front cover of Being after Rousseau
Being after Rousseau
Philosophy and Culture in Question
Richard L. Velkley
University of Chicago Press, 2002
In Being after Rousseau, Richard L. Velkley presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the founder of a modern European tradition of reflection on the relation of philosophy to culture—a reflection that calls both into question. Tracing this tradition from Rousseau to Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Martin Heidegger, Velkley shows late modern philosophy as a series of ultimately unsuccessful attempts to resolve the dichotomies between nature and society, culture and civilization, and philosophy and society that Rousseau brought to the fore.

The Rousseauian tradition begins, for Velkley, with Rousseau's criticism of modern political philosophy. Although the German Idealists such as Schelling accepted much of Rousseau's critique, they believed, unlike Rousseau, that human wholeness could be attained at the level of society and history. Heidegger and Nietzsche questioned this claim, but followed both Rousseau and the Idealists in their vision of the philosopher-poet striving to recover an original wholeness that the history of reason has distorted.
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The Bible on the Question of Homosexuality
Innocent Himbaza
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
The Bible on the Question of Homosexuality addresses the hotly debated topic of whether the Bible condemns homosexuality by a close reading of the biblical texts without taboo or prejudice, without personal or church interpretation
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The Capacity Contract
Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship
Stacy Clifford Simplican
University of Minnesota Press, 2015

In the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of political theory, The Capacity Contract shows how the exclusion of disabled people has shaped democratic politics. Stacy Clifford Simplican demonstrates how disability buttresses systems of domination based on race, sex, and gender. She exposes how democratic theory and politics have long blocked from political citizenship anyone whose cognitive capacity falls below a threshold level⎯marginalization with real-world repercussions on the implementation of disability rights today.

Simplican’s compelling ethnographic analysis of the self-advocacy movement describes the obstacles it faces. From the outside, the movement must confront stiff budget cuts and dwindling memberships; internally, self-advocates must find ways to demand political standing without reinforcing entrenched stigma against people with profound cognitive disabilities. And yet Simplican’s investigation also offers democratic theorists and disability activists a more emancipatory vision of democracy as it relates to disability⎯one that focuses on enabling people to engage in public and spontaneous action to disrupt exclusion and stigma.
Taking seriously democratic promises of equality and inclusion, The Capacity Contract rejects conceptions of political citizenship that privilege cognitive capacity and, instead, centers such citizenship on action that is accessible to all people.

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Cinematic Vitalism
Film Theory and the Question of Life
Inga Pollmann
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
This book argues that there are constitutive links between early twentieth-century German and French film theory and practice, on the one hand, and vitalist conceptions of life in biology and philosophy, on the other. By considering classical film-theoretical texts and their filmic objects in the light of vitalist ideas percolating in scientific and philosophical texts of the time, Cinematic Vitalism reveals the formation of a modernist, experimental and cinematic strand of vitalism in and around the movie theater. The book focuses on the key concepts including rhythm, environment, mood, and development to show how the cinematic vitalism articulated by film theorists and filmmakers maps out connections among human beings, milieus, and technologies that continue to structure our understanding of film.
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Citizenship in Question
Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Citizenship is often assumed to be a clear-cut issue—either one has it or one does not. However, as the contributors to Citizenship in Question demonstrate, citizenship is not self-evident; it emerges from often obscure written records and is interpreted through ambiguous and dynamic laws. In case studies that analyze the legal barriers to citizenship rights in over twenty countries, the contributors explore how states use evidentiary requirements to create and police citizenship, often based on fictions of racial, ethnic, class, and religious differences. Whether examining the United States’ deportation of its own citizens, the selective use of DNA tests and secret results in Thailand, or laws that have stripped entire populations of citizenship, the contributors emphasize the political, psychological, and personal impact of citizenship policies. Citizenship in Question incites scholars to revisit long-standing political theories and debates about nationality, free movement, and immigration premised on the assumption of clear demarcations between citizens and noncitizens.
 
Contributors. Alfred Babo, Jacqueline Bhabha, Jacqueline Field, Amanda Flaim, Sara L. Friedman, Daniel Kanstroom, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Beatrice McKenzie, Polly J. Price, Rachel E. Rosenbloom, Kim Rubenstein, Kamal Sadiq, Jacqueline Stevens, Margaret D. Stock
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Conceptualising "Home"
The Question of Belonging among Turkish Families in Germany
Esin Bozkurt
Campus Verlag, 2009
An extraordinarily rich account of the lives of Turkish men and women living in contemporary Germany, Conceptualising 'Home' offers striking insights into how members of a marginalized immigrant community make room for themselves and reconstruct homes away from home. Based on in-depth interviews, the volume places the life experiences of Turkish people into a broader theoretical perspective, while Esin Bozkurt's careful attention to gender and generational differences ensures an accurate, balanced representation. The result is a surprisingly useful understanding of the very idea of "home."
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Critical Transitions
Writing and the Question of Transfer
Chris M Anson
University Press of Colorado, 2017
In Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, Chris Anson and Jessie Moore offer an important new collection about prior learning and transfer theories that asks what writing knowledge should transfer, how we might recognize that transfer, and what the significance is—from a global perspective—of understanding knowledge transformation related to writing. The contributors examine strategies for supporting writers' transfer at key critical transitions, including transitions from high-school to college, from first-year writing to writing in the major and in the disciplines, between self-sponsored and academic writing, and between languages. The collection concludes with an epilogue offering next steps in studying and designing for writing transfer.

Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Chris M. Anson, Stuart Blythe, Scott Chien-Hsiung Chiu, Irene Clark, Nicolette Mercer Clement, Stacey M. Cozart, Gita DasBender, Christiane Donahue, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Dana R. Ferris, Gwen Gorzelsky, Regina A. McManigell Grijalva, Carol Hayes, Hogan Hayes, Tine Wirenfeldt Jensen, Ed Jones, Ketevan Kupatadze, Jessie L. Moore, Joe Paszek, Donna Qualley, Liane Robertson, Paula Rosinski, Kara Taczak, Elizabeth Wardle, Carl Whithaus, Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, Kathleen Blake Yancey
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Culture and the Question of Rights
Forests, Coasts, and Seas in Southeast Asia
Charles Zerner, ed.
Duke University Press, 2003
This collection of ethnographic and interpretive essays fundamentally alters the debate over indigenous land claims in Southeast Asia and beyond. Based on fieldwork conducted in Malaysia and Indonesia during the 1980s and 1990s, these studies explore new terrain at the intersection of environmental justice, nature conservation, cultural performance, and the politics of making and interpreting claims.
Calling for radical redefinitions of development and ownership and for new understandings of the translation of culture and rights in politically dangerous contexts—natural resource frontiers—this volume links social injustice and the degradation of Southeast Asian environments. Charles Zerner and his colleagues show how geographical areas once viewed as wild and undeveloped are actually cultural artifacts shaped by complex interactions with human societies. Drawing on richly varied sources of evidence and interpretation—from trance dances, court proceedings, tree planting patterns, marine and forest rituals, erotic poems, and codifications of customary law, Culture and the Question of Rights reveals the ironies, complexities, and histories of contemporary communities’ struggles to retain their gardens, forests, fishing territories, and graveyards. The contributors examine how these cultural activities work to both construct and to lay claim to nature. These essays open up new avenues for negotiating indigenous rights against a background of violence, proliferating markets, and global ideas of biodiversity and threatened habitat.

Contributors. Jane Atkinson, Don Brenneis, Stephanie Fried, Nancy Peluso, Marina Roseman, Anna Tsing, Charles Zerner

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Dracula's Crypt
Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood
Joseph Valente
University of Illinois Press, 2001
Dracula's Crypt unearths the Irish roots of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, offering a fresh interpretation of the author's relationship to his novel and to the politics of blood that consumes its characters.
 
An ingenious reappraisal of a classic text, Dracula's Crypt presents Stoker's novel as a subtly ironic commentary on England's preoccupation with racial purity. Probing psychobiographical, political, and cultural elements of Stoker's background and milieu, Joseph Valente distinguishes Stoker's viewpoint from that of his virulently racist, hypermasculine vampire hunters, showing how the author's dual Anglo-Celtic heritage and uncertain status as an Irish parvenu among London's theatrical elite led him to espouse a progressive racial ideology at odds with the dominant Anglo-Saxon supremacism. In the light of Stoker's experience, the shabby-genteel Count Dracula can be seen as a doppelgänger, an ambiguous figure who is at once the blood-conscious landed aristocrat and the bloodthirsty foreign invader.
 
Stoker also confronts gender ideals and their implications, exposing the "inner vampire" in men like Jonathan Harker who dominate and absorb the women who become their wives. Ultimately, Valente argues, the novel celebrates a feminine heroism, personified by Mina Harker, that upholds an ethos of social connectivity against the prevailing obsession with blood as a vehicle of identity.
 
Revealing a profound and heretofore unrecognized ethical and political message, Dracula's Crypt maintains that the real threat delineated in Dracula is not racial degeneration but the destructive force of racialized anxiety itself. Stoker's novel emerges as a powerful critique of the very anxieties it has previously been taken to express: anxieties concerning the decline of the British empire, the deterioration of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the contamination of the Anglo-Saxon race.
 
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Empire in Question
Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism
Antoinette Burton
Duke University Press, 2011
Featuring essays written by the influential historian Antoinette Burton since the mid-1990s, Empire in Question traces the development of a particular, contentious strand of modern British history, the “new imperial history,” through the eyes of a scholar who helped to shape the field. In her teaching and writing, Burton has insisted that the vectors of imperial power run in multiple directions, argued that race must be incorporated into history writing, and emphasized that gender and sexuality are critical dimensions of imperial history. Empire in Question includes Burton’s groundbreaking critiques of British historiography, as well as essays in which she brings theory to bear on topics from Jane Eyre to nostalgia for colonial India. Burton’s autobiographical introduction describes how her early encounters with feminist and postcolonial critique led to her convictions that we must ask who counts as a subject of imperial history, and that we should maintain a healthy skepticism regarding the claims to objectivity that shape much modern history writing. In the coda, she candidly reflects on shortcomings in her own thinking and in the new imperial history, and she argues that British history must be repositioned in relation to world history. Much of Burton’s writing emerged from her teaching; Empire in Question is meant to engage students and teachers in debates about how to think about British imperialism in light of contemporary events.
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The Family in Question
Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities in Multicultural Europe
Ralph Grillo
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
The family lives of immigrants and ethnic minority populations have become central to arguments about the right and wrong ways of living in multicultural societies. While the characteristic cultural practices of such families have long been scrutinized by the media and policy makers, these groups themselves are beginning to reflect on how to manage their family relationships in a world where migration is a transnational piece of the pluralized global puzzle. Exploring case studies from Austria, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Australia, The Family in Question explores how those in public policy often dangerously reflect the popular imagination, xenophobically stereotyping immigrants and their families, rather than recognizing the complex changes taking place within the global immigrant community.
 
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Global Governance in Question
Empire, Class and the New Common Sense in Managing North-South Relations
Susanne Soederberg
Pluto Press, 2006
"Global governance is the latest buzzword. Now comes a study that brings clarity and critical analysis to this ill-defined topic."
William I. Robinson, University of California-Santa Barbara

"[An] acute and revealing examination of the economic difficulties facing the American empire."
Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Professor of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Indispensable for students of international polical economy and a must for political activists." Professor Elmar Altvater, Department of Political Science, Free University, Berlin

Like many buzzwords, 'global governance' is as poorly understood as it is popular. In contrast to most mainstream accounts, this book examines global economic governance as an integral moment of contemporary capitalism -- presenting a critical insight into its real nature and the interests that it serves.

This book begins by asking what has not been discussed in the mainstream debates and why. Drawing on a Marxist perspective, Soederberg explores neglected issues including transnational debt and the increasingly coercive nature of US aid to so-called Œfailed states'. Soederberg argues that mainstream understandings fail to engage with the wider contradictions that characterise global capitalism. In consequence, there is no explanation of the changing nature of American empire and capitalist power in the world. Furthermore, Soederberg argues that global governance acts to normalise and legitimise increasingly austere forms of capitalist expansion, which may be regarded as a deepening and broadening of neoliberalism.

Susanne Soederberg is a Canada Research Chair in Global Political Economy and Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. She is author of The Politics of the New International Financial Architecture: Reimposing Neoliberal Domination in the Global South (Zed, 2005).
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Heidegger
The Question of Being and History
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida’s primary conceptual concerns—indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word “deconstruction”—but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy.
           
Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger’s prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger’s Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into “solicitation” and “deconstruction”) of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger’s thinking.
           
This is a rare window onto Derrida’s formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we’ve come to recognize—one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his. 
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How “Indians” Think
Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory
Gonzalo Lamana
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The conquest and colonization of the Americas marked the beginning of a social, economic, and cultural change of global scale. Most of what we know about how colonial actors understood and theorized this complex historical transformation comes from Spanish sources. This makes the few texts penned by Indigenous intellectuals in colonial times so important: they allow us to see how some of those who inhabited the colonial world in a disadvantaged position thought and felt about it.
 
This book shines light on Indigenous perspectives through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Building on but also departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.
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Indianizing Film
Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology
Schiwy, Freya
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Latin American indigenous media production has recently experienced a noticeable boom, specifically in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Indianizing Film zooms in on a selection of award-winning and widely influential fiction and docudrama shorts, analyzing them in the wider context of indigenous media practices and debates over decolonizing knowledge. Within this framework, Freya Schiwy approaches questions of gender, power, and representation.

Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.

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The Maghrib in Question
Essays in History and Historiography
Edited by Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins
University of Texas Press, 1997

A wealth of historical writing dealing with the Maghrib (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) has been published during the roughly forty years since European colonial control ended in the region. This book provides a "state of the field" survey of this postcolonial Maghribi historiography.

The book contains thirteen essays by leading Maghribi and North American scholars. The first section surveys the Maghrib as a whole; the second focuses on individual countries of the Maghrib; and the third explores theoretical issues and case studies. Cutting across chronological categories, the book encompasses historiographical writing dealing with all eras, from the ancient Maghrib to the contemporary period.

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Mexican Americans and the Question of Race
By Julie A. Dowling
University of Texas Press, 2014

Honorable Mention, Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, presented by the Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section of the American Sociological Association, 2015

With Mexican Americans constituting a large and growing segment of U.S. society, their assimilation trajectory has become a constant source of debate. Some believe Mexican Americans are following the path of European immigrants toward full assimilation into whiteness, while others argue that they remain racialized as nonwhite. Drawing on extensive interviews with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in Texas, Dowling’s research challenges common assumptions about what informs racial labeling for this population. Her interviews demonstrate that for Mexican Americans, racial ideology is key to how they assert their identities as either in or outside the bounds of whiteness. Emphasizing the link between racial ideology and racial identification, Dowling offers an insightful narrative that highlights the complex and highly contingent nature of racial identity.

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Naturalism in Question
Mario De Caro
Harvard University Press, 2008

Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the "naturalist" credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists--whether human or nonhuman. The new faith says science, not man, is the measure of all things. However, there is a growing skepticism about the adequacy of this complacent orthodoxy. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism.

The many prominent Anglo-American philosophers appearing in this book--Akeel Bilgrami, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, John Dupré, Jennifer Hornsby, Erin Kelly, John McDowell, Huw Price, Hilary Putnam, Carol Rovane, Barry Stroud, and Stephen White--do not march in lockstep, yet their contributions demonstrate mutual affinities and various unifying themes. Instead of attempting to force human nature into a restricted scientific image of the world, these papers represent an attempt to place human nature at the center of renewed--but still scientifically respectful--conceptions of philosophy and nature.

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Of Spirit
Heidegger and the Question
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1991
"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism—of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought—they still want to today—to oppose to the inhuman.

"Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism. . . . . This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts."—David Hoy, London Review of Books

"Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit. . . . Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style."—David Farrell Krell, Research in Phenomenology

"The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive."—Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review
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front cover of Of Spirit
Of Spirit
Heidegger and the Question
Jacques Derrida
University of Chicago Press, 1989
"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism—of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought—they still want to today—to oppose to the inhuman.

"Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism. . . . . This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts."—David Hoy, London Review of Books

"Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit. . . . Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style."—David Farrell Krell, Research in Phenomenology

"The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive."—Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review
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Phenomenology for Actors
Theatre-Making and the Question of Being
Daniel Johnston
Intellect Books, 2021
A valuable new touchstone for phenomenology and performance as research.

In this book, Daniel Johnston examines how phenomenology can describe, analyze, and inspire theater-making. Each chapter introduces themes to guide the creative process through objects, bodies, spaces, time, history, freedom, and authenticity. Key examples in the work are drawn from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Practical tasks throughout explore how the theatrical event can offer unique insights into being and existence, as Johnston’s philosophical perspective shines a light on broader existential issues of being. In this way, the book makes a bold contribution to the study of acting as an embodied form of philosophy and reveals how phenomenology can be a rich source of creativity for actors, directors, designers, and collaborators in the performance process.

Brimming with insight into the practice and theory of acting, this original new work stimulates new approaches to rehearsal and sees theater-making as capable of speaking back to philosophical discourse.
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The Picture in Question
Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation
Mark C. Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 1999
A rich exploration of the possibilities of representation after Modernism, Mark Taylor's new study charts the logic and continuity of Mark Tansey's painting by considering the philosophical ideas behind Tansey's art. Taylor examines how Tansey uses structuralist and poststructuralist thought as well as catastrophe, chaos, and complexity theory to create paintings that please the eye while provoking the mind. Taylor's clear accounts of thinkers ranging from Plato, Kant, and Hegel to Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and de Man will be an invaluable contribution to students and teachers of art.

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Postcolonial France
The Question of Race and the Future of the Republic
Paul Silverstein
Pluto Press, 2018
France has in recent years emerged as a bellwether for worldwide anxieties around postcolonialism and multiculturalism, and the rise of right-wing populism. This book offers a detailed exploration of the dynamics and dilemmas of the present moment of crisis and hope in France through an exploration of a number of recent moral panics. Paul Silverstein here examines urban racial violence, female Islamic dress and male public prayer, anti-system gangster rap, and sports—all of which have triggered major national debates over France’s multicultural future. Silverstein shows convincingly that these conflicts can be traced back to unresolved tensions around France's imperial project, the present-day effects of which are still being felt.
 
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Postcolonial Insecurities
India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood
Sankaran Krishna
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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The Question of Animal Culture
Kevin N. Laland
Harvard University Press, 2009
Fifty years ago, a troop of Japanese macaques was observed washing sandy sweet potatoes in a stream, sending ripples through the fields of ethology, comparative psychology, and cultural anthropology. The issue of animal culture has been hotly debated ever since. Now Kevin Laland and Bennett Galef have gathered key voices in the often rancorous debate to summarize the views along the continuum from “Culture? Of course!” to “Culture? Of course not!” The result is essential reading for anyone interested in the validity of animal culture, and what it might say about our own.
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A Question of Balance
How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe
Michael Creswell
Harvard University Press, 2006

Challenging standard interpretations of American dominance and French weakness in postwar Western Europe, Michael Creswell argues that France played a key role in shaping the cold war order. In the decade after the war, the U.S. government's primary objective was to rearm the Federal Republic of Germany within the framework of a European defense force--the European Defense Community. American and French officials differed, however, over the composition of the EDC and the rules governing its organization and use.

Although U.S. pressure played a part, more decisive factors--in both internal French politics and international French concerns--ultimately led France to sanction the plan to rearm West Germany. Creswell sketches the successful French challenge to the United States, tracing the genuine, sometimes heated, debate between the two nations that ultimately resulted in security arrangements preferred by the French but acceptable to the Americans.

Impressively researched and vigorously argued, A Question of Balance advances significantly our understanding of power politics and the rise of the cold war system in Western Europe.

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A Question of Character
Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912
Catherine Ann Boeckmann
University of Alabama Press, 2005

Boeckmann links character, literary genre, and science, revealing how major literary works both contributed to and disrupted the construction of race in turn-of-the-century America.

In A Question of Character, Cathy Boeckmann establishes a strong link between racial questions and the development of literary traditions at the end of the 19th century in America. This period saw the rise of "scientific racism," which claimed that the races were distinguished not solely by exterior appearance but also by a set of inherited character traits. As Boeckmann explains, this emphasis on character meant that race was not only a thematic concern in the literature of the period but also a generic or formal one as well.

Boeckmann explores the intersections between race and literary history by tracing the language of character through both scientific and literary writing. Nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences such as phrenology and physiognomy had a vocabulary for discussing racial character that overlapped conceptually with the conventions for portraying race in literature. Through close readings of novels by Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson—each of which deals with a black character "passing" as white—Boeckmann shows how this emphasis on character relates to the shift from romantic and sentimental fiction to realism. Because each of these genres had very specific conventions regarding the representation of character, genres often dictated how races could be depicted.
 

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A Question of Class
The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction
Duane Carr
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
“Rednecks” have long been subjects of scorn and ridicule, especially in the South. Carr probes the historical and sociological reasons for the descent of this social class into poverty, their inability to rise above it, and their continuing subjugation to a stereotype developed by others—and all too often accepted by themselves. Carr also records the progress in Southern fiction of this negative stereotype, from antebellum writers who saw rednecks as threats to the social order, to post-Civil War writers who lamented the lost potential of these people and urged sympathy and understanding, to contemporary writers who favor acceptance. Ultimately, this work is an evaluation of individual Southern fiction writers in their capacity to rise above stereotyping.
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The Question of Embodiment, Volume 15
Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney, eds.
Duke University Press
This special issue of differences addresses the realization that "nature" and "nurture" are now seen to be inseparably and dynamically related in the determination of human cultural expression, rather than divided as previously thought. Contributors delve into this dynamic relationship, approaching it particularly from a feminist perspective.

Contributors. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Petra Kuppers, Jennifer Reardon, Gayle Salamon, Elizabeth A. Wilson

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The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology
George Kovacs
Northwestern University Press, 1990
Several philosophers have developed theological perspectives out of Heidegger's ontology. Yet the question of God in Heidegger's thought itself has never received full elucidation. In this revealing new study, George Kovacs poses the problem of analyzing the idea of God as a process of questioning and thus subjects Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to a process of exposition Heidegger himself employed.
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A Question of Identity
Women, Science, and Literature
Benjamin, Marina
Rutgers University Press, 1993
 .
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A Question of Justice
New South Governors and Education, 1968-1976
Gordon E. Harvey
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Three trailblazers for education reform in the Sunbelt South.

In southern politics, 1970 marked a watershed. A group of southern governors entered office that year and changed both the way the nation looked at the South and the way the constituents of those states viewed themselves. Reubin Askew in Florida, John West in South Carolina, Jimmy Carter in Georgia, and Albert Brewer in Alabama all represented a new breed of progressive moderate politician that helped demolish Jim Crow segregation and the dual economies, societies, and educational systems notorious to the Sunbelt South. Historian Gordon Harvey explores the political lives and legacies of three of these governors, examining the conditions that led to such a radical change in political leadership, the effects their legislative agendas had on the identity of their states, and the aftermath of their terms in elected office.

A common thread in each governor's agenda was educational reform. Albert Brewer's short term as Alabama governor resulted in a sweeping education package that still stands as the most progressive the state has seen. Reubin Askew, far more outspoken than Brewer, won the Florida gubernatorial election through a campaign that openly promoted desegregation, busing, and tax reform as a means of equal school funding. John West's commitment to a policy of inclusion helped allay fears of both black and white parents and made South Carolina's one of the smoothest transitions to integrated schools.

As members of the first generation of New South governors, Brewer, Askew, and West played the role of trailblazers. Their successful assaults on economic and racial injustice in their states were certainly aided by such landmark events as Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement, and the expansion of voting rights-all of which sounded the death knell for the traditional one-party segregated South. But in this critical detailing of their work for justice, we learn how these reform-minded men made education central to their gubernatorial terms and, in doing so, helped redefine the very character of the place they called home.

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The Question of MacArthur's Reputation
Côte De Châtillon, October 14-16, 1918
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Perhaps the best known of all American five-star generals, Douglas MacArthur established his military reputation at the hill of Châtillon during the great battle of the Meuse-Argonne in World War I. The thirty-eight-year-old brigadier general in command of the Eighty-fourth Infantry Brigade boasted to a fellow general that he had inspired his troops by example, taking the hill and breaking the main German line in northern France. Ever since, historical accounts and biographies have celebrated his leadership and bravery.
            That MacArthur’s forces prevailed is beyond question, as military historians have shown. Yet in all the annals of the Great War there is no detailed description of what happened at Châtillon, nor of what MacArthur had to do with it. Robert Ferrell examines those events and comes to a startling conclusion—one that will revise how we view this archetypal American hero.
            After sifting through the inexact accounts of the battle found in regimental and divisional histories—and through the many biographies of MacArthur that assert his leadership at Châtillon but do not describe it—Ferrell has gone into Army records to determine if what MacArthur claimed was true. In a moment-by-moment account of the battle, he reconstructs the movements of troops and the decisions of officers to show in detail how MacArthur’s subordinates were the true heroes.
Ferrell describes how the taking of Côte de Châtillon could have been a disaster had the Eighty-fourth Brigade followed MacArthur's original plan, a bayonet charge at night. Wiser heads prevailed, and the attack of the Iowa and Alabama regiments was a great success.
            Ferrell has completed a chapter in the history of World War I that has stood unfinished for years, showing in masterly fashion how MacArthur exaggerated his reputation at Châtillon. The Question of MacArthur’s Reputation will reward historians seeking to fill gaps in the record, engage readers who enjoy descriptions of battle, and startle all who take their heroes for granted.
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A Question of Quality
Popularity and Value in Modern Creative Writing
Edited by Louis Filler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976

The subjects treated in this symposium have one major characteristic in common, that they have recently, or relatively recently, enjoyed high popularity among readers. Also, they have received from substantial to torrents of comment.

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A Question of Seeing
Poems
Donald Finkel
University of Arkansas Press, 1998

In lines electrified with lyricism and wit, Donald Finkel carves a clearing out of the backyard brush and the intellectual brambles of existence.

Whether he writes a short lyric or a long experimental series, Finkel relies on concrete images—a breeze through grass, a cigarette in a piano player’s hand—to ground his central questions about the clash of order and chaos in our everyday lives.

He delights in naming weeds and towering trees, cars and streets. Yet, in each poem, there is a constant tension between the actual wind and the words we must use to convey the wind’s force.

Working fluently in formal lines and in free verse, he can write with equal authority of butchers or great painters, aged bookkeepers or schizophrenics, Greek gods or house cats. In this new collection, Finkel has given us the priceless keepsakes, the best gifts from the clearing his words have won.

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A Question of Sex
Feminism, Rhetoric, and Differences That Matter
Kristan Poirot
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
By the mid-1990s feminist theorists and critics began to challenge conventional thinking about sex difference and its relationship to gender and sexuality. Scholars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler troubled the sex-gender/nature-nurture divide. Some have asserted that these questions about sex are much too abstract to contribute to a valuable understanding of the material politics faced by feminist movements. In A Question of Sex, Kristan Poirot challenges this assumption and demonstrates that contemporary theories about sex, gender, identity, and difference compel a rethinking of the history of feminist movements and their rhetorical practices.

Poirot focuses on five case studies—the circulation of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" in early and contemporary feminist contexts; the visual rhetorics of the feminist self-help health movement; the public discourse of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and early nineteenth-century ideas about suffrage, sex, and race; the conflicts over lesbian sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s; and the discourse that surrounds twenty-first-century SlutWalks. In the process, Poirot rethinks the terms through which we understand U.S. feminist movements to explore the ways feminism has questioned sexed distinctions and practices over time. She emphasizes the importance of reading feminist engagements with sex as rhetorical endeavors—practices that are shaped by the instrumental demands of movements, the exigent situations that call for feminists to respond, and the enduring philosophical traditions that circulate in U.S. political contexts., reviewing a previous edition or volume
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The Question of the Commons
The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources
Edited by Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson
University of Arizona Press, 1987
This collection of eighteen original essays evaluates the use and misuse of common-property resources, taking as its starting point ecologist Garret Hardin's assertion in "The Tragedy of the Commons" that common property is doomed to overexploitation in any society. This book represents the first cross-cultural test of Hardin's argument and argues that, while tragedies of the commons do occur under some circumstances, local institutions have proven resilient and responsive to the problems of communal resource use.
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A Question of Upbringing
Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
University of Chicago Press, 1995

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

A Question of Upbringing (1951) introduces us to the young Nick Jenkins and his housemates at boarding school in the years just after World War I. Boyhood pranks and visits from relatives bring to life the amusements and longueurs of schooldays even as they reveal characters and traits that will follow Jenkins and his friends through adolescence and beyond: Peter Templer, a rich, passionate womanizer; Charles Stringham, aristocratic and louche; and Kenneth Widmerpool, awkward and unhappy, yet strikingly ambitious. By the end of the novel, Jenkins has finished university and is setting out on a life in London; old ties are fraying, new ones are forming, and the first steps of the dance are well underway.

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times



"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

 

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”—Kingsley Amis


“There is no other work in the annals of European fiction that attempts meticulously to recreate half a century of history, decade by decade, with anything like the emotional precision or details of Powell’s twelve volumes. Neither Balzac’s panorama of the Restoration, nor Zola’s chronicles of the Second Empire, nor Proust’s reveries in the Belle Epoque can match a comparable span of time, an attention to variations within it, or a compositional intricacy capable of uniting them into a single narrative. . . . The elegance of this artifice was only compatible with comedy.”—Perry Anderson

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A Question of Voice
Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy
Ron Scapp
University of Michigan Press, 2020
A Question of Voice: Philosophy and the Search for Legitimacy offers an explicit and comprehensive consideration of voice as a complex of rethinking aspects of the history of philosophy through issues of power, as well as contemporary issues that include and involve the desire for and the dynamics of legitimacy, for individuals and communities. By identifying voice as a significant theme and means by which and through which we might better engage some important philosophical questions, Ron Scapp hopes to expand traditional philosophical discussion and discourse regarding questions about validity, legitimacy, empathy, and solidarity. He offers an innovative perspective that is informed and guided by multiculturalism, ethnic studies, queer studies, feminism, and thinkers and critics such as bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, among others. A Question of Voice is an American investigation, but also suggests questions that emanate from contemporary continental thought as well as issues that arise from transnational perspectives—an approach that is motived by doing philosophy in an age of multiculturalism.
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The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
Tani E. Barlow
Duke University Press, 2004
The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is a history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. She reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary criticism, ethics, and revolutionary political ideologies to illustrate the range and scope of Chinese feminist theory’s preoccupation with the problem of gender inequality. She reveals how, throughout the cataclysms of colonial modernity, revolutionary modernization, and market socialism, prominent Chinese feminists have gathered up the remainders of the past and formed them into social and ethical arguments, categories, and political positions, ceaselessly reshaping progressive Enlightenment sexual liberation theory.
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Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger
David Simpson
University of Chicago Press, 2012
In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger—the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor—carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are “different” has become particularly strong. But arguments about the stranger are not unique to our time. In Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, David Simpson locates the figure of the stranger and the rhetoric of strangeness in romanticism and places them in a tradition that extends from antiquity to today.
 
Simpson shows that debates about strangers loomed large in the French Republic of the 1790s, resulting in heated discourse that weighed who was to be welcomed and who was to be proscribed as dangerous. Placing this debate in the context of classical, biblical, and other later writings, he identifies a persistent difficulty in controlling the play between the despised and the desired. He examines the stranger as found in the works of Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and Southey, as well as in depictions of the betrayals of hospitality in the literature of slavery and exploration—as in Mungo Park's Travels and Stedman's Narrative—and portrayals of strange women in de Staël, Rousseau, and Burney. Contributing to a rich strain of thinking about the stranger that includes interventions by Ricoeur and Derrida, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger reveals the complex history of encounters with alien figures and our continued struggles with romantic concerns about the unknown.
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Social Science for What?
Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up
Alice O'Connor
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Much like today, the early twentieth century was a period of rising economic inequality and political polarization in America. But it was also an era of progressive reform—a time when the Russell Sage Foundation and other philanthropic organizations were established to promote social science as a way to solve the crises of industrial capitalism. In Social Science for What? Alice O'Connor relates the history of philanthropic social science, exploring its successes and challenges over the years, and asking how these foundations might continue to promote progressive social change in our own politically divided era. The philanthropic foundations established in the early 1900s focused on research which, while intended to be objective, was also politically engaged. In addition to funding social science research, in its early years the Russell Sage Foundation also supported social work and advocated reforms on issues from child welfare to predatory lending. This reformist agenda shaped the foundation's research priorities and methods. The Foundation's landmark Pittsburgh Survey of wage labor, conducted in 1907-1908, involved not only social scientists but leaders of charities, social workers, and progressive activists, and was designed not simply to answer empirical questions, but to reframe the public discourse about industrial labor. After World War II, many philanthropic foundations disengaged from political struggles and shifted their funding toward more value-neutral, academic social inquiry, in the belief that disinterested research would yield more effective public policies. Consequently, these foundations were caught off guard in the 1970s and 1980s by the emergence of a network of right-wing foundations, which was successful in promoting an openly ideological agenda. In order to counter the political in-roads made by conservative organizations, O'Connor argues that progressive philanthropic research foundations should look to the example of their founders. While continuing to support the social science research that has contributed so much to American society over the past 100 years, they should be more direct about the values that motivate their research.  In this way, they will help foster a more democratic dialogue on important social issues by using empirical knowledge to engage fundamentally ethical concerns about rising inequality. O'Connor's message is timely: public-interest social science faces unprecedented challenges in this era of cultural warfare, as both liberalism and science itself have come under assault. Social Science for What? is a thought-provoking critique of the role of social science in improving society and an indispensable guide to how progressives can reassert their voice in the national political debate. A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Centennial Series
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Sovereignty at the Edge
Macau and the Question of Chineseness
Cathryn H. Clayton
Harvard University Press, 2009

How have conceptions and practices of sovereignty shaped how ­Chineseness is imagined? This ethnography addresses this question through the example of Macau, a southern Chinese city that was a Portuguese colony from the 1550s until 1999. As the Portuguese administration prepared to transfer Macau to Chinese control, it mounted a campaign to convince the city’s residents, 95 percent of whom identified as Chinese, that they possessed a “unique cultural identity” that made them different from other Chinese, and that resulted from the existence of a Portuguese state on Chinese soil.

This attempt sparked reflections on the meaning of Portuguese governance that challenged not only conventional definitions of sovereignty but also conventional notions of Chineseness as a subjectivity common to all Chinese people around the world. Various stories about sovereignty and Chineseness and their interrelationship were told in Macau in the 1990s. This book is about those stories and how they informed the lives of Macau residents in ways that allowed different relationships among sovereignty, subjectivity, and culture to become thinkable, while also providing a sense of why, at times, it may not be desirable to think them.

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Speaking for the People
Native Writing and the Question of Political Form
Mark Rifkin
Duke University Press, 2021
In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors (William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša) illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking. These writers highlight the complex processes involved in negotiating the character, contours, and scope of Indigenous sovereignties under ongoing colonial occupation. Rifkin argues that attending to these writers' engagements with non-native publics helps provide further analytical tools for addressing the complexities of Indigenous governance on the ground—both then and now. Thinking about Native peoplehood and politics as a matter of form opens possibilities for addressing the difficult work involved in navigating among varied possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting peoplehood in the context of continuing settler intervention. As Rifkin demonstrates, attending to writings by these Indigenous intellectuals provides ways of understanding Native governance as a matter of deliberation, discussion, and debate, emphasizing the open-ended unfinishedness of self-determination.
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Stately Bodies
Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender
Adriana Cavarero
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Stately Bodies explores the curious prevalence of bodily metaphors in conceptions of noncorporeal institutions: the state, the law, and politics itself. The book builds on work from Adriana Cavarero's well-received study, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. In that work Cavarero--as political theorist, philosopher, classicist, and close reader--examines literary and philosophical texts from Greek antiquity to modern to reveal the paradox that characterizes notions of the "body politic" in Western political philosophy.
She examines bodily metaphor in political discourse and in fictional depictions of politics, including Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Timaeus, Livy, John of Salisbury, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Hobbes' Leviathan. An appendix explores two texts by women that disrupt these notions: Maria Zambrano's Tomb of Antigone and Ingeborg Bachmann's Undine Goes.
Cavarero exposes the problematic nature of the mind/body dualism that has been essential in Western thought. Her insight that the expelled, depoliticized body is a female one becomes an instrument for decoding many paradoxical tropes of the political body. For instance, Cavarero revisits Antigone as the tragedy in which a body that is displaced, bleeding, and matrilinear allows the construction of a political order where misogynous rationality rules. Throughout the book, Cavarero argues that women have been cast by male thinkers into the realm of the corporeal as nonpolitical, and also suggests that this nonpolitical position is also a source of knowledge and power, that politics is a masculine pursuit that should not be admired or envied.
Adriana Cavarero is Professor of Philosophy, University of Verona, and frequently is Visiting Professor. New York University. Her books Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy were published by Routledge.
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Strategic Occidentalism
On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature
Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Northwestern University Press, 2018
Strategic Occidentalism examines the transformation, in both aesthetics and infrastructure, of Mexican fiction since the late 1970s. During this time a framework has emerged characterized by the corporatization of publishing, a frictional relationship between Mexican literature and global book markets, and the desire of Mexican writers to break from dominant models of national culture.

In the course of this analysis, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado engages with theories of world literature, proposing that “world literature” is a construction produced at various levels, including the national, that must be studied from its material conditions of production in specific sites. In particular, he argues that Mexican writers have engaged in a “strategic Occidentalism” in which their idiosyncratic connections with world literature have responded to dynamics different from those identified by world-systems or diffusionist theorists.

Strategic Occidentalism identifies three scenes in which a cosmopolitan aesthetics in Mexican world literature has been produced: Sergio Pitol’s translation of Eastern European and marginal British modernist literature; the emergence of the Crack group as a polemic against the legacies of magical realism; and the challenges of writers like Carmen Boullosa, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ana García Bergua to the roles traditionally assigned to Latin American writers in world literature.
 
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The Subject in Question
Early Contemporary Spanish Literature and Modernism
C. Christopher Soufas
Catholic University of America Press, 2007
The Subject in Question presents the first systematic study of "Spanish modernism" in an attempt to end Spain's literary isolation from the mainstream of early contemporary European literature.
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Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light
Peter Handke
Seagull Books, 2010

Described as an answer to or at least an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape?, Till Day You Do Part Or A Question of Light, by esteemed Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, is a monologue delivered by the “she” in Beckett’s play. This unnamed female similarly recalls other significant women protagonists in Handke’s own work such as The Left-handed Woman. Handke prefaces the monologue in Till Day You Do PartOr a Question of Light with a description of two stone figures. While the male figure remains “as dead and gone as anyone can,” the female bursts into life, and her monologue gradually focuses on Krapp’s use of pauses and language to dominate the other characters in the Beckett play. Ultimately, however, her complaints and critique of Krapp become a declaration of her love for Krapp or at least an affirmation of their attachment, as the two of them are ultimately bound together, perhaps even inseparable. 

Till Day You Do Part Or a Question of Light  
is Handke at his best, evidencing the great skill, psychological acumen, and vision for which his work has been celebrated.

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Time & Eternity
The Question of Time in Church, Science and Theology
Antje Jackelen
Templeton Press, 2005

What is time? Is there a link between objective knowledge about time and subjective experience of time? And what is eternity? Does religion have the answer? Does science?

Internationally known scholar Antje Jackelén investigates the problem and concept of time. Her study draws on her experiences in the Continental-European science and religion dialogue, with a particular focus on the German, Scandinavian, and Anglo-American dialogues. Her analysis of the subject includes:
 
•The notion of time and eternity as it is narrated through Christian hymn books stemming from Germany, Sweden, and the English-speaking world, with insights into changes of the concept and understanding of time in Christian spirituality over the past few decades
•Theological approaches to time and eternity, as well as a look at Trinitarian theology and its relation to time
•The discussion of scientific theories of time, including Newtonian, relativistic, quantum, and chaos theories
•The formulation of a "theology of time," a theological-mathematical model incorporating relational thinking oriented toward the future, the doctrine of trinity, and the notion of eschatology

 

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Tomorrow Is the Question
New Directions in Experimental Music Studies
Edited by Benjamin Piekut
University of Michigan Press, 2014
In recent decades, experimental music has flourished outside of European and American concert halls. The principles of indeterminacy, improvisation, nonmusical sound, and noise, pioneered in concert and on paper by the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, can now be found in all kinds of new places: activist films, rock recordings, and public radio broadcasts, not to mention in avant-garde movements around the world.

The contributors to Tomorrow Is the Question explore these previously unexamined corners of experimental music history, considering topics such as Sonic Youth, Julius Eastman, the Downtown New York pop avant-garde of the 1970s, Fluxus composer Benjamin Patterson, Tokyo’s Music group (aka Group Ongaku), the Balinese avant-garde, the Leicester school of British experimentalists, Cuba’s Grupo de Experimentación Sonora del ICAIC, Pauline Oliveros’s score for the feminist documentary Maquilapolis, NPR’s 1980s RadioVisions, and the philosophy of experimental musical aesthetics.

Taken together, this menagerie of people, places, and things makes up an actually existing experimentalism that is always partial, compromised, and invented in its local and particular formations—in other words, these individual cases suggest that experimentalism has been a far more variegated set of practices and discourses than previously recognized. Asking new questions leads to researching new materials, new individuals, and new contexts and, eventually, to the new critical paradigms that are necessary to interpret these materials. Gathering contributions from historical musicology, enthnomusicology, history, philosophy, and cultural studies, Tomorrow Is the Question generates future research directions in experimental music studies by way of a productive inquiry that sustains and elaborates critical conversations.
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Transnational Migration and Asia
The Question of Return
Edited by Michiel Baas
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
As our increasingly globalized world alters the dynamics of migration, the ideas that migrants have about returning to their home countries have evolved as well. This diverse collection examines the changes and complexities of migration patterns in a range ofAsian countries and cities, exploring how globalization and transnationalism shape and give meaning to the migrant experience. From Japanese-Brazilian transmigrants and Filipina students in Ireland to skilled migrants from India, the authors address migrants’ backgrounds, ambitions, and opportunities to offer intriguing insights and propose fascinating new questions about the lives of migrants in today’s world.
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Washington at the Plow
The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery
Bruce A. Ragsdale
Harvard University Press, 2021

Winner of the George Washington Prize

A fresh, original look at George Washington as an innovative land manager whose singular passion for farming would unexpectedly lead him to reject slavery.

George Washington spent more of his working life farming than he did at war or in political office. For over forty years, he devoted himself to the improvement of agriculture, which he saw as the means by which the American people would attain the “respectability & importance which we ought to hold in the world.”

Washington at the Plow depicts the “first farmer of America” as a leading practitioner of the New Husbandry, a transatlantic movement that spearheaded advancements in crop rotation. A tireless experimentalist, Washington pulled up his tobacco and switched to wheat production, leading the way for the rest of the country. He filled his library with the latest agricultural treatises and pioneered land-management techniques that he hoped would guide small farmers, strengthen agrarian society, and ensure the prosperity of the nation.

Slavery was a key part of Washington’s pursuits. He saw enslaved field workers and artisans as means of agricultural development and tried repeatedly to adapt slave labor to new kinds of farming. To this end, he devised an original and exacting system of slave supervision. But Washington eventually found that forced labor could not achieve the productivity he desired. His inability to reconcile ideals of scientific farming and rural order with race-based slavery led him to reconsider the traditional foundations of the Virginia plantation. As Bruce Ragsdale shows, it was the inefficacy of chattel slavery, as much as moral revulsion at the practice, that informed Washington’s famous decision to free his slaves after his death.

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What Is the Mishnah?
The State of the Question
Shaye J. D. Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2023

The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic Judaism—all of rabbinic law, from ancient to modern times, is based on the Talmud, and the Talmud, in turn, is based on the Mishnah. But the Mishnah is also an elusive document; its sources and setting are obscure, as are its genre and purpose.

In January 2021 the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law of the Harvard Law School co-sponsored a conference devoted to the simple yet complicated question: “What is the Mishnah?” Leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel assessed the state of the art in Mishnah studies; and the papers delivered at that conference form the basis of this collection. Learned yet accessible, What Is the Mishnah? gives readers a clear sense of current and future direction of Mishnah studies.

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