front cover of Piecemeal Protest
Piecemeal Protest
Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits
Corey Lee Wrenn
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Given their tendency to splinter over tactics and goals, social movements are rarely unified. Following the modern Western animal rights movement over thirty years, Corey Lee Wrennapplies the sociological theory of Bourdieu, Goffman, Weber, and contemporary social movement researchers to examine structural conditions in the animal rights movement, facilitating factionalism in today’s era of professionalized advocacy.

Modern social movements are dominated by bureaucratically oriented nonprofits, a special arrangement that creates tension between activists and movement elites who compete for success in a corporate political arena. Piecemeal Protest examines the impact of nonprofitization on factionalism and a movement’s ability to mobilize, resonate, and succeed. Wrenn’sexhaustive analysis of archival movement literature and exclusive interviews with movement leaders illustrate how entities with greater symbolic capital are positioned to monopolize claims-making, disempower competitors, and replicate hegemonic power, eroding democratic access to dialogue and decision-making essential for movement health.

Piecemeal Protest examines social movement behavior shaped by capitalist ideologies and state interests. As power concentrates to the disadvantage of marginalized factions in the modern social movement arena, Piecemeal Protest shines light on processes of factionalism and considers how, in the age of nonprofits, intra-movement inequality could stifle social progress.

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Pigeon River Country
A Michigan Forest
Dale Clarke Franz
University of Michigan Press, 2007

The long awaited new edition of a classic offers memories, myths, and meanings of the largest contiguous piece of wild land in Michigan's Lower Peninsula.

This updated edition explores more deeply why and how the outdoors moves and compels us. It’s a book about mice who sing, elk who wear collars, deer who kiss, and birds who could dictate their compositions to Mozart. It's about the human species interacting in generous and sometimes misguided ways with the rest of life. It's about men trying to ripen pinecones into pineapples and women taking better aim with a revolver than expected. It's about poetry—from Mary Oliver, Lao Tzu, and Theodore Roethke—and seeing hawks dive in a night sky or feeling oil geologists shake the earth below. It's about finding fish dead in the river by the thousands and crouching behind a stump to watch beaver build a dwelling. While this book considers life beyond the boundaries of Pigeon River Country, it is steeped in the specifics of a place that lives mostly on its own, instead of human, terms.

The Pigeon River Country is a remote northern forest, ecologically distinct from most of the United States. Laced with waterways, it has a storied past. Dale Clarke Franz has collected personal accounts from various people intrigued with the Pigeon River Country—including loggers, conservationists, mill workers, campers, even the young Ernest Hemingway, who said he loved the forest "better than anything in the world." There are comprehensive discussions of the area's flora and fauna, guides to trails and camping sites, and photos showcasing the changing face of this hidden national treasure.

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The Pigs That Ate the Garden
A Human Ecology from Papua New Guinea
Peter D. Dwyer
University of Michigan Press, 1990
In The Pigs That Ate the Garden, Peter D. Dwyer examines the subsistence ecology of 109 Etolo people who live on the wet, forested mountain slopes of Papua New Guinea. Dwyer describes the community's practice of deliberately placing pigs in gardens so that the pigs depredate the vegetation there. He shows how this practice is actually the community's method of sending a message to itself that serves to resynchronize a switch from sweet potato gardening to sago starch processing. The interrelationships of the different food-producing activities of the Etolo—gardening, hunting, tree-crop cultivation, etc. —are shown to have seasonal rhythms, and these rhythms maximize the Etolo's use of food resources at appropriate times and areas. Dwyer argues that the "shape" of Etolo ecology is ultimately driven by sociocultural, rather than environmental, forces, and is set within a theoretical frame concerning processes of communication and change in open systems.
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The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior
Nancy Maveety, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2002
In The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior, prominent political scientists critically examine the contributions to the field of public law of the pioneering scholars of judicial behavior: C. Hermann Pritchett, Glendon Schubert, S. Sidney Ulmer, Harold J. Spaeth, Joseph Tanenhaus, Beverly Blair Cook, Walter F. Murphy, J. Woodward Howard, David J. Danelski, David Rohde, Edward S. Corwin, Alpheus Thomas Mason, Robert G. McCloskey, Robert A. Dahl, and Martin Shapiro.
Unlike past studies that have traced the emergence and growth of the field of judicial studies, The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior accounts for the emergence and exploration of three current theoretical approaches to the study of judicial behavior--attitudinal, strategic, and historical-institutionalist--and shows how the research of these foundational scholars has contributed to contemporary debates about how to conceptualize judges as policy makers. Chapters utilize correspondence of and interviews with some early scholars, and provide a format to connect the concerns and controversies of the first political scientists of law and courts to contemporary challenges and methodological debates among today's judicial scholars. The volume's purpose in looking back is to look forward: to contribute to an ecumenical research agenda on judicial decision making, and, ultimately, to the generation of a unified, general theory of judicial behavior.
The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior will be of interest to graduate students in the law and courts field, political scientists interested in the philosophy of social science and the history of the discipline, legal practitioners and researchers, and political commentators interested in academic theorizing about public policy making.
Nancy L. Maveety is Associate Professor of Political Science, Tulane University.
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The Pipes of Pan
Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton
Thomas K. Hubbard
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Departing from conventional views of the pastoral genre as an Arcadian escape from urban sophistication, The Pipes of Pan highlights its genesis in the allusive and polemical literary cultures of Alexandria and Rome. Both cities placed great emphasis upon learned invocation and reformulation of poetic models. The pastoral metaphor provided Theocritus and Vergil with tools for representing the contests and confrontations of poets and genres, the exchange of ideas among poets, and poets' reflections on the efficacy of their works.
Pastoral poetry highlights the didactic relationship of older and younger shepherds, whether as rivals or as patron and successor. As such it is an ideal form for young poets' self-representation vis-à-vis their elders, whose work they simultaneously appropriated and transformed, even as the elder poets were represented in the new texts. This influence is reenacted in every generation: Theocritus vs. his Alexandrian forebears, Vergil vs. Theocritus, Calpurnius vs. Vergil, Nemesianus vs. Vergil and Calpurnius, Petrarch vs. Vergil, Boccaccio vs. Petrarch, Spenser vs. Vergil, along with Chaucer and Milton vs. Spenser.
The Pipes of Pan combines multiple strands of contemporary intertextual theory with reception aesthetics and Harold Bloom's theory of intersubjective conflict between generations of poets. It also provides one of the first systematic studies of intertextual and intersubjective dynamics within a whole genre.
This work will be of interest to classicists, students of literary theory, comparative literature, medieval and Renaissance literature, Italian humanism, and English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All texts are translated.
Thomas Hubbard is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.
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Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition
Toward a 21st Century Poetics
Rigoberto González
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition gathers Rigoberto González’s most important essays and book reviews, many of which consider the work of emerging poets whose identities and political positions are transforming what readers expect from contemporary poetry. A number of these voices represent intersectional communities, such as queer writers of color like Natalie Díaz, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and Eduardo C. Corral, and many writers, such as Carmen Giménez Smith and David Tomás Martínez, have deep connections to their Latino communities. Collectively, these writers are enriching American poetry to reflect a more diverse, panoramic, and socially conscious literary landscape. Also featured are essays on the poets’ literary ancestors—including Juan Felipe Herrera, Alurista, and Francisco X. Alarcón—and speeches that address the need to leverage poetry as agency.

This book fills a glaring gap in existing poetry scholarship by focusing exclusively on writers of color, and particularly on Latino poetry. González makes important observations about the relevance, urgency, and exquisite craft of the work coming from writers who represent marginalized communities. His insightful connections between the Latino, African American, Asian American, and Native American literatures persuasively position them as a collective movement critiquing, challenging, and reorienting the direction of American poetry with their nuanced and politicized verse. González’s inclusive vision covers a wide landscape of writers, opening literary doors for sexual and ethnic minorities.


 
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The Place of Law
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2003
It has long been standard practice in legal studies to identify the place of law within the social order. And yet, as The Place of Law suggests, the meaning of the concept of "the place of law" is not self-evident.
This book helps us see how the law defines territory and attempts to keep things in place; it shows how law can be, and is, used to create particular kinds of places -- differentiating, for example, individual property from public land. And it looks at place as a metaphor that organizes the way we see the world. This important new book urges us to ask about the usefulness of metaphors of place in the design of legal regulation.
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The Place of the Stage
License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England
Steven Mullaney
University of Michigan Press, 1995


In this richly textured multidisciplinary work, Steven Mullaney examines the cultural situation of popular drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Relying upon a dynamic model of cultural production, Mullaney defines an original and historically grounded perspective on the emergence of popular theater and illustrates the critical, revisionary role it played in the symbolic economy of Renaissance England.

Combining literary, historical, and broadly conceived cultural analysis, he investigates, among other topics, the period's exhaustive "rehearsal" of other cultures and its discomfiting apprehensions of the self; the politics of vanished forums for ideological production such as the wonder-cabinet and the leprosarium; the cultural poetics of royal entries; and the incontinent, uncanny language of treason. As Mullaney demonstrates, Shakespearean drama relied upon and embodied the marginal license of the popular stage and, as a result, provides us with powerful readings of the shifting bases of power, license, and theatricality in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

"A major study, not merely of selected Shakespearean plays but of the very conditions of the possibility of Renaissance drama." --Louis Montrose, University of California, San Diego

"Mullaney's rich and engaged reading of the place of Shakespeare's stage represents the texture of early modern life and its cultural productions in the vivid tradition of annales history and brilliantly exemplifies his theoretical call for a poetics of culture." -- Shakespeare Quarterly

"Mullaney marshals an impressive range of cultural representations which, taken together, will undoubtedly force a reconsideration of the semiotics of the Elizabethan stage." --Times Higher Education Supplement

". . . something of a dramatic feat in cultural studies: literary critic Mullaney calls in a cast ranging from Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu to Raymond Williams, Mary Douglas, and Michel Foucault." --Contemporary Sociology

Steven Mullaney is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

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Plants of the Petén Itza’ Maya
Plantas de los maya itza’ del Petén
Scott Atran, Ximena Lois and Edilberto Ucan Ek'
University of Michigan Press, 2004
The Itza’ Maya of the Petén in Guatemala preside over a unique rainforest biosphere in danger of disappearing. Equally at risk is their own botanical knowledge, from taxonomy to medicinal uses. This volume contains a history of the Petén Itza’ Maya; explanation of Itza’ taxonomy; tables and keys to plant usage; common names in English, Spanish, and several indigenous languages; and much more.
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Plautus' Poenulus
A Student Commentary
Erin K. Moodie
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Erin K. Moodie presents a rigorous yet accessible guide to Plautus’ satirical play Poenulus for use in the contemporary classroom. Likely written and staged in the years following the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, Poenulus tells the tale of a young Carthaginian,
the adopted son and heir of the man who purchased him as a slave when he was a child, who is in love with a female Carthaginian slave and prostitute. The comedy, especially Plautus’ portrayal of his main character, compels the reader to consider Rome’s relationship with Carthage, its former enemy; Plautus’ role in choosing and adapting plays for the Roman stage; and the constraints of the palliata genre.

The full Latin text, based primarily on that of Friedrich Leo, is included in this volume. Moodie’s detailed introduction, map, and comprehensive notes approach the text from multiple angles, enabling the advanced undergraduate or graduate student to grapple directly with the issues
Poenulus raises. Her commentary, clearly correlated with specific points in the text by the use of line numbers, provides assistance with early Latin grammar and syntax, Plautine meter, Roman history, and the influences on and performance contexts of Roman comedy. The commentary also introduces students to modern scholarship on the genre, including metatheatrical interpretations and performance criticism.

“A comprehensive, user-friendly tool for students of Plautus and ancient comedy . . . almost everything that a student could ask seems to have been anticipated by the author.”
—Radd Ehrman, Kent State University
 
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The Play of Fictions
Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2
A. M. Keith
University of Michigan Press, 1992
A lucid analysis of the characterization of Ovidian narrative
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Play Redux
The Form of Computer Games
David Myers
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Play Redux excels in tying together intellectual traditions that are rooted in literary studies, cognitive science, play studies and several other fields, thereby creating a logical whole. Through this, the book makes service to several academic communities by pointing out their points of contact. This is clearly an important contribution to a growing academic field, and will no doubt become important in many future discussions about digital games and play."
---Frans Mäyrä, University of Tampere, Finland

"David Myers has researched video games longer than anyone else. Play Redux shows him continually relevant, never afraid of courting controversy."
---Jesper Juul, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Play Redux is an ambitious description and critical analysis of the aesthetic pleasures of video game play, drawing on early twentieth-century formalist theory and models of literature. Employing a concept of biological naturalism grounded in cognitive theory, Myers argues for a clear delineation between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of texts. In the course of this study, Myers asks a number of interesting questions: What are the mechanics of human play as exhibited in computer games? Can these mechanisms be modeled? What is the evolutionary function of cognitive play, and is it, on the whole, a good thing? Intended as a provocative corrective to the currently ascendant, if not dominant, cultural and ethnographic approach to game studies and play, Play Redux will generate interest among scholars of communications, new media, and film.

David Myers is Reverend Aloysius B. Goodspeed Distinguished Professor at the School of Mass Communication, Loyola University New Orleans.

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A Player and a Gentleman
The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century U.S. American Actor
Edited by Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Hardworking actor, playwright, and stage manager Harry Watkins (1825–94) was also a prolific diarist. For fifteen years Watkins regularly recorded the plays he saw, the roles he performed, the books he read, and his impressions of current events. Performing across the U.S., Watkins collaborated with preeminent performers and producers, recording his successes and failures as well as his encounters with celebrities such as P. T. Barnum, Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Forrest, Anna Cora Mowatt, and Lucy Stone. His is the only known diary of substantial length and scope written by a U.S. actor before the Civil War—making Watkins, essentially, the antebellum equivalent of Samuel Pepys. Theater historians Amy E. Hughes and Naomi J. Stubbs have selected, edited, and annotated excerpts from the diary in an edition that offers a vivid glimpse of how ordinary people like Watkins lived, loved, struggled, and triumphed during one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. The selections in A Player and a Gentleman are drawn from a more expansive digital archive of the complete diary. The book, like its digital counterpart, will richly enhance our knowledge of antebellum theater culture and daily life in the U.S. during this period.

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The Player's Passion
Studies in the Science of Acting
Joseph R. Roach
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Explores the historical and cultural evolution of the theoretical language of the stage
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Playing Darts with a Rembrandt
Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures
Joseph L. Sax
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Some of the world's greatest treasures are hidden away and have not been seen publicly for decades, sometimes for centuries. Others have been destroyed. They are not stolen property. They are simply private property, and no matter their public significance, the public has no claims on them. A capricious owner of Leonardo da Vinci's notebook would be perfectly within his rights to throw it in the fireplace, as James Joyce's grandson did with letters from the author's daughter, or Warren Harding's widow did with her husband's Teapot Dome papers. This is a book about such rights and why they are wrong.
Some incidents are famous. A great artist's mural is demolished because the rich man who commissioned it is offended by its political implications. One of America's most famous collections is closed to virtually every notable person in the art world, whose requests for visits produce only a postcard from the owner saying "go to Blazes." Scholars who seek access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, monopolized and secreted by a handful of individuals for nearly forty years, are dismissed as "slime," "fleas," "gang-snatchers," and "manure," and told, "You will not see these things in your lifetime."
Playing Darts with a Rembrandt explores abuses of ownership of cultural treasures in a wide range of settings, including material of historic and scientific interest, as well as art and antiquities. It examines the claims made on behalf of the public for preservation, protection, and access to important artifacts, balancing those claims against proprietary and privacy interests, and discusses the proper role of institutions such as museums and libraries that act as repositories. Acknowledging the complexities that sometimes arise (such as the claims of history against the desire of a great figure's family to withhold private letters), Playing Darts with a Rembrandt proposes a new species of qualified ownership: to own an object of great public importance is to become a "fortunate, if provisional, trustee, having no right to deprive others who value the objects as much as they do themselves."
The fascinating stories that comprise the bulk of the book, ranging from dinosaur excavations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to the fate of presidential papers and the secrets held by the Library of Congress, will be of interest to a wide range of general readers. The extensive discussion of collectors, and their role, should commend the book to those in the art world, as well as to those professionally associated with museums, libraries, and archives. While written in a readable and untechnical way, it should also be of interest to those in the legal community who are interested in the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of our property system.
"Sax turns his attention from public rights to conserve land and water to protection of cultural treasures. As always, he sees both sides of the argument and comes to reasoned and wise conclusions, balancing private and public interests. His prose is lucid, and his examples are both instructive and entertaining. An invaluable book for anyone interested in the preservation of our cultural resources." --I. Michael Heyman, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution
Joseph L. Sax is Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley. He was formerly the counselor to the Secretary of the Interior and Professor of Law, the University of Michigan Law School.
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Playing Doctor
Television, Storytelling, and Medical Power
Joseph Turow
University of Michigan Press, 2010
Playing Doctor is an engaging and highly perceptive history of the medical TV series from its inception to the present day. Turow offers an inside look at the creation of iconic doctor shows as well as a detailed history of the programs, an analysis of changing public perceptions of doctors and medicine, and an insightful commentary on how medical dramas have both exploited and shaped these perceptions.
 
Originally published in 1989 and drawing on extensive interviews with creators, directors, and producers, Playing Doctor immediately became a classic in the field of communications studies. This expanded edition includes a new introduction placing the book in the contemporary context of the health care crisis, as well as new chapters covering the intervening twenty years of television programming. Turow draws on recent research and interviews with principals in contemporary television doctor shows such as ER, Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice, and Scrubs to illuminate the extraordinary ongoing cultural influence of medical shows. Playing Doctor situates the television vision of medicine as a limitless high-tech resource against the realities underlying the health care debate, both yesterday and today.
 
Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He was named a Distinguished Scholar by the by the National Communication Association and a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2010. He has authored eight books, edited five, and written more than 100 articles on mass media industries. He has also produced a DVD titled Prime Time Doctors: Why Should You Care? which has been distributed to all first-year medical students with the support of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation.
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The Playing Fields of Eton
Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy
Mika LaVaque-Manty
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"Beautifully written and brilliantly argued, The Playing Fields of Eton takes us on a three-century tour of modern mental and physical life. We visit gymnasiums and dueling fields, murderball courts and Olympic venues, and while immersed in thought-provoking stories of people wrestling with the twin pursuit of equality and excellence, we find ourselves learning what it might mean to be modern. With equal measures of erudition and gentle humor, Mika LaVaque-Manty convincingly refutes the view that egalitarian progress forecloses possibilities for human excellence."
---Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University

"A very insightful and clearly written philosophical inquiry into the nature of sport."
---Marion Smiley, Brandeis University

"A marvelously original analysis of the tensions---and interdependence---between equality and excellence in modern political life. From eighteenth-century dueling to contemporary doping in sports, LaVaque-Manty illuminates the bodily life of democracy at play, and challenges us to think in new ways about the connections between achievement and autonomy. The Playing Fields of Eton is an important book that pushes liberal and democratic theory in fruitful new directions."
---Sharon Krause, Brown University

Can equality and excellence coexist? If we assert that no person stands above the rest, can we encourage and acknowledge athletic, artistic, and intellectual achievements? Perhaps equality should merely mean equality of opportunity. But then how can society reconcile inherent differences between men and women, the strong and the weak, the able-bodied and the disabled?

In The Playing Fields of Eton, Mika LaVaque-Manty addresses questions that have troubled philosophers, reformers, and thoughtful citizens for more than two centuries. Drawing upon examples from the eighteenth-century debate over dueling as a gentleman's prerogative to recent controversies over athletes' use of performance-enhancing drugs, LaVaque-Manty shows that societies have repeatedly redefined equality and excellence. One constant remains, however: sports provide an arena for working out tensions between these two ideals.

Just as in sports where athletes are sorted by age, sex, and professional status, in modern democratic society excellence has meaning only in the context of comparisons among individuals who are, theoretically, equals. LaVaque-Manty's argument will engage philosophers, and his inviting prose and use of familiar illustrations will welcome nonphilosophers to join the conversation.

Mika LaVaque-Manty is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

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Playing God
The Bible on the Broadway Stage
Henry Bial
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Biblical texts have inspired more than 100 Broadway plays and musicals, ranging from early spectacles like Ben-Hur (1899) to more familiar works such as Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. What happens when a culture’s most sacred text enters its most commercial performance venue? Playing God focuses on eleven successful productions, as well as a few notable flops that highlight the difficulties in adapting the Old and New Testaments for the stage. The book is informed by both performance studies and theater history, combining analysis of play scripts with archival research into the actual circumstances of production and reception. Biblical plays, Henry Bial argues, balance religious and commercial considerations through a complex blend of spectacle, authenticity, sincerity, and irony. Though there is no magic formula for a successful adaptation, these four analytical lenses help explain why some biblical plays thrive while others have not.

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Playing in the Shadows
Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
William Bridges
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.
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Playing Underground
A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement
Stephen J. Bottoms
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"Scrupulously researched, critically acute, and written with care, Playing Underground will become a classic account of an era of hard-won free expression."
-William Coco

"At last---a book documenting the beginnings of Off-Off Broadway theater. Playing Underground is an insightful, illuminating, and honest appraisal of this important period in American theater."
-Rosalyn Drexler, author of Art Does (Not!) Exist and Occupational Hazard

"An epic movie of an epic movement, Playing Underground is a book the world has waited for without knowing it. How precisely it captures the evolution of our revolution! I am amazed by the book's scope and scale, and I bless its author especially for giving two greats, Paul Foster and H. M. Koutoukas, their proper, polar places, and for memorializing such unjustly forgotten masterpieces as Irene Fornes's Molly's Dream and Jeff Weiss's A Funny Walk Home. Stephen Bottoms's vivid evocation of the grand adventure of Off-Off Broadway has woken and broken my heart. It is difficult to believe that he was not there alongside me to breathe the caffeine-nicotine-alkaloid-steeped air."
-Robert Patrick, author of Kennedy's Children and Temple Slave


Few books address the legendary age of 1960s off-off Broadway theater. Fortunately, Stephen Bottoms fills that gap with Playing Underground---the first comprehensive history of the roots of off-off Broadway.

This is a theater whose legacy is still felt today: it was the launching pad for many leading contemporary theater artists, including Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, and others, and it was a pivotal influence on improv comedy and shows like Saturday Night Live.

Off-off Broadway groups such as the Living Theatre, La Mama, and Caffe Cino captured the spirit of nontraditional theater with their edgy, unscripted, boundary-crossing subjects. Yet, as Bottoms discovers, there is no one set of truths about off-off Broadway to uncover; the entire scene was always more a matter of competing perceptions than a singular, concrete reality.

No other author has managed to illuminate this shifting tableau as Bottoms does. Through interviews with dozens of the era's leading playwrights, performers, directors, and critics, he unearths a countercultural theater movement that was both influential and transforming-yet ephemeral and quintessentially of its moment.

Playing Underground will be a definitive work on the subject, offering a complete picture of an important but little-studied period in American theater.

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Plays by French and Francophone Women
A Critical Anthology
Christiane P. Makward and Judith G. Miller, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1994

Plays by French and Francophone Women presents eight recent plays by contemporary French and francophone women writers. The plays vary in style and form from the satirical to the poetic, from the comedic one-woman show to the potential multi-media esoteric production, and have been written by French, Qué becois, Acadian, and Caribbean francophone writers. The editors have provided informative headnotes to introduce each play, then faithful translations rendered with an ear toward production in English. A general introduction to the volume situates each work within the broader context of contemporary French-language theater by women. The volume also includes an annotated bibliography by Cynthia Running-Johnson of thirty-one additional plays by women in French.

Featured plays and playwrights are The Scent of Sulphur by S. Corinna Bille; When Fairies Thirst by Denise Boucher; Island Memories by Ina Césaire; Warmth: A Bloodsong by Chantal Chawaf; The Goddess Lar or Centuries of Women by Andrée Chedid; The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body by Hélène Cixous; The Table: Womenspeak by Michèle Foucher; and The Rabble by Antonine Maillet.

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Pleasure Grounds of Death
The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America
Joy M. Giguere
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Rural cemeteries—named for their expansive, picturesque landscape design rather than location—were established during the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. An instant cultural phenomenon, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the nation’s first such burial ground to combine the functions of the public park and the cemetery, becoming a popular place to picnic and go for strolls even for people who didn’t have graves to visit. It sparked a nationwide movement in which communities sought to establish their own cities of the dead. 

Pleasure Grounds of Death considers the history of the rural cemetery in the United States throughout the duration of the nineteenth century as not only a critical cultural institution embedded in the formation of community and national identities, but also as major sites of contest over matters of burial reform, taste and respectability, and public behavior; issues concerning race, class, and gender; conflicts over the burial of the Civil War dead and formation of postwar memory; and what constituted the most appropriate ways to structure the landscape of the dead in a modern and progressive society. As cultural landscapes that served the needs of the living as well as the dead, rural cemeteries offer a mirror for the transformations and conflicts taking place throughout the nineteenth century in American society.
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The Pleasures of Exile
George Lamming
University of Michigan Press, 1992
In The Pleasures of Exile, as in his other works, George Lamming embraces the intricate issues of colonization and decolonization with a canny combination of playfulness and seriousness, irony and commitment. “[It] is a reciprocal process,” Lamming observes, “to be a colonial is to be a man in a certain relation; and this relation is an example of exile.”
 
Through a series of interrelated essays, The Pleasures of Exile explores the cultural politics and relationships created in the crucible of colonization. Drawing on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, as well as his own fiction and poetry, Lamming deftly locates the reader in a specific intellectual and cultural domain while conjuring a rich and varied spectrum of physical, intellectual, psychological, and cultural responses to colonialism. “My subject,” he writes, “is the migration of the West Indian writer, as colonial and exile, from his native kingdom, once inhabited by Caliban, to the tempestuous island of Prospero’s and his language. This book is a report on one man’s way of seeing.”
 
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Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs
Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs examines the symbolic language of food, fertility, and infertility in a small, mountainous African kingdom to explore more general notions of gender, modernity, and cultural identity.
In the Cameroon grassfields, an area of high fertility, women hold a paradoxical fear of infertility. By combining symbolic, political-economic, and historical analyses, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg traces the way reproductive threat is invoked in struggles over gender and ethnic identities. Women's fears of reproductive disorders, she finds, are an important mode of expression for their worries about much larger issues, such as rural poverty, brought about or exacerbated by political and economic changes in this century.
A lively case study of an infertile queen who flees the palace sets the stage for discussions of the ethnographic and historical setting, the symbolism of fertility and infertility, and the development and interaction of cosmopolitan and ethno-gynecologies. The book concludes with an analysis of the links between women's role in human reproduction and the divine king's role in social reproduction, both occurring in the rapidly changing context of a multiethnic African nation.
Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs underscores the relevance of medical anthropology to other anthropological specializations, as well as to epidemiologists, population specialists, and development planners. It should reach a broad audience in medical anthropology, public health, and women's studies.
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Carleton College.
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Poems from the Greek Anthology
Expanded Edition
Translated, with a Foreword, by Kenneth Rexroth
University of Michigan Press, 1999
"The first translation from the Greek that I ever did was the apple orchard of Sappho in my fifteenth year. It left me so excited with accomplishment that I couldn't sleep well for nights. Since that time, on the freight trains of my youthful years of wandering, in starlit camps on desert and mountain ranges, in snow-covered cabins, on shipboard, in bed, in the bath, in love, in time of loneliness and despair, in jail, while employed as an attendant of the insane, and on many other jobs and in many other places, the Anthology and the lyric poets of Greece have been my constant companions." --Kenneth Rexroth from the Foreword
Friend to the Beats, organizer of the Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955, and iconoclastic poet extraordinare, Kenneth Rexroth here turns his imagination to a selection of verses from the Greek Anthology. In his lively style he successfully captures the spirit of the originals by such poets as Sappho, Anyte, Glykon, Antipatros, Leonidas, Askelpiades, and Ammianos. Students of the classics as well as poets and translators will welcome this collection for the insight and dexterity of its unconventional editor.
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), poet, critic, and translator, is also noted for his translations from the Chinese and Japanese. Widely prolific, he helped usher in the Beat movement in the 1950s and is widely considered to have invented the idea of San Francisco as a center of literary innovation. David Mulroy is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He is the translator of Early Greek Lyric Poetry and Horace's Odes and Epodes.
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Poems of the Five Mountains
An Introduction to the Literature of the Zen Monasteries
Marian Ury
University of Michigan Press, 1992
This second, revised edition of a pioneering volume, long out of print, presents translations of Japanese Zen poems on sorrow, old age, homesickness, the seasons, the ravages of time, solitude, the scenic beauty of the landscape of Japan, and monastic life. Composed by Japanese Zen monks who lived from the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the middle of the fifteenth century, these poems represent a portion of the best of the writing called in Japanese gozan bungaku, “literature of the five mountains.”
“Five mountains” or “five monasteries” refers to the system by which the Zen monasteries were hierarchically ordered and governed. For the monks in the monasteries, poetry functioned as a means not only of expressing religious convictions and personal feelings but also of communicating with others in a civilized and courteous fashion. Effacing barriers of time and space, the practice of Chinese poetry also made it possible for Japanese authors to feel at one with their Chinese counterparts and the great poets of antiquity. This was a time when Zen as an institution was being established and contact with the Chinese mainland becoming increasingly frequent—ten of the sixteen poets represented here visited China.
Marian Ury has provided a short but substantial introduction to the Chinese poetry of Japanese gozan monasteries, and her translations of the poetry are masterful. Poems of the Five Mountains is an important work for anyone interested in Japanese literature, Chinese literature, East Asian Religion, and Zen Buddhism.
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Poetics
Aristotle
University of Michigan Press, 1967
Aristotle's Poetics is a work of transcendent importance, both for the history of literary criticism and in its own right.

In his masterful translation and accompanying notes, Dr. Else makes a special effort to achieve maximum clarity, while remaining faithful to the original.  His constant aim is to provide -- for all readers -- a "way in" to Aristotle's processes of thinking about literature.

This important modern translation is made form the 1965 Oxford Classical Text edition of the Poetics by Rudolf Kassel and thus reflects the latest and most authoritative textual scholarship.  Not only the translation but the valuable fund of commentary will delight anyone -- literary critic, philosopher, classicist, or general reader -- who want to learn what Aristotle really said.
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Poetics of Dislocation
Meena Alexander
University of Michigan Press, 2009

Poetics of Dislocation sets the work of contemporary American poetry within the streams of migration that have made the nation what it is in the twenty-first century. There are few poets better qualified to muse on that context than Meena Alexander, who spent her life studying at prestigious institutions around the globe before settling in the United States to work on her acclaimed body of poetry.

Part of the University of Michigan Press's award-winning Poets on Poetry series, Poetics of Dislocation studies not only the personal creative process Alexander uses, but also the work of other prominent writers. Alexander discusses what it means to come to America as an adult to write poetry, and her place---and that of others---in the collection of cultures that makes up this country. She outlines the dilemmas that face modern immigrant poets, including how to make a place for oneself in a new society and how to write poetry in a time of violence worldwide.

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Poetics of Relation
Édouard Glissant
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne. When he returned to his native land in the mid-sixties, his writing began to focus on the idea of a "relational poetics," which laid the groundwork for the "créolité" movement, fueled by the understanding that Caribbean culture and identity are the positive products of a complex and multiple set of local historical circumstances. Some of the metaphors of local identity Glissant favored--the hinterland (or lack of it), the maroon (or runaway slave), the creole language--proved lasting and influential.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture to provide forms of memory capable of transcending "nonhistory," Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"--both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses--telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings--is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies.
This translation of Glissant's work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English.
"The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today. . . . He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies." --Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Édouard Glissant is Distinguished Professor of French at City University of New York, Graduate Center. Betsy Wing's recent translations include Lucie Aubrac's Outwitting the Gestapo (with Konrad Bieber), Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault and Hélêne Cixous's The Book of Promethea.
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A Poetics of Resistance
Women Writing in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States
Mary DeShazer
University of Michigan Press, 1994
The recent critical works that look at literature as a weapon of resistance have frequently neglected the genre of poetry, particularly the poetry of Third World women writers. A Poetics of Resistance is the first book-length examination of poetry written by woman of El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States and the ways it bears witness to political struggle and produces new kinds of knowledge.
 
Engaging the works of critics such as Chandra Mohanty, Barbara Harlow, Claribel Alegria, Albie Sachs, and Audre Lorde, among others, Mary DeShazer reconceptualizes traditional notions of resistance and literature and the relationship between them. She argues that women’s voices have been underrepresented in previous analyses of Third World resistance poetry, and that when examined collectively, their work reveals overtly gendered concerns that distinguish it from that of their male counterparts.
 
DeShazer defines resistance as an active quest for justice and a means of collective empowerment. She looks at the diasporic consciousness of exiled and dislocated women, examines the tensions between claims of identity and claims of difference, and explores the ways in which gender and struggle connect women across nationalities and historical imperatives. Her analysis of Salvadoran and South African women’s poetry reveal the ways in which poetic conventions can be seen as “political declarations of privilege,” casting a new light on women’s resistance poetry in the United States.
 
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Poetics of the First Punic War
Thomas Biggs
University of Michigan Press, 2020
Poetics of the First Punic War investigates the literary afterlives of Rome’s first conflict with Carthage. From its original role in the Middle Republic as the narrative proving ground for epic’s development out of verse historiography, to its striking cultural reuse during the Augustan and Flavian periods, the First Punic War (264–241 BCE) holds an underappreciated place in the history of Latin literature. Because of the serendipitous meeting of historical content and poetic form in the third century BCE, a textualized First Punic War went on to shape the Latin language and its literary genres, the practices and politics of remembering war, popular visions of Rome as a cultural capital, and numerous influential conceptions of Punic North Africa. Poetics of the First Punic War combines innovative theoretical approaches with advances in the philological analysis of Latin literature to reassess the various “texts” of the First Punic War, including those composed by Vergil, Propertius, Horace, and Silius Italicus. This book also contains sustained treatment of Naevius’ fragmentary Bellum Punicum (Punic War) and Livius Andronicus’ Odusia (Odyssey), some of the earliest works of Latin poetry. As the tradition’s primary Roman topic, the First Punic War is forever bound to these poems, which played a decisive role in transmitting an epic view of history.
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Poetry and Prophecy
The Anthropology of Inspiration
John Leavitt, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997
The "magic" of words is something many people refer to without qualification or, often, attention. In this pathbreaking collection, John Harold Leavitt has assembled five essays that explore the places where magic and words most clearly intersect: in prophetic or inspired acts of speech and writing.
Based on rich ethnographic work in Western and non-Western cultures, the essays represent distinct approaches to the topic, from one person's account of her interactions with a possessing spirit to another's world-spanning statement on prophetic poetics. Each contributor challenges easy assumptions that poetic texts are crafted works, products of skill rather than inspiration, while prophetic speech and writing are best understood as spontaneous performance rather than formal art.
As a whole the collection aims to reorient the anthropological study of possession and oracular experiences toward an awareness of the word, and to draw the attention of literary critics to "inspired" poetry. It will also appeal to readers in performance studies and comparative religion.
Contributors are Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, James Fernandez, Paul Friedrich, John Leavitt, Dennis Tedlock, Margaret Trawick.
John Harold Leavitt is Professor of Anthropology, University of Montreal.
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Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs
The Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius
Michael Roberts
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Prudentius' Peristephanon is a collection of martyr texts from a vital period for the growth of martyr cult in the West. Building on recent work on the cult of the saints and on the sacralization of the space and time, Roberts demonstrates how the Peristephanon relates to developments in late fourth century spirituality.
The author examines how Prudentius creates an idiom to express devotion to the martyrs, particularly in the structuring of narrative and the use of poetic language. Roberts concludes by demonstrating how Prudentius employs the model of martyr cult to articulate the status of Christian literature, the role of the bishop in the Christian community, and the symbolic status of Rome in the Christian West.
Michael Roberts is Robert Rich Professor of Latin, Wesleyan University.
Jacket art: Gold-glass vase, after A.D. 350. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.
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Poetry, History, Memory
Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times
Zhiyi Yang
University of Michigan Press, 2023

Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue  reexamination of Wang’s impact on cultural memory of WWII in China.

In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang’s lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public’s posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.


 
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Poetry in the Museums of Modernism
Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein
Catherine Paul
University of Michigan Press, 2002
This book explores the relationships between four modernist poets and the museums that helped shape their writing. During the early twentieth century, museums were trying to reach a wider audience and used displayed objects to teach that audience about art, culture, and ecology. Writers such as Yeats, Pound, Moore, and Stein borrowed strategies and techniques from museums in order to create literary modernism. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism places these writers' poetry and prose within the context of specific gallery spaces, curatorial practices, displayed objects, and exhibition objectives of the museums that inspired them, exposing the ways in which literary modernism is linked to museums.
Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies.
Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.
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Poetry Los Angeles
Reading the Essential Poems of the City
Laurence Goldstein
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Is there such a thing as Los Angeles poetry? How do we assess a poem about a city as elusive of identity as Los Angeles? What features do poems about this unique urban landscape of diverse peoples and terrains have in common? Poetry Los Angeles is the first book to gather and analyze poems about sites as different as Hollywood, Santa Monica and Venice beaches, the freeways, downtown, South Central and East L.A. Laurence Goldstein presents original commentary on six decades of poets who have contributed to the iconography and poetics of Los Angeles literature, including Elizabeth Alexander, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dorothy Barresi, Victoria Chang, Wanda Coleman, Dana Gioia, Joy Harjo, James Harms, Robert Hass, Eloise Klein Healy, Garrett Hongo, Suzanne Lummis, Paul Monette, Harryette Mullen, Carol Muske-Dukes, Frederick Seidel, Gary Soto, Timothy Steele, Diane Wakoski, Derek Walcott, and Charles Harper Webb. Forty poems are reproduced in their entirety.

One chapter is devoted to Charles Bukowski, the celebrity face of the city’s poetry. Other chapters discuss the ways that poets explore “Interiors” and “Exteriors” throughout the cityscape. Goldstein also provides ample connections to the novels, films, art, and politics of Southern California. In clear prose, Poetry Los Angeles examines the strategies by which poets make significant places meaningful and memorable to readers of every region of the U.S. and elsewhere.

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A Poetry Precise and Free
Selected Madrigals of Guarini
Nicholas R. Jones
University of Michigan Press, 2018
A Poetry Precise and Free collects 150 lyric poems by the Renaissance Italian poet Giovanni Battista Guarini in new translations, accompanied by the Italian originals and commentary that will enlighten and engage both scholars and general readers.  Guarini’s madrigals provide insight into northern Italian court culture of the late Renaissance, when poetry and music were enjoyed as companion arts. Hundreds of composers of Guarini’s day set his lyric poems to music. Primarily known today in their vocal settings, most famously those of Claudio Monteverdi, the poems merit appreciation in their own right.

This volume is organized into ten sections, grouping the madrigals around themes such as the anguish of passion, the asymmetry of desire, the incursions of jealousy, and the possibility of mutual bliss. Nicholas R. Jones renders Guarini’s poetry into accessible contemporary English verse that nevertheless stays true to the substance and form of the original texts, reflecting their roots in the Petrarchan poetic tradition and displaying the emotion and musicality that made these lyrics so popular from the start. A substantive introduction provides cultural context for the madrigals and their musical settings; brief commentaries follow each translation to illuminate aspects of poetic and rhetorical craft. An extensive appendix lists the madrigal compositions that set these lyrics for vocal performance.

The book fills a major gap in the scholarship on Guarini’s literary legacy. It will appeal to scholars of literature, Renaissance studies, and musicology, early-music performers, and general readers interested in poetry and classical music.
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Poetry's Afterlife
Verse in the Digital Age
Kevin Stein
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"The great pleasure of this book is the writing itself. Not only is it free of academic and ‘lit-crit' jargon, it is lively prose, often deliciously witty or humorous, and utterly contemporary. Poetry's Afterlife has terrific classroom potential, from elementary school teachers seeking to inspire creativity in their students, to graduate students in MFA programs, to working poets who struggle with the aesthetic dilemmas Stein elucidates, and to teachers of poetry on any level."
--- Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Arizona State University

"Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century."
---David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University

At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates.

Kevin Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism.

digitalculturebooksis an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

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A Poet's Craft
A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry
Annie Finch
University of Michigan Press, 2012
A Poet's Craft transcends the limitations of current books, combining the best of three types of poetry-writing guides: textbooks for academic use, general guides to writing poetry, and guides to writing in form. Like textbooks, it includes poetry-writing exercises and discussion of classic and contemporary poems as examples, and is logically organized to provide a complete overview of the elements of poetry writing, from diction to trope to free verse. Like general poetry guides, it has a tone lively and mature enough for the nonundergraduate, and includes sections on journaling and inspiration, revision, publishing, and even how to assemble a poetry book. Like form guides, A Poet's Craft provides an introduction to meter and to writing formal poetry. Finch's book goes further than any poetry-writing guide now available to give readers a thorough, eclectic, and exciting introduction to every aspect of the art of poetry.
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A Poet's Ear
A Handbook of Meter and Form
Annie Finch
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Praise for Annie Finch

“A self-proclaimed ‘postmodern poetess,’ Annie Finch lives up to the moniker, presenting a simultaneously thorough and mercurial array of musings on poetics focusing on form and meter, remaining three beats ahead of the rank-and-file herd of traditional prosodists.”
Art New England

For beginning or advanced students of poetry focused on the art of structuring a poem, A Poet’s Ear serves as a handbook to writing in numerous fixed forms. Here, Annie Finch’s remarkably in-depth introduction to poetic form in English opens a new and exciting world to contemporary poets. From the basic meters and traditional European forms of the ballad and the sonnet to poetic forms brought to English from worldwide cultures and postmodern forms and techniques, A Poet’s Ear serves as both a survey and a guide to the exploration of poetic form. More diverse and comprehensive than any other form handbook, A Poet’s Ear will be essential to the serious student of poetry.

 
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Poets Teaching Poets
Self and the World
Gregory Orr and Ellen Bryant Voigt, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
The Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers has emerged as one of the most well-respected writing programs in the country, producing a generation of first-rate poets who are also deeply dedicated teachers of their art. Poets Teaching Poets collects essays by current and former lecturers at Warren Wilson, including acclaimed poets Joan Aleshire, Marianne Boruch, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Glück, Allen Grossman, Robert Haas, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr, Michael Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Alan Williamson, Eleanor Wilner, and Renate Wood.
This passionate and provocative anthology presents an extended, insightful dialogue on an astonishing range of topics: writers from Homer, Dickinson, and Akhmatova to Bishop, O'Hara, Milosz, and Plath; meditations on the nature of the image and the discovery of the self in Greek verse; a passionate defense of lyric poetry; and other engaging themes. Whatever their subject, these essays are, at the core, passionate and thoughtful meditations on the place of poetry in contemporary culture.
Poets Teaching Poets will be an invaluable tool for teachers and students of poetry and poetics at every level. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between craft and the larger issues of art, and in the continuing and exciting relevance of poetry today.
Gregory Orr is author of six books of poetry, most recently City of Salt, and of two books of criticism, Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is Professor of English, University of Virginia.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is founder and former director of the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and teaches in its relocated incarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has published four volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Poet's Work, Poet's Play
Essays on the Practice and the Art
Edited by Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett
University of Michigan Press, 2008

A follow-up to the highly praised Poets Teaching Poets, Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett's Poet's Work, Poet's Play gathers together essays by some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry: Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eleanor Wilner, Dean Young, and the late Larry Levis and Agha Shahid Ali.

Lively, accessible, and erudite, the pieces range from discussions on syntax and the syllable to an exploration of the complexities of canon formation under the shadow of imperialism, race, and history. Exploring the work of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Charles Olsen, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Harryette Mullen, and many others, Poet's Work, Poet's Play---like its predecessor volume---will be an invaluable tool for teachers, students, and poets at every level.

"Much more than a set of essays on poetic craft or aesthetic understandings, this collection takes on two of the most prevalent anxieties about writing poetry in our time: the place of subjectivity in poetry, and how to make a significant shape in language while both affirming and interrogating the poetic I's authority. This is a book for anyone who wants to write better poems, who wants to read with greater passion, and who believes that poetry is an independent category of human consciousness that can be as capaciousness as the world, and as nuanced."
---Tom Sleigh, author of Space Walk and Far Side of the Earth

"Gathering together essays by unquestionably important poets, Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value in the way it demonstrates how to discover in poetry resources of language and structure often overlooked in first, and ensuing, readings of complex texts."
---Laurence Goldstein, Professor of English, University of Michigan, and Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review

"A valuable document illuminating critical aspects of the contemporary American poetry scene."
---John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Sally's Hair: Poems

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Points of Contact
Disability, Art, and Culture
Susan Crutchfield and Marcy Epstein, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Points of Contact brings together contributions by leading writers, artists, scholars, and critics to provide a remarkably broad and consistently engaging look at the intersection of disability and the arts. The contributions include essays and memoirs by a wide range of disabled and nondisabled writers, including Bell Gale Chevigny, Sandra Gilbert, Joseph Grigely, Georgina Kleege, Victoria Ann Lewis, Carol Poore, Tobin Siebers, and Rosemarie Garland Thomson among others; poetry by Brooke Horvath, Joan Seliger Sidney, William Stafford, and others; fiction by Stephen Dixon, Michael Downs, Georgina Kleege, Dallas Wiebe, and others.
The collection covers a broad range of subjects and concerns that lie at the intersection of disability and the arts, including fetal alcohol syndrome, education, and identity; representations of disability in the visual arts and the complicated position of the disabled spectator; the impact of cancer on the patient and the caregiver; the similarities between beauty pageants and freak shows; Alzheimer's disease; prosthetic devices; the mechanized disabled body; disability and performance; and profiles of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, Christopher Reeve, Franklin Roosevelt, and sado-masochistic performance artist Bob Flanagan.
Points of Contact: Disability, Art, and Culture was originally published as a special double issue of the well regarded literary magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review. Now available in a single, convenient paperback volume, its broad range of perspectives on disability and its entertaining and engaging selections will appeal to general readers, scholars, and students alike.
Susan Crutchfield is lecturer in English, University of Michigan. Marcy Epstein teaches literature at The Roeper School and women's studies at Henry Ford Community College.
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Poker
The Parody of Capitalism
Ole Bjerg
University of Michigan Press, 2011

Poker is an extraordinary worldwide phenomenon with major social, cultural, and political implications, and Poker: The Parody of Capitalism investigates the game of poker as a cultural expression of significance not unlike art, literature, film, or music. Tracing the history of poker and comparing the evolution of the game to the development of capitalism, Ole Bjerg complicates prevalent notions of “casino capitalism” and correspondingly facile and simplistic comparisons of late capitalism and poker. By employing Slavoj Žižek’s threefold distinction between imaginary-symbolic-real as a philosophical framework to analyze poker and to understand the basic strategies of the game, Bjerg explores the structural characteristics of poker in relation to other games, making a clear distinction between poker and other gambling games of pure chance such as roulette and craps. With its combination of social theory and empirical research, Poker offers an engaging exploration of a cultural trend.

"Poker is a theoretically sophisticated, highly original and innovative treatment of a contemporary social phenomenon, and contributes greatly to our understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism."
—Charles Livingstone, Monash University Australia

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Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families
Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias
University of Michigan Press, 2006

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face the same family issues as their heterosexual counterparts, but that is only the beginning of their struggle. The LGBT community also encounters legal barriers to government recognition of their same-sex relationships and relationships to their own children. Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families addresses partner recognition, parenting, issues affecting children of LGBT parents, health care, discrimination, senior care and elder rights, and equal access to social services.

Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias provide up-to-date, accurate analysis of the major policies affecting LGBT people, their same-sex partners, and their children. This valuable resource offers literature reviews of demographic research as well as original research based on the U.S. Census same-sex couple sample. It also provides a look at the 30-year history of right-wing anti-gay activism and the intra-community intellectual debates over the fight for marriage.

"The sheer diversity of gay people and opinion shines through Cahill and Tobias's fact-packed depiction of same-sex couples and their kids, their needs and day-to-day challenges, and the movement for fairness and the freedom to marry. The disparate personal stories and struggles in this informative book underscore the importance of ending discrimination in marriage and ensuring that no family is left behind."

—Evan Wolfson, Founder and Executive Director of the Freedom to Marry Project

"A concise, comprehensive guide to gay-family issues that combines an impassioned progressive sensibility with a firm respect for facts."
—Jonathan Rauch, senior writer and columnist for National Journal,Atlantic Monthly correspondent, and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America

"Cahill and Tobias offer readers a thorough and immensely readable guide to the legal problems faced by LGBT families."
—Ellen Andersen, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis

"For an account of policy issues that frame lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) family lives here in the United States, one need look no further. Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias supply accurate and up-to-date information about the legal and policy contexts of LGBT lives across the country. This book is sure to be a valuable resource for students and scholars, as well as for others seeking to understand and challenge discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity."

—Charlotte J. Patterson, University of Virginia

Sean Cahill is Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.

Sarah Tobias is a feminist theorist and LGBT activist who earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. She has taught Political Theory at colleges in New York and New Jersey, and currently works as Senior Policy Analyst in the Democracy program at Demos, a New York City–based think tank.

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front cover of Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families
Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families
Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias
University of Michigan Press

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face the same family issues as their heterosexual counterparts, but that is only the beginning of their struggle. The LGBT community also encounters legal barriers to government recognition of their same-sex relationships and relationships to their own children. Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families addresses partner recognition, parenting, issues affecting children of LGBT parents, health care, discrimination, senior care and elder rights, and equal access to social services.

Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias provide up-to-date, accurate analysis of the major policies affecting LGBT people, their same-sex partners, and their children. This valuable resource offers literature reviews of demographic research as well as original research based on the U.S. Census same-sex couple sample. It also provides a look at the 30-year history of right-wing anti-gay activism and the intra-community intellectual debates over the fight for marriage.

"The sheer diversity of gay people and opinion shines through Cahill and Tobias's fact-packed depiction of same-sex couples and their kids, their needs and day-to-day challenges, and the movement for fairness and the freedom to marry. The disparate personal stories and struggles in this informative book underscore the importance of ending discrimination in marriage and ensuring that no family is left behind."

—Evan Wolfson, Founder and Executive Director of the Freedom to Marry Project

"A concise, comprehensive guide to gay-family issues that combines an impassioned progressive sensibility with a firm respect for facts."
—Jonathan Rauch, senior writer and columnist for National Journal,Atlantic Monthly correspondent, and author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America

"Cahill and Tobias offer readers a thorough and immensely readable guide to the legal problems faced by LGBT families."
—Ellen Andersen, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis

"For an account of policy issues that frame lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) family lives here in the United States, one need look no further. Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias supply accurate and up-to-date information about the legal and policy contexts of LGBT lives across the country. This book is sure to be a valuable resource for students and scholars, as well as for others seeking to understand and challenge discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity."

—Charlotte J. Patterson, University of Virginia

Sean Cahill is Director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.

Sarah Tobias is a feminist theorist and LGBT activist who earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. She has taught Political Theory at colleges in New York and New Jersey, and currently works as Senior Policy Analyst in the Democracy program at Demos, a New York City–based think tank.

[more]

front cover of Political and Sociological Theory and Its Applications
Political and Sociological Theory and Its Applications
George E.G. Catlin
University of Michigan Press, 1964
Today, George E. Gordon Catlin is an outstanding figure in international politics, working at close range with the most important problems of our time. He is one of the architects of the modern British Labour Party, a champion of Indian independence, a leader in the field of peace research, a staunch supporter of closer Anglo-American relations, and a founder of contemporary quantitative political science. His perceptive, often controversial writings are enhanced not only by years of practical political experience but by a refreshing wit and candor. In this hard-headed book Catlin charts a course that will enable nations to wage peace as vigorously as they formerly waged war. He examines the basic structure of modern politics and presents a systematic, scientific analysis of the causes of war. Catlin questions whether or not the national state has become obsolete and traces its development from the 17th century to the present. He emphasizes the limitations of the contemporary national state as an effective tool for solving political and social problems in the Nuclear Age. In simple, straightforward language, Catlin also discusses such subjects as coexistence, the Western Alliance, modern democratic education, the relations of church and state, and the possibility of creating a true world authority, competent to preserve peace. He presents an objective and almost Hobbesian view of the problems confronting modern man, and points the way toward future world peace and social justice.
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front cover of The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos
The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos
Rex Stem
University of Michigan Press, 2012

The Roman writer Cornelius Nepos was a friend of Cicero and Catullus and other first-century BCE authors, and portions of his encyclopedic work On Famous Men are the earliest surviving biographies written in Latin. In The Political Biographies of Cornelius Nepos, Rex Stem presents Nepos as a valuable witness to the late Republican era, whose biographies share the exemplary republican political perspective of his contemporaries Cicero and Livy. Stem argues that Nepos created the genre of grouped political biographies in order to characterize renowned Mediterranean figures as role models for Roman leaders, and he shows how Nepos invested his biographies with moral and political arguments against tyranny.

This book, the first to regard Nepos as a serious thinker in his own right, also functions as a general introduction to Nepos, placing him in his cultural context. Stem examines Nepos' contributions to the growth of biography, and he defends Nepos from his critics at the same time that he lays out the political significance and literary innovation of Nepos' writings. Accessible to advanced undergraduates, this volume is addressed to a general audience of classicists and ancient historians, as well as those broadly interested in biography, historiography, and political thought.

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front cover of Political Complexity
Political Complexity
Nonlinear Models of Politics
Diana Richards, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2000
This collection illustrates how nonlinear methods can provide new insight into existing political questions. Politics is often characterized by unexpected consequences, sensitivity to small changes, non-equilibrium dynamics, the emergence of patterns, and sudden changes in outcomes. These are all attributes of nonlinear processes. Bringing together a variety of recent nonlinear modeling approaches, Political Complexity explores what happens when political actors operate in a dynamic and complex social environment.
The contributions to this collection are organized in terms of three branches within non-linear theory: spatial nonlinearity, temporal nonlinearity, and functional nonlinearity. The chapters advance beyond analogy towards developing rigorous nonlinear models capable of empirical verification.
Contributions to this volume cover the areas of landscape theory, computational modeling, time series analysis, cross-sectional analysis, dynamic game theory, duration models, neural networks, and hidden Markov models. They address such questions as: Is international cooperation necessary for effective economic sanctions? Is it possible to predict alliance configurations in the international system? Is a bureaucratic agency harder to remove as time goes on? Is it possible to predict which international crises will result in war and which will avoid conflict? Is decentralization in a federal system always beneficial?
The contributors are David Bearce, Scott Bennett, Chris Brooks, Daniel Carpenter, Melvin Hinich, Ken Kollman, Susanne Lohmann, Walter Mebane, John Miller, Robert E. Molyneaux, Scott Page, Philip Schrodt, and Langche Zeng.
This book will be of interest to a broad group of political scientists, ranging from those who employ nonlinear methods to those curious to see what it is about. Scholars in other social science disciplines will find the new methodologies insightful for their own substantive work.
Diana Richards is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota.
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front cover of The Political Consequences of Motherhood
The Political Consequences of Motherhood
Jill S. Greenlee
University of Michigan Press, 2015

From civically and politically engaged women linking their identity as “mothers” to their fight for prohibition, public sanitation, and protective labor laws to the general call to arms of “mama grizzlies” issued by Sarah Palin in 2010, American political activists and candidates have used motherhood to rally women’s interest, support, and participation throughout American history. Politicized motherhood persists, and motherhood continues to inspire women’s participation and direct their concerns.

In The Political Consequences of Motherhood, Jill S. Greenlee investigates the complex relationship between motherhood and women’s political attitudes. Combining a historical overview of the ways motherhood has been used for political purposes with recent political opinion surveys and individual-level analysis, she explains how and when motherhood shapes women’s thoughts and preferences. Greenlee argues that two mechanisms account for the durability of motherhood politics. First, women experience attitudinal shifts when they become mothers. Second, “mother” is a broad-based identity, widely shared and ideologically unconstrained, that lends itself to appeals across the political spectrum to build support for candidates and policy issues.

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front cover of The Political Economy of Dual Transformations
The Political Economy of Dual Transformations
Market Reform and Democratization in Hungary
David L. Bartlett
University of Michigan Press, 1997
In the early 1990s, scholars voiced skepticism about the capacity of Eastern Europe's new democracies to manage simultaneous political and economic reform. They argued that the surge of popular participation following democratization would thwart efforts by successor governments to enact market reforms that imposed high costs on major elements of post-Communist society. David Bartlett challenges the conventional wisdom regarding the hazards of "dual transformations": far from hindering marketization, democratization facilitated it. Bartlett argues that the transition to democracy in East Central Europe lowered the political barriers to market reforms by weakening the ability of actors most vulnerable to marketization to manipulate the existing institutional structure to stop or slow down the process.
Although the analysis focuses on Hungary, whose long history of market reforms makes it an ideal vehicle for assessing the impact of institutional change on reform policy, the author shows how his findings call into question the use of "shock therapy" and arguments, based on the experience in East Asia, that economic development and democratization are incompatible.
This book will appeal to economists, political scientists, and others interested in transition problems in formerly communist countries, democratic transitions, and the politics of stabilization and adjustment.
David L. Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University.
[more]

front cover of The Political Economy of Expertise
The Political Economy of Expertise
Information and Efficiency in American National Politics
Kevin M. Esterling
University of Michigan Press, 2004
The Political Economy of Expertise is a carefully argued examination of how legislatures use expert research and testimony. Kevin Esterling demonstrates that interest groups can actually help the legislative process by encouraging Congress to assess research and implement well-informed policies.

More than mere touts for the interests of Washington insiders, these groups encourage Congress to enact policies that are likely to succeed while avoiding those that have too great of a risk of failure. The surprising result is greater legislative efficiency. The Political Economy of Expertise illustrates that this system actually favors effective and informed decision making, thereby increasing the likelihood that new policies will benefit the American public.
Kevin M. Esterling is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside.
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front cover of The Political Economy of Regional Peacemaking
The Political Economy of Regional Peacemaking
Edited by Steven E. Lobell and Norrin M. Ripsman
University of Michigan Press, 2016
In The Political Economy of Regional Peacemaking, scholars examine the efficacy of trade agreements, economic sanctions, and other strategies of economic statecraft for the promotion of peace both between rival states and across conflict-ridden regions more generally. In the introduction, Steven E. Lobell and Norrin M. Ripsman pose five central questions: (1) What types of economic statecraft, including incentives and sanctions, can interested parties employ? (2) Who are the appropriate targets in the rival states—state leaders, economic and social elites, or society as whole? (3) When should specific economic instruments be used to promote peace—prior to negotiations, during negotiations, after signature of the treaty, or during implementation of the treaty? (4) What are the limits and risks of economic statecraft and economic interdependence? (5) How can economic statecraft be used to move from a bilateral peace agreement to regional peace?

The chapters that follow are grouped in three sections, corresponding to the three stages of peacemaking: reduction or management of regional conflict; peacemaking or progress toward a peace treaty; and maintenance of bilateral peace and the regionalization of the peace settlement. In each chapter, the contributors consider the five key questions from a variety of methodological, historical, cultural, and empirical perspectives, drawing data from the Pacific, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The conclusion expands on several themes found in the chapters and proposes an agenda for future research.

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front cover of Political Elites in Modern Societies
Political Elites in Modern Societies
Empirical Research and Democratic Theory
Samuel J. Eldersveld
University of Michigan Press, 1989
Reflections on the nature of political leadership
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front cover of The Political Influence of Business in the European Union
The Political Influence of Business in the European Union
Andreas Dür, David Marshall, and Patrick Bernhagen
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Many citizens, politicians, and political activists voice concern about the political influence of business in the European Union. But do business interests really pull the strings in Brussels? Contrary to expectations, this book shows that business interests are no more influential than other interests in shaping contemporary EU policies. Andreas Dür, David Marshall, and Patrick Bernhagen present an original argument that stresses the role of public actors in facilitating or impeding interest groups’ lobbying success. Novel data on a large number of legislative proposals on the EU’s agenda and three case studies present strong support for this argument. The Political Influence of Business in the European Union offers new insights into how lobbying success depends on the demand and supply of information, as well as new ideas on how to measure lobbying success. The book advances a fresh perspective on the question of business power and shows why business interests often lose in the policy struggle.
[more]

front cover of Political Judgment
Political Judgment
Structure and Process
Milton Lodge and Kathleen M. McGraw, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1995
An information processing approach to how citizens make important political decisions
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front cover of Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan
Political Leadership in Contemporary Japan
Terry Edward MacDougall, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1982
Those who do not read Japanese seldom have access to analytic studies of the fascinating and surprisingly diverse world of contemporary Japanese political leadership. This volume constitutes a step toward bringing to the English reader some sense of the norms, beliefs, styles, and modes of exercising power of Japanese political leaders and the organizational and political contexts which are changing leadership role expectations. The second volume in this series concentrates more explicitly on leadership recruitment, although the subject is also addressed here.
All of the essays in this volume highlight specific politicians, while attempting to develop analytic categories to understand the broader significance of these types of leaders. Included are the following: a Liberal Democratic Party prime minister and faction leader (Fukuda Takeo) who rose "almost effortlessly" to the pinnacle of power on the basis of an elitist educational and bureaucratic career background and another (Tanaka Kakuei) who took advantage of the chaotic wartime and immediate postwar period to overcome the limitations of his commoner background by developing an entrepreneurial style that makes him even today "the most powerful in Japan"; a younger conservative leader (Kono Yohei) who, with certain others of his generation, found life within the restrictive but predictable career paths of ruling Liberal Democrats less attractive than the risky option of forming his own New Liberal Club; an unconventional Socialist chairman (Asukata Ichio) who bucks the pull toward coalition making among the opposition parties in favor of his belief that this major but perpetual opposition party must first reconstruct itself and structure a new popular consensus that can legitimize a coalitional alternative to the Liberal Democrats; parliamentary leaders (like lower-house speaker Maeo Shigesaburo, directors of the House Management Committee, and heads of the Diet policy committees of the various parties) who are projected into increasingly influential roles by changing electoral trends and popular expectations; an innovative and dynamic mayor (Suzuki Heizaburo) who, taking advantage of the considerable authority afforded by Japan's "presidential" system of local chief executives, pursues his own priorities, mobilizing the requisite support despite the lack of national guidance and the oppositions of former backers; and the "power behind the throne" (Matsunaga Yasuzaemon and Komori Takeshi) whose visions move prime ministers and governors as well as their own followers in powerful public and private bureaucracies. [intro]
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front cover of Political Parties and the Winning of Office
Political Parties and the Winning of Office
Joseph A. Schlesinger
University of Michigan Press, 1994
A theory of political parties as office-seeking organizations
[more]

front cover of Political Persuasion and Attitude Change
Political Persuasion and Attitude Change
Diana C. Mutz, Richard A. Brody, and Paul M. Sniderman, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Political Persuasion and Attitude Change defines and introduces a new field of research, one that investigates the alteration of people's attitudes: when people can be moved, and when they cannot.
Each chapter synopsizes a major area of political persuasion and provides an update on the latest findings as well as overviews of past research in each area. Whole sections of the book center on the three major agents involved in the political persuasion process: the mass media, political elites, and individual citizens themselves.
Political Persuasion and Attitude Change boldly contradicts the received wisdom on the extent of mass media's influence on political attitudes and argues that the media's effects are indeed massive, rather than limited. It explores the impact of political elites on the persuasion process, and focuses on individual control over the persuasion process.
This volume is unique in that chapters address theoretical as well as methodological issues, simultaneously combining reviews of literature with the latest research findings. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in the study of political persuasion in contemporary politics across the disciplines of political science, psychology, sociology, and communications.
Part I. Mass Media and Political Persuasion. Contributors are Steven Ansolabehere and Shanto Iyengar; Joanne M. Miller and Jon A. Krosnick; and John Zaller.
Part II. Persuasion by Political Elites. Contributors are James H. Kuklinski and Norman L. Hurley; Kathleen M. McGraw and Clark Hubbard; Lee Sigelman and Alan Rosenblatt.
Part III. Individual Control of the Political Persuasion Process. Contributors are Steven H. Chaffee and Rajiv Rimal; Dennis Chong; Gregory Andrade Diamond and Michael D. Cobb; Jeffrey Mondak, Diana C. Mutz, and Robert Huckfeldt.
Diana C. Mutz is Associate Professor of Political Science and Mass Communications, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Paul M. Sniderman is Professor of Political Science, Stanford University. Richard A. Brody is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Communications, Stanford University.
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front cover of Political Psychology in International Relations
Political Psychology in International Relations
Rose McDermott
University of Michigan Press, 2004
This outstanding book is the first to decisively define the relationship between political psychology and international relations. Written in a style accessible to undergraduates as well as specialists, McDermott's book makes an eloquent case for the importance of psychology to our understanding of global politics.

In the wake of September 11, the American public has been besieged with claims that politics is driven by personality. Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Kim Chong-Il, Ayatollah Khameinei-America's political rogues' gallery is populated by individuals whose need for recognition supposedly drives their actions on the world stage. How does personality actually drive politics? And how is personality, in turn, formed by political environment? Political Psychology in International Relations provides students and scholars with the analytical tools they need to answer these pressing questions, and to assess their implications for policy in a real and sometimes dangerous world.

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front cover of Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe
Political Survival of Small Parties in Europe
Jae-Jae Spoon
University of Michigan Press, 2015

It is often thought that small party survival or failure is a result of institutional constraints, the behavior of large parties, and the choices of individual politicians. Jae-Jae Spoon, in contrast, argues that the decisions made by small parties themselves determine their ability to balance the dual goals of remaining true to their ideals while maximizing their vote and seat shares, thereby enabling them to survive even in adverse electoral systems.

Spoon employs a mixed-methods approach in order to explore the policy, electoral, and communication strategies of West European Green Parties from 1980 to the present. She combines cross-national data on these parties with in-depth comparative case studies of two New Politics parties, the French and British Green Parties, that have survived in similar national-level plurality electoral systems. Both of these parties have developed as organizations which run candidates in elections at the local, national, and European levels in their respective countries. The parties’ survival, Spoon asserts, results from their ability to balance their competing electoral, policy, and communication goals.

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front cover of Politics and Foreign Direct Investment
Politics and Foreign Direct Investment
Nathan M. Jensen, Glen Biglaiser, Quan Li, Edmund Malesky, Pablo M. Pinto, Santiago M. Pinto, and Joseph L. Staats
University of Michigan Press, 2012
For decades, free trade was advocated as the vehicle for peace, prosperity, and democracy in an increasingly globalized market. More recently, the proliferation of foreign direct investment has raised questions about its impact upon local economies and politics. Here, seven scholars bring together their wide-ranging expertise to investigate the factors that determine the attractiveness of a locale to investors and the extent of their political power. Multinational corporations prefer to invest where legal and political institutions support the rule of law, protections for property rights, and democratic processes. Corporate influence on local institutions, in turn, depends upon the relative power of other players and the types of policies at issue.
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front cover of Politics and the News Media in Japan
Politics and the News Media in Japan
Ofer Feldman
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Written by a longtime resident of Japan, Politics and the News Media in Japan describes and analyzes political communication in Japan with a particular focus on the relationship between the news media and politicians. In this pioneering work, Ofer Feldman shows how the close connection between reporters and members of the Japanese National Diet influences the coverage of politics in the media and how the news media and reporters function as information sources for Diet members. The author discusses the importance of the national dailies in Japanese political life; reporters' work patterns and their formal and informal interaction with political news sources; the objectives reporters and politicians have vis-à-vis one another; and how Japanese cultural factors affect the role reporters play in politics. This volume fills a serious gap in the literature on the Japanese media and its role in the political system by focusing on the structure and process of news-gathering by Japanese reporters. It is the first work based on a survey of rank-and-file members of the Japanese National Diet; newsmen and editors of national and local newspapers, news agencies, and broadcast media; political party officials; and secretaries to Diet members. It will appeal especially to those interested in comparative politics, comparative mass communication, and Japanese studies.
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front cover of Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism
Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism
Peter Adams
University of Michigan Press, 2014

In 1862, in the only instance of a Jewish expulsion in America, General Ulysses S. Grant banished Jewish citizens from the region under his military command. Although the order was quickly revoked by President Lincoln, it represented growing anti-Semitism in America. Convinced that assimilation was their best defense, Jews sought to Americanize by shedding distinctive dress, occupations, and religious rituals.

American Jews recognized the benefit and urgency of bridging the divide between Reform and Orthodox Judaism to create a stronger alliance to face the challenges ahead. With Grant’s 1868 presidential campaign, they also realized they could no longer remain aloof from partisan politics. As they became a growing influence in American politics, both political parties courted the new Jewish vote.

Once in office, Grant took notice of the persecution of Jews in Romania and Russia, and he appointed more Jews to office than any president before him. Indeed, Simon Wolf, a Washington lawyer who became one of Grant’s closest advisers, was part of a new generation of Jewish leaders to emerge in the post–Civil War era—thoroughly Americanized, politically mature, and committed to the modernized Judaism of the Reform movement.

In Politics, Faith, and the Making of American Judaism, Peter Adams recounts the history of the American Jewish Community’s assimilation efforts, organization, and political mobilization in the late 19th century, as political and cultural imperatives crafted a new, American brand of Judaism.

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front cover of Politics in the Pews
Politics in the Pews
The Political Mobilization of Black Churches
Eric L. McDaniel
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"Politics in the Pews probes the internal dynamics of political decision making within the Black church."
---William E. Nelson, Jr., Research Professor, Department of African American and African Studies, Ohio State University

As Eric McDaniel demonstrates in his study of Black congregations in the U.S., a church's activism results from complex negotiations between the pastor and the congregation. The church's traditions, its institutional organization, and its cultural traditions influence the choice to make politics part of the church's mission. The needs of the local community and opportunities to vote, lobby, campaign, or protest are also significant factors.

By probing the dynamics of churches as social groups, McDaniel opens new perspectives on civil rights history and the evangelical politics of the twenty-first century. Politics in the Pews contributes to a clearer understanding of the forces that motivate any organization, religious or otherwise, to engage in politics.

Eric L. McDaniel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin.

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front cover of Politics, Markets, and Grand Strategy
Politics, Markets, and Grand Strategy
Foreign Economic Policies as Strategic Instruments
Lars S. Skalnes
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Why do states sometimes discriminate in favor of certain states and at other times choose to pursue nondiscriminatory policies? In answering these questions, Lars S. Skålnes stresses the international political importance of foreign economic policy, arguing that trade, foreign investment, and foreign aid policies are strategic instruments great powers use to manage political and military relations with allies and adversaries.
Skålnes explains changes in foreign economic policy in terms of shifting strategic assessments regarding the importance of military support from allies. When states need military support from their allies to meet threats to their security, they will adopt discriminatory foreign economic policies in an attempt to strengthen alliance relations. When states can go it alone without military support, by contrast, they will not pursue foreign economic policies that discriminate in favor of either allies or other countries. Discriminatory policies, Skalnes argues, are important strategic instruments for several reasons. First, they can be used to tie countries to a military alliance. Second, they are useful as signals of intention. Third, discriminatory policies may strengthen an ally militarily by increasing the economic resources available for military purposes.
Skålnes provides detailed accounts of the grand strategies of Germany (1879-1914), France (1887-1914), Great Britain (1919-1939), and the United States (1945-1967).
Politics, Markets, and Grand Strategy will be important reading for scholars and students in the fields of national security studies, international political economy, and economic history, and to economists working on problems associated with foreign investment and trade generally and customs union theory and discriminatory trade agreements specifically.
Lars S. Skålnes is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Oregon.
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front cover of The Politics of American Jews
The Politics of American Jews
Herbert F. Weisberg
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Jewish voting is distinctive and paradoxical. Stereotypes about the voting habits of American Jews include that they vote at unusually high levels, that they’re liberal, that they vote for Democratic candidates without regard to their self-interest, and that Israel is their most important issue. Not only are all of those claims wrong, but they obscure aspects of Jews’ voting behavior that are much more interesting.

The Politics of American Jews uncovers new perspectives on Jews’ political choices by analyzing the unprecedented amount of survey data that is now available, including surveys that permit contrasting the voting of Jews with that of comparable non-Jews. The data suggest several mysteries about Jewish voting. While more Jews are Democrats than are liberals, there has not been a previous exploration of why more politically conservative Jews are not Republicans.

A fresh picture of Jews’ political behaviors shows that Jews are no longer politically monolithic. They vote on the basis of their self-interest and their values, but not all Jews share the same self-interest or the same values. While most Jews have incorporated being Democratic and liberal into their political DNA, growing divisions in their ranks suggest a mutation could occur.
 

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front cover of The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia
The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia
Vladimir Gel'man
University of Michigan Press, 2022
In this book, Vladimir Gel’man considers bad governance as a distinctive politico-economic order that is based on a set of formal and informal rules, norms, and practices quite different from those of good governance. Some countries are governed badly intentionally because the political leaders of these countries establish and maintain rules, norms, and practices that serve their own self-interests. Gel’man considers bad governance as a primarily agency-driven rather than structure-induced phenomenon. He addresses the issue of causes and mechanisms of bad governance in Russia and beyond from a different scholarly optics, which is based on a more general rationale of state-building, political regime dynamics, and policy-making. He argues that although these days, bad governance is almost universally perceived as an anomaly, at least in developed countries, in fact human history is largely a history of ineffective and corrupt governments, while the rule of law and decent state regulatory quality are relatively recent matters of modern history, when they emerged as side effects of state-building. Indeed, the picture is quite the opposite: bad governance is the norm, while good governance is an exception. The problem is that most rulers, especially if their time horizons are short and the external constraints on their behavior are not especially binding, tend to govern their domains in a predatory way because of the prevalence of short-term over long-term incentives. Contemporary Russia may be considered as a prime example of this phenomenon. Using an analysis of case studies of political and policy changes in Russia after the Soviet collapse, Gel’man discusses the logic of building and maintaining the politico-economic order of bad governance in Russia and paths of its possible transformation in a theoretical and comparative perspective.
 
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front cover of The Politics of Community Policing
The Politics of Community Policing
Rearranging the Power to Punish
William Lyons
University of Michigan Press, 2002
In this in-depth examination of community policing in Seattle, William T. Lyons, Jr. explores the complex issues associated with the establishment and operation of community policing, an increasingly popular method for organizing law enforcement in this country.
Stories about community policing appeal to a nostalgic vision of traditional community life. Community policing carries with it the image of a safe community in which individual citizens and businesses are protected by police they know and who know them and their needs. However, it also carries an image of community based in partnerships that exclude the least advantaged, strengthen the police, and are limited to targeting those disorders feared by more powerful parts of the community and most amenable to intervention by professional law enforcement agencies.
The author argues that the politics of community policing are found in the construction of competing and deeply contested stories about community and the police in environments characterized by power inbalances. Community policing, according to the author, colonizes community life, increasing the capacity of the police department to shield itself from criticism, while manifesting the potential for more democratic forms of social control as evidenced by police attention to individual rights and to impartial law enforcement.
This book will be of interest to sociologists and political scientists interested in the study of community power and local politics as well as criminologists interested in the study of police.
William T. Lyons, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Akron. He previously worked for the Seattle Police Department.
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front cover of The Politics of Expertise
The Politics of Expertise
Competing for Authority in Global Governance
Ole Jacob Sending
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Experts dominate all facets of global governance, from accounting practices and antitrust regulations to human rights law and environmental conservation. In this study, Ole Jacob Sending encourages a critical interrogation of the role and power of experts by unveiling the politics of the ongoing competition for authority in global governance.

Drawing on insights from sociology, political science, and institutional theory, Sending challenges theories centered on particular actors’ authority, whether it is the authority of so-called epistemic communities, the moral authority of advocacy groups, or the rational-legal authority of international organizations. Using in-depth and historically oriented case studies of population and peacebuilding, he demonstrates that authority is not given nor located in any set of particular actors. Rather, continuous competition for recognition as an authority to determine what is to be governed, by whom, and for what purpose shapes global governance in fundamental ways.

Advancing a field-based approach, Sending highlights the political stakes disguised by the technical language of professionals and thus opens a broader public debate over the key issues of our time.

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front cover of The Politics of Herding Cats
The Politics of Herding Cats
When Congressional Leaders Fail
John Lovett
University of Michigan Press, 2021
In The Politics of Herding Cats, John Lovett looks at the relationship between media, Congress, and public policy, showing that leaders in Congress under normal circumstances control public policy on issue areas due to their status both within Congress and in the media by and large. When issue coverage on topics increases in media, however, other members seize on the opportunities to engage in the issue and shift public policy away from leader desires. As more members engage and more groups become involved, leaders lose the ability to control the process and are more likely to have problems actually getting public policy enacted. Lovett look at this phenomenon using newspaper coverage in the Washington Post over a 40-year period, both in terms of general analysis as well as individual case studies exploring agricultural subsidies (a low coverage topic), immigration (a changing coverage topic), and health care (a high coverage topic). As coverage increases, the amount leaders can control in the process decreases. Only under extreme circumstances, as seen in the Affordable Care Act, can leaders get anything done at all. The Politics of Herding Cats would be useful for those who wish to better understand the relationship between the media and Congress. It will also be useful to those who want to understand the relationship between actors in government and how the media has influenced American politics, as well as how individual members of Congress can go against party leaders on major issues.
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front cover of The Politics of Intimacy
The Politics of Intimacy
Rethinking the End-of-Life Controversy
Anna Durnová
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Debates on the end-of-life controversy are complex because they seem to highjack national and cultural traditions. Where previous books have focused on ideological grounds, The Politics of Intimacy explores dying as the site where policies are negotiated and implemented. Intimacy comprises the emotional experience of the end of life and how we acknowledge it—or not—through institutions. This process shows that end-of-life controversy relies on the conflict between the individual and these institutions, a relationship that is the cornerstone of Western liberal democracies.

Through interviews with mourners, stakeholders, and medical professionals, examination of media debates in France and the Czech Republic, Durnová shows that liberal institutions, in their attempts to accommodate the emotional experience at the end of life, ultimately fail. She describes this deadlock as the “politics of intimacy,” revealing that political institutions deploy power through collective acknowledgment of individual emotions but fail to maintain this recognition because of this same experience.

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The Politics of Military Force
Antimilitarism, Ideational Change, and Post-Cold War German Security Discourse
Frank A. Stengel
University of Michigan Press, 2020
The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.
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The Politics of Millennials
Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America's Most Diverse Generation
Stella M. Rouse and Ashley D. Ross
University of Michigan Press, 2018

Today the Millennial generation, the cohort born from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, is the largest generation in the United States. It exceeds one-quarter of the population and is the most diverse generation in U.S. history. Millennials grew up experiencing September 11, the global proliferation of the Internet and of smart phones, and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their young adulthood has been marked by rates of unemployment and underemployment surpassing those of their parents and grandparents, making them the first generation in the modern era to have higher rates of poverty than their predecessors at the same age. The Politics of Millennials explores the factors that shape the Millennial generation’s unique political identity, how this identity conditions political choices, and how this cohort’s diversity informs political attitudes and beliefs. Few scholars have empirically identified and studied the political attitudes and policy preferences of Millennials, despite the size and influence of this generation. This book explores politics from a generational perspective, first, and then combines this with other group identities that include race and ethnicity to bring a new perspective to how we examine identity politics.

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The Politics of Preference
Democratic Institutions and Affirmative Action in the United States and India
Sunita Parikh
University of Michigan Press, 1997
Sunita Parikh examines the history and fate of affirmative action programs in two ethnically heterogeneous democracies, the United States and India. Affirmative action programs in the United States represent a controversial policy about which the American public feel at best ambivalence and at worst hostility, while in India the expansion of reservation policies in recent years has led to riots and contributed to the fall of governments. And yet these policies were not particularly controversial when they were introduced. How the policy traveled from these auspicious beginnings to its current predicament can best be understood, according to Parikh, by exploring the changing political conditions under which it was introduced, expanded, and then challenged.
Although they are in many respects very different countries, India and the United States are important countries in which to study the implementation of ascriptive policies like affirmative action, according to Parikh. They are both large, heterogeneous societies with democratic political systems in which previously excluded groups were granted benefits by the majorities that had historically oppressed them. Parikh argues that these policies were the product of democratic politics--which required political parties to mobilize existing groups as voters--and the ethnically heterogeneous nature of Indian and U.S. society--where ethnic markers are particularly salient sources of identification as groups. Affirmative action in both countries was introduced because it could be used to solidify and expand electoral coalitions by giving benefits to defined minority groups, according to Parikh. As the policy became better known, it became more disliked by non-targeted groups, and it was no longer an appeal which was cost free for politicians.
This book will be of interest to social scientists concerned with race and ethnic relations and with the comparative study of political and social systems.
Sunita Parikh is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University.
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The Politics of Purity
Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy
Clayton A. Coppin and Jack High
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Spearheaded by Harvey Washington Wiley, the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 launched the federal regulation of food and drugs in the United States. Wiley is often lauded as a champion of public interest for bringing about a law that required healthful ingredients and honest labeling. Clayton Coppin and Jack High demonstrate, however, that Wiley was in fact surreptitiously allied with business firms that would benefit from regulation and moreover, that the law would help him build his government agency, the Federal Bureau of Chemistry.
Coppin and High discuss such issues as Wiley's efforts to assign the law's enforcement to his own bureau. They go on to expose the selectivity of Wiley's enforcement of the law, in which he manipulated commercial competition in order to reward firms that supported him and penalize those that opposed him. By examining the history of the law's movement, the authors show that, rather than acting in the public interest, Wiley used the Pure Food and Drugs Act to further his own power and success. Finally, they analyze government regulation itself as the outcome of two distinct competitive processes, one that takes place in the market, the other in the polity.
The book will interest scholars concerned with government regulation, including those in economics, political science, history, and business.
Clayton Coppin is a management consultant and historian, Koch Industries, Wichita. Jack High is Professor of Economics, George Mason University.
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The Politics of Rights
Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change
Stuart A. Scheingold
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Stuart A. Scheingold's landmark work introduced a new understanding of the contribution of rights to progressive social movements, and thirty years later it still stands as a pioneering and provocative work, bridging political science and sociolegal studies. In the preface to this new edition, the author provides a cogent analysis of the burgeoning scholarship that has been built on the foundations laid in his original volume. A new foreword from Malcolm Feeley of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law traces the intellectual roots of The Politics of Rights to the classic texts of social theory and sociolegal studies.

"Scheingold presents a clear, thoughtful discussion of the ways in which rights can both empower and constrain those seeking change in American society. While much of the writing on rights is abstract and obscure, The Politics of Rights stands out as an accessible and engaging discussion."
-Gerald N. Rosenberg, University of Chicago

"This book has already exerted an enormous influence on two generations of scholars. It has had an enormous influence on political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, as well as historians and legal scholars. With this new edition, this influence is likely to continue for still more generations. The Politics of Rights has, I believe, become an American classic."
-Malcolm Feeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, from the foreword

Stuart A. Scheingold is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Washington.

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The Politics of Sociability
Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840-1918
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
University of Michigan Press, 2007

An ambitious, original work, The Politics of Sociability is Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's exploration of the social and political significance of Freemasonry in German history. Drawing on de Tocqueville's theory that without civic virtue there is no civil society, and that civic virtue unfolds only through the social interaction between citizens, Hoffmann examines the critical link between Freemasonry and the evolution of German civil society in the late nineteenth century. The practice of Masonic sociability reflected an enlightened belief in the political significance of moral virtue for civil society, indeed, for humanity. Freemasons' self-image as civilizing agents, acting in good faith and with the unimpeachable idea of universal brotherhood, was contradicted not only by their heightened sense of exclusivity; Freemasons unintentionally exacerbated nineteenth-century political conflicts---for example, between liberals and Catholics, or Germans and French---by employing a universalist language.

Using a wealth of archival sources previously unavailable, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann shows how Freemasonry became a social refuge for elevated and liberal-minded bourgeois men who felt attracted to its secret rituals and moral teachings. German Freemasons sought to reform self and society but, Hoffmann argues, ultimately failed to balance modern politics with a cosmopolitan ethos. Hoffmann illuminates a capacious history of the political effects of Enlightenment concepts and practices in a century marked by nationalism, social discord, and religious conflict.

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is Assistant Professor of Modern History at Ruhr-University Bochum. The German edition of this book, Die Politik der Geselligkeit: Freimaurerlogen in der deutschen Bürgergesellschaft, 1840-1918 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), won the Association of German Historians' 2002 Hedwig Hintze Prize for Best First Book.

Tom Lampert was born in Boston in 1962 and grew up in northern California. He received a BA in political science from Stanford University (1986) and a PhD in government from Cornell (1998). His book, Ein einziges Leben (Hanser Verlag 2001) was published as One Life by Harcourt in 2004, which he translated himself. Lampert has worked as a freelance translator since 1998. He currently lives in Bad Kreuznach, Germany.

Cover Image: Monument of the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, erected between 1898 and 1913 by German Freemasons, Barbarossa-Head by Christian Behrens, located next to the stairs leading to the monument. The German mythical figure of the Kaiser Barbarossa is depicted as a sphinx, which in Masonic symbolism protects the Masonic secret from profanation. Courtesy of the Deutsche Bücherei, Leipzig.

"This is an exemplary study of the role of Freemasonry in the German Bürgergesellschaft (civil society) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concise, comprehensive, and well written. It combines social profiling with a careful examination of contemporary concepts in a long-term diachronic study, based on an impressive amount of primary material. . . . Hoffmann's empirically and methodologically convincing study is not only a major contribution to our understanding of Freemasonry in the German Bürgergesellschaft. It also reflects the complex social and political transformation of German society in the nineteenth century and the difficulties contemporaries faced in responding to it."
---German History

"Hoffmann's arguments are theoretically informed, supported by a wealth of archival sources. . . . Indeed, in many ways this is the best combination of painstaking social history and well-argued Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history). . . . One of the great virtues of this book is that Hoffmann does not shy away from the contradictions in the Freemasons' rhetoric and actions. Such contradictions, in fact, are key to the Mason's importance, because they force us to rethink some of our assumptions about Imperial Germany. . . . This is an important book that encourages us to rethink many of our characterizations of the German Kaiserreich and our assumptions about civil society."
---Central European History

"Based on a rich variety of sources. . . . Hoffmann explores the evolving relationship between Freemasonry and the monarchy, state, and church, and he also scrutinizes the internal practices and discourse of these notoriously secretive and cosmopolitan societies. . . . Hoffmann engages fruitfully with a wide historiography covering themes such as masculinity and racism, he dissects the complex attitude of Freemasonry to Jews and Catholics, and he scrutinizes the attacks of its conservative, clerical, and antisemitic critics."
---Journal of Modern History

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front cover of The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses
The Politics of Subjectivity in American Foreign Policy Discourses
Ty Solomon
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Why are some discourses more politically efficacious than others? Seeking answers to this question, Ty Solomon develops a new theoretical approach to the study of affect, identity, and discourse—core phenomena whose mutual interweaving have yet to be fully analyzed in International Relations. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Ernesto Laclau’s approach to hegemonic politics, Solomon argues that prevailing discourses offer subtle but powerfully appealing opportunities for affective investment on the part of audiences.

Through empirical case studies of the affective resonances of the war on terror and the rise and fall of neoconservative influence in American foreign policy, Solomon offers a unique way to think about the politics of identity as the construction of “common sense” powerfully underpinned by affective investments. He provides both a fuller understanding of the emotional appeal of political rhetoric in general and, specifically, a provocative explanation of the reasons for the reception of particular U.S. foreign policy rhetoric that shifted Americans’ attitudes toward neoconservative foreign policy in the 1990s and shaped the post-9/11 “war on terror.”
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The Politics of the Trail
Reflexive Mountain Biking along the Frontier of Jerusalem
Oded Löwenheim
University of Michigan Press, 2014
Each day, as Oded Löwenheim commutes by mountain bike along dirt trails and wadis in the hills of Jerusalem to Hebrew University, he feels a strong emotional connection to his surroundings. But for him this connection also generates, paradoxically, feelings and emotions of confusion and estrangement.

In The Politics of the Trail, Löwenheim confronts this tension by focusing on his encounters with three places along the trail: the separation fence between Israel and the Palestinians; the ruins of the Palestinian village Qalunya, demolished in 1948; and the trail connecting the largest 9/11 memorial site outside of the U.S. with a top-secret nuclear-proof bunker for the Israeli cabinet. He shares the stories of the people he meets along the way and considers how his own subjectivity is shaped by the landscape and culture of conflict. Moreover, he deconstructs, challenges, and resists the concepts and institutions that constitute such a culture and invites conversation about the idea of conflict as a culture.

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The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey
How Social Movements and Elite Competition Created a Welfare State
Erdem Yörük
University of Michigan Press, 2022
In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük’s European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfare in the global south. As such, this book is an ambitious analytical and empirical contribution to understanding the causes of a sweeping shift in the nature of state welfare provision in Turkey during the recent decades—part of a global trend that extends far beyond Turkey. Most scholarship about Turkey and similar countries has explained this shift toward poor relief as a response to demographic and structural changes including aging populations, the decline in the economic weight of industry, and the informalization of labor, while ignoring the effect of grassroots politics. In order to overcome these theoretical shortages in the literature, the book revisits concepts of political containment and political mobilization from the earlier literature on the mid-twentieth-century welfare state development and incorporates the effects of grassroots politics in order to understand the recent welfare system shift as it materialized in Turkey, where a new matrix of political dynamics has produced new large-scale social assistance programs. 
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Politics Over Process
Partisan Conflict and Post-Passage Processes in the U.S. Congress
Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Although the U.S. Constitution requires that the House of Representatives and the Senate pass legislation in identical form before it can be sent to the president for final approval, the process of resolving differences between the chambers has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. Hong Min Park, Steven S. Smith, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen document the dramatic changes in intercameral resolution that have occurred over recent decades, and examine the various considerations made by the chambers when determining the manner in which the House and Senate pursue conciliation. Politics Over Process demonstrates that partisan competition, increasing party polarization, and institutional reforms have encouraged the majority party to more creatively restructure post-passage processes, often avoiding the traditional standing committee and conference processes altogether.
 
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front cover of Politics, Policy, and Organizations
Politics, Policy, and Organizations
Frontiers in the Scientific Study of Bureaucracy
George A. Krause & Kenneth J. Meier, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2003
The bureaucracy is the fourth branch of government, often receiving attention in times of emergency or when it is the object of criticism from the media or politicians. Less understood is how bureaucratic institutions function in a democracy, both from an organizational perspective and as institutional participants within the political arena. Drawing on rational choice approaches, computationally intensive data and modeling techniques, and systematic empirical inquiry, this original collection of essays highlights the important role bureaucracies play in shaping public policy-making. The editors of and contributors to this volume demonstrate not only the constraints political officials face in harnessing the bureaucracy but, more important, how bureaucracies function as organizational entities in diverse contexts.
George A. Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina.
Kenneth J. Meier is Charles Puryear Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University.
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Politics, Process, and American Trade Policy
Sharyn O'Halloran
University of Michigan Press, 1994
Offers important new insights into how American trade policy is set
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Polycentric Games and Institutions
Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
Michael D. McGinnis, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Polycentric Games and Institutions summarizes contributions to the analysis of institutions made by scholars associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.
The readings in this volume illustrate several varieties of institutional analysis. Each reading builds upon the foundation of game theory to address similar sets of questions concerning institutions and self-governance. The chapters in the first section lay out interrelated frameworks for analysis. Section two illustrates the normative component of institutions and their effects on human behavior. Readings in the following two sections detail how these frameworks have been applied to models of specific situations. Section five presents a modeling exercise exploring the functions of monitoring and enforcement, and the sixth section discusses approaches to the problems of complexity that confront individuals playing polycentric games. The final readings provide overviews of experimental research on the behavior of rational individuals.
Contributors include Arun Agrawal, Sue E. S. Crawford, Clark C. Gibson, Roberta Herzberg, Larry L. Kiser, Michael McGinnis, Stuart A. Marks, Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, James Walker, Franz J. Weissing, John T. Williams, and Rick Wilson.
Michael McGinnis is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Co-Associate Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.
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Polycentric Governance and Development
Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
Michael D. McGinnis, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1999
How do local communities collectively manage those resources that are most important to their own survival or prosperity? Wherever they are located, all communities face similar dilemmas of collective action: how can common goals be realized despite the presence of individual incentives to over-exploit common resources for private gain? The readings collected in Polycentric Governance and Development show the achievements of scholars associated with the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in understanding how communities have dealt with dilemmas of collective action. Their analyses also have profound implications for broader issues of development.
The central insight of the research collected in the volume is this: much can be learned by a careful examination of the ways in which local communities have organized themselves to solve collective problems, achieve common aspirations, and resolve conflicts. The first two sections deal with efforts to manage water and other common-pool resources on a relatively small scale. Section three moves to the macro-level of analysis, with particular attention given to examples of constitutional order from Africa, while section four demonstrates that local organizations and informal networks can play essential roles in furthering democratization and development. The concluding section addresses issues at the national level, by linking the practical world of resource management and development policy to the abstract world of the policy analyst. This collection of essays is designed to illustrate how all the pieces fit together and to suggest connections among multiple levels and modes of analysis.
Contributors include Paula C. Baker, William Blomquist, Larry L. Kiser, Ronald J. Oakerson, Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, Roger B. Parks, Stephen L. Percy, Charles M. Tiebout, Martha Vandivort, Robert Warren, Gordon P. Whitaker, and Rick Wilson.
Michael McGinnis is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Co-Associate Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.
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Polycentricity and Local Public Economies
Readings from the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
Michael D. McGinnis, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The study of metropolitan political economies in the United States has provided much of the intellectual inspiration for the research of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. The readings collected in Polycentricity and Local Public Economies present an overview of the results of this research program on police services and metropolitan governance as well as enduring lessons for institutional analysis and public policy.
Polycentricity and Local Public Economies presents both explorations of broad general concepts and specific empirical analyses. The many interactions between the two modes of analysis provide valuable insights for the reader. Readings in the first section cover basic theoretical concepts and analytical distinctions that apply to the study of institutions generally. The second section includes conceptual pieces specifically addressed to the nature of governance in metropolitan areas, while section three reports on a series of empirical studies of police performance. Section four again broadens the focus to highlight the overall organization of local public economies. The final section discusses conceptual advances that have continuing relevance for research and policy debates.
Contributors include William Blomquist, Kathryn Firmin-Sellers, Roy Gardner, Dele Olowu, Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, Amos Sawyer, Edella Schlager, Shui Yan Tang, Wai Fung Lam, and James S. Wunsch.
Michael McGinnis is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Co-Associate Director, Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.
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Pompeii's Living Statues
Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death
Eugene Dwyer
University of Michigan Press, 2010

In AD 79, Mt. Vesuvius erupted in two stages. While the first stage was incredibly destructive, it was the second stage, a so-called pyroclastic flow, that inundated Pompeii with a combination of superheated gases, pumice, and rocks, killing tens of thousands of people and animals and burying them in ash and mud.

During excavations of the town in 1863, Giuseppe Fiorelli, the director of the dig, poured plaster of paris into a cavity under the soil revealed by a workman's pick. When the plaster set and the mound was uncovered, all were amazed to see the secret that the ground had held for 1,800 years: a detailed cast of an ancient Pompeian such as no one had seen before, frozen in the instant of dying and complete in every respect, including outlines of the clothes he was wearing at the time of the destruction. The bodies, photographed and exhibited in the specially built Pompeii Museum, completely changed the world's ideas of life in ancient Italy.

Pompeii's Living Statues is a narrative account, supported by contemporary documents, of the remarkable discovery of those ancient victims preserved in the volcanic mud of Vesuvius.

Eugene Dwyer examines these casts and related records, the originals of a number of which (along with their museum) were lost in World War II bombing. As he considers the casts as archaeological and cultural pieces, he also discusses Pompeii and its artifacts in the context of Italian unification and party politics, the development of modern excavation methods, and the challenges of maintaining a very large archaeological site. Dwyer's clear organization and writing style, combined with a collection of photographs and engravings, make for a fascinating exploration of Pompeii and its victims.

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Pompeis Difficile Est
Studies in the Political Life of Imperial Pompeii
James L. Franklin, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 2001
In describing the intensity of political life in ancient Pompeii, Cicero remarks, "at Pompeii it's difficult" (Pompeis difficile est). Drawing on thousands of fragmentary writings--campaign posters, graffiti, inscriptions, and business receipts--recovered in the excavations of lava- and mud-covered Pompeii, James L. Franklin assembles evidence from the eras of emperors Augustus through Vespasian to prove the validity of Cicero's statement.
By collecting, sifting, and cross-referencing these varied documents, Franklin proves it possible to trace the major political alliances of the times, explore the remains of their houses, and find traces of their personalities. A few families, like the powerful Holconii, developers of the region's most famous grape vine, prove to have been steady players throughout Pompeii's history; but most families rose and fell within two generations at most. Chapters examine the men and families most prominent in each imperial period, including an analysis of their houses, and concludes with family trees. The documents themselves, elsewhere difficult to access, are prominently featured and translated in the text, making these discussions available and vivid to all readers.
This book is the first such attempt to cross-reference and animate all kinds of writing found at this legendary site. Outside of the city of Rome itself, this is the largest collection of writing from Roman antiquity, and it has lain mostly unexamined in the course of three centuries of excavations at Pompeii. This volume will interest not only students of Pompeii and classical scholars, but also historians, political scientists, sociologists, and enthusiasts of human behavior of all eras.
James L. Franklin is Professor of Classical Studies, Indiana University.
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Pomponius Mela's Description of the World
F. E. Romer
University of Michigan Press, 1998
The Description of the World (Chorographia), written by Pomponius Mela, was last translated into English over 400 years ago, and is the earliest surviving geographical work in Latin. Although first published at the height of the Roman Empire, in roughly 44 C.E., Pomponius Mela's work circulated during Europe's great Age of Exploration. His description is in the form of a voyage around the three "known" continents--Africa, Asia, and Europe. Mela integrates geographical description with more familiar historical, cultural, and mythological information. F. E. Romer's translation and commentary on this work help the reader to appreciate the intellectual and physical shape of the ancient world as Mela and the Romans perceived it.
Frank Romer's introduction assesses Mela as a literary and geographic writer, while his translation matches Mela's style. Mela knows of the Chinese and reports geographical and cultural information about Sri Lanka and India, as well as Mediterranean and European locales that are less remote to his experience. The outer edges of all the continents, including Europe, however, remained unfamiliar to the Romans, and it is on the inhabited world's outer edges that the creatures of legend and mythology were believed to live. Romer's commentary clarifies specific ideas raised in the text. He identifies and explains issues, and he points the reader to ancient sources and modern studies.
This new study will intrigue students and teachers of ancient history. This edition of Mela's geography will be of interest to map lovers, historians, classicists, and anyone interested in history of travel, geography, and education.

F.E. Romer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, East Carolina University. He is the author of numerous articles and has received awards for both his writing and teaching.

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The Pop Palimpsest
Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music
Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Within popular music there are entire genres (jazz “standards”), styles (hip hop), techniques (sampling), and practices (covers) that rely heavily on references between music of different styles and genres. This interdisciplinary collection of essays covers a wide range of musical styles and artists to investigate intertextuality—the shaping of one text by another—in popular music. The Pop Palimpsest offers new methodologies and frameworks for the analysis of intertextuality in popular music, and provides new lenses for examining relationships between a variety of texts both musical and nonmusical. Enriched by perspectives from multiple subdisciplines, The Pop Palimpsest considers a broad range of intertextual relationships in popular music to explore creative practices and processes and the networks that intertextual practices create between artists and listeners.
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Population
The First Essay
Thomas R. Malthus
University of Michigan Press, 1959
Malthus's classic prescription for the problem of overpopulation
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Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living
Essays in Memory of David Herlihy
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. and Steven A. Epstein, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1996
This volume--a collection of essays dedicated to one of this century's most distinguished medieval historians, David Herlihy--introduces the general reader to the new social history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays address three themes: sex and the family, power and patronage in local history, and society in town and countryside. The authors use current research to illustrate how Herlihy's ideas continue to shape work about the lives of powerful and ordinary people in this long and important period of Western history.
Portraits of Medieval and Renaissance Living opens with Herlihy's final summary of his views on family history, followed by a reminiscence by his most important collaborator, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. The first group of essays takes us inside specific familial settings, using recent methods in anthropological, legal, and women's studies to uncover new dimensions of medieval and Renaissance family life. A second group of studies focuses on the question of authority in medieval society and advances new theses about politics and society in Florence and other local settings. The final group of authors considers the special circumstances of town and countryside in Italy, England, and Spain and draws insightful generalizations across territorial and national boundaries.
Like Herlihy's own work, these essays present innovative and challenging hypotheses about significant problems in the history of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Important new material on Florence, family history, religion, the Inquisition, and taxation is presented for the first time, but the essays are not simply technical exercises focused on small or isolated pieces of research. Thus the volume will go beyond the interest of specialists in medieval and Renaissance social history and will attract a wide audience of students and scholars.
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., is Professor of History, Brandeis University. Steven Epstein is Professor of History, University of Colorado.
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front cover of Portraits of the Vestal Virgins, Priestesses of Ancient Rome
Portraits of the Vestal Virgins, Priestesses of Ancient Rome
Molly M. Lindner
University of Michigan Press, 2015
For more than eleven hundred years, the Vestal Virgins dedicated their lives to the goddess Vesta, protector of the Roman state. Though supervised by a male priest, the Pontifex Maximus, they had privileges beyond those of most women; like Roman men, they dispensed favors and influence on behalf of their clients and relatives. In 1883, Rodolfo Lanciani, Director of Antiquities for Rome, discovered the first Vestal statues. The recovery of the Vestals’ house, and the objects contained therein, was an exciting moment in Roman archaeology. Newspapers were filled with details about the huge numbers of sculptures, inscriptions, jewelry, coins, and terracotta figures.

Molly M. Lindner examines the sculptural presentation of the Vestal Virgins and investigates what images of long-dead women tell us about their lives. She addresses why these portraits were created, and why they only began to appear in the late first or second century CE—much later than portraits of other Roman priestesses and nonimperial women. Lindner sheds light on the distinctions between a Vestal portrait and portraits of other priestesses, and considers why Vestal portraits do not copy each other’s headdresses and hairstyles. In addition to the extensive illustrations that complement the text, a catalog of all known Vestal portraits displays historical clues embedded in the hairstyles and facial features of the Vestals and other women of their day. In Portraits of the Vestal Virgins, Priestesses of Ancient Rome, Lindner has given a voice to the long-silent women of these extraordinary marble portraits.
 
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Portraits of Violence
War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement
Suzannah Biernoff
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Portraits of Violence explores the image and idea of facial disfigurement in one of its most troubling modern formations, as a symbol and consequence of war. It opens with Nina Berman’s iconic photograph Marine Wedding, which provoked a debate about the medical, military, and psychological response to serious combat injuries. While these issues remain urgent, it is equally crucial to interrogate the representation of war and injury. The concepts of valor, heroism, patriotism, and courage assume visible form and do their cultural work when they are personified and embodied. The mutilated or disabled veteran’s body can connote the brutalizing, dehumanizing potential of modern combat.
 
Suzannah Biernoff draws on a wide variety of sources mainly from WWI but also contemporary photography and computer games. Each chapter revolves around particular images: Marine Wedding is discussed alongside Stuart Griffiths’ portraits of British veterans; Henry Tonks’ drawings of WWI facial casualties are compared to the medical photographs in the Gillies Archives; the production of portrait masks for the severely disfigured is approached through the lens of documentary film and photography; and finally the haunting image of one of Tonks’s patients reappears in BioShock, a highly successful computer game. The book simultaneously addresses a neglected area in disability studies; puts disfigurement on the agenda for art history and visual studies; and makes a timely and provocative contribution to the literature on the First World War.

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Positive Political Theory I
Collective Preference
David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey S. Banks
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Positive Political Theory I is concerned with the formal theory of preference aggregation for collective choice. The theory is developed as generally as possible, covering classes of aggregation methods that include such well-known examples as majority and unanimity rule and focusing in particular on the extent to which any aggregation method is assured to yield a set of "best" alternatives. The book is intended both as a contribution to the theory of collective choice and a pedagogic tool.
Austen-Smith and Banks have made the exposition both rigorous and accessible to people with some technical background (e.g., a course in multivariate calculus). The intended readership ranges from more technically-oriented graduate students and specialists to those students in economics and political science interested less in the technical aspects of the results than in the depth, scope, and importance of the theoretical advances in positive political theory.
"This is a stunning book. Austen-Smith and Banks have a deep understanding of the material, and their text gives a powerfully unified and coherent perspective on a vast literature. The exposition is clear-eyed and efficient but never humdrum. Even those familiar with the subject will find trenchant remarks and fresh insights every few pages. Anyone with an interest in contemporary liberal democratic theory will want this book on the shelf." --Christopher Achen, University of Michigan
David Austen-Smith is Professor of Political Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Management and Strategy, Northwestern University. Jeffrey S. Banks is Professor of Political Science, California Institute of Technology.
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Positive Political Theory II
Strategy and Structure
David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey S. Banks
University of Michigan Press, 2005
“A major piece of work . . . a classic. There is no
other book like it.”
—Norman Schofield, Washington University

“The authors succeed brilliantly in tackling a large
number of important questions concerning the
interaction among voters and elected representatives
in the political arena, using a common, rigorous
language.”
—Antonio Merlo, University of Pennsylvania

Positive Political Theory II: Strategy and Structure
is the second volume in Jeffrey Banks and David
Austen-Smith’s monumental study of the links
between individual preferences and collective choice.
The book focuses on representative systems, including
both elections and legislative decision-making
processes, clearly connecting individual preferences to
collective outcomes. This book is not a survey. Rather,
it is the coherent, cumulative result of the authors’
brilliant efforts to indirectly connect preferences to
collective choice through strategic behaviors such as
agenda-selection and voting.

The book will be an invaluable reference and teaching
tool for economists and political scientists, and an
essential companion to any scholar interested in the
latest theoretical advances in positive political theory.


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The Possibility of Popular Justice
A Case Study of Community Mediation in the United States
Sally Engle Merry and Neal Milner, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1995
"The Possibility of Popular Justice is essential reading for scholars and practitioners of community mediation and should be very high on the list of anyone seriously concerned with dispute resolution in general. The book offers many rewards for the advanced student of law and society studies." --Law and Politics Book Review
"These immensely important articles--fifteen in all--take several academic perspectives on the [San Francisco Community Boards] program's diverse history, impact, and implications for 'popular justice.' These articles will richly inform the program, polemical, and political perspectives of anyone working on 'alternative programs' of any sort." -- IARCA Journal
"Few collections are so well integrated, analytically penetrating, or as readable as this fascinating account. It is a 'must read' for anyone interested in community mediation." --William M. O'Barr, Duke University
"You do not have to be involved in mediation to appreciate this book. The authors use the case as a launching pad to evaluate the possibilities and 'impossibilities' of building community in complex urban areas and pursuing popular justice in the shadow of state law." --Deborah M. Kolb, Harvard Law School and Simmons College
Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology, Wellesley College. Neal Milner is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Conflict Resolution, University of Hawaii.
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The Postcolonial Animal
African Literature and Posthuman Ethics
Evan Maina Mwangi
University of Michigan Press, 2019

Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.

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(Post-)colonial Archipelagos
Comparing the Legacies of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines
Hans-Jürgen Burchardt and Johanna Leinius, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2022

The Puerto Rican debt crisis, the challenges of social, political, and economic transition in Cuba, and the populist politics of Duterte in the Philippines—these topics are typically seen as disparate experiences of social reality. Though these island territories were colonized by the same two colonial powers—by the Spanish Empire and, after 1898, by the United States—research in the fields of history and the social sciences rarely draws links between these three contexts.

Located at the intersection of Postcolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, and History, this interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from the US, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines to examine the colonial legacies of the three island nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Instead of focusing on the legacies of US colonialism, the continuing legacies of Spanish colonialism are put center-stage. The analyses offered in the volume yield new and surprising insights into the study of colonial and postcolonial constellations that are of interest not only for experts, but also for readers interested in the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during Spanish colonization and in the present. The empirical material profits from a rigorous and systematic analytical framework and is thus easily accessible for students, researchers, and the interested public alike.

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