Author: Sudipta Sen File Type: pdf A sweeping, interdisciplinary history of the worlds third-largest river, a potent symbol across South Asia and the Hindu diaspora Originating in the Himalayas and flowing into the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is Indias most important and sacred river. In this unprecedented work, historian Sudipta Sen tells the story of the Ganges, from the communities that arose on its banks to the merchants that navigated its waters, and the way it came to occupy center stage in the history and culture of the subcontinent. Sen begins his chronicle in prehistoric India, tracing the rivers first settlers, its myths of origin in the Hindu tradition, and its significance during the ascendancy of popular Buddhism. In the following centuries, Indian empires, Central Asian regimes, European merchants, the British Empire, and the Indian nation-state all shaped the identity and ecology of the river. Weaving together geography, environmental politics, and religious history, Sen offers in this lavishly illustrated volume a remarkable portrait of one of the worlds largest and most densely populated river basins.**ReviewSudipta Sen blends geology and ecology with the legendary in a way that is scholarly and sophisticated while always entertaining and often moving to read. -Ruth Harris, University of Oxford About the Author Sudipta Sen is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Distant Sovereignty National Imperialism and the Origins of British India. He lives in Woodland, California.

Author: Randall J. Pogorzelski File Type: pdf James Joyces Ulysses is a modern version of Homers Odyssey, but Joycewho was a better scholar of Latin than of Greekalso was deeply influenced by the Aeneid, Virgils epic poem about the journey of Aeneas and the foundation of Rome. Joyce wrote Ulysses during the Irish War of Independence, when militants, politicians, and intellectuals were attempting to create a new Irish nation. Virgil wrote the Aeneid when, in the wake of decades of civil war, Augustus was founding what we now call the Roman Empire. Randall Pogorzelski applies modern theories of nationalism, intertextuality, and reception studies to illuminate how both writers confronted issues of nationalism, colonialism, political violence, and freedom during times of crisis. **

Author: Ana Monteiro-Ferreira File Type: pdf Employs a critical Afrocentric reading of Western constructions of knowledge so as to overcome the dehumanizing tendencies of modernity.Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the infrastructures of dominance and privilege, arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early Employs a critical Afrocentric reading of Western constructions of knowledge so as to overcome the dehumanizing tendencies of modernity. Afrocentricity is the most intellectually dominant idea in the African world, one that is having a growing impact on social science discourse. This paradigm, philosophically rooted in African cultures and values, fundamentally challenges major epistemological traditions in Western thought, such as modernism and postmodernism, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and postcolonialism. In The Demise of the Inhuman, Ana Monteiro-Ferreira reviews what Molefi Kete Asante has called the infrastructures of dominance and privilege, arguing that Western concepts such as individualism, colonialism, race and ethnicity, universalism, and progress, are insufficient to overcome various forms of oppression. Afrocentricity, she argues, can help lead us beyond Western structures of thought that have held sway since the early fifteenth century, towards a new epistemological framework that will enable a more human humanity.

Author: Susan Magarey File Type: pdf Dangerous Ideas explores sex and love, politics and performance, joy and anguish in a collection of essays focussed on the history and politics of the Womens Liberation Movement and one of its offshoots, Womens Studies, in Australia and around the world. These are serious matters they are about tectonic changes in peoples lives and ideas in the late twentieth century, too little remembered or understood any longer. Feminism, this book suggests, is always multiple and various, fluid and changing, defying efforts at definition, characterisation, periodisation. Nevertheless, Dangerous Ideas tackles some hard questions. How did Womens Liberation begin? What held this transformative movement together? Would it bring about the death of the family? Was it reorganising the labour market? Revolutionising human reproduction? How could Womens Studies exist in patriarchal universities? Could feminism change the paradigms governing the world of learning? In the United States? In Russia? In the Peoples Republic of China?