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As people from the cultures of the Indian sub-continent increasingly participate in the complex and often heated debates about race and ethnicity in the United States, they confront questions about naming and claiming an identity that designates their group in this country. To be sure, claiming any single identity omits, perhaps threatens to obliterate, the significant political, historical, economic, and religious differences between their countries of origin. However, the term "South Asian" is growing in acceptance among people in this country who trace their heritage to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Maldives because it acknowledges common interests while it allows for difference.

This construction process parallels the gradual acceptance of the term "Asian American" by peoples primarily of East and Southeast Asian ancestry who found abundant reason to claim a shared identity in dealing with officialdom and an apparently intractable racism in this country. In time, "Asian American" has become a designation of collective pride for a wide range of peoples. In academic institutions and society generally, there are vexed questions about the term's inclusiveness and the dominance of established groups over more recent ones.

A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America concerns itself with the extent to which South Asian American are and ought to be included within Asian America -- as that term is applied to academic programs and admission policies; grassroots community organizing and politics more broadly; and critical analyses of cultural products. Taken together these essays form a spirited dialogue on the dilemmas of identity politics, coalition building, and diasporics.

Liz Waldner's bold new collection takes its title and its inspiration from Definition 1 of Euclid's Elements of Geometry. Its six sections—point, line, circle, square, triangle, and point again—are explorations of various kinds of longing and loss—sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. Drawing from culture high and low—Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne, Silicon Valley and Walden Pond—these poems offer proof of and proof against the “mortal right-lined circle” of memory and identity.

The innocence and Keatsian beauty of Euclid's geometry become poignant from a perspective that encompasses all that is non-Euclidean as well as space, time, and the theory of matter. With rare wit and linguistic daring, Waldner opens resonant channels of communication that show there is indeed more than meets the eye—or the mind—in her poems.

Hand to Mouth (Twist and Shout)

Cold comes slow up out
of the darkness among the leaves
that smell so good when bruised

Do you, too, recognize me
god so soon?

Her First Reckoning

Pour wine into vessels the violet of woods,
wine of the reddening stars.
You are god, you can do it.

Your lover calls you St. John the Conqueror.
I have heard her.
This is the name of a root.

Asperge the thousands and thousands of rooms
in which photosynthesis promises sun
to the acolyte cells. Rain yourself on a leaf.

Birch. The bark is malleable as mushroom flesh.
Show that you know me. Scratch out my name
with this tree. My name of trees.

On the day I arrive at the door of my death,
myself now hard to tell
from the trees that had hid it from me,

I will demand that you love me.
You made me like this.
Why did you make me like this?


Transitive, Intransitive: Extemporary Measures

Two crows above the marsh: sew.
Stitch the seventeen sleek shades of blue
to the shadow-patterned greens below.
See fit to make me a suitable view who
having nowhere to else to go
might as well wear this world well.
Llama necks periscope the view:
yonder, across the water, you
testing the air now a crow
chases a redwing blackbird through.

What can I show you who sees
I don't believe? For now,
what the eye of the needle sees:
through through through:
clouds, birds, me, trees;
soon: in, out, with, to;
something moving, something moved:
a stitch in time's an avenue,
future's sutures' revenue—
“the shining hour” improved.

In the years following its publication, F. A. Hayek’s pioneering work on business cycles was regarded as an important challenge to what was later known as Keynesian macroeconomics. Today, as debates rage on over the monetary origins of the current economic and financial crisis, economists are once again paying heed to Hayek’s thoughts on the repercussions of excessive central bank interventions.

 

The latest editions in the University of Chicago Press’s ongoing series The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, these volumes bring together Hayek’s work on what causes periods of boom and bust in the economy. Moving away from the classical emphasis on equilibrium, Hayek demonstrates that business cycles are generated by the adaptation of the structure of production to changes in relative demand. Thus, when central banks artificially lower interest rates, the result is a misallocation of capital and the creation of asset bubbles and additional instability. Business Cycles, Part I contains Hayek’s two major monographs on the topic: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and Prices and Production. Reproducing the text of the original 1933 translation of the former, this edition also draws on the original German, as well as more recent translations. For Prices and Production, a variorum edition is presented, incorporating the 1931 first edition and its 1935 revision. Business Cycles, Part II assembles a series of Hayek’s shorter papers on the topic, ranging from the 1920s to 1981.

 

In addition to bringing together Hayek’s work on the evolution of business cycles, the two volumes of Business Cycles also include extensive introductions by Hansjoerg Klausinger, placing the writings in intellectual context—including their reception and the theoretical debates to which they contributed—and providing background on the evolution of Hayek’s thought.

Goethe is the most famous German author, and the poetic drama Faust, Part I (1808) is his best-known work, one that stands in the company of other leading canonical works of European literature such as Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is the first new translation into English since David Constantine’s 2005 version. Why another translation when there are several currently in print? To invoke Goethe’s own authority when speaking of his favorite author, Shakespeare, Goethe asserts that so much has already been said about the poet-dramatist “that it would seem there’s nothing left to say,” but adds, “yet it is the peculiar attribute of the spirit that it constantly motivates the spirit.” Goethe’s great dramatic poem continues to speak to us in new ways as we and our world continually change, and thus a new or updated translation is always necessary to bring to light Faust’s almost inexhaustible, mysterious, and enchanting poetic and cultural power. Eugene Stelzig’s new translation renders the text of the play in clear and crisp English for a contemporary undergraduate audience while at the same time maintaining its leading poetic features, including the use of rhyme. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman are a trilogy of Platonic dialogues that show Socrates formulating his conception of philosophy as he prepares the defense for his trial. Originally published together as The Being of the Beautiful, these translations can be read separately or as a trilogy. Each includes an introduction, extensive notes, and comprehensive commentary that examines the trilogy's motifs and relationships.

"Seth Benardete is one of the very few contemporary classicists who combine the highest philological competence with a subtlety and taste that approximate that of the ancients. At the same time, he as set himself the entirely modern hermeneutical task of uncovering what the ancients preferred to keep veiled, of making explicit what they indicated, and hence...of showing the naked ugliness of artificial beauty."—Stanley Rose, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

Seth Benardete (1930-2001) was professor of classics at New York University. He was the author or translator of many books, most recently The Argument of the Action, Plato's "Laws," and Plato's "Symposium," all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Routes of Passage provides a conceptual, substantive, and empirical orientation to the study of African people worldwide. The book addresses issues of geographical mobility and geosocial displacement; changing culture, political, and economic relationships between Africa and its diaspora; interdiaspora relations; political and economic agency and social mobilization, including cultural production and psychocultural transformation; existence in hostile and oppressive political and territorial space; and confronting interconnected relations of social inequality, especially class, gender, nationality, and race.