Month: June 2013

Celebration at a Funeral: Addressing an African Phenomenon

JindraFunerals
Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon, originally published in September 2011, was released this month in paperback form. Below, co-editor Michael Jindra shares the root of his interest in this cultural phenomenon, and discusses the collection and what became its purpose: to shed light on funerary traditions and to inspire other scholars.

One could say the genesis of this book was way back in 1984, when I went to Cameroon as a Peace Corps Volunteer, fresh out of university. I worked with rural credit unions (village banks), and at times when I showed up at a village for a meeting, I would find out the meeting was cancelled because of a “death celebration.”

 

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A Matter of Identity: What it Means to be Jewish in the 21st Century

Race, Color, Identity: Rethinking Discourses about ‘Jews’ in the Twenty-First Century, published May 2013, opens a fresh discussion about Jewish racial identity in the Twenty-First Century. Below, editor Efraim Sicher shares how a resurgence of racism, advances in genetic technology, and social and cultural constructs have given fresh breath to a discussion within the volume of what Jewishness means today.

 

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Berghahn Books: Did any perceptions on the subject change from the time you started your research/compiled the contributions to the time you completed the volume?

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On the Origin of “Supercinema”

It all started in 1999 with a camera that appeared to have superpowers, and that observation led to the publication of Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age in May 2013.  Below, author William Brown examines the digital techniques of modern cinema in his recently published work, in which he tells the story of popular cinema hiding behind analogue cinema techniques, “analogous to that of Superman hiding his powers behind the persona of Clark Kent.”

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My monograph, Supercinema, has two principal moments of origin.

 

The first moment came when watching Fight Club in 1999. I was intrigued by the way in which the camera passed – seemingly without a cut – through solid objects and empty space as if they were both permeable.

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The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Activism or Scholarship?

The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration, to be published this month, gives voice to the plight of the lesser-studied but still widely persecuted population of the Roma in Nazi-occupied Europe. Below, editor Anton Weiss-Wendt addresses the reception of the collection, which he says begs the question: “Is this scholarship or is it activism?” 

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Weiss-WendtThe mass murder of Jews and the mass murder of Roma during the Second World War are closely interrelated.

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What is “Militant Lactivism?”

More than a simple parenting choice, breastfeeding becomes a matter of feminist and activist discussion in Charlotte Faircloth’s book Militant Lactivism? published in March 2013 by Berghahn Books. Below, the author introduces us to the movement for public breastfeeding with an excerpt from her book.

 

Militant Lactivism? is a book based on research with women in London and Paris who are members of La Leche League (LLL), an international breastfeeding support organisation. The text focuses on the accounts of a small but significant population of mothers within LLL who practise ‘attachment parenting’. This is a style of care which endorses close parent-child proximity and typically involves long-term, on-cue breastfeeding, baby ‘wearing’ and co-sleeping as part of a ‘family bed’ philosophy. It is becoming increasingly popular in both the US and the UK, and has recently received a lot of publicity following a particularly provocative TIME magazine feature, amongst other coverage.

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