Search results for ""stanford university press""

This book examines cultural representations of African American and Asian American masculinity, focusing primarily on the major works of two influential figures, Ralph Ellison and Frank Chin. It highlights the language of gender and sexuality that writers use to depict the psychological injuries inflicted by racism on men of color—a language that relies on metaphors of emasculation. The book focuses on how homosexuality comes to function as a powerful symbol for a feminizing racism, and explains why this disturbing symbolism proves to be so rhetorically and emotionally effective. This study also explores the influential concept of literature that these writers promote—a view of writing as a cultural and political activity capable of producing the most virile and racially authentic forms of manhood. In comparing African American and Asian American writings, this book offers the first scholarly account of how black and yellow conceptions of masculinity are constructed in relation to each other.

Read more less

Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France's colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the "oriental woman," and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place. The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolution. Finally, the book proposes that the feminine figures of Orientalist texts are often interwoven with representations of language, and more specifically with representations of language as an alien and resistant code—something other than the transparent medium of ideas. It suggests that in promoting awareness that language is not simply the neutral medium of thought and experience, these veiled figures of language function as "foreign bodies," creating disruptive effects within an economy orchestrated toward the production of knowledge of the other. However, the book also argues against the view, espoused by certain critics, that the self-reflexivity of Orientalist writing fully counteracts its polarizing political effects, arguing instead for a process of "double reading" that acknowledges both the geopolitical power encoded within Orientalist representation and the ways in which specific texts resist this power.

Read more less

"Civilization" is a constantly invoked term. It is used by both politicians and scholars. How useful, in fact, is this term? Civilization and Its Contents traces the origins of the concept in the eighteenth century. It shows its use as a colonial ideology, and then as a support for racism. The term was extended to a dead society, Egyptian civilization, and was appropriated by Japan, China, and Islamic countries. This latter development lays the groundwork for the contemporary call for a "dialogue of civilizations." The author proposes instead that today the use of the term "civilization" has a global meaning, with local variants recognized as cultures. It may be more appropriate, however, to abandon the name "civilization" and to focus on a new understanding of the civilizing process.

Read more less

The Cuban missile crisis was the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War and the most perilous moment in American history. In this dramatic narrative written especially for students and general readers, Sheldon M. Stern, longtime historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, enables the reader to follow the often harrowing twists and turns of the crisis. Based on the author’s authoritative transcriptions of the secretly recorded ExComm meetings, the book conveys the emotional ambiance of the meetings by capturing striking moments of tension and anger as well as occasional humorous intervals. Unlike today's readers, the participants did not have the luxury of knowing how this potentially catastrophic showdown would turn out, and their uncertainty often gives their discussions the nerve-racking quality of a fictional thriller. As President Kennedy told his advisers, “What we are doing is throwing down a card on the table in a game which we don't know the ending of.” Stern documents that JFK and his administration bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the crisis. Covert operations in Cuba, including efforts to kill Fidel Castro, had convinced Nikita Khrushchev that only the deployment of nuclear weapons could protect Cuba from imminent attack. However, President Kennedy, a seasoned Cold Warrior in public, was deeply suspicious of military solutions to political problems and appalled by the prospect of nuclear war. He consistently steered policy makers away from an apocalyptic nuclear conflict, measuring each move and countermove with an eye to averting what he called, with stark eloquence, “the final failure.”

Read more less

This book examines major areas of late imperial Chinese culture, and their relation to Chinese culture today, focusing on the competence and sophistication of ordinary people. The work provides an overview of late imperial society and its responses to forces for change. Its ethnographically rich treatment of changes in family life under Communist rule is based on the author's fieldwork. Kinship beyond the family is treated through comparisons of the author's fieldwork sites in China and Taiwan. In dealing with the use of contracts and commodification within one community setting, it illuminates the broader economic culture of late imperial China. This book powerfully confirms that China's modernity has deep roots in its own tradition, and in doing so offers an excellent introduction to the anthropological view of China.

Read more less

Free Trade and the Environment examines the impact economic integration has on the environment, using Mexico, which transformed itself from one of the most closed economies to one of the world's most open, as a case study. As new nations join the Free Trade Area of the Americas or the World Trade Organization, they are considering the path taken by Mexico nearly 20 years ago. The author investigates two commonly held and opposing beliefs in the policy community about the impact of free trade on the environment. While some believe that free trade will raise incomes in developing countries, thus encouraging governments to protect the environment, others argue that free trade simply provides an incentive for heavily polluting industries to move to developing countries with lax environmental regulations. The author shows that for Mexico in fact neither position is correct, and concludes with suggestions for free trade policies that couple environmental benefits with economic integration.

Read more less

This book consists of a series of essays that all turn around questions of the address of speech or writing. They argue and demonstrate that meaning is not just a matter of the active intention of a subject (for example, speaker, writer, or other signatory of a meaningful act) but also of its reception at another's address. The book's main concern is therefore with a theory of meaning and of action that is not centered on the intentional, self-conscious subject. The fifteen chapters explore this problematic within three broad areas: love, jealousy, and sexual difference; fiction or literature; and political or public discourse. The book engages principally with contemporary French thought and includes important new readings of work by Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Read more less

This book is the first comprehensive examination of China's hukou (household registration) system. The hukou system registers and governs the 1.3 billion Chinese, while creating deep and rigid divisions and exclusions; in many domains the system determines how the Chinese live and shapes China's sociopolitical structure and socioeconomic development. This book shows that the system has made both positive and negative contributions to contemporary Chinese society: it has helped foster rapid economic growth and political stability, but also has reinforced social stratification, the rural-urban divide, regional inequalities, and discrimination and injustice. Using rich new materials, this book traces the history and development of the hukou system. It describes the functions, impact, and operational mechanisms of the system. It also analyzes the hukou in comparison with the systems of exclusion and discrimination in other nations, notably Brazil and India. This book presents important insights for understanding China's past, present, and future.

Read more less

This book analyzes Confucian ideology as culture and culture as history by exploring the interplay between popular ritual performance of the opera Mulian and gentrified mercantile lineages in late imperial Huizhou. Mulian, originally a Buddhist tale featuring the monk Mulian's journey through the underworld to save his mother, underwent a Confucian transformation in the sixteenth century against a backdrop of vast socioeconomic, intellectual, cultural, and religious changes. The author shows how local elites appropriated the performance of Mulian, turning it into a powerful medium for conveying orthodox values and religious precepts and for negotiating local social and gender issues altered by the rising money economy. The sociocultural approach of this historical study lifts Mulian out of the exorcistic-dramatic-ethnographic milieu to which it is usually consigned. This new approach enables the author to develop an alternative interpretation of Chinese popular culture and the Confucian tradition, which in turn sheds significant new light upon the social history of late imperial China.

Read more less

This book examines two large and generally overlooked diaspora communities, one Jewish and the other Slavic, which found refuge in Shanghai during the period 1900-1950. Victims of discrimination and persecution in their own lands—Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Ukraine—they chose Shanghai as their destination because no documentation was required to enter the city and settle there. In their struggle to survive and build a life in this Chinese open port, they encountered severe political, social, economic, and cultural challenges. The Jewish diaspora community began forming in the early 1900s and increased to more than 18,000 after the initial triumphs of Nazism. The Slavic community eventually numbered about 30,000 people, escaping revolution and persecution from Bolshevik and fascist forces at home and in north China. This book focuses on how these diverse groups, adhering to various religious and cultural traditions, formed communities, preserved their national and cultural identities, chose their leaders, found gainful employment, coped with the alien Chinese culture, educated and raised their children, and established a considerable presence in this large, cosmopolitan city. The author examines at length the different experiences and responses of the two diaspora groups during World War II under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. With the Chinese Communist takeover of the city in 1949, both groups found themselves in a renewed struggle to find a home, adding still another chapter to the saga of their diaspora experiences. The book concludes with an account of how the two groups handled this new challenge and where they finally found refuge. Apart from the particulars of the Shanghai experience, the story of the two communities clearly resonates with today’s accounts of societies in conflict, dislocated populations, and varied struggles to survive and sustain life under trying conditions.

Read more less

This study uses the participation of free colored men, whether mulatos, pardos, or morenos (i.e., Afro-Spaniards, Afro-Indians, or "pure blacks"), in New Spain's militias as a prism for examining race relations, racial identity, racial categorization, and issues of social mobility for racially stigmatized groups in colonial Mexico. By 1793, nearly 10 percent of New Spain's population was made up of people who could trace some African ancestry—people subject to more legal disabilities and social discrimination than mestizos, who in turn fell below white creoles, who in turn fell below the Spanish-born, in the stratified and caste-like society of colonial Spanish America. The originality of this study lies in approaching race via a single, important institution, the military, rather than via abstractions or examples taken from particular regions or single runs of legal documents. By exploring the lives of tens of thousands of part-time and full-time free colored soldiers, who served the colony as volunteers or conscripts, and by adopting a multi-regional approach, the author is able not only to show how military institutions evolved with reference to race and vice versa, but to do so in a manner that reveals discontinuities and regional differences as well as historical trends. He also is able to examine black lives beyond the institution of slavery and to achieve a more nuanced impression of the meaning of freedom in colonial times. From the 1550s on, free colored forces figured prominently in the colony's military forces, and units of free colored soldiers evolved with increasing autonomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author concludes, however, that the Bourbon reforms of the 1760s—which clearly expanded the military establishment and the role of Spanish soldiers born in the New World—came at the expense of free colored companies, which experienced a reduction in both numbers and institutional privileges.

Read more less

A Place in History is a cultural study of Tel Aviv, Israel's population center, established in 1909. It describes how a largely European Jewish immigrant society attempted to forge a home in the Mediterranean, and explores the role of memory and diaspora in the creation of a new national culture. Each chapter is devoted to a particular place in the city that has been central to its history, and includes literary, artistic, journalistic, and photographic material relating to that site. This is the first book-length study of Tel Aviv in English. It will appeal to readers interested in urban cultures, the contemporary Middle East, modern Jewish history, and Israeli literature. It also contributes to the ongoing public debate about memory, memorials and urban identity.

Read more less

Why are public identities so predictably, and often so radically, different from identities that flourish in realms of collective intimacy? Why does belonging to a group, knowing about it, or displaying its qualities to others require that certain aspects of identification be denied—not because they are false or stereotypical, but because they are thought to be accurate and indispensable signs of membership? In Off Stage/On Display, ten scholars with diverse geographical, theoretical, and topical interests take a close, critical look at the vexed relationship between public identities and the intimate spheres in which they are made. They ask how scholars and activists can engage more creatively with problems encountered on this awkward terrain, which is now global both in location and political significance. Their answers, careful and suggestive, point to more effective strategies for representing aspects of identification that cannot be easily shown or, in an age of mass mediation, easily concealed.

Read more less

Exemplary Romantic novelists Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley were likewise keen tourists and influential contributors to the discourse of Romantic tourism. The shaping power of this discourse—already highly developed in poetry, travel literature, and the visual arts by the time they began writing—affected not only what they saw and felt on tour but also how they imagined their greatest novels. Defining both tour and novel as privileged spaces exempt from the boring routines and hampering contingencies of ordinary life, these authors as well as many of their contemporaries and early Romantic predecessors effectively brought the tour into fiction and fiction into the tour. This is the first extended study of the intimate connections between these two major cultural innovations of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the first to pay close attention to the active commerce, the fluid interplay, within the larger discourse of Romantic tourism, between British Romantic fiction, poetry, tour books, landscape painting, and book illustration (as exemplified by the collaboration between Scott and J. M. W. Turner).

Read more less

Is East Asia heading toward war? Throughout the 1990s, conventional wisdom among U.S. scholars of international relations held that institutionalized cooperation in Europe fosters peace, while its absence from East Asia portends conflict. Developments in Europe and Asia in the 1990s contradict the conventional wisdom without discrediting it. Explanations that derive from only one paradigm or research program have shortcomings beyond their inability to recognize important empirical anomalies. International relations research is better served by combining explanatory approaches from different research traditions. This book makes a case for a new theoretical approach (called “analytical eclecticism” by the authors) to the study of Asian security. It informs the analysis in subsequent chapters of central topics in East Asian security, with specific reference to China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The authors conclude that the prospects for peace in East Asia look less dire than conventional—in many cases Eurocentric—theories of international relations suggest. At the same time, they point to a number of potentially destabilizing political developments.

Read more less

This volume brings together scholars from the United States and Europe to examine the history of one of the great challenges to European politics today—the relationship between political democracy and ethnic diversity. The major questions posed by the authors are: is ethnic homogeneity a condition of democracy, or is it a historical coincidence that modern democracies seem to prosper in ethnically homogeneous societies? How relevant is ethnic diversity or homogeneity in explaining the success or failure of democracy in Europe? And how did democracies cope with ethnic diversity, in comparison with other political systems—empires and modern dictatorships in particular? The answers may be unsettling: homogeneity and diversity have both proven to be destructive forces in history. Whereas Western European democracies incorporated these ethnic differences into their political system, the introduction of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe was seriously hampered, both by ethnic conflicts and by efforts to homogenize the region ethnically. This is the first book in which the fate of democracy is directly related to ethnic diversity.

Read more less

This book explores how the lower federal court appointment process became vastly politicized in the modern era. Scherer develops a theory of “elite mobilization,” positing that lower court appointments have always been used by politicians for electoral purposes, but because of two historic changes to American institutions in the 1950s and 1960s—the breakdown of the old party system, and a federal judiciary reception to expanding individuals’ constitutional rights—politicians shifted from an appointment system dominated by patronage to a system dominated by new policy-oriented appointment strategies. The use of these new strategies not only resulted in partisan warfare during the nomination and confirmation stages of the appointment process, but also led to party-polarized voting in the lower federal courts. Employing exclusive data of judicial decision-making from the New Deal era through the present, Scherer demonstrates that there was little party-polarized voting in the lower federal courts until the late 1960s, and that once politicians began to use elite mobilization strategies, significant party-polarized voting in the lower federal courts resulted. Accordingly, elite mobilization strategies have affected not only politics in Washington, but also the way justice is distributed across the country.

Read more less

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes (the possibility of) historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth.

Read more less

At the close of the twentieth century, democracy appeared to have overcome the Cold War partition of the world, as countries across the globe had deposed autocratic regimes and held free elections. Nowhere were these developments dramatized more brightly than in Eastern Europe in 1989, as newly formed civic movements replaced long-standing Leninist regimes with democratic governments. Yet it is clear that the “waves” of democracy that initially seemed similar have led to widely varying outcomes. While some countries in Eastern Europe were invited to join NATO and the European Union, others were excluded. Former communists were elected to power in post-communist Poland and Hungary, but were largely absent in the Czech Republic and were transformed into populists in Slovakia. These differences have led the author to address several questions, including: How similar actually were the Leninist regimes before their dissolution, and how similar were their demises? How did the way communism fell affect the founding of democratic states in Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and Czechoslovakia? This book offers a critique and reformulation of existing theories of democratization, as well as of earlier understandings of the fall of communism. By contrasting the negotiated pact in Poland with the collapse of the regime in Czechoslovakia, it provides a theoretical framework to explain how different paths of democratization affected the prospects for sustainable democracy. The book goes beyond the explanation that a “Gorbachev” effect determined events in the late 1980s by contrasting mobilization against Leninist regimes with negotiations for democratic institutions. It highlights competition between aspiring leaders, reconceptualizing the notion of civil society as a master frame within which movements and leaders sought to mobilize popular support. The book also emphasizes the transformation of networks associated with the birth of a democratic nation, such as the Catholic Church in Poland and the theater strikes in Czechoslovakia. Finally, it analyzes how paths of change structured political competition in new democracies in both the short and the medium term.

Read more less

Fred Terman was an outstanding American engineer, teacher, entrepreneur, and manager. Terman was also deeply devoted to his students, to engineering, and to Stanford University. This biography focuses on the weave of personality and place across time—it examines Terman as a Stanford faculty child growing up at an ambitious little regional university; as a young electrical engineering professor in the heady 1920s and the doldrums of the Depression; as an engineering manager and educator in the midst of large-scale wartime research projects and the postwar rise of Big Science and Big Engineering; as a university administrator on the razor’s edge of great expectations and fragile budgets; and, finally, as a senior statesman of engineering education. The first doctoral student of Vannevar Bush at M.I.T., Terman was himself a prodigious teacher and adviser to many, including William Hewlett and David Packard. Terman was widely hailed as the magnet that drew talent together into what became known as Silicon Valley. Throughout his life, Fred Terman was constant in his belief that quality could be quantified, and he was adamant that a university’s success must, in the end, be measured by the success of its students. Fred Terman’s formula for success, both in life and for his university, was fairly simple: hard work and persistence, systematic dedication to clearly articulated goals, accountability, and not settling for mediocre work in yourself or in others.

Read more less

Production of Presence is a comprehensive version of the thinking of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one of the most consistently original literary scholars writing today. It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. Based on this assessment of the past and the future of literary studies and the humanities, the book develops the provocative thesis that, through their exclusive dedication to interpretation, i.e. to the reconstruction and attribution of meaning, the humanities have become incapable of addressing a dimension in all cultural phenomena that is as important as the dimension of meaning. Interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension of "presence," a dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on our senses and our bodies. Production of Presence is a passionate plea for a rethinking and a reshaping of the intellectual practice within the humanities.

Read more less

This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.

Read more less

In July 2009, violence erupted among Uyghurs, Chinese state police, and Han residents of Ürümqi, the capital city of Xinjiang, in northwest China, making international headlines, and introducing many to tensions in the area. But conflict in the region has deep roots. Now available in paperback, Holy War in China remains the first comprehensive and balanced history of a late nineteenth-century Muslim rebellion in Xinjiang, which led to the establishment of an independent Islamic state under Ya'qūb Beg. That independence was lost in 1877, when the Qing army recaptured the region and incorporated it into the Chinese state, known today as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Hodong Kim offers readers the first English-language history of the rebellion since 1878 to be based on primary sources in Islamic languages as well as Chinese, complemented by British and Ottoman archival documents and secondary sources in Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and Turkish. His pioneering account of past events offers much insight into current relations.

Read more less

Emptiness and Temporality is an account of classical Japanese poetics based, for the first time, on the two concepts of emptiness (J.kū) and temporality (mujō) that ground the medieval practice and understanding of poetry. It clarifies the unique structure of the collective poetic genre called renga (linked poetry) by analyzing Shinkei's writings, particularly Sasamegoto. This book engages contemporary Western theory, especially Derrida's concepts of différance and deconstruction, to illuminate the progressive displacement that constitutes the dynamic poetry of the renga link as the sequence moves from verse 1 to 100. It also draws on phenomenology, Heidegger's Being and Time, Bakhtin's notion of the dialogical, Gadamer's Truth and Method, hermeneutics, and the concept of translation to delve into philosophical issues of language, mind, and the creative process. Furthermore, the book traces the development of the Japanese sense of the sublime and ineffable (yūgen and its variants) from the identification, by earlier waka poets like Shunzei and Teika, of their artistic practice with Buddhist meditation (Zen or shikan), and of superior poetry as the ecstatic figuration of the Dharma realm. Emptiness and Temporality constitutes a radically new definition of Japanese poetry from the medieval period onward as a symbolist poetry, a figuration of the sacred rather than a representation of nature, and reveals how the spiritual or moral dimension is essential to an understanding of traditional Japanese aesthetic ideals and practices, such as Nô performance, calligraphy, and black-ink painting.

Read more less

China's giant project in social engineering has drawn worldwide attention, both because of its coercive enforcement of strict birth limits, and because of the striking changes that have occurred in China's population: one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history and a gender gap among infants that is the highest in the world. These changes have contributed to an imminent crisis of social security for a rapidly aging population, provoking concern in China and abroad. What political processes underlie these population shifts? What is the political significance of population policy for the PRC regime, the Chinese people, and China's place in the world? The book documents the gradual "governmentalization" of China's population after 1949, a remarkable buildup of capacity for governance by the regime, the professions, and individuals. Since the turn of the millennium the regime has initiated a drastic shift from "hard" Leninist methods of birth planning toward "soft" neoliberal approaches involving indirect regulation by the state and self-regulation by citizens themselves. Population policy, once a lagging sector in China's transition from communism, is now helping lead the country toward more modern and internationally accepted forms of governance. Governing China's Population tells the story of these shifts, from the perspectives of both regime and society, based on internal documents, long-term fieldwork, and interviews with a wide range of actors—policymakers and implementers, propagandists and critics, compliers and resisters. This study also illuminates the far-reaching consequences for China's society and politics of deep state intrusion in individual reproduction. Like Mao's Great Leap Forward, Deng's one-child policy has created vast social suffering and human trauma. Yet power over population has also been positive and productive, promoting China's global rise by creating new kinds of "quality" persons equipped to succeed in the world economy. Politically, the PRC's population project has strengthened the regime and created a whole new field of biopolitics centering on the production and cultivation of life itself. Drawing on approaches from political science and anthropology that are rarely combined, this book develops a new kind of interdisciplinary inquiry that expands the domain of the political in provocative ways. The book provides fresh answers to broad questions about China's Leninist transition, regime capacity, "science" and "democracy," and the changing shape of Chinese modernity.

Read more less

Fraternal Capital examines class, gender, and work in Tiruppur, South India, where export of knitted garments has been led by a networked fraternity of owners of working-class and Gounder caste origins, who explain their class mobility as hinging on their "toil." This book asks how these self-made men drew from their agrarian past to turn Gounder toil into capital, and how they continue to make an entire town work for the global economy. Fraternal Capital decenters understandings of global capitalism by linking agrarian transition with the adaptation of a singular past in the interests of accumulation. As Tiruppur shifts to global production, this book tracks ways in which gender links sexed bodies to processes of differentiation, in the tenuous search for consent to increasingly despotic work politics. Tiruppur demonstrates the importance of gender and geography to the globalization of capital as it affects the lives of working people in provincial India and elsewhere. This book links the political economy of development to postcolonial and cultural studies, rooting the analysis of globalization ethnographically and geographically. Fraternal Capital provides a window into a decentralized capitalism and thereby critiques macroeconomic portrayals of globalization by showing how history, geography, gender, and work practice shape local sites of global production. For orders from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, please e-mail Permanent Black at perblack@ndb.vsnl.net.in.

Read more less

Although a strong indicator of social status, home ownership has rarely emerged as a topic in social inequality research. This book compares twelve countries—the United States, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Israel—to determine the interdependence of social inequality and homeownership attainment over the life course. Examining countries that are similar with respect to socioeconomic development, but different in regard to their housing policies, the authors show that housing policies matter and are largely consistent with a country’s general approach in the provision of welfare. This book presents a valuable contribution to the social stratification literature, which traditionally has neglected the dimension of home ownership. It goes beyond most housing studies by adopting a life-course framework and longitudinal approach. The empirical findings provide evidence that in all countries under study—even those of the social democratic welfare regime type—labor market position matters in one’s chances to become a homeowner.

Read more less

In this book of brilliantly erudite and precise discussions, Pierre Hadot explains that for the Ancients philosophy was not reducible to the building of a theoretical system: it was above all a choice about how to live one's life. One of the most influential historians of ancient philosophy in the world today, Hadot is adept at using ancient philosophers to illuminate the relevance of their ideas to contemporary life. In this book, which is an ideal introduction to Hadot's more scholarly What is Ancient Philosophy?, we learn that to be an Epicurean is not merely to think like one; it is to adopt a way of living where limiting desires is the condition for happiness. Being an Aristotelian, similarly, is to choose a life that involves contemplation, and being a Cynic is to follow Diogenes in his refusal of quotidian convention and the mentality of ordinary people. If so many Ancient philosophers founded schools, Hadot explains, it was precisely because they were proposing how to live life on a daily basis. We learn here that the history of philosophy has been something more than just that of a discourse. The founding texts of Greek philosophy, after all, were notes taken from oral exercises undertaken in concrete circumstances and contexts, most often a dialogue between students and specific interlocutors who meant to shed light on their students' real existence. The immense contribution of this book, which also traces Hadot's own personal itinerary in a touching manner, is to remind us, through direct language and numerous examples, what the theoretical aspect of philosophy often masks: its vital and existential dimensions.

Read more less

How might Russia and Eurasia attract private investment and trade from the West over the next several years, and what conditions in Russia and Eurasia may Western investors and traders expect? In this unprecedented volume, leading American experts and policymakers and their Russian and Eurasian counterparts survey economic prospects for the region and assess its important resources and institutions. The book begins by examining the overall trade and investment outlook in Russia and Eurasia. It then takes up critical sectors: energy, aerospace, automobiles, agriculture, and telecommunications. It turns to current institutional impediments to trade and investment such as problems in corporate governance, the banking system, and the rule of law. The final chapters look to the future and assess the prospects for economic reform, the movement to join the World Trade Organization, and the impact of political dynamics in the region. The experts are joined by Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze and former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who in their forewords acknowledge not only the crucial importance of trade and investment for the future but also the necessity of bringing the integrity of institutions up to international standards. A third foreword by the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, stresses the place of commerce in economic growth and in the integration of Russia and Eurasia with the world community.

Read more less

Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), the first judge to strike down a law, gave us modern common law by turning medieval common law inside-out. Through his resisting strong-minded kings, he bore witness for judicial independence. Coke is the earliest judge still cited routinely by practicing lawyers. This book breaks new ground as the first scholarly biography of Coke, whose most recent general biography appeared in 1957, and draws revealingly on Coke's own papers and notebooks. The book covers Coke's early life and career, to the end of the reign of Elizabeth I in 1603 (a second volume will cover Coke's career under James I and Charles I). In particular, this book highlights Coke's close connection with the Puritans of England; his learning, legal practice, and legal theory; his family life and ambitious dealings; and the treason cases he prosecuted.

Read more less

The Education of the Eye examines the origins of visual culture in eighteenth-century Britain. It claims that at the moment when works of visual art were first displayed and contemplated as aesthetic objects two competing descriptions of the viewer or spectator promoted two very different accounts of culture. The first was constructed on knowledge, on what one already knew, while the second was grounded in the eye itself. Though the first was most likely to lead to a socially and politically elite form for visual culture, the second, it was held, would almost certainly end up in the chaos of the mob. But there was another route through these conflicting accounts of the visual that preserved the education of the eye while at the same time allowing the eye freedom to enter into the realm of culture. This third route, that of the sentimental look, is explored in a series of contexts: the gallery, the pleasure garden, the landscape park, and the country house. The Education of the Eye sets out to reclaim visual culture for the democracy of the eye and to explain how aesthetic contemplation may, once more, be open to all who have eyes to look. The book will interest historians of eighteenth-century British culture and historians of architecture, art, and landscape, as well as readers generally curious about the origins of our current visual culture.

Read more less

Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, died in Honolulu in 1905, shortly after surviving strychnine poisoning in San Francisco. The inquest testimony of the physicians who attended her death in Hawaii led to a coroner’s jury verdict of murder—by strychnine poisoning. Stanford University President David Starr Jordan promptly issued a press release claiming that Mrs. Stanford had died of heart disease, a claim that he supported by challenging the skills and judgment of the Honolulu physicians and toxicologist. Jordan’s diagnosis was largely accepted and promulgated in many subsequent historical accounts. In this book, the author reviews the medical reports in detail to refute Dr. Jordan’s claim and to show that Mrs. Stanford indeed died of strychnine poisoning. His research reveals that the professionals who were denounced by Dr. Jordan enjoyed honorable and distinguished careers. He concludes that Dr. Jordan went to great lengths, over a period of nearly two decades, to cover up the real circumstances of Mrs. Stanford’s death.

Read more less

Winner of the Urban History Association's 2005 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award. In traditional Chinese cities, a lively street culture was an important part of popular culture, and street life was central to the daily lives of city dwellers, especially the lower classes. This book examines street culture in Chengdu, an under-studied inland city, during the transformative decades between 1870 and 1930, in order to explore various topics: the relationship between urban commoners and public space; the role that community and neighborhood played in public life; how the reform movement and the Republican revolution changed everyday life; and how popular culture and local politics interacted. Drawing on a rich array of Chinese and Western sources—including archives, local newspapers, gazetteers, personal records, folk literature, and field investigation—the author argues that life in public spaces was radically transformed in Chengdu during these eventful years.

Read more less

The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace. The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust, and Freud's successor Lacan. Freud's idea of "sorrow work" and Proust's concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.

Read more less

A traditionally conservative country in financial matters, India enacted a series of reforms in response to its balance of payments crisis in the early 1990s. But since then only halting progress has been made, raising concerns about India’s rising fiscal deficit, inefficiencies in its financial system, and its still relatively closed economy. This book analyzes some of the complex issues currently facing the Indian economy. Looking at India in the international economy, the first section examines reforms of policies toward trade and capital inflows, including issues in exchange rate policy and international business prospects. The second section addresses banking and financial markets, tracking the reforms to date and establishing the need for upgraded technology. The final section compares India's fiscal performance with that of other developing countries, highlighting worrying trends, and presents concrete policy recommendations to advance Indian reforms.

Read more less

This work renews the basic questions and principles of philosophical ethics and provides a thorough account of how being oneself presupposes freedom and responsibility. Elements of Ethics focuses on the descriptive and conceptual analysis of the experiences through which human lives become aware of themselves and shows how we are provoked to respond appropriately to the various dimensions and phenomena of the universe. Operating on the provocative thesis that "if the ethical is real, it cannot be proved, because it is either nothing at all or an irreducible origin," this book pursues the question that defines ethics: "How should I live?" After setting out a preliminary definition of terms, Elements of Ethics gives insight into the relation of human individuals and the world by showing that the traditional separation between "is" and "ought" overlooks their profound coincidence, and by clarifying the determining, though often overlooked, role of affectivity and katharsis in all ethical experiences.

Read more less

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism. Its first section examines aesthetic nationalism and the figure of the body, focusing on writings by Benedict Anderson, J. G. Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as “imagined community.” Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language. The author accounts for the hysteria that has characterized media representations of theory, explains why and how Romanticism has remained a locus of extravagant political hopes and anxieties, and, in a sequence of close readings, uncovers the “anaesthetic” condition of possibility of the politics of aesthetics.

Read more less

Territories of Profit compares Dell Computer, the dominant computer manufacturer of the late twentieth century, and G. F. Swift, the leading meatpacking firm of the late nineteenth century, to reveal how communications revolutions in different periods enabled businesses to innovate their operations, reorganize the structure of the firm, and reshape the geography of profit-making. By depicting the parallel experiences of Dell and Swift, which both deployed revolutionary communications technologies in their business systems and transformed patterns of development through their innovative advances, the book challenges simplified representations of the contemporary economy as historically unprecedented. Territories of Profit also incorporates information from interview sources within Dell to portray the "Dell Model" in ways never before revealed in existing studies of the PC maker.

Read more less

Marc Galanter's seminal work, "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead," is among the most well-cited law review articles of all time. With his distinction between experienced "repeat players" and inexperienced "one shotters" in the U.S. judicial system, Galanter established a clear and predictable model of how the structure of our legal system and one's frequency of interaction with it influence the outcomes of cases. This book collects the original paper and ten contemporary articles about Galanter's theory in a single volume. The articles, which present new research results and synthesize work done over the past few decades, examine the lasting influence and continued importance of this groundbreaking work. In Litigation provides a thorough presentation of the most durable theory explaining litigation and legal participation that sociolegal scholarship has produced.

Read more less

Max Weber's Economy and Society is widely considered the most important single work in sociology and among the most important in the history of the social sciences. This volume provides a critical and up-to-date introduction to Weber's magnum opus. While much has been published about the various parts of Economy and Society, this is the first book to cover all of its major sections and themes, as well as to discuss the methodological vision that unites them. In Max Weber's Economy and Society, a distinguished group of scholars illuminates the central arguments of Economy and Society and appraises their contemporary relevance for the analysis of the economy, the polity, law, religion, and social action. With essays that are both theoretical and empirical, this book will be of interest to those already familiar with Weber's work and to those encountering it for the first time.

Read more less

In the 1990s, numerous Latin American nations privatized their public pension systems. These reforms dramatically transformed the way these countries provide retirement income, and they provoked widespread protests from workers and pensioners alike. Retiring the State represents the first book-length study of the origins of this surprising trend. Drawing on original field research, including interviews with key policymakers, Madrid argues that the recent reforms were driven not by social policy, but by macroeconomic concerns. Countries facing growing financial pressures chose to privatize their pension systems largely to boost their domestic savings rates and reduce public pension spending in the long run. The author explores his arguments through detailed case studies of pension reform in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, a survey of social security privatization efforts in East Europe and Latin America as a whole, and a quantitative analysis of pension privatization worldwide.

Read more less

Corporations are undergoing dramatic changes that have significant implications for how human resources are best managed and organized. There is growing consensus that human capital is critical to an organization's success. But how should the HR function itself be organized? Is change in HR keeping pace with organizational change overall? Creating a Strategic Human Resources Organization reports the findings from a 6-year longitudinal study of whether and how the HR functions in large corporations are responding to the challenges and opportunities posed by the changing business environment. The book identifies the changes that will be required in order for HR to become a true strategic partner, and suggests why, in too many companies, this transition is not occurring. It examines the paradoxical roles played in this transition by the focus on talent management and the application of IT capabilities, and proposes a new way of conceptualizing HR as providing three service lines. It finds that the most effective HR teams are substantially changing their mix of activities to become knowledge-based contributors to organizational strategy and effectiveness. The authors conclude that HR is at a crossroads, and will either have to face up to these challenges or become a marginal contributor to corporate success. The study was carried out at the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, and was funded by the Human Resource Planning Society and the corporate sponsors of the Center for Effective Organizations.

Read more less

Managing as Designing explores "the design attitude," a new focus for analysis and decision making for managers that draws on examples of decision making and leadership in architecture, art, and design. Based on a series of conference papers given at the opening of the Peter B. Lewis Building (designed by Frank Gehry) at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, the book includes keynote speeches from Frank Gehry and Karl Weick. The premise of this book is that managers should act not only as decision makers, but also as designers. Though decision and design are inextricably linked in management action, managers and scholars have too long emphasized the decision face of management over the design face. In a series of essays from a multitude of disciplines, the authors develop a theory of the design attitude in contrast to the more traditionally accepted and practiced decision attitude. The book will appeal primarily to scholars of management theory and organization strategy and managers, with many contributions from a variety of academic backgrounds including architecture, sociology, design, history, choreography, strategy, economics, music, and accounting. There is a potential for strong crossover appeal to these groups, especially to those people and groups interested in design and product development.

Read more less

Why are women so dramatically underrepresented in formal leadership positions—and what can be done to improve the situation? This unique collection takes up these questions in the crucial practical concepts of law, politics, and business—the arenas in which women’s leadership has the most public influence. Bridging the worlds of theory and practice, the essays in this collection bring new insights to long-standing questions about the difference gender difference makes, both in access to leadership and in its exercise. The contributors to this collection represent some of the nation’s most distinguished women leaders and most respected scholars on women and leadership, and reflect a distinctive array of perspectives and backgrounds. Among others, they include former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder; former NOW president Patricia Ireland; the Right Honorable Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada; and Judith Resnik, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Written in accessible, lively prose, and informed by a wealth of scholarship and personal experience, this collection should appeal to a broad audience.

Read more less

For centuries, human perfection has been a powerful goal, but only in the twentieth century were national states able to achieve the capacity to impose radical change on entire societies in the name of rooting out imperfections. The contributions to this volume constitute an ambitious attempt to study a number of significant efforts by twentieth-century states to reshape—either through social policy or brute force—their societies and their populations according to ideologies based on various theories of human perfectibility. The cases examined include Germany during the World War I, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet regime, Germany under the Nazis, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, French anti-abortion policies in the interwar era, the treatment of Japanese Americans during the World War II, attitudes toward postwar Soviet Jewry, the changing role of Israeli war widows, and the particular difficulties facing east central European governments from the World War I until 1956.

Read more less

The basic thesis of this two-volume work (Volume I. Grammar was published in 2000) is that the well known and extensively studied Indo-European family of languages is but a branch of a much larger Eurasiatic family that extends from Europe across northern Asia to North America. Eurasiatic is seen to consist of Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus-Manchu), Japanese-Korean-Ainu (possibly a distinct subgroup of Eurasiatic), Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut. The author asserts that the evidence presented in the two volumes for the validity of Eurasiatic as a single linguistic family confirms his hypothesis since the numerous and interlocking resemblances he finds among the various subgroups can only reasonably be explained by descent from a common ancestor. The present volume provides lexical evidence for the validity of Eurasiatic as a linguistic stock. Since some of the relevant etymological material has already been published in the work of some Nostraticists, this volume emphasizes those etymologies involving Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut, languages generally omitted from Nostratic studies. The Eurasiatic family is itself most closely related to the Amerind family, with which it shares numerous roots. The Eurasiatic-Amerind family represents a relatively recent expansion (circa 15,000 BP) into territory opened up by the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Eurasiatic-Amerind stands apart from the other families of the Old World, among which the differences are much greater and represent deeper chronological groupings. The volume includes a classification of Eurasiatic languages, references cited, and semantic and phonetic indexes.

Read more less

Despite its importance, the twentieth-century Latin American right has received little scholarly attention. This is the first book to explicitly compare extreme rightist organizations, ideas, and actions in different national settings in Latin America. Hardly an undifferentiated whole, the right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile has changed over time and has contained moderate and extreme factions; the book's title, Las Derechas, emphasizes this diversity. The author focuses on extreme right-wing movements, showing how their class and gender composition, motives, programs, and activities varied over time and between countries. To demonstrate the variety of thought and fluidity of positions within the far right, the author brings to life the many voices it contained: its highbrow and lowbrow figures, its male and female exponents, and its mass-circulation periodicals and more erudite literature. The depiction of rallies, social welfare projects, and brutal clashes with opponents also reveals the flavor of the radical right and the rich texture of its history. Although extreme right-wing movements defined themselves as masculine, some nevertheless recruited women; this is only one of the many contradictions between their ideology and actions. Concentrating on domestic roots, the study shows how radical rightists incorporated local concerns, not simply European dogma, into their agendas. It explores their relations with the military, Catholic Church, government, labor, and other groups throughout the political spectrum. The ties of radical rightists to moderate rightists are of particular interest, for the ideological and tactical differences between the two factions tended to diminish during periods of crisis. The book concludes with an epilogue that traces radical rightist movements up to the present, demonstrating the importance of the analysis for understanding current conditions as well as the past.

Read more less

Christian Democracy swept across parts of Latin America, gaining influence in Venezuela in the 1940s, Chile in the 1950s, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1960s, and Costa Rica and Mexico in the 1980s. This book offers an overview of Christian Democracy in the region— underscoring its remarkable diversity—and examines the Christian Democratic organizations of Chile and Mexico, which are still major parties today. The concluding section analyzes the demise of formerly significant Christian Democratic parties in El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela. Christian Democracy in Latin America provides the definitive stufy of the nature, rise, and decline of Christian Democracy in Latin America. The book enriches the broader theoretical literature on political parties by highlighting the distinctive strategic dilemmas parties face, and the distinctive objectives they pursue, in contexts of fragile democracy or of authoritarian regimes.

Read more less