Music, Popular Culture, Identities is a collection of sixteen essays that will appeal to a wide range of readers with interests in popular culture and music, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology. Organized around the central theme of music as an expression of local, ethnic, social and other identities, the essays touch upon popular traditions and contemporary forms from several different regions of the world: political engagement in Italian popular music; flamenco in Spain; the challenge of traditional music in Bulgaria; boerenrock and rap in Holland; Israeli extreme heavy metal; jazz and...

Returning (to) Communities offers an innovative collection of examples and case studies into what has become a hotly disputed topic. The chapters present a wide-ranging series of interventions into the new debates over the concepts and practices of "community" and the communal. For this book, scholars have been gathered from across Europe and Australia as well as from the United States, and several contributors are involved in community practice. Returning (to) Communities is essential reading to researchers and students in social policy, sociology, ethnic studies, cultural analysis, media...

The present volume of Critical Studies is a collection of selected essays on the topic of feminism and femininity in Chinese literature. Although feminism has been a hot topic in Chinese literary circles in recent years, this remarkable collection represents one of the first of its kind to be published in English. The essays have been written by well-known scholars and feminists including Kang-I Sun Chang of Yale University, and Li Ziyun, a writer and feminist in Shanghai, China. The essays are inter- and multi-disciplinary, covering several historical periods in poetry and fiction (from the...

The Culture of Boredom is a collection of essays by well-known specialists reflecting from philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives, in which the reader will learn how different disciplines can throw light on such an appealing, challenging, yet still not fully understood, phenomenon. The goal is to clarify the background of boredom, and to explore its representation through forgotten cross-cutting narratives beyond the typical approaches, i.e. those of psychology or psychiatry. For the first time this experienced group of scholars gathers to promote a cross-border dialogue from a...