Bøker utgitt av University of Wisconsin Press

In the 2000s, as the World Bank was reeling from revelations of past hydropower failures, it nonetheless promoted the enormous Nam Theun 2 project. For the first time, this book shows in detail why, despite assertions of success from the World Bank and other agencies, the dam's true story has been one of substantial loss for affected villagers and the regional environment.

Russia's provinces have long held a prominent place in the nation's cultural imagination. Lyudmila Parts looks at the contested place of the provinces in twenty-first-century Russian literature and popular culture, addressing notions of nationalism, authenticity, Orientalism, Occidentalism, and post-imperial identity.

The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state.

A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.

Colonial immigrants and their French offspring have been a significant presence in the Parisian landscape since the 1940s. Expanding the narrow script of what and who is Paris, Laila Amine explores the novels, films, and street art of Maghrebis, Franco-Arabs, and African Americans in the City of Light.

Since the 1970s, folklorist James P. Leary has worked steadily to bring the folk music of the Upper Midwest to a larger public. Folksongs of Another America presents 187 representative performances by more than 200 singers and musicians, carefully restored in digital form from deteriorating original formats.

Set in Versailles of Louis XIV, this story is about Hugues, a dwarf who maneuvers his way up into the very highest of court circles by serving the needs of a mob of unscrupulous gamblers, of a priest notorious for saying black Masses at midnight, and, from under the gaming tables, of many sex-starved society women, including Louis's mistress.

Among Mexico's indigenous populations, the Yaqui Indians of Sonora have most successfully repelled threats to their identity, land, and community. Interested in explaining how the relatively "small" nation withstood four centuries of contact with white culture, Evelyn Hu-DeHirt focuses here on the Indians' response to shifting environmental pressures in the period 1820 to 1910 an increasingly violent, and ultimately decisive, chapter in their lives."

A candid and revelatory memoir of simultaneously falling in love with the Catholic faith and with another woman.

Burdened by poverty, illiteracy, and vulnerability as Mexican immigrants to California's Coachella Valley, three generations of Gonzalez men turn to vices or withdraw into depression. As brothers Rigoberto and Alex grow to manhood, they are haunted by the traumas of their mother's early death, their lonely youth, their father's desertion, and their grandfather's invective.

In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity.

What is good fortune? The Golden Coin asks - and answers - this question in poems about youth, conflict, travel, family love, and the joys and fears of getting old. Aboard his sailboat, Feldman draws lessons from the sea about time and history. His gaze is tempered not by nostalgia or longing but by satisfaction and happiness.

Fact and fiction meet at the boundaries, the betwixt and between where transformations occur. This is the area of ambiguity where fiction and fact become endowed with meaning, and this is the area--where ambiguity, irony, and metaphor join forces--that Harold Scheub exposes in all its nuanced and evocative complexity in The Poem in the Story.In a career devoted to exploring the art of the African storyteller, Scheub has conducted some of the most interesting and provocative investigations into nonverbal aspects of storytelling, the complex relationship between artist and audience, and, most dramatically, the role played by poetry in storytelling. This book is his most daring effort yet, an unconventional work that searches out what makes a story artistically engaging and emotionally evocative, the metaphorical center that Scheub calls "the poem in the story." Drawing on extensive fieldwork in southern Africa and decades of experience as a researcher and teacher, Scheub develops an original approach--a blend of field notes, diary entries, photographs, and texts of stories and poems--that guides readers into a new way of viewing, even experiencing, meaning in a story. Though this work is largely focused on African storytelling, its universal applications emerge when Scheub brings the work of storytellers as different as Shakespeare and Faulkner into the discussion.

A study of one of the most famous American journals - that of the 17th-century Puritan leader, John Winthrop. Moseley uses the journal to analyze Winthrop both as a historian and a politician, and traces how historians have read or misread his writings.

By offering a comparative, institutional analysis of how state-supported pensions for the elderly developed in Britain, Canada and the United States, Anna Shola Orloff aims to make a contribution to understanding the growth of modern social welfare policies.

An introduction to Bachelard's writings on the relation of science, poetry and human consciousness, containing extracts as well as critical essays which examine the development of his ideas and clarify his relation to the intellectual revolution commonly associated with Foucault and Derrida.

The War on Poverty, instituted in 1965 during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, was one of the chief elements of that president's Great Society initiative. This book describes and assesses the major social science research effort that grew up with, and in part because of, these programs. Robert H. Haveman's objective is to illuminate the process by which social and political developments have an impact on the direction of progress in the social sciences. Haveman identifies the policy measures most closely tied to the War on Poverty and the Great Society and describes the nature of these policies and their growth from 1965 to 1980. He examines the extent and growth of resources devoted to the poverty-related research that accompanied these programs, and assesses the impact of the growth in this research commitment over the 1965-1980 period.Haveman's was the first full overview of recent poverty-related research and an overview of methodological developments in the social sciences in the post-1965 period which were stimulated by the antipoverty effort.

Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialogue for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin.

This collection of theatre writings by the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky brings his powerful, wildly imaginative vision of theatre to an English-language audience for the first time. The centerpiece is his play That Third Guy (1937), a farce written at the onset of the Stalinist Terror and never performed.

For 872 days during World War II, the city of Leningrad endured a crushing blockade at the hands of German forces. Amid the devastation, Olga Berggolts broadcast her poems on the one remaining radio station. Berggolts wrote her memoir Daytime Stars in the spirit of the thaw after Stalin's death. In it, she celebrated the ideals of the revolution and the heroism of the Soviet people.

Reveals the daily lives and religious practice of ordinary Muslim men in Tajikistan as they aspire to become Sufi mystics. Benjamin Gatling describes in vivid detail the range of expressive forms - memories, stories, poetry, artifacts, rituals, and other embodied practices - employed as they try to construct a Sufi life in twenty-first-century Central Asia.