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In the early twentieth century, publicly staged productions of significant historical, political, and religious events became increasingly popularand increasingly grandin Ireland. These public pageants, a sort of precursor to todays opening ceremonies at the Olympic games, mobilized huge numbers of citizens to present elaborately staged versions of Irish identity based on both history and myth. Complete with marching bands, costumes, fireworks, and mock battles, these spectacles were suffused with political and national significance.
Dean explores the historical significance of these pageants, explaining how their popularity correlated to political or religious imperatives in twentieth-century Ireland. She uncovers unpublished archival findings to present scripts, programs, and articles covering these events. The book also includes over thirty photographs of pageants, program covers, and detailed designs for costumes to convey the grandeur of the historical pageants at the beginning of the century and their decline in production standards in the 1970s and 1980s. Tracing the Irish historical pageant phenomenon through the twentieth century, Dean presents a nation contending with the violence and political upheaval of the present by reimagining the past.

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"The rise of the West" has long been the accepted doctrine for framing analyses of world history. Privileging a Eurocentric approach, this traditional paradigm obscures the significance of the indigenous rich in non-Western regions and fails to recognize the contributions of the Orient. In this book, Peter Gran seeks to reframe current historical debates, presenting a model of analysis based on the rise of the rich. Gran outlines the structure of this new paradigm, building upon metanarrative concepts from Marxism to liberalism.

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An Anthology of Contemporary Middle Eastern American Writing

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The writers included here are descendants of multiple cultural heritages and reflect the perspectives of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds: Egyptian, Iranian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Syrian. They are from diverse socioeconomic classes and spiritual sensibilities: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and atheist, among others. Yet, they coexist in this volume simply as American voices.

Atefat-Peckham gathered poetry and prose from sixteen accomplished writers whose works concern a variety of themes: from the familial cross-cultural misunderstandings and conflicts in the works of Iranian American writers Nahid Rachlin and Roger Sedarat to the mysticism of Khaled Mattawas poems; from the superstitions that govern characters in Diana Abu-Jabers prose to the devastating homesickness of Pauline Kaldass characters. Filled with emotion and keen observations, this collection showcases these writers vital contributions to contemporary American literature.

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Like the author of this remarkable collection of thirteen linked stories, the protagonist, Nadia, was born and raised in Egypt, educated in England, and immigrated to the United States. Samia Serageldin draws her characters out with subtlety and control, moving from the narrators grandmothers garden house in Cairo to the suburbs of North Carolina, yielding powerful portraits of cultural dislocation, faith, and multigenerational conflicts.

As the narratives shift in time and place, they unfold through memory. In "The Zawiya," Nadia reflects on the change in womens space from the coiffeurs salon to a religious pulpit as she revisits a childhood ritual. In the title story, Nadia offers a vivid sketch of her grandmother Nanou, "a force of nature" who, as an early widow, single-handedly raised six children and ran the household. At a time when few women experienced such independence, Nanou had a potent influence on the young narrator. Told with compassion and clarity, Serageldins stories reveal one womans exploration of identity, finding it in both the sweeping backdrop of Egyptian history and the quotidian exchanges with friends and family.

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The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951-1955

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Grace Hartigan emerged during the 1950s as a leading representative of the "second generation" of the New York School of abstract expressionist painters, a movement that achieved international standing for American art. In 1958, Hartigan was the only woman and one of only two artists under forty chosen by the Museum of Modern Art for a show on that school. Entitled The New American Painting, the show traveled to eight European countries and included such artists as Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Published for the first time, Hartigans journals offer readers an intimate chronicle of the vibrant artistic and literary milieu of the times. Hartigans interactions with many of its leading artists, and her close association with such New York School poets as John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank OHara, make for fascinating reading. The only contemporaneous record of this extraordinary period in art history, this book is a treasure to the art student and literary scholar alike.

Grace Hartigans paintings are held in museums throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum of Art. Since 1965 she has worked at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is the director of the Hoffberger Graduate School of Painting.

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He was a trailblazing twentieth-century British photojournalist but George Rodger lived in the adventurous tradition of nineteenth-century explorers. Cofounding Magnum Photos in 1947 with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, the modest Rodger was eclipsed by his partnersuntil now.

Rodger's Indiana Jones-style escapades are legendary and worth the telling. He once covered over 75,000 miles of "old Africa" in a Land Rover. He even survived a white rhino charge. He went on to become a key photographer of African tribal life. During World War II he covered sixty-one countries for Life magazine. He was chased through three hundred miles of Burmese jungles by both the Japanese army and a tribe of headhunters. And he was the first to record the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He quit photography when he realized he was arranging "thousands of Jewish corpses in nice photographic compositions."

In fascinating detail Carol Naggar not only recalls Roger's singular life and artistic contribution, but she also provides an in-depth look at the complex dynamics of ethics, violence, and photojournalism. As such, it places the legacy of George Rodger within a broader sociohistorical context.

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Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes

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The Party of Justice and Development in Morocco

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What electoral mobilization choices do Islamist opposition parties make? How do they relate to authoritarian incumbents? Which key factors influence the choices these parties make? Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes explores the answers to these questions by studying the path of the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD) in Morocco from 1992 to 2007.

Wegner traces the partys choices through an analysis of organizational, ideological, and institutional constraints. Adopting a simple but novel perspective, Wegner distinguishes Islamist parties from other opposition parties because of their connection to a powerful social movement. The author shows how the PJD initially made major progress in electoral politics by building up a strong party organization, sustaining full support of the Islamist movement, and positioning itself as the only credible opposition party. Ultimately, the failure of the PJD to win elections was due to political concessions it made to secure its legality combined with a distancing from the Islamist movement.

Based on extensive field research in Morocco in 2003 and 2007 and drawing upon personal interviews with members, candidates, and leaders of the PJD, Islamist Opposition in Authoritarian Regimes presents a meticulous and enlightening case study. Wegner enriches our understanding of electoral authoritarianism in Morocco and throughout the Arab- Islamic world.

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Zenobia was the third-century Syrian queen who rebelled against Roman rule. Before Emperor Aurelian prevailed against her forces, she had seized almost one-third of the Roman Empire. Today, her legend attracts thousands of visitors to her capital, Palmyra, one of the great ruined cities of the ancient world.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the time of Ottoman rule, travel to the Middle East was almost impossible for Westerners. That did not stop five daring women from abandoning their conventional lives and venturing into the heart of this inhospitable region. Improbable Women explores the lives of Hester Stanhope, Jane Digby, Isabel Burton, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark, narrating the story of each womans pilgrimage to Palmyra to pay homage to the warrior queen. Although the women lived in different time periods, ranging from the eighteenth century to the midtwentieth century, they all had middle- to upper-class British backgrounds and overcame great societal pressures to pursue their independence.

Cotterman situates their lives against a backdrop of the Middle Eastern history that was the setting for their adventures. Divided into six sections, one devoted to Zenobia and one on each of the five women, Improbable Women is a fascinating glimpse into the experiences and characters of these intelligent, open-minded, and free-spirited explorers.

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The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012

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In one of the few anthropological works focusing on a contemporary Middle Eastern city, Colonial Jerusalem explores a vibrant urban center at the core of the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This book shows how colonialism, far from being simply a fixture of the past as is often
suggested, remains a crucial component of Palestinian and Israeli realities today. Abowd deftly illuminates everyday life under Israels long military occupation as it is defined by processes and conditions of "apartness" and separation as Palestinians are increasingly regulated and controlled.
Abowd examines how both national communities are progressively divided by walls, checkpoints, and separate road networks in one of the most segregated cities in the world. Drawing upon recent theories on racial politics, colonialism, and urban spatial dynamics, Colonial Jerusalem analyzes
the politics of myth, history, and memory across an urban landscape integral to the national cosmologies of both Palestinians and Israelis and meaningful to all communities.

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Probing, wide-ranging, brimming with passion and outrage, Melhems eighth collection of poems grips the reader with accounts of individual triumphs and the ongoing catastrophic conflicts of our world. The author draws on her years as a painter and sculptor to bring a distinct visual and tactile quality to her poetry.

In this volume, Melhem proceeds from robust individual portraits through observable terrains to traumatic visions of war. "Certain Personae" ranges from black writers to Abraham Lincoln, from a portrait of the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the poetry of John Updike, and finishes with paintings of Hannibal crossing the Alps. In "Mostly Political," the poems traverse the local and the universal: melting polar ice caps, capitalism, a painting by Max Ernst interpreted in antithetical ways, and a poem surveying Manhattans Upper West Side in the context of international events. "Wars," the third and last section, gives intimate and searing glimpses of the Trojan War, World War I, the Gulf War, the Iraq war, and the conflict over Palestine.

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Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817-1917

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Explores the relationship among the German confessional divide, collective memories of religion, and the construction of German national identity and difference. It argues that nineteenth-century proponents of church unity used and abused memories of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation to espouse German religious unity, which would then serve as a catalyst for German national unification.

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This book critically examines the feminization of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a major movement for Islamic renewal and reform in South Asia. Through an ethnographic and textual study of Jamaat women elected to local, provincial, and national bodies in Pakistan from 2002 to 2008, Jamal draws attention to the cultural-political forces that enabled these women to become influential within the party and in Pakistans major urban centers of Karachi and Lahore.

Jamal situates Jamaat women within Islamic modernism without reifying them as either pious agents reacting to state-imposed modernization or gendered citizens who use Islam for class-based instrumental ends. Jamaat women are represented as subjects who move in many directions by acting against and through the discourses of Islamic tradition, cultural modernity, and modernization.

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The Midnight Court / Cuirt an Mhean Oiche

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Banned and beloved in equal measure, The Midnight Court is a canonical eighteenth-century text widely considered to be one of the greatest comic Irish poems.  Despite its simple storyline, Merrimans poem addresses a wide range of themes from its satirical treatment of sexuality to its biting social commentary. This volume, the first critical edition, offers readers a fluid translation and five essays that contextualize the poem, making it an ideal text for any student of the poem and eighteenth-century Irish literature.

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Brian Merriman, Brian Ó Conchubhair, David Marcus

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Bringing together seventeen original essays by scholars from around the world, Screwball Television offers a variety of international perspectives on Gilmore Girls. Adored by fans and celebrated by critics for its sophisticated wordplay and compelling portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship, this contemporary American TV program finally gets its due as a cultural production unlike any other, one that is beholden to Hollywoods screwball comedies of the 1930s, steeped in intertextual references, and framed as a "kinder, gentler kind of cult television series" in this tightly focused yet wide-ranging collection.

This volume makes a significant contribution to television studies, genre studies, and womens studies.
Screwball Television seeks to bring Gilmore Girls more fully into academic discourse not only as a topic worthy of critical scrutiny but also as an infinitely rewarding text capable of stimulating the imagination of students beyond the classroom.

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A boy finds himself alone with his first love in a toboggan stalled atop the Matterhorn at Disneyland. A woman, bitter about her marriage to a man turned blind, must decide if he lives or dies. A man haunted by his role in creating the H-bomb suddenly disappears in old age, only to turn up at Alamagordo, seeking an Indian and redemption. Such characters, at the crossroads of emotion and ethics, confounding loss and resurrection, populate this unforgettable collection of tales. Loosely connected, the stories chronicle the lives of the Matters, a captivating, tragic, yet ultimately exultant Arab American family.

Spanning continents and a century, the stories center on the balm that human relationships offer. In "The Chandelier," a boy desperate to feed his starving family hauls a stolen chandelier over a snowy mountain in Lebanon during World War I. A young Mexican nurse and her lover wind their way through eighteenth-century California missions in "Fabiola." Against the backdrop of the September 11 attacks, an Arab American man is thrown from a bus, echoing past racial discriminations, in "Get Off the Bus."

With a poets ear and a historians keen eye for detail, Orfalea offers readers beautifully crafted stories filled with flawed yet irresistible characters who are rendered with great tenderness and aching complexity.

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In an age when geek chic has come to define mainstream pop culture, few writers and producers inspire more admiration and response than Joss Whedon. From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Much Ado About Nothing, from Dr. Horribles SingAlong Blog to The Avengers, the works of Whedon have been the focus of increasing academic attention. This collection of articles represents some of the best work covering a wide array of topics that clarify Whedons importance, including considerations of narrative and visual techniques, myth construction, symbolism, gender, heroism, and the business side of television. The editors argue that Whedons work is of both social and aesthetic significance; that he creates "canonical television." He is a master of his artistic medium and has managed this success on broadcast networks rather than on cable.

From the focus on a single episode to the exploration of an entire season, from the discussion of a particular narrative technique to a recounting of the history of Whedon studies, this collection will both entertain and educate those exploring Whedon scholarship for the first time and those planning to teach a course on his works.

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Rhonda V. Wilcox, Tanya R. Cochran, Cynthea Masson, David Lavery

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In this volume, a group of distinguished scholars reinterpret concepts and canons of Islamic thought in Arab, Persian, South Asian, and Turkish traditions. They demonstrate that there is no unitary "Islamic" position on important issues of statecraft and governance. They recognize that Islam is a discursive site marked by silences, agreements, and animated controversies. Rigorous debates and profound disagreements among Muslim theologians, philosophers, and literati have taken place over such questions as: What is an Islamic state? Was the state ever viewed as an independent political institution in the Islamic tradition of political thought? Is it possible that a religion that places an inordinate emphasis upon the importance of good deeds does not indeed have a vigorous notion of "public interest" or a systematic theory of government? Does Islam provide an edifice, a common idiom, and an ideological mooring for premodern and modern Muslim rulers alike? The nuanced reading of the Islamic traditions provided in this book will help future generations of Muslims contemplate a more humane style of statecraft.

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Super Girls, Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs

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Gender and Modernity in Global Youth Culture

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A compelling look at the ways in which youth, gender and gender identities are being transformed around the globe.

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The new millennium finds humanity situated at critical crossroads. While there are many hopeful signs of cross-cultural engagement and democratic dialogue, it is equally the case that the challenges of warfare and injustice continue to plague nations and communities around the globe. Against this backdrop, there exists a powerful mechanism for transforming crises into opportunities: the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. The expert authors brought together in this volume collectively deploy the essential teachings of nonviolence across a spectrum of contemporary issues.

From considering the principles of the French Revolution and encouraging peace through natural resource management to exploring multiculturism and teaching peace in the elementary classroom, this work is broad in scope yet detailed in its approach to the fundamental principles of nonviolence.

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Among various important efforts to address womens issues in Morocco, a particular set of individuals and associations have formed around   two specific goals: reforming the Moroccan Family Code and raising   awareness of womens rights. Evrard chronicles the history of the womens   rights movement, exploring the organizational structure, activities, and   motivations with specific attention to questions of legal reform and family law. Employing ethnographic scrutiny, Evrard presents the stories of the   individual women behind the movement and the challenges they faced. Given the vast reform of the Moroccan Family Code in 2004, and the emphasis on the role of women across the Middle East and North Africa today,   this book makes a timely argument for the analysis of womens rights as   both global and local in origin, evolution, and application.