- Table View
- List View
Tonics & Teas: Traditional And Modern Remedies
by Rachel De ThampleEveryone knows that chamomile tea is the answer to a good night's sleep, that lemon tea is an invigorating way to start your morning and that ginger tea can settle your stomach. But did you know that Jamu Kunyit, a ginger and turmeric tonic, is the Balinese equivalent of `an apple a day' to `keep health problems at bay'; that herbal medicinal vinegars can be antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral as well as helping fight respiratory infections, coughs and bronchitis; or that adding black pepper and coconut oil to any turmeric drink can help your body reap the benefits more effectively? Rachel de Thample has gathered a collection of the best of these ancient drinks and traditional remedies, along with a few modern spins, offering tips on how to best build them into a busy lifestyle. Organised into three chapters, she covers Tonics such as Dairy Keifr, Beet Kvass, Nettle Tonic and Ginger Shots; Teas such as Grasshopper Tea, Spice Route Tea, Armenian Herbal Tea and Afghan Pin Chai, plus delicious and beneficial Drinks such as Elderflower Cordial, Amazake and Kombucha. This eclectic mix of natural brews is the perfect way to give your body a healthy boost.
Tonics & Teas
by Rachel De Thample Rachel De ThampleEveryone knows that chamomile tea is the answer to a good night's sleep, that lemon tea is an invigorating way to start your morning and that ginger tea can settle your stomach. But did you know that Jamu Kunyit, a ginger and turmeric tonic, is the Balinese equivalent of 'an apple a day' to 'keep health problems at bay'; that herbal medicinal vinegars can be antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral as well as helping fight respiratory infections, coughs and bronchitis; or that adding black pepper and coconut oil to any turmeric drink can help your body reap the benefits more effectively? Rachel de Thample has gathered a collection of the best of these ancient drinks and traditional remedies, along with a few modern spins, offering tips on how to best build them into a busy lifestyle. Organised into three chapters, she covers Tonics such as Dairy Kefir, Beet Kvass, Nettle Tonic and Ginger Shots; Teas such as Grasshopper Tea, Spice Route Tea, Armenian Herbal Tea and Afghan Pin Chai, plus delicious and beneficial Drinks such as Elderflower Cordial, Amazake and Kombucha. This eclectic mix of natural brews is the perfect way to give your body a healthy boost.
Tonic to the Nation: Making English Music in the Festival of Britain
by Nathaniel G. LewLong remembered chiefly for its modernist exhibitions on the South Bank in London, the 1951 Festival of Britain also showcased British artistic creativity in all its forms. In Tonic to the Nation, Nathaniel G. Lew tells the story of the English classical music and opera composed and revived for the Festival, and explores how these long-overlooked components of the Festival helped define English music in the post-war period. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Lew looks closely at the work of the newly chartered Arts Council of Great Britain, for whom the Festival of Britain provided the first chance to assert its authority over British culture. The Arts Council devised many musical programs for the Festival, including commissions of new concert works, a vast London Season of almost 200 concerts highlighting seven centuries of English musical creativity, and several schemes to commission and perform new operas. These projects were not merely directed at bringing audiences to hear new and old national music, but to share broader goals of framing the national repertory, negotiating between the conflicting demands of conservative and progressive tastes, and using music to forge new national definitions in a changed post-war world.
Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship
by Dana A. WilliamsNPR SPRING PICKAn insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.Toni Morrison herself had great enthusiasm about Dana Williams's work on this story, generously sharing memories and thoughts with the author over the years, even giving her the book's title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.
Toni Morrison: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
by Melville House&“Knowledge is what&’s important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.&” — TONI MORRISON In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews — including her first and last — Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama called a &“national treasure&”) details not only her writing life, but also her other careers as a teacher, and as a publisher, as well as the gripping story of her family. In fact, Morrison reveals here that her Nobel Prize-winning novels, such as Beloved and Song of Solomon, were born out of her family&’s stories — such as those of her great-grandmother, born a slave, or her father, escaping the lynch mobs of the South. With an introduction by her close friend, poet Nikki Giovani, Morrison hereby weaves yet another fascinating and inspiring narrative — that of herself.
Toni Morrison: The Essential Guide (Vintage Living Texts #14)
by Louisa Joyner Margaret Reynolds Jonathan NoakesIn Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide to the works of Toni Morrison. Vintage Living Texts is unique in that it offers an in-depth interview with Toni Morrison, relating specifically to the texts under discussion. This guide deals with Morrison's themes, genre and narrative technique, and a close reading of the texts will provide a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels.Also included in this guide are detailed reading plans for the novels, questions for essays and discussion, contextual material, suggested texts for complementary and comparative reading, extracts from reviews, a biography, bibliography and a glossary of literary terms. Whether a teacher, student or general reader, Vintage Living Texts gives you the chance to explore new resources and enjoy new pleasures.
Toni Morrison: Memory and Meaning
by Adrienne Lanier Seward and Justine TallyToni Morrison: Memory and Meaning boasts essays by well-known international scholars focusing on the author’s literary production and including her very latest works—the theatrical production Desdemona and her tenth and latest novel, Home. These original contributions are among the first scholarly analyses of these latest additions to her oeuvre and make the volume a valuable addition to potential readers and teachers eager to understand the position of Desdemona and Home within the wider scope of Morrison’s career. Indeed, in Home, we find a reworking of many of the tropes and themes that run throughout Morrison’s fiction, prompting the editors to organize the essays as they relate to themes prevalent in Home.In many ways, Morrison has actually initiated paradigm shifts that permeate the essays. They consistently reflect, in approach and interpretation, the revolutionary change in the study of American literature represented by Morrison’s focus on the interior lives of enslaved Africans. This collection assumes black subjectivity, rather than argues for it, in order to reread and revise the horror of slavery and its consequences into our time. The analyses presented in this volume also attest to the broad range of interdisciplinary specializations and interests in novels that have now become classics in world literature. The essays are divided into five sections, each entitled with a direct quotation from Home, and framed by two poems: Rita Dove’s “The Buckeye” and Sonia Sanchez’s “Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo, Aaayeee Babo.”
Toni Morrison: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by Linda Wagner-MartinA reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison—fiction, non-fiction, and other—drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts, Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, second edition provides an overview of Morrison’s intellectual growth as an artist. Linda Wagner-Martin aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty plus years. The revised edition includes new discussion of God Help the Child, The Origin of Others, and The Source of Self-Regard. These additions present and intensify scholarship on Morrison’s major literary contributions, but also trace her significant role as a public intellectual, bringing to light the consistency of Morrison’s aesthetic and political visions.
Toni Morrison: A Literary Life (Literary Lives #67)
by L. Wagner-MartinA reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison — fiction, non-fiction, and other — drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.
Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism (Critical Studies in Black Life and Culture #30)
by David L. MiddletonFirst published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Toni Morrison's 'Beloved': Origins (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature)
by Justine TallyThis work expands the scope of Morrison’s project to examine the ways and means of memory in the preservation of belief systems passed down from the earliest civilizations (both the Classical Greek and the Ancient Egyptian) as a challenge to the sterility of modernity. Moreover, this research explores the author’s specific use of Foucauldian theory as a vehicle for her narrative, which reclaims the very origins of civilization’s primal concerns with life, procreation and regeneration, springing from the very Heart of Africa. Despite the weight of "white" authority and the disparaging of "blackness," Beloved’s multiple "ghosts" conjure up a legacy so potent that no authoritarian discourse has been able to entirely erase it, a legacy that still speaks to us from a heritage we no longer acknowledge yet that nevertheless remains, and sustains us.
Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture)
by Alice SundmanHow does Toni Morrison create and form her literary places? As one of the first studies exploring Morrison’s archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author’s textual choices, her writerly strategies, and her process of writing, all combining in shaping her literary places. In a methodology combining close reading and genetic criticism, the book examines Morrison’s writing—her drafting and crafting—of her fictional places. Focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1997), and A Mercy (2008), it analyses particular instances of written places, illuminating the manifold ways in which they are formed as text, and showing the centrality of the ideas of joining in Beloved, transformation in Paradise, and articulation in A Mercy. Toni Morrison is a major literary figure in contemporary literature, and commonly considered one of the most influential American writers of the post-1960s era. Investigating the conjunction of her texts and manuscripts, this book continues, extends, and supplements the rich body of Morrison scholarship by illuminating how the genesis and formation of her multifaceted literary places constitute vital parts of her fictional writing.
Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts
by Juda BennettToni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts radically intervenes in one of the most established and sacred topics in Toni Morrison scholarship, love. Moving beyond Morrison's representation of ghosts as the forgotten or occluded past, Juda Bennett uncovers how Morrison imagines the spectral sphere as always already queer, a provocation and challenge to heteronormativity—with the ghost appearing as an active participant in disruptions of compulsory heterosexuality, as a figure embodying closet desires, or as a disembodied emanation that counterpoints homophobia. From The Bluest Eye to Home, Morrison's novels have included many queer ghosts that challenge our most cherished conceptions of love and speak to cultural anxieties about black sexualities, gay marriage, AIDS, lesbian visibility, and transgender identities. Not surprisingly, the scene-stealing ghost Beloved appears at the very heart of this book, but Bennett cautions against interpretative stasis, inviting readers to break free of the stranglehold Beloved has had on imaginations, so as not to miss the full force of Morrison's lifelong project to queer love.
Toni Morrison and the New Black: Reading God Help the Child
by Jaleel AkhtarToni Morrison and the New Black examines how Morrison explores the concept of the new black in the context of post-soul, post-black and post-racial discourses. Morrison evolves the new black as symbolic of unprecedented black success in all walks of life, from politics to the media, business and beyond.The author's work shows how the new black reaffirms the possibility of upward mobility and success, and stands as testimony to the American Dream that anyone can achieve material success provided they work hard enough for it.
Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color
by Anissa Janine WardiCritics have routinely excluded African American literature from ecocritical inquiry despite the fact that the literary tradition has, from its inception, proved to be steeped in environmental concerns that address elements of the natural world and relate nature to the transatlantic slave trade, plantation labor, and nationhood. Toni Morrison’s work is no exception. Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color is the first full-length ecocritical investigation of the Nobel Laureate’s novels and brings to the fore an unequaled engagement between race and nature.Morrison’s ecological consciousness holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. It follows, then, that ecology, the branch of biology that studies how people relate to each other and their environment, is an apt framework for this book. The interrelationships and interactions between individuals and community, and between organisms and the biosphere, are central to this analysis. They highlight that the human and nonhuman are part of a larger ecosystem of interfacings and transformations. Toni Morrison and the Natural World is organized by color, examining soil (brown) in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; plant life (green) in Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Home; bodies of water (blue) in Tar Baby and Love; and fire (orange) in Sula and God Help the Child. By providing a racially inflected reading of nature, Toni Morrison and the Natural World makes an important contribution to the field of environmental studies and provides a landmark for Morrison scholarship.
Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing
by Marilyn Sanders MobleyToni Morrison’s readers and critics typically focus more on the “what” than the “how” of her writing. In Toni Morrison and the Geopoetics of Place, Race, and Be/longing, Marilyn Sanders Mobley analyzes Morrison’s expressed narrative intention of providing “spaces for the reader” to help us understand the narrative strategies in her work. Mobley’s approach is as interdisciplinary, intersectional, nuanced, and complex as Morrison’s. She combines textual analysis with a study of Morrison’s cultural politics and narrative poetics and describes how Morrison engages with both history and the present political moment. Informed by research in geocriticism, spatial literary studies, African American literary studies, and Black feminist studies at the intersection of poetics and cultural politics, Mobley identifies four narrative strategies that illuminate how Morrison creates such spaces in her fiction; what these spaces say about her understanding of place, race, and belonging; and how they constitute a way to read and re-read her work.
Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart
by Andrea O'ReillyTraces Morrison's theory of African American mothering as it is articulated in her novels, essays, speeches, and interviews.Mothering is a central issue for feminist theory, and motherhood is also a persistent presence in the work of Toni Morrison. Examining Morrison's novels, essays, speeches, and interviews, Andrea O'Reilly illustrates how Morrison builds upon black women's experiences of and perspectives on motherhood to develop a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of both maternal identity and role, radically different from motherhood as practiced and prescribed in the dominant culture. Motherhood, in Morrison's view, is fundamentally and profoundly an act of resistance, essential and integral to black women's fight against racism (and sexism) and their ability to achieve well-being for themselves and their culture. The power of motherhood and the empowerment of mothering are what make possible the better world we seek for ourselves and for our children. This, argues O'Reilly, is Morrison's maternal theory—a politics of the heart."As an advocate of 'a politics of the heart,' O'Reilly has an acute insight into discerning any threat to the preservation and continuation of traditional African American womanhood and values … Above all, Toni Morrison and Motherhood, based on Andrea O'Reilly's methodical research on Morrison's works as well as feminist critical resources, proffers a useful basis for understanding Toni Morrison's works. It certainly contributes to exploring in detail Morrison's rich and complex works notable from the perspectives of nurturing and sustaining African American maternal tradition." — African American Review"O'Reilly boldly reconfigures hegemonic western notions of motherhood while maintaining dialogues across cultural differences." — Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering"Andrea O'Reilly examines Morrison's complex presentations of, and theories about, motherhood with admirable rigor and a refusal to simplify, and the result is one of the most penetrating and insightful studies of Morrison yet to appear, a book that will prove invaluable to any scholar, teacher, or reader of Morrison." — South Atlantic Review "…it serves as a sort of annotated bibliography of nearly all the major theoretical work on motherhood and on Morrison as an author … anyone conducting serious study of either Toni Morrison or motherhood, not to mention the combination, should read [this book] ... O'Reilly's exhaustive research, her facility with theories of Anglo-American and Black feminism, and her penetrating analyses of Morrison's works result in a highly useful scholarly read." — Literary Mama"By tracing both the metaphor and literal practice of mothering in Morrison's literary world, O'Reilly conveys Morrison's vision of motherhood as an act of resistance." — American Literature "Motherhood is critically important as a recurring theme in Toni Morrison's oeuvre and within black feminist and feminist scholarship. An in-depth analysis of this central concern is necessary in order to explore the complex disjunction between Morrison's interviews, which praise black mothering, and the fiction, which presents mothers in various destructive and self-destructive modes. Kudos to Andrea O'Reilly for illuminating Morrison's 'maternal standpoint' and helping readers and critics understand this difficult terrain. Toni Morrison and Motherhood is also valuable as a resource that addresses and synthesizes a huge body of secondary literature." — Nancy Gerber, author of Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in Contemporary American Fiction"In addition to presenting a penetrating and original reading of Toni Morrison, O'Reilly integrates the evolving scholarship on motherhood in dominant and minority cultures in a review that is both a composite of commonalities and a clear representation of differences." — Elizabeth Bourque Johnson, University of MinnesotaAndrea O'Reilly is Associate Professor in the School of W
Toni Morrison ON Mothers and Motherhood
by Lee BaxterThis collection of essays explores the gamut of Toni Morrison’s novels from her earliest to her most recent. Each of the essays examines the various ways in which Morrison’s work delineates and interrogates Western culture’s ideological norms of mothers, motherhood, and mothering. The essays consider Morrison’s female, and in some cases male, characters as challenging the concept that mothering and motherhood is a stable notion. The essays reveal both that mothering is a central concept in Morrison’s work and that an examination of this pervasive notion illuminates her corpus as a whole. Toni Morrison on Mothers and Motherhood offers a wide range of scholarship that provides a compelling look at Morrison’s work through an array of interdisciplinary approaches that are grounded in feminist/gender studies. This interdisciplinary collection of essays will be of interest to scholars and critics concerned with the notions of how we define mother/motherhood/mothering and the problem of its interpretation within Western society, as well as those engaged in the interpretation of African-American literature, and Morrison’s work in particular.
Toni Morrison Box Set: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved
by Toni MorrisonA box set of Toni Morrison's principal works, featuring The Bluest Eye (her first novel), Beloved (Pulitzer Prize winner), and Song of Solomon (National Book Critics Award winner).Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, Beloved transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. This spellbinding novel tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who escapes to Ohio, but eighteen years later is still not free.In The New York Times bestselling novel, The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty and yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes, that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife.With Song of Solomon, Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as she follows Milkman Dead from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, introducing an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.This beautifully designed slipcase will make the perfect holiday and perennial gift.
Toni Morrison (Routledge Guides to Literature)
by Pelagia GoulimariToni Morrison's visionary explorations of freedom and identity, self and community, against the backdrop of African American history have established her as one of the foremost novelists of her time; an artist whose seriousness of purpose and imaginative power have earned her both widespread critical acclaim and great popular success. This guide to Morrison’s work offers: an accessible introduction to Morrison’s life and historical contexts a guide to her key works and the themes and concerns that run through them an overview of critical texts and perspectives on each of Morrison’s works cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism a chronology of Morrison’s life and works. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Toni Morrison and seeking a guide to her work and a way into the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds it.
Toni Morrison
by Linda Wagner-MartinIn this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that define human experience: the clash of gender and authority, the individual and community, race and national identity, culture and authenticity, and the self and other. As Furman demonstrates, Morrison more often than not renders meaning for characters and readers through an unflinching inquiry, if not resolution, of these enduring conflicts. She is not interested in tidy solutions. Enlightened self-love, knowledge, and struggle, even without the promise of salvation, are the moral measure of Morrison's characters, fiction, and literary imagination. Tracing Morrison's developing art and her career as a public intellectual, Furman examines the novels in order of publication. She also decodes their collective narrative chronology, which begins in the late seventeenth century and ends in the late twentieth century, as Morrison delineates three hundred years of African American experience. In Furman's view Morrison tells new and difficult stories of old, familiar histories such as the making of Colonial America and the racing of American society. In the final chapters Furman pays particular attention to form, noting Morrison's continuing practice of the kind of "deep" novelistic structure that transcends plot and imparts much of a novel's meaning. Furman demonstrates, through her helpful analyses, how engaging such innovations can be.
Toni Morrison
by Valerie SmithThis compelling study explores the inextricable links between the Nobel laureateOCOs aesthetic practice and her political vision, through an analysis of the key texts as well as her lesser-studied works, books for children, and most recent novels. Offers provocative new insights and a refreshingly original contribution to the scholarship of one of the most important contemporary American writersAnalyzes the celebrated fiction of Morrison in relation to her critical writing about the process of reading and writing literature, the relationship between readers and writers, and the cultural contributions of African-American literatureFeatures extended analyses of MorrisonOCOs lesser-known works, most recent novels, and books for children as well as the key texts"
Toni #4
by Raul Allen Lj AlongeA street-smart, action-packed basketball series with action on and off the court.Toni isn’t Coach Wise’s favorite player on Team Blacktop. Honestly, she’s not even in his top five. And if she’s being real, her own teammates keep siding with him during practice.But this isn’t the first time she’s been on her own, and it won’t be the last. If you can’t count on yourself, who can you count on?
Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies
by Edmond J Coleman Wah-Shan ChouTongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies examines Chinese societies where the family-kinship system, rather than sexuality, is taken as the basis of an individual's identity. With Tongzhi, you will come to understand the variations of same-sex erotica in different Chinese societies. Examining past and present treatment of the subject, including instances of discrimination against homosexuals, Tongzhi explores same-sex eroticism in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and explains the variations of categories and experiences of tongzhi in these countries. Just what is Tongzhi?Tongzhi is the most popular contemporary Chinese word for lesbians, bisexuals, and gay people. The word, which has very positive historical references, was a Chinese translation from the Soviet communist term comrade. It was appropriated by a Hong Kong gay activist in 1989 for the first Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in Hong Kong by its organizers, who wanted to employ an indigenous representation of same-sex eroticism. The term 'homosexual’was inappropriate because of its use as a medical term denoting sickness and pathology. Within a few years, tongzhi became a widely used term in Hong Kong and Taiwan and is often used interchangeably with the English term gay. But terms such as gay, lesbian, and queer are Anglo-Saxon in origin, with specific histories that cannot capture the indigenous features of Chinese same-sex relationships. Tongzhi implies and includes much more. S/Mers, transvestites, and other fetishists who are members of the Chinese sexual counterculture who may be quite heterosexual are also tongzhi. And the term has meaning beyond the sexual: it embodies a strong sentiment for integrating the sexual (legitimizing same-sex love), the political (sharing the goals of fighting heterosexism) and the cultural (reappropriating their Chinese identity). Tongzhi brings you fascinating insight into: the history of same-sex eroticism in China coming out in Chinese society how colonialism has affected sexual nonconformists in this region racial and sexual dynamics in Colonial Hong Kong the cultural politics of being a tomboy/girl in modern Hong Kong “queering the mainstream” with tongzhi identity politics sexual/cultural diversities and differences among contemporary Chinese societies . . . and much more!Tongzhi shows how culture influences identity and demonstrates how you can develop relevant strategies for successful activist movements. Discussing political movements for gay/lesbian/bisexual rights and the societal implications of same-sex eroticism, this intelligent book provides you with a clear understanding of the attitudes toward and meanings of being tongzhi today.
Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China
by Tiantian ZhengTongzhi, which translates into English as &“same purpose&” or &“same will,&” was once widely used to mean &“comrade.&” Since the 1990s, the word has been appropriated by the LGBT community in China and now refers to a broad range of people who do not espouse heteronormativity.Tongzhi Living, the first study of its kind, offers insights into the community of same-sex-attracted men in the metropolitan city of Dalian in northeast China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork by Tiantian Zheng, the book reveals an array of coping mechanisms developed by tongzhi men in response to rapid social, cultural, and political transformations in postsocialist China. According to Zheng, unlike gay men in the West over the past three decades, tongzhi men in China have adopted the prevailing moral ideal of heterosexuality and pursued membership in the dominant culture at the same time they have endeavored to establish a tongzhi culture. They are, therefore, caught in a constant tension of embracing and contesting normality as they try to create a new and legitimate space for themselves.Tongzhi men&’s attempts to practice both conformity and rebellion paradoxically undercut the goals they aspire to reach, Zheng shows, perpetuating social prejudice against them and thwarting the activism they believe they are advocating.