Search results for ""Columbia University Press""

A riveting series of stories that portray the biopolitics of speaking and writing in a postcolonial world.

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Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy.

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James Clay Moltz explores efforts by China, Japan, India, South Korea, and ten other countries to boost their civil, commercial, and, in some cases, military profiles in orbit. He investigates these nations’ divergent goals and their tendency to focus on national solutions rather than on regionwide cooperation and multilateral initiatives.

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Columbia's guides to postwar African literature paint a portrait of the continent's literary traditions. This volume examines the growth of modern literature in the three postcolonial nations of Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. It tracks the multiple political and economic pressures that shaped Central African writing since the end of World War II.

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Dana Burde shows how aid to education in Afghanistan bolstered conflict both deliberately in the 1980s through violence-infused, anti-Soviet curricula and inadvertently in the 2000s through misguided stabilization programs

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Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge in China from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing its role in the formation of Chinese modernity. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.

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An exploration of the pig in Judeo-Christian culture and European anti-semitism, this work chronicles its cultural and religious character. The author details the folkloric beliefs still found among both provincial and urban Europeans.

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Sheri Chinen Biesen explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services.

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Seyla Benhabib’s ongoing work has expanded the range and scope of critical theory beyond its origins to address questions of gender, migration, and difference. This book brings together an ensemble of leading theorists and younger voices to explore new dimensions of Benhabib’s thought across critical theory, feminism, and democratic theory, foregrounding the intricate relationship between critique and universality.Another Universalism provides both a wide-ranging and comprehensive engagement with Benhabib’s path-breaking interventions and a panoramic tour of the cutting edge of critical theory today. Contributors take part in key debates about the field’s past and future, tackling subjects such as the relationship between democracy and cosmopolitanism, the role of law in emancipatory struggles, human domination of nature, the deprovincialization of critical theory concerning questions of race and empire, as well as Hannah Arendt’s continuing significance. Covering a wide range of debates and themes, Another Universalism is united by a core question: How can universal norms of human freedom, equality, and dignity be reconciled with particular contexts, especially ones of exclusion, difference, and adversity? Searching for universalisms that emerge from the concrete struggles of emancipatory movements, this book points toward an expansive, inclusive, and radical democratic vision.

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If you no longer “believe in God,” the Supreme Being of classical theology, or you never did in the first place, is there anything you still ought to believe, anything you should cherish unconditionally, no matter what? In this lively and accessible book, addressed to believers, “recovering” believers, disbelievers, nonbelievers, and “nones” alike—to anyone in search of what they really do believe—the acclaimed philosopher and theologian John D. Caputo seeks out what there is to believe, with or without religion.Writing in a lucid and witty style, Caputo offers a bold account of a “radical theology” that is anything but what the word theology suggests to most people. His point of departure is autobiographical, describing growing up in the world of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, serving as an altar boy, and spending four years in a Catholic religious order after high school. Caputo places Augustine’s Confessions, Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, and Jacques Derrida and postmodern theory in conversation in the service of what he calls the “mystical sense of life.” He argues that radical theology is not simply an academic exercise but describes a concrete practice immediately relevant to the daily lives of believers and nonbelievers alike. What to Believe? is an engaging introduction to radical theology for all readers curious about what religion can mean today.

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Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life.Dung’s sketches center on once-trendy items that evoke the world at the turn of the millennium, such as Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk, a clamshell mobile phone, Air Jordans, and cargo shorts. The protagonist of each piece, typically a young woman, is struck by an odd, even overriding obsession with an object or fad. Characters embark on brief dalliances or relationships lasting no longer than the fashions that sparked them. Dung blends vivid everyday details—Portuguese egg tarts, Japanese TV shows, the Hong Kong subway—with situations that are often fantastical or preposterous. This catalog of vanished products illuminates how people use objects to define and even invent their own selves. A major work from one of Hong Kong’s most gifted and original writers, Dung’s archaeology of the end of the twentieth century speaks to perennial questions about consumerism, nostalgia, and identity.

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Pain is an inevitable part of existence, but severe debilitating or chronic pain is a pathological condition that diminishes the quality of life. The Brain and Pain explores the present and future of pain management, providing a comprehensive understanding based on the latest discoveries from many branches of neuroscience.Richard Ambron—the former director of a neuroscience lab that conducted leading research in this field—explains the science of how and why we feel pain. He describes how the nervous system and brain process information that leads to the experience of pain, detailing the cellular and molecular functions that are responsible for the initial perceptions of an injury. He discusses how pharmacological agents such as opiates affect the duration and intensity of pain. Ambron examines new evidence showing that discrete circuits in the brain modulate the experience of pain in response to a placebo, fear, anxiety, belief, or other circumstances, as well as how pain can be relieved by activating these circuits using mindfulness training and other nonpharmacological treatments. The book also evaluates the prospects of procedures such as deep brain stimulation and optogenetics.Current and thorough, The Brain and Pain will be invaluable for a range of people seeking to understand their options for treatment as well as students in neuroscience and medicine.

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Today, states’ ability to borrow private capital depends on stringent evaluations of their creditworthiness. While many presume that this has long been the case, Quentin Bruneau argues that it is a surprisingly recent phenomenon—the outcome of a pivotal shift in the social composition of financial markets.Investigating the financiers involved in lending capital to sovereigns over the past two centuries, Bruneau identifies profound changes in their identities, goals, and forms of knowledge. He shows how an old world made up of merchant banking families pursuing both profit and status gradually gave way to a new one dominated by large companies, such as joint stock banks and credit rating agencies, exclusively pursuing profit. Lacking the web of personal ties to sovereigns across the world that their established rivals possessed, these financial institutions began relying on a different form of knowledge created to describe and compare states through quantifiable data: statistics. Over the course of this epochal shift, which only came to an end a few decades ago, financial markets thus reconceptualized states. Instead of a set of individuals to be known in person, they became numbers on a page. Raising new questions about the history of sovereign lending, this book illuminates the nature of the relationship between states and financial markets today—and suggests that it may be on the cusp of another major transformation.

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No other country has devised a grand strategy for managing China’s rising economic and military power as deliberately or successfully as Japan. Seeking to counter Chinese ambitions toward regional hegemony, Japan has taken an increasingly assertive role in East Asia and the world. During the tenure of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the country pursued closer security cooperation with the United States and other democracies, established a more centralized national defense system, and advanced rules and norms to preserve the open regional order in the Indo-Pacific that is crucial to its prosperity and survival—all while managing an important economic relationship with China.In Line of Advantage, Michael J. Green provides a groundbreaking and comprehensive account of Japan’s strategic thinking under Abe. He explains the foundational logic and the worldview behind this approach, from key precedents in Japanese history to the specific economic, defense, and diplomatic priorities shaping contemporary policy toward China, the United States, the two Koreas, and the Indo-Pacific region. Drawing on two decades of access to Abe and other Japanese political, military, and business leaders, Green provides an insider’s perspective on subjects such as how Japan pursued competition with China without losing the benefits of economic cooperation. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Japan’s new active role, Line of Advantage sheds new light on a period with profound implications for the future of U.S. competition with China and international affairs in Asia more broadly.

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In 1968, Suzuki Seijun—a low-budget genre filmmaker known for movies including Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter, and Youth of the Beast—was unceremoniously fired by Nikkatsu Studios. Soon to be known as the “Suzuki Seijun Incident,” his dismissal became a cause for leftist student protestors and a burgeoning group of cinephiles to rally around. His films rapidly emerged as central to debates over politics and aesthetics in Japanese cinema.William Carroll offers a new account of Suzuki’s career that highlights the intersections of film theory, film production, cinephile culture, and politics in 1960s Japan. Carroll places Suzuki’s work between two factions that claimed him as one of their own after 1968: the New Left and its politicized theoretical practice on one hand, and the apparently apolitical cinephiles and their formalist criticism on the other. He considers how both of these strands of film theory shed light on the distinctive qualities of Suzuki’s films, and he explores how both Suzuki’s works and unheralded Japanese film theorists offer new ways of understanding world cinema.This book presents both a major reinterpretation of Suzuki’s work—which influenced directors such as John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, and Quentin Tarantino—and a new lens on postwar Japanese film culture and industry. Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema also includes a complete production history of Suzuki’s filmography along with never-before-discussed information about his unfinished film projects.

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Social work rests on complex philosophical assumptions that should be central to practice, education, and training. In this book, Frederic G. Reamer explores how these issues bear on the purpose, methods, and perspectives of social work and their far-reaching implications for practice and scholarship.Reamer examines major themes across the domains of moral and political philosophy, logic, epistemology, and aesthetics. He raises questions such as: How can ethical theories inform social workers’ moral judgments? In what ways are canons of inductive and deductive logic relevant to social workers’ thinking about their work? To what extent can scientific inquiry help social workers understand the nature and effect of their interventions? How can concepts related to aesthetics shed light on the nature of social work? Reamer’s nuanced inquiry never loses sight of the concrete applications of philosophy to social work practice with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities, or to broader goals of social change.This second edition of The Philosophical Foundations of Social Work is revised and updated throughout to address contemporary challenges. It focuses especially on newer thinking about the role of non-Western philosophical perspectives and the relevance of philosophy to social workers’ commitments to multiculturalism, feminism, and antiracism.

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Since the 1970s, the Egyptian state has embarked on a far-reaching and destabilizing project of economic liberalization, reneging on its commitments to social welfare. Despite widespread socioeconomic grievances stemming from these policies, class politics and battles over wealth redistribution have largely been sidelined from elite-led national politics. Instead, conflicts over identity have raged, as Islamist movements became increasingly prominent political players.Classless Politics offers a counterintuitive account of the relationship between neoliberal economics and Islamist politics in Egypt that sheds new light on the worldwide trend of “more identity, less class.” Hesham Sallam examines why Islamist movements have gained support at the expense of the left, even amid conflicts over the costs of economic reforms. Rather than highlighting the stagnancy of the left or the agility of Islamists, he pinpoints the historical legacies of authoritarian survival strategies. As the regime resorted to economic liberalization in the 1970s, it tacitly opened political space for Islamist movements to marginalize its leftist opponents. In the long run, this policy led to the fragmentation of opponents of economic reform, the increased salience of cultural conflicts within the left, and the restructuring of political life around questions of national and religious identity.Historically rich and theoretically insightful, this book demonstrates how the participation of Islamist groups shapes the politics of neoliberal reform and addresses why economic liberalization since the 1970s has contributed to the surge in culture wars around the world today.

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Writing about poetry follows models provided either by academic scholarship or literary journalism, each with its pitfalls. The former distances the reader from the poem and effaces the critic’s personality. In literary journalism, the critic is front and center, but the discussion is introductory and prioritizes value judgments. In either case, entrenched practices and patterns of privilege limit one’s perspective. The situation worsens when it comes to minoritized poets and poets from the Global South, where the focus is on restrictive notions of identity: the stylistic innovations of literary works get ousted by prefabricated historical narratives.In Worlds Woven Together, the critic, poet, and scholar Vidyan Ravinthiran searches for alternatives, pursuing close, imaginative readings of a variety of writers. His essays are open-ended, attentive, and curious, unabashedly passionate and subjective yet keenly analytical and investigative. Discussing neglected authors and those well-known in the West, Ravinthiran sees politics as inseparable from literary form and is fascinated by the relation of the creative consciousness to the violences of history. The book features essays on writers including Mir Taqi Mir, Ana Blandiana, A. K. Ramanujan, Marianne Moore, Eunice de Souza, Czeslaw Milosz, Ted Hughes, Rae Armantrout, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Galway Kinnell, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Vahni Capildeo. Revealing serendipitous connections—between poems and cultures, between lines of verse and the lives we lead—Worlds Woven Together is for all readers fascinated by the mechanics and politics of poetry.

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To what extent does journalism deserve blame for the failure to address climate change over the last thirty years? Critics point out that climate coverage has often lacked necessary urgency and hewed to traditional notions of objectivity and balance that allowed powerful interests—mainly fossil fuel companies—to manufacture doubt. Climate journalism, however, developed alongside the digital media landscape, which is characterized by rampant misinformation, political polarization, unaccountable tech companies, unchecked corporate power, and vast inequalities. Under these circumstances, journalism struggled, and bad actors flourished, muddling messages while emissions mounted and societies struggled to avert catastrophe.The Mediated Climate explores the places where the climate and information crises meet, examining how journalism, activism, corporations, and Big Tech compete to influence the public. Adrienne Russell argues that the inadequate response to climate change is intertwined with the profound challenges facing the communications environment. She demonstrates that the information crisis is driven not only by technological changes but also by concentrated power that predates the rise of digital media companies. Efforts to improve climate coverage must take into account the larger social and material contexts in which journalism operates and the broader power dynamics that shape public discourse. Drawing on interviews with journalists and activists, Russell considers the ways recent movements are battling misinformation. She offers timely recommendations to foster engagement with climate issues and calls on readers to join in efforts to reshape the media landscape to better serve the public interest.

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Cities have taken a leading role in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As federal and state climate policy waxes and wanes, many of the largest U.S. cities have pledged themselves to ambitious sustainability goals, as have smaller communities across the country. City-level policy makers, facing a range of political constraints, a thicket of federal and state laws, and varying degrees of municipal authority, need to figure out how to meet their climate commitments.Urban Climate Law is a practical, user-friendly primer on the legal challenges and opportunities for effective and equitable decarbonization. Michael Burger and Amy E. Turner—leading experts in local climate law and policy—examine the key issues surrounding climate mitigation policies across the buildings, transportation, waste, and energy sectors, with an emphasis on environmental justice. They explore the legal frameworks and factors that can constrain or enable various approaches at the municipal level. Burger and Turner clearly and accessibly present complex legal topics like preemption, federal statutes such as the Clean Air Act, and constitutional law for readers without legal backgrounds, including students, advocates, officials, and other practitioners. Aimed at a nonspecialist audience, this book provides concise and comprehensible answers to the core questions cities confront when seeking to develop legally sound local climate policy.

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