Excavating Marx’s early writings to rethink the rights of the poor and the idea of the commons in an era of unprecedented privatization
The politics of dispossession are everywhere. Troubling developments in intellectual property, genomics, and biotechnology are undermining established concepts of property, while land appropriation and ecological crises reconfigure basic institutions of ownership. In The Dispossessed, Daniel Bensaïd examines Karl Marx’s early writings to establish a new framework for addressing the rights of the poor, the idea of the commons, and private property as a social institution.
In his series of articles from 1842–43 about Rhineland parliamentary debates over the privatization of public lands and criminalization of poverty under the rubric of the “theft of wood,” Marx identified broader anxieties about customary law, property rights, and capitalist efforts to privatize the commons. Bensaïd studies these writings to interrogate how dispossession continues to function today as a key modality of power. Brilliantly tacking between past and present, The Dispossessed discloses continuity and rupture in our relationships to property and, through that, to one another.
In addition to Bensaïd’s prescient work of political philosophy, The Dispossessed includes new translations of Marx’s original “theft of wood” articles and an introductory essay by Robert Nichols that lucidly contextualizes the essays.
Athenians performed democracy daily in their law courts. Without lawyers or judges, private citizens, acting as accusers and defendants, argued their own cases directly to juries composed typically of 201 to 501 jurors, who voted on a verdict without deliberation. This legal system strengthened and perpetuated democracy as Athenians understood it, for it emphasized the ideological equality of all (male) citizens and the hierarchy that placed them above women, children, and slaves.
This study uses Athenian court speeches to trace the consequences for both disputants and society of individuals' decisions to turn their quarrels into legal cases. Steven Johnstone describes the rhetorical strategies that prosecutors and defendants used to persuade juries and shows how these strategies reveal both the problems and the possibilities of language in the Athenian courts. He argues that Athenian "law" had no objective existence outside the courts and was, therefore, itself inherently rhetorical. This daring new interpretation advances an understanding of Athenian democracy that is not narrowly political, but rather links power to the practices of a particular institution.
Mennonites have long referred to themselves as "The Quiet in the Land," but their actual historical experience has been marked by internal disquiet and contention over religious values and cultural practice. As Fred Kniss argues in his impressive study of Mennonite history, the story of this sectarian pacifist group is a story of conflict. How can we understand the ironic phenomenon of Mennonite conflict? How do ideas and symbols-both those of the American mainstream and those that are specifically Mennonite-influence the emergence and course of this conflict? What is the relationship betweenintra-Mennonite conflict and the changing historical context in which Mennonites are situated?
Through a rigorous analysis of a century of disputes over dress codes, congregational authority, and religious practice, Kniss offers the tools both to understand conflict within a specific religious group and to answer larger questions about culture, ideology, and social and historical change.
This volume provides the most economical and textually accurate version of Calhoun’s Disquisition available today. As a treatise, the Disquisition is one of the greatest and most enduring works of American politial thought, and a text of seminal importance to all students of American politics, history, philosophy, and law. In the Disquisition, Calhoun believed he had laid a “solid foundation for political science” through revitalizing popular rule. To complete his theoretical and practical mission, Calhoun attempts to explain the best example of the diffusion of authority and cultivation of liberty: the American Constitution. The fundamental law of the American republic provided, after all, the “interior structure” for regulating the shape and scope of government. As a guide for the states and the general government, the Constitution was also part of the “organism” that limited the centralization of authority and allowed for genuine popular rule; and it was Calhoun’s exposition of the connection between the moral demands of a properly constituted concept of popular rule and the need for practical ordering principles that is articulated in this book.
Calhoun presents a theory of politics that is both original and in accord with the mainstream of the American political tradition. More than any other thinker of his period, Calhoun sought to explain the enduring qualities of American political thought in light of the troubled world of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike other theorists who had preceded and would follow Calhoun, both American and European, he did not seek to invent a new mode of philosophical speculation or a “grand theory” for the human sciences. Instead, he attempted to offer a refinement of classical, medieval, and modern notions regarding the relationship between government and the social order. As an effort in philosophical retrenchment, the Disquisition strengthened many pre-existing conceptions regarding political liberty and popular rule within the American regime, while offering such insight with a view toward the future that awaited America. Calhoun’s attempt in the Disquisition to reconcile the good of popular rule with ethical requirements have singular relevance to the many nations in the twenty-first century now engaged, despite the ethnic animosities threatening their destruction, in building post-ideological, civilized political and social orders, especially the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Africa.
Millions of children in the United States have a parent who is incarcerated and a growing number of these nurturers are mothers. Disrupted Childhoods explores the issues that arise from a mother's confinement and provides first-person accounts of the experiences of children with moms behind bars. Jane A. Siegel offers a perspective that recognizes differences over the long course of a family's interaction with the criminal justice system.
Presenting an unparalleled view into the children's lives both before and after their mothers are imprisoned, this book reveals the many challenges they face from the moment such a critical caregiver is arrested to the time she returns home from prison. Based on interviews with nearly seventy youngsters and their mothers conducted at different points of their parent's involvement in the process, the rich qualitative data of Disrupted Childhoods vividly reveals the lived experiences of prisoners' children, telling their stories in their own words. Siegel places the mother's incarceration in context with other aspects of the youths' experiences, including their family life and social worlds, and provides a unique opportunity to hear the voices of a group that has been largely silent until now.
Jillian Ford and Nathalia E. Jaramillo edit a collection of writings by women that examine womanist worldviews in philosophy, theory, curriculum, public health, and education. Drawing on thinkers like bell hooks and Cynthia Dillard, the essayists challenge the colonizing hegemonies that raise and sustain patriarchal and male-centered systems of teaching and learning. Part One examines how womanist theorizing and creative activity offer a space to study the impact of conquest and colonization on the Black female body and spirit. In Part Two, the contributors look at ways of using text, philosophy, and research methodologies to challenge colonizing and colonial definitions of womanhood, enlightenment, and well-being. The essays in Part Three undo the colonial pedagogical project and share the insights they have gained by freeing themselves from its chokehold.
Powerful and interdisciplinary, Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies challenges colonialism and its influence on education to advance freer and more just forms of knowledge making.
Contributors: Silvia García Aguilár, Khalilah Ali, Angela Malone Cartwright, Adriana Diego, LeConté Dill, Sameena Eidoo, Genevieve Flores-Haro, Jillian Ford, Leena Her, Nathalia E. Jaramillo, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Claudia Lozáno, Liliana Manriquez, Alberta Salazár, León Salazár, and Lorri Santamaría
Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.
Haunting and methodologically innovative, Disruptive Archives attests to the power of women's storytelling and memory in the struggle to reclaim history.
Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world.
Moussawi’s intrepid ethnography features the voices of women, gay men and genderqueers in Beirut to examine how queer individuals negotiate life in this uncertain region. He examines “al-wad’,” or “the situation,” to understand the practices that form these strategies and to raise questions about queer-friendly spaces in and beyond Beirut.
Disruptive Situations alsoshows how LGBTQ Beirutis resist reconciliation narratives and position their identities and visibility at different times as ways of simultaneously managing their multiple positionalities and al-wad’. Moussawi argues that the daily survival strategies in Beirut are queer—and not only enacted by LGBTQ people—since Beirutis are living amidst an already queer situation of ongoing precarity.
Within twelve years of the first appearance of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Walt Whitman produced three other editions of what he insisted were the “same” work; two more followed later in his life. Rather than asking which of these editions is best, Michael Moon, in Disseminating Whitman, argues that the very existence of distinct versions of the text raises essential questions about it. Interpreting “revision” more profoundly than earlier Whitman critics have done, while treating the poet’s homosexuality as a cultural and political fact rather than merely as a biographical datum, Moon shows how Whitman’s continual modifications of his work intersect with the representations of male-male desire throughout his writing. What is subjected to endless revision throughout the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, Moon argues, is a historically specific set of political principles governing how the human body—Whitman’s avowed subject—was conceptualized and controlled in mid-nineteenth-century America.
Moon interprets Whitman’s project as one that continually engages in such divergent contemporaneous discourse of the body as the anti-onanist ones of the “male-purity” movement, anti-slaver writing, “temperance” tracts, and guides to conduct for the aspiring “self-made man.” Critically applying various interpretive models from psychoanalysis, literary and cultural theory, and gender studies, and heeding recurring patterns of language and figure, Moon provides rigorous intertextual readings of Whitman’s canon. Ingeniously employing “The Child’s Champion” as a paradigm, Moon scrutinizes such celebrated poems as “Song of Myself” and the great Civil War elegies, as well as such commonly overlooked poems as “Song of the Broad-Axe” and “Song of the Banner at Daybreak.”
Disseminating Whitman reveals as no previous study has done the poet’s fervent engagement with the most highly charged political questions of his day—questions of defining and regulating whole ranges of experiences and desires that remain the subject of intense political conflict in our own time. This radical reassessment of the “good gray” poet makes a definitive contribution to critical work in American history and literature, poetry, and gender studies.
Whether illuminating the narratives that have been used to legitimate the war on terror, reflecting on the power of American consumer culture to transform the attack sites into patriotic tourist attractions, or insisting that to be a Christian is to be a pacifist, these essays refuse easy answers. They consider why the Middle East harbors a deep-seated hatred for the United States. They argue that the U.S. drive to win the cold war made the nation more like its enemies, leading the government to support ruthless anti-Communist tyrants such as Mobutu, Suharto, and Pinochet. They urge Americans away from the pitfall of national self-righteousness toward an active peaceableness—an alert, informed, practiced state of being—deeply contrary to both passivity and war. Above all, the essays assembled in Dissent from the Homeland are a powerful entreaty for thought, analysis, and understanding. Originally published as a special issue of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, Dissent from the Homeland has been expanded to include new essays as well as a new introduction and postscript.
Contributors. Srinivas Aravamudan, Michael J. Baxter, Jean Baudrillard, Robert N. Bellah, Daniel Berrigan, Wendell Berry, Vincent J. Cornell, David James Duncan, Stanley Hauerwas, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Catherine Lutz, Jody McAuliffe, John Milbank, Peter Ochs, Donald E. Pease, Anne R. Slifkin, Rowan Williams, Susan Willis, Slavoj Zizek
Addressing such questions as why the Middle East harbors a deep-seated hatred for the U.S., the contributors refuse to settle for the easy answers preferred by the mass media. "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear" urges Americans away from the pitfall of national self-righteousness toward an active peaceableness—an alert, informed, practiced state of being—deeply contrary to both passivity and war. Another essay argues that the U.S. drive to win the Cold War made the nation more like its enemies, leading the government to support ruthless anti-Communist tyrants such as Mobutu, Suharto, and Pinochet. "Groundzeroland" offers a sharp commentary on the power of American consumer culture to absorb the devastation and loss of life by transforming the attack sites into patriotic tourist attractions. James Nachtwey’s photo essay provides a visual document of the devastation of the attacks.
Contributors. Michael Baxter, Jean Baudrillard, Robert Bellah, Daniel Berrigan, Wendell Berry, Vincent Cornell, Stanley Hauerwas, Fredric Jameson, Frank Lentricchia, Catherine Lutz, Jody McAuliffe, John Milbank, James Nachtwey, Peter Ochs, Anne Rosalind Slifkin, Rowan Williams, Susan Willis, Slavoj Zizek
For more information about SAQ, please visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/saq/
Winner of the Richard L. Wentworth Prize in American History, Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize, and the William Rockhill Nelson Award
On a hot summer evening in 1958, a group of African American students in Wichita, Kansas, quietly entered Dockum's Drug Store and sat down at the whites-only lunch counter. This was the beginning of the first sustained, successful student sit-in of the modern civil rights movement, instigated in violation of the national NAACP's instructions.
Dissent in Wichita traces the contours of race relations and black activism in this unexpected locus of the civil rights movement. Based on interviews with more than eighty participants in and observers of Wichita's civil rights struggles, this powerful study hones in on the work of black and white local activists, setting their efforts in the context of anticommunism, FBI operations against black nationalists, and the civil rights policies of administrations from Eisenhower through Nixon.
Through her close study of events in Wichita, Eick reveals the civil rights movement as a national, not a southern, phenomenon. She focuses particularly on Chester I. Lewis, Jr., a key figure in the local as well as the national NAACP. Lewis initiated one of the earliest investigations of de facto school desegregation by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and successfully challenged employment discrimination in the nation's largest aircraft industries.
Dissent in Wichita offers a moving account of the efforts of Lewis, Vivian Parks, Anna Jane Michener, and other courageous individuals to fight segregation and discrimination in employment, public accommodations, housing, and schools. This volume also offers the first extended examination of the Young Turks, a radical movement to democratize and broaden the agenda of the NAACP for which Lewis provided critical leadership.
Through a close study of personalities and local politics in Wichita over two decades, Eick demonstrates how the tenor of black activism and white response changed as economic disparities increased and divisions within the black community intensified. Her analysis, enriched by the words and experiences of men and women who were there, offers new insights into the civil rights movement as a whole and into the complex interplay between local and national events.
Between loyalty and disobedience; between recognition of the law’s authority and realization that the law is not always right: In America, this conflict is historic, with results as glorious as the mass protests of the civil rights movement and as inglorious as the armed violence of the militia movement. In an impassioned defense of dissent, Stephen L. Carter argues for the dialogue that negotiates this conflict and keeps democracy alive. His book portrays an America dying from a refusal to engage in such a dialogue, a polity where everybody speaks, but nobody listens.
The Dissent of the Governed is an eloquent diagnosis of what ails the American body politic—the unwillingness of people in power to hear disagreement unless forced to—and a prescription for a new process of response. Carter examines the divided American political character on dissent, with special reference to religion, identifying it in unexpected places, with an eye toward amending it before it destroys our democracy.
At the heart of this work is a rereading of the Declaration of Independence that puts dissent, not consent, at the center of the question of the legitimacy of democratic government. Carter warns that our liberal constitutional ethos—the tendency to assume that the nation must everywhere be morally the same—pressures citizens to be other than themselves when being themselves would lead to disobedience. This tendency, he argues, is particularly hard on religious citizens, whose notion of community may be quite different from that of the sovereign majority of citizens. His book makes a powerful case for the autonomy of communities—especially but not exclusively religious—into which democratic citizens organize themselves as a condition for dissent, dialogue, and independence. With reference to a number of cases, Carter shows how disobedience is sometimes necessary to the heartbeat of our democracy—and how the distinction between challenging accepted norms and challenging the sovereign itself, a distinction crucial to the Declaration of Independence, must be kept alive if Americans are to progress and prosper as a nation.
With style and imagination, this iconoclastic work covers the major issues in development economics. In eight carefully reasoned essays, P. T. Bauer challenges most of the accepted notions and supports his views with evidence drawn from a wide range of primary sources and direct experience.
The essays were selected on the basis of their interest to students and general readers from Bauer's book, Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics. Reviewing the previous work, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "It could have a profound impact on our thinking about the entire development question... Quite simply, it is no longer possible to discuss development economics intelligently without coming to grips with the many arguments P. T. Bauer marshalled in this extraordinary work."
For nearly half a century, until his death in October 1948, Judah Magnes occupied a singular place in Jewish public life. He won fame early as a preacher and communal leader, but abandoned these pursuits at the height of his influence for the roles of political dissenter and moral gadfly. During World War I he became an outspoken pacifist and supporter of radical causes. Settling permanently in Palestine in 1922, he was a founder and the first president of the Hebrew University.
Increasingly, he viewed rapprochement with the Arabs as the practical and moral test of Zionism, and the formation of a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews became his chief political goal. His life interests thus focused on the core issues that confronted and still confront the Jewish people: group survival in democratic America, the direction and character of the return to Zion, and thereconciliation of universal ideals with Jewish aspirations and needs.
Dissenter in Zion draws upon a rich corpus of private letters, personal journals, and diaries to offer a moving account of an eloquent and sensitive person grappling with the great questions of the day and of an activist striving to translate private moral feelings into public deeds through politics and diplomacy. We see Magnes disagreeing with Brandeis over the leadership and direction of American Zionism and with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion over ways to achieve peaceful relations with the Arabs; defending himself against charges by Einstein that he was mismanaging the affairs of the Hebrew University; and persistently negotiating with Arab leaders, trying to reach a compromise on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel.
Dissenter in Zion also contains a biographical essay on Magnes by Arthur Goren, assessing his ideas and motives and placing him in the context of his times. It shows Magnes's profundity without covering up his weaknesses, his lifelong tactic for courting repeated defeat in favor of long-term goals that could not come to pass in his lifetime.
Political, social, and aesthetic change marked Latin American society in the years between 1960 and 1985. In this book, Martin Stabb explores how these changes made their way into the essayistic writings of twenty-six Spanish American intellectuals.
Stabb posits that dissent—against ideology, against simplistic notions of technological progress, against urban values, and even against the direct linear expository style of the essay itself—characterizes the work of these contemporary essayists. He draws his examples from major canonical figures, including Paz, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Cortázar, and from lesser-known writers who merit a wider readership, such as Monterroso, Zaid, Edwards, and Ibargüengoitia. This exploration overturns many conventional assumptions about Latin American intellectuals and also highlights some of the other achievements of authors famous primarily for novels or short stories.
A renowned scholar of Arab cultures, cooke spent six months in Syria during the mid-1990s familiarizing herself with the country’s literary scene, particularly its women writers. While she was in Damascus, dissidents told her that to really understand life under Hafiz Asad, she had to speak with playwrights, filmmakers, and, above all, the authors of “prison literature.” She shares what she learned in Dissident Syria. She describes touring a sculptor’s studio, looking at the artist’s subversive work as well as at pieces commissioned by the government. She relates a playwright’s view that theater is unique in its ability to stage protest through innuendo and gesture. Turning to film, she shares filmmakers’ experiences of making movies that are praised abroad but rarely if ever screened at home. Filled with the voices of writers and artists, Dissident Syria reveals a community of conscience within Syria to those beyond its borders.
Yielding pivotal new perspectives on the indigenous women of Mexico, Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas presents a diverse collection of voices exploring the human rights and gender issues that gained international attention after the first public appearance of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in 1994.
Drawing from studies on topics ranging from the daily life of Zapatista women to the effect of transnational indigenous women in tipping geopolitical scales, the contributors explore both the personal and global implications of indigenous women's activism. The Zapatista movement and the Women's Revolutionary Law, a charter that came to have tremendous symbolic importance for thousands of indigenous women, created the potential for renegotiating gender roles in Zapatista communities. Drawing on the original research of scholars with long-term field experience in a range of Mayan communities in Chiapas and featuring several key documents written by indigenous women articulating their vision, Dissident Women brings fresh insight to the revolutionary crossroads at which Chiapas stands—and to the worldwide implications of this economic and political microcosm.
Incisive essays on modern poetry and translation by a noted poet, translator, and critic.
Musical sound has been central to heteromasculinist productions of nation and homeland, whether Chicano, Tejano, Texan, Mexican, or American. If this assertion holds true, as Deborah R. Vargas suggests, then what are we to make of those singers and musicians whose representations of gender and sexuality are irreconcilable with canonical Chicano/Tejano music or what Vargas refers to as “la onda”? These are the “dissonant divas” Vargas discusses, performers who stimulate our listening for alternative borderlands imaginaries that are inaudible within the limits of “la onda.”
Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music focuses on the Texan monument of the Alamo and its association with Rosita Fernandez; Tejano corrido folklore and its musical antithesis in Chelo Silva; the female accordion-playing bodies of Ventura Alonza and Eva Ybarra as incompatible with the instrumental labor of conjunto music; geography as national border, explored through the multiple national music scales negotiated by Eva Garza; and racialized gender, viewed through Selena’s integration of black diasporic musical sound. Vargas offers a feminist analysis of these figures’ contributions by advancing a notion of musical dissonance—a dissonance that recognizes the complexity of gender, sexuality, and power within Chicana/o culture.
Incorporating ethnographic fieldwork, oral history, and archival research, Vargas’s study demonstrates how these singers work together to explode the limits of Texan, Chicano, Tejano, Mexican, and American identities.
The Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and one of the most beautiful women ever to grace a throne, was the victim of her own inconstant mind. A daughter of an aristocratic Spanish family, she had a natural reverence for legitimate monarchy; yet her high-spirited temperament and chivalric outlook made her admire instinctively the boldness and aura of glory that she associated with the Napoleonic empire. The incongruous principles of Legitimism and Bonapartism battling within the Empress produced in her a double-mindedness that had tragic consequences.
The Empress has always been a controversial figure. Her enemies have blamed her the fall of the Second Empire and the defeat of France; her admirers have disclaimed for her any part in the mistakes that led to the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870. To determine the actual role that Eugénie played, Barker, using material from public and private European archives and a wide range of published works, examines in Distaff Diplomacy the development of the Empress' views on foreign affairs and ascertains their effect on the formation of the policies of the Second Empire.
Eugénie's influence fluctuated widely over the years. As a bride she was neither interested in nor knowledgable about foreign matters; as a middle-aged woman, in the late years of the Empire, she was discredited by her past errors, but she continued to pull strings outside of normal diplomatic channels. Her most sustained and effective work, from 1861 to 1863, was largely the inspiration for a grand design to remake the map to assure French hegemony in Europe and to establish an empire in Mexico. The success of this design rested on an Austro-French alliance; but the design itself, reflecting the Empress' incoherent thinking, contained the fatal inconsistencies that made Austrian rejection of it inevitable. Since the Mexican expedition and the diplomatic muddle of 1863 were the watershed from which the subsequent troubles of the Empire flowed, the Empress must be held responsible for seriously undermining the foreign policy of the Empire. Despite Eugénie's many fine qualities—her generosity of spirit, her splendid courage, and her moral integrity—her diplomatic efforts, affected as they were by her background, temperament, state of health, and changing moods, did not amount to statesmanship. This first systematic examination of the Empress' influence on foreign policy delves deeply and carefully into the subject.
Drawing on previously overlooked diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper accounts, military historian Flint Whitlock brings the Civil War in the West to life. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums details the battles of 1,000 Coloradans against 3,000 Confederate soldiers in New Mexico and offers vivid portraits of the leaders and soldiers involved - men whose strengths and flaws would shape the fate of the nation.
On their way to Colorado in search of gold and silver for the Confederacy's dwindling coffers, Texan Confederates won a series of engagements along the Rio Grande. Hastily assembled troops that had marched to meet them from Colorado finally turned them back in an epic conflict at Gloriéta Pass.
Miners, farmers, and peacetime officers turned themselves overnight into soldiers to keep the Confederacy from capturing the West's mines, shaping the outcome of the Civil War. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums tells their story. Southwest Book Award Winner from the Border Regional Library Association
In Distant Corners, his follow-up to Soccer in a Football World, David Wangerin details several of the people, places, and events that shaped American soccer history. Despite its struggle for popular acceptance, soccer in the United States has a rich history. Wangerin profiles Tom Cahill, the almost-forgotten "father of American soccer," and writes passionately about the 1979 North American Soccer League season, the high-water mark of the game in the twentieth century.
Wangerin shows how the American appetite for soccer has ebbed and grown over the years, chronicling the game at the college and professional levels and describing the city of St. Louis's unique historic attachment to the sport. Wangerin believes that the time is ripe for American fans to look into their own history and recognize the surprisingly deep connection their country has to soccer.
The adult children he interviewed live at least 200 miles from their parents. In most ways they are similar to the millions of other professionals whose careers have led them to move away from their parents. We hear their voices, as they speak frankly about the advantages, pains, and challenges of separation.
Climo considers distant relationships to be different from other relationships and to be a growing social problem. Distant living complicates communications by shaping and restricting both phone calls and visits. His description of the typical phone call and typical seasonal visit, with their patterns and limitations, will sound familiar to many of us. In addition to affecting communications, distance affects memories of past parent-child relationships in ways that influence present relationships. Memories, which take on great weight, tend to determine current behavior. Most seriously, distance limits the kinds of assistance children can provide when their parents become ill, resulting in frustration, anger, guilt, and a sense of powerlessness.
Climo urges us to be more aware of distant living as a growing social problem. The percentage of children who move away from their parents will continue to increase. Once adult children acknowledge the challenges distance creates, they can learn to develop better communications and to deal with their feelings of ambivalence.
Who was in charge of the widespread provinces of the great Inka Empire of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Inka from the imperial heartland or local leaders who took on the trappings of their conquerors, either by coercion or acceptance? By focusing on provinces far from the capital of Cuzco, the essays in this multidisciplinary volume provide up-to-date information on the strategies of domination asserted by the Inka across the provinces far from their capital and the equally broad range of responses adopted by their conquered peoples.
Contributors to this cutting-edge volume incorporate the interaction of archaeological and ethnohistorical research with archaeobotany, biometrics, architecture, and mining engineering, among other fields. The geographical scope of the chapters—which cover the Inka provinces in Bolivia, in southeast Argentina, in southern Chile, along the central and north coast of Peru, and in Ecuador—build upon the many different ways in which conqueror and conquered interacted. Competing factors such as the kinds of resources available in the provinces, the degree of cooperation or resistance manifested by local leaders, the existing levels of political organization convenient to the imperial administration, and how recently a region had been conquered provide a wealth of information on regions previously understudied. Using detailed contextual analyses of Inka and elite residences and settlements in the distant provinces, the essayists evaluate the impact of the empire on the leadership strategies of conquered populations, whether they were Inka by privilege, local leaders acculturated to Inka norms, or foreign mid-level administrators from trusted ethnicities.
By exploring the critical interface between local elites and their Inka overlords, Distant Provinces in the Inka Empire builds upon Malpass’s 1993 Provincial Inca: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Assessment of the Impact of the Inca State to support the conclusions that Inka strategies of control were tailored to the particular situations faced in different regions. By contributing to our understanding of what it means to be marginal in the Inka Empire, this book details how the Inka attended to their political and economic goals in their interactions with their conquered peoples and how their subjects responded, producing a richly textured view of the reality that was the Inka Empire.
A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.
Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.
The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.
Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.
Alchemy can't be science--common sense tells us as much. But perhaps common sense is not the best measure of what science is, or was. In this book, Bruce Moran looks past contemporary assumptions and prejudices to determine what alchemists were actually doing in the context of early modern science. Examining the ways alchemy and chemistry were studied and practiced between 1400 and 1700, he shows how these approaches influenced their respective practitioners' ideas about nature and shaped their inquiries into the workings of the natural world. His work sets up a dialogue between what historians have usually presented as separate spheres; here we see how alchemists and early chemists exchanged ideas and methods and in fact shared a territory between their two disciplines.
Distilling Knowledge suggests that scientific revolution may wear a different appearance in different cultural contexts. The metaphor of the Scientific Revolution, Moran argues, can be expanded to make sense of alchemy and other so-called pseudo-sciences--by including a new framework in which "process can count as an object, in which making leads to learning, and in which the messiness of conflict leads to discernment." Seen on its own terms, alchemy can stand within the bounds of demonstrative science.
No judgment of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France’s leading sociologist focuses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.
In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a French person’s choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions—that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the “California sports” such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgment.
The topic of Bourdieu’s book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. But the book is more than fascinating. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology.
Distinctionand Denial challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America’s cultural center. By documenting the effects of the “Negro aesthetic” on African American artists working in the interwar years, Distinctionand Denial shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture—never fully inside or outside the mainstream.
“A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo’s study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists.”
—Patricia Hills, Boston University
“A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies.”
—Helen Langa, American University
Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century and editor of Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings.
Students in special education programs can have widely divergent experiences. For some, special education amounts to a dumping ground where schools unload their problem students, while for others, it provides access to services and accommodations that drastically improve chances of succeeding in school and beyond. Distinguishing Disability argues that this inequity in treatment is directly linked to the disparity in resources possessed by the students’ parents.
Since the mid-1970s, federal law has empowered parents of public school children to intervene in virtually every aspect of the decision making involved in special education. However, Colin Ong-Dean reveals that this power is generally available only to those parents with the money, educational background, and confidence needed to make effective claims about their children’s disabilities and related needs. Ong-Dean documents this class divide by examining a wealth of evidence, including historic rates of learning disability diagnosis, court decisions, and advice literature for parents of disabled children. In an era of expanding special education enrollment, Distinguishing Disability is a timely analysis of the way this expansion has created new kinds of inequality.
During the period from 1836 to 1874, the legal system in the new state of Arkansas developed amid huge social change. While the legislature could, and did, determine what issues were considered of importance to the populace, the Arkansas Supreme Court determined the efficacy of legislation in cases involving land titles, banks, transportation, slavery, family law, property, debt, contract, criminal law, and procedure.
Distinguishing the Righteous from the Roguish examines the court’s decisions in this era and shows how Arkansas, as a rural slave-holding state, did not follow the transformational patterns typical of some other states during the nineteenth century. Rather than using the law to promote broad economic growth and encourage social change, the Arkansas court attempted to accommodate the interests of the elite class by preserving the institution of slavery. The ideology of paternalism is reflected in the decisions of the court, and Looney shows how social and political stability—an emphasis on preserving the status quo of the so-called “righteous”—came at the expense of broader economic development.Applying insights from philosophy and cognitive science to address the urgent issue of smartphone-induced distracted driving
Although the dangers of texting while driving are widely known, many people resist the idea that phone usage will impair their driving. And connectivity features in new cars have only made using technology behind the wheel more tempting. What will it take to change people’s minds and behavior? Robert Rosenberger contends that a better understanding of why this combination of technologies is so dangerous could effectively adjust both habits and laws.
Rosenberger brings together ideas from philosophy and cognitive science to leverage a postphenomenological perspective that reveals how our smartphones make us such bad drivers. Reviewing decades of empirical studies in cognitive science, he shows that we have developed habits of perception regarding our compulsive technology use—habits that may wrest our attention away from the road.
Distracted develops innovative concepts for understanding technology-related habits and the ways that our relationships to our devices influence how we perceive the world. In turn, these ideas can help drivers be more cognizant of the effect that smartphone usage has on their perceptions, better inform efforts to enact stricter regulations, and help us all to be more reflective about the technologies that shape our lives.
How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon reimagined and reconstructed the Native American past in their work.
In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have Native Americans played an active role in the construction of the South’s cultural landscape—despite a history of colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering them invisible—but that their under-examined presence in southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a post-regional understanding of the American South. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding societies of the American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently returned to the idea of an "Indian frontier," each articulating a different vision and discourse about Native Americans—wholesome and pure in the vision of some, symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others.
Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional identity by invoking the South’s "native" heritage and pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the "Indian" signifies regional and national self-definitions and contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national "others." Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses: quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs into the textual strata of America’s literature and its cultural history).
W. C. Handy waking up to the blues on a train platform, Buddy Bolden eavesdropping on the drums at Congo Square, John Lomax taking his phonograph recorder into a southern penitentiary—some foundational myths of the black vernacular remain inescapable, even as they come under increasing pressure from skeptics.
In Disturbing the Peace, Bryan Wagner revises the history of the black vernacular tradition and gives a new account of black culture by reading these myths in the context of the tradition’s ongoing engagement with the law. Returning to some familiar examples (trickster tales, outlaw legends, blues lyrics) central to previous studies of the black vernacular expression, Wagner uses an analytic framework he has developed from the historical language of the law to give new and surprising analyses.
Wagner’s work draws both on his deep understanding of history and on a wealth of primary sources that range from novels to cartoons to popular ballads and early blues songs to newspapers and court reports. Through his innovative engagement with them, Wagner gives us a new and deeper understanding of black cultural expression, revealing its basis in the relational workings of African Americans in the social world.
The Young Adult novel is ordinarily characterized as a coming-of-age story, in which the narrative revolves around the individual growth and maturation of a character, but Roberta Trites expands this notion by chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way through YA books. Characters in these novels must learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they function, including family, church, government, and school.
Trites argues that the development of the genre over the past thirty years is an outgrowth of postmodernism, since YA novels are, by definition, texts that interrogate the social construction of individuals. Drawing on such nineteenth-century precursors as Little Women and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Disturbing the Universe demonstrates how important it is to employ poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing adolescent literature, both in critical studies and in the classroom. Among the twentieth-century authors discussed are Blume, Hamilton, Hinton, Le Guin, L'Engle, and Zindel.
Trites' work has applications for a broad range of readers, including scholars of children's literature and theorists of post-modernity as well as librarians and secondary-school teachers.
Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites is the winner of the 2002 Children's Literature Association's Book Award. The award is given annually in order to promote and recognize outstanding contributions to children's literature, history, scholarship, and criticisim; it is one of the highest academic honors that can accrue to an author of children's literary criticism.
Between 1772 and 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria concluded agreements to annex and eradicate the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. With the partitioning of Poland, the dioceses of the Uniate Church (later known as the Greek Catholic Church) were fractured by the borders of three regional hegemons.
Larry Wolff's deeply engaging account of these events delves into the politics of the Episcopal elite, the Vatican, and the three rulers behind the partitions: Catherine II of Russia, Frederick II of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria. Wolff uses correspondence with bishops in the Uniate Church and ministerial communiqués to reveal the nature of state policy as it unfolded.
Disunion within the Union adopts methodologies from the history of popular culture pioneered by Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre) and Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms) to explore religious experience on a popular level, especially questions of confessional identity and practices of piety. This detailed study of the responses of common Uniate parishioners, as well as of their bishops and hierarchs, to the pressure of the partitions paints a vivid portrait of conflict, accommodation, and survival in a church subject to the grand designs of the late eighteenth century’s premier absolutist powers.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press