Search results for ""stanford university press""

The Agony of Greek Jews tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. Bowman focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. His book contains new archival material and interviews with survivors. It supersedes much of the general literature on the subject of Greek Jewry.

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Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty of René Girard's uncollected essays on literature and literary theory, which, along with his classic, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, have left an indelible mark on the field of literary and cultural studies. Spanning over fifty years of critical production, this anthology offers unique insights into the origin, development, and expansion of Girard's "mimetic theory"—a groundbreaking account of human interaction and of the genesis of cultural forms. The essays run the gamut of Western literary culture, from Racine and Shakespeare to the existentialist writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The authors who have most influenced Girard—Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky—receive extended treatment, and Girard's observations on the changing landscape of literary studies are chronicled in several essays devoted to psychoanalysis, formalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Though at times overshadowed by his work in religious and cultural anthropology, Girard's work in the area of literary studies has been the wellspring of his thought. All of the essays in this volume develop the idea that the greatest authors are also the greatest students of human nature, for their artistic intuitions are generally more penetrating than the analyses of the philosophers or the social scientists. Girard does not offer us a theory of literature but literature as theory.

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The Belated Witness stakes out an original place within the field of recent work on the theory and practice of literary writing after the Holocaust. Drawing in productive and unsettling ways from converging work in history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature, the book asks how the events of the Holocaust force us to alter traditional conceptions about human experience, as well as the way we can now talk and write about such experiences. Rather than providing a mere account of an outside or inside reality, literature after the Holocaust sets itself a more radical task: it testifies to unspeakable experiences in a specific mode of address, a call or summons to another in whose sole power resides the possibility of a future response to such testimonies of world-historical trauma.

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This collection of essays explores two traditions of interpreting and manipulating nature in the early-modern and nineteenth-century Iberian world: one instrumental and imperial, the other patriotic and national. Imperial representations laid the ground for the epistemological transformations of the so-called Scientific Revolutions. The patriotic narratives lie at the core of the first modern representations of the racialized body, Humboldtian theories of biodistribution, and views of the landscape as a historical text representing different layers of historical memory.

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Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how post-Holocaust testimony remains romantic, and shows why romanticism must therefore be rethought. The book argues that what literary historians have traditionally called "romanticism," and characterized as a literary movement stretching roughly between 1785 and 1832, should be redescribed in light of two circumstances. The first is the specific inadequacy of literary-historical models before "romantic" works. The second is the particular function that these unsettling aspects of "romantic" works have after Auschwitz. The book demonstrates that certain figures (of speech, writing, and argument) central to normative accounts of "romanticism," serve in their most radical—most genuinely "romantic"—form as vehicles for posing a conception of life (and death) revealed in the camps. In these pages, Agamben meets Wordsworth, Shakespeare meets Celan, film meets lyric poetry, survivors' accounts meet fiction, de Man encounters Nancy. The book offers new readings of highly canonical works—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Alain Resnais's Night and Fog—and introduces unfamiliar texts. It elaborates a fascinating account of the rhetoric of ethical dispositions and gives its readers an attentive, moving way of understanding the condition of human survival after the Holocaust.

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Exemplarity and Chosenness is a combined study of the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) that explores the question: How may we account for the possibility of philosophy, of universalism in thinking, without denying that all thinking is also idiomatic and particular? The book traces Derrida's interest in this topic, particularly emphasizing his work on "philosophical nationality" and his insight that philosophy is challenged in a special way by its particular "national" instantiations and that, conversely, discourses invoking a nationality comprise a philosophical ambition, a claim to being "exemplary." Taking as its cue Derrida's readings of German-Jewish authors and his ongoing interest in questions of Jewishness, this book pairs his philosophy with that of Franz Rosenzweig, who developed a theory of Judaism for which election is essential and who understood chosenness in an "exemplarist" sense as constitutive of human individuality as well as of the Jews' role in universal human history.

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This collection of essays, originally published at different times, presents a coherent, systematic, and comprehensive theory of the work of literature and its major aspects. The approach, which may be called "Constructive Poetics," does not assume that a work of literature is a text with fixed structures and meanings, but a text that invites the reader to evoke or project a network of interrelated constructs, complementary or contradictory as they may be. The work of literature is not just a narrative, as studies in narratology assume, but a text that projects a fictional world, or an Internal Field of Reference. Meanings in a text are presented through the evocation of "frames of reference" (scenes, characters, ideas, etc.). Language in literature is double-directed: it relates the Internal Field to External Fields and vice versa. The essays explore the problems of fictionality, presentation and representation, metaphor as interaction between several frames of reference, the theory of "Integrational Semantics" in literary and other texts, the meaning of sound patterns in poetry, and the question of "literariness." This theory and its specific aspects were developed by the author in Israel in the 1960s and 1970s and lay at the foundations of the Tel-Aviv School of Poetics. Revived now, it resonates with the current mood in literary criticism.

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The thirteen essays in this volume represent the most sustained investigation, in any language, of the connections between Heidegger's thought and the tradition of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant. This collection examines Heidegger's stand on central themes of transcendental philosophy: subjectivity, judgment, intentionality, truth, practice, and idealism. Several essays in the volume also explore hitherto hidden connections between Heidegger's later "post-metaphysical" thinking—where he develops a "topological" approach that draws as much upon poetry as upon the philosophical tradition—and the transcendental project of grasping the conditions that make experience of a meaningful world possible. This volume will interest philosophers in the continental tradition, where Heidegger's thought has long had a central role, as well as those many philosophers in the analytic tradition whose own approach to knowledge, semantics, and philosophy of mind traces its roots to Kant.

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Based on new archival research in many countries, this volume broadens the context of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Its primary focus is on relations between China and Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century; but the book also deals with China's relations with Cambodia, U.S. dealings with both China and Vietnam, French attitudes toward Vietnam and China, and Soviet views of Vietnam and China. Contributors from seven countries range from senior scholars and officials with decades of experience to young academics just finishing their dissertations. The general impact of this work is to internationalize the history of the Vietnam War, going well beyond the long-standing focus on the role of the United States.

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Throughout the Middle East, the clash between Islamic forces and authoritarian states has undermined many democratization efforts. But in Turkey, Islamic actors—from the Gülen movement to the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party—have been able to negotiate the terms of secular liberal democracy. This book explores the socio-political conditions and cultural venues in which Islamic movements cease to confront and start to cooperate with secular states. Though both the Gülen and JP have ambivalent attitudes toward individual freedoms and various aspects of civil society, their continuing engagements with the state have encouraged democracy in Turkey. As they contest issues of education and morality but cooperate in ethnic and gender politics, they redraw the boundaries between public sites and private lives. Showing opportunities for engagement between Islam and the state, from Turkey to Kazakhstan to the United States, Between Islam and the State illustrates a successful means of negotiating between religion and politics.

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Worlds Within tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood to supersede national borders, this book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics. Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, Worlds Within explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and nascent Third-Worldism of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, and the decolonizing nationalisms and postcolonial cosmopolitanisms of novelistic descendants, such as the Indian and Indo-Caribbean writers Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, and David Dabydeen, the anglophone and francophone African writers Chinua Achebe, Nggi wa Thiong'o, Assia Djebar, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Cuban postmodern novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy. Across this global field, national identity is subtended by transnational affiliations and expressed through diverse and intersecting literary forms.

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This book addresses the impact of globalization on the lives of youth, focusing on the role of legal institutions and discourses. As practices and ideas travel the globe—such as the promotion and transmission of zero tolerance and retributive justice programs, the near ubiquitous acceptance of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the transnational migration of street gangs—the legal arena is being transformed. The essays in this book offer case studies and in-depth analyses, spanning diverse settings including courts and prisons, inner-city streets, international human rights initiatives, newspaper offices, local youth organizations, and the United Nations. Drawing on everyday social practices, each chapter adds clarity to our current understanding of the ways in which ideas and practices in different parts of the world can affect youth in one particular locale.

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This book provides an overview of the state of Japan's civil society and a new theory, based on political institutions, to explain why Japan differs so much from other industrialized democracies. It offers a new interpretation of why Japan's civil society has developed as it has, with many small, local groups but few large, professionally managed national organizations. The book further asks what the consequences of that pattern of development are for Japan's policy and politics. The author persuasively demonstrates that political institutions—the regulatory framework, financial flows, and the political opportunity structure—are responsible for this pattern, with the result that civil groups have little chance of influencing national policy debates. The phenomenon of “members without advocates” thus has enormous implications for democratic participation in Japan.

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Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment showcases a variety of disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical approaches that, taken together, frame historical analysis in the study and teaching of criminal law. Featuring work by historians, lawyers, theorists, and sociologists, Modern Histories approaches the history of crime and punishment not as the freestanding study of a distinct institution or body of legal doctrine, but as part of a broader inquiry into the webs of governance and control that constitute social and political life.

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This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization.

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In the contemporary West, pressures to more effectively reallocate water to meet growing urban and environmental demands are increasing as environmental awareness grows and climate change threatens existing water supplies. The legacy of Owens Valley raises concerns about how reallocation can occur. Although it took place over seventy years ago, the water transfer from Owens Valley to Los Angeles still plays an important role in perceptions of how water markets work. The memory of Owens Valley transfer is one of theft and environmental destruction at the hands of Los Angeles. In reassessing the infamous transfer, one could say that there was no "theft." Owens Valley landowners fared well in their land and water sales, earning more than if they had stayed in agriculture. In another sense, however, "theft" did occur. The water was not literally stolen, but there was a sharp imbalance in gains from the trade—with most of the benefits going to Los Angeles. Owens Valley, then, demonstrates the importance of distributional issues in water trades when the stakes are large. Los Angeles water rights in the Owens Valley and Mono Basin have again been a front-page issue since 1970. New environmental and recreational values and air pollution concerns have ushered in demands to curtail the shipment of water from source regions for urban use. Owen's Valley Revisited: A Reassesment of the West's First Great Water Transfer carefully explores how these sagas were addressed, considering the costs involved, and alternative approaches that might have resulted in more rapid and less contentious remedies. This analysis offers insights to guide the ongoing conversation about water politics and the future thereof. .

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This is a book about jurisprudence—or legal philosophy. The legal philosophical texts under consideration are—to say the least—unorthodox. Tolkien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Legally Blonde, and others are referenced as instances of what the author calls lex populi—"pop law". Here, however, issues of legal philosophy are heavily coded, for few of these pop cultural texts announce themselves as expressly legal. Lex Populi reads these texts "jurisprudentially", with an eye to their hidden legal philosophical meanings, enabling connections such as: Tolkien's Ring as Kelsen's grundnorm; vampire slaying as legal language's semiosis; and Hogwarts as substantively unjust. Lex Populi attempts not only a jurisprudential reading of popular culture, but also a popular rereading of jurisprudence, removing it from the legal experts in order to restore it to the public at large: a lex populi by and for the people.

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Why is it that the modern conception of literature begins with one of the worst writers of the philosophical tradition? Such is the paradoxical question that lies at the heart of Jean-Luc Nancy's highly original and now-classic study of the role of language in the critical philosophy of Kant. While Kant did not turn his attention very often to the philosophy of language, Nancy demonstrates to what extent he was anything but oblivious to it. He shows, in fact, that the question of philosophical style, of how to write critical philosophy, goes to the core of Kant's attempt to articulate the limits, once and for all, that would establish human reason in its autonomy and freedom. He also shows how this properly philosophical program, the very pinnacle of the Enlightenment, leads Kant to posit literature as its other by way of what is here called the syncope, and how this other of philosophy, entirely its product, cannot be said to exist outside of metaphysics in its accomplishment. This subtle, unprecedented reading of Kant demonstrates the continued importance of reflection on the relation between philosophy and literature, indeed, why any commitment to Enlightenment must consider and confront this partition anew.

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The SARS epidemic of 2003 was one of the most serious public health crises of our times. The event, which lasted only a few months, is best seen as a warning shot, a wake-up call for public health professionals, security officials, economic planners, and policy makers everywhere. SARS in China addresses the structure and impact of the epidemic and its short and medium range implications for an interconnected, globalized world. Warnings from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made it clear that SARS may have been a prelude to bigger things. The authors of this volume focus on specific aspects of the SARS outbreak—epidemiological, political, economic, social, cultural, and moral. They analyze SARS as a form of social suffering and raise questions about the relevance of national sovereignty in the face of such global threats. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that SARS had the potential of becoming a major turning point in human history. This book forces us to ask what we have learned from SARS as we go on to face newer, and farther-reaching pandemics. The current case of the COVID-19 outbreak amplifies the urgency of this question, and illuminates the strengths and shortcomings of different national responses to such pandemics. Contributors: Erik Eckholm Joan Kaufman Arthur Kleinman Dominic Lee Sing Lee Megan Murray Thomas G. Rawski Tony Saich Alan Schnur James L. Watson Hong Zhang Yun Kwok Wing

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Stephen Steinberg offers a bold challenge to prevailing thought on race and ethnicity in American society. In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution. On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of "race relations" obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a "white sociology" that reflects white interests and viewpoints. What happens, he asks, when we foreground the interests and viewpoints of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of racial oppression? On ethnicity, Steinberg turns the tables and shows that the early sociologists who predicted ultimate assimilation have been vindicated by history. The evidence is overwhelming that the new immigrants, including Asians and most Latinos, are following in the footsteps of past immigrants—footsteps leading into the melting pot. But even today, there is the black exception. The end result is a dual melting pot—one for peoples of African descent and the other for everybody else. Race Relations: A Critique cuts through layers of academic jargon to reveal unsettling truths that call into question the nature and future of American nationality.

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Why are women such prominent workers in the global marketplace? Why do so many perform jobs that involve carework? What political forces have made these women key participants in globalization? What are the consequences for the women themselves, for their families, and for societies and international relations in general? This book offers a provocative examination of globalization, examining the lives of the women at the center of these new global dynamics. Arguing that society is facing multiple crises of care, the authors develop a new framework for understanding the interplay of globalization, gender, and carework. In four original essays, they examine gender, race, and class inequality; migration, citizenship, and the politics of social control; the evolving meanings of motherhood; and new social definitions of carework and the personal transformation of careworkers. Excerpts from the classic works in the field as well as recent cutting-edge research studies support the examination of each of these growing global crises.

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Residents of Parma, Italy pride themselves on their sophistication and connection to European modernity. But despite a reputation for civility, intimate partner violence continues to take place, largely hidden from public view. Offering a detailed ethnography of two women's shelters—one leftist, the other Catholic—this book provides the political, cultural, and legal contexts of competing explanations for intimate partner violence. Some contend that violence against women reflects the cultural and historical gender inequalities embedded in Italian society, including "old-fashioned" or "traditional" understandings of masculinity. Others argue that it stems from confusion and ambivalence over "new" or "modern" forms of gender relations. While the first explanation places the blame on tradition and the second cites the transition to modernity, both emphasize societal understandings of gender and point to collective, rather than individual, responsibility. Through an intimate portrayal of everyday life, Sheltering Women reveals how violence against women can be studied as one part of a continuum of locally relevant understandings of gender relations and gender change.

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Harry G. Frankfurt begins his inquiry by asking, "What is it about human beings that makes it possible for us to take ourselves seriously?" Based on The Tanner Lectures in Moral Philosophy, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right delves into this provocative and original question. The author maintains that taking ourselves seriously presupposes an inward-directed, reflexive oversight that enables us to focus our attention directly upon ourselves, and "[it] means that we are not prepared to accept ourselves just as we come. We want our thoughts, our feelings, our choices, and our behavior to make sense. We are not satisfied to think that our ideas are formed haphazardly, or that our actions are driven by transient and opaque impulses or by mindless decisions. We need to direct ourselves—or at any rate to believe that we are directing ourselves—in thoughtful conformity to stable and appropriate norms. We want to get things right." The essays delineate two features that have a critical role to play in this: our rationality, and our ability to love. Frankfurt incisively explores the roles of reason and of love in our active lives, and considers the relation between these two motivating forces of our actions. The argument is that the authority of practical reason is less fundamental than the authority of love. Love, as the author defines it, is a volitional matter, that is, it consists in what we are actually committed to caring about. Frankfurt adds that "The object of love can be almost anything—a life, a quality of experience, a person, a group, a moral ideal, a nonmoral ideal, a tradition, whatever." However, these objects and ideals are difficult to comprehend and often in conflict with each other. Moral principles play an important supporting role in this process as they help us develop and elucidate a vision that inspires our love. The first section of the book consists of the two lectures, which are entitled "Taking Ourselves Seriously" and "Getting It Right." The second section consists of comments in response by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman, and Meir Dan-Cohen. The book includes a preface by Debra Satz.

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Money Talks argues that, contrary to conventional explanations, the changes in the terms of International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality agreements are best explained by shifts in the sources for borrowing state financing. The Fund regularly relies on external financing to supplement its loans to countries facing payment imbalances. As a result, these supplementary financiers are able to exercise leverage over the Fund and the design of its conditionality programs. The book's conclusions are supported by rich empirical material gathered directly from the IMF archives, including descriptive statistics and statistical analyses using an original data set, which is the first to code the terms of the 249 Fund conditionality agreements from 1952—when Fund conditionality began—to 1995, as well as case studies substantiated with archival and interview evidence.

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In recent years, much political and legal debate has centered on the class action lawsuit. Many lawyers and judges have noted the intense pressure to settle caused by the very filing of a suit. Some contend that the procedure amounts to a form of judicial blackmail. Others counter that it is an effective means of policing corporate behavior and assuring injured victims' fair compensation. This book represents the first scholarly effort to view the modern class action comprehensively through the lenses of American political and constitutional theory. Redish argues that the modern class action undermines foundational constitutional principles, including procedural due process and separation of powers, and has been improperly transformed from its origins as a complex procedural device into a means for altering controlling substantive law in highly undemocratic ways. Redish proposes an alternative vision of the class action lawsuit, one that is designed to enable the device to serve its valuable procedural purposes without simultaneously contravening core precepts of American constitutional democracy.

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Algeria Cuts discusses the figure of woman, both under colonial rule in Algeria and within the postcolonial independent nation-state. It is an interdisciplinary project that spans fine art, film, colonial and legal policy, manifestos, prose fiction, and theoretical and philosophical texts concerning the relationship between France and Algeria. Khanna investigates gendered representation, identification, and justice, and in the process, calls into question the ways in which conventional disciplinary frameworks foreclose certain avenues of reflection while foregrounding others. Algeria Cuts seeks to understand Algeria and Algerian women as a philosophical site that facilitates an understanding of justice and the pursuit of feminism.

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Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers—Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703–1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849–1905)—each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

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Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with information technology and digital media. This book claims that what people really care about when they complain and protest that privacy has been violated is not the act of sharing information itself—most people understand that this is crucial to social life —but the inappropriate, improper sharing of information. Arguing that privacy concerns should not be limited solely to concern about control over personal information, Helen Nissenbaum counters that information ought to be distributed and protected according to norms governing distinct social contexts—whether it be workplace, health care, schools, or among family and friends. She warns that basic distinctions between public and private, informing many current privacy policies, in fact obscure more than they clarify. In truth, contemporary information systems should alarm us only when they function without regard for social norms and values, and thereby weaken the fabric of social life.

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This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law’s relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force.

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This book addresses the politics of environmental change in one of the richest areas of tropical rainforest in Indonesia. Based on field studies conducted in three agricultural communities in rural Aceh, this work considers a number of questions: How do customary (adat) village and state institutions work? What roles do they play in managing local resources? How have they evolved over time? Are villagers, state policies, or corrupt local networks responsible for the loss of tropical rainforest? Will better outcomes emerge from revitalizing customary management, from changing state policies, or from transforming the way the state works? And why do projects designed by outsiders so often fail? The book describes how, as key actors interact, they create arrangements that effectively manage local resources, eclipsing adat and formal state management structures. While outside interventions try to work with adat and the state, they fail to engage fully with the main problem—that is, that district webs of power and interest, coalescing around local resources and reaching into the wider society, lead inexorably to environmental decline.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal Republic of Germany abruptly created a new social order as old institutions were abolished and new counterparts imported. This unique situation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the central tenets of life course sociology. The empirical chapters of this book draw a comprehensive picture of life course transformation, demonstrating how the combination of life course dynamics coupled with an extraordinary pace of system change affect individual lives. How much turbulence was created by the transition and how much stability was preserved? How did the qualifications and resources acquired before 1989 influence the fortunes in the restructured economy? How did the privatization and reorganization of firms impact individuals? Did the transformation experiences differ by age/cohort and gender? How stable were social networks at work and in the family? Were personality characteristics important mediators of post-1989 success or failure or were they rather changed by them? How specific were the East German life trajectories in comparison with Poland and West-Germany?

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This book is one of the first to use citizenship as a lens through which to understand German history in the twentieth century. By considering how Germans defined themselves and others, the book explores how nationality and citizenship rights were constructed, and how Germans defined—and contested—their national community over the century. The volume presents new research informed by cultural, political, legal, and institutional history to obtain a fresh understanding of German history in a century marked by traumatic historical ruptures. By investigating a concept that has been widely discussed in the social sciences, Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany engages with scholarly debates in sociology, anthropology, and political science.

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Aesthetic Democracy argues that art and the aesthetic in general are the founding condition of the possibility of establishing social and political democracy. The book examines contemporary criticism and finds that it is historically shaped by colonialism, and that it sets up an opposition of east and west that shapes all contemporary cultural politics. The author argues for a way of outwitting this potentially dangerous struggle of east and west grounded in an aestheticism and a validation of sensory experience. Docherty proposes a new model of cultural critique, based on a revitalized and positively valorized notion of "hypocrisy," whose roots lie in Machiavelli, but whose contemporary strength lies in its potential for an ethical encounter with alterity as such.

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Most work on peacekeeping and peacebuilding focuses almost entirely on policy. Networks of Democracy provides a distinct and important perspective that links daily activities to mission outcomes. This book is an ethnography of the interaction between the diverse people and diverse organizations on the ground in a peacebuilding and reconstruction mission, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo. Anne Holohan asks and answers: how do people from many nationalities and who are part of organizations with diverse structures and cultures—militaries, police, civilian organizations—cooperate? What everyday behaviors and organizational practices facilitate communication and cooperation, and what behaviors and practices impede it? Drawing on extensive research of interactions on the ground, Holohan offers vivid accounts of a flexible, inclusive inter-organizational culture in two municipalities—one where all mission actors are present and participating, the other a rigid, hierarchical, exclusive inter-organizational culture. As she demonstrates, these differences produce a striking contrast in outcomes between the two municipalities, and for the mission overall.

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In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book—impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority—thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"—dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics—through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

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The Forbidden Lands concerns a pivotal but unexamined surge in frontier violence that engulfed the eastern forests of eighteenth-century Brazil's most populous region, Minas Gerais. Focusing on social, cultural, and racial relations, it challenges standard depictions of the occupation of Portuguese America's vast interior, while situating its frontier history in the broader context of the Americas and the Atlantic world. The author argues that the key to understanding the colony's internal consolidation—ignored and misconstrued by scholars fixed on coastal events and export-led development—resides in the incompatible ways in which Luso-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians, and seminomadic indigenous peoples accused of cannibalism sought to territorialize their distinctive societies. He demonstrates that cultural conflict on the frontier was a defining characteristic of Brazil's transition from colony to independent nation and a fundamental consequence of its relationship to a wider world. The study moves Brazil to a prominent place in our understanding of the hemispheric sweep of internal colonization in the Americas. Essays based on material in this book have won the 2006 CLAH Prize and the 2005 Tibesar Prize.

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This book analyzes the diverse understandings of poverty in a multiracial colonial society, eighteenth-century Quito. It shows that in a colonial world both a pauper and a landowner could lay claim to assistance as the "deserving poor" while the vast majority of the impoverished Andean population did not share the same avenues of poor relief. The Many Meanings of Poverty asks how colonialism shaped arguments about poverty—such as the categories of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor—in multiracial Quito, and forwards three central observations: poverty as a social construct (based on gender, age, and ethnoracial categories); the importance of these arguments in the creation of governing legitimacy; and the presence of the "social" and "economic" poor. An examination of poverty illustrates changing social and religious attitudes and practices towards poverty and the evolution of the colonial state during the eighteenth-century Bourbon reforms.

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How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.

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According to imperial edict in pre-modern China, an elementary school was to be established in every village in the empire for any boy to attend. This book looks at how the schools worked, how they changed over time, and who promoted them and why. Over the course of the Ming period (1368-1644), schools were sponsored first by the emperor, then by the central bureaucracy, then by local officials, and finally by the people themselves. The changing uses of schools helps us to understand how the Ming state related to society over the course of nearly 300 years, and what they can show us about community and political debates then and now.

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This remarkable volume introduces to the large English-speaking audience what is probably the most coherent segment of twentieth-century American literature not written in English. The range of American Yiddish Poetry runs the gamut from individualistic verse of alienation in the modern metropolis, responses to Western culture and ideologies, and experiments with poetic form and the resources of the Yiddish language, to the vitriolic associative chains of a politically engaged anarchist existentialist; from hymns to urban architecture and landscapes and the plight of African Americans to confrontations with the experiences of Jewish history and the loss of the Yiddish language. The bilingual facing-page format, the notes and the biographies of poets, the selections from Yiddish theory and criticism, and a comprehensive introduction to the cultural background and concerns of the poetry enhance the poems themselves.

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This is a collection of the last essays by Yuji Ichioka, the foremost authority on Japanese-American history, who passed away two years ago. The essays focus on Japanese Americans during the interwar years and explore issues such as the nisei (American-born generation) relationship toward Japan, Japanese-American attitudes toward Japan's prewar expansionism in Asia, and the meaning of "loyalty" in a racist society—all controversial but central issues in Japanese-American history. Ichioka draws from original sources in Japanese and English to offer an unrivaled picture of Japanese Americans in these years. Also included in this volume are an introductory essay by editor Eiichiro Azuma that places Ichioka's work in Japanese-American historiography, and a postscript by editor Chang reflecting on Ichioka's life-work.

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China’s increasing economic and military capabilities have attracted much attention in recent years. How should the world, especially the United States, respond to this emerging great power? A sensible response requires not only figuring out the speed and extent of China’s rise, but also answering a question that has received much less attention: What is China’s grand strategy? This book describes and explains the grand strategy China’s leaders have adopted to pursue their country’s interests in the international system of the 21st century. The author argues that their strategy is designed to foster favorable conditions for continuing China’s modernization while also reducing the risk that others will decide a rising China is a threat that must be countered. Why did China’s leaders settle on this grand strategy and what are its key elements? What alternatives were available? Is the current approach yielding the results China anticipated? What does this grand strategy imply for international peace and security in the coming years—and, most critically, what are the prospects for an increasingly prominent China and a dominant United States to rise to the challenge of managing their inevitable disagreements?

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It is widely recognized that internet technology has had a profound effect on political participation in China, but this new use of technology is not unprecedented in Chinese history. This is a pioneering work that systematically describes and analyzes the manner in which the Chinese used telegraphy during the late Qing, and the internet in the contemporary period, to participate in politics. Drawing upon insights from the fields of anthropology, history, political science, and media studies, this book historicizes the internet in China and may change the direction of the emergent field of Chinese internet studies. In contrast to previous works, this book is unprecedented in its perspective, in the depth of information and understanding, in the conclusions it reaches, and in its methodology. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is accessible to a broad audience.

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Colonialism and empire have rarely been seen from the perspectives and experiences of the colonized. Five Faces of Exile addresses this gap by exploring a wide range of perspectives on colonial, anti-colonial, and postcolonial developments. More specifically, it explores American empire in the Philippines and its ethnic and racial dimensions in the United States through a close reading of the texts and social practices of five pioneering, trans-Pacific Filipino American writers of the colonial era: the diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, the poet Jose Garcia Villa, fiction writers N. V. M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido N. Santos, and the celebrated Asian American worker-writer Carlos Bulosan. In this first transnational intellectual history of an Asian American group, Espiritu shows that an exploration of those at the margins of the nation, who feel at home neither in the Philippines nor in the United States, raises profound questions about citizenship and national belonging. This beautifully written book explores the common desire for national solidarity and cultural translation and the shared ambivalence at the heart of Filipino American expatriate intellectual life, as well as the social practices of patronage and performance that shaped ethnic and national identities.

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A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

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This book explores several canonical works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. The surprising juxtaposition of Kant's moral philosophy, Freud's reflections on obsessional neurosis, and Flaubert's peculiar late novel Bouvard et Pécuchet forms the basis of a compelling argument linking each of these central works around the problem of moral thought as it fundamentally determines the modern subject in relation to time. The book engages an area of emerging importance in contemporary critical thought, the problem of ethics or "otherness" as a crucial factor at play in speculative and literary works. The readings in this book provide insight into the ways in which three fundamental philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary texts can be reread in light of their confrontation with a seemingly inhuman force at the heart of the foundation of the human subject.

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Before imagination became the transcendent and creative faculty promoted by the Romantics, it was for something quite different. Not reserved to a privileged few, imagination was instead considered a universal ability that each person could direct in practical ways. To imagine something meant to form in the mind a replica of a thing—its taste, its sound, and other physical attributes. At the end of the Renaissance, there was a movement to encourage individuals to develop their ability to imagine vividly. Within their private mental space, a space of embodied, sensual thought, they could meditate, pray, or philosophize. Gradually, confidence in the self-directed imagination fell out of favor and was replaced by the belief that the few—an elite of writers and teachers—should control the imagination of the many. This book seeks to understand what imagination meant in early modern Europe, particularly in early modern France, before the Romantic era gave the term its modern meaning. The author explores the themes surrounding early modern notions of imagination (including hostility to imagination) through the writings of such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, François de Sales, Pascal, the Marquise de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, and Fénelon.

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This book is a history of the Mixtec Indians of southern Mexico, who in their own language call themselves Tay Ñudzahui, "people of the rain place." These people were among the most populous cultural and language groups of Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest. This study focuses on several dozen Mixtec communities in the region of Oaxaca during the period from about 1540 to 1750. The work is largely based on an extraordinary collection of primary sources, translated and analyzed by the author, that were written by Mixtecs in the roman alphabet from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. To complement this native-language corpus, the author has examined preconquest and early colonial pictorial writings, Spanish-language civil and trial records, and Nahuatl (Aztec) texts. The book addresses many interrelated topics, including writing, language, sociopolitical organization, local government, social and gender relations, land tenure, trade, rebellion, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory. Throughout, the author emphasizes the internal, indigenous perspective instead of relying on Spanish sources and points of view. In its focus on indigenous concepts, the book introduces a new terminology and new categories of analysis in colonial Mexican history. The conclusion makes detailed comparisons with recent findings on the Nahuas of central Mexico and the Maya of Yucatán, and revisits the question of cultural change among indigenous peoples under colonial rule.

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