Results by title

1713 books match the query '21st century' and 70 start with d

cover of Divided Parties, Strong Leaders

Divided Parties, Strong Leaders

Ruth Bloch Rubin

University of Chicago Press, 2025

Drawing on nearly a century of legislative history, this careful account invites readers to think anew about when, why, and how leaders of divided parties wield power in Congress.

For decades, legislative scholars have viewed party divisions as critical constraints on congressional leadership. The more a party’s rank and file disagree with one another, the weaker their leaders are predicted to be; as member preferences converge, leader power is thought to increase.

In a powerful corrective to this prevailing view, Ruth Bloch Rubin argues that party divisions are not inherently limiting. Divided Parties, Strong Leaders highlights and examines variation in how members of party factions choose to work together. She shows that leaders of divided parties are well positioned to overcome, and even draw strength from, their divided ranks when the collaborative efforts of their coalitions’ competing factions are evenly matched. By contrast, their capacity to get what they want is more limited when one faction has out-collaborated its competition. Presenting detailed case studies of some of the most storied leaders of the postwar Congress, including Speakers Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi, Bloch Rubin analyzes the factional configuration each leader encountered and explains why it mattered for their exercise of power.

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cover of Dizzy

Dizzy

Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Translated by Martha Turewicz

University of Wisconsin Press, 2027

Dizzy opens with its central characters in a nearly impossible situation. Ava is at home in her high-rise apartment building, enjoying an evening with Robin, when the doorbell rings. Her second lover arrives, looking for their lost cell phone; then Ava’s third lover shows up seeking an explanation as to why she is being ghosted. As Ava’s careful calibration of schedules and desires threatens to unravel, overwhelmed, she flees to the roof. The others follow, a door closes, and all four are stranded without a key or a phone. To escape the rooftop, they’ll need to work together—but that won’t be easy.

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cover of Dizzy: A Memoir

Dizzy

A Memoir

Rachel Weaver

West Virginia University Press, 2026

Gold Medal Winner, Living Now Book Awards, Inspirational Memoir (Female) 

“An arresting new memoir….”
– Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

Beverly Donofrio, author of Riding in Cars with Boys, says “Dizzy is a testament to the power of hope. Weaver’s courage and strength are so inspiring they encourage the same in the reader.  If all of that isn’t enough, the beauty and agility of the prose may make you regret reaching the last page.” 

In her early thirties, Rachel Weaver woke up dizzy and unable to function. She spent the next ten years seeing more than thirty medical practitioners before receiving a diagnosis, and then another eight years before finding relief from her condition. Dizzy is amedical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken healthcare system. It is a story about learning to live with life's uncertainty, persevering in the pursuit of answers, and striving to find joy in an imperfect yet beautiful world.

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cover of Djinns

Djinns

Fatma Aydemir, Translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

After laboring in Germany for thirty years, Hüseyin uses his hard-earned savings to purchase a sunny and spacious flat in Istanbul, envisioning the joys of retirement in his home country with his wife, Emine, by his side. But in a cruel twist of fate, he dies of a heart attack on the day he moves in. As Hüseyin’s children and wife travel to Turkey for his funeral, the novel explores their lives and dreams: a teenage son struggling to embrace his sexuality; a college-educated daughter desperate to align conflicting facets of her identity; a first-born son racialized and profiled all his life, forced to perform a role he could not choose for himself; a lonely daughter left behind in rural Turkey who dreams of recapturing her family’s love after joining them in Germany as a teenager; and a mother unable to break free from the cycles of violence that have defined her.

In this epic tale, Fatma Aydemir explores the lives of characters who could not be more different from one another—except in their insatiable desires to be understood. Rather than a seamless narrative, the novel circles around suppressed memories, unspoken trauma, and buried pasts. Turning expectations and stereotypes of the immigrant experience on their side, Aydemir shows how we all grapple with power and beauty, the holes in our lives, and the demons that hover just out of sight.
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cover of Doing Meritocracy Right: How Business Leaders Can Turn an American Aspiration into Reality (and Why They Should)

Doing Meritocracy Right

How Business Leaders Can Turn an American Aspiration into Reality (and Why They Should)

Thomas A. Cole

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A practical guide to more fully achieving a meritocratic society.
 
As America’s most vaunted cultural value, meritocracy is celebrated by some as an institution and derided by others as a myth—or even a trap. Thomas A. Cole argues in Doing Meritocracy Right that if meritocracy is to persist as an institution—and it must—it requires structural support in the private sector. For America to achieve a version of meritocracy that more closely matches our aspirations, our business leaders must first offer equity of opportunity for individuals to demonstrate and develop their talents on equal terms.
 
Drawing on his decades of experience in advising CEOs and corporate boards, personally serving on the boards of major not-for-profits, and leading a large global law firm, Cole cites elite professional-service institutions—consultancies and law firms especially—as improbable laboratories for equity of opportunity. These workplaces, out of self-interest, are laser-focused on the quality of their professionals, seeking out talent and representation and then judging these individuals on (ideally) equal terms once they’re in place. Here, Cole sees an opportunity that no public initiative or platitudes can deliver: if workplaces seek out representational diversity by applying, with thought and care, a single standard of merit—one that emphasizes character—and by providing training and mentoring on an equitable basis, then they will offer a ladder to social and economic mobility that serves both individuals and society.
 
Cole argues that a meritocratic society is achieved in two interrelated stages: access to education; and post-education promotion to membership in the elite. The latter, he says, is the domain of business. Cole argues that the private sector is better positioned to effect reform and he encourages leaders in the private sector to pursue reform both in their organizations, in government, and in the universities and communities where they have influence.
 
Meritocracy in the private sector can’t control the many American inequities that exist on the ground of American society. But it can do social good by serving as a reliable, merit-determined path to the highest echelons of business and industry. Cole sets the stage for the discussion of reforms with a “brief history of our imperfect meritocracy,” and rounds out the book with a to-do list for business leaders.
 
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cover of Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India

Doing Style

Youth and Mass Mediation in South India

Constantine V. Nakassis

University of Chicago Press, 2016

In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call “style” anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity.
           
As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth’s profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India. 
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cover of Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Domestications

American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens

Hosam Aboul-Ela

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Domestications traces a genealogy of American global engagement with the Global South since World War II. Hosam Aboul-Ela reads American writers contrapuntally against intellectuals from the Global South in their common—yet ideologically divergent—concerns with hegemony, world domination, and uneven development. Using Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism as a model, Aboul-Ela explores the nature of U.S. imperialism’s relationship to literary culture through an exploration of five key terms from the postcolonial bibliography: novel, idea, perspective, gender, and space.

Within this framework the book examines juxtapositions including that of Paul Bowles’s Morocco with North African intellectuals’ critique of Orientalism, the global treatment of Vietnamese liberation movements with the American narrative of personal trauma in the novels of Tim O’Brien and Hollywood film, and the war on terror’s philosophical idealism with Korean and post-Arab nationalist materialist archival fiction.

Domestications departs from other recent studies of world literature in its emphases not only on U.S. imperialism but also on intellectuals working in the Global South and writing in languages other than English and French. Although rooted in comparative literature, its readings address issues of key concern to scholars in American studies, postcolonial studies, literary theory, and Middle Eastern studies.

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cover of Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

Don't Leave Hungry

Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

James Smith

University of Arkansas Press, 2009

This substantial anthology charts the development of this influential journal decade by decade, making clear that although it has close ties to a particular region, it has consistently maintained a national scope, publishing poets from all over the United States. SPR’s goal has been to celebrate the poem above all, so although there are poems by major poets here, there are many gems by less famous, perhaps even obscure, writers too. Here are 183 poems by nearly as many poets, from A. R. Ammons, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Mark Doty, Claudia Emerson, David Ignatow, and Carolyn Kizer to Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, and Charles Wright.
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cover of Don't Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe

Don't Look Away

Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe

Brianne Cohen

Duke University Press, 2023

In Don’t Look Away Brianne Cohen considers the role of contemporary art in developing a public commitment to end structural violence in Europe. Cohen focuses on art activism of the early twenty-first century that confronts the slow violence perpetuated against precarious peoples. Exploring the work of German filmmaker Harun Farocki, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, and the art collective Henry VIII’s Wives, Cohen argues that their recursive art practices offer a more sustained counter to the violence undergirding the public sphere than do artworks premised on immediate rupture. Their art reflects on a variety of flashpoints of violence and vulnerability in Europe, from the legacy of the Holocaust to Islamophobia and rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Because this violence has often cultivated fear-based publics, Cohen contends that art must foster ethical and civil relations between strangers across physical and virtual borders. In contrast to art-critical practices that privilege direct action in contemporary art activism, Cohen advocates for the imaginative, messier, often more elusive potential of art to change mindsets and foster a nonviolent social imaginary.
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cover of Don't Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen

Don't Look Now

Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen

Edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar

The Ohio State University Press, 2020

Would that our memories were self-selecting. But often what we remember most, and most vividly, are those moments that caught us unawares: the things we wish we hadn’t seen and have never been able to shake. This group of prominent American writers tries to come to grips with obsessive memory, the uncanny, and the bad dreams that accompany the moments in our lives when we wish we’d looked away, the places we wish we’d never been, and the scenes we wish we’d never stumbled upon.
Featuring essays by Jericho Parms, XU XI, Jerald Walker, José Orduña, Kristen Iversen, Nicole Walker, Mary Cappello, Lina Ferreira, Colleen O’Connor, Sonya Huber, Paul Crenshaw, Alyce Miller, Patrick Madden, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Yalie Kamara, Emily Heiden, Lee Martin, and David Lazar,
this collection bares all. The authors invite readers into a dream that resurrects a departed mother each night, only to lose her again each morning upon waking; the post-mortem newspaper photos of a former student; kaleidoscope childhood memories of the mundane mixed up together with the traumatic; an unplanned pregnancy; a bullfight and a spouse’s mortality; a teen witnessing the suicide of her father; a parent trying to shield his children from witnessing a violent death. What these writers are after, though, is not the melancholic/grotesque/violent moment itself, but the process of remembering—and trying to forget. They examine the way these memories take hold, resurface, and never leave, and what it means for a life lived long after these moments have passed. These scenes, slowly enfolding us like bad dreams or flying by like trains on elevated platforms, demand we reach some kind of accommodation with them—make peace or make sense or make amends. The one thing they insist with certainty is this: they cannot—will not—be unseen.
 
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cover of Down Syndrome Culture: Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts

Down Syndrome Culture

Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts

Benjamin Fraser

University of Michigan Press, 2024

People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability—one that fits between the social and medical models of disability—within the disability studies field. 

Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.
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cover of Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging

Down from the Mountaintop

From Belief to Belonging

Joshua Dolezal

University of Iowa Press, 2014

A lyrical coming-of-age memoir, Down from the Mountaintop chronicles a quest for belonging. Raised in northwestern Montana by Pentecostal homesteaders whose twenty-year experiment in subsistence living was closely tied to their faith, Joshua Doležal experienced a childhood marked equally by his parents’ quest for spiritual transcendence and the surrounding Rocky Mountain landscape. Unable to fully embrace the fundamentalism of his parents, he began to search for religious experience elsewhere: in baseball, books, and weightlifting, then later in migrations to Tennessee, Nebraska, and Uruguay. Yet even as he sought to understand his place in the world, he continued to yearn for his mountain home.

For more than a decade, Doležal taught in the Midwest throughout the school year but returned to Montana and Idaho in the summers to work as a firefighter and wilderness ranger. He reveled in the life of the body and the purifying effects of isolation and nature, believing he had found transcendence. Yet his summers tied him even more to the mountain landscape, fueling his sense of exile on the plains.

It took falling in love, marrying, and starting a family in Iowa to allow Doležal to fully examine his desire for a spiritual mountaintop from which to view the world. In doing so, he undergoes a fundamental redefinition of the nature of home and belonging. He learns to accept the plains on their own terms, moving from condemnation to acceptance and from isolation to community. Coming down from the mountaintop means opening himself to relationships, grounding himself as a husband, father, and gardener who learns that where things grow, the grower also takes root.
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cover of Dragons in the Land of the Condor: Writing Tusán in Peru

Dragons in the Land of the Condor

Writing Tusán in Peru

Ignacio López-Calvo, Foreword by Eugenio Chang-Rodríguez

University of Arizona Press, 2014

Building on his 2013 study on Nikkei cultural production in Peru, in Dragons in the Land of the Condor Ignacio López-Calvo studies the influence of a Chinese ethnic background in the writing of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Sino-Peruvian authors.

While authors like Siu Kam Wen and Julia Wong often rely on their Chinese cultural heritage for inspiration, many others, like Pedro Zulen, Mario Wong, and Julio Villanueva Chang, choose other sources of inspiration and identification. López-Calvo studies the different strategies used by these writers to claim either their belonging in the Peruvian national project or their difference as a minority ethnic group within Peru. Whether defending the rights of indigenous Peruvians, revealing the intricacies of a life of self-exploitation among Chinese shopkeepers, exploring their identitarian dilemmas, or re-creating—beyond racial memory—life under the political violence in Lima of the 1980s, these authors provide their community with a voice and a collective agency, while concomitantly repositioning contemporary Peruvian culture as transnational.

López-Calvo bridges from his earlier study of Peruvian Nikkei’s testimonials and literature and raises this question: why are Chinese Peruvian authors seemingly more disconnected from their Asian heritage than Japanese Peruvian authors from theirs? The author argues that the Chinese arrival in Peru half a century earlier influenced a stronger identification with the criollo world. Yet he argues that this situation may soon be changing as the new geopolitical and economic influence of the People’s Republic of China in the world, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, affects the way Chinese and Sino–Latin American communities and their cultures are produced and perceived.
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cover of Drawing on Anger: Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy

Drawing on Anger

Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy

Eric J. García

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Drawing on Anger: Portraits of U.S. Hypocrisy is a collection of Eric J. García’s most unabashed political cartoons about U.S. history and politics from 2004 to the present. They offer a scathing indictment of Republicans, Democrats, and the self-proclaimed greatest country on earth. Garcia reconstructs pivotal moments in history—such as U.S. complicity in the disappearance of forty-three Mexican students, genocide and torture in Iraq, and femicide along the U.S.—Mexico border—and reflects on the larger themes of anti-immigration laws, global imperialism, veterans affairs, and the conquest of the Americas. His cartoons are equally critical of both political parties and of both the United States and Mexico–lobbing criticism and satire in every direction.
 
For over a decade García has been serving up inked visuals with the sharpest of political critiques through a Chicano lens. If you’re looking for funny punch lines, these aren’t the cartoons for you. But if you want to pull down Uncle Sam’s pants and see what’s really going on, this is your book.
 
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cover of Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China

Dreadful Desires

The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China

Charlie Yi Zhang

Duke University Press, 2022

In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China’s place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires—as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping—are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront of using affective attachments to nation, leader, and family in the global shifts toward exploitation and authoritarianism.
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cover of Dream Shot: The Journey to a Wheelchair Basketball National Championship

Dream Shot

The Journey to a Wheelchair Basketball National Championship

Josh Birnbaum

University of Illinois Press, 2017

In 2008, the men's wheelchair basketball team at the University of Illinois set out to achieve their sport's pinnacle: a college national championship. That lofty goal represented another stage of a journey begun in 1948 when Tim Nugent established the Gizz Kids wheelchair squad. Embedded with the team, Josh Birnbaum took photos that captured the life experiences of people in the Illinois wheelchair basketball program from 2005 through the 2008 championship season. Dream Shot follows the unique lives of the players and coaches on the court and the road, and in quiet moments at home and the classroom. Along the way, Birnbaum provides the definitive story of the 2008 team and the challenges it overcame to capture one of Illinois's record fifteen men's titles. Featuring more than 100 color photographs, Dream Shot memorializes a legendary team alongside the story of the university's dedication to the progress of disability rights.
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cover of Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

Dream Zones

Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

Jamie Cross

Pluto Press, 2014

Dream Zones explores the dreamed of and desired futures that constitute, sustain and disrupt capitalism in contemporary India.

Drawing on five years of research in and around India's Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the book follows the stories of regional politicians, corporate executives, rural farmers, industrial workers and social activists to show how the pursuit of growth, profit and development shapes the politics of industrialisation and liberalisation.

This book offers a timely reminder that the global economy is shaped by sentiment as much as reason and that un-realised expectations are the grounds on which new hopes for the future are sown.

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cover of Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing

Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Absence and Caribbean Life Writing

Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

Rutgers University Press, 2021

The first book on pan-Caribbean life writing, Dreams of Archives Unfolded reveals the innovative formal practices used to write about historical absences within contemporary personal narratives. Although the premier genres of writing postcoloniality in the Caribbean have been understood to be fiction and poetry, established figures such as Erna Brodber, Maryse Condé, Lorna Goodison, Edwidge Danticat, Saidiya Hartmann, Ruth Behar, and Dionne Brand and emerging writers such as Yvonne Shorter Brown, and Gaiutra Bahadur use life writing to question the relationship between the past and the present. Stitt theorizes that the remarkable flowering of life writing by Caribbean women since 2000 is not an imitation of the “memoir boom” in North America and Europe; instead, it marks a different use of the genre born out of encountering gendered absences in archives and ancestral memory that cannot be filled with more research. Dreams of Archives makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

 
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cover of Dynamics of an Authoritarian System: Hungary, 2010–2021

Dynamics of an Authoritarian System

Hungary, 2010–2021

Mária Csanádi

Central European University Press, 2022

This conceptually synthetic and empirically rich book demonstrates the vulnerability of democratic settings to authoritarianism and populism. Six scholars from various professional fields explore here the metamorphosis of a political party into a centralized authoritarian system. Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party needed less than ten years to accomplish this transformation in Hungary. In 2010, after winning a majority that could make changes in the constitution – two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, they evolved and stabilized the system, which produced again the two-thirds majority in 2014 and 2018.

The authors reveal how a democratic setting can be used as a device for political capture. They show how a political entity managed to penetrate almost all sub-fields of the economy to arrive at institutionalized corruption, and how the centralized power structure reproduces itself. With the help of a powerful empirical apparatus—among others analyses of more than 220,000 public tenders, redistributions of state subsidies, and the interconnectedness of those privileged with the political elite — the authors detail the functioning of a crony system and the network aspects of political connections in the rapid enrichment of politically-linked businesses. Their studies demonstrate the role of political capture in this redistribution and how this capture leads to a new social stratification.

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cover of Dynastic Democracy: Political Families of Thailand

Dynastic Democracy

Political Families of Thailand

Yoshinori Nishizaki

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

The political history of Thailand since the overthrow of absolute monarchy in 1932 has conventionally been interpreted as a long series of popular struggles for representative democracy and against military authoritarian rule. Yoshinori Nishizaki argues that this history can be better understood as one of struggles by elite political families for and against “dynastic democracy”—a form of democracy that is characterized by the patrimonial transmission of power between members of select ruling families. Dynastic Democracy suggests it is these familial-based contestations for political ascendancy that underlie the tumultuous politics of Thailand, a country that has experienced no fewer than twenty-two coups over the course of the past century.
 
Drawing extensively on Thai-language primary sources, including assets documents and cremation volumes for deceased politicians and their kin, Nishizaki traces the intricate blood and marriage connections among Thailand’s political families. These families may fall into two categories: influential commoner families that have held parliamentary seats since 1932 and form the core of Thailand’s dynastic democracy; and upper-class families that are kin to or aligned ideologically with the royal family and have repeatedly challenged dynastic democracy through coups, constitutional changes, and other political maneuvers. Nishizaki’s exploration of dynastic democracy illustrates how democratic pluralism in Thailand has been consistently stifled, to the detriment of ordinary citizens. Dynastic Democracy fleshes out a widely acknowledged yet heretofore empirically unsubstantiated facet of Thai political history—that in Thai politics, family matters.
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