Results by title

2018 books match the query 'Political aspects' and 91 start with m

cover of Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia

Magic’s Translations

Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia

Margaret J. Wiener

Duke University Press, 2025

“Do you believe in magic?” This familiar question suggests magic is easily recognized but unreal. In Magic’s Translations, Margaret J. Wiener argues that such views are shaped by historical power struggles, especially in Europe’s relations with the wider world. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch interactions with Indonesians, Wiener reveals how colonial agents framed unfamiliar practices, practitioners, and objects as “magic,” rendering distinct phenomena fundamentally alike and advancing colonizing projects that deemed magic antithetical to reason and reality. While colonial authorities, including ethnologists, mobilized the concept of magic to differentiate Europeans from Indonesians, nature from culture, reason from superstition, and fact from fetish, their efforts produced unexpected outcomes: Some Indonesian artifacts and acts not only retained their power but invaded European experiences. As anthropologists were among the key translators of magic throughout the world, Wiener intersperses accounts of magic’s translations in the Indies with reflections on anthropology’s ongoing engagement with the concept. She demonstrates that magic became an object of expert knowledge, political control, and popular fascination, rather than a self-evident category or relic of naïve belief.
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cover of Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

Making Hispanics

How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

G. Cristina Mora

University of Chicago Press, 2014

How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and '80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.

Some argue that these cultures are fundamentally similar and that the Spanish language is a natural basis for a unified Hispanic identity. But Mora shows very clearly that the idea of ethnic grouping was historically constructed and institutionalized in the United States. During the 1960 census, reports classified Latin American immigrants as “white,” grouping them with European Americans. Not only was this decision controversial, but also Latino activists claimed that this classification hindered their ability to portray their constituents as underrepresented minorities. Therefore, they called for a separate classification: Hispanic. Once these populations could be quantified, businesses saw opportunities and the media responded. Spanish-language television began to expand its reach to serve the now large, and newly unified, Hispanic community with news and entertainment programming. Through archival research, oral histories, and interviews, Mora reveals the broad, national-level process that led to the emergence of Hispanicity in America.
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cover of Making Local News

Making Local News

Phyllis Kaniss

University of Chicago Press, 1991

Why do crimes and accidents earn more news coverage than development and policy issues affecting thousands of people? Filled with revealing interviews with both journalists and city officials, Making Local News is the first comprehensive look at how the economic motives of media owners, professional motives of journalists, and the strategies of media-wise politicians shape the news we see and hear, thereby influencing urban policy.

"Making Local News by Phyllis Kaniss . . . is significant. . . . If we can continue to get smarter about that which journalism leaves out or distorts in its coverage of politics, we may eventually get smarter about politics itself."—Mitchell Stephens, The Philadelphia Inquirer View

"A convincing analysis of the factors and forces which color how and why local issues do, or do not, become newsworthy." —Michael H. Ebner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"This work serves as a reminder of the importance of a medium that is often overlooked until economic realities threaten its very existence." —Choice

"Kaniss is truly a pioneer in the study of local news."—Susan Herbst, Contemporary Sociology
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cover of Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics

Making Matters

Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics

Leigh Gruwell

Utah State University Press, 2022

Craft is a process-oriented practice that takes seriously the relationships between bodies—both human and nonhuman—and makes apparent how these relationships are mired in and informed by power structures. Making Matters introduces craft agency, a feminist vision of new materialist rhetorics that enables scholars to identify how power circulates and sometimes stagnates within assemblages of actors and provides tools to rectify that uneven distribution.
 
To recast new materialist rhetorics as inherently crafty, Leigh Gruwell historicizes and locates the concept of craft both within rhetorical history as well as in the disciplinary history of writing studies. Her investigation centers on three specific case studies: craftivism, the fibercraft website Ravelry, and the 2017 Women’s March. These instances all highlight how a material, ecological understanding of rhetorical agency can enact political change.
 
Craft agency models how we humans might work with and alongside things—nonhuman, sometimes digital, sometimes material—to create more equitable relationships. Making Matters argues that craft is a useful starting point for addressing criticisms of new materialist rhetorics not only because doing so places rhetorical action as a product of complex relationships between a network of human and nonhuman actors, but also because it does so with an explicitly activist agenda that positions the body itself as a material interface.
 
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cover of Making Mexican Rock: Censorship, Journalism, and Popular Music after Avándaro

Making Mexican Rock

Censorship, Journalism, and Popular Music after Avándaro

Andrew J. Green

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

The history of Mexican rock is one of censorship. A number of cultural histories recount how rock was repressed, censored, and marginalized by Mexico’s single-party regime in the twentieth century, often focusing on the authoritarian crackdown that followed a mediatized moral panic after the Avándaro Festival of 1971. The popular 2020 Netflix documentary Break It All, for example, positions Mexican rock as a potent expression of resistance in the late twentieth century, forging a strong association with Mexico’s transition away from authoritarian rule and toward neoliberal democracy.

Yet in light of the failures of successive democratically elected governments in Mexico, these histories are worth critically revisiting and updating. What stories about music censorship can be told after Mexico’s transition to multi-party democracy? Placing history and ethnography into dialogue, Making Mexican Rock explores historical and recent experiences of censorship and repression against popular music, focusing on the independent rock scene (or “escena independiente”) in Mexico City.

Informed by the so-called new censorship theory, ethnomusicologist Andrew J. Green challenges historical accounts that equate acts of censorship with state activity. The open-ended account of censorship assumed here helps us to understand, instead, how conceptions of censorship and expressive freedom transformed toward the end of single-party rule; how practices of policing live rock adapted to neoliberal securitization; and how histories of rock censorship have been invoked by those seeking to construct and protect emergent music scenes. Making Mexican Rock thus both decenters histories of music censorship from the state, and extends them into the country’s recent history.
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cover of Making Michigan Home: Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural-Urban Experience

Making Michigan Home

Mexican Americans Bridging the Rural-Urban Experience

Brett T. Olmsted

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Mexicanos in Michigan and across the Midwest share a common experience: living as largely invisible outsiders as they struggled to build vibrant communities in places that wanted their labor but not their presence. Brett Olmsted ranges from the 1920s to the 1970s as he analyzes how Mexicanos sought to transcend social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. Never numerous in any one area, Mexican Americans pursued inclusion via leisure spaces and labor unionism. Activities like celebrations, sports, movies, and music encouraged Mexicanos to claim physical and social space, connect with Michigan’s other Mexicano communities, and construct their own sense of identity. Mexicano workers, meanwhile, embraced interethnic union activism to address racism in job placement and promotion. Olmsted also examines how the state’s Mexicanos adapted to Michigan’s dual economy and found advantages in moving back-and-forth between rural and urban areas. In-depth and innovative, Making Michigan Home spotlights the state’s overlooked Mexicanos and their distinctive experiences within the Latina/o/x Studies Midwest.
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cover of Making Minnesota Liberal: Civil Rights And The Transformation Of The Democratic Party

Making Minnesota Liberal

Civil Rights And The Transformation Of The Democratic Party

Jennifer A. Delton

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

The surprising story of how Minnesota politicians helped redirect the course of American politics. How did a largely white state like Minnesota become a springboard for leadership in civil rights? Why did it produce a generation of liberals-Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Donald Fraser, Orville Freeman, and Eugene McCarthy-whose ideals transformed the Democratic Party? In Making Minnesota Liberal, Jennifer A. Delton delves into the roots of Minnesota politics for the answer, tracing the change from the regional, third-party, class-oriented politics of the Farmer-Labor Party to the national, two-party, pluralistic liberalism of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). While others have examined how anticommunism and the Cold War shaped this transformation, Delton takes a new approach, showing the key roles played by antiracism and the civil rights movement. In telling this story, Delton contributes to our understanding not only of Minnesota's political history but also of the relationship between antiracism and American politics in the twentieth century. Making Minnesota Liberal combines political history with a discussion of the symbolic role played by race in political battles between whites. Delton recounts the creation of Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party, its merger with the Democrats, and the acrimonious battle for control of the DFL just after World War II. She argues that the Humphrey liberals won this battle in part because antiracism activities enabled previously antagonistic groups, divided by ethnicity, religion, and class, to unify around a common cause. Delton contends that although liberal Minnesotans' concern for racial justice was genuine, it also provided them with national political relevance and imbued their bid for power with a sense of morality. Ultimately the language of tolerance and diversity that emerged from antiracism prepared Minnesotans for Humphrey's vision of a pluralistic and state-centered liberalism, which eventually became the model for Democratic politics nationwide. Making Minnesota Liberal is an absorbing and trenchant account of a key moment in American history, one that continues to resonate in our time. Jennifer A. Delton is assistant professor of history at Skidmore College.
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cover of Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918-1928

Making Modernism Soviet

The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918-1928

Pamela Kachurin

Northwestern University Press, 2013

Making Modernism Soviet provides a new understanding of the ideological engagement of Russian modern artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, and Vera Ermolaeva with the political and social agenda of the Bolsheviks in the chaotic years immediately following the Russian Revolution. Focusing on the relationship between power brokers and cultural institutions under conditions of state patronage, Pamela Kachurin lays to rest the myth of the imposition of control from above upon a victimized artistic community. Drawing on extensive archival research, she shows that Russian modernists used their positions within the expanding Soviet arts bureaucracy to build up networks of like-minded colleagues. Their commitment to one another and to the task of creating a socially transformative visual language for the new Soviet context allowed them to produce some of their most famous works of art. But it also contributed to the "Sovietization" of the art world that eventually sealed their fate.
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cover of Making Of Asian America: Through Political Participation

Making Of Asian America

Through Political Participation

Pei-te Lien

Temple University Press, 2001

Asian Americans are widely believed to be passive and compliant participants in the U.S. political process—if they participate at all. In this ground-breaking book, Pei-te Lien maps the actions and strategies of Asian Americans as they negotiate a space in the American political arena.

Professor Lien looks at political participation by Asian Americans prior to 1965 and then examines, at both organizational and mass politics levels, how race, ethnicity, and transnationalism help to construct a complex American electorate. She looks not only at rates of participation among Asian Americans as compared with blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and non-Hispanic whites, but also among specific groups of Asian Americans—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Vietnamese. She also discusses how gender, socioeconomic class, and place of birth affect political participation.

With documentation ranging from historical narrative to opinion survey data, Professor Lien creates a picture of a diverse group of politically active people who are intent on carving out a place for themselves in American political life.
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cover of Making Politics Work: Practical Lessons on Politics for Would-Be Education Reformers

Making Politics Work

Practical Lessons on Politics for Would-Be Education Reformers

Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim

University of Chicago Press, 2025

An expansive study shows how politics can work for, not just against, efforts to improve America’s schools.
 
The education reform project has always been about making America’s schools more effective for the children who attend them. In Making Politics Work, authors Paul T. Hill and Ashley E. Jochim show that this project cannot succeed without mastering what is the single largest constraint on its success: politics.

Drawing upon more than a decade of work with dozens of school systems, Hill and Jochim show how failures to secure political support or mitigate inevitable opposition dooms the education reform project from the start. But this outcome is not inevitable. By tracing the evolution of the “portfolio strategy” across 27 localities that implemented it, they uncover practical lessons that superintendents, state leaders, and foundation officials can use to increase the likelihood that their ideas for improving public education don’t join the list of once-promising initiatives that could not be sustained in the face of intractable political conflict.
 
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cover of Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

Making an Antislavery Nation

Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom

Graham A. Peck

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Winner of the Russell P. Strange Memorial Book Award

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation.

Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered the Civil War.

Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America.

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cover of Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience

Making the American Team

Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience

Mark Dyreson

University of Illinois Press, 1998

Sport dominates television and the mass media. Politics and business are a-bustle with sports metaphors. Endorsements by athletes sell us products. "Home run," "slam dunk," and the rest of the vocabulary of sport color daily conversation. Even in times of crisis and emergency, the media reports the scores and highlights. 

Marky Dyreson delves into how our obsession with sport came into being with a close look at coverage of the Olympic Games between 1896 and 1912. How people reported and consumed information on the Olympics offers insight into how sport entered the heart of American culture as part of an impetus for social reform. Political leaders came to believe in the power of sport to revitalize the "republican experiment." Sport could instill a new sense of national identity that would forge a new sense of community and a healthy political order while at the same time linking America's intellectual and power elite with the experiences of the masses.

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cover of Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument

Making the Case

Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument

Kathryn M. Olson

Michigan State University Press, 2012

In an era when the value of the humanities and qualitative inquiry has been questioned in academia and beyond, Making the Case is an engaging and timely collection that brings together a veritable who’s who of public address scholars to illustrate the power of case-based scholarly argument and to demonstrate how critical inquiry into a specific moment speaks to general contexts and theories. Providing both a theoretical framework and a wealth of historically situated texts, Making the Case spans from Homeric Greece to twenty-first-century America. The authors examine the dynamic interplay of texts and their concomitant rhetorical situations by drawing on a number of case studies, including controversial constitutional arguments put forward by activists and presidents in the nineteenth century, inventive economic pivots by Franklin Roosevelt and Alan Greenspan, and the rhetorical trajectory and method of Barack Obama.

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cover of Maladies of Modernity: Scientism and the Deformation of Political Order

Maladies of Modernity

Scientism and the Deformation of Political Order

David N. Whitney

St. Augustine's Press, 2014

This work explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Scientism is a deformation of science, which unnecessarily restricts the scope of scientific inquiry by placing a dogmatic faith in the method of the natural sciences. Its adherents call for nothing less than a complete transformation of society. Science becomes the idol that can magically cure the perpetual maladies of modern society and of human nature itself. Whitney demonstrates that scientism is intellectually impoverishing and politically dangerous. Whitney surveys the development of scientism from early modernity to the present day, beginning with Francis Bacon, arguing that Bacon stands as the founder, not only of the experimental method, but also of scientism. This is most evident in his presentation of a scientific utopia in New Atlantis. After briefly noting the impact of Isaac Newton and the French Encylopedists, Whitney then moves on to the other great representative figure of scientism: Auguste Comte, who demonstrates the religious fervor that accompanies the scientistic attitude. Continuing on the path set forth by Bacon, Comte argues for a reorganization of society based on the precepts of positive science. The eugenics movements in 20th-century America and Germany is next, and the author argues that they reflect the new worldview that had emerged from Darwin’s evolutionary theory; a theory partially based on scientistic principles. The solution to scientism, Whitney advances, lies in a new (or revised) science of politics; the foundation of which is based on the Classical sources that were either discredited or banned outright by the proposals of Bacon and Comte. He concludes the work with contemporary examples of scientism, including the climate change debates, genetic engineering, and the New Atheism movement.

“Chief among the spiritually blighting tendencies of the age is materialist reductionism parading as scientific orthodoxy. David Whitney powerfully explores this movement and habit of mind as it takes its rise in the form of scientism, especially from Sir Francis Bacon’s NEW ATLANTIS in the 17th century and finds full fruition in the positivist teachings of August Comte in the 19th century—a preamble to the behavioralist dogmas of our own time. The openness to the facts of experience characteristic of all science as a search for the truth of reality in all its dimensions and diversity is thereby effectively abandoned in favor of an unrelenting insistence on a restrictive methodology ostensibly grounded in phenomenal reality that is perversely made the touchstone of all valid inquiry. The consequences are philosophically as well as politically disastrous, as Whitney brilliantly demonstrates in this path-breaking study.”

– Ellis Sandoz, Founder of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies

"David Whitney’s excellent critique of what he calls scientism, a dogmatic application of the methods of natural science to social science, provides a high-brow diagnosis of the modern maladies that result from the “rhetorical power of science.”

–– Scott Robinson, voegelinview
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cover of Malaysiakini and the Power of Independent Media in Malaysia

Malaysiakini and the Power of Independent Media in Malaysia

Janet Steele

National University of Singapore Press, 2023

Chronicles the success of Malaysia’s only truly independent media outlet. 

Founded in 1999 by Steven Gan and Premesh Chandran, Malaysiakini was one of many online portals that sprung up in the wake of Reformasi, a period of public protests sparked by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad’s 1998 firing of his deputy Anwar Ibrahim. At first, there was no reason to think that Malaysiakini would be anything momentous. However, Malaysiakini wanted to do something much more important than just reporting on Reformasi—its founders intended to bring independent journalism to Malaysia in hopes of changing the country for the better.

Based on more than fifteen years of observation of Malaysiakini's newsroom practices, Malaysiakini and the Power of Independent Media in Malaysia is an intimate portrait of the people and issues behind Malaysia’s only truly independent media outlet. The author illustrates Malaysiakini’s unique mix of idealism in action, studying how sensitive issues such as race, religion, politics, and citizenship are discussed in the newsroom. This attention to the inner workings of one of the most important media institutions in the region yields not only a deep newsroom ethnography but a nuanced, rich history of modern Malaysia.
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cover of Mama's Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression

Mama's Gun

Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression

Marlo D. David

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

In Mama’s Gun: Black Maternal Figures and the Politics of Transgression, Marlo D. David identifies five bold, new archetypes of black motherhood for the post-civil rights generation in order to imagine new ways of thinking about pervasive maternal stereotypes of black women. Rather than avoiding “negative” images of black motherhood, such as welfare queens, teen mothers, and “baby mamas,” Mama’s Gun centralizes these dispossessed figures and renames them as the Young Mother, the Blues Mama, the Surrogate, Big Mama, and the Mothership.
 
Taking inspiration from African American fiction, historical accounts of black life, Afrofuturism, and black popular culture in music and on screen, David turns her attention to Sapphire’s Push, Octavia Butler’s Dawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body as well as the performance art of Erykah Badu and the films of Tyler Perry. She draws out the implications of black maternal figures in these texts who balk at tradition and are far from “ideal.” David’s study shows how representations of blackness are deeply embedded in the neoliberal language of contemporary American politics and how black writers and performers resist such mainstream ideologies with their own transgressive black maternal figures.
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cover of Managerial Capitalism: Ownership, Management, and the Coming New Mode of Production

Managerial Capitalism

Ownership, Management, and the Coming New Mode of Production

Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy

Pluto Press, 2018

Marxist analysis has traditionally been built on a two-class framework: workers and capitalists. With Managerial Capitalism, Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy mount a powerful argument that such a framework is outdated—we are in fact amid a transition to a new mode of production, one that is fundamentally shaped by a third, intermediary class: managerialism.
            Drawing examples from the United States and Europe, the authors offer a historically rooted interpretation of major current economic and political trends. Without eschewing Marx’s theory of history and political economy, they update it to take account of the changes underway in class patterns and relationships to production. The result is a robust new Marxism for the present and the future.
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cover of Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood

Manufacturing Celebrity

Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood

Vanessa Diaz

Duke University Press, 2020

In Manufacturing Celebrity Vanessa Díaz traces the complex power dynamics of the reporting and paparazzi work that fuel contemporary Hollywood and American celebrity culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, her experience reporting for People magazine, and dozens of interviews with photographers, journalists, publicists, magazine editors, and celebrities, Díaz examines the racialized and gendered labor involved in manufacturing and selling relatable celebrity personas. Celebrity reporters, most of whom are white women, are expected to leverage their sexuality to generate coverage, which makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation and assault. Meanwhile, the predominantly male Latino paparazzi can face life-threatening situations and endure vilification that echoes anti-immigrant rhetoric. In pointing out the precarity of those who hustle to make a living by generating the bulk of celebrity media, Díaz highlights the profound inequities of the systems that provide consumers with 24/7 coverage of their favorite stars.
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cover of Manufacturing the Enemy: The Media War Against Cuba

Manufacturing the Enemy

The Media War Against Cuba

Keith Bolender

Pluto Press, 2019

Mainstream media in the United States for the past 60 years has converged with the neo-colonial foreign policy objectives of the state to create a misinformed, biased narrative against the Cuban revolution. Using extensive examples, including pre-revolutionary historic coverage, journalist Keith Bolender reveals how the national press has established an anti-Cuba chronicle in adherence to Washington's unrelenting regime change policies. From coverage of the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cuban Five and the current issues of Obama's 'Cuban Thaw' in 2014 to the renewed hostility under the Trump Administration, the edition examines with specific clarity how damaging corporate media treatment of Cuba is to the understanding of the revolution and those who continue to support it. This original treatment scrutinises the foundation for the media’s hostility against Cuba's socialist political/economic system, providing new insight into the propaganda workings of the so called 'free' press in the US and across Western liberal democracies. The work is a unique resource for activists, journalists and students interested in the ever-complicated relationship between the United States and its island neighbour to the south.
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cover of Mapping Europe's Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Mapping Europe's Borderlands

Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Steven Seegel

University of Chicago Press, 2012

The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book.
Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices. 
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cover of Maps and Mirrors: Topologies of Art and Politics

Maps and Mirrors

Topologies of Art and Politics

Steve Martinot

Northwestern University Press, 2001

Maps and Mirrors explores the links and gaps between the aesthetic and the political at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Testing the major voices of aesthetic and literary theory, it raises important questions about the implicit political contexts and commitments of thinkers from Kant to de Man. Taken together the essays provide a tour of the complexities and richness of contemporary modes of critique.
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cover of Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana

Market Encounters

Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana

Bianca Murillo

Ohio University Press, 2017

In Market Encounters, Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s.

Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race.

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cover of Marketing Marianne: French Propaganda in America, 1900-1940

Marketing Marianne

French Propaganda in America, 1900-1940

Robert J. Young

Rutgers University Press, 2003

 Although historians have written extensively on propaganda during Napoleon III’s regime and Vichy, they have virtually ignored the Third Republic. Focusing on Third Republic policies, Marketing Marianne suggests that Americans’ long-lasting love affair with French culture is no accident. Robert J. Young argues that the French used subtle but effective means to influence U.S. policy in Europe. He examines French propaganda efforts and the methods of the French Foreign Ministry, always highlighting the wider cultural and social context of Franco-American relations. French propagandists believed that the steady promotion of their nation as the cultural capital of the world was the best way to foster goodwill among Americans. They slowly recognized the important role the United States played in maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Young argues that the French deliberately exploited America’s sense of cultural inferiority when faced with Europe’s rich heritage, and the rise of new technologies and modern forms of government in France encouraged the development of more sophisticated forms of propaganda.

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cover of Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq

Mass Deception

Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq

Scott A. Bonn

Rutgers University Press, 2010

The attacks of 9/11 led to a war on Iraq, although there was neither tangible evidence that the nation's leader, Saddam Hussein, was linked to Osama bin Laden nor proof of weapons of mass destruction. Why, then, did the Iraq war garner so much acceptance in the United States during its primary stages?



Mass Deception argues that the George W. Bush administration manufactured public support for the war on Iraq. Scott A. Bonn introduces a unique, integrated, and interdisciplinary theory called "critical communication" to explain how and why political elites and the news media periodically create public panics that benefit both parties. Using quantitative analysis of public opinion polls and presidential rhetoric pre- and post-9/11 in the news media, Bonn applies the moral panic concept to the Iraq war. He critiques the war and occupation of Iraq as violations of domestic and international law. Finally, Mass Deception connects propaganda and distortion efforts by the Bush administration to more general theories of elite deviance and state crime.
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cover of Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens

Mass Performance

Systems and Citizens

Kimberly Jannarone

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Mass Performance: Systems and Citizens examines mass performance systems from the first major festival of the French Revolution through the democratic and socialist movements of the nationalizing nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, to totalitarian communist and socialist regimes in the twentieth century, ending with contemporary North Korea. While other scholars have studied specific mass performances, this study synthesizes the phenomenon across centuries and countries, focusing on its systemization. Modern nations defining or redefining their identities not only organized mass performances, but also planned to make those performances a permanent component of nationhood. Kimberly Jannarone reveals that mass performance systems, including synchronized gymnastics to choreographed rallies, encapsulate ideals and debates within emerging nations about the relationship of citizens to each other and to their leaders, playing a generative and reflective role in the culture and politics of the modern era. Mass Performance analyzes the specifics of performance choreography and design, the organizational planning and thinking behind the systems, the material circumstances of each system’s emergence, and the broader intellectual milieu in which they developed. 

Although not a comprehensive study of such events, Jannarone’s analysis of the selected mass performance systems yields new theoretical perspectives on these phenomena, a central focus of her study being how political leaders find ways to create a physically coordinated mass body politic, even during times of hardship and war. By interpreting and historicizing mass assemblies of bodies, this study analyzes the choreographies and organizations that brought thousands of people together as an ensemble and kept them together in meaning-making motion.
 
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cover of Mass–Elite Representation Gap in Old and New Democracies: Critical Junctures and Elite Agency

Mass–Elite Representation Gap in Old and New Democracies

Critical Junctures and Elite Agency

Edited by Jaemin Shim

University of Michigan Press, 2024

How can we explain policy preference mismatch between voters and their representatives?
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cover of Meat!: A Transnational Analysis

Meat!

A Transnational Analysis

Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism.

Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson
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cover of Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis

Media Amnesia

Rewriting the Economic Crisis

Laura Basu

Pluto Press, 2018

One of the major questions confronting us in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the Brexit vote, and the rise of populism around the world, is what role the media has played in shaping our current political moment. This book offers an unprecedented dive into that question, reaching back more than a decade to show the stance of the media toward the 2008 financial crash, the recession that followed, austerity in the UK, the Eurozone crisis, and more. Throughout, we see—with damning clarity—that even as capitalism is in crisis, the media remains devoted to a narrative of a swollen public sector, welfare scams, and immigration threats. What does this mean for those who are committed to solving our manifest economic and social problems? How can we use what we know about the workings of the media to break through their filter and force progress? The insights in this book are the first step.
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cover of Media Constrained by Context: International Assistance and Democratic Media Transition in the Western Balkans

Media Constrained by Context

International Assistance and Democratic Media Transition in the Western Balkans

Kristina Irion

Central European University Press, 2018

This books draws a comparative balance of twenty years' international media assistance in the five countries of the Western Balkans. The central question was what happens to imported models when they are transposed onto the newly evolving media systems of transitional societies. Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia undertook a range of media reforms to conform with accession requirements of the European Union and the standards of the Council of Europe, among others. The essays explore the nexus between the democratic transformation of the media and international media assistance. The cross-national analysis concludes that the effects of international assistance are highly constrained by the local context. From today's vantage point it becomes obvious, that scaling media assistance does not necessarily improve outcomes. The experiences in the region suggest that imported solutions have not been very cognitive in all aspects of local conditions but international strategies tent to be rather schematic and lacked strategic approaches to promote media policy stability, credible media reform and implementation. The book offers valuable insights into the nature and effects of media assistance and the strategies deployed by international aid agencies, local political forces, media professionals, civil society organizations and other actors.
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cover of Media Freedom and Pluralism: Media Policy Challenges in the Enlarged Europe

Media Freedom and Pluralism

Media Policy Challenges in the Enlarged Europe

Beata Klimkiewicz

Central European University Press, 2010

Addresses a critical analysis of major media policies in the European Union and Council of Europe at the period of profound changes affecting both media environments and use, as well as the logic of media policy-making and reconfiguration of traditional regulatory models. The analytical problem-related approach seems to better reflect a media policy process as an interrelated part of European integration, formation of European citizenship, and exercise of communication rights within the European communicative space. The question of normative expectations is to be compared in this case with media policy rationales, mechanisms of implementation (transposing rules from EU to national levels), and outcomes.
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cover of Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity

Media Freedom

The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity

Richard Barbrook

Pluto Press, 1995

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cover of Media Power in Central America

Media Power in Central America

Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Media Power in Central America explores the political and cultural interplay between the media and those in power in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua. Highlighting the subtle strangulation of opposition media voices in the region, the authors show how the years since the guerrilla wars have not yielded the free media systems that some had expected.

Rick Rockwell and Noreene Janus examine the region country by country and deal with the specific conditions of government-sponsored media repression, economic censorship, corruption, and consumer trends that shape the political landscape. Challenging the notion of the media as a democratizing force, Media Power in Central America shows how governments use the media to block democratic reforms and outlines the difficulties of playing watchdog to rulers who use the media as a tool of power.

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cover of Media Theory in Japan

Media Theory in Japan

Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, editors

Duke University Press, 2017

Providing an overview of Japanese media theory from the 1910s to the present, this volume introduces English-language readers to Japan's rich body of theoretical and conceptual work on media for the first time. The essays address a wide range of topics, including the work of foundational Japanese thinkers; Japanese theories of mediation and the philosophy of media; the connections between early Japanese television and consumer culture; and architecture's intersection with communications theory. Tracing the theoretical frameworks and paradigms that stem from Japan's media ecology, the contributors decenter Eurocentric media theory and demonstrate the value of the Japanese context to reassessing the parameters and definition of media theory itself. Taken together, these interdisciplinary essays expand media theory to encompass philosophy, feminist critique, literary theory, marketing discourse, and art; provide a counterbalance to the persisting universalist impulse of media studies; and emphasize the need to consider media theory situationally.
 
Contributors. Yuriko Furuhata, Aaron Gerow, Mark Hansen, Marilyn Ivy, Takeshi Kadobayashi, Keisuke Kitano, Akihiro Kitada, Thomas Looser, Anne McKnight, Ryoko Misono, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Miryam Sas, Fabian Schäfer, Marc Steinberg, Tomiko Yoda, Alexander Zahlten
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cover of Media in New Turkey: The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State

Media in New Turkey

The Origins of an Authoritarian Neoliberal State

Bilge Yesil

University of Illinois Press, 2016

In Media in New Turkey, Bilge Yesil unlocks the complexities surrounding and penetrating today's Turkish media. Yesil focuses on a convergence of global and domestic forces that range from the 1980 military coup to globalization's inroads and the recent resurgence of political Islam. Her analysis foregrounds how these and other forces become intertwined, and she uses Turkey's media to unpack the ever-more-complex relationships.
 
Yesil confronts essential questions regarding: the role of the state and military in building the structures that shaped Turkey's media system; media adaptations to ever-shifting contours of political and economic power; how the far-flung economic interests of media conglomerates leave them vulnerable to state pressure; and the ways Turkey's politicized judiciary criminalizes certain speech.
 
Drawing on local knowledge and a wealth of Turkish sources, Yesil provides an engrossing look at the fault lines carved by authoritarianism, tradition, neoliberal reform, and globalization within Turkey's increasingly far-reaching media.
 
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cover of Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Media, Culture, and Decolonization

Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana

Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana invites us to look at media and culture from a decolonial perspective. Through Dagbaŋ epistemologies and knowledge systems, this book examines media by highlighting how African languages, cultures, and traditions can shift how we think of knowledge. It is an offering to anyone curious about the relationship between culture, language, and media. By focusing on African language media in Ghana such as film, television, and radio, the book emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. It connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. This book demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.

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cover of Media, Culture, and the Environment

Media, Culture, and the Environment

Anderson, Alison

Rutgers University Press, 1997

Are you getting the real news on environmental issues? Or are the reports you are hearing slanted to meet the special interests of the reporters? The government? A lobbying group? How are our views on the Torrey Canyon oil spill, the demise of Brazilian rain forests, or the Chernobyl disaster shaped by individuals or organizations that know how to use the media to best deliver their message?

Media, Culture and the Environment provides an accessible introduction to key issues and debates surrounding the media politics of risk assessment and the environment. Anderson looks at nature as contested terrain and reveals how news sources use it to compete for our emotions and attention. She shows how framings of risk in relation to the environment are influenced by social, political, and cultural factors, but she also rejects extreme versions of social constructionism.

The book moves beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries by synthesizing recent debates in cultural theory and media studies with key developments in human geography. It offers an in-depth analysis of pressure politics and environmental lobbying groups, while examining the production, transmission and negotiation language of news discourse. The examples, drawn from both Europe and North America, include the tremendous headline controversies over oil spills and killing of baby seals. Difficult issues, clearly surveyed and incisively presented, make this book essential reading for anyone interested in how and why journalists handle environmental news in the ways they do.

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cover of Media, Geopolitics, and Power: A View from the Global South

Media, Geopolitics, and Power

A View from the Global South

Herman Wasserman

University of Illinois Press, 2018

The end of apartheid brought South Africa into the global media environment. Outside companies invested in the nation's newspapers while South African conglomerates pursued lucrative tech ventures and communication markets around the world. Many observers viewed the rapid development of South African media as a roadmap from authoritarianism to global modernity.

Herman Wasserman analyzes the debates surrounding South Africa's new media presence against the backdrop of rapidly changing geopolitics. His exploration reveals how South African disputes regarding access to, and representation in, the media reflect the domination and inequality in the global communication sphere. Optimists see post-apartheid media as providing a vital space that encourages exchanges of opinion in a young democracy. Critics argue the public sphere mirrors South Africa's past divisions and privileges the viewpoints of the elite. Wasserman delves into the ways these simplistic narratives obscure the country's internal tensions, conflicts, and paradoxes even as he charts the diverse nature of South African entry into the global arena.

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cover of Media, Nationalism and European Identities

Media, Nationalism and European Identities

Karol Jakubowicz

Central European University Press, 2011

Explores patterns of interaction between the mass media and identity formation in the context of Europeanization. On the one hand, the major contribution of the volume is a comprehensive framework that considers media impacts on four levels of identity: European, regional, national, and ethnic minority identities. On the other hand, authors offer cutting edge analysis of the structural transformation of European media institutions, and policies that shape the future of European media.
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cover of Medical Necessity: Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making

Medical Necessity

Health Care Access and the Politics of Decision Making

Daniel Skinner

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

How the politics of “medical necessity” complicates American health care


The definition of medical necessity has morphed over the years, from a singular physician’s determination to a complex and dynamic political contest involving patients, medical companies, insurance companies, and government agencies. In this book, Daniel Skinner constructs a comprehensive understanding of the politics of defining this concept, arguing that sustained political engagement with medical necessity is essential to developing a health care system that meets basic public health objectives.

From medical marijuana to mental health to reproductive politics, the concept of medical necessity underscores many of the most divisive and contentious debates in American health care. Skinner’s close reading of medical necessity’s production illuminates the divides between perceptions of medical need as well as how the gatekeeper concept of medical necessity tends to frame medical objectives. He questions the wisdom of continuing to use medical necessity when thinking critically about vexing health care challenges, exploring the possibility that contracts, rights, and technology may resolve the contentious politics of medical necessity.

Skinner ultimately contends that a major shift is needed, one in which health care administrators, doctors, and patients admit that medical necessity is, at its base, a contestable political concept.

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cover of Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial Russia

Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial Russia

Elisa M. Becker

Central European University Press, 2011

Examines the theoretical and practical outlook of forensic physicians in Imperial Russia, from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, arguing that the interaction between state and these professionals shaped processes of reform in contemporary Russia. It demonstrates the ways in which the professional evolution of forensic psychiatry in Russia took a different turn from Western models, and how the process of professionalization in late imperial Russia became associated with liberal legal reform and led to the transformation of the autocratic state system.
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cover of Mediterranean in Dis/order: Space, Power, and Identity

Mediterranean in Dis/order

Space, Power, and Identity

Rosita Di Peri and Daniel Meier, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Mediterranean in Dis/order reveals the connection between space and politics by examining the role that space has played in insurgencies, conflicts, uprisings, and mobilities in the Mediterranean region. With this approach, the authors are able to challenge well-established beliefs about the power structure of the state across different disciplines (including political science, history, sociology, geography, and anthropology), and its impact on the conception, production, and imagination of space in the broader Mediterranean. Further, they contribute to particular areas of studies, such as migration, political Islam, mobilization, and transition to democracy, among others. The book, infusing critical theory, unveils original and revelatory case studies in Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Morocco, and the EU Mediterranean policy, through a various set of actors and practices—from refugees and migrations policies, to Islamist or students’ movements, architectural sites, or movies. This multidisciplinary perspective on space and power provides a valuable resource for practitioners interested in how space, context, and time interact to produce institutions, political subjectivities, and asymmetries of power, particularly since the turning point of the Arab uprisings. The book also helps readers understand the conditions under which the uprisings develop, giving a clearer picture about various national, regional, and international dynamics.

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cover of Melting the Ice Curtain: The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier

Melting the Ice Curtain

The Extraordinary Story of Citizen Diplomacy on the Russia-Alaska Frontier

David Ramseur

University of Alaska Press, 2017

Just five years after a Soviet missile blew a civilian airliner out of the sky over the North Pacific, an Alaska Airlines jet braved Cold War tensions to fly into tomorrow. Crossing the Bering Strait between Alaska and the Russian Far East, the 1988 Friendship Flight reunited Native peoples of common languages and cultures for the first time in four decades. It and other dramatic efforts to thaw what was known as the Ice Curtain launched a thirty-year era of perilous, yet prolific, progress.

Melting the Ice Curtain tells the story of how inspiration, courage, and persistence by citizen-diplomats bridged a widening gap in superpower relations. David Ramseur was a first-hand witness to the danger and political intrigue, having flown on that first Friendship Flight, and having spent thirty years behind the scenes with some of Alaska’s highest officials. As Alaska celebrates the 150th anniversary of its purchase, and as diplomatic ties with Russia become perilous, Melting the Ice Curtain shows that history might hold the best lessons for restoring diplomacy between nuclear neighbors.
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cover of Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine

Memory Activism

Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine

Yifat Gutman

Vanderbilt University Press, 2017

SAGE Memory Studies Journal & Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award, Honorable Mention, 2019

Set in Israel in the first decade of the twenty-first century and based on long-term fieldwork, this rich ethnographic study offers an innovative analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of "memory activism" by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens--Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna--showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies.

These activist efforts gave visibility to a silenced Palestinian history in order to come to terms with the conflict's origins and envision a new resolution for the future. This unique focus on memory as a weapon of the weak reveals a surprising shift in awareness of Palestinian suffering among the Jewish majority of Israeli society in a decade of escalating violence and polarization--albeit not without a backlash.

Contested memories saturate this society. The 1948 war is remembered as both Independence Day by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the catastrophe") by Palestinians. The walking tour and survivor testimonies originally deployed by the state for national Zionist education that marginalized Palestinian citizens are now being appropriated by activists for tours of pre-state Palestinian villages and testimonies by refugees.
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cover of Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space

Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space

Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds.

Duke University Press, 2004

Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space explores the effects of major upheavals—wars, decolonization, and other social and economic changes—on the ways in which public histories are presented around the world. Examining issues related to public memory in twelve countries, the histories collected here cut across political, cultural, and geographic divisions. At the same time, by revealing recurring themes and concerns, they show how basic issues of history and memory transcend specific sites and moments in time. A number of the essays look at contests over public memory following two major political transformations: the wave of liberation from colonial rule in much of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America during the second half of the twentieth century and the reorganization of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc beginning in the late 1980s.

This collection expands the scope of what is considered public history by pointing to silences and absences that are as telling as museums and memorials. Contributors remind us that for every monument that is erected, others—including one celebrating Sri Lanka’s independence and another honoring the Unknown Russian Soldier of World War II—remain on the drawing board. While some sites seem woefully underserved by a lack of public memorials—as do post–Pinochet Chile and post–civil war El Salvador—others run the risk of diluting meaning through overexposure, as may be happening with Israel’s Masada. Essayists examine public history as it is conveyed not only in marble and stone but also through cityscapes and performances such as popular songs and parades.

Contributors
James Carter
John Czaplicka
Kanishka Goonewardena
Lisa Maya Knauer
Anna Krylova
Teresa Meade
Bill Nasson
Mary Nolan
Cynthia Paces
Andrew Ross
Daniel Seltz
T. M. Scruggs
Irina Carlota Silber
Daniel J. Walkowitz
Yael Zerubavel

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cover of Metaphorical World Politics

Metaphorical World Politics

Francis A. Beer

Michigan State University Press, 2004

Metaphorical World Politics argues that language and metaphor are important parts of international political reality. Metaphors and world politics have appeared together many times in recent history. The blended space that results is metaphorical world politics, a real- world game for political and scientific actors. This collection picks up the challenge to unravel the game, to examine its rules, to clarify the mixture of images and facts that is so real in politics but so exceptional in science. Scholars have studied metaphor mostly from a linguistic or a literary point of view. This work forces those primarily interested in metaphors to think about applications and implications beyond the text. Others concerned mainly with world politics may consider how metaphors may help to energize and structure international political thought and action.
     Scholars have most often studied world politics embedded in so-called "facts." Metaphorical World Politics shows that facts are misleading in their compactness, that facts are often meaningless, that metaphors in contrast are energetic processors of meaning, and that facts in world politics are nothing more than weak emulsions of metaphor. This work outlines the general place of metaphor on the map of politics and highlights the location of specific metaphors on the political terrain.

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cover of Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama

Method Acting and Its Discontents

On American Psycho-Drama

Shonni Enelow

Northwestern University Press, 2015

Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama provides a new understanding of a crucial chapter in American theater history. Enelow’s consideration of the broader cultural climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s, specifically the debates within psychology and psychoanalysis, the period’s racial and sexual politics, and the rise of mass media, gives us a nuanced, complex picture of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio and contemporaneous works of drama. Combining cultural analysis, dramaturgical criticism, and performance theory, Enelow shows how Method acting’s contradictions reveal powerful tensions inside mid-century notions of individual and collective identity.

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cover of Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis

Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis

Bruce Campbell

University of Arizona Press, 2003

Murals have been an important medium of public expression in Mexico since the Mexican Revolution, and names such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco will forever be linked with this revolutionary art form. Many people, however, believe that Mexico's renowned mural tradition died with these famous practitioners, and today's mural artists labor in obscurity as many of their creations are destroyed through hostility or neglect.

This book traces the ongoing critical contributions of mural arts to public life in Mexico to show how postrevolutionary murals have been overshadowed both by the Mexican School and by the exclusionary nature of official public arts. By documenting a range of mural practices—from fixed-site murals to mantas (banner murals) to graffiti—Bruce Campbell evaluates the ways in which the practical and aesthetic components of revolutionary Mexican muralism have been appropriated and redeployed within the context of Mexico's ongoing economic and political crisis. Four dozen photographs illustrate the text. Blending ethnography, political science, and sociology with art history, Campbell traces the emergence of modern Mexican mural art as a composite of aesthetic, discursive, and performative elements through which collective interests and identities are shaped.

He focuses on mural activists engaged combatively with the state—in barrios, unions, and street protests—to show that mural arts that are neither connected to the elite art world nor supported by the government have made significant contributions to Mexican culture. Campbell brings all previous studies of Mexican muralism up to date by revealing the wealth of art that has flourished in the shadows of official recognition. His work shows that interpretations by art historians preoccupied with contemporary high art have been incomplete—and that a rich mural tradition still survives, and thrives, in Mexico.
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cover of Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises: Success on the Commons and the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene

Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises

Success on the Commons and the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene

David Barton Bray

University of Arizona Press, 2020

The road to sustainable forest management and stewardship has been debated for decades. Some advocate for governmental control and oversight. Some say that the only way to stem the tide of deforestation is to place as many tracts as possible under strict protection. Caught in the middle of this debate, forest inhabitants of the developing world struggle to balance the extraction of precarious livelihoods from forests while responding to increasing pressures from national governments, international institutions, and their own perceptions of environmental decline to protect biodiversity, restore forests, and mitigate climate change.

Mexico presents a unique case in which much of the nation’s forests were placed as commons in the hands of communities, who, with state support and their own entrepreneurial vigor, created community forest enterprises (CFEs). David Barton Bray, who has spent more than thirty years engaged with and researching Mexican community forestry, shows that this reform has transformed forest management in that country at a scale and level of maturity unmatched anywhere else in the world.

For decades Mexico has been conducting a de facto large-scale experiment in the design of a national social-ecological system (SES) focused on community forests. What happens when you give subsistence communities rights over forests, as well as training, organizational support, equipment, and financial capital? Do the communities destroy the forest in the name of economic development, or do they manage them sustainably, generating current income while maintaining intergenerational value as a resource for their children? Bray shares the scientific and social evidence that can now begin to answer these questions. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, and the interested public on the future of global forest resilience and the possibilities for a good Anthropocene.
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cover of Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary

Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary

Edited by Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee

Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

Not afraid to tackle provocative topics in American culture, from gun violence and labor policies to terrorism and health care, Michael Moore has earned both applause and invective in his career as a documentarian. In such polarizing films as Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko, Moore has established a unique voice of radical nostalgia for progressivism, and in doing so has become one of the most recognized documentary filmmakers of all time.

In the first in-depth study of Moore’s feature-length documentary films, editors Thomas W. Benson and Brian J. Snee have gathered leading rhetoric scholars to examine the production, rhetorical appeals, and audience reception of these films. Contributors critique the films primarily as modes of public argument and political art. Each essay is devoted to one of Moore’s films and traces in detail how each film invites specific audience responses.

Michael Moore and the Rhetoric of Documentary reveals not only the art, the argument, and the emotional appeals of Moore’s documentaries but also how these films have revolutionized the genre of documentary filmmaking.

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cover of Michael Moore: Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon

Michael Moore

Filmmaker, Newsmaker, Cultural Icon

Matthew Bernstein, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2010

For more than twenty years, Michael Moore has transformed himself from a marginal filmmaker into a cultural icon, unofficial spokesperson for liberals and the Left. American conservatives constantly use him for target practice and target. Book author, film director, television personality, and Web presence, Moore is now a one-man cultural phenomenon. Although Michael Moore is a constant presence on the media landscape, this is the first volume to focus on the Moore phenomenom. It explores Moore's work in film and elsewhere, bringing diverse perspectives on his activities and status as voice of liberal America and the disenfranchised working class. Topics examined include the disjunction between Moore's celebrity status and everyman, middle-western persona, his self-mocking ironic sensibility, his tendency to diagnose American social and political problems in terms of class rather than gender, his reception abroad, and his uneasy relationship with the conventions of documentary filmmaking. The contributors are leading scholars and film critics, including Paul Arthur, Cary Elza, Jeffrey P. Jones, Douglas Kellner, Richard Kilborn, William Luhr, Charles Musser, Richard R. Ness, Miles Orvell, Richard Porton, Sergio Rizzo, Christopher Sharrett, Gaylyn Studlar, and David Teztlaff. The volume features both assessments of Moore's work in general and close analyses of his most successful films. The result is a definitive assessment of Moore's career to date.

Matthew Bernstein is Professor and Chair of Film Studies at Emory University. He is author of Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent.

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