Azizah Ismail was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1809, to a Somali father, Darod Clan leader Mohamed Ismail, and a Berber mother, Amina Ali. In 1828, the Geledi Sultan sent the Warsangali war party, led by the ruthless Omar Garimarro, against the Ismail family. The fearsome warrior turned out to be a Vampire, and he turned Azizah into one of the Undead. After slaying Garimarro, Azizah wandered the world, fighting evil and protecting the innocent. The Supreme Council of the Vampire Community wants her dead. Her only ally is Dr. Jayson Hawthorne, a handsome physician whom she saves from fascists one night in Washington D.C. Hunted by the Living and the Undead, Azizah and Hawthorne find themselves reluctant allies, and perhaps much more. Can this unlikely alliance save them from their enemies ?

My name is Rashid King. I was born on a Plantation in the environs of Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1839 and ran away in 1859. Back then, Biloxi was definitely no place for a Black man. While fleeing the American Civil War, I met Farouk, a powerful Vampire of Persian lore. He turned me into one of the Undead. Well over a century later, I live in the City of Toronto, Ontario, and I've become a leader among the local Vampire Community. With my lady Dominica Alvarez and my good friend Alexander Poe, two extremely powerful Vampires, by my side, I fear nothing. Unfortunately, these are dark times, as the humans are now hunting us. They've recently discovered our existence after centuries of secrecy and want to eradicate us. If the Vampire Community is to survive, I must make some hard choices. Wish me luck. Peace.

Following a long historical legacy, Muslim women’s lives continue to be represented and circulate widely as a vehicle of intercultural understanding within a context of the "war on terror." Following Edward Said’s thesis that these cultural forms reflect and participate in the power plays of empire, this volume examines the popular and widespread production and reception of Muslim women’s lives and narratives in literature, poetry, cinema, television and popular culture within the politics of a post-9/11 world. This edited collection provides a timely exploration into the pedagogical and ethical possibilities opened up by transnational, feminist, and anti-colonial readings that can work against sensationalized and stereotypical representations of Muslim women. It addresses the gap in contemporary theoretical discourse amongst educators teaching literary and cultural texts by and about Muslim Women, and brings scholars from the fields of education, literary and cultural studies, and Muslim women’s studies to examine the politics and ethics of transnational anti-colonial reading practices and pedagogy. The book features interviews with Muslim women artists and cultural producers who provide engaging reflections on the transformative role of the arts as a form of critical public pedagogy.

This book reveals how everyday experiences of being ‘modern’ (c. 1920s-70s) indexed continuity and change in the transition from colonialism to independence and after in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume recover modern times at the intersection of public and private domains, encompassing sex, religion, art, film, literature and urban space. The authors examine the conditions and representations of modernity, as shaped by elites and the governed, by actors, artists, novelists and non-fiction writers. Plural encounters in cities, through spiritual communities, art, high and popular culture saw Southeast Asians fashioning modern times in dialogue with global capitalism, consumer culture and second-wave feminism.

This book provides a historical and ethnographic examination of gender relations in Malay society, in particular in the well-known state of Negeri Sembilan, famous for its unusual mixture of Islam and matrilineal descent. Peletz analyzes the diverse ways in which the evocative, heavily gendered symbols of "reason" and "passion" are deployed by Malay Muslims. Unlike many studies of gender, this book elucidates the cultural and political processes implicated in the constitution of both feminine and masculine identity. It also scrutinizes the relationship between gender and kinship and weighs the role of ideology in everyday life. Peletz insists on the importance of examining gender systems not as social isolates, but in relation to other patterns of hierarchy and social difference. His study is historical and comparative; it also explores the political economy of contested symbols and meanings. More than a treatise on gender and social change in a Malay society, this book presents a valuable and deeply interesting model for the analysis of gender and culture by addressing issues of hegemony and cultural domination at the heart of contemporary cultural studies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

A conscious mind in a sleeping brain: the title of this book provides a vivid image of the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which dreamers are consciously aware that they are dreaming while they seem to be soundly asleep. Lucid dreamers could be said to be awake to their inner worlds while they are asleep to the external world. Of the many questions that this singular phenomenon may raise, two are foremost: What is consciousness? And what is sleep? Although we cannot pro vide complete answers to either question here, we can at least explain the sense in which we are using the two terms. We say lucid dreamers are conscious because their subjective reports and behavior indicate that they are explicitly aware of the fact that they are asleep and dreaming; in other words, they are reflectively conscious of themselves. We say lucid dreamers are asleep primarily because they are not in sensory contact with the external world, and also because research shows physiological signs of what is conventionally considered REM sleep. The evidence presented in this book-preliminary as it is-still ought to make it clear that lucid dreaming is an experiential and physiological reality. Whether we should consider it a paradoxical form of sleep or a paradoxical form of waking or something else entirely, it seems too early to tell.