For most Americans, the Revolution’s main achievement is summed up by the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet far from a straightforward attempt to be free of Old World laws and customs, the American founding was also a bid for inclusion in the community of nations as it existed in 1776. America aspired to diplomatic recognition under international law and the authority to become a colonizing power itself.

As Eliga Gould shows in this reappraisal of American history, the Revolution was an international transformation of the first importance. To conform to the public law of Europe’s imperial powers, Americans crafted a union nearly as centralized as the one they had overthrown, endured taxes heavier than any they had faced as British colonists, and remained entangled with European Atlantic empires long after the Revolution ended.

No factor weighed more heavily on Americans than the legally plural Atlantic where they hoped to build their empire. Gould follows the region’s transfiguration from a fluid periphery with its own rules and norms to a place where people of all descriptions were expected to abide by the laws of Western Europe—“civilized” laws that precluded neither slavery nor the dispossession of Native Americans.

A scholar of law and religion uncovers a surprising origin story behind the idea of the separation of powers.

The separation of powers is a bedrock of modern constitutionalism, but striking antecedents were developed centuries earlier, by Jewish scholars and rabbis of antiquity. Attending carefully to their seminal works and the historical milieu, David Flatto shows how a foundation of democratic rule was contemplated and justified long before liberal democracy was born.

During the formative Second Temple and early rabbinic eras (the fourth century BCE to the third century CE), Jewish thinkers had to confront the nature of legal authority from the standpoint of the disempowered. Jews struggled against the idea that a legal authority stemming from God could reside in the hands of an imperious ruler (even a hypothetical Judaic monarch). Instead scholars and rabbis argued that such authority lay with independent courts and the law itself. Over time, they proposed various permutations of this ideal. Many of these envisioned distinct juridical and political powers, with a supreme law demarcating the respective jurisdictions of each sphere. Flatto explores key Second Temple and rabbinic writings—the Qumran scrolls; the philosophy and history of Philo and Josephus; the Mishnah, Tosefta, Midrash, and Talmud—to uncover these transformative notions of governance.

The Crown and the Courts argues that by proclaiming the supremacy of law in the absence of power, postbiblical thinkers emphasized the centrality of law in the people’s covenant with God, helping to revitalize Jewish life and establish allegiance to legal order. These scholars proved not only creative but also prescient. Their profound ideas about the autonomy of law reverberate to this day.

Together with the late Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, the 1982 Nobel laureate, stands at the pinnacle of Latin American literature. His work, in the words of Julio Ortega, "contains its own 'deconstructive' force—a literary power capable of reshaping natural order and rhetorical tradition in order to 'carnivalize' the Borges' library and allow us to hear the voices—and the laughter—of a culture, that of Latin America." This reshaping force invites us to read the works of García Márquez in a new way, one that bypasses the traditional, inadequate approaches through Latin American politics, history, and "magical realism."

In Gabriel García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction, noted scholars Julio Ortega, Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat, Michael Palencia-Roth, Aníbal González, and Gonzalo Díaz-Migoyo offer English-speaking readers a new approach to García Márquez's work. Their poststructuralist readings focus on the peculiar sign-system, formal configuration, intradiscursivity, and unfolding representation in the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold and in several of the author's short stories. Also included as an appendix is a translation of García Márquez's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "The Solitude of Latin America."

A dialogue among leading figures in history education research and practice.

The “knowledge turn” in curriculum studies has drawn attention to the central role that the knowledge of the disciplines plays in education and the need for fresh perspectives on knowledge-building. Knowing History in Schools explores these issues in the context of the discipline of history through a dialogue between the eminent sociologist of curriculum Michael Young, and leading figures in history education research and practice from a range of traditions and contexts. Focusing on Young’s “powerful knowledge” theorization of the curriculum, and on his more recent articulations of the “powers” of knowledge, this dialogue explores the many complexities facing history education. The book attempts to clarify how educators can best conceptualize knowledge-building in history education, and it will be of interest to history education students, history teachers, teacher educators, and history curriculum designers, as they navigate the challenges that knowledge-building processes pose for learning history in schools.
 

Reasserts the centrality of Jewish culture to contemporary discussions of diaspora. Diaspora: the scattering of a people, often described as a condition of helplessness and a pathology to be overcome. It can also be, as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin assert in this provocative work, a unique source of power and strength. Focusing on Jewish experience, Powers of Diaspora forcefully argues that diasporic communities exercise a distinct form of cultural power in order to maintain themselves. With reference to rabbinic culture and contemporary Jewish ethnography, the authors evoke the cultural strategies of Jewish diaspora-of regeneration through statelessness-that should prove increasingly relevant to the dilemmas and possibilities of the "new diasporas" born in the midst and in the aftermath of the modern world-system. Their work exposes the various methods by which peoples in diaspora "legislate" distinctive ways of life and establish formal communal structures, thus creating fluid yet effective boundaries between themselves and the others who surround them, and critiques the internal power dynamics that can sometimes result. Powers of Diaspora strongly reasserts the place of Jewish culture in contemporary discussions of diaspora, where the cultural politics of postcolonialism have remarginalized Jewish experience; at the same time, it brings insights from studies of other diasporas to bear on the study of Jews. In challenging the equation of diaspora with powerlessness, the book questions the modern nation-state ideal and suggests that diasporic cultural formations offer important clues toward an alternative means of relating culture to polity. Jonathan Boyarin is an attorney and an independent scholar in the fields of anthropology and Jewish cultural studies. His books include Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (1992), Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography (1996), and Thinking in Jewish (1996). Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture in the departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Carnal Israel (1993), A Radical Jew (1994), and Unheroic Conduct (1997). These authors also coedited Jews and Other Differences (1997).

In The Powers of Dignity Nick Bromell unpacks Frederick Douglass's 1867 claim that he had “elaborated a political philosophy” from his own “slave experience.” Bromell shows that Douglass devised his philosophy because he found that antebellum Americans' liberal-republican understanding of democracy did not provide a sufficient principled basis on which to fight anti-Black racism. To remedy this deficiency, Douglass deployed insights from his distinctively Black experience and developed a Black philosophy of democracy. He began by contesting the founders' racist assumptions about humanity and advancing instead a more robust theory of “the human” as a collection of human “powers.” He asserted further that the conscious exercise of those powers is what confirms human dignity and that human rights and democracy come into being as ways to affirm and protect that dignity. Thus, by emphasizing the powers and the dignity of all citizens, deriving democratic rights from these, and promoting a remarkably activist, power-oriented model of citizenship, Douglass's Black political philosophy aimed to rectify two major failings of US democracy in his time and ours: its complacence and its racism.

Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema's persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema's ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and "feminization."

Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.

These seven critical essays, each on a twentieth-century novelist, are disparate in content, but all are concerned with the problem of evil and inhumanity and with the paradoxes of human existence.

Each essay discusses a different author, but this independence of subject is resolved into a central theme through the interpretive approach followed by the seven critics. Each of the contributors presents his subject against the background of the current disillusionment and frustration of our age. Underlying each essay are undertones of the "absurdity" of life today for those who consider it thoughtfully, and the contrast between what men would like reality to be and what they actually find.

This unity of theme—the problem of evil, of inhumanity, of meaninglessness, the concern for the human being and his future—is developed in an interesting manner. It was exploited in different ways by the seven modern novelists discussed in the essays, and it is presented with different analytical techniques by the seven critics. Yet the reader senses the unity of feeling and purpose amid the diversity of fictional content and critical evaluation.

Besdies the interpretive Introduction by Thomas B. Whitbread, the book contains the following essays:

• R. W. Lewis, "The Conflicts of Reality: Cozzens' The Last Adam"
• Alan Friedman, "The Pitching of Love's Mansion in the Tropics of Henry Miller"
• Roger D. Abrahams, "Androgynes Bound: Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts"
• George Clark, "An Illiberal Education: William Golding's Pedagogy"
• Vance Ramsey, "From Here to Absurdity: Heller's Catch-22"
• Anthony Channell Hilfer, "George and Martha: Sad, Sad, Sad"
• Robert G. Twombly, "Hubris, Health, and Holiness: The Despair of J. F. Powers"

Since his assassination in 1828, King Shaka Zulu—founder of the powerful Zulu kingdom and leader of the army that nearly toppled British colonial rule in South Africa—has made his empire in popular imaginations throughout Africa and the West. Shaka is today the hero of Zulu nationalism, the centerpiece of Inkatha ideology, a demon of apartheid, the namesake of a South African theme park, even the subject of a major TV film.

Terrific Majesty explores the reasons for the potency of Shaka’s image, examining the ways it has changed over time—from colonial legend, through Africanist idealization, to modern cultural icon. This study suggests that “tradition” cannot be freely invented, either by European observers who recorded it or by subsequent African ideologues. There are particular historical limits and constraints that operate on the activities of invention and imagination and give the various images of Shaka their power. These insights are illustrated with subtlety and authority in a series of highly original analyses.

Terrific Majesty is an exceptional work whose special contribution lies in the methodological lessons it delivers; above all its sophisticated rehabilitation of colonial sources for the precolonial period, through the demonstration that colonial texts were critically shaped by indigenous African discourse. With its sensitivity to recent critical studies, the book will also have a wider resonance in the fields of history, anthropology, cultural studies, and postcolonial literature.