This study of a contemporary indigenous culture documents the vitality of a number of self-constructed "indigenous" Carib communities in the postcolonial Caribbean. These small groups, which have asse
This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. Leading scholar of Chinese
Originally published in 1967, An Absence of Ruins is a poignant portrayal of a man shaped by the colonial education of the Caribbean intellectual class. Orlando Patterson offers a devastating critique
In this 1987 text, by focusing on rhetoric, Dr Springer distinguishes between the encomiastic mode of the Papacy and the exhortatory mode of the Risorgimento. Springer shows that instead of concentrating on the pathos of the absence implicit in the ruined landscape of Rome, both the Church and its democratic opposition celebrated antiquity as a presence. Whereas the Church assembled the spoils of pagan Rome in the Vatican museums as proof of its temporal power, lay patriots from Foscolo to Mazzini appropriated the imagery of archaeology to call for a resurrection of Rome's republican traditions. Thus, the book argues, they concurred, despite dramatic ideological differences, in invoking archaeology as a figure of cultural rehabilitation. By analyzing a wide variety of cultural representations, the author shows that the metaphor of archaeology was central to the rhetoric of Italian romanticism and equally adaptable to the reinforcement and subversion of political authority.
