A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY276 start with V start with V
Village Housing explores the housing challenges faced by England’s amenity villages, rooted in post-war counter-urbanization and a rising tide of investment demand for rural homes. It tracks solutions to date and considers what further actions might be taken to increase the equity of housing outcomes and thereby support rural economies and alternate rural futures. The authors examine first the interwar reliance on landowners to provide tied housing and post-war diversification of responses to rising housing access difficulties, including from the public and third sectors; second, recent community-led responses; and third, actions that disrupt established production processes: self-build, low impact development, and a re-emergence of council provision. These responses to the village housing challenges are set against a broader backdrop of structural constraints and opportunities to reduce those constraints through planning, land, and tax reforms that can broaden the social inclusivity and diversity of villages and support their economic well-being.
According to Magazine, where Western anthropologists often assume that persons are individuals capable of acting on their own to produce things, rural highland Mexicans see persons as inherently interdependent and in need of others even to act. He utilizes the term “active subjectivity” to denote the fact that what they produce in others is not simply action but also a subjective state or attitude of willingness to perform the action.
The author’s goals are to improve understandings of rural highland Mexicans’ lives and to contribute to a broader disciplinary effort aimed at revealing the cultural specificity or ethnocentricity of our supposedly universally applicable concepts and theories.
In August 1870, during a fair in the isolated French village of Hautefaye, a gruesome murder was committed in broad daylight that aroused the indignation of the entire country. A young nobleman, falsely accused of shouting republican slogans, was savagely tortured for hours by a mob of peasants who later burned him alive. Rumors of cannibalism stirred public fascination, and the details of the case were dramatically recounted in the popular press. While the crime was rife with political significance, the official inquiry focused on its brutality. Justice was swift: the mob’s alleged ringleaders were guillotined at the scene of the crime the following winter.
The Village of Cannibals is a fascinating inquiry by historian Alain Corbin into the social and political ingredients of an alchemy that transformed ordinary people into executioners in nineteenth-century France. Corbin’s chronicle of the killing is significant for the new light it sheds on the final eruption of peasant rage in France to end in murder. No other author has investigated this harrowing event in such depth or brought to its study such a wealth of perspectives.
Corbin explores incidents of public violence during and after the French Revolution and illustrates how earlier episodes in France’s history provide insight into the mob’s methods and choice of victim. He describes in detail the peasants’ perception of the political landscape and the climate of fear that fueled their anxiety and ignited long-smoldering hatreds. Drawing on the minutes of court proceedings, accounts of contemporary journalists, and testimony of eyewitnesses, the author offers a precise chronology of the chain of events that unfolded on the fairground that summer afternoon. His detailed investigation into the murder at Hautefaye reveals the political motivations of the murderers and the gulf between their actions and the sensibilities of the majority of French citizens, who no longer tolerated violence as a viable form of political expression. The book will be welcomed by scholars, students, and general readers for its compelling insights into the nature of collective violence.
Greenport today boasts a population that is one-third Hispanic. Gordon contends that these immigrants have effectively saved the town’s economy by taking low-skill jobs, increasing the tax base, filling local schools, and patronizing local businesses. Greenport’s seaside beauty still attracts summer tourists, but it is only with the support of the local Latino workforce that elegant restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts are able to serve these visitors. For Gordon the picture is complex, because the wave of immigrants also presents the town with challenges to its services and institutions. Gordon’s portraits of local immigrants capture the positive and the negative, with a cast of characters ranging from a Guatemalan mother of three, including one child who is profoundly disabled, to a Colombian house painter with a successful business who cannot become licensed because he remains undocumented. Village of Immigrants weaves together these people’s stories, fears, and dreams to reveal an environment plagued by threats of deportation, debts owed to coyotes, low wages, and the other bleak realities that shape the immigrant experience—even in the charming seaport town of Greenport.
A timely contribution to the national dialogue on immigration, Gordon’s book shows the pivotal role the American small town plays in the ongoing American immigrant story—as well as how this booming population is shaping and reviving rural communities.
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
- emphasizing the piecemeal, contingent, and largely improvised ways both development and the state are comprised and experienced
- providing new entry points into longstanding discussions about developmental power and discourse
- unsettling common ideas about how and by whom states are made
- exposing the importance of unpaid labor in mediating relationships between governments and the governed
- showing how state engagement could both exacerbate and disrupt inequities
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.
An accessible and thorough introduction to Flusser’s thought, this book reveals his engagement with a wide array of disciplines, from communication studies, posthuman philosophy, media studies, and history to art and art history, migrant studies, anthropology, and film studies. The first to connect Flusser’s entire oeuvre, this volume shows how his works on media theory are just one part of a greater mosaic of writings that bring to the fore cultural and cognitive changes concerning all of us in the twenty-first century.
A theorist deeply influenced by his experiences as a privileged citizen of Prague, a Jew pursued by the Nazis, a European emigrant, a Brazilian immigrant, and a survivor keenly interested and invested in history and memory, Vilém Flusser was an outsider in a staunchly hierarchical and disciplined academic world.
The microhistory of the wine industry in colonial Moquegua, Peru, during the colonial period stretches from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, yielding a wealth of information about a broad range of fields, including early modern industry and labor, viniculture practices, the cultural symbolism of alcohol consumption, and the social history of an indigenous population. Uniting these perspectives, Vintage Moquegua draws on a trove of field research from more than 130 wineries in the Moquegua Valley.
As Prudence Rice walked the remnants of wine haciendas and interviewed Peruvians about preservation, she saw that numerous colonial structures were being razed for development, making her documentary work all the more crucial. Lying far from imperial centers in pre-Hispanic and colonial times, the area was a nearly forgotten administrative periphery on an agricultural frontier. Spain was unable to supply the Peruvian viceroyalty with sufficient wine for religious and secular purposes, leading colonists to import and plant grapevines. The viniculture that flourished produced millions of liters, most of it distilled into pisco brandy. Summarizing archaeological data and interpreting it through a variety of frameworks, Rice has created a three-hundred-year story that speaks to a lost world and its inhabitants.
Selected as one of “The Best of the Best from the University Presses: Books You Should Know About” at the 2016 ALA Annual Conference
Violence against lesbians and gay men has increasingly captured media and scholarly attention. But these reports tend to focus on one segment of the LGBT community—white, middle class men—and largely ignore that part of the community that arguably suffers a larger share of the violence—racial minorities, the poor, and women. In Violence against Queer People, sociologist Doug Meyer offers the first investigation of anti-queer violence that focuses on the role played by race, class, and gender.
Drawing on interviews with forty-seven victims of violence, Meyer shows that LGBT people encounter significantly different forms of violence—and perceive that violence quite differently—based on their race, class, and gender. His research highlights the extent to which other forms of discrimination—including racism and sexism—shape LGBT people’s experience of abuse. He reports, for instance, that lesbian and transgender women often described violent incidents in which a sexual or a misogynistic component was introduced, and that LGBT people of color sometimes weren’t sure if anti-queer violence was based solely on their sexuality or whether racism or sexism had also played a role. Meyer observes that given the many differences in how anti-queer violence is experienced, the present media focus on white, middle-class victims greatly oversimplifies and distorts the nature of anti-queer violence. In fact, attempts to reduce anti-queer violence that ignore race, class, and gender run the risk of helping only the most privileged gay subjects.
Many feel that the struggle for gay rights has largely been accomplished and the tide of history has swung in favor of LGBT equality. Violence against Queer People, on the contrary, argues that the lives of many LGBT people—particularly the most vulnerable—have improved very little, if at all, over the past thirty years.
A human rights lawyer travels to hot zones around the globe, before and after the September 11 attacks, to document abuses committed by warlords, terrorist groups, and government counterterrorism forces. Whether reporting on al Qaeda safe houses, the mechanics of the Pentagon’s smartest bombs, his interviews with politicians and ordinary civilians, or his own brush with death outside Kabul, John Sifton wants to help us understand violence—what it is, and how we think and speak about it.
For the human rights community, the global war on terror brought unprecedented challenges. Of special concern were the secret detention centers operated by the CIA as it expanded into a paramilitary force, and the harsh treatment of prisoners throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. In drafting legal memoranda that made domestic prosecution for these crimes impossible, Sifton argues, the United States possessed not only the detainees but the law itself. Sifton recounts his efforts to locate secret prisons and reflects on the historical development of sanctioned military or police violence—from hand-to-hand combat to the use of drones—and the likelihood that technology will soon enable completely automated killing.
Sifton is equally concerned to examine what people have meant by nonviolent social change, and he asks whether pure nonviolence is ever possible. To invoke rights is to invoke the force to uphold them, he reminds us. Ultimately, advocates for human rights can only shame the world into better behavior, and their work may involve advocating the very violence they deplore.
In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens. Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention provides a multidisciplinary approachto the analysis and resolution of violent conflicts. In particular, the book discusses ecologies of violence, and micro-macro linkages at the local, national, and international levels as well as intervention and prevention processes critical to constructive conflict transformation.
The causes of violence are complex and demand a deep multidimensional analysis if we are to fully understand its driving forces. Yet in the aftermath of such destruction there is hope in the resiliency, knowledge, and creativity of communities, organizations, leaders, and international agencies to transform the conditions that lead to such violence.
In a world desperate to comprehend and address what appears to be an ever-enlarging explosion of violence, this book provides important insights into crucial contemporary issues, with violence providing the lens. Violence: Analysis, Intervention, and Prevention provides a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis and resolution of violent conflicts. In particular, the book discusses ecologies of violence, and micro-macro linkages at the local, national, and international levels as well as intervention and prevention processes critical to constructive conflict transformation.
The causes of violence are complex and demand a deep multidimensional analysis if we are to fully understand its driving forces. Yet in the aftermath of such destruction there is hope in the resiliency, knowledge, and creativity of communities, organizations, leaders, and international agencies to transform the conditions that lead to such violence.
Between 1993 and 2003, more than 370 girls and women were murdered and their often-mutilated bodies dumped outside Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, Mexico. The murders have continued at a rate of approximately thirty per year, yet law enforcement officials have made no breakthroughs in finding the perpetrator(s). Drawing on in-depth surveys, workshops, and interviews of Juárez women and border activists, Violence and Activism at the Border provides crucial links between these disturbing crimes and a broader history of violence against women in Mexico. In addition, the ways in which local feminist activists used the Juárez murders to create international publicity and expose police impunity provides a unique case study of social movements in the borderlands, especially as statistics reveal that the rates of femicide in Juárez are actually similar to other regions of Mexico.
Also examining how non-governmental organizations have responded in the face of Mexican law enforcement's "normalization" of domestic violence, Staudt's study is a landmark development in the realm of global human rights.
The assumption that violence and its threat buttressed elite social control is now challenged from various perspectives. This volume incorporates new models of the relationship between violence and social inequalities into the archaeology of social complexity, building more complicated and nuanced understandings of how different modes of social violence can militate different types of social constitution. Contributions from a variety of methodological angles—such as the bioarchaeology of health and trauma and radiogenic isotope studies and the aesthetics of violence—use a comparative perspective, drawing on data from the Southwestern US, Bronze Age China, early dynastic Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, Roman Britain, and the Andes.
Violence and Inequality offers an original and deep history of violence and inequality. Understanding the long-term intersection of violence and inequality and how they support or erode one another is of intrinsic importance, making this work significant to the study of archaeology, economic history, and collective action.
The essays examine topics such as the socioeconomic crisis in Mexico in the 1980s; continuities between plantation slavery, colonization, and the emergence of independent states as war machines in Africa; the culture of a Palestinian suicide bomber; the architecture of mass rioting and rape in Indonesia; the experience of unredeemed suffering in Herman Melville’s “Shiloh;” and the aggression of Aborigines in Australia.
Contributors. Tim Blackmore, John Borneman, Gillian Cowlishaw, Richard Falk, Ken Graves, Ghassan Hage, Abidin Kusno, Eva Lipman, Claudio Lomnitz, Patchen Markell, Achille Mbembe, Laura Nader, Steven Sampson, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Candace Vogler, Michael Warner, Margaret Werry, Richard Ashby Wilson
Violence and the Dream People is an account of a little-known struggle by the Malayan government and the communist guerrillas, during the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency, to win the allegiance of the Orang Asli, the indigenous people of the peninsular Malaya. The author argues that the use of force by both sides in their attempts to woo or coerce the jungle dwellers to support one side or the other in the conflict, caused tensions among the Orang Asli that resulted in counter violence against the interlopers and internecine killings in the tribal groups.
This study challenges the depiction of the Orang Asli as naïve innocents, unwittingly manipulated by outsiders for their own purposes. Heavily outnumbered, they looked to their own resources to survive, in the face of relocation, conscription, random bombings, and haphazard killing. Leary argues that they were shrewd enough to recognize the winning side and backed their judgment with force where necessary.
Violence and the Dream People is an important study of a much neglected facet of the Malayan Emergency and of the history of the indigenous peoples of the Malay Peninsula.
Many violent acts attempted to reestablish and reinforce a moral, social, and political order among Africans. However, what constituted a moral order changed as white governance became more intrusive, land became scarcer, and people reconstructed their notions of “traditional” culture. State policies became obstacles around which Africans had to navigate by invoking the idea of tradition, using the state’s court system, alleging the use of witchcraft, or engaging in violent threats and acts. Redding’s use of multiple court cases and documents to discuss several types of violence provides a richer context for the scholarly conversation about the legitimation of violence in traditions, family life, and political protest.
This book provides a focused, nuanced, and systematic discussion of violence and its presence and influence across pedagogical and administrative sites. Violence in the Work of Composition offers a close look at the nature of violence as it emerges in the work of composition; provides strategies for identifying violence, especially covert violence, addressing its impact and preventing its eruption across many sites; and invites readers to reflect on both the presence of violence and the hope for its cessation. Contributors consider, first, how compositionists can recognize the ways their work inadvertently enacts and/or perpetuates violence and, second, how they can intervene and mitigate that violence.
Rich with the voices of myriad stakeholders, Violence in the Work of Composition initiates an essential conversation about violence and literacy education at a time when violence in its many forms continues to shape our culture, communities, and educational systems.
Contributors: Kerry Banazek, Katherine Bridgman, Eric Camarillo, Elizabeth Chilbert Powers, Joshua Daniel, Lisa Dooley, Allison Hargreaves, Jamila Kareem, Lynn C. Lewis, Trevor Meyer, Cathryn Molloy, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ellen Skirvin, Krista Speicher Sarraf, Thomas Sura, James Zimmerman
American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.
On the distant margins of empire, Great Basin Indians increasingly found themselves engulfed in the chaotic storms of European expansion and responded in ways that refashioned themselves and those around them. Focusing on Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone Indians, Blackhawk illuminates this history through a lens of violence, excavating the myriad impacts of colonial expansion. Brutal networks of trade and slavery forged the Spanish borderlands, and the use of violence became for many Indians a necessary survival strategy, particularly after Mexican Independence when many became raiders and slave traffickers. Throughout such violent processes, these Native communities struggled to adapt to their changing environments, sometimes scoring remarkable political ends while suffering immense reprisals.
Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples, written from the vantage point of an Indian scholar whose own family history is intimately bound up in its enduring legacies.
This collection represents first-rate examples of gender, critical race, genre, and material culture studies. Topics ranging from epistemological and authorial rebellions marking Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition to the twentieth-century labors of writers, such as Francisco Goldman and Helena María Viramontes, who work to make visible the complexities of “North” and “South” with respect to subordinated Latino/a bodies. William Faulkner is revisited in an essay on the internalization of “race” in Light in August. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night are analyzed in a framework of homopolitical desire. Genre and regional studies combine in an energetic essay resituating Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with respect to “Northern” fiction.
Contributors. Houston A. Baker Jr., Jeannine DeLombard, Laura Doyle, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Andrea Levine, Dana D. Nelson, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Bryan Wagner
Violent acts over the past fifteen years have profoundly altered civil rituals, cultural identity, and the meaning of place in Tel Aviv. Three events in particular have shed light on the global rule of urban space in the struggle for territory, resources, and power: the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 in the city council square; the suicidal bombing at the Dolphinarium Discothèque along the shoreline in 2001; and bombings in the Neve Shaanan neighborhood in 2003.
Tali Hatuka uses an interdisciplinary framework of urban theory and sociopolitical theory to shed light on the discourse regarding violent events to include an analysis of the physical space where these events take place. She exposes the complex relationships among local groups, the state, and the city, challenging the national discourse by offering a fresh interpretation of contesting forces and their effect on the urban environment.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this book is its critical assessment of the current Israeli reality, which is affected by violent events that continually alter the everyday life of its citizens. Although these events have been widely publicized by the media, there is scant literature focusing on their impact on the urban spaces where people live and meet. In addition, Hatuka shows how sociopolitical events become crucial defining moments in contemporary lived experience, allowing us to examine universal questions about the way democracy, ideology, and memory are manifested in the city.
Passed in 2013, Russia’s “gay propaganda” law cemented the nation’s anti-LGBTQ sentiment into legal rhetoric that has since emboldened countless instances of violence against queer people. Based on an analysis of over three hundred criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of the law, Violent Affections shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials, thus uncovering the techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Utilizing an original methodology of studying legal memes, this book argues that individual affective states are directly connected to the political and legislative violence aimed at policing queer lives. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature–queer theory and affect theory–in order to conceptualize what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. The book traces how affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus, eventually enabling the turn from a memetic response to violent action.
In addition to challenging the official narratives of independence and Partition, these narratives challenge our contemporary understanding of gender and ethnicity in history and politics. Violent Belongings argues that both male and female bodies, and heterosexual coupledom, became symbols of the nation in public life. In the newly independent Indian nation both men and women were transformed into ideal citizens or troubling bodies, immigrants or refugees, depending on whether they were ethnically Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Sikh. The divisions set in motion during Partition continue into our own time and account for ethnic violence in South Asia.
as "the most far-reaching, provocative, and profound analysis of violent conduct" available in criminological literature. In Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited, Athens returns to his pioneering work and finds that his premises are just as relevant and original as in their earlier version--and that they have been curiously, and to society's detriment, overlooked.
Rather than finding the causes of criminal behavior in external forces
or personality disorders, as conventional wisdom often does, Athens renews his fundamental argument that a violent situation comes into being when defined by an individual as a situation that calls for violence--that an actor responds to the circumstance as he or she defines it. Based on the author's many firsthand interviews with offenders and on his personal experience, Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited augments Athens’s call to reexamine the source and locus of violent criminal behavior.
Roger Lane uses the statistics on violent death in Philadelphia from 1839 to 1901 to study the behavior of the living. His extensive research into murder, suicide, and accident rates in Philadelphia provides an excellent factual foundation for his theories. A computerized study of every homicide indictment during the sixty-two years covered is the source of the most detailed information. Analysis of suicide and accident statistics reveals differences in behavior patterns between the sexes, the races, young and old, professional and laborer, native and immigrant, and how these patterns changed overtime.
Using both these group differences and the changing overall incidence of the three forms of death, Lane synthesizes a comprehensive theory of the influences of industrial urbanization on social behavior. He believes that the demands of the rising industrial system, as transmitted through factory, school, and bureaucracy, combined to socialize city dwellers in new ways, to raise the rate of suicide, and to lower rates of simple accident and murder. Finally, Lane suggests a relation between these developments and the violent disorder in the postindustrial city, which has lost the older mechanisms of socialization without finding any effective new ones. Original and probing, Lane's combination of statistics and theory makes this a significant new work in social, urban, and medical history.
The contributors—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians—explore how individuals and institutions in Latin American democracies, from the rural regions of Colombia and the Dominican Republic to the urban centers of Brazil and Mexico, use violence to impose and contest notions of order, rights, citizenship, and justice. They describe the lived realities of citizens and reveal the historical foundations of the violence that Latin America suffers today. One contributor examines the tightly woven relationship between violent individuals and state officials in Colombia, while another contextualizes violence in Rio de Janeiro within the transnational political economy of drug trafficking. By advancing the discussion of democratic Latin American regimes beyond the usual binary of success and failure, this collection suggests more sophisticated ways of understanding the challenges posed by violence, and of developing new frameworks for guaranteeing human rights in Latin America.
Contributors: Enrique Desmond Arias, Javier Auyero, Lilian Bobea, Diane E. Davis, Robert Gay, Daniel M. Goldstein, Mary Roldán, Todd Landman, Ruth Stanley, María Clemencia Ramírez
Violent extremism has galvanized public fear and attention. Driven by their concerns, the public has pushed for law enforcement and mental health systems to prevent attacks rather than just respond to them after they occur. The prevention process requires guidance for practitioners and policymakers on how best to identify people who may be at risk, to understand and assess the nature and function of the harm they may cause, and to manage them to mitigate or prevent harm. Violent Extremism provides such guidance.
Over ten chapters, prepared by leading experts, this handbook illuminates the nature of violent extremism and the evolution of prevention-driven practice. Authors draw on the literature and their experience to explain which factors might increase (risk factors) or decrease (protective factors) risk, how those factors might operate, and how practitioners can prepare risk formulations and scenario plans that inform risk management strategies to prevent violent extremist harm.
Each chapter is crafted to support thoughtful, evidence-based practice that is transparent, accountable, and ultimately defensible. Written for an international audience, the volume will be of interest to law enforcement and mental health professionals, criminal justice and security personnel, as well as criminologists, policymakers, and researchers.
This book offers an explosive look at violence in America—why it is so prevalent, and what and who are responsible. David Courtwright takes the long view of his subject, developing the historical pattern of violence and disorder in this country. Where there is violent and disorderly behavior, he shows, there are plenty of men, largely young and single. What began in the mining camp and bunkhouse has simply continued in the urban world of today, where many young, armed, intoxicated, honor-conscious bachelors have reverted to frontier conditions.
Violent Land combines social science with an engrossing narrative that spans and reinterprets the history of violence and social disorder in America. Courtwright focuses on the origins, consequences, and eventual decline of frontier brutality. Though these rough days have passed, he points out that the frontier experience still looms large in our national self-image—and continues to influence the extent and type of violence in America as well as our collective response to it.
Broadly interdisciplinary, looking at the interplay of biological, social, and historical forces behind the dark side of American life, this book offers a disturbing diagnosis of violence in our society.
An exploration of instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.
In Violent Sensations, Scott Spector explores how the protagonists of these stories—people at society’s margins—were given new identities defined by the groundbreaking sciences of psychiatry, sexology, and criminology, and how this expert knowledge was then transmitted to an eager public by journalists covering court cases and police investigations. The book analyzes these sexual and criminal subjects on three levels: first, the expertise of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and scholars; second, the sensationalism of newspaper scandal and pulp fiction; and, third, the subjective ways that the figures themselves came to understand who they were. Throughout, Spector answers important questions about how fantasies of extreme depravity and bestiality figure into the central European self-image of cities as centers of progressive civilization, as well as the ways in which the sciences of social control emerged alongside the burgeoning emancipation of women and homosexuals.
Delves deep into the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive
Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, ViralCultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic’s past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS.
Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises. Cifor analyzes the various power structures through which these archives are mediated, demonstrating how ideology shapes the nature of archival material and how it is accessed and used. Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, this book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age.
While many books, popular films, and major exhibitions have contributed to a necessary awareness of HIV and AIDS activism, Viral Cultures provides a crucial missing link by highlighting the powerful role of archives in making those cultural moments possible.
In Viral Economies, Natalie Porter draws from long-term research on bird flu in Vietnam to chart the pathways of scientists, NGO workers, state veterinarians, and poultry farmers as they define and address pandemic risks. Porter argues that as global health programs expand their purview to include life and livestock, they weigh the interests of public health against those of commercial agriculture, rural tradition, and scientific innovation. Porter challenges human-centered analyses of pandemics and shows how dynamic and often dangerous human-animal relations take on global significance as poultry and their pathogens travel through global livestock economies and transnational health networks. Viral Economies urges readers to think critically about the ideas, relationships, and practices that produce our everyday commodities, and that shape how we determine the value of life—both human and nonhuman.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted some lives more than others. While more than half the world’s population experienced physical restrictions in the wake of the virus, Viral Loads reveals how the international response placed disparate burdens on exploited communities across the globe. Contributors from six continents situate the pandemic within a highly connected yet exceedingly unequal world marked by fragmented communities, austere economies, and unstable governments. Ambitious in its scope, Viral Loads insists that medical anthropology must be part of any future efforts to build a new post-pandemic world.
"Long overdue . . . Hausman's focus on cultural representation rather than real mothers and practices is savvy and strategic in removing the debates from personal stories and investments to the ways in which this volatile topic becomes embedded in cultural values, language, and imagery."
---Alison Bartlett, University of Western Australia
Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS addresses modern fears of dangerous motherhood, focusing on preoccupations with mothers' bodies as vectors for infection and contamination. The book examines how the maternal body is perceived as a conduit for disease, drugs, or contaminants that end up in the body of an innocent---and pure---infant. Paying special attention to HIV transmission through breastfeeding, Viral Mothers examines ideologies of maternal embodiment that influence public health protocols and mothers' behaviors worldwide.
The medical community has known since the late 1980s that HIV is passed through breast milk from infected mothers to their babies. In highly industrialized countries, HIV-positive mothers are advised not to breastfeed their babies, but in poor countries breastfeeding has continued to be a predominant and medically recommended practice as a partial solution to problems of infant health and welfare in resource-poor contexts. Now, in areas of high rates of HIV infection and high infant mortality, decisions concerning infant feeding are, literally, about life and death. Public health debates concerning breastfeeding and HIV transmission must consider both the mortality associated with not breastfeeding and the possibility of HIV infection from mother to child.
The transmission of HIV through breastfeeding is a medical and public health issue that touches on and augments contemporary concerns about bodies, germs, and the environment. These concerns affect all people around the globe as we struggle with the meanings of health, risk, and embodiment in modernity. Viral Mothers addresses and explores the dense cultural meanings evoked by mothers' postnatal transmission of HIV. In so doing, the book pays special attention to fears of contamination and contagion that emerge as consequences of a medicalizing modernity. The main themes of the book---risk, purity, denial, and choice---define the terms through which the viral mother is constituted in discourse and enacted publicly as a set of identifiable, culturally legible, concerns.
Bernice L. Hausman is Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She is also the author of Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture.
Illustration: ©iStockphoto.com/timeless
During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the prevailing ideal of feminine virtue was radically transformed: the pure but fertile heroines of Greek and Roman romance were replaced by a Christian heroine who ardently refused the marriage bed. How this new concept and figure of purity is connected with--indeed, how it abetted--social and religious change is the subject of Kate Cooper's lively book.
The Romans saw marital concord as a symbol of social unity--one that was important to maintaining the vigor and political harmony of the empire itself. This is nowhere more clear than in the ancient novel, where the mutual desire of hero and heroine is directed toward marriage and social renewal. But early Christian romance subverted the main outline of the story: now the heroine abandons her marriage partner for an otherworldly union with a Christian holy man. Cooper traces the reception of this new ascetic literature across the Roman world. How did the ruling classes respond to the Christian claim to moral superiority, represented by the new ideal of sexual purity? How did women themselves react to the challenge to their traditional role as matrons and matriarchs? In addressing these questions, Cooper gives us a vivid picture of dramatically changing ideas about sexuality, family, and morality--a cultural revolution with far-reaching implications for religion and politics, women and men.
The Virgin and the Bride offers a new look at central aspects of the Christianization of the Roman world, and an engaging discussion of the rhetoric of gender and the social meaning of idealized womanhood.
Ergun’s comparative framework reveals translation’s potential to facilitate cross-border flows of feminist theories, empower feminist interventions, connect feminist activists across differences and divides, and forge transnational feminist solidarities. As she considers hopeful and woeful pictures of border crossings, Ergun invites readers to revise their views of translation’s role in transnational feminism and examine their own potential as ethically and politically responsible agents willing to search for new meanings.
Sophisticated and compelling, Virgin Crossing Borders reveals translation’s vital role in exchanges of feminist theories, stories, and knowledge.
For more than half a century, Virginia E. Walker Broughton (1856–1934) worked tirelessly to uplift black communities, and especially black women, throughout Tennessee. Born into an elite African American family in Nashville, she began her professional career as a teacher and later became one of the most prominent domestic missionaries in the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., as well as an accomplished speaker and writer. This annotated collection is the first scholarly work devoted entirely to Broughton’s life and writings.
The book for which Broughton is best known, Twenty Year’s [sic] Experience of a Missionary, was an autobiography first published in 1907 and reprinted in 1988 as part of a scholarly edition of spiritual narratives by black women. Recently, in the archives of Fisk University, Broughton’s alma mater, Tomeiko Ashford Carter discovered an earlier autobiographical work, A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labors of Mrs. V. W. Broughton, Bible Band Missionary, for Middle and West Tennessee, which was distributed at the famous Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895. While both autobiographies portray Broughton as an important religious figure for whom missionary work became a saving grace, Life and Labors is more revealing of key facts about Broughton and her family, and it situates them more clearly among the nation’s black elite. This volume not only brings Life and Labors back into print but also collects various other pieces Broughton produced during her long career.
Among those other writings is a 1904 booklet titled Woman’s Work: As Gleaned from the Women of the Bible, and the Bible Women of Modern Times, which recognizes the prominence of the female in Christian theology and shows how Broughton anticipated the work of present-day feminist and womanist theologians. Several “training course” articles that Broughton wrote for a National Baptist newspaper, covering such topics as the Christian deportment of women and the need for black spiritual literature, are also gathered here, as are a program she devised for systematic Bible study and a brief article, published just a few years before her death, in which she describes some of her missionary field work. Complementing these primary materials are an extensive critical introduction and notes by Carter, a Walker-Broughton family tree, and a chronology of Broughton’s life.
As this collection makes clear, Virginia Broughton was strongly committed to making the work of black religious women an ongoing intellectual enterprise. In these pages, she emerges as both a dedicated missionary and a formidable religious scholar.
From Virginia Woolf's 1937 appearance on the cover of Time magazine to her current roles in theater, film, and television, Silver traces the often contradictory representations and the responses they provoke, highlighting the recurring motifs that associate Virginia Woolf with fear. By looking more closely at who is afraid and the contexts in which she is perceived to be frightening, Silver illustrates how Virginia Woolf has become the site of conflicts about cultural boundaries and legitimacy that continue to rage today.
An absorbing account of the descendants of the ancient Aztecs and of the survival of their culture into the twentieth century in the Valley of Mexico is presented in this fascinating volume. Focusing on San Francisco Tecospa—a village of some eight hundred Indians who still spoke Nahuatl, whose lives were dominated by supernaturalism, and who observed with only slight modification much of their Aztec heritage—this story bears out the anthropological principle that innovations are most likely to be accepted when they are useful, communicable, and compatible with established tradition.
Nowhere is the Indian genius for combining the old and the new better exemplified than in the story of how the Virgin of Guadalupe came to fulfill the role formerly played by the pagan goddess Tonantzin and of how Christian saints replaced the Aztec gods. At the time of this study, the Tecospans still called the Catholic Virgin Tonantzin, but their concept of the mother goddess had changed profoundly since Aztec times.
Tonantzin the Pagan, a hideous goddess with claws on her hands and feet and with snakes entwining her face, wore a necklace of hearts, hands, and skulls to represent her insatiable appetite for corpses. Tonantzin the Catholic—also called Guadalupe—is a beautiful and benevolent mother deity who repeatedly stays God’s anger against her Mexican children and answers the prayers of the poorest Indian, with no thought of return.
In Tecospa the road to social recognition lay in the performance of religious works, and the neglect of ritual obligation subjected both the individual and the community to the anger of supernaturals who punished with illness or other misfortune. Religion was inextricably a part of every phase of life, and it is the whole life of the Aztecan that is recorded here: fiesta, clothing, food, agricultural practices, courtship, marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, death, witchcraft and its cures, medical practices and attitudes, houses and home life, ethics, and the hot-cold complex that classifies everything in the Tecospan universe from God to Bromo-Seltzer.
With a marked simplicity of style and language William Madsen has produced a profoundly significant anthropological study that is delightful reading from the first sentence to the last. The drawings, the work of a ten-year-old Tecospan lad, are remarkable for their penetrating insight into the culture.
The sweep of the volume's coverage is impressive, ranging across historical periods and academic disciplines, as contributors consider the place of the body in gender fantasy and the consequences of gender fantasy for real people and real bodies. The essays investigate figures and topics including Amelia Earhart, soap-opera chat groups, Elizabeth I, mesmerism, lesbianism in the early modern period, cybergames, women in the federalist period, the transgendered body, and performance art. Also examined are the status of embodiment, the origins of gender, gender politics, the pains of subjectivity, the uses of utopian fantasy, technological advances and information technology, the experience of gendered communities, and the role of gender in global politics.
Contributors include Harriette Andreadis, Seyla Benhabib, Charlotte Canning, Bernice Hausman, Janel Mueller, Mary Ann O'Farrell, Kay Schaffer, Sidonie Smith, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Helen F. Thompson, Lynne Vallone, and Robyn Warhol. The book will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars, critics, and students with interests in gender, identity, and cyberculture.
Mary Ann O'Farrell is Associate Professor of English, Texas A & M University. Lynne Vallone is Associate Professor of English, Texas A & M University.
As Mallapragada shows, ideologies around family and citizenship shift to fit the transnational contexts of the online world and immigration. At the same time, the tactical use of the home page to make gender, racial, and class struggles visible and create new modes for belonging implicates the web within complex political and cultural terrain. On e-commerce, community, and activist sites, the recasting of home and homeland online points to intrusion by public agents such as the state, the law, and immigration systems in the domestic, the private, and the familial. Mallapragada reveals that the home page may mobilize to reproduce conservative narratives of Indian immigrants' familial and citizenship cultures, but the reach of a website extends beyond the textual and discursive to encompass the institutions shaping it, as the web unmakes and remakes ideas of "India" and "America."
As almost (or, truly, virtually) every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of “watching a film” is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media competing for an audience, what will happen to cinema—and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, D. N. Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of moviemaking and viewing in the twenty-first century.
Here Rodowick proposes and examines three different critical responses to the disappearance of film in relation to other time-based media, and to the study of contemporary visual culture. Film, he suggests, occupies a special place in the genealogy of the arts of the virtual: while film disappears, cinema persists—at least in the narrative forms imagined by Hollywood since 1915. Rodowick also observes that most so-called “new media” are fashioned upon a cinematic metaphor. His book helps us see how digital technologies are serving, like television and video before them, to perpetuate the cinematic as the mature audiovisual culture of the twentieth century—and, at the same time, how they are preparing the emergence of a new audiovisual culture whose broad outlines we are only just beginning to distinguish.
Short introductions to each story provide a sketch of the country's literary history, revealing the interaction between individual writers and their sociopolitical situations. Many of the stories are ethnographic and provide snapshots of cultures at a specific historical moment. The stories also reflect gender balance, diversity of style, and quality of literary expression. Exploring everything from the realities of being a middle-aged woman in Burma in the witty drama "An Umbrella" to the difficult choice between appeasing a troubled Vietnamese community or tending to an ailing father in "Tu Ben the Actor," this collection is sure to appeal to a variety of readers the world over.
This anthology will be useful in courses in comparative translation and culture, postcolonial studies, political science, Asian history, and gender studies. It is also appropriate for a literary reading public interested in comparative world literature.
Teri Shaffer Yamada is Associate Professor, California State University, Long Beach.
Another significant focus of the collection is the U.S. military's exploitation of ethnographic research, particularly through its controversial Human Terrain Systems (HTS) Program, which embeds anthropologists as cultural experts in military units. Several pieces address the ethical dilemmas that HTS and other counterinsurgency projects pose for anthropologists. Other essays reveal the relatively small scale of those programs in relation to the military's broader use of, and ambitions for, social scientific data.
Contributors. Robertson Allen, Brian Ferguson, Sverker Finnström, Roberto J. González, David H. Price, Antonius Robben, Victoria Sanford, Jeffrey Sluka, Koen Stroeken, Matthew Sumera, Neil L. Whitehead
A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism
Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts shows that more dramatic violence by women—including infanticide, the scalping of captors during the Indian Wars, and even witchcraft accusations—was not necessarily intended to challenge the structures of authority but often sprung from women's desire to protect property, safety, and standing for themselves and their families. The situations in which women chose to flout powerful social conventions and resort to overt violence expose the underlying, often unspoken, priorities and gendered expectations that shaped this society.
Examining the role of eroticism in citizenship and why only normalizing
constructions of homosexuality enable inclusion, Clarke reconsiders the work of Habermas and Foucault in relation to contemporary visibility politics, Kant’s moral and political theory, Marx’s analysis of value, and the sexualized dynamics of the Victorian cultural public sphere. The juxtaposition of Habermas with Foucault reveals the surprising value of reading the former in the context of queer politics and the usefulness of the theory of the public sphere for understanding contemporary identity politics and the visibility politics of the 1990s. Examining how a host of nonsexual factors impinge historically upon the constitution of sexual identities and practices, Clarke negotiates the relation between questions of publicity and categories of value. Discussions of television sitcoms (such as Ellen), marketing techniques, authenticity, and literary culture add to this daring analysis of visibility politics.
As a critique of the claim that equal representation of gays and lesbians necessarily constitutes progress, this significant intervention into social theory will find enthusiastic readers in the fields of Victorian, cultural, literary, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as other fields engaged with categories of identity.
"This book is an interestingly complex ethnography that approaches the self-critical dialectical ethnography called for two decades ago....It is a welcome contribution to postmodernist theory and to the ethnography of the Visayas."—Ronald Provencher, Journal of Asian Studies
A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest
Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation.
Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility.
2023 Outstanding Book Award, National Association for Ethnic Studies
A thorough examination of the political and economic exploitation of Latinx subjects, migrants, and workers through the lens of Latinx literature, photography, and film.
Globalization in the United States can seem paradoxical: free trade coincides with fortification of the southern border, while immigration is reimagined as a national-security threat. US politics turn aggressively against Latinx migrants and subjects even as post-NAFTA markets become thoroughly reliant on migrant and racialized workers. But in fact, there is no incongruity here. Rather, anti-immigrant politics reflect a strategy whereby capital uses specialized forms of violence to create a reserve army of the living, laboring dead.
Visible Borders, Invisible Economies turns to Latinx literature, photography, and films that render this unseen scheme shockingly vivid. Works such as Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer crystallize the experience of Latinx subjects and migrants subjugated to social death, their political existence erased by disenfranchisement and racist violence while their bodies still toil in behalf of corporate profits. In Kristy L. Ulibarri’s telling, art clarifies what power obscures: the national-security state performs anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics that substitute cathartic nationalism for protections from the free market while ensuring maximal corporate profits through the manufacture of disposable migrant labor.
Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories of Muslim women who lived in Calcutta and Dhaka in the first half of the twentieth century, Sarkar traces Muslim women as they surface and disappear in colonial, Hindu nationalist, and liberal Muslim writings, as well as in the memories of Muslim women themselves. The oral accounts provide both a rich source of information about the social fabric of urban Bengal during the final years of colonial rule and a glimpse of the kind of negotiations with stereotypes that even relatively privileged, middle-class Muslim women are still frequently obliged to make in India today. Sarkar concludes with some reflections on the complex links between past constructions of Muslim women, current representations, and the violence against them in contemporary India.
In this collection, fifteen leading historians of women and American history explore women's political action from 1830 to the present. Together, their contributions illustrate the tremendous scope and racial, ethnic, and class diversity of women's public activism while also clarifying various conceptual issues. Essays include an analysis of ideologies and strategies; suffrage militance in 1870s; ideas for a feminist approach to public life; labor feminism in the urban South; women's activism in Tampa, Florida; black women and economic nationalism; black women's clubs; the YMCA's place in the community; the role of Southern churchwomen in racial reform and transformation; and other topics.
"Establishes important links between citizenship, race, and gender following the Reconstruction amendments and the Dawes Act of 1887."--Sharon Hartmann Strom, American Historical Review
The essays in Vision/Re-Vision analyze in detail ten popular and important films adapted from contemporary American fiction by women, addressing the ways in which the writers' latent or overt feminist messages are reinterpreted by the filmmakers who bring them to the screen, demonstrating that there is much to praise as well as much to fault in the adaptations and that the process of adaptation itself is instructive rather than destructive, since it enriches understanding about both media.
Janes finds the beginnings of queer martyrdom in the nineteenth-century Church of England and the controversies over Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sexuality. He then considers how liturgical expression of queer desire in the Victorian Eucharist provided inspiration for artists looking to communicate their own feelings of sexual deviance. After looking at Victorian monasteries as queer families, he analyzes how the Biblical story of David and Jonathan could be used to create forms of same-sex partnerships. Finally, he delves into how artists and writers employed ecclesiastical material culture to further queer self-expression, concluding with studies of Oscar Wilde and Derek Jarman that illustrate both the limitations and ongoing significance of Christianity as an inspiration for expressions of homoerotic desire.
Providing historical context to help us reevaluate the current furor over homosexuality in the Church, this fascinating book brings to light the myriad ways that modern churches and openly gay men and women can learn from the wealth of each other’s cultural and spiritual experience.
In Visions of Sodom, H. G. Cocks examines the many different ways in which the story of Sodom’s destruction provided a template for understanding homoerotic desire and behaviour in Britain between the Reformation and the nineteenth century. Sodom was not only a marker of sexual sins, but also the epitome of false—usually Catholic—religion, an exemplar of the iniquitous city, a foreshadowing of the world’s fiery end, an epitome of divine and earthly punishment, and an actual place that could be searched for and discovered. Visions of Sodom investigates each of these ways of reading Sodom’s annihilation in the three hundred years after the Reformation. The centrality of scripture to Protestant faith meant that Sodom’s demise provided a powerful origin myth of homoerotic desire and sexual excess, one that persisted across centuries, and retains an apocalyptic echo in the religious fundamentalism of our own time.
The Sheik. Pépé le Moko. Casablanca. Aladdin. Some of the most popular and frequently discussed titles in movie history are imbued with orientalism, the politically-charged way in which western artists have represented gender, race, and ethnicity in the cultures of North Africa and Asia. This is the first anthology to address and highlight orientalism in film from pre-cinema fascinations with Egyptian culture through the "Whole New World" of Aladdin. Eleven illuminating and well-illustrated essays utilize the insights of interdisciplinary cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, and genre criticism. Other films discussed includeThe Letter, Caesar and Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Indochine, and several films of France's cinéma colonial.
"Visions" has three meanings, each of which corresponds to a part of the book. In Part 1, Levine presents the ways previous sociologists have rendered accounts of their discipline, as a series of narratives—or "life stories"—that build upon each other, generation to generation, a succession of efforts to envisage a coherent past for the sake of a purposive present.
In Part 2, the heart of the book, Levine offers his own narrative, reconnecting centuries of voices into a richly textured dialogue among the varied strands of the sociological tradition: Hellenic, British, French, German, Marxian, Italian, and American. Here, in a tour de force of clarity and conciseness, he tracks the formation of the sociological imagination through a series of conversations across generations. From classic philosophy to pragmatism, Aristotle to W. I. Thomas, Levine maps the web of visionary statements—confrontations and oppositions—from which social science has grown.
At the same time, this is much more than an expert synthesis of social theory. Throughout each stage, Levine demonstrates social knowledge has grown in response to three recurring questions: How shall we live? What makes humans moral creatures? How do we understand the world? He anchors the creation of social knowledge to ethical foundations, and shows for the first time how differences in those foundations disposed the shapers of modern social science—among them, Marshall and Spencer, Comte and Durkheim, Simmel and Weber, Marx and Mosca, Dewey and Park—to proceed in vastly different ways.
In Part 3, Levine offers a vision of the contemporary scene, setting the crisis of fragmentation in social sciences against the fragmentation of experience and community. By reconstructing the history of social thought as a series of fundamentally moral engagements with common themes, he suggests new uses for sociology's intellectual resources: not only as insight about the nature of modernity, but also as a model of mutually respectful communication in an increasingly fractious world.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Contributors. Heike Bauer, Roland Betancourt, Alexis L. Boylan, Topher Campbell, João Florêncio, Kyle Frackman, Javier Fernández Galeano, Sarah Jones, Carol Leigh, Conor McGrady, Ben Miller, Derek Conrad Murray, Lynda Nead, Melina Pappademos, Ashkan Sepahvand, David Serlin, Meg Slater, Katie Sutton, Annette F. Timm, Jennifer Tucker, Jeanne Vaccaro, Sunny Xiang
Visual Cultures is the first study of the place of visuality and literacy in specific nations around the world, featuring authoritative, insightful essays on the value accorded to the visual and the verbal in Japan, Poland, China, Russia, Ireland, and Slovenia.
Focusing on the national instead of the global, distinguished art critic James Elkins offers a critique of general histories of visuality, such as those of Martin Jay or Jean Baudrillard, as well as a critique of local histories of visuality, as in Third Text and other postcolonial studies. The content is not only analytic, but also historical, tracing changes in the significance of visual and verbal literacy in each nation. Visual Cultures also explores questions of national identity and the many issues Elkins raises suggest a wealth of promising avenues for future research.
The articles, contributed by scholars in the fields of art history, cultural history, and Japanese literature, address the interactions between Japan, the West, and the rest of Asia. Costumes, architecture, tourism propaganda, pottery, and a host of other sources provide the raw materials for Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism, and the incisive essays built from these sources will change readers’ understanding of the visual culture(s) of imperialism.
Contributors. Kim Brandt, Leo Ching, Carol Ann Christ, Christine Guth, Jordan Sand, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Cherie Wendelken
Analyzing the visual syntax and display rhetoric applied in newspaper photos, national historical albums, and museum exhibitions, Noa Hazan shows that although racial thought was and still is verbally suppressed in Israel, it is vividly present in its nonverbal official and public visual sphere. The racist perspective of newspaper editors, book publishers, photographers, and museum curators were morally justified in its time by such patronizing ideals as realistic news coverage or the salvation of Jewish heritage assets. Although their perspectives played a dominant role in establishing a visual syntax of race in Israel, they were not seen as racially discriminating at the time. The racist motifs and actions are revealed here by colligating multiple cases into a coherent narrative in retrospect.
This book points to a direct influence of the anti-Semitic discourse in Europe toward Mizrahim in Israel, highlighting the shared visual stereotypes used in both Europe and the fledgling state of Israel. Engraved in their body, these cultural traits were depicted and understood as racial-biological qualities and were visually manipulated to silo Ashkenazim and Mizrahim in Israel as distinct racial types.
An eye-opening union of analysis and fieldwork, Visualizing Black Lives examines the alternative and activist Black media and the people creating it in today's Brazil.
Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists. Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems, and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions, photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance, music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original artworks.
The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and visual culture.
Contributors
T. Christopher Aplin
Emily Arthur
Marwin Begaye
Charlene Villaseñor Black
Yve Chavez
Iris Colburn
Ellen Fernandez-Sacco
Stephen Gilchrist
John Hitchcock
Michelle J. Lanteri
Jérémie McGowan
Nancy Marie Mithlo
Anne May Olli
Emily Voelker
Richard Ray Whitman
Over the past two decades secular polities across the globe have witnessed an increasing turn to religion-based political movements, such as the rise of political Islam and Hindu nationalism, which have been fueling new and alternative notions of nationhood and national ideologies. The rise of such movements has initiated widespread debates over the meaning, efficacy, and normative worth of secularism. Visualizing Secularism and Religion examines the constitutive role of religion in the formation of secular-national public spheres in the Middle East and South Asia, arguing that in order to establish secularism as the dominant national ideology of countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and India, the discourses, practices, and institutions of secular nation-building include rather than exclude religion as a presence within the public sphere. The contributors examine three fields---urban space and architecture, media, and public rituals such as parades, processions, and commemorative festivals---with a view to exploring how the relation between secularism, religion, and nationalism is displayed and performed. This approach demands a reconceptualization of secularism as an array of contextually specific practices, ideologies, subjectivities, and "performances" rather than as simply an abstract legal bundle of rights and policies.
The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.
Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press