Search results for ""stanford university press""

A Stanford University Press classic.

Read more less

The only complete guide to the historical landmarks of California, this standard work has now been thoroughly revised and updated. The edition is enriched by some 200 photographs, most of which were taken by the reviser and all of which are new to this edition. Since the last revision in 1990, enormous changes have taken place within the state: many landscapes and buildings have been greatly altered and some are no longer in existence. Every effort has been made, through personal observation, to record the present condition of the landmarks and to provide clear and accurate descriptions of their locations. The text is written with the idea that the reader might use the book while traveling around the state, and thus mileage and signposts have been given where it was thought helpful. For this new edition, the reviser has added additional information on the state's geography, the presence of Native Americans, and state and local museums. To provide historical background, the reviser has written a short historical overview. The chapters of the book are organized by county, in alphabetical order. A rough chronology is followed for each county, beginning with pertinent facts on geography, continuing with Native American life, the coming of the Spaniards and other Europeans, the American conquest of the 1840s, and, in those areas where it had a major impact, the gold rush. The text then continues into the period of intensive agricultural development, railroads, industrialization, the growth of cities, the effects of World War II, and on into more recent times. The bibliography, like the text, has been updated to 2001 and includes some of the established classics in California history as well as more recent material. Reviews of the Fourth Edition "Prodigious in detail and scope, this is the definitive guide to historical landmarks in California and a valuable resource not only for travelers but also for anyone interested in California history." —California Highways "This is an outstanding and accessible piece of scholarship, one that every student of California will value." —San Francisco Chronicle "Kyle and Stanford University Press are to be lauded for this monumental undertaking." —Southern California Quarterly

Read more less

In 1938 Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a volume that would remain in print for more than fifty years. For decades it drew enough poets, students, and general readers to keep Jeffers—in spite of the almost total academic neglect that followed his fame in the 1920s and 1930s—a force in American poetry. Now scholars are at last beginning to recognize that he created a significant alternative to the High Modernism of Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. Similarly, contemporary poets who have returned to the narrative poem acknowledge Jeffers to be a major poet, while those exploring California and the American West as literary regions have found in him a foundational figure. Moreover, Jeffers stands as a crucial precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink our practical, ethical, and spiritual obligations to the natural world and the environment. These developments underscore the need for a new selected edition that would, like the 1938 volume, include the long narratives that were to Jeffers his major work, along with the more easily anthologized shorter poems. This new selected edition differs from its predecessor in several ways. When Jeffers shaped the 1938 Selected Poetry, he drew from his most productive period (1917-37), but his career was not over yet. In the quarter century that followed, four more volumes of his poetry were published. This new selected edition draws from these later volumes, and it includes a sampling of the poems Jeffers left unpublished, along with several prose pieces in which he reflects on his poetry and poetics. This edition also adopts the texts of the recently completed The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (five volumes, Stanford, 1988-2000). When the poems were originally published, copy editors and typesetters adjusted Jeffers's punctuation, often obscuring the rhythm and pacing of what he actually wrote, and at points even obscuring meaning and nuance. This new selected edition, then, is a much broader, more accurate representation of Jeffers's career than the previous Selected Poetry. Reviews of volumes in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers "A masterful job of contemporary scholarly editing, this book begins an edition intended to clarify a 'Jeffers canon,' establishing for times to come the verse legacy of a poet who looked on all things with the eyes of eternity."—San Francisco Chronicle "This edition will be standard . . . a tribute and justice to a poet whose independent strength has survived to challenge personal and public canons."—Virginia Quarterly Review "Jeffers is the last of the major poets of his generation—Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot—to get his collected poems. Now that the job is at hand, it is done very well. . . . Tim Hunt has been painstaking in his editorial preparation and judicious in his presentation. . . . A great poet is ready for his due."—Philadelphia Inquirer "Few American poets are treated as well by publishers as Jeffers is by Stanford University Press. . . . These poems represent a distinctive voice in the American canon, and it is good to have them so wonderfully set forth."—Christian Century

Read more less

The futures of reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ liberation are intimately connected. Both movements were born out of the desire to love and build families of our choosingwhen and how we decide. Both movements are rooted in broader social justice liberationist traditions that center the needs of Black and brown communities, the LGBTQIA+ community, gender-nonconforming folks, femmes, poor folks, parents, and all those who have been forced to the margins of society. Taking as its starting point the idea that we all have the human right to bodily autonomy, to sexual health and pleasure, and to exercise these rights with dignity, Queering Reproductive Justice sets out to re-envision the seemingly disparate strands of the reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ movements and offer an invitation to reimagine these movements as one integrated vision of freedom for the future. Candace Bond-Theriault asserts that for reproductive justice to be truly successful, we must acknowledge th

Read more less

More than half the population will experience menopause; it is time for the law to acknowledge it.Menopause is a stage of life that half the population will inevitably experience. But it remains one of the last great taboo topics for discussion, even among close friends and family members. Silence and stigmas around many aspects of reproductive healthfrom menstruation to infertility to miscarriage to abortionhave historically created the conditions in which bias and discrimination can flourish. Menopause exemplifies that phenomenon, and in Hot Flash, authors Emily Gold Waldman, Bridget Crawford, and Naomi Cahn set out to replace the silence surrounding menopause with a deeper understanding.Hot Flash explores the culturally specific stereotypes that surround menopause as well as how menopause is treated in law and medicine. The book contextualizes menopause as one of several stages in a person''s reproductive life. Taking U.S. law regarding pregnanc

Read more less

Groundbreaking research illuminates the pivotal, problematic role of consultants in the nonprofit world.The nonprofit sector leans heavily on consultants to guide strategic planning, advise on fundraising strategy, gather data on program effectiveness and more. How Consultants Shape Nonprofits explores how consultants, while working diligently to customize solutions for their clients, reinforce status-quo practices and ideas while prioritizing the opinions of people in power (nonprofit funders, leaders, etc.) over those of lower-level staff and communities. Consultants thus leave unaddressed some of the most pernicious problems in the nonprofit sector. The book''s important conclusions about the complex role of consultants in the nonprofit world are based on more than a year of ethnographic research and nearly 200 interviews with practitioners. Dr. Reisman concludes with guidance on how consultants, nonprofit leaders, and donors can better collaborate, and overc

Read more less

In the host clubs of Tokyo's Kabuki-chō red-light district, ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and sometimes sex to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. Staged Seduction reveals a world where all intimacies and feigned feelings are fair game for the hosts who employ feathered bangs, polished nails, fine European suits, and the sensitivity of the finest salesmen to create a fantasy for wealthy women seeking an escape from the everyday. Akiko Takeyama's investigation of this beguiling underground "love business" provides an intimate window into Japanese host clubs and the lives of hosts, clients, club owners, and managers. The club is a place where fantasies are pursued and the art of seduction isn't merely about romance; a complex set of transactions emerges. Like a casino of love, the host club is a site of desperation, aspiration, and hope, in which both hosts and clients are eager to roll the dice. Takeyama reveals the aspirational mode not only of the host club, but also of a Japanese society built on the commercialization of aspiration, seducing its citizens out of the present and into a future where hopes and dreams are imaginable—and billions of dollars can be made.

Read more less

The Sino-Russian Challenge to the World Order is the third volume in Gilbert Rozman's trilogy on national identity. The first two volumes, edited by Gilbert Rozman, concerned the identities of three East Asian countries: China, Japan, and South Korea. These books analyzed how these countries' national identities suffered through their relation to modernization, and examined how the national identity of each differed from the other two and how those differences were shaped by the relation of each country to the United States.In this third volume, Rozman examines Russia together with China. The Sino-Russian Challenge to the World Order argues that China and Russia's national identities are much closer to each other than usually thought, and are growing even closer. Moreover, the closeness of their identities comes neither from their prerevolutionary pasts nor from today's practical politics, but rather from habits carried over from their communist periods, even though the ideological dimensions of their identities have weakened since 1990.

Read more less

This is a lavishly illustrated history of the Oregon-American Lumber Company, during its heyday one of the most important lumber firms in the Pacific Northwest. Operating from 1922 until its closure in 1957, the company provides an illuminating example of the history of lumbering in the region, showing in detail both the opportunities and problems encountered by firms seeking to exploit the area’s rich natural stands of Douglas fir. The story is enhanced by the inclusion of 285 illustrations, most of which are previously unpublished, that depict logging, railroading, and sawmilling activities, and 17 period-specific maps that give the reader a unique perspective on the growth of the company. The lumbering industry was pivotal to America’s settlement and development, reaching its zenith in the period covered by this book, which shows how Oregon-American’s survival depended on successfully adapting to great changes in market forces and in industry structures, to natural disasters, and to economic crises like the Great Depression. Essential to the company’s objective of supplying lumber to markets in the Midwest farm belt was its relationship with the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads; accordingly, the book provides much information on the railroad networks that made timber extraction possible. The study is based on fifteen years of archival and on-the-ground research and draws heavily on the extensive collection of Oregon-American records, notably the correspondence files of Judd Greenman, the company president who conceived and executed most of the company’s operating policies. It also includes, as sidebars, engaging oral histories related by employees, which enrich the text and provide a vivid contrast between management and employee viewpoints.

Read more less

This is the definitive story of how the United States attempted to turn Japan into a democratic and peace-loving nation by drafting a new constitution for its former enemy—and then pretending that the Japanese had written it. Based on scores of interviews with participants in the process, as well as exhaustive research in Japanese and American records, the book explores in vivid detail the thinking and intentions behind the drafting of the constitution. Confusion and strife marked planning for the democratization of Japan, first in Washington, then in occupied Tokyo. Policy makers in the State, War, and Navy departments, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House contended bitterly over how to devise an “unconditional surrender” that would minimize Allied casualties while according the victor supreme authority over a soundly defeated Japan. By war’s end, there were still no firm guidelines on a host of crucial issues, including how the Japanese system of government could be made acceptably democratic. The first months of occupation were chaotic, with General MacArthur organizing his staff around loyal followers and edging out experts sent from Washington. Hampered by a narrow interpretation of the terms of surrender and wishful thinking about Japanese compliance with American expectations, MacArthur set in motion a fiasco. Because of a translator’s error, Prince Konoye, three-time Prime Minister of Japan, thought MacArthur had entrusted him with revising the Japanese constitution and assembled a staff of constitutional law experts and set to work. However, conservatives in the Japanese cabinet denounced his efforts and produced their own version, which MacArthur found unacceptable. MacArthur then secretly instructed his staff, with its very limited knowledge of either Japan or constitutional law, to draft a new Japanese constitution, which amazingly they did in a week’s time. Expecting approval of its own draft, the Japanese cabinet was stunned when presented with a completely different American document. So unrelenting was the pressure exerted by MacArthur’s officers that it was clear to members of the cabinet they had no choice but to adopt the American draft more or less intact, and publish it as their own. Because of the broad range of its meticulous research, the book will be a standard reference not only for students of Japanese history but also for legal scholars, diplomatic historians, and political scientists.

Read more less

In this book, Brian Lennon demonstrates the power of a philological approach to the history of programming languages and their usage cultures. In chapters focused on specific programming languages such as SNOBOL and JavaScript, as well as on code comments, metasyntactic variables, the very early history of programming, and the concept of DevOps, Lennon emphasizes the histories of programming languages in their individual specificities over their abstract formal or structural characteristics, viewing them as carriers and sometimes shapers of specific cultural histories. The book''s philological approach to programming languages presents a natural, sensible, and rigorous way for researchers trained in the humanities to perform research on computing in a way that draws on their own expertise.Combining programming knowledge with a humanistic analysis of the social and historical dimensions of computing, Lennon offers researchers in literary studies, STS, media and digital studies

Read more less

Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systemically neglected cemeteries. As they rake, clean headstones, and research silenced histories, they offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens is the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work. It focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead, and asks what kinds of repair are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes us to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities.Cemetery Citizens dives into the ethical quandaries and practical complexities of cemetery reclamation, showing how volunteers build community across social boundaries, craft new ideas about citizenship and ancestry, and expose injustices that would otherwise be suppressed. Ultimately, Rosenblatt argues that an ethic of

Read more less

The definitive biography of a distinguished public servant, who as US Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of State, was pivotal in steering the great powers toward the end of the Cold War. Deftly solving critical but intractable national and global problems was the leitmotif of George Pratt Shultz's life. No one at the highest levels of the United States government did it better or with greater consequence in the last half of the 20th century, often against withering resistance. His quiet, effective leadership altered the arc of history. While political, social, and cultural dynamics have changed profoundly since Shultz served at the commanding heights of American power in the 1970s and 1980s, his legacy and the lessons of his career have even greater meaning now that the Shultz brand of conservatism has been almost erased in the modern Republican Party. This book, from longtime New York Times Washington reporter Philip Taubman, restores the modest Shultz to his central place in American history. Taubman reveals Shultz's gift for forging relationships with people and then harnessing the rapport to address national and international challenges, under his motto "trust is the coin of the realm"—as well as his difficulty standing up for his principles, motivated by a powerful sense of loyalty that often trapped him in inaction. Based on exclusive access to Shultz's personal papers, housed in a sealed archive at the Hoover Institution, In the Nation's Service offers a remarkable insider account of the behind-the-scenes struggles of the statesman who played a pivotal role in unwinding the Cold War.

Read more less

The postwar period saw increased interest in the idea of relatively easy-to-manufacture but devastatingly lethal radiological munitions whose use would not discriminate between civilian and military targets. Death Dust explores the largely unknown history of the development of radiological weapons (RW)—weapons designed to disperse radioactive material without a nuclear detonation—through a series of comparative case studies across the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Iraq, and Egypt. The authors illuminate the historical drivers of and impediments to radiological weapons innovation. They also examine how new, dire geopolitical events—such as the war in Ukraine—could encourage other states to pursue RW and analyze the impact of the spread of such weapons on nuclear deterrence and the nonproliferation regime. Death Dust presents practical, necessary steps to reduce the likelihood of a resurgence of interest in and pursuit of radiological weapons by state actors.

Read more less

In this volume, noted philosopher Lenn E. Goodman shares the insights gained over a lifetime of pondering the meaning and purpose of Maimonides'' celebrated Guide to the Perplexed. Written in the late twelfth century, Maimonides'' Guide aims to help religiously committed readers who are alive to the challenges posed by reason and the natural sciences to biblical and rabbinic tradition. Keyed to the new translation and commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman, this volume follows Maimonides'' life and learning and delves into the text of the Guide, clearly explaining just what Maimonides means by identifying the Talmudic Ma''aseh Bereshit and Ma''aseh Merkavah with physics and metaphysics (to Maimonides, biblical cosmology and theology). Exploring Maimonides'' treatments of revelation, religious practice and experience, law and ritual, the problem of evil, and the rational purposes of the commandments, this guide to the Guide explains the tac

Read more less

Nature has gone feral. How can we re-attune ourselves to the new nature? A field guide can help.While the global scientific community recently made headlines by ruling the Anthropocenean era many date to the Industrial Revolution when human action truly began to transform the planetdid not qualify for a geological epoch quite yet, understanding the nature of human transformation of the Earth is more important than ever. The effects of human activity are global in scope, but take shape within distinct social and ecological patches, discontinuous regions within which the key actors may not be human, but the plants, animals, fungi, viruses, plastics, and chemicals creating our new world. Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene takes stock of our current planetary crisis, leading readers through a series of sites, thought experiments, and genre-stretching descriptive practices to nurture a revitalized natural history.Field guides teach us how to notice, name,

Read more less

The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 investigates the political and social imaginaries of "terrorism" in the early twentieth century. Chris Millington traces the development of how the French conceived of terrorism, from the late nineteenth-century notion that terrorism was the deed of the mad anarchist bomber, to the fraught political clashes of the 1930s when terrorism came to be understood as a political act perpetrated against French interests by organized international movements. Through a close analysis of a series of terrorist incidents and representations thereof in public discourse and the press, the book argues that contemporary ideas of terrorism in France as "unFrench"—that is, contrary to the ideas and values, however defined, that make up "Frenchness"—emerged in the interwar years and subsequently took root long before the terrorist campaigns of Algerian nationalists during the 1950s and 1960s. Millington conceptualizes "terrorism" not only as the act itself, but also as a political and cultural construction of violence composed from a variety of discourses and deployed in particular circumstances by commentators, witnesses, and perpetrators. In doing so, he argues that the political and cultural battles inherent to perceptions of terrorism lay bare numerous concerns, not least anxieties over immigration, antiparliamentarianism, representations of gender, and the future of European peace.

Read more less

Iran's prison system is a foundational institution of Iranian political modernity. The Incarcerated Modern traces the transformation of Iran from a decentralized empire with few imprisoned persons at the turn of the twentieth century into a modern nation-state with over a quarter million prisoners today. In policing the line between "bad criminal" and "good citizen," the carceral system has shaped and reshaped Iranian understandings of citizenship, freedom, and political belonging. Golnar Nikpour explores the interplay between the concrete space of the Iranian prison and the role of prisons in producing new public cultures and political languages in Iran. From prison writings of 1920s leftist prisoners and communiqués of 1950s militant Islamists, to paintings of 1970s revolutionary guerrillas and mapping projects organized by contemporary dissident prisoners, carceral confinement has shaped modern Iranian political movements. Today, mass incarceration is a global phenomenon. The Incarcerated Modern connects Iranian history to transnational carceral histories to illuminate the shared architectures, economies, and techniques of modern punishment.

Read more less

The postwar period saw increased interest in the idea of relatively easy-to-manufacture but devastatingly lethal radiological munitions whose use would not discriminate between civilian and military targets. Death Dust explores the largely unknown history of the development of radiological weapons (RW)—weapons designed to disperse radioactive material without a nuclear detonation—through a series of comparative case studies across the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Iraq, and Egypt. The authors illuminate the historical drivers of and impediments to radiological weapons innovation. They also examine how new, dire geopolitical events—such as the war in Ukraine—could encourage other states to pursue RW and analyze the impact of the spread of such weapons on nuclear deterrence and the nonproliferation regime. Death Dust presents practical, necessary steps to reduce the likelihood of a resurgence of interest in and pursuit of radiological weapons by state actors.

Read more less

In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of "pure sound." Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of "pure sound" was always an expression of western ethnocentrism. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.

Read more less

Technological advancements, expanding education, and unfettered capitalism have encouraged many around the world to aspire to better lives, even as declines in employment and widening inequality are pushing more and more people into insecurity and hardship. In Egypt, a generation of young men desire fulfilling employment, meaningful relationships, and secure family life, yet find few paths to achieve this. The Labor of Hope follows these educated but underemployed men as they struggle to establish careers and build satisfying lives. In so doing, this book reveals the lived contradiction at the heart of capitalist systems—the expansive dreams they encourage and the precarious lives they produce. Harry Pettit follows young men as they engage a booming training, recruitment, and entrepreneurship industry that sells the cruel meritocratic promise that a good life is realizable for all. He considers the various ways individuals cultivate distraction and hope for future mobility: education, migration, consumption, and prayer. These hope-filled practices are a form of emotional labor for young men, placing responsibility on the individual rather than structural issues in Egypt's economy. Illuminating this emotional labor, Pettit shows how the capitalist economy continues to capture the attention of the very people harmed by it.

Read more less

Since the 1990s, a growing number of criminal courts around the world have been using expert assessments based on behavioral genetics and neuroscience to evaluate the responsibility and dangerousness of offenders. Despite this rapid circulation, however, we still know very little about the scientific knowledge underlying these expert evaluations. Hereditary traces the historical development of biosocial criminology in the United States from the 1960s to the present, showing how the fate of this movement is intimately linked to that of the field of criminology as a whole. In claiming to identify the biological and environmental causes of so-called "antisocial" behaviors, biosocial criminologists are redefining the boundary between the normal and the pathological. Julien Larregue examines what is at stake in the development of biosocial criminology. Beyond the origins of delinquency, Larregue addresses the reconfiguration of expertise in contemporary societies, and in particular the territorial struggles between the medical and legal professions. For if the causes of crime are both biological and social, its treatment may call for medical as well as legal solutions.

Read more less

A thorough and engaging look at an unexpected driver of changes in the American criminal justice system Driving is an unavoidable part of life in the United States. Even those who don't drive much likely know someone who does. More than just a simple method of getting from point A to point B, however, driving has been a significant influence on the United States' culture, economy, politics – and its criminal justice system. Rules of the Road tracks the history of the car alongside the history of crime and criminal justice in the United States, demonstrating how the quick and numerous developments in criminal law corresponded to the steadily rising prominence, and now established supremacy, of the automobile. Spencer Headworth brings together research from sociology, psychology, criminology, political science, legal studies, and histories of technology and law in illustrating legal responses to changing technological and social circumstances. Rules of the Road opens by exploring the early 20th-century beginnings of the relationship between criminal law and automobility, before moving to the direct impact of the automobile on prosecutorial and criminal justice practices in the latter half of the 20th century. Finally, Headworth looks to recent debates and issues in modern-day criminal justice to consider what this might presage for the future. Using a seemingly mundane aspect of daily life as its investigative lens, this creative, imaginative, and thoroughly researched book provides a fresh perspective on the transformations of the U.S. criminal justice system.

Read more less

A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, the book examines in depth six of the cultural "battles" that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using contemporaneous reviews in the press as well as other historical material, we can see that these now-canonical works provoked outrage at the time of their release because they addressed critical points of social upheaval and transformation in ways that engaged broad audiences with subversive messages. This framework allows us to understand and navigate the cultural debates that play such an important role in 21st century politics.

Read more less

Drawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era. In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers' status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world's largest manufacturing powerhouse.

Read more less

In the world of online dating, race-based discrimination is not only tolerated, but encouraged as part of a pervasive belief that it is simply a neutral, personal choice about one's romantic partner. Indeed, it is so much a part of our inherited wisdom about dating and romance that it actually directs the algorithmic infrastructures of most major online dating platforms, such that they openly reproduce racist and sexist hierarchies. In Not My Type: Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating, Apryl Williams presents a socio-technical exploration of dating platforms' algorithms, their lack of transparency, the legal and ethical discourse in these companies' community guidelines, and accounts from individual users in order to argue that sexual racism is a central feature of today's online dating culture. She discusses this reality in the context of facial recognition and sorting software as well as user experiences, drawing parallels to the long history of eugenics and banned interracial partnerships. Ultimately, Williams calls for, both a reconceptualization of the technology and policies that govern dating agencies, and also a reexamination of sociocultural beliefs about attraction, beauty, and desirability.

Read more less

Upon their independence, Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian governments turned to the Global South and offered military and financial aid to Black liberation struggles. Tangier and Algiers attracted Black American and Caribbean artists eager to escape American white supremacy; Tunis hosted African filmmakers for the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage; and young freedom fighters from across the African continent established military training camps in Morocco. North Africa became a haven for militant-artists, and the region reshaped postcolonial cultural discourse through the 1960s and 1970s. Maghreb Noir dives into the personal and political lives of these militant-artists, who collectively challenged the neo-colonialist structures and the authoritarianism of African states. Drawing on Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English sources, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, Paraska Tolan-Szkilnik expands our understanding of Pan-Africanism geographically, linguistically, and temporally. This network of militant-artists departed from the racial solidarity extolled by many of their nationalist forefathers, instead following in the footsteps of their intellectual mentor, Frantz Fanon. They argued for the creation of a new ideology of continued revolution—one that was transnational, trans-racial, and in defiance of the emerging nation-states. Maghreb Noir establishes the importance of North Africa in nurturing these global connections—and uncovers a lost history of grassroots collaboration among militant-artists from across the globe.

Read more less

Once the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897–1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of "erasure"—monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon existing palace structures—to articulate to colonized Korean subjects the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, and the naturalization of colonial rule as inevitable historical change. Drawing from and analyzing a wide range of materials, from architecture and photography to print media and sound recordings, City of Sediments shows how Seoul became a site to articulate a new mode of time—modernity—that defined the place of the colonized in accordance with the progression of history, and how the underbelly of the city, latent places of darkness filled with chatters of the alleyway, challenged this visual language of power. To do so, Se-Mi Oh builds an inventive new model of history where discrete events do not unfold one after the other, but rather one in which histories layer atop each other like sediment, allowing a new map of colonial Seoul to emerge, a map where the material traces of the city are overlapping, with vibrant residues of earlier times defiantly visible among the superimposed signs of modernity and colonial domination.

Read more less

Over the last few decades, the decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Chávez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms. Through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival inquiry, Mariya Ivancheva historicizes the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the vanguard institution of the higher education reform, and examines the complex and often contradictory and quixotic visions, policies, and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality. This book offers a serious contribution to debates on the future of the university and the role of the state in the era of neoliberal globalization, and outlines lessons for policymakers and educators who aspire to develop higher education alternatives.

Read more less

Hiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Whether working for the United Nations, governmental aid agencies, or NGOs such as Oxfam, Save the Children, or World Vision, expatriate aid workers in the developing world employ maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners and chauffeurs. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes, these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed in analyses of the development paradigm and its praxis. Aid and the Help addresses this major lacuna through an ethnographic analysis of the intersection of development work and domestic work. Examining the reproductive labor cheaply purchased by aid workers posted overseas opens the opportunity to assess the multiple ways that the ostensibly "giving" industry of development can be an extractive industry as well.

Read more less

A beguiling exploration of the last Habsburg monarchs' grip on Europe's historical and cultural imagination. In 1919 the last Habsburg rulers, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, left Austria, going into exile. That same year, the fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), featuring a mythological emperor and empress, premiered at the Vienna Opera. Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and German composer Richard Strauss created Die Frau ohne Schatten through the bitter years of World War I, imagining it would triumphantly appear after the victory of the German and Habsburg empires. Instead, the premiere came in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy explores how the changing circumstances of politics and society transformed their opera and its cultural meanings before, during, and after the First World War. Strauss and Hofmannsthal turned emperors and empresses into fantastic fairy-tale characters; meanwhile, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy after the war, their real-life counterparts, removed from political life in Europe, began to be regarded as anachronistic, semi-mythological figures. Reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that rocked post-imperial Europe, Larry Wolff follows the story of Karl and Zita after the loss of their thrones. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War. By her death in 1989, she had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia. Wolff weaves together the story of the opera's composition and performance; the end of the Habsburg monarchy; and his own family's life in and exile from Central Europe, providing a rich new understanding of Europe's cataclysmic twentieth century, and our contemporary relationship to it.

Read more less

Communicology is Vilém Flusser's first thesis on his concepts of technical images and technical imagination. In this foundational text he lays the groundwork for later work, offering a philosophical approach to communication as a phenomenon that permeates every aspect of human existence. Clearly organized around questions such as "What is Communication?," "What are Codes?," and "What is Technical Imagination?," the work touches on theater, photography, film, television, and more. Originally written in 1978, but only posthumously published in German, the book is one of the clearest statements of Flusser's theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world. Although Flusser was writing in the 1970s, his work demonstrates a prescience that makes it of significant contemporary interest to scholars in visual culture, art history, media studies, and philosophy.

Read more less

After Pinochet's dictatorship ended in Chile in 1990, the country experienced a rapid decline in poverty along with a quickly growing economy. As a result, Chile's middle class expanded dramatically, echoing trends seen across the Global South as neoliberalism took firm hold in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Identity Investments examines the politics and consumption practices of this vast and varied fraction of the Chilean population, seeking to better understand their value systems and the histories that informed them. Using participant observation, interviews, and photographs, Joel Stillerman develops a unique typology of the middle class, made up of activists, moderate Catholics, pragmatists, and youngsters. This typology allows him to unearth the cultural, political, and religious roots of middle-class market practices in contrast with other studies focused on social mobility and exclusionary practices. The resultant contrast in backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives of these four groups animates this book and extends an emerging body of scholarship focused on the connections between middle-class market choices and politics in the Global South, with important implications for Chile's recent explosive political changes.

Read more less

This career-spanning anthology from prominent Jewish historian David Biale brings over a dozen of his key essays together for the first time. These pieces, written between 1974 and 2016, are all representative of a method Biale calls "counter-history": "the discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered marginal, disreputable and irrational." The themes that have preoccupied Biale throughout the course of his distinguished career—in particular power, sexuality, blood, and secular Jewish thought—span the periods of the Bible, late antiquity, and the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Exemplary essays in this volume argue for the dialectical relationship between modernity and its precursors in the older tradition, working together to "brush history against the grain" in order to provide a sweeping look at the history of the Jewish people. This volume of work by one of the boldest and most intellectually omnivorous Jewish thinkers of our time will be essential reading for scholars and students of Jewish studies.

Read more less

A poignant account of everyday polygamy and what its regulation reveals about who is viewed as an "Other" In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies, Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath uncovers the ways in which intimacies framed as "other" and "offensive" serve to define the very limits of Western tolerance. These regulation efforts, counterintuitively, allow the flourishing of polygamies on the ground. The case studies illustrate a continuum of justice, in which some groups, like white fundamentalist Mormons in the U.S., organize to fight against the prohibition of their families' existence, whereas African migrants in France face racialized discrimination in addition to rigid migration policies. The matrix of legal and social contexts, informed by gender, race, sexuality, and class, shapes the everyday experiences of these relationships. Heath uses the term "labyrinthine love" to conceptualize the complex ways individuals negotiate different kinds of relationships, ranging from romantic to coercive. What unites these families is the secrecy in which they must operate. As government intervention erodes their abilities to secure housing, welfare, work, and even protection from abuse, Heath exposes the huge variety of intimacies, and the power they hold to challenge heteronormative, Western ideals of love.

Read more less

From its rise in the 1830s to its pinnacle in the 1930s, the opium trade was a guiding force in the Chinese political economy. Opium money was inextricably bound up in local, national, and imperial finances, and the people who piloted the trade were integral to the fabric of Chinese society. In this book, Peter Thilly narrates the dangerous lives and shrewd business operations of opium traffickers in southeast China, situating them within a global history of capitalism. By tracing the evolution of the opium trade from clandestine offshore agreements in the 1830s, to multi-million dollar prohibition bureau contracts in the 1930s, Thilly demonstrates how the modernizing Chinese state was infiltrated, manipulated, and profoundly transformed by opium profiteers. Opium merchants carried the drug by sea, over mountains, and up rivers, with leading traders establishing monopolies over trade routes and territories and assembling "opium armies" to protect their businesses. Over time, and as their ranks grew, these organizations became more bureaucratized and militarized, mimicking—and then eventually influencing, infiltrating, or supplanting—the state. Through the chaos of revolution, warlordism, and foreign invasion, opium traders diligently expanded their power through corruption, bribery, and direct collaboration with the state. Drug traders mattered—not only in the seedy ways in which they have been caricatured but also crucially as shadowy architects of statecraft and China's evolution on the world stage.

Read more less

For many residents of Western nations, COVID-19 was the first time they experienced the effects of an uncontrolled epidemic. This is in part due to a series of little-known regulations that have aimed to protect the global north from epidemic threats for the last two centuries, starting with International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 and culminating in the present with the International Health Regulations, which organize epidemic responses through the World Health Organization. Unlike other equity-focused global health initiatives, their mission—to establish "the maximum protections from infectious disease with the minimum effect on trade and traffic"—has remained the same since their founding. Using this as his starting point, Alexandre White reveals the Western capitalist interests, racism and xenophobia, and political power plays underpinning the regulatory efforts that came out of the project to manage the international spread of infectious disease. He examines how these regulations are formatted; how their framers conceive of epidemic spread; and the types of bodies and spaces it is suggested that these regulations map onto. Proposing a modified reinterpretation of Edward Said's concept of orientalism, White invites us to consider "epidemic orientalism" as a framework within which to explore the imperial and colonial roots of modern epidemic disease control.

Read more less

From 1750 until Brazil won its independence in 1822, the Portuguese crown sought to extend imperial control over the colony's immense, sea-like interior and exploit its gold and diamond deposits using enslaved labor. Carrying orders from Lisbon into the Brazilian backlands, elite vassals, soldiers, and scientific experts charged with exploring multiple frontier zones and establishing royal authority conducted themselves in ways that proved difficult for the crown to regulate. The overland expeditions they mounted in turn encountered actors operating beyond the state's purview: seminomadic Native peoples, runaway slaves, itinerant poor, and those deemed criminals, who eluded, defied, and reshaped imperial ambitions. This book measures Portugal's transatlantic projection of power against a particular obstacle: imperial information-gathering, which produced a confusion of rumors, distortions, claims, conflicting reports, and disputed facts. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of ethnohistory, slavery and diaspora studies, and legal and literary history, Hal Langfur considers how misinformation destabilized European sovereignty in the Americas, making a major contribution to histories of empire, frontiers and borderlands, knowledge production, and scientific exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Read more less

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the U.S. in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.

Read more less

What is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this provocative book reawakens the foundational question of what 'critique' is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, its limits and its risks, its history and its possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from diverse sources—theological, psychological, etymological, and artistic, but mainly across the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. Along the way, Ben-Shai invites the reader to examine their own orientation of thought, even at the moment of reading the book; to question popular discourse; and to revisit the philosophical canon, revealing affinities among often antagonistic traditions, such as Catholicism and Marxism. Most importantly, Critique of Critique sets the ground for an examination of alternative orientations of critical thinking, other ways of inhabiting and grasping the world.

Read more less

At a time when movements for racial justice are front and center in U.S. national politics, this book provides essential new understanding to the study of race, its influence on people's lives, and what we can do to address the persistent and foundational American problem of systemic racism. Knowledge about race and racism changes as social and historical conditions evolve, as different generations of scholars experience unique societal conditions, and as new voices from those who have previously been kept at the margins have challenged us to reconceive our thinking about race and ethnicity. In this collection of essays by prominent sociologists whose work has transformed the understanding of race and ethnicity, each reflects on their career and how their personal experiences have shaped their contribution to understanding racism, both in scholarly and public debate. Merging biography, memoir, and sociohistorical analysis, these essays provide vital insight into the influence of race on people's perspectives and opportunities both inside and outside of academia, and how racial inequality is felt, experienced, and confronted.

Read more less

Shadow Negotiators is the first book to demonstrate that United Nations (UN) organizations have intervened to influence the discourse, agenda, and outcomes of international trade lawmaking at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While UN organizations lack a seat at the bargaining table at the WTO, Matias E. Margulis argues that these organizations have acted as "shadow negotiators" engaged in political actions intended to alter the trajectory and results of multilateral trade negotiations. He draws on analysis of one of the most contested issues in global trade politics, agricultural trade liberalization, to demonstrate interventions by four different UN organizations—the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (SRRTF). By identifying several novel intervention strategies used by UN actors to shape the rules of global trade, this book shows that UN organizations chose to intervene in trade lawmaking not out of competition with the WTO or ideological resistance to trade liberalization, but out of concerns that specific trade rules could have negative consequences for world food security—an outcome these organizations viewed as undermining their social purpose to reduce world hunger and protect the human right to food.

Read more less

Unruly Speech explores how Uyghurs in China and in the diaspora transgress sociopolitical limits with "unruly" communication practices in a quest for change. Drawing on research in China, the United States, and Germany, Saskia Witteborn situates her study against the backdrop of displacement and shows how naming practices and witness accounts become potent ways of resistance in everyday interactions and in global activism. Featuring the voices of Uyghurs from three continents, Unruly Speech analyzes the discursive and material force of place names, social media, surveillance, and the link between witnessing and the discourse on human rights. The book provides a granular view of disruptive communication: its global political moorings and socio-technical control. The rich ethnographic study will appeal to audiences interested in migration and displacement, language and social interaction, advocacy, digital surveillance, and a transnational China.

Read more less

In this book, Brian Lennon demonstrates the power of a philological approach to the history of programming languages and their usage cultures. In chapters focused on specific programming languages such as SNOBOL and JavaScript, as well as on code comments, metasyntactic variables, the very early history of programming, and the concept of DevOps, Lennon emphasizes the histories of programming languages in their individual specificities over their abstract formal or structural characteristics, viewing them as carriers and sometimes shapers of specific cultural histories. The book''s philological approach to programming languages presents a natural, sensible, and rigorous way for researchers trained in the humanities to perform research on computing in a way that draws on their own expertise.Combining programming knowledge with a humanistic analysis of the social and historical dimensions of computing, Lennon offers researchers in literary studies, STS, media and digital studies

Read more less

Grounded in extensive interviews, longitudinal methods, historical analysis, and archival work, Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland shows how two distinct groups of working young people in Lima, Peru have become political protagonists, resisting and critiquing the daily inequality and injustice they face. She details the ways these young people interpret and address a range of issues affecting their lives—from environmental degradation to second-rate public facilities, gender-based violence to dangerous working conditions—and reveals a range of ways they make sense of their systematic marginalization and their own labor, and in doing so, how they navigate everyday state violence. By attending to the affect, longing, and desires that animate these young people's politics, Luttrell-Rowland conveys the meaning of their lives and work in an economy that invokes their subjectivity and rights while rendering them non-participatory subjects. Though the lives of young people are often imagined as far from politics, these "political children" expose the contradictions of public policy narratives in which the Peruvian state is cast as a neutral site for engagement and action. Through their criticism and activism, the young people in this book demonstrate that such narratives divorce state power from the very places in which it is experienced as structural violence.

Read more less