Books about Appropriating from Amazon.com

Performance artist and scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.

Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness..
Price: $20.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For more than a hundred years, outsiders enamored of the perceived strengths of American Indian cultures have appropriated and distorted elements of them for their own purposes—more often than not ignoring the impact of the process on the Indians themselves. This book contains eight original contributions that consider the selling of American Indian culture and how it affects the Native community. It goes beyond studies of “white shamanism” to focus on commercial ventures, challenging readers to reconsider how Indian cultures have been commercialized in the twentieth century.

Some selections examine how Indians have been displayed to the public, beginning with a “living exhibit” of Cocopa Indians at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and extending to contemporary stagings of Indian culture for tourists at Tillicum Village near Seattle. Other chapters range from the Cherokees to Puebloan peoples to Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, in an examination of the roles of both Indians and non-Indian reformers in marketing Native arts and crafts.

These articles show that the commercialization and appropriation of American Indian cultures have been persistent practices of American society over the last century and constitute a form of cultural imperialism that could contribute to the destruction of American Indian culture and identity. They offer a means toward understanding this complex process and provide a new window on Indian-white interactions.

CONTENTS

Part I: Staging the Indian
1. The “Shy” Cocopa Go to the Fair, Nancy J. Parezo and John W. Troutman
2. Command Performances: Staging Native Americans at Tillicum Village, Katie N. Johnson and Tamara Underiner
3. Savage Desires: The Gendered Construction of the American Indian in Popular Media, S. Elizabeth Bird
4. “Beyond Feathers and Beads”: Interlocking Narratives in the Music and Dance of Tokeya Inajin (Kevin Locke), Pauline Tuttle

Part II: Marketing the Indian
5. “The Idea of Help”: White Women Reformers and the Commercialization of Native American Women’s Arts, Erik Trump
6. Saving the Pueblos: Commercialism and Indian Reform in the 1920s, Carter Jones Meyer
7. Marketing Traditions: Cherokee Basketry and Tourist Economies, Sarah H. Hill
8. Crafts, Tourism, and Traditional Life in Chiapas, Mexico: A Tale Related by a Pillowcase, Chris Goertzen

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Price: $7.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

According to Vincent Bacote, Christians need to know how to follow Jesus in every area of life. In The Spirit in Public Theology, Bacote shows how the Dutch politician and church leader Abraham Kuyper lived a thoroughly Christian life. He then explains why Christians need to follow Kuyper by taking their faith into the public sphere. Indentifying the characterisitcs of a true Christian worldview, Bacote demonstrates the need for a public theology that stresses engagement between the church and the world. The Spirit in Public Theology should be required reading for pastors, students, and all Christians who want to take their faith beyong the four walls of the Church..
Price: $2.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Appropriating Gender explores the paradoxical relationship of women to religious politics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh Contrary to the hopes of feminists, many women have responded to religious nationalist appeals; contrary to the hopes of religious nationalists, they have also asserted their gender, class, caste, and religious identities; contrary to the hopes of nation states, they have often challenged state policies and practices. Through a comparative South Asia perspective, Appropriating Gender explores the varied meanings and expressions of gender identity through time, by location, and according to political context.

The first work to focus on women's agency and activism within the South Asian context, Appropriating Gender is an outstanding contribution to the field of gender studies..
Price: $29.13 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From the vernacular engineering of Latino car design to environmental analysis among rural women to the production of indigenous herbal cures—groups outside the centers of scientific power persistently defy the notion that they are merely passive recipients of technological products and scientific knowledge. This is the first study of how such "outsiders" reinvent consumer products—often in ways that embody critique, resistance, or outright revolt..
Price: $24.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The incursions of women into areas from which they had been traditionally excluded, together with the literary representations of their attempts to negotiate, subvert and appropriate these forbidden spaces, is the underlying theme that unites this collection of essays. Here scholars from Australia, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, Switzerland and the United States reconsider the well-entrenched assumptions associated with the public/private distinction, working with the notions of public and private spheres while testing their currency and exploring their blurred edges. The essays cover and uncover a rich variety of spaces, from the slums and court-rooms of London to the American wilderness, from the Victorian drawing-room and sick-room to out of the ordinary places like Turkish baths and the trenches of the First World War. Where previous studies have tended to focus on a single aspect of women's engagement with space, this edited book reveals a plethora of subtle and tenacious strategies found in a variety of discourses that include fiction, poetry, diaries, letters, essays and journalism. Inside Out goes beyond the early work on artistic explorations of gendered space to explore the breadth of the field and its theoretical implications..
Price: $96.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"The history of modern meteorology has been shaped by a few brilliant individuals, whose enormous contributions set conditions for permanent progress. Robert Marc Friedman's book is a serious and substantial contribution to the documentation of this history." --American Meteorological Society

"In this very thoughtful and extremely well-researched and well-written [book] Robert Marc Friedman relates the story of Vilhelm Bjerknes's switch to geophysical studies and his subsequent development of scientific study of the weather into a persuasive new professional discipline." --Isis.
Price: $2.89 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Although Martin Heidegger is undeniably one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, among the philosophers who study his work there is considerable disagreement over what might seem to be basic issues: Why is Heidegger important? What did his work do? This volume is an explicit response to these differences, and is unique in bringing together representatives of many different approaches to Heidegger's philosophy. The essays discuss topics that are central to Heidegger's work, and the contributors also address the presuppositions that guide their understanding of Heidegger..
Price: $26.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The middle ages remain a prize to be fought for and a territory to control From early modern times rulers and politicians have sought to ground their legitimacy in ancient tradition - which they have often invented or rewritten for their own purposes. The current issue of Studies in Medievalism/ presents a number of such cases, ranging from the rewriting of Mozart, and Merovingian history, for the King of Bavaria, to the anglicization of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion by the wife of an English ironmaster. Other articles consider the involvement of scholarship with national and professional self-definition, whether in Renaissance Holland or Victorian Britain. And who 'discovered' America, Christopher Columbus or Leif Ericsson? This is an issue of vital importance to many 19th-century Americans, but one created and determined entirely by scholarship. Simple commercial motives for exploiting the middle ages are also represented, whether straightforward forgery for sale, or the giant modern industry of tourism.Professor TOM SHIPPEY teaches in the Department of English at the University of St Louis; Dr MARTIN ARNOLD teaches at University College, Scarborough.Contributors: SOPHIE VAN ROMBURGH, ROLF H. BREMMER JR, BETSY BOWDEN, WERNER WUNDERLICH, JUDITH JOHNSTON, GERALDINE BARNES, RICHARD UTZ, JOHN BLOCK FRIEDMAN, STEVE WATSON..
Price: $66.54 [Notify me when price goes down.]

During the last two decades, new critical schools of Shakespeare scholarship have emerged, each with its own ideology, each convinced that all other approaches are deficient. In this controversial book Brian Vickers surveys deconstructionist, feminist, new historicist, cultural materialist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, and Christian interpretations of Shakespeare, and he argues that in attempting to appropriate Shakespeare for their own purposes, each of these schools distorts the text by omission and misrepresentation..
Price: $27.28 [Notify me when price goes down.]