Judith Hamera

Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970 examines the myriad cultural meanings of the American home aquarium during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and argues that the home aquarium provided its enthusiasts with a potent tool for managing the challenges of historical change, from urbanization to globalization. The tank could be a window to an alien world, a theater for domestic melodrama, or a vehicle in a fantastical undersea journey. Its residents were seen as inscrutable and wholly disposable “its,” as deeply loved and charismatic individuals, and as alter egos by aquarists themselves. Parlor Ponds fills a gap in the growing field of animal studies by showing that the tank is an emblematic product of modernity, one using elements of exploration, technology, science, and a commitment to rigorous observation to contain anxieties spawned by industrialization, urbanization, changing gender roles, and imperial entanglements. Judith Hamera engages advertisements, images, memoirs, public aquarium programs, and enthusiast publications to show how the history of the aquarium illuminates complex cultural attitudes toward nature and domestication, science and religion, gender and alterity, and national conquest and environmental stewardship with an emphasis on the ways it illuminates American public discourse on colonial and postcolonial expansion.

The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850 - 1970

Parlor Ponds

Alfred Bendixen

A stimulating overview of American journeys from the eighteenth century to the present.

The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing

How does structural economic change look and feel? How are such changes normalized? How are these trends represented in movement, in performance, and in culture? Looking at Detroit's postindustrial revitalization, The Heidelberg Project, and Michael Jackson's many performances, UnfinishedBusiness argues that U.S. deindustrialization cannot be separated from issues of race, specifically from choreographed movements of African Americans that represent or resist normative or aberrant relationships to work and capital in transitional times. Presenting Jackson and Detroit as material entities with specific histories and as representations with uncanny persistence, the book divulges invaluable lessons on three decades of structural economic transition in the U.S., particularly on the changing nature of work and capitalism between themid-1980s and 2016. Jackson and Detroit offer examples of the racialization of these economic changes, how they operate as structures of feeling and representations as well as shifts in the dominant mode of production, and how industrialization's successor mode, financialization, uses imagery bothvery similar to and very different from its predecessor.

Judith Hamera

Books

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