Reclaiming The Radical Socialist, Martin Luther King Jr.

Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. “This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.” The King West portrays here was “anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and [a] democratic socialist,” but he was also courageous in every sense of that term, even and especially in the face of death. “Could it be,” West asks, “that we know so little of the radical King because such courage defies our market-driven world?” 

7 Questions for Andrea R. Jain

Andrea R. Jain One difficult thing about writing Selling Yoga, though it was not surprising, is that contemporary popular culture defies the ability to locate any cultural object at one site or sites. And in the case of pop-culture yoga, we cannot locate it in my chosen sites alone. However, as a practical move, I had to select my examples as windows into the incalculable sites of the construction, dissemination, and practice of yoga. I had to carefully select from case studies in my effort to demonstrate that the postural practice we most associate with yoga today underwent global popularization as a consequence of its coincidence with transnational cultural developments.

On Nostalgia, Myth, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Ben Brazil To a significant extent, the conversation about Star Wars hinges on the same question: don’t we want something new? Put another way, differing opinions about The Force Awakens tend to hinge on how the reviewer judges the film’s balance of nostalgia and newness, of (cultural) history and change.