Ian Maxwell's sophisticated story of Australia's hip-hop scene follows the lives of a small, influential group of rappers from Sydney's Westside in the early 1990s. Maxwell conveys the excitement of the scene and the struggles of the white musicians to define Australian hip-hop, showing how discourses of nationalism and community are played out in everyday life. Whether describing composition in a bedroom, confrontation in a radio studio, tagging in a subway line, or breaking in front of a stage, Maxwell evokes the intensity of feeling and the complexity of these key experiences. Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes looks at the many practices of hip-hop-graffiti, rapping, break dancing performances, compositional process, lyrics, music, and fanzines-and captures the fluid contradictions along with the bodily pleasures that make up the scene. With acute sensitivity, Maxwell shows how these young men negotiate issues of identity by imagining themselves within an international hip-hop nation. The book is rich in detail and theoretically innovative, A glossary of terms is included.

"The days of anything static-form, content, state-are over," declares poet and translator Pierre Joris in A Nomad Poetics, his first collection of critical essays. Joris maps the success and limitations of contemporary avant-garde poetics, from Tristan Tzara to the most contemporary American experimental poetry, an investigation that leads him to envision a "nomadic poetics" as a strategy for new poetic work, for translation and, fundamentally, for an ethics of early 21st century life. Extending concepts and concerns voiced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Nomad Poetics is a daring first step in deploying the method of the rhizome, one grounded in Paul Celan's insight that "Reality is not. It has to be searched for and won." With articulate immediacy, Joris's essays announce a metamorphosis of language-based art, much needed if poetry is to be of essential use in shaping the world to come.

Don Bogen's latest volume, Luster, takes on everything from bullhorns to the cultivation of olive trees in poems that are sharp-edged and open to surprise. They capture not just things themselves but the essential contexts-history, power, the personal and the social-that give them meaning. The stylistic dexterity and range of approaches here make the book as rich as the world it engages. Luster includes evocations of place and memory, character studies of figures from Coleridge to Tarzan, a verse epistle, and an extended meditation on machines in our daily lives, all within an overarching vision. From racehorses to waterwheels to great cities, Bogen illuminates "things that go," in both their dynamism and their inevitable decay. Luster traces the sheen of human activity that clings to the world around us: imperfect, irrevocably marred by time, but always gleaming.

Kenneth King is one of America's most inventive postmodern choreographers. His dancing has always reflected his interest in language and technology, combining movement with film, machines, lighting and words both spoken and written. King is also conversant in philosophy, and some of his most influential dances have been dedicated to and in dialogue with the work of such philosophers as Susanne K. Langer, Edmund Husserl and Friedrich Nietzsche. Since the 1960s, he has performed his dance to texts both spoken and prerecorded-texts intended to stand separately as literary works.Writing in Motion spans more than thirty years and is collected here for the first time. It includes essays, performance scripts of King's own work, art criticism, philosophy and cultural commentary. Dense with movement, these writings explode and reconfigure the familiar, crack syntax open, and invent startling new words. Dancing, to King, is "writing in space," and writing is a dance of ideas. Whether referencing Aristotle, Langer, Simone de Beauvoir, MTV, Maurice Blanchot or Marshall McLuhan, King's delightfully lavish prose is very much "in motion."

Moving from web to field, from Victorian parlor to 21st-century mall, the 15 essays gathered here yield new insights regarding the intersection of local culture, musical creativity and technological possibilities. Inspired by the concept of "technoculture," the authors locate technology squarely in the middle of expressive culture: they are concerned with how technology culturally informs and infuses aspects of everyday life and musical experience, and they argue that this merger does not necessarily result in a "cultural grayout," but instead often produces exciting new possibilities. In this collection, we find evidence of musical practices and ways of knowing music that are informed or even significantly transformed by new technologies, yet remain profoundly local in style and meaning. CONTRIBUTORS: Leslie C. Gay, Jr., Kai Fikentscher, Tong Soon Lee, René T. A. Lysloff, Matthew Malsky, Charity Marsh, Marc Perlman, Thomas Porcello, Andrew Ross, David Sanjek, jonathan Sterne, Janet L. Sturman, Timothy D. Taylor, Paul Théberge, Melissa West, Deborah Wong.

This collection of classic and new writings on dance improvisation brings together 21 essays by prominent dancers, scholars and historians. Until now, discussion of improvisation in dance has focused mainly on the postmodern form known as contact improv. Taken by Surprise reflects the development of improvisation as a compositional and performance mode in a wide variety of dance contexts, including dance traditions from around the globe, such as Yoruban masked dance, Indian Bharatanatyam and flamenco. The book also includes a thoughtful look at computer-aided choreography, a discussion of recent innovations in tap dancing and a section on improvisation in everyday life. Combining primary sources with critical analysis, Taken by Surprise will serve as an indispensible companion to studio work in improvisation, and a much-needed supplement to twentieth century dance histories. CONTRIBUTORS: Ann Cooper Albright, Sally Banes, Bruce Curtis, Kent Despain, Margaret Thompson Drewal, Simone Forti, Susan Leigh Foster, David Gere, Raymond W. Gibbs, JR, Michelle Heffner Hayes, Carmela Hermann, Constance Valis Hill, Rachel Kaplan, Maura Keefe, Victoria Marks, Avanthi Meduri, Steve Paxton, Janice Ross, Karen Schaffman, Nancy Stark Smith, Ellen Webb, Ruth Zaporah.

Peter Gizzi's poems move between bewilderment and understanding, anger and astonishment. His third book in a decade, Some Values of Landscape and Weather revives poetic architectures such as elegy, song and litany, to build what he calls "a comprehensive music." Here musical and pictorial values perform against a backdrop of political, social and ethical values. These intense and exacting poems traverse a landscape of cultural memory that opens into the explosive, vibrant registers of the now. John Ashbery has written that Gizzi's poems are "simultaneously all over the page and right on target. He is the most exciting poet to come along in quite a while."

First published in 1935, Salamina details artist and adventurer Rockwell Kent's second trip to Greenland. Salamina unfolds as a series of vivid vignettes, each illustrated with Kent's bold black and white drawings. Through his accounts of fishing trips and Christmas festivities, shared meals and budding friendships, Kent acquaints us with the Eskimo and Danish inhabitants of the small vibrant community of Igdlorssuit. Both the native people and the forbidding Arctic landscape held a special beauty for Kent, and he describes them with an artist's eye. Salamina is Kent's Eskimo housekeeper (kifak), who becomes a central figure in the book when she and her daughter come to share Kent's small hut for the year. Kent's wry self-reflection and his poetic meditations on nature, humanity and love make this an enduring classic of travel literature and artistic quest. This Wesleyan edition includes a foreword by art historian Scott R. Ferris that highlights the cultural importance of the text and illustrations and shows that for Kent, inspiration comes from life.

In this unique collection of fiction and essays, some of the best writers in the science fiction world explore our relationship to the future through the dual lens of science fiction and cultural studies, and provide a rich testament to the power of science fiction to help us re-imagine reality.Each contributor was asked to reflect on our anxiety about the new millennium and to write about how science fiction could help us envision the far future and future cultural spaces. The resulting array of speculative writings, both critical and fictional, is diverse and illuminating-from a personal essay by Marge Piercy on love, sex and the power of fiction; to a new story by Harlan Ellison in which consumerism is the opiate of the masses; to a fictional book review by Kim Stanley Robinson which imagines what future historians will say about science in the third millennium. CONTRIBUTORS: Marleen S. Barr, Rosi Braidotti, Harlan Ellison, James Gunn, Walter Mosley, Patrick Parrinder, Marge Peircy, Neil Postman, Eric S. Rabkin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Pamela Sargent, Darko Suvin, George Zebrowski.

First published in 1927, Deluge is one of the most famous of the English catastrophe novels. Beautifully written and action packed-RKO Radio Pictures even filmed this story-the novel depicts a flood so severe that it destroys modern civilization, leaving the few survivors to adapt to the rigors of the natural world. Like other English writers responding to the trauma of World War I, Sydney Fowler Wright expresses a loathing of the worst aspects of industrialization. The flood, in his view, becomes an opportunity for the remaking of society. The protagonists soon realize that civilization and technology have divorced them from the knowledge and skills necessary for survival. Released from their over-reliance on social regulation, they struggle to overcome their own brutality to develop a new sense of community. For over 75 years readers have praised this book for its style and wisdom, and debated the meaning of its controversial ending. This Wesleyan edition is graced with an excellent introduction and annotations by leading science fiction scholar Brian Stableford.

Opening a window onto a fascinating new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the present. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region's celebrated literary fantastic. In the 27 stories included in this anthology, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events. The introduction examines the ways the genre has developed in Latin America and Spain since the 1700s and studies science fiction as a means of defamiliarizing, and then critiquing, regional culture, history and politics-especially in times of censorship and political repression. The volume also includes a brief introduction to each story and its author, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works. Cosmos Latinos is a critical contribution to Latin American, Spanish, popular culture and science fiction studies and will be stimulating reading for anyone who likes a good story.

The Teatro Solís in Montevideo, Uruguay-established in 1856 and still operating-is the oldest theater in the Americas. Solís audiences thrilled to the lyricism of many of the great singers of the 19th Century, among them Adelina Patti, Romilda Pantaleoni, Gemma Bellincioni, and Enrico Caruso, accompanied by a 285-member company. Programs also featured orchestra and dance: the theater played host to dancer Vaslav Nijinksy's last stage performance and presented Puccini, Mascagni, Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss. Susana Salgado's lively historical account-the very first of its kind-is enriched by anecdotes, reviews and illustrations. A complete narrative chronology of performances is indexed by performer and work, making this book a rare treat for opera buffs and an invaluable resource for scholars in the fields of music and dance history, American studies, and Latin American studies.

As one of the founding poets and editors of the Language School of poetry and one of its central theorists, Barrett Watten has consistently challenged the boundaries of literature and art. In The Constructivist Moment, he offers a series of theoretically informed and textually sensitive readings that advance a revisionist account of the avant-garde through the methodologies of cultural studies. His major topics include American modernist and postmodern poetics, Soviet constructivist and post-Soviet literature and art, Fordism and Detroit techno-each proposed as exemplary of the social construction of aesthetic and cultural forms. His book is a full-scale attempt to place the linguistic turn of critical theory and the self-reflexive foregrounding of language by the avant-garde since the Russian Formalists in relation to the cultural politics of postcolonial studies, feminism, and race theory. As such, it will provide a crucial revisionist perspective within modernist and avant-garde studies.

A Useful Art is an invaluable chronicle of a major American poet's engagement with this country's indigenous tradition of design. In 1936, the Federal Arts Project (a division of the WPA) hired Louis Zukofsky, along with many others, to prepare a compendium of information on traditional American crafts. The Index of American Design aimed to define original U. S. culture at a time when interest in handicrafts had just begun to emerge. These previously unpublished essays and radio scripts are scrupulously researched investigations of various American handicrafts: the topics they cover include ironwork, tin ware, furniture maker Duncan Phyfe and friendship quilts. They also reflect Zukofsky's sense of the poem as a crafted object and his attempt to reconcile the labor theory of value with aesthetic production. This book, which can be seen in the context of kindred work by William Carlos William (In the American Grain) and Ezra Pound (Guide to Kulchur), will be of special interest to readers of 20th-century poetry, cultural critics, social historians, and scholars of design.

In Kenneth Mackay's 1895 admonitory tale, Britain's attention and military forces are diverted by a Russian attack on India, and Australia is left defenseless. The Russians lead the invasion force, but for readers of the Victorian Age, the real horror is the use of Chinese troops. This sweeping speculative story foreshadows the rapid growth of nationalism in the 20th Century. It also takes remarkable risks with its subject matter and its audience, challenging both literary and moral conventions. The Wesleyan edition-the first version of the book published in over a hundred years-includes facsimile illustrations from the original text, a new introduction and thorough notations. Peopled with extraordinary characters, swiftly plotted, and thrillingly romantic, this influential classic fantasy is as fascinating today as it was more than a century ago.

Richard Ohmann's work is in a class by itself. While editor of College English, and in the three books he published since then, he has created America's most comprehensive vision of how teaching and scholarship are at once part of the university, of society and of history. In Politics of Knowledge, Ohmann's essays and interviews analyze, explain and criticize the roles of the university, the academic professions and publishing in a rearranged America. Focusing on the opposed movements of a more open university and overwhelmingly powerful multinational corporations, he offers language and formulations that will help present generations move closer to the hope that teaching and scholarly work can enhance the lives of all. This scholar, teacher and activist sets his often anecdotal and autobiographical reflections within the broad tapestry of historical, economic and material conditions. It is this combination of the long backward-looking personal perspective and adept critical analysis that have made his work a resource for professors and students alike.