Lost Lineage

Gita leads us from spiritual infancy to maturity, impulsive irrationality to intelligent rationalism, and agitation to tranquility. ‘G-OO-D’ contains two ‘O’s between ‘G’, the God, and ‘D’, the Devil. First ‘O’ near ‘G’ denotes Obeisance to God; and second ‘O’, near Devil, denotes Obfuscation. Eliminate Obfuscation from life to see God in everything ‘Good’. Ego and prejudice are the earplugs that stop us from listening to inner voice of God. Enjoy the 3 D film of life by wearing spectacle of Anaasakti, the indifference. Orthodoxy is the peel of a banana whose pulp is Dharm. We shouldn’t set foot on the peel and slip into gutter but relish soul-nourishing pulp. Our senses must follow our commands like the ‘Genie’ of Aladdin’s lamp. The best batsman defends his wicket by driving every ball to boundary but the less skilled runs to score; and the least skilled is bowled out. Dharm appears as the ferocious tiger Richard Parker in the film ‘Life of Pi’. Initially Pi struggles to save himself from tiger; then it suddenly dawns on him that the tiger is an indispensible anchor of his life in the boat. His simple attitudinal change saves the beast and himself.

Human bodies have been represented and defined in various ways across different cultures and historical periods. As an object of interpretation and site of social interaction, the body has throughout history attracted more attention than perhaps any other element of human experience. The essays in this volume explore the manifestations of the body in Italian society from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Adopting a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, these fresh and thought-provoking essays offer original perspectives on corporeality as understood in the early modern literature, art, architecture, science, and politics of Italy. An impressively diverse group of contributors comment on a broad range and variety of conceptualizations of the body, creating a rich dialogue among scholars of early modern Italy. Contributors: Albert R. Ascoli, University of California, Berkeley; Douglas Biow, The University of Texas at Austin; Margaret Brose, University of California, Santa Cruz; Anthony Colantuono, University of Maryland, College Park; Elizabeth Horodowich, New Mexico State University; Sergius Kodera, New Design University, St. Pölten, Austria; Jeanette Kohl, University of California, Riverside; D. Medina Lasansky, Cornell University; Luca Marcozzi, Roma Tre University; Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University; Katharine Park, Harvard University; Sandra Schmidt, Free University of Berlin; Bette Talvacchia, University of Connecticut

This book traverses the cultural landscape of Colombia through in-depth analyses of displacement, local and global cultures, human rights abuses, and literary and media production. Through an exploration of the cultural processes that perpetuate the "darker side" of Latin America for global consumption, it investigates the "condition" that has led writers, filmmakers, and artists to embrace (purposefully or not) the incessant violence in Colombian society as the object of their own creative endeavors. In this examination of mass-marketed cultural products such as narco-stories, captivity memoirs, gritty travel narratives, and films, Herrero-Olaizola seeks to offer a hemispheric approach to the role played by Colombia in cultural production across the continent where the illicit drug trade has made significant inroads. To this end, he identifies the "Colombian condition" within the parameters of the global economy while concentrating on the commodification of Latin America’s violence for cultural consumption. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Publisher description

Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema and Internet, and the Korean Wave, Sheng-mei Ma's Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity probes into the conjoinedness of West and East, of modernity's illusion and nothing's infinitude. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intuition, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to the experience of diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism. The book's first two chapters trace the Asian pursuit of modernity into nothing, as embodied in horror film and the gaming motif in transpacific literature and film. Chapters three through eight focus on the borderlands of East and West, the edges of humanity and meaning. Ma examines how loss occasions a revisualization of Asia in children's books, how Asian diasporic passing signifies, paradoxically, both "born again" and demise of the "old" self, how East turns "East" or the agent of self-fashioning for Anglo-America, Asia, and Asian America, how the construct of "bugman" distinguishes modern West's and East's self-image, how the extreme human condition of "non-person" permeates the Korean Wave, and how manga artists are drawn to wartime Japan. The final two chapters interrogate the West's death-bound yet enlightening Orientalism in Anglo-American literature and China's own schizophrenic split, evidenced in the 2008 Olympic Games.

"The present book is intended as a progress report on [the] synthetic approach to evolution as it applies to the plant kingdom." With this simple statement, G. Ledyard Stebbins formulated the objectives of Variation and Evolution in Plants, published in 1950, setting forth for plants what became known as the "synthetic theory of evolution" or "the modern synthesis." The pervading conceit of the book was the molding of Darwin's evolution by natural selection within the framework of rapidly advancing genetic knowledge. At the time, Variation and Evolution in Plants significantly extended the scope of the science of plants. Plants, with their unique genetic, physiological, and evolutionary features, had all but been left completely out of the synthesis until that point. Fifty years later, the National Academy of Sciences convened a colloquium to update the advances made by Stebbins. This collection of 17 papers marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stebbins' classic. Organized into five sections, the book covers: early evolution and the origin of cells, virus and bacterial models, protoctist models, population variation, and trends and patterns in plant evolution.