Meke, a traditional rhythmic dance accompanied by singing, signifies an important piece of identity for Fijians. Despite its complicated history of colonialism, racism, censorship, and religious conflict, meke remained a vital part of artistic expression and culture. Evadne Kelly performs close readings of the dance in relation to an evolving landscape, following the postcolonial reclamation that provided dancers with political agency and a strong sense of community that connected and fractured Fijians worldwide. Through extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork in both Fiji and Canada, Kelly offers key insights into an underrepresented dance form, region, and culture. Her perceptive analysis of meke will be of interest in dance studies, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, anthropology and performance ethnography, and Pacific Island studies.

Too often Christians drift from the creativity that is a vital part of everyday living. This can lead to discouragement in the valleys and shortsightedness on the mountaintops. Visionary and prophetic leader Jill Austin invites readers to take a closer look at the promises of destiny. No heart is truly fulfilled until it is awakened to Jesus's love and his call to save the lost. Dancing with Destiny helps readers discover their deepest dreams, follow the Holy Spirit to the heart of Jesus, and move in divine strategies. With inspiring personal examples and unusual insight into the lives of biblical dreamers, lovers, and warriors, Austin shows readers how to use their God-given creativity and authority to move in spiritual power.

Jerry and Chungliang share a long friendship and a lifelong passion for helping others discover the warrior's path of living a fully engaged life. They also share an understanding that athletics and fitness can serve as vehicles to transport us to a more sacred space. Together, they have written Spirit of Dancing Warrior to assist you on this path, filling it with information on practical spirituality and how to use it to achieve peak capacity in all your physical work and play. By opening your heart to the special connection between the physical and the spiritual--whether in the gym, on the field, practiing Tai Chi or ridin

A collaboration between well-established and rising scholars, Futures of Dance Studies suggests multiple directions for new research in the field. Essays address dance in a wider range of contexts—onstage, on screen, in the studio, and on the street—and deploy methods from diverse disciplines. Engaging African American and African diasporic studies, Latinx and Latin American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Asian American and Asian studies, this anthology demonstrates the relevance of dance analysis to adjacent fields.

Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada explores how dance intersects with the shifting concerns of pluralism in a variety of racial and ethnic communities across Canada. Focusing on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contributors examine a broad range of dance styles used to promote diversity and intercultural collaborations. Examples include Fijian dance in Vancouver; Japanese dance in Lethbridge; Danish, Chinese, Kathak, and Flamenco dance in Toronto; African and European contemporary dance styles in Montréal; and Ukrainian dance in Cape Breton. Interviews with Indigenous and Middle Eastern dance artists along with an artist statement by a Bharata Natyam and contemporary dance choreographer provide valuable artist perspectives. Contributors offer strategies to decolonize dance education and also challenge longstanding critiques of multiculturalism. Moving Together demonstrates that dance is at the cutting edge of rethinking the contours of race and ethnicity in Canada and is necessary reading for scholars, students, dance artists and audiences, and everyone interested in thinking about the future of racial and ethnic pluralism in Canada.

This book offers a comprehensive report on a three-year, cross-cultural, critical participatory action research study, conducted in children’s homes and communities in Fiji. This project contributed to building sustainable local capacity in communities without access to early childhood services, so as to promote preschool children’s literacy development in their home languages and English. The book includes rich descriptions of the young children’s lived, multilingual literacy practices in their home and community contexts. This work advances research-based practices for fostering young children’s multilingual literacy and building community capacity in a post-colonial Pasifika context; further, it shares valuable insights into processes and complexities that are inherent to multiliteracy and cross-cultural research.

As countless alterations have taken place in medicine in the twenty-first century so too have literary artists addressed new understandings of disease and pathology. Dis/ability studies, fat studies, mad studies, end-of-life studies, and critical race studies among other fields have sought to better understand what social factors lead to pathologizing certain conditions while other variations remain “normalized.” While recognizing that these scholarly approaches often speak to identities with radically different experiences of pathologization, this collection of essays is open to all critical engagements with narratives of health in order to facilitate the messiness of cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As scientific advances provide insight into a wide range of well-being issues and help extend life, it is vital that we come to question the very categories of “healthy” and “unhealthy.” This collection brings together analyses of cultural productions which probe those categorizations and suggest new psychological and philosophical understandings which will help better apply and guide the knowledge being rapidly developed within the life sciences. “Right of health” is a widely accepted human right, but in applying a right to healthcare what care and what sort of health are less universally agreed upon. The contributors share an interest in addressing who controls answers to the questions of “how do we define a healthy body and a healthy life?” and “what are the political forces that influence our definitions of health?”

Lulu is different to others. Once, she believed, she had a friend to love her. Then that friend betrayed her and Lulu learned that hate is safer than love. When she begins her new life at the Court of St Jerome in the Old Sea City, she finds people who must fight their personal demons of hatred, ambition and greed. Embraced in St Jerome's fold, Lulu learns to trust again, perhaps even to love. Nothing, however, is as it seems and Lulu discovers that love doesn't always wear the face of the one you yearn to call beloved. Lyrical and atmospheric, buoyed by touches of magical realism, this compelling spiritual story explores the sacrifices people make in the pursuit of their dreams. Lulu's quest, and that of Jamila and Zahra too, is to find the divine love that will fulfil their hopes and save their souls...if they can recognise the masks of those who seek to lead them astray.

Destiny was abandoned, alone, and isolated ... The Draconian race is trying to destroy the Earth ... the Earthlings are asleep. No one other than the Creator knows the role Dorian is playing as Destiny's protector ... including her four team members. Kindness, gentleness and loving compassion were woven into Destiny's soul. She was empathetic and could hear, see, feel things beyond the physical realm. The Creator asked the questions: Who is ready for the ultimate test? Who is willing to sacrifice themselves if need be? Who would be willing to have their DNA and memory altered to ensure the success of this grand plan? What propelled Destiny to accept the quest that would require her DNA to be altered and lose all knowledge of who she is, who she was? To forfeit her life ... and to be reborn as something she knew was destroying the worlds. Waking up, she is born a Draconian-a race dedicated to selfishness, greed, unrest and war. Destiny is lost ... can she ever be found again?