Foundational Book Research Articles

English Schooled: International Society Between Hegemony and Jihad

Combating Jihadism: American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation in the War on Terrorism. By Barak Mendelsohn, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 304 pp., $45.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-226-52011-7). Barak Mendelsohn breathes new life into English School theory and policy relevance with Combating Jihadism: American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation . As a state-centric perspective focusing on the rules and order of “international society,” the English School (ES) has been a realist cousin, whereby state interests and power matter but with a hint of sociality defining legitimate action in ways that transcend realist materialism. Just what exactly ES offers in contrast to realism and other theoretical views has not always been clear in the thirty-plus years since Hedley Bull's foundational book, The Anarchical Society . Mendelsohn revisits the perspective, freshens it up with policy-relevant focus on both the transnational terrorism and the age of American hegemony. In so doing, he relates these two as twin forces that international society guards against in its pursuit of survival and stability as a community of sovereign states. While not wholly successful in his theoretical or empirical tasks, he makes a plausible case for taking norms and normative behavior seriously in the study of both counterterrorism and hegemonic orders. Mendelsohn's thesis is that transnational “jihadism” is a threat to international society. He argues that disparate states with their own interests nonetheless come together and cooperate because of a desire to preserve the social order threatened by transnational jihadists. Such various states set aside differences and bear high material costs to do so, even following the “hegemonic” power, the United States, to uphold the survival and stability of international society. But, cooperation is contingent on the hegemon's leadership being …

Table of Contents

Abstract NEWS Companies seeing more value in employee volunteerism Bausch + Lomb, Lions Clubs tackle childhood cataracts SCUTTLEBUTT SPOTLIGHT Food and beverages H. J. Heinz Company The Quaker Oats Company Sara Lee Corp. ConAgra Foods Inc. Advertising and public relations Dentsu Inc. DDB Worldwide Communications Inc. Burson‐Marsteller Manning Selvage & Lee GRANT ALERTS Arts and Culture Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Films National Postal Museum research scholarships Community Development SEVEN Fund grants for enterprisebased poverty programs US Airways Community Foundation Disabilities CVS Caremark Community Grants Research grants for spinal cord injury and rehabilitation Education Toshiba America Foundation Classroom Innovators grants Libri Foundation's Books for Children program Sloan Consortium awards for online education excellence Health AstraZeneca's cardiovascular health care grants Medical Research Foundation for Physical Therapy research grants American Skin Association psoriasis research award Women WHO Foundation grants for women and children

Above and Beyond or Betwixt and Between?

Above and Beyond or Betwixt and Between? Review article on Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, Richard Leppert (eds), Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Ahmanson Foundation Book in the Humanities) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 333pp.NICHOLAS REYLANDEven film music scholars desensitised to advertising hyperbole by the shock and awe tactics of cinematic marketing must have found the promotional claims made in advance of the publication of Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema a tad bold. The copy on the University of California Press's website for this collection makes a series of statements surely designed to raise eyebrows, and perhaps even ire. Cue fanfare:This groundbreaking collection by the most distinguished musicologists and film scholars in their fields gives long overdue recognition to music as equal to the image in shaping the experience of film. Refuting the familiar idea that music serves as an unnoticed prop for narrative, these essays demonstrate that music is a fully imagined and active power in the worlds of film. Even where films do give it a supporting role - and many do much more - music makes an independent contribution. Drawing on recent advances in musicology and cinema studies, Beyond the Soundtrack interprets the cinematic representation of music with unprecedented richness. The authors cover a broad range of narrative films, from the silent era (not so silent) to the present. Once we think beyond the soundtrack, this volume shows, there is no unheard music in cinema.(University of California Press website 2007)'At long last', the deep-throated voiceover artist would growl in the Hollywood trailer for this book, 'a group of the most distinguished musicologists and film scholars' (as opposed, presumably, to those grubbing about in the subdiscipline of film musicology to date) 'has broken new ground by refuting the idea that music goes unnoticed in film' (an issue apparently never before problematised in the literature) 'and by drawing on recent advances in cinema studies and musicology' (but not film music studies) 'the result is unprecedented richness' (in comparison to the impoverished offerings thus far on this topic). One would not wish to imply, of course, that this copy came from the keyboards of Goldmark, Kramer and Leppert, although the rhetoric of their book's introduction may have fanned the copywriter's flames. Therein, earlier work in 'the film music literature' is described as being 'solid' but 'marginal' and as having 'tended to accept without serious challenge the status hierarchy that puts music on the bottom and treats film as above all a visual medium' (2). One cannot help wondering what some of the contributors to this very book (not least the one who penned the pointedly-entitled L'audio-vision back in 1990) might have had to say about that, or the notion that work on the topic over the previous twenty years (the period since the publication of another contributor's groundbreaking study, Unheard Melodies) has merely been 'winking an eye at the presence of music in cinema', or the fact that 'film is also a musical medium' (3).This would indeed be unequivocally ground-breaking work if no one had thought to question such matters before, or if scholars had uttered such thoughts, but without any kind of intellectual refinement. Even a passing acquaintance with recent, and to an extent revisionist, publications in the field of screen music and sound studies reveals, though, that this is not the case. One need only consider the James Buhler, Caryl Flinn and David Neumeyer edited collection Music and Cinema (2000), Anahid Kassabian's Hearing Film (2001), Annette Davison's Hollywood Theory, Non- Hollywood Practice (2004), Steve Lannin's edited collection Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema (2005), the Phil Powrie and Robynn J. Stilwell edited volume Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film (2006), or the manifestos of new journals like the present one or the School of Sound's house publication, to realise that a good deal of fresh spade work has been done. …

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Framing Latina/o Immigration, Education, and Activism

The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. Vol. 2 (1578–1582) (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. Vol. 2 (1578–1582) Keith J. Egan (bio) The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. Vol. 2 (1578–1582). Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2007. 661 pp. $14.95 With the publication of this second volume of the letters of Teresa of Avila, Kieran Kavanaugh, Discalced Carmelite, concludes the translation into English of the writings of Saint Teresa. This project began with the translation of The Book of Her Life in 1976. Kavanaugh’s collaborator in these translations, with the exception of the letters, was Otilio Rodriquez, OCD, who died in 1994. The two scholars also collaborated on the translation of the writings of John of the Cross, the latest edition of which was published in 1991. The first volume of Teresa’s letters was published in 2005 and was reviewed by Professor Jane Ackerman in this journal (vol. 3, no 1, 2003, 137–139). These translations have been published by the Institute of Carmelite Studies whose mission has been to publish Carmelite classics in English and to do so inexpensively. Those who consult volume 2 of Teresa’s letters will need to go to volume one for Kavanaugh’s brief but quite informative Introduction. Helpful also for users of the two volumes of Teresa’s letters is the following essay based on a study of Teresa’s correspondence: Kevin Culligan, OCD, “Teresa of Jesus: A Personality Profile,” Spiritual Life 29 (1983), 131–162. The writings of Teresa of Avila have had a commanding role to play in the retrieval of Western mysticism during the last half century. This Spanish Carmelite saint and first woman doctor of the church (1970), with very little formal education, has composed the acknowledged masterpiece, The Interior Castle, along with other significant texts: The Book of Her Life, The Way of Perfection, Meditations on the Song of Songs as well as the much neglected Book of Her Foundations. Even more neglected have been Teresa’s letters which now have a modern American English version that will alert scholars to the value of these letters. Teresa’s formal treatises are immensely insightful with regular evocations of transcendental moments that move the heart and mind and make one feel that the author is directly addressing the reader. Yet, important aspects of the outsized personality of this Carmelite mystic are revealed only in her letters. Teresa’s correspondence shows her to have been outgoing, warm, gregarious, and energetic, with countless friends with whom she managed to stay intimately engaged. Her correspondence also reveals Teresa to be an able leader of the reform that she instigated as well as an astute manager of the myriad affairs of the reform’s female monasteries and [End Page 129] male house’s friars. Teresa labored unceasingly on behalf of her reform until she died in 1582. The Discalced Carmelites became an independent branch separated from the parent order only after the deaths of both Teresa and John of the Cross. According to Kavanaugh (Letters, vol. 1, 11), Teresa’s letters constitute about one half of her written output. The letters in volume two were composed during the last four years of Teresa’s life, 1578–1582, when issues concerning the Teresian Reform of the Carmelite Order were coming to a head. Teresa was convinced that the best way to insure the success of this reform was to obtain permission from the papacy to establish a separate province in Spain of Carmelite nuns and friars. Letters in this volume show Teresa working tirelessly to gain this permission that was finally granted by papal brief in June of 1580. In March of 1581, Teresa’s dedicated associate, Jerónimo Gracián, was elected the province’s first provincial. This election pleased Teresa, whose closest male friend was Gracián, a friar thirty years Teresa’s junior, but to whom Teresa made a vow of obedience. Teresa’s own words reveal her admiration for this friar, whom she met for the first time in the spring of 1575. Not long afterwards, Teresa wrote to Isabel de Santo Domingo: Oh, Madre, how I have desired that you be with...

Poet Laureate: San Francisco

Page 16 American Book Review The Beat poems in this book pay homage to Jack Kerouac, Wallace Berman, and Bob Kaufman B O O K R E V I E W S Poet Laureate: San Francisco Rob Johnson All That’s Left Jack Hirschman City Lights Foundation Books http://www.citylights.com 86 pages; paper, $10.95 San Francisco poetry has for fifty years been dogged by its Beat legacy. It’s easy to forget that before Allen Ginsberg howled there and Jack Kerouac bummed his way there that Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder and other important poets were already there and had been for a while. They were so pissed off at the Beat incursion that, at the height of San Francisco’s “Poetry Renaissance” in 1956, they refused to be photographed with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso for a Mademoiselle magazine spread. They had real differences with the Beats. As a group, for example, the San Franciscans were much more political than the early Beats. Rexroth was an anarchist, and Snyder was a Wobbly. Ginsberg, of course, became a political poet but somewhat later, and you really don’t want to know Kerouac’s politics (like his friend, William S. Burroughs, he was pretty much a Goldwater Republican with a strong anti-communist bent; at any rate, he never wrote what I would call a “political” poem). Corso, was so appalled by the overwhelming pressure to write political poetry in the 1960s that he stopped writing poetry altogether. Instead, he put his energies into being a drug addict: better a drug addict than a political poet, he believed. San Francisco poetry is still of two minds. There’s that impulse towards anarchy and revolution , but there’s also the continued Beat influence that won’t be brought down to the level of simple politics. In Jack Hirschman’s All That’s Left, a book that commemorates his appointment as San Francisco “Poet Laureate,” we see a personification of these two sides of San Francisco poetry—the impulse to change the world through social protest poetry, and the Beat impulse to view the world more personally and also on a spiritual plane. The Beat poems in the book pay homage to Jack Kerouac, Wallace Berman, and Bob Kaufman. The one on Kerouac is fine indeed, and in the following lines, echoes what Norman Mailer said upon first reading Kerouac’s On the Road (1957): “I was thinking, Oh shit, this guy’s done it. He was there, living it, and I was just an intellectual, writing about it.” Hirshman writes, When I was student young one day the Kerouac way suddenly was felt far and near like an eruption of the American moment I’d only been hanging around or talking about or studying about but not living in…. There’s also a lovely homage to a recently deceased street poet named Suzy that’s witty and supple and personal and very beatific: Poetry’s so sad about not being able to be written by her, it’s gone to a corner and won’t come out until she speaks again. Hirschman’s known, however, as a “political” poet, even though I think his real gift is for the kind of verse quoted above. His political poetry, by contrast , brings to mind Marcel Proust’s observation, “A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.” In “This House of Hunger,” he trades his poetic muse in for stale and sophomoric protest rhetoric: “Fat Exxon and Bechtel / have billions of bux in them. / What pretty profits to set / before King Death!” “The Kick Arcane” shows the seventy-two-year-old poet and veteran of many civil-rights crusades being cursed by a black woman on a bus and then kicked out the door onto the streets. Now, this might have made a fine subject for a darkly ironic and comic poem, but instead the poet drags out the tired saw that our differences have less to do with skin color than with “class” differences. The aging radical Allen Ginsberg wrote a similar poem about being mugged and losing...

Book Review: Empowering Society: An Analysis of Business, Government and Social Development Approaches to Empowerment, by Usha Jumani. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006. 263 pp. $42.95

Book Review: Empowering Society: An Analysis of Business, Government and Social Development Approaches to Empowerment, by Usha Jumani. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006. 263 pp. $42.95

Paradoxical Dyskinesia With Olanzapine

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article LetterFull AccessParadoxical Dyskinesia With OlanzapineRavi Gupta, M.D., , and Sandeep Bansal, M.D., Ravi GuptaSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences, Department of Psychiatry, Dehradun Uttaranchal, India, and Sandeep BansalSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences, Department of Pharmacology, Dehradun, Uttaranchal, IndiaPublished Online:1 Feb 2006AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail SIR: Dyskinesias are the involuntary movements that appear following long-term antipsychotic therapy. They are usually associated with conventional neuroleptic drugs. However, olanzapine has been found recently to cause tardive dyskinesias (TDs).1 Increased duration of neuroleptic exposure has been positively correlated with the occurrence of TD.2 We describe the case of a patient who developed paradoxical orofacial dyskinesias after short-term olanzapine therapy.A 45-year old woman presented with complaints suggestive of manic episode for 2 months. She was a known case of bipolar disorder II, which started 3 years prior. She had suffered one episode of mania in the past and presented during the second episode. Her medical examination was unremarkable. During first episode, she was given haloperidol 20 mg per day, to which she responded well. She continued the dose for 4 months. The patient did not suffer another episode until 2 1/2 years after the first. The second episode progressed gradually, and she was given olanzapine 30 mgs per day in divided doses when she became troublesome. She responded to the drug, but developed orofacial dyskinesias, particularly lip-licking, just after 20 days of treatment. The drug was withdrawn, and the movements disappeared within the next 10 to 15 days.The paradoxical TD has been described as “initial hyperkinesia,” “primary hyperkinesias,” “paradoxical dyskinesia,” and “hypercholinergic dyskinesia.” These movements are phenomenologically similar to TD, but can be distinguished by their early onset during therapy, younger age of patients, and occurs with moderate drug doses.3 The symptoms disappear with the discontinuation or decrease in the dose of the drug, or they may respond to anticholinergics. We suggest that even though the risk for TD is lesser with atypical antipsychotics, they should be judiciously used, especially in cases with known risk factors.References1 Stahl SM (eds.): Antipsychotic agents, in Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis & Practical applications 2nd Edition. New Delhi, Foundation Books, 2003, pp 401-458Google Scholar2 Kane JM, Smith JM: Tardive dyskinesia: prevalence & risk factors, 1959 to 1976. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1982; 39:474–481Google Scholar3 Casey DE: Paradoxical Tardive Dyskinesia, in Movement Disorders in Neurology & neuropsychiatry. Edited by Joseph AB & Young RR. Bangalore, India, Panther Publishers Pvt. Ltd, 1992, pp58-60Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 18Issue 1 February 2006Pages 132-132 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 February 2006 Published in print 1 February 2006

Systematics and the origin of species: An introduction

E rnst Mayr, one of the 20th century's greatest scientists and a principal author of the modern theory of evolution, passed away on February 3, 2005, at the age of 100. From December 16 to 18, 2004, before Mayr's passing, a colloquium on “Systematics and the Origin of Species” sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences was held in his honor. The colloquium's title was the same as that of Mayr's 1942 book (1), generally considered one of the foundation books of the theory of evolution. The 17 papers that follow explore current knowledge about the main topics of Mayr's book. The modern theory of evolution embodies a complex array of biological knowledge centered around Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection couched in genetic terms. It is not one single theory with its corroborating evidence, but a multidisciplinary body of knowledge bearing on biological evolution: an amalgam of well established theories and working hypotheses together with the observations and experiments that support accepted hypotheses (and falsify rejected ones), which jointly seek to explain the evolutionary process and its outcomes. These hypotheses, observations, and experiments originate in disciplines such as genetics, developmental biology, neurobiology, zoology, botany, paleontology, and molecular biology. Darwin's theory of evolution (2) argued that natural selection, the process accounting for the adaptation and diversity of organisms, emerges as a necessary conclusion from two premises: ( i ) the assumption that hereditary variations useful to organisms occur and ( ii ) the observation that more individuals are produced than can possibly survive. A serious difficulty facing Darwin's evolutionary theory was the lack of an adequate theory of inheritance that would account for the preservation through the generations of the variations on which natural selection was supposed to act. Theories then current of “blending inheritance” proposed that offspring struck an average between the …

Book Reviews : SUMMIT GANGULY, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War. Hopes of Peace, New Delhi: Foundation Books, 1997, pp. 182, Rs 395

Book Reviews : SUMMIT GANGULY, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War. Hopes of Peace, New Delhi: Foundation Books, 1997, pp. 182, Rs 395

EU-U.S. Research Collaboration

T he now-classic National Science Foundation book Science, the Endless Frontier by Vannevar Bush, published in 1945, portrays science as an exploration of the unknown and an effort to understand ourselves and the world around us. This approach has proved to be highly successful, generating new discoveries that have had major economic and social impacts and truly changed the societies we live in. In 1997, the European Commission (EC) published a book titled Society, the Endless Frontier-A European Vision of Research and Innovation Policies for the 21st Century. This vision complements classical science and technology-driven policy with a problem-driven approach by directly addressing the many complex issues facing our societies, such as global change, ecological sustainability, genetically modified organisms, and energy and transportation systems. It is becoming increasingly obvious that tackling planetwide issues requires extensive international research collaborations and multidisciplinary approaches, as well as the integration of contributions from basic and applied research, the application of new technologies and industrial processes, socioeconomic analyses, and even ethical considerations. It is also important to integrate the results all the way to policy alternatives with estimates of their costs and benefits, impacts and risks. This approach is being adopted in many countries today. But it is particularly important in Europe, where such questions are often complicated by the varying cultural and linguistic traditions of the 15 European Union (EU) member countries of today, and perhaps more than 30 tomorrow. The landscape of European research and its collaborative aspects is complex. For large-scale facilities, separate organizations have been set up, some of them in collaboration on a global level, such as CERN for particle physics and the European Space Agency for space studies. However, most research is conducted in national programs with national funding. A new initiative—the European Research Area, launched by the EC in January 2000—sets out a strategy for a frontier-free research policy in Europe through improved cooperation between researchers in the member states. About 15 percent of European public research investments are devoted to collaborative efforts, including about 5 percent to the EU research programs. The EU has just launched a new 4-year framework program for research and technological development, with a budget of 15 billion Euros. It has been structured to cover topics in four thematic areas: the life sciences; developing a user-friendly information society; competitive and sustainable growth; and energy, environment, and sustainable development. The majority of funding is devoted to 23 key “actions” that address, in a multidisciplinary manner, areas such as nutrition and health, control of infectious diseases, telecommunication standards and electronic commerce, sustainable transport and mobility, and global change. Such problems require multinational, even global, approaches, and hence they are natural choices for multilateral EU research. As an example of the success of this approach, research on European telecommunication standards, involving industry, the basic research community, and government, has laid the foundation for the worldwide success of the European mobile phone and wireless communication systems, such as Nokia and Vodaphone. Science collaborations on bilateral levels between the United States and many European countries have long and successful traditions. To complement these bilateral arrangements, the EU and United States signed an agreement on cooperation in science and technology in early 1998 to address questions calling for wide international collaborations. Agreements similar to the EU-U.S. collaboration have also been made with other major countries. Many policy-related topics are being debated, and there are conflicting national and societal interests, such as those regarding genetically modified organisms. But this is merely one more reason why these issues should be studied jointly: to arrive at the best solutions before collisions arise in the trade arena or elsewhere. Research collaboration is clearly a non-zero-sum game: It benefits all partners and contributes to the solution of common, complex, and vitally important challenges.

Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization, 1919-1999

At the turn of the century, the United States is on the verge of losing its vote in the General Assembly for non-payment of its arrears. There are eerie parallels between the domestic debate over the United Nations in 1999 and the struggles over the League of Nations in 1919. Why, many ask, are Americans the first to create international organizations and the first to abandon them? What is it about the American political culture that breeds both the most ardent supporters and the most vocal detractors of international organization? And why can't they find any common ground? In seeking to uncover the roots of American ambivalence toward international organization, this political history presents the first major analysis of U.S. attitudes toward both the United Nations and the League of Nations. It traces eight themes that have resurfaced again and again in congressional and public debates over the course of this century: exceptionalism, sovereignty, nativism and racism, unilateralism, security, commitments, reform, and burden-sharing. It assesses recent domestic political trends and calls for the development of two interactive political compacts--one domestic and one international--to place U.S.-UN relations on a new footing. A Century Foundation Book

Performing the Caribbean in American studies

Performing the Caribbean in American Studies Frances R. Aparicio (bio) The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Second Edition. By Antonio Benítez Rojo. Translated by James E. Maraniss. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 350 pages. Price $49.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper). The American in American studies, now mediated by the forces of globalization, still carries the weight of colony and empire. The term has yet to be replaced by the plural, hemispheric and multicultural Americas, despite the scholarly incursions of comparative Americanists such as José David Saldívar and Suzanne Oboler, among others, and the institutional overtures of the American Studies Association (ASA) towards internationalism. 1 The ASA’s historical efforts to establish ties with Americanists on the international sphere, however laudatory, continue to reify the strong boundaries between the “domestic” and the “foreign.” This is most evident in the linguistic attitudes and practices of American Studies, which privilege English over the knowledge of other languages that are internal to the United States yet deemed “foreign” despite historical evidence to the contrary. 2 In addition, American studies has slowly incorporated ethnic studies partly because this field addresses cultural difference clearly within the geopolitical borders of the United States. While African American studies, Chicano studies and Latino studies emerged as domestic fields, focusing with social urgency on the populations and cultures from within, the fact is that migration always already destabilizes any preconceived, [End Page 636] modern notions of nation and identity. Today, American studies as a field constructs itself, epistemologically, linguistically, and socially, within the U.S. borders. It resists being transformed into Studies of the Americas. Yet the growing tensions and fruitful overlap between the American and the Americas are creating new intellectual possibilities for both Latin Americanists and U.S. scholars, as funding previously allocated to race and ethnicity studies is now being funneled into “international” and “global” studies. These brief comments may explain why I am reviewing here Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, now a classic, foundational book in Caribbean studies, eight years after its original publication in Spanish. Its 1992 English translation by James Maraniss, published by Duke University Press, marked its entry into scholarship in English; having received the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize enhanced its visibility within the U.S. academe. To introduce The Repeating Island, now in its second edition in English (1996), to an American studies audience is not only a potentially fruitful, although tardy, gesture but a necessary one as well. Previous reviewers of the book have called it a masterpiece of Cuban studies and an impeccable instance of the Caribbean essay, delimiting the text to the traditional disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism and Caribbean studies. 3 Without failing to summarize Benítez Rojo’s central arguments, however, this review essay will reflect on the need for rethinking the U.S. as also Caribbean and the Caribbean as a major link between South and North Americas. The long, historical ties of the United States to the Caribbean region will be revisited in 1998 as scholars, cultural critics, anthropologists, and historians reflect on the power of imperialism during 1848 and 1898. Thus, it seems fitting to re-read The Repeating Island in 1998 within the context of American studies. The Caribbean, as a geocultural space and as a U.S. satellite for economic and military power, has been a repressed narrative in the construction of the U.S. nation-state. Likewise, Caribbeanists whose work has focused exclusively on the “islands” need to rethink what is “Caribbeanness” beyond geographical boundaries, as Benítez-Rojo exhorts his readers. They also need to relocate it within the U.S. borders, bringing together what have been the discrete spaces of African American and Latino studies, a route which Benítez-Rojo, unfortunately, chooses not to take. As a postmodern text, The Repeating Island is about the impossibility of definitions and, in particular, of defining the Caribbean. It proposes chaos [End Page 637] theory as an interdisciplinary approach, as an alternative to the dominant binary of unity versus diversity that has framed most Caribbean scholarship, an area of inquiry that, according to the author, needs more interlingual...

Captain Watson's travels in America: the sketchbooks and diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1772-1818

From 1816 to 1817, British naval captain Joshua Rowley Watson visited friends in Philadelphia and toured the northeastern United States. During that time he filled two sketchbooks and a diary with impressions of travels that took him to Washington, Boston, and the wilds of the Hudson River valley. Watson's record proves to be a charming and graceful observation of the American scene. With a style reminiscent of eighteenth-century British topographical draftsmen, Watson's watercolors joined the flow of British art in America that ultimately formed and inspired the Hudson River school. Kathleen Foster has now gathered this previously unpublished material into a handsome volume that presents a fresh view of American art, architecture, landscape, and society in the Jeffersonian era. Her book comprises an extended essay on Watson's life and travels, a discussion of his artistic style, a guide to the diary, and the complete diary itself. Of the more than 140 drawings and watercolors, the 18 color and 90 black-and-white reproductions from Watson's work allow an appreciation not only of his considerable talent but also of the early American landscapes he encountered, from scenes along the Schuylkill to Lake George to the Chesapeake. A Barra Foundation Book

Of Stones, Angels and Humans: Michel Serres and the Global City

The cover of Atlas reproduces a Winkel projection of a planisphere; it shows a nocturnal view of the orbis terrarum (fictive since night is not simultaneous around the planet), where the oecumene appears, like an upside down sky, as an immense galaxy made of all the lights of the cities of the world. The inhabited space is now dominated by urban megalopolises; increasingly, the human species seems to be concentrated in cities. Global space appears as the archipelago of the cities of the earth. The planet becomes a city. Arnold Toynbee already had a foreboding that this was the major event of current civilization since the Industrial Revolution. He called this planetary megalopolis Oecumenopolis. However, Toynbee's vision still belonged to the nineteenth century, inasmuch as he saw this extension as a proliferation of the industrial city and its metamorphoses, and of the infinite and boring suburbs that today surround these metropolises everywhere or indeed actually constitute most of them. In reality, in this invasion of the urban form, there is more at stake than the city; this transformation of the ways of inhabiting the city is not simply about the extension of the built environment and population management. Something very different is happening on multiple levels. This is what Michel Serres helps us to understand. He does so without having written explicitly about the urban question, not even in Rome, the Book of Foundations. Nevertheless, it is present in his work everywhere, but in the context of numerous other questions. One of the chapters of Angels, a Modern Myth is called Angeles. It contains no analysis of the urban problems of the Californian metropolis; rather it is the extension of a reflection on global space as a worldwide network of messages, as a space filled with angels, figures of a plural Hermes. The journey from Rome to Los Angeles is in fact a journey that goes from questions of foundations to questions of relations, both being intertwined. These are important questions, which include many others, and pervade all of Serres's work: the relations between local and global, be

Rome: the book of foundations

Rome: the book of foundations

The Paris of Henri IV: architecture and urbanism

King Henri IV of France . . . was not interested in courtly splendor, or books, or the arts; he was notoriously averse to spending money, even on his mistresses. But when it came to embellishing Paris, nothing was too good for him. Henri first entered the city as its sovereign after several sieges and half a century of civil wars, What he found was a decaying and ravaged medieval hodge-podge. By the time he died, in 1610, he had transformed it into one of the great European capitals. Just how he did this is the fascinating (and still relevant) story that Hilary Ballon tells in her admirably documented book. --Olivier Bernier, Wall Street Journal This delightful book elegantly documents Henri IV's architectural programs of 1605-10 . . . and helps us understand the surprisingly gentle humanity and charm that those urban groupings possess. -- New Yorker The Louvre, the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges), the Place and rue Dauphine, the Pont Neuf, and the Ho pital Saint Louis were part of a building program initiated by Henri IV that would be unmatched in Paris for more than two centuries. Drawing on previously untapped notarial archives in Paris's Minutier central, Hilary Ballon provides a rich and original account of the crucial period between 1605 and 1610 when Paris was transformed from a medieval city decimated by war and neglect into a modern capital.An Architectural History Foundation Book

Seventeenth-century Roman palaces: use and the art of the plan

Winner, Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians.Buildings have lives in time, observes Patricia Waddy in this pioneering study of the relation between plan and use in the palaces of the Borghese, Barberini, and Chigi families. Waddy reconstructs what was done at precise moments in a building's life, relating these acts of building to the needs and purposes of the owners and offering a rich understanding of architectural activity in seventeenth-century Rome.In its analysis of the relation between plan and use over the course of several decades, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces provides a valuable measure for estimating architectural changes over time and a basis for reevaluating seventeenth-century design skills. It is also a fascinating account that shows how the requirements of a hierarchical diplomatic society, whose leaders were celibate churchmen, intersected with a tradition of plasticity, flexibility, and revision in the architecture of Rome's major palaces.Waddy first delves into the complex workings of the household to conceptualize a general program for any large Roman palace of the period. She explains the intricate relationships between design and use at a time when elaborate rules of behavior governed the flow of aristocratic life. The activities of households requiring as many as one hundred staff are examined in lively detail as Waddy describes the specialized workplaces and living quarters, the segregated residences for the family's noblewomen and their attendants, seasonal apartments, the circulation of carriages and people, and the settings that reflected the patron's special interests--varying from theater and ball games to art and bathing. She then considers five palaces commissioned by families at the pinnacle of Roman society. The architects range from the well-known Carlo Maderno and Gianlorenzo Bernini to others who are barely remembered.Patricia Waddy is Associate Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University. An Architectural History Foundation Book.

Florentine New Towns, Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages

Winner, Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians.The city of Florence came late to the process of town foundation that reshaped Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, yet the five towns it created are the most complex and artistically accomplished of the entire new town tradition.Florentine New Towns is an original and comprehensive study of an important episode in late Medieval urbanism. It uncovers the root of urban phenomena familiar since the Renaissance but shown here to have developed much earlier. On the basis of archival evidence unknown for any other medieval founded towns, Friedman demonstrates that the Tuscan new towns of San Giovanni, Castelfranco di Sopra, Terranuova, Scarperia, and Firenzuola were created by men recognized as professional designers by 14th-century Florence. He identifies them and analyzes their design process, including the geometry of sines and chords on which two of the new towns are based.During the period from 1299 to 1350 when Florence undertook its foundation of towns, it was in the process of a transformation that was central to the formation of the modern European city. This was a time when the merchant class gained control of government and when government took charge of the physical environment of the city. A new urban ideal emerged, Friedman points out, that was only partly realized in Florence but which found its fullest expression in the planners' comprehensive schemes for these new towns.David Friedman is Associate Professor of History in the Architecture Department at MIT. An Architectural History Foundation Book.

Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia. By Dell Upton. Architectural History Foundation Books 10. New York: The Architectural History Foundation, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986. xxii + 278 pp.

Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia. By Dell Upton. Architectural History Foundation Books 10. New York: The Architectural History Foundation, and Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1986. xxii + 278 pp. - Volume 58 Issue 2