Culture The Cutting Edge

The anglophone Caribbean has long been celebrated and known for its vibrant and innovative music. Reggae, dancehall, calypso, soca, gospel and ringbang have flourished within the Caribbean and have exploded on the worldwide stage. Somewhat surprisingly, many facets of this contribution have not been analysed or discussed by academic writing. This work deliberately moves away from the customary exclusive focus on Trinidad and Jamaica and broadens the discourse to represent the wider region. It addresses such topics as the status of Caribbean gospel; the birth of new musical styles in the Eastern Caribbean; cultural misrepresentation in Caribbean music videos; the representation of Aids in Caribbean music; and the impact of the actual music technology utilized by Caribbean musicians since the 1980s.

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Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture. In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant-garde culture of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror's subversiveness as a genre. In her treatment of what she terms "art-horror" films, Hawkins examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films. Cutting Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono's rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju's Eyes without a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter film. The rediscovery of Tod Browning's Freaks as an art film, the "eurotrash" cinema of Jess Franco, camp cults like the one around Maria Montez, and the "cross-over" reception of Andy Warhol's Frankenstein are all studied for what they reveal about cultural hierarchies. Looking at the low aspects of high culture and the high aspects of low culture, Hawkins scrutinizes the privilege habitually accorded "high" art -- a tendency, she argues, that lets highbrow culture off the hook and removes it from the kinds of ethical and critical social discussions that have plagued horror and porn. Full of unexpected insights, Cutting Edge calls fora rethinking of high/low distinctions -- and a reassigning of labels at the video store.

"The concept of the beautiful has undergone profound changes during the last half of the twentieth century, as has our way of considering everything that is called art. We need a new key to help us "know how to see" so that we can stay attuned to what is going on in the contemporary world of art where new aesthetic styles are appearing and being challenged one after the other." "This book by Lea Vergine, which discusses seventeen different art movements in separate chapters, offers, within the panorama of contemporary art criticism books, a blend between a handy art-history manual and an assessment of a cultural adventure that has passed through and overturned the parameters of taste of the last forty years. The clear and incisive writing style guides the reader, student or specialist, whatever his or her specific interests and curiosities, like an essential travel kit for understanding today's reality, grasping its raison d'etre, and above all, plunging into its multiple mutations." From the Trade Paperback edition.

The rapid expansion of laborless production systems creates enormous instability. Money previously paid in wages is spent on technology. Workers lose jobs to robotic intelligence and, therefore, have no money to buy the goods produced by the technology. CUTTING EDGE provides an up-to-the-minute analysis of the complex relations between technology and work and how jobs and living standards can be protected.

If you were a fan of the SAW movies, you will love this book. If you weren't a fan, this will change your mind. The Cutting Edge: Philosophy of the SAW Films analyzes the SAW movies, revealing their deeper meaning, comparing their philosophical concepts to the views of many philosophers throughout history, and demonstrating that they convey a fascinating blend of traditional and innovative philosophical thought. The book also examines the primary characters of the movies and includes a comprehensive index of the infamous Jigsaw traps.

This book aims to be a showcase for cutting edge research offering a high-edited selection of the best paper submitted to the 2006 tourism conference at the University of Surrey, which itself is a celebration of 40 years of tourism education at the University. The emphasis of the book is on contributions which offer new insights and approaches to tourism research rather than case studies or applications of existing research methods to new contexts, and this is where the book is unique.