Mother Earth

Sample

Nancy Frazier

"The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History presents a new perspective on art history. In keeping with today's students, who are interested in more than just the details of connoisseurship and provenance, it takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon literature, history, psychology, geography, economics, and other areas to set important artistic advances in a cultural context. With more than 1500 entries, ranging in length from 150 to 600 words, this is a concise yet highly readable work.". "It also differs from similar references, which tend to be Eurocentric, by giving relatively more space to American art, artists, and architects; to the work of women artists; to sometimes controversial post-modern ideas; and to the words of the artists themselves, quoted in most of the major entries."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Odile Goerg

Les séances ont commencé dans les rues, les cours, au fond des cafés. Puis surgirent les salles aux noms grandioses, tout droit venus d'Europe : Rex, Vox, Palace ou Palladium... Nous sommes en Afrique subsaharienne, sous domination française ou britannique, dans la période de l'entre-deux-guerre : Fantômas, Tarzan, Les Trois Mousquetaires, King Kong font désormais partie d'un paysage culturel partagé. Tandis que John Wayne ou Gary Cooper deviennent des modèles pour des générations d'adolescents en quête de repères. Le 7e art est bien perçu par les populations comme un moyen d'échapper, provisoirement, à un quotidien marqué par la colonisation. Et le lieu de projection comme un espace étrange où Noirs et Blancs se côtoient sans se mêler, où s'exerce une censure qui ne dit pas son nom, où l'on apprend, aussi, que les Européens ne sont pas invincibles, que leurs moeurs ne sont pas irréprochables et leur système politique pas exempt de critiques...

Sample

Sandy Isenstadt

"In The Modern American House, Sandy Isenstadt examines how architects, interior designers, and landscape designers worked to visually enhance spatial perception in middle-class houses. The desire for spaciousness reached its highest pitch where it was most lacking, in the small, single-family houses that came to be the cornerstone of middle-class life in the nineteenth century. In direct conflict with actual dimensions, spaciousness was linked to a tension unique to the middle-class: between spatial aspirations and financial limitations. Although rarely addressed in a sustained fashion by theorists and practitioners: Isenstadt argues that spaciousness was central to the development of modern American domestic architecture, with explicit strategies for perceiving space being pivotal to modern house design. Through professional endorsement, concern for visual space found its way into discussion on the course of a century of real estate taste and law. This book documents how visual space came to be internalized as a cultural value."--Jacket.

Sample

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

The U.S.-Mexico border region is home to anthropologist Carlos Velez-Ibanez. Into these pages he pours nearly half a century of searching and finding answers to the Mexican experience in the southwestern United States. He describes and analyzes the process, as generation upon generation of Mexicans moved north and attempted to create an identity or "sense of cultural space and place." In today's border fences he also sees barriers to how Mexicans understand themselves and how they are fundamentally understood. From prehistory to the present, Velez-Ibanez traces the intense "bumping" among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Mexicans, as Mesoamerican population and ideas moved northward. He demonstrates how "cultural glue" is constantly replenished through strong family ties that reach across both sides of the border. The author describes ways in which Mexicans have resisted and accommodated the dominant culture by creating communities and by forming labor unions, voluntary associations, and cultural movements. He analyzes "the distribution of sadness," or overrepresenation of Mexicans in poverty, crime, illnes, and war, and shows how that sadness is balanced by creative expressions of literature and art, especially mural art, in the ongoing search for space and place. Here is a book for the nineties and beyond, a book the relates to NAFTA, to complex questions of immigration, and to the expanding population of Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico border region and other parts of the country. An important new volume for social science, humanities, and Latin American scholars, Border Visions will also attract general readers for its robust narrative and autobiographical edge. For all readers, the book points to new ways of seeing borders, whether they are visible walls of brick and stone or less visible, infinitely more powerful barriers of the mind.