In this groundbreaking study, Paul Friedrich looks closely at the strong men of the Tarascan Indian village of Naranja: their leadership, friendship, kinship, and violent local politics (over a time depth of one generation), and ways to understand such phenomena. What emerges is an acutely observed portrait of the men who form the very basis of the grass-roots power structure in Mexico today.
Of interest to historians, sociologists, and political scientists, as well as Latin Americanists and anthropologists, The Princes of Naranja is a sequel to Friedrich's now classic Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village. It begins with biographical character studies of seven leaders—peasant gunmen, judges, politicos; here the book will grip the reader and provoke strong emotional response, from laughter to horror. A middle section places these "princes" in relation to each other, and to the contexts of village society and the larger entities of which it forms a part. Friedrich's synthesis of anthropology, local (mainly oral) history, macrohistory, microsociology, psychology, and literature gives new insight into the structure of Mexican politics from the local level up, and provides a model for other scholars doing analogous work in other parts of the world, especially in the developing world. The concluding section raises vital questions about the dynamic relations between the fieldworker, fieldwork, field notes, the villagers, the writing of a fieldwork-based book, and, implicitly, the audience for such books.
Of all the major cities of Britain, London, the world metropolis, was the last to acquire a modern municipal government. Its antiquated administrative system led to repeated crises as the population doubled within a few decades and reached more than two million in the 1840s. Essential services such as sanitation, water supply, street paving and lighting, relief of the poor, and maintenance of the peace were managed by the vestries of ninety-odd parishes or precincts plus divers ad hoc authorities or commissions. In 1855, with the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the groundwork began to be laid for a rational municipal government.
David Owen tells in absorbing detail the story of the operations of the Metropolitan Board of Works, its political and other problems, and its limited but significant accomplishments—including the laying down of 83 miles of sewers and the building of the Thames Embankments—before it was replaced in 1889 by the London County Council. His account, based on extensive archival research, is balanced, judicious, lucid, often witty, and always urbane.
Once the hub of the tsarist state, later Brezhnev's "model Communist city"--home of the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil's Cathedral--Moscow is for many the quintessence of everything Russian. Timothy Colton's sweeping biography of this city at the center of Soviet life reveals what such a position has meant to Moscow and ultimately to Russia itself.
Linchpin of the Soviet system and exemplar of its ideology, Moscow was nonetheless instrumental in the Soviet Union's demise. It was in this metropolis of nine million people that Boris Yeltsin, during two frustrating years as the city's party boss, began his move away from Communist orthodoxy. Colton charts the general course of events that led to this move, tracing the political and social developments that have given the city its modern character. He shows how the monolith of Soviet power broke down in the process of metropolitan governance, where the constraints of censorship and party oversight could not keep up with proliferating points of view, haphazard integration, and recurrent deviation from approved rules and goals. Everything that goes into making a city--from town planning, housing, and retail services to environmental and architectural concerns--figures in Colton's account of what makes Moscow unique. He shows us how these aspects of the city's organization, and the actions of leaders and elite groups within them, coordinated or conflicted with the overall power structure and policy imperatives of the Soviet Union. Against this background, Colton explores the growth of the anti-Communist revolution in Moscow politics, as well as fledgling attempts to establish democratic institutions and a market economy.
As it answers persistent questions about Soviet political history, this lavishly illustrated volume may also point the way to understanding Russia's future.
The Mongolian Yuan dynasty, 1272-1368, is a short but interesting chapter in the long history of Sino-Mongolian relations. Faced with the challenge of governing a huge sedentary empire, the traditionally nomadic Mongols acceded to some Chinese institutional precedents, but, in large part, adhered to their own Inner Asian practices of staffing and administering the government apparatus.
Yuan administrative documents provide information that permits a fairly accurate reconstruction of the day-to-day functioning of the local government bureaucracy. From these materials, Endicott-West has put together a detailed picture of the Mongols' methods of selecting local officials, the ethnic backgrounds of officials, and policy formation and implementation at the local level.
A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana.
Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them.
The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South by
Despite massive changes in twentieth-century political structures—the imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies—unremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking “the village” became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.
This interdisciplinary work brings the humanities and social sciences into dialogue by examining issues such as globalized capital, discourses of antiterrorism, and identity politics. Essayists from the fields of postcolonial studies and globalization theory address the ethical and pragmatic ramifications of opposing interpretations of these issues and, for the first time, seek common ground.
Contributors: Pal Ahluwalia, U of California, San Diego; Arjun Appadurai, New School U; Geoffrey Bowker, Santa Clara U; Timothy Brennan, U of Minnesota; Ruth Buchanan, U of British Columbia; Verity Burgmann, U of Melbourne; Pheng Cheah, U of California, Berkeley; Inderpal Grewal, U of California, Irvine; Ramon Grosfoguel, U of California, Berkeley; Barbara Harlow, U of Texas, Austin; Anouar Majid, U of New England; John McMurtry, U of Guelph; Walter D. Mignolo, Duke U; Sundhya Pahuja, U of Melbourne; R. Radhakrishnan, U of California, Irvine; Ileana Rodriguez, Ohio State U; E. San Juan, Philippine Forum, New York; Saskia Sassen, U of Chicago; Ella Shohat, New York U; Leslie Sklair, London School of Economics; Robert Stam, New York U; Madina Tlostanova, Russian Peoples’ Friendship U; Harish Trivedi, U of Delhi.
Revathi Krishnaswamy is associate professor of English at San Jose State University.
John C. Hawley is professor and chair of English at Santa Clara University.
The contributors represent many of the fields altered by postcolonial studies over the past two decades, including literary studies, history, anthropology, Asian and African studies, and political science. They model diverse applications of postcolonial theory to Latin America, East Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. Postcolonial Studies and Beyond propels the field forward. It showcases scholars coming from intellectual precincts usually considered outside the purview of the postcolonial finding new ways to deploy classic techniques of postcolonial analysis, and scholars strongly associated with postcolonial studies offering substantial critiques designed to challenge the field’s most fundamental assumptions.
Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Ali Behdad, Daniel Boyarin, Timothy Brennan, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, Laura Chrisman, Jean Comaroff, Frederick Cooper, Vilashini Cooppan, Jed Esty, James Ferguson, Peter Hulme, Suvir Kaul, Neil Lazarus, Ania Loomba, Florencia E. Mallon, Nivedita Menon, Rob Nixon, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, David Scott, Ella Shohat, Kelwyn Sole, Robert Stam, Rebecca L. Stein
Bringing together thirty-seven essays that have helped define the study of colonial and postcolonial cultures, this expansive and thoughtfully organized anthology offers an up-to-date and in-depth overview of this rapidly developing field.
Canonical articles, most unexcerpted, explore postcolonialism’s key themes—power and knowledge—while articles by contemporary scholars expand the discipline to include discussions of the discovery of the New World, Native American and indigenous identities in Latin America and the Pacific, settler colonies in Africa and Australia, English colonialism in Ireland, and feminism in Nigeria and Egypt. The inclusion of a broad sampling of histories and theories attests to multiple, even competing postcolonialisms, while the skillful organization of the volume provides a useful map of the field in terms of recognizable patterns, shared family resemblances, and common genealogies.
The book is divided into nine sections: Ideologies of Imperialism, The Critique of Colonial Discourse, The Politics of Language and Literary Studies, Nationalisms and Nativisms, Hybrid Identities, Gender and Sexualities, Reading the Subaltern, Comparative (Post)colonialisms, and Globalization and Postcoloniality. Detailed introductions to each section serve to develop key themes, encourage debate, and contextualize the wide-ranging voices that contribute to the topic.
The most cogent and teachable collection of postcolonial texts yet compiled, this anthology is equally suitable for undergraduate students and seasoned scholars.
Contributors. Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Ali Behdad, Homi Bhabha, Daniel Boyarin, Neil Larsen, Saree Makdisi, Joseph Massad, Walter Mignolo, Hamid Naficy, Ngugi Wa Thingo, Timothy B. Powell, R. Radhakrishnan, Bruce Robbins, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Ella Shohat, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
“We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.
Sai Englert offers readers an accessible and global account of settler colonialism, taking in its history, some of its main characteristics, and its continued relevance today.
From the Palestinian struggle against Israel occupation to the First Nations' mass opposition to pipeline construction in North America, indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the most important struggles of our age. Rich with their own unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, these different struggles are connected by the enemy they face: settler colonialism.
While settler-colonial regimes differ, Englert explains how they are all defined by a fundamental conflict between themselves and the indigenous people they aim to dispossess, exploit and/or eliminate.
To understand settler colonialism as a distinct, structural, and contemporary process, is also to start engaging with a number of international social movements, political struggles, and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start asking how decolonization – as a material struggle for freedom – might be possible.
The North Atlantic World in the Seventeenth Century was first published in 1974. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In his preface the author writes: "Europe's style was both courageous and ignoble, Europe's achievement both magnificent and appalling. There is less need now that Europe's hegemony is over, for pride or shame to color historical judgments." In that candid vein Mr. Davies provides a balanced and impartial history of British, French, and Dutch beginnings in North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa to the end of the seventeenth century. He contrasts two styles of empire: the planting of trading posts in order to gather fur, fish, and slaves; and the planting of people in colonies of settlement to grow tobacco and sugar. He shows that the first style, involving little outlay of capital, was favored by European merchants; the second, by rulers and landlords. In his conclusion he examines the impact made by the Europeans on the people they traded with and expropriated, and assesses the diplomatic, economic, and cultural repercussions of the North Atlantic on Europe itself.
"Should provide valuable supplementary reading in courses in British imperial and American colonial history, as well as a source of information for those who teach them." –History.
Uncertain Dimensions was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
World War I battered the Western imperial systems and destroyed one, that of Germany, but it did not sound the death knell of an empire. The "scramble" for overseas territory ha reached a virtual conclusion shortly before the war; afterwards, the main business of empire was to ensure a pax colonia: the often contradictory goals of a stable government and economic development. It is with the years between world wars—the brief age of administrative empire — that Raymond Betts is chiefly concerned in this book. An unsettled time, when individuals coped with empire of uncertain dimensions, the interwar years nonetheless left a material legacy—railroads, motor roads, public buildings — and an ideological one—the voices of protest that led to independence after World War II.
Preeminently a cultural history of the era rather than a political narrative, Uncertain Dimensions centers upon the regions we now call the Third World—Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia—and the major colonial powers, Great Britain and France. Betts has structured this book as a group of closely linked interpretive essays, each devoted to a specific aspect of the late colonial experience: World War I and the postwar mandates, colonial administration, the European economic imperative and "technology transfer," urbanization, anti-imperial protest, and decolonization. Throughout, he draws upon the work of novelists, poets, and theoreticians—Aime Cesaire, Claude McKay, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and many others—and recognizes the deep irony at the heart of modern imperialism: that contact between Western and Third worlds was mostly confined to two minorities, the alien European and the socially uprooted African or Asian.
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