Five Faces Of America

"Five Faces of America" is an intimate account of the spiritual journeys of five Americans from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Five Faces of Exile is the first transnational history of Asian American intellectuals. Espiritu explores five Filipino American writers whose travels, literary works, and political reflections transcend the boundaries of nations and the categories of "Asia" and "America."

What do Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, and Ray Kroc, the man who created the McDonald's franchise enterprise, have in common? They have all mastered the skills of creative genius-essential tools in today's business climate. Having researched the lives and techniques of past and present geniuses for this inspiring and provocative new handbook, Annette Moser-Wellman helps workers at all levels build and refine their working styles. These qualities of creativity-drawn from the the realms of art, science, as well as business-make up the five distinct "faces": Seer-the power to image Observer-the power to notice details Alchemist-the power to make connections Fool-the power to celebrate weakness Sage-the power to simplify Moser-Wellman shows how we can utilize these creative thinking strategies and flourish in the workplace.

Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

This exquisite collection of short fiction by Sata Ineko (1904–1998) offers readers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of women rarely dignified in fiction: glamorous café waitresses, feisty communist activists, a tortured novelist, a soldier’s wife, and single women in Japan’s Korean colony. Her delicately penned portraits challenge the tired, erotic tropes of the geisha and schoolgirl, while delving into the dilemmas women themselves faced in their personal and professional relationships. The stories and novella translated here span a period of two decades and the most important events and themes in twentieth-century history. “Café Kyoto” (1929) takes up the glamorous, if tragic, lives of café waitresses in the wake of the late 1920s Depression. “Tears of a Factory Girl in the Union Leadership” (1931) offers a unique portrait of a woman who works with the underground Communist Party. “The Scent of Incense” (1942), written as a work of “home front” literature, was meant to help mobilize women as productive workers and supportive housewives during World War II. “White and Purple” (1950), one of Sata’s rare postcolonial works penned just after the outbreak of the Korean War, reflects on the psychological damage inflicted on women during Japan’s occupation of Korea. Sata’s first novella, Crimson (1936–1938), joins a long tradition of women’s writing in Japan that sought to assert women’s “liberation” from what was seen as the oppressively patriarchal institution of marriage. Translator Samuel Perry’s critical introduction weaves the story of Sata’s life into an examination of the historical and cultural milieu that helped to generate her stories about working women, their lives in the workplace and in the home. As the celebrated author herself once wrote, “The kinds of womanhood available today exist precisely because literary masters of different ages and cultures have drawn us to them: the woman we pity, the woman with a heart of gold, the cruel woman, the clever woman, the hen-pecker, the cheapskate, and the ‘good wife wise mother.’ As terms we use to describe the kinds of women who exist in the world today, they have simply outgrown their usefulness.”

Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been a rite of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification. Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions: as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.

DIVFocusing on the early to mid-twentieth century, Denise Cruz illuminates the role that a growing English-language Philippine print culture played in the emergence of new classes of transpacific women./div

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.