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The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (New World Studies)
by Anke BirkenmaierArguing that race has been the specter that has haunted many of the discussions about Latin American regional and national cultures today, Anke Birkenmaier shows how theories of race and culture in Latin America evolved dramatically in the period between the two world wars. In response to the rise of scientific racism in Europe and the American hemisphere in the early twentieth century, anthropologists joined numerous writers and artists in founding institutions, journals, and museums that actively pushed for an antiracist science of culture, questioning pseudoscientific theories of race and moving toward more broadly conceived notions of ethnicity and culture.Birkenmaier surveys the work of key figures such as Cuban historian and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, Haitian scholar and novelist Jacques Roumain, French anthropologist and museum director Paul Rivet, and Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, focusing on the transnational networks of scholars in France, Spain, and the United States to which they were connected. Reviewing their essays, scientific publications, dictionaries, novels, poetry, and visual arts, the author traces the cultural study of Latin America back to these interdisciplinary discussions about the meaning of race and culture in Latin America, discussions that continue to provoke us today.
The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment
by Anton M. MatytsinEnlightenment confidence in the power of human reason was earned by grappling with the challenge of philosophical skepticism.The ancient Greek philosophy of Pyrrhonian skepticism spread across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the 1600s, casting a shadow over the European learned world. The early modern skeptics expressed doubt concerning the existence of an objective reality independent of human perception. They also questioned long-standing philosophical assumptions and, at times, undermined the foundations of political, moral, and religious authorities. How did eighteenth-century scholars overcome this skeptical crisis of confidence to usher in the so-called Age of Reason?In The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, Anton Matytsin describes how skeptical rhetoric forced philosophers to formulate the principles and assumptions that they found to be certain or, at the very least, highly probable. In attempting to answer the deep challenge of philosophical skepticism, these thinkers explicitly articulated the rules for attaining true and certain knowledge and defined the boundaries beyond which human understanding could not venture. Matytsin explains the dialectical outcome of the philosophical disputes between the skeptics and their various opponents in France, the Dutch Republic, Switzerland, and Prussia. He shows that these exchanges transformed skepticism by mitigating its arguments while broadening the learned world’s confidence in the capacities of reason by moderating its aspirations. Ultimately, the debates about the powers and limits of human understanding led to the making of a new conception of rationality that privileged practicable reason over speculative reason. Matytsin also complicates common narratives about the Enlightenment by demonstrating that most of the thinkers who defended reason from skeptical critiques were religiously devout. By attempting either to preserve or to reconstruct the foundations of their worldviews and systems of thought, they became important agents of intellectual change and formulated new criteria of doubt and certainty. This complex and engaging book offers a powerful new explanation of how Enlightenment thinkers came to understand the purposes and the boundaries of rational inquiry.
The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain
by Nicholas PopperAn exploration of the proliferation of paper in early modern Britain and its far-reaching effects on politics and society. We are used to thinking of ourselves as living in a time when more information is more available than ever before. In The Specter of the Archive, Nicholas Popper shows that earlier eras had to grapple with the same problem—how to deal with too much information at their fingertips. He reveals that early modern Britain was a society newly drowning in paper, a light and durable technology whose spread allowed statesmen to record drafts, memoranda, and other ephemera that might otherwise have been lost, and also made it possible for ordinary people to collect political texts. As original paperwork and copies alike flooded the government, information management became the core of politics. Focusing on two of the primary political archives of early modern England, the Tower of London Record Office and the State Paper Office, Popper traces the circulation of their materials through the government and the broader public sphere. In this early media-saturated society, we find the origins of many issues we face today: Who shapes the archive? Can we trust the pictures of the past and the present that it shows us? And, in a more politically urgent vein: Does a huge volume of widely available information (not all of it accurate) risk contributing to polarization and extremism?
Specters of Cavafy (Greek / Modern Intersections)
by Maria BoletsiThe Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognized as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death, carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, it develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book’s first part shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. The second part traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis. Beyond its original contribution to Cavafy studies, the book proposes tools and modes of reading that are broadly applicable in literary and cultural studies.
Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures
by Adam LifsheyThis book intervenes in transatlantic and hemispheric studies by positing "America" as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly, still are present. That apparent paradox results in a haunted America, whose conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. Readers of scholarship by transatlanticists such as Paul Gilroy and hemispherists such as Diana Taylor will find new conceptualizations here of an America that knows no geographic boundaries, whose absences are collective but not necessarily interrelated by genealogy. The five principal texts at hand - Columbus's diary of his first voyage, the Popol Vuh of the Maya-K'iche', Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. Interspersed too are shorter studies of narratives by William Carlos Williams, Rigoberta Menchú, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel García Márquez. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in narratives ostensibly contextualized by the Conquest.The book concludes by proposing that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the great American novel.After Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures, America will never seem the same.
Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale (The Donald Haase Series in Fairy-Tale Studies)
by Kimberly J. LauA transformative lens revealing the historical racial context that profoundly influenced European fairy tales. In stories retold for generations, wondrous worlds and magnificent characters have defined the genre of European fairy tales with little recognition of yet another defining aspect—racism and racialized thinking. Engaging four classic fairy-tale collections, author Kimberly J. Lau connects close readings of the tales to the cultural discourses, scholarly debates, and imperial geopolitics that established and perpetuated ideas about racial difference and white superiority. Within the tales of Giambattista Basile, Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, the Grimms, and Andrew and Nora Lang, Lau teases apart and historicizes the racialized themes and ideologies embedded within fairy tales spanning the early seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. She contends that the European fairy tale is definitively marked, whether implicitly or explicitly, by whiteness, and given the genre's documented colonization of diverse narrative traditions over time, this specter of race is all the more haunting. This trailblazing work demonstrates the continuous evolution of racialized thinking that has informed the publication and dissemination of fairy tales. Here, Lau provides a new framework for understanding European fairy tales in the milieux in which they were created, bringing distant and ethereal worlds back to earth.
Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage
by Sarah BalkinTheater’s materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don’t appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.
The Spectral Metaphor
by Esther PeerenWhat does it mean to live as a ghost? Exploring spectrality as a metaphor in the contemporary British and American cultural imagination, Peeren proposes that certain subjects - migrants, servants, mediums and missing persons - are perceived as living ghosts and examines how this figuration can signify both dispossession and empowerment or agency.
Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation
by Pheng CheahThis far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism.
Spectral Shakespeares
by Maurizio CalbiSpectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations foreground a cluster of self-reflexive "themes" - from incorporation to reiteration, from migration to addiction, from silence to survival - that contribute to the redefinition of adaptation, and Shakespearean adaptation in particular, as an unfinished and interminable process. The "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary, mediatized, and heterogeneous presence, a spectral Shakespeare that leaves a mark on our contemporary mediascape.
Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
by Christina LeeThis anthology explores the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. It considers how the ‘appearance’ of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. At its core, the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? Drawing from a diversity of mediums, forms and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to Spectral Spaces and Hauntings illustrate the complicated ways absent presences can manifest and be registered. The case studies range from the memory sites of a terrorist attack, the lost home, a vanished mining town and abandoned airports, to the post-apocalyptic wastelands in literary fiction, the photographic and filmic surfaces where spectres materialise, and the body as a site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. In ruminating on the afteraffects of spectral spaces on human experience, the anthology importantly foregrounds the ethical and political imperative of engaging with ghosts and following their traces.
The Spectre of Tradition and the Aesthetic-Political Movement of Theatre and Performance: An Intercultural Perspective (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
by Min TianThis book interrogates anew the phenomenon of tradition in a dialogical debate with a host of Western thinkers and critical minds. In contrast to the predominantly Western approaches, which look at traditions (Western and non-Western) from a predominantly (Western) modernist perspective, this book interrogates, from an intercultural perspective, the transnational and transcultural consecration, translation, (re)invention, and displacement of traditions (theatrical and cultural) in the aesthetic-political movement of twentieth-century theatre and performance, as exemplified in the case studies of this book. It looks at the question of traditions and modernities at the centre of this aesthetic-political space, as modernities interculturally evoke and are haunted by traditions, and as traditions are interculturally refracted, reconstituted, refunctioned, and reinvented. It also looks at the applicability of its intercultural perspective on tradition to the historical avant-garde in general, postmodern, postcolonial, and postdramatic theatre and performance and to the twentieth-century "classical" intercultural theatre and the twenty-first-century "new interculturalisms" in theatre and performance. To conclude, it looks at the future of tradition in the ecology of our globalized theatrum mundi and considers two important interrelated concepts, future tradition and intercultural tradition. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance studies.
Spectres from the Past: Slavery and the Politics of "History" in West African and African-American Literature (Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture)
by Portia OwusuSpectres from the Past: The "History" of Slavery in West African and African-American Narratives examines the merit of the claim that West African writers, in comparison to African-Americans authors, deliberately expunge the history of slavery from literary narratives. The book explores slavery in contemporary West African and African-American literature by looking at the politics of history and memory. It interrogates notions of History and memory by considering the possibility that shared traumas, such as West African and African-American experiences of slavery, can be remembered and historicised differently, according to critical factors such as socio-economic realities, cultural beliefs and familial traditions. At the heart of the book are compelling and new readings of slavery in six literary narratives that draws on cultural philosophies, musicology and linguistics to demonstrate diverse and unusual ways that Black writers in West Africa and North America write about slavery in literature.
Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst
by Mark SchmittThis book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations.Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.
Spectrum Language Arts (Grade #4)
by SpectrumAn understanding of language arts concepts is key to strong communication skills―the foundation of success across disciplines. Spectrum Language Arts for grade 4 provides focused practice and creative activities to help your child master grammar, vocabulary, parts of speech, and sentence types.<p><p> This comprehensive workbook doesn’t stop with focused practice–it encourages children to explore their creative sides by challenging them with thought-provoking writing projects. Aligned to current state standards, Spectrum Language Arts for grade 4 includes an answer key and a supplemental Writer’s Guide to reinforce grammar and language arts concepts. With the help of Spectrum, your child will build the language arts skills necessary for a lifetime of success.
Spectrum Language Arts, Grade 6 (Spectrum Series)
by SpectrumAn understanding of language arts concepts is key to strong communication skills the foundation of success across disciplines. Spectrum Language Arts for grade 5 provides focused practice and creative activities to help your child master sentence types, parts of speech, vocabulary, and grammar. <P><P>—This comprehensive workbook doesnt stop with focused practice it encourages children to explore their creative sides by challenging them with thought-provoking writing projects. <P><P>Aligned to current state standards, Spectrum Language Arts for grade 5 includes an answer key and a supplemental Writers Guide to reinforce grammar and language arts concepts. With the help of Spectrum, your child will build the language arts skills necessary for a lifetime of success.
Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (Routledge Revivals)
by Murray PittockThe 1890s, the Naughty Nineties, was an exciting and flamboyant time in British life and literature. First published in 1993, this title traces the genesis of the literary culture of the 1890s through some of the popular novels and literary texts of the period. By examining works by such writers as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and Walter Pater, Murray Pittock analyses the nature of the ‘Decadent era’ and the artistic theories of Symbolism and Aestheticism. Significantly, he provides a full assessment of the lasting impact that the thought of the period has had on our own understanding of our cultural past. Spectrum of Decadence explores the confrontations between art and science, sex and mortality, desire and virtue, which, the author argues are as much a part of modern society’s fin-de-siécle as they were of the nineteenth century’s. This reissue bridges the gap between literary texts, historical context, and contemporary critical theory.
Spectrum Reading
by School Specialty PublishingReading skills include: Author’s purpose, Synonyms and antonyms, Reading comprehension, Phonics skills, Study skills.
Spectrum Reading (Spectrum Series)
by SpectrumThe Spectrum® Reading Workbook for Grade 2 features 174 pages of illustrated fiction, informational texts, and engaging exercises that strengthen students’ ability to understand, process, and analyze text. This standards-based workbook enhances reading comprehension skills with grade-appropriate, yet challenging reading passages and discussion questions. <p><p>This focused, repetitive practice is essential to boosting reading and language arts skills. Concepts include letters and sounds, word recognition, integration of knowledge and ideas, key ideas and details, main idea, story structure, theme, and summarization. An answer key is included to help parents and teachers accurately monitor students’ progress and feel confident in their competency. The best-selling Spectrum series is a favorite of parents and teachers because it's carefully designed to be both effective and engaging––the perfect building blocks for a lifetime of learning.
Spectrum Reading Grade 3
by SpectrumSpectrum Reading will help your child improve their reading habits and strengthen their ability to understand and analyze text.
Spectrum Reading, Grade 4
by SpectrumStrong reading skills are the basis of school success, and Spectrum Reading for grade 4 will help children triumph over language arts and beyond. This standards-based workbook uses engaging text to support understanding theme, summarization, knowledge integration, key ideas, and details. <p><p> Spectrum Reading will help your child improve their reading habits and strengthen their ability to understand and analyze text. This best-selling series is a favorite of parents and teachers because it is carefully designed to be both effective and engaging the perfect building blocks for a lifetime of
Spectrum Reading, Grade 7
by SpectrumSpectrum Reading for Grade 7 includes focused practice for reading comprehension including fiction and non-fiction passages, story structure, integration of knowledge and ideas, and key ideas and details. Spectrum(R) Reading workbooks contain focused practice for reading comprehension, including letters and sounds, word recognition, integration of knowledge and ideas, key ideas and details, main idea, story structure, theme, and summarization. Each lesson features an illustrated story followed by exercise in comprehension. A variety of fiction and nonfiction reading passages combined with standards-based learning make these workbooks an essential resource for school success. A complete answer key is included. Spectrum, the best-selling workbook series, is proud to provide quality, educational materials that support your students' learning achievement and success.
Spectrum Spelling, Grade 1
by SRA/McGraw-HillThis series links spelling to reading and writing. It increases skills in words and meanings, consonant and vowel spelling, and proofreading practice. Riddles, brainteasers, and puzzles make spelling fun. Includes a speller dictionary and an answer key.
Spectrum Test Prep, Grade 3
by Spectrum StaffSpectrum(R) Test Prep Grade 3 includes strategy-based activities for language arts and math, test tips to help answer questions, and critical thinking and reasoning. The Spectrum(R) Test Prep series for grades 1 to 8 was developed by experts in education and was created to help students improve and strengthen their test-taking skills. The activities in each book not only feature essential practice in reading, math, and language arts test areas, but also prepare students to take standardized tests. Students learn how to follow directions, understand different test formats, use effective strategies to avoid common mistakes, and budget their time wisely. Step-by-step solutions in the answer key are included. These comprehensive workbooks are an excellent resource for developing skills for assessment success. Spectrum(R), the best-selling workbook series, is proud to provide quality educational materials that support your students’ learning achievement and success.
Spectrum Vocabulary, Grade 3
by Carson-Dellosa Publishing Staff Spectrum StaffSpectrum Vocabulary makes word analysis and vocabulary building easier than ever! The lessons, perfect for students in third grade, strengthen phonics skills by focusing on concept and sensory words, context clues, imported words, and more! Each book aids with classification, context, sensory, concept, and word structure strategies. They are also aligned to national and state standards and include a complete answer key. --Today, more than ever, students need to be equipped with the essential skills they need for school achievement and for success on proficiency tests. The Spectrum series has been designed to prepare students with these skills and to enhance student achievement. Developed by experts in the field of education, each title in the Spectrum workbook series offers grade-appropriate instruction and reinforcement in an effective sequence for learning success. Perfect for use at home or in school, and a favorite of parents, homeschoolers, and teachers worldwide, Spectrum is the learning partner students need for complete achievement.