Transformational analysis in practice: Music-analytical studies on composers and musicians from around the world

Edited by Bozhidar Chapkanov

October 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-754-2
Availability: In stock
368pp. ¦ $108 £86 €101

'Transformational analysis in practice' is a Must-Have for everyone working in the field or aspiring to develop their music-analytical and theoretical skills in transformational theory. This co-authored book puts together a plethora of analytical studies, diverse both in the repertoires covered and the methodologies employed. It is a much-needed anthology in this sub-field of music analysis, which has been developing and growing in recent years, reaching ever wider outlets in English-speaking countries and beyond, from dedicated conference panels to YouTube videos. The book is divided into four parts based on the repertoires under discussion. Part I encompasses four analytical studies on familiar composers from the European Romanticism of the nineteenth century. Part II analyzes the music of less familiar composers from Brazil and Turkey. Part III offers four contrasting ways to adapt the analytical capabilities of neo-Riemannian theory to the post-tonal music of the twentieth century. Catering to the interests of jazz performers and researchers, as well as those into popular music production, Part IV offers transformational analytical approaches to both notated and improvised jazz, emphasizing John Coltrane’s performance. Providing an invaluable synthesis of a wide range of analytical studies, this book will be an essential companion for many musicology students, as well as for performers and composers.

Impressions from Paris: Women Creatives in Interwar Years France

Edited by Sylvie Eve Blum-Reid, University of Florida

October 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-735-1
Availability: In stock
205pp. ¦ $102 £81 €92

‘Impressions from Paris’ studies the contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris during the Interwar Years, from the 1920s to 1940. The “Roaring Twenties” constituted years of experimentation and freedom to test new techniques and lifestyles at a time affected by serious political changes leading to World War II. Their trajectories have left traces that can be mapped out, studied, and addressed today, a hundred years later. The volume revisits their experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, as well as film and food. The volume revisits the artistic, literary, and journalistic contributions of women worldwide, including France, as they flocked to Paris from the 1920s to 1940. The overall principle lies in the inclusion of female painters, visual artists, and writers from diverse international and national backgrounds. Scholars who participate in the volume explore the possibilities presented in a modern literary and artistic history while building on previous scholarship. Two seminal books and a documentary film inspire this project: Shari Benstock’s ‘Women of the Left Bank. Paris 1900-1940’ (Texas UP 1986) and Andrea Weiss’s ‘Paris was a woman. Portraits from the Left Bank’ (HarperSanFrancisco 1995), which in turn produced an eponymous film (Greta Schiller/Andrea Weiss 1996). These works highlight the community of women artists, editors and writers during the interwar years in Paris. There is scholarship in the area, although most of it is scattered in single monographs, crossing various genres, and various languages, from (recent) graphic novels, to fiction, biographical studies, cultural histories as well as scholarly artistic and literary studies.

Development in Africa's Informal Settlements: Below the Proletariat

Angela R. Pashayan, American University, Washington, DC

November 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-774-0
Availability: In stock
251pp. ¦ $66 £53 €62

This book discusses the effectiveness of international development programs in African informal settlements (slums). It also represents the voices of slum dwellers and how they view the programs offered. With over 60% of Africans living in slums, the book intends to foster dialogue among development professionals to determine how to improve service to their clients, people experiencing extreme poverty. This book examines the critical thinking disconnect between development professionals and slum dwellers. It enables practitioners, professors, and their students to investigate the gap between the types of development programs offered versus what is most beneficial to reduce extreme poverty in slum communities. With a sample of 500 residents from Mukuru Slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and 100 development professionals with expertise in poverty reduction in slums, this book sheds light on the similarities and differences between various programs. Most importantly, this book provides a theoretical way forward (The Theory of Extreme Poverty Reduction) based on Freirean pedagogy to stimulate discussion on how to program new strategies for authentic dialogue with slum dwellers that leads to the critical consciousness necessary for successful poverty reduction.

The Labyrinth of Multitude and Other Reality Checks on Being Latino/x

Julio Marzán

October 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-677-4
Availability: In stock
266pp. ¦ $76 £61 €69

Seventies “Hispanics,” identifying with Latin American emergence and increasing immigration to the U.S., adopted the epithet 'latino', soon written as Latino. Media fast-tracked, English Latino would eventually tilt presidential elections, advocate national programs, and protest policies, with native and immigrant subgroups presumed homogenous. Enunciated identically as 'latino' and presumed to be 'latino' or its exact translation, “Latino” proved to be a transliteration that since its coining started diverging from 'latino'. Latino became the political mask of unity over discrete subgroups; its primary agenda identity politics as a racialized, brown consciousness divested of its Hispanic cultural history. In contrast, 'latino' retains its Spanish transracial semantics, invoking an 'hispano' cultural history. Nationally Latino represents the entire Hispanic demographic while internecinely not all subgroups identify as Latinos. Latino is defined by immediate sociopolitical issues yet when needed invokes the 'latino' cultural history it presumably disowns. Intellectual inconsistency and semantic amorphousness make Latino a confusing epithet that subverts both speech and scholarship. Collective critical thinking on its semantic dysfunction, deferring to solidarity, is displaced with politically correct but circumventing tweaks, creating Latino/a, Latin@, Latinx. On the other hand, Latino exists because its time had come, expressing an aspiration for a more participatory identity in a multicultural America. Julio Marzán, author of 'The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams', suspends solidarity to articulate the intellectual challenges of his Latino identity. Writing to academic standards in a style accessible to the general reader, Marzán argues that from 'latino' roots Latino evolved into an American identity as a demographic summation implying a culture that actually origin cultures provide, ambiguously an ethnicity and a nostalgic assimilation. “Latino” are American-germane sociopolitical extrapolations of 'latino' experiential details, the often-conflicted distinction illustrated in Marzán’s equally engaging essays that revisit iconic personages and personal events with more nuance than seen as Latino.

Dogmas in Literature and Literary Missionary: Text, Reader and Critique

Edited by Önder Çakırtaş, Bingol University, Türkiye

September 2023 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-695-8
Availability: In stock
166pp. ¦ $70 £59 €65

Literature does have an aspect that drags the readers, habitually burying them in its pages and blindly attaching them to itself. Blind devotion stems from the factors that are effective in determining the readers' faith. Theories of literature, similarly, might bring about the generation of blind adherence and dogmatic approaches. This book explores the existence of dogma in literature and some cult texts and writers and how dogmas in literature are conveyed to various audiences as a mission by some literary readers, experts, and academics. Generally, dogma is a word related mostly to religion. In this frame, Mathew Arnold's 'Dogma in Religion and Literature' is of great importance as far as religion is concerned. However, there are dogmas in every field, literature being no exception. Virginia Woolf, for instance, wrote stupendous works that turned out to be well-known, and in 1928, she delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, where women were once not allowed, that formed the basis for the celebrated 'A Room of One's Own' (1929). Roland Barthes' 1967 'La mort de l'auteur' ('The Death of the Author') essay might be another text that some of its literary readers have developed a dogmatic commitment to. In addition to revealing how dogma finds its place in literature, this book also discusses how literary writers and readers often unwittingly embrace 'literary missionary.' Focusing on the dogmatic elements of literature and the dogmatized literary theory and criticism through cult works of various authors, the book offers a striking and interesting contribution to literary theory and criticism and literature readings.