Island Paradox
Title | Island Paradox PDF eBook |
Author | Francisco Rivera-Batiz |
Publisher | Russell Sage Foundation |
Pages | 211 |
Release | 1996-11-21 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1610444736 |
"One of the year's best books on Puerto Rico."—El Nuevo Dia, San Juan "[The authors] are highly regarded labor economists who have written extensively and intelligently in the past, and again in this volume, on Puerto Rican migration and labor markets... There isabundant statistical data and careful analysis, some of which challenges the conventional wisdom. Highly recommended." —Choice Island Paradox is the first comprehensive, census-based portrait of social and economic life in Puerto Rico. During its nearly fiftyyears as a U.S. commonwealth, the relationship between Puerto Rico's small, developing economy and the vastly larger, more industrialized United States has triggered profound changes in the island's industry and labor force. Puerto Rico has been deeply affected by the constant flow of its people to and from the mainland, and by the influx of immigrant workers from other nations. Distinguished economists Francisco Rivera-Batiz and Carlos Santiago provide the latest data on the socioeconomic status of Puerto Rico today, and examine current conditions within the context of the major trends of the past two decades. Island Paradox describes many improvements in Puerto Rico's standard of living, including rising per-capita income, longer life expectancies, greater educational attainment, and increased job prospects for women. But it also discusses the devastating surge in unemployment. Rapid urbanization and a vanishing agricultural sector have led to severe inequality, as family income has become increasingly dependent on education and geographic location. Although Puerto Rico's close ties to the United States were the major source of the island's economic growth prior to 1970, they have also been at the root of recent hardships. Puerto Rico's trade andbusiness transactions remain predominantly with the United States, but changes in federal tax, social, and budgetary policies, along with international agreements such as NAFTA, now threaten to alter the economic ties between the island and the mainland. Island Paradox reveals the social and family changes that have occurred among Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland. The significant decline in the island's population growth is traced in part to women's increased pursuit of educational and employment opportunities before marrying. More children are being raised by singleparents, but this stems from a higher divorce rate and not a rise in teenage pregnancy. The widespread circular migration to and from the United States has had strong repercussions for the island's labor markets and social balance, leading to concerns about an island brain drain. The Puerto Rican population in the United States hasbecome increasingly diverse, less regionally concentrated and not, as some have claimed, in danger of becoming an underclass. Within a single generation Puerto Rico has experienced social and economic shifts of an unprecedented magnitude. Island Paradox charts Puerto Rico's economic fortunes, summarizes the major demographic trends, and identifies the issues that will have the strongest bearings on Puerto Rico's prospects for a successful future. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Census Series
The Pine Island Paradox
Title | The Pine Island Paradox PDF eBook |
Author | Kathleen Dean Moore |
Publisher | Milkweed Editions |
Pages | 267 |
Release | 2011-12-18 |
Genre | Nature |
ISBN | 1571318585 |
Can the love reserved for family and friends be extended to a place? “Luminous essays” on nature and environmental stewardship (Booklist). Named one of the Top Ten Northwest Books of the Year by the Oregonian In this book, acclaimed author Kathleen Dean Moore, a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for Holdfast, reflects on how deeply the environment is entrenched in the human spirit, despite the notion that nature and humans are somehow separate. Moore’s essays, deeply felt and often funny, make connections in what can appear to be a disconnected world. Written in parable form, her stories of family and friends—of wilderness excursions with her husband and children, camping trips with students, blowing up a dam, her daughter’s arrest for protesting the war in Iraq—affirm an impulse of caring that belies the abstract division of humans from nature, of the sacred from the mundane. Underlying these wonderfully engaging stories is the author’s belief in a new ecological ethic of care, one that expands the idea of community to include the environment, and embraces the land as family. “Stands with the best tradition of nature writing.” —The Oregonian
Islands of Empire
Title | Islands of Empire PDF eBook |
Author | Camilla Fojas |
Publisher | University of Texas Press |
Pages | 253 |
Release | 2014-03-01 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 0292756305 |
Examining a broad range of pop culture media-film, television, journalism, advertisements, travel writing, and literature-Fojas explores the United States as an empire and how it has narrated its relationship to its island territories.
Islands and the Modernists
Title | Islands and the Modernists PDF eBook |
Author | Jill Franks |
Publisher | McFarland |
Pages | 203 |
Release | 2006-07-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0786424575 |
This study examines five modernists in different disciplines--biology, painting, drama, fiction, and anthropology--whose work on islands made them famous. Charles Darwin challenged every presumption of popular science with his theory of evolution by natural selection, derived from his study of the Galapagos Islands. Paul Gauguin found on Tahiti inspiration enough to break through the inhibiting traditions of the Parisian art world. John Millington Synge's experience on the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland gave birth to a new style of drama that defied classic divisions between tragedy and comedy. D.H. Lawrence's life-long search for a utopian community culminated in his famous short story, "The Man Who Loved Islands," that poignantly portrays the tension between idealism and realism, solitude and human intimacy. Finally, Margaret Mead began her career in anthropology by studying the remote South Sea Islands and through her work acquired the sobriquet "Mother of the World." The text explores the extent to which islands inspired these radical thinkers to perform innovative work. Each used islands differently, but similar phenomena affected their choice of place and the outcome of their projects. Their examples illuminate the relationship of modernism to alienation and insularity.
Islands Magazine
Title | Islands Magazine PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | 114 |
Release | 2004-07 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Lighthouse Paradox
Title | Lighthouse Paradox PDF eBook |
Author | D. Ann Kelley |
Publisher | Lypton Pub. |
Pages | 354 |
Release | 2004-01-01 |
Genre | Drummond Island (Mich.) |
ISBN | 9780975278000 |
The Aesthetics of Island Space
Title | The Aesthetics of Island Space PDF eBook |
Author | Johannes Riquet |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 370 |
Release | 2019-12-18 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0192568531 |
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, in the journals of explorers and scientists such as James Cook and Charles Darwin, and in Hollywood cinema. It traces the ways in which literary and cinematic islands have functioned as malleable spatial figures that offer vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the material energies of words and images and the energies of the physical world. The chapters focus on America's island gateways (Roanoke and Ellis Island), visions of tropical islands (Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the US-Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest, and the imaginative appeal of mutable islands. It argues that modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual and cognitive challenges to the experience of space, and that these challenges were negotiated in complex and contradictory ways via poetic engagement with islands. Discussions of island narratives in postcolonial theory have broadened understanding of how islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions, bounded spaces easily subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story. In this alternative account, the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space. Drawing on and rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that the modern experience of islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a dispersal, fragmentation, and diversification of spatial experience, and it explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by both non-fictional and fictional responses.