Interzones

Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities. Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture. Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities. The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

In 1954 William Burroughs settled in Tangiers, finding a sanctuary of sorts in its shadowy streets, blind alleys, and lowlife decadence. It was this city that served as a catalyst for Burroughs as a writer, the backdrop for one of the most radical transformations of style in literary history. Burroughs's life during this period is limned in a startling collection of short stories, autobiographical sketches, letters, and diary entries, all of which showcase his trademark mordant humor, while delineating the addictions to drugs and sex that are the central metaphors of his work. But it is the extraordinary "WORD," a long, sexually wild and deliberately offensive tirade, that blends confession, routine, and fantasy and marks the true turning point of Burroughs as a writer-the breakthrough of his own characteristic voice that will find its full realization in Naked Lunch. James Grauerholz's incisive introduction sets the scene for this series of pieces, guiding the reader through Burroughs's literary evolution from the precise, laconic, and deadpan writer of Junky and Queer to the radical, uncompromising seer of Naked Lunch. Interzone is an indispensable addition to the canon of his works.

In this innovative study, German and film studies scholar Randall Halle advances the concept of "interzones"--geographical and ideational spaces of transit, interaction, transformation, and contested diversity--as a mechanism for analyzing European cinema. He focuses especially on films about borders, borderlands, and cultural zones as he traces the development of interzones from the inception of central European cinema to the avant-garde films of today. Throughout, he shows how cinema both reflects and engenders interzones that explore the important questions of Europe's social order: imperialism and nation-building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; "first contact" between former adversaries (such as East and West Germany) following World War II and the Cold War; and migration, neo-colonialism, and cultural imperialism in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, Halle argues that today's cinema both produces and reflects imaginative communities. He demonstrates how, rather than simply erasing boundaries, the European Union instead fosters a network of cultural interzones that encourage cinematic exploration of the new Europe's processes and limits of connectivity, tolerance, and cooperation.

Now you can have ALL of Interzone, this edition includes all the chapters and sub chapters that had been previously censored or otherwise removed by various editors and concerned parties. But now! you can have it all, every sick, twisted and depraved word of it.

The works in this book were completed between 2005 and 2008. In creating the book, I was myself pleasantly surprised that while the foci, presentations and media changed over time, my interest in portraying people in relation to today's big-city world didn't. By the way, the title, "Interzone," was inspired by a rock band named Joy Division, whose music inspired me to capture the infinite faces of life during one's journey from the darkness and coldness of beginning.

Emissaries from planet Näkän are heavily invested in an altruistic mission: saving a dying Earth and its inhabitants from a tragic end. Humans around the world, mesmerized by the extraterrestrial technology and the hope it brings to their planet, have so far shown little resistance to the mostly pacific invasion of their homelands. But other aliens involved in the undertaking appear to have less noble intentions for the blue planet...

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'Creative Urban Milieus' is an interdisciplinary examination of the historical relationship between culture and the economy in such cities as Berlin, New York, Helsinki, London, Venice, and many others.