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Journal articles on the topic "American literature American literature Nationalism Nationalism Books Books"
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Winegar, Jessica. "LILIANE KARNOUK, Contemporary Egyptian Art (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995). Pp. 137." International Journal of Middle East Studies 32, no. 2 (2000): 304–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020743800002440.
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Studies of contemporary visual art in the Middle East are scarce compared with the vast literature on historical Islamic arts. In the past ten years, however, several notable books and articles have featured this important but under-recognized realm of visual culture in the region. These recent works often examine the ways in which art reflects social trends such as nationalism and struggles for religious identity. Karnouk's book is a worthy introduction to the world of contemporary art in Egypt, and is the first major English-language book of its kind on the subject (see also Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997]). Contemporary Egyptian Art is a sequel to Karnouk's earlier Modern Egyptian Art: The Emergence of a National Style (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), in which she outlined the prominent artists and styles of the first half-century of the modern art movement within the context of Egyptian nationalism. This recent book picks up from the 1952 revolution and presents the major trends in art since that time while offering possible socio-political explanations for these trends.
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SABER, YOMNA. "Langston Hughes: Fringe Modernism, Identity and Defying the Interrogator Witch-Hunter." Journal of American Studies 49, no. 1 (2015): 173–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s002187581400190x.
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Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.
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Fakheri, Mehdi. "Iran nuclear deal: from nationalism to diplomacy." Asian Education and Development Studies 6, no. 1 (2017): 2–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/aeds-06-2016-0049.
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Purpose Selected countries in the world have the technical capability of creating nuclear energy. Iran has striven to acquire the know-how to harness nuclear power and has been scientifically successful. However, it was sanctioned by the foremost world powers for doing so. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the Iranian nuclear dossier came about and how it became a global issue, how it was resolved and who will benefit from its resolution. Design/methodology/approach The paper is designed to review the antecedents, to study the international community’s position, to analyze the outcomes and to make some recommendations. The study’s methodology is therefore analytical. Findings Access to nuclear technology is a political matter and those who are allowed to use it might be subject to the ideological preferences of those that have long had it. The holders of nuclear technology normally interact with allies to provide them with help to fulfill a nuclear power program under certain circumstances. If an individual country decides to go its own way and develop an indigenous technical capability, it will come under scrutiny and measures will be taken to control it. If those measures fail, sanctions and pressures will be employed to hamper the achievement of nuclear independence. In the absence of tangible results, negotiations will start and agreement may be reached based on the expertise of the two sides’ negotiators. A peaceful agreement could be a win-win solution if it respects the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved. Iran’s nuclear deal, if implemented properly, would be a success story and will shape future policies in the Middle East. Research limitations/implications The first prerequisite for research is to have access to credible literature. When dealing with a new phenomenon, researchers face the challenge of not having sufficient material to develop a hypothesis or respond to all the questions that they have to pose. For Iran’s nuclear deal hundreds of articles have been written, but few books. Furthermore, because of the delicacy and confidentiality of the negotiations undertaken, one cannot interview the authorities involved either. Practical implications There are some Asian, Latin American and African countries with similar plans concerning nuclear energy. The paper will provide food for thought to evaluate the cost of their decisions and make suggestions for how they should proceed so that they can be perceived to be acting properly. Social implications Although nuclear themes are largely political and a part of the security arena internationally, access to nuclear technology as a power source could have a significant impact on the social development of the countries pursuing nuclear energy programs. The paper studies the effect of the Iranian deal on health, education, social networks and civil society. Originality/value The author has been involved in part of the negotiating process and has, thus, been in a position to verify different information discussed in the global mass media. The subject is also a brand-new issue in international relations, since a peaceful solution was found for a scenario that had previously been solved by military intervention, without exception. Finally, it is interdisciplinary research with an innovative analysis approach.
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Lévy, J. "Science + Space + Society: urbanity and the risk of methodological communalism in social sciences of space*." Geographica Helvetica 69, no. 2 (2014): 99–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/gh-69-99-2014.
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Abstract. During the last decades, geography has lost its epistemological exceptionality, but is this enough? Social sciences are commonly threatened by methodological nationalism and, more generally, by methodological communalism, that is the corruption of a scientific approach or project by any kind of other social alignment that undermines its capacity to develop a free, autonomous thought. Has geography escaped these pitfalls? In this text, the example of urban studies is taken to try and answer these questions. More specifically, the way the idea of spatial justice has emerged in the last decades is explored through the analysis of five significant books among the academic production on these topics. It is then argued, thanks to a critical review around the iconic notion of 'gentrification', that the corpus at stake is more substantial than the limited, partially arbitrary selection of these five books. The present-day situation of urban geography (and probably of urban sociology, too) shows a serious risk of methodological communalism particularly located in Anglophone, and especially North American, literature. Some hypotheses are proposed to explain this particular geography of the academic episteme of inhabited space. It is argued that the potential single-paradigm hegemony in geography and, more generally, in social sciences might fuel this danger. Finally, a possible antidote to this worrying trend could be the simple, but complex idea of putting science, space and society together in a non-dissociable way. The conclusion stresses the necessity of taking up key challenges that urbanity issues raise and the usefulness of epistemological and theoretical pluralism as a major intellectual resource.
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Greene, Roland. "Nation-Building by Anthology." Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 4, no. 1 (1995): 105–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.4.1.105.
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In a short space of years, nation and nationality have lost their position as ever-present but unquestioned markers in literary and cultural study. In the play of argument, they have become movable pieces. In particular, a wide array of books and essays has intensively pursued the relations of literature and national identity in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983)— most notable among them, the essays collected by Homi Bhabha in Nation and Narration , Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions , and the volume Nationalisms and Sexualities , edited by Andrew Parker and others after a Harvard conference of the same name. Among these, Gregory Jusdanis’s Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature has received less attention than it deserves. The book’s diminished visibility follows from the same source as its value: it comes to the discussion with a stake neither in western Europe and the Americas nor in what for scholars in the humanities have become the fashionable parts of the developing world, but in a country whose present few of us can see for its past, namely modern Greece. Jusdanis’s subject in this discussion is one that not many seem prepared to take up—the “minor” literature and culture that nonetheless struggles with its own adaptations of those problems of modernity and identity that have been chronicled elsewhere. And yet societies such as Greece can contribute urgently to the discussion because of the density of what might be called the middle stratum of their modernizing experience—the stratum between an adopted paradigm of national identity and a complex, often ambivalent social reality. This middle stratum is the site of a multitude of local interpretations that mediate between the other two layers and produce astonishing concatenations of classical Greek, European, and American cultural forms. With its particular siting and its arguably “minor” urge to measure modern Greece against more internationally prominent countries (an impulse that seldom runs in the opposite direction), Jusdanis’s book is one of the most useful recent additions to the broad field of books that treat the making of nationhood.
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Nindyasmara, Ken Ruri. "NEGOTIATION OF IDENTITY IN DIASPORIC LITERATURE: A CASE STUDY ON AMY TAN’S THE HUNDRED SECRET SENSES AND LESLIE MARMON SILKO’S CEREMONY." Rubikon : Journal of Transnational American Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 57. http://dx.doi.org/10.22146/rubikon.v3i1.47838.
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Negotiation of identity has become an important issue because its never-ending process always relates to conflicts, differences and similarities. Chinese Americans and Native Americans are two distinct diasporic communities amongst other ethnic group in the U.S. As minorities, they experience prejudice, discrimination and exclusion from mainstream American culture and society. This research aims to reveal the negotiation of identity of Chinese Americans and Native Americans which is reflected on their literature. Literature is seen as the record of diasporic experience of both ethnic groups. This research is qualitative conducted under Post-Nationalist American Studies. Post-colonial, hegemony and representation theories are used to help the process of data analysis. The primary data is taken from The Hundred Secret Senses written by Amy Tan and Ceremony written by Leslie Marmon Silko. The secondary data are taken from books, journals, and internet sources. The finding of the research shows that Chinese Americans and Native Americans negotiate their identity by choosing or combining competing values. The construction of identity is done through the reenactment of ethnic root and the adaptation to mainstream American cultural values. Sense of belongingness, history and socio-cultural background become the determining factors of identity negotiation. In brief, they construct hybrid identity to survive and to counter American hegemony. Compared to Native Americans, Chinese Americans are more blending to mainstream American culture. However, both novels depict their hybrid identity. Keywords: identity negotiation, diasporic literature, diaspora communities, hegemony, hybrid identity
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Kamhieh, Celine. "Female Emirati University Students’ Book Reading Choices: An Investigation." International Journal of Linguistics 9, no. 6 (2017): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v9i6.12095.
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The inescapable link between college students' reading habits and their academic success suggests the importance to educators of investigating their students’ reading interests and preferences. The study reported here was an open investigation into the book reading choices of first-year female Emirati university students to see what genres, authors, main protagonists and book settings they preferred. Book titles were mined from data which was gathered during a larger in-depth research on students’ reading habits over a period of two years, through interviews, journal entries, surveys, emails and conversations. Results showed that, while students had a preference for fiction, they also had a comparatively high interest in nonfiction, particularly self-help books. Gender did not appear to be a major factor in their preferences although male authors were popular. Geography, including author and protagonist nationality and book setting, appeared to be more important, with students showing a preference for American and British authors, protagonists and settings. With students’ overall choice of Arab authors and titles at little more than one tenth of their total choices, availability of interesting books would appear to be of paramount importance. There are implications for the Arabic book publishing industry, in general, and the Emirati book publishing industry, in particular. Findings will be of interest also to educators, librarians and others who wish to promote leisure reading among college students in the Arab world and augment the limited literature on Arab students' reading choices.
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Walsh, Richard. "“A Man's Story is His Gris-Gris”: Cultural Slavery, Literary Emancipation and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada." Journal of American Studies 27, no. 1 (1993): 57–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875800032667.
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With the emergence of black nationalism in the late sixties, the delineation of a new black aesthetic became an urgent issue: it was first and most persistently raised by Hoyt Fuller in Negro Digest, and soon became the staple of radical black little magazines across America. In 1971, the appearance of a collection of essays entitled The Black Aesthetic and edited by Addison Gayle brought some coherence to the debate, and sanctified its assumptions. In his own contributions to that book, Gayle recorded the passing of the myth of the American melting pot and the consequent need to repudiate assimilationism. He argued that black nationalism implied the development of a black aesthetic in direct opposition to prevailing aesthetic criteria, in which white cultural concerns were privileged under a guise of “universalism”: this bogus universalism actually depended upon the marginalization of black perspectives and black writers by a white literary establishment. Such observations established the need for a new black aesthetic, and prescriptions for its form proliferated. These blueprints were handed down at a series of conferences at which black writers past and present stood trial against the new criteria. The emergent consensus was for writing that directly recreated the black experience out of which it arose; that found its style in the forms of “black folk expression”; that was socially progressive in effect – according to a very literal concept of functional literature; that addressed itself to the common readership of black people; and that assiduously cultivated positive black characters.
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Staten, Henry. "Ethnic Authenticity, Class, and Autobiography: The Case of Hunger of Memory." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 113, no. 1 (1998): 103–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/463412.
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Richard Rodriguez's autobiographical Hunger of Memory (1982) is assigned to Chicano-Chicana literature because the book tells a story of growing up the child of Mexican immigrants, but Rodriguez rejects the term Chicano for himself and denies that it is possible or desirable for Americans of Mexican descent to retain an identification with their culture of origin. Rodriguez has been widely criticized as a sellout to white bourgeois culture, but his life narrative shows that his rejection of Chicano identity is rooted in the class-and-race ideology of his Mexican parents and thus in the contradictions of Mexican history. Chicano-Chicana nationalism assumes a simple dichotomy between the proletarian mestizo or mestiza and the bourgeois white oppressor. Rodriguez's family history, however, points toward race and class divisions within the population of Mexican descent that call into question the monolithic conceptions of Chicano-Chicana identity on the basis of which Rodriguez has been attacked.
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Krylova, Maria N. "The image of a person of another nationality in the fantastic works of Oleg Divov." Current Issues in Philology and Pedagogical Linguistics, no. 2(2020) (June 25, 2020): 167–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.29025/2079-6021-2020-2-167-175.
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The article is devoted to the analysis of the image of a person of a different nationality, who is created in his works by the modern Russian science fiction writer Oleg Divov. Based on the analysis of the author’s three novels, “The Best Solar Crew,” “Technical Support” and “Elephants’ Homeland,” his original attitude to the problem of the national and ethnic affiliation of a person is revealed. The aim of the study was to analyze the image of a person of a different nationality in the books of O.I. Divov and to represent a person of a different nationality in the context of the image of the “Other”. The tasks were set to identify the author’s treatment of the image of a person of a different nationality, to detect interpretations of this image in various works. The scientific novelty of the study was provided both by the novelty of the text material introduced into the scientific circulation, and by the approach to the problem of the image of the “Other” in modern literature from the point of view of the optionality of observing the principles of tolerance and political correctness, more precisely, new ways of observing these principles. In the reviewed works of the writer, heroes of different nationalities appear, and the national differences between them are not hidden, but, on the contrary, stand out in relief, are brought to the fore. Representatives of each of the nationalities (Russians, Jews, Germans, Americans, French, Chukchi, and others) are portrayed as people with undeniable merits, and at the same time – ironically, with humor. The writer does not demonstrate any stable national preferences: in the novel “The Best Solar Crew”, Russians are glorified first of all, and in the novel “The Land of Elephants” – the Chukchi. Despite ridicule, reflecting the stereotypical perception of a particular nation, the description of none of them becomes nationalistic. The author creates an original concept of perception of heroes of a different nationality, opposing the popular in modern culture of tolerance, showing the importance of national differences and the uselessness of silencing them.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "American literature American literature Nationalism Nationalism Books Books"
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Loughran, Patricia Lynn. "Virtual nation : local and national cultures of print in the early United States /." 2000. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9978045.
Full textBooks on the topic "American literature American literature Nationalism Nationalism Books Books"
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Captain America and the nationalist superhero: Metaphors, narratives, and geopolitics. Temple University Press, 2013.
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Lawler, Mary. Marcus Garvey: Black nationalist leader. Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.
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Lawler, Mary. Marcus Garvey: Black Nationalist Leader (Black American Series). Holloway House Publishing Company, 1990.
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Cohen, Richard I., ed. Benjamin Schreier, The Impossible Jew: Identity and Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 269 pp. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190912628.003.0034.
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This chapter reviews the book The Impossible Jew: Identity and Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (2015), by Benjamin Schreier. In The Impossible Jew, Schreier challenges the dominance of a totalizing (historicist/nationalist/anthropologist) context in Jewish studies in America. Rather than asking what is “Jewish” in a text, he wishes to focus on scholars’ and readers’ inclination to conceptualize texts within one of these essentialist categories. He rejects the approach used by scholars to distinguish between the “Jews” and the “non-Jews.” Instead, he offers an alternative that highlights the way (Jewish) literature destabilizes these same categories. The Impossible Jew is thus a reflection on the impossibility of Jewishness as a coherent identity.
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Lawler, Mary. Marcus Garvey: Black Nationalist Leader (Black Americans of Achievement). Chelsea House Publications, 1987.
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Lawler, Mary, and John Davenport. Marcus Garvey: Black Nationalist Leader (Black Americans of Achievement). Chelsea House Publications, 2004.
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Pecora, Vincent P. Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198852148.001.0001.
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Despite its growing cosmopolitanism, European culture after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 was no stranger to ancient beliefs in a natural, religiously sanctioned, and aesthetically pleasing relationship to the land. The classical Greek notion translates as “autochthony”—literally, birth from the soil, enabled by a god. The biblical account in Exodus gives the idea of a Promised Land, designed for a particular people by their god. Twentieth-century versions of the first theme culminate in the Nordic (and then Nazi) notion of a Volksgemeinschaft—a folk community—built on the supposedly intrinsic link between Blut und Boden, blood and soil. And the idea of a Promised Land has motivated rebellious English Puritans, colonizing Americans obsessed with their “manifest destiny,” Dutch Voortrekkers, and a wide array of liberation movements.The many resonances of these topoi form a more or less coherent whole, from the novels of George Eliot to the poetry of T. S. Eliot, from thinkers such as J. G. Fichte to the Austrian historian Otto Brunner and the Indian social psychologist Ashis Nandy, and throughout the long history of Western aesthetics, from Meister Eckhart to Alexander Baumgarten to Martin Heidegger. The supposed cosmopolitanism of the modern age often obscures a deep commitment to regional, nativist, nationalist, and civilizational attachments, including a justifying theological politics, much of which is still with us today. Untangling the meaning of the vital geographies of the modern age, including how they shaped our accounts of literature and representation, is the goal of this book.
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Ramírez, Dixa. Colonial Phantoms. NYU Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479850457.001.0001.
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Colonial Phantoms argues that Dominican cultural expression from the late nineteenth century to the present day reveals the ghosted singularities of Dominican history and demographic composition. For centuries, the territory hosted a majority mixed-race free population whose negotiations with colonial power were deeply ambivalent. Disquieted by the predominating black freedom, Western discourses ghosted—mis-categorized or erased—the Dominican Republic from the most important global conversations and decisions of the 19th century. What kind of national culture do you create when leaders of the world powers, on whose recognition you depend, rarely remember your nation’s name? Dominicans, both island and diasporic, have expressed their dissatisfaction with dominant descriptors and interpellations through literature, music, and speech acts. These expressions run the gamut from ultra-conservative, anti-Haitian nationalist literature to present-day Afro-Latinx activism. Dominant fields of knowledge constructed to account for various modes of being in the Americas have not been able to discern, and, in some cases, have helped to obscure, the kinds of free black subjectivity that emerged in the Dominican Republic. Analyzing literature, government documents, music, the visual arts, public monuments, film, and ephemeral and stage performance, this book intervenes at the level of knowledge production and analysis by disrupting some of the fields. In so doing, it establishes a framework for placing Dominican expressive culture and historical formations at the forefront of a number of scholarly investigations of colonial modernity in the Americas, the African diaspora, geographic displacement (e.g., migration and exile), and international divisions of labor.
Book chapters on the topic "American literature American literature Nationalism Nationalism Books Books"
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Evangelista, Stefano. "Controversies in the Periodical Press." In Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198864240.003.0005.
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This chapter argues that the periodical medium played a fundamental role in the construction of literary cosmopolitanism as a discursive phenomenon. It focuses on two periodicals launched in the fin de siècle: the American Cosmopolitan and the European Cosmopolis. The commercially oriented and middle-brow Cosmopolitan promoted cosmopolitanism as a female-gendered social identity linked to class privilege, as testified by the serialization of Elizabeth Bisland’s round-the-world trip in 1889. However, it also interrogated the cosmopolitan tendencies of modern American literature embodied by the writings of Henry James. By contrast, the short-lived Cosmopolis was a high-brow periodical that aimed to revive Kant’s Enlightenment ideal and Goethe’s notion of world literature. It was committed to multilingualism and to fighting nationalism. The chapter closes with an analysis of Cosmopolis as a competitor to the iconic 1890s English literary periodicals, the Yellow Book and The Savoy.
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Couret, Nilo. "Introduction." In Mock Classicism. University of California Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520296848.003.0001.
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The introduction is loosely structured in three parts addressing questions of genre, geography, and period. It situates the book within comparative literature debates on world literature in order to defend a genre-based paradigm (in opposition to nation-based models) that produces a diachronic made all the more significant by the particular reception of comedy; debates in Latin American studies that cast this period exclusively in terms of cultural nationalism, that is, as complicit with nation-state consolidation; and, finally, debates in film studies on vernacular modernism and the intersections of cinema and modernity. The introduction explains how studying the transition to sound and the emergence of film comedy provides an endogenous and nonsynchronous rejoinder to the cosmopolitanism of these debates, a mock classicism reliant on an intertextual horizon that produces a semblance of continuity between screen and theater.
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Leader-Picone, Cameron. "Coda." In Black and More than Black. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496824516.003.0007.
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This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to argue that while much of the optimism of the post era has been mitigated, several of its major theoretical strains—the emphasis on individual agency over racial identity, the turn towards racial identity as performance—remain critical to understanding current activism. It also explains the influence of theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality and Afropessimism on current movements. The coda also looks briefly towards growing and ongoing trends in African American literature, like Afrofuturism.
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Neumann, David J. "Introduction." In Finding God through Yoga. University of North Carolina Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469648637.003.0001.
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This book explores Paramahansa Yogananda’s ministry as an Indian, an American, and the founder of a global religious organization. As a figure often associated with the origins of yoga in the United States, he has been curiously neglected in the scholarly literature. Yogananda’s ministry was fueled by a religious nationalism that led him to conclude that Hinduism could uniquely fill the spiritual void in “the West.” Rejecting both exclusivism and pluralism, he embraced an inclusivism that viewed Hinduism as the ultimate expression of truth. He illuminates the nature of religious entrepreneurialism as he invented a variety of products to keep his ministry financially viable. His ministry reveals how missionary Hinduism’s success hinged on a deep understanding of Christian belief and practice; apart from his famed Autobiography, Yogananda’s longest text was a commentary on the New Testament Gospels, which explained how Jesus was a yogi. Yogananda’s life story demonstrates the connectedness of spirituality and place. He began to gain traction in his ministry only after he found Southern California. Yogananda “reenchanted” the modern world through his instruction and his claims to divine authority.