Erotic Defiance

Erotic Defiance PDF Author: Courtney Bryant
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506478700
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The West fears desire. It fears ecstasy. It fears flesh. It copes with its fears by deploying its intellectual, political, and religious instruments to regulate, discipline, and punish. Western fear of the erotic has led to its regimes of racial and gender hierarchies, institutions of repression, and dehumanization of large portions of the human family. In the face of anti-erotic hegemony, Black women have too often yielded to Western Christianity's anti-erotic culture, its misnaming of the erotic as evil, and its denial of the erotic's relationship to the divine. But they have also resisted. They have also defied. This book is rooted in that tradition of defiance. Erotic Defiance considers the sacred and transformative power of the flesh through investigating the ethical and theological dimensions of the erotic experiences of Black women and performances of Black womanhood. Drawing on womanist and feminist analyses, Courtney Bryant approaches the erotic as a divine energy that manifests love in and through the flesh. Such love takes many forms. It extends beyond the sexual to include passion, spirituality, community, and self-love. By positing love's manifestations as sacred work that cannot be accomplished without the divine, Bryant presents the erotic as a collaboration between Spirit and flesh. This collaboration results in unique, liberating properties that make possible the kind of healing, resistance, and self-making necessary for Black women's self-actualization in a world hell-bent on their erasure and demonization.

Erotic Defiance

Erotic Defiance PDF Author: Courtney Bryant
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506478700
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Get Book Here

Book Description
The West fears desire. It fears ecstasy. It fears flesh. It copes with its fears by deploying its intellectual, political, and religious instruments to regulate, discipline, and punish. Western fear of the erotic has led to its regimes of racial and gender hierarchies, institutions of repression, and dehumanization of large portions of the human family. In the face of anti-erotic hegemony, Black women have too often yielded to Western Christianity's anti-erotic culture, its misnaming of the erotic as evil, and its denial of the erotic's relationship to the divine. But they have also resisted. They have also defied. This book is rooted in that tradition of defiance. Erotic Defiance considers the sacred and transformative power of the flesh through investigating the ethical and theological dimensions of the erotic experiences of Black women and performances of Black womanhood. Drawing on womanist and feminist analyses, Courtney Bryant approaches the erotic as a divine energy that manifests love in and through the flesh. Such love takes many forms. It extends beyond the sexual to include passion, spirituality, community, and self-love. By positing love's manifestations as sacred work that cannot be accomplished without the divine, Bryant presents the erotic as a collaboration between Spirit and flesh. This collaboration results in unique, liberating properties that make possible the kind of healing, resistance, and self-making necessary for Black women's self-actualization in a world hell-bent on their erasure and demonization.

Fictions of Conversion

Fictions of Conversion PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Shoulson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The fraught history of England's Long Reformation is a convoluted if familiar story: in the space of twenty-five years, England changed religious identity three times. In 1534 England broke from the papacy with the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII head of the church; nineteen years later the act was overturned by his daughter Mary, only to be reinstated at the ascension of her half-sister Elizabeth. Buffeted by political and confessional cross-currents, the English discovered that conversion was by no means a finite, discrete process. In Fictions of Conversion, Jeffrey S. Shoulson argues that the vagaries of religious conversion were more readily negotiated when they were projected onto an alien identity—one of which the potential for transformation offered both promise and peril but which could be kept distinct from the emerging identity of Englishness: the Jew. Early modern Englishmen and -women would have recognized an uncannily familiar religious chameleon in the figure of the Jewish converso, whose economic, social, and political circumstances required religious conversion, conformity, or counterfeiting. Shoulson explores this distinctly English interest in the Jews who had been exiled from their midst nearly three hundred years earlier, contending that while Jews held out the tantalizing possibility of redemption through conversion, the trajectory of falling in and out of divine favor could be seen to anticipate the more recent trajectory of England's uncertain path of reformation. In translations such as the King James Bible and Chapman's Homer, dramas by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and poetry by Donne, Vaughan, and Milton, conversion appears as a cypher for and catalyst of other transformations—translation, alchemy, and the suspect religious enthusiasm of the convert—that preoccupy early modern English cultures of change.

Bad New Days

Bad New Days PDF Author: Hal Foster
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784781460
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

Dancing with the Nation

Dancing with the Nation PDF Author: Ruth Vanita
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501334425
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

Desirable Belief

Desirable Belief PDF Author: Margaret D Kamitsuka
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book offers an analysis of erotic love in the Bible, patristic theology, mystical writings, philosophy, and literature. Eschewing hyper-conservative shaming of lust and overly optimistic views of eros as sacred and liberating, the book demonstrates how eros illuminates core Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ, the afterlife, and the Trinity.

For the Sake of Peace

For the Sake of Peace PDF Author: Charles L. Chavis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786614464
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
For the Sake of Peace examines racism and injustice in the United States through the eyes of those of African descent. Historically America has promoted itself as the moral police promoting democracy across the globe, offering her perspectives and ideas to combat poverty and racial and ethnic violence. The rise of overt political racism and intolerance has made visible, for a global audience for the first time since the Civil Rights Movement, the deeply rooted systems of discrimination and identity-based conflicts in the United States, that gives rise to structural and direct violence. African Americans, like other minorities, find themselves in a unique position in this age as new forms of race lynching continue to go unchecked; voting rights continue to be suppressed; prisons continue to serve as a mechanism for disenfranchising minorities and the poor. This volume centers around an understanding of peace that is concerned with justice and racial equality. Highlighting the prevailing impact of anti-black racism and injustice, authors offer prescriptive and descriptive insight that will aid in understanding and overcoming these historical and contemporary obstacles to peace focusing on specific themes including civil rights, education, white supremacy, structural violence, ritual, reparations, and human rights. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the essays are written by leading and emerging scholars, activists, and practitioners from the viewpoints of history, conflict analysis and resolution, anthropology, ethics, theology, and philosophy. A foreword by The Rev. Canon Nontombi Naomi Tutu, daughter of Nobel Peace Prize–winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Cathedral Missioner for Racial and Economic Equity at The Cathedral of All Souls in Ashville, NC, highlights the importance of Africana perspectives in the global pursuit of peace and equality.

Erotic Defiance

Erotic Defiance PDF Author: Courtney Bryant
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506478697
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Erotic Defiance considers the sacred and transformative power of the flesh, investigating the ethical and theological dimensions of the erotic experiences of Black women and performances of Black womanhood. Bryant approaches the erotic as a divine energy that manifests love through the flesh and makes healing, resistance, and self-making possible.

Reenchantment

Reenchantment PDF Author: Jeffrey Paine
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393326260
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The colorful tale of the successful flowering of an obscure, ancient Eastern sect in the modern world. In a single generation, Tibetan Buddhism developed from the faith of a remote mountain people, associated with bizarre, almost medieval, superstitions, to perhaps the most rapidly growing and celebrity-studded religion in the West. Disaffected with other religious traditions yet searching for meaning, huge numbers of Americans have found their way to the wisdom of Tibetan lamas in exile. Earthy, humorous, commonsensical, and eccentric, these flamboyant teachers—larger-than-life characters like Lama Yeshe and Chogyma Trungpa—proved to be charismatic and gifted ambassadors for their ancient religion. So did two Western women, born in Brooklyn and London's East End, whose homegrown religious intuitions turned out to be identical with the most sophisticated Tibetan teachings, revealing them to be reincarnated lamas. With great flair for both the sublime and the human, Jeffrey Paine narrates in page-turning, richly informative fashion how Tibetan Buddhism—rarefied and sensual, mystical and commonsensical—became the ideal religion for a "post-religious" age. "By far the best of the recent popular books exploring the amazing impact of Tibetan Buddhism. Paine's witty, erudite, flowing prose creates a memorable album of many characters—saints, rascals, and ordinary folks. He glosses over nothing, is ruthlessly critical where it is deserved, but is also secure enough to appreciate the beauty and the power of the 'magic and mystery': the profound practical wisdom and compassion of Tibetan civilization gone global."—Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies, Columbia University "Riveting....Recounts elegantly, yet without fuss, stories of human transformation that consistently incite our capacity for wonder."—Askold Melnyczuk, Boston Globe "Memorable anecdotes, great storytelling and keen observations mark this cogent exploration of the explosive growth of Tibetan Buddhism in the West."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Desert Voices

Desert Voices PDF Author: Moneera Al-Ghadeer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857711962
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The Bedouin, or 'desert dwellers', have a rich cultural heritage often expressed through music and poetry. Here, Moneera Al-Ghadeer provides us with the first comparative reading of women's oral poetry from Saudi Arabia. She examines women's lyrics of love, desire, mourning and grievance. We come to understand Bedouin mores and - most significantly - the unique description of a desert that is consistently held to be infinite, evocative, stimulating and an eternal freedom. As the first English translation and analysis of this poetry, "Desert Voices" is both a gesture to preserving the oral poetic tradition of Bedouin women and a radical critique addressing the exclusion of their poetry from current academic literary studies. The book provides invaluable material for reflection in the debates around oral culture and women's poetic composition while it translates, presents and critically examins a genre, which opens Arabic poetry and literature to contemporary theory and criticism.

Law and the Image

Law and the Image PDF Author: Costas Douzinas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226569543
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Discussing the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image, this book includes coverage of the history of the relationship between art and law, and the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law.