Images Of America In Scandinavia

The subject of Images of America in Scandinavia, the first comprehensive study of its kind, is as multifaceted, complex, and overwhelming as America or the United States, itself. It concerns the nature and function, reality and fiction of such images in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden past and present. The book is intended to be a source of solid information as well as a starting point for further inquiries into its cultural territory. Part of its focus is on images of America rooted in printed sources, but, in addition, general surveys of other cultural signs of America in the Scandinavian countries present a broader picture and provide some of the background for the predominantly literary images. Issues such as government and politics, popular and vanguard music and art, and socio-cultural institutions intermittently come to the fore. Framing the volume's three pairs of national surveys is an introductory chapter, which addresses the entire subject from a bird's-eye view, and a concluding chapter, which, by contrast, delves into the cross-fire of sentiments defining people whose images of America, are both American and Scandinavian. The discussion of America as perceived in Scandinavia sheds new light on intriguing inter-Scandinavian cultural distinctions and borderlines. Countless books and articles, methods and theories, have been devoted to the study of national and cultural identity. Still, the exchanges between such identities and the images they engender - so indispensable for the participants in a global culture - remain clouded by many misconceptions. Images of America in Scandinavia whose editors and authors all have Scandinavian backgrounds, will contribute an improved understanding of the cultural interplay between Scandinavia and the United States of America.

The Norwegians who immigrated to Seattle were a sturdy stock. Perhaps it was due to their ancient history as determined Viking seafarers--or their more recent experiences as tenacious fishermen, farmers, loggers, and carpenters. From the first Norwegians to arrive in 1868 through today, Seattle's Norwegian American community has maintained a remarkable cohesiveness. They participate in Sons and Daughters of Norway and other clubs; enjoy lutefisk dinners, lively music and dance groups, and the annual May 17 parade; boast elaborately knitted sweaters and historic costumes; and labor over language classes and genealogy. The result is a pride of heritage unique to the Norwegian Americans in Seattle and a sinew that binds their community.

The body is increasingly understood as being at the centre of colonial and post-colonial relationships and textual productions. Creating and circulating images of the undisciplined body of the 'other' was and is a critical aspect of colonialism. Likewise, resistance to colonial practices was also frequently corporeal, with indigenous peoples appropriating, parodying, and subverting those European practices which were used to signify the 'civilized' status of the colonizing body. The Body in the Library reads representations of the corporeal in texts of empire; case studies include: • gendered representations of corporeality • medical régimes • ethnography and photography in the Pacific • cultural transvestism in theatre • disease and colonial knowledge generation • 'freak shows' and colonial exhibits • cinematic representations of bodies • geography and the metaphorization of land as a penetrable body • marketing the body • organ transplants and the limits of the post-colonial paradigm In viewing colonialism and resistance as a bodily phenomenon, The Body in the Library enables new perspectives on the process of colonization and resistance. It is an important resource for teachers and students of colonial and post-colonial literatures.

This volume offers unique interdisciplinary views on issues in communication and culture with a central focus on Chinese perspectives as China and the world face the 21st century. These perspectives are based upon comparative data and East-West cross-cultural experience. Seventeen chapters, plus an introductory chapter that places the topics in perspective, report and interpret data here for the first time. The majority of the contributors are Chinese scholars from various disciplines, who now share their research on communication with Western as well as Eastern readers. The common thread of the essays is the way in which communication influences culture and cultural dimensions impact the processes of communication. The authors represent scholars from education, communication studies, mass communication, intercultural communication, sociology, rhetoric, literature, law, linguistics, telecommunications, international relations, journalism, and sociolinguistics. Part I presents cultural perspectives on ethics, East-West relations, translation issues, cross-cultural competence, persuasion, journalistic acculturation, and gender representation in advertisements. Part II addresses international and intercultural communication as seen in comparative campus cultures, cross-cultural interaction between Chinese and Americans, the practice of taijiquan, the media depiction of watching, the legal implications of the internet, and the issues of nation building. Part III focuses on mediated communication issues in Chinese films, China's media campaign for the olympics, Chinese youth's use of Western media, talk radio in China, and the use of new technologies in the post-Cold War era.

On tax day, April 15, 2010, hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets with signs demanding lower taxes on the richest one percent. But why? Rich people have plenty of political influence. Why would they need to publicly demonstrate for lower taxes-and why would anyone who wasn't rich join the protest on their behalf? Isaac William Martin shows that such protests long predate the Tea Party of our own time. Ever since the Sixteenth Amendment introduced a Federal income tax in 1913, rich Americans have protested new public policies that they thought would threaten their wealth. But while historians have taught us much about the conservative social movements that reshaped the Republican Party in the late 20th century, the story of protest movements explicitly designed to benefit the wealthy is still little known. Rich People's Movements is the first book to tell that story, tracking a series of protest movements that arose to challenge an expanding welfare state and progressive taxation. Drawing from a mix of anti-progressive ideas, the leaders of these movements organized scattered local constituencies into effective campaigns in the 1920s, 1950s, 1980s, and our own era. Martin shows how protesters on behalf of the rich appropriated the tactics used by the Left-from the Populists and Progressives of the early twentieth century to the feminists and anti-war activists of the 1950s and 1960s. He explores why the wealthy sometimes cut secret back-room deals and at other times protest in the public square. He also explains why people who are not rich have so often rallied to their cause. For anyone wanting to understand the anti-tax activists of today, including notable defenders of wealth inequality like the Koch brothers, the historical account in Rich People's Movements is an essential guide.

Using Germany as a case study of the impact of American culture throughout a period characterized by a totalitarian system, two destructive wars, ethnic cleansing, and economic disaster, this book explores the political and cultural parameters of Americanization and anti-Americanism.

This volume explores the complex and contradictory ways in which the cultural, scientific and political myth of whiteness has influenced identities, self-perceptions and the process of integration of Nordic immigrants into multicultural and racially segregated American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In deploying central insights from whiteness studies, postcolonial feminist and intersectionality theories, it shows that Nordic immigrants - Danes, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians and Sámi - contributed to and challenged American racism and white identity. A diverse group of immigrants, they could proclaim themselves ‘hyper-white’ and ‘better citizens than anybody else’, including Anglo-Saxons, thus taking for granted the racial bias of American citizenship and ownership rights, yet there were also various, unexpected intersections of whiteness with ethnicity, regional belonging, gender, sexuality, and political views. ‘Nordic whiteness’, then, was not a monolithic notion in the USA and could be challenged by other identities, which could even turn white Nordic immigrants into marginalised figures. A fascinating study of whiteness and identity among white migrants in the USA, Nordic Whiteness will appeal to scholars of sociology, history and anthropology with interests in Scandinavian studies, migration and diaspora studies and American studies.

The first thorough analysis of Scandinavian Americans, examining citizenship, settler colonialism and whiteness in the Civil War era.