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A provocative new perspective on presidential power.

Border walls, school bathrooms, student loans, gun control, diversity, abortion, climate change—today, nothing seems out of reach for the president's pen. But after all the press releases, ceremonies, and speeches, shockingly little gets done. The American presidency promises to solve America's problems, but presidents' unilateral solutions are often weak, even empty.

Kenneth Lowande argues this is no accident. The US political system is not set up to allow presidents to solve major policy problems, yet it lays these problems at their doorstep, and there is no other elected official better positioned to attract attention by appearing to govern. Like any politician, presidents are strategic actors who seek symbolic wins. They pursue executive actions, even when they know that these will fail, because doing so allows them to put on a compelling show for key constituencies. But these empty presidential actions are not without their costs: they divert energy from effective government—and, over time, undermine public trust. Drawing on thousands of executive actions, news coverage, interviews, and presidential archives, False Front shows that the real root of presidential power is in what presidents can get away with not doing.

What the popularity of the Fast and Furious film franchise says about Hollywood blockbusters and media production

Fast and Furious Franchising charts the transformation of Hollywood through the story of one of its most successful cinematic universes. Released in 2001, The Fast and the Furious became an unexpected hit, developing into a seven-billion-dollar media franchise with nine direct sequels (so far), one “sidequel,” copious spin-offs, and licensing deals from board games to theme park rides.

Dan Hassler-Forest shows how Fast and Furious paved the way for a new form of serialized storytelling that balanced new distribution practices and expansion into international markets with a savvy awareness of representational politics. By following the series’s development over the past twenty-five years, Fast and Furious Franchising reveals distinct phases that reflect larger media-industrial trends: the postclassical blockbuster era of the early 2000s; the emergence of the megafranchise between 2008 and 2014; the franchise’s “imperial” era, from 2015 through 2019; and the postpandemic crisis era of media saturation and franchise fatigue.

While examining this rapidly changing media landscape, Hassler-Forest offers lively, insightful analyses of the films as they have embraced ever-more-ludicrous plots and unlikely character turns while always maintaining their signature faith in the power of family. As he illuminates the role of the Fast and Furious movies in the global entertainment industry, Hassler-Forest shows how the films’ improbable success proves Dominic Toretto’s adage that, whether “you win by an inch or a mile . . . winning’s winning.”

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Feeling Yellow examines how yellowface has persisted on the contemporary musical stage and how Asian Americans have contested yellowface, as they stake their own claim to the theatrical stage and nation state. Donatella Galella boldly argues that the pleasures of musical theatre and the disavowal of systemic anti-Asian racism enable the ongoing portrayal of Asian and Asian American characters by non-Asian actors. Galella offers two concepts to understand these phenomena: feeling yellow and yellowface without yellowed faces. Feeling yellow encapsulates the racialized anger, despair, and alienation of Asian American artists and audiences. Yellowface without yellowed faces denotes subtle ways of conveying Asianness, such as performing Asianness with exaggerated irony, using racialized costumes rather than yellow skin and slanted eye makeup, and setting musicals in fantasy Asian lands populated by multiracial casts. 

Galella utilizes musicals such as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Anything Goes, The Mikado, and Soft Power, to understand how Asian and Asian American representation is connected to larger questions: How does racial identity shape emotional reactions to musical theatre? Why does yellowface and anti-Asian racism persist? What are the terms for Asian Americans belonging in the United States? Using a range of approaches from dramaturgy to auto-ethnography and materials from interviews to Reddit posts, Feeling Yellow spotlights Asian American affect, artistry, and activism.

This book explores how festivals and events affect urban places and public spaces, with a particular focus on their role in fostering inclusion. The ‘festivalisation’ of culture, politics and space in cities is often regarded as problematic, but this book examines the positive and negative ways that festivals affect cities by examining festive spaces as contested spaces. The book focuses on Western European cities, a particularly interesting context given the social and cultural pressures associated with high levels of in-migration and concerns over the commercialisation and privatisation of public spaces.

The key themes of this book are the quest for more inclusive urban spaces and the contested geographies of festival spaces and places. Festivals are often used by municipal authorities to break down symbolic barriers that restrict who uses public spaces and what those spaces are used for. However, the rise of commercial festivals and ticketed events means that they are also responsible for imposing physical and financial obstacles that reduce the accessibility of city parks, streets and squares.

Alongside addressing the contested effects of urban festivals on the character and inclusivity of public spaces, the book addresses more general themes including the role of festivals in culture-led regeneration. Several chapters analyse festivals and events as economic development tools, and the book also covers contested representations of festival cities and the ways related images and stories are used in place marketing.

A range of cases from Western Europe are used to explore these issues, including chapters on some of the world’s most significant and contested festival cities: Venice, Edinburgh, London and Barcelona. The book covers a wide range of festivals, including those dedicated to music and the arts, but also events celebrating particular histories, identities and pastimes. A series of fascinating cases are discussed - from the Venice Biennale and Dublin Festival of History, to Rotterdam’s music festivals and craft beer festivals in Manchester. The diverse and innovative qualities of the book are also evident in the range of urban spaces covered: obvious examples of public spaces – such as parks, streets, squares and piazzas – are addressed, but the book includes chapters on enclosed public spaces (e.g., libraries) and urban blue spaces (waterways) too. This reflects the interpretation of public spaces as socio-material entities: they are produced informally through their use (including for festivals and events), as well as through their formal design and management.

Brenda Werth’s Fictions of the Real traces the transformation of “the real” and its transnational conceptualization by Argentine artists in the twenty-first century, focusing on artists who engage in both documentary theater and filmmaking. Werth places the work of Lola Arias, Romina Paula, Federico León, Mariano Pensotti, and Grupo Krapp in dialogue with the distinct but intertwined lineages of theater and film, exploring the intermedial dimensions of these artists’ theatrical work, resonances in their documentary films, and the transmedial relationships between their documentary plays and films. Focusing on the dynamic and shifting context of Argentina between 1998 and 2023, a period roughly bookmarked by the economic crisis of 2001 and the COVID-19 pandemic, this book explores how these artists disrupt the relations of power and counter political manipulation with their own evocative fictions of the real as they engage in the roles of translators, curators, researchers, archivists, and collaborators.

Studies the complex constraints and trade-offs the second administration of Colombian President Uribe (2006–2010) encountered as it attempted to resolve that nation’s violent Marxist insurrection and to have a more efficient judicial system

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a deeply insightful analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America’s most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a stand-alone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe’s response to this existential threat.

In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups. The following president Andrés Pastrana then boldly changed course and attempted resolution through negotiations, an effort whose failure Kline examines in Chronicle of a Failure Foretold. In his third book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, Kline shows how in his first term President Álvaro Uribe Vélez more successfully quelled the insurrection through a combination of negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups and using US backing to mount more effective military campaigns.

Kline opens Fighting Monsters in the Abyss with a recap of Colombia’s complex political history, the development of Marxist rebels and paramilitary groups and their respective relationships to the narcotics trade, and the attempts of successive Colombian presidents to resolve the crisis. Kline next examines the ability of the Colombian government to reimpose rule in rebel-controlled territories as well as the challenges of administering justice. He recounts the difficulties in the enforcement of the landmark Law of Justice and Peace as well as two significant government scandals, that of the “false positives” (“falsos positivos”) in which innocent civilians were killed by the military to inflate the body counts of dead insurgents and a second scandal related to illegal wiretapping.

In tracing Uribe’s choices, strategies, successes, and failures, Kline also uses the example of Colombia to explore a dimension quite unique in the literature about state building: what happens when some members of a government resort to breaking rules or betraying their societies’ values in well-intentioned efforts to build a stronger state?

U.S. foreign policy has long been built on a dichotomy of an irreplaceable “here” and an expendable “there.” In his 2003 announcement of the military campaign in Iraq, George W. Bush declared that we would fight in the Middle East so we wouldn’t have to fight “on the streets of our cities.” But what do the millions of people who live over “there” have to say about U.S. interventions and the displacement they provoke?

In this pathbreaking study, Alaina Kaus analyzes literature by and about refugees who fled Southeast Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East, in the wake of U.S. military occupation and economic intervention. Narratives by authors such as Lan Cao, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Demetria Martínez, Héctor Tobar, Dave Eggers, Mohsin Hamid, and Riverbend reveal contradictions in the human rights pledges that undergird U.S. foreign policy, which promote freedom while authorizing intervention and displacement, and favor market-based solutions over social justice and racial equality.

"Mayor Richard M. Daley dropped the bomb at a routine news conference at City Hall on Tuesday. With no prelude or fanfare, Mr. Daley announced that he would not seek re-election when his term expires next year. 'Simply put, it's time,' he said." New York Times, September 7, 2010

With those four words, an era ended. After twenty-two years, the longest-serving and most powerful mayor in the history of Chicago—and, arguably, America—stepped down, leaving behind a city that was utterly transformed, and a complicated legacy we are only beginning to evaluate.

Exposes a stylistic tradition of flamboyantly failed passing in queer literature and film

This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to the German New Wave and the present day. Ian Fleishman exposes a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of queer style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for queer content. Exploring a corpus of films and novels by André Gide, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, among others, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing intervenes in trenchant debates about queer agency, visibility, negativity, and disidentification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer practices of self-invention, Flamboyant Fictions wagers that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.

English-Korean Bilingual Edition 
영-한 이중언어판

Anyone who was not in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of the city experienced the disaster as a media event, a flood of images pouring across television and computer screens. The twenty-four-hour news cycle created a surplus of representation that overwhelmed viewers and complicated understandings of the storm, the flood, and the aftermath. As time passed, documentary and fictional filmmakers took up the challenge of explaining what had happened in New Orleans, reaching beyond news reports to portray the lived experiences of survivors of Katrina. But while these narratives presented alternative understandings and more opportunities for empathy than TV news, Katrina remained a mediated experience.

In Flood of Images, Bernie Cook offers the most in-depth, wide-ranging, and carefully argued analysis of the mediation and meanings of Katrina. He engages in innovative, close, and comparative visual readings of news coverage on CNN, Fox News, and NBC; documentaries including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble the Water, and Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Elie’s Faubourg Treme; and the HBO drama Treme. Cook examines the production practices that shaped Katrina-as-media-event, exploring how those choices structured the possible memories and meanings of Katrina and how the media’s memory-making has been contested. In Flood of Images, Cook intervenes in the ongoing process of remembering and understanding Katrina.

Flows of Violence offers a profound ethnographic exploration of the intricate relationship between violence and water infrastructure in one of Colombia’s most marginalized cities. This groundbreaking work engages with the concept of “infrastructural violence,” revealing how the Colombian state’s neglect and inadequate provision of water services perpetuate inequality and suffering among Buenaventura’s residents. Through extensive fieldwork, Fernández provides rich empirical data and firsthand accounts that bring to light the daily struggles and resilience of the city’s inhabitants.

The book critically examines how everyday crime and state neglect intersect, altering the improvised practices of water storage and access among the population. It also highlights the innovative mechanisms employed by social movements and ordinary citizens to cope with and resist these challenges.

Flows of Violence is an essential read for scholars in anthropology, geography, and Latin American studies, offering valuable insights into the sociopolitical impacts of infrastructure. This timely contribution underscores the urgent need for equitable infrastructure development and social justice, making it a pivotal text for understanding urban poverty and state dynamics in Latin America and beyond.

Folklore is often positioned at the center of critical social issues. While folklorists have acknowledged this power and explored how folklore has been used for political ends, far less attention has been paid to the role folklorists and folklore scholarship can play in addressing contemporary social issues in public discourse. Folklore in the Public Square explores how folklorists apply their research to engage general audiences and address the challenging issues we face daily.

Folklore in the Public Square brings together folklorists working in the humanities and the social sciences committed to applying their research to help solve contemporary social challenges, formalizing an undercurrent of thought that has gained growing attention. Case studies apply ethical research to address pervasive questions about the environment, poverty, health and healthcare, political partisanship, war, tourism, stigma, racism, and conspiracy theories, among others. Building on conversations raised by folklorists who have contributed to public programming or conducted collaborative research in local communities, this book appeals to anyone interested in contemporary social issues, applied research, or collaborative and ethical fieldwork.

A journey to find Norway’s supposed bliss makes for a comic travelogue that asks, seriously, what makes Norwegians so damn happy—and does it translate?

Norway is usually near or at the top of the World Happiness Report. But is it really one of the happiest countries on Earth? Eric Dregni had his doubts. Years ago he and his wife had lived in this country his great-great-grandfather once fled. When their son Eilif was born there, the Norwegian government paid for the birth, gave them $5,000, and deposited $150 into their bank account every month, but surely happiness was more than a generous health care system. What about all those grim months without sun? When Eilif turned fifteen, father and son decided to go back together and investigate. For the Love of Cod is their droll report on the state of purported Norwegian bliss.

Arriving in May, a month of festivals and eternal sun, the Dregnis are thrust into Norway at its merriest—and into the reality of the astronomical cost of living, which forces them to find lodging with friends and relatives. But this gives them an inside look at the secrets to a better life. It’s not the massive amounts of money flowing from the North Sea oil fields but how these funds are distributed that fuels the Norwegian version of democratic socialism—resulting in miniscule differences between rich and poor. Locals introduce them to the principles underlying their avowed contentment, from an active environmentalism that translates into flyskam (flight shame), which keeps Norwegians in the family cabin for the long vacations prescribed by law and charges a 150 percent tax on gas guzzlers (which, Eilif observes, means more Teslas seen in one hour than in a year in Minnesota!). 

From a passion for dugnad or community volunteerism and sakte or “slow,” a rejection of the mad pace of modernity, to the commodification of Viking history and the dark side of Black Metal music that turns the idea of quaint, traditional Norway upside down, this idiosyncratic father and son tour lets readers, free of flyskam, see how, or whether, Norwegian happiness translates.

Presents alternative categories of fiction through which to examine how contemporary writers have envisaged Africa’s changing literary terrains

Stephanie Bosch Santana analyzes southern African writers’ experimentations with literary form in periodical print and digital media since the mid-twentieth century in order to offer an alternative account of contemporary African imaginations of mobility. Based on an understudied archive of texts in English and Chichewa/Nyanja from Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures examines new, noncanonical categories of fiction, including migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, and digital diaries. These generically, linguistically, and geographically mobile forms map changing ideas of interconnection and belonging. By reading them “in motion,” as they travel across space, time, genre, and language and between publications and platforms, Bosch Santana limns multiple centers of literary influence and relation across southern African and Black diasporas, revealing forms of literary mobility and space making that are occluded by current models of world literature.