Search results for ""Stanford University Press""
Stanford University Press Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent
Since the 1970's, when Maxine Hong Kingston began publishing her prize-winning books, we have seen an explosive growth in Asian American literature, a literature that has won both popular and critical acclaim. Literary anthologies and critical studies attest to a growing academic interest in the field. This book seeks to identify the forces behind this literary emergence and to explore both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined. The author is preoccupied with how the sense of the nation is disseminated through the practice of reading and writing, and he argues that Asian American literature is a productive discursive negotiation of the contemporary contradiction in American citizenship. By analyzing the textual strategies with which literary Asian America is represented, the book shows how the "fictive ethnicity" of the nation continues to exert its regulatory power and suggests how we can work toward a radical American democratic consent. Through nuanced readings of exemplary texts, the author delineates how Asian American literary production has become a site for the creation of Asian American subjects and community. The texts range from Kingston's enigmatic Tripmaster Monkey to the seductive cunning of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; from Bharati Mukherjee's romantic Jasmine to the geocultural ambivalence of David Mura's Turning Japanese; and from the transvestic subversion of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly to the transpirational tropes of David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love. Imagining the Nation integrates a fine appreciation of the formal features of Asian American literature with the conflict and convergence among different reading communities and the dilemma of ethnic intellectuals caught in the process of their institutionalization. By articulating Asian American structures of feeling across the nexus of East and West, black and white, nation and diaspora, the book both sets out a new terrain for Asian American literary culture and significantly strengthens the multiculturalist challenge to the American canon.
£99.00
Stanford University Press Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994
This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interview on Heidegger, or that on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer not only an introduction to other discussions, but something available nowhere else in his work. When did feminist discourse become an indispensable consideration for deconstruction? What was the impact on Derrida's work of his being an Algerian Jew growing up during World War II? Is there an ineradicable gap between language-based attitude such as those found in a deconstruction and subjectivity-oriented critical models such as those developed by Foucault and Lacan? Such questions as these are answered with great thoughtfulness and intensity. Derrida's oral style is patient, generous, and helpful. His tone varies with the questioners and the subject matter—militant, playful, strategic, impassioned, analytic: difference in modulation can sometimes be heard within the same dialogue. The informality of the interview process frequently leads to the most succinct and lucid explications to be found of many of the most important and influential aspects of Derrida's thought. Sixteen of the interviews appear here for the first time in English, including an interview, conducted especially for this volume, concerning the recent exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books.
£124.00
Stanford University Press Chinese Poetry and Prophecy: The Written Oracle in East Asia
Focusing on oracular texts, Chinese Poetry and Prophecy examines the role of divination in Chinese culture, particularly in religious practice. Drawing on a dazzling array of ancient and modern sources, the author establishes the oracular sequence of important but obscure works in his celebrated engaging style. This is the second posthumous work of Michel Strickmann to be to be edited by Bernard Faure for publication by Stanford University Press.
£104.40
Stanford University Press Chinese Poetry and Prophecy: The Written Oracle in East Asia
Focusing on oracular texts, Chinese Poetry and Prophecy examines the role of divination in Chinese culture, particularly in religious practice. Drawing on a dazzling array of ancient and modern sources, the author establishes the oracular sequence of important but obscure works in his celebrated engaging style. This is the second posthumous work of Michel Strickmann to be to be edited by Bernard Faure for publication by Stanford University Press.
£27.99
Stanford University Press Labors of Love
£130.00
Stanford University Press A Matter of Death and Life
A year-long journey by the renowned psychiatrist and his writer wife after her terminal diagnosis, as they reflect on how to love and live without regret. Internationally acclaimed psychiatrist and author Irvin Yalom devoted his career to counseling those suffering from anxiety and grief. But never had he faced the need to counsel himself until his wife, esteemed feminist author Marilyn Yalom, was diagnosed with cancer. In A Matter of Death and Life, Marilyn and Irv share how they took on profound new struggles: Marilyn to die a good death, Irv to live on without her. In alternating accounts of their last months together and Irv's first months alone, they offer us a rare window into facing mortality and coping with the loss of one's beloved. The Yaloms had numerous blessings—a loving family, a Palo Alto home under a magnificent valley oak, a large circle of friends, avid readers around the world, and a long, fulfilling marriage—but they faced death as we all do. With the wisdom of those who have thought deeply, and the familiar warmth of teenage sweethearts who've grown up together, they investigate universal questions of intimacy, love, and grief. Informed by two lifetimes of experience, A Matter of Death and Life is an openhearted offering to anyone seeking support, solace, and a meaningful life.
£16.06
Stanford University Press Organizations, Policy, and the Natural Environment: Institutional and Strategic Perspectives
This book brings together emerging perspectives from organization theory and management, environmental sociology, international regime studies, and the social studies of science and technology to provide a starting point for discipline-based studies of environmental policy and corporate environmental behavior. Reflecting the book’s theoretical and empirical focus, the audience is two-fold: organizational scholars working within the institutional tradition, and environmental scholars interested in management and policy. Together this mix forms a creative synthesis for both sets of readers, analyzing how environmental policy and organizational practices are shaped, spread and contested.
£40.50
Stanford University Press Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics, and Identity
The last several decades have witnessed major restructurings—economic, political, and cultural—in the international arena. The depth and scope of these changes have prompted anthropologists to rethink many of their most basic assumptions, to problematize issues that have long gone unexamined, and to grapple with new and unique problems. Doing so has left the discipline profoundly unsettled. Existing standards of scholarship and research methodologies have come under attack, key conceptual categories have been called into question, and truths once considered secure have been subjected to severe scrutiny and even ridicule. Seizing upon the opportunity afforded by the contemporary conjuncture of disciplinary crisis and redefinition, this book raises questions about two interrelated aspects of historical process and academic production. The volume contributes to ongoing debates about the degree to which the developments of recent decades represent the advent of a new historical era, a rupture with the past that requires new conceptualizations and logics in order to be understood. In confronting this question, the contributors to this volume have assembled a range of materials that place the present period of reconstruction in the context of a broader history and geography of other, related restructurings. Locating Capitalism in Time and Space also raises questions about the degree to which the scholarship of recent decades represents a qualitative break with that of the past. At issue here is whether one understands the history of academic production as a linear process of intellectual growth punctuated by major breakthroughs in understanding, or as a political process structured by the same kinds of inequalities and struggles that characterize the social worlds that are the object of anthropological analysis.
£32.92
Stanford University Press California Plain: Remembering Barns
Widely acknowledged as the leading architectural photographer of Northern California, the late Morley Baer had an enduring passion for photographing barns, which he began doing in the 1950s. This book makes available fine-arts quality prints of sixty-eight extraordinary black-and-white photographs of California barns, those often ghostly but comforting shapes in a grassy pasture we glimpse as we fly down the freeway at seventy miles an hour. The photographs also serve as a documentary record of a once common and now vanishing element of the landscape of California and the West. What is it about an old barn that wrenches a heartfelt pang from us today? Why do we photograph them, visualize them in their prime, and voice strenuous objections when new developments threaten to wipe them away? For many of us, abandoned farm structures are the focus of romantic reverie, an evocation of our agrarian roots, inviting us back to what we imagine must have been simpler, less complicated lives. A vision of life on the farm conjures a sense of wholesomeness and hard work, tillers of the soil taming the wild land as the American way of life moved West. Enjoyment of the superb photographs will be deepened by Bright Eastman’s colorful discussion of the history and various roles and styles of barns, as well as by the description by Patrick Jablonski—Morley Baer’s last assistant—of how Baer took pictures, developed his negatives, and printed them.
£62.00
Stanford University Press Human, All Too Human I: Volume 3
This is the second volume to appear in an edition that will be the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation of all of Nietzsche’s work. Volume 2: Unfashionable Observations, translated by Richard T. Gray, was published in 1995. The edition is a new English translation, by various hands, of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which has been acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last quarter century. The original Italian edition was simultaneously published in French, German, and Japanese. This volume of Human, All Too Human, the first of two parts, is the earliest of Nietzsche’s works in which his philosophical concerns and methodologies can be glimpsed. In this work Nietzsche began to establish the intellectual difference from his own cultural milieu and time that makes him our contemporary. Published in 1878, it marks both a stylistic and an intellectual shift away from Nietzsche’s own youthful affiliation with Romantic excesses of German thought and culture typified by Wagnerian opera.
£118.88
Stanford University Press Stones of the Sur: Poetry by Robinson Jeffers, Photographs by Morley Baer
The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the Big Sur coast of California were alive for Robinson Jeffers, and throughout his long career as a poet, he extolled their wild beauty. His vivid descriptions inspired the best work of other artists who lived nearby, including such noted photographers as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and their younger contemporary Morley Baer. Before he died in 1995, Baer was planning a volume that would bring together a group of his landscape photographs of the Big Sur area with a selection of poems that expressed Jeffers's mystical experience of stone. Jeffers believed that stone is alive, perhaps even conscious in some way. Baer wanted to create a visual and literary meditation on the life-experience of stone. James Karman was invited by Baer to serve as his collaborator, and has brought the project to completion—more than 50 of Baer's photographs paired with poems by Jeffers (some complete, others excerpted). Stones of the Sur is in five parts, each of which takes its title from a poem. Part I, "Tor House," contains photographs and poems about Jeffers's home, ever the locus of his inspiration. Part II, "Continent's End," begins with a panoramic view of the coastline and is followed by visual and textual images that become progressively narrower in scope as Baer and Jeffers focus on the mountains, cliffs, beaches, boulders, rocks, and pebbles of the Big Sur. The inward progression continues in Part III, "Oh Lovely Rock," where Baer trains his lens on close surfaces—revealing his sensibilities at their most abstract. From the middle of Part III on, the spiral is reversed and the view begins to open. Part IV, "Credo," expands outwardly from the pebbles and rocks of the Big Sur back to the beaches, cliffs, and mountains. Part V, "The Old Stone-Mason," concludes the book with a return to Tor House.
£65.00
Stanford University Press Why the Church
Why did Christianity produce the special organizational form church in the first place? Is it possible to be a Christian without the church? To what extent is Christian faith in community with other believers an alternative to the mere self-optimization of individuals?In this accessible and questioning new work, Hans Joas traverses theological, church-historical, sociological, and ethical territory in search of a viable conception of the church adequate to contemporary globalized societies. Across eleven essays that draw on work by Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, H. Richard Niebuhr, Leszek Kolakowski and others, Joas reflects on key debatesfrom the failure of so-called secularization theory to explain religiosity in modern society, to the role of Christianity and the church in relation to rampant nationalism and refugee crises, and to the question of whether or not human dignity ever was, or still is, the highest value in the West. Addressing the sociology of the
£21.99
Stanford University Press Love Across Difference
Lebanon may be the most complicated place in the world to be a mixed couple. It has no civil marriage law, fifteen personal status laws, and a political system built on sectarianism. Still, Lebanon has the most interreligious marriages per capita in the Middle East. What constitutes a mixed marriage is in flux as social norms shift, and reactions to mixed marriage reveal underlying social categories of discrimination. Through stories of Lebanese couples, Love Across Difference challenges readers to rethink categories of difference and imagine possibilities for social change.Drawing on two decades of interviews and research, Lara Deeb shows how mixed couples in Lebanon confront patriarchy, social difference, and sectarianism. In the drama that ensues as women and young men make their own marital choices, they push gender boundaries and reveal the ultimately empty nature of sect as a category of social difference. Love won''t end sectarianism, but it can contribute to re
£24.99
Stanford University Press The Sexual Economy of Capitalism
£23.99
Stanford University Press New Sincerity
The years 19892008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these yearsspecifically the post-baby boom generation of writers born between the late 1950s and early 1970sresponded to the times by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity. How, and in what way, these writers ask, can you mean what you say, and avow what you feel, when what you say and feel can be bought and sold on the market? What is authentic art in a historical moment when the artist has become a model for neoliberal subjectivity rather than its negation? Through six chapters focused on key writers of the periodincluding Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallacethe book explores these central questions while intervening critically in a set of debates in contemporary literary studies concerning aesthe
£104.40
Stanford University Press The Arts of Logistics
We live in a world where nothing is untouched by supply chainsart included. In this major contribution to the study of contemporary culture and supply chains, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a pervasive means of artistic production. The Arts of Logistics provides a new map of supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. What emerges is a magisterial account of the logistics revolution that foregrounds the role played by art in the long downturn of global capitalism. With chapters on art produced from technologies including ships, barrels, containers, and drones, Boyle narrates the long history of art''s connection to logistics, beginning in the transatlantic slave trade and continuing today in Silicon Valley''s dreams of automation. The global reach of the artists considered reflects the geographies of supply chain capitalism it
£97.20
Stanford University Press Global Ayahuasca
Ceremonies of drinking the psychoactive brew ayahuasca have flourished across the planet in recent decades. Emerging from Indigenous roots in the Amazon rainforest, the brew is now envisaged by many as the spiritual gateway to archaic and primordial worlds, with reports of healing, spiritual insight, and awe-inspiring visions placing ayahuasca among the burgeoning field of psychedelic medicines. Astonished and allured by descriptions of ayahuasca experiences, researchers in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy have attempted to define the shared properties of the visions. In this book, Alex Gearin challenges this simplified obsession with universal truth and explores the embodied practices of contemporary ayahuasca drinkers to reveal how the brew has conjured contradictory experiences across the globe. These range from urban disenchantment and capitalist mastery to competitive sorcery and ecological harmony, wherein the plant-induced visions embody different attitudes towards ca
£23.99
Stanford University Press Fabricating Homeland Security
Homeland security is rarely just a matter of the homeland; it involves the circulation and multiplication of policing practices across borders. Though the term homeland security is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with first developing this all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node in the sprawling global homeland security industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. And in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as India''s 9/11 or simply 26/11, the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt modern homeland security approaches. Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise.Pairing insights from science and technology studies with those from decolonial and postcolonial theory, Fab
£104.40
Stanford University Press Central Bank Capitalism
Today''s global financial system bears little resemblance to what it was at the end of the twentieth century. Shadow bankingfinancial activity taking place outside existing regulatory frameworkshas grown so important that it now serves as the backbone of the entire system. The shadow banking system, however, is highly unstable and the main reason why the financial system has remained in crisis mode since the 2008 financial crisis. To maintain stability, central banks like the Fed and the European Central Bank have come to use radical new monetary policy instruments which were inconceivable until very recently. Without intervention on the part of central banks, existing financial systems would completely collapse.As Joscha Wullweber shows, there has been a radical change in the state-market nexus. With governments refraining from strong and comprehensive fiscal and financial regulatory policies, central banks have become the main stabilizing force and the nodal point of financ
£20.99
Stanford University Press Past Progress
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress whether political or economic has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history''s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book''s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores post-historical Hunchun''s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism''s demise. Part I
£24.99
Stanford University Press Climate of Denial
Many people today experience the climate crisis with a divided state of mind: aware of the extreme effects, but living everyday life as if the crisis is not actually happening. This book argues that this structure of feeling has roots that can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when Western culture encountered the profound shock of Charles Darwin''s theory of evolution.Darwin''s theory made it increasingly difficult for secular humanists to flatly deny that humans are animals, fully enmeshed in natural systems and processes. But like those of us confronting climate change today, many writers and scientists struggled to integrate its depersonalizing vision into their understanding of the place of humans in the natural order. The result was that the radical environmental implications of The Origin of Species were evaded as soon as they were articulated, abetted by a culture of denial structured by the illusions of capital and empire.In light of the c
£97.20
Stanford University Press Translating the Jewish Freud
There is an academic cottage industry on the Jewish Freud, aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought. This book takes a different approach, turning its gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to touch Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud''s responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, rescue, and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna.
£104.40
Stanford University Press Laws of the Spirit
The compelling vision of religious life and practice found in Hasidic sources has made it the most enduring and successful Jewish movement of spiritual renewal of all time. In this book, Ariel Evan Mayse grapples with one of Hasidism''s most vexing questions: how did a religious movement known for its radical views about immanence, revelation, and the imperative to serve God with joy simultaneously produce strict adherence to the structures and obligations of Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Mayse argues that the exceptionality of Hasidism lies not in whether its leaders broke or upheld rabbinic norms, but in the movement''s vivid attempt to rethink the purpose of Jewish ritual and practice. Rather than focusing on the commandments as law, he turns to the methods and vocabulary of ritual studies as a more productive way to reckon with the contradictions and tensions of this religious movement as well as its remarkable intellectual vi
£55.80
Stanford University Press Liberating the United Nations
£104.40
Stanford University Press Past Progress
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress whether political or economic has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history''s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book''s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores post-historical Hunchun''s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism''s demise. Part I
£92.70
Stanford University Press Enlightenment Links
In this ambitious work, Collin Jennings applies computational methods to eighteenth-century fiction, history, and poetry to reveal the nonlinear courses of reading they produce. Hallmark genres of the British Enlightenment, such as the novel and the stadial history, are typically viewed as narratives of linear progress, emerging from Britain''s imperial growth and scientific advancement. Jennings foregrounds Enlightenment links: the paratextual devices, including cross-references, footnotes, and epigraphs, that make words work differently by pointing the reader to places inside and outside the text. Writers and printers combined text and paratext to produce nonlinear paths of reading and polysemous forms of reference that resist simple, causal structures of experience or theories of mind. Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and other writers developed genres that operate diagrammatically, with different points of entry and varied relationships between the language and format
£52.20
Stanford University Press Breathless
Each year in India more than two million people fall sick with tuberculosis (TB), an infectious, airborne, and potentially deadly lung disease. The country accounts for almost 30 percent of all TB cases worldwide and well above a third of global deaths from it. Because TB''s prevalence also indicates unfulfilled development promises, its control is an important issue of national concern, wrapped up in questions of postcolonial governance. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with a village in North India and its TB epidemic, Andrew McDowell tells the stories of socially marginalized Dalit (ex-untouchable) farming families afflicted by TB, and the nurses, doctors, quacks, mediums, and mystics who care for them. Each of the book''s chapters centers on a material or metaphorical substancesuch as dust, clouds, and ghoststo understand how breath and airborne illness entangle biological and social life in everyday acts of care for the self, for others, and for the environment.
£81.90
Stanford University Press Global MegaScience
Never has the world been as rich in scientific knowledge as it is today. But what are its main sources? In accessible and engaging fashion, Global Mega-Science examines the origins of this unprecedented growth of knowledge production over the past hundred and twenty years. David P. Baker and Justin J.W. Powell integrate sociological and historical approaches with unique scientometric data to argue that at the heart of this phenomenon is the unparalleled cultural success of universities and their connection to science: the university-science model. Considering why science is so deeply linked to (higher) educational development, the authors analyze the accumulation of capacity to produce researchand demonstrate how the university facilitates the emerging knowledge society. The age of global mega-science was built on the symbiotic relationship between higher education and science, especially the worldwide research collaborations among networked university-based scientists
£23.99
Stanford University Press How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare
Sanctions have enormous consequences. Especially when imposed by a country with the economic influence of the United States, sanctions induce clear shockwaves in both the economy and political culture of the targeted state, and in the everyday lives of citizens. But do economic sanctions induce the behavioral changes intended? Do sanctions work in the way they should? To answer these questions, the authors of How Sanctions Work highlight Iran, the most sanctioned country in the world. Comprehensive sanctions are meant to induce uprisings or pressures to change the behavior of the ruling establishment, or to weaken its hold on power. But, after four decades, the case of Iran shows the opposite to be true: sanctions strengthened the Iranian state, impoverished its population, increased state repression, and escalated Iran's military posture toward the U.S. and its allies in the region. Instead of offering an 'alternative to war,' sanctions have become a cause of war. Consequently, How Sanctions Work reveals how necessary it is to understand how sanctions really work.
£76.50
Stanford University Press Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan
After the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence. Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.
£112.50
Stanford University Press Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan
Japan's contemporary struggle with low fertility rates is a well-known issue, as are the country's efforts to bolster their population in order to address attendant socioeconomic challenges. However, though this anxiety about and discourse around population is thought of as relatively recent phenomenon, government and medical intervention in reproduction and fertility are hardly new in Japan. The "population problem (jinko mondai)" became a buzzword in the country over a century ago, in the 1910s, with a growing call among Japanese social scientists and social reformers to solve what were seen as existential demographic issues. In this book, Sujin Lee traces the trajectory of population discourses in interwar and wartime Japan, and positions them as critical sites where competing visions of modernity came into tension. Lee destabilizes the essentialized notions of motherhood and population by dissecting gender norms, modern knowledge, and government practices, each of which played a crucial role in valorizing, regulating, and mobilizing women's maternal bodies and responsibilities in the name of population governance. Bringing a feminist perspective and Foucauldian theory to bear on the history of Japan's wartime scientific fascism, Lee shows how anxieties over demographics have undergirded justifications for ethnonationalism and racism, colonialism and imperialism, and gender segregation for much of Japan's modern history.
£23.99
Stanford University Press Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China
From the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of political turmoil and war, China nevertheless is the only nation to successfully navigate the twentieth century with its imperial territorial expanse largely intact. In Birth of the Geopolitical Age, Shellen Xiao Wu demonstrates how global examples of frontier settlements refracted through China's unique history and informed the making of the modern Chinese state. Wu weaves a narrative that moves through time and space, the lives of individuals, and empires' rise and fall and rebirth, to show how the subsequent reshaping of Chinese geopolitical ambitions in the twentieth century, and the global transformation of frontiers into colonial laboratories, continues to reorder global power dynamics in East Asia and the wider world to this day.
£25.19
Stanford University Press A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela
A Blessing and a Curse examines the lived experience of political change, moral uncertainty, and economic crisis amid Venezuela's controversial Bolivarian Revolution. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an urban barrio over the course of a decade, Matt Wilde argues that everyday life in this period was intimately shaped by a critical contradiction: that in their efforts to capture a larger portion of oil money and distribute it more widely among the population, the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro pursued policies that ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency they sought to overcome. Offering a new synthesis between anthropological work on energy, politics, and morality, the book explores how the use of oil money to fund the revolution's social programs and political reforms produced profound cultural anxieties about the contaminating effects of petroleum revenues in everyday settings. Tracing how these anxieties rippled out into community life, family networks, and local politics, Wilde shows how questions about how to live a good life came to be intimately shaped by Venezuela's contradictory relationship with oil. In doing so, he brings a vital perspective to contemporary debates about energy transitions by proposing a new way of thinking about the political and moral economies of natural resources in postcolonial settings.
£84.60
Stanford University Press Styles of Seriousness
Being serious demands serious kinds of work. In Styles of Seriousness, Steven Connor reflects on the surprisingly various ways in which a sense of the serious is made and maintained, revealing that while seriousness is the most powerful feeling, it is also the most poignantly indeterminate, perhaps because of the impossibility of being completely serious. In colloquy with philosophers such as Aristotle, Nietzsche, James, Sartre, Austin, Agamben and Sloterdijk, and writers like Shakespeare, Byron, Auden and Orwell, Connor considers the linguistic and ritual behaviors associated with different modes of seriousness: importance; intention, or ways of really "meaning things;" sincerity; solemnity; urgency; regret; warning; and ordeal. The central claim of the book is human beings are capable of taking things seriously in a way that nonhuman animals are not, for the unexpected reason that human beings are so much more versatile than most animals at not being completely serious. One always, in fact, has a choice about whether or not to take seriously something that is supposed to be so. As a consequence, seriousness depends on different kinds of formalization or stylized practice. Styles of seriousness matter, Connor shows, because human beings are incapable of simply and spontaneously existing. Being a human means having to take seriously one's style of being.
£84.60
Stanford University Press The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought
World War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. In response to this crisis of race, the UN and UNESCO initiated a project of racial reeducation. This global antiracist campaign was framed by the persecution of Europe's Jews and anchored by UNESCO's epochal 1950 Statement on Race, which redefined the race concept and canonized the midcentury liberal antiracist consensus that continues to shape our present. In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.
£97.20
Stanford University Press Wombs of Empire: Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan
Japan's contemporary struggle with low fertility rates is a well-known issue, as are the country's efforts to bolster their population in order to address attendant socioeconomic challenges. However, though this anxiety about and discourse around population is thought of as relatively recent phenomenon, government and medical intervention in reproduction and fertility are hardly new in Japan. The "population problem (jinko mondai)" became a buzzword in the country over a century ago, in the 1910s, with a growing call among Japanese social scientists and social reformers to solve what were seen as existential demographic issues. In this book, Sujin Lee traces the trajectory of population discourses in interwar and wartime Japan, and positions them as critical sites where competing visions of modernity came into tension. Lee destabilizes the essentialized notions of motherhood and population by dissecting gender norms, modern knowledge, and government practices, each of which played a crucial role in valorizing, regulating, and mobilizing women's maternal bodies and responsibilities in the name of population governance. Bringing a feminist perspective and Foucauldian theory to bear on the history of Japan's wartime scientific fascism, Lee shows how anxieties over demographics have undergirded justifications for ethnonationalism and racism, colonialism and imperialism, and gender segregation for much of Japan's modern history.
£89.10
Stanford University Press The Indebted Woman: Kinship, Sexuality, and Capitalism
Women, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Across various categories of loans, including subprime lending, microcredit policies, and consumer loans, as well as rent and utilities, women are overrepresented as clients and managers, and are being enfolded into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles poor women play in making and consolidating debt and credit markets. Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian spent over two decades observing a credit market that specifically targets women in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu. They found that paying off debts required labor, frequently involved sexual transactions, and shaped women's bodies and subjectivities. Bringing together ethnography, statistical surveys, and financial diaries, they offer for the first time a comprehensive theory for this sexual division of debt that goes far beyond the Indian case, exposing the ways capitalism transforms womanhood and how this transformation in turn fuels capitalism.
£81.00
Stanford University Press The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam
The Nuclear Club reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes of a bright and peaceful tomorrow. While fears of nuclear war were ever-present, it was the perceived threat to their preeminence that drove Washington, Moscow, and London to throw their weight behind the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) banishing nuclear testing underground, the 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco banning atomic armaments from Latin America, and the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) forbidding more countries from joining the most exclusive club on Earth. International society, the Cold War, and the imperial U.S. presidency were reformed from 1945 to 1970, when a global nuclear order was inaugurated, averting conflict in the industrial North and yielding what George Orwell styled a "peace that is no peace" everywhere else. Today the nuclear order legitimizes foreign intervention worldwide, empowering the nuclear club and, above all, the United States, to push sanctions and even preventive war against atomic outlaws, all in humanity's name.
£25.19
Stanford University Press Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire
In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. As the "tribe" became a category of Ottoman administration, Bedouin in the Syrian interior used this category both to gain political influence and to organize community resistance to maintain control over land. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the "empty land" they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires. Ultimately, the book illuminates Ottoman state formation attempts within Bedouin communities and the unique trajectory of Bedouin in Syria, who maintained their control over land.
£25.19
Stanford University Press The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War
An incisive demonstration of how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.
£11.99
Stanford University Press The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting
Helmut Puff invites readers to visit societies and spaces of the past through the lens of a particular temporal modality: waiting. From literature, memoirs, manuals, chronicles, visuals, and other documents, Puff presents a history of waiting anchored in antechambers—interior rooms designated and designed for people to linger. In early modern continental Western Europe, antechambers became standard in the residences of the elites. As a time-space infrastructure these rooms shaped encounters between unequals. By imposing spatial distance and temporal delays, antechambers constituted authority, rank, and power. Puff explores both the logic and the experience of waiting in such formative spaces, showing that time divides as much as it unites, and that far from what people have said about early moderns, they approached living in time with apprehensiveness. Unlike how contemporary society primarily views the temporal dimension, to early modern Europeans time was not an objective force external to the self but something that was tied to acting in time. Divided only by walls and doors, waiters sought out occasions to improve their lot. At other times, they disrupted the scripts accorded them. Situated at the intersection of history, literature, and the history of art and architecture, this wide-ranging study demonstrates that waiting has a history that has much to tell us about social and power relations in the past and present.
£97.20
Stanford University Press Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global Economy
The term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit.
£72.90
Stanford University Press The War That Must Not Occur
The possibility of a nuclear war that could destroy civilization has influenced the course of international affairs since 1945, suspended like a sword of Damocles above the heads of the world's leaders. The fact that we have escaped a third world war involving strategic nuclear weapons—indeed, that no atomic weapon of limited power has yet been used under battlefield conditions—seems nothing short of a miracle. Revisiting debates on the effectiveness and ethics of nuclear deterrence, Jean-Pierre Dupuy is led to reformulate some of the most difficult questions in philosophy. He develops a counterintuitive but powerful theory of apocalyptic prophecy: once a major catastrophe appears to be possible, one must assume that it will in fact occur. Dupuy shows that the contradictions and paradoxes riddling discussions of deterrence arise from the tension between two opposite conceptions of time: one in which the future depends on decisions and strategy, and another in which every occurring event is one that could not have failed to occur. Considering the immense destructive power of nuclear warheads and the almost unimaginable ruin they are bound to cause, Dupuy reaches a provocative conclusion: whether they bring about good or evil does not depend on the present or future intentions of those who are in a position to use them. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination.
£21.99
Stanford University Press Feel the Grass Grow: Ecologies of Slow Peace in Colombia
On November 24, 2016, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia signed a revised peace accord that marked a political end to over a half-century of war. Feel the Grass Grow traces the far less visible aspects of moving from war to peace: the decades of campesino struggle to defend life, land, and territory prior to the national accord, as well as campesino social leaders' engagement with the challenges of the state's post-accord reconstruction efforts. In the words of the campesino organizers, "peace is not signed, peace is built." Drawing on nearly a decade of extensive ethnographic and participatory research, Angela Jill Lederach advances a theory of "slow peace." Slowing down does not negate the urgency that animates the defense of territory in the context of the interlocking processes of political and environmental violence that persist in post-accord Colombia. Instead, Lederach shows how the campesino call to "slowness" recenters grassroots practices of peace, grounded in multigenerational struggles for territorial liberation. In examining the various layers of meaning embedded within campesino theories of "the times (los tiempos)," this book directs analytic attention to the holistic understanding of peacebuilding found among campesino social leaders. Their experiences of peacebuilding shape an understanding of time as embodied, affective, and emplaced. The call to slow peace gives primacy to the everyday, where relationships are deepened, ancestral memories reclaimed, and ecologies regenerated.
£72.90
Stanford University Press Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire
In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. As the "tribe" became a category of Ottoman administration, Bedouin in the Syrian interior used this category both to gain political influence and to organize community resistance to maintain control over land. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the "empty land" they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires. Ultimately, the book illuminates Ottoman state formation attempts within Bedouin communities and the unique trajectory of Bedouin in Syria, who maintained their control over land.
£76.50
Stanford University Press The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949-2019
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.
£76.50
Stanford University Press Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine
The United States integrated counterterrorism mandates into its aid flows in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the early years of the global war on terror. Some two decades later, this securitized model of aid has become normalized across donor intervention in Palestine. Elastic Empire traces how foreign aid, on which much of the Palestinian population is dependent, has multiplied the sites and means through which Palestinian life is regulated, surveilled, and policed—this book tells the story of how aid has also become war. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Palestine, Elastic Empire offers a novel accounting of the US security state. The US war chronicled here is not one of tanks, grenades, and guns, but a quieter one waged through the interlacing of aid and law. It emerges in the infrastructures of daily life—in a greenhouse and library, in the collection of personal information and mapping of land plots, in the halls of municipal councils and in local elections—and indelibly transfigures lives. Situated in a landscape where the lines between humanitarianism and the global war on terror are increasingly blurred, Elastic Empire reveals the shape-shifting nature of contemporary imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.
£89.10
Stanford University Press Hinge Points: An Inside Look at North Korea's Nuclear Program
North Korea remains a puzzle to Americans. How did this country—one of the most isolated in the world and in the policy cross hairs of every U.S. administration during the past 30 years—progress from zero nuclear weapons in 2001 to a threatening arsenal of perhaps 50 such weapons in 2021? Hinge Points brings readers literally inside the North Korean nuclear program, joining Siegfried Hecker to see what he saw and hear what he heard in his visits to North Korea from 2004 to 2010. Hecker goes beyond the technical details—described in plain English from his on-the-ground experience at the North's nuclear center at Yongbyon—to put the nuclear program exactly where it belongs, in the context of decades of fateful foreign policy decisions in Pyongyang and Washington. Describing these decisions as "hinge points," he traces the consequences of opportunities missed by both sides. The result has been that successive U.S. administrations have been unable to prevent the North, with the weakest of hands, from becoming one of only three countries in the world that might target the United States with nuclear weapons. Hecker's unique ability to marry the technical with the diplomatic is well informed by his interactions with North Korean and U.S. officials over many years, while his years of working with Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani nuclear officials have given him an unmatched breadth of experience from which to view and interpret the thinking and perspective of the North Koreans.
£32.40
