American Sea Literature Seascapes Beach Narratives And Underwater Explorations

Implementing a never-before-seen approach to sea literature, American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations explores the role of American maritime activities and their cultural representations in literature. Differentiating between the 'terrestrial' and 'oceanic' as concepts, Shin Yamashiro divides sea literature into three categories: literature on the sea, by the sea, and beneath the sea. Discussing both canonical works and new books on scuba diving, deep-sea explorations, and surfing, this fascinating study recognizes sea literature's unique influence on American history.

Implementing a never-before-seen approach to sea literature, American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations explores the role of American maritime activities and their cultural representations in literature. Differentiating between the 'terrestrial' and 'oceanic' as concepts, Shin Yamashiro divides sea literature into three categories: literature on the sea, by the sea, and beneath the sea. Discussing both canonical works and new books on scuba diving, deep-sea explorations, and surfing, this fascinating study recognizes sea literature's unique influence on American history.

Underwater Worlds throws open a new area in the emerging field of “blue” environmental humanities by exploring how subaqueous environments have been imagined and represented across cultures and media. The collection pursues this theme through various disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, including history, literary and film criticism, myth studies, legal studies and the history of art. The essays suggest that, since the nineteenth century, technologies of underwater exploration have generated novel sensory experiences that have destabilized conventional modes of representation and influenced new aesthetic forms from fiction and television to virtual reality. The collection also examines how representations of underwater environments have reflected and critiqued humans’ relationships with marine ecology and life-forms. It reflects on the deeper cultural and symbolic resonances of mythical figures such as mermaids, sea monsters and the ghosts of drowned seafarers. The contributions further reveal myriad political, ideological, gendered and racial dimensions of representing underwater environments.

In The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment and movie camera technology has allowed documentary and narrative filmmakers to take human vision into the depths, creating new imagery of the seas and the underwater realm, and expanding the scope of popular imagination. Innovating on the most challenging film set on earth, filmmakers have tapped the emotional power of the underwater environment to forge new visions of horror, tragedy, adventure, beauty, and surrealism, entertaining the public and shaping its perception of ocean reality. Examining works by filmmakers ranging from J. E. Williamson, inventor of the first undersea film technology in 1914, to Wes Anderson, who filmed the underwater scenes of his 2004 The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou entirely in a pool, The Underwater Eye traces how the radically alien qualities of underwater optics have shaped liquid fantasies for more than a century. Richly illustrated, the book explores documentaries by Jacques Cousteau, Louis Malle, and Hans Hass, art films by Man Ray and Jean Vigo, and popular movies and television shows such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Sea Hunt, the Bond films, Jaws, The Abyss, and Titanic. In exploring the cultural impact of underwater filmmaking, the book also asks compelling questions about the role film plays in engaging the public with the remote ocean, a frontline of climate change.

Water in Social Imagination studies meanings of water in cultural and environmental contexts, from medieval Stockholm to post-Soviet Russia. Authors consider both state policy and modern technologies along with creative resistance to the exploitative imagination.

African-American Males and the US Justice System of Marginalization provides an overview of the economic and social status of African-American males in America, which continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. Weatherspoon posits that in every American institutional system, from birth to death, the journey of African-American males to achieve racial justice and equity in this country is ignored, marginalized, and exploited. The American justice system, in particular, has permitted and in some cases sanctioned the marginalization of African-American males as full citizens. Weatherspoon examines the idea that African-American males are disproportionately represented in every aspect of the criminal justice system, and that the marginalization of African-American males in America has a long and treacherous history that continues to negatively impact their economic, political, and social status.

This book examines US foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the region’s key role in the practice and evolution of American exceptionalism. The political developments in the Eastern Mediterranean during the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, gave to the US opportunities to express, in the most explicit way, its anti-colonialism, the fervent support of open and democratic societies, and its willingness to openly confront tyranny and oppression whenever this was possible (or necessary) for American interests. Since that time, the region has been a testing ground for the core elements of American foreign policy deployed worldwide. The monograph shows the contributions of the United States during critical moments in the region, such as the First Barbary War (1801-1805), the introduction of Truman Doctrine, Washington’s role in the Suez Crisis, the Greek junta and the Imia Crisis of 1996. It also scrutinizes the different levels of the economic, military and diplomatic challenges which China, Russia and Turkey present today, while it also covers the American approach to the Arab Spring. From a ‘Shining City on a Hill’ to the current ‘Make America Great Again’ mottoes, this critique follows American Foreign Policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the strong bonds that the nation established with the geostrategic, political and ideological features of the region. The pace of recent events, and the increasing complexity of this global corner, prove a challenge to America today; the future and clarion call that hard work and the finest ingenuity are necessary to keep its regional hegemony, and its course toward increased prosperity. This work’s goal is to inspire the conversations by academics, diplomats, leaders (both political and military) and most of all businessmen, to this end.

The opening of the ports of Japan in 1859 brought a flood of Japanese craft products to the world marketplace. For ivory it was a golden age. This book examines the role that ivory and ivory carvers played in the expression of nationalism and the development of sculpture in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.