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Focuses on contemporary art and media to examine the role of visuals in environmental violence and war in Northern Kurdistan.

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it does so by mobilizing these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved.

Earthmoving conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.

A sweeping exploration of survival, resilience, and the fate of one family amid Europe’s most turbulent century.

Echoes of Exile reveals the seismic disruptions of twentieth-century European history through the intimate lens of one family’s struggle to survive. Setting out to record the life of her mother, Ruth, Daniela Spenser unearthed personal facts and stories that additionally illuminate the shared traumas and experiences of millions of Czech, Polish, and German Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the stories of those who survived and lived under Communism and the Cold War. Her resulting work is a fascinating hybrid that combines family letters and interviews with deeply researched political history spanning from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Spenser’s fascinating work reveals the difficult choices her mother and family faced, the tests to their loves and loyalties, and the lingering scars of exile. More than a family history, it weaves personal and historical narratives with mundane and momentous threads to create a fresh, distinctive fabric. Spenser recovers fragments of the past that contribute to a map of the present and possibilities for the future. An engrossing account of survival, resilience, and the enduring human spirit amid the maelstrom of Europe’s savage twentieth century, Echoes of Exile will interest readers who value firsthand accounts of significant events and who seek to understand the complexities of survival, identity, and political change through intimate, lived experiences.

Runner-up, Violet Crown Award, Writer's League of Texas, 2008

Renowned for his "brilliant legislative mind" and political oratory—as well as for bicycling to Congress in a rumpled white linen suit and bow tie—U.S. Congressman Bob Eckhardt was a force to reckon with in Texas and national politics from the 1940s until 1980. A liberal Democrat who successfully championed progressive causes, from workers' rights to consumer protection to environmental preservation and energy conservation, Eckhardt won the respect of opponents as well as allies. Columnist Jack Anderson praised him as one of the most effective members of Congress, where Eckhardt was a national leader and mentor to younger congressmen such as Al Gore.

In this biography of Robert Christian Eckhardt (1913-2001), Gary A. Keith tells the story of Eckhardt's colorful life and career within the context of the changing political landscape of Texas and the rise of the New Right and the two-party state. He begins with Eckhardt's German-American family heritage and then traces his progression from labor lawyer, political organizer, and cofounder of the progressive Texas Observer magazine to Texas state legislator and U.S. congressman. Keith describes many of Eckhardt's legislative battles and victories, including the passage of the Open Beaches Act and the creation of the Big Thicket National Preserve, the struggle to limit presidential war-making ability through the War Powers Act, and the hard fight to shape President Carter's energy policy, as well as Eckhardt's work in Texas to tax the oil and gas industry.

The only thorough recounting of the life of a memorable, important, and flamboyant man, Eckhardt also recalls the last great era of progressive politics in the twentieth century and the key players who strove to make Texas and the United States a more just, inclusive society.

Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa examines the ways that accountability offers an effective interpretive lens to the social, cultural, and institutional struggles of both the elites and ordinary citizens in Africa. Each chapter investigates questions of power, its public deliberation, and its negotiation in Africa by studying elites through the framework of accountability. The book enters conversations about political subjectivity and agency, especially from ongoing struggles around identities and belonging, as well as representation and legitimacy. Who speaks to whom? And on whose behalf do they speak? The contributors to this volume offer careful analyses of how such concerns are embedded in wider forms of cultural, social, and institutional discussions about transparency, collective responsibility, community, and public decision-making processes. These concerns affect prospects for democratic oversight, as well as questions of alienation, exclusivity, privilege and democratic deficit. The book situates our understanding of the emergence, meaning, and conceptual relevance of elite accountability, to study political practices in Africa. It then juxtaposes this contextualization of accountability in relation to the practices of African elites. Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa offers fresh, dynamic, and multifarious accounts of elites and their practices of accountability and locally plausible self-legitimation, as well as illuminating accounts of contemporary African elites in relation to their socially and historicallysituated outcomes of contingency, composition, negotiation, and compromise.

 "A magisterially written, well-researched, informative, and entertaining biography of a woman who helped throw open the doors to broader participation and power for women in the Republican Party and American politics."
---Dave Dempsey, author of William G. Milliken: Michigan's Passionate Moderate

"Elly Peterson will be a text to which historians and researchers turn for insight into the yin and yang of mainstream politics in the mid-century."
---Patricia Sullivan, past president, Journalism and Women Symposium

"This lively portrait of a leading woman in the Republican Party between 1952 and 1982 also charts the party's shift to the right after 1964, revealingly viewed through the eyes of liberal Republican women. Intensively researched with ethnographic attention to the subtleties of political culture, Fitzgerald's book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Republican Party changed during the turbulent decades after 1960 and how women and women's issues shaped those changes."
---Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History, State University of New York, Binghamton

"Sara Fitzgerald tells Peterson's story in this superb and timely biography. It carries a message that deserves the widest audience as the nation struggles to find needed consensus on critical issues amid poisonous political partisanship that has made it increasingly difficult for public officials to bridge their differences. I hope that every American reads it."
---Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson, from the Foreword

"To understand the quest for equal rights in America you really need to meet those women who were active at the time of transition. In this gripping biography we meet one woman who entered a male dominated world and triumphed."
---Francis X. Blouin Jr., Director, Bentley Historical Library

"Sara Fitzgerald's writing is as intelligent as it is entertaining."
---Best-selling novelist Diane Chamberlain

Elly Peterson was one of the highest ranking women in the Republican Party. In 1964 she ran for a Michigan seat in the U.S. Senate and became the first woman to serve as chair of the Michigan Republican Party. During the 1960s she grew disenchanted with the increasing conservatism of her party, united with other feminists to push for the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive choice, battled Phyllis Schlafly to prevent her from gaining control of the National Federation of Republican Women, and became an independent.

Elly Peterson's story is a missing chapter in the political history of Michigan, as well as the United States. This new biography, written by Sara Fitzgerald (a Michigan native and former Washington Post editor), finally gives full credit to one of the first female political leaders in this country.

When Peterson resigned in 1970 as assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, David Broder of the Washington Post wrote that "her abilities would have earned her the national chairmanship, were it not for the unwritten sex barrier both parties have erected around that job."

The 1870s is a key decade in the evolution of British thinking about the nature, purpose, and future of empire. Increasing economic competition began to disturb the complacent assumption about Britain's leadership in technology and in the world economy. The growth of other countries, most notably the United States and Germany, put in question Britain's survival as a great power. These changes set in motion a reappraisal of Britain's empire and its importance to the motherland, and a heated debated as to whether colonialism and imperialism were a burden rather than a benefit to Britain. The discussion of the 1870s set the agenda for the debates of the next half-century. This volume documents the writing central to the debate; it includes contributions by such leading British thinkers and statesmen as J. A. Froude, Robert Lowe, Edward Dicey, Frederic Seebohm, Lord Carnarvon, Gladstone, Julius Vogel, and Lord Blachford.

Empowered!examines Arizona’s recent political history and how it has been shaped and propelled by Latinos. It also provides a distilled reflection of U.S. politics more broadly, where the politics of exclusion and the desire for inclusion are forces of change.

Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva argue that the state of Arizona is more inclusive and progressive then it has ever been. Following in the footsteps of grassroots organizers in California and the southeastern states, Latinos in Arizona have struggled and succeeded to alter the anti-immigrant and racist policies that have been affecting Latinos in the state for many years. Draconian immigration policies have plagued Arizona’s political history. Empowered! shows innovative ways that Latinos have fought these policies.

Empowered! focuses on the legacy of Latino activism within politics. It raises important arguments about those who stand to profit financially and politically by stoking fear of immigrants and how resilient politicians and grassroots organizers have worked to counteract that fear mongering. Recognizing the long history of disenfranchisement and injustice surrounding minority communities in the United States, this book outlines the struggle to make Arizona a more just and equal place for Latinos to live. 

In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers’ social security. This landmark provision was part of a larger project to transform the state and expand social inclusion during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. The Bolivarian revolution opened new opportunities for poor and working-class—or popular—women’s organizing. The state recognized their unpaid labor and maternal gender role as central to the revolution. Yet even as state recognition enabled some popular women to receive public assistance, it also made their unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to state appropriation.

Offering the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, Engendering Revolution demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations. Showcasing field research that comprises archival analysis, observation, and extensive interviews, these thought-provoking findings underscore the ways in which popular women sustained a movement purported to exalt them, even while many could not access social security and remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.

Explores questions of identity and belonging through the lens of Canadian cultural production

What does it mean to be at home? In a critical engagement with notions of territory, identity, racial difference, separatism, multiculturalism, and homelessness, this book delves into the question of what it means to belong—in particular, what it means to be at home in Canada. Ephemeral Territories weaves together many narratives and representations of Canadian identity—from political philosophy and cultural theory to art and films such as Srinivas Krishna’s Lulu, Clement Virgo’s Rude, and Charles Biname’s Eldorado—to develop and complicate familiar views of identity and selfhood.

A groundbreaking historical narrative of corruption and economic success in Mexico.

Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite provides a new way to understand the scope and impact of crony capitalism on institutional development in Mexico. Beginning with the Porfiriato, the period between 1876 and 1911 named for the rule of President Porfirio Díaz, José Galindo identifies how certain behavioral patterns of the Mexican political and economic elite have repeated over the years, and analyzes aspects of the political economy that have persisted, shaping and at times curtailing Mexico’s economic development.

Strong links between entrepreneurs and politicians have allowed elite businessmen to receive privileged support, such as cheap credit, tax breaks, and tariff protection, from different governments and to run their companies as monopolies. In turn, successive governments have obtained support from businesses to implement public policies, and, on occasion, public officials have received monetary restitution. Galindo notes that Mexico’s early twentieth-century institutional framework was weak and unequal to the task of reining in these systematic abuses. The cost to society was high and resulted in a lack of fair market competition, unequal income distribution, and stunted social mobility.

The most important investors in the banking, commerce, and manufacturing sectors at the beginning of the twentieth century in Mexico were of French origin, and Galindo explains the formation of the Franco-Mexican elite. This Franco-Mexican narrative unfolds largely through the story of one of the richest families in Mexico, the Jeans, and their cotton textile empire. This family has maintained power and wealth through the current day as Emilio Azcárraga Jean, a great-grandson of one of the members of the first generation of the Jean family to arrive in Mexico, owns Televisa, a major mass media company with one of the largest audiences for Spanish-language content in the world.