Results by title

193 books match the query 'Empire' and 3 start with l

cover of Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire

Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal

Celeste Vaughan Curington

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Winner of the ASA Race, Gender, and Class section's Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award

Winner of the ASA Racial and Ethnic Minorities section’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

[more]
cover of Law and Democracy in the Empire of Force

Law and Democracy in the Empire of Force

H. Jefferson Powell and James Boyd White, editors

University of Michigan Press, 2009

The authors of this book share a concern for the state of law and democracy in our country, which to many seems to have deteriorated badly. Deep changes are visible in a wide array of phenomena: judicial opinions, the teaching of law, legal practice, international relations, legal scholarship, congressional deliberations, and the culture of contemporary politics. In each of these intersections between law, culture, and politics, traditional expectations have been transformed in ways that pose a threat to the continued vitality and authority of law and democracy.
 
The authors analyze specific instances in which such a decline has occurred or is threatened, tracing them to "the empire of force," a phrase borrowed from Simone Weil. This French intellectual applied the term not only to the brute force used by police and soldiers but, more broadly, to the underlying ways of thinking, talking, and imagining that make that sort of force possible, including propaganda, unexamined ideology, sentimental clichés, and politics by buzzwords, all familiar cultural forms.
 
Based on the underlying crisis and its causes, the editors and authors of these essays agree that neither law nor democracy can survive where the empire of force dominates. Yet each manages to find a ground for hope in our legal and democratic culture.
 
H. Jefferson Powell is Frederic Cleaveland Professor of Law and Divinity at Duke University and has served in both the federal and state governments, as a deputy assistant attorney general and as principal deputy solicitor general in the U.S. Department of Justice and as special counsel to the attorney general of North Carolina. His latest book is Constitutional Conscience: The Moral Dimension of Judicial Decision.
 
James Boyd White is Hart Wright Professor of Law emeritus and Professor of English emeritus, at the University of Michigan. His latest book is Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force.

"An extraordinary collection of provocative, insightful, and inspiring essays on the future of law and democracy in the twenty-first century."
---Geoffrey R. Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago

"These thoughtful essays diagnose democracy's perilous present, and---more importantly---they explore avenues to democracy's rescue through humanization of law."
---Kenneth L. Karst, David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA

Contributors
Martin Böhmer, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
M. Cathleen Kaveny, University of Notre Dame
Howard Lesnick, University of Pennsylvania
The Honorable John T. Noonan Jr., Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
H. Jefferson Powell, Duke University
Jedediah Purdy, Duke University
Jed Rubenfeld, Yale University
A.W. Brian Simpson, University of Michigan
Barry Sullivan, Jenner and Block LLP, Chicago
Joseph Vining, University of Michigan
Robin West, Georgetown University
James Boyd White, University of Michigan

[more]
cover of Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

Liberalism and Empire

A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought

Uday Singh Mehta

University of Chicago Press, 1999

We take liberalism to be a set of ideas committed to political rights and self-determination, yet it also served to justify an empire built on political domination. Uday Mehta argues that imperialism, far from contradicting liberal tenets, in fact stemmed from liberal assumptions about reason and historical progress. Confronted with unfamiliar cultures such as India, British liberals could only see them as backward or infantile. In this, liberals manifested a narrow conception of human experience and ways of being in the world.

Ironically, it is in the conservative Edmund Burke—a severe critic of Britain's arrogant, paternalistic colonial expansion—that Mehta finds an alternative and more capacious liberal vision. Shedding light on a fundamental tension in liberal theory, Liberalism and Empire reaches beyond post-colonial studies to revise our conception of the grand liberal tradition and the conception of experience with which it is associated.

[more]