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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.

Employing a critical, poststructuralist perspective, Doty examines two “imperial encounters” over time: between the United States and the Philippines and between Great Britain and Kenya. The history of these two relationships demonstrates that not only is the more powerful member allowed to construct “reality,” but this construction of reality bears an important relationship to actual practice. Doty is particularly interested in the way in which the South has been represented by policymakers, scholars, and journalists, and how these representations have influenced specific encounters. Doty also uses the insights of Edward Said to argue that the power dynamic that allows the North to define the global identity of nations in the South ultimately tells us more about northern powers than about their southern neighbors. Doty then considers the persistence of representational practices, particularly with regard to Northern views of human rights in the South and contemporary social science discourses on North-South relations. She ends with the argument that the discipline of international relations needs to be reformed by broadening the repertoire of theoretical and analytical tools available to scholars studying global politics. Important and timely, Imperial Encounters brings a fresh perspective to the debate over the past-and the future-of global politics.

The first comprehensive defense of an inferential conception of scientific representation with applications to art and epistemology.
 
Mauricio Suárez develops a conception of representation that delivers a compelling account of modeling practice. He begins by discussing the history and methodology of model building, charting the emergence of what he calls the modeling attitude, a nineteenth-century and fin de siècle development. Prominent cases of models, both historical and contemporary, are used as benchmarks for the accounts of representation considered throughout the book. After arguing against reductive naturalist theories of scientific representation, Suárez sets out his own account: a case for pluralism regarding the means of representation and minimalism regarding its constituents. He shows that scientists employ a variety of modeling relations in their representational practice—which helps them to assess the accuracy of their representations—while demonstrating that there is nothing metaphysically deep about the constituent relation that encompasses all these diverse means.
 
The book also probes the broad implications of Suárez’s inferential conception outside scientific modeling itself, covering analogies with debates about artistic representation and philosophical thought over the past several decades.

Berger excavates the lineage of stereotype as a concept, illustrating how perception of stereotypes in works of literature and fine art shifts relative to representational norms.
 
Upending a century of scholarly and popular thinking about stereotype, Martin A. Berger traces our current understanding of it to the 1920s, when American journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann borrowed the term from printmaking techniques and defined it as a shared mental picture that simplified a person, event, group, or thing so it could be easily grasped. Berger uncovers stereotype’s intellectual debts to philosophy, psychology, political science, and, in particular, art history and interwar racial theories.
 
Inventing Stereotype analyzes a series of plays, novels, and paintings from the 1920s and 1930s that sparked fierce debate about whether they employed racial stereotypes in the depiction of Black, Jewish, and other characters. Through careful attention to audience responses—parsed by race, political leanings, religion, and class—the book illustrates how artistic depictions are categorized as either stereotyped or not, relative to current representational norms, rather than to their success in conveying the authentic identities of individuals or racial groups.
 

In this groundbreaking study of French-language comic strips, Catriona MacLeod looks at the representation of women across three distinct categories: as main characters and as secondary figures created by male artists, and as characters created by women artists. Drawing from feminist scholarship, especially well-known film and literary theorists, the book asks what it means to draw and depict women from within a phallocentric, male-dominated paradigm as well as how the particular medium of bande dessinée (the French-language graphic novel) has shaped dominant representations of women.

MacLeod’s exploration focuses on the representation of female characters in French comics across genres, artistic styles, and time periods. Until now, these characters and their creators have received relatively little scholarly attention, or have only been considered individually, rather than within wider patterns of female representation; this book aims to correct that.