Search results for ""fordham university press""

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.

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Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of French theory. Panagia's book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France's pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian

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This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside “atopia”: not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an “object-oriented ontology” would be able to formalize, nor the matter that “new materialisms” could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its “eccentricity.” Etymologically, to exist means “to be outside” and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being. It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

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India is witnessing a unique moment in populism, with sentiments divided between economic reforms that promise fast industrialization and protests that thwart such industrialization. This book offers an ethnographic study of divergent local responses to the proposed construction of a Tata Motors factory in eastern India that would have produced the Nano, the so-called people’s car. Initial excitement was followed by long protests among the villagers whose agricultural land was being acquired for the project. After these protests secured the relocation of the factory, further demonstrations followed, sometimes involving the same participants, seeking to bring the factory back. People’s Car explores this ambivalence concerning industrialization, asking why long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast-paced industrialization. Majumder argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is incommensurable with money and a site specially marked by desire for middle caste small landowners aspiring to futures beyond agriculture. Previous studies of industrialization have generally focused on either demands for development or populist critiques. Moving beyond romantic clichés about urban/rural divisions, People’s Car offers a single analytical and ethnographic framework demonstrating how pro- and anti-industrialization forces feed off each other.

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Pragmatism mediates rival extremes, and religion is no exception: The problems of realism versus antirealism, evidentialism versus fideism, and science versus religion, along with other key issues in the philosophy of religion, receive new interpretations when examined from a pragmatist point of view. Religion is then understood as a human practice with certain inherent aims and goals, responding to specific human needs and interests, serving certain important human values, and seeking to resolve problematic situations that naturally arise from our practices themselves, especially our need to live with our vulnerability, finitude, guilt, and mortality.

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In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational challenges to Britain’s filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation. Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain’s cultural scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World War—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)—Puckett treats these movies as objects of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war, violence, and commitment as well as both an answer to and an expression of a more general violence. Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those “sporting-club rules,” that it sought also to protect.

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In the last ten years, investigators worldwide have focused on the connections between the philosophy of classical figures in American pragmatism (e.g., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey) and the Hispanic world. Pragmatism in the Americas examines the intersection between these two traditions, advancing new and unexplored realms of Western philosophy, and uncovering new relationships. It argues that, with respect to philosophical issues, there are fewer rifts and more affinity than is commonly thought between these two worlds. The book will provide an invaluable source for philosophers and philosophy students, as well as for scholars from other disciplines (e.g., history, political science, sociology, diversity studies, and gender and race studies) to begin understanding the dynamic relationship in thinking between the two Americas. In additional to documenting the results of a new and thriving area of research, it can also function as a primer to direct and provoke further inquiry. The volume is divided into three parts. First, the reception of the classical American Pragmatists within the Hispanic world is explored. Some of the essays argue for the inclusion of Hispanic figures in the history of pragmatism and therefore challenge the notion that pragmatism is a philosophy that is exclusively North American. Others put forth pragmatism as a philosophy that can contribute to dealing with the present social, ethical, or political problems experienced by Hispanics in and outside of the United States. These essays, from North American, Spanish, and Latin American scholars, fill a void in the humanities and introduce a number of Hispanic pragmatists, who are not included in standard pragmatists texts. Altogether, the book questions gaps that never existed, building new bridges instead. It pioneers the way for a twenty-first-century dialogue between two great philosophical traditions.

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Thinking about Thinking examines philosophy from a variety of perspectives as a practice realized by persons who communicate with one another while reflecting about the meaning of human life and thought. Without forgetting the logical and methodological conditions of systematic thought, the author insists on the intimate connections that tie all philosophical texts and conversations to the lives from which they emerge. As product of an individual thinker, who, thanks to individual teachers, has been familiarized with particular traditions of a particular culture, each philosophy is unique. If it is a good one, it is also revealing for many—perhaps even for all—other philosophers. At the same time, all thinking is addressed to individual interlocutors, each of whom responds to it by transforming it into a different philosophy. This fact invites us to explore the dialogical dimension of thinking, which, in turn, refers us to the communitarian and historical contexts from which solitude, as well as solidarity, competition, alliances, and friendships in thought, emerge.

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In February 2009, America celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and the pace of new Lincoln books and articles has already quickened. From his cabinet’s politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to say about the greatest of our Presidents. Lincoln Revisited is a masterly guidePub to what’s new and what’s noteworthy in this unfolding story—a brilliant gathering of fresh scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. Brought together by The Lincoln Forum, they tackle uncharted territory and emerging questions; they also take a new look at established debates—including those about their own landmark works. Here, these well-known historians revisit key chapters in Lincoln’s legacy—from Matthew Pinsker on Lincoln’s private life and Jean Baker on religion and the Lincoln marriage to Geoffrey Perret on Lincoln as leader and Frank J. Williams on Lincoln and civil liberties in wartime. The eighteen original essays explore every corner of Lincoln’s world—religion and politics, slavery and sovereignty, presidential leadership and the rule of law, the Second Inaugural Address and the assassination. In his 1947 classic, Lincoln Reconsidered, David Herbert Donald confronted the Lincoln myth. Today, the scholars in Lincoln Revisited give a new generation of students, scholars, and citizens the perspectives vital for understanding the constantly reinterpreted genius of Abraham Lincoln.

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A current truism holds that the undergraduate degree today is equivalent to the high-school diploma of yesterday. But undergraduates at a research university would probably not recognize themselves in the historical mirror of high-school vocational education. Students in a vast range of institutions are encouraged to look up the educational social scale, whereas earlier vocational education was designed to “cool out” expectations of social advancement by training a working class prepared for massive industrialization. In Class Degrees, Evan Watkins argues that reforms in vocational education in the 1980s and 1990s can explain a great deal about the changing directions of class formation in the United States, as well as how postsecondary educational institutions are changing. Responding to a demand for flexibility in job skills and reflecting a consequent aspiration to choice and perpetual job mobility, those reforms aimed to eliminate the separate academic status of vocational education. They transformed it from a “cooling out” to a “heating up” of class expectations. The result has been a culture of hyperindividualism. The hyperindividual lives in a world permeated with against-all-odds plots, from “beat the odds” of long supermarket checkout lines by using self-checkout and buying FasTrak transponders to beat the odds of traffic jams, to the endless superheroes on film and TV who daily save various sorts of planets and things against all odds. Of course, a few people can beat the odds only if most other people do not. As choice begins to replace the selling of individual labor at the core of contemporary class formation, the result is a sort of waste labor left behind by the competitive process. Provocatively, Watkins argues that, in the twenty-first century, academic work in the humanities is assuming the management function of reclaiming this waste labor as a motor force for the future.

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In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology. The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

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The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has been characterized as metaphysics, poetry, and mysticism-virtually everything except what its author claimed it was: a "purely scientific mémoir." Professor O'Connell here follows up on a nest of clues, uncovered first in an early unpublished essay, then in the series of essays contained principally in The Vision of the Past. Those clues all point to Teilhard's intimate familiarity with the philosophy of science propounded by the celebrated Pierre Duhem. It was Duhem's central claim that science, to remain true to itself, must aim at establishing a genuine "natural classification" phenomenal reality. That insight, Professor O'Connell argues, guided Teilhard's lifelong effort to describe the "imposed reality-factors" which science in its variety of forms suggests as ingredients and operative at every phase in the evolutionary development of planet Earth. Limiting his focus to the way Teilhard unfolded his vision of the past, Professor O'Connell concludes that those who deprecate Teilhard as unscientific betray little awareness of how sophisticated his understanding of science truly was.

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This facsimile of Melville's historical novel appears in a paperback classroom edition, with a commentary by Hennig Cohen. "Israel Potter" is the story of a neglected hero of the American Revolution.

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"…Elizabeth M. Kerr has, with the publication of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha: 'A Kind of Keystone in the Universe,' completed a comprehensive examination of Faulkner's mythical county…this latest work deals with the 'symbolic values related to the themes of the separate narratives and to the encompassing mythology.' In successive chapters, Kerr examines (1) recurrent symbols and archetypes in Faulkner's fiction; (2) mythology in the modern world, the South, and Yoknapatawpha; and (3) 'the basic Christian humanism which underlies Williams Faulkner's existential focus on the human condition' - most specifically as it relates to Time, Motion, and Change. The book is scholarly, well written, and carefully organized…Highly recommended."—Choice "Aiming for the universal in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction, this book reads somewhat like an annotated bibliography, or three bibliographies: one on symbols in Yoknapatawpha, citing (copiously) dissertations, articles, and books on symbolism in general and Faulkner's own symbols; one on various myths Kerr and other critics have noticed in Yoknapatawpha

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A lively exploration into America’s preoccupation with childhood innocence and its corruption In The Drinking Curriculum, Elizabeth Marshall brings the taboo topic of alcohol and childhood into the limelight. Marshall coins the term “the drinking curriculum” to describe how a paradoxical set of cultural lessons about childhood are fueled by adult anxieties and preoccupations. By analyzing popular and widely accessible texts in visual culture—temperance tracts, cartoons, film, advertisements, and public-service announcements—Marshall demonstrates how youth are targets of mixed messages about intoxication. Those messages range from the overtly violent to the humorous, the moralistic to the profane. Offering a critical and, at times, irreverent analysis of dominant protectionist paradigms that sanctify childhood as implicitly innocent, The Drinking Curriculum centers the graphic narratives our culture uses to teach about alcohol, the roots of these pictorial tales in the nineteenth century, and the discursive hangover we nurse into the twenty-first.

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Philosophical thinking is interrupted by the finitude of what cannot be named, on the one hand, and that within which it is subsumed as one of multiple modes of sense-making, on the other. Sense and Singularity elaborates Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical project as an inquiry into the limits or finitude of philosophy itself, where it is interrupted, and as a practice of critical intervention where philosophy serves to interrupt otherwise unquestioned ways of thinking. Nancy’s interruption of philosophy, Van Den Abbeele argues, reveals the limits of what philosophy is and what it can do, its apocalyptic end and its endless renewal, its Sisyphean interruption between the bounds of infinitely replicating sense and the conceptual vanishing point that is singularity. In examinations of Nancy’s foundational rereading of Descartes's cogito as iterative, his formal experimentations with the genres of philosophical writing, the account of “retreat” in understanding the political, and the interruptive play of sense and singularity in writings on the body, sexuality, and aesthetics, Van Den Abbeele offers a fresh account of one of our major thinkers as well as a provocative inquiry into what philosophy can do.

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Today’s regnant global economic and cultural system, neoliberal capitalism, demands that life be led as a series of sacrifices to the market. Send Lazarus’s theological critique wends its way through four neoliberal crises: environmental destruction, slum proliferation, mass incarceration, and mass deportation, all while plumbing the sacrificial and racist depths of neoliberalism.

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Sex is a difficult issue for contemporary Christians, but the past decade has witnessed a newfound openness regarding the topic among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Both the theological trajectory and the historical circumstances of the Orthodox Church differ radically from those of other Christian denominations that have already developed robust and creative reflections on sexuality and sexual diversity. Within its unique history, theology, and tradition, Orthodox Christianity holds rich resources for engaging challenging questions of sexuality in new and responsive ways. What is at stake in questions of sexuality in the Orthodox tradition? What sources and theological convictions can uniquely shape Orthodox understandings of sexuality? This volume aims to create an agora for discussing sex, and not least the sexualities that are often thought of as untraditional in Orthodox contexts. Through fifteen distinct chapters, written by leading scholars and theologians, this book offers a developed treatment of sexuality in the Orthodox Christian world by approaching the subject from scriptural, patristic, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives. Chapters devoted to practical and pastoral insights, as well as reflections on specific cultural contexts, engage the human realities of sexual diversity and Christian life. From re-thinking scripture to developing theologies of sex, from eschatological views of eros to re-evaluations of the Orthodox responses to science, this book offers new thinking on pressing, present-day issues and initiates conversations about homosexuality and sexual diversity within Orthodox Christianity.

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The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation. The introduction of theory into English studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of investments at the same time that institutional conflicts between them became more intense than ever before. Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures who shaped and were shaped by this new landscape—including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour—the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than is usually understood from the perspective of either literature or composition alone. Possessing a clear view of the entire discipline is essential today as the contemporary corporate university pushes English studies to abandon its liberal arts tradition and embrace a more vocational curriculum. This book provides important conceptual tools for responding to and resisting in this environment.

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The most important work by a key figure in German thought, Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, originally published in 1928, appears here for the first time in English, accompanied by a substantial Introduction by J. M. Bernstein, after having served for decades as an influence on thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Peter Berger, Habermas, and the new naturalists. The Levels, as it has long been known, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources as part of a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings in turn as a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing’s insides and surrounding world. On Plessner’s unique account, living things are classed and analyzed by their “positionality,” or orientation to and within an environment. “Life” is thereby phenomenologically defined, and its universal yet internally variable features such as metabolism, reproduction, and death are explained. The approach provides a foundation not only for philosophical biology but philosophical anthropology as well. According to Plessner’s radical view, the human form of life is excentric—that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This “excentric positionality” enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. Plessner studied zoology and philosophy with Hans Driesch in the 1910s before embarking on a highly productive philosophical career. His work was initially obscured by the superficially similar views of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger and by his forced exile during World War II. Only in recent decades, as scholarship has moved more squarely into engagement with issues like animality, embodiment, human dignity, social theory, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of nature, has the originality and depth of Plessner’s vision been appreciated. A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition. This modern philosophical classic, long-awaited in English translation, is a key book both historically and for today’s interest in understanding philosophy and social theory together with science, without reducing the former to the latter.

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In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. In Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, Bonnie Honig asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? Following Tocqueville, who extolled the virtues of “pursuing in common the objects of common desires,” Honig focuses not on the demos but on the objects of democratic life. Democracy, as she points out, postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of Public Things is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. Public Things attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, who saw how things fabricated by humans lend stability to the human world, Honig shows how Arendt and Winnicott—both theorists of livenesss—underline the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

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In certain key respects, 1943 marked a turning point in the war. Increasingly, victory seemed assured. However, the backdrop to this gradually improving situation was one of widespread and unremitting destruction. In the essays from that year, Blanchot writes from a position of almost total detachment from day-to-day events, now that all of his projects and involvements have come to naught. As he explores and promotes works of literature and ideas, he privileges those with the capacity to sustain a human perspective that does not merely contemplate ruin and disaster but sees them as the occasion for a radical revision of what “human” is capable of signifying. Consigning all that the name “France” has hitherto meant to him to a past that is now in ruins, Blanchot begins to sketch out a counter-history that is international in nature, and whose human field is literature.

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What does it mean to live with life-threatening illness? How does one respond to loss? Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects attempts to answer these questions and, as such, illuminates the vulnerabilities of the human body and how human beings suffer harm. In particular, it examines how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic theory and literary analysis, Lana Lin tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how losing a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Lin concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums in London and Vienna. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities. Freud’s Jaw asks what are the psychic effects of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality, and it suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of such injury. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Lin proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative, reparative projects of love and writing.

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Few people today have ever heard of North Brother Island, though a hundred years ago it was place known to—and often feared by—nearly everyone in New York City. The island, a small dot in the East River, twenty acres slotted between today’s gritty industrial shores of the Bronx and Queens, was a minor piece of the New York archipelago until the late 19th century, when calls for social and sanitary reform—and the massive expansion of the city’s population—combined to remake NBI as a hospital island, a place to contain infectious disease and, later, other societal ills. Abandoned since 1963, North Brother Island is a ruin and a wildlife sanctuary (it is the protected nesting ground of the Black-crowned Night Heron), closed to the public and virtually invisible to it. But one cannot mistake its abandoned state as a sign of its irrelevance to the city’s history and culture. Traces of the extensive hospital campus remain, as do sites linked to notorious people (it was the final home of “Typhoid Mary”) and events (the steamship General Slocum sank by its shores). It has stories to tell. Photographer Christopher Payne (Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals) was granted permission by New York City’s Parks & Recreation Department to photograph the island over a period of years. The results are both beautiful and startling. On North Brother Island, devoid of human habitation for fifty years, buildings great and small are being consumed by the unchecked growth of vegetation. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where once there were the streets and manicured lawns of a hospital campus. North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City includes a history by University of Pennsylvania preservationist Randall Mason, who has studied the island extensively, and an essay by the writer Robert Sullivan (Rats, The Meadowlands), who came along on one of the rare expeditions.

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Wittgenstein's House reads Wittgenstein's his two main philosophical texts, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, in relation to an experience that intervened between them: his design and construction of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house in Vienna. Arguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, but a conceptual position as well, the book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases. The book advances the radical proposition that the field in which architecture and philosophy operate includes linguistic and spatial practices. It develops innovative forms of interdisciplinary analyses to demonstrate that the philosophical positions put forth by Wittgenstein's two main works are literally unthinkable outside of their respective conceptions of space: the view from above in the early work and the view from within constructed by the late work. To examine the manner in which Wittgenstein's practice of architecture insinuated itself into his philosophy, the author interweaves in-depth analyses of the spatial constructs underpinning the early and late philosophies with conceptual, formal and operative discussions of the design of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house. Together these discussions reveal how Wittgenstein's practice of architecture engaged philosophical concepts, through which it influenced Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. At the heart of this approach is the finding that the philosophical concepts at the core of Wittgenstein's philosophy are indeed spatial ones, including his concerns with the limits of language, the boundary between showing and saying, the intricate textual numbering systems he devises, the relationship between the interiority of the subject and the publicness of language, and the formative principle of family resemblance.

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Bruno Latour stirs things up. Latour began as a lover of science and technology, co-founder of actor-network theory, and philosopher of a modernity that had “never been modern.” In the meantime he is regarded not just as one of the most intelligent—and also popular—exponents of science studies but also as a major innovator of the social sciences, an exemplary wanderer who walks the line between the sciences and the humanities. This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast), to influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action, and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of “modes of existence.” In the course of this enquiry it becomes clear that the basic problem to which Latour’s work responds is that of social tradition, the transmission of experience and knowledge. What this empirical philosopher constantly grapples with is the complex relationship of knowledge, time, and culture.

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St. Ignatius Loyola is one of the great shapers of the Catholic tradition. The Spanish soldier turned pilgrim for Christ bequeathed not only an extraordinary institutional legacy but also a distinctive spirituality that today nourishes men and women looking for ways to integrate faith and life. Informing Jesuit education, ministry, and training in communities around the world, Ignatian spirituality offers a practical vision—of engaged, responsible, discerning men and women striving to find God in all things—that resonates in this age of transition. Drawn from the vast body of Ignatius’s writings, these 365 maxims help everyone reflect on the presence of God in daily life. First complied by the Jesuit scholar Gabriel Hevenesi in 1715 as Scintillae Ignatianae, these brief thoughts, supplications, prayers, directions, and other aphorisms were first published in an English translation in 1928 but have been unavailable in book form for many years. Organized into a daybook for contemplation, Ignatius’s words serve as personal spiritual exercises. They touch on a range of topics, from affirmations of God’s presence and Christ’s love to practical advice for living a life of virtue in service to others. In this accessible gathering, anyone seeking a richer spiritual life will find words that inspire, challenge, enlighten, and transform. FROM THE BOOK “A little holiness and great health of body does more in the care of souls than great holiness and little health.“Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” “The sharper you are at noticing other people’s failings, the more apt you will be to overlook your own.” “Go and set the whole world on fire.”

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For over a thousand years, Eastern Christendom had as its center the second capital of the Roman Empire—Constantinople, the "New Rome," or Byzantium. The geographical division between the Eastern and Western Churches was only one manifestation of deeper rifts, characterized by a long history of conflicts, suspicions, and misunderstandings. Although the art, monasticism, and spirituality of Byzantium have come to be recognized as inspirational and influential in the shaping of Eastern European civilization, and of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well, the West has been in the main ignorant of the historical evolution and the doctrinal significance of Byzantine theology. Here, for the first time in English, is presented a synthesis of Byzantine Christian thought. The reader is guided through its complexities to an understanding of Byzantium: its view of man and his destiny of "deification"; its ability to transcend the "Western captivity"; its survival under quite adverse historical circumstances. In the end, he may well find himself receptive to the basic positions of Byzantine thought, which have attained, in this time of need for the reintegration of Christianity itself, a surprising, contemporary relevance.

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This volume interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing conflicts of our times? Taking as their point of departure the question of whether critique belongs exclusively to forms of liberal democracy that define themselves in opposition to religion, these authors consider the case of the “Danish cartoon controversy” of 2005. They offer accounts of reading, understanding, and critique for offering a way to rethink conventional oppositions between free speech and religious belief, judgment and violence, reason and prejudice, rationality and embodied life. The book, first published in 2009, has been updated for the present edition with a new Preface by the authors.

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A gripping, funny, joyful account of how the books you read shape your own life in surprising and profound ways. Bookworms know what scholars of literature are trained to forget: that when they devour a work of literary fiction, whatever else they may be doing, they are reading about themselves. Read Shakespeare, and you become Cleopatra, Hamlet, or Bottom. Or at the very least, you experience the plays as if you are in a small room alone with them, and they are speaking to your life, your sensibility. Drawing on fifty years as a Shakespearean, Leonard Barkan has produced a captivating book that asks us to reconsider what it means to read. Barkan violates the rule of distance he was taught and has always taught his students. He asks: Where does this brilliantly contrived fiction actually touch me? Where is Shakespeare in effect telling the story of my life? King Lear, for Barkan, raises unanswerable questions about what exactly a father does after planting the seed. Mothers from Gertrude to Lady Macbeth are reconsidered in the light of the author’s experience as a son of a former flapper. The sonnets and comedies are seen through the eyes of a gay man who nevertheless weeps with joy when all the heterosexual couples are united at the end. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is interpreted through the author’s joyous experience of performing the role of Bottom and finding his aesthetic faith in the pantheon of antiquity. And the exquisitely poetical history play Richard II intersects with, of all things, Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Full of engrossing stories, from family secrets to the world of the theater, and written with humor and genuine excitement about literary experiences worthy of our attention and our love, Reading Shakespeare Reading Me makes Shakespeare’s plays come alive in new ways.

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In the Wake of Medea examines the violence of seventeenth-century French political dramas. French tragedy has traditionally been taken to be a passionless, cerebral genre that refused all forms of violence. This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence persists, contextualizing it in a longer literary and philosophical history from Ovid to Pasolini. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, exemplifies the persistence of violence in literature and art. A refugee who is welcomed yet feared, who confirms the social while threatening its integrity, Medea offers an alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone. The Medean presence, Cherbuliez shows, offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness, both for classical theater and for its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama, from rhetorical devices like ekphrasis to dramaturgical mechanisms like machinery, all of which involve temporal disruption. The full range of this Medean presence is explored in treatments of the character Medea and in works figuratively invoking a Medean presence, from the well-known tragedies of Racine and Corneille through a range of other neoclassical political theater, including spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater. In the Wake of Medea recognizes the violence within these tragedies to explain why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.

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Explores four centuries of colonization, land divisions, and urban development around this historic landmark neighborhood in West HarlemIt was the neighborhood where Alexander Hamilton built his country home, George Gershwin wrote his first hit, a young Norman Rockwell discovered he liked to draw, and Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man. Through words and pictures, Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill traces the transition of this picturesque section of Harlem from lush farmland in the early 1600s to its modern-day growth as a unique Manhattan neighborhood highlighted by stunning architecture, Harlem Renaissance gatherings, and the famous residents who called it home. Stretching from approximately 135th Street and Edgecombe Avenue to around 165th, all the way to the Hudson River, this small section in the Heights of West Harlem is home to so many significant events, so many extraordinary people, and so much of New York's most stunning architecture, i

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Three gay men in pre-Stonewall New York City find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar. Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him. Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything. For Danny Duffy, an Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and a diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge. The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propelDisorderly Mento its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: How much happiness is he allowed to have . . . and what share of it will he lay claim to?

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Finalist, 2021 Bram Stoker Awards (Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction) The first collection of essays to address Satan’s ubiquitous and popular appearances in film Lucifer and cinema have been intertwined since the origins of the medium. As humankind’s greatest antagonist and the incarnation of pure evil, the cinematic devil embodies our own culturally specific anxieties and desires, reflecting moviegoers’ collective conceptions of good and evil, right and wrong, sin and salvation. Giving the Devil His Due is the first book of its kind to examine the history and significance of Satan onscreen. This collection explores how the devil is not just one monster among many, nor is he the “prince of darkness” merely because he has repeatedly flickered across cinema screens in darkened rooms since the origins of the medium. Satan is instead a force active in our lives. Films featuring the devil, therefore, are not just flights of fancy but narratives, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes calling into question, a familiar belief system. From the inception of motion pictures in the 1890s and continuing into the twenty-first century, these essays examine what cinematic representations tell us about the art of filmmaking, the desires of the film-going public, what the cultural moments of the films reflect, and the reciprocal influence they exert. Loosely organized chronologically by film, though some chapters address more than one film, this collection studies such classic movies as Faust, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, Angel Heart, The Witch, and The Last Temptation of Christ, as well as the appearance of the Devil in Disney animation. Guiding the contributions to this volume is the overarching idea that cinematic representations of Satan reflect not only the hypnotic powers of cinema to explore and depict the fantastic but also shifting social anxieties and desires that concern human morality and our place in the universe. Contributors: Simon Bacon, Katherine A. Fowkes, Regina Hansen, David Hauka, Russ Hunter, Barry C. Knowlton, Eloise R. Knowlton, Murray Leeder, Catherine O’Brien, R. Barton Palmer, Carl H. Sederholm, David Sterritt, J. P. Telotte, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

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Dry Bones, the third novel of the Fintan Dunne series by Peter Quinn, follows Fintan, who works for the OSS, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The novel is set during World War II, when Fintan teams up with several of his colleagues working to rescue several intelligence officers who had been fighting the Nazis inside Czechoslovakia. Things go awry and the team soon uncovers a huge conspiracy that may change the course of their careers and their lives. After the end of the war, many of his colleagues have bad things happen to them. The common thing about his friends who either go missing or end up dead is that they were trying to unearth the mystery of an infamous doctor who had gone missing. It seems the CIA is determined to ensure that what happened to the infamous doctor who had made his name experimenting on prisoners of war remained a secret.

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Peter Quinn’s The Man Who Never Returned is a noir-ish, stylized detective narrative set in 1950s New York. It follows Fintan, a retired detective turned private investigator who has been given the job of finding Judge Crater, who just went missing in 1930. Based on a real story, it is quite an intriguing tale that was even more so for people living at the time. The famous missing-person case is comparable to the Amelia Earhart missing-person case, though it could have been an even more interesting one. It was alleged that the missing judge may have had information about underhanded dealings in the New York judiciary. It was believed that if such information came to light, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then governor of New York, would have had a hard time becoming the president of the United States. There were also rumors that the judge, who was a known ladies’ man, had either decided to disappear or had fallen afoul of the mafia. Featuring hardboiled characters and a beautiful re-creation of New York from the ’50s, it is quite a compelling read.

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Named one of the top twenty books every Irish American should read by Irish Central The Civil War has just entered its third bloody year, and the North is about to impose its first military draft, a decision that will spark the most devastating and destructive urban riot in American history. Banished Children of Eve traces that event as its tentacles grip New York City. The cast is drawn from every stratum: a likeable and laconic Irish-American hustler, an ambitious and larcenous Yankee stockbroker, an immigrant serving girl, a beautiful and mysterious mulatto actress and her white minstrel lover as well as a cluster of real-life characters, including scheming, ever-pompous General George McClellan; fiery, fierce Archbishop “Dagger John” Hughes; and fast-declining musical genius Stephen Foster. The fates of these characters coalesce in the cataclysm of the Draft Riots, as a pivotal period in the history of New York and the nation is painfully, vividly, magically bought to life.

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It’s just another murder, one of the hundreds of simple homicides in 1939: A spinster nurse is killed in her apartment; a suspect is caught with the murder weapon and convicted. Fintan Dunne, the P.I. lured onto the case and coerced by conscience into unraveling the complex setup that has put an innocent man on Death Row, will soon find that this is a murder with tentacles which stretch far beyond the crime scene . . . to Nazi Germany, in fact; following it to the end leads him into a murder conspiracy of a scope that defies imagination. The same clouds are rolling over Berlin, where plans for a military coup are forming among a cadre of Wehrmacht officers. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Military Intelligence, is gripped by a deadly paralysis: He is neither with the plotters nor against them. Joining them in treason would violate every value he holds as an officer. Betraying the plotters to the Gestapo Chief, Reinhard Heydrich, might just forsake the country’s last hope to avert utter destruction and centuries of shame. Heydrich is suspicious. With no limits to Hitler’s manic pursuit of territorial expansion, with crimes against the people candy-coated as racial purification, the “hour of the cat” looms when every German conscience must make a choice. When Canaris receives an order to assist in a sinister covert operation on foreign shores, his hour has come. Hour of the Cat is a stunning achievement: tautly suspenseful, hauntingly memorable, and brilliantly authentic.

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In Mapping Memory, Kaitlin M. Murphy investigates the use of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical intervention. Mapping Memory focuses specifically on visual case studies, including documentary film, photography, performance, new media, and physical places of memory, from sites ranging from the Southern Cone to Central America and the U.S.–Mexican borderlands. Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing, arguing that visuality is inherently performative. By analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts—such as embodiment, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places Murphy elucidates how memory is both anchored in and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places. Drawing together diverse theoretical strands, Murphy originates the theory of “memory mapping”, which tends to the ways in which memory is strategically deployed in order to challenge official narratives that often neglect or designate as transgressive certain memories or experiences. Ultimately, Murphy argues, memory mapping is a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not.

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Named a Gift Book for the Discerning New Yorker by The New York Times In a metropolis like New York, homelessness can blend into the urban landscape. For editor Susan Greenfield, however, New York is the place where a community of resilient, remarkable individuals are yearning for a voice. Sacred Shelter follows the lives of thirteen formerly homeless people, all of whom have graduated from the life skills empowerment program, an interfaith life skills program for homeless and formerly homeless individuals in New York. Through frank, honest interviews, these individuals share traumas from their youth, their experience with homelessness, and the healing they have discovered through community and faith. Edna Humphrey talks about losing her grandparents, father, and sister to illness, accident, and abuse. Lisa Sperber discusses her bipolar disorder and her whiteness. Dennis Barton speaks about his unconventional path to becoming a first-generation college student and his journey to reconnect with his family. The memoirists share stories about youth, family, jobs, and love. They describe their experiences with racism, mental illness, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Each of the thirteen storytellers honestly expresses his or her brokenheartedness and how finding community and faith gave them hope to carry on. Interspersed among these life stories are reflections from program directors, clerics, mentors, and volunteers who have worked with and in the life skills empowerment program. In his reflection, George Horton shares his deep gratitude for and solidarity with the 500-plus individuals he has come to know since he co-founded the program in 1989. While religion can be divisive, Horton firmly believes that all faiths urge us to “welcome the stranger” and, as Pope Francis asks, “accompany” them through the struggles of life. Through solidarity and suffering, many formerly homeless individuals have found renewed faith in God and community. Beyond trauma and strife, Dorothy Day’s suggestion that “All is grace” is personified in these thirteen stories. Jeremy Kalmanofsky, rabbi at Ansche Chesed Synagogue, says the program points toward a social fabric of encounter and recognition between strangers, who overcome vast differences to face one another, which in Hebrew is called Panim el Panim. While Sacred Shelter does not tackle the socioeconomic conditions and inequities that cause homelessness, it provides a voice for a demographic group that continues to suffer from systemic injustice and marginalization. In powerful, narrative form, it expresses the resilience of individuals who have experienced homelessness and the hope and community they have found. By listening to their stories, we are urged to confront our own woundedness and uncover our desire for human connection, a sacred shelter on the other side of suffering.

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Mirko D. Grmek (1924-2000) is one of the most significant figures in the history of medicine, and has long been considered a pioneer of the field. The singular trajectory that took Grmek from Yugoslavia to the academic culture of post-war France placed him at the crossroads of different intellectual trends and made him an influential figure during the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, scholars have rarely attempted to articulate his distinctive vision of the history of science and medicine with all its tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities. This volume brings together and publishes for the first time in English a range of Grmek’s writings, providing a portrait of his entire career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Pathological Realities pieces together Grmek’s scholarship that reveals the interconnections of diseases, societies, and medical theories. Straddling the sciences and the humanities, Grmek crafted significant new concepts and methods to engage with contemporary social problems such as wars, genocides and pandemics. Uniting some major strands of his published work that are still dispersed or simply unknown, this volume covers the deep epistemological changes in historical conceptions of disease as well as major advances within the life sciences and their historiography. Opening with a classic essay – “Preliminaries for a Historical Study of Diseases,” this volume introduces Grmek’s notions of “pathocenosis” and “emerging infections,” illustrating them with historical and contemporary cases. Pathological Realities also showcases Grmek’s pioneering approach to the history of science and medicine using laboratory notebooks as well as his original work on biological thought and the role of ideologies and myths in the history of science. The essays assembled here reveal Grmek’s significant influence and continued relevance for current research in the history of medicine and biology, medical humanities, science studies, and the philosophy of science.

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Is Christianity exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or do its concepts actually underpin secular politics? To this question, which animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology, Liturgical Power advances a third alternative. Christian anti-politics, Heron contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, he argues, assumes the form of what today we call “administration,” but which the ancients termed “economics.” The book’s principal aim is thus genealogical: it seeks to understand our current conception of government in light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity. This transformation in the idea of politics precipitates in turn a concurrent shift in the organization of power; an organization whose determining principle, Heron contends, is liturgy—understood in the broad sense as “public service.” Whereas until now only liturgy’s acclamatory dimension has made the concept available for political theory, Heron positions it more broadly as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, he argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service.

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Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the deep theological resonances of questions about the social and cultural construction of time, memory, and futurity. Apocalyptic, eschatological and apophatic languages, frameworks, and orientations pervade both queer theorizing and theologizing about time, affect, history and desire. The volume fosters a more explicit engagement between theories of queer temporality and affectivity and religious texts and discourses.

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Not rediscovered until the twentieth century, the works of Georges de La Tour retain an aura of mystery. At first sight, his paintings suggest a veritable celebration of light and the visible world, but this is deceptive. The familiarity of visual experience blinds the beholder to a deeper understanding of the meanings associated with vision and the visible in the early modern period. By exploring the representations of light, vision, and the visible in La Tour’s works, this interdisciplinary study examines the nature of painting and its artistic, religious, and philosophical implications. In the wake of iconoclastic outbreaks and consequent Catholic call for the revitalization of religious imagery, La Tour paints familiar objects of visible reality that also serve as emblems of an invisible, spiritual reality. Like the books in his paintings, asking to be read, La Tour’s paintings ask not just to be seen as visual depictions but to be deciphered as instruments of insight. In figuring faith as spiritual passion and illumination, La Tour’s paintings test the bounds of the pictorial image, attempting to depict what painting cannot ultimately show: words, hearing, time, movement, changes of heart. La Tour’s emphasis on spiritual insight opens up broader artistic, philosophical, and conceptual reflections on the conditions of possibility of the pictorial medium. By scrutinizing what is seen and how, and by questioning the position of the beholder, his works revitalize critical discussion of the nature of painting and its engagements with the visible world.

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Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies. From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification. Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

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Runner Up Winner of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize - Established Scholars, Cultural Studies Category Winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize (20th & 21st Centuries) Honorable Mention for the Howard R. Marraro Prize By linking Italy’s long history of emigration to all continents in the world, contemporary transnational migrations directed toward it, as well as the country’s colonial legacies, Fiore’s book poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. Through an interdisciplinary cultural approach, the book finds traces of globalization in a past that may hold interesting lessons about inclusiveness for the present. Fiore rethinks Italy’s formation and development on a transnational map through cultural analysis of travel, living, and work spaces as depicted in literary, filmic, and musical texts. By demonstrating how immigration in Italy today is preoccupied by its past emigration and colonialism, the book stresses commonalities and dispels preoccupations.

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No longer able to read community in terms colored by a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity, closeness and sameness, or the myth of rational choice, we nevertheless face an imperative to think the common. The prominent scholars assembled here come together to articulate community while thinking seriously about the tropes, myths, narratives, metaphors, conceits, and shared cultural texts on which any such articulation depends. The result is a major contribution to literary theory, postcolonialism, philosophy, political theory, and sociology.

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A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin’s discomfort with that document’s enshrinement of “socioeconomic rights,” his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy. Beginning with a critical overview of Dworkin’s work culminating in his two principles of dignity, Cornell and Friedman turn to Kant and Hegel for an approach better able to ground the principles of dignity Dworkin advocates. Framed thus, Dworkin’s challenge to legal positivism enables a theory of constitutional revolution in which existing legal structures are transformatively revalued according to ethical mandates. By founding law on dignity, Dworkin begins to articulate an ethical jurisprudence responsive to the lived experience of injustice. This book, then, articulates a revolutionary constitutionalism crucial to the struggle for decolonization.

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