Best of
Theory

2013

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study


Fred Moten - 2013
    Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

Feminist, Queer, Crip


Alison Kafer - 2013
    Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

A Theory of the Drone


Grégoire Chamayou - 2013
    public. Not since debates over nuclear warfare has American military strategy been the subject of discussion in living rooms, classrooms, and houses of worship. Yet as this groundbreaking new work shows, the full implications of drones have barely been addressed in the recent media storm.In a unique take on a subject that has grabbed headlines and is consuming billions of taxpayer dollars each year, philosopher Grégoire Chamayou applies the lens of philosophy to our understanding of how drones are changing our world. For the first time in history, a state has claimed the right to wage war across a mobile battlefield that potentially spans the globe. Remote-control flying weapons, he argues, take us well beyond even George W. Bush’s justification for the war on terror.What we are seeing is a fundamental transformation of the laws of war that have defined military conflict as between combatants. As more and more drones are launched into battle, war now has the potential to transform into a realm of secretive, targeted assassinations of individuals—beyond the view and control not only of potential enemies but also of citizens of democracies themselves. Far more than a simple technology, Chamayou shows, drones are profoundly influencing what it means for a democracy to wage war. A Theory of the Drone will be essential reading for all who care about this important question.

Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971, & Oedipal Knowledge


Michel Foucault - 2013
    Here, he builds on his earlier work, Discipline and Punish, to explore the relationship between tragedy, conflict, and truth-telling. He also explores the different forms of truth-telling, and their relation to power and the law. The publication of Lectures on the Will to Know marks a milestone in Foucault's reception, and it will no longer be possible to read him in the same way as before.

The Transgender Studies Reader 2


Susan Stryker - 2013
    In 2006, Routledge's The Transgender Studies Reader brought together the first definitive collection of the field. Since its publication, the field has seen an explosion of new work that has expanded the boundaries of inquiry in many directions. The Transgender Studies Reader 2 gathers these disparate strands of scholarship, and collects them into a format that makes sense for teaching and research.Complementing the first volume, rather than competing with it, The Transgender Studies Reader 2 consists of fifty articles, with a general introduction by the editors, explanatory head notes for each essay, and bibliographical suggestions for further research. Unlike the first volume, which was historically based, tracing the lineage of the field, this volume focuses on recent work and emerging trends. To keep pace with this rapidly changing area, the second reader has a companion website, with images, links to blogs, video, and other material to help supplement the book.For more information, visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/stryker

Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art


Jennifer Doyle - 2013
    She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.

Four Times Through the Labyrinth


Olaf Nicolai - 2013
    This book on labyrinths is wonderful! It enlarges the traditional catalog

Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict


David A. Nibert - 2013
    But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different societies over time, David Nibert reaches a strikingly different conclusion. He finds in the domestication of animals, which he renames ?domesecration, OCO a perversion of human ethics, the development of large-scale acts of violence, disastrous patterns of destruction, and growth-curbing epidemics of infectious disease. Nibert centers his study on nomadic pastoralism and the development of commercial ranching, a practice that has been largely controlled by elite groups and expanded with the rise of capitalism. Beginning with the pastoral societies of the Eurasian steppe and continuing through to the exportation of Western, meat-centered eating habits throughout todayOCOs world, Nibert connects the domesecration of animals to violence, invasion, extermination, displacement, enslavement, repression, pandemic chronic disease, and hunger. In his view, conquest and subjugation were the results of the need to appropriate land and water to maintain large groups of animals, and the gross amassing of military power has its roots in the economic benefits of the exploitation, exchange, and sale of animals. Deadly zoonotic diseases, Nibert shows, have accompanied violent developments throughout history, laying waste to whole cities, societies, and civilizations. His most powerful insight situates the domesecration of animals as a precondition for the oppression of human populations, particularly indigenous peoples, an injustice impossible to rectify while the material interests of the elite are inextricably linked to the exploitation of animals. Nibert links domesecration to some of the most critical issues facing the world today, including the depletion of fresh water, topsoil, and oil reserves; global warming; and world hunger, and he reviews the U.S. governmentOCOs military response to the inevitable crises of an overheated, hungry, resource-depleted world. Most animal-advocacy campaigns reinforce current oppressive practices, Nibert argues. Instead, he suggests reforms that challenge the legitimacy of both domesecration and capitalism.

Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights


Dian Million - 2013
    This analysis by an Indigenous feminist scholar challenges the United Nations–based human rights agendas and colonial theory that until now have shaped Indigenous models of self-determination. Gender inequality and gender violence, Dian Million argues, are critically important elements in the process of self-determination. Million contends that nation-state relations are influenced by a theory of trauma ascendant with the rise of neoliberalism. Such use of trauma theory regarding human rights corresponds to a therapeutic narrative by Western governments negotiating with Indigenous nations as they seek self-determination. Focusing on Canada and drawing comparisons with the United States and Australia, Million brings a genealogical understanding of trauma against a historical filter. Illustrating how Indigenous people are positioned differently in Canada, Australia, and the United States in their articulation of trauma, the author particularly addresses the violence against women as a language within a greater politic. The book introduces an Indigenous feminist critique of this violence against the medicalized framework of addressing trauma and looks to the larger goals of decolonization. Noting the influence of humanitarian psychiatry, Million goes on to confront the implications of simply dismissing Indigenous healing and storytelling traditions.Therapeutic Nations is the first book to demonstrate affect and trauma’s wide-ranging historical origins in an Indigenous setting, offering insights into community healing programs. The author’s theoretical sophistication and original research make the book relevant across a range of disciplines as it challenges key concepts of American Indian and Indigenous studies.

Music & Literature: Issue 2


László KrasznahorkaiVeronica Scott Esposito - 2013
    This special volume presents, for the first time in English, an extensive selection of newly translated fiction spanning Krasznahorkai’s 28-year career alongside an array of new appreciations and essays on his work by top critics and artists from around the world; a portfolio of photographs by cinematographer Gábor Medvigy, taken on-set while filming Tarr’s masterpiece Sátántangó; and 24 new paintings by renowned German artist Max Neumann, who previously collaborated with Krasznahorkai on the chapbook Animalinside (New Directions Books & Sylph Editions, 2010). An essential volume for the aficionado and the casual fan alike, Issue 2 brings together an international community for a hearty nod to three of our finest living artists.With contributions and translations by: Noémi Aponyi; David Auerbach; Justin Beplate; Margaret B. Carson; Sergio Chejfec; Péter Eötvös; Scott Esposito; Dan Gunn; Michael Hulse; Andreas Isenschmid; Paul Kerschen; Louise Rogers Lalaurie; Gábor Medvigy; Ottilie Mulzet; Sándor Radnóti; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Ivan Sanders; Jennifer Szalai; Lenke Szilágyi; George Szirtes; Péter Szivák; Tibor Sennyey Weiner; Antonio Werli

Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology


Adam S. Miller - 2013
    In the process, it also provides a systematic and original account of Latour's overall project. The account of grace offered here redistributes the tasks assigned to science and religion. Where now the work of science is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant, and too transcendent to be visible, the business of religion is to bring into focus objects that are too near, too available, and too immanent to be visible. Where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our nearsightedness, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our farsightedness. Speculative Grace remaps the meaning of grace and examines the kinds of religious instruments and practices that, as a result, take center stage.

The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange


Kōjin Karatani - 2013
    Karatani seeks to understand both Capital-Nation-State, the interlocking system that is the dominant form of modern global society, and the possibilities for superseding it. In The Structure of World History, he traces different modes of exchange, including the pooling of resources that characterizes nomadic tribes, the gift exchange systems developed after the adoption of fixed-settlement agriculture, the exchange of obedience for protection that arises with the emergence of the state, the commodity exchanges that characterize capitalism, and, finally, a future mode of exchange based on the return of gift exchange, albeit modified for the contemporary moment. He argues that this final stage—marking the overcoming of capital, nation, and state—is best understood in light of Kant's writings on eternal peace. The Structure of World History is in many ways the capstone of Karatani's brilliant career, yet it also signals new directions in his thought.

Mad Matters: A Critical Reader for Canadian Mad Studies


Brenda A. LeFrançois - 2013
    The 'mad,' the oppressed, the ex-inmates of society's asylums are coming together and speaking for themselves."Mad Matters brings together the writings of this vital movement, which has grown explosively in the years since. With contributions from scholars in numerous disciplines, as well as activists and psychiatric survivors, it presents diverse critical voices that convey the lived experiences of the psychiatrized and challenges dominant understandings of "mental illness." The connections between mad activism and other liberation struggles are stressed throughout, making the book a major contribution to the literature on human rights and anti-oppression.

Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education


Zeus Leonardo - 2013
    Renowned theoretician and philosopher Zeus Leonardo surveys the dominant race theories and, more specifically, focuses on those frameworks that are considered essential to cultivating a critical attitude toward race and racism. The book examines four frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxism, Whiteness Studies, and Cultural Studies, with a critique following each one in order to analyze its strengths and set its limits. The last chapter offers a theory of "race ambivalence," which combines aspects of all four theories into one framework. Engaging and cutting edge, Race Frameworks is a foundational text suitable for courses in education and critical race studies.Chapters:Introduction: Critical Frameworks on Race1.; Critical Race Theory in Education: On Racial State Apparatuses2.; Marxism and Race: The Racialized Division of Labor 3.; Whiteness Studies and Educational Supremacy: The Unbearable Whiteness of Schooling4.; Cultural Studies, Race Representation, and Education: From the Means of Production to the Production of Meanness5.; Race Ambivalence and a Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education

The Classics of Marxism


Friedrich Engels - 2013
    There is no better explanation of Marxism than in the words of its foremost thinkers. This volume includes: The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels. The State and Revolution by V. I. Lenin. The Transitional Programme by Leon Trotsky.

The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation


Ed Steck - 2013
    Literary Nonfiction. Composed in part from technical military intelligence text, Ed Steck's THE GARDEN: SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT FOR ANALYSIS AND SIMULATION is a formally complex representation of cultural brain damage, the damage left by war in language and thought.

Collected Works of Edmund Burke


Edmund Burke - 2013
    •Inner click-able Tables of Contents for all individual books with multiple chapters.•Nicely organized chapters and text.Author’s works include:•THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL•REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE•BURKE'S SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA•THOUGHTS ON THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE FIRST•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE SECOND•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE THIRD•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE FOURTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE FIFTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE SIXTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE SEVENTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE EIGHTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE NINTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE TENTH•THE WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE ELEVENTH•WORKS OF EDMUND BURKE IN 12 VOLUMES: VOLUME THE TWELFTH

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design


Tim Barringer - 2013
    Effectively Britain’s first modern art movement, the Brotherhood combined rebellion and revivalism, scientific precision, and imaginative grandeur. Today, the works of the Pre-Raphaelites are among the best known of all English paintings, and yet they have often been dismissed or misunderstood as Victoriana or escapism. This fascinating book convincingly corrects that view, examining works in a wide variety of media and demonstrating the broad scope of the movement’s revolutionary ideas about art, design, and society.Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelites’ unflinchingly radical style, inspired by the purity of early Renaissance painting, defied convention, provoked critics, and entranced audiences. Many of their most famous paintings are featured, including Millais’s Ophelia and Ford Madox Brown’s The Last of England. This book also includes sculpture, photography, and the applied arts, the last of which shows the important role the Brotherhood played in the early development of the Arts and Crafts movement and the socialist ideas of the poet, designer, and theorist William Morris.

Capital: Volumes One and Two


Karl Marx - 2013
    Born in Trier into a middle-class Jewish family in 1818, by the time of his death in London in 1883, Marx claimed a growing international reputation. Of central importance then and later was his book Das Kapital, or, as it is known to English readers, simply Capital. Volume One of Capital was published in Paris in 1867. This was the only volume published during Marx's lifetime and the only to have come directly from his pen. Volume Two, published in 1884, was based on notes Marx left, but written by his friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). Readers from the nineteenth century to the present have been captivated by the unmistakable power and urgency of this classic of world literature. Marx's critique of the capitalist system is rife with big themes: his theory of 'surplus value', his discussion of the exploitation of the working class, and his forecast of class conflict on a grand scale. Marx wrote with purpose. As he famously put it, 'Philosophers have previously tried to explain the world, our task is to change it.'

Earth Sound Earth Signal


Douglas Kahn - 2013
    Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. "Earth Sound Earth Signal "rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.

The Alexander Technique for Musicians


Judith Kleinman - 2013
    Perfect as an introduction to the Alexander Technique, or to supplement the reader's lessons, the book looks at daily and last-minute practice, breathing, performance and performance anxiety, teacher–pupil relationships, ensemble skills, and the application of the Alexander Technique to instrumental and vocal work.Complete with diagrams and photographs to aid the learning process, as well as step-by-step procedures and diary entries written by participating students, The Alexander Technique for Musicians gives tried-and-tested advice, drawn from the authors' twenty-plus years of experience working with musicians, providing an essential handbook for musicians seeking the most from themselves and their art.

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe


MariJo Moore - 2013
    Phillip J. Deloria, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of History and American Studies, University of Michigan, author of Playing Indian and coauthor of The Native Americans"Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time offers a very clear contrast between the Western science view of the cosmos as an object for study - something external to the scientists - and the Native American view of each person being a participating part of a dynamical, living web of connections. This anthology will be very useful in opening up readers to a vision and experience of the Native American worldview, which is presented expertly throughout the text as one of flux and change."-Dr. F. David Peat, Theoretical Physicist, founder of the Pari Center for New Learning in Italy, and author of Blackfoot Physics and Science, Order and Creativity (with David Bohm)Included are stories by Suzan Shown Harjo, Gabriel Horn, John Trudell, Dean Hutchins, Lois Red Elk, Suzanne Zahrt Murphy, Amy Krout-Horn, Jack D. Forbes, John D. Berry, Sidney Cook Bad Moccasin, III, Trace A. DeMeyer, Clieord E. Trafzer, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Bobby González, Duane BigEagle, Carol Wille`e Bachofner, Lela Northcross Wakely, Georges Sioui, Keith Secola, Mary Black Bonnet, Kim Shuck, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Dawn Karima Pe`igrew, Stephanie A. Sellers, Natalie bomas Kindrick, Basil H. Johnston, Barbara-Helen Hill, Alice Azure, Phyllis A. Fast, Doris Seale, Terra Trevor, Denise Low, Vine Deloria Jr., Jim Stevens, ire’ne lara silva, Susan Deer Cloud, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Tony Abeyta, MariJo Moore.

Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories


Jill Doerfler - 2013
    They are bagijiganan, offerings of the possibilities within Anishinaabeg life. Existing along a broad narrative spectrum, from aadizookaanag (traditional or sacred narratives) to dibaajimowinan (histories and news)—as well as everything in between—storytelling is one of the central practices and methods of individual and community existence. Stories create and understand, survive and endure, revitalize and persist. They honor the past, recognize the present, and provide visions of the future. In remembering, (re)making, and (re)writing stories, Anishinaabeg storytellers have forged a well-traveled path of agency, resistance, and resurgence. Respecting this tradition, this groundbreaking anthology features twenty-four contributors who utilize creative and critical approaches to propose that this people’s stories carry dynamic answers to questions posed within Anishinaabeg communities, nations, and the world at large. Examining a range of stories and storytellers across time and space, each contributor explores how narratives form a cultural, political, and historical foundation for Anishinaabeg Studies. Written by Anishinaabeg and non-Anishinaabeg scholars, storytellers, and activists, these essays draw upon the power of cultural expression to illustrate active and ongoing senses of Anishinaabeg life. They are new and dynamic bagijiganan, revealing a viable and sustainable center for Anishinaabeg Studies, what it has been, what it is, what it can be.

Power to the People: The Black Panthers Speak


Fred Hampton - 2013
    The Panthers practiced militant self-defense of minority communities against the U.S. government, and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizing and community-based programs. The party was one of the first organizations in U.S. history to militantly struggle for ethnic minority and working class emancipation - a party whose agenda was the revolutionary establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. Many words have been said about the Black Panthers...listen to what they have to say.

On Ghosts


Elizabeth Robinson - 2013
    "This book is continuing a tradition of Neo-Spiritualist literature in America where the poem is the means of divination. The poem is a map of a world where ghosts and unattributed thinkers and writers haunt and intrude and give signals to the world next to us. This is an occupation for all poets, the most secular to the most conceptual and the most experiential and spontaneous. If words appear in prose here in these pages, they are still the production of a New Spiritualist poet who feels the presences and wants to tell us about them."--Fanny Howe"Elizabeth Robinson's ON GHOSTS returns us to the haunted aura around words. Here, a crossing of genres--poetry, prose meditation, personal testimony--shows that language itself amounts to a gathering of ghosts. Robinson's oblique lyricism beckons us toward a twilight zone where we become 'witness to the unverifiable.' This is writing as the highest form of bewitching."--Andrew Joron

Critique of Black Reason


Achille Mbembe - 2013
    Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy


Chris Crass - 2013
    These essays and interviews present powerful lessons for transformative organizing. It offers a firsthand look at the challenges and the opportunities of antiracist work in white communities, feminist work with men, and bringing women of color feminism into the heart of social movements. Drawing on two decades of personal activist experience and case studies within these areas, Crass’s essays insightfully explore ways of transforming divisions of race, class, and gender into catalysts for powerful vision, strategy, and building movements in the United States today. This collection will inspire and empower anyone who is interested in implementing change through organizing.

The Ideas of Karl Marx: Marx at 200


Alan Woods - 2013
    Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Bourgeois, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were a cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him. And he died beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers – from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America… "His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work." Two hundred years after the birth of the great revolutionary Karl Marx, across the world, the capitalist system is in crisis and the working class are moving into action to change their lives. In ruling class circles, no longer do they snidely declare the death of Marx. On the contrary, there is fear and consternation in their ranks. There has, therefore, never been a more urgent time to study his ideas. This short book, released for the two hundredth birthday of Marx, contains a series of articles on the man, his life, and his ideas: from an explanation of the philosophy of Marxism; to Marx’s battles against petty-bourgeois anarchist ideas; to Trotsky’s assessment of the Communist Manifesto. And much more! This book should be read by all class-conscious workers as the beginning of the study of the ideas of Marxism. As Lenin said, “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement."

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature


Franco Moretti - 2013
    Who could repeat these words today?Thus begins Franco Moretti’s study of the bourgeois in modern European literature, where a gallery of individual portraits is entwined around the analysis of specific keywords – such as ‘useful’ and ‘earnest’, ‘efficiency’, ‘influence’, ‘comfort’, ‘roba’ – and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. The book charts the rise and fall of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and searches for the seeds of its failures.

The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory


Maria del Pilar Blanco - 2013
    A watershed moment for this area of study was the publication of Derrida's Specters of Marx in 1993, marking the inauguration of a "spectral turn" in cultural criticism. Gathering together the most compelling texts of the past twenty years, the editors transform the field of spectral studies with this first ever reader, employing the ghost as an analytical and methodological tool. The Spectralities Reader takes ghosts and haunting on their own terms, as wide-ranging phenomena that are not conscripted to a single aesthetic genre or style.Divided into six thematically discreet sections, the reader covers issues of philosophy, politics, media, spatiality, subject formation (gender, race and sexuality), and historiography. It anthologizes the previously published work of theoretical heavyweights from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, such as Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben, alongside work by literary and cultural historians such as Jeffrey Sconce and Roger Luckhurst.

Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection


Jan Rehmann - 2013
    He compares them in a way that a genuine dialogue becomes possible and applies the different methods to the ‘market totalitarianism’ of today’s high-tech-capitalism to explain the stability of capitalism even in the midst of the crisis.

30 Years of Swiss Typographic Discourse in the Typografische Monatsblatter: TM RSI Sgm 1960-90


Ecole Cantonale D'Art De Lausanne (Ecal) - 2013
    With more than 70 years in existence, the journal witnessed significant moments in the history of typography and graphic design. 30 Years of Swiss Typographic Discourse in the Typografische Monatsblatter examines the years 1960-90, that correspond to a period of transition in which many factors such as technology, socio-political contexts and aesthetic ideologies profoundly affected and transformed the fields of typography and graphic design. The book includes a large number of works from well-known and lesser-known designers such as Emil Ruder, Helmut Schmid, Wolfgang Weingart, Hans-Rudolf Lutz, Jost Hochuli and many others.

The Future of Development: A Radical Manifesto


Gustavo Esteva - 2013
    Truman heralded the era of international development, a “worldwide effort for the achievement of peace, plenty, and freedom” that would aim to “greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations and. . . . raise substantially their standards of living.” At the time, more than half of the world’s population lived in areas defined as underdeveloped; today, that figure surprisingly remains the same. Arguing that such persistent stagnation resulted partly from poor comprehension of the terms “developed” and “underdeveloped,” this provocative book revises our understanding of these fraught concepts.            Demystifying the statistics that international organizations use to measure development, the authors introduce the alternative concept of buen vivir: a state of living well. They contend that everyone on the planet can achieve this state, but only if we all begin living as communities rather than individuals and nurture our respective commons. With their unique take on a famously difficult issue, they offer new hope for the future of development—and of humankind.

Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition


Yasemin Yildiz - 2013
    Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).

How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement


Lambros Malafouris - 2013
    In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality -- the world of things, artifacts, and material signs -- into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.

Interpretive Autoethnography


Norman K. Denzin - 2013
    Denzin in Interpretive Autoethnography, Second Edition . "I want to turn the traditional life story, biographical project into an interpretive autoethnographic project, into a critical, performative practice, a practice that begins with the biography of the writer and moves outward to culture, discourse, history, and ideology." Drawing on C. Wright Mills, Sartre, and Derrida, Denzin lays out the key assumptions, terms, and parameters of autoethnography, provides a guide to using and studying personal experience, and considers the dilemmas and political implications of textualizing a life. He weaves his narrative through family stories, and concludes with thoughts concerning a performance-centered pedagogy and the directions, concerns, and challenges for autoethnography.

Handbook of Autoethnography


Stacy Holman Jones - 2013
    Chapters address the theory, history, and ethics of autoethnographic practice, representational and writing issues, the personal and relational concerns of the autoethnographer, and the link between researcher and social justice. A set of 13 exemplars show the use of these principles in action. Autoethnography is one of the most popularly practiced forms of qualitative research over the past 20 years, and this volume captures all its essential elements for graduate students and practicing researchers.

Writings of Emma Goldman: Essays on Anarchism, Feminism, Socialism, and Communism


Emma Goldman - 2013
    Includes "Anarchy Defended by Anarchists," "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation," "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For," "The Psychology of Political Violence," "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty," "Speech Against Conscription And War," "There Is No Communism In Russia," and "The Individual, Society, And The State."

Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination


Ann Laura Stoler - 2013
    Ann Laura Stoler's introduction is a manifesto, a compelling call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people's bodies and minds. In their provocative, tightly focused responses to Stoler, the contributors explore subjects as seemingly diverse as villages submerged during the building of a massive dam in southern India, Palestinian children taught to envision and document ancestral homes razed by the Israeli military, and survival on the toxic edges of oil refineries and amid the remains of apartheid in Durban, South Africa. They consider the significance of Cold War imagery of a United States decimated by nuclear blast, perceptions of a swath of Argentina's Gran Chaco as a barbarous void, and the enduring resonance, in contemporary sexual violence, of atrocities in King Leopold's Congo. Reflecting on the physical destruction of Sri Lanka, on Detroit as a colonial metropole in relation to sites of ruination in the Amazon, and on interactions near a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the contributors attend to present-day harms in the occluded, unexpected sites and situations where earlier imperial formations persist.Contributors. Ariella Azoulay, John F. Collins, Sharad Chari, E. Valentine Daniel, Gastón Gordillo, Greg Grandin, Nancy Rose Hunt, Joseph Masco, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, Ann Laura Stoler

Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War?: Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond


Maria Eriksson Bazz - 2013
    In this provocative book, Baaz and Stern challenge the dominant understandings of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. Drawing upon original fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as research material from other conflict zones, the authors emphasize the importance of context and the multiplicity of factors involved in gender-based violence, such as the nature of civilian-military relations, and ultimately argue that it is misleading to isolate sexual violence from other aspects of conflict. A much-anticipated book by two acknowledged experts in the field dealing with an issue that has become an increasingly important security and legal topic.

Reading Like a Girl: Narrative Intimacy in Contemporary American Young Adult Literature


Sara K. Day - 2013
    Reading Like a Girl explains the construction of narrator-reader relationships in recent American novels written about adolescent women and marketed to adolescent women.Sara K. Day explains, though, that such levels of imagined friendship lead to contradictory cultural expectations for the young women so deeply obsessed with reading these novels. Day coins the term "narrative intimacy" to refer to the implicit relationship between narrator and reader that depends on an imaginary disclosure and trust between the story's narrator and the reader. Through critical examination, the inherent contradictions between this enclosed, imagined relationship and the real expectations for adolescent women's relations prove to be problematic.In many novels for young women, adolescent female narrators construct conceptions of the adolescent woman reader, constructions that allow the narrator to understand the reader as a confidant, a safe and appropriate location for disclosure. At the same time, such novels offer frequent warnings against the sort of unfettered confession the narrators perform. Friendships are marked as potential sites of betrayal and rejection. Romantic relationships are presented as inherently threatening to physical and emotional health. And so, the narrator turns to the reader for an ally who cannot judge. The reader, in turn, may come to depend upon narrative intimacy in order to vicariously explore her own understanding of human expression and bonds.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital


Vivek Chibber - 2013
    It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism.Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.

Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design


Harry Francis Mallgrave - 2013
    Traditional arguments such as "nature versus nurture" are rapidly disappearing because of the realization that just as we are affecting our environments, so too do these altered environments restructure our cognitive abilities and outlooks. If the biological and technological breakthroughs are promising benefits such as extended life expectancies, these same discoveries also have the potential to improve in significant ways the quality of our built environments. This poses a compelling challenge to conventional architectural theory...This is the first book to consider these new scientific and humanistic models in architectural terms. Constructed as a series of five essays around the themes of beauty, culture, emotion, the experience of architecture, and artistic play, this book draws upon a broad range of discussions taking place in philosophy, psychology, biology, neuroscience, and anthropology, and in doing so questions what implications these discussions hold for architectural design.Drawing upon a wealth of research, Mallgrave argues that we should turn our focus away from the objectification of architecture (treating design as the creation of objects) and redirect it back to those for whom we design: the people inhabiting our built environments.

Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide


Stephen Benson - 2013
    The Anthology is of interest to all students, teachers and critics of literature and creative writing, and especially those students who are required to write critical essays. All 14 texts included respond innovatively to the question: How do we write criticism? As examples of academic critical writing they are all sympathetic to works whose aim is to change the ways in which we see and describe our world.Key Features- Unique as an anthology of and guide to creative critical writing- Demonstrates a range of ways to write critically and creatively - Extensive introduction & explanatory headnotes to each textContents Roland Barthes, from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments; John Cage, from 'Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?'; Anne Carson, 'Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)'; H�l�ne Cixous, 'Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner's taking off'; Jacques Derrida 'Aphorism Countertime'; Geoff Dyer, from Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence; Benjamin Friedlander, 'Gertrude Stein: A Retrospective Criticism'; Peter Gizzi, 'Correspondences of the Book'; Kevin Kopelson, 'Music Lessons'; Denise Riley, 'Lyric Selves'; Eve Sedgwick, 'Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl'; Ali Smith, 'Green'; John Wilkinson, 'Imperfect Pitch'; Sarah Wood, 'Anew Again'.Stephen Benson and Clare Connors teach in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Stephen Benson is the author of Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory (2002) and Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction (2006), and the editor of Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (2008). Clare Connors is the author of Force from Nietzsche to Derrida and Literary Theory: A Beginner's Guide (2010).

Seeking the Beloved Community: A Feminist Race Reader


Joy James - 2013
    Focusing on the experiences of black women calling attention to and resisting social injustice, the astonishing scale of mass and politically driven imprisonment in the United States, and issues relating to government and civic powers in American democracy, Joy James gives voice to people and ideas persistently left outside mainstream progressive discourse those advocating for the radical steps necessary to acknowledge and remedy structural injustice and violence, rather than merely reforming those existing structures.Ebook also available.

At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions


Didier Fassin - 2013
    Against this common sense idea, At the Heart of the State argues that it is also a concrete and situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and inscribed in the issues of its time. The result of a five-year investigation conducted by ten scholars, this book describes and analyses the police, the court system, the prison apparatus, the social services, and mental health facilities in France. Combining genealogy and ethnography, its authors show that these state institutions do not simply implement laws, rules and procedures: they mobilise values and affects, judgements and emotions. In other words, they reflect the morality of the state. Of immense interest to both social scientists and political theorists, this work will make an important contribution to the ever expanding literature on the contemporary state.

Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion


Arnold August - 2013
    By comparing it with practices in the US, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, August shows that people's participation in politics and society is not limited to a singular Eurocentric understanding of democracy, but rather, democracy as practiced in the West is largely non-participatory, static and fixed in time.Cuba, by contrast, is a laboratory where the process of democratization is continually in motion, an ongoing experiment to create new ways for people to participate. August argues forcefully for the need to develop mutual understanding of different political systems and, in doing so, to not be satisfied with either blanket condemnation or idealistic illusions, both resulting from a refusal to analyze the actual inner workings of each process.

Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art


T.J. Demos - 2013
    With great timeliness, projects by Sven Augustijnen, Vincent Meessen, Zarina Bhimji, Renzo Martens, and Pieter Hugo have emerged during the fiftieth anniversary of independence for many African countries, inspiring a kind of “reverse migration”—a return to the postcolony, which drives an ethico-political as well as aesthetic set of imperatives: to learn to live with ghosts, and to do so more justly.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself: A New Critical Edition by Angela Y. Davis (City Lights Open Media)


Angela Y. Davis - 2013
    

Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen


Fred Ritchin - 2013
    Is visual journalism even effective at all, given the ease with which so many of us can simply record events? And how can the impact of iconic images from the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War be compared to, say, the consequences of leaked images from Abu Ghraib? Do changes in strategy imply changes in accountability and responsibility for visual journalism as a whole? Ritchin intends his discussion--which ranges across new media but also includes uses of video as well as a wide range of books and exhibitions--to provide critical tools with which to approach the various efforts of today's visual (and "citizen") journalists and documentary photographers. He also examines the historical uses of photography and related media to inspire social change, the better to pose the critical question that lies at the heart of his book: How can images promote new thinking and make a difference in the world?

Pornocultura: El espectro de la violencia


Naief Yehya - 2013
    This volume traces the varied forms of this phenomenon in our modernity, especially its depiction in pop culture — erotized violence as visual entertainment. The images of violence on which this book dwells are also related to porn, that side-culture of transgression that defines itself through and against censorship. That’s the other subject of this book, media and mainstream discourse have acquired characteristics from porn: what happens when porn — prohibited genre par excellence — becomes a mass obsession, when porn icons become easily accessible and imbue popular imagination in unpredictable and bizarre ways. Are we so obsessed with entertainment that we have turned death and torture into one more source of enjoyment?

Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited


Tom Shakespeare - 2013
    In this challenging review of the field, leading disability academic and activist Tom Shakespeare argues that disability research needs a firmer conceptual and empirical footing.This new edition is updated throughout, reflecting Shakespeare's most recent thinking, drawing on current research, and responding to controversies surrounding the first edition and the World Report on Disability, as well as incorporating new chapters on cultural disability studies, personal assistance, sexuality, and violence. Using a critical realist approach, Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited promotes a pluralist, engaged and nuanced approach to disability. Key topics discussed include:dichotomies - going beyond dangerous polarizations such as medical model versus social model to achieve a complex, multi-factorial account of disability identity - the drawbacks of the disability movement's emphasis on identity politics bioethics - choices at the beginning and end of life and in the field of genetic and stem cell therapies relationships - feminist and virtue ethics approaches to questions of intimacy, assistance and friendship. This stimulating and accessible book challenges disability studies orthodoxy, promoting a new conceptualization of disability and fresh research agenda. It is an invaluable resource for researchers and students in disability studies and sociology, as well as professionals, policy makers and activists.

Novelty: A History of the New


Michael North - 2013
    But that desire for novelty carries with it a fundamental philosophical problem: If everything has to come from something, how can anything truly new emerge? Is novelty even possible?In Novelty, Michael North takes us on a dazzling tour of more than two millennia of thinking about the problem of the new, from the puzzles of the pre-Socratics all the way up to the art world of the 1960s and ’70s. The terms of the debate, North shows, were established before Plato, and have changed very little since: novelty, philosophers argued, could only arise from either recurrence or recombination. The former, found in nature’s cycles of renewal, and the latter, seen most clearly in the workings of language, between them have accounted for nearly all the ways in which novelty has been conceived in Western history, taking in reformation, renaissance, invention, revolution, and even evolution. As he pursues this idea through centuries and across disciplines, North exhibits astonishing range, drawing on figures as diverse as Charles Darwin and Robert Smithson, Thomas Kuhn and Ezra Pound, Norbert Wiener and Andy Warhol, all of whom offer different ways of grappling with the idea of originality.Novelty, North demonstrates, remains a central problem of contemporary science and literature—an ever-receding target that, in its complexity and evasiveness, continues to inspire and propel the modern. A heady, ambitious intellectual feast, Novelty is rich with insight, a masterpiece of perceptive synthesis.

Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century


James Clifford - 2013
    Engaging with indigenous histories of survival and transformation, James Clifford opens fundamental questions about where we are going, separately and together, in a globalizing, but not homogenizing, world.It was once widely assumed that native, or tribal, societies were destined to disappear. Sooner or later, irresistible economic and political forces would complete the work of destruction set in motion by culture contact and colonialism. But many aboriginal groups persist, a reality that complicates familiar narratives of modernization and progress. History, Clifford invites us to observe, is a multidirectional process, and the word "indigenous," long associated with primitivism and localism, is taking on new, unexpected meanings.In these probing and evocative essays, native people in California, Alaska, and Oceania are understood to be participants in a still-unfolding process of transformation. This involves ambivalent struggle, acting within and against dominant forms of cultural identity and economic power. Returns to ancestral land, performances of heritage, and maintenance of diasporic ties are strategies for moving forward, ways to articulate what can paradoxically be called "traditional futures." With inventiveness and pragmatism, often against the odds, indigenous people today are forging original pathways in a tangled, open-ended modernity. The third in a series that includes The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), this volume continues Clifford's signature exploration of late-twentieth-century intercultural representations, travels, and now returns.

Waving, Not Drowning


Lev Parikian - 2013
    Covering a multitude of issues including technique, player psychology, shirt colours, anecdotes, pencil choices and much more besides, Waving, Not Drowning is the indispensable guide for all budding Maestros.With the tragic death of co-author and doyen of the podium Barrington Orwell in an as yet unexplained contrabassoon accident, it was left to his colleague and friend Lev Parikian to complete the story on his behalf. The result is part biography, part coaching manual, all wisdom.From the profound insights of his professor, the incomparable Etwas Ruhiger, to his views on spectacles management, Orwell’s thoughts, collected in this mercifully short book, will keep you enthralled from auftakt to ovation. It will change your view of conducting forever.

The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness


Veronica T Watson - 2013
    Arguing against the prevailing approach to these texts that says African American writers retreated from issues of "race" when they wrote about whiteness, Veronica T. Watson instead identifies this body of literature as an African American intellectual and literary tradition that she names "the literature of white estrangement."In chapters that theorize white double consciousness (W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt), white womanhood and class identity (Zora Neale Hurston and Frank Yerby), and the socio-spatial subjectivity of southern whites during the civil rights era (Melba Patillo Beals), Watson explores the historically situated theories and analyses of whiteness provided by the literature of white estrangement from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. She argues that these texts are best understood as part of a multipronged approach by African American writers to challenge and dismantle white supremacy in the United States and demonstrates that these texts have an important place in the growing field of critical whiteness studies.

On World Peace: Two Essays by the Holy Kabbalist Rav Yehuda Ashlag


Yehuda Ashlag - 2013
    He awakens us to the knowledge that upon arrival at our final destination all things, even the most damaged will be good.This remarkable perspective helps us to view with awe the system the Creator has given us to develop and grow, and to gain certainty in the end of the journey. How will the process work? For this information, you’ll want read the second essay, One Precept and experience for yourself the route to consciousness that Rav Ashlag so aptly charts out for us.As the handwriting of a righteous person contains spiritual energy, On World Peace includes copies of Rav Ashlag's original writings. The book is nothing less than a gift to humanity.

Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature


Beth H. Piatote - 2013
    military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Piatote tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defense of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form


Anna Kornbluh - 2013
    She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature's unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.

Supersymmetry and Beyond: From the Higgs Boson to the New Physics


Gordon L. Kane - 2013
    He introduces the theory of supersymmetry, which implies that each of the fundamental particles has a "superpartner" that can be detected at energies and intensities only now being achieved in the giant accelerators. If the theory is correct, these superpartners will also help solve many of the puzzles of modern physics—such as the existence of the Higgs boson—as well as one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: the notorious "dark matter" of the universe.An absorbing narrative of science in the making, Supersymmetry and Beyond, now fully updated to reflect recent discoveries at the Large Hadron Collider, offers a glimpse of the cutting edge in one of the most exciting scientific ventures of our times.

Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence


Daniel Colucciello Barber - 2013
    Daniel Barber shows that this is not the case. Addressing the intersection between Deleuze's thought and the notion of religion, he proposes an alliance between immanence and the act of naming God. In doing so, he gives us a way out of the paralysing debate between religion and the secular. What matters is not to take one side or the other, but to create the new in this world.

X – the Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought


Nahum Dimitri Chandler - 2013
    It likewise challenges the conception of analogous objects of study across dominant ethnological disciplines (e.g., anthropology, history, and sociology) and the various forms of cultural, ethnic, and postcolonial studies. With special reference to the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Chandler shows how a concern with the Negro is central to the social and historical problematization that underwrote twentieth-century explorations of what it means to exist as an historical entity referring to their antecedents in eighteenth-century thought and forward into their ongoing itinerary in the twenty-first century. For Du Bois, "the problem of the color line" coincided with the inception of a supposedly modern horizon. The very idea of the human and its avatars the idea of race and the idea of culture emerged together with the violent, hierarchical inscription of the so-called African or Negro into a horizon of commonness beyond all natal premises, a horizon that we can still situate with the term global. In ongoing struggles with the idea of historical sovereignty, we can see the working out of then new concatenations of social and historical forms of difference, as both projects of categorical differentiation and the irruption of originary revisions of ways of being. In a word, the world is no longer and has never been one. The world, if there is such from the inception of something like "the Negro as a problem for thought" could never be, only, one. The problem of the Negro in "America" is thus an exemplary instance of modern historicity in its most fundamental sense. It renders legible for critical practice the radical order of an ineluctable and irreversible complication at the heart of being its appearance as both life and history as the very mark of our epoch.

Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable


H. Porter Abbott - 2013
    Porter Abbott, breaks new ground in Real Mysteries:Narrative and the Unknowable. In it, he revisits the ancient theme of what we cannot know about ourselves and others. But in a sharp departure, he shifts the focus from the representation of this theme to the ways narrative can be manipulated to immerse “the willing reader” in the actual experience of unknowing.As he shows, this difficult and risky art, which was practiced so inventively by Samuel Beckett, was also practiced by other modern writers. Abbott demonstrates their surprising diversity in texts by Beckett, Gabriel García Márquez, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, Tim O’Brien, Kathryn Harrison, and Jeanette Winterson, together with supporting roles by J. G. Ballard, Gertrude Stein, Michael Haneke, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.The demands of this art bear directly on key issues of narrative inquiry, including the nature and limits of reader-resistant texts, the function of permanent narrative gaps, the relation between experiencing a text and its interpretation, the fraught issue of aligning grammatical and narrative syntax, the mixed blessing of our mind-reading capability, and the ethics of reading. Despite its challenges, this book has also been written with an eye to the general reader. In accessible language, Abbott shows how narrative fiction may create spaces in which our ignorance, when it is by its nature absolute, can be not only acknowledged but felt, and why this is important.

The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities


Anna Mae Duane - 2013
    The Children's Table brings together scholars from architecture, philosophy, law, and literary and cultural criticism to provide an overview of the innovative work being done in childhood studies—a transcript of what is being said at the children's table. Together, these scholars argue for rethinking the academic seating arrangement in a way that acknowledges the centrality of childhood to the work of the humanities.The figure we now recognize as a child was created in tandem with forms of modernity that the Enlightenment generated and that the humanities are now working to rethink. Thus the growth of childhood studies allows for new approaches to some of the most important and provocative issues in humanities scholarship: the viability of the social contract, the definition of agency, the performance of identity, and the construction of gender, sexuality, and race. Because defining childhood is a means of defining and distributing power and obligation, studying childhood requires a radically altered approach to what constitutes knowledge about the human subject.The diverse essays in The Children's Table share a unifying premise: to include the child in any field of study realigns the shape of that field, changing the terms of inquiry and forcing a different set of questions. Taken as a whole, the essays argue that, at this key moment in the state of the humanities, rethinking the child is both necessary and revolutionary.Contributors: Annette Ruth Appell, Sophie Bell, Robin Bernstein, Sarah Chinn, Lesley Ginsberg, Lucia Hodgson, Susan Honeyman, Roy Kozlovsky, James Marten, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Carol Singley, Lynne Vallone, John Wall.

Red-Inked Retablos


Rigoberto González - 2013
    Acclaimed author and essayist Rigoberto González commemorates the passion and the pain of these carvings in his new volume Red-Inked Retablos, a moving memoir of human experience and thought.This frank new collection masterfully combines accounts from González’s personal life with reflections on writers who have influenced him. The collection offers an in-depth meditation on the development of gay Chicano literature and the responsibilities of the Chicana/o writer.Widely acclaimed for giving a voice to the Chicano GLBT community, González’s writing spans a wide range of genres: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual books for children and young adults. Introduced by Women’s Studies professor Maythee Rojas, Retablos collects thirteen pieces that together provide a narrative of González’s life from his childhood through his career as a writer, critic, and mentor.In Red-Inked Retablos, González continues to expand his oeuvre on mariposa (literally, “butterfly”) memory, a genre he pioneered in which Chicano/a writers openly address non-traditional sexuality. For González, mariposa memory is important testimony not only about reconfiguring personal identity in relation to masculinity, culture, and religion. It’s also about highlighting values like education, shaping a sex-positive discourse, and exercising agency through a public voice. It’s about making the queer experience a Chicano experience and the Chicano experience a queer one.

Black Male(d): Peril and Promise in the Education of African American Males


Tyrone C. Howard - 2013
    schools. Citing a plethora of disturbing academic outcomes for Black males, this book focuses on the historical, structural, educational, psychological, emotional, and cultural factors that influence the teaching and learning process for this student population. Howard discusses the potential and promise of Black males by highlighting their voices to generate new insights, create new knowledge, and identify useful practices that can significantly improve the schooling experiences and life chances of Black males. Howard calls for a paradigm shift in how we think about, teach, and study Black males.Book Features: Examines current structures, ideologies, and practices that both help and hinder the educational and social prospects of Black males. Translates frequently cited theoretical principles into research-based classroom practice. Documents teacher-student interactions, student viewpoints, and discusses the troubling role that sports plays in the lives of many Black males. Highlights voices and perspectives from Black male students about ways to improve their schooling experiences and outcomes. Identifies community-based programs that are helping Black males succeed.

The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom


James Laidlaw - 2013
    This book argues that it represents not just a new subfield within anthropology but a conceptual renewal of the discipline as a whole, enabling it to take account of a major dimension of human conduct which social theory has so far failed adequately to address. An ideal introduction for students and researchers in anthropology and related human sciences. - Shows how ethical concepts such as virtue, character, freedom and responsibility may be incorporated into anthropological analysis - Surveys the history of anthropology's engagement with morality - Examines the relevance for anthropology of two major philosophical approaches to moral life.

Cruel Modernity


Jean Franco - 2013
    She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. When "draining the sea" to eliminate the support for rebel groups gave license to eliminate entire families, the rape, torture, and slaughter of women dramatized festering misogyny and long-standing racial discrimination accounted for high death tolls in Peru and Guatemala. In the drug wars, cruelty has become routine as tortured bodies serve as messages directed to rival gangs.Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival.

The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincialising Europe


Vasant Kaiwar - 2013
    Kaiwar mobilizes Marxism to demonstrate that subaltern studies is marred by orientalism, and that far richer understandings of ‘Europe’ not to mention ‘colonialism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘difference’ are possible without a postcolonialism captive to phenomenological-existentialism and post-structuralism.

Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America


Christa Craven - 2013
    Together, we suggest avenues for incorporating methodological innovations, collaborative analysis, and collective activism in our scholarly projects. What are the possibilities (and challenges) that exist for feminist ethnography 25 years after initial debates emerged in this field about reflexivity, objectivity, reductive individualism, and the social relevance of activist scholarship? How can feminist ethnography intensify efforts towards social justice in the current political and economic climate? This collection continues a crucial dialog about feminist activist ethnography in the 21st century--at the intersection of engaged feminist research and activism in the service of the organizations, people, communities, and feminist issues we study.

Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader


Ken C Kawashima - 2013
    This collection of translations contains some of Tosaka's most important essays and original articles on Tosaka.

The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing


David Bolt - 2013
    The Metanarrative of Blindness counters this trend by bringing to readings of twentieth-century works in English a perspective appreciative of impairment and disability. Author David Bolt examines representations of blindness in more than forty literary works, including writing by Kipling, Joyce, Synge, Orwell, H. G. Wells, Susan Sontag, and Stephen King, shedding light on the deficiencies of these representations and sometimes revealing an uncomfortable resonance with the Anglo-American science of eugenics.What connects these seemingly disparate works is what Bolt calls “the metanarrative of blindness,” a narrative steeped in mythology and with deep roots in Western culture. Bolt examines literary representations of blindness using the analytical tools of disability studies in both the humanities and social sciences. His readings are also broadly appreciative of personal, social, and cultural aspects of disability, with the aim of bringing literary scholars to the growing discipline of disability studies, and vice versa. This interdisciplinary monograph is relevant to people working in literary studies, disability studies, psychology, sociology, applied linguistics, life writing, and cultural studies, as well as those with a general interest in education and representations of blindness.

A Topology of Everyday Constellations


Georges Teyssot - 2013
    The house is not merely a home but a position for negotiations with multiple spheres--the technological as well as the physical and the psychological. In A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Georges Teyssot considers the intrusion of the public sphere into private space, and the blurring of notions of interior, privacy, and intimacy in our societies. He proposes that we rethink design in terms of a new definition of the practices of everyday life.Teyssot considers the door, the window, the mirror, and the screen as thresholds or interstitial spaces that divide the world in two: the outside and the inside. Thresholds, he suggests, work both as markers of boundaries and as bridges to the exterior. The stark choice between boundary and bridge creates a middle space, an in-between that holds the possibility of exchanges and encounters.If the threshold no longer separates public from private, and if we can no longer think of the house as a bastion of privacy, Teyssot asks, does the body still inhabit the house--or does the house, evolving into a series of microdevices, inhabit the body?

A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism


Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins - 2013
    Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity. Informed by sources as diverse as the writings of John Locke, Alexander Pope, and Mary Wortley Montagu, Zuroski Jenkins begins with a consideration of how literature transported cosmopolitan commercial practices into a model of individual and collective identity. She then extends her argument to the vibrant world of Restoration comedy-most notably the controversial The Country Wife by William Wycherley-where Chinese objects are systematically associated with questionable tastes and behaviors. Subsequent chapters draw on Defoe, Pope, and Swift to explore how adventure fiction and satirical poetry use chinoiserie to construct, question, and reimagine the dynamic relationship between people and things. The second half of the eighteenth century sees a marked shift as English subjects anxiously seek to separate themselves from Chinese objects. A reading of texts including Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea shows that the enthrallment with chinoiserie does not disappear, but is rewritten as an aristocratic perversion in midcentury literature that prefigures modern sexuality. Ultimately, at the century's end, it is nearly disavowed altogether, which is evinced in works like Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.A persuasively argued and richly textured monograph on eighteenth-century English culture, A Taste for China will interest scholars of cultural history, thing theory, and East-West relations.

The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California


Wendy Cheng - 2013
    suburbs are typically imagined to be predominantly white communities, but this is increasingly untrue in many parts of the country. Examining a multiracial suburb that is decidedly nonwhite, Wendy Cheng unpacks questions of how identity—especially racial identity—is shaped by place. She offers an in-depth portrait, enriched by nearly seventy interviews, of the San Gabriel Valley, not far from downtown Los Angeles, where approximately 60 percent of residents are Asian American and more than 30 percent are Latino. At first glance, the cities of the San Gabriel Valley look like stereotypical suburbs, but almost no one who lives there is white.The Changs Next Door to the Díazes reveals how a distinct culture is being fashioned in, and simultaneously reshaping, an environment of strip malls, multifamily housing, and faux Mediterranean tract homes. Informed by her interviews as well as extensive analysis of three episodic case studies, Cheng argues that people’s daily experiences—in neighborhoods, schools, civic organizations, and public space—deeply influence their racial consciousness. In the San Gabriel Valley, racial ideologies are being reformulated by these encounters. Cheng views everyday landscapes as crucial terrains through which racial hierarchies are learned, instantiated, and transformed. She terms the process “regional racial formation,” through which locally accepted racial orders and hierarchies complicate and often challenge prevailing notions of race.There is a place-specific state of mind here, Cheng finds. Understanding the processes of racial formation in the San Gabriel Valley in the contemporary moment is important in itself but also has larger value as a model for considering the spatial dimensions of racial formation and the significant demographic shifts taking place across the national landscape.

A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form


Kenneth Frampton - 2013
    Conceived as a genealogy of twentieth century architecture from 1924 to 2000, it compiles some sixteen comparative analyses of canonical modern buildings ranging from exhibition pavilions and private houses to office buildings and various kinds of public institutions. The buildings are compared in terms of their hierarchical spatial order, circulation structure and referential details. The analyses are organized so as to show what is similar and different between two paired types, thus revealing how modern tradition has been diversely inflected. Richly illustrated, -A Genealogy of Modern Architecture- is a new standard work in architectural education.

Schizo-Culture: The Event, The Book (Semiotext(e))


Sylvère Lotringer - 2013
    Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that this is a healthy sign. -- William Burroughs, from "Schizo-Culture"The legendary 1975 "Schizo-Culture" conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-'68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze's first presentation of the concept of the "rhizome" to Foucault's introduction of his "History of Sexuality" project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion "Schizo-Culture" revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.The "Schizo-Culture" issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.This slip-cased edition includes "The Book: 1978," a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and "The Event: 1975," a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Felix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvere Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Francois Peraldi, and John Cage.

Endnotes 3: Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes


Endnotes Collective - 2013
    The newest installment in this UK journal features articles on: Arab Spring; indignados; Occupy; England riots; austerity and anti-austerity; the logic of gender; class identity; Jasper Bernes on logistics, counterlogistics and the communist prospect; Chris Chen on race, and redefining central concepts of revolutionary theory—spontaneity, mediation, rupture.

The Story of My Accident Is Ours


Rachel Levitsky - 2013
    A product of over 15 years of writing, this multivalent new work both builds on and departs from Levitsky's previous efforts, as she traverses a host of contemporary theoretical discourses and concerns: transgendered bodies, social movements, pharmaceutical management of the emotions, and countless others. "The movement revolves around an accident, the exact nature of which is not disclosed. Despite the abstractions inherent in these constraints, I want the document to be accessible, engaging, addictive, and uncomfortable to hold, as in the instance of a suitcase with something vibrating inside." In this project, the formal poetics of expression confront fiction to create something utterly new.

Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War


Laura Sjoberg - 2013
    Through the lens ofgender, she examines the meaning, causes, practices, and experiences of war, building a more inclusive approach to the analysis of violent conflict between states.Considering war at the international, state, substate, and individual levels, Sjoberg's feminist perspective elevates a number of causal variables in war decision-making. These include structural gender inequality, cycles of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the often overlooked role of emotion in political interactions, gendered understandings of power, and states' mistaken perception of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gendering Global Conflict also calls attention to understudied spaces that can be sites of war, such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Her findings show gender to be a linchpin of even the most tedious and seemingly bland tactical and logistical decisions in violent conflict. Armed with that information, Sjoberg undertakes the task of redefining and reintroducing critical readings of war's political, economic, and humanitarian dimensions, developing the beginnings of a feminist theory of war.

Being, Time, Bios: Capitalism and Ontology


A. Kiarina Kordela - 2013
    In Being, Time, Bios, A. Kiarina Kordela aims to overcome this divide, formulating a historical ontology that draws from Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, and Sartre to theorize the changed character of "being" and "time" under secular capitalism. With insights from film theory, postcolonial studies, and race theory, Kordela's wide-ranging analysis suggests a radically new understanding of contemporary capitalism--one in which uncertainty, sacrifice, immortality, and the gaze are central.

Troubling Care: Critical Perspectives on Research and Practices


Pat Armstrong - 2013
    

Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis


Charles Freeland - 2013
    Lacan himself embraced the term anti-philosophy in characterizing his work, and yet his seminars undeniably evince rich engagement with the Western philosophical tradition. These essays explore how Lacan's work challenges and builds on this tradition of ethical and political thought, connecting his ethics of psychoanalysis to both the classical Greek tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to the Enlightenment tradition of Kant, Hegel, and de Sade. Charles Freeland shows how Lacan critically addressed some of the key ethical concerns of those traditions: the pursuit of truth and the ethical good, the ideals of self-knowledge and the care of the soul, and the relation of moral law to the tragic dimensions of death and desire. Rather than sustaining the characterization of Lacan's work as anti-philosophical, these essays identify a resonance capable of enriching philosophy by opening it to wider and evermore challenging perspectives.

John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship


Andy Kesson - 2013
    This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time.Kesson traces Lyly's work in prose fiction and the theatre, demonstrating previously unrecognised connections between these two forms of entertainment. The final chapter examines how his importance to early modern authorship came to be forgotten in the late seventeenth century and thereafter.This book serves as an introduction to Lyly and early modern literature for students, but its argument for the central importance of Lyly himself and 1580s literary culture makes it a significant contribution to current scholarly debate. Its investigation of the relationship between performance and print means that it will be of interest to those who care about, watch or work in modern performance.

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing


Donna McCormack - 2013
    With a focus on the aesthetics and politics of queer postcolonial narratives, this book examines how unspeakable traumas of colonial and familial violence are communicated through the body. Exploring multisensory epistemologies as queer and anti-colonial acts of resistance, McCormack offers an original engagement with collective and public forms of bearing witness that may emerge in response to institutionalized violence. Intergenerational, communal and fragmented narratives are central to this analysis of ethics, witnessing, and embodied memories.Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is the first text to offer a sustained analysis of Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's intersecting theories of performativity, and to draw out the centrality of witnessing to the performative structure of power. It moves through queer, postcolonial, disability and trauma studies to explore how the repetition of familial violence – throughout multiple generations –may be lessened through an embodied witnessing that is simultaneously painful, disturbing and filled with pleasure. Its focus is selected literary texts by Shani Mootoo, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Ann-Marie MacDonald, and it situates this literary analysis in the colonial histories of Trinidad, Morocco and Canada.

The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution


Matt Richardson - 2013
    It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget.Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies-—Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson-—in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.

Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism


Alex Levant - 2013
    Ilyenkov, whose activity approach offers an anti-reductionist Marxist theory of the subject.

Who Is an Indian?: Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas


Maximilian C. Forte - 2013
    For centuries, the dominant views on this issue have been strongly shaped by ideas of both race and place. But just as important, who is permitted to ask, and answer this question?This collection examines the changing roles of race and place in the politics of defining Indigenous identities in the Americas. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous communities across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it is a rare volume to compare Indigenous experience throughout the western hemisphere. The contributors question the vocabulary, legal mechanisms, and applications of science in constructing the identities of Indigenous populations, and consider ideas of nation, land, and tradition in moving indigeneity beyond race.

From Modernity to Cosmodernity: Science, Culture, and Spirituality


Basarab Nicolescu - 2013
    In practice, this view has promoted much violence among humans. Basarab Nicolescu heralds a new era, cosmodernity, founded on a contemporary vision of the interaction between science, culture, spirituality, religion, and society. Here, reality is plastic and its people are active participants in the cosmos, and the world is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. Ultimately, every human recognizes his or her face in the face of every other human being, independent of his or her particular religious or philosophical beliefs. Nicolescu notes a new spirituality free of dogmas and looks at quantum physics, literature, theater, and art to reveal the emergence of a newer, cosmodern consciousness.

Children's Literature and the Posthuman: Animal, Environment, Cyborg


Zoe Jaques - 2013
    In complicating questions of human identity, ecology, gender, and technology, Jaques engages with a multifaceted posthumanism to understand how philosophy can emerge from children's fantasy, disclosing how such fantasy can build upon earlier traditions to represent complex issues of humanness to younger audiences. Interrogating the place of the human through the non-human (whether animal or mechanical) leads this book to have interpretations that radically depart from the critical tradition, which, in its concerns with the socialization and representation of the child, has ignored larger epistemologies of humanness. The book considers canonical texts of children's literature alongside recent bestsellers and films, locating texts such as Gulliver's Travels (1726), Pinocchio (1883) and the Alice books (1865, 1871) as important works in the evolution of posthuman ideas. This study provides radical new readings of children's literature and demonstrates that the genre offers sophisticated interventions into the nature, boundaries and dominion of humanity.

Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present


Peggy Deamer - 2013
    Eleven historians each discuss in brand new essays the time period they know best, looking at cultural and economic issues, which in light of current economic crises you will find have dealt with diverse but surprisingly familiar economic issues. Told through case studies, the narrative begins in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with 2011, with introductions by Editor Peggy Deamer to pull the main themes together so that you can see how other architects in different times and in different countries have dealt with similar economic conditions. By focussing on what previous architects experienced, you have the opportunity to avoid repeating the past.With new essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Keller Easterling, Lauren Kogod, Robert Hewison, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Robin Schuldenfrei, Deborah Gans, Simon Sadler, Nathan Rich, and Micahel Sorkin.

Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge


Thomas Pfau - 2013
    Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will, person, judgment, action—from antiquity through Scholasticism and on to eighteenth-century moral theory and its critical revision in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Featuring extended critical discussions of Aristotle, Gnosticism, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith, and Coleridge, this study contends that humanistic concepts they seek to elucidate acquire meaning and significance only inasmuch as we are prepared positively to engage (rather than historicize) their previous usages. Beginning with the rise of theological (and, eventually, secular) voluntarism, modern thought appears increasingly reluctant and, in time unable to engage the deep history of its own underlying conceptions, thus leaving our understanding of the nature and function of humanistic inquiry increasingly frayed and incoherent. One consequence of this shift is to leave the moral self-expression of intellectual elites and ordinary citizens alike stunted, which in turn has fueled the widespread notion that moral and ethical concerns are but a special branch of inquiry largely determined by opinion rather than dialogical reasoning, judgment, and practice. A clear sign of this regression is the present crisis in the study of the humanities, whose role is overwhelmingly conceived (and negatively appraised) in terms of scientific theories, methods, and objectives. The ultimate casualty of this reductionism has been the very idea of personhood and the disappearance of an adequate ethical language. Minding the Modern is not merely a chapter in the history of ideas; it is a thorough phenomenological and metaphysical study of the roots of today's predicaments. “[A] learned, deeply important, and accomplished study . . . that calls upon a set of interpretive and communal traditions that, far from being fossilized, contain radical and renovating power, but whose power can be called on, extended, elaborated, and applied to the present and future only if one knows that those traditions can and do remain alive and available, and that we ignore or pronounce them 'past' at our peril. The sweep and comprehensiveness of the work are remarkable. This is not a history of philosophy at all. It is a call for us to rededicate ourselves to a serious, demanding practice of humanistic studies.” —James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University "Minding the Modern is comparable to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. With extraordinary erudition, Pfau locates the philosophical developments that contributed to the agony of the modern mind. Moreover, he helps us see why many who exemplify that intellectual stance do not recognize their own despair. Suffice it to say, this is an immensely important book that hopefully will be read widely and across the disciplines." —Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School

Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy


Diana Fuss - 2013
    Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit.Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry's fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing.

Projective Ecologies (Cancelled)


Chris Reed - 2013
    The field of ecology has movedfrom classical determinism and a reductionistNewtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporaryunderstandings of dynamic systemic change andthe related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility.But ecology is not simply a project of thenatural sciences. Researchers, theorists, socialcommentators, and designers have all usedecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a setof conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications.Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity ofcontemporary ecological research and theory--embracing Felix Guattari's broader definitionof ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential--and speculates on potentialpaths forward for design practices. Where areecological thinking and theory now? What docurrent trajectories of research suggest for futurepractice? How can advances in ecological researchand modeling, in social theory, and in digitalvisualization inform, with greater rigor, morerobust design thinking and practice?New original essays by Peter Del Tredici, Erle Ellis, Christopher Hight, Sanford Kwinter, Sean Lally, Nina-Marie Lister, Chris Reed, Jane WolffReprinted/excerpted essays by Robert Cook, David Fletcher, Richard T.T. Forman, C.S. Holling.With drawings by, Gross.MAX, James CornerField Operations, Sean Lally, Anuradha Mathurand Dilip DaCunha, OMA, Stoss LandscapeUrbanism, West 8.

Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3 (The Seminars of Alain Badiou)


Alain Badiou - 2013
    Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking.In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou’s own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.

Dispossession: The Performative in the Political


Judith Butler - 2013
    This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, ...Available here : readmeaway.com/download?i=0745653812            0745653812 Dispossession: The Performative in the Political PDF by Judith ButlerRead Dispossession: The Performative in the Political PDF from Polity,Judith ButlerDownload Judith Butler's PDF E-book Dispossession: The Performative in the Political

Misogyny Re-Loaded


Abigail Bray - 2013
    By exposing everything from the casual acceptance of snuff pornography in "gore" culture to the framing of rape as a punch line, Abigail Bray links the celebration of sexual sadism to the rise of an authoritarian culture of militarized violence.Arguing that a meaningful collective resistance has been undermined by the mass destruction of genuine social and economic security for ordinary women, "Misogyny Re-loaded" presents a scathing critique of a politically convenient, billionaire-friendly, mainstream brand of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of resources from popular culture, literature, economics, psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and environmental science, this book offers a warning about the growing social and environmental threat of an out-of-control military industrial complex.

Diplomatic Counterinsurgency: Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina


Philippe LeRoux-Martin - 2013
    This compelling eyewitness account of a key political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2007 demonstrates how interventions from foreign powers to end armed conflict can create new forms of conflict that are not only as determined and resilient, but can lead groups to challenge the power of fragile states through political and legal means. Countering such challenges is an integral but often ignored part of peace processes. How do these nonviolent wars evolve? How can the power of fragile states be challenged through nonviolent means in the aftermath of armed conflict? And what is the role of diplomacy in countering such challenges? This book offers key insights for policy makers dealing with fragile states who seek answers to such questions.

Motherhood in Patriarchy: Animosity Toward Mothers in Politics and Feminist Theory - Proposals for Change


Mariam Tazi-Preve - 2013
    The book makes an important contribution to women's studies on issues of reproduction, feminist theory, motherhood, and welfare politics, and offers alternative perspectives.

Zero Hour: Time to Build the Clean Power Platform


Reed Hundt - 2013
    The power platform is where the knowledge platform was in 1993. Emanating from the United States, digital mobile and Internet networks wrapped around the world, changing societies and economies in just a few years. The hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the American move to the new knowledge platform meant for the Clinton Administration that everything supposed to go up (labor force participation, income, productivity), went up. Everything supposed to go down (unemployment, cost of capital), went down. Now the power platform begs to be rebuilt quickly, producing cheap, clean, abundant energy instead of expensive, polluting, and inefficiently consumed power. As was the case for the knowledge platform in the 1990s, if America moves to the new power platform, all can revel in full employment and take satisfaction in reduced inequality in wealth and income. The mass purchasing power of consumers will cast the deciding vote for the new power platform, if and when consumers can buy energy solutions that are both cleaner and cheaper than what is otherwise available. Each American should be able to order and get (1) a cheaper bill for household or business consumption of cleaner energy, (2) no up-front payments for any of the steps necessary to get cheaper, cleaner energy solutions, and (3) convenient access to charging stations for electric cars. These three rights – buy cheaper and cleaner energy solutions, finance up-front costs, and rely on others to provide charging station networks – will make consumers leaders of the move to the new power platform. To give Americans these rights, state governments should charter green banks. These non-profit banks can borrow the money to build the new platform, give the money to the utilities and investor-owned businesses that would do the work, and then get paid back over the years as customers pay for the cleaner, cheaper electricity. As everyone who has bought a house knows, the lower the interest rate on a loan, the less the consumer has to pay on the loan and the more house the consumer can buy. Similarly, the lower the cost of capital for clean energy, the lower the price of the clean energy that the consumer has to pay, and the more clean energy projects people will pay for. After November 2010, when the Republican take-over of Congress killed the already dim prospects for a federal green bank, the governors of Connecticut and later New York decided to create their own state green banks. If Connecticut, New York and others move forward in persuading utilities to lower the energy bills paid by consumers even while selling them clean electricity, other states will follow. In summary: 1. Knowledge is Power. The shift to the new knowledge platform, manifested in digital mobile and the Internet, foreshadows the move to the new power platform. 2. Power of Price. People should pay less for cleaner energy solutions than they would otherwise pay for electricity. 3. Lemonade Tastes Better than Lemons. Political leaders should adopt tax breaks and low cost financing through green banks to produce cheaper, cleaner solutions to the common problems of heating, lighting, air-conditioning, industrial processes and transportation. Customers should be better off moving to the new platform. 4. Borrow Long, Spend Now, Get Paid Back Over Time. Governments should capitalize green banks by borrowing at low rates, with long terms; green banks should provide long term, low interest financing support to clean energy and efficiency suppliers; customers should pay over long time periods either on electricity bill or on mortgage.