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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Ethnic studies
Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this
book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national
commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a
mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public
performances are presented, and where acts of participation are
authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book
within the material and ideological environment where it is
positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration
are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a
participatory platform that becomes an extension of the
commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists'
and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book,
which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public
performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and
affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the
entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and
processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice,
addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and
reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but
also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity,
and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel
society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and
interviews, which were done both with the management of the site
(Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors
themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices
involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what
to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The
interviews with the site's management also illuminate the
commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged
and managed.
Whether on a national or a personal level, everyone has a complex
relationship with their closest neighbors. Where are the borders?
How much interaction should there be? How are conflicts solved?
Ancient Israel was one of several small nations clustered in the
eastern Mediterranean region between the large empires of Egypt and
Mesopotamia in antiquity. Frequently mentioned in the Bible, these
other small nations are seldom the focus of the narrative unless
they interact with Israel. The ancient Israelites who produced the
Hebrew Bible lived within a rich context of multiple neighbors, and
this context profoundly shaped Israel. Indeed, it was through the
influence of the neighboring people that Israel defined its own
identity-in terms of geography, language, politics, religion, and
culture. Ancient Israel's Neighbors explores both the biblical
portrayal of the neighboring groups directly surrounding Israel-the
Canaanites, Philistines, Phoenicians, Edomites, Moabites,
Ammonites, and Arameans-and examines what we can know about these
groups through their own literature, archaeology, and other
sources. Through its analysis of these surrounding groups, this
book will demonstrate in a direct and accessible manner the extent
to which ancient Israelite identity was forged both within and
against the identities of its close neighbors. Animated by the
latest and best research, yet written for students, this book will
invite readers into journey of scholarly discovery to explore the
world of Israel's identity within its most immediate ancient Near
Eastern context.
In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the
Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning
recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late
1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed
Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music
history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom
conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz.
Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came to exceed a
million strong, a new generation of New York Latinos, mostly Puerto
Ricans born and raised in the city, went on to create the music
that came to be called salsa, which continues to enjoy avid
popularity around the world. And now, the children of the mambo and
salsa generation are contributing to the making of hip hop and
reviving ancestral Afro-Caribbean forms like Cuban rumba, Puerto
Rican bomba, and Dominican palo. Salsa Rising provides the first
full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided
by close critical attention to issues of tradition and
experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing
roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry
in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. It is a history not
only of the music, the changing styles and practices, the
innovators, venues and songs, but also of the music as part of the
larger social history, ranging from immigration and urban history,
to the formation of communities, to issues of colonialism, race and
class as they bear on and are revealed by the trajectory of the
music. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New
York Latin music field into his work, including musicians,
producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic
scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement
with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians
themselves.
Crime and gentrification are hot button issues that easily polarize
racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and
politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight
crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing
visions of neighborhood change necessarily divide activists into
racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex
alliances and divisions? In Us versus Them, Jan Doering answers
these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago
neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic
fieldwork, Doering examines how activists and community leaders
clashed and collaborated as they launched new initiatives, built
coalitions, appeased critics, and discredited opponents. At the
heart of these political maneuvers, he uncovers a ceaseless battle
over racial meanings that unfolded as residents strove to make
local initiatives and urban change appear racially benign or
malignant. A thoughtful and clear-eyed contribution to the field,
Us versus Them reveals the deep impact that competing racial
meanings have on the fabric of community and the direction of
neighborhood change.
Written in a conversational style that transforms complex ideas
into accessible ones, this international best-selling textbook
provides an interdisciplinary review of the theories and research
in cross-cultural psychology. The text's unique critical thinking
framework, including Critical Thinking boxes, helps students
develop analytical skills. Exercises interspersed throughout
promote active learning and encourage class discussion. Case in
Point sections review controversial issues and opinions about
behavior in different cultural contexts. Cross-Cultural Sensitivity
boxes underscore the importance of empathy in communication.
Numerous applications prepare students for working in various
multicultural contexts such as teaching, counseling, health care,
and social work. New to the 7th Edition: over 190 recent
references, particularly on studies of non-Western regions such as
the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the
United States and Europe. broader discussion of gender roles and
health behaviors across cultures. new discussions related to the
psychological fallout of both globalization and anti-globalization
tendencies. greater attention shifted from general psychological
theories to specific challenges of cross-cultural psychology. new
or revised chapter openings that draw upon current events. more
examples related to the experiences of international students in
the United States and indigenous people. updated figures, tables,
and graphs that are also available for download for instructors to
utilize in their online teaching. new research on global trends,
nationalism, gender, race, religious beliefs, parenting styles,
sexual orientation, ethnic identity and stereotypes, immigration,
intelligence, substance abuse, states of consciousness, DSM-5,
cultural customs, evolutionary psychology, treatment of
psychological disorders, and acculturation. online resources for
instructors and students. The dynamic author team brings a diverse
set of experiences in writing this text that provides
cross-cultural perspectives on topics such as sensation,
perception, consciousness, intelligence, human development,
emotion, motivation, social perception, personality, psychological
disorders, and various applied topics.
Written in a conversational style that transforms complex ideas
into accessible ones, this international best-selling textbook
provides an interdisciplinary review of the theories and research
in cross-cultural psychology. The text's unique critical thinking
framework, including Critical Thinking boxes, helps students
develop analytical skills. Exercises interspersed throughout
promote active learning and encourage class discussion. Case in
Point sections review controversial issues and opinions about
behavior in different cultural contexts. Cross-Cultural Sensitivity
boxes underscore the importance of empathy in communication.
Numerous applications prepare students for working in various
multicultural contexts such as teaching, counseling, health care,
and social work. New to the 7th Edition: over 190 recent
references, particularly on studies of non-Western regions such as
the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the
United States and Europe. broader discussion of gender roles and
health behaviors across cultures. new discussions related to the
psychological fallout of both globalization and anti-globalization
tendencies. greater attention shifted from general psychological
theories to specific challenges of cross-cultural psychology. new
or revised chapter openings that draw upon current events. more
examples related to the experiences of international students in
the United States and indigenous people. updated figures, tables,
and graphs that are also available for download for instructors to
utilize in their online teaching. new research on global trends,
nationalism, gender, race, religious beliefs, parenting styles,
sexual orientation, ethnic identity and stereotypes, immigration,
intelligence, substance abuse, states of consciousness, DSM-5,
cultural customs, evolutionary psychology, treatment of
psychological disorders, and acculturation. online resources for
instructors and students. The dynamic author team brings a diverse
set of experiences in writing this text that provides
cross-cultural perspectives on topics such as sensation,
perception, consciousness, intelligence, human development,
emotion, motivation, social perception, personality, psychological
disorders, and various applied topics.
The postwar period witnessed an outpouring of white life novels,
that is texts by African American writers focused almost
exclusively on white characters. Almost every major mid-twentieth
century black writer, including Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright,
Ann Petry and James Baldwin, published one of these anomalous
texts. Controversial since their publication in the 1940s and 50s,
these novels have since fallen into obscurity given the challenges
they pose to traditional conceptions of the African American
literary canon. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects
aims to bring these neglected novels back into conversations about
the nature of African American literature and the unique
expectations imposed upon black texts. In a series of nuanced
readings, Li demonstrates how postwar black novelists were at the
forefront of what is now commonly understood as whiteness studies.
Novels like Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee and Wright's Savage
Holiday, once read as abdications of the political imperative of
African American literature, are revisited with an awareness of how
whiteness signifies in multivalent ways that critique America's
abiding racial hierarchies. These novels explore how this
particular racial construction is freighted with social power and
narrative meaning. Whiteness repeatedly figures in these texts as a
set of expectations that are nearly impossible to fulfill. By
describing characters who continually fail at whiteness, white life
novels ask readers to reassess what race means for all Americans.
Along with its close analysis of key white life novels, Playing in
the White also provides important historical context to understand
how these texts represented the hopes and anxieties of a newly
integrated nation.
For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France's "other"
face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the
suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal
opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of
the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist
discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to black
U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv'
developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as
part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and
supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of
"Arabic" North African, African and Asian forms circulating with
classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop
is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as
legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political
recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express
themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone
else. French hip hop develops into concert dance not through the
familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of
Culture; it nuances an "Anglo-Saxon" model of identity politics
with a "francophone" post-colonial identity poetics and grants its
dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and
transmit body-based knowledge. This book- the first in English to
introduce readers to the French mouv' -analyzes the choreographic
development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national
and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue,
figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and
global migration.
Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and
charismatic speakers of our age. Without missing a beat, he often
moves between Washington insider talk and culturally Black ways of
speaking-as shown in a famous YouTube clip, where Obama declined
the change offered to him by a Black cashier in a Washington, D.C.
restaurant with the phrase, "Nah, we straight." In Articulate While
Black, two renowned scholars of Black Language address language and
racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of
President Barack Obama's language use-and America's response to it.
In this eloquently written and powerfully argued book, H. Samy Alim
and Geneva Smitherman provide new insights about President Obama
and the relationship between language and race in contemporary
society. Throughout, they analyze several racially loaded,
cultural-linguistic controversies involving the President-from his
use of Black Language and his "articulateness" to his "Race
Speech," the so-called "fist-bump," and his relationship to Hip Hop
Culture. Using their analysis of Barack Obama as a point of
departure, Alim and Smitherman reveal how major debates about
language, race, and educational inequality erupt into moments of
racial crisis in America. In challenging American ideas about
language, race, education, and power, they help take the national
dialogue on race to the next level. In much the same way that
Cornel West revealed nearly two decades ago that "race matters,"
Alim and Smitherman in this groundbreaking book show how deeply
"language matters" to the national conversation on race-and in our
daily lives.
While most research on inequality focuses on impoverished
communities, it often ignores how powerful communities and elites
monopolize resources at the top of the social hierarchy. In
Privilege at Play, Hugo Ceron-Anaya offers an intersectional
analysis of Mexican elites to examine the ways affluent groups
perpetuate dynamics of domination and subordination. Using
ethnographic research conducted inside three exclusive golf clubs
and in-depth interviews with upper-middle and upper-class golfers,
as well as working-class employees, Ceron-Anaya focuses on the
class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege in
contemporary Mexico. His detailed analysis of social life and the
organization of physical space further considers how the legacy of
imperialism continues to determine practices of exclusion and how
social hierarchies are subtlety reproduced through distinctions
such as fashion and humor, in addition to the traditional
indicators of wealth and class. Adding another dimension to the
complex nature of social exclusion, Privilege at Play shows how
elite social relations and spaces allow for the resource hoarding
and monopolization that helps create and maintain poverty.
This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the
Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing,
freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern
Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a
cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, are non-literate, poor, and
enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of
Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic
world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of
history, and statecraft, it is conventionally believed to have
taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the
contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish
Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law.
The book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within
current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history.
The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how
legal documents were made, fresh interpretations of the
intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the
period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from
six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the
colonies-far more often than peninsular Spaniards-sued superiors at
an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general
rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native
peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and
husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new
law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented
legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at
precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined
them in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the
Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of
the modern West.
Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of
conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip hop-often regarded
as politically radioactive-in his presidential campaigns. Just as
important was the extent to which hip hop artists and activists
embraced him in return. This new relationship fundamentally altered
the dynamics between popular culture, race, youth, and national
politics. But what does this relationship look like now, and what
will it look like in the decades to come? The Hip Hop & Obama
Reader attempts to answer these questions by offering the first
systematic analysis of hip hop and politics in the Obama era and
beyond. Over the course of 14 chapters, leading scholars and
activists offer new perspectives on hip hop's role in political
mobilization, grassroots organizing, campaign branding, and voter
turnout, as well as the ever-changing linguistic, cultural, racial,
and gendered dimensions of hip hop in the U.S. and abroad. Inviting
readers to reassess how Obama's presidency continues to be shaped
by the voice of hip hop and, conversely, how hip hop music and
politics have been shaped by Obama, The Hip Hop & Obama Reader
critically examines hip hop's potential to effect social change in
the 21st century. This volume is essential reading for scholars and
fans of hip hop, as well as those interested in the shifting
relationship between democracy and popular culture. Foreword:
Tricia Rose, Brown University Afterword: Cathy Cohen, University of
Chicago
Over the past two decades, a steady stream of recordings, videos,
feature films, festivals, and concerts has presented the music of
Balkan Gypsies, or Roma, to Western audiences, who have greeted
them with exceptional enthusiasm. Yet, as author Carol Silverman
notes, "Roma are revered as musicians and reviled as people." In
this book, Silverman introduces readers to the people and cultures
who produce this music, offering a sensitive and incisive analysis
of how Romani musicians address the challenges of discrimination.
Focusing on southeastern Europe then moving to the diaspora, her
book examines the music within Romani communities, the lives and
careers of outstanding musicians, and the marketing of music in the
electronic media and "world music" concert circuit. Silverman
touches on the way that the Roma exemplify many qualities-
adaptability, cultural hybridity, transnationalism-that are taken
to characterize late modern experience. Rather than just
celebrating these qualities, she presents the musicians as
complicated, pragmatic individuals who work creatively within the
many constraints that inform their lives. As both a performer and
presenter on the world music circuit, Silverman has worked
extensively with Romani communities for more than two decades both
in their home countries and in the diaspora. At a time when the
political and economic plight of European Roma and the popularity
of their music are objects of international attention, Silverman's
book is incredibly timely.
Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits,
women have always been historians. Although few participated in the
academic study of history until the mid-twentieth century, women
functioned as primary translators and teachers, offering
explanations, allegories, and scholastic narrations of the past.
Though often lesser known that white women in the historical
literature, black women wrote textbooks, pedagogical polemics,
popular poems, and sermons assessing ancient Ethiopia, contemporary
Liberia, the role of the female historian, and the future of the
black race.
This anthology aims to bring together approximately sixteen
writings by African-American women between 1832 and 1920, the
period when they began to write for American audiences and to use
history to comment on political and social issues of the day. The
pieces are by more familiar nineteenth-century writers in black
America--like Maria Stewart, Francis E. W. Harper, and Alice
Dunbar-Nelson--as well as lesser-known mothers and teachers whose
participation in their local educational systems thrust them into
national intellectual conversations. Each piece will have a
headnote providing biographical information about its author as
well as contextual information about its publication and the topic
being discussed. The volume will contain a substantial introduction
to the overall enterprise of black women's historical writings.
Because the editors are both trained in American Studies and
religious history, their introduction will particularly highlight
religious themes and venues in which these writings were presented.
This book should appeal to general readers of books like those in
the Schomburg Libraryseries, as well as those who work and teach
American history, African American studies, womens studies,
American literature, and American religious history.
What is the status of religious freedom in the world today? What
barriers does it face? What are the realistic prospects for
improvement, and why does this matter? The Future of Religious
Freedom addresses these critical questions by assembling in one
volume some of the best forward-thinking and empirical research on
religious liberty, international legal trends, and societal
dynamics. Top scholars from law, political science, diplomacy,
sociology, and religion explore the status, value, and challenges
of religious liberty around the world - with illustrations from a
wide range of historical situations, contemporary contexts, and
constitutional regimes. With a thematic focus on the nature of
religious markets and statecraft, the book surveys conditions in
different regions, from the Muslim arc to Asia to Eastern Europe.
It probes dynamics in both established and emerging democracies. It
features up-to-date treatments of such pivotal nations as China,
Russia, and Turkey, as well as illuminating new threats to
conscience and religious autonomy in the United States and in kin
countries of the English speaking world. Finally, it demonstrates
the vital contribution of religious freedom to inter-religious
harmony, thriving societies, and global security, and applies these
findings to the momentous issue of advancing freedom and democracy
in Islamic cultures.
There are few movements more firmly associated with civil
disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream
imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to
the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal
punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and
facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic
principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to
civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the normative
standard for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience. This
narrative offers the civil disobedience of the Civil Rights
Movement as a moral exemplar: a blueprint for activists who seek
transformative change and racial justice within the bounds of
democracy. Yet in this book, Erin R. Pineda shows how it more often
functions as a disciplining example-a means of scolding activists
and quieting dissent. As Pineda argues, the familiar account of
Civil Rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also
distorts our political judgments about how civil disobedience might
fit into democratic politics. Seeing Like an Activist charts the
emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the
Civil Rights Movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative
about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy.
Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of
scholarship saw civil disobedience "like a white state": taking for
granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as
primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability,
centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring
the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and
all-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil
disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the
consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold
in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence,
Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concert with
anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil
disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate
themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial
order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account by
adopting a different theoretical approach-one which sees activists
as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.
The white nationalist movement in the United States is nothing new.
Yet, prior to the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville,
Virginia, many Americans assumed that it existed only on the
fringes of our political system, a dark cultural relic pushed out
of the mainstream by the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
The events in Charlottesville made clear that we had underestimated
the scale of the white nationalist movement; Donald Trump's
reaction to it brought home the reality that the movement had
gained political clout in the White House. Yet, as this book
argues, the mainstreaming of white nationalism did not begin with
Trump, but began during the Obama era. Hard White explains how the
mainstreaming of white nationalism occurred, pointing to two major
shifts in the movement. First, Barack Obama's presidential tenure,
along with increases in minority representation, fostered white
anxiety about Muslims, Latinx immigrants, and black Americans.
While anti-Semitic sentiments remained somewhat on the fringes,
hostility toward Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans bubbled up
into mainstream conservative views. At the same time, white
nationalist leaders shifted their focus and resources from protest
to electoral politics, and the book traces the evolution of the
movement's political forays from David Duke to the American Freedom
Party, the Tea Party, and, finally, the emergence of the Alt-Right.
Interestingly it also shows that white hostility peaked in 2012-not
2016. Richard C. Fording and Sanford F. Schram also show that the
key to Trump's win was not persuading economically anxious voters
to become racially conservative. Rather, Trump mobilized racially
hostile voters in the key swing states that flipped from blue to
red in 2016. In fact, the authors show that voter turnout among
white racial conservatives in the six states that Trump flipped was
significantly higher in 2016 compared to 2012. They also show that
white racial conservatives were far more likely to participate in
the election beyond voting in 2016. However, the rise of white
nationalism has also mobilized racial progressives. While the book
argues that white extremism will have enduring effects on American
electoral politics for some time to come, it suggests that the way
forward is to refocus the conversation on social solidarity,
concluding with ideas for how to build this solidarity.
Routes and Realms explores the ways in which Muslims expressed
attachment to land from the ninth through the eleventh centuries,
the earliest period of intensive written production in Arabic. In
this groundbreaking first book, Zayde Antrim develops a "discourse
of place," a framework for approaching formal texts devoted to the
representation of territory across genres. The discourse of place
included such varied works as topographical histories, literary
anthologies, religious treatises, world geographies, poetry, travel
literature, and maps.
By closely reading and analyzing these works, Antrim argues that
their authors imagined plots of land primarily as homes, cities,
and regions and associated them with a range of claims to religious
and political authority. She contends that these are evidence of
the powerful ways in which the geographical imagination was tapped
to declare loyalty and invoke belonging in the early Islamic world,
reinforcing the importance of the earliest regional mapping
tradition in the Islamic world.
Routes and Realms challenges a widespread tendency to underestimate
the importance of territory and to over-emphasize the importance of
religion and family to notions of community and belonging among
Muslims and Arabs, both in the past and today.
In 2005, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath starkly revealed the
continued racial polarization of America. Disproportionately
impacted by the ravages of the storm, displaced black victims were
often characterized by the media as "refugees." The
characterization was wrong-headed, and yet deeply revealing.
Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire traces the long history of
this and related terms, like alien and foreign, a rhetorical
shorthand that has shortchanged black America for over 250 years.
In tracing the language and politics that have informed debates
about African American citizenship, Sanctuary in effect illustrates
the historical paradox of African American subjecthood: while
frequently the target of legislation (slave law, the Black Codes,
and Jim Crow), blacks seldom benefited from the actions of the
state. Blackness helped to define social, cultural, and legal
aspects of American citizenship in a manner that excluded black
people themselves. They have been treated, rather, as foreigners in
their home country. African American civil rights efforts worked to
change this. Activists and intellectuals demanded equality, but
they were often fighting for something even more fundamental: the
recognition that blacks were in fact human beings. As citizenship
forced acknowledgement of the humanity of African Americans, it
thus became a gateway to both civil and human rights.
Waligora-Davis shows how artists like Langston Hughes underscored
the power of language to define political realities, how critics
like W.E.B. Du Bois imagined democratic political strategies, and
how they and other public figures have used their writing as a
forum to challenge the bankruptcy of a social economy in which the
value of human life is predicated on race and civil identity.
In Genocide Denials and the Law, Ludovic Hennebel and Thomas
Hochmann offer a thorough study of the relationship between law and
genocide denial from the perspectives of specialists from six
countries. This controversial topic provokes strong international
reactions involving emotion caused by denial along with concerns
about freedom of speech.
The authors offer an in-depth study of the various legal issues
raised by the denial of crimes against humanity, presenting
arguments both in favor of and in opposition to prohibition of this
expression. They do not adopt a pro or contra position, but include
chapters written by proponents and opponents of a legal prohibition
on genocide denial.
Hennebel and Hochmann fill a void in academic publications by
comparatively examining this issue with a collection of original
essays. They tackle this diverse topic comprehensively, addressing
not only the theoretical and philosophical aspects of denial, but
also the specific problems faced by judges who implement
anti-denial laws. Genocide Denials and the Law will provoke
discussion of many theoretical questions regarding free speech,
including the relationship between freedom of expression and truth,
hate, memory, and history.
The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second
half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the
prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five
percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot
easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the
"tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern
Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison
sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit
or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The
First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom
by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a
system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in
fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early
1960s, not in the period after. Murakawa traces the development of
the modern American prison system through several presidencies,
both Republication and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the
lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local
levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what was
previously a weak federal system. Later administrations from
Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more.
Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the
vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What
began as a liberal initiative to curb the mob violence and police
brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil
right-physical safety-eventually evolved into the federal
correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large
numbers, of another important right: freedom. The First Civil Right
is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at
the intersection of race and the legal system in America
In the past few decades, and across disparate geographical
contexts, states have adopted policies and initiatives aimed at
institutionalizing relationships with "their" diasporas. These
practices, which range from creating new ministries to granting
dual citizenship, are aimed at integrating diasporas as part of a
larger "global" nation that is connected to, and has claims on the
institutional structures of the home state. Although links, both
formal and informal, between diasporas and their presumptive
homelands have existed in the past, the recent developments
constitute a far more widespread and qualitatively different
phenomenon.
In this book, Latha Varadarajan theorizes this novel and largely
overlooked trend by introducing the concept of the "domestic
abroad." Varadarajan demonstrates that the remapping of the
imagined boundaries of the nation, the visible surface of the
phenomenon, is intrinsically connected to the political-economic
transformation of the state that is typically characterized as
"neoliberalism." The domestic abroad must therefore be understood
as the product of two simultaneous, on-going processes: the
diasporic re-imagining of the nation and the neoliberal
restructuring of the state.
The argument unfolds through a historically nuanced study of the
production of the domestic abroad in India. The book traces the
complex history and explains the political logic of the remarkable
transition from the Indian state's guarded indifference toward its
diaspora in the period after independence, to its current
celebrations of the "global Indian nation." In doing so, The
Domestic Abroad reveals the manner in which the boundaries of the
nation and the extent of the authority of the state, in India and
elsewhere, are dynamically shaped by the development of capitalist
social relations on both global and national scales.
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