Book Review

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November 5, 2008

Sydney Hutchinson. From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Cultural Performance, Dance, Immigrant Communities, Music, North America
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Sydney Hutchinson. From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007. 240 pages. $24.95 softcover.

Gustavo Ponce
Independent Scholar


Sydney Hutchinson’s From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican American Youth Culture is a riveting and award-worthy study. This book is simply brilliant. Hutchinson takes on the quebradita/tecnobanda dance craze of the mid 1990s. This dance style was particularly popular among Latino youth in Los Angeles and Tucson and, by 2006, it evolved into pasito duranguense in Chicago. Hutchinson presents an insightful social and critical analysis of how mainstream American culture has repeatedly failed to incorporate these subaltern groups into its political, social, and economic apparatus. (more…)

 

November 5, 2008

Keila Diehl. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, India, Music
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Keila Diehl. Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. xi+312, illustrations, glossary, index. $25.00 paper.

Lori Goshert
Indiana University

In Echoes from Dharamsala, anthropologist Keila Diehl presents an engaging and complex picture of Tibetan refugee life in Dharamsala, India, the site of Tibet’s government-in-exile, through the music the community listens to and produces. Diehl begins the book with a colorful description of the first few days of her fieldwork, allowing readers to share her experiences and visualize themselves in India with her. The rest of the book is just as vivid in the way she describes her interactions with the Tibetan refugee community and her role as a participant-observer in Dharamsala’s music culture while playing keyboards for the Yak Band, a Tibetan rock group. (more…)

 

November 5, 2008

David Buchan and James Moreira, eds. The Glenbuchat Ballads

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Europe, Music
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David Buchan and James Moreira, eds. The Glenbuchat Ballads. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Pp. lxxiv + 274, multiple indices, glossary. $60.00 hardbound.

Sarah Lash
Indiana University

In the early decades of the 19th century, the Reverend Robert Scott compiled a collection of ballads in the small community of Glenbuchat, located in a relatively isolated valley in Northeastern Scotland. Unlike similar collections, this gathering of some 68 ballads was never anthologized into the Francis James Child collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Virtually unknown until 1949, it was donated to the Aberdeen University Library by one of Scott’s descendants. (more…)

 

February 22, 2008

Huang Sui-chi. Essentials of Neo-Confucianism: Eight Major Philosophers of the Song and Ming Periods.

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, East Asia
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Huang Sui-chi. Essentials of Neo-Confucianism: Eight Major Philosophers of the Song and Ming Periods. London: Greenwood, 1999. Pp. 280, glossary, bibliography, index.

Lanlan (Diane) Kuang
Indiana University

Huang Sui-chi’s book on Chinese Neo-Confucianism is an impressive and well-organized work. Prior to her presentation of the eight major philosophers: Zhou Dun-yi 周敦頤 (1017-1073), Shao Yong 邵雍 (1011-1077), Zhang Zai 张载 (1020-1077), Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032-1085), Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033-1107), Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200), Lu Xiang-shan 陸九淵 (1139-1193), and Wang Yang-ming 王阳明 (1472-1529), Huang lays out the historical context in which Neo-Confucianism arose and the sociopolitical influences on its formation. Most importantly, Huang points out the main differences between Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, thus her reader can trace and compare the two schools of thought. (more…)

 

February 22, 2008

Jack Zipes. Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller.

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Europe, Narrative
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Jack Zipes. Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood Storyteller. New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xvii + 171, bibliography, film bibliography, index.

Steve Stanzak
Indiana University

As the subtitle suggests, this work by distinguished fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes endeavors to dispel the romanticized image of Andersen in popular culture by offering a more accurate and nuanced examination of the Danish storyteller. Although published during the bicentennial commemoration event of Andersen’s birth (the book carries the event’s logo), Zipes nevertheless avoids celebrating Andersen. Instead, Zipes aims to reevaluate the life and works of the prolific storyteller so that he may be taken as a serious literary figure. (more…)

 

February 22, 2008

Laura Gonzenbach. The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales.

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Europe, Narrative
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Laura Gonzenbach. The Robber with a Witch’s Head: More Stories from the Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xxxii+230. Illus., notes, bibliography.

David Elton Gay
Indiana University

The Robber with a Witch’s Head is the second volume of Jack Zipes’s translation of Laura Gonzenbach’s nineteenth-century collection of Sicilian folk narrative. While this volume completes the translation of Gonzenbach’s work, the introduction to the volume is a slight revision of the introduction to the first volume, and thus it could easily stand alone as a translation of Italian folk narrative. (more…)

 

February 22, 2008

Katherine Borland. Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival.

Posted by folkpub under Book Review, Central America, Cultural Performance
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Katherine Borland. Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. Pp. 184, notes, references, index. ISBN:0-8165-2511-0, $45.00 cloth.

Elizabeth A. Burbach
Indiana University

Nicaragua has experienced an incredibly difficult century of supposed independence, a century wherein a variety of internal and external forces to Nicaragua sought and seeks to define and redefine the economic, political, social, and cultural landscape, a situation not unfamiliar to Latin America as a whole. Katherine Borland, in Unmasking Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Nicaraguan Festival, has crafted an illuminating and thoughtful ethnographic-historical analysis of Nicaraguan festival as one arena wherein this struggle for power is played out. An Associate Professor of Comparative Studies in the Humanities at The Ohio State University at Newark, Borland illustrates Nicaraguan festival as a complex locus for the construction, assertion, and negotiation of individual, local, and national identities. (more…)

 

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