front cover of The Labor of Faith
The Labor of Faith
Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism
Judith Casselberry
Duke University Press, 2017
In The Labor of Faith Judith Casselberry examines the material and spiritual labor of the women of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., which is based in Harlem and one of the oldest and largest historically Black Pentecostal denominations in the United States. This male-headed church only functions through the work of the church's women, who, despite making up three-quarters of its adult membership, hold no formal positions of power. Casselberry shows how the women negotiate this contradiction by using their work to produce and claim a spiritual authority that provides them with a particular form of power. She also emphasizes how their work in the church is as significant, labor intensive, and critical to their personhood, family, and community as their careers, home and family work, and community service are. Focusing on the circumstances of producing a holy black female personhood, Casselberry reveals the ways twenty-first-century women's spiritual power operates and resonates with meaning in Pentecostal, female-majority, male-led churches.
[more]

front cover of Labor's Lot
Labor's Lot
The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
University of Chicago Press, 1994
How does an Aboriginal community see itself, its work, and its place on the land? Elizabeth Povinelli goes to the Belyuen community of northern Australia to show how it draws from deep connections between labor, language, and the landscape. Her findings challenge Western notions of "productive labor" and longstanding ideas about the role of culture in subsistence economies.

In Labor's Lot, Povinelli shows how everyday activities shape Aboriginal identity and provide cultural meaning. She focuses on the Belyuen women's interactions with the countryside and on Belyuen conflicts with the Australian government over control of local land. Her analysis raises serious questions about the validity of Western theories about labor and culture and their impact on Aboriginal society.

Povinelli's focus on women's activities provides an important counterpoint to recent works centering on male roles in hunter-gatherer societies. Her unique "cultural economy" approach overcomes the dichotomy between the two standard approaches to these studies. Labor's Lot will engage anyone interested in indigenous peoples or in the relationship between culture and economy in contemporary social practice.
[more]

front cover of Labour's Civil Wars
Labour's Civil Wars
How Infighting has Kept the Left from Power (and What Can Be Done About It)
Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice
Haus Publishing, 2023
A compelling chronicle of the Labour Party’s perpetual internal divisions.
 
The biblical adage that “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” remains sound theological advice. It is also essential counsel for any political party that aspires to win elections. When a party is riven with division, the public does not know what it stands for. Though both major UK parties have been subject to internal conflict over the years, the Labour Party has been more prone to damaging splits. The divide exposed by the Corbyn insurgency is only the most recent example in almost a century of destructive infighting. Indeed, it has often seemed as though Labour has been more adept at fighting itself than in defeating the Tory party. This book examines the history of Labour’s civil wars and the underlying causes of the party’s schisms, from the first split of 1931, engineered by Ramsay MacDonald, to the ongoing battle for the future between the incumbent, Keir Starmer, and those who fundamentally altered the party’s course under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
 
[more]

front cover of Landscape and Power, Second Edition
Landscape and Power, Second Edition
Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2002
The first edition of this book, published in 1994, reshaped the direction of landscape studies by considering landscape not simply as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as an instrument of cultural force, a central tool in the creation of national and social identities. This second edition adds not only a new preface, but five new essays—from Edward Said, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jonathan Bordo, Michael Taussig, and Robert Pogue Harrison-extending the scope of the book in remarkable ways.
[more]

front cover of Landscapes of Power and Identity
Landscapes of Power and Identity
Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic
Cynthia Radding
Duke University Press, 2005
Landscapes of Power and Identity is a groundbreaking comparative history of two colonies on the frontiers of the Spanish empire—the Sonora region of northwestern Mexico and the Chiquitos region of eastern Bolivia’s lowlands—from the late colonial period through the middle of the nineteenth century. An innovative combination of environmental and cultural history, this book reflects Cynthia Radding’s more than two decades of research on Mexico and Bolivia and her consideration of the relationships between human societies and the geographic landscapes they inhabit and create. At first glance, Sonora and Chiquitos are quite different: one a scrub-covered desert, the other a tropical rainforest of the greater Amazonian and Paraguayan river basins. Yet the regions are similar in many ways. Both were located far from the centers of colonial authority, organized into Jesuit missions and linked to the principal mining centers of New Spain and the Andes, and then absorbed into nation-states in the nineteenth century. In each area, the indigenous communities encountered European governors, missionaries, slave hunters, merchants, miners, and ranchers.

Radding’s comparative approach illuminates what happened when similar institutions of imperial governance, commerce, and religion were planted in different physical and cultural environments. She draws on archival documents, published reports by missionaries and travelers, and previous histories as well as ecological studies and ethnographies. She also considers cultural artifacts, including archaeological remains, architecture, liturgical music, and religious dances. Radding demonstrates how colonial encounters were conditioned by both the local landscape and cultural expectations; how the colonizers and colonized understood notions of territory and property; how religion formed the cultural practices and historical memories of the Sonoran and Chiquitano peoples; and how the conflict between the indigenous communities and the surrounding creole societies developed in new directions well into the nineteenth century.

[more]

front cover of Landscapes of Power
Landscapes of Power
Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation
Dana E. Powell
Duke University Press, 2018
In Landscapes of Power Dana E. Powell examines the rise and fall of the controversial Desert Rock Power Plant initiative in New Mexico to trace the political conflicts surrounding native sovereignty and contemporary energy development on Navajo (Diné) Nation land. Powell's historical and ethnographic account shows how the coal-fired power plant project's defeat provided the basis for redefining the legacies of colonialism, mineral extraction, and environmentalism. Examining the labor of activists, artists, politicians, elders, technicians, and others, Powell emphasizes the generative potential of Navajo resistance to articulate a vision of autonomy in the face of twenty-first-century colonial conditions. Ultimately, Powell situates local Navajo struggles over energy technology and infrastructure within broader sociocultural life, debates over global climate change, and tribal, federal, and global politics of extraction.
[more]

front cover of Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages
Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages
Patrick J. Geary
Brandeis University Press, 2013
The eminent historian Patrick J. Geary has written a provocative book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel about the role of language and ideology in the study and history of the early Middle Ages. He includes a fascinating discussion of the rush by nationalist philologists to rediscover the medieval roots of their respective vernaculars, the rivalry between vernacular languages and Latin to act as transmitters of Christian sacred texts and administrative documents, and the rather sloppy and ad hoc emergence in different places of the vernacular as the local administrative idiom. This is a fascinating look at the weakness of language as a force for unity: ideology, church authority, and emerging secular power always trumped language.
[more]

front cover of Language and Power in the Modern World
Language and Power in the Modern World
Mary Talbot
University of Alabama Press, 2003

An accessible overview of five major issues in sociolinguistics and the relationship between language and power

This book analyzes the key ways in which language constitutes and conveys power and social relationships in modern society. It offers selected readings that illustrate the thematic introductions and a set of tasks designed to guide linguistic analysis of data and to stimulate student discussion, in five specific areas:

• Multilingualism, Identity, and Ethnicity: examines the phenomena of linguistic diversity from the perspective of language planning and language policies, with emphasis on personal, psychological, educational, cultural, and political issues.

• Language and Youth: examines the languages of old age and the language of youth subcultures.

• Language and Gender: explores the claim that men and women use interactional communication styles based on power and solidarity, respectively.

• Language and the Media: considers the extent to which verbal interaction through mass media differs from other kinds of communication and its consequences in terms of power relations.

• Language and Organizations: explores the use of language as a tool of power in public institutions and bureaucracies and how control over individuals is articulated through a range of different discourse structures and strategies.

With a unique combination of selected readings and student-centered tasks in a single volume, Language and Power in the Modern World covers contemporary issues of communication theory and sociolinguistics, ranging from the global to the interpersonal.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Language of Power, the Power of Language
The Effects of Ambiguity on Sociopolitical Structures as Illustrated in Shakespeare’s Plays
Stephen Cohen
Harvard University Press, 1987
In a fusion of historicist and deconstructive reading strategies, Stephen Cohen asserts the fundamental force of ambiguity on social and political structures in Othello, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure. He argues that there is an inherently “radical” ambiguity which cannot be controlled by countries or wits. Drawing from the works of a wide range of critics, including Jacques Derrida and Stephen Greenblatt, Cohen show how language itself erodes usurpers’ intentions to shape a world according to their own designs. His account of the transactions between author and reader provides a skeptical critique of readings that remove the loose ends that such “radical” ambiguities impart to the text.
[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Language, Power, and Ideology in Brunei Darussalam
Mis Sea#99
Geoffrey C. Gunn
Ohio University Press, 1996
Contrary to modern theories of developing nations, Brunei Darussalam, which has a very high rate of literacy, is also one of the few countries where the traditional elite retains absolute political power. Professor Gunn's comprehensive study, which assesses the state's efforts to implement national language policies, explores the aspects of the complex relationship between language and power including the oral tradition, the rise of Islamic literacy, print culture and mass literacy, and the electronic media and its effects.
[more]

front cover of Language, Power, and Resistance
Language, Power, and Resistance
Mainstreaming Deaf Education
Elizabeth S. Mathews
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
The current policy of educating d/Deaf and h/Hard of hearing (DHH) students in a mainstream setting, rather than in the segregated environments of deaf schools, has been portrayed as a positive step forward in creating greater equality for DHH students. In Language, Power, and Resistance, Elizabeth S. Mathews explores this claim through qualitative research with DHH children in the Republic of Ireland, their families, their teachers, and their experiences of the education system. While sensitive to the historical context of deaf education, Mathews focuses on the contemporary education system and the ways in which the mainstreaming agenda fits into larger discussions about the classification, treatment, and normalization of DHH children.
               The research upon which this book is based examined the implications that mainstreaming has for the tensions between the hegemonic medical model of deafness and the social model of Deafness. This volume explores how different types of power are used in the deaf education system to establish, maintain, and also resist medical views of deafness. Mathews frames this discussion as one of power relations across parents, children, and professionals working within the system. She looks at how various forms of power are used to influence decisions, to resist decisions, and to shape the structure and delivery of deaf education. The author’s findings are a significant contribution to the debates on inclusive education for DHH students and will resonate in myriad social and geographic contexts.
[more]

front cover of Latin America
Latin America
The Allure and Power of an Idea
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
University of Chicago Press, 2017
“Latin America” is a concept firmly entrenched in its philosophical, moral, and historical meanings. And yet, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues in this landmark book, it is an obsolescent racial-cultural idea that ought to have vanished long ago with the banishment of racial theory. Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea makes this case persuasively.

Tenorio-Trillo builds the book on three interlocking steps: first, an intellectual history of the concept of Latin America in its natural historical habitat—mid-nineteenth-century redefinitions of empire and the cultural, political, and economic intellectualism; second, a serious and uncompromising critique of the current “Latin Americanism”—which circulates in United States–based humanities and social sciences; and, third, accepting that we might actually be stuck with “Latin America,” Tenorio-Trillo charts a path forward for the writing and teaching of Latin American history. Accessible and forceful, rich in historical research and specificity, the book offers a distinctive, conceptual history of Latin America and its many connections and intersections of political and intellectual significance. Tenorio-Trillo’s book is a masterpiece of interdisciplinary scholarship.
[more]

front cover of Law and the Balance of Power
Law and the Balance of Power
The Automobile Manufacturers and their Dealers
Stewart Macaulay
Russell Sage Foundation, 1966
Stewart Macaulay teaches contracts at the University of Wisconsin Law School and is interested in the part the legal system plays in implementing, regulating, and hindering economic relationships, and how it does these things. This book is a descriptive analysis of organizational change that has resulted from automobile dealers' attempts to find a legal remedy for what they consider unfair practices of the manufacturers. It advances our understanding of the limitations and the positive functions of formal rules in the regulation of human conduct, and shows how informal procedures can develop as a result of pressure for changes in the formal rules.
[more]

front cover of LBJ and Mexican Americans
LBJ and Mexican Americans
The Paradox of Power
By Julie Leininger Pycior
University of Texas Press, 1997

T. R. Fehrenbach Award, 1997

As he worked to build his Great Society, Lyndon Johnson often harkened back to his teaching days in the segregated "Mexican" school at Cotulla, Texas. Recalling the poverty and prejudice that blighted his students' lives, Johnson declared, "It never occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—and I'll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it."

This book explores the complex and sometimes contradictory relations between LBJ and Mexican Americans. Julie Pycior shows that Johnson's genuine desire to help Mexican Americans—and reap the political dividends—did not prevent him from allying himself with individuals and groups intent on thwarting Mexican Americans' organizing efforts. Not surprisingly, these actions elicited a wide range of response, from grateful loyalty to, in some cases, outright opposition. Mexican Americans' complicated relationship with LBJ influenced both their political development and his career with consequences that reverberated in society at large.

[more]

front cover of Literacy, Economy, and Power
Literacy, Economy, and Power
Writing and Research after "Literacy in American Lives"
Edited by John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, Bryan Trabold
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Following on the groundbreaking contributions of Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives—a literacy ethnography exploring how ordinary Americans have been affected by changes in literacy, public education, and structures of power—Literacy, Economy, and Power expands Brandt’s vision, exploring the relevance of her theoretical framework as it relates to literacy practices in a variety of current and historical contexts, as well as in literacy’s expanding and global future. Bringing together scholars from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, the book offers thirteen engrossing essays that extend and challenge Brandt’s commentary on the dynamics between literacy and power.

The essays cover many topics, including the editor of the first Native American newspaper, the role of a native Hawaiian in bringing literacy to his home islands, the influence of convents and academies on nineteenth-century literacy, and the future of globalized digital literacies. Contributors include Julie Nelson Christoph, Ellen Cushman, Kim Donehower, Anne Ruggles Gere, Eli Goldblatt, Harvey J. Graff, Gail E. Hawisher, Bruce Horner, David A. Jolliffe, Rhea Estelle Lathan, Min-Zhan Lu, Robyn Lyons-Robinson, Carol Mattingly, Beverly J. Moss, Paul Prior, Cynthia L. Selfe, Michael W. Smith, and Morris Young. Literacy, Economy, and Power also features an introduction exploring the scholarly impact of Brandt’s work, written by editors John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold. An invaluable tool for literacy studies at the graduate or professional level, Literacy, Economy, and Power provides readers with a wide-ranging view of the work being done in literacy studies today and points to ways researchers might approach the study of literacy in the future.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Localities at the Center
Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing
Richard Belsky
Harvard University Press, 2005

A visitor to Beijing in 1900, Chinese or foreign, would have been struck by the great number of native-place lodges serving the needs of scholars and officials from the provinces. What were these native-place lodges? How did they develop over time? How did they fit into and shape Beijing's urban ecology? How did they further native-place ties?

In answering these questions, the author considers how native-place ties functioned as channels of communication between China's provinces and the political center; how sojourners to the capital used native-place ties to create solidarity within their communities of fellow provincials and within the class of scholar-officials as a whole; how the state co-opted these ties as a means of maintaining order within the city and controlling the imperial bureaucracy; how native-place ties transformed the urban landscape and social structure of the city; and how these functions were refashioned in the decades of political innovation that closed the Qing period. Native-place lodges are often cited as an example of the particularistic ties that characterized traditional China and worked against the emergence of a modern state based on loyalty to the nation. The author argues that by fostering awareness of membership in an elite group, the native-place lodges generated a sense of belonging to a nation that furthered the reforms undertaken in the early twentieth century.

[more]

front cover of Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century
Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century
The Marriage of Violet Blair
Virginia Jeans Laas
University of Arkansas Press, 1998

Winner, 1999 Missouri Conference on History Book Award

This fascinating biography of a marriage in the Gilded Age closely examines the dynamic flow of power, control, and love between Washington blue blood Violet Blair and New Orleans attorney Albert Janin. Based on their voluminous correspondence as well as Violet’s extensive diaries, it offers a thoroughly intimate portrait of a fifty-four-year union which, in many ways, conformed to societal strictures, yet always created its own definition of itself in order to fit the flux of needs of both husband and wife.

Central to their story is Violet’s fierce determination to maintain her autonomy within the patriarchic institution of marriage. An enduring belle who thought, talked, and acted with the assurance and self-confidence of one whose wishes demanded obedience, she rejected the Victorian ideal of women as silent, submissive consorts. Yet her feminism was a private one, not played out on a public stage but kept to the confines of her own daily life and marriage.

With abundant documentary evidence to draw upon, Laas ties this compelling story to broader themes of courtiship behavior, domesticity, gender roles, extended family bonds, elitism, and societal stereotyping. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century has the dual virtue of making an important historical contribution while also appealing to a broad popular audience.

[more]

logo for University of Pittsburgh Press
The Lung Block
Plagues, Parks, and Power in Progressive-Era New York
Adrienne deNoyelles
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
Public health, housing, poverty, and immigration dominated social and political discourse in early twentieth-century New York, much as they do today. The Lower East Side provided an urban environment where infectious disease and other public health concerns flourished. One city block in particular, known in muckraking circles as “The Lung Block,” housed four thousand first- and second-generation Americans in dilapidated tenements where deadly tuberculosis spread uninhibited. The Lung Block looks at a 1903 reform crusade to demolish this working-class tenement neighborhood and replace it with a park. Progressive reformers aimed to confront the area’s moral and environmental dangers, but their conceptualization of the problem and methods for addressing it placed them into direct conflict with the hand-to-mouth priorities of the residents. The campaign and its eventual failure illuminate the formidable social barriers distancing urban reformers and the marginalized populations they intend to help. 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter