Seduced by the Familiar

Title: Seduced by the Familiar : Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema
Author: M.K. Raghavendra
ISBN:9780195696547
Binding: Hardback
Date: August 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 362
Price: Rs 695/-


Description
Seduced by the Familiar looks at contemporary social history from the perspective of popular Indian cinema. M.K. Raghavendra interprets a wide range of films––including Sant Tukaram (1936), Baazi (1951), Sangam (1964), Sholay (1975), Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994), and the recent Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (2006)––in the context of events like colonial rule, Independence, the Indo–Chinese War, the political conduct of Indira Gandhi, and the economic liberalization initiated in the 1990s.



Locating his approach within the body of scholarship on the subject, Raghavendra creates the basis for a new reading of Indian popular cinema based on its narrative strategies. He examines Indian popular cinema’s ‘grammar’––its definition of space, time, and causality, as well as its ‘voice’, reliance on melodrama, ‘aggregate’ nature, and moral preoccupations. A large number of films are analysed chronologically in this context to provide a consistent (and often surprising) interpretation of film motifs.



A significant advance for film studies, Seduced by the Familiar makes a vital contribution to the reading of Indian popular culture. Lucid and persuasive, this book consciously avoids the jargon associated with the study of cinema today and is accessible not only to students and teachers of film and cultural studies, but also to lay readers.





About the Author


M.K. Raghavendra Freelance film critic and scholar living in Bangalore. He writes for a number of international and Indian film journals, and is one of the founder editors of Deep Focus. He has taught cinema in India and abroad and has also been on several film festival juries. Raghavendra was awarded the ‘Best Film Critic Award for 1996–Swarna Kamal’ by the President of India.





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WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution

Title: WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution
Author: Cornelia H. Butler (Editor), Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Editor)
ISBN 10: 0914357999ISBN-13: 978-0914357995
Binding: Vinyl Bound
Date: (March 2, 2007)
Publisher: The MIT Press
Number of Pages: 512 pages
Price: $ 59.95

Product Description
There had never been art like the art produced by women artists in the 1970s—and there has never been a book with the ambition and scope of this one about that groundbreaking era. WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period—Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovič, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others—as well as important works made in those years by artists whose whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.

The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media—from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video—arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.
Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics—including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism—provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.
for more info http://www.moca.org/wack/

In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal

Title: In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (Hardcover)
Author: Niklaus Largier , Graham Harman (Translator)
ISBN-10: 189095165X, ISBN-13: 978-1890951658
Binding: Hardcover
Date: 1 edition (April 1, 2007)
Publisher: Zone Books
Number of Pages: Zone Books
Price: $37.00

Product Description

In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal is a new history of voluntary flagellation in Europe, from its invention in medieval religious devotion to its use in the modern pornographic imagination. Working with a wide range of religious, literary, and medical texts and images, Niklaus Largier explores the emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual practices. From early modern pornography to the Marquis de Sade and the fantasies of Swinburne and Joyce, the erotic and devotional imagination drew on the whip.

Largier explores how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation problematized the medieval culture of arousal. The stimulating qualities of medieval visual displays, especially flagellant practices, processions, and spectacles, were subjected to a criticism that sought to control the imagination. In modern bourgeois life the practice, effects, and imagery of flagellation became a central site of investigation into concerns and anxieties about exercising emotional self-control and censoring fantasy. Modern references to flagellant practice in the works of Swinburne, Proust, and Joyce testified not only to a "decadent" fascination with "medieval" cultures or "perverse sexuality," but also to a fascination that nineteenth-century censorship, informed by psychopathological discourses, had obliterated. Such evocations of flagellation, Largier explains, were attempts to recover a culture of stimulation and imagination—both erotic and devotional—that transcended the modern boundaries of sexuality.

About the Author

Niklaus Largier is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit and Diogenes der Kyniker. He is also the editor of the selected writings of Meister Eckhart.

Muslims and Media Images News versus Views

Title: Muslims and Media Images News versus Views
Author: Ather Farouqui
ISBN: 9780195694956
Binding: Hardback
Date: August 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 354
Price: 695/-
The massive reach and influence of media commentary on incidents like 9/11, the 2005 terrorist attack on the London underground, the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, and the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, makes discussions on popular representations of Muslim peoples and cultures universally topical and relevant. The situation is particularly complex in India, where Muslims form an intrinsic part of democratic civil society, yet continue to carry the baggage of history, especially Partition.
How do the media view Indian Muslims in an age of global Islamic extremism? How far is jihadi pan-Islamism a part of the popular Indian Muslim consciousness? How are Indian Muslims dealing with media distortions of a delicate, nuanced issue? This volume raises these pertinent questions and seeks answers to them.
The contributors—well-known media commentators, scholars, and activists—focus on the politics of Muslim identity, the portrayal of the community in the media, and its relationship with civil society. They analyse the contours of mass politics—especially prevalent in northern India—based on the stereotyping of Muslims. The essays also discuss the challenges and concerns of a people wrecked by powerful internal churning and debates on identity. In fact, the increasing radicalization in the community in the face of heightened global mistrust and isolation is attributed to some of these tensions. (http://www.oup.co.in/)

Dalit Movement in IndiaLocal Practices, Global Connections

Title: Dalit Movement in IndiaLocal Practices, Global Connections
Author: Eva-Maria Hardtmann
ISBN 13: 9780195697841, ISBN10: 0195697847
Binding: hardbackDate: November 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press Number of Pages: 304 pages
Price: 675/-

Chaste Wives and Prostitute Sisters

Title: Chaste Wives and Prostitute SistersPatriarchy and Prostitution among the Bedias of India
Author: Anuja Agrawal
ISBN: 978-0-415-43077-7
Binding: Hardback
Date: 01/04/2007
Publisher: Routledge India
Number of Pages:
Price: 650/-

About the Book

This book is an anthropological study of the unusual coincidence of prostitution and patriarchy among an extremely marginalized group in north India, the Bedias, who are also a de-notified community.

It is the first detailed account of the implications of a systematic practice of familial prostitution on the kinship structures and marriage practices of a community. This starkly manifests among the Bedias in the clear separation between sisters and daughters who engage in prostitution and wives and daughters-in-law who do not. The Bedias exemplify a situation in which prostitution of young unmarried women is the mainstay of the familial economy of an entire social group. Tracing the recent origins of the practice in the community, the author goes on to explore the manner in which this familial economy manifests itself in the lives of individual women and the kind of family groupings it produces. She then examines the repercussion this economy has on the lives of Bedia men, how the problem of their marriage is resolved, and how the Bedia wives become repositories of female purity which otherwise stands jeopardized by Bedia sisters engaged in prostitution. (From http://www.routledge.com/)

The Last Jews of Kerala

Title: The Last Jews of Kerala

Author: Edna Fernandes

ISBN13: 9780670081479

Binding: PaperbackPublishing

Date: October 2008

Publisher: Penguin , Vikin g

Number of Pages: 216 pp

Price: Rs 499.00

Separated by a narrow stretch of swamp-like waters, and distinguished by the colour of their skin, the Black Jews and the White Jews have been locked in a rancorous feud for centuries. Only now, when their combined number has diminished to less than 50 and they are on the threshold of extinction, have the two remaining Jewish communities in south India begun to realise that their destiny, and their undoing, is the same. Living in Cochin alongside this last generation, Edna Fernandes tells their story from the illustrious arrival of their ancestors from the court of King Solomon, through their long heyday of wealth, tolerance and privilege to their present twilit existence, as synagogues crumble into disuse and weddings disappear, leaving only funerals.