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Title: The shadows of poetry: Vergil in the mind of Augustine
Author: MacCormack, Sabine
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Ancient History | Christianity | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official literature and art of the time. Her study offers . . . [more]
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Title: Dioscorus of Aphrodito: his work and his world 
Author: MacCoull, Leslie B
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Classics
Publisher's Description: From the hand of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, sixth-century Coptic lawyer and poet, we have the only autograph poems to come down to us on papyrus from the late ancient world. Both the poetry he wrote for special occasions and the documents he produced in his legal career, in Greek and Coptic, reflect the major preoccupations of Dioscorus' society and his age: the nature of Byzantine imperial government, the patronage of the powerful elite, and the spirituality of the Egyptian Christian church. Thanks to residence in Egypt and many years of work with the original papyri, Leslie S. B. MacCoull is able to present a comprehensive picture of Dioscorus and his times. Through detailed analyses of the documents and poems, some previously unknown, she leads us to a fresh perception of the Coptic culture of Byzantine Egypt. She reveals the man and his world as inheritors of and contributors to the Egyptian-Classical-Christian fusion of society and intellectual life that gave birth to Gnosticism and the Desert Fathers. Dioscorus of Aphrodito epitomizes the little-known cultural flowering of late antique Egypt, which is now seen not as a place of sterility and decadence, but as the home of a strikingly original and creative culture whose subsequent eclipse still remains unexplained.   [brief]
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Title: A critical cinema 3: interviews with independent filmmakers
Author: MacDonald, Scott 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film
Publisher's Description: A Critical Cinema 3 continues Scott MacDonald's compilation of personal interviews and public discussions with major contributors to independent filmmaking and film awareness. An informative exchange with Amos Vogel, whose Cinema 16 Society drew American filmgoers into a broader sense of film history, is followed by interviews reflecting a wide range of approaches to filmmaking. Sally Potter discusses her popular feature, Orlando , in relation to the experimental work that preceded it, and Canadian independent John Porter argues compellingly for small-gauge, Super-8mm filmmaking. Ken Jacobs discusses the "Nervous System" apparatus with which he transforms old film footage into new forms of motion picture art; Jordan Belson describes his Vortex Concerts, ancestors of modern laser light shows; and Elias Merhige talks about going beneath the "rational structure of meaning" in Begotten . A Critical Cinema 3 presents independent cinema as an international and multiethnic phenomenon. MacDonald interviews filmmakers from Sweden, France, Italy, Austria, Armenia, India, the Philippines, and Japan and examines the work of African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics. He provides an introductory overview of each interviewee, as well as detailed film/videographies and selected bibliographies. With its predecessors, A Critical Cinema (California, 1988) and A Critical Cinema 2 (California, 1992), this is the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English.   [brief]
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Title: A critical cinema 2: interviews with independent filmmakers
Author: MacDonald, Scott 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This sequel to A Critical Cinema offers a new collection of interviews with independent filmmakers that is a feast for film fans and film historians. Scott MacDonald reveals the sophisticated thinking of these artists regarding film, politics, and contemporary gender issues.The interviews explore the careers of Robert Breer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, James Benning, Su Friedrich, and Godfrey Reggio. Yoko Ono discusses her cinematic collaboration with John Lennon, Michael Snow talks about his music and films, Anne Robertson describes her cinematic diaries, Jonas Mekas and Bruce Baillie recall the New York and California avant-garde film culture. The selection has a particularly strong group of women filmmakers, including Yvonne Rainer, Laura Mulvey, and Lizzie Borden. Other notable artists are Anthony McCall, Andrew Noren, Ross McElwee, Anne Severson, and Peter Watkins.   [brief]
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Title: Selected letters of Alessandra Strozzi
Author: Macinghi Strozzi, Alessandra 1407-1471
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Renaissance History | Women's Studies | European Studies | Literature in Translation | Autobiography | European History | Letters
Publisher's Description: The letters of Alessandra Strozzi provide a vivid and spirited portrayal of life in fifteenth-century Florence. Among the richest autobiographical materials to survive from the Italian Renaissance, the letters reveal a woman who fought stubbornly to preserve her family's property and position in adverse circumstances, and who was an acute observer of Medicean society. Her letters speak of political and social status, of the concept of honor, and of the harshness of life, including the plague and the loss of children. They are also a guide to Alessandra's inner life over a period of twenty-three years, revealing the pain and sorrow, and, more rarely, the joy and triumph, with which she responded to the events unfolding around her.This edition includes translations, in full or in part, of 35 of the 73 extant letters. The selections carry forward the story of Alessandra's life and illustrate the range of attitudes, concerns, and activities which were characteristic of their author.   [brief]
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Title: Visionary Women: ecstatic prophecy in seventeenth-century England
Author: Mack, Phyllis
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | European History | Christianity | Women's Studies
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Title: China reporting: an oral history of American journalism in the 1930's and 1940's 
Author: Mackinnon, Stephen R
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | China | Asian History | Print Media
Publisher's Description: China Reporting documents the gathering of American journalists, diplomats and China scholars, "old China hands" all, who met in 1982 to discuss their experience in China.
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Title: Nothing bad happens to good girls: fear of crime in women's lives
Author: Madriz, Esther 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies | Women's Studies | Criminology
Publisher's Description: "The possibility of being a victim of a crime is ever present on my mind; thinking about it as natural as breathing." - 40-year-old womanThis is a compelling analysis of how women in the United States perceive the threat of crime in their everyday lives and how that perception controls their behavior. Esther Madriz draws on focus groups and in-depth interviews to show the damage that fear can wreak on women of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. Although anxiety about crime affects virtually every woman, Madriz shows that race and class position play a role in a woman's sense of vulnerability.Fear of crime has resulted in public demand for stronger and more repressive policies throughout the country. As funds for social programs are cut, Madriz points out, those for more prisons and police are on the increase. She also illustrates how media images of victims - "good" victims aren't culpable, "bad" victims invite trouble - and a tough political stance toward criminals are linked to a general climate of economic uncertainty and conservatism.Madriz argues that fear itself is a strong element in keeping women in subservient and self-limiting social positions. "Policing" themselves, they construct a restricted world that leads to positions of even greater subordination: Being a woman means being vulnerable. Considering the enormous attention given to crime today, including victims' rights and use of public funds, Madriz's informative study is especially timely.   [brief]
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Title: China's Catholics: tragedy and hope in an emerging civil society
Author: Madsen, Richard 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Asian Studies | History | Sociology | Christianity
Publisher's Description: After suffering isolation and persecution during the Maoist era, the Catholic Church in China has reemerged with astonishing vitality in recent years. Richard Madsen focuses on this revival and relates it to the larger issue of the changing structure of Chinese society, particularly to its implications for the development of a "civil society."Madsen knows China well and has spent extensive time there interviewing Chinese Catholics both young and old, the "true believers" and the less devout. Their stories reveal the tensions that have arisen even as political control over everyday life in China has loosened. Of particular interest are the rural-urban split in the church, the question of church authority, and the divisions between public and underground practices of church followers.All kinds of religious groups have revived and flourished in the post-Mao era. Protestants, Buddhists, Daoists, practitioners of folk religions, even intellectuals seeking more secularized answers to "ultimate" concerns are engaged in spiritual quests. Madsen is interested in determining if such quests contain the resources for constructing a more humane political order in China. Will religion contribute to or impede economic modernization? What role will the church play in the pluralization of society? The questions he raises in China's Catholics are important not only for China's political future but for all countries in transition from political totalitarianism.   [brief]
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Title: China and the American dream: a moral inquiry
Author: Madsen, Richard 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Asian Studies | Politics | China | American Studies | Pacific Rim Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From the "Red Menace" to Tiananmen Square, the United States and China have long had an emotionally tumultuous relationship. Richard Madsen's frank and innovative examination of the moral history of U.S.-China relations targets the forces that have shaped this surprisingly strong tie between two strikingly different nations. Combining his expertise as a sinologist with the vision of America developed in Habits of the Heart and The Good Society , Madsen studies the cultural myths that have shaped the perceptions of people of both nations for the past twenty-five years.The dominant American myth about China, born in the 1960s, foresaw Western ideals of economic, intellectual, and political freedom emerging triumphant throughout the world. Nixon's visit to China nurtured this idea, and by the 1980s it was helping to sustain America's hopefulness about its own democratic identity. Meanwhile, Chinese popular culture has focused on the U.S., especially American consumer goods - Coca-Cola was described by the People's Daily as "capitalism concentrated in a bottle."Today we face a new global institutional and cultural environment in which the old myths no longer work for either Americans or Chinese. Madsen provides a framework for us to think about the relationship between democratic ideals and economic/political realities in the post-Cold War world. What he proposes is no less than the foundation for building a public philosophy for the emerging world order.   [brief]
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Title: The travels of Dean Mahomet: an eighteenth-Century journey through India 
Author: Mahomet, Sake Deen 1759-1851
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Travel | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole.Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.   [brief]
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Title: The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon 
Author: Makdisi, Ussama Samir 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies | Islam | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Focusing on Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi shows how sectarianism was a manifestation of modernity that transcended the physical boundaries of a particular country. His study challenges those who have viewed sectarian violence as an Islamic response to westernization or simply as a product of social and economic inequities among religious groups. The religious violence of the nineteenth century, which culminated in sectarian mobilizations and massacres in 1860, was a complex, multilayered, subaltern expression of modernization, he says, not a primordial reaction to it. Makdisi argues that sectarianism represented a deliberate mobilization of religious identities for political and social purposes. The Ottoman reform movement launched in 1839 and the growing European presence in the Middle East contributed to the disintegration of the traditional Lebanese social order based on a hierarchy that bridged religious differences. Makdisi highlights how European colonialism and Orientalism, with their emphasis on Christian salvation and Islamic despotism, and Ottoman and local nationalisms each created and used narratives of sectarianism as foils to their own visions of modernity and to their own projects of colonial, imperial, and national development. Makdisi's book is important to our understanding of Lebanese society today, but it also makes a significant contribution to the discussion of the importance of religious discourse in the formation and dissolution of social and national identities in the modern world.   [brief]
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Title: Republic of fear: the politics of modern Iraq
Author: Makiya, Kanan
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: In 1968 a coup d'état brought into power an extraordinary regime in Iraq, one that stood apart from other regimes in the Middle East. Between 1968 and 1980, this new regime, headed by the Arab Ba'th Socialist party, used ruthless repression and relentless organization to transform the way Iraqis think and react to political questions. In just twelve years, a party of a few thousand people grew to include nearly ten percent of the Iraqi population.This book describes the experience of Ba'thism from 1968 to 1980 and analyzes the kind of political authority it engendered, culminating in the personality cult around Saddam Hussein. Fear, the author argues, is at the heart of Ba'thi politics and has become the cement for a genuine authority, however bizarre.Examining Iraqi history in a search for clues to understanding contemporary political affairs, the author illustrates how the quality of Ba'thi pan-Arabism as an ideology, the centrality of the first experience of pan-Arabism in Iraq, and the interaction between the Ba'th and communist parties in Iraq from 1958 to 1968 were crucial in shaping the current regime.Saddam Hussein's decision to launch all-out war against Iran in September 1980 marks the end of the first phase of this re-shaping of modern Iraqi politics. The Iraq-Iran war is a momentous event in its own right, but for Iraq, the author argues, the war diverts dissent against the Ba'thi regime by focusing attention on the specter of an enemy beyond Iraq's borders, thus masking a hidden potential for even greater violence inside Iraq.   [brief]
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Title: The returns of Odysseus: colonization and ethnicity
Author: Malkin, Irad
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Anthropology | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: This remarkably rich and multifaceted study of early Greek exploration makes an original contribution to current discussions of the encounters between Greeks and non-Greeks. Focusing in particular on myths about Odysseus and other heroes who visited foreign lands on their mythical voyages homeward after the Trojan War, Irad Malkin shows how these stories functioned to mediate encounters and conceptualize ethnicity and identity during the Archaic and Classical periods. Synthesizing a wide range of archaeological, mythological, and literary sources, this exceptionally learned book strengthens our understanding of early Greek exploration and city-founding along the coasts of the Western Mediterranean, reconceptualizes the role of myth in ancient societies, and revitalizes our understanding of ethnicity in antiquity.Malkin shows how the figure of Odysseus became a proto-colonial hero whose influence transcended the Greek-speaking world. The return-myths constituted a generative mythology, giving rise to oral poems, stories, iconographic imagery, rituals, historiographical interpretation, and the articulation of ethnic identities. Reassessing the role of Homer and alternative return-myths, the book argues for the active historical function of myth and collective representations and traces their changing roles through a spectrum of colonial perceptions - from the proto-colonial, through justifications of expansion and annexation, and up to decolonization.   [brief]
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Title: The call from Algeria: third worldism, revolution, and the turn to Islam
Author: Malley, Robert 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam | Intellectual History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: The speed with which Algeria has gone from symbol of revolutionary socialism to Islamic battleground has confounded most observers. Charting Algeria's political evolution from the turn of the century to the present, Robert Malley explores the historical and intellectual underpinnings of the current crisis. His analysis helps makes sense of the civil war that is tearing Algeria apart.Using contemporary Algerian politics as a case study of the intellectual movement labeled "Third Worldism," Malley's thoughtful analysis also elucidates the broader transformations affecting countries of the Third World that once embraced ideologies of state-centered radical change. Malley focuses on the interplay between politics, economics, and ideology to explain the rise, essential components, and precipitous decline of Third Worldism - a movement that attracted scholars and activists in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds from the mid 1950s to the mid 1980s. He relates the disillusionment with Third Worldism to the growing appeal in the Third World of economic liberalism, versions of political pluralism, and ideological movements that threaten the very existence of the central state.At a time when the public increasingly is associating countries of the less developed world with Islamism, tribalism, and ethnic warfare, The Call from Algeria challenges our assumptions and offers a new perspective.   [brief]
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Title: Inscribing the time: Shakespeare and the end of Elizabethan England 
Author: Mallin, Eric Scott
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Combining the resources of new historicism, feminism, and postmodern textual analysis, Eric Mallin reveals how contemporary pressures left their marks on three Shakespeare plays written at the end of Elizabeth's reign. Close attention to the language of Troilus and Cressida , Hamlet , and Twelfth Night reveals the ways the plays echo the events and anxieties that accompanied the beginning of the seventeenth century. Troilus reflects the rebellion of the Earl of Essex and the failure of the courtly, chivalric style. Hamlet resonates with the danger of the bubonic plague and the difficult succession history of James I. Twelfth Night is imbued with nostalgia for an earlier period of Elizabeth's rule, when her control over religious and erotic affairs seemed more secure.   [brief]
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Title: Peasant and nation: the making of postcolonial Mexico and Peru
Author: Mallon, Florencia E 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Anthropology | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle.With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.   [brief]
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Title: Culture of the future: the Proletkult movement in revolutionary Russia 
Author: Mally, Lynn
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Russian and Eastern European Studies | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Just days before the October 1917 Revolution, the Proletkult was formed in Petrograd to serve as an umbrella organization for numerous burgeoning working-class cultural groups. Advocates of the Proletkult hoped to devise new forms of art, education, and social relations that would express the spirit of the class that had come to power in the world's first successful proletarian revolution. Lynn Mally offers a detailed analysis of the Proletkult's cultural and political agenda. Drawing extensively on archival sources, she argues that the creation of a new culture proved as difficult and controversial as the creation of new notions of politics. From the outset, the Proletkult was divided by severe political and social tensions as members struggled to define the role of the organization and the cultural desires of the proletariat. What fused this divided movement was the shared belief that without radical cultural change the revolution would not succeed. The Proletkult's eventual decline graphically shows how political consolidation, institutional rivalries, and the devastating social consequences of the revolution and Civil War all worked together to limit the utopian potential of the October Revolution.   [brief]
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Title: Medicines of the soul: female bodies and sacred geographies in a transnational Islam
Author: Malti-Douglas, Fedwa
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Gender Studies | Islam | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: In Medicines of the Soul, the autobiographical writings of three leading women in today's Islamic revival movement reveal dramatic stories of religious transformation. As interpreted by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, the autobiographies provide a powerful, groundbreaking portrayal of gender, religion, and dis . . . [more]
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Title: Men, women, and God(s): Nawal El Saadawi and Arab feminist poetics 
Author: Malti-Douglas, Fedwa
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Literature | Middle Eastern Studies | Gender Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Men, Women, and God(s) is a pioneering study of the Arab world's leading feminist and most controversial woman writer, Nawal El Saadawi. Author of plays, memoirs, and such novels as Woman at Point Zero and The Innocence of the Devil , El Saadawi has become well known in the West as well as in the Arab community for her unforgettable female heroes and explosive narratives, which boldly address sexual violence, female circumcision, theology, and other politically charged themes. Her outspoken feminism and critique of patriarchy have also earned her the wrath of repressive forces in the Middle East. Imprisoned in her native Egypt under Sadat, El Saadawi is now among those on the death lists of Islamic religious conservatives.In Men, Women, and God(s) Fedwa Malti-Douglas makes the work of this important but little-understood writer truly accessible. Contending that El Saadawi's texts cannot be read in isolation from their Islamic and Arabic heritage, Malti-Douglas draws upon a deep knowledge of classical and modern Arabic textual traditions - and on extensive conversations with Nawal El Saadawi - to place the writer within her cultural and historical context. With this impassioned and radical exegesis of El Saadawi's prolific output, Malti-Douglas has written a crucial study of one of the most controversial and influential writers of our time.   [brief]
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