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The Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value
The Body Impolitic is a critical study of tradition, not merely as an ornament of local and national heritage, but also as a millstone around the necks of those who are condemned to produce it. Michael Herzfeld takes us inside a rich variety of small-town Cretan artisans' workshops to show how apprentices are systematically thwarted into learning by stealth and guile. This harsh training reinforces a stereotype of artisans as rude and uncultured. Moreover, the same stereotypes that marginalize artisans locally also operate to marginalize Cretans within the Greek nation and Greece itself within the international community. What Herzfeld identifies as "the global hierarchy of value" thus frames the nation's ancient monuments and traditional handicrafts as evidence of incurable "backwardness." Herzfeld's sensitive observations offer an intimately grounded way of understanding the effects of globalization and of one of its most visible offshoots, the heritage industry, on the lives of ordinary people in many parts of the world today. .
Price: $19.04
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Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil Actions
Although art may sometimes shock us, so do many recent attempts to regulate it. Increasingly contemporary art displays new values and beliefs that may disturb or even frighten viewers. In Chicago, a painting of the late Mayor Harold Washington in women's underwear was seized by outraged politicians and the police. The National Endowment for the Arts rescinded funds it had pledged to a New York City exhibit confronting the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. The Corcoran Gallery balked at mounting a retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, some of which depicted homoerotic scenes or nude children. In Florida, a music store owner and 2 Live Crew were prosecuted for the alleged obscenity of a record album. Drawing upon extensive interviews, a broad sampling of media accounts, legal documents and his own observations of important events, Steven Dubin surveys visual art, photography and film, as well as artistic upstarts such as video and performance art. He examinesboth the nature of art work which disarms its viewers and the social reaction to it--the dual meaning of arresting images. Dubin combines the eye of someone familiar with art and the rigor of a social scientist with insights about contemporary society and politics..
Price: $31.05
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The Kali Pact: An Impolitic Tale of a Kashmir Idyll and a Tyrant's Strange End
Major Simon Foster is a member of a UN peacekeeping mission in Kashmir, patrolling the tense cease fire line between India and Pakistan Here, he rediscovers Margitte, whose opiate addiction tragically ended their Cold War idyll, a history traced in The Phoenix Cage, Book 2 of The Faust Legacy. Drawn to each other again like moths to a flame, they court a devastating vengeance. Simon's past also surfaces in the person of a UN apparatchik and former Cypriot EOKA terrorist. In the high Karakorums soldiers of Pakistan's army become innocent victims of betrayals and intrigues with obscure origins in the fortunes of SS Haupsturmführer Reinhardt Faustenach, antihero of The Lame King, Book 1 of The Faust Legacy Quartet. Fortune's labyrinth ends where Germany's dictator began before World War 2, with stark justice for another tyrant, Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq. In The Kali Pact Brodsky makes masterly use of history's open questions, leading the reader to wonder where-or even if-fact and fiction part ways..
Price: $21.30
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Bare and Impolitic Right: Internment and Ukrainian-Canadian Redress
When must a current government attempt to come to terms with the wrongs of governments long past? In "A Bare and Impolitic Right" Bohdan Kordan and Craig Mahovsky examine the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during the Great War, and explore the political, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of redress. Situating the campaign for Ukrainian-Canadian redress within a wider discussion on political leadership and transitional justice, the authors argue that, by reaffirming the values that are central to a rule-based society, symbolic redress might not only play an important role in reconciling the past with present and future generations, but also aid the country to reconnect with those foundational traditions that inform Canadian political culture..
Price: $60.00
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Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham
With this witty and elegant new book, one of our leading medievalists breaks new ground in fifteenth-century scholarship, a critical site of cultural study. Delany examines the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, a figure never before written on at any length, and fully explores the relations between history and literature in a particularly turbulent period in English history, a period extending from the "War of the Roses" through the "Hundred Years War." Delany focuses on Bokenham's major work, Legends of Holy Women--the first collection of all female saint's lives in any language--composed between 1443 and 1447. Organizing the book around the image of the body--a medieval procedure becoming popular once again in current attention to the social construction of the body--she looks at a number of major concerns. One is Bokenham's relation to the body of English literature, particularly Chaucer. Another is the entire genre of saints's lives, particularly female saints's lives, with their striking uses of the body of the saint to generate their meaning. Yet another is the image of the body politic and its importance in the political and dynastic crises of fifteenth century England. Delany draws these diverse strands together to create an innovative and readable portrait of Bokenham's work and its larger cultural and political importance, offering a host of new insights into this unjustly neglected period in English literary history..
Price: $21.25
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