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In the second century CE, the multiethnic, multilingual, and religiously diverse Roman Empire grew to its greatest extent. To maintain order, Rome relied heavily on strict social hierarchies, established not only through legal frameworks like citizenship, but also through cultural markers (such as clothing and language) and personal traits (such as educational achievement). Even as Rome grew into one of the world’s most powerful empires, however, its social systems strained under the stresses caused by that very growth, which encouraged cultural interaction, long-distance travel, and social mobility—all of which threatened the hierarchies that underpinned Roman order.

It was during this time that the North African–born, Latin-speaking, Greek-educated Apuleius—whose own background showcases the multiplicity of identities available then to Roman individuals—flourished. He remains one of the ancient world’s best-known authors today, thanks particularly to his famous novel, Metamorphoses, known also as The Golden Ass. Taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, Ashli J. E. Baker proffers a bold new reading of Apuleius, proposing that across his writings there is a consistent focus on the theme of identity and its instability. By placing close readings in conversation with sociocultural and material contexts, she shows that because the structures of Roman power depended on inherently unreliable markers of identity, Apuleius’ work can be read as a biting critique of the fraught relationship between the individual, society, and the state in his contemporary Rome.

A powerful argument that the failure of ideology has created political disconnection and apathy

Political institutions increasingly fail to provide representations where citizens can recognize, identify, and imagine themselves as part of the institutions’ democratic project. Robin Truth Goodman argues that this disconnection is because ideology itself has gotten interrupted. Reversing Louis Althusser’s famous formulation of ideology as “calling” to citizens who, in response, turn toward the call, she argues that citizens now believe that ideology has turned away from them and stopped calling, endangering the most basic processes of modern democracies.

Deconstructing the widespread failure of democratic institutions to connect with individuals, Goodman examines recent works by authors such as Claire Vaye Watkins, Colson Whitehead, Ling Ma, Han Kang, and Ruth Ozeki that interrogate subjective agency within three different sites of social struggle: eco-catastrophe, pandemic, and food insecurity. She shows the themes that emerge from the novels reflecting and extending how the privatization and technologization of political decision-making have effectively cut off politicians and political institutions from the people they are supposed to serve.

Basing her study in the political philosophy of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, and other prominent feminists, Goodman draws parallels with gender theory and argues that precarity in democratic societies has prevented citizens from finding points of engagement within politics. Diagnosing this widespread inability to translate private struggles into collective responses, Ideology, Interrupted is a powerful and inspiring call for new forms of societal bonds and political engagement to rejuvenate our democratic systems.

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A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

Demonstrating how art and literature remain vital to alternative imaginaries beyond the power of imperialism and modernization

Imperial Decay: Literature, Autonomy, and the End of Modernization in the Americas employs a dynamic, comparative approach to contemporary literature and visual art, showing how fiction, photography, poetry, and film from Latin America and the United States vividly illuminate the present. Focusing on the period from the end of the Cold War to the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Emilio Sauri contends that what brings these media together is not just the history of hemispheric connections but also, and more strikingly, the question of the artwork’s autonomy.

Elaborating on influential accounts that reveal how US hegemony in Latin America and the resistance it inspired throughout the region are bound up with the promise of modernization, Imperial Decay offers unique insights into the hollowing out of this promise at the end of the so-called American Century. Tracing this commitment back to the modernisms of the last century and forward to more recent works, this book casts canonical figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Walker Evans, and Gabriel García Márquez in a new and necessary light while developing a compelling interpretive framework for contemporary writers and artists from across the region, including Roberto Bolaño and Benjamin Kunkel, Alejandro Cartagena and Yvonne Venegas, and Kleber Mendonça Filho. Ultimately, Sauri shows why the work of art remains vital to the task of envisioning alternatives to the immiserations, ecological devastation, and degraded forms of life wrought by imperial decay.

Offers a fresh perspective on power relationships in global politics.

“Developed/underdeveloped,” “first world/third world,” “modern/traditional”-although there is nothing inevitable, natural, or arguably even useful about such divisions, they are widely accepted as legitimate ways to categorize regions and peoples of the world. In Imperial Encounters, Roxanne Lynn Doty looks at the way these kinds of labels influence North-South relations, reflecting a history of colonialism and shaping the way national identity is constructed today.

Where values collide, politics guides the way.

Scholars of public administration have historically too often been disdainful towards politics in the field, viewing political activities and interests as opportunities for corruption, mismanagement, and skewed priorities. Supporters of this anti-political stance have become even more strident in recent years, many of them advancing scientific models for the study and practice of public administration and governance.

Michael Spicer argues that politics deserves to be defended as a vital facet of public administration on the grounds that it can promote moral conduct in government and in public administration, principally by bringing to the foreground the role of values in administrative practice. Politics can facilitate the resolution of conflicts that naturally arise from competing values, or conceptions of the good, while minimizing the use of force or violence. Drawing on the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Crick, and Stuart Hampshire, In Defense of Politics in Public Administration argues that value conflict is an integral part of our moral experience, both in making our own moral choices and in dealing with those whose values conflict with our own. This book is a spirited declaration of principles and a timely contribution to a dialogue that is redefining public administration, both in theory and in practice.

Informed by recent developments in literary criticism and social theory, In the Nature of Things addresses the presumption that nature exists independent of culture and, in particular, of language. The theoretical approaches of the contributors represent both modernist and postmodernist positions, including feminist theory, critical theory, Marxism, science fiction, theology, and botany. They demonstrate how the concept of nature is invoked and constituted in a wide range of cultural projects—from the Bible to science fiction movies, from hunting to green consumerism. Ultimately, it weeks to link the work of theorists concerned with nature and the environment to nontheorists who share similar concerns.

The home pregnancy test is a technology that can be purchased in drug stores, gas stations, and online, and the results are often casually posted to social media. But, as sociologist and attorney Joan Robinson argues, no technology is as simple as it appears. In Whose Hands traces this test from its origin story in a lab to its day-to-day existence in the hands of users, showing that mundane technologies matter, especially when they are used as tools of surveillance and self-surveillance. The book is the result of Robinson's fourteen-year exploration of the social life of the home pregnancy test, and it describes the breadth and beauty of people's messy reproductive lives today. Based on archival and legal research as well as interviews with home pregnancy test users, it shows how even those technologies that we use because they're convenient can be tools of shame, surveillance, and control. 
 

In the early 1900s, a handful of unconventional couples emerged within the American radical Left. In Intimate Radicals, Ashley Walters tells the story of a group of young, East European Jewish women and white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men— such as Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and William English Walling, among other notable figures in American literature, domestic and international affairs, and early Hollywood—and how they imbued their romances with revolutionary principles. The relationships captivated the public and became a source of intrigue, largely driven by the growth of human-interest journalism. Through individual biographies, historical narrative, and literary analysis, Walters reveals the cultural and political contingencies of desire.

 As Progressive Era radicals rebelled against the constraints of an earlier era, East European Jews—and Jewish women in particular— came to embody a new cosmopolitan ideal and European revolutionary spirit. Drawing on letters, newspapers, literature, and film, Walters shows how the public reception of these patrician-immigrant relationships lent credence to a new cultural mythology of Jewish womanhood. The men’s desire for East European Jewish women, she also points out, can be viewed as a form of “radical tourism,” in which men who enjoy a degree of privilege pursue an alluring Other in the hope of obtaining a more worldly identity.

This book is published with the support of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award, administered by the Association for Jewish Studies.

An appeal for the importance of theory, utopia, and close consideration of our contemporary dark times

What does any particular theory allow us to do? What is the value of doing so? And who benefits? In Invoking Hope, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the undiminished importance of the practices of theory, utopia, and a deep and critical reading of our current situation of what Bertolt Brecht refers to as finsteren Zeiten, or dark times.

Invoking Hope was written in response to three events that occurred in 2016: the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia; the one hundredth anniversary of the founding text in theory, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; and the rise of the right-wing populism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Wegner offers original readings of major interventions in theory alongside dazzling utopian imaginaries developed from classical Greece to our global present—from Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Sarah Ahmed, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Lacan to such works as Plato’s Republic, W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown, Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, and more. Wegner comments on an expansive array of modernist and contemporary literature, film, theory, and popular culture.

With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.

Thousands of Iranians fled their homeland when the 1978–1979 revolution ended the fifty-year reign of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Some fled to Europe and Canada, while others settled in the United States, where anti-Iranian sentiment flared as the hostage crisis unfolded. For those who chose America, Texas became the fourth-largest settlement area, ultimately proving to be a place of paradox for any Middle Easterner in exile. Iranians in Texas culls data, interviews, and participant observations in Iranian communities in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to reveal the difficult, private world of cultural pride, religious experience, marginality, culture clashes, and other aspects of the lives of these immigrants.

Examining the political nature of immigration and how the originating and receiving countries shape the prospects of integration, Mohsen Mobasher incorporates his own experience as a Texas scholar born in Iran. Tracing current anti-Muslim sentiment to the Iranian hostage crisis, two decades before 9/11, he observes a radically negative shift in American public opinion that forced thousands of Iranians in the United States to suddenly be subjected to stigmatization and viewed as enemies. The book also sheds light on the transformation of the Iranian family in exile and some of the major challenges that second-generation Iranians face in their interactions with their parents.

Bringing to life a unique population in the context of global politics, Iranians in Texas overturns stereotypes while echoing diverse voices.

An exploration of the link between politics of migration, prospects of integration, and ethnic identity among Iranian immigrants and their descendants in the United States, spanning from the 1970s to the present day.

Thousands of Iranians fled their homeland when the 1978–1979 revolution ended the fifty-year reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. Some fled to Europe and Canada, while others settled in the United States, where anti-Iranian sentiment flared as the hostage crisis unfolded. For those who chose America, Texas became the fourth-largest settlement area. Iranians in Texas culls data, interviews, and participant observations in Iranian communities in Houston, Dallas, and Austin to reveal the difficult, private world of cultural pride, religious experience, marginality, culture clashes, and other aspects of the lives of these immigrants.

Examining the political nature of immigration between Iran and the United States and social, cultural, and economic life for Iranian immigrants and their American-born children, Mohsen Mostafavi Mobasher incorporates his own experience as a Texas scholar born in Iran. In this revised edition, two new chapters and a new introduction and conclusion provide updates on what has happened in the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, including the Iran nuclear deal and resulting controversy, the Muslim ban, and the global protests over the death of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for not wearing a hijab. Bringing to life a unique immigrant population in the context of global politics, Iranians in Texas overturns stereotypes and echoes diverse voices.

This book examines the political dimension of Islam in predivided Pakistan (1947-1971), one of the first new Muslim nations to commit itself to an Islamic political order and one in which the national debate on Islamic, political, and ideological issues has been the most persistent, focused, and rich of any dialogues in the contemporary Muslim world.

Nasim Jawed draws on the findings of a survey he conducted among two influential social groups—the ulama (traditional religious leaders) and the modern professionals—as well as on the writings of Muslim intellectuals. He probes the major Islamic positions on critical issues concerning national identity, the purpose of the state, the form of government, and free, socialist, and mixed economies.

This study contributes to an enhanced understanding of Islam's political culture worldwide, since the issues, positions, and arguments are often similar across the Muslim world. The empirical findings of the study not only outline the ideological backdrop of contemporary Islamic reassertion, but also reveal diversity as well as tensions within it.