Advertising is a central part of the global system of commerce and culture. Every day it exposes consumers around the world to practices associated with the West, urban life, prosperity, and modernity. One consequence of this exposure is that it frees people's imaginations from time and place, and imposes a new and foreign reality. In this book Steven Kemper looks at a parallel trend, arguing that advertising firms in Nairobi, Caracas, and Colombo also domesticate the imagination, insinuating images into people's minds of the traditional as well as the modern, the local as much as the global....

Anagarika Dharmapala is one of the most galvanizing figures in Sri Lanka s recent turbulent history. He is widely regarded as the nationalist hero who saved the Sinhala people from cultural collapse and whose protestant reformation of Buddhism drove monks toward increased political involvement and ethnic confrontation. Yet as tied to Sri Lankan nationalism as Dharmapala is in popular memory, he spent the vast majority of his life abroad, engaging other concerns. In "Rescued from the Nation," Steven Kemper reevaluates this important figure in the light of an unprecedented number of his...