And The Rituals Of American Football, Mark Axelrod

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Popular Culture and the Rituals of American Football," Mark Axelrod reflects on meanings of cultural practice in American popular culture. Before globalization -- driven by economics -- became a fact of life with profound implications, there were myths and rituals that provided a kind of insulation from the mysteries of life. These practices were ritualized by "primitive" men and women who, seemingly, did not understand the universe as well as we moderns do. But in fact one only needs to witness throngs of Baltimoreans rushing after a caravan of cars attempting to kiss the Vince Lombardi Trophy …

[Introduction To] Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators And American Identities, Laura Browder

Bookshelf

In the 1920s, black janitor Sylvester Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, and Elizabeth Stern, the native-born daughter of a German Lutheran and a Welsh Baptist, authored the immigrant's narrative I Am a Woman--and a Jew; in the 1990s, Asa Carter, George Wallace's former speechwriter, produced the fake Cherokee autobiography, The Education of Little Tree. While striking, these examples of what Laura Browder calls ethnic impersonator autobiographies are by no means singular. Over the past 150 years, a number of American authors have left behind unwanted identities by writing themselves into new ethnicities.

Significantly, notes …

Women Defenders On Television: Representing Suspects And The Racial Politics Of Retribution, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

This Essay is about Ellenor Frutt, Annie Dornell, Joyce Davenport, and other women criminal defense attorneys of prime time television. It examines how high-stakes network television presents sympathetic stories about women working as criminal defense attorneys while simultaneously supporting the popular thirst for the harshest criminal penalties. Real women who choose to represent criminal defendants are fundamentally out of step with angry and unforgiving attitudes toward crime and criminals. Indeed, women defenders have chosen work that puts them in direct opposition to the widespread public willingness to incarcerate record numbers of Americans, often young African-American and Latino men, for longer …

Review Of Ward Churchill, A Little Matter Of Genocide: Holocaust And Denial In The Americas, 1492 To The Present, A. Claire Brandabur

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Book Review Article: A. Clare Brandabur, Review of Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present

Deslanting The Lens, Lui Amador

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Deslanting the Lens examines the historical and sociological implications of how Asian men have been represented in popular American film. From the early days of “yellowface” to caricatures like Long Duck Dong, Asian men have been relegated to perpetual foreigner status in American cinema. This paper will explore why the portrayal of Asian men has been limited to very specific ideas about Asian and Asian Americans are in society. This analysis will also include how socio/political events have shaped and influence popular perceptions about Asians, that inform how Asian men continue to be depicted in film.

Book Review: Chechnya: Tombstone Of Russian Power, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

From December 1994 to August 1996, Russia was engaged in the Chechen War, a Vietnam-style quagmire that exemplified, on the one hand, the end of Russia as a great military and imperial power, and, on the other hand, "one of the greatest epics of colonial resistance in the past century.'' No analysis can hope to understand the totality of forces that lend to the stability (or instability) of nations with large minority populations unless it first examines the conditions that led to the Russian defeat in Chechnya. At the center of that problem lies an interesting issue. What aspects of …

Where No Man Has Gone Before: Star Trek And The Death Of Cultural Relativism In America, Kenneth Anderson

Book Reviews

This 1997 Times Literary Supplement (London) essay reviews the 1996 Star Trek (Next Generation) film First Contact, along with a book of essays in cultural studies about Star Trek (Taylor Harrison, et al., Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek). Of greatest long term interest in the moral and political philosophy of Star Trek is the so-called Prime Directive - non interference in local culture on local planets. This Vietnam era ethic of cultural relativism was prominent in the original 1960s Star Trek series as much for its assertion as for being regularly violated by Captain Kirk and his crew. …

Book Review: The Decolonization Of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge And Power, Rory J. Conces

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power includes fourteen essays, some of which are revised papers presented at a cultural studies conference in Amsterdam in 1991, that contribute to the rapidly growing library of literature on postcolonial theory by exploring the dimensions of decolonization.

Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies, Terence Wesley-Smith

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Spanish Music In The Twentieth Century [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

North-American audiences, musicians, and musicologists remain unfamiliar with twentieth-century Spanish music. Most concertgoers identify Spanish music with the folkloristic tunes associated with such composers as Isaac Albéniz, thus construing a true "other" facing the Germanic musical tradition. The musicological canon is not only almost closed to non-European musics, but also excludes the music of some countries that since the Industrial Revolution have been deemed "peripheral," forgetting, to be sure, that five and six hundred years ago the actual periphery was all lands north of Paris. Most of us were not surprised to hear in a special session on Hispanic music …

Philosophy And The Analysis Of Music: Bridges To Musical Sound, Form, And Reference [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

In recent years there seems to have been a tendency (in theory at least) to view conventional academic disciplines with a certain hostility as intellectual chastisements that, rather than opening our minds to knowledge, merely hinder us. In the humanities especially, interdisciplinary studies have become a trend. Many scholars are tempted to abandon the cozy security of their methodology and embark on other, more adventurous hybrid enterprises. Philosophy and the Analysis of Music, one such enterprise, draws its premises from two apparently different fields, philosophy and musical analysis, in order to arrive at a better understanding of music.

Historical Study As Cultural Critique: A Proposal For The Role Of Biblical Scholarship In Theological Education, Vincent L. Wimbush

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Some things are a bit clearer to me today than they were a decade or so ago. For example, I can now better understand and articulate the reasons for my initial and continuing interest in biblical studies. It was the recognition of the pervasive influence of the Bible in the historical experiences of African Americans that first inspired the interest. The importance of the Bible among African Americans is not of significance to me because it is assumed to be unique in the history of the United States. I am quite aware of the historical importance of the Bible among …

Newspaper Article, Film Series, September 19, 1969, The Reflector

Reflector Collection, 1965-1975

This article is a notification for students interested in film studies. An MSU professor began the class for students interested in learning the reciprocal relationship between film and contemporary socio-political issues.