Title: The poetics of rock: cutting tracks, making records
Author: Zak, Albin
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Music | Popular Music | American Music | Musicology | Contemporary Music | American  Studies | Media Studies | Popular Music
Publisher's Description: After a hundred years of recording, the process of making records is still mysterious to most people who listen to them. Records hold a fundamental place in the dynamics of modern musical life, but what do they represent? Are they documents? Snapshots? Artworks? Fetishes? Commodities? Conveniences? The Poetics of Rock is a fascinating exploration of recording consciousness and compositional process from the perspective of those who make records. In it, Albin Zak examines the crucial roles played by recording technologies in the construction of rock music and shows how songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers contribute to the creative project, and how they all leave their mark on the finished work. Zak shapes an image of the compositional milieu by exploring its elements and discussing the issues and concerns faced by artists. Using their testimony to illuminate the nature of record making and of records themselves, he shows that the art of making rock records is a collaborative compositional process that includes many skills and sensibilities not traditionally associated with musical composition. Zak connects all the topics--whether technical, conceptual, aesthetic, or historical--with specific artists and recordings and illustrates them with citations from artists and with musical examples. In lively and engaging prose, The Poetics of Rock brilliantly illustrates how the musical energy from a moment of human expression translates into a musical work wrought in sound.   [brief]
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Title: In the shadow of the eagles: Sonora and the transformation of the border during the Porfiriato 
Author: Tinker Salas, Miguel
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History | Latin American  Studies | Ethnic Studies | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In the Shadow of the Eagles considers the historical roots of Mexican border society. The Mexican northwest, and Sonora in particular, has often captured the public's imagination; it has been portrayed as a region of untold mineral wealth, insurgent Apaches and Yaquis, self-reliant cowboys, miners, and smugglers. During the nineteenth century, however, the Sonoran region was transformed from a distant frontier outpost to a bustling and influential border state. This transformation gave rise to a dynamic relationship between Sonora and the southwestern United States. In this innovative synthesis of Mexican, border, and western history, Miguel Tinker Salas traces the social and economic history of the Sonora border region and shows the role played by the United States in the economy of Mexico.Drawing on extensive research in Mexico City, Sonora, Arizona, and California, Tinker Salas contributes original discussions of the development of regional credit practices, the elite's use of violence as a political tool to preserve autonomy, the effects of class, race, and gender in Sonoran society, and the influence of the railroad and mining on the border economy. Balancing theory with original empirical data in a strong, readable narrative, In the Shadow of the Eagles recasts our understanding of regional Mexican history and expands our ideas about the borderlands.   [brief]
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Title: No there there: race, class, and political community in Oakland
Author: Rhomberg, Chris 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | American  Studies | Labor Studies | Politics | Ethnic Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the '20s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the '40s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the '60s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, Chris Rhomberg examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell us about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.   [brief]
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Title: New world encounters
Author: Greenblatt, Stephen 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Postcolonial Studies | Latin American  Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: The discovery of the Indies, wrote Francisco López de Gómara in 1552, was "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the Incarnation and Death of Him who created it." Five centuries have not diminished either the overwhelming importance or the strangeness of the early encounter between Europeans and American peoples. This collection of essays, encompassing history, literary criticism, art history, and anthropology, offers a fresh and innovative approach to the momentous encounter.   [brief]
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Title: The erotic Whitman 
Author: Pollak, Vivian R
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Literature | American  Studies | Gender Studies | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: In this provocative analysis of Whitman's exemplary quest for happiness, Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to his portrayal of masculinity in crisis. She maintains that in representing himself as a characteristic nineteenth-century American and in proposing to heal national ills, Whitman was trying to temper his own inner conflicts as well. The poet's expansive vision of natural eroticism and of unfettered comradeship between democratic equals was, however, only part of the story. As Whitman waged a conscious campaign to challenge misogynistic and homophobic literary codes, he promoted a raceless, classless ideal of sexual democracy that theoretically equalized all varieties of desire and resisted none. Pollak suggests that this goal remains imperfectly achieved in his writings, which liberates some forbidden voices and silences others. Integrating biography and criticism, Pollak employs a loosely chronological organization to describe the poet's multifaceted "faith in sex." Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, poetry, and self-reviews, as well as letters and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as "the phallic choice of America."   [brief]
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Title: Loss: the politics of mourning
Author: Eng, David L 1967-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | American  Studies | History | Philosophy | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Immigration
Publisher's Description: Taking stock of a century of pervasive loss - of warfare, disease, and political strife - this eloquent book opens a new view on both the past and the future by considering "what is lost" in terms of "what remains." Such a perspective, these essays suggest, engages and reanimates history. Plumbing the cultural and political implications of loss, the authors--political theorists, film and literary critics, museum curators, feminists, psychoanalysts, and AIDS activists--expose the humane and productive possibilities in the workings of witness, memory, and melancholy. Among the sites of loss the authors revisit are slavery, apartheid, genocide, war, diaspora, migration, suicide, and disease. Their subjects range from the Irish Famine and the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians to the aftermath of the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, problems of partial immigration and assimilation, AIDS, and the re-envisioning of leftist movements. In particular, Loss reveals how melancholia can lend meaning and force to notions of activism, ethics, and identity.   [brief]
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Title: Insider/outsider: American Jews and multiculturalism 
Author: Biale, David 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | American  Studies | Popular Culture | Judaism | Gender Studies | United States History | Literature
Publisher's Description: Twelve distinguished historians, political theorists, and literary critics present new perspectives on multiculturalism in this important collection. Central to the essays (all but one is appearing in print for the first time) is the question of how the Jewish experience can challenge the conventional polar opposition between a majority "white monoculture" and a marginalized "minorities of color multiculture." This book takes issue with such a dichotomy by showing how experiences of American Jews can undo conventional categories. Neither a complaint against multiculturalism by Jews who feel excluded from it, nor a celebration of multiculturalism as the solution to contemporary Jewish problems, Insider/Outsider explores how the Jews' anomalous status opens up multicultural history in different and interesting directions. The goal of the editors has been to transcend the notion of "comparative victimology" and to show the value of a narrative that does not rely on competing histories of persecution. Readers can discover in these essays arguments that will broaden their understanding of Jewish identity and multicultural theory and will enliven the contemporary debate about American culture generally.   [brief]
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Title: Taking back the streets: women, youth, and direct democracy
Author: Kaplan, Temma 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Politics | Anthropology | Latin American  Studies | European Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Toward the end of the twentieth century in places ranging from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe, the United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, China, and South Asia, women and young people took to the streets to fight injustices they believed they could not confront in any other way. In the hope of changing the way politics is done, they called officials to account for atrocities they had committed and unjust laws they had upheld. They attempted to drive authoritarian governments from power by publicizing the activities these officials tried to hide. This powerful book takes us into the midst of these movements to give us a close-up look at how a new generation bore witness to human rights violations, resisted the efforts of regimes to shame and silence young idealists, and created a vibrant public life that remains a vital part of ongoing struggles for democracy and justice today. Through personal interviews, newspaper accounts, family letters, and research in the archives of human rights groups, this book portrays women and young people from Argentina, Chile, and Spain as emblematic of others around the world in their public appeals for direct democracy. An activist herself, author Temma Kaplan gives readers a deep and immediate sense of the sacrifices and accomplishments, the suffering and the power of these uncommon common people. By showing that mobilizations, sometimes accompanied by shaming rituals, were more than episodic - more than ways for societies to protect themselves against government abuses and even state terrorism - her book envisions a creative political sphere, a fifth estate in which ordinary citizens can reorient the political practices of democracy in our time.   [brief]
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Title: L.A. city limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the present
Author: Sides, Josh 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | African American  Studies | Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | California and the West
Publisher's Description: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass - embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South - is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities - and limits - quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.   [brief]
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Title: The trouble with nature: sex in science and popular culture
Author: Lancaster, Roger N
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: American  Studies | Anthropology | Gender Studies | Popular Culture | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Science | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Roger N. Lancaster provides the definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire in this spirited exposé of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene. Lancaster links the recent resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general with the current pitched battles over sexual politics. Ideas about a "hardwired" and immutable human nature are circulating at a pivotal moment in human history, he argues, one in which dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented normalization of lesbian and gay relationships are challenging received notions and commonly held convictions on every front. The Trouble with Nature takes on major media sources - the New York Times, Newsweek - and widely ballyhooed scientific studies and ideas to show how journalists, scientists, and others invoke the rhetoric of science to support political positions in the absence of any real evidence. Lancaster also provides a novel and dramatic analysis of the social, historical, and political backdrop for changing discourses on "nature," including an incisive critique of the failures of queer theory to understand the social conflicts of the moment. By showing how reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on essentialist ideas about gender, Lancaster invites us to think more deeply and creatively about human acts and social relations.   [brief]
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Title: Draw the lightning down: Benjamin Franklin and electrical technology in the Age of Enlightenment
Author: Schiffer, Michael B
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Urban Studies | History of Science | Anthropology | American  Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: Most of us know - at least we've heard - that Benjamin Franklin conducted some kind of electrical experiment with a kite. What few of us realize - and what this book makes powerfully clear - is that Franklin played a major role in laying the foundations of modern electrical science and technology. This fast-paced book, rich with historical details and anecdotes, brings to life Franklin, the large international network of scientists and inventors in which he played a key role, and their amazing inventions. We learn what these early electrical devices - from lights and motors to musical and medical instruments - looked like, how they worked, and what their utilitarian and symbolic meanings were for those who invented and used them. Against the fascinating panorama of life in the eighteenth century, Michael Brian Schiffer tells the story of the very beginnings of our modern electrical world. The earliest electrical technologies were conceived in the laboratory apparatus of physicists; because of their surprising and diverse effects, however, these technologies rapidly made their way into many other communities and activities. Schiffer conducts us from community to community, showing how these technologies worked as they were put to use in public lectures, revolutionary experiments in chemistry and biology, and medical therapy. This story brings to light the arcane and long-forgotten inventions that made way for many modern technologies - including lightning rods (Franklin's invention), cardiac stimulation, xerography, and the internal combustion engine - and richly conveys the complex relationships among science, technology, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Take my word: autobiographical innovations of ethnic American working women 
Author: Goldman, Anne E 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Ethnic Studies | Women's Studies | United States History | American  Studies
Publisher's Description: In an innovative critique of traditional approaches to autobiography, Anne E. Goldman convincingly demonstrates that ethnic women can and do speak for themselves, even in the most unlikely contexts. Citing a wide variety of nontraditional texts - including the cookbooks of Nuevo Mexicanas, African American memoirs of midwifery and healing, and Jewish women's histories of the garment industry - Goldman illustrates how American women have asserted their ethnic identities and made their voices heard over and sometimes against the interests of publishers, editors, and readers. While the dominant culture has interpreted works of ethnic literature as representative of a people rather than an individual, the working women of this study insist upon their own agency in narrating rich and complicated self-portraits.   [brief]
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Title: Bad girls and sick boys: fantasies in contemporary art and culture
Author: Kauffman, Linda S 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Literature | Cinema and Performance Arts | Popular Culture | American  Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us. Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.   [brief]
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Title: Good with their hands: boxers, bluesmen, and other characters from the Rust Belt
Author: Rotella, Carlo 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | American  Studies | Sociology | Literature | Labor Studies | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: This eloquent, streetwise book is a paean to America's Rust Belt and a compelling exploration of four milieus caught up in a great transformation of city life. With loving attention to detail and a fine sense of historical context, Carlo Rotella explores women's boxing in Erie, Pennsylvania; Buddy Guy and the blues scene in Chicago; police work and crime stories in New York City, especially as they converged in the making of the movie The French Connection; and attempts at urban renewal in the classic mill city of Brockton, Massachusetts. Navigating through accrued layers of cultural, economic, and personal history, Rotella shows how stories of city life can be found in a boxing match, a guitar solo, a chase scene in a movie, or a landscape. The stories he tells dramatize the coming of the postindustrial era in places once defined by their factories, a sweeping set of changes that has remade the form and meaning of American urbanism. A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turfs of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing elegantly connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "good with their hands" to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work. Strong feelings emerge in this book about what has been lost and gained in the long, slow aging-out of the industrial city. But Rotella's journey through the streets has its ultimate reward in discovering deep-rooted instances of what he calls "truth and beauty in the Rust Belt."   [brief]
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Title: Joyce in America: cultural politics and the trials of Ulysses 
Author: Segall, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | English Literature | American  Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature
Publisher's Description: When James Joyce's Ulysses was first published in America, it quickly became a dynamic symbol of both modern art and the modern age. Jeffrey Segall skillfully demonstrates how various political, ideological, and religious allegiances influenced the critical reception and eventual canonization of what is perhaps the twentieth century's greatest novel.In re-creating the polemical debates that erupted, Segall provides a dramatic reminder of just how challenging and controversial Ulysses was - and is. Seventy years after Ulysses was first banned, the novel remains at the center of contemporary debates among feminist, neo-Marxist, and poststructuralist critics.Segall allows us the opportunity to view Ulysses from the perspective of its early readers, and he also elucidates key moments in recent American cultural history.   [brief]
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Title: Cultural curiosity: thirteen stories about the search for Chinese roots
Author: Khu, Josephine M.T 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Asian Studies | Anthropology | Social Science | Asian American  Studies | China
Publisher's Description: This anthology of autobiographical essays reveals the human side of the Chinese diaspora. Written by ethnic Chinese who were born or raised outside of China, these moving pieces, full of the poignant details of everyday life, describe the experience of growing up as a visible minority and the subsequent journey each author made to China. The authors - whose diverse backgrounds in countries such as New Zealand, Denmark, Sri Lanka, England, Indonesia, and the United States mirror the complex global scope of the Chinese diaspora - describe in particular how their journey to the country of their ancestors transformed their sense of what it means to be Chinese. The collection as a whole provides important insights into what ethnic identity has come to mean in our transnational era. Among the pieces is Brad Wong's discussion of his visit to his grandfather's poverty-stricken village in China's southern Guangdong province. He describes working with a few of the peasants tilling vegetables and compares life in the village with his middle-class upbringing in a San Francisco suburb. In another essay, Milan Lin-Rodrigo tells of her life in Sri Lanka and of the trip she made to China as an adult. She describes the difficult and sometimes humorous cultural differences she experienced when she met her Chinese half-sister and her father's first wife. Josephine Khu's lively afterword provides background information on the Chinese diaspora and gives a theoretical framework for understanding the issues raised in the essays. This intimate and rich anthology will be compelling reading for all who are seeking answers to the increasingly complex issue of ethnic and personal identity.   [brief]
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Title: The price of poverty: money, work, and culture in the Mexican-American barrio
Author: Dohan, Daniel 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Sociology | Social Problems | Urban Studies | Latin American  Studies | Chicano Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in two impoverished California communities - one made up of recent immigrants from Mexico, the other of U.S.-born Chicano citizens - this book provides an invaluable comparative perspective on Latino poverty in contemporary America. In northern California's high-tech Silicon Valley, author Daniel Dohan shows how recent immigrants get by on low-wage babysitting and dish-cleaning jobs. In the housing projects of Los Angeles, he documents how families and communities of U.S.-born Mexican Americans manage the social and economic dislocations of persistent poverty. Taking readers into worlds where public assistance, street crime, competition for low-wage jobs, and family, pride, and cross-cultural experiences intermingle, The Price of Poverty offers vivid portraits of everyday life in these Mexican American communities while addressing urgent policy questions such as: What accounts for joblessness? How can we make sense of crime in poor communities? Does welfare hurt or help?   [brief]
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Title: Building with our hands: new directions in Chicana studies
Author: Torre, Adela de la
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Ethnic Studies | Latin American  Studies | Latino Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies | Chicano Studies
Publisher's Description: This is the first interdisciplinary collection of articles addressing the unique history of Chicana women. From a diverse range of perspectives, a new generation of Chicana scholars here chronicles the previously undocumented rich tapestry of Chicanas' lives over the last three centuries. Focusing on how women have grappled with political subordination and sexual exploitation, the contributors confront the complex intersection of class, race, ethnicity, and gender that defines the Chicana experience in America.The book analyzes the ways that oppressive power relations and resistance to domination have shaped Chicana history, exploring subjects as diverse as sexual violence against Amerindian women during the Spanish conquest of California to contemporary Chicanas' efforts to construct feminist cultural discourses.The volume ends with a provocative dialogue among the contributors about the challenges, frustrations, and obstacles that face Chicana scholars, and the voices heard here testify to the vibrant state of Chicano scholarship.Trenchant and wide-ranging, this collection is essential reading for understanding the dynamics of feminism and multiculturalism.   [brief]
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Title: Overhearing film dialogue
Author: Kozloff, Sarah
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Literary Theory and Criticism | American  Studies | Film
Publisher's Description: Since the birth of cinema, film has been lauded as a visual rather than a verbal medium; this sentiment was epitomized by John Ford's assertion in 1964 that, "When a motion picture is at its best, it is long on action and short on dialogue." Little serious work has been done on the subject of film dialogue, yet what characters say and how they say it has been crucial to our experience and understanding of every film since the coming of sound. Through informative discussions of dozens of classic and contemporary films - from Bringing Up Baby to Terms of Endearment, from Stagecoach to Reservoir Dogs --this lively book provides the first full-length study of the use of dialogue in American film. Sarah Kozloff shows why dialogue has been neglected in the analysis of narrative film and uncovers the essential contributions dialogue makes to a film's development and impact. She uses narrative theory and drama theory to analyze the functions that dialogue typically serves in a film. The second part of the book is a comprehensive discussion of the role and nature of dialogue in four film genres: westerns, screwball comedies, gangster films, and melodramas. Focusing on topics such as class and ethnic dialects, censorship, and the effect of dramatic irony, Kozloff provides an illuminating new perspective on film genres.   [brief]
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Title: A life's mosaic: the autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala 
Author: Ntantala, Phyllis
Published: University of California Press,  1986
Subjects: Literature | Gender Studies | Latin American  Studies | Women's Studies | Autobiographies and Biographies
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