Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, Women Singers in Global Contexts is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing voice as a central element in her life, experiencing various opportunities, tensions, and choices through her vocality. These biographical and poetic narratives demonstrate how the act of vocalizing embodies dynamics of representation, power, agency, activism, and risk-taking. Engaging with performance practice, politics, and constructions of gender through vocality and vocal aesthetics, this collection offers valuable insights into the experiences of specific women singers in a range of sociocultural contexts. Contributors trace themes and threads that include childhood, families, motherhood, migration, fame, training, transmission, technology, and the interface of private lives and public identities.

A pathbreaking study of the critical role women’s institutions play in global higher education. Educating girls and women is a powerful route to improving societies worldwide. When women receive more education, literacy rates in children rise, maternal and infant death rates drop, and women enjoy an increased earning capacity. Yet in parts of the developing world, women’s education is considered a low priority at best and a dangerous countercultural activity at worst. In Europe and North America, the number of women’s colleges is shrinking—yet women-only institutions are growing in size and number in many other regions of the world, where they provide access to female students who are prevented for legal, cultural, religious, or practical reasons from attending coeducational universities. Women’s Colleges and Universities in a Global Context is the first book to provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of the increasing significance of single-sex higher education institutions for women around the world. Based on Kristen A. Renn’s on-site study of thirteen women’s colleges and universities in ten different countries—Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom—this timely and provocative volume combines interviews of campus leaders, faculty, and students with extensive online and archival research. Renn provides an overview of each country’s political, economic, and educational situation, then explores the theoretical and practical themes she uncovers in their educational institutions for women. In the end, this volume addresses not only the role of women’s colleges in their own countries but also what these institutions can teach us that would benefit higher education worldwide.

Presents a clear and comprehensive introduction to the evolving discipline of global art studies This volume examines how art historians, critics, and artists revisit art from ancient times through to the early modern period as well as the ways in which contemporary objects are approached through the lens of global contact, exchange, networks, and trade routes. It assists students who actively seek to understand "global art history" and the discipline beyond the founding Western canons. The first section of Art History in a Global Context: Methods, Themes and Approaches explores how themes related to globalization are framing the creation, circulation, reception, and study of art today. The second section examines how curators, scholars, artists, and critics have challenged the Eurocentric canon through works of art, writings, exhibitions, biennials, large-scale conferences, and the formation of global networks. The third section is designed to help students look forward by exploring how art history in a global context is beginning to extend beyond the contemporary condition to understand the meaning, conditions, and impacts of exchange across borders and among artists in earlier periods. Presents a historiography of global art histories in academic, museological, and exhibition projects Written by a collection of authors from different linguistic, cultural, geographic, generational, and disciplinary perspectives Aids students in understanding “global art history” and the discipline beyond the founding Western canons Provides a set of case studies to bring to life methodologies being employed in the field Features contributors from the program of the Getty Foundation and the College Art Association International Committee’s project Art History in a Global Context is an ideal choice for upper-level undergraduate and entry level graduate art students. It can also be used as a teaching tool, or as models for case studies in different formats.

African American women have played a pivotal part in rock and roll—from laying its foundations and singing chart-topping hits to influencing some of the genre's most iconic acts. Despite this, black women's importance to the music's history has been diminished by narratives of rock as a mostly white male enterprise. In Black Diamond Queens, Maureen Mahon draws on recordings, press coverage, archival materials, and interviews to document the history of African American women in rock and roll between the 1950s and the 1980s. Mahon details the musical contributions and cultural impact of Big Mama Thornton, LaVern Baker, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, Merry Clayton, Labelle, the Shirelles, and others, demonstrating how dominant views of gender, race, sexuality, and genre affected their careers. By uncovering this hidden history of black women in rock and roll, Mahon reveals a powerful sonic legacy that continues to reverberate into the twenty-first century.

Various modes of women's contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from women's point of view. They deconstruct the notion of leadership as corporative and career-related modes of success by showing how women's agency, power and negotiation in and through music can and should be considered as empowering, transformative and role-modeling. By interweaving several disciplinary perspectives - from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology - this volume aims to substantially contribute to the study of women's leadership.

Using her observations of the United Nation's Fourth World Women's Conference held in China in 1995 as a foundation, the author examines the history and current situation of Latinas and attempts to place them in a global context. After examining the goals, objectives, and atmosphere of the Conference, she analyzes the Chicana feminist movement and its legacy and how Chicanas have struggled to relate to the Conference and its human rights platform. She then profiles U.S. Latinas and presents data on their reality in today's world. The response to U.S. expansionist policies and the Americanization process is examined and related to the Chicana feminist movement and its legacy. An important synthesis for students and researchers in Ethnic and Race Relations and Women's Studies.

Singers generating cultural identity from K-Pop to Beverly Sills Around the world and across time, singers and their songs stand at the crossroads of differing politics and perspectives. Levi S. Gibbs edits a collection built around the idea of listening as a political act that produces meaning. Contributors explore a wide range of issues by examining artists like Romani icon Esma Redžepova, Indian legend Lata Mangeshkar, and pop superstar Teresa Teng. Topics include gendered performances and the negotiation of race and class identities; the class-related contradictions exposed by the divide between highbrow and pop culture; links between narratives of overcoming struggle and the distinction between privileged and marginalized identities; singers’ ability to adapt to shifting notions of history, borders, gender, and memory in order to connect with listeners; how the meanings we read into a singer’s life and art build on one another; and technology’s ability to challenge our ideas about what constitutes music. Cutting-edge and original, Social Voices reveals how singers and their songs equip us to process social change and divergent opinions. Contributors: Christina D. Abreu, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Kwame Dawes, Nancy Guy, Ruth Hellier, John Lie, Treva B. Lindsey, Eric Lott, Katherine Meizel, Carol A. Muller, Natalie Sarrazin, Anthony Seeger, Carol Silverman, Andrew Simon, Jeff Todd Titon, and Elijah Wald

This book examines aesthetic issues based on humanities principles and creates a theory of Chinese aesthetics from a global perspective by applying China’s traditional and cultural history to a Western theoretical framework. In particular, this book emphasizes the shared features of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, namely the unity of heaven and men, unity of nature and society, and the materialization of human feelings and humanization of material things. It also highlights the dominant role of humans in the aesthetic relationship between human and object, while placing imagery in a focal position.

The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior, lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.