Search results for ""stanford university press""

Busyness defines the lives of most Americans. For some, the focus of busyness is family. For others, it is career or social activities. Sometimes busyness results from a big event, like the catastrophic illness of a family member, but much of it builds from many seemingly inconsequential demands that collectively become overwhelming. We search for the best airline prices on the Internet, are "partners" with teachers in our children's education, and employ a battery of devices that promise to save labor if only we can learn how to use them. Busier Than Ever! follows the daily activities of fourteen American families. It explores why they are busy and what the consequences are for their lives. Busyness is not just a matter of personal time management, but of the activities we participate in and how each of us creates "the good life." While numerous books deal with efficiency and the difficulties of balancing work and family, Busier Than Ever! offers a fresh approach. Busyness is not a "problem" to be solved—it is who we are as Americans and it's redefining American families.

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On July 13, 1942, French gendarmes arrested Irène Némirovsky in southern Burgundy. She was deported to Auschwitz where she died on August 19. Who was this woman, author of more than a dozen popular novels and more than thirty short stories, whose posthumous novel, Suite Française, won France's prestigious Renaudot prize in 2004? Born in Russia to wealthy parents, Irène Némirovsky immigrated to Paris in 1919. Although she was Jewish, she consorted with authors and politicians on the extreme right, some of whom were openly anti-Semitic. She was sure that these friends would protect her from deportation after the Nazis invaded France. Instead, they abandoned her. Yet she never lost faith in France, even after she was refused French nationality. In this fascinating biography, Jonathan Weiss analyzes the discrepancy between Némirovsky's real and imagined identities, and explores a literary work that revisits in a unique way Jewish identity, exile, betrayal, and the solidarity of a persecuted people.

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The late Jacques Derrida’s notion of literature is explored in this new study. Starting with Derrida’s self-professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett, whom Derrida nevertheless considered one of the most interesting and exemplary writers of our time, Asja Szafraniec argues that the shared feature of literary works as Derrida understands them is a double, juridical-economical gesture, and that one aspect of this notion (the juridical) is more hospitable to Beckett’s oeuvre than the other. She then discusses other contemporary philosophical approaches to Beckett, including those of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and Alain Badiou. The book offers an innovative analysis of Derrida’s approach to literature, as well as an overview of current philosophical approaches to contemporary literature, and a number of innovative readings of Beckett’s work.

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Among the native-language documents written by the Nahuas of central Mexico after Spanish contact, the annals genre gave them the freest rein in expressing themselves. The premier practitioner of the Nahuatl annals form was a writer of the early seventeenth century now known as Chimalpahin. Until recently, attention went primarily to his writings about precontact events. Now Chimalpahin's equally important writings about his own time have begun to come to the fore; the present volume is the first English edition of Chimalpahin's largest work, written during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. The great immediate value of the material is that it shows the Mexico City of the author's time, both Spanish and indigenous, as a cultured Nahua viewed it, and reveals the Nahuatl social and cultural vocabulary of that era. Among entries reporting run-of-the-mill events, the annals contain much color and humanity. The edition features a faithful transcription and a very readable translation. The apparatus includes telling new analysis of both language and content.

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Is "community" in America in decline? If so, does this mean that charitable giving in the United States is also in decline? In this innovative and original work, Emily Barman offers new insights into this important issue. Analyzing workplace charity in different cities across the United States, Contesting Communities shows that while traditional notions of community might be in decline, new types and visions of community have emerged. Barman traces how these different "communities" take the form of organizational competition between the United Way and new alternative fundraisers over workplace contributions. Deftly blending sociological theory of organizations with archival research, interviews with nonprofit leaders, and original survey data, Contesting Communities ultimately shows that the meaning of community occurs almost incidentally to the wishes of those who give and the needs of those who receive.

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In this historical study, Gil Eyal argues that before the formation of Israel, Jewish experts participated in constructing the Orient as both a metaphor for the rejuvenation of the Jewish nation, and an enchanted space populated by hybrid figures that mixed Jewish and Arab elements. But following the creation of the state, these experts took up a new role: creating boundaries (both external and internal) between Jews and Arabs, purifying the hybrids that inevitably exist on the margins of boundaries. The enchanted space of the Orient was destroyed, and its place was taken by expert discourses that reinforce the cultural separation between Jews and Arabs.

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H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . is Derrida's literary critical recollection of his lifelong friendship with Hélène Cixous. The main figure that informs Derrida's reading here is that of "taking sides." While Hélène Cixous in her life and work takes the side of life, "for life," Derrida admits always feeling drawn to the side of death. Rather than being an obvious choice, taking the side of life is an act of faith, by wagering one's life on life. H. C. for Life sets up and explores this interminable "argument" between Derrida and Cixous as to what death has in store deep within life itself, before the end. In addition to being a memoir, it is also a theoretical confrontation—for example about the meaning of "might" and "omnipotence," and a philosophical and philological analysis of the crypts within the vast oeuvre of Hélène Cixous. Finally, the book is Derrida's tribute to the thought of the woman whom he regards as one of the great French poets, writers, and thinkers of our time.

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Since the hiring of the first Supreme Court law clerk by Associate Justice Horace Gray in the late 1880s, court observers and the general public have demonstrated a consistent fascination with law clerks and the influence—real or imagined—that they wield over judicial decisions. While initially each Supreme Court justice hired a single clerk, today's justices can hire up to four new law school graduates. The justices have taken advantage of this resource, and in modern times law clerks have been given greater job duties and more responsibility. The increased use of law clerks has spawned a controversy about the role they play, and commentators have suggested that liberal or conservative clerks influence their justices' decision making. The influence debate is but one piece of a more important and largely unexamined puzzle regarding the hiring and utilization of Supreme Court law clerks. Courtiers of the Marble Palace is the first systematic examination of the "clerkship institution"—the web of formal and informal norms and rules surrounding the hiring and utilization of law clerks by the individual justices on the United States Supreme Court. Todd Peppers provides an unprecedented view into the work lives of and day-to-day relationships between justices and their clerks; relationships that in some cases have extended to daily breakfasts, games of competitive basketball and tennis, and occasional holiday celebrations. Through personal interviews with fifty-three former clerks and correspondence with an additional ninety, as well as personal interviews with a number of non-clerks, including Justice Antonin Scalia, Peppers has amassed a body of information that reveals the true inner-workings of the clerkship institution. With a Foreword by Professor Robert M. O'Neil of the University of Virginia School of Law, former President of the University of Virginia and former law clerk for Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.

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From Rebel to Rabbi establishes how the changes that occurred in Jewish culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stimulated a widespread fascination with the figure of Jesus and with Christian motifs among numerous Jewish theologians, historians, intellectuals, writers, and artists. It illustrates how and why the process of modernization for these Jews involved a radical reevaluation of Jesus of Nazareth. This book analyzes works of Jewish history, theology, Yiddish literature, Jewish visual art, and intellectual debates, in an attempt to situate this phenomenon within the broader context of a cultural history of how Jews have related to and depicted the figure of Jesus in the modern period. It suggests that for writers and artists, such as Sholem Asch and Marc Chagall, refiguring Jesus as intrinsically Jewish and using Christian themes to express aspects of the modern Jewish experience were an integral part of creating a new and distinctive modern Jewish culture.

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This book explores the emergence of an anarchic states-system in the twentieth-century Arab world. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalist movements first considered establishing a unified regional arrangement to take the empire's place and present a common front to outside powers. But over time different Arab leaderships abandoned this project and instead adopted policies characteristic of self-interested, territorially limited states. In his explanation of this phenomenon, the author shifts attention away from older debates about the origins and development of Arab nationalism and analyzes instead how different nationalist leaderships changed the ways that they carried on diplomatic and strategic relations. He situates this shift in the context of influential sociological theories of state formation, while showing how labor movements and other forms of popular mobilization shaped the origins of the regional states-system.

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Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhou’s streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhou’s and greater China’s modernity.

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Religious NGOs are important sources of humanitarian aid in Africa, entering where the welfare programs of weakened states fail to provide basic services. As collaborators and critics of African states, religious NGOs occupy an important structural and ideological position. They also, however, illustrate a key irony—how economic development, a symbol of science, progress, and this-worldly material improvement, borrows heavily from other-worldly faith. Through a study of two transnational NGOs in Zimbabwe, this book offers a nuanced depiction of development as both liberatory and limiting. Humanitarian effort is not a hopeless task, but behind the liberatory potential of Christian development lurks the sad irony that change can bring its own disappointments. While rapt attention has been given to the supposed role of NGOs in democratizing Africa, few studies engage with the ground operations. Questioning the assumption that economic development is a move away from religious mysticism toward the scientific promise of progress, the author offers a remarkable account of development that is neither defeatist nor comforting.

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Arguments for forgiveness, mercy, and clemency abound. These arguments flourish in organized religion, fiction, philosophy, and law as well as in everyday conversations of daily life among parents and children, teachers and students, and criminals and those who judge them. As common as these arguments are, we are often left with an incomplete understanding of what we mean when we speak about them. This volume examines the registers of individual psychology, religious belief, social practice, and political power circulating in and around those who forgive, grant mercy, or pose clemency power. The authors suggest that, in many ways, necessary examinations of the questions of forgiveness and pardon and the connection between mercy and justice are only just beginning.

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This is the Center for Effective Organizations’s (CEO) fourth national study of the human resources (HR) function in large corporations. It is the only long-term national study of this important function. Like the previous studies, it focuses on measuring whether the HR function is changing and on gauging its effectiveness. The study focuses particularly on whether the HR function is changing to become an effective strategic partner. It also analyzes how organizations can more effectively manage their human capital. The present study compares data from earlier studies to data collected in 2004. The results show some important changes and indicate what HR needs to do to be effective. Practices are identified that enable HR functions to be high value-added strategic partners.

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This book summarizes twenty years of the author's work in historical anthropology and documents his argument that in China, ritual provided the social glue that law provided in the West. The book offers a readable history of the special lineage institutions for which south China has been noted and argues that these institutions fostered the mechanisms that enabled south China to be absorbed into the imperial Chinese state—first, by introducing rituals that were acceptable to the state, and second, by providing mechanisms that made group ownership of property feasible and hence made it possible to pool capital for land reclamation projects important to the state. Just as taxation, defense, and recognition came together with the emergence of powerful lineages in the sixteenth century, their disintegration in the late nineteenth century signaled the beginnings of a new Chinese state.

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This ethnographic study of an urban high school in one of the most diverse cities in the United States examines the role that race plays in the lives of students. At a school publicly celebrated for its integration, academic excellence, and racial harmony, the reality is a different story: that of continuing internal segregation and racial conflicts. Examining the role of race in neighborhood relations, desegregation programs, and school violence, the author uncovers competing racial orders. A gifted magnet program reinforces the notion that being white means being gifted. Conflicts in the schoolyard show a racial bipolarization where Cambodian Americans identify as blacks and Latinos as whites. Applying racial formation theory to ethnographic research, this study reveals how a school racializes its students. But students are not just passive victims of such structural forces. They also creatively shape the way in which race is organized, imagined, and experienced.

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This book is about the social history of the Arab Jews—Jews living in Arab countries—against the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissaries—prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were reproduced upon the arrival of the Arab Jews to Israel. The book also provides a new prism for understanding the intricate relationships between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a link that is usually obscured or omitted by studies that are informed by Zionist historiography. Finally, the book uses the history of the Arab Jews to transcend the assumptions necessitated by the Zionist perspective, and to open the door for a perspective that sheds new light on the basic assumptions upon which Zionism was founded.

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A Poverty of Rights is an investigation of the knotty ties between citizenship and inequality during the years when the legal and institutional bases for modern Brazilian citizenship originated. Between 1930 and 1964, Brazilian law dramatically extended its range and power, and citizenship began to signify real political, economic, and civil rights for common people. And yet, even in Rio de Janeiro—Brazil's national capital until 1960—this process did not include everyone. Rio's poorest residents sought with hope, imagination, and will to claim myriad forms of citizenship as their own. Yet, blocked by bureaucratic obstacles or ignored by unrealistic laws, they found that their poverty remained one of rights as well as resources. At the end of a period most notable for citizenship's expansion, Rio's poor still found themselves akin to illegal immigrants in their own land, negotiating important components of their lives outside of the boundaries and protections of laws and rights, their vulnerability increasingly critical to important networks of profit and political power. In exploring this process, Brodwyn Fischer offers a critical re-interpretation not only of Brazil's Vargas regime, but also of Rio's twentieth-century urban history and of the broader significance of law, rights, and informality in the lives of the very poor.

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Open Secrets identifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), and poems by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy. The author argues that these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular that of self-concealment and self-presentation. Declining the twin pressures of self-actualization and self-denial defining modernity's call to make good on one's talents, the subjects of the "literature of uncounted experience" do nothing so heroic as renounce ambitions of self-expression; they simply set aside the fantasy of the all-responsible subject. The originality of Open Secrets is thus to imagine the non-instrumental without casting it as a heavy ethical burden. Non-appropriation emerges not as what is difficult to do but as the path of least resistance. The book offers a valuable counterpoint to recent anti-Enlightenment revaluations of passivity that have made non-mastery and non-appropriation the fundamental task of the ethical subject.

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The HP Phenomenon tells the story of how Hewlett-Packard innovated and transformed itself six times while most of its competitors were unable to make even one significant transformation. It describes those transformations, how they started, how they prevailed, and how the challenges along the way were overcome—reinforcing David Packard's observation that "change and conflict are the only real constants." The book also details the philosophies, practices, and organizational principles that enabled this unprecedented sequence of innovations and transformations. In so doing, the authors capture the elusive "spirit of innovation" required to fuel growth and transformation in all companies: innovation that is customer-centered, contribution-driven, and growth-focused. The corporate ethos described in this book—with its emphasis on bottom-up innovation and sufficient flexibility to see results brought to the marketplace and brought alive inside the company—is radically different from current management "best practice." Thus, while primarily a history of Hewlett-Packard, The HP Phenomenon also holds profound lessons for engineers, managers, and organizational leaders hoping to transform their own organizations. "At last! The 'HP Way, that most famous of all corporate philosophies, has taken on an almost mythical status. But how did it really work? How did it make Hewlett-Packard the fastest growing, most admired, large company of the last half-century? Now, two important figures in HP's history, Chuck House and Raymond Price, have finally given us the whole story. The HP Phenomenon is the book we've been waiting for: the definitive treatise on how Bill and Dave ran their legendary company, day to day and year to year. It should be a core text for generations of young entrepreneurs and managers, a roadmap to building a great enterprise."—Michael S. Malone, author of Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company

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In many different parts of the world people cordon off sites of great suffering or great heroism from routine use and employ these sites exclusively for purposes of remembrance. The author of this book turns to the landscape of contemporary Berlin in order to understand how some places are forgotten by all but eyewitnesses, whereas others become the sites of public ceremonies, museums, or commemorative monuments. The places examined mark the city’s Nazi past and are often rendered off limits to use for apartments, shops, or offices. However, only a portion of all “authentic” sites—places with direct connections to acts of resistance or persecution during the Nazi era—actually become designated as places of official collective memory. Others are simply reabsorbed into the quotidian landscape. Remembering leaves its marks on the skin of the city, and the goal of this book is to analyze and understand precisely how.

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For more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West’s knowledges—especially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledges—of the non-Western world. The essays that make up this volume treat diverse aspects of this remarkable body of work. Among them: the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge; the historical shifts giving shape to the complexly interrelated categories of the secular and the religious, and the significance of these shifts in the emergence of modern Europe; and aspects of human embodiment, including some of the various ways that pain, emotion, embodied aptitude, and the senses connect with and structure cultural practices. While the specific themes and arguments addressed by the individual contributors range widely, the essays cohere in a shared orientation of both critical engagement and productive extension. Note that this is not a festschrift, nor a celebratory farewell, but a series of engagements with a thinker whose work is in full spate and deserves to be far better known and understood.

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How often do working-class children obtain college degrees and then pursue professional careers? Conversely, how frequently do the children of doctors and lawyers fail to enter high status careers upon completion of their schooling? As inequalities of wealth and income have increased in industrialized nations over the past 30 years, have patterns of between-generation mobility changed? In this volume, leading sociologists and economists present original findings and conceptual arguments in response to questions like these. After assessing the range of mobility patterns observed in recent decades, the volume considers the mechanisms that generate mobility, focusing on both the training and skills that are rewarded in the labor market as well as the role of educational institutions in certifying graduates for professional positions. The volume concludes with chapters that assess the contexts of social mobility, examining the impact of macroeconomic conditions and societal levels of inequality on social and economic mobility.

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The fifteenth and final volume of the series The Making of Modern Freedom, this book explores a variety of issues surrounding questions of human rights and freedom in China. The chapters suggest very significant realms of freedom, with or without the protection of law, in the personal, social, and economic lives of people in China before the twentieth century. This was recognized, and partly codified, in the early twentieth century, when legal experts sought to establish a republic of laws and limits. The process of legal reform, however, would be placed firmly in the service of strengthening the post-imperial Chinese nation-state, culminating after 1949 in despotism unparalleled in Chinese history. Nevertheless, the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of our own would witness a slow, steady, but unmistakable reassertion of realms of personal and communal autonomy that show, even in an era of strong states, at least the prospect of institutionalized freedoms.

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The economic boom of the 1990s that led to the rapid rise of computer hardware and software companies (on both sides of the Pacific Rim) also led to the rise of a trans-Pacific commuter culture, a culture in which thousands of Taiwanese-born high-tech engineers realized that they could greatly increase their career opportunities by establishing a life-style that allowed them and their families to regularly commute between two homes, one in Silicon Valley and the other in Taiwan. The Global Silicon Valley Home takes a close look at how participants in the jet-set, wired-to-the-Net, trans-Pacific commuter culture have invented new ways of thinking about how their homes reflect their personal identities.

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

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For better or worse, the information and communication revolution has transformed our economic, cultural, and political world. On an individual scale, many of the traditional social, political, and cultural habits of mind and ways of being that evolved under the regime of the clock are changing rapidly, including the way individuals save, spend, and optimize time. At the organizational level, the pacing of innovation, levels of production, and new product development, are no longer temporally fixed due to the effects of living in a networked society and in the networked economy. 24/7 brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to analyze the differing relationships to time in an accelerated society. Offering much-needed insight and perspective into new issues and problems, this unique volume is the first to offer a wide range of cutting-edge thought on the new economic, cultural, and political world of the networked society. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in this area, such as Barbara Adam, Mike Crang, Thomas Hylland Erikson, and Geert Lovink.

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

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Naming the Witch explores the recent series of witchcraft accusations and killings in East Java, which spread as the Suharto regime slipped into crisis and then fell. After many years of ethnographic work focusing on the origins and nature of violence in Indonesia, Siegel came to the conclusion that previous anthropological explanations of witchcraft and magic, mostly based on sociological conceptions but also including the work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Claude Lévi-Strauss, were simply inadequate to the task of providing a full understanding of the phenomena associated with sorcery, and particularly with the ideas of power connected with it. Previous explanations have tended to see witchcraft in simple opposition to modernism and modernity (enchantment vs. disenchantment). The author sees witchcraft as an effect of culture, when the latter is incapable of dealing with accident, death, and the fear of the disintegration of social and political relations. He shows how and why modernization and witchcraft can often be companions, as people strive to name what has hitherto been unnameable.

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Sing, Stranger is a comprehensive historical anthology of a century of American poetry written in Yiddish and now translated into English for the first time. Here are the Proletarian or "sweat-shop" poets, sympathizing with Socialist Anarchists, who were highly popular with Yiddish audiences at the end of the nineteenth century; the lyrical moods and ironies of the "Young Generation" at the beginning of the twentieth century; the sophisticated poetry of the modern world seen through the individualistic prism of the "Introspectivists" after World War I; samples of epic poetry; and, finally, the poetry of the Holocaust and the decline of the Yiddish language. This anthology reveals both an amazing achievement of Jewish creative work and an important body of American poetry, written in a minority language, practically unknown to most readers. The travails, joys, and intimate experiences of the individual in the big metropolis are intertwined with representations of American realities: architecture and alienation in the big city, the migration of the blacks, trade unions and underworld, the immigrant experience in this immense and strange land, and the destinies of Jewish history.

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Though originally an interloper in a system of justice mediated by courtroom battles, plea bargaining now dominates American criminal justice. This book traces the evolution of plea bargaining from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century to its present pervasive role. Through the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, judges showed far less enthusiasm for plea bargaining than did prosecutors. After all, plea bargaining did not assure judges “victory”; judges did not suffer under the workload that prosecutors faced; and judges had principled objections to dickering for justice and to sharing sentencing authority with prosecutors. The revolution in tort law, however, brought on a flood of complex civil cases, which persuaded judges of the wisdom of efficient settlement of criminal cases. Having secured the patronage of both prosecutors and judges, plea bargaining quickly grew to be the dominant institution of American criminal procedure. Indeed, it is difficult to name a single innovation in criminal procedure during the last 150 years that has been incompatible with plea bargaining’s progress and survived.

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Stanley Cavell's unique contributions to the study of epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, film, Shakespeare, and American philosophy have all received wide acclaim. But there has been relatively little recognition of the pertinence of Cavell's work to our understanding of political philosophy. The Claim to Community fills this gap with essays from a wide range of prominent American, English, French, and Italian philosophers and political theorists, as well as a lengthy response to the essays by Cavell himself. The topics covered include Cavell's understanding of political community, philosophical anthropology, moral perfectionism, the positivist distinction between fact and value, political friendship, the differences between political and aesthetic disagreement, political romanticism, "the pursuit of happiness," tragedy, and race. There are also evaluations of the ways Cavell's positions on these and other matters compare with those of Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Peter Winch, Wittgenstein, and Fred Astaire. This volume will be of great interest to political theorists and political philosophers, as well as to students of literature and film.

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Brazil’s democracy has frequently been described as unconsolidated, its citizens as apathetic and uninterested in politics. But in Porto Alegre, a host city to the World Social Forum, thousands of ordinary citizens participate in local governance, making binding decisions on urban policy on a daily basis. While there has been immense attention paid to the practice of participatory democracy in Porto Alegre, this is the first book to examine the politics, culture, and day-to-day activities of its citizens. Drawing on the rich tradition of urban ethnography and political theory, the book argues that Porto Alegre’s importance may lie not just with its effective governance, but with its new political logic, namely a greater access to government functions and government officials for traditionally disenfranchised citizens. In an age characterized by seemingly strong voter apathy, this study has global implications. The author shows that in the discussions on the failings of democracy in industrialized countries like the United States, most people may be missing what is central to civic engagement—unimpeded access to government.

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For Greek antiquity, the question of right or fitting measure constituted the very heart of both ethics and politics. But can the Good of the ethical life and the Justice of the political be reduced to measurement and calculation? If they are matters of measure, are they not also absolutely immeasurable? In critical dialogue with texts by Plato, Hölderlin, Rilke, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Levi, the author argues that the question of measure has become ever more urgent in the context of a modernity pressured by the conditions of a technological economy and a relativism that threatens to destroy a vital sense of moral responsibility and the commitment to justice that underlies the possibility of freedom. Conceived as a task for the “metaphysics” of memory, this book explores the normative problematic of measure, bringing its deeply buried redemptive promise to appearance in our gestures, uses and abuses of the hands, the dialectic of tact, and the manners of social existence.

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Prospects for Peace in South Asia addresses the largely hostile, often violent relations between India and Pakistan that date from their independence in 1947. The persistent conflict between the two neighboring countries over Kashmir has defied numerous international attempts at resolution and entered its most dangerous phase when both India and Pakistan became nuclear powers in 1998. The struggle over Kashmir is enduringly rooted in national identity, religion, and human rights. It has also influenced the politicization of Pakistan's army, religious radicalism, and nuclearization in both countries. This incisive volume analyzes these forces, their impact on relations between the two countries, and alternative roles the United States might play in resolving the dispute. While acknowledging the risks, the book is optimistic about peace in South Asia. The key argument is that many of the domestic concerns (such as territorial integrity in both countries and civilian-military rapprochement in Pakistan) that were fueling the conflict have abated.

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This collection focuses fresh attention on the relationships between "homeland" and "diaspora" communities in today's world. Based on in-depth anthropological studies by leading scholars in the field, the book highlights the changing character of homeland-diaspora ties. Homelands and Diasporas offers new understandings of the issues that these communities face and explores the roots of their fascinating, yet sometimes paradoxical, interactions. The book provides a keen look at how "homeland" and "diaspora" appear in the lives of both Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians and also explores how these issues influence Pakistanis who make their home in England, Armenians in Cyprus and England, Cambodians in France, and African-Americans in Israel. The critical views advanced in this collection should lead to a reorientation in diaspora studies and to a better understanding of the often contradictory changes in the relationships between people whose lives are led both "at home and away."

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This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. Empathic Vision will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics.

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

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This book has two main subjects which are interwoven: the attitudes of selected poets (including Neruda, Rilke, Breton, Celan, and Artaud) to the "primitive" and the “archaic,” studied from an anthropologist's viewpoint; and a model of the processes whereby poetry is produced and received, built on the author’s successful careers as both poet and anthropologist. The book includes detailed biographical information about how Tarn went from being a French to an English to an American poet. It also reveals the effect of a double career and of these moves on a unique body of poetry and theoretical work. An extremely substantial interview, serving also as an introduction to, and discussion of, the essays, demonstrates that there is nothing like this work to be found elsewhere.

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This interdisciplinary book of essays addresses critical issues arising from the emergence of legal process and legal institutions in contemporary China. The introduction by the editors and the individual chapters attempt, for the first time, to bring to bear on the study of Chinese law the law-and-society scholarship that has enriched Western legal studies.

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Centered on the urban workplace, the danwei (workunit) has been the fundamental social and spatial unit of urban China under socialism. Not only was it the source of employment, wages, and other material benefits for the vast majority of urban residents, it was also the institution through which the urban population was housed, organized, regulated, policed, educated, trained, protected, and surveyed. Furthermore, as the basic unit of urban society, each danwei became a community, providing its members with identity, a "face," and social belonging. With particular focus on the link between spatial forms and social organization, this book traces the origins and development of this critical institution up to the present day. Recent economic restructuring has seen the danwei lose its dominant role, yet its presence still influences the possibilities for urban transformation. Moreover, the author argues, the new institutions emerging in its place display important characteristics of the old danwei system.

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Each branch of American government possesses inherent advantages and disadvantages in structure. In this book, the author relies on a separation-of-powers analysis that emphasizes the advantage of the legislature to draft precise words to fit intended situations, the judiciary’s advantage of being able to do justice in an individual case, and the executive’s homogeneity and flexibility, which best suits it to decisions of an ad hoc nature. Identifying these structural abilities, the author analyzes major public policy issues, including gun control, flag burning, abortion, civil rights, war powers, suing the President, legislative veto, the exclusionary rule, and affirmative action. Each issue is examined not from the point of view of determining the right outcome, but with the intention of identifying the branch of government most appropriate for making the decision.

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

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Set against conventional views of Peru as a place where indigenous mobilization has been absent, this book examines the complex, contentious politics between intercultural activists, local Andean indigenous community members, state officials, non-governmental organizations, and transnationally-educated indigenous intellectuals. It examines the paradoxes and possibilities of Quechua community protests against intercultural bilingual education, official multicultural policies implemented by state and non-state actors, and the training of "authentic" indigenous leaders far from their home communities. Focusing on important local sites of transnational connections, especially in the highland communities of Cuzco, and on an international academic institute for the study of intercultural bilingual education, this book shows how contemporary indigenous politics are inextricably and simultaneously local and global. In exploring some of the seeming contradictions of Peruvian indigenous politics, Making Indigenous Citizens suggests that indigenous movements and citizenship are articulated in extraordinary but under-explored ways in Latin America and beyond.

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In the 1990s, societies across the world were confronted with a sudden mass inflow of Chinese migrants. Transnational Chinese investigates the global nature of this migration by focusing on one of the fastest growing groups of new Chinese international migrants: those from Fujian province in southern China. It specifically focuses on Fujianese migration to Europe, where a broad range of immigration regimes has provided various incentives and disincentives that have influenced their migratory patterns across the continent. Applying intensive, multisited fieldwork research in the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Italy, as well as sending areas in Fujian, Transnational Chinese investigates the origins and mechanics of Fujianese migration, the work and life of Fujianese migrants in Europe, and the many transnational spaces that connect Fujianese across Europe, the United States, and China.

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

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The 2000 Mexican presidential race culminated in the election of opposition candidate Vicente Fox and the end of seven decades of one-party rule. This book, which traces changes in public opinion and voter preferences over the course of the race, represents the most comprehensive treatment of campaigning and voting behavior in an emerging democracy. It challenges the “modest effects” paradigm of national election campaigns that has dominated scholarly research in the field. Chapters cover authoritarian mobilization of voters, turnout patterns, electoral cleavages, party strategies, television news coverage, candidate debates, negative campaigning, strategic voting, issue-based voting, and the role of the 2000 election in Mexico's political transition. Theoretically-oriented introductory and concluding chapters situate Mexico's 2000 election in the larger context of Mexican politics and of cross-national research on campaigns. Collectively, these contributions provide crucial insights into Mexico's new politics, with important implications for elections in other countries.

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Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

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