Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.

Weaver-Zercher blends academic analysis with her own experiences of researching, reading, and talking with others about Amish fiction in order to explore the phenomenon, with particular attention to the hypermodernity and hypersexuality that are fueling the appeal of the genre for evangelical Christian readers.

Cultural Writing. Edited by Graziella Parati and Ben Lawton. ITALIAN CULTURAL STUDIES includes selected essays written by participants of the Italian Cultural Studies Symposium at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH on October 29-31, 1999. These essays examine the notion of cultural studies-both Italian and others. What is cultural studies? Why should we study it? How should we teach it? What is its relation to traditional language studies? Contributors include Norma Bouchard, Joseph A. Buttigieg, Sandra Carletti, Roberto Maria Dainotto, Nathalie Hester, Sarah Patricia Hill, Irene Kacandes, Giancarlo Lombardi, Daniela Orlandi, Marie Orton, Nicoletta Pireddu, Adrian W.B. Randolph, Maria Galli Stampino, and Rebecca West. Perfectbound.

Wandering Women: Urban Ecologies of Italian Feminist Filmmaking explores the work of contemporary Italian women directors from feminist and ecological perspectives. Mostly relegated to the margins of the cultural scene, and concerned with women's marginality, the compelling films Wandering Women sheds light on tell stories of displacement and liminality that unfold through the act of walking in the city. The unusual emptiness of the cities that the nomadic female protagonists traverse highlights the absence of, and their wish for, life-sustaining communities. Laura Di Bianco contends that women's urban filmmaking—while articulating a claim for belonging and asserting cinematic and social agency—brings into view landscapes of the Anthropocene, where urban decay and the erasure of nature intersect with human alienation. Though a minor cinema, it is also a powerful movement of resistance against the dominant male narratives about the world we inhabit. Based on interviews with directors, Wandering Women deepens the understanding of contemporary Italian cinema while enriching the field of feminist ecocritical literature.