Best of
Theory

2003

Are Prisons Obsolete?


Angela Y. Davis - 2003
    Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity


Chandra Talpade Mohanty - 2003
    This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights.Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity


bell hooks - 2003
    "If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse."In this powerful new book, bell hooks arrests our attention from the first page. Her title--We Real Cool; her subject--the way in which both white society and weak black leaders are failing black men and youth. Her subject is taboo: "this is a culture that does not love black males: " "they are not loved by white men, white women, black women, girls or boys. And especially, black men do not love themselves. How could they? How could they be expected to love, surrounded by so much envy, desire, and hate?

Responsibility and Judgment


Hannah Arendt - 2003
    At the heart of the book is a profound ethical investigation, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in which Arendt confronts the inadequacy of traditional moral “truths” as standards to judge what we are capable of doing and examines anew our ability to distinguish good from evil and right from wrong. We also see how Arendt comes to understand that alongside the radical evil she had addressed in earlier analyses of totalitarianism, there exists a more pernicious evil, independent of political ideology, whose execution is limitless when the perpetrator feels no remorse and can forget his acts as soon as they are committed.Responsibility and Judgment is an indispensable investigation into some of the most troubling and important issues of our time.

In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition


Fred Moten - 2003
    In the Break is an extended riff on “The Burton Greene Affair,” exploring the tangled relationship between black avant-garde in music and literature in the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of a distinct form of black cultural nationalism, and the complex engagement with and disavowal of homoeroticism that bridges the two. Fred Moten focuses in particular on the brilliant improvisatory jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and others, arguing that all black performance—culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself—is improvisation.For Moten, improvisation provides a unique epistemological standpoint from which to investigate the provocative connections between black aesthetics and Western philosophy. He engages in a strenuous critical analysis of Western philosophy (Heidegger, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) through the prism of radical black thought and culture. As the critical, lyrical, and disruptive performance of the human, Moten’s concept of blackness also brings such figures as Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, Cecil Taylor and Samuel R. Delany, Billie Holiday and William Shakespeare into conversation with each other.Stylistically brilliant and challenging, much like the music he writes about, Moten’s wide-ranging discussion embraces a variety of disciplines—semiotics, deconstruction, genre theory, social history, and psychoanalysis—to understand the politicized sexuality, particularly homoeroticism, underpinning black radicalism. In the Break is the inaugural volume in Moten’s ambitious intellectual project-to establish an aesthetic genealogy of the black radical tradition.

Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture


Lisa Robertson - 2003
    The Office constructs propositions and documents for the advancement of a natural history of civic surface. Three books of Robertson's poetry have been published: XEclogue (Tsunami Editions, 1993, reissued by New Star, 1999) Debbie: An Epic (1997, nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry) and The Weather (2001) (both co-published by New Star in Canada and Reality Street in the U.K.). Her prose has appeared in Cabinet, Front, Jacket, Mix, Collapse, Nest magazine, and many art catalogs and monographs.

Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique


Roderick A. Ferguson - 2003
    But what is missing from the picture--sexual difference--can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology--Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson--has measured African Americans' unsuitability for a liberal capitalist order in terms of their adherence to the norms of a heterosexual and patriarchal nuclear family model. In short, to the extent that African Americans' culture and behavior deviated from those norms, they would not achieve economic and racial equality. Aberrations in Black tells the story of canonical sociology's regulation of sexual difference as part of its general regulation of African American culture. Ferguson places this story within other stories--the narrative of capital's emergence and development, the histories of Marxism and revolutionary nationalism, and the novels that depict the gendered and sexual idiosyncrasies of African American culture--works by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Toni Morrison. In turn, this book tries to present another story--one in which people who presumably manifest the dys-functions of capitalism are reconsidered as indictments of the norms of state, capital, and social science. Ferguson includes the first-ever discussion of a new archival discovery--a never-published chapter of Invisible Man that deals with a gay character in a way thatcomplicates and illuminates Ellison's project. Unique in the way it situates critiques of race, gender, and sexuality within analyses of cultural, economic, and epistemological formations, Ferguson's work introduces a new mode of discourse--which Ferguson calls queer of color analysis--that helps to lay bare the mutual distortions of racial, economic, and sexual portrayals within sociology. A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture.

The Transgender Studies Reader


Susan Stryker - 2003
    Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reader puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.

Giving an Account of Oneself


Judith Butler - 2003
    In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938-1940


Walter Benjamin - 2003
    Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to flee the Nazis. However insistently the idea of catastrophe hangs over Benjamin's writings in the final years of his life, the "victories wrested" in this period nonetheless constitute some of the most remarkable twentieth-century analyses of the emergence of modern society. The essays on Charles Baudelaire are the distillation of a lifetime of thinking about the nature of modernity. They record the crisis of meaning experienced by a civilization sliding into the abyss, even as they testify to Benjamin's own faith in the written word.This volume ranges from studies of Baudelaire, Brecht, and the historian Carl Jochmann to appraisals of photography, film, and poetry. At their core is the question of how art can survive and thrive in a tumultuous time. Here we see Benjamin laying out an ethic for the critic and artist--a subdued but resilient heroism. At the same time, he was setting forth a sociohistorical account of how art adapts in an age of violence and repression.Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture


Hortense Spillers - 2003
    Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures


Ann Cvetkovich - 2003
    She argues for the importance of recognizing---and archiving---accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. Cvetkovich contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, she develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. An Archive of Feelings challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and AIDS activism and caretaking.An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act/up New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherrie Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how these cultural formations---activism, performance, and literature---give rise to public cultures that both work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma-one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.About the Author: Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism.

Regarding the Pain of Others


Susan Sontag - 2003
    How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newspapers) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag takes a fresh look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001. In Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag once again changes the way we think about the uses and meanings of images in our world, and offers an important reflection about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time.Features an analysis of our numbed response to images of horror. This title alters our thinking about the uses and meanings of images, and about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 and 1979-1980


Roland Barthes - 2003
    Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way.Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust.This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978 and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.

Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness


Caroline Evans - 2003
    This book looks closely at this strand of fashion design in the 1990s, exploring what its disturbing themes tell us about consumer culture and contemporary anxieties. Caroline Evans analyses the work of experimental designers, the images of fashion photographers, and the spectacular fashion shows that developed in the final decade of the 20th century to arrive at a new understanding of fashion's dark side and what it signifies. in unprecedented depth and detail, including the work of such current designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Viktor & Rolf. Contrasting images by photographers like Steven Meisel, Nick Knight, and Juergen Teller are also reviewed. Drawing on diverse perspectives from Marx to Walter Benjamin, Evans shows that fashion stands at the very centre of the contemporary, and that it voices some of Western culture's deepest concerns.

The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas


Diana Taylor - 2003
    From plays to official events to grassroots protests, performance, she argues, must be taken seriously as a means of storing and transmitting knowledge. Taylor reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory—conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances—offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. The Archive and the Repertoire invites a remapping of the Americas based on traditions of embodied practice.Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani, and televised astrological readings by Univision personality Walter Mercado, Taylor explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . , Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. Meditating on events like those of September 11, 2001 and media representations of them, she examines both the crucial role of performance in contemporary culture and her own role as witness to and participant in hemispheric dramas. The Archive and the Repertoire is a compelling demonstration of the many ways that the study of performance enables a deeper understanding of the past and present, of ourselves and others.

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress


Kara Walker - 2003
    1969) has emerged as one of her generation's most important artists. Best known for her provocative black paper cutout silhouettes, she confronts stereotypes, sex, violence, and power relationships through Civil War-era parodies, narratives, and a mastery of craft and installation.This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art, presents a comprehensive overview of Walker's work, beginning with her first cut-paper wall installation, "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart" (1994). Other highlights include the 1996 series of twenty-four watercolor drawings, "Brown Follies," which is reproduced in full as an artist's book within the book, and installation views of many of Walker's exhibitions. Recent drawings and projections are also featured. Throughout the book are a selection of the Walker's writings reproduced as they were created typed on index cards. These writings reveal a rarely seen side of the artist, whose words are as provocative as her installations and drawings. The essays discuss Walker's place in art history, formal and narrative readings of her work, her relation to culture at large, and issues of race, sexuality, and representation addressed in her work.Copublished with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and Williams College Museum of Art.

The Haraway Reader


Donna J. Haraway - 2003
    The Haraway Reader brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work, she is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world and this volume is ideal introduction to her thought.

Privilege: A Reader


Michael S. Kimmel - 2003
    In addition to readings from well-known authors in the field, this edition includes pieces from contemporary scholars breaking new ground in superordinate studies. Seventeen carefully selected essays explore the multifaceted aspects of privilege: how race, gender, class, and sexual preference interact in the lives of those who are privileged by one or more of these identities. Written from a variety of viewpoints, personal and analytic, the essays in this volume help students understand that “race” can mean white people, “gender” can mean men, and “sexuality” can mean heterosexuals.I. MAKING PRIVILEGE VISIBLE1. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”2. Woods, Jewel.“Black Male Privilege.” *3. Larew, John, “Why are Droves of Unqualified, Unprepared Kids Getting Into our Top Colleges?”4. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. “On Being Okie.”5. Messner, Michael A. “Becoming 100% Straight” 6. Rochlin, M. “The Heterosexual Questionnaire.” II. UNDERSTANDING PRIVILEGE7. Johnson, Allan. “Privilege Power and Difference and Us,” from Privilege Power and Difference.*8. Brodkin Sacks, Karen. “How Jews Became White”9. Kimmel, Michael S. “Masculinity as Homophobia.” 10. Wise, Tim. “Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male.” *11. Kendall, Diana. “Class in the United States: Not Only Alive but Reproducing.” *III. EXAMINING INTERSECTIONS12. Redding, Maureen T. “Invisibility/Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Normative Whiteness.” *13. hooks, bell. “Class and Race: The New Black Elite.”14. Bérubé, Allan. “How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White it Stays.”IV. MOVING FORWARD15. Thompson, Becky. “Subverting Racism From Within.”16. Hill Collins, Patricia. “Toward a New Vision.” 17.Ferber, Abby. “Dismantling Privilege and Becoming an Ally.” *

Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions


María Lugones - 2003
    A deeply original essayist, Lugones writes from her own perspective as an inhabitant of a number of different 'worlds.' Born in Argentina but living for a number of years in the United States, she sees herself as neither quite a U.S. citizen, nor quite an Argentine. An activist against the oppression of Latino/a people by the dominant U.S. culture, she is also an academic participating in the privileges of that culture. A lesbian, she experiences homophobia in both Anglo and Latino world. A woman, she moves uneasily in the world of patriarchy. Lugones writes out of multiple and conflicting subjectivities that shape her sense of who she is, resisting the demand for a unified self in light of her necessary ambiguities. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes explores the possibility of deep coalition with other women of color, based on 'multiple understandings of oppressions and resistances'-understandings whose logic she subjects to philosophical investigation.

The Oxford Companion to the Brontës


Christine Alexander - 2003
    From the masterly fusion of romance and realism in Wuthering Heights to the passion and drama of Jane Eyre, the works of these three sisters have captured the hearts and imagination of readers everywhere. Their tragic, real-life stories only contribute to the timeless attraction to these three brilliant writers. With The Oxford Companion to the Bront�s, Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith provide a comprehensive volume about the lives, works, and reputations of the Bront� sisters, together with their father, Patrick, an author in his own right, and their brother, Branwell who, along with his sister Charlotte, created the imaginary world of Angria. This authoritative guide is organized in an easy-to-use A-Z format, offers extensive cross-referencing, and provides chronologies of the sisters' work, including a list of juvenilia, first line of poems and Bront� art, as well as maps and illustrations for quick, easy study and further research. In addition, the authors offer insight into the publishing history, biographical studies, collectors and museums, book illustrations, and theoretical and critical approaches to the Bront�s' writing. The Oxford Companion to the Bront�s is a unique and fascinating guide that will appeal to all lovers of English literature.

Poetical Dictionary (Abridged)


Lohren Green - 2003
    Lohren Green's POETICAL DICTIONARY concludes with chaos and begins with acrobatics. In between these he presents us with "both a book of words and a cosmos"; a linguistic gas cloud bounded by the universal and the particular. Green's project departs from the traditional dictionary, a peculiar contraption of sense and order. In the preface, he reviews the architectures of these teetering, teeming, linguistic edifices. His attitude towards words is almost that of a material scientist, exploding an individual specimen of language-"bulwark" "heft" "oyster" "purple" "torpid" "foreplay"--in order to ascertain its "synthesis of body and concept." Organized into SUBJECT WORD, PRONUNCIATION, ETYMOLOGY, and DEFINITION, each entry in the POETICAL DICTIONARY makes the traditional dictionary hiccup, divulging the stanza within the standard definition and the wiggle of wit in the pronunciation key. "addressable / glow unit of / information"--from "pixel."

Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jab�s


Rosmarie Waldrop - 2003
    Born in Cairo, he settled in France after being expelled from Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Rosmarie Waldrop is Jab�s's primary English translator. Over the course of her long association and friendship with Jab�s, Waldrop developed a very nuanced understanding of his work that in turn influenced her development as both writer and translator. Lavish Absence is a book-length essay with a triple focus: it is a memoir of Jab�s as Waldrop knew him, it is both an homage to and an explication of Jab�s's work, and it is a meditation on the process of translation. The writing interweaves these topics, evoking Jab�s's own interest in the themes of exile and nomadism.

The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader


Roger Caillois - 2003
    Caillois was part of the Surrealist avant-garde and in the 1930s founded the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris. He spent his life exploring issues raised by this famous group and by Surrealism itself. Though his subjects were diverse, Caillois focused on concerns crucial to modern intellectual life, and his essays offer a unique perspective on many of twentieth-century France’s most significant intellectual movements and figures. Including a masterful introductory essay by Claudine Frank situating his work in the context of his life and intellectual milieu, this anthology is the first comprehensive introduction to Caillois’s work to appear in any language.These thirty-two essays with commentaries strike a balance between Caillois’s political and theoretical writings and between his better known works, such as the popular essays on the praying mantis, myth, and mimicry, and his lesser-known pieces. Presenting several new pieces and drawing on interviews and unpublished correspondence, this book reveals Caillois’s consistent effort to reconcile intellectual rigor and imaginative adventure. Perhaps most importantly, The Edge of Surrealism provides an overdue look at how Caillois’s intellectual project intersected with the work of Georges Bataille and others including Breton, Bachelard, Benjamin, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss.

Rogues: Two Essays on Reason


Jacques Derrida - 2003
    The term "État voyou" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines.Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of "democracy to come," which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world.

Disinformation: The Complete Series


Richard Metzger - 2003
    Literary celebs interviewed include Illuminatus! author Robert Anton Wilson, popular media commentator Douglas Rushkoff (Media Virus), Lucifer Principle author Howard Bloom, X-Men scribe and comics genius Grant Morrison, and underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger—people you rarely see on TV. Shock rocker Marilyn Manson is also featured, guaranteeing a crossover with his still huge fan base. An instant classic of the weird and unusual, the Disinformation television series caused a stir when it aired on the UK’s Channel 4 TV network, challenging the network’s censors and resulting in Channel 4 refusing to air certain segments. Nonetheless, the series was a hit and was bought by SCI FI Channel in the United States, but never aired.The companion book, Disinformation: The Interviews (ISBN 0-9713942-1-0), was released in November 2002.Lots of press interest relating to the SCI FI Channel’s purchase and later refusal to air the programsSuperb value—two discs containing more than six hours of viewingContains bonus footage—never seen before—from the legendary Disinfo.Con 2000 conference held in New York, including exclusive footage of Robert Anton Wilson, Marilyn Manson, Joe Coleman, Kenneth Anger, Grant Morrison, Adam Parfrey, Douglas Rushkoff and more!DVD is available at standard book discount and may be combined with other CBSD books for discount.

Reading the Illegible


Craig Dworkin - 2003
    What twentieth-century writers and artists have meant by such appropriations and violations, and how the "illegible" results are to be read, is the subject Craig Dworkin takes up in this ambitious work.In his scrutiny of selected works, and with reference to a rich variety of textual materials--from popular and scientific texts to visual art, political and cultural theories, and experimental films--Dworkin proposes a new way of apprehending the radical formalism of so-called unreadable texts. Dworkin unveils what he describes as "the politics of the poem"--what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, and implicit in the philosophy of language; how it positions its reader; and other questions relating to the poem as material object. In doing so, he exposes the mechanics and function of truly radical formalism as a practice that move beyond aesthetic considerations into the realms of politics and ideology. Reading the Illegible asks us to reconsider poetry as a physical act, and helps us to see how the range of a text's linguistic and political maneuvers depends to a great extent on the material conditions of reading and writing as well as the mechanics of reproduction.

The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel


Alex Woloch - 2003
    His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory.Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le P�re Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The character-space, as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel's very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation.Woloch's discussion of character-space allows for a different history of the novel and a new definition of characterization itself. By making the implied person indispensable to our understanding of literary form, this book offers a forward-looking avenue for contemporary narrative theory.

Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents


Guy Debord - 2003
    The scripts are illustrated with 62 stills, and Debord’s own annotations help elucidate the subtleties of these astonishing works, unparalleled in cinematic history.

Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader


Reina Lewis - 2003
    Divided into eight thematic sections, the readings have been selected in order to examine not just the textual and discursive nature of colonial and post-colonial discourse in relation to gender, but also the material effects of the post-colonial condition and practices developed in relation to it.

Women on War: An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present


Daniela Gioseffi - 2003
    Yet most of these writings are little known, just as women's perceptions of war remain largely absent from the history books.Women on War gathers together writings by more than 150 women, including renowned poets, novelists, essayists, journalists, and activists, as well as ordinary women with firsthand experience of armed conflict as survivors, refugees, rape victims, nurses, and soldiers. Spanning the globe and traversing more than two centuries, the pieces in this compelling collection range from an ancient verse by Sappho about a wife who awaits the return of her warrior husband to an essay by Arundhati Roy about the impact of September 11. In voices that are gripping, mournful, defiant, and often surprisingly hopeful, these writers join to produce a portrait of wartime experience and a plea for peace.

American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays


Anne Waters - 2003
    Covers American Indian thinking on issues concerning time, place, history, science, law, religion, nationhood, and art. Features newly commissioned essays by authors of American Indian descent. Includes a comprehensive bibliography to aid in research and inspire further reading.

Readings in the Philosophy of Technology


David M. Kaplan - 2003
    Compiled specifically with students and newcomers in mind, this book explores the multiple ways in which humanity shapes and affects technologies and is, in turn, shaped and affected by them. Readers will learn to understand, evaluate, appreciate, and criticize the ways that technology both reflects and changes human life-individually, socially, and culturally. Readings in the Philosophy of Technology is an ideal core text for undergraduate courses in Philosophy of Technology, Science, Technology, and Society, and Ethics and Technology.

Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews


Marshall McLuhan - 2003
    It was McLuhan who made the distinction between hot and cool media. And it was he who coined the phrases the medium is the message and the global village and popularized other memorable terms including feedback and iconic.McLuhan was far more than a pithy phrasemaker, however. He foresaw the development of personal computers at a time when computers were huge, unwieldy machines available only to institutions. He anticipated the wide-ranging effects of the Internet. And he understood, better than any of his contemporaries, the transformations that would be wrought by digital technology--in particular, the globalization of communications and the instantaneous-simultaneous nature of the new, electric world. In many ways, we're still catching up to him--forty years after the publication of Understanding Media.In Understanding Me, Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have brought together nineteen previously unpublished lectures and interviews either by or with Marshall McLuhan. They have in common the informality and accessibility of the spoken word. In every case, the text has been transcribed from the original audio, film, or videotape of McLuhan's actual appearances. This is not what McLuhan wrote but what he said--the spoken words of a surprisingly accessible public man. He comes across as outrageous, funny, perplexing, stimulating, and provocative. McLuhan will never seem quite the same again.The foreword by Tom Wolfe provides a twenty-first century perspective on McLuhan's life and work, and co-editor David Staines's insightful afterword offers a personal account of McLuhan as teacher and friend.Lectures and InterviewsElectronic Revolution: Revolutionary Effects of New Media (1959) -Popular/Mass Culture: American Perspectives (1960) - Technology, the Media, and Culture - The Communications Revolution - Cybernetics and Human Culture (1964) - The Future of Man in the Electric Age (1965) - The Medium Is the Massage (1966) - Predicting Communication via the Internet (1966) - The Marfleet Lectures (1967) - Canada, the Borderline Case - Towards an Inclusive Consciousness - Fordham University: First Lecture (1967) - Open-Mind Surgery (1967) - TV News as a New Mythic Form (1970) - The Future of the Book (1972) - The End of the Work Ethic (1972) - Art as Survival in the Electric Age (1973) - Living at the Speed of Light (1974) - What TV Does Best (1976) - TV as a Debating Medium (1976) - Violence as a Quest for Identity (1977) - Man and Media (1979)

Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art


Pavel Florensky - 2003
    In addition to seven essays by Florensky, the book includes a biographical introduction and an examination of Florensky’s contribution as an art historian by Nicoletta Misler. Beyond Vision reveals Florensky’s fundamental attitudes to the vital questions of construction, composition, chronology, function and destination in the fields of painting, sculpture and design. His reputation as a theologian and philosopher is already established in the English-speaking world, but this first collection in English of his art essays (translated by Wendy Salmond) will be a revelation to those in the field.Pavel Florensky was a true polymath: trained in mathematics and philosophy at Moscow University, he rejected a scholarship in advanced mathematics in order to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy. He was also an expert linguist, scientist and art historian. A victim of the Soviet government’s animosity towards religion, he was condemned to a Siberian labor camp in 1933 where he continued his work under increasingly difficult circumstances. He was executed in 1937.

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces


Juana María Rodríguez - 2003
    Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined.Juana Mar�a Rodr�guez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project's case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodr�guez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields.As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodr�guez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.

Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation


Joan Copjec - 2003
    In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath


Helen Vendler - 2003
    By looking at the precedents, circumstances, and artistry of the first perfect poems composed by John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath, Coming of Age as a Poet offers rare insight into this mysterious process, and into the indispensable period of learning and experimentation that precedes such poetic achievement.Milton's L'Allegro, Keats's On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Plath's The Colossus are the poems that Helen Vendler considers, exploring each as an accession to poetic confidence, mastery, and maturity. In meticulous and sympathetic readings of the poems, and with reference to earlier youthful compositions, she delineates the context and the terms of each poet's self-discovery--and illuminates the private, intense, and ultimately heroic effort and endurance that precede the creation of any memorable poem.With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps us to appreciate anew the conception and the practice of poetry, and to observe at first hand the living organism that breathes through the words of a great poem.

The Sleep That Changed Everything


Lee Ann Brown - 2003
    Abounding in a playfulness of style, including songs and ballads, the poems in The Sleep That Changed Everything are by turns funny, serious, insightful and moving. Botanical and scientific language are used here as collage elements to chart cycles of desire and emotional transformation. Brown is committed to Whitman's idea that we all have many selves; thus her work embraces the immediacy of the New York School, the personal and literary wildness of the Beats, the word play and political astuteness of Language poetry and an eroticism all her own. In poems that are both highly literate and plain-spoken, Brown makes the life of the soul directly available in all its renegade garb.

The End of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment


Todd McGowan - 2003
    McGowan identifies many of the social ills of American culture today as symptoms of this transformation: the sense of disconnection, the increase in aggression and violence, widespread cynicism, political apathy, incivility, and loss of meaning. Discussing these various symptoms, he examines various texts from film, literature, popular culture, and everyday life, including Toni Morrison's Paradise, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and such films as Dead Poets Society and Trigger Effect. Paradoxically, The End of Dissatisfaction? shows how the American cultural obsession with enjoying ourselves actually makes it more difficult to do so.

Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew


Susan Gubar - 2003
    From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, many contemporary writers grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. By speaking about or even as the dead, these poets tell what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation. This moving meditation by a major feminist critic finds in poetry a stimulant to empathy that can help us take to heart what we forget at our own peril.

Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook


Gesa E. Kirsch - 2003
    A valuable reference, the volume surveys the history of feminist pedagogy, theory, and research, as well as the politics of the profession.

How to Write Law Essays and Exams


S.I. Strong - 2003
    The book focuses on those questions that give students the most trouble, namely problem questions, but its techniques are equally applicable to othertypes of essays. Designed for law students of all levels, the text helps students understand their substantive courses while at the same time teaching vital writing and analytical skills.

Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey


Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht - 2003
    It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. Based on this assessment of the past and the future of literary studies and the humanities, the book develops the provocative thesis that, through their exclusive dedication to interpretation, i.e. to the reconstruction and attribution of meaning, the humanities have become incapable of addressing a dimension in all cultural phenomena that is as important as the dimension of meaning. Interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension of "presence," a dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on our senses and our bodies. Production of Presence is a passionate plea for a rethinking and a reshaping of the intellectual practice within the humanities.

Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity


E. Patrick Johnson - 2003
    Patrick Johnson’s provocative study examines how blackness is appropriated and performed—toward widely divergent ends—both within and outside African American culture. Appropriating Blackness develops from the contention that blackness in the United States is necessarily a politicized identity—avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, fixed and malleable. Drawing on performance theory, queer studies, literary analysis, film criticism, and ethnographic fieldwork, Johnson describes how diverse constituencies persistently try to prescribe the boundaries of "authentic" blackness and how performance highlights the futility of such enterprises.Johnson looks at various sites of performed blackness, including Marlon Riggs’s influential documentary Black Is . . . Black Ain’t and comedic routines by Eddie Murphy, David Alan Grier, and Damon Wayans. He analyzes nationalist writings by Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver, the vernacular of black gay culture, an oral history of his grandmother’s experience as a domestic worker in the South, gospel music as performed by a white Australian choir, and pedagogy in a performance studies classroom. By exploring the divergent aims and effects of these performances—ranging from resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia to excluding sexual dissidents from the black community—Johnson deftly analyzes the multiple significations of blackness and their myriad political implications. His reflexive account considers his own complicity, as ethnographer and teacher, in authenticating narratives of blackness.

Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris


Ginette Vincendeau - 2003
    Ginette Vincendeau discusses the artistic value of his films in their proper context and comments on Jean-Pierre Melville's love of American culture and his controversial critical and political standing in this English language study.

The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism


Manfred Frank - 2003
    In the twelve lectures collected here, Manfred Frank redresses this oversight, offering an in-depth exploration of the philosophical contributions and contemporary relevance of early German Romanticism. Arguing that the early German Romantics initiated an original movement away from idealism, Frank brings the leading figures of the movement, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), into concert with contemporary philosophical developments, and explores the role that Friedrich Holderlin and other members of the Homburg Circle had upon the development of early German Romantic philosophy.

Queer Cultures


Jennifer Digrazia - 2003
    Presented in a way that is historically contextualized, politically complex, and far-reaching across different disciplines, the readings demonst

Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique


Kandice Chuh - 2003
    Recognizing that the rubric "Asian American" elides crucial differences, Kandice Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Toward that end, she urges the foregrounding of the constructedness of "Asian American" formations and shows how this understanding of the field provides the basis for continuing to use the term "Asian American" in light of—and in spite of—contemporary critiques about its limitations.Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.

White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism


Ashley W. Doane - 2003
    White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history, and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of "whiteness".

The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982


Douglas Fogle - 2003
    How did this come to be? The Last Picture Show will address the emergence of this phenomenon of artists using photography by tracing the development of conceptual trends in postwar photographic practice from its first glimmerings in the 60s in the work of artists such as Bernd & Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, to its rise to art-world prominence in the work of the artists of the late 70s and early 80s including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Intended as a major genealogy of the rise of a still-powerful and evolving photographic practice by artists, the checklist will include a wide array of works examining a range of issues: performativity and photographic practice; portraiture and cultural identity; the formal and social architectonics of the built environment; societal and individual interventions in the landscape; photography's relationship to sculpture and painting; the visual mediation of meaning in popular culture; and the poetic and conceptual investigation of visual non-sequiturs, disjunctions and humorous absurdities. Bringing together a newly commissioned body of scholarship with reprints of important historical texts, The Last Picture Show seeks to define the legacy that has produced a rich body of photographic practice in the art world today.

On Imperialist Globalization


Fidel Castro - 2003
    In these two speeches delivered on the eve of the new century, Fidel Castro argues that globalization is an imperialist world order, manifested in new forms of economic exploitation, attacks on national sovereignty, cultural subjugation, and military aggression.

Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity


Alexander Alberro - 2003
    In this book Alexander Alberro traces its origins to the mid-1960s, when its principles were first articulated by the artists Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others. One of Alberro's central arguments is that the conceptual art movement was founded not just by the artists but also by the dealer Seth Siegelaub. Siegelaub promoted the artists, curated groundbreaking shows, organized symposia and publications, and in many ways set the stage for another kind of entrepreneur: the freelance curator. Alberro examines both Siegelaub's role in launching the careers of artists who were making something from nothing and his tactful business practices, particularly in marketing and advertising.Alberro draws on close readings of artworks produced by key conceptual artists in the mid- to late 1960s. He places the movement in the social context of the rebellion against existing cultural institutions, as well as the increased commercialization and globalization of the art world. The book ends with a discussion of one of Siegelaub's most material and least ephemeral contributions, the Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which he wrote between 1969 and 1971. Designed to limit the inordinate control of collectors, galleries, and museums by increasing the artist's rights, the Agreement unwittingly codified the overlap between capitalism and the arts.

The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations


Carol A. Newsom - 2003
    Her innovative approach makes possible a new understanding of the unity of the book that rejects its dismantling in historical criticism and the flattening of the text that characterizes many final form readings. Additionally, she rehabilitates the moral perspectives represented by certain voices of the book that modern critics have treated with disdain.

Auroras Of The Zapatistas: Local & Global Struggles Of The Fourth World War


Midnight Notes Collective - 2003
    A study of Mexico's Zapatista revolution and its enlightening and heating effects on the new social struggles worldwide.

Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research


Gillian Rose - 2003
    Using Social Theory is a magisterial effort to open up the black-box of research methods, and to provide students, in a way that no other comparable text has done, with a road map for the practice of the contemporary human sciences' - "Michael Watts, Chancellor's Professor of Geography and Director Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley"From "theory talk to making it walk," Using Social Theory is one of the most useful and interesting books on the market. The authors demonstrate how to use philosophy and social theory as an indispensable toolkit for passionate and rigorous research. Essential reading for students and teachers in the social sciences and humanities' - "Professor Elspeth Probyn, Department of Gender Studies, University of Sydney"Have you ever stopped to wonder about the influences that underpin research? If you are thinking about doing a piece of research, what difference might it make to the question you ask, to your approach to empirical work, analysis and writing of research, if you are influenced by one theoretical approach rather than another?The chapters in this innovative guide share a common belief that thinking alongside ideas, philosophical persuasions, is an integral part of the research process; it is not an optional extra. It sets out ways to encourage the researcher to think through three key moments of the research process: the production of a research question; fieldwork; and analysis and writing.As the authors demonstrate, research is not simply done': it has to be thought about and thought through. The book's accessible style makes it suitable for anyone wishing to engage ideas in research in the social sciences and humanities.

The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages


Adam H. Becker - 2003
    Includes a new preface by the editors discussing scholarship since 2003.

Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change


Cynthia Kaufman - 2003
    Yet those genuinely interested in reading about the issues find that few contemporary theorists are seriously committed to accessible, clear writing. Furthermore, the mainstream media rarely represents social movements, and the theories associated with them, without distortion or bias.Written in an engaging and accessible style, Ideas for Action gives activists the intellectual tools to turn discontent into a plan of action. Exploring a wide range of political traditions—including Marxism, anarchism, anti-imperialism, poststructualism, feminism, critical race theory, and environmentalism—Cynthia Kaufman acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of political movements and the ideologies inspired by or -generated through them. Kaufman incorporates elements of her own activist experiences, and offers a coherent analysis without pretending to offer "the final word" on complex issues. Instead, she encourages inquiry and further investigation, offering readers the information to orient a critical understanding of the social world and a glimpse of the excitement and rewards of serious intellectual engagement with political ideas. Ideas for Action examines the work of diverse thinkers such as Adam Smith, Paulo Freire, Stuart Hall, and Ronald Takaki. Kaufman’s insights break the chains of cynicism and lay a foundation for more effective organizing.Cynthia Kaufman lives in Oakland, CA, where she has been involved in the tenant’s rights movement. She has a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and teaches Philosophy and Women’s Studies at De Anza College in Cupertino.

The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting


François Jullien - 2003
    Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, The Great Image Has No Form explores the “nonobject”—a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.   François Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters’ deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective with the Western notion of art as separate from the world it represents, Jullien investigates the theoretical conditions that allow us to apprehend, isolate, and abstract objects. His comparative method lays bare the assumptions of Chinese and European thought, revitalizing the questions of what painting is, where it comes from, and what it does. Provocative and intellectually vigorous, this sweeping inquiry introduces new ways of thinking about the relationship of art to the ideas in which it is rooted.

Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject


Kevin Quashie - 2003
    He considers how the work of writers such as Toni Morrison, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dionne Brand, photographer Lorna Simpson, and many others, inform debates over the concept of identity. Quashie argues that these authors and artists replace the notion of a stable, singular identity with the concept of the self developing in a process both communal and perpetually fluid, a relationship that functions in much the same way that an adult woman negotiates with her girlfriend(s). He suggests that memory itself is corporeal, a literal body that is crucial to the process of becoming. Quashie also explores the problem language poses for the black woman artist and her commitment to a mastery that neither colonizes nor excludes.The analysis throughout interacts with schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and post-colonialism, but ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic, one that ultimately aims to center black women and their philosophies.

State of Exception


Giorgio Agamben - 2003
    Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a normal paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.In this highly topical book, Agamben ultimately arrives at original ideas about the future of democracy and casts a new light on the hidden relationship that ties law to violence.

Classical Mechanics: Point Particles and Relativity


Walter Greiner - 2003
    The idea of developing a coherent, complete presentation of an entire ?eld of science in a series of closely related textbooks is not a new one. Many older physicians remember with real pleasure their sense of adventure and discovery as they worked their ways through the classic series by Sommerfeld, by Planck, and by Landau and Lifshitz. From the students' viewpoint, there are a great many obvious advantages to be gained through the use of consistent notation, logical ordering of topics, and coherence of presentation; beyond this, thecompletecoverageofthescienceprovidesauniqueopportunityfortheauthortoconvey his personal enthusiasm and love for his subject. These volumes on classical physics, ?nally available in English, complement Greiner's textsonquantumphysics, mostofwhichhavebeenavailabletoEnglish-speakingaudiences for some time. The complete set of books will thus provide a coherent view of physics that includes, in classical physics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, classical dyn- ics, electromagnetism, and general relativity; and in quantum physics, quantum mechanics, symmetries, relativistic quantum mechanics, quantum electro- and chromodynamics, and the gauge theory of weak interactions.

Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order


Neferti Xina M. Tadiar - 2003
    Tadiar probes the consequences of dominant Philippine imaginations by examining a broad range of phenomena which characterize the contemporary Philippine nation, including the mass migration overseas of domestic workers, the ‘prostitution economy’, urban restructuring, the popular revolt toppling the Marcos dictatorship, as well as various works of art, poetry, historiography, and film. This will be one of the first books available widely in English that provides a sustained theoretical engagement with the cultural dimensions of contemporary socio-political and economic developments in the Philippines.

Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life


Andrew Blauvelt - 2003
    This shift away from more strictly formal and functional concerns has allowed them to freely explore design's contexts and effects. A light that responds to silence, a table that knows where it is, a pig farm the size of a skyscraper, a coat that becomes a tent, a house that fits in your pocket--these projects by innovators in the field of design question the habitual, transform the commonplace, alter our notions of dwelling and blur the boundaries between form and function. Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life explores the paradox of design in our daily lives. Anonymous and conspicuous, familiar and strange, design surrounds us while fading from view, becoming second nature to us and yet remaining still somehow elusive. This exhibition catalogue includes more than 40 innovative projects drawn internationally from the fields of architecture, product, furniture, fashion and graphic design. Among the designers and architects featured are Shigeru Ban, MVRDV, LOT-EK, Atelier Bow-Wow, Dunne & Raby, Marcel Wanders, Michael Anastassiades, Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym, and Allan Wexler. This richly illustrated volume includes essays on the tactics of formlessness and its impact on everyday consumption, the potential of an endlessly transformable environment to extend product lifecycles, and ruminations on the strange and familiar worlds of design.

Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning


Edward Schiappa - 2003
    In response to theories that deem discourse to be persuasive, the author asserts that all discourse is definitive discourse that contributes to our construction of a shared reality. Defining Reality sheds light on our methods of creating common truths through language and argumentation and forces us to reconsider the contexts, limitations, and adaptability of our definitions. Hinging on a synthesis of arguments regarding the significance of definitional practices, the book is bolstered by a series of case studies of debates about rape, euthanasia, abortion, and political and environmental issues. These case studies ground Schiappa’s concepts in reality and delineate the power of public discourse within legal contexts. Ranging widely among disciplines from philosophy and classical philology to constitutional law and cognitive psychology, this study substantially contributes to the scholarship of rhetoric and argumentation, particularly as they function in the realm of public discourse.

Gramsci's Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?


Frank B. Wilderson III - 2003
    The most ridiculous question a black person can ask a cop is, ‘why did you shoot me?’ How does one account for the gratuitous? The cop is at a disadvantage: ‘I shot you because you are black; you are black because I shot you.’ Here is the tautology at the heart of the colonial experience.

The Immaterial


André Gorz - 2003
    This economy would be based on zero-cost exchange and pooled resources, and knowledge would be treated as humanity’s common property. Currently, in order to exploit knowledge and turn it into capital, the capitalist enterprise privatizes specialized knowledge and claims ownership through private licenses and copyright. But as Gorz shows, the traditional foundations of such capitalist economics have begun to crumble because of the immaterial nature of this new form of product, which makes it almost impossible to measure in monetary terms. The knowledge economy, Gorz declares, is the crisis of capitalism.Thought-provoking and divisive, The Immaterial is the perfect book for our time, as we begin to reimagine the structures of our economic system in order to rebuild and move forward.“It is to Gorz . . . that readers should turn for a compelling combination of sharp analysis, well-wrought polemic, and suggestions for the future.”—Red Pepper            “A great figure of the intellectual Left.”—Nicolas Sarkozy            “Gorz’s intelligence strikes you at the very first glance: it is one of the nimblest, acutest intelligences I know.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism


Madhu Dubey - 2003
    Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy.Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression

The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India


Rajeswari Sunder Rajan - 2003
    Well-known for her work combining feminist theory and postcolonial studies, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan shows how the state is central to understanding women’s identities and how, reciprocally, women and “women’s issues” affect the state’s role and function. She argues that in India law and citizenship define for women not only the scope of political rights but also cultural identity and everyday life. Sunder Rajan delineates the postcolonial state in implicit contrast with the “enlightened,” postfeminist neoliberal state in the West. Her analysis wrestles with complex social realities, taking into account the influence of age, ethnicity, religion, and class on individual and group identities as well as the shifting, heterogeneous nature of the state itself.The Scandal of the State develops through a series of compelling case studies, each of which centers around an incident exposing the contradictory position of the Indian state vis-à-vis its female citizens and, ultimately, the inadequacy of its commitment to women’s rights. Sunder Rajan focuses on the custody battle over a Muslim child bride, the compulsory sterilization of mentally retarded women in state institutional care, female infanticide in Tamilnadu, prostitution as labor rather than crime, and the surrender of the female outlaw Phoolan Devi. She also looks at the ways the Uniform Civil Code presented many women with a stark choice between allegiance to their religion and community or the secular assertion of individual rights. Rich with theoretical acumen and activist passion, The Scandal of the State is a powerful critique of the mutual dependence of women and the state on one another in the specific context of a postcolonial modernity.

Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method


Bertell Ollman - 2003
    In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method.   Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker.   In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful.   Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.

The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal


Frank B. Wilderson III - 2003
    

Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition: Essays by Western Muslim Scholars


Joseph E. B. Lumbard - 2003
    This book offers an analysis byWestern Muslim scholars of the key reasons behind the dangerous breaksown in understanding between Islam and the West.

Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan


Heather J. Sharkey - 2003
    Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state. Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources, including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as on colonial documents and photographs, this perceptive study examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, Sharkey gives her book broad comparative appeal. She shows that colonial legacies—such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures—have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.

Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919-1939


Mary R. Habeck - 2003
    Habeck traces the strategies developed between the wars for the use of armored vehicles in battle. Only in Germany and the Soviet Union were truly original armor doctrines (generally known as blitzkreig and deep battle) fully implemented. Storm of Steel relates how the German and Soviet armies formulated and chose to put into practice doctrines that were innovative for the time, yet in many respects identical to one another.As part of her extensive archival research in Russia, Germany, and Britain, Habeck had access to a large number of formerly secret and top-secret documents from several post-Soviet archives. This research informs her comparative approach as she looks at the roles of technology, shared influences, and assumptions about war in the formation of doctrine. She also explores relations between the Germans and the Soviets to determine whether collaboration influenced the convergence of their armor doctrines.

The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition


Catherine Doughty - 2003
     Discusses the biological and cognitive underpinnings of SLA, mechanisms, processes, and constraints on SLA, the level of ultimate attainment, research methods, and the status of SLA as a cognitive science. Includes contributions from twenty-seven of the world's leading scholars. Provides an invaluable resource for all students and scholars of human cognition, including those in linguistics, psychology, applied linguistics, ESL, foreign languages, and cognitive science.

For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression


Adriana Cavarero - 2003
    The one who is speaking is inevitably revealed by the singular sound of her voice, no matter "what" she says. We take this fact for granted—for example, every time someone asks, over the telephone, "Who is speaking?" and receives as a reply the familiar utterance, "It's me." Starting from the given uniqueness of every voice, Cavarero rereads the history of philosophy through its peculiar evasion of this embodied uniqueness. She shows how this history—along with the fields it comprehends, such as linguistics, musicology, political theory, and studies in orality—might be grasped as the "devocalization of Logos," as the invariable privileging of semantike over phone, mind over body. Female figures—from the Sirens to the Muses, from Echo to opera singers—provide a crucial counterhistory, one in which the embodied voice triumphs over the immaterial semantic. Reconstructing this counterhistory, Cavarero proposes a "politics of the voice" wherein the ancient bond between Logos and politics is reconfigured, and wherein what matters is not the communicative content of a given discourse, but rather who is speaking.

Magic Pencil: Children's Book Illustration Today


Quentin Blake - 2003
    Each chapter contains a commentary by the illustrator, introducing their work and explaining how they started to illustrate children's books, and shows several original artworks by each illustrator. Quentin Blake's introduction reflects on the complexities of providing an illustrative response to the characters and activities of a writer.Joanna Carey, formerly Children's Book Editor of The Guardian, contributes an illustrated essay on the history of children's book illustration, from the work of Cruikshank, Ardizonne, and Walter Crane, to the instantly recognisable pictures from Winnie the Pooh and the tales of Beatrix Potter. The illustrators featured are: Angela Barrett, Quentin Blake, Lauren Child, Patrick Benson, Raymond Briggs, Sara Fanelli, Stephen Biesty, John Burningham, Michael Foreman, Tony Ross, Posy Simmonds, Emma Chichester Clark, and Charlotte Voake.

The Political Theology of Paul


Jacob Taubes - 2003
    In his distinctive argument for the apocalyptic-revolutionary potential of Romans, Taubes also takes issue with the “political theology” advanced by the conservative Catholic jurist Carl Schmitt. Taubes’s reading has been crucial for a number of interpretations of political theology and of Paul—including those of Jan Assmann and Giorgio Agamben—and it belongs to a wave of fresh considerations of Paul’s legacy (Boyarin, Lyotard, Badiou, Zîzêk). Finally, Taubes’s far-ranging lectures provide important insights into the singular experiences and views of this unconventional Jewish intellectual living in post-Holocaust Germany.

The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture


Setha M. Low - 2003
     Assembles key anthropological articles that challenge accepted definitions and ideas of space and place Reveals how both the conceptual and material dimensions of space as well as of built forms and landscape characteristics are central to the production of social life Includes introduction that synthesizes existing literature, highlights core issues, and maps potential directions for future research Brings classics in cultural anthropology together with new theoretical approaches

Sociology of Gender: The Challenge of Feminist Sociological Thought


Sharmila Rege - 2003
    It covers a broad range of issues relating to the lifespan of women in different social institutions such as the family, school and the workplace. This book is one of the Indian Sociological Society: Golden Jubilee Volumes.

Common-Law Liberty: Rethinking American Constitutionalism


James R. Stoner Jr. - 2003
    . . powerful and convincing by the American Historical Review and a stunning achievement by the Journal of Politics. In that work, which provided historical background to the Founding era, he focused on the common law almost exclusively as a mode of legal thought. He now amplifies and extends his thinking on this subject with a study that transcends such formalistic limits and reveals how constitutional law has developed since the Founding.Common-Law Liberty is a rediscovery and reassertion of the common law's central contributions to and enduring impact on American constitutional law. Stoner illuminates the common law's ties to an entire way of life, inextricably linked to the Founding and American constitutionalism, influenced by Christianity, closely connected to the development of free enterprise, and open to the influences of modern science and democracy.Stoner delineates two common laws: one understood by the Founders and rooted in British traditions of jurisprudence and one that, thanks to jurists like Holmes and Cardozo, corrupted the first by redefining common law as mere judge-made law or judicial process, dangerously disconnected from the values and norms of the communities it serves. The latter, for Stoner, has been a disastrous development, shrouding the common law's original meaning and vitality, replacing its spirited liberty with personal license, giving far too much discretion to judges who wish to depart from tradition and precedent, and, thus, undermining our constitutional system of checks-and-balances.In an era as morally confused as ours, Stoner argues, we at least ought to know what we've abandoned or suppressed in the name of judicial activism and the modern rights-oriented Constitution. Having lost our way, perhaps the common law, in its original sense, provides a way back, a viable alternative to the debilitating relativism of our current age.Drawing upon themes from his first book, as well as numerous articles, papers, and lectures produced during the past decade, Stoner crystallizes and reintegrates this body of work. By applying and contrasting both understandings of the common law to specific cases--including free speech, abortion, and religious liberty--he hopes to reclaim essential principles long buried but, in his view, desperately needed to preserve the integrity of our nation's polity and its hold on our moral imagination.

The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance [With CDROM]


Guerino Mazzola - 2003
    It reflects the dramatic progress of mathematical music theory and its operationalization by information technology since the publication of Geometrie der T ne in 1990. The conceptual basis has been vastly generalized to topos-theoretic foundations, including a corresponding thoroughly geometric musical logic. The theoretical models and results now include topologies for rhythm, melody, and harmony, as well as a classification theory of musical objects that comprises the topos-theoretic concept framework. Classification also implies techniques of algebraic moduli theory. The classical models of modulation and counterpoint have been extended to exotic scales and counterpoint interval dichotomies. The probably most exciting new field of research deals with musical performance and its implementation on advanced object-oriented software environments. This subject not only uses extensively the existing mathematical music theory, it also opens the language to differential equations and tools of differential geometry, such as Lie derivatives. Mathematical performance theory is the key to inverse performance theory, an advanced new research field which deals with the calculation of varieties of parameters which give rise to a determined performance. This field uses techniques of algebraic geometry and statistics, approaches which have already produced significant results in the understanding of highest-ranked human performances. The book's formal language and models are currently being used by leading researchers in Europe and Northern America and have become a foundation of music software design. This is also testified by the book's nineteen collaborators and the included CD-ROM containing software and music examples.

The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan


Mel Scult - 2003
    Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, is the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America. Kaplan was indeed a heretic, rejecting such fundamental Jewish beliefs as the concept of the chosen people and a supernatural God. Although he valued the Jewish community and was a committed Zionist, his primary concern was the spiritual fulfillment of the individual. Drawing on Kaplan's 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes the development of Kaplan's radical theology in dialogue with the thinkers and writers who mattered to him most, from Spinoza to Emerson and from Ahad Ha-Am and Matthew Arnold to Felix Adler, John Dewey, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. This gracefully argued book, with its sensitive insights into the beliefs of a revolutionary Jewish thinker, makes a powerful contribution to modern Judaism and to contemporary American religious thought.

Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction


Wail S. Hassan - 2003
    Undertaking a sustained interpretation of Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih's novels and short stories, this study focuses primarily on the ways in which his work depicts the clashing of Arab ideologies - that is, questions of tradition, modernity, imperialism, gender and political authority.

Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy


Peter E. Gordon - 2003
    The architect of a unique kind of existential theology, and an important influence upon such philosophers as Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Leo Strauss, and Emmanuel Levinas, Rosenzweig is remembered chiefly as a "Jewish thinker," often to the neglect of his broader philosophical concerns. Cutting across the artificial divide that the traumatic memory of National Socialism has drawn between German and Jewish philosophy, this book seeks to restore Rosenzweig's thought to the German philosophical horizon in which it first took shape. It is the first English-language study to explore Rosenzweig's enduring debt to Hegel's political theory, neo-Kantianism, and life-philosophy; the book also provides a new, systematic reading of Rosenzweig's major work, The Star of Redemption.Most of all, the book sets out to explore a surprising but deep affinity between Rosenzweig’s thought and that of his contemporary, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Resisting both apologetics and condemnation, Gordon suggests that Heidegger’s engagement with Nazism should not obscure the profound and intellectually compelling bond in the once-shared tradition of modern German and Jewish thought. A remarkably lucid discussion of two notably difficult thinkers, this book represents an eloquent attempt to bridge the forced distinction between modern Jewish thought and the history of modern German philosophy—and to show that such a distinction cannot be sustained without doing violence to both.

The George Gershwin Reader


Robert Wyatt - 2003
    Here, music lovers are treated to a spectacular celebration of this great American composer. The Reader offers a kaleidoscopic collection of writings by Gershwin, as well as those about Gershwin, written by a who's who of famous commentators. More than eighty pieces of superb variety, color, and depth include the critical debate over Gershwin's concert pieces, especially Rhapsody inBlue and An American in Paris. There is a complete section devoted to the controversies over Porgy and Bess, including correspondence between Gershwin and DuBose Hayward, the opera's librettist, plus unique interviews with the original Porgy and Bess--Todd Duncan and Anne Brown. Sprinkledthroughout the book are excerpts from Gershwin's own letters, which offer unique insight into this fascinating and charming man. Along with a detailed chronology of the composer's life, the editors provide informative introductions to each entry. Here is a book for anyone interested in American music. Scholars, performers, and Gershwin's legions of fans will find it an irresistible feast.

The Limits of History


Constantin Fasolt - 2003
    It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis—gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning—Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends.With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.

Distracted


Jalal Toufic - 2003
    Philosophy. Why do a second edition of DISTRACTED? According to the author, "Because it is now starkly clear to me that there is a limited number of concepts, figures and postures that a writer is here to create and possibly elaborate (in my case: freezing, diegetic silence-over, over-turn, radical closure with irruption of unworldly ahistorical fully-formed entities, the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, etc.). The extra material that was in my first book still awaits its writers--paradoxically getting rid of it is indirectly a way of avoiding future imitators." Jalal Toufic is a writer, film theorist, and video artist who is currently Head of the MA program in Film/Video Studies at the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Holy Spirit University, Lebanon.

Unknown Quantity


Paul Virilio - 2003
    His latest catalogue, published to accompany an exhibition he has conceived for the Foundation Cartier in Paris, examines the philosophical issues raised by our confrontation with accidents and their impact on our world. Accidents capture our attention, surprise or shock us, disrupt or ultimately alter the course of our existence. Whether significant or insignificant, benign or disastrous, accidents always reveal something about ourselves and the systems we construct. For Virilio, to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck, to invent electricity is to invent electrocution. Accidents are consequently, in his view, inherent in all technological systems. This catalogue features over 200 illustrations, including press photographs, paintings and engravings representing natural and industrial accidents from the past three centuries. It also contains reproductions of the works of the many artists included in the exhibit, most notably Lebbeus Woods, Noncy Robins, Stephen Vitiello, Cai Guo Qiang, Bruce Conner, Ton

Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity


Aída Hurtado - 2003
    Though "Chicana feminisms" have only recently been enumerated, a feminist perspective has long existed in Chicano communities without ever having been explicitly named. Grounded in specific aspects of Chicano culture such as the contested role of La Malinche and the complexities of Marianismo, the distinguishing feature of Chicana feminisms has been their embrace of diversity. Chicanas readily acribe to many feminisms and do not expect there to be only one.Focusing on young women between the ages of 20 and 30, Chicanas Speak Feminisms explores the relationship between Chicana feminism and the lived experiences of Chicanas. What do they see as their day-to-day manifestation of feminist consciousness? What is the relationship between what Chicana feminists propose and their lived experiences as women and as members of other significant social groups? Including rich ethnographic testimony based on questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and shadowing, Hurtado allows the women to speak in their own terms about how they see their femininity, sexuality, gender identity, ethnic/racial identity, and ties to other feminisms and political struggles.

Elliptic Curves: Number Theory and Cryptography


Lawrence C. Washington - 2003
    With additional exercises, this edition offers more comprehensive coverage of the fundamental theory, techniques, and applications of elliptic curves. New to the Second EditionChapters on isogenies and hyperelliptic curves A discussion of alternative coordinate systems, such as projective, Jacobian, and Edwards coordinates, along with related computational issues A more complete treatment of the Weil and Tate-Lichtenbaum pairings Doud's analytic method for computing torsion on elliptic curves over Q An explanation of how to perform calculations with elliptic curves in several popular computer algebra systems Taking a basic approach to elliptic curves, this accessible book prepares readers to tackle more advanced problems in the field. It introduces elliptic curves over finite fields early in the text, before moving on to interesting applications, such as cryptography, factoring, and primality testing. The book also discusses the use of elliptic curves in Fermat's Last Theorem. Relevant abstract algebra material on group theory and fields can be found in the appendices.

Theories of Communication Networks


Peter R. Monge - 2003
    First, it tends to be atheoretical, ignoring the various social theories that contain network implications. Second, it explores single levels of analysis rather than the multiple levels out of which most networks are comprised. Third, network analysis has employed very little the insights from contemporary complex systems analysis and computer simulations. Foruth, it typically uses descriptive rather than inferential statistics, thus robbing it of the ability to make claims about the larger universe of networks. Finally, almost all the research is static and cross-sectional rather than dynamic. Theories of Communication Networks presents solutions to all five problems. The authors develop a multitheoretical model that relates different social science theories with different network properties. This model is multilevel, providing a network decomposition that applies the various social theories to all network levels: individuals, dyads, triples, groups, and the entire network. The book then establishes a model from the perspective of complex adaptive systems and demonstrates how to use Blanche, an agent-based network computer simulation environment, to generate and test network theories and hypotheses. It presents recent developments in network statistical analysis, the p* family, which provides a basis for valid multilevel statistical inferences regarding networks. Finally, it shows how to relate communication networks to other networks, thus providing the basis in conjunction with computer simulations to study the emergence of dynamic organizational networks.

Sketches of an Elephant


Peter T. Johnstone - 2003
    Now available in this two volume set, it contains all the important informationboth volumes provides. Considered to be a complete benefit for all researchers and academics in theoretical computer science, logicians and philosophers who study the foundations of mathematics, and those working in differential geometry and continuum physics.

Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers


Louis Roy - 2003
    Presupposing a living interaction between meditation and thinking, the work draws on Western and Japanese thinkers to develop a philosophy of religion that is friendly to the experience of meditators and that can explore such themes as emptiness, nothingness, and the self. Western thinkers considered include Plotinus, Eckhart, Schleiermacher, Heidegger, Brentano, Husserl, Sartre, and Lonergan; and Japanese thinkers referenced include Nishitani, Hisamatsu, and Suzuki. All employed centering prayer, Zen, or other forms of mental concentration. Particular emphasis is placed on the work of twentieth-century Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan, whose writings on consciousness can inform an understanding of mysticism.

The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy


Lisa Duggan - 2003
    But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics. The Twilight of Equality? searches out these links through an analysis of the politics of the 1990s, the decade when neoliberalism-free market economics-became gospel. After a brilliant historical examination of how racial and gender inequities were woven into the very theoretical underpinnings of the neoliberal model of the state, Duggan shows how these inequities play out today. In a series of political case studies, Duggan reveals how neoliberal goals have been pursued, demonstrating that progressive arguments that separate identity politics and economic policy, cultural politics and affairs of state, can only fail. Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have functioned but, more importantly, it shows a way to revitalize and unify progressive politics in the U.S. today.

The Continental Ethics Reader


M. Calarco - 2003
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy


David Sherman - 2003
    The newly-commissioned essays that comprise this book reflect the enormous diversity of authors, concerns, and styles encompassed by the continental tradition. Although the chapters stand on their own as comprehensive overviews of each subject, they also reveal how the thinkers presented in this volume are interconnected. They detail the ways in which these philosophers influenced one another and even explore some nasty rivalries. Among the figures and topics addressed are Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl and phenomenology, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, critical theory, Habermas, Gadamer, Foucault, Derrida, postmodernism, and French feminism. This book is a valuable resource for anyone with an interest in continental philosophy.

The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History


Kathleen Biddick - 2003
    Ranging widely across the history of text, technology, and book art, she relates three interwoven stories: the Christians' translation of circumcision into a graphic problem of writing on the heart; the temporal construction of Christian notions of history based on the binary supersession of an Old Testament past by the present of a new dispensation; and the traumatic repetition of the graphic cutting off of Christians from Jews in academic history and anthropology.Moving beyond well-studied theological polemics, Biddick works from the relatively unfamiliar vantage point of the graphic technologies used in medieval and early modern texts and print sources, from maps to trial transcripts to universal histories. Addressing current concerns about the posthuman condition by linking them to a deeper genealogy of disembodiment at the technological heart of imaginary fantasies, she argues that such supersessionary practices extend to contemporary psychoanalytic and postcolonial texts, even as they propose alternative ways of thinking about memory and temporality. Crucial to Biddick's study is the ethical challenge of unbinding the typological imaginary, not in order to disavow theological difference but rather to open up the encounter between Christian and Jew to less deadening teleological readings.Making a significant contribution to the large debate over the transition from scriptural to scientific culture in Europe, The Typological Imaginary also succeeds in shedding light on the centrality of Jews to medieval and Enlightenment history.

Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities


Sander L. Gilman - 2003
    In this series of interlinked essays, noted critic Sander L. Gilman suggests that we examine Jewish history from a different starting point. Instead of focusing on "diaspora", Gilman reimagines Jewish history as the story of people living on a "frontier" -- a place where all peoples, including Jews, interacted to define themselves and those they encounter in reality or fantasy. Gilman looks at the representation of Jews and Jewishness in film, literature, and history. He addresses a wide range os questions, including: how has the Holocaust been represented in comic films, from Jakob the Liar to Life Is Beautiful? What do fantasies about the Jewish origin of smoking in Europe, debates about Jewish genetic disease, and literary representations from Proust and Kafka to Zadie Smith tell us about the imagination of Jewish identity?

Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking for Children (Thinker's Guide Library)


Linda Elder - 2003
    This mini-guide is designed for grade levels K–6. It explains basic critical thinking principles to children using cartoon characters. It focuses on the concepts of fairmindedness and selfishness, the elements of reasoning, intellectual standards, and intellectual virtues.