1427 books match the query 'Politics' and 31 start with n

cover of Narrowing the Channel: The Politics of Regulatory Protection in International Trade

Narrowing the Channel

The Politics of Regulatory Protection in International Trade

Robert Gulotty

University of Chicago Press, 2020

While large, multinational corporations have supported the removal of tariffs, behind the scenes these firms have fought for protection in the form of product regulations, including testing, labeling, and registration requirements. Unlike tariffs, these regulations can raise fixed costs, excluding smaller firms from the market and shifting profits toward global giants.

Narrowing the Channel demonstrates that globalization and globalized firms can paradoxically hinder rather than foster economic cooperation as larger firms seek to protect their markets through often unnecessarily strict product regulations. To illustrate the problem of regulatory protectionism, Robert Gulotty offers an in-depth analysis of contemporary rulemaking in the United States and the European Union in the areas of health, safety, and environmental standards. He shows how large firms seek regulatory schemes that disproportionately disadvantage small firms. When multinationals are embedded in the local economy, governments too have an incentive to use these regulations to shift profits back home. Today, the key challenge to governing global trade is not how much trade occurs but who is allowed to participate, and this book shows that new rules will be needed to allow governments to widen the benefits of global commerce and avoid further inequality and market concentration.
 
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cover of Nashville Metro: The Politics of City-County Consolidation

Nashville Metro

The Politics of City-County Consolidation

Brett W. Hawkins

Vanderbilt University Press, 2024

As Nashville's governance is under increasing scrutiny by the Tennessee General Assembly, many Nashvillians are struggling to understand what our metropolitan form of government is and why we chose to reorganize our city this way in 1963. Nashville Metro was first published in the aftermath of that decision, and it provides a comprehensive record of what the city understood itself to be doing at the time. How did it happen? When so many less thoroughgoing reforms had failed elsewhere, how could Nashville accomplish a complete city‑county consolidation? Why in Nashville did the voters outside the central city support consolidation, when in area after area it is typically these voters who defeat reform proposals? Why did the consolidation fail in 1958 and succeed in 1962? Nashville Metro was written to answer such questions. One great benefit to Brett W. Hawkins' approach is how he lays out what was conventional wisdom at the time and what was reported in the local papers and balances it against what participants told him directly.
 
This is a valuable artifact in itself, but the new foreword by Judge David Briley—former Nashville mayor and grandson of the first metro Nashville mayor, Beverly Briley—offers a firsthand account of the realities of metropolitan government sixty years on.
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cover of National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago

National Performances

The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago

Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas

University of Chicago Press, 2003

In this book, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial, and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black, and white populations.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism, and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans—or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies.

Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.
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cover of National Policy Issues: Politics, Perceptions, and Performance, Volume 28

National Policy Issues

Politics, Perceptions, and Performance, Volume 28

Mark Schlesinger, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

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cover of Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec

Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec

Richard Handler

University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Richard Handler’s pathbreaking study of nationalistic politics in Quebec is a striking and successful example of the new experimental type of ethnography, interdisciplinary in nature and intensively concerned with rhetoric and not only of anthropologists but also of scholars in a wide range of fields, and it is likely to stir sharp controversy.
    Bringing together methodologies of history, sociology, political science, and philosophy, as well as anthropology, Handler centers on the period 1976–1984, during which the independantiste Parti Québéois was in control of the provincial government and nationalistic sentiment was especially strong. Handler draws on historical and archival research, and on interviews with Quebec and Canadian government officials, as he addresses the central question: Given the similarities between the epistemologies of both anthropology and nationalist ideology, how can one write an ethnography of nationalism that does not simply reproduce—and thereby endorse—nationalistic beliefs? Handler analyzes various responses to the nationalist vision of a threatened existence. He examines cultural tourism, ideology of the Quebec government, legislations concerning historical preservation, language legislation and policies towards immigrants and “cultural minorities.” He concludes with a thoughtful meditation on the futility of nationalisms.
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cover of Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature

Native Intelligence

Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature

Deepika Bahri

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

A compelling reclamation of the place of aesthetics in postcolonial literature

Literature though it may be, postcolonial literature is studied and understood largely—and often solely—in social and political terms. In neglecting its aesthetic dimension, as this book forcefully demonstrates, we are overlooking not only an essential aspect of this literature but even a critical perspective on its sociopolitical function and value. In Native Intelligence, Deepika Bahri focuses on postcolonial literature’s formal and aesthetic negotiations with sociopolitical concerns.

How, Bahri asks, do aesthetic considerations contest the social function of postcolonial literature? In answering, her book takes on two tasks: First, it identifies the burden of representation borne by postcolonial literature through its progressive politicization. Second, it draws on Frankfurt School critical theory to reclaim a place for aesthetics in literary representation by closely engaging works of Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy. Throughout, Bahri shows how attention to the aesthetic innovations and utopian impulses of postcolonial works uncovers their complex and uneven relationship to ideology, reanimating their potential to make novel contributions to the larger project of social liberation.
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cover of Nature's Experts: Science, Politics, and the Environment

Nature's Experts

Science, Politics, and the Environment

Bocking, Stephen

Rutgers University Press, 2004

"With clarity and grace, Stephen Bocking tackles the complicated question of the role of scientific expertise in environmental policy making. Nature’s Experts is a timely and important book."—David H. Guston, author of Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research

"This book by Stephen Bocking is as much about deliberative democracy as it is about science and the environment. Stephen Bocking’s treatment is deep, perceptive, and profoundly wise. He has caught the heart of present and future environmental science, politics, and democratic governance."—C. S. Holling, The Resilience Alliance and emeritus professor, Arthur R. Marshall Jr. Chair in Ecological Sciences at the University of Florida

"If knowledge is power, how should expert advice be deployed by a would-be democratic society? This perennial question is newly illuminated by this timely and wide-ranging review of the role played by science in the making of environmental policy."—William C. Clark, Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science, Public Policy, and Human Development, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

It seems self-evident that science plays a central role in environmental affairs. Regulatory agencies, businesses, and public interest groups all draw on scientific research to support their claims. Some critics, however, describe science not as the solution to environmental problems, but as their source. Moreover, the science itself is often controversial, as debates over global warming and environmental health risks have shown.

Nature’s Experts explores the contributions and challenges presented when scientific authority enters the realm of environmental affairs. Stephen Bocking focuses on four major areas of environmental politics: the formation of environmental values and attitudes, management of natural resources such as forests and fish, efforts to address international environmental issues such as climate change, and decisions relating to environmental and health risks. In each area, practical examples and case studies illustrate that science must fulfill two functions if it is to contribute to resolving environmental controversies. First, science must be relevant and credible, and second, it must be democratic, where everyone has access to the information they need to present and defend their views.

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cover of Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality

Negotiating Difference

Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality

Michael Awkward

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Encamped within the limits of experience and "authenticity," critics today often stake out their positions according to race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and vigilantly guard the boundaries against any incursions into their privileged territory. In this book, Michael Awkward raids the borders of contemporary criticism to show how debilitating such "protectionist" stances can be and how much might be gained by crossing our cultural boundaries.

From Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It to Michael Jackson's physical transmutations, from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon to August Wilson's Fences, from male scholars' investments in feminism to white scholars' in black texts—Awkward explores cultural moments that challenge the exclusive critical authority of race and gender. In each instance he confronts the question: What do artists, scholars, and others concerned with representations of Afro-American life make of the view that gender, race, and sexuality circumscribe their own and others' lives and narratives? Throughout he demonstrates the perils and merits of the sort of "boundary crossing" this book ultimately makes: a black male feminism.

In pursuing a black male feminist criticism, Awkward's study acknowledges the complexities of interpretation in an age when a variety of powerful discourses have proliferated on the subject of racial, gendered, and sexual difference; at the same time, it identifies this proliferation as an opportunity to negotiate seemingly fixed cultural and critical positions.
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cover of Negotiating Marian Apparitions: The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine

Negotiating Marian Apparitions

The Politics of Religion in Transcarpathian Ukraine

Agnieszka Halemba

Central European University Press, 2015

This book concerns the politics of religion as expressed through apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Dzhublyk in Transcarpathian Ukraine. On the one hand, the analysis provides insights into the present position of Transcarpathia in regional, Ukraine-wide, and European struggles for identity and political belonging. The way in which the apparitions site has been conceived and managed raises questions concerning the fate of religious communities during and after socialism, the significance of national projects for religious organizations, and the politics of religious management in a situation in which local religious commitments are relatively strong and religious organizations are relatively weak. The analysis contributes to the ethnography and history of this particular region and of the post-socialist world in general. On the other hand, the changing status of the apparition site over the years allows investigation of the questions concerning authority, legitimacy, and power in religious organizations, especially in relation to management of religious experiences. The analysis aims at clarification of such concepts as religious institutions, organizations but also religious experiences and is relevant to anthropology, sociology and religious studies. It is argued that the important question in analyses of religious apparitions should not be how an individual experience becomes institutionalized and instrumentalized, but how experience becomes a tool for negotiation and transformation in the religious field. Key word: 1. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint-–Apparitions and miracles–Ukraine–Zakarpats'kaoblast'. 2. Zakarpats'ka oblast' (Ukraine)–Church history.
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cover of Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity

Negras in Brazil

Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity

Caldwell, Kia Lilly

Rutgers University Press, 2006

For most of the twentieth century, Brazil was widely regarded as a "racial democracy"-a country untainted by the scourge of racism and prejudice. In recent decades, however, this image has been severely critiqued, with a growing number of studies highlighting persistent and deep-seated patterns of racial discrimination and inequality. Yet, recent work on race and racism has rarely considered gender as part of its analysis.

In Negras in Brazil, Kia Lilly Caldwell examines the life experiences of Afro-Brazilian women whose stories have until now been largely untold. This pathbreaking study analyzes the links between race and gender and broader processes of social, economic, and political exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic research with social movement organizations and thirty-five life history interviews, Caldwell explores the everyday struggles Afro-Brazilian women face in their efforts to achieve equal rights and full citizenship. She also shows how the black women's movement, which has emerged in recent decades, has sought to challenge racial and gender discrimination in Brazil. While proposing a broader view of citizenship that includes domains such as popular culture and the body, Negras in Brazil highlights the continuing relevance of identity politics for members of racially marginalized communities. Providing new insights into black women's social activism and a gendered perspective on Brazilian racial dynamics, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Latin American Studies, African diaspora studies, women's studies, politics, and cultural anthropology.
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cover of Networked: Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia, 1998-2004

Networked

Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia, 1998-2004

Wahyu Prasetyawan

National University of Singapore Press, 2018

B. J. Habibie may have served the shortest term of any of Indonesia’s presidents, but his push for decentralization would affect the country for decades. Habibie came to power in 1998 and immediately set to work restructuring the government. He gave local districts more power, allowing them to elect their own leaders and create their own bylaws. After years of authoritarian rule, these reforms were meant to return power to the people. But that led to local governments engaging in bureaucratic and political conflict with the central government over control of valuable natural resources and the distribution of the revenue they generated. Decentralization became the most important political economic development in Indonesia of the past thirty years.
Networked Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia evaluates three cases of deep-seated political conflict and intrigue including central government, local governments, and multinational companies. It looks at how the structure of the national political economy has changed as the result of local politicians becoming involved in disputes with the national government over control of natural resources. It also analyzes how these changes will affect the distribution of wealth in the country as well as Indonesia’s evolving democratic politics and modes of governance.
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cover of New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation

New Blood

Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation

Chris Bobel

Rutgers University Press, 2010

New Blood offers a fresh interdisciplinary look at feminism-in-flux. For over three decades, menstrual activists have questioned the safety and necessity of feminine care products while contesting menstruation as a deeply entrenched taboo. Chris Bobel shows how a little-known yet enduring force in the feminist health, environmental, and consumer rights movements lays bare tensions between second- and third-wave feminisms and reveals a complicated story of continuity and change within the women's movement.

Through her critical ethnographic lens, Bobel focuses on debates central to feminist thought (including the utility of the category "gender") and challenges to building an inclusive feminist movement. Filled with personal narratives, playful visuals, and original humor, New Blood reveals middle-aged progressives communing in Red Tents, urban punks and artists "culture jamming" commercial menstrual products in their zines and sketch comedy, queer anarchists practicing DIY health care, African American health educators espousing "holistic womb health," and hopeful mothers refusing to pass on the shame to their pubescent daughters. With verve and conviction, Bobel illuminates today's feminism-on-the-ground--indisputably vibrant, contentious, and ever-dynamic.
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cover of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics

New Materialisms

Ontology, Agency, and Politics

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds.

Duke University Press, 2010

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures.

Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment.


Contributors
Sara Ahmed
Jane Bennett
Rosi Braidotti
Pheng Cheah
Rey Chow
William E. Connolly
Diana Coole
Jason Edwards
Samantha Frost
Elizabeth Grosz
Sonia Kruks
Melissa A. Orlie

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cover of New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre

New Television

The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre

Martin Shuster

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Even though it’s frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as “chewing gum for the mind” really disappeared.
 
Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes.
 
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cover of New World Maker: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes

New World Maker

Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes

Ryan James Kernan, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley

Northwestern University Press, 2022

In an ambitious reappraisal of Langston Hughes’s work and legacy, Ryan James Kernan reads Hughes’s political poetry in the context of his practice of translation to reveal an important meditation on diaspora. Drawing on heretofore unearthed archival evidence, Kernan shows how Hughes mined his engagements with the poetics of Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén, Regino Pedroso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Federico García Lorca, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as translations of his own poetry, to fashion a radical poetics that engaged Black left internationalist concerns. As he follows Hughes from Harlem to Havana, Moscow, Madrid, and finally to Dakar, Kernan reveals how the writer’s identity and aesthetic were translated within these leftist geographies and metropoles, by others but also collaboratively. As Kernan argues, we cannot know Hughes without knowing him in translation.
 
Through original research and close readings alert to the foreign prosody underlying Hughes’s work, New World Maker recuperates his political writing, which had been widely maligned by Cold War detractors and adherents of New Criticism, and affirms his place as a progenitor of African diasporic literature and within the pantheon of US modernists. Demonstrating the integral part translation played in Hughes’s creative process, this book challenges a number of common assumptions about this canonical thinker and offers important insights for scholars of African diasporic literature, comparative literature, and American, Caribbean, and translation studies.
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cover of New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society, and Culture--A Comparative View

New York and Los Angeles

Politics, Society, and Culture--A Comparative View

Edited by David Halle

University of Chicago Press, 2003

No two cities are more symbolic of the modern American metropolis than New York and Los Angeles. But while New York boasts a recently revitalized urban center, Los Angeles is the classic example of sprawl and decentralization, with multiple clusters of economic and social activity dispersed throughout its surrounding area.

This volume presents advanced studies that consider this fundamental difference between New York and Los Angeles while comparing and contrasting politics and culture in each region. An esteemed group of contributors from a wide variety of disciplines considers issues that include immigration, the effects of race and class on residence, the efficacy of public schools, the value of welfare reform, the meaning of mayoral politics, the function of charter reform, and the respective roles of the cinema and art scenes in each city.

Capturing much of what is new and vibrant in urban studies today, New York and Los Angeles will prove to be must reading for scholars in that field, as well as in sociology, political science, and government.

Contributors:
Andrew Beveridge, Mehdi Bozorgmehr, Geoffrey DeVerteuil, Susan S. Fainstein, Robert Gedeon, Saverio Giovacchini, David L. Gladstone, David Halle, Jack Katz, Karen M. Kaufmann, Rebecca Kim, Mark Levitan, Kevin Rafter, Georges Sabagh, David O. Sears, Heidi Sommer, Raphael J. Sonenshein, András Szántó, Lois Takahashi, Susan Weber, Jennifer Wolch, Julia Wrigley, Min Zhou
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cover of News: The Politics of Illusion, Ninth Edition

News

The Politics of Illusion, Ninth Edition

W. Lance Bennett

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Free and attentive news media are essential to the workings of a democratic nation. But how well does the news, in reality, actually serve the needs of citizens, and thereby democracy? How well do the major methods of sharing national political information work, and how well-informed do they leave voters? For years, News: The Politics of Illusion has been the leading textbook to address that question, and in this ninth edition W. Lance Bennett brings his analysis fully up to date, exploring recent developments in news media and showing how they have improved--or hampered--the wide sharing of political news and information.
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cover of News: The Politics of Illusion, Tenth Edition

News

The Politics of Illusion, Tenth Edition

W. Lance Bennett

University of Chicago Press, 2016

For over thirty years, News: The Politics of Illusion has not simply reflected the political communication field—it has played a major role in shaping it. Today, the familiar news organizations of the legacy press are operating in a fragmenting and expanding mediaverse that resembles a big bang of proliferating online competitors that are challenging the very definition of news itself. Audience-powered sites such as the Huffington Post and Vox blend conventional political reporting with opinion blogs, celebrity gossip, and other ephemera aimed at getting clicks and shares. At the same time, the rise of serious investigative organizations such as ProPublica presents yet a different challenge to legacy journalism. Lance Bennett’s thoroughly revised tenth edition offers the most up-to-date guide to understanding how and why the media and news landscapes are being transformed. It explains the mix of old and new, and points to possible outcomes. Where areas of change are clearly established, key concepts from earlier editions have been revised. There are new case studies, updates on old favorites, and insightful analyses of how the new media system and novel kinds of information and engagement are affecting our politics. As always, News presents fresh evidence and arguments that invite new ways of thinking about the political information system and its place in democracy.
 
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cover of Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia: Development and Culture in the Modern State

Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia

Development and Culture in the Modern State

Daniel Chavez

Vanderbilt University Press, 2015

The history of modern Nicaragua is populated with leaders promising a new and better day. Inevitably, as Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia demonstrates, reality casts a shadow and the community must look to the next leader. As an impoverished state, second only to Haiti in the Americas, Nicaragua has been the scene of cyclical attempts and failures at modern development. Author Daniel Chavez investigates the cultural and ideological bases of what he identifies as the three decisive movements of social reinvention in Nicaragua: the regimes of the Somoza family of much of the early to mid-twentieth century; the governments of the Sandinista party; and the present day struggle to adapt to the global market economy.


For each era, Chavez reveals the ways Nicaraguan popular culture adapted and interpreted the new political order, shaping, critiquing, or amplifying the regime's message of stability and prosperity for the people. These tactics of interpretation, otherwise known as meaning-making, became all-important for the Nicaraguan people, as they opposed the autocracy of Somocismo, or complemented the Sandinistas, or struggled to find their place in the Neoliberal era. In every case, Chavez shows the reflective nature of cultural production and its pursuit of utopian idealism.

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cover of Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics

Nietzsche's Earth

Great Events, Great Politics

Gary Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 2016

We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche’s thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche’s powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places.
           
Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche’s prescient vision of today’s massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state’s desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche’s vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the Antichrist,” by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck’s Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche’s Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.
 
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cover of Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics

Nietzsche's New Seas

Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics

Edited by Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Nietzsche's New Seas makes available for the first time in English a representative sample of the best recent Nietzsche scholarship from Germany, France, and the United States. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong have brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines—philosophy, history, literary criticism, and musicology—and from schools of thought that differ both methodologically and ideologically. The contributors—Karsten Harries, Robert Pippin, Eugen Fink, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kurt Paul Janz, Sarah Kofman, Jean-Michel Rey, and the editors themselves—take a new approach to Nietzsche, one that begins with the claim that his enigmatic utterances can best be understood by examining the style or structure of his thought.
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cover of Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance

Nightmare Remains

The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance

Ege Selin Islekel

Northwestern University Press, 2024

Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning

Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.

Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.

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cover of Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes

Nightwatch

The Politics of Protest in the Andes

Orin Starn

Duke University Press, 1999

Organized in the mid-1970s as a means of communal protection against livestock rustling and general thievery in Peru’s rugged northern mountains, the rondas campesinas (peasants who make the rounds) grew into an entire system of peasant justice and one of the most significant Andean social movements of the late twentieth century. Nightwatch is the first full-length ethnography and the only study in English to examine this grassroots agrarian social movement, which became a rallying point for rural pride.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted over the course of a decade, Orin Starn chronicles the historical conditions that led to the formation of the rondas, the social and geographical expansion of the movement, and its gradual decline in the 1990s. Throughout this anecdotal yet deeply analytical account, the author relies on interviews with ronda participants, villagers, and Peru’s regional and national leaders to explore the role of women, the involvement of nongovernmental organizations, and struggles for leadership within the rondas. Starn moves easily from global to local contexts and from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, presenting this movement in a straightforward manner that makes it accessible to both specialists and nonspecialists.
An engagingly written story of village mobilization, Nightwatch is also a meditation on the nature of fieldwork, the representation of subaltern people, the relationship between resistance and power, and what it means to be politically active at the end of the century. It will appeal widely to scholars and students of anthropology, Latin American studies, cultural studies, history, subaltern studies, and those interested in the politics of social movements.


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cover of Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia

Nihil Obstat

Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia

Sabrina P. Ramet

Duke University Press, 1998

Nihil Obstat—Latin for "nothing stands in the way"—examines the interplay between religion and politics in East-Central Europe and Russia. While focusing on the postcommunist, late twentieth century, Sabrina P. Ramet discusses developments as far back as the eleventh century to explain the patterns that have developed over time and to show how they still affect contemporary interecclesiastical relations as well as those among Church, state, and society.
Based on interview research in Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Macedonia, and on materials published in German, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Russian, and English, Ramet paints a clear picture of the political and religious fragility of former communist states, which are experiencing some aspects of freedom and choice for the first time. With its comprehensive discussion of the largest religious institutions in the area, especially the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and its extensive survey of nontraditional religious associations that have become active in the region since 1989, this study makes a distinct contribution to growing discussions about the rise of fundamentalism and the inner dilemmas of modernity. With its depth of information and thoughtful exploration of cultural traditions, Nihil Obstat uniquely presents the ramifications and complexities of European religion in a postcommunist world.
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cover of Nkrumah & the Chiefs: The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana, 1951–1960

Nkrumah & the Chiefs

The Politics of Chieftaincy in Ghana, 1951–1960

Richard Rathbone

Ohio University Press, 1999

Kwame Nkrumah, who won independence for Ghana in 1957, was the first African statesman to achieve world recognition. Nkrumah and his movement also brought about the end of independent chieftaincy—one of the most fundamental changes in the history of Ghana.

Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples’ Party was committed not only to the rapid termination of British colonial rule but also to the elimination of chiefly power. This book is an account of Kwame Nkrumah and his government’s long struggle to wrest administrative control of the Ghanaian countryside from the chiefs. Based largely upon previously unstudied documentation in Ghana, this study charts the government’s frustrated attempts to democratize local government and the long and bitter campaigns mounted by many southern chiefs to resist their political marginalization.

Between 1951 and the creation of the First Republic in 1960, Ghanaian governments sought to discard the chiefly principle in local government, then to weaken chieftaincy by attrition and eventually, by altering the legal basis of chieftaincy, to incorporate and control a considerably altered chieftaincy. The book demonstrates that chieftaincy was consciously and systematically reconstructed in the decade of the 1950s with implications which can still be felt in modern Ghana.

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cover of No Place for Home: Terror and Race in Literature After 9/11

No Place for Home

Terror and Race in Literature After 9/11

Jay Shelat

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

Exploring contemporary literature to expose how post-9/11 counterterror strategies are used to unhome families of color

More than a quarter of a century after 9/11, the global war on terror continues to rage in the name of homeland security. Through literature and archival research, Jay Shelat shows how war, Islamophobia, police brutality, and other state-sponsored legal and social maneuvers are used to revoke and control Brown and Black families and their belonging, and why the empire always starts at home.

By exploring insurgent narratives in fiction and poetry by writers of color such as Kamila Shamsie, N. K. Jemisin, and Dur e Aziz Amna, No Place for Home traces the long history of white supremacy infiltrating family life. Shelat expands this picture to include records, laws, brochures, executive orders, and other forms of documentation to illuminate how domesticity is posited as conditional—dependent on racial permission—in the United States. Woven through this nuanced exploration of radicalized violence in the US since the attacks are discussions of stubborn identity, queer kinship, and community organizing.

No Place for Home analyzes post-9/11 literature as a crucial informant for our understanding of how the war on terror has evolved into its current state. In doing so, Shelat charts a radical, healing way forward.

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cover of No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics, and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States

No Winners Here Tonight

Race, Politics, and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States

Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Ohio University Press, 2009

Few subjects are as intensely debated in the United States as the death penalty. Some form of capital punishment has existed in America for hundreds of years, yet the justification for carrying out the ultimate sentence is a continuing source of controversy. No Winners Here Tonight explores the history of the death penalty and the question of its fairness through the experience of a single state, Ohio, which, despite its moderate midwestern values, has long had one of the country’s most active death chambers.

In 1958, just four states accounted for half of the forty-eight executions carried out nationwide, each with six: California, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas. By the first decade of the new century, Ohio was second only to Texas in the number of people put to death each year. No Winners Here Tonight looks at this trend and determines that capital punishment has been carried out in an uneven fashion from its earliest days, with outcomes based not on blind justice but on the color of a person’s skin, the whim of a local prosecutor, or the biases of the jury pool in the county in which a crime was committed.

Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s work is the only comprehensive study of the history of the death penalty in Ohio. His analysis concludes that the current law, crafted by lawmakers to punish the worst of the state’s killers, doesn’t come close to its intended purpose and instead varies widely in its implementation. Welsh-Huggins takes on this controversial topic evenhandedly and with respect for the humanity of the accused and the victim alike. This exploration of the law of capital punishment and its application will appeal to students of criminal justice as well as those with an interest in law and public policy.

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cover of Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs

Nonaligned Imagination

Yugoslavia, the Global South, and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs

Nataša Kovacevic

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Recovering the literary and intellectual history of anticolonial collaborations
 
Preoccupied with developing a multiethnic, postcolonial culture and seeking an alternative to Cold War–bloc politics, socialist Yugoslavia turned to the decolonizing countries of the Global South. It forged political, economic, and cultural links with postcolonial states and anticolonial liberation movements through the Non-Aligned Movement, of which it was a founding member in 1961. NAM spanned political and economic systems, uniting members in opposition to superpower politics and around policies of nuclear disarmament, active peaceful coexistence, anticolonialism, and respect for national sovereignty.
 
Nataša Kovačević reconstructs the forgotten literary and cultural history of this movement, tracing the development of new networks of intellectual engagement and cultural exchange between writers, journalists, and scholars who connected postwar Yugoslavia with 1950s India, 1960s Algeria and Guinea, 1970s Vietnam, and beyond. Nonaligned narratives attempted to reconfigure the understanding of the globe outside Eurocentric tropes and hegemonic political stratifications and to articulate Yugoslavs’ own internationalist sensibility. With Cold War–era rhetoric intensifying again in the twenty-first century, Nonaligned Imagination assumes the urgent task of unearthing a history of engaged writing and cultural diplomacy that imagined alternatives to superpower conflicts and a bipolar vision of the world.

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cover of Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health

Not Tonight

Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health

Joanna Kempner

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Pain. Vomiting. Hours and days spent lying in the dark. Migraine is an extraordinarily common, disabling, and painful disorder that affects over 36 million Americans and costs the US economy at least $32 billion per year. Nevertheless, it is frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized.

In Not Tonight, Joanna Kempner argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Because the symptoms that accompany headache disorders—like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound—lack an objective marker of distress that can confirm their existence, doctors rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are. Kempner shows how this problem plays out in the history of migraine, from nineteenth-century formulations of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectual men and hysterical women to the influential concept of “migraine personality” in the 1940s, in which women with migraine were described as uptight neurotics who withheld sex, to contemporary depictions of people with highly sensitive “migraine brains.” Not Tonight casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose suffering we legitimate, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, and how knowledge about disease is produced.
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cover of Notorious Facts: Publicity in Romantic England, 1780–1830

Notorious Facts

Publicity in Romantic England, 1780–1830

James Mulvihill

University of Delaware Press, 2012

Notorious Facts examines the sensationalistic confounding of persons and principles in the public life of Romantic England (1780–1830). Its purview is limited to five decades straddling the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its trajectory, moving from a politics rendered in personal terms to a politics of personality, describes a shift still in process today. The study’s chapters draw on a motley body of literature (pamphlets, secret histories, and the like) that at first glance seems uncharacteristic of what literary historians call the English Romantic period. Viewed in the context of something called late Georgian England, these texts seem more indigenous, but if the canonical revisionism of the last few decades should teach us anything, it is that a Romanticism encompassing all romanticisms ideally excludes nothing.

In its heroic Enlightenment sense, publicity is concerned with exposing the workings of power for all to see. A good deal may be inferred about publicity in Romantic England from primary texts in which this salutary function is at once espoused and subverted. These texts—the mostly nameless or pseudonymous authors of the age’s pamphlet literature are the heroes and villains of the piece—almost invariably claim to speak from a disinterested conception of publicity while putting its methods of critical exposure to wholly self-interested purposes. This study examines well-known authors of the period like Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt, as well as pamphleteers like John Horne Tooke, Philip Withers, and Nathaniel Jefferys. Other figures include authors of secret history like Thomas Ashe, Mary Anne Clarke, Lewis Goldsmith, and Joseph Haslewood in addition to notorious figures in their own right such as the Prince and Princess of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the Reverend Edward Irving. Among the topics treated are treasonous libel, royal scandal, secret history, and celebrity.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

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cover of Náyari History, Politics, and Violence: From Flowers to Ash

Náyari History, Politics, and Violence

From Flowers to Ash

Philip E. Coyle

University of Arizona Press, 2001

In recent years the Náyari (Cora) people of northwestern Mexico have experienced violence at the hands of drug producers and traffickers. Although a drug economy may seem potentially lucrative to such peasants, spreading violence tied to this trade threatens to destroy their community. This book argues that the source of the problem lies not solely in drug trafficking but also in the breakdown of traditional political authority.

By studying the history of religious practices that legitimate such authority, Philip Coyle shows that a contradiction exists between ceremonially based forms of political authority and the bureaucratic and military modes of power that have been deployed by outside governments in their attempts to administer the region. He then shows how the legitimacy of traditional authority is renewed or undermined through the performance of ceremonies.

Coyle explores linkages between long-term political and economic processes and changes in Náyari ceremonial life from Spanish contact to the present day. As a participant-observer of Náyari ceremonies over a ten-year period, he gained an understanding of the history of their ceremonialism and its connections to practically every other aspect of Náyari life. His descriptions of the Holy Week Festival, mitote ceremonies, and other public performances show how struggles over political legitimacy are intimately tied to the meanings of the ceremonies. With its rich ethnographic descriptions, provocative analyses, and clear links between data and theory, Coyle's study marks a major contribution to the ethnography of the Indians of western Mexico and Latin America more generally. It also provides unusual insight into the violence raging across the Mexican countryside and helps us understand the significance of indigenous people in a globalizing world.
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