Peter Lang Publishing Inc

African and African American children's and adolescent literature in the classroom; a critical guide.

US scholars of education recommend books of African American and African literature that are suitable for children and adolescents. Though acknowledging that in many respects African and African-American cultures are different, they argue that exposing students to both at the same time provides greater insight. In sections on pre-kindergarten to third grade, upper elementary and middle grades four to eight, and high school grades nine to twelve, they consider such topics as traditional families in recently published African American children's literature for the early grades, sharing culturally relevant literature with preschool children and their families, young black adolescents reading through the grief, engaging hearts and minds with excellent nonfiction literature, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando and Cyril Everard Palmers's The Cloud with the Silver Lining as young adult fiction portraying black poverty in the postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean, and disability in Africana adolescent literature. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Bakhtinian pedagogy; opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe.

This collection of thirteen articles on the application of Bakhtinian philosophy in modern pedagogy examines the history of the dialogic learning process and practical applications in education policy today. Essays address such topics as dialogic pedagogy in test oriented schools, fostering dialog in a context of socio-political conflict and Bakhtinian lessons for educational leaders. Contributors include academics in education, philosophy and the history of education from universities around the world. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Baudelaire, Emerson and the French-American connection; contrary affinities.

Baudelaire and Emerson, as socially-conscious individualists par excellence, lend themselves remarkably to Marchi's (French and comparative literature, North Carolina State U.) study of how France and the United States have warily borrowed from and dismissed one another in their modern projects of democracy and reconciling the individual with the collective. Baudelaire dominates the book, and the first three chapters focus on his relationship to American writers — Poe, Longfellow and Emerson. The fourth chapter focuses on Baudelaire's enduring influence on American literature, music and culture, from the Lost Generation to the Beats to the punk and Goth movements. The fifth chapter compares Thomas Jefferson and Baudelaire's respective liaisons with women of color. The sixth chapter makes more connections between Baudelaire and Emerson through Michel de Montaigne. The seventh chapter jumps ahead to reflect on the contemporary French-American connection in terms of economic crisis, terrorism, cultural politics as well as Baudelaire, Jean Baudrillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy. An epilogue ties this study with pedagogic considerations for French-American studies. Though written with those not trained in academic theories or vocabularies in mind, Marchi does not sacrifice intellectual rigor, subtlety nor profundity — though he does use untranslated French occasionally. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Body language; corporeality, subjectivity, and language in Johann Georg Hamann.

Assaiante (German language and literature, Trinity College, Connecticut) examines the centrality of corporeal finitude in German philosopher Hamann's (1730-88) construction of subjectivity and the resulting ontological status of language. It is the nature of his philosophical project, however, that every discrete concern reveals its infinite connections to all other aspects of his thought, she says, so in a way she cannot look at anything without seeing everything. Among her topics are the emergence of the particular, origins and the letter "h," the unity of theos and logos, and translation and metaphor. She has not indexed her work. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Cognitive capitalism, education, and digital labor.

"Cognitive capitalism" is a new form of capitalism replacing the earlier phases of mercantile and industrial capitalism in which "the accumulation process is centered on immaterial assets utilizing immaterial or digital labor processes and production of symbolic goods and experiences," in the words of editors Peters (education, U. of Waikato, New Zealand) and Bulut (a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Communications Research, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US), who present fourteen chapters that theorize cognitive capitalism, particularly in terms of its implications for educational pedagogy and struggles around visuality, networks, and universities. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Conducting multi-generational qualitative research in education; an experiment in grounded theory.

This volume on the educational experiences of black Americans across generations examines the influences of social, political and economic forces on the quality, and perceived quality of education. The work examines four distinct time periods between the end of slavery and the present and explores key educational themes through the experiences of four case study families. Collins is a professor of leadership and counseling at Prairie View A&M University, Texas. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Corneille's Horace and David's Oath of the Horatii; a chapter in the politics of gender in art.

Gutwirth (emerita, French and women's studies, West Chester U.) conducts a feminist analysis of gendered aesthetics and politics in Jacque-Louis David's 1784 painting Oath of the Horatii, "a work of crucial significance in French Revolutionary culture." While others have already explored this topic, Gutwirth offers a new approach that builds on their work while also exploring the painting in relation to its classical sources (the subject is taken from Livy and Dionysius) and to the 1640 play Horace, by Pierre Corneille, built on the same classical sources. She investigates how the different climates of gender relations within which the works were produced affected the gender dispensations represented in the painting and the play. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Courageous voices of immigrants and transnationals of color; counter narratives against discrimination in schools and beyond.

Orelus (curriculum and instruction, New Mexico State U.) offers a part autoethnography and part broader study of how transnationals of color try to integrate into American society in the face of persistent racial marginalization. The other voices in this slim volume come from Jordan, Nigeria, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Algeria and Haiti. He focuses on not just race, but language and specifically how having accented but otherwise "perfect" English marks immigrants and transnationals as other. Orelus draws on critical race theorists, like Frantz Fanon, and critical pedagogy with the aim of providing a framework for educators to recognize and think through the persistence of racism and linguicism. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Critical civic literacy; a reader.

The critical literacy approach to education examines the underlying assumptions of various texts encountered in academia and everyday life, such as school curricula, government legislation, corporate policies, and the media, in order to uncover the connections between power, knowledge, language, ideology, and social justice. In this collection of 37 readings, contributors in education, social studies, and public policy emphasize the importance of critical literacy in the renewal of civic education in public schools. Some topics discussed include promoting a progressive civics curriculum, the Bible Literacy Project's impact on civic engagement, the role of service learning in critical thinking, and the middle-class curriculum of teacher education. While the book is written for educators and policymakers, it is also accessible to interested citizens and students. DeVitis teaches educational foundations at Old Dominion University. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Curiosity, inquiry, and the geographical imagination.

Curiosity may have killed the proverbial cat, but for Gade (emeritus, geography, U. of Vermont) it is the driving phenomena behind scholarly research, particularly in his own field of cultural-historical geography. In this work, he presents 12 essays, written over the course of the past 40 years, exploring the importance of curiosity (or the pursuit of knowledge) to the scholarly endeavor. The essays explore the question of curiosity in general, historical, exemplary, and archetypal terms; examine curiosity in the field of cultural-historical geography, drawing on Gade's own scholarly pursuits as well as the careers of scholarly exemplars such as Carl O. Sauer; and discuss how Gade has transmitted his own "exuberant" curiosity into the scholarly process. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

D.H. Lawrence; a study of literary fascism.

Al-Dabbagh (English literature, United Arab Emirates U.) argues that the author of Lady Chatterly's Lover and many other novels was guided by an anti-socialist, fascist outlook that came out of an intellectual milieu in which British literary intellectuals were isolated from the socialist workers' movement in the context of imperial Britain and thus tended to divide among social-imperialists on the one hand, and reactionaries and potential fascists on the other. After discussing the development of this milieu, Al-Dabbagh interrogates Lawrence's outlook on imperialism and his attitude towards socialism, particularly in his more overtly political novels. He then discusses such themes in Lawrence's writing as contempt for man as a social being and the existential division of human beings into higher and lower creatures. He further examines Lawrence's relationships with other writers around him, arguing that their writings were a manifestation of the decay of imperialist culture that continues to the present, and explores the ways that critics have sought to hide Lawrence's politics. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Diffusion of gender quotas in Latin America and beyond; advances and setbacks in the last two decades.

In her introduction and in the first chapter, Piatti-Crocker (comparative politics, U. of Illinois, Springfield) explains how gender quota laws came into existence in Argentina, initially, in the early 1990s, as a means of ensuring women's representation in government. This collection of contributed chapters on 12 nations that followed suit with their own gender quota legislation affords a rich comparative study of the quotas and their effects. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Elegiac eyes; vision in Roman love elegy.

Raucci (classics, Union College) explores the role of vision in ancient Roman love elegy, focusing on how elegists such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid engaged in an appropriation of Roman visual culture and Roman cultural modes of seeing in their elegies, building her readings on the ancient Roman understandings of the eye and vision and thus reconstructing the elegists use of the eye and vision within their contemporary context familiar to the readers of the elegies. She proceeds with the readings in thematic chapters that address the contexts of public and military settings, wounds of war, public spectacles of erotic viewing, the private bedroom, and the public and private arenas of death. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Embodying the feminine in the dances of the world's religions.

Also a professional dancer and artist, Yarber is pastor for preaching and worship at Wake Forest Baptist Church. Using the methods of phenomenology, formal analysis, and Paul Knitter's constructive method of global responsibility, she analyzes four dances that teach both the dancer and observers inside and outside a particular faith tradition, about the experiences, expressions, and understandings of women within that faith tradition. The dances are the Bharatanatyam from India, the kabuki onnagata from Japan, whirling dervishes from the Sufi Mevlevi Order, and Jewish folk dance. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Evolutionary creation in biblical and theological perspective.

A science student before studying religion, Lioy (Southwestern College, Kansas) challenges the anti-evolution stance of his fellow evangelical Christians by trying to discern the theological meaning and message of a representative set of biblical creation texts. He uses a text-centered, inner-canonical, and integrative hermeneutic to examine an evolutionary creationist process for the origin of humanity, the pre-scientific cosmology found in the Old and New Testaments, a biblical and theological analysis of life and death in the Old and New Testaments, and progressive covenantalism as an integrative motif of scripture. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The French revolution and the British novel in the Romantic period.

Editors A.D. Cousins, Dani Napton, and Stephanie Russo are all affiliated with Macquarie U., Australia. They provide an introductory chapger before presentation of nine scholarly essays (including their own). Contributions address: children's literature and the French revolution; Charlotte Smith's The Banished Man; Wollstonecraft's feminist adaptation of the revolutionary novel; the novels of Frances Burney; Mary Robinson and androgyny; Jane Austen; and Mary Shelley's The Last Man, among other topics. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Interrupting history; rethinking history curriculum after 'the end of history'.

Parkes (curriculum studies, U. of New Castle) explores the way that postmodern skepticism in the humanities and the idea that history has come to an end have created challenges and opportunities for teaching history. He focuses on the postwar period to the present, arguing that the idea of an end to history operates much differently in this period than it did in the 19th Century when first advanced by thinkers like Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche. He is less interested in writing a "history of the end of history" than offering a framework for developing history curricula and teaching, as well as evaluating claims that the end of history itself is an academic fad. He analyzes New Curriculum History and its emphasis on discourse analysis and deconstruction, as well as the problems that arise when counter-histories compete for attention. He ultimately advocates a historiographic and hermeneutic approach to working out a posthumous history pedagogy. Parkes' writing is clear, though the book is intended to be of the most interest to educators and historiographers. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

International perspectives on youth media; cultures of production and education.

This collection of 19 essays presents research and analysis on youth media from around the world. Youth media is, quite simply, media or media-products made by young people. The international perspective is represented in the first three major sections that focus on regional analyses of youth programs in places like Brazil, Singapore, the USA and the Middle East, their problems and needs; case studies of youth media performers; and cross-cultural comparisons and collaborations between youth media-projects. The final major section offers several chapters with detailed suggestions about implementing and otherwise engaging youth media projects. To that end, the essays are written with educators and youth activists in mind. The contributors are mostly academics working in communication, media- and cultural-studies, and education, as well as high school teachers, and people working within or in alliance with youth media projects. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

An introduction to visual communication; from cave art to second life.

Barnes (Lab for Social Computing, Rochester Institute of Technology) presents an undergraduate-level introductory textbook on visual literacy and communication that incorporates a broad array of approaches — including historical, semiotic, and cognitive approaches — to understanding visuality. She addresses visual literacy in relation to signs and symbols, written symbols and typography, and graphic design; visuality in print media, photographs, motion pictures and television, and digital media; and visual communication in cultural contexts. Chapters incorporate a variety of pedagogical devices, including side boxes focusing on specific theorists or illustrative case studies, chapter summaries, glossaries of key terms, and student exercises. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Italy meets Africa; colonial discourses in Italian cinema.

Di Carmine (film, Western Illinois U.) analyzes colonial discourses of Italian and African identity in Italian cinema both during and after the major period of Italian colonial intervention in Africa. The three films that provide the focus of the discussion are Attilio Gatti's Siliva Zulu (1927), Mario Camerini's Kif tebbi (1928), and Agusto Genina's Squadrone bianco (1936). The later comparative films discussed are Bernardo Bertolucci's L'assedio (1998) and Christina Comencini's Bianco e Nero (2007). (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)