365 Days to Level up Purpose and Passion


Book Description

This is a short description by the author, Michael Assibey-Bonsu, on how living the 365 principles for 365 days, found in this book, propelled him profoundly forward in life. The principles outlined in this book have completely shifted the way I see and view life on a day-to-day basis. Take, for example, the three deepest internalized principles of self-awareness, complete expression, and three for eight and ten for thirty. At the beginning of 2017, when I began to internally understand and practice these, they allowed me to uncover and harness my passion, which had always been loosely tied to business and people. From becoming self-aware and understanding my passions, I began to completely express myself as who I am, nothing more and nothing less, which uncovered access to numerous untapped gifts and strengths I had no idea existed within me. This is how my startup companies of Nector and Digital Proof came into being and also how my latest project, Social Proof, is unfolding. These have all been created as a result of me following my passions, from self-awareness to completely expressing myself, together with living the 365 principles expressed in this book. From that point forward, the world and my purpose therein became clear, and the companies and teams I was able to build evolved effortlessly, as if an unseen yet guiding hand was directing me. I realized how everything had converged and, as a result, was able to continue adding more ideas and further innovation, which led to me understanding that I had tapped into my purpose, creating a bright and futuristic feeling. Thereafter, I followed the principle of three for eight and ten for thirty, which is the view that the future is bright and my purpose is even brighter. So the understanding that it will take a while to fully come to fruition leads to the realization and acceptance of the number of years I will have to keep moving toward my goals so as to reach who I was created to be. With these principles, the way is now clear, and I wake every day with a sense of fulfillment, regardless of the understanding of how long it may take. I now know what the end feels and looks like, which ultimately balances my passion and my purpose. This is such a powerful state of mind, and the greatest gift of wisdom that has been given to me by God the creator thus far. By positioning myself for greatness and following these 365 drops of wisdom, I wake up every day satisfied, before Ive even reached my best self. These principles are not mine alone, but they are ours to share with all. I truly hope that my journey in following these 365 truths is emulated by many others and that they also reap the benefits and future they richly deserve. The present is bright, the past is forgotten, and the future is clear.




Voices of Marginality


Book Description

Voices of Marginality is theoretically grounded in the theology of the diaspora, which according to Fernando F. Segovia has been forged in the migratory experience of American Hispanics. This theological perspective views Judean exiles (587 B.C.E.) and contemporary Mexican migrants as part of a recurring diasporic human experience. The present analysis «reads across» from the exile and return envisioned in the poetry of Second Isaiah (40-55) to the corridos (ballads) about Mexican immigration to the United States. More specifically, the diasporic categories of exile and return in Second Isaiah inform our reading of exile and return in the Mexican immigrant corridos. Conversely, the rhetorical ability of these corridos to transmit a collective Mexican identity for immigrants in the United States provides a compelling lens for understanding the images of exile and return in Second Isaiah. Ultimately, both literary productions reflect voices of marginality.




Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America


Book Description

A New York Times Editors' Choice pick Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Food Network, KCRW, WBUR Here & Now, Emma Straub, and Globe and Mail One of the Millions's Most Anticipated Books of 2021 America’s modern culinary history told through the lives of seven pathbreaking chefs and food writers. Who’s really behind America’s appetite for foods from around the globe? This group biography from an electric new voice in food writing honors seven extraordinary women, all immigrants, who left an indelible mark on the way Americans eat today. Taste Makers stretches from World War II to the present, with absorbing and deeply researched portraits of figures including Mexican-born Elena Zelayeta, a blind chef; Marcella Hazan, the deity of Italian cuisine; and Norma Shirley, a champion of Jamaican dishes. In imaginative, lively prose, Mayukh Sen—a queer, brown child of immigrants—reconstructs the lives of these women in vivid and empathetic detail, daring to ask why some were famous in their own time, but not in ours, and why others shine brightly even today. Weaving together histories of food, immigration, and gender, Taste Makers will challenge the way readers look at what’s on their plate—and the women whose labor, overlooked for so long, makes those meals possible.




Arab Family Studies


Book Description

Family remains the most powerful social idiom and one of the most powerful social structures throughout the Arab world. To engender love of nation among its citizens, national movements portray the nation as a family. To motivate loyalty, political leaders frame themselves as fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters to their clients, parties, or the citizenry. To stimulate production, economic actors evoke the sense of duty and mutual commitment of family obligation. To sanctify their edicts, clerics wrap religion in the moralities of family and family in the moralities of religion. Social and political movements, from the most secular to the most religious, pull on the tender strings of family love to recruit and bind their members to each other. To call someone family is to offer them almost the highest possible intimacy, loyalty, rights, reciprocities, and dignity. In recognizing the significance of the concept of family, this state-of-the-art literature review captures the major theories, methods, and case studies carried out on Arab families over the past century. The book offers a country-by-country critical assessment of the available scholarship on Arab families. Sixteen chapters focus on specific countries or groups of countries; seven chapters offer examinations of the literature on key topical issues. Joseph’s volume provides an indispensable resource to researchers and students, and advances Arab family studies as a critical independent field of scholarship.




Decolonial Voices


Book Description

The interdisciplinary essays in Decolonial Voices discuss racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities and the aesthetic politics of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. This collection represents several key directions in the field: First, it charts how subaltern cultural productions of the US/ Mexico borderlands speak to the intersections of "local," "hemispheric," and "globalized" power relations of the border imaginary. Second, it recovers the Mexican women's and Chicana literary and cultural heritages that have been ignored by Euro-American canons and patriarchal exclusionary practices. It also expands the field in postnationalist directions by creating an interethnic, comparative, and transnational dialogue between Chicana and Chicano, African American, Mexican feminist, and U.S. Native American cultural vocabularies. Contributors include Norma AlarcÃ3n, Arturo J. Aldama, Frederick Luis Aldama, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Alejandra Elenes, RamÃ3n Garcia, MarÃa Herrera-Sobek, Patricia Penn Hilden, Gaye T. M. Johnson, Alberto Ledesma, Pancho McFarland, Amelia MarÃa de la Luz Montes, Laura Elisa Pérez, Naomi Quiñonez, Sarah Ramirez, Rolando J. Romero, Delberto Dario Ruiz, Vicki Ruiz, José David SaldÃvar, Anna Sandoval, and Jonathan Xavier Inda.




Women’s Writing, Englishness and National and Cultural Identity


Book Description

An original mapping of women's writing in the 1940s and 1950s, this book looks at Englishness and national identity in women's writing and includes writing from Scotland, Wales, Ireland the Indian subcontinent and Africa. The authors discussed include Virginia Woolf, Daphne Du Maurier, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark.




Persons of Courage and Renown


Book Description

Persons of Courage and Renown is a theoretically engaged ethnography by a social/cultural anthropologist that explores issues of culture, memory, creativity, and power by analyzing beloved, yet vulnerable, actors, acting, and play performances in Tamajaq-speaking, predominantly Muslim, traditionally stratified, and semi-nomadic Tuareg communities in northern Mali. The town and region of Kidal are the primary sites of field research. This book traces how Tuareg actors powerfully negotiate cultural memory and encounters in communities caught, between political violence and peacekeeping efforts in northern Mali. Urban, state, and nongovernmental bureaucracies there seek to reshape Tuareg verbal art performances to comply with official agendas aimed at transforming local culture. This book shows how acting and plays are crucial in continuing, but also debating and redefining, the meanings of older verbal art performances of Tuareg tales, songs, and epics, as well as wider cultural knowledge and social practice. Their arts offer important possibilities for peacemaking in a turbulent and unpredictable world.




Women and Migration


Book Description

The essays in this book chart how women’s profound and turbulent experiences of migration have been articulated in writing, photography, art and film. As a whole, the volume gives an impression of a wide range of migratory events from women’s perspectives, covering the Caribbean Diaspora, refugees and slavery through the various lenses of politics and war, love and family. The contributors, which include academics and artists, offer both personal and critical points of view on the artistic and historical repositories of these experiences. Selfies, motherhood, violence and Hollywood all feature in this substantial treasure-trove of women’s joy and suffering, disaster and delight, place, memory and identity. This collection appeals to artists and scholars of the humanities, particularly within the social sciences; though there is much to recommend it to creatives seeking inspiration or counsel on the issue of migratory experiences.




Dolores Huerta


Book Description

Shares the story of how teacher Dolores Huerta came to fight for the rights of her community's farm workers.




Voices of Black Folk


Book Description

In the late 1920s, Reverend A. W. Nix (1880–1949), an African American Baptist minister born in Texas, made fifty-four commercial recordings of his sermons on phonographs in Chicago. On these recordings, Nix presented vocal traditions and styles long associated with the southern, rural Black church as he preached about self-help, racial uplift, thrift, and Christian values. As southerners like Nix fled into cities in the North to escape the rampant racism in the South, they contested whether or not African American vocal styles of singing and preaching that had emerged during the slavery era were appropriate for uplifting the race. Specific vocal characteristics, like those on Nix’s recordings, were linked to the image of the “Old Negro” by many African American leaders who favored adopting Europeanized vocal characteristics and musical repertoires into African American churches in order to uplift the modern “New Negro” citizen. Through interviews with family members, musical analyses of the sounds on Nix’s recordings, and examination of historical documents and relevant scholarship, Terri Brinegar argues that the development of the phonograph in the 1920s afforded preachers like Nix the opportunity to present traditional Black vocal styles of the southern Black church as modern Black voices. These vocal styles also influenced musical styles. The “moaning voice” used by Nix and other ministers was a direct connection to the “blues moan” employed by many blues singers including Blind Willie, Blind Lemon, and Ma Rainey. Both Reverend A. W. Nix and his brother, W. M. Nix, were an influence on the “Father of Gospel Music,” Thomas A. Dorsey. The success of Nix’s recorded sermons demonstrates the enduring values African Americans placed on traditional vocal practices.