Best of
Theory
2007
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Ruth Wilson Gilmore - 2007
prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.
Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
bell hooks - 2007
The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.
The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution / The Mass Strike
Rosa Luxemburg - 2007
This new, authoritative introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s two most important works presents the full text of Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike, with explanatory notes, appendices, and introductions.One of the most important Marxist thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg is finding renewed interest among a new generation of activists and critics of global capitalism.
Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
Jasbir K. Puar - 2007
Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
Heather Love - 2007
It makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward.
The Archive
Walter Benjamin - 2007
It comprises myriad smaller archives, in which Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artefacts, assortments of images, texts and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized and analyzed by their author. In them, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy.This unique book, produced in association with the Benjamin Archive, delves into these archives. They include carefully laid-out manuscripts; photographs of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys; picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics; meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalogs; notebooks, in which every single square centimeter is covered; a collation of his son's first words and sentences; riddles and enigmatic Sibyls. Everything here is subtly interlinked with everything else.Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads right into the core of his work, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire
David Graeber - 2007
Not only does he accomplish this profound feat, he redoubles it by the critical task—now more urgent than ever—of making the possibilities of other people’s worlds the basis for understanding our own.” —Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago“Graeber’s ideas are rich and wide-ranging; he pushes us to expand the boundaries of what we admit to be possible, or even thinkable.”—Steven Shaviro, Wayne State UniversityIn this new collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Written in an unpretentious style that uses accessible and entertaining language to convey complex theoretical ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground, including the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions in rural Madagascar, and the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests. But they’re linked by a clear purpose: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken, or might take in the future.Anarchism is currently undergoing a worldwide revival, in many ways replacing Marxism as the theoretical and moral center of new revolutionary social movements. It has, however, left little mark on the academy. While anarchists and other visionaries have turned to anthropology for ideas and inspiration, anthropologists are reluctant to enter into serious dialogue. David Graeber is not. These essays, spanning almost twenty years, show how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy.David Graeber has written for Harper’s Magazine, New Left Review, and numerous scholarly journals. He is the author or editor of four books and currently lives in New York City.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.
Ordinary Affects
Kathleen Stewart - 2007
Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.
The Essential Writings of Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli - 2007
Refreshingly accessible, these superb new translations are faithful to Machiavelli’s original, beautifully crafted writings.The volume features essays that appear in English for the first time, such as “A Caution to the Medici” and “The Persecution of Africa.” Also included are complete versions of the political treatise, The Prince, the comic satire The Mandrake, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, and the classic story “Belfagor”, along with selections from The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. Augmented with useful features–vital and concise annotations and cross-references–this unique compendium is certain to become the standard one-volume reference to this influential, versatile, and ever timely writer.“Machiavelli's stress on political necessity rather than moral perfection helped inspire the Renaissance by renewing links with Thucydides and other classical thinkers. This new collection provides deeper insight into Machiavelli’s personality as a writer, thus broadening our understanding of him.”–Robert D. Kaplan, author of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos “Constantine’s selection is not only intelligent; his translations are astonishingly good. Thoughtfully introduced by Albert Russell Ascoli, this edition belongs in everyone’s library.”–John Jeffries Martin, professor and chair, department of history, Trinity University“If one were to assign a single edition of Machiavelli's works, this most certainly would be it.”–John P. McCormick, professor, department of political science, University of Chicago
The Past Didn't Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Antisemitism Part of All of Our Movements
April Rosenblum - 2007
The Declarations of Havana
Fidel Castro - 2007
As Latin America experiences more revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia, and continues to upset America’s plans for neo-liberal imperialism, renowned radical writer and activist Tariq Ali provides a searing analysis of the relevance of Castro’s message for today.
Music in the Galant Style
Robert Gjerdingen - 2007
Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to specialists, formative of the galant style.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives
François Dosse - 2007
Félix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including "Anti-Oedipus," "What Is Philosophy?" and "A Thousand Plateaus."Fran?ois Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history--particularly the turbulent time of May 1968--play in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles.
Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit
Jo-Ann Archibald - 2007
Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making.
The Human Argument: The Writings of Agnes Denes
Agnes Denes - 2007
Her work involves ecological, cultural, and social issues, and are often monumental in scale. She is perhaps best known for Wheatfield - A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre wheat field she planted and harvested in downtown Manhattan, a work that addresses human values and misplaced priorities.
Flaming Arrows
Rod Coronado - 2007
Most of the chapters were taken from the zine Strong Hearts, which Rod wrote while in prison from 1997-1999.For over 20 years, Rod Coronado has been at the forefront of the radical ecological and animal rights movements. A loving father and compassionate warrior, he has inspired countless numbers of young radicals and scared the crap out of dozens of corporations. As a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation, Rod has made clear the links between the current destruction of the planet and the ongoing genocide perpetrated against native peoples. All proceeds from this sale of this collection go to Rod's legal defense."As Earth warriors, we choose to be participants in the ancient battle between good and evil. On our side stand the waters and wind, and all things wild and of the Earth. On the other side, consumed with greed and in persuit of power, control and money, stand all the dark forces that lay waste to Her." - Rod Coronado"[Rod Coronado is] a danger to the community... I know he wasn't tried here for being a violent anarchist. This trial isn't about Rod Coronado being a violent terrorist, but he is one." - Assistant U.S. Attorney Wallace Kleindienst
Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory
Andrea Lauterwein - 2007
This work traces Anselm Kiefer's use of themes from 20th century German history, and shows how the poet Paul Celan's writings have haunted his work for over 25 years - an alliance that was recently cemented by Kiefer when he dedicated a series of works to the poet.
The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense
Kara Keeling - 2007
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the cinematic”—not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself —Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa, images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier’s roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off, and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou.
Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
Giovanni Arrighi - 2007
In this magisterial new work, Giovanni Arrighi shows how China’s extraordinary rise invites us to read The Wealth of Nations in a radically different way than is usually done. He examines how the recent US attempt to bring into existence the first truly global empire in world history was conceived in order to counter China’s spectacular economic success of the 1990s, and how the US’s disastrous failure in Iraq has made the People’s Republic of China the true winner of the US War on Terror. In the 21st century, China may well become again the kind of noncapitalist market economy that Smith described, under totally different domestic and world-historical conditions.
Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation
Steve Dixon - 2007
Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art.Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others.To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance--including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new--and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.
Statistical Physics of Fields
Mehran Kardar - 2007
These properties may emerge from the collective behaviour of simple fundamental constituents, and are studied using statistical field theories. Initial chapters connect the particulate perspective developed in the companion volume, to the coarse grained statistical fields studied here. Based on lectures taught by Professor Kardar at MIT, this textbook demonstrates how such theories are formulated and studied. Perturbation theory, exact solutions, renormalization groups, and other tools are employed to demonstrate the emergence of scale invariance and universality, and the non-equilibrium dynamics of interfaces and directed paths in random media are discussed. Ideal for advanced graduate courses in statistical physics, it contains an integrated set of problems, with solutions to selected problems at the end of the book and a complete set available to lecturers at www.cambridge.org/9780521873413.
Scripting Magic
Pete McCabe - 2007
Magicians around the world, hungry for ways to improve their magic, were thrilled to have a volume dedicated to the vital question: what you say when you perform? Written by Pete McCabe and including contributions from 26 of magic’s best thinkers and most experienced performers, Scripting Magic zipped through three printings and has been unavailable for years.Vanishing Inc. Magic is proud to publish the definitive edition of Scripting Magic. This new version, expanded with illustrations, contains fantastic magic from luminaries like John Lovick, Jon Armstrong, Max Maven, and David Regal, and covers the process for creating memorable presentations. You'll learn how to write, edit, and perform compelling magic in this one-of-a-kind exploration into the presentation of magic.
Black Geographies and the Politics of Place
Katherine McKittrick - 2007
From the Middle Passage to the “Whites Only” signposts of US apartheid, the black Diasporic experience is rooted firmly in the politics of place.Literature has long explored the cultural differences in the experience of blackness in different quarters of the Diaspora. But what are the real differences between being a maroon in the hills of Jamaica and a runaway in the swamps of Florida? How does location impact repression and resistance, both on the ground and in the terrain of political imagination?Enter Black Geographies. In this path-breaking collection, fourteen authors interrogate the intersection between space and race. For instance, confronted with the importance of space in black cultural creation and preservation, some activists have sought to protect or restore black historical sites such as Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” and the African Burial Ground in New York City. For the dispossessed, all markers of history and belonging, including cultural property, become paramount. Yet each of these sites has in common acts of racial hatred and state terrorism that have left few of the historical structures standing—making them unlikely candidates for preservation. This begs the question: Is it even possible that advocating for preserving historic locations can act as a vehicle for social justice and spur community redevelopment?Other contributors consider how Bob Marley’s music maps a path to freedom, whether Malcolm Little could have emerged as Malcolm X outside of a black urban center, and if “lost” communities can be recovered.Katherine McKittrick authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and Cartographies of Struggle.Clyde Woods authored Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta.
Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction
Sherryl Vint - 2007
In Bodies of Tomorrow, Sherryl Vint argues for a new model of an ethical and embodied posthuman subject through close readings of the works of Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, and other science fiction authors. Vint's discussion is firmly contextualized by discussions of contemporary technoscience, specifically genetics and information technology, and the implications of this technology for the way we consider human subjectivity.Engaging with theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Anne Balsamo, N. Katherine Hayles, and Douglas Kellner, Bodies of Tomorrow argues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world. If we are to understand the post-human subject, then we must acknowledge our embodied connection to the world around us and the value of our multiple subjective responses to it. Vint's study thus encourages a move from the common liberal humanist approach to posthuman theory toward what she calls 'embodied posthumanism.' This timely work of science fiction criticism will prove fascinating to cultural theorists, philosophers, and literary scholars alike, as well as anyone concerned with the ethics of posthumanism.
Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System
María Lugones - 2007
Colonialism did not impose precolonial, european gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. But we cannot understand this gender system without understanding what anibal Quijano calls “the coloni- ality of power” (2000a, 2000b, 2001–2002). The reason to historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis. To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism—with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power—is to understand our present organization of life anew." — Maria Lugones
The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire
Greg Thomas - 2007
Greg Thomas interrogates a system that represents race, gender, sexuality, and class in certain systematic and oppressive ways. By connecting sex and eroticism to geopolitics both politically and epistemologically, he examines the logic, operations, and politics of sexuality in the West. The book focuses on the centrality of race, class, and empire to Western realities of "gender and sexuality" and to problematic Western attempts to theorize gender and sexuality (or embodiment). Addressing a wide range of intellectual disciplines, it holds out the hope for an analysis freed from the domination of white, Western terms of reference.
Racism: A Beginner's Guide
Alana Lentin - 2007
Alana Lentin traces its development through political history right up to modern debates about ethnicity and xenophobia, and considers the implications of a ‘raceless’ and truly multicultural society. Thought-provoking and intelligent, this invaluable resource exposes the earliest roots of racist thought, and reveals how it has tenaciously remained a part of our everyday lives.
How to Read Foucault
Johanna Oksala - 2007
He irreversibly shaped the way we think today about such controversial issues as power, sexuality, madness, and criminality.Johanna Oksala explores the conceptual tools that Foucault gave us for constructing new forms of thinking as well as for smashing old certainties. She offers a lucid account of him as a thinker whose persistent aim was to challenge the self-evidence and necessity of our current experiences, practices, and institutions by showing their historical development and, therefore, contingency.Extracts are taken from the whole range of Foucault’s writings—his books, essays, lectures, and interviews—including the major works History of Madness, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality.
Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture
Sanford Kwinter - 2007
In this work, Kwinter ponders the complex encounters between technology, culture, and architecture, offering an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, the mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity.
Julie Mehretu: Black City
Julie Mehretu - 2007
Now the New York Times writes that her canvases--multilayered, futuristic visual worlds where historical and fictional landscapes meet--"make history painting important again." Each one pulls from diverse sources, noteworthy among them Japanese manga, Chinese landscape art, Ethiopian illuminated books, Baroque engraving in the style of D�rer, graffiti and the geometric abstractions of Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky. And they are often structured on architectural drawing, which appeals to Mehretu "because there is no way that you could make architecture that doesn't work." Plans for buildings are metaphors "for systems, for rational efforts to construct the world that we exist within, even though so many things happen in a very organic or irrational way." These angular architectural spaces swarm with organic forms, with communities marching to war, confronting systems and creating elaborate new civilizations. Human relationships unfold, interacting with the built and controlled world. Of her interest in these warring factions and in the "aggressive and forceful nature of history," Mehretu says that, "most of my personal ancestry comes from different cultures that, at one time or another, were at war." This is the first comprehensive monograph on a strong new talent in contemporary painting.
Big Medicine from Six Nations
Ted Williams - 2007
Williams intertwines the lore and lifeways of his Tuscarora upbringing, illustrating the dynamic encounter of tradition and innovation at the heart of contemporary Haudenosaunee culture. At the same time, Williams writes with an irreverence, irony, and good humor unmistakably his own.Colored by Ted's wry and irreverent wit, Big Medicine from Six Nations amply fulfills the promise of its title. It offers a fascinating view, not only of herbal medicine, but of prayers, omens, feasts, vision quests, sweat lodges, spirits, humor, and the sacred teachings of the Great Law of the Great Peace. But readers will find that there is more to this book, about the "spiritual mechanics" of humankind writ large.
Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion
Philippe-Alain Michaud - 2007
His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg's project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture.Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg's method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using procedures of "montage-collision" he brought together pagan artifacts with masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, the astrology of the ancient Near East with the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals with the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism.Michaud provides us with a book that not only is about Warburg but also extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Lo�e Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English.
The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo
Jacqueline A. Bussie - 2007
Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, Oecolampadius, Reinhold Niebuhr) maintains that laughter is nihilistic and irresponsible, especially if occurring within tragic circumstance. However, she argues that the dominant social location of these theologians and theorists has led to a gap in inquiry, to a failure to consider laughter "from below." For Judeo-Christian theology, The Laughter of the Oppressed explores uncharted terrain. This book broadens the theological lens to examine the multicultural, modern historical fiction of Elie Wiesel, Toni Morrison, and Shusaku Endo as case studies. In these authors' well-respected texts, Gates of the Forest, Beloved, and Silence, we discover the laughter of the Jews during the Holocaust, the laughter of African Americans both slave and free, and the laughter of the persecuted religious minority of Japanese Christians. These texts, in dialogue with voices from within and beyond their traditions, help us construct a theology of laughter. Bussie's book concludes that laughter functions as invaluable ethical and theological mode of resistance in the face of radically negating oppression that has ruptured both language and traditional belief. The Laughter of the Oppressed not only interrupts the banality of evil and the dualism of faith and doubt, but also deconstructs the dominant consciousness. Such laughter challenges theology to rearticulate the relationships between God and evil, theology and theodicy, theology and language, paradox and faith, tragedy and hope, and oppression and resistance.
Image and Imagination: Georgia O'keeffe by John Loengard
Georgia O'Keeffe - 2007
Loengard's elegant black and white images capture the grand, solitary woman in the desert, and candid shots record her daily routine at Ghost Ranch. Juxtaposed here with selected O'Keeffe paintings, these photographs reveal how the austere poetry of the landscape corresponded to the artist's own painterly world. This unique marriage of paintings and photographs, presented in a stunningcollectible volume, also includes a touching introduction by Loengard describing his first encounter with O'Keeffe and contemplative writings by the artist herself on her work and inspirations.
Fidel's Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro
Dayan Jayatilleka - 2007
This book explores the evolution of Castro's political thinking-and in particular how he philosophically reconciles violence,political power and morality. The author argues that Castro's doctrine of armed struggle is the logical development of his idea of the ethical liberation fighter. At its core is the unremitting emphasis on the ethical use of violence and the occupation of the moral high ground.
The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa
George Steinmetz - 2007
During this period, dramatically different policies were enacted in the colonies: in Southwest Africa, German troops carried out a brutal slaughter of the Herero people; in Samoa, authorities pursued a paternalistic defense of native culture; in Qingdao, China, policy veered between harsh racism and cultural exchange.Why did the same colonizing power act in such differing ways? In The Devil’s Handwriting, George Steinmetz tackles this question through a brilliant cross-cultural analysis of German colonialism, leading to a new conceptualization of the colonial state and postcolonial theory. Steinmetz uncovers the roots of colonial behavior in precolonial European ethnographies, where the Hereros were portrayed as cruel and inhuman, the Samoans were idealized as “noble savages,” and depictions of Chinese culture were mixed. The effects of status competition among colonial officials, colonizers’ identification with their subjects, and the different strategies of cooperation and resistance offered by the colonized are also scrutinized in this deeply nuanced and ambitious comparative history.
Material Feminisms
Stacy AlaimoCatriona Mortimer-Sandilands - 2007
In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.
Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics
Frederik Stjernfelt - 2007
Based on the general doctrine of diagrams in Charles Peirce's mature work, Diagrammatology claims diagrams to constitute a centerpiece of epistemology. The book reflects Peirce's work on the issue in Husserl's contemporanous doctrine of "categorial intuition" and charts the many unnoticed similarities between Peircean semiotics and early Husserlian phenomenology. Diagrams, on a Peircean account, allow for observation and experimentation with ideal structures and objects and thus furnish the access to the synthetic a priori of the regional and formal ontology of the Husserlian tradition.The second part of the book focuses on three regional branches of semiotics: biosemiotics, picture analysis, and the theory of literature. Based on diagrammatology, these domains appear as accessible for a diagrammatological approach which leaves the traditional relativism and culturalism of semiotics behind and hence constitutes a realist semiotics.
From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan's Keynes
Richard J. Smethurst - 2007
Takahashi is considered Japan's Keynes in many circles because of the forward-thinking (and controversial) fiscal and monetary policies--including deficit financing, currency devaluation, and lower interest rates--that he implemented to help Japan rebound from the Great Depression and move toward a modern economy.Richard J. Smethurst's engaging biography underscores the profound influence of the seven-time finance minister on the political and economic development of Japan by casting new light on Takahashi's unusual background, unique talents, and singular experiences as a charismatic and cosmopolitan financial statesman.Along with the many fascinating personal episodes--such as working as a houseboy in California and running a silver mine in the Andes--that molded Takahashi and his thinking, the book also highlights four major aspects of Takahashi's life: his unorthodox self-education, his two decades of service at the highest levels of government, his pathbreaking economic and political policies before and during the Depression, and his efforts to stem the rising tide of militarism in the 1930s. Deftly weaving together archival sources, personal correspondence, and historical analysis, Smethurst's study paints an intimate portrait of a key figure in the history of modern Japan.
Memory Systems: Cache, Dram, Disk
Bruce Jacob - 2007
You learn how to to tackle the challenging optimization problems that result from the side-effects that can appear at any point in the entire hierarchy.As a result you will be able to design and emulate the entire memory hierarchy.
Fait Accompli
Nick Piombino - 2007
Nick Piombino's FAIT ACCOMPLI, a journal within a journal, is a selection from the first three months, mid-February through mid-May, 2003, of Piombino's continuing weblog (nickpiombino.blogspot.com). "I thought about my handwritten journals filled with unpublished writings and visualized blogging these as synchronic meditations. Then the title came to me, FAIT ACCOMPLI."--Nick Piombino.
Handbook of Research on New Literacies
Julie Coiro - 2007
It provides leadership for this newly emerging field, directing scholars to the major issues, theoretical perspectives, and interdisciplinary research pertaining to new literacies. Reviews of research are organized into six sections:MethodologiesKnowledge and InquiryCommunicationPopular Culture, Community, and Citizenship: Everyday LiteraciesInstructional Practices and AssessmentMultiple Perspectives on New Literacies Research FEATURESBrings together a diverse international team of editors and chapter authorsProvides an extensive collection of research reviews in a critical area of educational researchMakes visible the multiple perspectives and theoretical frames that currently drive work in new literaciesEstablishes important space for the emerging field of new literacies researchIncludes a unique Commentary section: The final section of the Handbook reprints five central research studies. Each is reviewed by two prominent researchers from their individual, and different, theoretical position. This provides the field with a sense of how diverse lenses can be brought to bear on research as well as the benefits that accrue from doing so. It also provides models of critical review for new scholars and demonstrates how one might bring multiple perspectives to the study of an area as complex as new literacies research. The Handbook of Research on New Literacies is intended for the literacy research community, broadly conceived, including scholars and students from the traditional reading and writing research communities in education and educational psychology as well as those from information science, cognitive science, psychology, sociolinguistics, computer mediated communication, and other related areas that find literacy to be an important area of investigation.
The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940
Julian B. Carter - 2007
Gilded Age elites defined white civilization as the triumphant achievement of exceptional people hewing to a relational ethic of strict self-discipline for the common good. During the early twentieth century, that racial and relational ideal was reconceived in more inclusive terms as “normality,” something toward which everyone should strive. The appearance of inclusiveness helped make “normality” appear consistent with the self-image of a racially diverse republic; nonetheless, “normality” was gauged largely in terms of adherence to erotic and emotional conventions that gained cultural significance through their association with arguments for the legitimacy of white political and social dominance. At the same time, the affectionate, reproductive heterosexuality of “normal” married couples became increasingly central to legitimate membership in the nation.Carter builds his intricate argument from detailed readings of an array of popular texts, focusing on how sex education for children and marital advice for adults provided significant venues for the dissemination of the new ideal of normality. He concludes that because its overt concerns were love, marriage, and babies, normality discourse facilitated white evasiveness about racial inequality. The ostensible focus of “normality” on matters of sexuality provided a superficially race-neutral conceptual structure that whites could and did use to evade engagement with the unequal relations of power that continue to shape American life today.
The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan
Todd McGowan - 2007
Historically film scholars have located the gaze on the side of the spectator; however, Todd McGowan positions it within the filmic image, where it has the radical potential to disrupt the spectator's sense of identity and challenge the foundations of ideology. This book demonstrates several distinct cinematic forms that vary in terms of how the gaze functions within the films. Through a detailed investigation of directors such as Orson Welles, Claire Denis, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Federico Fellini, Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and David Lynch, McGowan explores the political, cultural, and existential ramifications of these differing roles of the gaze.
Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature
Cynthia Kuhn - 2007
Numerous authors have made powerful-even radical-use of clothing and its implications, and the essays collected here demonstrate how scholarly attention to literary fashioning can contribute to a deeper understanding of texts, their contexts, and their innovations. These generative and engaging discussions focus on issues such as fashion and anti-fashion; clothing reform; transvestism; sartorial economics; style and the gaze; transgressive modes; and class, gender, or race "passing." This is the first academic volume to address such an extensive range of texts, inviting consideration of how fashionable desires and concerns not only articulate the aesthetics, subjectivities, and controversies of a given culture, but also communicate across temporal and spatial divisions. Styling Texts is an essential resource for anyone interested in the artistic representations and significations of dress.
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II
Cedric J. Robinson - 2007
Robinson offers a new understanding of race in America through his analysis of theater and film of the early twentieth century. He argues that economic, political, and cultural forces present in the eras of silent film and the early "talkies" firmly entrenched limited representations of African Americans. Robinson's analysis marks a new way of approaching the intellectual, political, and media racism present in the beginnings of American narrative cinema.
The Painting of Modern Life: 1960s to Now
Vija Celmins - 2007
Beginning in the early 60s, with seminal works by the aforementioned artists, The Painting of Modern Life charts the 45-year evolution of the translation of photographic images to paint--revealing an extraordinary breadth of stylistic and thematic diversity. This volume features 22 painters whose sources range from snapshots to commercial media, among them Richard Artschwager, Robert Bechtle, Celmins, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Thomas Eggerer, Judith Eisler, Franz Gertsch, Richard Hamilton, Eberhard Havekost, David Hockney, Johannes Kahrs, Johanna Kandl, Martin Kippenberger, Liu Xiaodong, Malcolm Morley, Elizabeth Peyton, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Richter, Wilhelm Sasnal, Luc Tuymans and Warhol. Essays by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, writer and critic Martin Herbert, Hayward Director Ralph Rugoff and poet and critic, Barry Schwabsky lend insight to issues of translation, context and content.
Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature
Clare Bradford - 2007
Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children's Literature demonstrates how settler-society texts position child readers as citizens of postcolonial nations, how they represent the colonial past to modern readers, what they propose about race relations, and how they conceptualize systems of power and government.Clare Bradford focuses on texts produced since 1980 in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand and includes picture books, novels, and films by Indigenous and non-Indigenous publishers and producers. From extensive readings, the author focuses on key works to produce a thorough analysis rather than a survey. Unsettling Narratives opens up an area of scholarship and discussion--the use of postcolonial theories--relatively new to the field of children's literature and demonstrates that many texts recycle the colonial discourses naturalized within mainstream cultures.
Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children's Literature
Rudine Sims Bishop - 2007
Yet there are many works by African Americans from prior eras that aren't well known. In Free Within Ourselves, nationally respected expert Rudine Sims Bishop introduces you to the full beauty and power of African American children's literature, offering insight into its rich tradition. Bishop guides you from important early works for African American children such as W.E.B. DuBois' The Brownies Book, to the 1969 publication of John Steptoe's Stevie - the breakthrough modern African American picture book - to recent young adult fiction such as Christopher Paul Curtis' popular Bud Not Buddy, winner of both the Coretta Scott King Author Award and the Newbery Medal. All along, her energetic chronicle brings to life the crucial figures who have contributed to the rise of African American children's literature and delves deep into the plot, characters, and themes of their most popular and teachable works. The result is an unparalleled treasury of ideas and information for teaching with African American children's literature. Across genres, in poetry, picture books, and contemporary and historical fiction, Black authors and artists have created a body of children's literature that celebrates the strengths of family; bears witness to the struggle for freedom, equality, and dignity; nurtures children; and honors the story as a way of teaching and knowing. Free Within Ourselves gives you all the background you'll need to introduce or expand the role of African American children's literature in your classroom; to use it for teaching reading, literature, and social studies; and to connect all students with the powerful stories of African Americans. This title is also available as a hardcover through http: //www.greenwood.com.
Contract and Domination
Carole Pateman - 2007
Since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, contract theory has once again become central to the Western political tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice almost completely ignored. Carole Pateman and Charles Mills's earlier books, The Sexual Contract (1988) and The Racial Contract (1997), offered devastating critiques of gender and racial domination and the contemporary contract tradition's silence on them. Both books have become classics of revisionist radical democratic political theory. Now Pateman and Mills are collaborating for the first time in an interdisciplinary volume, drawing on their insights from political science and philosophy. They are building on but going beyond their earlier work to bring the sexual and racial contracts together. In Contract and Domination, Pateman and Mills discuss their differences about contract theory and whether it has a useful future, excavate the (white) settler contract that created new civil societies in North America and Australia, argue via a non-ideal contract for reparations to black Americans, confront the evasions of contemporary contract theorists, explore the intersections of gender and race and the global sexual-racial contract, and reply to their critics.This iconoclastic book throws the gauntlet down to mainstream white male contract theory. It is vital reading for anyone with an interest in political theory and political philosophy, and the systems of male and racial domination.
Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies
Boaventura de Sousa Santos - 2007
Another Knowledge is Possible explores the struggles against moral and cultural imperialism and neoliberal globalization that have taken place over the past few decades, and the alternatives that have emerged in countries throughout the developing world from Brazil and Colombia, to India, South Africa and Mozambique. In particular it looks at the issue of biodiversity, the confrontation between scientific and non- scientific knowledges, and the increasing difficulty experienced by great numbers of people in accessing information and scientific- technological knowledge.
Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex
Elizabeth Bernstein - 2007
Yet in both the developing world and in postindustrial cities of the West, sexual commerce has continued to flourish, diversifying along technological, spatial, and social lines. In this deeply engaging and theoretically provocative study, Elizabeth Bernstein examines the social features that undergird the expansion and diversification of commercialized sex, demonstrating the ways that postindustrial economic and cultural formations have spawned rapid and unforeseen changes in the forms, meanings, and spatial organization of sexual labor.Drawing upon dynamic and innovative research with sex workers, their clients, and state actors, Bernstein argues that in cities such as San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amstersdam, the nature of what is purchased in commercial sexual encounters is also new. Rather than the expedient exchange of cash for sexual relations, what sex workers are increasingly paid to offer their clients is an erotic experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection. As such, contemporary sex markets are emblematic of a cultural moment in which the boundaries between intimacy and commerce—and between public life and private—have been radically redrawn. Not simply a compelling exploration of the changing landscape of sex-work, Temporarily Yours ultimately lays bare the intimate intersections of political economy, desire, and culture.
Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship
Charles R. Hale - 2007
Some advocate on behalf of the communities they study; others incorporate the knowledge and leadership of their informants directly into the process of knowledge production. What ethical, political, and practical tensions arise in the course of such work? In this wide-ranging and multidisciplinary volume, leading scholar-activists map the terrain on which political engagement and academic rigor meet.Contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Edmund T. Gordon, Davydd Greenwood, Joy James, Peter Nien-chu Kiang, George Lipsitz, Samuel Martínez, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Dani Nabudere, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Jemima Pierre, Laura Pulido, Shannon Speed, Shirley Suet-ling Tang, João Vargas
Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror
Bruce Holsinger - 2007
Far from just a gaffe, however, such medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America’s perceived enemy in the war on terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror addresses the role of neomedievalism in contemporary politics. While international-relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration’s torture memos, which enlist neomedievalism’s model of feudal sovereignty on behalf of the abrogation of human rights.
Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959
Bruce Altshuler - 2007
It is the most important reference book available on the subject, and the only book available that charts these groundbreaking events in such detail and scope. Volume I opens with the revolutionary first Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863, and concludes with the multi-locational international exhibition 'The New American Painting,' organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958-59. SALON TO BIENNIAL depicts a wealth of rare documentary material and ephemera, including installation photographs, publications, and reviews of the period surrounding each exhibition. It is an exceptional sourcebook for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century art, exhibition design, or curatorial practice.
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy
Joy James - 2007
Although most of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic and white, the vast majority of the incarcerated—and policed—is not. In this compelling collection, scholars, activists, and current and former prisoners examine the sensibilities that enable a penal democracy to thrive. Some pieces are new to this volume; others are classic critiques of U.S. state power. Through biography, diary entries, and criticism, the contributors collectively assert that the United States wages war against enemies abroad and against its own people at home.Contributors consider the interning or policing of citizens of color, the activism of radicals, structural racism, destruction and death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the FBI Counterintelligence Program designed to quash domestic dissent. Among the first-person accounts are an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a Black Panther and former political prisoner; a portrayal of life in prison by a Plowshares nun jailed for her antinuclear and antiwar activism; a discussion of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement by one of its members, now serving a seventy-year prison sentence for sedition; and an excerpt from a 1970 letter by the Black Panther George Jackson chronicling the abuses of inmates in California’s Soledad Prison. Warfare in the American Homeland also includes the first English translation of an excerpt from a pamphlet by Michel Foucault and others. They argue that the 1971 shooting of George Jackson by prison guards was a murder premeditated in response to human-rights and justice organizing by black and brown prisoners and their supporters.Contributors. Hishaam Aidi, Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Richard Moore), Marilyn Buck, Marshall Eddie Conway, Susie Day, Daniel Defert, Madeleine Dwertman, Michel Foucault, Carol Gilbert, Sirène Harb, Rose Heyer, George Jackson, Joy James, Manning Marable, William F. Pinar, Oscar Lòpez Rivera, Dylan Rodríguez, Jared Sexton, Catherine vön Bulow, Laura Whitehorn, Frank B. Wilderson III
When Sex Counts: Making Babies and Making Law
Sherry F. Colb - 2007
The book consists of previously published general audience articles that are both provocative and newsworthy.
Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces
Bertrand Westphal - 2007
Today, a number of emerging critical discourses connect geography, architecture, and environmental studies, among others to literature, film, and the mimetic arts. Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism explores these diverse fields, examines various theories of space and place, and proposes a new critical practice suitable for understanding our spatial condition today. Drawing on a wide array of theoretical and literary resources from around the globe and from antiquity to the present, Westphal argues for a geocritical approach to literary and cultural studies. This volume is an indispensable touchstone for those interested in the interactions between literature and space.
Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines
Martin Nakata - 2007
An alternative reading for those struggling at the contradictory and ambiguous intersections of academia and Indigenous experience, this book moves beyond the usual criticisms of the disciplines providing an alternative for understanding Indigenous peoples.
Peirce's Theory of Signs
T.L. Short - 2007
L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.
Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy
Adam David Morton - 2007
Adam David Morton examines in detail the themes of hegemony, passive revolution, and uneven development to provide a useful way of analyzing the contemporary global political economy, neoliberalism, state formation, and practices of resistance. The book explores the theoretical and practical limitations to the use of Gramsci's ideas today.
"Powerful and clarifying . . . a landmark volume."---John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles
"Morton draws upon an impressive knowledge of Gramsci's writings to provide new insights into key processes in today's world order."---Anne Showstack Sassoon, Kingston University and Birbeck College, University of London.
Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience
Anne-Lise François - 2007
The author argues that these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular that of self-concealment and self-presentation. Declining the twin pressures of self-actualization and self-denial defining modernity's call to make good on one's talents, the subjects of the "literature of uncounted experience" do nothing so heroic as renounce ambitions of self-expression; they simply set aside the fantasy of the all-responsible subject. The originality of Open Secrets is thus to imagine the non-instrumental without casting it as a heavy ethical burden. Non-appropriation emerges not as what is difficult to do but as the path of least resistance. The book offers a valuable counterpoint to recent anti-Enlightenment revaluations of passivity that have made non-mastery and non-appropriation the fundamental task of the ethical subject.
'Hamlet' Without Hamlet
Margreta de Grazia - 2007
For over two centuries, Hamlet has been valued as the icon of consciousness: but only by ignoring the hard fact of his dispossession. By admitting that premise, this book brings the play to life around man's relation to land, from graves to estate to empire. Key preoccupations are thereby released, including the gendered imperatives of genealogy, and man's elemental affinity to dust. As de Grazia demonstrates from the 400 years of Hamlet's afterlife, such features have disappeared into the vortex of an interiorized Hamlet, but they remain in the language of the play as well as in the earliest accounts of its production. Once reactivated, a very different Hamlet emerges, one whose thoughts and desires are thickly embedded in the worldly, and otherworldly, matters of the play: a Hamlet within Hamlet.
Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory
Michael Syrotinski - 2007
Until recently, the emphasis has been almost exclusively within an Anglophone context, but the focus of postcolonial studies is shifting to a more comparative approach. One of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are being drawn, connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory–Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak–to an earlier generation of predominantly postructuralist French theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida and the status of deconstruction have been acknowledged, but not adequately accounted for. In Deconstruction and the Postcolonial, Michael Syrotinski reconsiders the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what he terms a "deconstructive postcolonialism" and argues that postcolonial studies stands to gain ground in terms of its political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.
Constructing a Sociology of Translation
Michaela Wolf - 2007
This volume deals with central questions of the new domain and aims to contribute to the conceptualisation of a general sociology of translation. Interdisciplinary in approach, it discusses the role of major representatives of sociology like Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour, Bernard Lahire, Anthony Giddens or Niklas Luhmann in establishing a theoretical framework for a sociology of translation. Drawing on methodologies from sociology and integrating them into translation studies, the book questions some of the established categories in this discipline and calls for a redefinition of long-assumed principles. The contributions show the social involvement of translation in various fields and focus especially on the translator's position in an emerging sociology of translation, Bourdieu's influence in conceptualising this new sub-discipline, methodological questions and a sociologically oriented meta-discussion of translation studies.
Algebraic Geometry: An Introduction
Daniel Perrin - 2007
The course consisted of about 50 hours of classroom time, of which three-quarters were lectures and one-quarter examples classes. It was aimed at students who had no previous experience with algebraic geometry. Of course, in the time available, it was impossible to cover more than a small part of this ?eld. I chose to focus on projective algebraic geometry over an algebraically closed base ?eld, using algebraic methods only. The basic principles of this course were as follows: 1) Start with easily formulated problems with non-trivial solutions (such as B ezout s theorem on intersections of plane curves and the problem of rationalcurves).In1993 1994, thechapteronrationalcurveswasreplaced by the chapter on space curves. 2) Use these problems to introduce the fundamental tools of algebraic ge- etry: dimension, singularities, sheaves, varieties and cohomology. I chose not to explain the scheme-theoretic method other than for ?nite schemes (which are needed to be able to talk about intersection multiplicities). A short summary is given in an appendix, in which special importance is given to the presence of nilpotent elements. 3) Use as little commutative algebra as possible by quoting without proof (or proving only in special cases) a certain number of theorems whose proof is not necessary in practise. The main theorems used are collected in a summary of results from algebra with references. Some of them are suggested as exercises or problems."
A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics
Vyvyan Evans - 2007
A mature intellectual movement with a large international community of active scholars, cognitive linguistics is a fast growing approach to language and mind within cognitive science with an impressive and complex technical vocabulary. This alphabetic guide gives an up-to-date introduction to the key terms in cognitive linguistics, covering all the major theories, approaches, ideas, and many relevant theoretical constructs. A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics also features a brief introduction to cognitive linguistics, a detailed annotated reading list, and a listing of some key researchers in cognitive linguistics. Key Features: -A handy and easy to understand pocket guide for anyone embarking on courses in cognitive linguistics or language and the mind -Numerous cross-references to related terms -Coverage of newer areas such as Radical Construction Grammar, Embodied Construction Grammar, Primary Metaphor Theory, and Principled Polysemy Linguistics Distribution is limited to Canada and the United States
Reading and Writing Disability Differently: The Textured Life of Embodiment
Tanya Titchkosky - 2007
Her goal is to configure disability as something more than a problem, and beyond simply a positive or a negative, and to treat texts on disability as potential sites to examine neo-liberal culture. Titchkosky holds that through an exploration of the potential behind limited representations of disability, we can relate to disability as a meaningful form of resistance to the restricted normative order of contemporary embodiment.Incorporating a textual analysis of ordinary depictions of disability, this innovative study promises to represent embodied differences in new ways and alter our imaginative relations to the politics of the body.
Writings of Rosa Luxemburg
Rosa Luxemburg - 2007
Contains "Reform or Revolution?", concerning the reformist program of parliamentary socialism; "The Socialist Crisis in France", concerning the entry of the Socialist Party into the French Government; and other essays.
The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly; 150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History
Robert Vare - 2007
The founders of the magazine valued these things—and they valued the immense amount of effort it takes to preserve them from generation to generation.”--The Editors of The Atlantic Monthly, 2006This landmark collection of writings by the illustrious contributors of The Atlantic Monthly is a one-of-a-kind education in the history of American ideas.The Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857 by a remarkable group that included some of the towering figures of nineteenth-century intellectual life: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell.For 150 years, the magazine has continued to honor its distinguished pedigree by publishing many of America’s most prominent political commentators, journalists, historians, humorists, storytellers, and poets.Throughout the magazine’s history, Atlantic contributors have unflinchingly confronted the fundamental subjects of the American experience: war and peace, science and religion, the conundrum of race, the role of women, the plight of the cities, the struggle to preserve the environment, the strengths and failings of our politics, and, especially, America’s proper place in the world. This extraordinary anthology brings together many of the magazine’s most acclaimed and influential articles. “Broken Windows,” by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, took on the problem of inner-city crime and gave birth to a new way of thinking about law enforcement. “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” by Bernard Lewis, prophetically warned of the dangers posed to the West by rising Islamic extremism. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr., became one of the twentieth century’s most famous reflections upon—and calls for—racial equality. And “The Fifty-first State,” by James Fallows, previewed in astonishing detailthe mess in which America would find itself in Iraqa full six months before the invasion.The collection also highlights some of The Atlantic’s finest moments in fiction and poetry—from the likes of Twain, Whitman, Frost, Hemingway, Nabokov, and Bellow—affirming the central role of literature in defining and challenging American society.Rarely has an anthology so vividly captured America. Serious and comic, touching and tough, The American Idea paints a fascinating portrait of who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going.
Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano - 2007
Dana Luciano argues that the cultural plotting of grief provides a distinctive insight into the nineteenth-century American temporal imaginary, since grief both underwrote the social arrangements that supported the nation's standard chronologies and sponsored other ways of advancing history.Nineteenth-century appeals to grief, as Luciano demonstrates, diffused modes of "sacred time" across both religious and ostensibly secular frameworks, at once authorizing and unsettling established schemes of connection to the past and the future. Examining mourning manuals, sermons, memorial tracts, poetry, and fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Apess, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Luciano illustrates the ways that grief coupled the affective body to time. Drawing on formalist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic criticism, Arranging Grief shows how literary engagements with grief put forth ways of challenging deep-seated cultural assumptions about history, progress, bodies, and behaviors.
Riding the Whirlwind: Connecting People and Organisations in a Culture of Innovation
Fons Trompenaars - 2007
What is lacking is a practical book that brings these ideas together. 'Riding The Whirlwind' aims to do just that by reconnecting people, teams and organization to create constant renewal of talent & motivation.
Spirit and the Politics of Disablement
Sharon V. Betcher - 2007
She claims disablement as a site of powerful social and religious critique and reflection. With searing honesty, she reveals how our culture, only recently tolerant and supportive of disabled people, still fears them. The presence of disabled persons stands as a rebuke to our images of body and health, to the distorted values of our consumerist culture, and the globalized economy that embodies those values in unjust structures. Yet, Betcher claims, disablement has also revealed powerful alternative understandings of the body and body politic, in Scripture, in the actions of Jesus, in the healing work of the Spirit at work in the world. Brimming with insight, Betcher's work is a revelation and a bracing challenge to all Christians.
Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason
Gunnar Olsson - 2007
Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives.A spectacular reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience—to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art.
Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain
Mark Reinhardt - 2007
This volume explores these painful images from the past few decades of photography, weighing in on the intense critical debate that has arisen in recent years around depictions of acute human suffering—especially those that are beautifully rendered. Drawing on works from advertising, photojournalism, art photography, and conceptual art, Beautiful Suffering features reproductions of all the pieces in the Williams College Museum of Art exhibition that shares its name—including portrayals of AIDS sufferers, Abu Ghraib prisoners, refugees, and casualties of war. It also includes five critical essays that engage the works themselves as well as the larger issues the exhibition confronts: Is it inherently problematic to seek aesthetic pleasure in a rendering of pain? And if so, why? These essays, composed by scholars in fields as diverse as art history and political science, are perfect complements to the powerful images of suffering that probe some of the most pressing issues we face today.
Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and V. S. Naipaul
Cristina Emanuela Dascalu - 2007
Green, Chair, Department of Theatre, Butler University "A welcome addition to academic library collections in literacy criticism (especially comparative literature), ethnic and immigrant studies, exile and diaspora literature, as well as cultural studies." - James Vroom, Librarian, Carnegie Mellon University "In yoking together with her unsparing research, keen observation, and clearly empathetic stance of three seemingly dissimilar postcolonial writers, Cristina Dascalu has done far more than provide an excellent academic tool and fascinating reading. She has identified and redefined a metaphor for our time." - Professor Francine Ringold, University of Tulsa; Editor-in-Chief, Nimrod International Journal, and Poet Laureate of Oklahoma "Cristina Dascalu writes with a fine touch and knowledge a solid book about exile literature that is clarifying without oversimplifying, convincing, intelligent, poignant.an essential, satisfying reading.a compelling book of extensive scholarship and clear, well-expressed thoughts.A must have, must read book." - Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Poet Laureate of Russia and Distinguished Professor of University of Tulsa "One of the most lucid and concise examinations of exile that I have ever read. Dascalu's meticulous theoretical groundwork allows her to articulate her position in the clearest of terms so that any educated and literate scholar could understand her argument." - Professor G. Matthew Jenkins, Director of the Writing Program, English Department, University of Tulsa "This book holds solid, extensive documentation with an impressive bibliography.the author's daring, courage, and the freshness of her approaches as well as the originality demonstrated in her superb analysis of the texts from Rushdie, Mukherjee and Naipaul is outstanding." - Prof. Dr. Odette Blumenfeld, Chair, Department of English, Al. I. Cuza University of Iasi, Romania
Toward a Global Idea of Race
Denise Ferreira da Silva - 2007
Looking at the United States and Brazil, she argues that modern subjects are formed in philosophical accounts that presume two ontological moments—historicity and globality—which are refigured in the concepts of the nation and the racial, respectively. By displacing historicity’s ontological prerogative, Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the present global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by the leading post-Enlightenment ethical ideals—namely, universality and self-determination.By introducing a view of the racial as the signifier of globality,Toward a Global Idea of Race provides a new basis for the investigation of past and present modern social processes and contexts of subjection.Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego.
An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy
Alison Stone - 2007
The book introduces key issues and debates in feminist philosophy including: the nature of sex, gender, and the body; the relation between gender, sexuality, and sexual difference; whether there is anything that all women have in common; and the nature of birth and its centrality to human existence. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy shows how feminist thinking on these and related topics has developed since the 1960s. The book also explains how feminist philosophy relates to the many forms of feminist politics. The book provides clear, succinct and readable accounts of key feminist thinkers including de Beauvoir, Butler, Gilligan, Irigaray, and MacKinnon. The book also introduces other thinkers who have influenced feminist philosophy including Arendt, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Accessible in approach, this book is ideal for students and researchers interested in feminist philosophy, feminist theory, womens studies, and political theory. It will also appeal to the general reader.
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence
Adriana Cavarero - 2007
With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word--"horrorism"--to capture the experience of violence.Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the Iliad, in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty.In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality.
Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject
Thomas Rickert - 2007
Acts of Enjoyment presents a critique of current pedagogies and introduces a psychoanalytical approach in teaching composition and rhetoric. Thomas Rickert builds upon the advances of cultural studies and its focus on societal trends and broadens this view by placing attention on the conscious and subconscious thought of the individual. By introducing the cultural theory work of Slavoj Zizek, Rickert seeks to encourage personal and social invention--rather than simply following a course of unity, equity, or consensus that is so prevalent in current writing instruction. He argues that writing should not be treated as a simple skill, as a naïve self expression, or as a tool for personal advancement, but rather as a reflection of social and psychical forces, such as jouissance (enjoyment/sensual pleasure), desire, and fantasy-creating a more sophisticated, panoptic form. The goal of the psychoanalytical approach is to highlight the best pedagogical aspects of cultural studies to allow for well-rounded individual expression, ultimately providing the tools necessary to address larger issues of politics, popular culture, ideology, and social transformation.
The Pacificus-Helvidius Debates of 1793-94: Toward the Completion of the American Founding
Alexander Hamilton - 2007
Ignited by President Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation of 1793, which annulled the eleventh article of America’s Treaty with France of 1778, the debate addressed whether Washington had the authority to declare America neutral, despite an early alliance treaty with France. Hamilton argued that Washington’s actions were constitutional and that friction between the two branches was an unavoidable, but not harmful, consequence of the separation of powers. Madison countered that Washington’s proclamation would introduce “new principles and new constructions” into the Constitution and contended that “the power to declare war and make treaties can never fall within the definition of executive powers.” In the introduction, Morton Frisch asserts that the debate between Hamilton and Madison helped to clarify “certain constitutional principles that we now associate with executive power generally” such as that foreign policy is essentially an executive function. Yet it is the open-ended character of our Constitution that has continued to allow different interpretations of the limits of the powers of government, a debate that continues to this day. Frisch writes in the introduction, “The open-ended character of some of the constitutional provisions afforded opportunities for extending the powers of government beyond their specified limits. Although not given prior sanction by the Constitutional Convention, such additions served to provide a more complete definition of powers without actually changing the ends of government.” The Liberty Fund edition brings together for the first time all the relevant original documents of this controversy: Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation, the full text of the Pacificus and Helvidius letters, Jefferson’s letter to Madison imploring him to answer Hamilton’s arguments, and Hamilton’s Americanus letters, intended as his final response to Madison’s rebuttal. This edition is supplemented with an introduction by Frisch, which places the work in historical context.Morton J. Frisch (1923–2006) was Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Northern Illinois University.
Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama
Christina Wald - 2007
As the first study in its field, Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia explores the characteristics and concerns of the Drama of Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia through in-depth readings of representative plays.
Memory Evolutive Systems; Hierarchy, Emergence, Cognition: Volume 4
Andrée C. Ehresmann - 2007
Written by the developers of the MEM, the book proposes a mathematical model for autonomous evolutionary systems based on the Category Theory of mathematics. It describes a framework to study and possibly simulate the structure of living systems and their dynamic behavior.This book contributes to understanding the multidisciplinary interfaces between mathematics, cognition, consciousness, biology and the study of complexity. It is organized into three parts. Part A deals with hierarchy and emergence and covers such topics as net of interactions and categories; the binding problem; and complexifications and emergence. Part B is about MEM while Part C discusses MEM applications to cognition and consciousness. The book explores the characteristics of a complex evolutionary system, its differences from inanimate physical systems, and its functioning and evolution in time, from its birth to its death.This book is an ideal reference for researchers, teachers and students in pure mathematics, computer science, cognitive science, study of complexity and systems theory, Category Theory, biological systems theory, and consciousness theory. It would also be of interest to both individuals and institutional libraries.
Translation and Identity in the Americas
Gentzler Edwin - 2007
In its survey of these multiple and competing groups and its study of the geographic, socio-political and cultural aspects of translation, Edwin Gentzler's book demonstrates that the Americas are a fruitful terrain for the field of translation studies.Building on research from a variety of disciplines including cultural studies, linguistics, feminism and ethnic studies and including case studies from Brazil, Canada and the Caribbean, this book shows that translation is one of the primary means by which a culture is constructed: translation in the Americas is less something that happens between separate and distinct cultures and more something that is capable of establishing those very cultures.Using a variety of texts and addressing minority and oppressed groups within cultures, Translation and Identity in the Americas highlights by example the cultural role translation policies play in a discriminatory process: the consequences of which can be social marginalization, loss of identity and psychological trauma.Translation and Identity the Americas will be critical reading for students and scholars of Translation Studies, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.
Queer Futures (Radical History Review (Duke University Press))
David Serlin - 2007
Contributors look at the historical forces through which lesbian and gay rights organizations and community advocates align with social conservatives and endorse family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, military service, and gender-normative social roles.Distinguished by its historical approach, “Queer Futures” examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant’s antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the “endangered child.” Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and a history of how “safe streets” patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.Contributors. Anna M. Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Aaron Belkin, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Maxime Cervulle, Vincent Doyle, Roderick A. Ferguson, Christina Hanhardt, Dan Irving, Regina Kunzel, Patrick McCreery, Kevin P. Murphy, Tavia Nyong’o, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Tamara L. Spira, Susan Stryker, Margot D. Weiss
Media Literacy: A Reader
Donaldo Macedo - 2007
Such an appreciation encourages both critical thinking and self-analysis, as students begin to realize that everyday decisions are not necessarily made freely and rationally. While we strongly believe that humans exercise agency, we understand that there are social, cultural, and political forces that affect agency. In this context our conception of media literacy analyzes the ways our everyday decisions are encoded and inscribed by emotional and bodily commitments relating to the production of desire and mood, all of which leads, in Noam Chomsky's famous phrase, to the �manufacture of consent.� These complex pedagogical and ideological issues demand rigorous skills including questioning, analyzing, interpreting, and meaning-making. Media Literacy: A Reader is a comprehensive collection of essays that is sorely needed, as most of the academic work in the area is written not for an introductory audience, but for scholars in the field. It will shape the agenda in media literacy for years to come.
Marxism, Reparations the Black Freedom Struggle
Monica Moorehead - 2007
Illuminating the often forgotten history of this diaspora and the legacy of brutal prejudice that stemmed from it, this critical argument discusses the fight for reparations within the United States as well as among the peoples of Africa and the Caribbean.
Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment
Maria Pia Lara - 2007
In Narrating Evil, Mar�a P�a Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development.Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible.In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as J�rgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined.The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. Narrating Evil describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world.
Shakespeare's Double Helix
Henry S. Turner - 2007
Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream during a period when the 'new science' had begun to unsettle the foundations of knowledge about the natural world. Through close analysis of the play and reflection on modern genetic engineering, Turner examines developments in early modern culture as it sought to come to terms with the new forces of magic, astrology, alchemy and mechanics - fields of knowledge that preoccupied the most adventurous intellects of Shakespeare's period and that promised limitless power over nature. Shakespeare's writing sheds light on current developments in science, ethics, law, and religion in contemporary culture. This book reveals the richness and peculiarity of early scientific thought in Shakespeare's time and shows how the questions he poses remain fundamental as the nature of 'life' has become one of the most pressing political, ethical, and philosophical problems for society today.
Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds
Kristin Waters - 2007
In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy.
Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories
John Sandlos - 2007
John Sandlos argues that the introduction of game regulations, national parks, and game sanctuaries was central to the assertion of state authority over the traditional hunting cultures of the Dene and Inuit. His archival research undermines the assumption that conservationists were motivated solely by enlightened preservationism, revealing instead that commercial interests were integral to wildlife management in Canada.
Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures
Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey - 2007
Taking the tidalectic between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.
Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality
Merrill Singer - 2007
Drugging the Poor provides a unified theoretical framework to assess how all drugs, including tobacco, heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and diverted pharmaceuticals contribute to maintaining social inequality among the wealthier and poorer social classes in American society. Singer's analysis rejects conventional approaches that see tobacco or alcohol manufacturers and distributors, on the one hand, and drug cartels and mafias, on the other, as completely different entities. Instead, he shows how legal and illegal "drug corporations" share key features and follow the same economic principles. He also emphasizes that mixing legal and illegal drugs to self-medicate against social discrimination, poverty, and structural violence offers short-term relief, but in the long run, it functions to maintain an unjust and oppressive system. Drugging the Poor actively challenges the assumption that how things are is how they always have been or how they need to be.
Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City
William J. Glover - 2007
British and Indian officials had designed a modern, architecturally distinct city center adjacent to the old walled city, administered under new methods of urban governance.In Making Lahore Modern, William J. Glover investigates the traditions that shaped colonial Lahore. In particular, he focuses on the conviction that both British and Indian actors who implemented urbanization came to share: that the material fabric of the city could lead to social and moral improvement. This belief in the power of the physical environment to shape individual and collective sentiments, he argues, links the colonial history of Lahore to nineteenth-century urbanization around the world.Glover highlights three aspects of Lahore’s history that show this process unfolding. First, he examines the concepts through which the British understood the Indian city and envisioned its transformation. Second, through a detailed study of new buildings and the adaptation of existing structures, he explores the role of planning, design, and reuse. Finally, he analyzes the changes in urban imagination as evidenced in Indian writings on the city in this period. Throughout, Glover emphasizes that colonial urbanism was not simply imposed; it was a collaborative project between Indian citizens and the British.Offering an in-depth study of a single provincial city, Glover reveals that urban change in colonial India was not a monolithic process and establishes Lahore as a key site for understanding the genealogy of modern global urbanism.William J. Glover is associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan.
Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies
Antonio Viego - 2007
Antonio Viego argues that Lacanian theory has the potential to begin rectifying the deeply flawed way that ethnic and racialized subjects have been conceptualized in North America since the mid-twentieth century. Viego contends that the accounts of human subjectivity that dominate the humanities and social sciences and influence U.S. legal thought derive from American ego psychology. Examining ego psychology in the United States during its formative years following World War II, Viego shows how its distinctly American misinterpretation of Freudian theory was driven by a faith in the possibility of rendering the human subject whole, complete, and transparent. Viego traces how this theory of the subject gained traction in the United States, passing into most forms of North American psychology, law, civil rights discourse, ethnic studies, and the broader culture.Viego argues that the repeated themes of wholeness, completeness, and transparency with respect to ethnic and racialized subjectivity are fundamentally problematic as these themes ultimately lend themselves to the project of managing and controlling ethnic and racialized subjects by positing them as fully knowable, calculable sums: as dead subjects. He asserts that the refusal of critical race and ethnic studies scholars to read ethnic and racialized subjects in a Lacanian framework—as divided subjects, split in language—contributes to a racist discourse. Focusing on theoretical, historical, and literary work in Latino studies, he mines the implicit connection between Latino studies’ theory of the “border subject” and Lacan’s theory of the “barred subject” in language to argue that Latino studies is poised to craft a critical multiculturalist, anti-racist Lacanian account of subjectivity while adding historical texture and specificity to Lacanian theory.
The Modernist Papers
Fredric Jameson - 2007
Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarities of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.Challenging our previous understanding of the literature of this period, this monumental work will come to be regarded as the classic study of modernism.
Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times
Roopali Mukherjee - 2007
Drinking a "Caring Cup" of coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to support fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global warming. All these commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporary culture: the most common way we participate in social activism is by buying something.Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case studies of "commodity activism." Drawing from television, film, consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, and Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary.Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities, arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded commodity.
Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing
Graham Harman - 2007
And more than any other recent philosopher, Heidegger has a following outside philosophy, among artists, architects, literary theorists, psychologists, and computer scientists.Heidegger Explained is the clearest exposition of Heidegger yet written. It describes his controversial life and career, his relations with contemporaries, the evolution of his thought, and the pathways of his influence.
Multiculturalism Without Culture
Anne Phillips - 2007
In Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips contends that critics misrepresent culture as the explanation of everything individuals from minority and non-Western groups do. She puts forward a defense of multiculturalism that dispenses with notions of culture, instead placing individuals themselves at its core.Multiculturalism has been blamed for encouraging the oppression of women--forced marriages, female genital cutting, school girls wearing the hijab. Many critics opportunistically deploy gender equality to justify the retreat from multiculturalism, hijacking the equality agenda to perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Phillips informs her argument with the feminist insistence on recognizing women as agents, and defends her position using an unusually broad range of literature, including political theory, philosophy, feminist theory, law, and anthropology. She argues that critics and proponents alike exaggerate the unity, distinctness, and intractability of cultures, thereby encouraging a perception of men and women as dupes constrained by cultural dictates.Opponents of multiculturalism may think the argument against accommodating cultural difference is over and won, but they are wrong. Phillips believes multiculturalism still has an important role to play in achieving greater social equality. In this book, she offers a new way of addressing dilemmas of justice and equality in multiethnic, multicultural societies, intervening at this critical moment when so many Western countries are poised to abandon multiculturalism.