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75 books match the query 'Construction' and 4 start with p

cover of Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy

Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy

Erik J. Engstrom

University of Michigan Press, 2016

Erik J. Engstrom offers a historical perspective on the effects of gerrymandering on elections and party control of the U.S. national legislature. Aside from the requirements that districts be continuous and, after 1842, that each select only one representative, there were few restrictions on congressional districting. Unrestrained, state legislators drew and redrew districts to suit their own partisan agendas. With the rise of the “one-person, one-vote” doctrine and the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, however, redistricting became subject to court oversight.

Engstrom evaluates the abundant cross-sectional and temporal variation in redistricting plans and their electoral results from all the states, from 1789 through the 1960s, to identify the causes and consequences of partisan redistricting. His analysis reveals that districting practices across states and over time systematically affected the competitiveness of congressional elections, shaped the partisan composition of congressional delegations, and, on occasion, determined party control of the House of Representatives.

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cover of Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault

Postmodern Spiritual Practices

The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault

Paul Allen Miller

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy’s self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought.
On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages. 
A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world. 
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cover of Prayers and the Construction of Israelite Identity

Prayers and the Construction of Israelite Identity

Susanne Gillmayr-Bucher

SBL Press, 2019

Substantial insights into various identity discourses reflected in the biblical prayers

This collection of essays from an international group of scholars focuses on how biblical prayers of the Persian and early Hellenistic periods shaped identity, evoked a sense of belonging to specific groups, and added emotional significance to this affiliation. Contributors draw examples from different biblical texts, including Genesis, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, Psalms, Jonah, and Daniel.

Features

  • Thorough study of prayers that play a key role for a biblical book’s (re)construction of the people’s history and identity
  • An examination of ways biblical figures are remodeled by their prayers by introducing other, sometimes even contradictory, discourses on identity
  • An exploration of different ways in which psalms from postexilic times shaped, reflected, and modified identity discourses
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cover of Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity

Prince, Musical Genre, and the Construction of Racial Identity

Griffin Woodworth

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Throughout his career, the Minneapolis musician Prince was known for fusing different musical genres as well as moving between different identities—sexual lothario, devout man of God, androgynous sprite—qualities that fit the postmodernism of the 1980s. This volume takes a fresh look at Prince’s work, arguing that his music was deeply informed by the history and techniques of Black culture, and that his multigenre fluency and changeable image were weapons that he deployed in a career-long fight against the racially segregated structures of the American music industry. Using a methodology that mixes musicology with African American literary theory, queer theory, and gender studies, this book analyzes the ways that Prince mixed and manipulated musical genres that are indexed to racial identities—such as “White” rock or new-wave, and “Black” funk, gospel, or R&B—in order to construct pluralistic identities. 

Each chapter includes detailed musical analyses and transcriptions of Prince’s songs, focusing on his use of rock guitar, new-wave synthesizers, funk drumming, gospel singing, and R&B horns. By tracking Prince’s transformations of instrumental and vocal idioms derived from specific musical genres, and considering the historical and cultural values embedded within those genres, Griffin Woodworth explores the ways that Prince musically broke down stereotypes of Black masculinity. With its intersectional approach to musical analysis, this book captures the sounds of American racial politics in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s as heard through the music of one of the era’s most popular artists as he worked to transform and transcend those politics.
 
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