This book should come with aloe vera gel and a handle, because you might get burned and you will need to hold on to something. Urban Swagger is not for the faint hearted, but is not devoid of hope. Peace, Hope and Love are still the message, however in Urban Swagger the message is grittier and wounded many times. These poems are what you may have thought / would have liked to say out loud, but may find it wiser to keep these thoughts to yourself. With time and distance, I think it is safe to share these raw emotions in a place where they may do more good than harm. Consider it food for thought. These potent poems range from irreverent to relevant, from profane to profound, from celestial to terrestrial. Urban Swagger loves life, if it didn't love it wouldn't care, if it didn't care it wouldn't bother. This is based in love, not disdain. It is meant to give a close up picture of life among people; Earth's own human beings, in this place and time.

Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.

In this "beautifully written, sharply observed, and heartfelt" guide to his hometown (New York Times), legendary New York City journalist Pete Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves. Walking the Manhattan streets he loves, from Times Square to the island’s southern tip, Pete Hamill combines a moving memoir of his own days and nights in new York with a lively and revealing history of the city’s most enduring places and people. “Pete Hamill lovingly captures the vibrant sights, sounds, and smells of Manhattan from Battery Park to midtown, the most important, most exciting stretch of real estate in the world.” --New York Daily News

Comprehensive and comparative, this volume investigates African American street novelists since the Chicago Black Renaissance and the semiotic strategies they employ in publication, consumption, and depiction of street life. Divided into three chapters, this text analyzes the content, style, and ethics of “street” narrative through a discursive/rhetorical lens, exploring the development of street literature’s formal and contextual concerns to resolve the sociocultural and political questions surrounding cultural work. The book also gives emphasis to “text” or (post)structural literary analysis by answering questions about the genre’s aesthetic and linguistic techniques that respond to the injustices of urban planning. The last chapter, “Representation,” investigates the phenomenological hermeneutics of more recent street literature and its satire, highlighting the political stakes for authorship, credibility, and subjectivity. Through historical and contemporary studies of urban space, Blackness, and adaptations of street literature, this work attempts to network activists, artists, and scholars with the greater reading public by providing a functional ontology of reading the inner city.

Perfect for any reader interested in fashion, history, or popular culture, this text is an essential resource that presents vital information and informed analysis of key fashion fads not found elsewhere. Fashion Fads Through American History: Fitting Clothes into Context explores fashion fads from the 19th century to the current decade, providing the reader with specific insights into each era. The text draws fascinating connections between what we see in fashion phenomena—including apparel, accessories, hair, and makeup—and events in popular culture in general and across history. Written by an art and design historian, the book is ideal for a wide range of student research projects, especially those in American history, social studies, art, and literature classes. It covers topics overlooked by fashion history texts because of their origination outside of the formal fashion system. Each entry provides critical historical context to help readers understand why the fad originated and why it resonated with consumers, and presents vital information and analysis of key fashions that were intimately related to currents in contemporary culture. The text also considers the resurgence of some fashion fads in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and provides context for their relevance.

Military occupations and interventions have a gendered impact on both those engaged in occupying, and those whose lands have been occupied, yet little has been published about this effect either historically or in contemporary times. This collection redresses this neglect by examining and analyzing the impact of occupation on men and women, both occupied and occupier, in a variety of geographical spaces from Japan to the Philippines to Iraq. The gendered perspectives offered are also intimately tied to analyses of ‘power’: how power is enacted by the occupier; how powerlessness is experienced by the occupied; how power is negotiated, shared, compromised, subverted, reclaimed; institutional power; and contested power in post-conflict societies. This collection covers a variety of geographical and period contexts in the Asia Pacific and Middle East since 1945, offering the reader a comparative view across time and space of post-WWII military occupations and interventions. The term ‘military occupation’ is interpreted broadly to include military interventions, the presence of military bases, and peacekeeping/post-conflict operations, allowing space to demonstrate that the lines between each definition are blurred. Including perspectives from established and emerging scholars, aid workers, and activists from around the world, this volume incorporates voices from those conducting research on and those with direct experience of military occupations and interventions.

Build bridges, foster better relationships, and establish a more inclusive school community. In her direct yet conversational style, Hedreich Nichols examines discriminatory classroom practices and offers strategies for eliminating them. You'll acquire the knowledge and skills to identify biases that adversely affect your practice and learn how to move beyond those biases to ensure a more equitable, inclusive campus culture. Recognize your own personal biases and how they affect the classroom. Learn how your language can reinforce discrimination and how to choose inclusive language instead. Understand gender and sexuality and how they relate to identity. Discover ways to celebrate and foster diversity daily. Identify microaggressions and how they create barriers to relationships. Contents: Foreword Introduction Chapter 1: Bias and Belonging Chapter 2: Bias, Guilt, and Accountability Chapter 3: Bias, Language, and Labels Chapter 4: Bias in Curriculum Chapter 5: Bias and Cultural Expression Chapter 6: Bias and Gender Equality Chapter 7: Bias and Representation Chapter 8: Bias in Action--What Not to Do and Say Conclusion References and Resources Index

Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.

This book offers an extended analysis of writers and theatre companies in Britain since 1995, and explores them alongside recent cultural, social and political developments. Referencing well-known practitioners from modern theatre, this book is an excelle

AIDS has been a devastating plague in much of sub-Saharan Africa, yet the long-term implications for gender and sexuality are just emerging. AIDS and Masculinity in the African City tackles this issue head on and examines how AIDS has altered the ways masculinity is lived in Uganda—a country known as Africa’s great AIDS success story. Based on a decade of ethnographic research in an urban slum community in the capital Kampala, this book reveals the persistence of masculine privilege in the age of AIDS and the implications such privilege has for combating AIDS across the African continent.