Uneasy Encounters


Book Description

Early twentieth century China went through a tumultuous period, marked by the end of an ancient monarchy, political instability and profound cultural upheaval. The medical discourse both reflected and contributed to these transformations. Western medicine arrived in China as part of missionary, foreign imperialist and internal modernization efforts. In various ways it interacted with Chinese practices and belief systems. The contributions in this volume explore important episodes of this multi-faceted process, describing key institutions, personalities and their respective motives and interests. Collectively, the chapters reveal a complex web of interlocking dimensions, which evade simple categorizations of Western or Chinese, exploitive or supportive, traditional or modern.




Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters


Book Description

From award-nominated writer John Langan comes a collection of uneasy meetings. A frustrated professor and his graduate student assistant accompany a group of soldiers to a remote Scottish island to learn what is buried there. A man plays an audiotape left for him by his late father and is initiated into a family story of monstrous deeds. A student learns frightening lessons in a surreal tutoring center. A young couple struggles to make their stand against a group of inhuman pursuers in a ravaged landscape. And, in a new story, an artist discovers a mysterious statue whose completion becomes his obsession.




Uneasy Military Encounters


Book Description

Uneasy Military Encounters presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military's counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater part of the Malay-Muslim minority. Ruth Streicher argues that counterinsurgency practices mark the southern population as the racialized, religious, and gendered other of the Thai, which contributes to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a state formation based on essentialized difference between the Thai and their others. Through a genealogical approach, Uneasy Military Encounters addresses broad conceptual questions of imperial politics in a non-Western context: How can we understand imperial policing in a country that was never colonized? How is "Islam" constructed in a state that is officially secular and promotes Buddhist tolerance? What are the (historical) dynamics of imperial patriarchy in a context internationally known for its gender pluralism? The resulting ethnography excavates the imperial politics of concrete encounters between the military and the southern population in the ongoing conflict in southern Thailand.




The Jews in America


Book Description

A brilliant, challenging revisionist history of the Jewish experience in America by Arthur Hertzberg, political leader, rabbi, social historian, and one of America'a most eminent Jewish thinkers.




Ethnographic Encounters in Israel


Book Description

Essays on the challenges of anthropological work in a complicated country: “A compelling anthology.” —Ruth Behar Israel is a place of paradoxes, a small country with a diverse population and complicated social terrain. Studying its culture and social life means confronting a multitude of ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges. These first-person accounts by anthropologists engage contradictions of religion, politics, identity, kinship, racialization, and globalization to reveal fascinating and often vexing dimensions of the Israeli experience. Caught up in pressing existential questions of war and peace, social justice, and national boundaries, the contributors explore the contours of Israeli society as insiders and outsiders, natives and strangers, as well as critics and friends.




Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival


Book Description

In this ground-breaking contribution to the study of tourism and languages, Alison Phipps examines what happens when tourists learn to speak other languages. From ordering a coffee to following directions she argues for a new perception of the relationship between tourism and languages from one based on the acquisition of basic, functional skills to one which sustains and even strengthens intercultural dialogue. The twelve chapters comprising this book tell stories of the experience of learning and speaking tourist languages. Drawing on a range of disciplines Alison Phipps takes the reader on a journey through risk, way finding, mistakes, laughter, conversations and the imagination. She provides rich descriptions of the world of language learning which has remained invisible to mainstream studies of language education, existing as it does on the margins of educational life. She shows how tourism is shaped by the learning experiences of everyday life. Languages, she argues passionately, fundamentally change the nature of perception, dwelling and relationships to other people and the world. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in tourism studies and in modern languages education. It is a timely study, coming at time of crisis in languages, as English exerts its power as a world language and as a dominant language of tourism. Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival: Languaging, Tourism, Life will also be of interest to anthropologists, linguists, geographers, sociologists and those studying education.




Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory


Book Description

Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. The editors have chosen queer theory as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse. The book brings together a number of psychoanalytic schools of thought and clinical approaches, which are sometimes at odds with one another and thus tend not to engage in dialogue about divisive theoretical concepts and matters of clinical technique. The volume also stages, for the first time, a sustained clinical psychoanalytic engagement with queer theory. The central questions we present to readers to think about are: What are the discourses of sexuality underpinning psychoanalysis, and how do they impact on clinical practice? In what ways does sexuality get played out for, and between, the psychoanalytic practitioner and the patient? How do social, cultural and historical attitudes towards sexuality impact on the transference and countertransference, consciously and unconsciously? Why is sexuality so prone to reification? TABLE OF CONTENTS // Introduction: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, by Noreen Giffney SECTION 1: QUEER THEORIES / Chapter 1 [Identity]: Precarious Sexualities: Queer Challenges to Psychoanalytic and Social Identity Categorisation, by Alice Kuzniar - Chapter 2 [Desire]: Are We Missing Something? Queer Desire, by Lara Farina - Chapter 3 [Pleasure]: Jouissance: The Gash of Bliss, by Kathryn Bond Stockton - Chapter 4 [Perversion]: Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity, by Lisa Downing - Chapter 5 [Ethics]: Out of Line, On Hold: D.W. Winnicott's Queer Sensibilities, by Michael D. Snediker - Chapter 6 [Discourse]: Discourse and the History of Sexuality, by Will Stockton SECTION 2: PSYCHOANALYTIC RESPONSES / Chapter 7: On Not Thinking Straight: Comments on a Conceptual Marriage, by R.D. Hinshelwood - Chapter 8: Queer as a New Shelter from Castration, by Abe Geldhof and Paul Verhaeghe - Chapter 9: The Redress of Psychoanalysis, by Ann Murphy - Chapter 10: Queer Directions from Lacan, by Ian Parker - Chapter 11: Queer Theory Meets Jung, by Claudette Kulkarni - Chapter 12: Queer Troubles for Psychoanalysis, by Carol Owens - Chapter 13: Clinique, by Aranye Fradenburg - Chapter 14: From Tragic Fall to Programmatic Blueprint: 'Behold this is Oedipus ...' by Olga Cox Cameron - Chapter 15: Enigmatic Sexuality, by Katrine Zeuthen and Judy Gammelgaard - Chapter 16: The Transforming Nexus: Psychoanalysis, Social Theory and Queer Childhood, by Ken Corbett - Chapter 17: Clinical Encounters: The Queer New Times, by Rob Weatherill - Chapter 18: Undoing Psychoanalysis: Towards a Clinical and Conceptual Metistopia, by Dany Nobus - Chapter 19: 'You make me feel like a natural woman': Thoughts on a Case of Transsexual Identity Formation and Queer Theory, by Ami Kaplan - Chapter 20: Sexual Difference: From Symptom to Sinthome, by Patricia Gherovici SECTION 3: RESPONSES TO PSYCHOANALYTIC PRACTICES ENCOUNTERING QUEER THEORIES / Chapter 21: A Plague on Both Your Houses, by Stephen Frosh - Chapter 22: Something Amiss, by Jacqueline Rose - Chapter 23: Taking Shelter from Queer, by Tim Dean - Chapter 24: Courageous Drawings of Vigilant Ambiguities, by Noreen O'Connor - Chapter 25: Understanding Homophobia, by Mark J. Blechner - Chapter 26: Transgender and Psychoanalysis, by Susan Stryker - Chapter 27: The Psychoanalysis that Dare Not Speak Its Name, Ona Nierenberg ABOUT THE COVER / On the Not-Meanings of Karla Black's There Can Be No Arguments, by Medb Ruane AFTERWORD, by Eve Watson




All Those Strangers


Book Description

Adored by many, appalling to some, baffling still to others, few authors defy any single critical narrative to the confounding extent that James Baldwin manages. Was he a black or queer writer? Was he a religious or secular writer? Was he a spokesman for the civil rights movement or a champion of the individual? His critics, as disparate as his readership, endlessly wrestle with paradoxes, not just in his work but also in the life of a man who described himself as "all those strangers called Jimmy Baldwin" and who declared that "all theories are suspect." Viewing Baldwin through a cultural-historical lens alongside a more traditional literary critical approach, All Those Strangers examines how his fiction and nonfiction shaped and responded to key political and cultural developments in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s. Showing how external forces molded Baldwin's personal, political, and psychological development, Douglas Field breaks through the established critical difficulties caused by Baldwin's geographical, ideological, and artistic multiplicity by analyzing his life and work against the radically transformative politics of his time. The book explores under-researched areas in Baldwin's life and work, including his relationship to the Left, his FBI files, and the significance of Africa in his writing, while also contributing to wider discussions about postwar US culture. Field deftly navigates key twentieth-century themes-the Cold War, African American literary history, conflicts between spirituality and organized religion, and transnationalism-to bring a number of isolated subjects into dialogue with each other. By exploring the paradoxes in Baldwin's development as a writer, rather than trying to fix his life and work into a single framework, All Those Strangers contradicts the accepted critical paradigm that Baldwin's life and work are too ambiguous to make sense of. By studying him as an individual and an artist in flux, Field reveals the manifold ways in which Baldwin's work develops and coheres.




Children of the Fang and Other Genealogies


Book Description

John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with a new book of stories. An aspiring actress goes to an audition with a mysterious director. An editor receives the last manuscript of his murdered friend. A young lawyer learns the terrible connection between her grandfather and an ancient race of creatures. A bodyguard drives her employer across a frozen road toward an immense hole in the earth. In these stories and others, John Langan maps the branches of his literary family tree, tracing his connections to the writers whose dark fictions have inspired his own. Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones.




The Uneasy Conscience of a White Christian


Book Description

Do White people bear moral responsibility for racial disparities? Are White Christians under a spiritual mandate to make racial equity a priority? Clifford Williams taught philosophy at Christian colleges for many years, including a course on race. He has journeyed alongside students as they gained insights about racism. In this book, he draws from deeply personal stories as he shows the need for White Christians to recognize the impact of racism and to cultivate key character traits which enable them to pursue racial equity. In succinct and thoughtful prose, interwoven with first-person accounts of racialized experiences by people of color, Williams describes the importance of the Golden Rule, the power and effects of racial socialization, and the harm racism does to those who harbor it. He asks the haunting question, “Why do White people react so strongly to Black power?” He explains why widespread church integration in the United States may never exist. He unpacks the concept of White identity and links police brutality to faulty moral perception. This book gently explains what White Christians need to do to make racial equity a priority.