by Janice Boddy (1989)
Based on nearly two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Muslim village in northern Sudan, Wombs and Alien Spirits explores the zâr cult, the most widely practiced traditional healing cult in Africa. Adherents of the cult are usually women with marital or fertility problems, who are possessed by spirits very different from their own proscribed roles as mothers. Through the woman, the spirit makes demands upon her husband and family and makes provocative comments on village issues, such as the increasing influence of formal Islam or encroaching Western economic domination. In accommodating the spirits, the women are able metaphorically to reformulate everyday discourse to portray consciousness of their own subordination. Janice Boddy examines the moral universe of the village, discussing female circumcision, personhood, kinship, and bodily integrity, then describes the workings of the cult and the effect of possession on the lives of men as well as women. She suggests that spirit possession is a feminist discourse, though a veiled and allegorical one, on women's objectification and subordination. Additionally, the spirit world acts as a foil for village life in the context of rapid historical change and as such provides a focus for cultural resistance that is particularly, though not exclusively, relevant to women. -- Publisher description.
Shawn Thomas Odyssey
In 1877, in an enchantment shop on the last of the Faerie roads linking New York City to the Land of the Fey, just after twelve-year-old Oona opts to relinquish her apprenticeship to her uncle, the Wizard, and become a detective, her uncle is stabbed, testing her skills.
David Rieff
In this book, the author looks at L.A., that incarnation of the American dream, and finds the place and the fantasy radically transformed by the new immigrants from Asia and Latin America, who have been arriving in the millions, both legally and illegally, over the past twenty years. What is happening right now in Los Angeles is nothing less than the most visible manifestation of the greatests story of the late twentieth century, the author notes, the movement of the colored peoples of the world into the white world, and in the U.S., the transformation of the country from an anthology of Europe to an anthology of the peoples of the entire planet.
Holly Black and Cassandra Clare
From Holly Black and Cassandra Clare comes the third installment in the New York Times bestselling series that defies what you think you know about the worlds of good and evil.
story by Kazuma Kamachi
A Certain Scientific Accelerator is a must-have sequel to the New York Times Best-selling seriesA Certain Scientific Railgun!