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Stages Of Capital - Law, Culture, And Market Governance In Late Colonial India

by Ritu Birla

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India's market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the "free" circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture.Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or "vernacular" capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India's capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla's innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.
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Environment And The People In American Cities, 1600s-1900s - Disorder, Inequality, And Social Change

by Dorceta E. Taylor

55,58€ + 10% CARD

 In The Environment and the People in American Cities, Dorceta E. Taylor provides an in-depth examination of the development of urban environments, and urban environmentalism, in the United States. Taylor focuses on the evolution of the city, the emergence of elite reformers, the framing of environmental problems, and the perceptions of and responses to breakdowns in social order, from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. She demonstrates how social inequalities repeatedly informed the adjudication of questions related to health, safety, and land access and use. While many accounts of environmental history begin and end with wildlife and wilderness, Taylor shows that the city offers important clues to understanding the evolution of American environmental activism.Taylor traces the progression of several major thrusts in urban environmental activism, including the alleviation of poverty; sanitary reform and public health; safe, affordable, and adequate housing; parks, playgrounds, and open space; occupational health and safety; consumer protection (food and product safety); and land use and urban planning. At the same time, she presents a historical analysis of the ways race, class, and gender shaped experiences and perceptions of the environment as well as environmental activism and the construction of environmental discourses. Throughout her analysis, Taylor illuminates connections between the social and environmental conflicts of the past and those of the present. She describes the displacement of people of color for the production of natural open space for the white and wealthy, the close proximity between garbage and communities of color in early America, the cozy relationship between middle-class environmentalists and the business community, and the continuous resistance against environmental inequalities on the part of ordinary residents from marginal communities.
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Online A Lot Of The Time - Ritual, Fetish, Sign

by Ken Hillis

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 <div>A wedding ceremony in a Web-based virtual world. Online memorials commemorating the dead. A coffee klatch attended by persons thousands of miles apart via webcams. These are just a few of the ritual practices that have developed and are emerging in online settings. Such Web-based rituals depend on the merging of two modes of communication often held distinct by scholars: the use of a device or mechanism to transmit messages between people across space, and a ritual gathering of people in the same place for the performance of activities intended to generate, maintain, repair, and renew social relations. In <i>Online a Lot of the Time</i>, Ken Hillis explores the stakes when rituals that would formerly have required participants to gather in one physical space are reformulated for the Web. In so doing, he develops a theory of how ritual, fetish, and signification translate to online environments and offer new forms of visual and spatial interaction. The online environments Hillis examines reflect the dynamic contradictions at the core of identity and the ways these contradictions get signified.<p>Hillis analyzes forms of ritual and fetishism made possible through second-generation virtual environments such as Second Life and the popular practice of using webcams to "lifecast" one’s life online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Discussing how people create and identify with their electronic avatars, he shows how the customs of virtual-world chat reinforce modern consumer-based subjectivities, allowing individuals to both identify with and distance themselves from their characters. His consideration of web-cam cultures links the ritual of exposing one’s life online to a politics of visibility. Hillis argues that these new "rituals of transmission" are compelling because they provide a seemingly material trace of the actual person on the other side of the interface.</p></div>
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Mourning The Nation - Indian Cinema In The Wake Of Partition

by Bhaskar Sarkar

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 What remains of the "national" when the nation unravels at the birth of the independent state? The political truncation of India at the end of British colonial rule in 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which roughly one million people died and ten to twelve million were displaced. Combining film studies, trauma theory, and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema over the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia and that its representation on screen enables forms of historical engagement that are largely opaque to standard historiography.Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual "return of the repressed" as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma's disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.
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Looking For Mexico - Modern Visual Culture And National Identity

by John Mraz

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 This survey of Mexicos visual culture from the mid-1800s to the present illuminates the powerful role of photographs, films, illustrated magazines, and image-filled books in the construction of Mexican identity.
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Racially Writing The Republic - Racists, Race Rebels, And Transformations Of American Identity

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 Investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. This title highlights the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major US political and social leaders.
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Who Can Stop The Drums? - Urban Social Movements In Chávez''S Venezuela

by Sujatha Fernandes

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 Offering an ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, this title reveals a significant dimension of political life in Venezuela since President Hugo Chavez was elected. It traces the histories of the barrios, from the guerrilla insurgency, movements against displacement, to the Chavez period.
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Mobilizing Youth - Communists And Catholics In Interwar France

by Susan Whitney

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 Examines how youth moved to the forefront of French politics in the two decades following the First World War. This book focuses on the competing efforts of the two groups to mobilize the young and harness generational aspirations.
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Children Of Fate - Childhood, Class, And The State In Chile, 1850-1930

by Nara B. Milanich

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 In modern Latin America, profound social inequalities have persisted despite the promise of equality. Nara B. Milanich argues that social and legal practices surrounding family and kinship have helped produce and sustain these inequalities. Tracing families both elite and plebeian in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chile, she focuses on a group largely invisible in Latin American historiography: children. The concept of family constituted a crucial dimension of an individual's identity and status, but also denoted a privileged set of gendered and generational dependencies that not all people could claim. Children of Fate explores such themes as paternity, illegitimacy, kinship, and child circulation over the course of eighty years of Chile's modern history to illuminate the ways family practices and ideologies powerfully shaped the lives of individuals as well as broader social structures.Milanich pays particular attention to family law, arguing that liberal legal reforms wrought in the 1850s, which left the paternity of illegitimate children purposely unrecorded, reinforced not only patriarchal power but also hierarchies of class. Through vivid stories culled from judicial and notarial sources and from a cache of documents found in the closet of a Santiago orphanage, she reveals how law and bureaucracy helped create an anonymous underclass bereft of kin entitlements, dependent on the charity of others, and marginalized from public bureaucracies. Milanich also challenges the recent scholarly emphasis on state formation by highlighting the enduring importance of private, informal, and extralegal relations of power within and across households. Children of Fate demonstrates how the study of children can illuminate the social organization of gender and class, liberalism, law, and state power in modern Latin America.
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Itineraries In Conflict - Israelis, Palestinians, And The Political Lives Of Tourism

by Rebecca L. Stein

42,33€ + 10% CARD

 In Itineraries in Conflict, Rebecca L. Stein argues that through tourist practices-acts of cultural consumption, routes and imaginary voyages to neighboring Arab countries, culinary desires-Israeli citizens are negotiating Israel's changing place in the contemporary Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted throughout the last decade, Stein analyzes the divergent meanings that Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel have attached to tourist cultures, and she considers their resonance with histories of travel in Israel, its Occupied Territories, and pre-1948 Palestine. Stein argues that tourism's cultural performances, spaces, souvenirs, and maps have provided Israelis in varying social locations with a set of malleable tools to contend with the political changes of the last decade: the rise and fall of a Middle East Peace Process (the Oslo Process), globalization and neoliberal reform, and a second Palestinian uprising in 2000.Combining vivid ethnographic detail, postcolonial theory, and readings of Israeli and Palestinian popular texts, Stein considers a broad range of Israeli leisure cultures of the Oslo period with a focus on the Jewish desires for Arab things, landscapes, and people that regional diplomacy catalyzed. Moving beyond conventional accounts, she situates tourism within a broader field of "discrepant mobility," foregrounding the relationship between histories of mobility and immobility, leisure and exile, consumption and militarism. She contends that the study of Israeli tourism must open into broader interrogations of the Israeli occupation, the history of Palestinian dispossession, and Israel's future in the Arab Middle East. Itineraries in Conflict is both a cultural history of the Oslo process and a call to fellow scholars to rethink the contours of the Arab-Israeli conflict by considering the politics of popular culture in everyday Israeli and Palestinian lives.
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Religion At The Corner Of Bliss And Nirvana - Politics, Identity, And Faith In New Migrant Communities

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 Based on ethnographic research by an interdisciplinary team of scholars and activists, Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana illuminates the role that religion plays in the civic and political experiences of new migrants in the United States. By bringing innovative questions and theoretical frameworks to bear on the experiences of Chinese, Filipino, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Vietnamese migrants, the contributors demonstrate how groups and individuals negotiate multiple religious, cultural, and national identities, and how religious faiths are transformed through migration. Taken together, their essays show that migrants' religious lives are much more than replications of home in a new land. They reflect a process of adaptation to new physical and cultural environments, and an ongoing synthesis of cultural elements from the migrants' countries of origin and the United States.As they conducted research, the contributors not only visited churches and temples but also single-room-occupancy hotels, brothels, tattoo-removal clinics, and the streets of San Francisco, El Salvador, Mexico, and Vietnam. Their essays include an exploration of how faith-based organizations can help LGBT migrants surmount legal and social complexities, an examination of transgendered sex workers' relationship with the unofficial saint Santisima Muerte, a comparison of how a Presbyterian mission and a Buddhist temple in San Francisco help Chinese immigrants to acculturate, and an analysis of the transformation of baptismal rites performed by Mayan migrants. The voices of gang members, Chinese and Vietnamese Buddhist nuns, members of Pentecostal churches, and many others animate this collection. In the process of giving voice to these communities, the contributors interrogate theories about acculturation, class, political and social capital, gender and sexuality, the sociology of religion, transnationalism, and globalization. The collection includes twenty-one photographs by Jerry Berndt.Contributors. Luis Enrique Bazan, Kevin M. Chun, Hien Duc Do, Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola, Joaquin Jay Gonzalez III, Sarah Horton, Cymene Howe, Mimi Khuc, Jonathan H. X. Lee, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Andrea Maison, Dennis Marzan, Rosalina Mira, Claudine del Rosario, Susanna Zaraysky
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Words In Motion - Toward A Global Lexicon

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings frequently leads in unexpected directions and alters conventional depictions of global modernity.Such words as security in Brazil, responsibility in Japan, community in Thailand, and hijab in France changed the societies in which they moved even as the words were changed by them. Some words threatened to launch wars, as injury did in imperial Britain's relations with China in the nineteenth century. Others, such as secularism, worked in silence to agitate for political change in twentieth-century Morocco. Words imposed or imported from abroad could be transformed by those who wielded them to oppose the very powers that first introduced them, as happened in Turkey, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Taken together, this selection of fourteen essays reveals commonality as well as distinctiveness across modern societies, making the world look different from the interdisciplinary and transnational perspective of "words in motion."Contributors. Mona Abaza, Itty Abraham, Partha Chatterjee, Carol Gluck, Huri Islamoglu, Claudia Koonz, Lydia H. Liu, Driss Maghraoui, Vicente L. Rafael, Craig J. Reynolds, Seteney Shami, Alan Tansman, Kasian Tejapira, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
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Managing African Portugal - The Citizen-Migrant Distinction

by Kesha Fikes

42,33€ + 10% CARD

 Shows how Portugal's economic integration into the European Union (EU) in 1996 fundamentally changed ordinary encounters between African migrants and Portuguese citizens. This book examines this economic transition through transformations in popular ideologies of difference in workspaces in Lisbon between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s.
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Jacques Ranciere - History, Politics, Aesthetics

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 The French philosopher Jacques Ranciere has influenced disciplines from history and philosophy to political theory, literature, art history, and film studies. His research into nineteenth-century workers' archives, reflections on political equality, critique of the traditional division between intellectual and manual labor, and analysis of the place of literature, film, and art in modern society have all constituted major contributions to contemporary thought. In this collection, leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism engage Ranciere's work, illuminating its originality, breadth, and rigor, as well as its place in current debates. They also explore the relationships between Ranciere and the various authors and artists he has analyzed, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Flaubert, Rossellini, Auerbach, Bourdieu, and Deleuze.The contributors to this collection do not simply elucidate Ranciere's project; they also critically respond to it from their own perspectives. They consider the theorist's engagement with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways that individuals and communities can disturb or reconfigure what he has called the "distribution of the sensible." They examine his unique conception of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of bodies and roles in the social order, and they elucidate his novel account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics by exploring his astute analyses of literature and the visual arts. In the collection's final essay, Ranciere addresses some of the questions raised by the other contributors and returns to his early work to provide a retrospective account of the fundamental stakes of his project.Contributors. Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Yves Citton, Tom Conley, Solange Guenoun, Peter Hallward, Todd May, Eric Mechoulan, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Parker, Jacques Ranciere, Gabriel Rockhill, Kristin Ross, James Swenson, Rajeshwari Vallury, Philip Watts
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Democracy And Other Neoliberal Fantasies - Communicative Capitalism And Left Politics

by Jodi Dean

42,33€ + 10% CARD

 Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left's ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of "communicative capitalism," a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason.Dean's critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of "evil" in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.
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Expecting Pears From An Elm Tree - Franciscan Missions On The Chiriguano Frontier In The Heart Of South America, 1830-1949

by Erick D. Langer

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 Analyzes one of the most important Catholic mission systems in republican-era Latin America.
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Pleasure Consuming Medicine - The Queer Politics Of Drugs

by Kane Race

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 An exploration of the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state and of counterpublic health measures that do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
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Black And Green - Afro-Colombians, Development, And Nature In The Pacific Lowlands

by Kiran Asher

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 Presents a framework for re-conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberal development and social movements. Moving beyond the notion that development is a hegemonic, homogenizing force that victimizes local communities, this book argues that development processes and social movements shape each other in uneven and paradoxical ways.
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Land Of Necessity - Consumer Culture In The United States-Mexico Borderlands

42,33€ + 10% CARD

 Historians and anthropologists unravel the interplay of the national and transnational, and of scarcity and abundance, in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
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Crisis And Capitalism In Contemporary Argentine Cinema

by Joanna Page

42,33€ + 10% CARD

 This first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films released since the mid-1990s explains how they have registered Argentinas recent experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis.
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Politics Without A Past - The Absence Of History In Postcommunist Nationalism

by Shari J. Cohen

46,31€ + 10% CARD

 Offers a challenge to common characterisations of post-communist politics as either a resurgence of aggressive nationalism or an evolution toward Western-style democracy. This title focuses on Slovakia's failure to forge a collective memory of the World War II experience. It is suitable for scholars in political science and history.
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Conflicted Antiquities - Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity

by Colla Elliott Colla

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 Conflicted Antiquities is a rich cultural history of European and Egyptian interest in ancient Egypt and its material culture, from the early nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth. Consulting the relevant Arabic archives, Elliott Colla demonstrates that the emergence of Egyptology-the study of ancient Egypt and its material legacy-was as consequential for modern Egyptians as it was for Europeans. The values and practices introduced by the new science of archaeology played a key role in the formation of a new colonial regime in Egypt. This fact was not lost on Egyptian nationalists, who challenged colonial archaeologists with the claim that they were the direct heirs of the Pharaohs, and therefore the rightful owners and administrators of ancient Egypt's historical sites and artifacts. As this dispute developed, nationalists invented the political and expressive culture of "Pharaonism"-Egypt's response to Europe's Egyptomania. In the process, a significant body of modern, Pharaonist poetry, sculpture, architecture, and film was created by artists and authors who looked to the ancient past for inspiration.Colla draws on medieval and modern Arabic poetry, novels, and travel accounts; British and French travel writing; the history of archaeology; and the history of European and Egyptian museums and exhibits. The struggle over the ownership of Pharaonic Egypt did not simply pit Egyptian nationalists against European colonial administrators. Egyptian elites found arguments about the appreciation and preservation of ancient objects useful for exerting new forms of control over rural populations and for mobilizing new political parties. Finally, just as the political and expressive culture of Pharaonism proved critical to the formation of new concepts of nationalist identity, it also fueled Islamist opposition to the Egyptian state.
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Selling Modernity - Advertising In Twentieth-Century Germany

52,93€ + 10% CARD

 Explores the relationship between advertising and propaganda in Nazi Germany, influence of US on German advertising, use of advertising to promote mass consumption in West Germany, and prohibition of advertising in East Germany. This book focuses on those who shaped the depiction of a company's products, reputation, and visions of modern life.
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Liberated Territory - Untold Local Perspectives On The Black Panther Party

38,36€ + 10% CARD

 Focuses on the local manifestations of the Black Panther Party, far away from the Party's Oakland headquarters. This collection examines how specific Party chapters or offshoots emerged, developed, and waned, as well as how the local branches related to their communities and to the national party.
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