Best of
Theory

2017

Carceral Capitalism


Jackie Wang - 2017
    When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral CapitalismIn this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

Living a Feminist Life


Sara Ahmed - 2017
    Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene


Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - 2017
    This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch.Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design


Beatriz Colomina - 2017
    Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina's and Wigley's field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability


Jasbir K. Puar - 2017
    Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 2017
    Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color note includes:* A biography of Kimberle Crenshaw* An in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis* A short summary* A character list and related descriptions* Suggested essay questions and answers* Quotes and analysis* A list of themes* A glossary* Historical context* Two academic essays (if available)* 100 quiz questions to improve test taking skills!

Red Star Over the Third World


Vijay Prashad - 2017
    There has never existed such a revolution of such significance and scale in the history of humanity’. – Hồ Chí Minh From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution remains as an inspiration. After all, that Revolution proved that the working class and the peasantry could not only overthrow an autocratic government but that it could form its own government, in its image. It proved decisively that the working class and the peasantry could be allied. It proved as well the necessity of a vanguard party that was open to spontaneous currents of unrest, but which could guide a revolution to completion. This book explains the power of the October Revolution for the Third World. It is not a comprehensive study, but a small book with a large hope – that a new generation will come to see the importance of this revolution for the working class and peasantry in that part of the world that suffered under the heel of colonial domination. Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (both from LeftWord). He is a columnist for Frontline and Alternet. He is Chief Editor at LeftWord Books.

Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression


Tithi BhattacharyaSerap Saritas Oran - 2017
    While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression.In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation.Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.

The Combahee River Collective Statement


The Combahee River Collective - 2017
    

A Third University Is Possible


La Paperson - 2017
    Author la paperson cracks open uncanny connections between Indian boarding schools, Black education, and missionary schools in Kenya; and between the Department of Homeland Security and the University of California. Central to la paperson’s discussion is the “scyborg,” a decolonizing agent of technological subversion.Drawing parallels to Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, A Third University is Possible ultimately presents new ways of using language to develop a framework for hotwiring university “machines” to the practical work of decolonization. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility


Reina GossettMiss Major Griffin-Gracy - 2017
    Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture.

Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War


Hito Steyerl - 2017
    They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of "neurocurating," in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age.What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world's most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

small white monkeys


Sophie Collins - 2017
    Beginning with the image of the small white monkeys, the text examines the author’s relationship with shame through a series of short studies on, amongst other things, cats, hair as a metonym for the self in poetry and fiction, and perceptions of sexual violence.

What IS Sex?


Alenka Zupančič - 2017
    But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around) -- even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, "What is sex?" rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupancic approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan "orthopedists of the unconscious." Zupancic argues that sexuality is at the point of a "short circuit" between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.

The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences


Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm - 2017
    Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.   By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Women's Revolution and Democratic Confederalism


Abdullah Öcalan - 2017
    Now, writing from prison in Turkey, he has inspired a new political movement. Called Democratic Confederalism, this revolutionary model is developing on the ground in parts of Syria and Turkey; it represents an alternative to religious sectarianism, patriarchy, capitalism and chauvinistic nationalism, providing the blueprint for a burgeoning radical democratic society.This selection of Öcalan’s writings is an indispensable introduction for anyone wanting to engage with his political ideas. His central concepts address the Kurdish question, gender, Democratic Confederalism and the future of the nation. With The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan, his most influential ideas can now be considered and debated in the light of his continuing legacy, most notably in the ongoing revolution in Rojava.

Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements


Julietta Singh - 2017
    Drawing on postcolonial theory, queer theory, new materialism, and animal studies, Singh traces how pervasive the concept of mastery has been to modern politics and anticolonial movements. She juxtaposes destructive uses of mastery, such as the colonial domination of bodies, against more laudable forms, such as intellectual and linguistic mastery, to underscore how the concept—regardless of its use—is rooted in histories of violence and the wielding of power. For anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi, forms of bodily mastery were considered to be the key to a decolonial future. Yet as Singh demonstrates, their advocacy for mastery unintentionally reinforced colonial logics. In readings of postcolonial literature by J. M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, Indra Sinha, and Jamaica Kincaid, Singh suggests that only by moving beyond the compulsive desire to become masterful human subjects can we disentangle ourselves from the legacies of violence and fantasies of invulnerability that lead us to hurt other humans, animals, and the environment.

Futures of Black Radicalism


Gaye Theresa Johnson - 2017
    Here, key scholarly voices from a wide array of disciplines recalls the powerful tradition of Black radicalism as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while defining new directions for Black radical thought. In a time when activists in Ferguson, Palestine, Baltimore, and Hong Kong immediately make connections between their movements, this book makes clear that new Black radical politics are thoroughly internationalist and redraws the links between Black resistance and anti-capitalism. Featuring the key voices in the new intellectual wave of Black radical thinking, this collection outlines one of the most vibrant areas of thought today. With contributions from Cedric Robinson, Elizabeth Robinson, Steven Osuna, Nikhil Pal Singh, Damien Sojoyner, Francoise Verges, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, George Lipsitz, Greg Burris, Paul Ortiz, Darryl C. Thomas, Thulani Davis, Avery Gordon, Shana L. Redmond, Kwame M. Phillips, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and Robin D. G. Kelley.

The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation


Stuart Hall - 2017
    As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity in Western culture were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the “badge of color” W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, “black” became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of “new ethnicities” as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change.Migration was at the heart of Hall’s diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the target of new nationalisms, Hall’s prescient vision helps us to understand today’s crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the twenty-first century.

Listening to Images


Tina M. Campt - 2017
    Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.

Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason


David Harvey - 2017
    Since 1867, when the first of its three volumes was published, it has had a profound effect on politics and economics in theory and practice throughout the world. But Marx wrote in the context of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century: his assumptions and analysis need to be updated in order to address to the technological, economic, and industrial change that has followed Capital's initial publication.In Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, David Harvey not only provides a concise distillation of his famous course on Capital, but also makes the text relevant to the twenty-first century's continued processes of globalization. Harvey shows the work's continuing analytical power, doing so in the clearest and simplest terms but never compromising its depth and complexity. Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason provides an accessible window into Harvey's unique approach to Marxism and takes readers on a riveting roller coaster ride through recent global history. It demonstrates how and why Capital remains a living, breathing document with an outsized influence on contemporary social thought.

Art Can Help


Robert Adams - 2017
    In particular, Adams advocates art that evokes beauty without irony or sentimentality, art that “encourages us to gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence.” Following an introduction, the book begins with two short essays on the works of the American painter Edward Hopper, an artist venerated by Adams. The rest of this compilation contains texts—more than half of which have never before been published—that contemplate one or two works by an individual artist. The pictures discussed are by noted photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Emmet Gowin, Dorothea Lange, Abelardo Morell, Edward Ranney, Judith Joy Ross, John Szarkowski, and Garry Winogrand. Several essays summon the words of literary figures, including Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz. Adams’s voice is at once intimate and accessible, and is imbued with the accumulated wisdom of a long career devoted to making and viewing art. This eloquent and moving book champions art that fights against disillusionment and despair.

Black and Blur


Fred Moten - 2017
    In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and José Esteban Muñoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

Solution Focused Narrative Therapy


Linda Metcalf - 2017
    It harnesses the power of both models—the strengths-based, problem-solving approach of SFT and the value-honoring and re-descriptive approach of Narrative Therapy--to offer brief, effective help to clients that builds on their strengths and abilities to envision and craft preferred outcomes.Authored by a leading trainer, teacher, and practitioner in the field, the book provides an overview of the history of both models and outlines their differences, similarities, limitations and strengths. It then demonstrates how to blend these two approaches in working with such issues as trauma, addictions, grief, relationship issues, family therapy and mood issues. Each concern is illustrated with a case study from practice with individual adults, adolescents, children, and families. Useful client dialogue and forms are included to help the clinician guide clients in practice. Each chapter concludes with a summary describing and reinforcing the principles of the topic and a personal exercise so the reader can experience the approach first hand. Key Features: Describes how two popular postmodern therapy models are combined to create a powerful new therapeutic approach—the first book to do so Includes case studies reflecting the model’s use with individual adults, children, adolescents, and families Provides supporting dialogue and forms for practitioners Authored by a leading figure in SFT and its application in a variety of setting Presents an overview of the history of both models

Understanding Marx's Capital: A Reader's Guide


Rob Sewell - 2017
    Written over 150 years ago, it revealed for the first time the real workings of capitalism. It was, however, met with a wall of silence from mainstream economists and the establishment. Despite this, Capital became regarded in the labour movement as the Bible of the working class.Basing himself on the most advanced material of the age, Marx was able to explain the mysteries that the classical economists were incapable of resolving. What is value? Where does profit come from? How are workers exploited? Why does the system face periodic crises?Marx was able to answer these questions by analysing the main contradictions of capitalism. He was able to explain how the system would eventually reach its limits and enter into decline and demise.Like other sciences, political economy has its own terminology, which can sometimes be difficult to digest. Those prepared to overcome such hurdles, however, will find that Marx's Capital contains a veritable feast of ideas and a new way of looking at the world.Written by authors from the International Marxist Tendency, this book is intended to help guide readers through the pages of volume one of Capital. The aim is to bring out the main themes and ideas contained within Marx's economic writings.Understanding Capital allows us to understand the crisis-ridden world around us today - and, most importantly, how we can radically transform it."The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, " Marx famously asserted. "The point, however, is to change it."

Transforming Communities: How People Like You Are Healing Their Neighborhoods


Sandhya Jha - 2017
    When there's so much conflict around the country and around the corner, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, powerless, and helpless. What can one person do to make a difference?Here's the good news. Millions of everyday people are ready to step into their power to transform their communities. And you are one of them. Take heart and be inspired by real stories of ordinary people who took action and changed their corner of the world, one block at a time. Equal parts inspiration, education, and Do-It-Yourself, Transforming Communities by veteran community activist Sandhya Jha will open your eyes to the world-healing potential within you, and give you the vision, the tools, and the encouragement to start transforming your neighborhood, one person at a time.

Qur'an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam


Shadaab Rahemtulla - 2017
    Shadaab Rahemtulla considers the exegeses of the SouthAfrican Farid Esack (b. 1956), the Indian Asghar Ali Engineer (1939-2013), the African American Amina Wadud (b. 1952), and the Pakistani American Asma Barlas (b. 1950). Rahemtulla examines how these intellectuals have been able to expound this seventh-century Arabian text in a socially liberatingway, addressing their own lived realities of oppression, and thus contexts that are worlds removed from that of the text's immediate audience. Through a close reading of their works, he underlines the importance of both the ethico-social content of the Qur'an and their usage of new and innovativereading practices.This work provides a rich analysis of the thought-ways of specific Muslim intellectuals, thereby substantiating a broadly framed school of thought. Rahemtulla draws out their specific and general importance without displaying an uncritical sympathy. He sheds light on the impact of modern exegeticalcommentary which is more self-consciously concerned with historical context and present realities. In a mutually reinforcing way, this work thus illuminates both the role of agency and hermeneutical approaches in modern Islamic thought.

Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism


Charles W. Mills - 2017
    Liberalism is the creed of fairness - yet liberalism has been complicit with European imperialism and African slavery. Liberalism is the classic ideology of Enlightenment and political transparency - yet liberalism has cast a dark veil over its actual racist past and present. In sum, liberalism's promise of equal rights has historically been denied to blacks and other people of color. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in self-conceivedly liberal polities today. Mills argues that rather than bracket as an anomaly the role of racism in the development of liberal theory, we should see it as shaping that theory in fundamental ways. As feminists have urged us to see the dominant form of liberalism as a patriarchal liberalism, so too Mills suggests we should see it as a racialized liberalism. It is unsurprising, then, if contemporary liberalism has yet to deliver on the recognition of black rights and the correction of white wrongs. These essays look at racial liberalism, past and present: "white ignorance" as a guilty ignoring of social reality that facilitates white racial domination; Immanuel Kant's role as the most important liberal theorist of both personhood and sub-personhood; the centrality of racial exploitation in the United States; and the evasion of white supremacy in John Rawls's "ideal theory" framing of social justice and in the work of most other contemporary white political philosophers. Nonetheless, Mills still believes that a deracialized liberalism is both possible and desirable. He concludes by calling on progressives to "Occupy liberalism!" and develop accordingly a radical liberalism aimed at achieving racial justice.

On Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine


Jewish Voice for Peace - 2017
    Antisemitism is harmful and real in our society. What must also be addressed is how the deployment of false charges of antisemitism or redefining antisemitism can suppress the global progressive fight for justice. There is no one definitive voice on antisemitism and its impact.Jewish Voice for Peace has curated a collection of essays that provides a diversity of perspectives and standpoints. Each contribution explores critical questions concerning uses and abuses of antisemitism in the twenty-first-century, focusing on the intersection between anti-Semitism, accusations of anti-Semitism, and Palestinian human rights activism.This anthology provides a much-needed tool for Palestinian solidarity activists, teachers, as well as Jewish communities. Featuring contributions from Omar Barghouti, Judith Butler, and Rebecca Vilkomerson, as well as activists, academics, students, and cultural workers, On Political Solidarity and Justice includes the voices of Palestinian students and activists, and Jews that are often marginalized in mainstream discussions of anti-Semitism, including Jews of Color and Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews.Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a national, grassroots organization inspired by Jewish tradition to work for a just and lasting peace according to principles of human rights, equality, and international law for all the people of Israel and Palestine. JVP has over 200,000 online supporters, over sixty chapters, a youth wing, a Rabbinic Council, an Artist Council, an Academic Advisory Council, and an Advisory Board made up of leading U.S. intellectuals and artists.

Mission Command: The Who, What, Where, When and Why An Anthology


Donald E. Vandergriff - 2017
    This is Mission Command: a command culture, leadership style, and operating concept that has been embraced by armed forces the world over. While the U.S. Military and many of our allies have formally adopted Mission Command, much work remains to truly understand and implement this style of leadership. In this anthology, 12 authors from 3 nations (United States, United Kingdom, and Norway) offer diverse perspectives on the topic of Mission Command as it relates to their service in the military, law enforcement, government, and private sector. Real-world examples supported by in-depth research provide the who, what, when, where, and why of Mission Command, identifying opportunities to improve how we lead our teams. Topics and authors include: - Unit Cohesion (Joe Labarbera) -Mission Command at Sea (Tommy Krabberød) -The Historical Evolution of Mission Command (Donald Vandergriff) - Improving Army Doctrine (Regina Parker) - Military Campaign Analysis (Gerry Long) - Organizational Culture (Thomas Rebuck) -Mission Command in Garrison (Darrell Fawley) - Training and Leadership for Mission Command (Chad Foster) -Mission Command and Complex Operations (Grant Martin) -Fitness and Mission Command (Daniel Markert & Scott Sonnon) -Civil Policing and Mission Command (Fred Leland) ...and more!http://missioncommand5ws.com

Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy and the Urban Poor


Wataru Kusaka - 2017
    After the ousting of Ferdinando Marcos in 1986, society in the Philippines fractured along socioeconomic lines. The educated middle class began to recognize themselves as moral citizens and political participants while condemning the poor as immoral “masses” who earn money illegally and support corrupt leaders. Conversely, the poor believe themselves to be morally upright and criticize the rich as arrogant oppressors. Wataru Kusaka looks at the dangers of this moralization of politics during the last several decades, and he analyzes the damaging effects it has had on democracy by excluding much of society and marginalizing the interests of those most in need of resources.

Austerity Apparatus


J. Moufawad-Paul - 2017
    In this sense, the austerity apparatus is simply that which functions to police the everyday operations of crisis capitalism. In another sense this apparatus is the mobilization of operations that are a normative part of capitalism even without a crisis But this is simply due to the fact that economic crises are also part of capitalism's day-to-day functioning: capitalism is crisis, implicitly or explicitly." An excavation of the ideology of austerity and its relationship to the mechanisms of capitalism, Austerity Apparatus is a philosophical excursion through a variety of concepts surrounding capitalist crisis and class struggle. Written as a series of interconnected meditations on the problematic of austerity, Austerity Apparatus is a creative intervention rather than a polemic or rigorous analysis; it is designed to force reflection on the ways in which contemporary capitalism conditions its subjects to accept its limits.In examining the problematic of austerity, Moufawad-Paul also discusses the relationship between neoliberalism and fascism and the ways in which the latter is immanent to capitalism. This aspect of Austerity Apparatus should be of particular interest to readers exploring the meaning of the contemporary re-emergence of fascist politics.

Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies


Joanne Barker - 2017
    and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future. Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin

Crazy Horse Weeps: Stories of Young Lives on South Dakota's Indian Reservations


Joseph M. Marshall III - 2017
    Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota children and young adults are disproportionately affected by these trends. Historical trauma, chronically underfunded federal programs, and broken promises on the part of the US government have resulted in gaping health, educational, and economic disparities compared to the general population. Award-winning Lakota writer Joseph Marshall III, who himself was raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, wants to give voice to the hundreds of thousands of native children currently suffering. Crazy Horse Weeps offers a thorough historical overview of how South Dakota reservations have arrived at these tragic circumstances. Through personal narratives and first hand accounts from children and their families, he shows how discrimination, a disorganized tribal government, and a devastating dissolution of Lakota culture by the U.S. government have transformed the landscape of Native American life. These extraordinary challenges, Marshall argues, can be overcome. Using his extensive experience in traditional Lakota wisdom, he proposes a return to traditional tribal values and outlines a plan for a hopeful future.

Becoming a Successful Illustrator


Derek Brazell - 2017
    This edition features even more 'Spotlight on…' sections, with advice from practicing illustrators as well as the people that commission them. You can enjoy added coverage in fields such as moving image, character illustration and social media. There are also new exercises to get you started planning and building your business, and over 200 inspirational examples of artwork, most of which are new to this edition. You can expect practical tips on how to seek work, how to market yourself and how to run your illustration business in an enterprising way, with advice that will prove useful long after your first commission. Building on the resources of the first edition, this continues to be the must-have guide to practicing professionally as an illustrator.Featured illustrators include: Millie MarottaMark UlriksenNatsko SekiEllen Weinstein Stephen Collins ... and many moreFeatured topics include:Finding clientsAgency representationFields of workFinancial and legal requirementsSkills in art and designSelf-promotionShowing workManaging your business

Practicing Presence: Tools for the Overwhelmed Teacher


Lisa J. Lucas - 2017
    

Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People


Danny Katch - 2017
    and the world into uncharted waters, with a bigoted, petty man-child at the head of the planet’s most powerful empire. Danny Katch indicts the hollowness of U.S. political system which led to Trump’s rise and puts forward a vision for a real alternative, a democracy that works for the people.

There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution


Marcello Tarì - 2017
    With equal parts sophistication and raw urgency, Marcello Tarì identifies the original moments as well as the powerful disruptive and creative content haunting our times like a specter. One hundred years after the October Revolution, amidst our current civilizational crisis, is it still possible to think and build communism? Yes, Tarì responds, provided we radically rethink the tradition of revolutionary movements that have followed one century to another. Offering both a militant philosophy and a philosophy of militancy, he deftly confronts the different contemporary movements from the Argentinean insurrection of 2001 to Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, the French movement against the labor law, and the Arab spring, resurrecting and renewing a lineage of revolutionary thought, from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben, that promises to make life livable.

Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing


Stacey Waite - 2017
    Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students (as much work on queer pedagogy has done since the 1990s), this book offers writing and teaching as already queer practices, and contends that the overlap between queer theory and composition presents new possibilities for teaching writing. Teaching Queer argues for and enacts “queer forms”—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing—those that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, and the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms.

The Enigma of Kidson: The Portrait of an Eton Schoolmaster


Jamie Blackett - 2017
    Forget Eton, think Mr Chips, The History Boys and Dead Poets Society. Kidson was a maverick; funny, eccentric, breathtakingly rude, quick-tempered, insulting, kind, compassionate and loyal, with a secret past about which he never spoke. Among his pupils were David Cameron, Matthew Pinsent, Justin Welby, Dominic West, ‘Lupin’, Johnnie Boden, Nat Rothschild and many others, who all tell stories and anecdotes about how he changed their lives. This biography unravels his complex character and discovers that it has been formed by an early life that is stranger than fiction. “Michael Kidson was a wonderful eccentric and an inspiring teacher. Reading this book brought back many happy memories.” —David Cameron “Nothing short of a triumph. I laughed out loud dozens of times….it is really, really wonderful” —Sir Matthew Pinsent

Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror


Kinitra D. Brooks - 2017
    Kinitra D. Brooks creates a racially gendered critical analysis of African diasporic women, challenging the horror genre’s historic themes and interrogating forms of literature that have often been ignored by Black feminist theory.Brooks examines the works of women across the African diaspora, from Haiti, Trinidad, and Jamaica, to England and the United States, looking at new and canonized horror texts by Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Gloria Naylor, and Chesya Burke. These Black women fiction writers take advantage of horror’s ability to highlight U.S. white dominant cultural anxieties by using Africana folklore to revise horror’s semiotics within their own imaginary.Ultimately, Brooks compares the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sycorax (of The Tempest) to Black women writers themselves, who, deprived of mainstream access to self-articulation, nevertheless influence the trajectory of horror criticism by forcing the genre to de-centralize whiteness and maleness.

Aesthetics


Theodor W. Adorno - 2017
    All the while, Adorno remains deeply connected to his surrounding context, offering us a window onto the artistic, intellectual and political confrontations that shaped life in post-war Germany.This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in the development of critical theory.

Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination


Sue Elliot - 2017
    The Sexual Offences Act 1967 changed that in part, sparking a chain of social reforms that altered the face of British society for ever. But it was only the beginning of the long fight for equality in the eyes of the law, in society and in millions of private lives.This vital new oral history – to accompany a Channel 4 documentary of the same name – tells that story through the lives of gay men who lived through those years. Built around the intimate testimonies of some exceptional but largely unknown characters, it gives voice to previously untold stories of denial, deceit and subterfuge, public pain and secret pleasure through the ten tumultuous decades before and since that watershed Act.The human variety of gay experience is all here: lives lived in joyous defiance of the law and a repressive society; others always in fear of a prurient tabloid press. Those committed to love and others to licence: lifelong affairs alongside casual sex.Young gay men may now take for granted the equal treatment denied those who went before. This vibrant celebration of past achievements and hardwon freedoms offers a powerful reminder of how much has changed in the past fifty years, and a warning that hard-won freedoms can so easily be eroded in uncertain times.

Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell


Toril Moi - 2017
    L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.

My Further Disillusionment in Russia


Emma Goldman - 2017
    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Boredom


Tom McDonough - 2017
    The current sense of the word emerged simultaneously with industrialization, mass politics, and consumerism. From Manet onwards, when art represents the everyday within modern life, encounters with tedium are inevitable. And starting with modernism's retreat into abstraction through subsequent demands placed on audiences, from the late 1960s to the present, the viewer's endurance of repetition, slowness or other forms of monotony has become an anticipated feature of gallery-going.In contemporary art, boredom is no longer viewed as a singular experience; rather, it is contingent on diverse social identifications and cultural positions, and exists along a spectrum stretching from a malign condition to be struggled against to an something to be embraced or explored as a site of resistance. This anthology contextualizes the range of boredoms associated with our neoliberal moment, taking a long view that encompasses the political critique of boredom in 1960s France; the simultaneous aesthetic embrace in the United States of silence, repetition, or indifference in Fluxus, Pop, Minimalism and conceptual art; the development of feminist diagnoses of malaise in art, performance, and film; punk's social critique and its influence on theories of the postmodern; and the recognition, beginning at the end of the 1980s, of a specific form of ennui experienced in former communist states. Today, with the emergence of new forms of labor alienation and personal intrusion, deadening forces extend even further into subjective experience, making the divide between a critical and an aesthetic use of boredom ever more tenuous.Artists surveyed include Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Bernadette Corporation, John Cage, Critical Art Ensemble, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Claire Fontaine, Dick Higgins, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Robert Morris, John Pilson, Sigmar Polke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Gerhard Richter, Situationist International, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Andy Warhol, Faith Wilding, Janet ZweigWriters includeIna Blom, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jennifer Doyle, Alla Efimova, Jonathan Flatley, Julian Jason Haladyn, The Invisible Committee, Jonathan D. Katz, Chris Kraus, Tan Lin, Sven Lutticken, John Miller, Agne Narusyte, Sianne Ngai, Peter Osborne, Patrice Petro, Christine Ross, Moira Roth, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandr Zinovyev

Why We Revolt: A patient revolution for careful and kind care


Victor Montori - 2017
    Montori rescues the language of patient care to propose a revolution of compassion and solidarity, of unhurried conversations, and of careful and kind care.

Renew!: Become a Better and More Authentic Writing Teacher


Shawna Coppola - 2017
    Instructional strategies that have worked in the past may need to evolve accordingly. Coppola guides K-8 writing teachers with a three-part framework for Rethinking, Revising, and Renewing their approach—and finding new energy along the way. Using the framework, Renew! examines the most pervasive educational practices in writing instruction and poses questions that guide teachers to revise those practices to ensure they are effective for all students. Coppola believes the work is challenging, yet critical, referencing R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Knowledge Doubling Curve:” According to Fuller's paradigm, the amount of time it takes for us to increase our collective knowledge base by 100 percent will continue to shrink the older we get. If this is true—or even close to being true—how can we, as educators, ever feel satisfied with teaching our students the same concepts, using the same methodologies and practices, that we have in the past?The book offers a road map for renewing key aspects of our practice, including:  How we teach the writing process: Over time and frequent usage, some of our favorite teaching strategies can become rigid. Coppola gives a candid account of how her enthusiasm for “the writing process” as an undergraduate led her to teach writing for years as a set of pre-determined steps. Now she teaches that there are many variations of the writing process, and many twists and turns along the path. One foundational strategy used is opening up her own process as a writer—and her writer’s notebook—to students and encouraging them to think and talk about their process with classmates. What we mean by “Writing:” Coppola argues that drawing isn’t an accompaniment to writing; it is writing. Its another form of composition through which students can tell stories, convey ideas, and engage readers. The book is full of visual compositions by students as well as Shawna’s wonderfully simple and evocative sketches from her writer’s notebook. The tools we use to teach writing: The most ubiquitous tools used to teach writing—from anchor charts to graphic organizers to sentence starters etc.—tend to be teacher-centric rather than student-centric. Renew! invites students into the process of constructing tools that are meaningful and helpful to them. The book includes a range of examples of tools built collaboratively with students.  How we assess and evaluate student writing: Coppola draws a distinction between assessment—which should be an interactive conversation with students—and evaluation, which is about judging and categorizing what students know and can do. Renew! offers a range of examples and resources that illustrate effective feedback for student writers, including online videos of teacher-student and peer-to-peer conferences.   Renew! also offers ideas for how teachers can nurture their own writing lives and thus reinvigorate their instructional practice. Through rethinking, revising, and renewing their practice, teachers can not only strengthen students’ skills as writers, but also nurture students to become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and risk takers in the classroom and in our rapidly-changing world.

The Introverted Lawyer: A Seven Step Journey Toward Authentically Empowered Advocacy


Heidi K. Brown - 2017
    While loquacious law students, professors, lawyers, and judges thrive in a world dominated by the Socratic Method and rapid-fire oral discourse, quiet thinkers and writers can become sidelined. Introverted, shy, or socially anxious law students and lawyers often question their place in the legal arena, though research reveals they offer much-needed gifts to the profession, including active listening, empathy, contemplative analysis, and impactful writing. As legal education and law practice adjust to economic shifts and changing client mindsets, this is a prime opportunity for the legal community to make room for subtler voices. The Introverted Lawyer invites that dialogue into the legal profession. This book explains the differences among introversion, shyness, and social anxiety and how each manifests in the legal context; describes how the extrovert bias in law school and practice detrimentally can impact quiet individuals, fueling enhanced anxiety in a vocation already fraught with mental health issues; explores how quiet law students and lawyers offer greatly needed proficiencies to the legal profession; and finally, presents a seven-step process to help introverted, shy, and socially anxious individuals amplify their authentic lawyer voices, capitalize on their natural strengths, and diminish unwarranted stress. The Introverted Lawyer provides practical, tangible steps for individual growth, as well as a sound platform to enable caring professors, law office mentors, and bar association representatives to educate themselves, their students, and developing lawyers about this important and often overlooked issue.

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible


Malik Gaines - 2017
    These ideas paved the way for imaginative models for social transformation through performance. Using the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—Malik Gaines considers how performances of that era circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling commonplace understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following the transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois, Josephine Baker, and other modern political actors, from the United States to West Africa, Europe and back, this book considers how artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented.Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life—from American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, to California-based performer Sylvester—Gaines explores how shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional distinction.Bringing the lens forward through contemporary art performance at the 2015 Venice Biennial, Gaines connects the idea of sixties radicality to today’s interest in that history, explores the aspects of those politics that are lost in translation, and highlights the black expressive strategies that have maintained potent energy. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left articulates the role black theatricality played in the radical energy of the sixties, following the evolution of black identity politics to reveal blackness’s ability to transform contemporary social conditions.

Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean


Randy M Browne - 2017
    In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive.Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death.Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century


Manu Samriti Chander - 2017
    Chander demonstrates the importance of Romantic notions of authorship to such poets as Henry Derozio (India), Egbert Martin (Guyana), and Henry Lawson (Australia), using the work of these poets, each prominent in the national cultural of his own country, to explain the crucial role that the Romantic myth of the poet qua legislator plays in the development of nationalist movements across the globe. The first study of its kind, Brown Romantics examines how each of these authors develop poetic means of negotiating such key issues as colonialism, immigration, race, and ethnicity.-- "Modern Language Review"

Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects


Mari Ruti - 2017
    How should we understand this stance? Is it the best foundation for queer theory? In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti cautions queer theorists against turning antinormativity into a new norm while highlighting the ways in which opting out rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely transformative ways. She offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of queer theory, including debates about affect theory, subjectivity, negativity, defiance, agency, and bad feelings. In doing so, Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the political divisions that have animated the field over the last decade. The Ethics of Opting Out grapples with queer negativity, particularly in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and with the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, David Eng, and Heather Love. In this wide-ranging and thoughtful book, Ruti maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.

America and the Future of War: The Past as Prologue


Williamson Murray - 2017
    This study examines what history suggests about the future possibilities and characteristics of war and the place that thinking about conflict deserves in the formation of American strategy in coming decades. The author offers a historical perspective to show that armed conflict between organized political groups has been mankind’s constant companion and that America must remain prepared to use its military power to deal with an unstable, uncertain, and fractious world.Williamson Murray shows that while there are aspects of human conflict that will not change no matter what advances in technology or computing power may occur, the character of war appears to be changing at an increasingly rapid pace with scientific advances providing new and more complex weapons, means of production, communications, and sensors, and myriad other inventions, all capable of altering the character of the battle space in unexpected fashions. He explains why the past is crucial to understanding many of the possibilities that lie in wait, as well as for any examination of the course of American strategy and military performance in the future—and warns that the moral and human results of the failure of American politicians and military leaders to recognize the implications of the past are already apparent.

Contemporary Left Antisemitism


David Hirsh - 2017
    This book looks at the kind of antisemitism which is tolerated or which goes unacknowledged in apparently democratic spaces: trade unions, churches, left-wing and liberal politics, the social gatherings of the chattering classes and the seminars and journals of the radical intellectuals. It analyses how criticism of Israel can mushroom into antisemitism and it looks at struggles over how antisemitism is defined. It focuses on ways in which those who raise the issue of antisemitism are often accused of doing so in bad faith for nationalist reasons. Hostility to Zionism has become a language in which opposition to imperialism, to neo-liberalism and to global capitalism is articulated and so it sets up a toxic way of imagining most Jews.Weaving together theoretical discussion with case study narrative in an engaging and interesting way, this book is a global study which is essential reading for scholars working in sociology, politics, Middle East studies, Israel studies, Jewish studies, philosophy, anthropology, journalism and history, as well as anyone interested in current affairs and politics.

The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500-2000


John Tutino - 2017
    In a sweeping analytical narrative spanning the sixteenth century to today, John Tutino challenges our basic assumptions about the forces that shaped global capitalism--setting families and communities at the center of histories that transformed the world.Despite invasion, disease, and depopulation, Mexico's heartland communities held strong on the land, adapting to sustain and shape the dynamic silver capitalism so pivotal to Spain's empire and world trade for centuries after 1550. They joined in insurgencies that brought the collapse of silver and other key global trades after 1810 as Mexico became a nation, then struggled to keep land and self-rule in the face of liberal national projects. They drove Zapata's 1910 revolution--a rising that rattled Mexico and the world of industrial capitalism. Although the revolt faced defeat, adamant communities forced a land reform that put them at the center of Mexico's experiment in national capitalism after 1920. Then, from the 1950s, population growth and technical innovations drove people from rural communities to a metropolis spreading across the land. The heartland urbanized, leaving people searching for new lives--dependent, often desperate, yet still pressing their needs in a globalizing world.A masterful work of scholarship, The Mexican Heartland is the story of how landed communities and families around Mexico City sustained silver capitalism, challenged industrial capitalism--and now struggle under globalizing urban capitalism.

The Psychology of Oppression


E.J.R. David - 2017
    Painful historical examples and modern-day occurrences of oppression including mass incarceration, LGBTQ and transgender issues, police brutality, immigration reform, anti-Muslim sentiments, and systemic racism are explored. How oppression exists and operates on various levels, the mental and behavioral health consequences of oppression, and promising clinical and community programs to eradicate oppression are reviewed. The authors hope that by providing readers with a basic understanding of oppression, it will motivate them to combat bias to create a more just, harmonious, and healthy world.Highlights include: Introduces readers to the psychological theories and research on oppression whereas most other books focus on a sociological or ethnic studies perspective.Introduces readers to the fundamentals of oppression--what it is, who experiences it, and where and when it has taken place.Dissects the layers of oppression--how it is expressed blatantly or subtly and overtly or covertly.Explores how oppression is manifested on different levels (including interpersonal, institutional/systemic, and internalized) for a deeper understanding.Demonstrates how oppression influences peoples' thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors, and how it influences peoples' well-being and health.Explores why certain people are discriminated against simply because of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality and the resulting psychological implications.Highlights what researchers and service providers are doing to address oppression via encouraging community and clinical interventions.Examines why oppression exists and has persisted throughout history and what it looks like today.Recommends future psychological work on oppression across research, clinical, and community contexts.Ideal as a text in upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate courses on oppression, prejudice and discrimination, race relations, ethnic studies, ethnic and racial minorities, multicultural or cross-cultural psychology, multicultural counseling, diversity, women's studies, LGBTQ studies, disability studies, and social justice taught in psychology, social work, and counseling. Behavioral and mental health providers in both clinical and community contexts will also appreciate this book.

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times


Alison McQueen - 2017
    In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccolo Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.

The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future


Marjanne Van Helvert - 2017
    Adjectives like -sustainable, - -green- and -eco- describe this new wave of socially committed design. But though today's conditions are urgent and particular, the ideologies behind these new products are often not totally new, but rather a part of design history. Contemporary sustainable design is just the newest chapter of a story that stretches back throughout the previous centuries. The Responsible Object presents a selected history of socially committed design strategies within the Western design tradition of roughly the last 150 years, from William Morris to Victor Papanek, and from VKhUTEMAS to FabLab. It includes about 20 interstitial mini-posters with slogans from the text, printed on different colored papers.

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano: Bookmarked


David Ryan - 2017
    In his Bookmarked entry, critically celebrated author David Ryan shows how this modernist masterpiece has affected his life and creative work.

Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy (10th anniversary edition)


Stephanie Vanderslice - 2017
    Now brought up-to-date with new issues that have emerged with the explosion of creative writing courses in higher education, the new edition includes:· Guides to and case studies of workshop practice· Discussions on grading and the myth of “the easy A”· Explorations of the relationship between reading and writing· A new chapter on creative writing research· A new chapter on games, fan-fiction and genre writing· New chapters on identity and activismCan Creative Writing Really Be Taught? is supported by a companion website at www.bloomsbury.com, including extensive links to online resources, teaching case studies and lesson plans.

Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How To Listen to the World)


Dominic Pettman - 2017
    Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen.

Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism


Marie Thompson - 2017
    But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Weaving together affect theory with technical descriptions, philosophical accounts, acoustic ecology and a range of noises - from disruptive neighbours to the music of Maria Chavez -Beyond Unwanted Sound critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Instead, through the development of an 'ethico-affective' approach, this book aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity - the capacity to modulate, transform and perturb. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

Happy Parents, Happy Kids: Parenting Advice for the Twenty-First Century


Daisaku Ikeda - 2017
    The SGI president's warm and broad-mindedadvice will serve as reliable guideposts as mothers and fathers seekto build happy families.Topics include:* Respecting each child's individuality* Dealing with delinquency* The importance of parents changing themselves first* How best to discipline* School and studies* Contributing to society

Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History


Kadji Amin - 2017
    Not only sexually queer, Genet was also a criminal and a social pariah, a bitter opponent of the police state, and an ally of revolutionary anticolonial movements. In Disturbing Attachments, Kadji Amin challenges the idealization of Genet as a paradigmatic figure within queer studies to illuminate the methodological dilemmas at the heart of queer theory. Pederasty, which was central to Genet's sexuality and to his passionate cross-racial and transnational political activism late in life, is among a series of problematic and outmoded queer attachments that Amin uses to deidealize and historicize queer theory. He brings the genealogy of Genet's imaginaries of attachment to bear on pressing issues within contemporary queer politics and scholarship, including prison abolition, homonationalism, and pinkwashing. Disturbing Attachments productively and provocatively unsettles queer studies by excavating the history of its affective tendencies to reveal and ultimately expand the contexts that inform the use and connotations of the term queer.

Black Women's Liberatory Pedagogies: Resistance, Transformation, and Healing Within and Beyond the Academy


Olivia N. Perlow - 2017
    Contributors for this anthology submitted works from an array of academic disciplines and learning environments, inviting readers to bear witness to black women faculty's classroom experiences, as well as their pedagogical approaches both inside and outside of the higher education classroom that have fostered transformative teaching-learning environments. Through this multidimensional lens, the editors and contributors view instruction and learning as a political endeavor aimed at changing the way we think about teaching, learning. and praxis.

A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut


Toufoul Abou-Hodeib - 2017
    For middle-class residents of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Beirut, these debates took on critical importance. As Beirut was reshaped into a modern city, legal codes and urban projects pressed at the home from without, and imported commodities and new consumption habits transformed it from within. Drawing from rich archives in Arabic, Ottoman, French, and English—from advertisements and catalogues to previously unstudied government documents—A Taste for Home places the middle-class home at the intersection of local and global transformations. Middle-class domesticity took form between changing urbanity, politicization of domesticity, and changing consumption patterns. Transcending class-based aesthetic theories and static notions of "Westernization" alike, this book illuminates the self-representations and the material realities of an emerging middle class. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib offers a cultural history of late Ottoman Beirut that is at once global in the widest sense of the term and local enough to enter the most private of spaces.

From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice


Rob Halpern - 2017
    As editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw write in their introduction, "We are not interested in offering an 'authoritative' canon of New Narrative work, nor are we interested in consolidating an official version of New Narrative's history. Rather, we want to use this as an opportunity to foreground New Narrative as a movement that is still coming into focus, a more or less unstable object that doesn't want to be 'fixed,' codified, or hardened into a limited & limiting list of names and works. One of our motivating questions is Why New Narrative now? Or, What are the stakes of New Narrative for our contemporary moment? In other words, while we remain committed to a set of past works that have been identified as 'New Narrative,' we are equally committed to maintaining New Narrative as a dynamic and ongoing project, one with consequences for our present writing." Roomy in the collective vision that they manifest, the twenty-four contributions to FROM OUR HEARTS TO YOURS address the AIDS crisis, the politics of race, the structural impacts of neo-liberalism on urban space, and the movement across queer, straight and transgender subject positions. Other topics of investigation include the category of queer art, the importance of "feeling," the fiction of personality, the necessity of risk, the function of pedagogy, the strategy of appropriation, as well as scandal and gossip as these topics have been important to New Narrative and its expanded sphere of influence. Contributors include: Lindsey Boldt, Brandon Brown, David Buuck, Amanda Davidson, Robert Dewhurst, Thom Donovan, Joel Fares, Ariel Goldberg, Rob Halpern, Carla Harryman, Colin Herd, Kaplan Harris, Arnold J. Kemp, Trisha Low, Jason Morris, Trace Peterson, Ted Rees, Camille Roy, Kathy Lou Schultz, Eric Sneathen, Brian Teare, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Catherine Wagner, and Stephanie Young.

Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge


Sara Carpenter - 2017
    Scholar-activists Sara Carpenter and Sharazad Mojab closely examine the core philosophical concepts behind Marxist analysis of learning and extend its critique with significant implications for critical education scholarship, research, and practice by drawing upon work by feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial scholars.    They reconsider the contributions of Marx, Gramsci, and Freire to educational theory from an explicitly feminist perspective, moving Marxist analysis of education into a more complex relation to patriarchal and imperialist capitalism. Their distinctive approach focuses on the nature of schooling and educational institutions, and pushes past previous literature on Marxist-feminism.  Revolutionary Learning’s significance lies not only in its contribution to theory, but also in its engagement with pedagogical practice through careful attention to the daily work of educators and how this can be connected to the broader environment of public policy, civil society, and the market.

Negotiating Disability: Disclosure and Higher Education


Stephanie L. Kerschbaum - 2017
    This collection reveals the pervasiveness of disability issues and considerations within many higher education populations and settings, from classrooms to physical environments to policy impacts on students, faculty, administrators, and staff. While disclosing one's disability and identifying shared experiences can engender moments of solidarity, the situation is always complicated by the intersecting factors of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. With disability disclosure as a central point of departure, this collection of essays builds on scholarship that highlights the deeply rhetorical nature of disclosure and embodied movement, emphasizing disability disclosure as a complex calculus in which degrees of perceptibility are dependent on contexts, types of interactions that are unfolding, interlocutors' long- and short-term goals, disabilities, and disability experiences, and many other contingencies.

The Freedom of Things: An Ethnology of Control


Peter Harrison - 2017
    With remarkable clarity, Peter Harrison reveals how the assumed escape from 'savagery' the Enlightenment promised was ever only the transformation of humans into commodities freely available in a market: independence and autonomy being replaced by dependence and drudgery.

Dismembered: Native Disenrollment and the Battle for Human Rights


David E. Wilkins - 2017
    This depopulation is not being perpetrated by the federal government, but by Native governments that are banishing, denying, or disenrolling Native citizens at an unprecedented rate. Since the 1990s, tribal belonging has become more of a privilege than a sacred right. Political and legal dismemberment has become a national phenomenon with nearly eighty Native nations, in at least twenty states, terminating the rights of indigenous citizens.The first comprehensive examination of the origins and significance of tribal disenrollment, Dismembered examines this disturbing trend, which often leaves the disenrolled tribal members with no recourse or appeal. At the center of the issue is how Native nations are defined today and who has the fundamental rights to belong. By looking at hundreds of tribal constitutions and talking with both disenrolled members and tribal officials, the authors demonstrate the damage this practice is having across Indian Country and ways to address the problem.

The Ends of Collage


Yuval EtgarBenjamin H.D. Buchloh - 2017
    The book attempts to survey different approaches to- and definitions of collage and the role of this medium in two crucial historical moments: its emergence in the early decades of the 20th century, and the introduction of digital media during the postmodern moment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book includes full length writings by theorists, historians, and artists including Yuval Etgar (The Ends of Collage), Herta Wescher (The Forerunners), Clement Greenberg (Collage), Louis Aragon (The Challenge to Painting), Max Ernst (Beyond Painting), Elza Adamowicz (Towards a Definition of Surrealist Collage), Hans Arp (Collage), Hannah Höch (On Collage), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste), Brandon Taylor (The Cutting Edge), Groupe Mu (Twelve Fragment to Take Off [In 40,000 Signs]), John Stezaker (Cutting and framing), Craig Owens (The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism), Douglas Crimp (Pictures), Richard Prince (Practicing Without A License 1977), Martha Rosler (Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations, Some Considerations), Sherrie Levine (Statement), and Ali Smith (On Edge). The Ends of Collage was first published on the occasion of a two part exhibition at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York and London, bearing the same title. The book was edited by Yuval Etgar.

Histories of Violence: Post-War Critical Thought


Brad Evans - 2017
    And though we all fear violence, what actually constitutes violence, who perpetuates it, and why, are questions of great debate, which have drawn the attention of the world’s foremost thinkers for centuries. Offering an accessible introduction to post-war critical thought on the topic, Histories of Violence examines how many prominent theorists from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Slavoj Žižek have grappled with these questions.  Offering an insightful and thought-provoking guide to the work of many famous writers who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, and cultural study, Histories of Violence is an essential interrogation of critical thought as it relates to an ever-present topic.

Visual Communication Design: An Introduction to Design Concepts in Everyday Experience


Meredith Davis - 2017
    In response, Meredith Davis and Jamer Hunt provide a new slant on design basics from the perspective of audiences and users. Chapters break down our interactions with communication as a sequence of meaningful episodes, each with related visual concepts that shape the interpretive experience. Explanatory illustrations and professional design examples support definitions of visual concepts and discussions of context. Work spans print, screen, and environmental applications from around the world. This introduction to visual communication design demystifies the foundational concepts that underpin professional design decisions and shape our experiences in a complex visual world.

Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film


Dawn Keetley - 2017
    From medieval manuscript illustrations to modern works of science fiction and horror, plants that manifest monstrous agency defy human control, challenge anthropocentric perception, and exact a violent vengeance for our blind and exploitative practices. Plant Horror explores how depictions of monster plants reveal concerns about the viability of our prevailing belief systems and dominant ideologies as well as a deep-seated fear about human vulnerability in an era of deepening ecological crisis. Films discussed include The Day of the Triffids, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Wicker Man, Swamp Thing, and The Happening.

Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System


John Rieder - 2017
    Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.

Advancing Conversations: Srecko Horvat - Subversion!


Srećko Horvat - 2017
    Drawing from his own experience of participating in different protest movements all around the world, working closely with WikiLeaks and being one of the protagonists of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, Horvat resists the prevailing melancholy of the Left by offering new political imagination beyond traditional concepts. Instead of the tension between horizontal movements or vertical political parties, "Subversion" opts for a radical dialectics of both methods as the only way out of our current deadlock. If there is a crack in everything, the way to use the light that gets in is constructive subversion.

Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design


Zeynep Çelik Alexander - 2017
    Focusing in particular on Germany and tracing the story up to the start of World War II, Alexander reveals the tension between intellectual meditation and immediate experience to be at the heart of the modern discourse of aesthetics, playing a major part in the artistic and teaching practices of numerous key figures of the period, including Heinrich Wölfflin, Hermann Obrist, August Endell, László Moholy-Nagy, and many others. Ultimately, she shows, kinaesthetic knowing did not become the foundation of the human sciences, as some of its advocates had hoped, but it did lay the groundwork—at such institutions as the Bauhaus—for modern art and architecture in the twentieth century.

The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/abled girls of color in the school-prison nexus


Subini Ancy Annamma - 2017
    Focusing uniquely on the pathologization of female students of color, whose voices are frequently engulfed by labels of deviance and disability, a distinct and underrepresented experience of the school-to-prison pipeline is detailed through original, qualitative methodologies. The book’s DisCrit framework, grounded in interdisciplinary research, draws on scholarship from education, women’s and girl’s studies, critical race theory, legal studies, and more.

The History of Reason in the Age of Madness: Foucault’s Enlightenment and a radical critique of psychiatry


John Iliopoulos - 2017
    Foucault's exploration of the origins of psychiatry applies his own theories of power, truth and reason and draws on Kant's philosophy, shedding new light on the way we perceive the birth and development of psychiatric practice. Following Foucault's adoption of 'limit attitude', which investigates the limits of our thinking as points of disruption and renewal of established frames of reference, this book dispels the widely accepted belief that psychiatry represents the triumph of rationalism by somehow conquering madness and turning it into an object of neutral, scientific perception. It examines the birth of psychiatry in its full complexity: in the late eighteenth century, doctors were not simply rationalists but also alienists, philosophers of finitude who recognized madness as an experience at the limits of reason, introducing a discourse which conditioned the formation of psychiatry as a type of medical activity. Since that event, the same type of recognition, the same anthropological confrontation with madness has persisted beneath the calm development of psychiatric rationality, undermining the supposed linearity, absolute authority and steady progress of psychiatric positivism. Iliopoulos argues that Foucault's critique foregrounds this anthropological problematic as indispensable for psychiatry, encouraging psychiatrists to become aware of the epistemological limitations of their practice, and also to review the ethical and political issues which madness introduces into the apparent neutrality of current psychiatric discourse.

The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV


Kane Race - 2017
    What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts - such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods - mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we 'learn to be affected' by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.

Under the Radar: Underground Zines and Self-Publications 1965-1975


Annette Gilbert - 2017
    Hectographs, mimeographs, and offset printing not only allowed for the production of small, lowcost print runs but also promote a unique aesthetic: using wild mock-ups, messianic amateurs combined typescript aesthetics, handwriting, scribbled drawings, assemblages of collaged visuals, porn photos, snapshots, and comic strips. The typography consciously frees itself, in parallel to a liberalization of linguistic and visual forms of expression in the name of a new sensibility. This book (which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Weserburg in Bremen) is the first to present the underground and self-published works that came out of West Germany in such depth, while also showing the internationalcontext in which they emerged: not as an anecdotal history but as an attempt to tap into the aesthetic cosmos of a Do-It-Yourself rebellion, one that also challenges us to take a new look at the current boom in independent publishing, the risograph aesthetic, and so on.

Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction


Mark C Jerng - 2017
    According to dominant theories of racial formation, we see race on bodies and persons and then link those perceptions to unjust practices of racial inequality. Racial Worldmaking argues that we do not just see race. We are taught when, where, and how to notice race by a set of narrative and interpretive strategies. These strategies are named "racial worldmaking" because they get us to notice race not just at the level of the biological representation of bodies or the social categorization of persons. Rather, they get us to embed race into our expectations for how the world operates. As Mark C. Jerng shows us, these strategies find their most powerful expression in popular genre fiction: science fiction, romance, and fantasy.Taking up the work of H.G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick and others, Racial Worldmaking rethinks racial formation in relation to both African American and Asian American studies, as well as how scholars have addressed the relationships between literary representation and racial ideology. In doing so, it engages questions central to our current moment: In what ways do we participate in racist worlds, and how can we imagine and build one that is anti-racist?

The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story


Scott Brewster - 2017
    The main task of the volume is to properly situate the genre within historical and contemporary literary cultures across the globe, and to explore its significance within wider literary contexts as well as those of the supernatural. The Handbook offers the most significant contribution to this new critical field to date, assembling some of its leading scholars to examine the key contexts and issues required for understanding the emergence and development of the ghost story.

Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present


Tom Eyers - 2017
    Where formalism has often been accused of sealing texts within themselves, Eyers demonstrates instead how a renewed, speculative formalism can illuminate the particular ways in which literature actively opens onto history, politics, and nature, in a connective movement that puts formal impasses to creative use.   Through a combination of philosophical reflection and close rhetorical readings, Eyers explores the possibilities and limits of deconstructive approaches to the literary, the impact of the “digital humanities” on theory, and the prospects for a formalist approach to “world literature.” The book includes sustained close readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, as well as Alain Badiou, Paul de Man, and Fredric Jameson.

Adam Pendleton: Black Dada Reader


Adam Pendleton - 2017
    The Reader brings a diverse range of cultural figures into a shared conceptual space, including Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, LeRoi Jones, Sun Ra, Adrian Piper, Joan Retallack, Harryette Mullen, Ron Silliman and Gertrude Stein, as well as artists from different generations such as Ad Reinhardt, Joan Jonas, William Pope.L, Thomas Hirschhorn and Stan Douglas. The Reader also includes essays on the concept of Black Dada and its historical implications from curators and critics including Adrienne Edwards (Walker Arts Center / Performa), Laura Hoptman (MoMA), Tom McDonough (Binghamton), Jenny Schlenzka (PS122) and Susan Thompson (Guggenheim).

Disney, Leadership & You: House of the Mouse Ideas, Stories & Hope For The Leader In You


J. Jeff Kober - 2017
    Who has led this organization to greatness, and what are the lessons you can glean from these leaders to benefit your own organization? Take a look at Disney leaders great and small--from Walt Disney and Bob Iger, to remarkable animators, Imagineers, and Cast Members. Study how these leaders attain real results while working effectively with others. See examples from Snow White to Frozen, from Disneyland to Shanghai Disney, and from Aulani to the Disney Cruise Line. Experience ideas and stories throughout the book that you can apply back to your own organization. Learn how you can become a great leader from J. Jeff Kober, Disney author, former Disney Institute leader, and the foremost analyst on best-in-business practices at Disney.

Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain


David Russell - 2017
    In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic.Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom--an "aesthetic liberalism"--not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made.Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

The Nyaya-sutra: Selections with Early Commentaries


Matthew Dasti - 2017
    This translation of selections from the early school of Nyāya focuses on its foundational text, the Nyāya-sūtra (c. 200 CE), with excerpts from the early commentaries. It will be welcomed by specialists and non-specialists alike seeking an accessible text that both represents some of the best of Indian philosophical thought and can be integrated into courses on Indian philosophy, religion, and intellectual culture.

Making Design Theory


Johan Redström - 2017
    Tendencies toward "academization" of traditionally practice-based fields have forced design to articulate itself as an academic discipline, in theoretical terms. In this book, Johan Redström offers a new approach to theory development in design research-one that is driven by practice, experimentation, and making. Redström does not theorize from the outside, but explores the idea that, just as design research engages in the making of many different kinds of things, theory might well be one of those things it is making.Redström proposes that we consider theory not as stable and constant but as something unfolding--something acted as much as articulated, inherently fluid and transitional. Redström describes three ways in which theory, in particular formulating basic definitions, is made through design: the use of combinations of fluid terms to articulate issues; the definition of more complex concepts through practice; and combining sets of definitions made through design into "programs." These are the building blocks for creating conceptual structures to support design.Design seems to thrive on the complexities arising from dichotomies: form and function, freedom and method, art and science. With his idea of transitional theory, Redström departs from the traditional academic imperative to pick a side--theory or practice, art or science. Doing so, he opens up something like a design space for theory development within design research.

Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media


Shannon Mattern - 2017
    But what if cities have long been built for intelligence, maybe for millennia? In Code and Clay, Data and Dirt Shannon Mattern advances the provocative argument that our urban spaces have been “smart” and mediated for thousands of years.Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt goes far beyond the standard historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Mattern shows that in their architecture, laws, street layouts, and civic knowledge—and through technologies including the telephone, telegraph, radio, printing, writing, and even the human voice—cities have long negotiated a rich exchange between analog and digital, code and clay, data and dirt, ether and ore. Mattern’s vivid prose takes readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories, scenes, and locations, synthesizing a new narrative for our urban spaces. Taking media archaeology to the city’s streets, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt reveals new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories.

Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society and Science Fiction


Lars Schmeink - 2017
    The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk," a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. The analysis deals with dystopian science fiction artifacts of different media from the year 2000 onwards that project a posthuman intervention into contemporary socio-political discourse based in liquid modernity in the cultural formation of biopunk. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet. As Rosi Braidotti argues, "there is a posthuman agreement that contemporary science and biotechnologies affect the very fibre and structure of the living and have altered dramatically our understanding of what counts as the basic frame of reference for the human today." The proposed book analyzes this alteration as directors, creators, authors, and artists from the field of science fiction extrapolate it from current trends.

The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture


Heike Bauer - 2017
    It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century.Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence-including persecution, death and suicide-shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism.The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

Enduring Time


Lisa Baraitser - 2017
    Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended.How do we now 'take care' of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? And what can quotidian experiences of suspended time - waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating - tell us about the survival of social bonds? Enduring Time responds to the question of the relationship between time and care through a paradoxical engagement with time's suspension. Working with an eclectic archive of cultural, political and artistic objects, it aims to reestablish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of.A strikingly original philosophy of time, this book also provides a detailed survey of contemporary theories of the topic; it is an indispensable read for those attempting to live meaningfully in the current age.

Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America


Jennifer Terry - 2017
    Focusing on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2002 and 2014, Terry identifies the presence of a biomedicine-war nexus in which new forms of wounding provoke the continual development of complex treatment, rehabilitation, and prosthetic technologies. At the same time, the U.S. military rationalizes violence and military occupation as necessary conditions for advancing medical knowledge and saving lives. Terry examines the treatment of war-generated polytrauma, postinjury bionic prosthetics design, and the development of defenses against infectious pathogens, showing how the interdependence between war and biomedicine is interwoven with neoliberal ideals of freedom, democracy, and prosperity. She also outlines the ways in which military-sponsored biomedicine relies on racialized logics that devalue the lives of Afghan and Iraqi citizens and U.S. veterans of color. Uncovering the mechanisms that attach all Americans to war and highlighting their embeddedness and institutionalization in everyday life via the government, media, biotechnology, finance, and higher education, Terry helps lay the foundation for a more meaningful opposition to war.

The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia


Nancy Postero - 2017
    Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In 2005, Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, Evo Morales. Ushering in a new “democratic cultural revolution,” Morales promised to overturn neoliberalism and inaugurate a new decolonized society. In this perceptive new book, Nancy Postero examines the successes and failures that have followed in the ten years since Morales’s election. While the Morales government has made many changes that have benefited Bolivia’s majority indigenous population, it has also consolidated power and reinforced extractivist development models. In the process, indigeneity has been transformed from a site of emancipatory politics to a site of liberal nation-state building. By carefully tracing the political origins and practices of decolonization among activists, government administrators, and ordinary citizens, Postero makes an important contribution to our understanding of the meaning and impact of Bolivia’s indigenous state.

Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture


Keridiana W. Chez - 2017
    Chez is the first monograph located at the intersection of animal and affect studies to examine how gender is produced via the regulation of interspecies relationships. Looking specifically at the development of the human-dog relationship, Chez argues that the bourgeoisie fostered connections with canine companions in order to mediate and regulate gender dynamics in the family. As Chez shows, the aim of these new practices was not to use animals as surrogates to fill emotional vacancies but rather to incorporate them as “emotional prostheses.” Chez traces the evolution of the human-dog relationship as it developed parallel to an increasingly imperialist national discourse. The dog began as the affective mediator of the family, then addressed the emotional needs of its individual members, and finally evolved into both “man’s best friend” and worst enemy. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the porous human-animal boundary served to produce the “humane” man: a liberal subject enabled to engage in aggressive imperial projects. Reading the work of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Margaret Marshall Saunders, Bram Stoker, and Jack London, Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men charts the mobilization of affect through transatlantic narratives, demonstrating the deep interconnections between animals, affect, and gender.

Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure (Routledge Innovations in Political Theory)


A. Kiarina Kordela - 2017
    Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism—from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, É. Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, and others—to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect—power—is foreclosed and becomes the object of biopower. Using monistic Marxian/Lacanian structuralism as an alternative to dominant models from Plato and Kant to phenomenological accounts, deconstruction, and other contemporary approaches, Kordela expertly argues that Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is a reformulation of the Spinozian thesis that thought (mind) and things (bodies or extension) are manifestations of one and the same being or substance. Kordela’s link between Spinoza and Marx shows that being consists of two aspects, value and power, the former leading to structuralist thought, the latter becoming the object of contemporary biopower. Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan intervenes between two dominant lines of thought in the reception of Marx today: on the one hand, an approach that relates Marxian thought to psychoanalysis from a Hegelian/dialectical perspective and, on the other hand, an approach that links Marxism to Spinozian monism, at the total exclusion of psychoanalysis.This book will interest scholars and researchers who study Marxism, (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ontology, epistemology and theories of representation, theoreticians of cultural studies and comparative literature, aesthetic theory, including the relation of art to economy and politics, and biopolitics.

Signals from the Periphery : [alternative practices of graphic designers : exhibition]


Gepard (osaühing), näitus Signaalid perifeeriast - 2017