In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women's literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy. Issues of race, class, color, caste, nationality, and sexuality are all central to their fiction--as is an urgent sense of the historical place of women between the two U.S. occupations of the country. Their novels interrogate women's social and political stance in Haiti from an explicitly female point of view, forcefully responding to overt sexual and political violence within the nation's ambivalent political climate.

Silence is essential for the health and well-being of humans and the environment in which they live. Yet silence has almost vanished from our lives and our world. Of all the books that claim to be about silence, this is the only one that addresses silence directly. Silence: A User's Guide is just what the title says: it is a guide to silence, which is both a vast interior spaciousness, and the condition of our being in the natural world. This book exposes the processes by which silence can transfigure our lives--what Maggie Ross calls "the work of silence"; it describes how lives steeped in silence can transfigure other lives unawares. It shows how the work of silence was once understood to be the foundation of the teaching of Jesus, and how this teaching was once an intrinsic part of Western Christianity; it describes some of the methods by which the institution suppressed the work of silence, and why religious institutions are afraid of silence. Above all, this book shows that the work of silence gives us a way of being in the world that is more than we can ask for or imagine.

This book provides a theoretical account of a variety of different communicative aspects of silence and explores new ways of studying socially-motivated language. A research overview shows the influence of related work in the fields of media studies, politics, gender studies, aesthetics and literature. The author argues that in theoretically pragmatic terms, silence can be accounted for by the same principles as those of speech. A later, more applied section of the book explores the power of silencing in politics. A concluding chapter shows the importance of silence beyond linguistics and politics in terms of artistic expression. The approach is intentionally eclectic in order to explore the concept of silence as a rich and

Global and local contestations are not only gendered, they also raise important questions about agency and its practice and location in the twenty-first century. Silence and voice are being increasingly debated as sites of agency within feminist research on conflict and insecurity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist approaches, this volume examines the various ways that silence and voice have been contested in feminist research, and their impact on how agency is understood and performed, particularly in situations of conflict and insecurity. The collection makes an important and timely contribution to interdisciplinary feminist theorizing of silence, voice and agency in global politics. Interrogating the intellectual landscape of existing debates about agency, silence and voice in an increasingly unequal and conflict-ridden world, the contributors to this volume challenge the dominant narratives of agency based on voice or speech alone as a necessary precondition for understanding or negotiating agency or empowerment. Many of the authors have engaged in field research in both the Global South and North and bring in-depth and diverse gendered case studies to their analysis, focusing on the increasing importance of examining silence as well as voice for understanding gender and agency in an increasingly embattled and complicated world. This book will contribute to and deepen existing discussions of agency, silence and voice in development, culture and gender studies, political economy, postcolonial and de-colonial scholarship as well as in the field of International Relations.

Silence : Interdisciplinary Perspectives Studies in Anthropological Linguistics.

This fourth volume of the Iconicity series is like its predecessors devoted to the study of iconicity in language and literature in all its forms. Many of the papers turn the notion of iconicity ‘inside-out’, some suggesting that ‘less-is-more’; others focus on the cognitive factors ‘inside’ the brain that are important for the iconic phenomena that are produced in the ‘outside’ world. In addition this volume includes a paper related to iconicity in music and its interaction with language. Other papers range from the theoretical issues involved in the evolution of language, to those that offer many ‘inside-out’ claims, such as claiming that nouns are derived from pronouns, and as such should more properly be called ‘pro-pronouns’. Also, this volume includes perhaps the first English-language analysis of the iconic aspects of sound symbolism in a prayer from the Koran. This is a truly interdisciplinary collection that should turn some of the notions of iconicity in language and literature ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’.

Music/Ideology is a response to the question: Must the practice of music analysis and music theory always reinscribe the ideology of aesthetic autonomy? And, if not, under what circumstances does it reinscribe that ideology? The responses to these questions should appeal not only to music and cultural theorists, but also to a larger audience engaged in critical theory. These essays serve as an introduction to the broad array of issues arising from approaches that represent the full spectrum, from music-theoretical to marxist and feminist issues. Such questions are of vital importance, and not only to those who are engaged in establishing a connection among music theory, music analysis, and aesthetic ideology. Music/Ideology presents today's most interesting critical thinkers in postmodern theory and music theory, introducing an interdisciplinary approach and covering a wide range of subjects - both by implication and explication.