From the airing of bin Laden tapes to the coverage of war in Iraq, the rise of the new media in the Middle East is an important and controversial development. When contrasted with the government-controlled media that limited Arab public information and expression in previous decades, the new media, especially satellite television networks such as Al-Jazeera, have moved to the foreground of regional politics and U.S. foreign policy. Utilizing original and ground-breaking public opinion surveys within the Middle East, best-selling author Shibley Telhami lays out the implications of this historic expansion in media activities and outlets.
Telhamiﾒs timely investigation explores the actual impact of these media on Arab public opinion and, more important, on how they help form notions of identity in the region. Do the media mirror public opinion or do they shape it? Are they reinforcing Arab identity at the expense of state identity in the Arab world? As one of Americaﾒs most sought-after intellectuals and commentators on the region, Telhami offers a unique analysis of the trends that will shape the Arab media, and how the U.S. government will interact with them in coming years.
University of Virginia Press
What happens, asks Patrick Riley, when a life transformed becomes an autobiography? What is the relationship between the subjective upheaval of conversion and the representation of character? Who, then, is this "self" writing the narrative of a life? Thinking of conversion as a radical turning point or fulcrum on which incompatible configurations of character are precariously balanced, Riley examines both historically and tropologically the paradoxes of identity and life writing that conversion raises. While conversion can motivate the writing of an autobiography that ties together threads of a life story, it also implies a fragmentation of character. As it creates a unified framework for the subject's history, it also disrupts any stable conception of the self...
This book argues that correspondence theories of truth fail because the relation that holds between a true thought and a fact is that of identity, not correspondence. Facts are not complexes of worldly entities which make thoughts true; they are merely true thoughts. According to Julian Dodd, the resulting modest identity theory, while not defining truth, correctly diagnoses the failure of correspondence theories, and thereby prepares the ground for a defensible deflation of the concept of truth.
"Humorous yet touching, Performing Femininity challenges traditional and feminist perspectives on gender. As ""a woman whose brand of feminism is suspect,"" Lesa Lockford places herself in the most shameful, the most abject, circumstances; an image obsessed weight watcher, an exotic dancer and a theatrical performer. By exposing herself to the abject she reclaims her body's symbolic value from society. This experimental autoethnography provides practical advice to the ethnographer and insight to the student of gender studies."
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