robotrabbit
danish (name), any/all prns, 27, south asian villager in the persian gulf / mainly into nonfic academic writings & the occasional treat (monster romances) / 1st person in my bloodline to read yuri
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My Taste
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1w
Animality and Children's Literature and Film (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
Amy Ratelle
40%
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1w
The Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better
Zoe Weil
Forges a path away from polarization toward ethical problem solving and a more humane, equitable, and healthy society From tackling poverty, to protecting wild spaces, to improving the strength of our communities, deep polarization in our society often prevents us from working collaboratively to solve the problems we face. Based on Zoe Weil’s decades of work as a humane educator, The Solutionary Way offers an antidote to dysfunctional societal dynamics. It provides clear, achievable methods to bridge divides, address the root and systemic causes of seemingly intractable challenges, and create positive change. Grounded in evidence-based optimism and illustrated with dozens of real-world examples, this invaluable resource This exciting and empowering book will appeal to a broad audience, including changemakers, activists, advocates for social and environmental justice and animal protection, business and political leaders, and anyone who yearns to contribute to a healthy, equitable, and humane world.
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2w
Caste and Nature: Dalits and Indian Environmental Politics
Mukul Sharma
Rarely do Indian environmental discourses examine nature through the lens of caste. Whereas nature is considered as universal and inherent, caste is understood as a constructed historical and social entity. Mukul Sharma shows how caste and nature are intimately connected. He compares Dalit meanings of environment to ideas and practices of neo-Brahmanism and certain mainstreams of environmental thought. Showing how Dalit experiences of environment are ridden with metaphors of pollution, impurity, and dirt, the author is able to bring forth new dimensions on both environment and Dalits, without valourizing the latter's standpoint.
Rather than looking for a coherent understanding of their ecology, the book explores the diverse and rich intellectual resources of Dalits, such as movements, songs, myths, memories, and metaphors around nature. These reveal their quest to define themselves in caste-ridden nature and building a form of environmentalism free from the burdens of caste. The Dalits also pose a critical challenge to Indian environmentalism, which has, until now, marginalized such linkages between caste and nature.
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2w
L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema
Allyson Field
L.A. Creating a New Black Cinema is the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The group—including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davis—shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and practice in American cinema, works that reflected the full complexity of Black experiences. This landmark collection of essays and oral histories examines the creative output of the L.A. Rebellion, contextualizing the group's film practices and offering sustained analyses of the wide range of works, with particular attention to newly discovered films and lesser-known filmmakers. Based on extensive archival work and preservation, this collection includes a complete filmography of the movement, over 100 illustrations (most of which are previously unpublished), and a bibliography of primary and secondary materials. This is an indispensible sourcebook for scholars and enthusiasts, establishing the key role played by the L.A. Rebellion within the histories of cinema, Black visual culture, and postwar art in Los Angeles.
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2w
The Absent Body (4)
Drew Leder
The body plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world. Why, then, are we so frequently oblivious to our own bodies? We gaze at the world, but rarely see our own eyes. We may be unable to explain how we perform the simplest of acts. We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body is absent —forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured.
In part 1, Leder explores a wide range of bodily functions with an eye to structures of concealment and alienation. He discusses not only perception and movement, skills and tools, but a variety of "bodies" that philosophers tend to the inner body with its anonymous rhythms; the sleeping body into which we nightly lapse; the prenatal body from which we first came to be. Leder thereby seeks to challenge "primacy of perception." In part 2, Leder shows how this phenomenology allows us to rethink traditional concepts of mind and body. Leder argues that Cartesian dualism exhibits an abiding power because it draws upon life-world experiences. Descartes' corpus is filled with disruptive bodies which can only be subdued by exercising "disembodied" reason. Leder explores the origins of this notion of reason as disembodied, focusing upon the hidden corporeality of language and thought. In a final chapter, Leder then proposes a new ethic of embodiment to carry us beyond Cartesianism.
This original, important, and accessible work uses examples from the author's medical training throughout. It will interest all those concerned with phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, or the Cartesian tradition; those working in the health care professions; and all those fascinated by the human body.
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2w
Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
Edward W. Said
‘A stimulating, elegant yet pugnacious essay’—Observer In this highly acclaimed seminal work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation—a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. In the Afterword, Said examines the effect of continuing Western imperialism.
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2w
Animality and Children's Literature and Film (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
Amy Ratelle
32%
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3w
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Julian Jaynes
National Book Award “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
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3w
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3w
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Anomaly)
Reza Negarestani
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun. 'The Middle East is a sentient entity - it is alive!' concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the 'lubricant' of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...
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robotrabbit is interested in reading...
3w
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Anomaly)
Reza Negarestani
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth's tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun. 'The Middle East is a sentient entity - it is alive!' concludes renegade Iranian archeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the 'lubricant' of historical and political narratives. A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along. Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...
3
1Reply
robotrabbit made progress on...
3w
Animality and Children's Literature and Film (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
Amy Ratelle
23%
3
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robotrabbit commented on aquenetanupi's review of 動物人間 [Dōbutsu Ningen]
3w
spoilers
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From Ring Shout to Bomba: Ethnographic Perceptions and Approaches to Music and Religion in the Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Latin Diasporas
Anthony L Sánchez Cruz
Exploring sounds of the musical rhythms of the Ring Shout and the evocative textures of the Caribbean bomba song and dance, this book presents a comparative musicological and ethnomusicological work that concentrates on the parallel diasporic aspects of history, religion, and music of the Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Latin people. From Ring Shout to Bomba documents how the Gullah/Geechee community has striven to preserve their culture and history throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It carefully investigates the transcultural links among this United States community along the "Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor" and the Afro-Latin communities from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. From Ring Shout to Bomba offers readers past and present archival and ethnographic field research related to these communities by examining their musical and religious customs. It enables audiences to explore the African connections of the Ring Shout with the Latin American and Caribbean "call and response" syncretic religious forms found in Lucumí, Candomblé, and Espiritismo. This book also discusses cultural preservation techniques and reexamines the ethical aspects of both understanding and (re)interpreting Gullah/Geechee and Afro-Latin identities. Such research presents audiences with a different perspective that adds more to the constantly evolving history.
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robotrabbit commented on aquenetanupi's review of 動物人間 [Dōbutsu Ningen]
4w
spoilers
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4w
robotrabbit TBR'd a book
4w
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
Henry Petroski
"Reading Petroski's fine book is not only a delight, it is a necessity."
--Houston Chronicle
How did a simple design error cause one of the great disasters of the 1980s—the collapse of the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel? What made the graceful and innovative Tacoma Narrows Bridge twist apart in a mild wind in 1940? How did an oversized waterlily inspire the magnificent Crystal Palace, the crowning achievement of Victorian architecture and engineering? These are some of the failures and successes that Henry Petroski, author of the acclaimed The Pencil, examines in this engaging, wonderfully literate book. More than a series of fascinating case studies, To Engineer Is Human is a work that looks at our deepest notions of progress and perfection, tracing the fine connection between the quantifiable realm of science and the chaotic realities of everyday life.
"Alert, inquisitive, unspecialized, wholly human...refreshingly eclectic."
--The Spectator
"Henry Petroski is an ardent engineer, and if he writes more good books like this, he might find himself nominated to become the meistersinger of the guild. [This is] a refreshing plunge into the dynamics of the engineering ethos...as straightforward as an I-beam."
--Science
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robotrabbit made progress on...
4w
Animality and Children's Literature and Film (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
Amy Ratelle
12%
2
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4w
Animality and Children's Literature and Film (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature)
Amy Ratelle
Examining culturally significant works of children's culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, Animality and Children's Literature and Film argues that Western philosophy's objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to this end.
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robotrabbit finished a book
4w
Posthumanism (Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature)
Pramod K. Nayar
This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants.
Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and ‘speciesist’ politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism’s roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of ‘normalcy’ in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself.
As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.
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robotrabbit finished a book
4w
Posthumanism (Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature)
Pramod K. Nayar
This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants.
Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and ‘speciesist’ politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanism’s roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of ‘normalcy’ in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself.
As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.
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