A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
"His conceptually rigorous and tightly reasoned study . . . reminds us that power is never value neutral but organizes commercial systems in liberal or imperial terms."
---Perspectives on Politics
"Lobell's book is tightly written, nicely argued and thoroughly researched to a fault. He seems to delight in historical detail. The complexity of his approach is refreshing."
---International Affairs
"The Challenge of Hegemony is a pleasure to read. It is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich."
---International Studies Review
"The Challenge of Hegemony offers a compelling reinterpretation of key historical cases and provides wise guidance as to how the United States should wield its power today."
--Charles A. Kupchan, Council on Foreign Relations
"Lobell demonstrates clearly how the international environment confronting great powers interacts with their domestic political coalitions to produce different grand strategies. Through a masterful sweep of history, Lobell shows us the alternative trajectories before the United States today."
--David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego
Chomsky is as controversial as he is influential. Admirers see him as a courageous teller of unpleasant truths about political power and those who wield it in the United States. Critics view him as a propagandist and ideologue who sees only black and white where there are multiple shades of gray. While Chomsky's fans tend to view him uncritically, his critics often don't take him seriously. Unlike any previous work, this book takes Chomsky seriously while treating him critically. The author gives Chomsky credit for valuable contributions to our understanding of the contemporary political world, but spares no criticism of the serious deficiencies he sees in Chomsky's political analyses.
Geopolitical Economy radically reinterprets the historical evolution of the world order, as a multi-polar world emerges from the dust of the financial and economic crisis.
Radhika Desai offers a radical critique of the theories of US hegemony, globalisation and empire which dominate academic international political economy and international relations, revealing their ideological origins in successive failed US attempts at world dominance through the dollar.
Desai revitalizes revolutionary intellectual traditions which combine class and national perspectives on ‘the relations of producing nations’. At a time of global upheavals and profound shifts in the distribution of world power, Geopolitical Economy forges a vivid and compelling account of the historical processes which are shaping the contemporary international order.
Well-regarded author Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions have been not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodated and sometimes forcefully imposed. Such impositions have created discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multilayered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages—even the invention of community-created trilingual dictionaries.
Vélez-Ibáñez gives particular attention to both sides of the border, explaining the consequences of the fragile splitting of the area through geopolitical border formation. He illustrates the many ways those discontents have manifested in linguistic, cultural, educational, political, and legal forms.
From revolt to revitalization, from silent objection to expressive defiance, people in the Southwest North American Region have developed arcs of discontent from the Spanish colonial period to the present. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work discusses the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the "Funds of Knowledge" concept as creative contemporary discontents with monolingual approaches.
Presents a comparative and textual exploration of Gramsci's interpretation of Machiavelli's political analyses. This valuable contribution to our understanding of Gramsci includes a comparison of the major Machiavellian ideas such as the nature of political knowledge, the new principality, the concept of the people, and the relation between thought and action, to Gramsci's concepts of hegemony, moral and intellectual reform, and the collective will.
This pathbreaking collection builds on recent examinations of identity in the postcolonial states of South and Southeast Asia by investigating the ways in which domestic workers and their employers come to know and depict one another and themselves through their interactions inside and outside of the home. This setting provides a particularly apt arena for examining the daily negotiations of power and hegemony.
Contributors to the volume, all anthropologists, provide rich ethnographic analyses that avoid a narrow focus on either workers or employers. Rather, they examine systems of power through specific topics that range from the notion of "nurture for sale" to the roles of morality and humor in the negotiation of hierarchy and the dilemmas faced by foreign employers who find themselves in life-and-death dependence on their servants.
With its provocative theoretical and ethnographic contributions to current debates, this collection will be of interest to scholars in Asian studies, women's studies, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies.
Kathleen M. Adams is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Loyola University of Chicago. Sara Dickey is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Bowdoin College.
This book places Gramsci’s ideas within the linguistically influenced social theory of the twentieth century. It summarizes some of the major ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, language philosophy and post-structuralism in relation to Gramsci’s position. By paying great attention to the linguistic underpinnings of Gramsci's Marxism, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci shows how his theorization of power, language and politics address issues raised by post-modernism and the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.
Modernism and Hegemony was first published in 1990. 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 Modernism and Hegemony, Neil Larsen exposes the underlying political narratives of modernist aesthetic theory and practice. Unlike earlier Marxist critics, Larsen insists that modernist ideology be approached as a "displaced politics" and not simply as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this view, modernism is broadly ideological project comprising not only the literary-artist canon but also a wide array of theoretical discourses from aesthetics to philosophy, culture, and politics. Larsen gives postmodernism some credit for the apparent breakup of modernism, and for exposing the philosophical and political nature of its aesthetic stance. But he parts company with its ideological and epistemological notions, proposing to change the terms, and thus the framework, of the debate.
For Larsen, modernism is intimately linked to a crisis of representation that affected all aspects of life in the late nineteenth century - a period when capitalism itself was undergoing transformation from its "classical" free market phase into a more abstract, monopolistic and imperialistic stage. Larsen finds the resultant loosening of ties between individuals and society - the breakdown of social and historical agency - behind the growth of modernism. He employs speculative cross-readings of key texts by Marx and Adorno, an examination of Manet's "The Execution of Maximilian," and an analysis of modernism in a Third World setting to explain why modernism made special claims upon the aesthetic, and how it ultimately ascribed historical agency to "works of art."
The Osage Indians were a powerful group of Native Americans who lived along the prairies and plains of present-day Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, now available in paper, shows how the Osage formed and maintained political, economic, and social control over a large portion of the central United States for more than 150 years.
What does it mean for human beings to exist in an era of dronified state violence? How can we understand the rise of robotic systems of power and domination? Focusing on U.S. drone warfare and its broader implications as no other book has to date, Predator Empire argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive “Predator Empire.”
Moving from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror and beyond, Ian G. R. Shaw reveals how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose our planet in a robotic system of control. The rise of drones presents a series of “existential crises,” he suggests, that are reengineering not only spaces of violence but also the character of the modern state. Positioning drone warfare as part of a much longer project to watch and enclose the human species, he shows that for decades—centuries even—human existence has slowly but surely been brought within the artificial worlds of “technological civilization.” Instead of incarcerating us in prisons or colonizing territory directly, the Predator Empire locks us inside a worldwide system of electromagnetic enclosure—in which democratic ideals give way to a system of totalitarian control, a machinic “rule by Nobody.”
As accessibly written as it is theoretically ambitious, Predator Empire provides up-to-date information about U.S. drone warfare, as well as an in-depth history of the rise of drones.
“Blood is thicker than water,” goes the old proverb. But do common bloodlines in fact demand special duties or prescribe affections? Thicker than Water examines the roots of this belief by studying the omnipresent discourse of bloodlines and kindred relations in the literature of early modern Europe.
Early modern discourses concerning kinship promoted the idea that similar bloodlines dictated greater love or affinity, stabilizing the boundaries of families and social classes, as well as the categories of ethnicity and race. Literary representations of romantic relationships were instrumental in such conceptions, and Lauren Weindling examines how drama from England, France, and Italy tests these assumptions about blood and love, exposing their underlying political function. Among the key texts that Weindling studies are Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet¸ Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, Giambattista della Porta’s La Sorella and its English analog, Thomas Middleton’s No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s, John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Machiavelli’s La Mandragola.
Each of these plays offers an extreme limit case for early modern notions of belonging and exclusion, through plots of love, courtship, and marriage, including blood feuds and incest. Moreover, they feature the voices of marginalized groups, unprivileged by these metrics and ideologies, and thus offer significant counterpoints to this bloody worldview.
While most critical studies of blood onstage pertain to matters of guilt or violence, Thicker Than Water examines the work that blood does unseen in arbitrating social and emotional connections between persons, and thus underwriting our deepest forms of social organization.
The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin.
However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.
"Powerful and clarifying . . . a landmark volume."
---John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles
"Morton draws upon an impressive knowledge of Gramsci's writings to provide new insights into key processes in today's world order."
---Anne Showstack Sassoon, Kingston University and Birbeck College, University of London.
On a wave of revolutionary upheaval in the early twenty-first century, Evo Morales was swept into state power as Bolivia’s first Indigenous president with a mandate to radically transform the country. The ensuing period, known simply as “el proceso de cambio” (the process of change), has been a tension-filled and contradictory process involving progressive transformations, ambiguous continuities, and outright revolutionary failures. Importantly, the contradictions have been just as much ideological as they are material.
By examining and illuminating the contrasting logics underlying opposing theories of revolutionary change, Visions of Transformation provides an analytical framework through which to understand and interpret the central conflicts and contradictions of Bolivia under Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo.
Based on nearly two years of immersive fieldwork, Visions of Transformation explores the relation between theoretical production and political practice. Through the contrasting perspectives of hegemony and plurinationality, the book analyzes three specific conjunctural moments—a proposed highway through the TIPNIS, a conflict over representation of the highland Indigenous movement organization CONAMAQ, and the struggle for Indigenous autonomy—to shed light on the primary economic, social, political, and theoretical tensions at the heart of Bolivia’s proceso de cambio.
Modern warfare has a new form. The days of international combat are fading. So how do major world powers maintain control over their people today?
This book is a disturbing insight into the new ways world powers such as the US, Israel, Britain and China forge war today. It is a subliminal war of surveillance and whitewashed terror, conducted through new, high-tech military apparatuses, designed and first used in Israel against the Palestinian population. Including nano-technology, hidden camera systems, information databases on civilian activity, automated targeting systems and unmanned drones, it is used to control the very people the nation's leaders profess to serve.
Jeff Halper reveals that this practice is much more insidious than was previously thought. As Western governments claw back individual liberties, War Against the People is a reminder that fundamental human rights are being compromised for vast sections of the world, and that this is a subject that should concern everyone.
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