Cultural Entanglements

In addition to being a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and essayist, Langston Hughes was also a globe-trotting cosmopolitan, travel writer, translator, avid international networker, and—perhaps above all—pan-Africanist. In Cultural Entanglements, Shane Graham examines Hughes’s associations with a number of black writers from the Caribbean and Africa, exploring the implications of recognizing these multiple facets of the African American literary icon and of taking a truly transnational approach to his life, work, and influence. Graham isolates and maps Hughes’s cluster of black Atlantic relations and interprets their significance. Moving chronologically through Hughes’s career from the 1920s to the 1960s, he spotlights Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay, Haitian novelist and poet Jacques Roumain, French Negritude author Aimé Césaire of Martinique, South African writers Es’kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams, and Caribbean American novelist Paule Marshall. Taken collectively, these writers’ intellectual relationships with Hughes and with one another reveal a complex conversation—and sometimes a heated debate—happening globally throughout the twentieth century over what Africa signified and what it meant to be black in the modern world. Graham makes a truly original contribution not only to the study of Langston Hughes and African and Caribbean literatures but also to contemporary debates about cosmopolitanism, the black Atlantic, and transnational cultures.

The impulse for the recent transformations in the Arab world came from the Maghreb. Research on the region has been on the rise since, yet much remains to be done when it comes to interdisciplinary comparative research. The Maghreb is a heterogeneous region that deserves thorough investigation. This volume focuses on Entanglements as a cross-field and cross-lingual concept to generate a new approach to the region and its inner interdependencies as well as exchanges with other regions. Eminent researchers conceptualize Entanglements through the description of various thematic fields and actors in motion, addressing culture, politics, social affairs, and economics.

In this book, Xiong Yuezhi and a team of distinguished scholars bring together cutting-edge research on the urban history of Shanghai and the diversity of its distinctive culture.

This cross-disciplinary volume makes the case for the Levant, including the use of the term, as a unit of analysis for the study of cultural production and change over the long-term in the Eastern Mediterranean. It offers a new perspective on the history of this region that overcomes Orientalist approaches and introduces a global history perspective. It posits a way forward for studying the agency of the local as a key to understanding the long-term history of cultural production over the long-term in the region. Finally, it tells the story of the crystallization within the region of a type of sub-imperial power, illustrated by the canonical discourses popularly associated with the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Entangled Objects threatens to dislodge the cornerstone of Western anthropology by rendering permanently problematic the idea of reciprocity. All traffic, and commerce, whether economic or intellectual, between Western anthropologists and the rest of the world, is predicated upon the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations between the West and the indigenous peoples it has colonized for centuries.

Papers from a the conference Globalisation + Art + Cultural Difference-on the edge of change, 2001, Sydney; contributions by Langton and Perkins on Aborignal art annotated separately.

"Patterned Ground unravels the entangled relationships between nature and culture. Around 100 entries by leading names in new geography and related disciplines focus on various 'objects' in the landscape - from beaches to battlefields, bees to horses, police stations to post offices, trees to tractors. Each entry, written by an expert in the field, explores the way in which we understand that object and its relationship to the world around it." "This book is neither encyclopaedia nor dictionary, but a knowledgeable and impassioned engagement with the world. In this sense, it chimes with earlier experiments in understanding the earth and its landscapes, whether these endeavours have been conducted within the sciences, the social sciences or the arts." "Patterned Ground backtracks from familiar and obvious ways of seeing patterns in the world in order to discover the world anew. It opens up new possibilities for thinking about the relationships between ourselves, objects and the ground on which we walk."--BOOK JACKET.

Presents strikingly original and contemporary answers to the most traditional philosophical problems in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political theory. A work of maximally ambitious scope with a foundation in humility, Entanglements sets out a philosophical system of the sort rarely seen over the past century. In a discipline marked by greater and greater specialization and the narrowing of increasingly insular traditions and approaches, Crispin Sartwell has spent his career engaging widely across philosophical topics and texts. Here he brings together his philosophical positions in a unified system that is coherent across the issues and subdisciplines in the field. In addition to presenting his own theories of truth, knowledge, free will, beauty, and the political state, Sartwell’s criticisms of other figures and movements provide an overview of the history of philosophy. The project of presenting an overarching philosophical system is a resolutely old-fashioned one, and in undertaking it, Sartwell is not only encapsulating an extraordinarily unique and productive career but also nudging philosophy back to its broader aims of explaining the world and our place in it. “One of the greatest strengths of this book is its breadth, not just in topics but in the range of ideas drawn on—it’s unusual to find a scholar who can move effortlessly from J. L. Austin to Heidegger to Emerson. Original, engaging, and accessible, there’s nothing else like it.” — Roderick T. Long, Auburn University

This anthology reconsiders the social, political and intellectual meanings of multiculturalism in the West, particularly Britain. It introduces a conceptual language for thinking about multiculturalism and casts the surrounding debates in the contexts of globalization, post-colonialism and what Barnor Hesse calls multicultural transruptions. The contributors consider a variety of diaspora formations ranging from the Muslim Umma and Black Britain to the Chinese foodscape and Transatlantic Black sporting performances. They examine the transnational impact on how cultural differences are lived and pose questions for how we participate in and think about Western societies. The material on cultural entanglements focuses on media constructions of the Asian Gang in Britain, gender and sexuality in ragga music, and the ambivalence of identities in post-apartheid South Africa.

Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.