Return To Culture

In an examination of cultural change in the post-Cold War era, this work addresses a series of questions covering topics such as the lack of interest in culture and identity in IR theory, and the case for rethinking the contemporary theoretical reach of the concepts.

The Culture Book is a practical guide to building incredible corporate cultures. It is for everyone who believes in the power of culture, and anyone who wants to affect positive change wherever they work.Within its pages you'll find the best stories that we've encountered in years of hands-on fieldwork, paired with proven, practical frameworks that you can get started with right now.

More than any other decade, the sixties capture our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King Jr. declaring “I have a dream!” or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels, the revolutionary sixties resonates around the world: China’s communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets, calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War. In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

Updated 2nd Edition! If you were lucky, you knew about and were prepared for culture shock when you moved overseas, but unless you are very lucky, you probably don’t know about and are not prepared for reverse culture shock. And you should be. Most expats find coming home after an overseas assignment more difficult than adjusting to a foreign culture—and very few organizations and companies prepare people for the experience. Veteran trainer and consultant Craig Storti sketches the workplace challenges faced by returning businessmen and women as well as the re-entry issues of spouses, younger children, and teenagers. He also addresses in detail the special issues faced by exchange students, international development volunteers, and military and missionary personnel and their families. If you’re about to relocate abroad, are already living abroad, about to come home, or already home, this book walks you through the biggest adjustments, personal and professional, and in this new edition presents a complete do-it-yourself repatriation workshop to help you identify and address your individual readjustment issues.

Discover the evolution of the artisanal movement from the fringes of the 1970s to the spike of domesticity—home-cooking, gardening, and DIY crafting—caused by COVID-19 and what it means for the future of work and American culture. In the 1950s, America was a world of immaculate grocery stores, brightly packaged consumer goods, relentless big brand advertising, homes that were much too clean, and diets so rich in salt, sugar, fat, and preservatives you nearly have a heart attack just thinking of them. And while this approach made a great fortune for large consumer packaged goods companies it has been detrimental to American’s overall health and wellbeing. Then, towards the end of the 20th century, Alice Waters and other pioneers figured out how to market natural, handmade, small-batch products to the American consumer again—and the rest is history. Now, we are in the third wave of a revolution. Thanks to COVID-19, millions of Americans went from being consumers of artisanal goods to being producers. People in the mainstream are baking bread, keeping bees, growing vegetables, and even raising chickens. Gardens are flourishing, workshops are growing, and sewing machines are whirring. Thousands have left the cities for the countryside, and if their companies don’t require it, they might never return. Return of the Artisan is a collection of stories and interviews with artisanal businesses across America including family farms and collectives. This book explores their business models, their motivations, and explores how you can join them by turning your own hobby or passion into your work. Whether you want to make this a profession or simply enjoy providing artisanal goods to your family and friends, this book is a must-have for navigating the ups and downs of the latest artisanal revolution.

The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture explores the re-invention of the early European Baroque within the philosophical, cultural, and literary thought of postmodernism in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Gregg Lambert argues that the "return of the Baroque" expresses a principle often hidden behind the cultural logic of postmodernism in its various national and cultural incarnations, a principal often in variance with Anglo-American modernism. Writers and theorists examined include Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Octavio Paz, and Cuban novelists Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy. A highly original and compelling reinterpretation of modernity, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture answers Raymond Williams' charge to create alternative national and international accounts of aesthetic and cultural history in order to challenge the centrality of Anglo-American modernism.

In 1957, Richard Altick's groundbreaking work The English Common Reader transformed the study of book history. Putting readers at the centre of literary culture, Altick anticipated-and helped produce-fifty years of scholarly inquiry into the ways and means by which the Victorians read. Now, A Return to the Common Reader asks what Altick's concept of the 'common reader' actually means in the wake of a half-century of research. Digging deep into unusual and eclectic archives and hitherto-overlooked sources, its authors give new understanding to the masses of newly literate readers who picked up books in the Victorian period. They find readers in prisons, in the barracks, and around the world, and they remind us of the power of those forgotten readers to find forbidden texts, shape new markets, and drive the production of new reading material across a century. Inspired and informed by Altick's seminal work, A Return to the Common Reader is a cutting-edge collection which dramatically reconfigures our understanding of the ordinary Victorian readers whose efforts and choices changed our literary culture forever.

Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory.