Of Silk Saris & Mini-Skirts


Book Description

Dr. Handa explores issues surrounding the way identity is imagined and constructed by South Asian girls, women and South Asian community workers in Toronto. The author also examines ways in which young South Asian women are constructed and represented through discourses of race, nation, culture and community. Using feedback from her interviews, the author discusses South Asian women's struggle with the threat of the erosion of their authentic cultural practices. Handa's critical theoretical perspective illuminates how South Asian women struggle to live within the boundaries of cultural preservation at the same time that they embrace aspects of the communities in which they live. She explores whether they both desire and are excluded from Canadian cultural hegemony. She also examines the theoretical implications of exclusion and conversely, the problematic of cultural preservation.







Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon


Book Description

Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.




Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds


Book Description

Cultural Production in Virtual and Imagined Worlds foregrounds how the two important fields of visual culture and Internet culture interact. This collection of essays explores the intersections, overlaps and disparities in terms of how the two discourses illuminate our everyday negotiations as we become increasingly dependent on the Internet and virtual/visual imaginings for constructing who we are. What is being examined here are the ways in which we use visual/virtual lenses to see the world both individually and collectively. This book represents a transnational effort that began as a series of conversations during the Mid Atlantic Popular/American Culture conferences from 2005–2009. The editors, a Canadian and an American, have included contributors across national and geographic contexts. Cultural Production is aimed at raising questions, crossing borders and presenting points of departure for future scholarship in the relatively new and very rapidly changing disciplines of visual and virtual cultures. Our critical approach to this study includes viewing Internet images as contested sites of cultural activity and also as sites that advance ideologies related to cultural transformation.




American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 21:4


Book Description

The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes a wide variety of scholarly research on all facets of Islam and the Muslim world: anthropology, economics, history, philosophy and metaphysics, politics, psychology, religious law, and traditional Islam. Submissions are subject to a blind peer review process.




The Grace of Four Moons


Book Description

Because clothing, food, and shelter are basic human needs, they provide excellent entries to cultural values and individual aesthetics. Everyone gets dressed every day, but body art has not received the attention it deserves as the most common and universal of material expressions of culture. The Grace of Four Moons aims to document the clothing decisions made by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Banaras, India, Pravina Shukla conceptualizes and realizes a total model for the study of body art—understood as all aesthetic modifications and supplementations to the body. Shukla urges the study of the entire process of body art, from the assembly of raw materials and the manufacture of objects, through their sale and the interactions between merchants and consumers, to the consumer's use of objects in creating personal decoration.




Desi Tales


Book Description

Desi (pronounced they-see) tales is a humorous take on lesser written about elements of Pakistani and Indian culture. From a young generation of liberal leftists that baffle everyone, Pakistan television soap operas, credit card debt, the odd recruits of a well meaning MSA president, reluctant suitors, scarves, mosque administrations to people with unusual shopping habits. Desi tales is a view askew of modern Indian and Pakistani expatriate culture.




Fashioning Globalisation


Book Description

Drastic changes in the career aspirations of women in the developed world have resulted in a new, globalised market for off-the-peg designer clothes created by independent artisans. This book reports on a phenomenon that seems to exemplify the twin imperatives of globalisation and female emancipation. A major conceptual contribution to the literatures on globalisation, fashion and gender, analysing the ways in which women’s entry into the labour force over the past thirty years in the developed world has underpinned new forms of aestheticised production and consumption as well as the growth of ‘work-style’ businesses A vital contribution to the burgeoning literature on culture and creative industries which often ignores the significant roles taken by women as entrepreneurs and designers rather than mere consumers Introduces fashion scholars and economic geographers to a paradigmatic example of the new designer fashion industries emerging in a range of countries not traditionally associated with fashion Takes a fresh perspective on an industry in which Third World garment workers have been the subject of exhaustive analysis but first world women have been largely ignored




Canadian Islamic Schools


Book Description

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork and interviews with forty-nine participants, Canadian Islamic Schools provides significant insight into the role and function that Islamic schools have in Diasporic, Canadian, educational, and gender-related contexts.




Learning Civil Societies


Book Description

This collection explores the theoretical underpinnings of democratic planning and governance in relation to civil society formation and social learning.