Coat Of Many Cultures

This book focuses on how we perceive, know and interpret culture across disciplinary boundaries. The study combines theoretical and critical contexts for close readings in culture through discussions of literature, philosophy, history, psychology and visual arts by and about men and women in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

Muslims and African Americans are the two most misunderstood groups in America today, yet both groups have been a part of American life from its beginning. Today, it is the African American that most represents the aspirations of both groups. They are a new peoplea people who have overcome a history of oppression yet retained the good human character that is the saving grace of humanity. But we first have to acknowledge that we all have one Creator, share one common origin, and are part of one brotherhood of man. It is this people, the African American Muslim, that represents those ideals and who presents a model for humanity going forward.

Archie Green--shipwright, folklorist, teacher, and lobbyist--was a legendary figure in the field of American folklore and vernacular culture studies. An inspiration to a generation of students and scholars, Green was known for the remarkable passion, intelligence, and curiosity he brought to his explorations of everyday people, their communities, their work, and their forms of expression. This book gathers twelve essays intended to represent the range of Green's writings over forty years. Selections include a study of folk depictions in the art of Thomas Hart Benton, investigations of occupational and labor language, and a contemplative account of personal and political morality in the study of Appalachian musicians. In an afterword, Green traces his career and reflects on the state of folklore as a discipline. Woven through the foreword by Robert Cantwell is Green's biography, key to understanding his unique mix of activism and scholarship.

The articles of this volume present instantiations of the Hebrew Bible’s deployment in textual and visual forms by Iberian Jewish, Christian and converso exegetes, translators, philosophers, artists, and literary authors between the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 and the Expulsion of 1492.

Sovereign Justice collects valuable contributions from scholars of both continental and analytic tradition, and aims to investigate into the relationship between global justice and the nation state. It deals therefore especially with the moral relevance of national boundaries and cosmopolitanism. It is organised in four sections. The first section deals with cosmopolitan approaches to global justice, with regard to which Kok-Choir Tan's article presents an overview over the current state of the art, the challenges that cosmopolitanism is currently facing, and its relationship and contrasts with other theoretical strands. Etinson's article attempts to clarify the concept of cosmopolitanism. De Angelis's contribution aims to assess the current argumentative state of the art. The second section discusses more specific normative issues. The contributions included in this section deal with global egalitarianism, the moral relevance of national boundaries, global moral and political obligation, and the relationship of national sovereignty and global justice. The third section deals with the contribution of Rawls's work to the current debate on global justice. It also contains an article that deals with the Kantian "aesthetic judgement" - a topic already developed and made famous by Hannah Arendt - and its relevance in the context of international political theory - recently pointed out by Alessandro Ferrara's increasingly influential work. Finally, section four deals with economic justice and discusses principles of economic equality in times of globalisation and Pogge's idea of a global resources dividend. The book presents both a useful assessment of the state of the art and valuable contributions to its advancement. The articles will be of great use both for scholars and for students. 

In the study of Judaism, the Zohar has captivated the minds of interpreters for over seven centuries, and continues to entrance readers in contemporary times. Yet despite these centuries of study, very little attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the text, or to formal appreciation of its status as one of the great works of religious literature. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a critical approach to the zoharic story, seeking to explore the interplay between fictional discourse and mystical exegesis. Eitan Fishbane argues that the narrative must be understood first and foremost as a work of the fictional imagination, a representation of a world and reality invented by the thirteenth-century authors of the text. He claims that the text functions as a kind of dramatic literature, one in which the power of revealing mystical secrets is demonstrated and performed for the reading audience. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the Zohar and on the intersections of literary and religious studies.

In Creating Conversos, Roger Louis Martínez-Dávila skillfully unravels the complex story of Jews who converted to Catholicism in Spain between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, migrated to colonial Mexico and Bolivia during the conquest of the Americas, and assumed prominent church and government positions. Rather than acting as alienated and marginalized subjects, the conversos were able to craft new identities and strategies not just for survival but for prospering in the most adverse circumstances. Martínez-Dávila provides an extensive, elaborately detailed case study of the Carvajal–Santa María clan from its beginnings in late fourteenth-century Castile. By tracing the family ties and intermarriages of the Jewish rabbinic ha-Levi lineage of Burgos, Spain (which became the converso Santa María clan) with the Old Christian Carvajal line of Plasencia, Spain, Martínez-Dávila demonstrates the family's changing identity, and how the monolithic notions of ethnic and religious disposition were broken down by the group and negotiated anew as they transformed themselves from marginal into mainstream characters at the center of the economies of power in the world they inhabited. They succeeded in rising to the pinnacles of power within the church hierarchy in Spain, even to the point of contesting the succession to the papacy and overseeing the Inquisitorial investigation and execution of extended family members, including Luis de Carvajal "The Younger" and most of his immediate family during the 1590s in Mexico City. Martinez-Dávila offers a rich panorama of the many forces that shaped the emergence of modern Spain, including tax policies, rivalries among the nobility, and ecclesiastical politics. The extensive genealogical research enriches the historical reconstruction, filling in gaps and illuminating contradictions in standard contemporary narratives. His text is strengthened by many family trees that assist the reader as the threads of political and social relationships are carefully disentangled.