Founded during the Gold Rush years, San Francisco's Chinatown became the largest and most vibrant Chinese community in America, and helped shape white America's view of Asians in general. This is a detailed social and cultural history of the Chinese in San Francisco, relating the development of social and cultural institutions, from brothels to ......
The foundational question this book explores is: what happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing when the observer s attention is redirected so that the primary object the portrait imitates becomes the likeness not of a person but of an act, the act of sitting for one ......
This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy (such as Plato, ......
This provocative book argues that in his fiction Henry James was more canny about sexual identities, more focused on sexual pleasure, and more insistent on flouting heterosexual convention than has been acknowledged by his critics and biographers. Without leaping to the construction of a gay Henry James, whose writings aver a conscious sexual ......
In this provocative and thoughtful book, Amy Zegart challenges the conventional belief that national security agencies work reasonably well to serve the national interest as they were designed to do. Using a new institutionalist approach, Zegart asks what forces shaped the initial design of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of ......
How can science be brought to connect with experience? This book addresses two of the most challenging problems facing contemporary neurobiology and cognitive science: first, understanding how we unconsciously execute habitual actions as a result of neurological and cognitive processes that are not formal actions of conscious judgment but part of ......
This book, by one of Italy s most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The author ......
Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art. These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of ......
In this book, one of Italy s most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He takes seriously Hegel s claim that art has exhausted its spiritual vocation, that it is no longer through art that Spirit principally comes to knowledge of itself. He argues, however, that Hegel by no means ......
