Scholarship @ Claremont

The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity: Essays on Education

Nita Kumar

This collection of essays studies the provincial and the rural, locating the sites of the community and family as producing other histories. The volume is divided into three parts: the first part engages with disabling practices of history within communities; the second part works towards producing gendered and community-oriented histories of modernity in South Asia; the third part proposes post-colonialism as an appropriate term for discussions of history and modernity and includes reflections on the scholar's particular position within the history and modernity. In addition, there are certain methodological arguments and concepts that span the whole book, such as the implication of narratives and the power of pain.

Hollywood Reborn

James Morrison

The Films of Terrence Malick

James Morrison

Despite overwhelming acclaim for his work, director Terrence Malick remains an under-examined figure of an era of filmmaking that also produced such notables as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. His films Badlands and Days of Heaven remain benchmarks of American cinema, while his recent The Thin Red Line returned him to the pantheon of American directors. In this new study, authors James Morrison and Thomas Schur examine each of his films in detail, drawing on extensive archival research to construct a portrait of his working methods as a director as well as the thematic, aesthetic, and cultural components of his work.

Moreover, aside from tracing the development of Malick's filmmaking from its beginnings to the present, the book compares his finished pictures to their original shooting scripts, and so provides a unique means of exploring the nature of his working methods and the ways in which they influence the final products. Revealing the ways in which these films connect to and depart from evolving traditions of the last 30 years, The Films of Terrence Malick provides a comprehensive and penetrating study as well as an informative and adventurous work of film criticism.

Broken Fever: Reflections of Gay Boyhood

James Morrison

What are the roots of personal identity? In this collection of essays, James Morrison searches for answers within the experiences and emotional reality of his own childhood in an attempt to pinpoint the beginnings of his own gay self-identity. "Although from the vantage point of my present self, I do not remember a time in my life when I was not 'gay,' I know that the arrival at any avowed identity is always a complex process of affirmation and negation, refusal and identification." It is this process, and specifically the ways gay identity circulates before it is even spoken, that Morrison seeks to distill in specific experiences. From the beginnings of questioning his religion to exploring his first boyhood attraction, Morrison's experiences are chronicled honestly and compellingly.

Lessons from Schools

Nita Kumar

This book focuses on the educational history of Banaras from 1840 to 1940. It defines the concepts of learning and education and provides a detailed picture of the social history of Banaras. The authors then describe how the various systems of education underwent changes and upheavals.

Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen

Audrey Bilger

An examination of comedy and feminism in the works of early women British novelists. Humor in Life and Letters Series.

Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors

James Morrison

In Passport to Hollywood, James Morrison examines a series of Hollywood films by directors from European art-cinemas. Drawing widely on current research in film theory, film history, and cultural studies, he traces the influence of European filmmakers in Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1980s and illuminates the relation between modernism and mass-culture in American movies. By interpreting important American films, Morrison also shows how these films illustrate key issues of cultural hierarchy and national culture over fifty years of American cinema. In addition, he explores the complex and often contradictory ways that these Hollywood movies conceptualize ideas about "foreignness." Using insightful close viewings, Morrison demonstrates new connections among modernism, postmodernism, and American movies.

Friends, Brothers and Informants: Fieldwork Memoirs of Banaras

Nita Kumar

In this unusually personal, evocative account of her fieldwork experiences, Kumar tackles the dilemma of how a Western-trained Indian intellectual adapts to the field and builds deeply affecting relationships with strangers. She discloses what it is like to be a native researching her own culture, offering her fieldwork memoirs in all their spontaneity and candor. We see Banaras through her eyes when she first arrives: throngs of people, cramped and dark lodgings, unappetizing food, mischievous monkeys, and almost overwhelming filth. But as she establishes friendships, we are treated to her discoveries not only about the city and its people, but also about her place in this society. The familiar problems that face most anthropologists conducting fieldwork--of Self versus Other, objectivity versus bias, familiar circumstances versus new and dismaying ones--are given a surprising and complex dimension. Through a narration of her own experiences, the author demonstrates how personal locations--habits, preferences, expectations deriving from childhood memories, and areas of ignorance--impose themselves on the process of selection, observation, and interpretation in research.