Results by title

The American criminal justice system was in flux in 2020, a clash of possibilities for reform, retrenchment, and radical change—nowhere more so than in Massachusetts, which had just passed major criminal justice reform. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the moment with life-threatening force, ravaging people held in prisons and jails across the country. However, it did not so much create new deprivations and suffering as it exposed prisons as sites of physical, institutional, and psychological violence that do not make communities safer. At the same time, advocates for people in prisons—including many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people—seized on the pandemic’s disruptions to demand change. Detailing the first year of the pandemic inside the Massachusetts state prison system, this book argues that the history of the pandemic inside prisons exposed both the cruelties of incarceration and the power of change when it is led by directly affected people. 

Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter

Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile.  

Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. 

Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. 

Winner of the 2024 ACLA Harry Levin Prize • Honorable Mention MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize 

A bold comparative study illustrating the creative potential of translations that embrace mutuality and resist assimilation

Cannibal translators digest, recombine, transform, and trouble their source materials. Isabel C. Gómez makes the case for this model of literary production by excavating a network of translation projects in Latin America that includes canonical writers of the twentieth century, such as Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Rosario Castellanos, Clarice Lispector, José Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and Ángel Rama. Building on the avant-garde reclaiming of cannibalism as an Indigenous practice meant to honorably incorporate the other into the self, these authors took up Brazilian theories of translation in Spanish to fashion a distinctly Latin American literary exchange, one that rejected normative and Anglocentric approaches to translation and developed collaborative techniques to bring about a new understanding of world literature. 

By shedding new light on the political and aesthetic pathways of translation movements beyond the Global North, Gómez offers an alternative conception of the theoretical and ethical challenges posed by this artistic practice. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America mobilizes a capacious archive of personal letters, publishers’ records, newspapers, and new media to illuminate inventive strategies of collectivity and process, such as untranslation, transcreation, intersectional autobiographical translation, and transpeaking. The book invites readers to find fresh meaning in other translational histories and question the practices that mediate literary circulation.

Reorienting critical theory and literary criticism to consider how the present contains seeds of a future beyond capitalism

Critical theorists have long held to the axiom that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Greg Forter starts this wide-ranging study of contemporary literature by suggesting that this position is increasingly hard to maintain. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the global rise of the New Right, and the mass disruptions and despair wrought by COVID-19, the story that capital had built about itself has begun to reveal cracks in its foundations. Capitalism has not succeeded in fully flattening or homogenizing time. Developing in combined and uneven fashion, it has retained the residues of pasts that suggest other futures are possible. Forter assembles a corpus of novels that theorize this insight. He names these fictions speculative realism to highlight how they map the closures of our present while opening that present onto other, more speculative orders of time. In the face of ongoing, overlapping crises, Forter posits, these fictions locate flickering intimations of a utopian somewhen; they illuminate a present charged with precipitates of a transfigured but now imaginable future.

The institutional evolution of “corporate futurism” and its influence on our view of the role of private enterprise in society. 

While the bright capitalist future that the power elite of postwar America dreamed of hasn’t come to pass, its influence and repercussions continue to resonate. Gavin Benke shows that the cultural, intellectual, and political rise of neoliberalism was not inevitable. Instead, beginning in the early 1960s,  a group that he dubs “corporate futurists” imagined a differently shaped and community-minded version of capitalism. Most interestingly, Benke goes beyond the once-big names in the field (such as Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell) to show how deep-seated and granular the engagement with futurism was. 

Using an incredible array of futurists’ reports, conference proceedings, and internal deliberations at places like the infamous RAND Corporation, Capitalism’s Tomorrows uncovers a moment of genuine introspection about capitalism’s development and shows how it is subject to our imaginative capacity and ability to shape how these systems work.

One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023

Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt.

Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume’s themes in works that bookend each section.

Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora

A groundbreaking feminist perspective on Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) rule in Bolivia and the country’s radical transformation under Evo Morales
 

The presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–2019) has produced considerable academic scholarship, much of it focused on indigenous social movements or extractivism, and often triumphalist about the successes of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Turning a new lens on the movement, Cash, Clothes, and Construction presents the first gender-based analysis of “pluri-economy,” a central pillar of Bolivia’s program under Morales, evaluating the potential of this vision of “an economy where all economies fit” to embrace feminist critiques of capitalism and economic diversity. 

Based on more than twelve years of empirical research exploring the remarkable transformations in Bolivia since 2006, this book focuses on three sectors—finance, clothing, and construction—in which indigenous women have defied gendered expectations. Kate Maclean presents detailed case studies of women selling secondhand high street clothes from the United States in the vast, peri-urban markets of Bolivian cities; Aymaran designers of new pollera (traditional Andean dress) fashions, one of whom exhibited her collection in New York City; and the powerful and rich chola paceña, whose real estate investments have transformed the cultural maps of La Paz and El Alto. 

Cash, Clothes, and Construction offers a gendered analysis of the mission of MAS to dismantle neoliberalism and decolonize politics and economy from the perspective of the Indigenous women who have radically transformed Bolivia’s economy from the ground up.

A thorough reassessment of how domestic factors do and do not constrain the use of American military force abroad in the early twenty-first century.

More than two decades have passed since the September 11th terrorist attacks resuscitated debates about the “imperial presidency” within the United States. During that same time, the United States has fought costly and inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, pivoted to the Pacific to counter China, and pulled its gaze back to Europe and the Middle East in response to wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Moreover, new technologies and ways of funding and staffing wars have made the costs of war less visible to the public while polarization has increased and a new legal doctrine of presidential power has gained force.

Against this backdrop, Checking the Costs of War reassesses how domestic factors have both constrained and failed to constrain the use of military power across different contexts and over time. Richly empirical chapters explore the varying effects of different kinds of potential checks: legislative, public opinion, and bureaucratic. Collectively, chapters offer new insight into the prospects for war and peace today.

Chicago’s transformation into a global city began at City Hall. Dick Simpson and Betty O’Shaughnessy edit in-depth analyses of the five mayors that guided the city through this transition beginning with Harold Washington’s 1983 election: Washington, Eugene Sawyer, Richard M. Daley, Rahm Emmanuel, and Lori Lightfoot. Though the respected political science, sociologist, and journalist contributors approach their subjects from distinct perspectives, each essay addresses three essential issues: how and why each mayor won the office; whether the City Council of their time acted as a rubber stamp or independent body; and the ways the unique qualities of each mayor’s administration and accomplishments influenced their legacy.

Filled with expert analysis and valuable insights, Chicago’s Modern Mayors illuminates a time of transition and change and considers the politicians who--for better and worse--shaped the Chicago of today.

One of the most significant global events in the last forty years has been the rise of China— economically, technologically, politically, and militarily. The question on people's minds for decades has been whether China will replace the United States as a superpower in the near future. But for China, this power must be comprehensive — having strong economic and militant forces are only two pieces of the puzzle. China must also possess soft power, such as attractive ideologies, values, and culture.

China’s Challenges and International Order Transition introduces an integrated conceptual framework of “international order” categorized by three levels (power, rules, and norms) and three issue-areas (security, political, and economic). Each contributor engages one or more of these analytical dimensions to examine two questions: (1) Has China already challenged this dimension of international order? (2) How will China challenge this dimension of international order in the future?

The contested views and perspectives in this volume suggest it is too simple to assume an inevitable conflict between China and the outside world. With different strategies to challenge or reform the many dimensions of international order, China’s role is not a one-way street. It is an interactive process in which the world may change China as much as China may change the world.

The aim of the book is to broaden the debate beyond the “Thucydides Trap” perspective currently popular in the West. Rather than offering a single argument, this volume offers a platform for scholars, especially Chinese scholars vs. Western scholars, to exchange and debate their different views and perspectives on China and the potential transition of international order.

Few social issues have received more public attention and scholarly debate than the death penalty. While the abolitionist movement has made a successful stride in recent decades, a small number of countries remain committed to the death penalty and impose it with a relatively high frequency. In this regard, the People’s Republic of China no doubt leads the world in both numbers of death sentences and executions. Despite being the largest user of the death penalty, China has never conducted a national poll on citizens’ opinions toward capital punishment, while claiming “overwhelming public support” as a major justification for its retention and use.

Chinese Netizens’ Opinions on Death Sentences: An Empirical Examination uses a forum of public comments to explore and examine Chinese netizens’ opinions on the death penalty. Based on a content analysis of 38,512 comments collected from 63 cases in 2015, this study examines the diversity and rationales of netizens’ opinions, netizens’ interactions, and their evaluation of China’s criminal justice system. In addition, the book discusses China’s social, systemic, and structural problems and critically examines the rationality of netizens’ opinions based on Habermas’s communicative rationality framework. Readers will be able to contextualize Chinese netizens’ discussions and draw conclusions about commonalities and uniqueness of China’s death penalty practice.

An investigation of how the expansion of modern medicine in Turkey transformed young boys’ experiences of circumcision.

In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities.

Based on Oyman Başaran’s extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.