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As the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empire on Afghanistan’s past and present, Decolonizing Afghanistan marks a decolonial turn in Afghanistan and American studies. Featuring new and often sidelined ground-up perspectives, this collection examines how Afghan communities have subverted, resisted, and participated in colonial projects from the early twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. Contributors interrogate the relationship between knowledge and power to analyze how narratives about Afghanistan have framed and legitimated imperial governance. Topics span the contradictions and consequences of the US “Forever” War, the rise of private security contracting, the deployment of biometric and surveillance technologies, the politics of US and Taliban countermedia operations, the evolution of gender discourses, and the mobilization of Afghan Americans and “Afghan culture,” among others. Throughout, contributors draw important connections and insights to ongoing global anticolonial struggles and offer paths to decolonial futures.

Contributors. Matthieu Aikins, Dawood Azami, Purnima Bose, Paula Chakravartty, Robert D. Crews, Marya Hannun, Ali Karimi, Nivi Manchanda, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Wazhmah Osman, Hosai Qasmi, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Morwari Zafar, Helena Zeweri

Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit’s history. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit’s development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior. Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit’s location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating a multitude of gender norms of their nations, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor. These families would maintain that power as the British imperial presence splintered on the eve of the American Revolution.

Developing the City investigates the forms, levels, and spaces of power (visible, hidden, and invisible) involved in community development ecosystems. The editors and contributors, a mix of embedded activists, academics, and community leaders, provide a series of diverse case studies that evaluate the local dynamics that shape urban policy.

Chapters address racialized power dynamics in Cleveland, OH, community development funding in Memphis, TN, economic growth and inclusion in Newark, NJ, housing policies in Denver and Colorado Springs, CO, and participatory governance in Reno, NV among other topics. They reflect the unique manifestations of power within each local context, shaped by distinctive histories and sociopolitical dynamics.

In addition to exploring how various dimensions of power influence decision-making, resource allocation, democratic engagement, and civic participation, Developing the City provides a systematic framework for understanding and questioning these power dynamics, and advocates for a power-conscious approach to foster more equitable and democratic urban futures with respect to economic, racial, social, and environmental justice.

Contributors: Nakeefa Cilicia Bernard, Prentiss A. Dantzler, Caraline Feairheller, Austin Harrison, Brad A. M. Johnson, Katherine Lambert-Pennington, Eric Stokan, Robert Stoker, Jill Yordy, and the editors

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands--the Salem Fire of 1914 and the Halifax Explosion of 1917--saw working class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. Both official and unofficial responses, meanwhile, showed how the United States and Canada were linked by experts, workers, and money.

In Disaster Citizenship, Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses  or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE).

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.

Analyzes urban land value extraction and the resulting community displacement in London.

Disrupting the Speculative City tells the story of how the Haringey Development Vehicle community coalition, defeated one of the most ambitious programs of state-led gentrification in London. Drawing on the accounts of those at the heart of local statecraft and grassroots organizations, and analyzing crucial developments in property investment, this book explores a significant and inspirational success for campaigners in London, where social cleansing has become the default outcome of redevelopment.

 The Young Adult novel is ordinarily characterized as a coming-of-age story, in which the narrative revolves around the individual growth and maturation of a character, but Roberta Trites expands this notion by chronicling the dynamics of power and repression that weave their way through YA books. Characters in these novels must learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they function, including family, church, government, and school.

Trites argues that the development of the genre over the past thirty years is an outgrowth of postmodernism, since YA novels are, by definition, texts that interrogate the social construction of individuals. Drawing on such nineteenth-century precursors as Little Women and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Disturbing the Universe demonstrates how important it is to employ poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing adolescent literature, both in critical studies and in the classroom. Among the twentieth-century authors discussed are Blume, Hamilton, Hinton, Le Guin, L'Engle, and Zindel.

Trites' work has applications for a broad range of readers, including scholars of children's literature and theorists of post-modernity as well as librarians and secondary-school teachers.

Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites is the winner of the 2002 Children's Literature Association's Book Award. The award is given annually in order to promote and recognize outstanding contributions to children's literature, history, scholarship, and criticisim; it is one of the highest academic honors that can accrue to an author of children's literary criticism.