Cultures Of Ambivalence And Contempt

This collection of essays focuses on the concepts of tolerance and intolerance as it commemorates the life of James Parkes - the man who pioneered the study of antisemitism and Jewish-non-Jewish relations. The essays analyse many different examples of antisemitism, ambivalence and philosemitism.

Britain's medieval Jewish community arrived with the Normans in 1066 and was expelled from the country in 1290. This is the first time in forty years that its life has been comprehensively examined for a student and general readership. Beginning with an introduction setting the medieval British experience into its European context, the book continues with three chapters outlining the history of the Jews' presence and a discussion of where they settled. Further chapters then explore themes such as their relationship with the Christian church, Jewish women's lives, the major types of evidence used by historians, the latest evidence emerging from archaeological exploration, and new approaches from literary studies. The book closes with a reappraisal of one of the best-known communities, that at York. Drawing together the work of experts in the field, and supported by an extensive bibliographical guide, this is a valuable and revealing account of medieval Jewish history in Britain. Patricia Skinner is a Wellcome Research Fellow in the College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University. Contributors: ANTHONY BALE, SUZANNE BARTLETT, PAUL BRAND, BARRIE DOBSON, JOHN EDWARDS, JOSEPH HILLABY, D.A. HINTON, ROBIN MUNDILL, ROBERT C. STACEY.

Matthias Smalbrugge compares modern images to plays without a script: while they appear to refer to a deeper identity or reality, it is ultimately the image itself that truly matters. He argues that our modern society of images is the product of a destructive tendency in the Christian notion of the image in general, and Augustine of Hippo's in particular. This insight enables him to decode our current 'scripts' of image. As we live in an increasingly visual culture, we are constantly confronted with images that seem to exist without a deeper identity or reality – but did this referential character really get lost over time? Smalbrugge first explores the roots of the modern image by analysing imagery, what it represents, and its moral state within the framework of Platonic philosophy. He then moves to the Augustinian heritage, in particular the Soliloquies, the Confessions and the Trinity, where he finds valuable insights into images and memory. He explores within the trinitarian framework the crossroads of a theology of grace and a theology based on Neoplatonic views. Smalbrugge ultimately answers two questions: what happened to the referential character of the image, and can it be recovered?

For many illusions it is easy to find owners—people who proudly declare their belief in things such as life after death, human reason, or the self-regulation of financial markets. Yet there are also different kinds of illusions, too, for example, in art: trompe l'oeil painting pleases its observers with "anonymous illusions"—illusions where it is not entirely clear who should be deceived. Anonymous illusions offer a universal pleasure principle within culture. They are present in games, sports, design, eroticism, manners, charm, beauty, and so on. However, it seems that this pleasure principle is increasingly misinterpreted. The proud proprietors of certain illusions are no longer capable of recognizing that they also follow anonymous illusions. As a consequence, they mistake happy, polite others for naïve idiots or "savages"—the possessors of stupid illusions whose happiness is an obscene intrusion into the lives of more rational creatures. The misrecognition of anonymous illusions thus becomes a crucial ideological bedrock for contemporary neoliberal policy. Hatred of the other's happiness leads to the destruction of the public sphere and to a state that, rather than fostering and stimulating its citizens' capacities, interpellates them as victims and limits itself to providing "protective" or repressive measures directed against them.

In Contours of White Ethnicity, Yiorgos Anagnostou explores the construction of ethnic history and reveals how and why white ethnics selectively retain, rework, or reject their pasts. Challenging the tendency to portray Americans of European background as a uniform cultural category, the author demonstrates how a generalized view of American white ethnics misses the specific identity issues of particular groups as well as their internal differences. Interdisciplinary in scope, Contours of White Ethnicity uses the example of Greek America to illustrate how the immigrant past can be used to combat racism and be used to bring about solidarity between white ethnics and racial minorities. Illuminating the importance of the past in the construction of ethnic identities today, Anagnostou presents the politics of evoking the past to create community, affirm identity, and nourish reconnection with ancestral roots, then identifies the struggles to neutralize oppressive pasts. Although it draws from the scholarship on a specific ethnic group, Contours of White Ethnicity exhibits a sophisticated, interdisciplinary methodology, which makes it of particular interest to scholars researching ethnicity and race in the United States and for those charting the directions of future research for white ethnicities.

This volume describes and analyses a series of emotions prevalent in everyday life and culture, with each chapter exploring the main facets of a particular emotion and considering the ways in which it manifests itself in and informs our culture and lives. Considering our expression, conception, management and sanctioning of emotions, and the ways in which these have changed over time, as well as the ways in which we can theorise particular emotional states, authors ask how certain emotions are linked to culture and society and what roles they play in politics and contemporary life. With examples and case studies taken from research into media, culture and social life, Emotions in Culture and Everyday Life will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, psychology, media and cultural studies and philosophy with interests in the emotions.

This study connects the idiosyncratic modernism of Wyndham Lewis, co-founder of the Vorticist art movement, with works of several artists from the British art rock tradition, among them Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, art-punk pioneers Wire and electronic pop musician John Foxx. By taking a transdisciplinary and intermedial approach to texts from two fields normally studied in isolation and staking out the elements of a shared modernist ethos, the book presents a new perspective on both fields relevant to scholars of literature, popular culture, and the visual arts alike. While the book rests on sound research from the fields of literary criticism, art history, and pop theory, the structure and writing of the book is fundamentally designed to be accessible and comprehensible to non-scholarly readers.

Zucker (history, Bar-Ilan U., Israel) examines how the US consuls perceived, interpreted, and administered immigration policy towards Jewish refugees during the Nazi regime, exploring the relationship of consuls with the US State Department, as well as obvious examples of prejudice in obstructing the entry of refugees. She argues that the US held a restrictive policy in terms of both interpretation and administration of the law which was due in large part to consular anti-Semitism. Distributed by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.