Böcker utgivna av Columbia University Press

The notion of landscape typically seems innocuous, associated with leisure and contemplation. Likewise, aesthetics is often seen as apolitical, a matter of subjective tastes and preferences. This book challenges the common understanding of these categories as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities. Alberto L. Siani argues that the concept of landscape helps us overcome deeply ingrained oppositions, such as nature and culture, spirit and flesh, or the environment and the human. Landscape represents the intersection of these categories and therefore provides a helpful vantage point on contemporary predicaments that cannot be understood within dualistic frameworks. An engaged aesthetics shows that landscapes are not simply ways of seeing the world but ways of being in the world, offering practical guidance for inhabiting places ethically. Landscape Aesthetics sheds new light on issues spanning art and its interpretation, environmentalism, temporality, lived spaces, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity. Bringing together a wide range of sources across philosophy and other disciplines as well as personal experience, Siani reveals the key role of landscape and aesthetics in responding to the pressing crises we face today.

How are histories of racial oppression dealt with in contexts of diversity? Chana Teeger tackles this question by examining how young South Africans, born into democracy, confront their country's racist apartheid past in high school history lessons. Drawing on extensive observational, interview, and textual data, Distancing the Past vividly chronicles how students learn that racism is a thing of the past, even as they experience it in their everyday lives. Teeger shows how teachers' desire to avoid conflict between students mirrors a national focus on racial reconciliation, leading to the historical distancing of the recent apartheid past. This historical distancing allows schools to present a façade of transformation. Beneath the surface, however, the lessons reproduce unequal power relations at school and legitimize inequality at the societal level. In documenting these processes, Distancing the Past illuminates the subtle reconfiguration of racism in the era of civil liberties. It shows how acknowledging the racist past is not enough. When the past is remembered--but its legacies ignored--racism can continue unabated in the present. Distancing the Past is a timely account of the remaking of race and inequality in the aftermath of de jure discrimination. It offers vital lessons for other societies grappling with their own racist histories.

As competing American, European, and later Japanese imperial and colonial ambitions spread across the ocean in the nineteenth century, Honolulu emerged as a transnational hub for the exchange of ideas. Rumi Yasutake reveals the pivotal role of women's organizing in this era of rapid globalization, tracing how diverse movements intersected and converged in Hawai'i--with worldwide consequences. The Feminist Pacific examines transnational networks in Hawai'i beginning in 1820, with the arrival of American missionary wives, and through the rise of women's internationalism in the interwar years. It follows an array of suffragists, missionaries, maternalists, and antiwar activists in their international campaigns for peace and social justice that culminated in the formation of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association (PPWA) and subsequent conferences. Yasutake explores how these movements radiated from Honolulu and branched out to the United States, Japan, and China. She illuminates their contradictions, showing how women's striving for collective power went at once in the face of and hand in hand with globalization, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Yasutake underscores how the PPWA and the movements that formed it wrestled with the dichotomies of their world: home and public, domestic and foreign, native and settler, white and nonwhite, feminist and antifeminist. Bridging nineteenth-century Protestant churchwomen's evangelism with twentieth-century feminist internationalism, this book recasts women's global organizing from the perspective of the Pacific.

How do waves break, and what makes good surf? What are dangerous rip currents, and how do you spot one? What should you do if you get caught in one? Australia's best-known surf scientist, Rob "Dr. Rip" Brander, takes readers on a fascinating and entertaining journey to uncover how beaches form and behave, the science of waves and currents, and how beaches respond to storms and climate change. He explains where the sand we lay our towels on came from, how the tides that wash up new treasures each day work, why no two beaches are exactly the same, and why some of them are disappearing. He also explores some of the hazards to watch out for, from rip currents to tsunamis to the (unlikely) event you find yourself swimming with a shark. Whether you're a surfer looking for the perfect wave or you just enjoy hitting the beach with friends and family, this book is a must-read for all ocean lovers.

Harun Farocki was one of the world's most celebrated experimental filmmakers at the time of his death in 2014. In a career spanning over fifty years, the German artist produced more than one hundred works, including political cinema, nonfiction film and video, and art installations, which have been exhibited globally. After his early politically engaged films in Super 8 and 16 mm, Farocki spent many years making independent films and commissions for German public television. In the last phase of his career, he transitioned to creating digital and multichannel installations. He also collaborated with the director Christian Petzold on a dozen films. In addition to his prolific media-making career, Farocki was an incisive critic and editor. This groundbreaking book is an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Farocki's oeuvre, shedding new light on his media experimentation and writings across platforms and venues. Nora M. Alter examines how Farocki's work investigates film and media images: their history, nature, manipulation, changing function, and strategic use. Focusing on interconnected ideas surrounding labor, critique, and war, she shows how his politically committed art is informed by pedagogical strategies that drive viewers to perceive how the media world they inhabit functions. Alter also argues that Farocki's career provides a lens on the history of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking amid shifts in materials and exhibition platforms. Tracing the transformations of Farocki's artistic practice and thought, this book offers new insight into the body of work of one of the most significant media makers of the late twentieth century.

Drawing on first-hand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy.

Drawing on first-hand experience in the State Department's Office of Religion and Global Affairs during the Obama-Trump transition, David T. Buckley traces how the Trump administration's populism affected the foreign policy bureaucracy.

In this groundbreaking book, Matsuoka Shinpei-a leading scholar of noh theater-provides a detailed account of the birth of one of Japan's most celebrated art forms.

Revered by many fundamentalist Shiites and reviled by the West, Hezbollah is considered to be a paradigm for other militant groups wishing to make the promise of Islamic Revolution a reality. Journalist Hala Jaber was granted exclusive and unparalleled access to the inner circle of this organization, and she exposes not only its tactics, but also its history, ideology, and culture.

Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

The renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women's taste as the engine of liberal values.

I Have No Enemies is the definitive biography of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, offering a meticulously researched account of the twists and turns of a remarkable life.

One of the most influential commentaries on the Yijing (I Ching), or Scripture of Change, for the past thousand years has been that of Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Joseph A. Adler's translation of the Yijing includes for the first time in any Western language Zhu Xi's commentary in full.

Having returned to Russia in 1990 after two decades, the writer known as Abram Tertz creates a vivid picture of today's Russian intelligentsia and its role as conscience and critic since the fall of communism, as well as a chilling portrait of economic and political stagnation under Yeltsin.

Analyzing the right to die as a controversial social and political issue, this text examines its development in contemporary public policy. Case studies of policy-making in California, Massachusetts and Florida show the variations that have developed as laws are enacted by each state.

In a work that is both a fascinating social history and an engagingly written guide to the use of historical source material, the authors illuminate the quantititative methodology of social history which allows scholars to study groups of people and aspects of history previously ignored.

This study explores the passion with which Victorian male writers and artists gave meaning to the myth of Perseus and Andromeda and its medieval analogue, the legend of St George and the dragon. It demonstrates how men used the myth to exert their own gender on Victorian culture.

An award-winning biologist presents his moving yet deeply reasoned discussion on the intersection of scientific method and religious faith.

Sanjay Krishnan rereads V. S. Naipaul's work to offer new perspectives on his achievements, shortcomings, trajectory, and complicated legacy. While recognizing the flaws and prejudices that shaped and limited Naipaul's life and art, this book challenges the binaries that have restricted discussions of his writing.