How can we account for the persistent appeal of glossy commercial pop music? Why do certain performers have such emotional power, even though their music is considered vulgar or second rate? In The Persistence of Sentiment, Mitchell Morris gives a critical account of a group of American popular music performers who have dedicated fan bases and considerable commercial success despite the critical disdain they have endured. Morris examines the specific musical features of some exemplary pop songs and draws attention to the social contexts that contributed to their popularity as well as their dismissal. These artists were all members of more or less disadvantaged social categories: members of racial or sexual minorities, victims of class and gender prejudices, advocates of populations excluded from the mainstream. The complicated commercial world of pop music in the 1970s allowed the greater promulgation of musical styles and idioms that spoke to and for exactly those stigmatized audiences. In more recent years, beginning with the “Seventies Revival” of the early 1990s, additional perspectives and layers of interpretation have allowed not only a deeper understanding of these songs' function than when they were first popular, but also an appreciation of how their significance has shifted for American listeners in the succeeding three decades.

This book discusses capital markets and investment decision-making, focusing on the globalisation of the world economy. It presents empirically tested results from Indian and Southwest Asian stock markets and offers valuable insights into the working of Indian capital markets. The book is divided into four parts: the first part examines capital-market operations, particularly clearance and settlement processes, and stock market operations. The second part then addresses the functioning of global markets and investment decisions; more specifically it explores calendar anomalies, dependencies, overreaction effect, causality effect and stock returns volatility in South Asia, U.S. and global stock markets as a whole. Part three covers issues relating to capital structure, values of firm and investment strategies. Lastly, part four discusses emerging issues in finance like behavioral finance, Islamic finance, and international financial reporting standards. The book fills the gap in the existing finance literature and helps fund managers and individual investors make more accurate investment decisions.

In this erudite and groundbreaking series of essays, renowned author Joseph Massad asks and answers key questions, such as: What has been the main achievement of the Zionist movement? What accounts for the failure of the Palestinian National Movement to win its struggle against Israel? What do anti-Semitism, colonialism and racism have to do with the Palestinian/Israeli 'conflict'? Joseph Massad offers a radical departure from mainstream analysis in order to expose the causes for the persistence of the 'Palestinian Question'. He proposes that it is not in de-linking the Palestinian Question from the Jewish Question that a resolution can be found, but by linking them as one and the same question. All other proposed solutions, the author argues, are bound to fail. Deeply researched and documented, this book analyzes the failure of the 'peace process' and proposes that a solution to the Palestinian Question will not be found unless settler-colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism are abandoned as the ideological framework for a resolution. Individual essays further explore the struggle over Jewish identity in Israel and the struggle among Palestinians over what constitutes the Palestinian Question today.

The Presence of the Past offers a new perspective on Hollywood's "New Wave" as engaged with the vitality of sensory experience and the affective imagination. As author Daniel Bishop shows, the soundtracks of several key films of the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960s and 70s cultivated an array of sensibilities regarding the American past. This importance of the past exceeded the New Hollywood's acknowledged use of genre revisionism as a vehicle for timely ideological commentary. There was also a vital tendency in this era to locate the past as an object of imagined phenomenal presence. Although this concept of the past never solidified into a self-conscious discourse, it was nevertheless woven into film culture, readable between the lines of criticism, cultural reception, New Wave aesthetics, and in the aesthetic and industrial transformations of sound design and film music. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Last Picture Show (1971), American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Badlands (1973) are not only key texts of an exciting era in American popular cinema. They are also mediations upon the presence of the past, an image central to the polarities of visceral energy and ambiguous ephemerality, of utopian dreams and melancholy resignation that characterized this cinema. These sensibilities of pastness engage in diverse ways with myth, nostalgia, paranoia, and existential alienation. They are, however, also united by a concern both with the experiential actuality of the past and with the distances that inevitably separate us from this actuality.

Having experienced a period of crisis, the young scholars included in this anthology provide evidence that critical periods can be favorable to the flourishing of the social sciences and that crises in society and the polity may provide new incentives for the profession. The authors have used the most critical period of Brazil's change from a liberal to an authoritarian government to further their training in Europe and the United States, returning to their country to shed new light on past and current events. They have adapted their training to a non-liberal environment and combined local research with a universalistic orientation in their analyses of Brazilian social structure. This book investigates the roles of the peasantry in Brazilian society, past and present. It describes the pact established between traditional rural elites and the central government, which favored the previous populistic style of urban politics but left unaltered the rural social structure. In addition to analyzing the political trade-offs between the traditional elite and the central government, the authors focus on the class structure within which peasant leagues emerged. The country's political development is analyzed through a bi-polar political structure wherein populist and authoritarian regimes alternate in power. Other aspects of the military government's impact are discussed through the use of public policy models aimed at analyzing the output of both liberal and authoritarian regimes. Continuity between the current administration and previous authoritarian governments is shown as well as new developments, such as changes in municipal taxation, which allow for the emergence of new technical elites. The increase in authoritarian legislation is discussed within this analytical framework, as is the expansion of entrepreneurial activities. This book brings together the analytical result of recent research by a distinguished group of young Brazilian social scientists. It is ... the first book written in English about Brazil by Brazilians and, as such, represents an extremely important contribution to the literature ... An up-to-date selected bibliography on* social science research in Brazil from 1960-77 is an essential reference point for all future undertakings. Shepard Forman, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Honour, Violence and Emotions in History is the first book to draw on emerging cross-disciplinary scholarship on the study of emotions to analyse the history of honour and violence across a broad range of cultures and regions. Written by leading cultural and social historians from around the world, the book considers how emotions - particularly shame, anger, disgust, jealousy, despair and fear - have been provoked and expressed through culturally-embedded and historically specific understandings of honour. The collection explores a range of contexts, from 17th-century China to 18th-century South Africa and 20th-century Europe, offering a broad and wide-ranging analysis of the interrelationships between honour, violence and emotions in history. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to all researchers studying the relationship between violence and the emotions.