2018 books match the query 'Political aspects' and 167 start with c

cover of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity

Conceiving Masculinity

Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity

Liberty Walther Barnes

Temple University Press, 2014

In Conceiving Masculinity, Liberty Walther Barnes puts the world of male infertility under the microscope to examine how culturally pervasive notions of gender shape our understanding of disease, and how disease impacts our personal ideas about gender. 

 

Taking readers inside male infertility clinics, and interviewing doctors and couples dealing with male infertility, Barnes provides a rich account of the social aspects of the confusing and frustrating diagnosis of infertility. She explains why men resist a stigmatizing label like "infertile," and how men with poor fertility redefine for themselves what it means to be manly and masculine in a society that prizes male virility. Conceiving Masculinity also details how and why men embrace medical technologies and treatment for infertility.

 

Broaching a socially taboo topic, Barnes emphasizes that infertility is not just a women's issue. She shows how gender and disease are socially constructed within social institutions and by individuals. 

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cover of Conceptual Activism: Radical Sense-Making and the Struggle for Gender

Conceptual Activism

Radical Sense-Making and the Struggle for Gender

Davina Cooper

Duke University Press, 2026

The struggle over defining, naming, and using concepts is central to many political conflicts. In this original account of conceptual activism, Davina Cooper asks how new conceptual meanings are made, used, held, and experienced. Drawing on theoretical and empirical research, she analyzes the high-profile contemporary conflict in Britain over sex and gender. Here policymakers, regulatory bodies, community organizations, and academics fight to draw and redraw categories and their boundaries in a struggle that has spread across the census, speculative law reform, equality governance, and more. To understand the techniques and challenges that the advancement of new and controversial meanings faces, Conceptual Activism offers an innovative account of concepts and how meaning is reorganized in conditions of resistance, attentive to concepts’ materiality, plasticity, force, and unexpected encounters. As sex and gender meet economy, property, play, and activism, Cooper demonstrates how and why academic work should engage in conceptual activism.
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cover of Concrete Changes: Architecture, Politics, and the Design of Boston City Hall

Concrete Changes

Architecture, Politics, and the Design of Boston City Hall

Brian M. Sirman

University of Massachusetts Press, 2018

From the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century, Boston transformed from a city in freefall into a thriving metropolis, as modern glass skyscrapers sprouted up in the midst of iconic brick rowhouses. After decades of corruption and graft, a new generation of politicians swept into office, seeking to revitalize Boston through large-scale urban renewal projects. The most important of these was a new city hall, which they hoped would project a bold vision of civic participation. The massive Brutalist building that was unveiled in 1962 stands apart—emblematic of the city's rebirth through avant-garde design.

And yet Boston City Hall frequently ranks among the country's ugliest buildings. Concrete Changes seeks to answer a common question for contemporary viewers: How did this happen? In a lively narrative filled with big personalities and newspaper accounts, Brian M. Sirman argues that this structure is more than a symbol of Boston's modernization; it acted as a catalyst for political, social, and economic change.
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cover of Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation

Concrete Revolution

Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation

Christopher Sneddon

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Water may seem innocuous, but as a universal necessity, it inevitably intersects with politics when it comes to acquisition, control, and associated technologies. While we know a great deal about the socioecological costs and benefits of modern dams, we know far less about their political origins and ramifications. In Concrete Revolution, Christopher Sneddon offers a corrective: a compelling historical account of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s contributions to dam technology, Cold War politics, and the social and environmental adversity perpetuated by the US government in its pursuit of economic growth and geopolitical power.

Founded in 1902, the Bureau became enmeshed in the US State Department’s push for geopolitical power following World War II, a response to the Soviet Union’s increasing global sway. By offering technical and water resource management advice to the world’s underdeveloped regions, the Bureau found that it could not only provide them with economic assistance and the United States with investment opportunities, but also forge alliances and shore up a country’s global standing in the face of burgeoning communist influence. Drawing on a number of international case studies—from the Bureau’s early forays into overseas development and the launch of its Foreign Activities Office in 1950 to the Blue Nile investigation in Ethiopia—Concrete Revolution offers insights into this historic damming boom, with vital implications for the present. If, Sneddon argues, we can understand dams as both technical and political objects rather than instruments of impartial science, we can better participate in current debates about large dams and river basin planning.
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cover of Confessions of a Presidential Speechwriter

Confessions of a Presidential Speechwriter

Craig R. Smith

Michigan State University Press, 2014

An avid high school debater and enthusiastic student body president, Craig Smith seemed destined for a life in public service from an early age. As a sought-after speechwriter, Smith had a front-row seat at some of the most important events of the twentieth century, meeting with Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon, advising Governor Ronald Reagan, writing for President Ford, serving as a campaign manager for a major U.S. senator’s reelection campaign, and writing speeches for a contender for the Republican nomination for president. Life in the volatile world of politics wasn’t always easy, however, and as a closeted gay man, Smith struggled to reconcile his private and professional lives. In this revealing memoir, Smith sheds light on what it takes to make it as a speechwriter in a field where the only constant is change. While bouncing in and out of the academic world, Smith transitions from consultantships with George H. W. Bush and the Republican caucus of the U.S. Senate to a position with Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. When Smith returns to Washington, D.C., as president and founder of the Freedom of Expression Foundation, he becomes a leading player on First Amendment issues in the nation’s capital. Returning at long last to academia, Smith finds happiness coming out of the closet and reaping the benefits of a dedicated and highly successful career.
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cover of Conflict Graffiti: From Revolution to Gentrification

Conflict Graffiti

From Revolution to Gentrification

John Lennon

University of Chicago Press, 2021

This study examines the waves of graffiti that occur before, during, and after a conflict—important tools of political resistance that make protest visible and material.
 
Graffiti makes for messy politics. In film and television, it is often used to create a sense of danger or lawlessness. In bathroom stalls, it is the disembodied expression of gossip, lewdness, or confession. But it is also a resistive tool of protest, making visible the disparate voices and interests that come together to make a movement.

In Conflict Graffiti, John Lennon dives into the many permutations of graffiti in conflict zones—ranging from the protest graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, to the tourist-attraction murals on the Israeli Separation Wall and the street art that has rebranded Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans. Graffiti has played a crucial role in the revolutionary movements of these locales, but as the conflict subsides a new graffiti and street art scene emerges—often one that ushers in postconflict consumerism, gentrification, militarization, and anesthetized forgetting.

Graffiti has an unstable afterlife, fated to be added to, transformed, overlaid, photographed, reinterpreted, or painted over. But as Lennon concludes, when protest movements change and adapt, graffiti is also uniquely suited to shapeshift with them.
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cover of Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán: Liberals, the Second Empire, and Maya Revolutionaries, 1855–1876

Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán

Liberals, the Second Empire, and Maya Revolutionaries, 1855–1876

Douglas W. Richmond

University of Alabama Press, 2015

The Yucatán Peninsula has one of the longest, most multifaceted histories in the Americas. With the arrival of Europeans, native Maya with long and successful cultural and diplomatic traditions of their own had to grapple with outside forces attempting to impose new templates of life and politics on them.  Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán provides a rigorously researched study of the vexed and bloody period of 1855 to 1876, during which successive national governments implemented, replaced, and restored liberal policies.
 
Synthesizing an extensive and heterogeneous range of sources, Douglas W. Richmond covers three tumultuous political upheavals of this period. First, Mexico’s fledgling republic attempted to impose a liberal ideology at odds with traditional Maya culture on Yucatán; then, the French-backed regime of Emperor Maximilian began to reform Yucatán; and, finally, the republican forces of Benito Juárez restored the liberal hegemony. Many issues spurred resistance to these liberal governments. Instillation of free trade policies, the suppression of civil rights, and persecution of the Roman Catholic Church mobilized white opposition to liberal governors. The Mayas fought the seizure of their communal properties. A long-standing desire for regional autonomy united virtually all Yucatecans. Richmond advances the thought-provoking argument that Yucatán both fared better under Maximilian’s Second Empire than under the liberal republic and would have thrived more had the Second Empire not collapsed.
 
The most violent and bloody manifestation of these broad conflicts was the Caste War (Guerra de Castas), the longest sustained peasant revolt in Latin American history. Where other scholars have advocated the simplistic position that the war was a Maya uprising designed to reestablish a mythical past civilization, Richmond’s sophisticated recounting of political developments from 1855 to 1876 restores nuance and complexity to this pivotal time in Yucatecan history.
 
Richmond’s Conflict and Carnage in Yucatán is a welcome addition to scholarship about Mexico and Yucatán as well as about state consolidation, empire, and regionalism.
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cover of Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru

Conflicted Memory

Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Peru

Cynthia E. Milton

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

What happens when concepts of "truth," "memory," and "human rights" are taken up and adapted by former perpetrators of violence? Peru has moved from the 1980s–90s conflict between its armed forces and Shining Path militants into an era of open democracy, transitional justice, and truth and reconciliation commissions. Cynthia Milton reveals how Peru's military has engaged in a tactical cultural campaign—via books, films, museums—to shift public opinion, debate, and memories about the nation's violent recent past and its part in it.

Milton calls attention to fabrications of our post-truth era but goes further to deeply explore the ways members of the Peruvian military see their past, how they actively commemorate and curate it in the present, and why they do so. Her nuanced approach upends frameworks of memory studies that reduce military and ex-military to a predictable role of outright denial.
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cover of Conflicts Over Land & Water in Africa: Cameroon, Ghana, Burkina Faso, West Africa, Sudan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania

Conflicts Over Land & Water in Africa

Cameroon, Ghana, Burkina Faso, West Africa, Sudan, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania

Bill Derman

Michigan State University Press, 2007

This is an examination of the broader context for the re-emergence of land reform and resource conflicts in Africa. Efforts to change the race based systems of land ownership and land tenure in Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe have pushed land issues to the forefront of social and economic discourses in Africa. This collection examines the broader context for the re-emergence of land reform and resource conflicts.
     The case studies examine the links between identity maintenance, tenurial changes, state intervention, and forms and modes of conflict. The authors emphasize the need for a deeper understanding of local histories, cultures, and motivations if efforts to attain a more just distribution of resources are to succeed. The book contributes to a field that has been developing rapidly in the decade since the publication of Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns' collection The Lie of the Land and Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject. Those two books started a wide ranging discussion of the political reasons for failed development in Africa, as well as the environmental and natural resource dimensions of that failure.

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cover of Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

Paul Finkelman

Ohio University Press, 2011

During the long decade from 1848 to 1861 America was like a train speeding down the track, without an engineer or brakes. The new territories acquired from Mexico had vastly increased the size of the nation, but debate over their status—and more importantly the status of slavery within them—paralyzed the nation. Southerners gained access to the territories and a draconian fugitive slave law in the Compromise of 1850, but this only exacerbated sectional tensions. Virtually all northerners, even those who supported the law because they believed that it would preserve the union, despised being turned into slave catchers. In 1854, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Congress repealed the ban on slavery in the remaining unorganized territories. In 1857, in the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court held that all bans on slavery in the territories were unconstitutional. Meanwhile, northern whites, free blacks, and fugitive slaves resisted the enforcement of the 1850 fugitive slave law. In Congress members carried weapons and Representative Preston Brooks assaulted Senator Charles Sumner with a cane, nearly killing him. This was the decade of the 1850s and these were the issues Congress grappled with.

This volume of new essays examines many of these issues, helping us better understand the failure of political leadership in the decade that led to the Civil War.


Contributors
Spencer R. Crew
Paul Finkelman
Matthew Glassman
Amy S. Greenberg
Martin J. Hershock
Michael F. Holt
Brooks D. Simpson
Jenny Wahl

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cover of Conjured Bodies: Queer Racialization in Contemporary Latinidad

Conjured Bodies

Queer Racialization in Contemporary Latinidad

Laura Grappo

University of Texas Press, 2022

2022 Honorable Mention, John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association (PCA)
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book, Latinx Studies Section of Latin American Studies Association (LASA)
2024 Honorable Mention — Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards


This study argues that powerful authorities and institutions exploit the ambiguity of Latinidad in ways that obscure inequalities in the United States.

Is Latinidad a racial or an ethnic designation? Both? Neither? The increasing recognition of diversity within Latinx communities and the well-known story of shifting census designations have cast doubt on the idea that Latinidad is a race, akin to white or Black. And the mainstream media constantly cover the “browning” of the United States, as though the racial character of Latinidad were self-evident.

Many scholars have argued that the uncertainty surrounding Latinidad is emancipatory: by queering race—by upsetting assumptions about categories of human difference—Latinidad destabilizes the architecture of oppression. But Laura Grappo is less sanguine. She draws on case studies including the San Antonio Four (Latinas who were wrongfully accused of child sex abuse); the football star Aaron Hernandez’s incarceration and suicide; Lorena Bobbitt, the headline-grabbing Ecuadorian domestic-abuse survivor; and controversies over the racial identities of public Latinx figures to show how media institutions and state authorities deploy the ambiguities of Latinidad in ways that mystify the sources of Latinx political and economic disadvantage. With Latinidad always in a state of flux, it is all too easy for the powerful to conjure whatever phantoms serve their interests.

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cover of Conjuring Crisis: Racism and Civil Rights in a Southern Military City

Conjuring Crisis

Racism and Civil Rights in a Southern Military City

Baca, George

Rutgers University Press, 2010

How have civil rights transformed racial politics in America? Connecting economic and social reforms to racial and class inequality, Conjuring Crisis counters the myth of steady race progress by analyzing how the federal government and local politicians have sometimes "reformed" politics in ways that have amplified racism in the post civil-rights era.

In the 1990s at Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, North Carolina, the city's dominant political coalition of white civic and business leaders had lost control of the city council. Amid accusations of racism in the police department, two white council members joined black colleagues in support of the NAACP's demand for an investigation. George Baca's ethnographic research reveals how residents and politicians transformed an ordinary conflict into a "crisis" that raised the specter of chaos and disaster. He explores new territory by focusing on the broader intersection of militarization, urban politics, and civil rights.
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cover of Connected: Engagements with Media

Connected

Engagements with Media

Edited by George E. Marcus

University of Chicago Press, 1996

From the frontiers of cyberspace to Tibetans in exile, from computer bulletin boards to faxes, film, and videotape, the ongoing and often startling evolution of media continues to generate fresh new avenues for cultural criticism, political activism, and self-reflection. How is contemporary life affected by this stunning proliferation of information technologies? How does the Internet influence, and perhaps alter, users' experience of community and their sense of self? In what way are giant media conglomerates implicated in these far-reaching developments?

Connected, the third volume in the groundbreaking and highly acclaimed Late Editions series, confronts these provocative questions through unique experiments with the interview format. It explores both the new pathways being forged through media and the predicaments of those struggling to find their way in the twilight of the twentieth century.
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cover of Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol 2: Emerging Theoretical and Pedagogical Practice

Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol 2

Emerging Theoretical and Pedagogical Practice

Diane Kelly-Riley

University Press of Colorado, 2024

The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment.
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cover of Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol. 1: Technical and Political Contexts

Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol. 1

Technical and Political Contexts

Diane Kelly-Riley

University Press of Colorado, 2024

The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment.
[more]
cover of Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil

Constellations of Inequality

Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil

Sean T. Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Winner of the 2018 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazil Section Book Prize

In 1982, the Brazilian Air Force arrived on the Alcântara peninsula to build a state-of-the-art satellite launch facility. They displaced some 1,500 Afro-Brazilians from coastal land to inadequate inland villages, leaving many more threatened with displacement. Completed in 1990, this vast undertaking in one of Brazil’s poorest regions has provoked decades of conflict and controversy.
 
Constellations of Inequality tells this story of technological aspiration and the stark dynamics of inequality it laid bare. Sean T. Mitchell analyzes conflicts over land, ethnoracial identity, mobilization among descendants of escaped slaves, military-civilian competition in the launch program, and international intrigue. Throughout, he illuminates Brazil’s changing politics of inequality and examines how such inequality is made, reproduced, and challenged. How people conceptualize and act on the unequal conditions in which they find themselves, he shows, is as much a cultural and historical matter as a material one. Deftly broadening our understanding of race, technology, development, and political consciousness on local, national, and global levels, Constellations of Inequality paints a portrait of contemporary Brazil that will interest a broad spectrum of readers. 
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cover of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

Constituting Americans

Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

Priscilla Wald

Duke University Press, 1995

Ever since the founders drafted "We the People," "we" have been at pains to work out the contradictions in their formulation, to fix in words precisely what it means to be American. Constituting Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to this project; in doing so, it revises the traditional narrative of U.S. literary history, restoring an essential chapter to the story of an emerging American cultural identity. In diverse ways, very different writers—including Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Wilson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Gertrude Stein—participated in the construction and dissemination of an American identity, but none was entirely at ease in the culture they all helped to define. Evident in their work is a haunting sense of their telling someone else’s story, a discomfort that Priscilla Wald reads in the context of legal and political debates about citizenship and personhood that marked the emergence of the United States as a nation and a world power.

From early-nineteenth-century Supreme Court cases to turn-of-the-century Jim Crow and immigration legislation, from the political speeches of Abraham Lincoln to the historical work of Woodrow Wilson, nation-builders addressed the legal, political, and historical paradoxes of American identity. Against the backdrop of their efforts, Wald shows how works such as Douglass’s autobiographical narratives, Melville’s Pierre, Wilson’s Our Nig, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks, and Stein’s The Making of Americans responded, through formal innovations, to the aggressive demands for literary participation in the building of that nation. The conversation that emerges among these literary works challenges the definitions and genres that largely determine not only what works are read, but also how they are read in classrooms in the United States today.

Offering insight into the relationship of storytelling to national identity, Constituting Americans will compel the attention of those with an interest in American literature, American studies, and cultural studies.
[more]
cover of Constructing Identities in Mexican-American Political Organizations: Choosing Issues, Taking Sides

Constructing Identities in Mexican-American Political Organizations

Choosing Issues, Taking Sides

By Benjamin Márquez

University of Texas Press, 2003

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 2002

The formation of a group identity has always been a major preoccupation of Mexican American political organizations, whether they seek to assimilate into the dominant Anglo society or to remain separate from it. Yet organizations that sought to represent a broad cross section of the Mexican American population, such as LULAC and the American G.I. Forum, have dwindled in membership and influence, while newer, more targeted political organizations are prospering—clearly suggesting that successful political organizing requires more than shared ethnicity and the experience of discrimination.

This book sheds new light on the process of political identity formation through a study of the identity politics practiced by four major Mexican American political organizations—the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation, the Texas Association of Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, and the Mexican American Women's National Association (now known as MANA—A National Latina Organization). Through interviews with activists in each organization and research into their records, Benjamin Marquez clarifies the racial, class-based, and cultural factors that have caused these organizations to create widely differing political identities. He likewise demonstrates why their specific goals resonate only with particular segments of the Mexican American community.

[more]
cover of Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany

Consumption and Violence

Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany

Alexander Sedlmaier

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Combining the tools of political, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Consumption and Violence: Radical Protest in Cold-War West Germany explores strategies of legitimization developed by advocates of militant resistance to certain manifestations of consumer capitalism. The book contributes to a more sober evaluation of West German protest movements, not just terrorism, as it refrains from emotional and moral judgments, but takes the protesters’ approaches seriously, which, regarding consumer society, had a rational core. Political violence is not presented as the result of individual shortcomings, but emerges in relation to major societal changes, i.e., the unprecedented growth of consumption. This new perspective sheds important light on violence and radical protest in post-war Germany, as previous books have failed to examine to what extent these forms of resistance should be regarded as reactions to changing regimes of provision. Continuing the recently growing interest in the interdependence of countercultures and consumer society, the focus on violence gives the argument a unique twist, making the book thought-provoking and engaging.
[more]
cover of Contemporary African Screen Worlds

Contemporary African Screen Worlds

Lindiwe Dovey, Añulika Agina, and Michael W. Thomas, editors

Duke University Press, 2025

Contemporary African Screen Worlds brings together a new generation of African screen media scholars who explore and theorize the dynamic, interactive screen worlds that have arisen in contemporary Africa due to dramatic global changes in technology. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, extensive interviews, and specific case studies, the contributors bring to life the complex materialities and entanglements of film spectatorship, fandom, production, and circulation in Africa. They particularly attend to the interfaces among film audiences, actors, makers, platforms, and screens both small and large. Engaging with more than a dozen national contexts across the continent, the book reveals the diversity of African screen media practices and the creativity and agency of the people who passionately generate them, from film craftworkers in Nigeria and film students in Ghana to film fans in Rwanda and Burkina Faso. By focusing on the work of powerful platforms (such as Netflix and MTVShuga) and ordinary people (such as domestic workers watching Nollywood films in rural Kenya), this volume grapples with the effects and affects of digitization, mobile screens, media convergence, and the televisual turn in Africa.

Contributors. Moradewun Adejunmobi, Añulika Agina, Alexander Bud, Lindiwe Dovey, Femi Eromosele, Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Alexandra Grieve, Jonathan Haynes, Joe Jackson, Alessandro Jedlowski, Dennis-Brook Prince Lotsu, Alison MacAulay, Elastus Mambwe, Asteway M. Woldemichael, Nedine Moonsamy, Elizabeth Olayiwola, Temitayo Olofinlua, Rashida Resario, Estrella Sendra, Robin Steedman, Michael W. Thomas, Stefanie Van de Peer, Solomon Waliaula
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cover of Contemporary Opera in Flux

Contemporary Opera in Flux

Edited by Yayoi U. Everett

University of Michigan Press, 2024

In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. 

Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.
[more]
cover of Contentious City: The Politics of Recovery in New York City

Contentious City

The Politics of Recovery in New York City

John Mollenkopf

Russell Sage Foundation, 2005

Few public projects have ever dealt with economic and emotional issues as large as those surrounding the rebuilding of lower Manhattan following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. Picking up the pieces involved substantial challenges: deciding how to memorialize one of America's greatest tragedies, how to balance the legal claim of landowners against the moral claim of survivors who want a say in the future of Ground Zero, and how to rebuild the Trade Center site while preserving the sacredness and solemnity that Americans now attribute to the area. All the while, the governor, the mayor, the Port Authority, and the leaseholder competed with one another to advance their own interests and visions of the redevelopment, while at least leaving the impression that the decisions were the public's to make. In Contentious City, editor John Mollenkopf and a team of leading scholars analyze the wide-ranging political dimensions of the recovery process. Contentious City takes an in-depth look at the competing interests and demands of the numerous stakeholders who have sought to influence the direction of the recovery process. Lynne Sagalyn addresses the complicated institutional politics behind the rebuilding, which involve a newly formed development commission seeking legitimacy, a two-state transportation agency whose brief venture into land ownership puts it in control of the world's most famous 16 acres of land, and a private business group whose affiliation with the World Trade Center places it squarely in a fight for billions of dollars in insurance funds. Arielle Goldberg profiles five civic associations that sprouted up to voice public opinion about the redevelopment process. While the groups did not gain much leverage over policy outcomes, Goldberg argues that they were influential in steering the agenda of decision-makers and establishing what values would be prioritized in the development plans. James Young, a member of the jury that selected the design for the World Trade Center site memorial, discusses the challenge of trying to simultaneously memorialize a tragic event, while helping those who suffered find renewal and move on with their lives. Editor John Mollenkopf contributes a chapter on how the September 11 terrorist attacks altered the course of politics in New York, and how politicians at the city and state level adapted to the new political climate after 9/11 to win elected office. Moving forward after the destruction of the Twin Towers was a daunting task, made more difficult by the numerous competing claims on the site, and the varied opinions on how it should be used in the future. Contentious City brings together the voices surrounding this intense debate, and helps make sense of the rival interests vying for control over one of the most controversial urban development programs in history. A Russell Sage Foundation September 11 Initiative Volume
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cover of Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Contentious Republicans

Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

James E. Sanders

Duke University Press, 2004

Contentious Republicans explores the mid-nineteenth-century rise of mass electoral democracy in the southwestern region of Colombia, a country many assume has never had a meaningful democracy of any sort. James E. Sanders describes a surprisingly rich republicanism characterized by legal rights and popular participation, and he explains how this vibrant political culture was created largely by competing subaltern groups seeking to claim their rights as citizens and their place in the political sphere. Moving beyond the many studies of nineteenth-century nation building that focus on one segment of society, Contentious Republicans examines the political activism of three distinct social and racial groups: Afro-Colombians, Indians, and white peasant migrants.

Beginning in the late 1840s, subaltern groups entered the political arena to forge alliances, both temporary and enduring, with the elite Liberal and Conservative Parties. In the process, each group formed its own political discourses and reframed republicanism to suit its distinct needs. These popular liberals and popular conservatives bargained for the parties’ support and deployed a broad repertoire of political actions, including voting, demonstrations, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and armed struggle. By the 1880s, though, many wealthy Colombians of both parties blamed popular political engagement for social disorder and economic failure, and they successfully restricted lower-class participation in politics. Sanders suggests that these reactionary developments contributed to the violence and unrest afflicting modern Colombia. Yet in illuminating the country’s legacy of participatory politics in the nineteenth century, he shows that the current situation is neither inevitable nor eternal.

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cover of Contested Airwaves: American Radio at Home and Abroad, 1914-1946

Contested Airwaves

American Radio at Home and Abroad, 1914-1946

Michael A. Krysko

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Controversial American-led radio initiatives sparked a kaleidoscope of conflicts and rivalries from the medium’s earliest days through the end of World War II. Michael A. Krysko explores how the medium engaged the knowledge, assumptions, and prejudices that fueled listeners’ and policymakers’ objections to foreign and unwelcome radio content.

Krysko considers Americans’ antagonism toward non-English language broadcasting; issues of identity, geography, and sovereignty that propelled opposition to Mexico’s “border blaster” stations; how a project aimed at helping Cajun-speaking listeners became a French-only celebration of Acadian culture; a failed initiative to teach English to Latin Americans via shortwave broadcasting; enduring US-Panamanian conflicts over the control of radio in and around the Panama Canal; and how farmers from across the Southwest protested a radio treaty’s perceived preferential treatment of Cuba. Paying particular attention to the act of listening, Krysko shows how these initiatives illuminated and solidified divisions rooted in identity, nationalism, and prejudice.

Clear and wide-ranging, Contested Airwaves reveals early radio’s place at the nexus of public programming, transnational relations, and its own evolution as a communication medium.

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cover of Contested Ground: The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America

Contested Ground

The Tunnel and the Struggle over Television News in Cold War America

Mike Conway

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

In 1962, an innovative documentary on a Berlin Wall tunnel escape brought condemnation from both sides of the Iron Curtain during one of the most volatile periods of the Cold War. The Tunnel, produced by NBC's Reuven Frank, clocked in at ninety minutes and prompted a range of strong reactions. While the television industry ultimately awarded the program three Emmys, the U.S. Department of State pressured NBC to cancel the program, and print journalists criticized the network for what they considered to be a blatant disregard of journalistic ethics.

It was not just The Tunnel's subject matter that sparked controversy, but the medium itself. The surprisingly fast ascendance of television news as the country's top choice for information threatened the self-defined supremacy of print journalism and the de facto cooperation of government officials and reporters on Cold War issues. In Contested Ground, Mike Conway argues that the production and reception of television news and documentaries during this period reveals a major upheaval in American news communications.
[more]
cover of Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819-1821

Contesting the Constitution

Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819-1821

William S. Belko

University of Missouri Press, 2021

The admission of Missouri to the Union quickly became a constitutional crisis of the first order, inciting an intensive reexamination of the U.S. Constitution by the U.S. Congress. The heart of the question in need of resolution was whether that body possessed the authority to place conditions on a territory—in this instance Missouri—regarding restrictions on slavery—before its admittance to the Union.

The larger question with which the legislators grappled were the limits of the Constitution’s provisions granting Congress the authority to affect the institution of slavery—both where it already existed and where it could expand. The issue—what would come to be known as the Missouri Crisis—severely tested the still young republic and, some four decades later, would all but rend it asunder. This timely collection of original essays thoughtfully engages the intersections of history and constitutional law, and is certain to find eager readers among historians, legal scholars, political scientists, as well as many who call Missouri home.

Contributing Authors:
William S. Belko
Christopher Childers
John Eastman
Brook Poston
John R. Van Atta
[more]
cover of Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life

Contingent Encounters

Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life

Dan DiPiero

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.
[more]
cover of Contours of Israeli Politics: Jewish Ethnicity, Religious Nationalism, and Democracy

Contours of Israeli Politics

Jewish Ethnicity, Religious Nationalism, and Democracy

Hannah M. Ridge

Temple University Press, 2025

There is no single Jewish ethnicity, and no single Jewish ethnic group constitutes a clear majority of Jewish Israelis. These intra-Jewish differences permit a social hierarchy within the “in-group” – Jewish Israelis – that privileges the Ashkenazi Jews of European descent over Mizrahi/Sephardi Jews of Middle Eastern backgrounds.

The timely Contours of Israeli Politics focuses on the socio-political ramifications of this hierarchy within the upper stratum of Israeli society. Using public opinion studies and qualitative data, Hannah Ridge examines the effects of this social hierarchy to address attitudes on Israeli ethnicity and religious majoritarianism, support for Israeli democracy, and preference for an expanded territorial state and peace with its neighbors.

As various Jewish ethnic groups face greater pressure to assert their in-group membership (their Jewishness), they are more likely to protect the status privileges of that group. This can strengthen their ideas about identity, nationalism, democratic values, and conflict attitudes. Ridge’s findings reveal the ways in which Jewish ethnicity continues to influence the politics of Israel, a Jewish ethno-religious state.
[more]
cover of Controlling the Past, Owning the Future: The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East

Controlling the Past, Owning the Future

The Political Uses of Archaeology in the Middle East

Edited by Ran Boytner, Lynn Swartz Dodd, and Bradley J. Parker

University of Arizona Press, 2010

What are the political uses—and misuses—of archaeology in the Middle East? In answering this question, the contributors to this volume lend their regional expertise to a variety of case studies, including the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, the commercialization of archaeology in Israel, the training of Egyptian archaeology inspectors, and the debate over Turkish identity sparked by the film Troy, among other provocative subjects. Other chapters question the ethical justifications of archaeology in places that have “alternative engagements with the material past.” In the process, they form various views of the role of the archaeologist, from steward of the historical record to agent of social change.

The diverse contributions to this volume share a common framework in which the political use of the past is viewed as a process of social discourse. According to this model, political appropriations are seen as acts of social communication designed to accrue benefits to particular groups. Thus the contributors pay special attention to competing social visions and the filters these impose on archaeological data. But they are also attentive to the potential consequences of their own work. Indeed, as the editors remind us, “people’s lives may be affected, sometimes dramatically, because of the material remains that surround them.”

Rounding out this important volume are critiques by two top scholars who summarize and synthesize the preceding chapters.
[more]
cover of Conversations on Violence: An Anthology

Conversations on Violence

An Anthology

Brad Evans

Pluto Press, 2021

'Brad Evans in one of the brightest critical minds of his generation' - Henry A. Giroux

Whether physical or metaphorical, institutional or interpersonal, violence is everywhere. A seemingly immutable fact of life, it is nonetheless rarely engaged with at the conceptual level. What does violence actually mean? And is it an inevitable part of the human condition?

Conversations on Violence brings together many of the world's leading critical scholars, artists, writers and cultural producers to provide a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence. Through in-depth interviews with thirty figures including Marina Abramovic, Kehinde Andrews and Simon Critchley, Brad Evans and Adrian Parr interrogate violence in all its manifestations, including its role in politics, art, gender discrimination and decolonisation.

Provocative, eye-opening and bracingly original, Conversations on Violence sheds light on a defining political and ethical concern of our age.
[more]
cover of Core Samples: A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood

Core Samples

A Climate Scientist's Experiments in Politics and Motherhood

Anna Farro Henderson

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

People live by their stories—how can we use them to accelerate action on climate change?
 

Climate scientist and policy expert Anna Farro Henderson embarks on a remarkable narrative journey in Core Samples, exploring how science is done, discussed, legislated, and imagined. Through stories both raucous and poignant—of far-flung expeditions, finding artistic inspiration in research, and traversing the systemic barriers women and mothers face in science and politics—she brings readers into the daily rhythms and intimacies of scientific research and political negotiation.

 

Grounded in her experiences as a climate scientist, an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton, and a constant juggler of the many roles and responsibilities of professional moms, Henderson’s eclectic, unconventional essays range from observations, confessions, and meditations on lab and fieldwork to a packing list for a trip to the State Capitol and a lactation diary. Readers are invited on voyages as far afield as the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, and a meteor crater in Ghana—and as close to home as a town hall meeting in America’s corn belt.

 

A love letter to science and a bracing (and sometimes hilarious) portrait of the many obstacles women, mothers, and people digging for truth navigate, Core Samples illuminates the messy, contradictory humanity of our scientific and political institutions. Bringing us behind the closed doors of discovery and debate, Henderson exposes the flaws in research institutions, the halls of government, and the role of science in policy, yet she shows how each crack is also an invitation for camaraderie, creativity, and change.

[more]
cover of Coronavirus Politics: The Comparative Politics and Policy of COVID-19

Coronavirus Politics

The Comparative Politics and Policy of COVID-19

Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, André Peralta-Santos, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2021

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.
[more]
cover of Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia

Corporeal Politics

Dancing East Asia

Katherine Mezur and Emily Wilcox, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2020

In Corporeal Politics, leading international scholars investigate the development of dance as a deeply meaningful and complex cultural practice across time, placing special focus on the intertwining of East Asia dance and politics and the role of dance as a medium of transcultural interaction and communication across borders. Countering common narratives of dance history that emphasize the US and Europe as centers of origin and innovation, the expansive creativity of dance artists in East Asia asserts its importance as a site of critical theorization and reflection on global artistic developments in the performing arts.

Through the lens of “corporeal politics”—the close attention to bodily acts in specific cultural contexts—each study in this book challenges existing dance and theater histories to re-investigate the performer's role in devising the politics and aesthetics of their performance, as well as the multidimensional impact of their lives and artistic works. Corporeal Politics addresses a wide range of performance styles and genres, including dances produced for the concert stage, as well as those presented in popular entertainments, private performance spaces, and street protests.
[more]
cover of Cosmopolitan Archaeologies

Cosmopolitan Archaeologies

Lynn Meskell, ed.

Duke University Press, 2009

An important collection, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. The contributors explore the implications of applying the cosmopolitan ideals of obligation to others and respect for cultural difference to archaeological practice, showing that those ethics increasingly demand the rethinking of research agendas. While cosmopolitan archaeologies must be practiced in contextually specific ways, what unites and defines them is archaeologists’ acceptance of responsibility for the repercussions of their projects, as well as their undertaking of heritage practices attentive to the concerns of the living communities with whom they work. These concerns may require archaeologists to address the impact of war, the political and economic depredations of past regimes, the livelihoods of those living near archaeological sites, or the incursions of transnational companies and institutions.

The contributors describe various forms of cosmopolitan engagement involving sites that span the globe. They take up the links between conservation, natural heritage and ecology movements, and the ways that local heritage politics are constructed through international discourses and regulations. They are attentive to how communities near heritage sites are affected by archaeological fieldwork and findings, and to the complex interactions that local communities and national bodies have with international sponsors and universities, conservation agencies, development organizations, and NGOs. Whether discussing the toll of efforts to preserve biodiversity on South Africans living near Kruger National Park, the ways that UNESCO’s global heritage project universalizes the ethic of preservation, or the Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk that the Archaeological Institute of America sent to the U.S. government before the Iraq invasion, the contributors provide nuanced assessments of the ethical implications of the discursive production, consumption, and governing of other people’s pasts.

Contributors. O. Hugo Benavides, Lisa Breglia, Denis Byrne, Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, Ian Lilley, Jane Lydon, Lynn Meskell, Sandra Arnold Scham

[more]
cover of Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States

Cracking Up

Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States

Katelyn Hale Wood

University of Iowa Press, 2021

Cracking Up archives and analyzes Black feminist stand-up comedy in the United States over the past sixty years. Looking closely at the work of Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Mo’Nique, Wanda Sykes, Sasheer Zamata, Sam Jay, Phoebe Robinson, Jessica Williams, Amanda Seales, and Michelle Buteau, this book shows how Black feminist comedy and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest.

Katelyn Hale Wood interprets these artists not as tokens in a white, male-dominated field, but as part of a continuous history of Black feminist performance and presence. Broadly, Cracking Up frames stand-up comedy as an important platform from which to examine citizenship in the United States, articulate Black feminist political thought, and subvert structures of power. Wood also champions comedic performance and theatre history as imperative contexts for advancing historical studies of race, gender, and sexuality. From the comedy routines popular on Black vaudeville circuits to stand-up on contemporary social media platforms, Cracking Up excavates an overlooked history of Black women who have made the art of joke-telling a key part of radical performance and political engagement.
[more]
cover of Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word

Crafting Equality

America's Anglo-African Word

Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Philosophers and historians often treat fundamental concepts like equality as if they existed only as fixed ideas found solely in the canonical texts of civilization. In Crafting Equality, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites argue that the meaning of at least one key word—equality—has been forged in the day-to-day pragmatics of public discourse.

Drawing upon little studied speeches, newspapers, magazines, and other public discourse, Condit and Lucaites survey the shifting meaning of equality from 1760 to the present as a process of interaction and negotiation among different social groups in American politics and culture. They make a powerful case for the critical role of black Americans in actively shaping what equality has come to mean in our political conversation by chronicling the development of an African-American rhetorical community. The story they tell supports a vision of equality that embraces both heterogeneity and homogeneity as necessary for maintaining the balance between liberty and property.

A compelling revision of an important aspect of America's history, Crafting Equality will interest anyone wanting to better understand the role public discourse plays in affecting the major social and political issues of our times. It will also interest readers concerned with the relationship between politics and culture in America's increasingly multi-cultural society.
[more]
cover of Creating Chaos Online: Disinformation and Subverted Post-Publics

Creating Chaos Online

Disinformation and Subverted Post-Publics

Asta Zelenkauskaite

University of Michigan Press, 2022

With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity, Creating Chaos Online unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Asta Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments but also across two analyzed sociopolitical contexts suggesting the orchestrated efforts behind messaging. Through a dystopian vision of publics that are expected to navigate in the sea of uncertain both authentic and orchestrated content, pushed by human and nonhuman actors, Creating Chaos Online offers a concept of post-publics. The idea of post-publics is reflected within the continuum of treatment of public, counter public, and anti-public. This book argues that affect-instilled arguments used in public deliberation in times of uncertainty, along with whataboutism constitute a playbook for chaos online.

[more]
cover of Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement

Creating Conservatism

Postwar Words that Made an American Movement

Michael J. Lee

Michigan State University Press, 2014

Creating Conservatism charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States. Dedicated conservatives have argued for decades that the conservative movement was a product of print, rather than a march, a protest, or a pivotal moment of persecution. The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Witness, The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, The Conscience of a Conservative, and other mid-century texts became influential not only among conservative office-holders, office-seekers, and well-heeled donors but also at dinner tables, school board meetings, and neighborhood reading groups. These books are remarkable both because they enumerated conservative political positions and because their memorable language demonstrated how to take those positions—functioning, in essence, as debate handbooks. Taking an expansive approach, the author documents the wide influence of the conservative canon on traditionalist and libertarian conservatives. By exploring the varied uses to which each founding text has been put from the Cold War to the culture wars, Creating Conservatism generates original insights about the struggle over what it means to think and speak conservatively in America.
[more]
cover of Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism

Creating Worlds Otherwise

Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism

Paula Serafini

Vanderbilt University Press, 2022

Honorable Mention, Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies, Latin American Studies Association–Visual Culture Studies Section, 2023

Extractivism has increasingly become the ground on which activists and scholars in Latin America frame the dynamics of ecological devastation, accumulation of wealth, and erosion of rights. These maladies are the direct consequences of long-standing extraction-oriented economies, and more recently from the expansion of the extractive frontier and the implementation of new technologies in the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, and agriculture. But the fields of sociology, political ecology, anthropology, and geography have largely ignored the role of art and cultural practices in studies of extractivism and post-extractivism.

The field of art theory, on the other hand, has offered a number of texts that put forward insightful analyses of artwork addressing extraction, environmental devastation, and the climate crisis. However, an art theory perspective that does not engage firsthand and in depth with collective action remains limited and fails to provide an account of the role, processes, and politics of art in anti- and post-extractivist movements.

Creating Worlds Otherwise examines the narratives that subaltern groups generate around extractivism, and how they develop, communicate, and mobilize these narratives through art and cultural practices. It reports on a six-year project on creative resistance to extractivism in Argentina and builds on long-term engagement working on environmental justice projects and campaigns in Argentina and the UK.

It is an innovative contribution to the fields of Latin American studies, political ecology, cultural studies, and art theory, and addresses pressing questions regarding what post-extractivist worlds might look like as well as how such visions are put into practice.
[more]
cover of Creative Belonging: The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China

Creative Belonging

The Qiang and Multiethnic Imagination in Modern China

Yanshuo Zhang

University of Michigan Press, 2026

China is a multicultural country home to fifty-five ethnic minority groups, yet due to linguistic and cultural barriers many of these groups remain understudied or unknown in the West. The Qiang, one of modern China’s officially recognized ethnic minorities, is also China’s longest-standing ethnoracial identity marker that has existed since the earliest recorded history of China. Creative Belonging investigates the formation and evolution of the Qiang as a people, a concept, and a cultural history in China. It further examines how the contemporary Qiang ethnic group interacts strategically with mainstream Chinese society, challenging the historically entrenched hierarchies between the sociocultural “centers” of China and its ethnic “peripheries.” 

This book is based on years of ethnographic and textual-archival research in the Himalayan regions of southwest China, where the contemporary Qiang group resides. Drawing on a diverse range of official and local political discourses and previously unstudied literary, historiographical, and cinematic works, Yanshuo Zhang illuminates how the Qiang have carved out spaces of “creative belonging” within the parameters of multiculturalism in contemporary China. Rooted in ethnographic and textual-archival research, the book presents original materials produced by Qiang indigenous writers, scholars, artists, grassroots village cultural activists, and entrepreneurs at both the local and the global levels. Creative Belonging invites readers to rethink ethnicity and national belonging in China by centering minority groups’ efforts to expand the meanings and implications of “Chinese culture.” 

[more]
cover of Creative Life: Music, Politics, People, and Machines

Creative Life

Music, Politics, People, and Machines

Bob Ostertag

University of Illinois Press, 2008

In this eloquent and passionate volume, Bob Ostertag explores the common ground and points of friction among music, creativity, politics, culture, and technology. In terrain ranging from the guerrilla underground in El Salvador's civil war to the drag queen underground in San Francisco and New York, these essays combine journalism and autobiography to explore fundamental questions of what art is and what role it can occupy in a violent and fragmented world, a world in which daily events compromise the universality toward which art strives.

Drawing on his intimate engagement with political conflict in Latin America and the Balkans, Ostertag identifies an art of "insurgent politics" that struggles to expand the parameters of the physical and social world. He also discusses his innovative collaborations with major modern performers, filmmakers, and artists around the world. Part memoir, part journalism, and part aesthetic manifesto, Creative Life is a dazzling set of writings from a musical artist who has worked on the cutting edge of new music for thirty years.

[more]
cover of Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics

Creolized Aurality

Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics

Jérôme Camal

University of Chicago Press, 2019

In the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, the complex interplay between anticolonial resistance and accommodation resounds in its music. Guadeloupean gwoka music—a secular, drum-based tradition—captures the entangled histories of French colonization, movements against it, and the uneasy process of the island’s decolonization as an overseas territory of France. In Creolized Aurality, Jérôme Camal demonstrates that musical sounds and practices express the multiple—and often seemingly contradictory—cultural belongings and political longings that characterize postcoloniality. While gwoka has been associated with anti-colonial activism since the 1960s, in more recent years it has provided a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. This generation of musicians even worked through the French state to gain UNESCO heritage status for their art. These gwoka practices, Camal argues, are “creolized auralities”—expressions of a culture both of and against French coloniality and postcoloniality.
[more]
cover of Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era

Crime in Verse

The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era

Ellen L. O’Brien

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

Over the last few decades, Victorian scholars have produced many nuanced studies connecting the politics of crime to the generic developments of the novel—and vice versa. Ellen L. O’Brien’s Crime in Verse grants the same attention and status to poetic representations of crime. Considering the literary achievements and cultural engagements of poetry while historicizing murder’s entanglement in legal fictions, punitive practices, medical theories, class conflicts, and gender codes, O’Brien argues that shifting approaches to poetry and conflicted understandings of murder allowed poets to align problems of legal and literary interpretation in provocative, disruptive, and innovative ways.
 
Developing focused analyses of generic and discursive meanings, individual chapters examine the classed politics of crime and punishment in the broadside ballad, the epistemological tensions of homicidal lunacy and criminal responsibility in the dramatic monologue, and the legal and ideological frictions of domestic violence in the verse novel and verse drama. Their juxtaposition of the rhymes of anonymous street balladeers, the underexamined verse of “minor” poets, and the familiar poems of canonical figures suggests the interactive and intertextual relationships informing poetic agendas and political arguments. As it simultaneously reconsiders the institutional and ideological status of murder and the aesthetic and political interests of poetry, Crime in Verse offers new ways of thinking about Victorian poetry’s contents and contexts.
          
[more]
cover of Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines

Crip Colony

Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines

Sony Coráñez Bolton

Duke University Press, 2023

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability.
[more]
cover of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Tom Monahan

Duke University Press, 2022

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.
[more]
cover of Critical Approaches to Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Courses

Critical Approaches to Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Courses

Angela Pashia

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2019

[more]
cover of Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age

Critical Excess

Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age

J. Griffith Rollefson

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Jay-Z and Kanye West’s 2011 Watch the Throne is a self-avowed “luxury rap” album centered on Eurocentric conceptions of nobility, artistry, and haute couture. Critical Excess performs a close reading of the sonic and social commentary on this album, examining how the album alternately imagines and critiques the mutually reinforcing ideas of Europe, nobility, old money, art, and their standard bearer, whiteness. Reading the album alongside Black critical theory and work on the prophetic nature of music, Rollefson argues that through their performance of black excellence, opulence, and decadence, Jay-Z and Kanye West poured gas on the white resentment of the Obama presidency—a resentment that would ultimately spill over into public life, make audible the dog whistling of the Far Right, and embolden white supremacists to come out from under their rocks. Ultimately, Rollefson argues, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s performance of what Rollefson calls “critical excess” on this hip hop album exceeds the limits of conspicuous consumption and heralds the final stage of late capitalism—“the New Gilded Age.” 
[more]
cover of Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics

Critical Moves

Dance Studies in Theory and Politics

Randy Martin

Duke University Press, 1998

In Critical Moves Randy Martin sets in motion an inquiry into the relationship between dance, politics, and cultural theory. Drawing on his own experiences as a dancer as well as his observations as a cultural critic and social theorist, Martin illustrates how the study and practice of dance can reanimate arrested prospects for progressive politics and social change.
From experimental and concert dance to more popular expressions, Martin engages a range of performances and demonstrates how a critical reflection on dance helps promote fluency in the language of mobilization that political theory alludes to yet rarely speaks. He explores how Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land defies attempts to separate social ideas from aesthetic concerns and celebrates multiculturalism in the face of a singular national culture; he studies the choreography in rapper Ice Cube’s video “Wicked,” which confronts racialized depictions of violent crime; and he discusses how racial difference is negotiated by analyzing a hip hop aerobics class in a nonblack environment.
Revealing how mastery of modern dance technique teaches an individual body to express cultural difference and display its intrinsic diversity, Critical Moves concludes with a reflection on the contribution dance studies can make to other fields within cultural studies and social sciences. As such it becomes an occasion to rethink the terms of history and agency, multiculturalism and nationalism, identity and political economy. This book will appeal not only to scholars and practitioners of dance, but also to a wide cross-section of people concerned with the study of political theory and the history of social movements.


[more]
cover of Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Critically Sovereign

Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Joanne Barker, editor

Duke University Press, 2017

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin
[more]
cover of Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry

Critique of Exotica

Music, Politics and the Culture Industry

John Hutnyk

Pluto Press, 2000

[more]