Intimate Outsiders

DIVComparative study of 19th-century representations of Ottoman harems that considers both the tradition of British paintings and writings about harems as well as the perspectives of Ottoman women who commissioned their own harem portraits./div

The Jewish community of Rome is the oldest Jewish community in Europe. It is also the Jewish community with the longest continuous history, having avoided interruptions, expulsions, and annihilations since 139 BCE. For most of that time, Jewish Romans have lived in close contact with the largest continuously functioning international organization: the Roman Catholic Church. Given the church’s origins in Judaism, Jews and Catholics have spent two thousand years negotiating a necessary and paradoxical relationship. With engaging stories that illuminate the history of Jews and Jewish-Catholic relations in Rome, Intimate Strangers investigates the unusual relationship between Jews and Catholics as it has developed from the first century CE to the present in the Eternal City. Fredric Brandfon innovatively frames these relations through an anthropological lens: how the idea and language of family have shaped the self-understanding of both Roman Jews and Catholics. The familial relations are lopsided, the powerful family member often persecuting the weaker one; the church ghettoized the Jews of Rome longer than any other community in Europe. Yet respect and support are also part of the family dynamic—for instance, church members and institutions protected Rome’s Jews during the Nazi occupation—and so the relationship continues. Brandfon begins by examining the Arch of Titus and the Jewish catacombs as touchstones, painting a picture of a Jewish community remaining Jewish over centuries. Papal processions and the humiliating races at Carnival time exemplify Jewish interactions with the predominant Catholic powers in medieval and Renaissance Rome. The Roman Ghetto, the forcible conversion of Jews, emancipation from the Ghetto in light of Italian nationalism, the horrors of fascism and the Nazi occupation in Rome, the Second Vatican Council proclamation absolving Jews of murdering Christ, and the celebration of Israel’s birth at the Arch of Titus are interwoven with Jewish stories of daily life through the centuries. Intimate Strangers takes us on a compelling sweep of two thousand years of history through the present successes and dilemmas of Roman Jews in postwar Europe.

Stepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy examines language use, laws, cultural stereotypes, media images, and social policies and practices to create an understanding of how predominant views about stepfamilies and stepfamily members are constructed within society. As the rates of divorce and remarriage continue to increase, it is more important than ever to overcome nuclear family ideology and abandon the model of research that compares stepfamilies with nonstepfamilies. This book shows you how honor and empowerment can be attained in new family structures and how alternative kin networks can be just as healthy as the traditional nuclear family unit.As this book examines the ability of different societies to integrate different family forms into mainstream notions of "family," you will realize the damaging effects of treating stepfamilies as incomplete, undesirable institutions. In fact, Stepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy will challenge your notions of family over and over again, as it discusses: key relationships in stepfamilies stepfather involvement in parenting after remarriage meaning of gender in a stepfamily differences in "investment" between biological and nonbiological parents demographic change and significant shifts in the social and cultural implications of stepfamilies attempting to reconstruct a household like that of a previous marriage the impact of stereotypes on the internal dynamics of stepfamilies and on the interactions of stepfamilies with outsiders the absence of guidelines and cultural norms for role performance and problem solving in stepfamiliesStepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy discusses both the difficulties of forming new families and households as well as the factors that promote family cohesiveness and integration in stepfamilies. From stereotypes of stepmothers to ambiguous legal relationships to child maltreatment in stepfamilies to sibling relations, there isn't much that the penetrating lens of this book leaves uncovered.

Hospitality in a Time of Terror: Strangers at the Gate offers a reading of hospitality that suggests the encounter with strangers is at the core of cultural production and culture itself in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It documents the significance of hospitality after the terrorist attacks, particularly as such an ethics is so provocatively raised or disavowed by a predominantly visual and cultural archive that has been and continues to be consumed by millions of people around the world. This book utilizes works of cultural memory, film, art and literature that show the breadth of hospitality’s influence but that offer a depth of insight, historical specificity, and theoretical intensity that only a product created in the aftermath of 9/11 allows. The September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City, for example, is best understood as an institution defined by the question of hospitality, particularly as hospitality is engaged or disavowed through an experience with loss. This bookalso considers how hospitality might function in consideration of the violence perpetuated against bodies marked by discourses of race, gender, and sexuality, as is the case in the 2011 film, Zero Dark Thirty, and separately explores how alternative modes of hospitality are enabled by the fluid and dynamic space of the street and the urban art found there. The final chapter examines Don DeLillo's 2007 novel Falling Man, and argues that the novel demonstrates a sustained engagement with hospitality through the figure of organic shrapnel, a metaphor that suggests the possibility of being literally and figuratively embedded by another. The purpose of this book is to point out the diverse and even devastating ways that hospitality appears in ways that remind us that, if hospitality as we understand it is failing, it matters more than ever how we deploy it.

In this wholly revised second edition, Michael Edelstein draws or iis thiffy years as a community activist tc provide a much-expanded theoretical foundation for understanding the psychosocial impacts of toxic contaminagtion. Informed by social psychological theory and an extensive survey of documented cases of toxic exposure, and enlivened by excerpts drawn from more than one thousand Interviews with victims, Contaminated Communities, Second Edition, presents, a candid portrayal of the toxic victim's experience and the key stages in the course of toxic disaster. The second edition introduces dozens of new cases and provvides expanded considerations of environmental justice, environmental racism, environmental turbulence, and environmental stigma, as well as a fully articulated theory of "lifescape." The new edition moves past the well-charted role of reactive environmentalism to explore issues for a proactivist approach that employs a "third path" of social learning, sustainable innovation, consensus building, and community empowerment.

This new volume of essays marks eighty years since the death of Marmaduke Pickthall. His various roles as translator of the Qurʾan, traveller to the Near East, political journalist writing on behalf of Muslim Turkey, and creator of the Muslim novel are discussed. In later life Pickthall became a prominent member of the British Muslim community in London and Woking, co-worker with Muslims in the Indian subcontinent, supporter of the Khilafat movement, and editor of the journal Islamic Culture under the patronage of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Marmaduke Pickthall: Islam and the Modern World makes an important contribution to the field of Muslims in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Contributors are: Humayun Ansari, Adnan Ashraf, James Canton, Peter Clark, Ron Geaves, A.R. Kidwai, Faruk Kokoglu, Andrew C. Long, Geoffrey P. Nash, M. A. Sherif and Mohammad Siddique Seddon.

Acknowledging the significance of Edward Said’s Orientalism for contemporary discourse, the contributors to this volume deconstruct, rearrange, and challenge elements of his thesis, looking at the new conditions and opportunities offered by globalization. What can a renewed or reconceptualized Orientalism teach us about the force and limits of our racial imaginary, specifically in relation to various national contexts? In what ways, for example, considering our greater cross-cultural interaction, have clichés and stereotypes undergone a metamorphosis in contemporary societies and cultures? Theoretically, and empirically, this book offers an expansive range of contexts, comprising the insights, analytical positions, and perspectives of a transnational team of scholars of comparative literature and literary and cultural studies based in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, USA, Singapore, Taiwan, and Turkey. Working with, through and beyond Orientalism, they examine a variety of cultural texts, including the novel, short story, poetry, film, graphic memoir, social thought, and life writing. Making connections across centuries and continents, they articulate cultural representation and discourse through multiple approaches including critical content analysis, historical contextualization, postcolonial theory, gender theory, performativity, intertextuality, and intersectionality. Given its unique approach, this book will be essential reading for scholars of literary theory, film studies and Asian studies, as well as for those with a general interest in postcolonial literature and film.

Many liberals consider CCTV surveillance in public places - particularly when it is as extensive as it is in England - to be an infringement of important privacy-based rights. An influential report by the House of Lords in 2009 also took this view. However there has been little public, or academic, discussion of the underlying principles and ethical issues. What rights of privacy or anonymity do people have when abroad in public space? What is the rationale for these rights? In what respect does CCTV surveillance compromise them? To what extent does the state's interest in crime prevention warrant encroachment upon such privacy and anonymity rights? This book offers the first extended, systematic treatment of these issues. In it, the author develops a theory concerning the rationale for the entitlement to privacy and anonymity in public space, based on notions of liberty and dignity. She examines how CCTV surveillance may compromise these rights, drawing on everyday conventions of civil inattention among people in the public domain. She also considers whether and to what extent crime-control concerns could justify overriding these entitlements. The author's conclusion is that CCTV surveillance should be appropriate only in certain restrictively-defined situations. The book ends with a proposal for a scheme of CCTV surveillance that reflects this conclusion.