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In this magisterial study, Timothy Mitchell rethinks the history of
energy, bringing into his grasp environmental politics, the
struggle for democracy, and the place of the Middle East in the
modern world. With the rise of coal power, the producers who
oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy
systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies.
Oil offered the West an alternative, and with it came a new form of
politics. Oil created a denatured political life the central object
of which-the economy-appeared capable of infinite growth. What
followed was a Western democracy dependent on an undemocratic
Middle East. We now live with the consequences: an impoverished
political practice, incapable of addressing the crises that
threaten to end the age of carbon democracy - namely, the
disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of
the ecological order. For the updated edition of this classic
title, Timothy Mitchell has written a new preface, reassessing its
arguments in the light of recent political events.
In recent times, priests charged with sexual abuse have captured
headlines and bankrupted dioceses all over the United States. But
these cases have not exacerbated class conflict, threatened the
stability of the government, despoiled national folklore, obsessed
several literary generations, or led to the murder of thousands of
priests. Spain has seen all of this and more. Timothy Mitchell's
powerful and compelling book is the first to assess the long-term
consequences of clergy sexual activity in another culture. Mitchell
shows how the extreme idealization of motherhood promoted by
Spanish Catholicism greatly increased the frequency of exploitative
events. The resulting spiritual and social conflicts affected every
area of cultural life: film, literature, law, show business,
child-rearing, psychiatry, and gynecology are among the many
Mitchell explores. When anticlerical writers and politicians were
crushed by Franco with the aid of fascist women's organizations,
Spanish children were subjected to another long period of
authoritarian sexuality. The battle for custody of their minds is
far from over; Betrayal of the Innocents concludes with a look at
current trends and salutes new generations of Spaniards recovering
from a legacy of clergy abuse unlike anything in American
experience.
Carbon Democracy provides a unique examination of the relationship
between oil and democracy. Interweaving the history of energy,
political analysis, and economic theory, Mitchell targets
conventional wisdom regarding energy and governance. Emphasizing
how oil and democracy have intermixed, he argues that while coal
provided the impetus for mass democracy, the shift to oil
drastically limited democratic possibility; above all, the ability
to confront contemporary ecological crises.
Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political
analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western
conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's
colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.
Can one explain the power of global capitalism without attributing
to capital a logic and coherence it does not have? Can one account
for the powers of techno-science in terms that do not merely
reproduce its own understanding of the world?
"Rule of Experts "examines these questions through a series of
interrelated essays focused on Egypt in the twentieth century.
These explore the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism
interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian
state; the forms of debt, discipline, and violence that founded the
institution of private property; the methods of measurement,
circulation, and exchange that produced the novel idea of a
national "economy," yet made its accurate representation
impossible; the stereotypes and plagiarisms that created the
scholarly image of the Egyptian peasant; and the interaction of
social logics, horticultural imperatives, powers of desire, and
political forces that turned programs of economic reform in
unanticipated directions.
Mitchell is a widely known political theorist and one of the most
innovative writers on the Middle East. He provides a rich
examination of the forms of reason, power, and expertise that
characterize contemporary politics. Together, these intellectually
provocative essays will challenge a broad spectrum of readers to
think harder, more critically, and more politically about history,
power, and theory.
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations
throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans,
isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often
framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded
in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in
most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of
misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries,
increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the
eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to
critically examine culturally constructed views of the
environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have
often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the
peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the
questionable policies and practices born of these environmental
imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the
region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in
the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and
hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge
production. Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul
Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan
Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George
R. Trumbull IV
The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations
throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans,
isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often
framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded
in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in
most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of
misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries,
increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the
eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to
critically examine culturally constructed views of the
environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have
often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the
peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the
questionable policies and practices born of these environmental
imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the
region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in
the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and
hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge
production. Contributors: Samer Alatout, Edmund Burke III, Shaul
Cohen, Diana K. Davis, Jennifer L. Derr, Leila M. Harris, Alan
Mikhail, Timothy Mitchell, Priya Satia, Jeannie Sowers, and George
R. Trumbull IV
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