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An enjoyable overview of the world of pop, rock and politics in Beijing, accessible for students of Chinese culture and popular music studies. This is an area that has been exceptionally well covered in the literature, and Baranovitch's claim to originality lies mainly in his focus on ethnicity and gender. The overview of the development of pop from 1978–97 does a useful job of drawing together the various strands, though most of this is very familiar from the writings of Geremie Barmé, Andrew Jones et al. We begin with the introduction of Gangtai (Hong Kong and Taiwan pop) to the mainland, led by Deng Lijun whose 'coquettish nasal slides,' Baranovitch rightly suggests, were more truly subversive in China in 1978 than any of the subsequent rock and punk styles. Baranovitch chronicles the rise of the xibeifeng, the Shaanbei folk-infused rock style, linking it into the xungun roots movement and Tiananmen. An interesting section on qiuge or 'prison songs,' popular in 1988, explores somewhat less well-known territory. We follow the rise of the commercial, the karaoke craze and Mao fever, and the co-option of at least some of the rebellious rockers by the state. Baranovitch enthusiastically reveals the significance of music in the political arena, and its ability to prefigure, even shape the political.

Yellow Music is one of the rare publications in the field of ethnomusicology whose cross-over appeal is immediately apparent. This book will provide new perspectives for students of modern Chinese history, placing music centre stage in the cultural and political debates of the interwar period. It is less a study in musicology than a study of the cultural and political debates surrounding the musical recordings of the time.

Recent studies in the anthropology of Islam have called for a new understanding of the relationship between global forms of Islam and local priorities, new ideologies and everyday religious experience. This article addresses these concerns in the context of Uyghur society in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China where communities are increasingly engaging with transnational currents of Islamic ideology, and increasingly under pressure from the state that conflates religiosity with anti-state activity and extremist terrorism. The article focuses on Islamic media, in particular at the ways in which rural Uyghur women experience and reproduce globalized forms of Islamic media. It aims to understand how the most marginalized sectors of society are engaging with these changing religious ideologies and practices. The theoretical frame draws on notions of the 'soundscape', which explore the ways in which sound, practices of listening and perceptions of sound, may be central to making sense of the world around us.

Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema' is a feminist study of Israel?s film industry and the changes that have occurred since the 1990s. Working in feminist film theory, the book adopts a cultural studies approach, considering the creation of a female-centered and thematically feminist film culture in light of structural and ideological shifts in Israeli society. Author Rachel S. Harris situates these changes in dialogue with the cinematic history that preceded them and the ongoing social inequalities that perpetuate women?s marginalization within Israeli society

The relationship between travel and home are given new life in the novels of Eshkol Nevo. Framing the contemporary reality in narratives that explore Zionism, travel, and social activism, Nevo offers a conception of the new generation of Israeli writers torn between an Israeli identity, with its increasingly inclusive and polyethnic state, and a Jewish identity with its diasporic roots.

Free Zone (Amos Gitai, 2005); The Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis, 2008) and Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis, 2004), explore the Arab-Israeli conflict through women's experience of the political and military stalemate. In presenting Palestinian, Druze, and Israeli women, these filmmakers attempt to contrast and compare women's shared encounters, including their experience of patriarchy. While the characters may come from diametrically opposed sides, their experiences as women occlude their political differences. In these films, women are foregrounded within the plot, and have agency over their actions if not their situations. Rejecting the masculine frame that has governed representations of the conflict, these filmmakers demonstrate a new kind of approach in Israeli film that considers feminist aesthetics in the construction of character and plot, as well as the treatment of women's physicality, gaze, territoriality, and agency.

Reviews of:Alexandra Nocke. The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity. Brill 2010, Cloth $70. ISBN 9789004173248 Amy Horowitz. Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Paper $29.95. ISBN 9780814334652. Karen Grumberg. Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 9780815632597.