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In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism’s center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.

Working in four scholarly teams focused on different global regions—North America, the European Union, the Middle East, and China—the contributors to Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging examine how new political worlds intersect with locally specific articulations of religion and secularism. The chapters address many topics, including the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Tunisia after the 2010 revolution, the influence of religion on the sharp turn to the political right in Western Europe, understandings of Confucianism as a form of secularism, and the alliance between evangelical Christians and neoliberal business elites in the United States since the 1970s. This volume also provides a methodological template for how humanities scholars around the world can collaboratively engage with sweeping issues of global significance.

Contributors. Markus Balkenhol, Elizabeth Bentley, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, David N. Gibbs, Ori Goldberg, Marcia Klotz, Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman, Leerom Medovoi, Eva Midden, Mohanad Mustafa, Mu-chou Poo, Shaul Setter, John Vignaux Smith, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ernst van den Hemel, Albert Welter, Francis Ching-Wah Yip, Raef Zreik

In Remaindered Life Neferti X. M. Tadiar offers a new conceptual vocabulary and framework for rethinking the dynamics of a global capitalism maintained through permanent imperial war. Tracking how contemporary capitalist accumulation depends on producing life-times of disposability, Tadiar focuses on what she terms remaindered life—practices of living that exceed the distinction between life worth living and life worth expending. Through this heuristic, Tadiar reinterprets the global significance and genealogy of the surplus life-making practices of migrant domestic and service workers, refugees fleeing wars and environmental disasters, criminalized communities, urban slum dwellers, and dispossessed Indigenous people. She also examines artists and filmmakers in the Global South who render forms of various living in the midst of disposability. Retelling the story of globalization from the side of those who reach beyond dominant protocols of living, Tadiar demonstrates how attending to remaindered life can open up another horizon of possibility for a radical remaking of our present global mode of life.

Uses New York City to discuss the ways that policy has mismanaged the effects of globalization

Inequality increases, instability grows, communities fragment: this is the fate of a city in the wake of globalization—but is globalization really the cause? Proposing a new perspective on politics, globalization, and the city, this provocative book argues that such urban problems result in part from U.S. policies that can be changed.

William Sites develops the concept of primitive globalization, identifying a pattern of reactive politics—ad hoc measures to subsidize business, displace the urban poor, and dismantle the welfare state—that uproots social actors (corporations, citizens, urban residents) and facilitates a damaging, short-term-oriented type of international integration. In light of this theory, Sites examines the transformation of New York City since the 1970s, focusing on the logic of political action at national, local, and neighborhood levels. In the process, the story of late twentieth-century New York and its Lower East Side community emerges as something different: not a tale of globalist transformation or of local resurgence but a distinctly American case, one in which urban politics and the state, in their own right, exacerbate inequality and community fragmentation within the city.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2006

Traveling alone when she was between 17 and 22, with no institutional affiliation and no financial assistance, the author visited five developing countries and two developed ones on five continents. Her goal was to extend her own experience in an abortion clinic in Portland, Oregon. Lara Knudsen interviewed over 90 women's rights activists, health professionals, NGO workers, and government officials, gaining a sense of both official policies and the actual delivery of services in local clinics. The book places the experiences of women within the global context of how international population control agendas have influenced women's reproductive rights in the past, and how the changing international discourse on reproductive health continues to influence those rights today.

Framed by brilliant readings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Gabriel Tarde, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Maurizio Lazzarato’s Revolutions of Capitalism charts a new theory of contemporary capitalism and the politics against it. Originally published in French in 2004, this newly translated work sees capitalism as driven, not only by labor or value, but by the capture of cooperation and by the taming of possibles. Lazzarato theorizes how contemporary capitalism depends on noo-politics, or the “action of brains at a distance on other brains,” which seeks to control memory and attention and to trap the proliferation of possibles. Against this, Lazzarato reveals how current social movements attack established institutions and their vision of a single possible world to liberate the creation and actualization of a multiplicity of possible worlds.

Rio as Method provides a new set of lenses for apprehending and transforming the world at critical junctures. Challenging trends that position Global South scholars as research informants or objects, this Rio de Janeiro-based network of scholars, activists, attorneys, and political leaders center their Brazilian megacity as a globally relevant source for transformational world-making insights. Presenting this volume as a handbook and manifesto for energizing public engagement and direct action, more than forty contributors reconceive method as a politics of knowledge production that animates new ways of being, seeing, and doing politics. They draw on lessons from the city’s intersecting religious, feminist, queer, Black, Indigenous, and urbanist movements to examine issues ranging from state violence, urban marginalization, and moral panic to anticorruption efforts, paramilitary policing, sex work, and mutual aid. Rethinking theoretical and collaborative research methods, Rio as Method models theories of decolonial analysis and concepts of collective resistance that can be taken up by scholar-activists anywhere.

Contributors. Rosiane Rodrigues de Almeida, José Claudio Souza Alves, Tamires Maria Alves, Paul Amar, Marcelo Caetano Andreoli, Beatriz Bissio, Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette, Fernando Brancoli, Thayane Brêtas, Victoria Broadus, Fatima Cecchetto, Leonard Cortana, Marcos Coutinho, Monica Cunha, Luiz Henrique Eloy Amado, Marielle Franco, Cristiane Gomes Julião, Benjamin Lessing, Roberto Kant de Lima, Amanda De Lisio, Bryan McCann, Flávia Medeiros, Ana Paula Mendes de Miranda, Sean T. Mitchell, Rodrigo Monteiro, Vitória Moreira, Jacqueline de Oliveira Muniz, Laura Rebecca Murray, Cesar Pinheiro Teixeira, Osmundo Pinho, Paulo Pinto, María Victoria Pita, João Gabriel Rabello Sodré, Luciane Rocha, Marcos Alexandre dos Santos Albuquerque, Ana Paula da Silva, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Soraya Simões, Indianare Siqueira, Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima, Leonardo Vieira Silva

A timely consideration of the meaning of transnational cultural interactions today

In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations’s—and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation—understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization—the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories.

Contributors: Robin Brown, U of Leeds; David Campbell, U of Newcastle upon Tyne; Michael Dillon, U of Lancaster; Debbie Lisle, Queen’s U, Belfast; Moya Lloyd, Queen’s U, Belfast; Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State U; Patricia L. Price, Florida International U; Jayne Rodgers, U of Leeds; Marysia Zalewski, Queen’s U, Belfast.

This fourth Rural Sociological Society decennial volume provides advanced policy scholarship on rural North America during the 2010’s, closely reflecting upon the increasingly global nature of social, cultural, and economic forces and the impact of neoliberal ideology upon policy, politics, and power in rural areas.

The chapters in this volume represent the expertise of an influential group of scholars in rural sociology and related social sciences. Its five sections address the changing structure of North American agriculture, natural resources and the environment, demographics, diversity, and quality of life in rural communities.