The Poetics and Politics of the Desert

The Poetics and Politics of the Desert
Author: Catrin Gersdorf
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9042024968
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This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

Flower of the Desert

Flower of the Desert
Author: Antonio Negri
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2015-10-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438458487
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Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi's resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason's power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its "true illusions." Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition—a uniquely Italian one—that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.

The Politics and Poetics of Water

The Politics and Poetics of Water
Author: Lyla Mehta
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9788125028697
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The book studies the relationship between large dams and water scarcity in Kutch. It argues that water scarcity is not merely natural, but is embedded in the social and power relations shaping water access, use and practices. Scarcity is portrayed as natural rather than human induced and this naturalisation of scarcity is beneficial to those who are powerful. This is a significant book in the light of the growing water crisis in India, and the world.

Storied Deserts

Storied Deserts
Author: Celina Osuna
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2024-06-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1040044689
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Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.

Global Indigenous Media

Global Indigenous Media
Author: Pamela Wilson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2008-08-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0822388693
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In this exciting interdisciplinary collection, scholars, activists, and media producers explore the emergence of Indigenous media: forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and created by Indigenous peoples around the globe. Whether discussing Maori cinema in New Zealand or activist community radio in Colombia, the contributors describe how native peoples use both traditional and new media to combat discrimination, advocate for resources and rights, and preserve their cultures, languages, and aesthetic traditions. By representing themselves in a variety of media, Indigenous peoples are also challenging misleading mainstream and official state narratives, forging international solidarity movements, and bringing human rights violations to international attention. Global Indigenous Media addresses Indigenous self-representation across many media forms, including feature film, documentary, animation, video art, television and radio, the Internet, digital archiving, and journalism. The volume’s sixteen essays reflect the dynamism of Indigenous media-making around the world. One contributor examines animated films for children produced by Indigenous-owned companies in the United States and Canada. Another explains how Indigenous media producers in Burma (Myanmar) work with NGOs and outsiders against the country’s brutal regime. Still another considers how the Ticuna Indians of Brazil are positioning themselves in relation to the international community as they collaborate in creating a CD-ROM about Ticuna knowledge and rituals. In the volume’s closing essay, Faye Ginsburg points out some of the problematic assumptions about globalization, media, and culture underlying the term “digital age” and claims that the age has arrived. Together the essays reveal the crucial role of Indigenous media in contemporary media at every level: local, regional, national, and international. Contributors: Lisa Brooten, Kathleen Buddle, Cache Collective, Michael Christie, Amalia Córdova, Galina Diatchkova, Priscila Faulhaber, Louis Forline, Jennifer Gauthier, Faye Ginsburg, Alexandra Halkin, Joanna Hearne, Ruth McElroy, Mario A. Murillo, Sari Pietikäinen, Juan Francisco Salazar, Laurel Smith, Michelle Stewart, Pamela Wilson

Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy
Author: Tynan Aidan Tynan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2020-06-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474443389
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Aidan Tynan provocatively rethinks some of the core assumptions of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Showing the significance of deserts and wastelands in literature since the Romantics, he argues that the desert has served to articulate anxieties over the cultural significance of space in the Anthropocene. He explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity. And he looks at how the desert has been a terrain of desire over which the Western imagination of space and place has range, in writings from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo, from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

Sovereignties in Question

Sovereignties in Question
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823224376
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This book brings together five encounters. They include the date or signature and its singularity; the notion of the trace; structures of futurity and the "to come"; language and questions of translation; such speech acts as testimony and promising; the possibility of the impossible; and the poem as addressed and destined beyond knowledge.

The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing

The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing
Author: Carl Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134105142
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As many places around the world confront issues of globalization, migration and postcoloniality, travel writing has become a serious genre of study, reflecting some of the greatest concerns of our time. Encompassing forms as diverse as field journals, investigative reports, guidebooks, memoirs, comic sketches and lyrical reveries; travel writing is now a crucial focus for discussion across many subjects within the humanities and social sciences. An ideal starting point for beginners, but also offering new perspectives for those familiar with the field, The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing examines: Key debates within the field, including postcolonial studies, gender, sexuality and visual culture Historical and cultural contexts, tracing the evolution of travel writing across time and over cultures Different styles, modes and themes of travel writing, from pilgrimage to tourism Imagined geographies, and the relationship between travel writing and the social, ideological and occasionally fictional constructs through which we view the different regions of the world. Covering all of the major topics and debates, this is an essential overview of the field, which will also encourage new and exciting directions for study. Contributors: Simon Bainbridge, Anthony Bale, Shobhana Bhattacharji, Dúnlaith Bird, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Wendy Bracewell, Kylie Cardell, Daniel Carey, Janice Cavell, Simon Cooke, Matthew Day, Kate Douglas, Justin D. Edwards, David Farley, Charles Forsdick, Corinne Fowler, Laura E. Franey, Rune Graulund, Justine Greenwood, James M. Hargett, Jennifer Hayward, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Graham Huggan, William Hutton, Robin Jarvis, Tabish Khair, Zoë Kinsley, Barbara Korte, Julia Kuehn, Scott Laderman, Claire Lindsay, Churnjeet Mahn, Nabil Matar, Steve Mentz, Laura Nenzi, Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Manfred Pfister, Susan L. Roberson, Paul Smethurst, Carl Thompson, C.W. Thompson, Margaret Topping, Richard White, Gregory Woods.

The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora
Author: Jerome C. Branche
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2014-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317627709
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This book studies the creative discourse of the modern African diaspora by analyzing poems, novels, essays, hip-hop and dub poetry in the Caribbean, England, Spain, and Colombia, and capturing diasporan movement through mutually intersecting axes of dislocation and relocation, and efforts at political group affirmation and settlement, or “location.” Branche’s study connects London’s multimillion-dollar riots of 2011, and its antecedents associated with the West Indian settler community, to the discontent and harrowing conditions facing black immigrants to contemporary Spain as gateway to Fortress Europe. It links the brutal massacres that target Colombia’s dispossessed and displaced poor - and mainly black - “throwaway” citizens, victims of the drug trade and neoliberal expansionism, to older Caribbean stories that tell of the original spurts of capitalist greed, and the colonial cauldron it created, at the center of which lay the slave trade. In revisiting the question of what really has awaited Afro-descendants at the end of the Middle Passage, this volume brings transatlantic slavery, the making of weak postcolonial states that bleed people, and the needle’s eye of racial identification together through a close reading of rappers, black radicals, dub poetry, and novelists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Branche at once demonstrates the existence of an archive of Afro-modern diasporan, discursive production, and just as importantly, points toward a historically-rooted theoretical framework that would contain its liberatory trajectory.

Tributary Voices

Tributary Voices
Author: Paul A. Formisano
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2022-04-26
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1647790433
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The Colorado River is in crisis. Persistent drought, climate change, and growing demands from ongoing urbanization threaten this life-source that provides water to more than forty million people in the U.S. and Mexico. Coupled with these challenges are our nation’s deeply rooted beliefs about the region as a frontier, garden, and wilderness that have created competing agendas about the river as something to both exploit and preserve. Over the last century and a half, citizens and experts looked to law, public policy, and science to solve worsening water problems. Yet today’s circumstances demand additional perspectives to foster a more sustainable relationship with the river. Through literary, rhetorical, and historical analysis of some of the Colorado River’s lesser-known stakeholders, Tributary Voices considers a more comprehensive approach to river management on the eve of the one-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Colorado River Compact, which governs the allocation of water rights to the seven states in the region. Ranging from the early twentieth century to the present, Tributary Voices examines nature writing, women’s narratives, critiques of dam development, the Latina/o communities’ appeals for river restoration, American Indian authors’ and tribal nations’ claims of water sovereignty, and teachings about environmental stewardship and provident living. This innovative study models an interdisciplinary approach to water governance and reinvigorates our imagination in achieving a more sustainable water ethic.