Search results for ""Cornell University Press""
Cornell University Press The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea
In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history of the minjung ("common people's") movement in South Korea, Namhee Lee shows how the movement arose in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the repressive authoritarian regime and grew out of a widespread sense that the nation's "failed history" left Korean identity profoundly incomplete. The Making of Minjung captures the movement in its many dimensions, presenting its intellectual trajectory as a discourse and its impact as a political movement, as well as raising questions about how intellectuals represented the minjung. Lee's portrait is based on a wide range of sources: underground pamphlets, diaries, court documents, contemporary newspaper reports, and interviews with participants. Thousands of students and intellectuals left universities during this period and became factory workers, forging an intellectual-labor alliance perhaps unique in world history. At the same time, minjung cultural activists reinvigorated traditional folk theater, created a new "minjung literature," and influenced religious practices and academic disciplines. In its transformative scope, the minjung phenomenon is comparable to better-known contemporaneous movements in South Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Understanding the minjung movement is essential to understanding South Korea's recent resistance to U.S. influence. Along with its well-known economic transformation, South Korea has also had a profound social and political transformation. The minjung movement drove this transformation, and this book tells its story comprehensively and critically.
£41.70
Cornell University Press Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia
A prominent Mediterranean port located near Islamic territories, the city of Valencia in the late fifteenth century boasted a slave population of pronounced religious and ethnic diversity: captive Moors and penally enslaved Mudejars, Greeks, Tartars, Russians, Circassians, and a growing population of black Africans. By the end of the fifteenth century, black Africans comprised as much as 40 percent of the slave population of Valencia. Whereas previous historians of medieval slavery have focused their efforts on defining the legal status of slaves, documenting the vagaries of the Mediterranean slave trade, or examining slavery within the context of Muslim-Christian relations, Debra Blumenthal explores the social and human dimensions of slavery in this religiously and ethnically pluralistic society. Enemies and Familiars traces the varied experiences of Muslim, Eastern, and black African slaves from capture to freedom. After describing how men, women, and children were enslaved and brought to the Valencian marketplace, this book examines the substance of slaves' daily lives: how they were sold and who bought them; the positions ascribed to them within the household hierarchy; the sorts of labor they performed; and the ways in which some reclaimed their freedom. Scrutinizing a wide array of archival sources (including wills, contracts, as well as hundreds of civil and criminal court cases), Blumenthal investigates what it meant to be a slave and what it meant to be a master at a critical moment of transition. Arguing that the dynamics of the master-slave relationship both reflected and determined contemporary opinions regarding religious, ethnic, and gender differences, Blumenthal's close study of the day-to-day interactions between masters and their slaves not only reveals that slavery played a central role in identity formation in late medieval Iberia but also offers clues to the development of "racialized" slavery in the early modern Atlantic world.
£44.13
Cornell University Press Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
Some have claimed that "War is too important to be left to the generals," but P. W. Singer asks "What about the business executives?" Breaking out of the guns-for-hire mold of traditional mercenaries, corporations now sell skills and services that until recently only state militaries possessed. Their products range from trained commando teams to strategic advice from generals. This new "Privatized Military Industry" encompasses hundreds of companies, thousands of employees, and billions of dollars in revenue. Whether as proxies or suppliers, such firms have participated in wars in Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and Latin America. More recently, they have become a key element in U.S. military operations. Private corporations working for profit now sway the course of national and international conflict, but the consequences have been little explored. In this book, Singer provides the first account of the military services industry and its broader implications. Corporate Warriors includes a description of how the business works, as well as portraits of each of the basic types of companies: military providers that offer troops for tactical operations; military consultants that supply expert advice and training; and military support companies that sell logistics, intelligence, and engineering. In an updated edition of P. W. Singer's classic account of the military services industry and its broader implications, the author describes the continuing importance of that industry in the Iraq War. This conflict has amply borne out Singer's argument that the privatization of warfare allows startling new capabilities and efficiencies in the ways that war is carried out. At the same time, however, Singer finds that the introduction of the profit motive onto the battlefield raises troubling questions—for democracy, for ethics, for management, for human rights, and for national security.
£39.26
Cornell University Press Music in the Moment
What is required for a listener to understand a piece of music? Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, Levinson argues that basic understanding of music only requires properly grounded, present-focused attention, and that virtually everything in the comprehension of extended pieces of music that suggests explicit architectonic awareness can be explained without positing conscious grasp of relationships across broad spans. Levinson rejects the notion that keeping music's large-scale form before the mind is somehow essential to fundamental understanding of it. As evidence, he describes in detail the experience of listening to a wide range of music. He defends, with some qualifications, the views of nineteenth-century musician and psychologist Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, who argued that musical comprehension requires only attention to the evolution of music from moment to moment. Music theory standardly misapprehends the experience and mindset of most who know and love classical music, concludes Levinson. His book is a defense of the passionate and attentive, though architectonically unconcerned, music listener.
£42.51
Cornell University Press Allegory and Violence
The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.
£63.58
Cornell University Press The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity
"Evil—the infliction of pain upon sentient beings—is one of the most long-standing and serious problems of human existence. Frequently and in many cultures evil has been personified. This book is a history of the personification of evil, which for the sake of clarity I have called 'the Devil.' I am a medievalist, but when I began some years ago to work with the concept of the Devil in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, I came to see that I could not understand the medieval Devil except in terms of its historical antecedents. More important, I realized that I could not understand the Devil at all except in the context of the problem of evil. I needed to face the issue of evil squarely, both as a historian and as a human being."—from the Preface This lively and learned book traces the history of the concept of evil from its beginnings in ancient times to the period of the New Testament. A remarkable work of synthesis, it draws upon a vast number of sources in addressing a major historical and philosophical problem over a broad span of time and in a number of diverse cultures, East and West. Jeffrey Burton Russell probes the roots of the idea of evil, treats the development of the idea in the Ancient Near East, and then examines the concept of the Devil as it was formed in late Judaism and early Christianity. Generously illustrated with fifty black-and-white photographs, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, from specialists in religion, theology, sociology, history, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy to anyone with an interest in the demonic, the supernatural, and the question of good and evil.
£39.26
Cornell University Press Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, 1860–1960
Violence and democracy may seem fundamentally incompatible, but the two have often been intimately and inextricably linked. In Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists, Eiko Maruko Siniawer argues that violence has been embedded in the practice of modern Japanese politics from the very inception of the country's experiment with democracy. As soon as the parliament opened its doors in 1890, brawls, fistfights, vandalism, threats, and intimidation quickly became a fixture in Japanese politics, from campaigns and elections to legislative debates. Most of this physical force was wielded by what Siniawer calls "violence specialists": ruffians and yakuza. Their systemic and enduring political violence-in the streets, in the halls of parliament, during popular protests, and amid labor strife-ultimately compromised party politics in Japan and contributed to the rise of militarism in the 1930s. For the post-World War II years, Siniawer illustrates how the Japanese developed a preference for money over violence as a political tool of choice. This change in tactics signaled a political shift, but not necessarily an evolution, as corruption and bribery were in some ways more insidious, exclusionary, and undemocratic than violence. Siniawer demonstrates that the practice of politics in Japan has been dangerous, chaotic, and far more violent than previously thought. Additionally, crime has been more political. Throughout the book, Siniawer makes clear that certain yakuza groups were ideological in nature, contrary to the common understanding of organized crime as nonideological. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists is essential reading for anyone wanting to comprehend the role of violence in the formation of modern nation-states and its place in both democratic and fascist movements.
£26.29
Cornell University Press Byzantine Media Subjects
Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with imagesicons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them
£91.14
Cornell University Press The Supplement of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice
Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history.
£16.56
Cornell University Press Pining Wind: A Cycle of Nō Plays
Translations of 19 noh and nine kyogen plays seeking to produce English poetry which reproduces the 'texture of the Japanese'... an experiment in translating the 'untranslatable' word play which provides so much of the effect of noh in the original.
£10.08
Cornell University Press Shelley's Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority
Jones challenges traditional images of Percy Bysshe Shelley in this first book-length analysis of his major satiric works. Bringing to bear genre theory and a New Historical frame of reference, Jones places Shelley's satires in their broad context of popular, political, and material culture. Jones argues that Shelley's satiric poems express an important countervoice within Shelley's work as well as within Romanticism as a whole. These ironic, public, referential, and worldly texts are shown to be deeply ambivalent, employing the imagery of curse, revenge, and punishment in a coercive rhetoric of violence only occasionally covered with laughter. Thus the satires vividly represent the darker side of the Romantic poet's relation to society as well as his efforts to engage and to change the world. Shelley's Satire illuminates the historical and cultural contexts that stirred the poet's imagination - contemporary superstition, the popular entertainments of the pantomime and graphic prints, and historical events such as the Peterloo Massacre and the Queen Caroline affair. It will engage not only Shelleyans and Romanticists but also anyone interested in satire as a genre, New Historicist methods, theories of cultural formation, and the Regency period in English history.
£24.66
Cornell University Press Why Me?: A Philosophical Inquiry into Fate
Most of us have felt, at one time or another, an attraction to the idea that fate plays a role in our lives. It is difficult to dismiss entirely the notion that certain things were somehow meant to be. Perhaps key events did not just happen but were inevitable, maybe even a part of our destiny. As thoughtful and critical beings, however, we may find that we cannot explain to ourselves or to others just what fate means. In this groundbreaking work, Michael Gelven confronts the question of fate and shows how it is possible to think clearly about fate without abandoning logic or philosophical sophistication. Dismissing the mysterious or the psychological, Gelven subjects the issue to rigorous philosophical examination, thereby opening the topic to critical and rational sensibility. Gelven raises the challenging question "what is fate?" and seeks to answer it by expressing the problem in terms of what it means to be fated. Chance, destiny, fortune, inevitability—these four aspects of fate provide the foundation for the investigation. Gelven closely examines these aspects through four corresponding figures—the gambler, the historian, the birthday celebrant, and the tragedian—and demonstrates how each interacts with fate. His findings are both surprising and provocative. Finally, Gelven explores the full significance of what it means to be an individual buffeted by uncontrolled destinies. Placing the great human issues of freedom, mortality, rationality, and truth within the context of his discussion, Gelven reveals how our existential meaning is indeed consistent with our being fated. Written in clear, nontechnical language for the philosophical audience as well as for those who are simply perplexed by fate's wanton authority, Why Me? offers an enlightening and stimulating inquiry into the nature of our existence.
£21.43
Cornell University Press The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia
When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays—two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.
£27.10
Cornell University Press In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology
Judith Wagner DeCew provides a solid philosophical foundation for legal discussions of privacy by articulating and unifying diverse arguments on the right to privacy and on how it should be guaranteed in various contemporary contexts. Philosophers and legal theorists tend either to define privacy narrowly or to abandon privacy as conceptually incoherent, she claims. In order to assess how far privacy should extend, and determine how the wide range of specific cases can be reconciled, DeCew surveys the history of the notion of privacy as it first evolved in American tort law and constitutional law and then analyzes current characterizations. In different contexts, privacy has been defined on the basis of information, autonomy, property, and intimacy. DeCew's broader claim is that privacy has fundamental value because it allows us to create ourselves as individuals, offering us freedom from judgment, scrutiny, and the pressure to conform. Feminist theorists often view privacy as a tool for shielding abuses. DeCew responds to this feminist critique of privacy, as well as addressing the issues of abortion and of gay and lesbian sexuality in the context of specific landmark legal cases. In discussions of Roe v. Wade, Bowers v. Hardwick, and the Hart/Devlin debates on decriminalization of homosexuality and prostitution, DeCew applies her broad theory to sexual and reproductive privacy, anti-sodomy laws, and the legislation and enforcement of morals. She finally discusses the intersection of privacy with public safety concerns, such as drug testing, and in light of new communication technologies, such as caller ID.
£27.90
Cornell University Press The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France
In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.
£27.90
Cornell University Press Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933
During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.
£26.29
Cornell University Press Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World
Despite the wealth of scholarship in recent decades on medieval women, we still know much less about the experiences of women in the early Middle Ages than we do about those in later centuries. In Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World, Valerie L. Garver offers a fresh appraisal of the cultural and social history of eighth- and ninth-century women. Examining changes in women's lives and in the ways others perceived women during the early Middle Ages, she shows that lay and religious women, despite their legal and social constrictions, played integral roles in Carolingian society. Garver's innovative book employs an especially wide range of sources, both textual and material, which she uses to construct a more complex and nuanced impression of aristocratic women than we've seen before. She looks at the importance of female beauty and adornment; the family and the construction of identities and collective memory; education and moral exemplarity; wealth, hospitality and domestic management; textile work, and the lifecycle of elite Carolingian women. Her interdisciplinary approach makes deft use of canons of church councils, chronicles, charters, polyptychs, capitularies, letters, poetry, exegesis, liturgy, inventories, hagiography, memorial books, artworks, archaeological remains, and textiles. Ultimately, Women and Aristocratic Culture in the Carolingian World underlines the centrality of the Carolingian era to the reshaping of antique ideas and the development of lasting social norms.
£44.13
Cornell University Press Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy's Imaginary Portraits
During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Burne-Jones and Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. In Reframing Decadence, Peter Jeffreys returns us to this critical period of Cavafy’s life, showing the poet’s creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. In the process, Jeffreys offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy’s relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence. Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy’s view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater’s imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. Jeffreys concludes by considering Cavafy’s current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.
£43.31
Cornell University Press The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France
The Afterlives of the Terror explores how those who experienced the mass violence of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. Focusing on the Reign of Terror, Ronen Steinberg challenges the presumption that its aftermath was characterized by silence and enforced collective amnesia. Instead, he shows that there were painful, complex, and sometimes surprisingly honest debates about how to deal with its legacies. As The Afterlives of the Terror shows, revolutionary leaders, victims' families, and ordinary citizens argued about accountability, retribution, redress, and commemoration. Drawing on the concept of transitional justice and the scholarship on the major traumas of the twentieth century, Steinberg explores how the French tried, but ultimately failed, to leave this difficult past behind. He argues that it was the same democratizing, radicalizing dynamic that led to the violence of the Terror, which also gave rise to an unprecedented interrogation of how society is affected by events of enormous brutality. In this sense, the modern question of what to do with difficult pasts is one of the unanticipated consequences of the eighteenth century's age of democratic revolutions. Thanks to generous funding from Michigan State University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes, available on the Cornell University Press website and other Open Access repositories.
£19.80
Cornell University Press Thinking Otherwise
Thinking Otherwise addresses the question of what makes a great historian by exploring the teaching and scholarship of Walter LaFeber, widely acclaimed as the most distinguished historian of US foreign relations. This volume of essays, edited by Susan A. Brewer, Richard H. Immerman, and Douglas Little, is a testament to a scholar who published more than a dozen books during his time at Cornell University, where he delivered legendary lectures for half a century. The chapters trace LaFeber''s journey as a scholar and demonstrate his enduring influence on the history of US foreign relations by linking six of his monographs to his abiding concern about the fate of the American experiment from the 18th century to the present. Thinking Otherwise explains and assesses the scholarship of a historian whose work became canonical in his lifetime and continues to resonate throughout public policy debates.
£35.21
Cornell University Press This Luminous Coast: Walking England's Eastern Edge
Over the course of a year, Jules Pretty walked along the shoreline of East Anglia in southeastern England, eventually exploring four hundred miles on foot (and another hundred miles by boat). It is a coast and a culture that is about to be lost—not yet, perhaps, but soon—to rising tides and industrial sprawl. This Luminous Coast takes the reader with him on his journey over land and water; over sea walls of dried grass, beside stretched fields of golden crops, alongside white sails gliding across the intricate lacework of invisible creeks and estuaries, under vast skies that are home to curlews and redshanks and the outpourings of skylarks. East Anglia’s coastline is as much a human landscape as it is a natural one, and Pretty is equally perceptive about the region’s cultural heritage and its "industrial wild": fishing villages and the modern seaside resorts, family farms and oil refineries, pleasure piers and concrete seawalls, cozy pubs and military installations. Through words and photographs, Pretty interweaves stories of the land and sea with people past and present. He is a passionate and sensitive guide to a region in transition, under stress, and perhaps even doomed, as finely attuned to its history as he is to its unique sensory world.
£20.61
Cornell University Press Democracy and Displacement in Colombia's Civil War
Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country’s political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia’s ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens’ political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents. Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government’s displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia’s political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.
£40.08
Cornell University Press Why Terrorists Quit: The Disengagement of Indonesian Jihadists
Why do hard-line terrorists decide to leave their organizations and quit the world of terror and destruction? This is the question for which Julie Chernov Hwang seeks answers in Why Terrorists Quit. Over the course of six years Chernov Hwang conducted more than one hundred interviews with current and former leaders and followers of radical Islamist groups in Indonesia. Using what she learned from these radicals she examines the reasons they rejected physical force and extremist ideology, slowly moving away from, or in some cases completely leaving, groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah, Mujahidin KOMPAK, Ring Banten, Laskar Jihad, and Tanah Runtuh. Why Terrorists Quit considers the impact of various public initiatives designed to encourage radicals to disengage, and follows the lives of five radicals from the various groups, seeking to establish trends, ideas, and reasons for why radicals might eschew violence or quit terrorism. Chernov Hwang has, with this book, provided a clear picture of why Indonesians disengage from jihadist groups, what the state can do to help them reintegrate into nonterrorist society, and how what happens in Indonesia can be more widely applied beyond the archipelago.
£31.98
Cornell University Press Philosophers in the "Republic": Plato's Two Paradigms
In Plato's Republic, Socrates contends that philosophers make the best rulers because only they behold with their mind's eye the eternal and purely intelligible Forms of the Just, the Noble, and the Good. When, in addition, these men and women are endowed with a vast array of moral, intellectual, and personal virtues and are appropriately educated, surely no one could doubt the wisdom of entrusting to them the governance of cities. Although it is widely—and reasonably—assumed that all the Republic’s philosophers are the same, Roslyn Weiss argues in this boldly original book that the Republic actually contains two distinct and irreconcilable portrayals of the philosopher. According to Weiss, Plato’s two paradigms of the philosopher are the "philosopher by nature" and the "philosopher by design." Philosophers by design, as the allegory of the Cave vividly shows, must be forcibly dragged from the material world of pleasure to the sublime realm of the intellect, and from there back down again to the "Cave" to rule the beautiful city envisioned by Socrates and his interlocutors. Yet philosophers by nature, described earlier in the Republic, are distinguished by their natural yearning to encounter the transcendent realm of pure Forms, as well as by a willingness to serve others—at least under appropriate circumstances. In contrast to both sets of philosophers stands Socrates, who represents a third paradigm, one, however, that is no more than hinted at in the Republic. As a man who not only loves "what is" but is also utterly devoted to the justice of others—even at great personal cost—Socrates surpasses both the philosophers by design and the philosophers by nature. By shedding light on an aspect of the Republic that has escaped notice, Weiss’s new interpretation will challenge Plato scholars to revisit their assumptions about Plato’s moral and political philosophy.
£28.73
Cornell University Press Developmental Mindset: The Revival of Financial Activism in South Korea
The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 was supposed to be the death knell for the developmental state. The International Monetary Fund supplied emergency funds for shattered economies but demanded that states liberalize financial markets and withdraw from direct involvement in the economy. Financial liberalization was meant to spell the end of strategic industry policy and the state-directed "policy lending" it involved. Yet, largely unremarked by analysts, South Korea has since seen a striking revival of financial activism. Policy lending by state-owned development banks has returned the state to the core of the financial system. Korean development banks now account for one quarter of all loans and take the lead in providing low-cost finance to local manufacturing firms in strategic industries.Elizabeth Thurbon argues that an ideational analysis can help explain this renewed financial activism. She demonstrates the presence of a "developmental mindset" on the part of political leaders and policy elites in Korea. This mindset involves shared ways of thinking about the purpose of finance and its relationship to the productive economy. The developmental mindset has a long history in Korea but is subject to the vicissitudes of political and economic circumstances. Thurbon traces the structural, institutional, political, and ideational factors that have strengthened and at times weakened the developmental consensus, culminating in the revival of financial activism in Korea. In doing so, Thurbon offers a novel defense of the developmental state idea and a new framework for investigating the emergence and evolution of developmental states. She also canvasses the implications of the Korean experience for wider debates concerning the future of financial activism in an era of financialization, energy insecurity, and climate change.
£24.66
Cornell University Press Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia
Women known as "shriekers" howled, screamed, convulsed, and tore their clothes. Believed to be possessed by devils, these central figures in a cultural drama known as klikushestvo stirred various reactions among those who encountered them. While sympathetic monks and peasants tended to shelter the shriekers, others analyzed, diagnosed, and objectified them. The Russian Orthodox Church played an important role, for, while moving toward a scientific explanation for the behavior of these women, it was reluctant to abandon the ideas of possession and miraculous exorcism. Possessed is the first book to examine the phenomenon of demon possession in Russia. Drawing upon a wide range of sources—religious, psychiatric, ethnographic, and literary—Worobec looks at klikushestvo over a broad span of time but focuses mainly on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when all of Russian society felt the pressure of modernization. Worobec's definitive study is as much an account of perceptions of the klikushi as an analysis of the women themselves, for, even as modern rationalism began to affect religious belief in Russia, explanations of the shriekers continued to differ widely. Examining various cultural constructions, Worobec shows how these interpretations were rooted in theology, village life and politics, and gender relationships. Engaging broad issues in Russian history, women's history, and popular religious culture, Possessed will interest readers across several disciplines. Its insights into the cultural phenomenon of possession among Russian peasant women carry rich implications for understanding the ways in which a complex society treated women believed to be out of control.
£30.35
Cornell University Press Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine: Fascisms in Interwar Alsace
Through the unique window of Alsace during the 1920s and 1930s, Goodfellow reveals the many faces of fascism and demonstrates its flexibility and coherence as an ideology. His study of this region, where the interplay of French, German, and Alsatian nationalities allowed a variety of fascisms to flourish, proves a framework for understanding how this ideology has mutated over time to fit changing contexts. Looking at various groups, Goodfellow shows how fascism varied according to its social support. Different fascism catered to distinct social constituents: there were elitist, peasant, lower middle-class, regionalist, and mass fascist parties, each with a sociologically appropriate ideological variant. Examining these variants and the people who embraced them, Goodfellow redefines fascism as simultaneously divided against itself and tremendously fluid. Between the Swastika and the Cross of Lorraine will appeal to those interested in French and German history and the nature of fascism and its evolution in the twentieth century.
£34.40
Cornell University Press From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870–1914
£23.85
Cornell University Press Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises
In Politics in Hard Times, Peter Gourevitch explores the common political factors that shape economic policy choices. He focuses on three periods of economic crisis—1873–1896, 1929–1949, and 1971 to the present—and compares policy choices made in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States.
£24.66
Cornell University Press The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico
The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its relevance to the development of the New Science, the Autobiography is also of interest for the light it sheds on Italian culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Still regarded by many as the best English-language translation of this classic work, the Cornell edition was widely lauded when first published in 1944. Wrote the Saturday Review of Literature: "Here was something new in the art of self-revelation. Vico wrote of his childhood, the psychological influences to which he was subjected, the social conditions under which he grew up and received an education and evolved his own way of thinking. It was so outstanding a piece of work that it was held up as a model, which it still is."
£18.18
Cornell University Press Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons
How are soul and body related to one another? Are human beings immaterial souls, or complex physical organisms? Will we survive the death of our bodies? Does only the dualist view allow the possibility of life after death? This collection brings together cutting-edge research on the metaphysics of human nature and the possibility of post-mortem survival.Kevin Corcoran's collection, Soul, Body, and Survival, includes chapters from those who embrace traditional soul-body dualism, those who assert person-body identity, and those who propose entirely new views that fall outside the categories of monism and dualism. The first book to connect the metaphysics of persons with the belief in life after death, thus intersecting with theological as well as philosophical inquiry, it blurs the divide between metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.
£27.90
Cornell University Press The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East
The emerging consensus that institutions shape political and economic outcomes has produced few theories of institutional change and no defensible theory of institutional origination. Kiren Aziz Chaudhry shows how state and market institutions are created and transformed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two countries that typify labor and oil exporters in the developing worlds. In a world where the international economy dramatically affects domestic developments, the question of where institutions come from becomes at once more urgent and more complex. In both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, fundamental state and market institutions forged during a period of isolation at the end of World War I were destroyed and reshaped not once but three times in response to exogenous shocks. Comparing boom-bust cycles, Chaudhry exposes the alternating social and organizational origins of institutions, arguing that both broad changes in the international economy and specific forms of international integration shape institutional outcomes. Labor and oil exporters thus experience identical economic cycles but generate radically different state, market, and financial institutions in response to different resource flows. Chaudhry supplemented years of field work in Saudi Arabia and Yemen with extensive analysis of previously unavailable materials in the Saudi national archives.
£29.54
Cornell University Press Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job
This is a story of how work gets done. It is also a study of how field service technicians talk about their work and how that talk is instrumental in their success. In his innovative ethnography, Julian E. Orr studies the people who repair photocopiers and shares vignettes from their daily lives. He characterizes their work as a continuous highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine. The work technicians do encompasses elements not contained in the official definition of the job yet vital to its success. Orr's analysis of the way repair people talk about their work reveals that talk is, in fact, a crucial dimension of their practice. Diagnosis happens through a narrative process, the creation of a coherent description of the troubled machine. The descriptions become the basis for technicians' discourse about their experience, and the circulation of stories among the technicians is the principal means by which they stay informed of the developing subtleties of machine behavior. Orr demonstrates that technical knowledge is a socially distributed resource stored and diffused primarily through an oral culture. Based on participant observation with copier repair technicians in the field and strengthened by Orr's own years as a technician, this book explodes numerous myths about technicians and suggests how technical work differs from other kinds of employment.
£23.85
Cornell University Press Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza
£39.26
Cornell University Press Questions Concerning the Law of Nature
John Locke's untitled manuscript "Questions Concerning the Law of Nature" (1664) was his only work focused on the subject of natural law, a circumstance that is especially surprising since his published writings touch on the subject frequently, if inconclusively. Containing a substantial apparatus criticus, this new edition of Locke's manuscript is faithful to Locke's original intentions.
£28.73
Cornell University Press China's Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics
Assessments of China's importance on the world stage usually focus on a single dimension of China's increasing power, rather than on the multiple sources of China's rise, including its economic might and the continuing modernization of its military. This book offers multiple analytical perspectives—constructivist, liberal, neorealist—on the significance of the many dimensions of China's regional and global influence. Distinguished authors consider the likelihood of conflict and peaceful accommodation as China grows ever stronger. They look at the changing position of China "from the inside": How do Chinese policymakers evaluate the contemporary international order and what are the regional and global implications of that worldview? The authors also address the implications of China's increasing power for Chinese policymaking and for the foreign policies of Korea, Japan, and the United States.
£24.66
Cornell University Press The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe
The seventeenth century was called the Dutch Golden Age. Over the course of eighty years, the tiny United Provinces of the Netherlands overthrew Spanish rule and became Europe's dominant power. Eventually, though, Dutch hegemony collapsed as quickly as it had risen. In The Familial State, Julia Adams explores the role that Holland's great families played in this dramatic history. She charts how family patriarchs—who were at the time both state-builders and merchant capitalists—shaped the first great wave of European colonialism, which in turn influenced European political development in innovative ways. On the basis of massive archival work, Adams arrives at a profoundly gendered reading of the family/power structure of the Dutch elite and their companies, in particular the VOC or Dutch East India Company. In the United Provinces, she finds the first example of the power structure that would dominate the transitional states of early modern Europe—the "familial state." This organizational structure is typified, in her view, by "paternal political rule and multiple arrangements among the family heads."
£25.48
Cornell University Press Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe
Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.
£19.80
Cornell University Press Theater and Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire
Theater, spectacle, and performance played significant roles in the political and social structure of the Roman Empire, which was diverse in population and language. A wide and varied range of entertainment was available to a Roman audience: the traditional festivals with their athletic contests and dramatic performances, pantomime and mime, the chariot races of the circus, and the gladiatorial shows and wild beast hunts of the arena. In Theater and Spectacle in the Art of the Roman Empire, which is richly illustrated in color throughout, Katherine M. D. Dunbabin emphasizes the visual evidence for these events.Images of spectacle appear in a wide range of artistic media, from the mosaics and paintings that decorated wealthy private houses to the sculpture of tomb monuments, and from luxury objects such as silver tableware to more humble ceramic lamps and pottery vessels. Dunbabin places the information derived from this visual material into the wider context provided by the written sources, both literary and epigraphic. This allows us to understand the functions that these images served in the social rituals of public and domestic life. By explicating both the social and cultural role of the spectacles themselves and the nature of their representation in art, Dunbabin provides a comprehensive portrait of the popular culture of the period.
£40.04
Cornell University Press Biology and Evolution of Crocodylians
Crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials—the Crocodylia, known collectively as crocodylians—are the world’s largest living reptiles. The largest of them, probably the estuarine or saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus, can grow to almost twenty feet and weigh more than two thousand pounds. Crocodylians are creatures of great contrast. They can remain patiently still for ages, yet can also move like lightning to snap up a meal. They are formidably strong, active predators, with jaws that can tear apart large prey items, yet a mother or a father can gently assist hatchlings out of the eggs, and carry them to the water between their teeth. Because large crocodylians can (and do) eat people, they invite fear and loathing, but they also inspire curiosity and admiration. Biology and Evolution of Crocdylians is a comprehensive review of current knowledge about the world’s largest and most famous living reptiles. Gordon Grigg’s authoritative and accessible text and David Kirshner’s stunning artwork and color photographs combine expertly in this contemporary celebration of crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials. This book showcases the skills and capabilities that allow crocodylians to live how and where they do. It covers the biology and ecology of the extant species, conservation issues, crocodilian-human interaction, and the evolutionary history of the group. Richly illustrated with more than five hundred color photographs and black-and-white illustrations, this book will be a benchmark reference work for crocodylian biologists, herpetologists, and vertebrate biologists for years to come.
£190.71
Cornell University Press Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States
The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.
£32.79
Cornell University Press The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France
In this account of the Algerian War's effect on French political structures and notions of national identity, Todd Shepard asserts that the separation of Algeria from France was truly a revolutionary event with lasting consequences for French social and political life. For more than a century, Algeria had been legally and administratively part of France; after the bloody war that concluded in 1962, it was other—its eight million Algerian residents deprived of French citizenship while hundreds of thousands of French pieds noirs were forced to return to a country that was never home. This rupture violated the universalism that had been the essence of French republican theory since the late eighteenth century. Shepard contends that because the amputation of Algeria from the French body politic was accomplished illegally and without explanation, its repercussions are responsible for many of the racial and religious tensions that confront France today. In portraying decolonization as an essential step in the inexorable "tide of history," the French state absolved itself of responsibility for the revolutionary change it was effecting. It thereby turned its back not only on the French of Algeria—Muslims in particular—but also on its own republican principles and the 1958 Constitution. From that point onward, debates over assimilation, identity, and citizenship—once focused on the Algerian "province/colony"—have troubled France itself. In addition to grappling with questions of race, citizenship, national identity, state institutions, and political debate, Shepard also addresses debates in Jewish history, gender history, and queer theory.
£41.70
Cornell University Press Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion
"There is no attempt here to lay down as inviolable or to legislate certain ways of looking at things or ways of proceeding for philosophers of religion, only proposals for how to deal with a range of basic issues—proposals that I hope will ignite much fruitful discussion and which, in any case, I shall take as a basis for my own ongoing work in the field."—from the Preface Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of religious and irreligious belief, the varieties of religious skepticism, and the nature of religion itself. From the author's searching analysis of faith emerges a novel understanding of propositional faith as requiring the absence of belief. Schellenberg asks what the aims of the field should be, setting out a series of principles for carrying out some of the most important of these aims. His account of justification considers not only belief but also other responses to religious claims and distinguishes the justification of responses, propositions, and persons. Throughout Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg is laying the groundwork for an elaboration of his own vision while at the same time suggesting how philosophers might rethink assumptions guiding most of today's work in analytic philosophy of religion.
£44.94
Cornell University Press A Hudson Valley Reckoning
A Hudson Valley Reckoning tells the long-ignored story of slavery''s history in upstate New York through Debra Bruno''s absorbing chronicle that uncovers her Dutch ancestors'' slave-holding past and leads to a deep connection with the descendants of the enslaved people her family owned. Bruno, who grew up in New York''s Hudson Valley knowing little about her Dutch heritage, was shaken when a historian told her that her Dutch ancestors were almost certainly slaveholders. Driven by this knowledge, Bruno began to unearth her family''s past. In the last will and testament of her ancestor, she found the first evidence: human beings bequeathed to his family along with animals and furniture. The more she expanded her family tree, the more enslavers she found. She reached out to Black Americans tracing their own ancestry, and by serendipitous luck became friends with Eleanor C. Mire, a descendent of a woman enslaved by Bruno''s Dutch ancestors.A Hudson
£26.90
Cornell University Press A Grand Strategy for America
The United States today is the most powerful nation in the world, perhaps even stronger than Rome was during its heyday. It is likely to remain the world''s preeminent power for at least several decades to come. What behavior is appropriate for such a powerful state?To answer this question, Robert J. Art concentrates on grand strategythe deployment of military power in both peace and war to support foreign policy goals. He first defines America''s contemporary national interests and the specific threats they face, then identifies seven grand strategies that the United States might contemplate, examining each in relation to America''s interests. The seven are:* dominionforcibly trying to remake the world in America''s own image;* global collective securityattempting to keep the peace everywhere;* regional collective securityconfining peacekeeping efforts to Europe;* cooperative securityseeking to reduce the occurrence of war by limiting other states''
£52.24
Cornell University Press "I Saw A Pale Horse" and Selected Poems from "Diary of a Vagabond"
Hayashi Fumiko, one of the most popular prose writers of the Showa era, began writing as a down-and-out poet wandering the streets of 1920s Tokyo. In these translations of her first poetry collection, I Saw a Pale Horse (Aouma wo mitari) and Selected Poems from Diary of a Vagabond (Hōrōki), Fumiko's literary origins are colorfully revealed. Little known in the west, these early poetic texts focus on Fumiko's unconventional early life, and her construction of a female subject that would challenge, with gusto and panache, accepted notions not only of class, family, and gender but also of female poetic practice.
£27.10
Cornell University Press Cursed: A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom
In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics. Tokarska-Bakir weaves together the voices of the Kielce pogrom survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators with a myriad of other archival sources. Her meticulous research exposes wartime and postwar biographies of local factory workers, city and church officials, local police officers, and members of the security service, some of whom participated in the Holocaust and then directly or indirectly participated in the Kielce pogrom. Tokarska-Bakir paints a social portrait that explores people's behavior in light of forces and emotions greater than themselves. She reconstructs a postwar communist system that, despite promises to combat deeply rooted antisemitism, not only failed to prevent its spread but turned a blind eye to it and eventually used it to legitimize itself. Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence. It offers readers a nuanced analysis that cuts across social and ideological divisions. The resulting narrative is filled with new discoveries not only about the Kielce pogrom but about the nature of antisemitism, hostility toward minorities, and collective violence. Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
£36.80
Cornell University Press Reworking Japan: Changing Men at Work and Play under Neoliberalism
Reworking Japan examines how the past several decades of neoliberal economic restructuring and reforms have challenged Japan's corporate ideologies, gendered relations, and subjectivities of individual employees. With Japan's remarkable economic growth since the 1950s, the lifestyles and life courses of "salarymen" came to embody the "New Middle Class" family ideal. However, the nearly three decades of economic stagnation and reforms since the bursting of the economic bubble in the early 1990s has intensified corporate retrenchment under the banner of neoliberal restructuring and brought new challenges to employees and their previously protected livelihoods. In a sweeping appraisal of recent history, Gagné demonstrates how economic restructuring has reshaped Japanese corporations, workers, and ideals, as well as how Japanese companies and employees have resisted and actively responded to such changes. Gagné explores Japan's fraught and problematic transition from the postwar ideology of "companyism" to the emergent ideology of neoliberalism and the subsequent large-scale economic restructuring. By juxtaposing Japan's economic transformation with an ethnography of work and play, and individual life histories, Gagné goes beyond the abstract to explore the human dimension of the neoliberal reforms that have impacted the nation's corporate governance, socioeconomic class, workers' subjectivities, and family relations. Reworking Japan, with its firsthand analysis of how the supposedly hegemonic neoliberal regime does not completely transform existing cultural frames and social relations, will shake up preconceived ideas about Japanese men and the social effects of neoliberalism.
£34.40