Sunday, December 6, 2009

Wayward Contracts or Identities Affiliations and Allegiances

Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674

Author: Victoria Ann Kahn

Why did the language of contract become the dominant metaphor for the relationship between subject and sovereign in mid-seventeenth-century England? In Wayward Contracts, Victoria Kahn takes issue with the usual explanation for the emergence of contract theory in terms of the origins of liberalism, with its notions of autonomy, liberty, and equality before the law.

Drawing on literature as well as political theory, state trials as well as religious debates, Kahn argues that the sudden prominence of contract theory was part of the linguistic turn of early modern culture, when government was imagined in terms of the poetic power to bring new artifacts into existence. But this new power also brought in its wake a tremendous anxiety about the contingency of obligation and the instability of the passions that induce individuals to consent to a sovereign power. In this wide-ranging analysis of the cultural significance of contract theory, the lover and the slave, the tyrant and the regicide, the fool and the liar emerge as some of the central, if wayward, protagonists of the new theory of political obligation. The result is must reading for students and scholars of early modern literature and early modern political theory, as well as historians of political thought and of liberalism.



Table of Contents:
Ch. 1Introduction1
Pt. IAn anatomy of contract, 1590-164029
Ch. 2Language and the bond of conscience31
Ch. 3The passions and voluntary servitude57
Pt. IIA poetics of contract, 1640-167481
Ch. 4Imagination83
Ch. 5Violence112
Ch. 6Metalanguage134
Ch. 7Gender171
Ch. 8Embodiment196
Ch. 9Sympathy223
Ch. 10Critique252
Ch. 11Conclusion279

Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances

Author: Seyla Benhabib

Where do political identities come from, how do they change over time, and what is their impact on political life? This book explores these and related questions in a globalizing world where the nation state is being transformed, definitions of citizenship are evolving in unprecedented ways, and people's interests and identities are taking on new local, regional, transnational, cosmopolitan, and even imperial configurations. Pre-eminent scholars examine the changing character of identities, affiliations, and allegiances in a variety of contexts: the evolving character of the European Union and its member countries, the Balkans and other new democracies of the post-1989 world, and debates about citizenship and cultural identity in the modern West. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the political and intellectual ferment that surrounds debates about political membership and attachment, and will be of interest to students and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and law.



Saturday, December 5, 2009

J M Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual or Shermans March through the Carolinas

J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual

Author: Jane Poyner

In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies. Taking the author’s ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding Coetzee’s fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzee’s singular, modernist response to the apartheid and postapartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with the later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual explores Coetzee’s roles as a South African intellectual and a novelist; his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor; his tacit critique of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; his performance of public lectures of his alter ego, Elizabeth Costello; and his explorations into ecofeminism and animal rights. The essays collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel Laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzee’s writing.



Table of Contents:
J. M. Coetzee in conversation with Jane Poyner21
1The life and times of Elizabeth Costello : J. M. Coetzee and the public sphere25
2The writer, the critic, and the censor : J. M. Coetzee and the question of literature42
3Against allegory : Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and the question of literary reading63
4Death and the space of the response to the other in J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg83
5A belief in frogs : J. M. Coetzee's enduring faith in fiction100
6J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the limits of the sympathetic imagination118
7Sorry, sorrier, sorriest : the gendering of contrition in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace135
8Going to the dogs : humanity in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission148
9What is it like to be a nonracist? : Costello and Coetzee on the lives of animals and men172
10A feminist-vegetarian defense of Elizabeth Costello : a rant from an ethical academic on J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals193
11Textual transvestism : the female voices of J. M. Coetzee217

Book about: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man or Office Spa

Sherman's March through the Carolinas

Author: John Gilchrist Barrett

In retrospect, General William Tecumseh Sherman considered his march through the Carolinas the greatest of his military feats, greater even than the Georgia campaign. When he set out northward from Savannah with 60,000 veteran soldiers in January 1865, he was more convinced than ever that the bold application of his ideas of total war could speedily end the conflict. Before him lay South Carolina, the birthplace of secession. Beyond were North Carolina and Virginia, where Grant and Lee stood deadlocked.



Friday, December 4, 2009

Convicted In The Womb or Battleground Chicago

Convicted In The Womb

Author: Carl Upchurch

Once Carl Upchurch was an elementary school dropout fighting for survival on the streets of South Philadelphia, a gang member wedded to a life of violence, a bank robber facing a future in federal penitentiaries.  Now he is a respected community organizer and one of the most compelling and visionary leaders of the civil rights movement.  Catapulted into the national spotlight following his organization of a summit that brought together the country's most notorious gangs.  Carl Upchurch has found himself in direct conflict with other African American civil right leaders.  This is his scathing critique of t he established civil rights movement and his bold manifesto for solving the critical problems facing today's urban American.  And this is his own unforgettable story-reality of urban crime gang warfare, and racial injustice from one who knows firsthand what it's like to be Convicted in the Womb

Publishers Weekly

Upchurch tells his up-from-prison story well and with conviction. He calls his childhood "niggerization," describing the Philadelphia ghetto deprivations and depredations that turned him into a pre-teen criminal. Later he was politicized by Martin Luther King's assassination, but he reverted to criminality and became a violent prisoner. In prison, he discovered Shakespeare (by accident), then James Baldwin, Dostoyevski, Twain and other writers. Thus began what Upchurch terms "deniggerization," fighting his self-hatred and despair. After 10 years in prison, he was set free at 31. He pursued a college degree, married and, in 1992, founded the Council for Urban Peace and Justice (based in Columbus, Ohio) to work for gang truces and other ways of bringing progress to inner cities. He describes the 1993 Kansas City gang summit he organized as bringing hope, but it is still unclear what lasting effects it had. Upchurch concludes his book with proposals for "antiniggerization," challenging African Americans to take personal responsibility, proposing that they use boycotts to shape society and urging black leaders (he's suspicious of Jesse Jackson, hopeful about Kweisi Mfume) to challenge both their followers and the powers that support "American apartheid." (Sept.)

Library Journal

In this account of his tough childhood, the founder and director of the Council for Urban Peace and Justice reveals his encounters with violence, gangs, and reform schools and how by educating himself he finally escaped from that life. (LJ 9/1/96)

Kirkus Reviews

A provocative memoir of life as an enemy of society.

Born in 1950, Upchurch freely admits that he has been a bad man for much of the last half century: a robber, a thief, prone to violence, and quick with a lie. He was educated in his bad ways by the mean streets of South Philadelphia; "I was niggerized by my environment," Upchurch writes, "governed by a careless, heartless ruthlessness fostered by a pervasive sense of inferiority." Stints in reform schools followed his earliest forays in criminality, and there Upchurch found that the "cumulative caring" of those assigned to guard him took the place of family love. That caring was still not enough to set him straight, and as a young adult Upchurch drifted, committing crimes petty and major, eventually winding up in a federal prison in Michigan. There, in a narrow cell, he discovered the works of William Shakespeare—an earlier occupant had used a copy of the sonnets to prop up a crooked table—and other writers, and he educated himself in a program of self-improvement that, while not likely to earn Upchurch a spot on William Bennett's list of culture heroes, could well serve as an inspirational model for others seeking a way out. His narrative is sometimes marred by self-righteous passages, but Upchurch, now a community activist, has much of value to say about the way American society marginalizes its ethnic minorities, forcing many of its citizens to endure hellish lives. For all that, he is quick to accept ultimate responsibility for his actions. "I could choose to wallow in niggerhood—shooting drugs, robbing people, committing murder, going to jail, disrespecting people—or I could choose to rediscover my humanity and work against being a nigger for the rest of my life," he writes. "I chose the latter."

In doing so, Upchurch has become a thinker and social critic well worth paying attention to.



Book review: Changing the Channel or The Innovators Solution

Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention

Author: Frank Kusch

The 1968 Democratic Convention, best known for police brutality against demonstrators, has been relegated to a dark place in American historical memory. Battleground Chicago ventures beyond the stereotypical image of rioting protestors and violent cops to reevaluate exactly how—and why—the police attacked antiwar activists at the convention.
Working from interviews with eighty former Chicago police officers who were on the scene, Frank Kusch uncovers the other side of the story of ’68, deepening our understanding of a turbulent decade.

“Frank Kusch’s compelling account of the clash between Mayor Richard Daley’s men in blue and anti-war rebels reveals why the 1960s was such a painful era for many Americans. . . . to his great credit, [Kusch] allows ‘the pigs’ to speak up for themselves.”—Michael Kazin

“Kusch’s history of white Chicago policemen and the 1968 Democratic National Convention is a solid addition to a growing literature on the cultural sensibility and political perspective of the conservative white working class in the last third of the twentieth century.”—David Farber, Journal of American History



Table of Contents:

Preface to the Paerback Edition

Preface

Timeline

1 "An American City": The Roots of a Creed 1

2 "Freaks, Cowards, and Bastards": The War at Home 17

3 "What's America Coming To?": January-June 1968 31

4 "On to Chicago": Countdown to August 43

5 "A Perfect Mess": Convention Week 69

6 "Terrorists from Out of Town": Fallout in the Second City 115

7 "Half the Power of God": Chicago in '68 Revisited 135

Conclusion 159

Notes 163

Bibliography 193

Index 201

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

International Human Rights or Modern Weapons Caching

International Human Rights: Problems of Law, Policy, and Practice

Author: Richard B Lillich

This long-awaited revision presents a refreshing new alternative for students and instructors. INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS: Problems of Law, Policy, and Practice, Fourth Edition, takes a problem-oriented approach to covering all global and regional human rights systems as they currently operate, along with a discussion of the theoretical foundations of human rights, US foreign policy and human rights, and key current issues.

This student-friendly casebook:

  • retains a problem-oriented focus designed to help students understand contemporary debates about human rights from a political as well as a legal perspective
  • addresses practical issues of implementation, as well as recent developments in substantive human rights jurisprudence in Europe, Latin America, and national courts
  • contrasts differing views on the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere
  • discusses the theoretical foundations of human rights and cultural relativism
  • examines historical developments in human rights as well as current problems

This significant revision addresses the many changes in human rights over the last 10 years, with:

  • the additional insight of two new authors: James Anaya has written several books and numerous articles about international human rights and the rights of Native Americans. Dinah Shelton is the author of two prize-winning books on human rights as well as many articles on international law, human rights law, and international environmental law.
  • extensive new material alongside the best of the original Lillich and Hannumedition, carefully updated for today¿s classes
  • a thorough discussion of the impact on human rights of the ¿war on terrorism,¿ including analysis of command responsibility for the mistreatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the legality of detention without trial at Guantanamo
  • new material on indigenous rights, the environment, and the responsibility of corporations and other non-state actors for human rights violations
  • added discussions of freedom of expression and religion and the International Criminal Court



Modern Weapons Caching: A Down to Earth Approach to Beating the Government Gun Grab

Author: Benson Ragnar

The time to prepare is now. In the race against the firearm roundup in the U.S., gun owners who refuse to give up the freedoms that are their birthright must take their weapons underground-bury them-before it's too late. Ragnar will show you how to do it right.



Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 - The French Resistance

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Loving Enemies or Masculinities

Loving Enemies: A Manual for Ordinary People

Author: Randy Klassen

Like parents and grandparents everywhere, Randy and Joyce Klassen are deeply concerned about the state of the world in which their children and grandchildren will be living. Will violence and wars escalate? Or will the world's peoples, including those in a United States so often involved in war, try a different way? Will even ordinary people commit ourselves to selfless love? Will we strengthen and expand the reality of justice and peace in our world? This book is a manual for those of us ready to try. As Robert K. Johnston, Fuller Theological Seminary, observes in the Foreword, the authors "remind us how inspired we become by the illogic of nonviolence, how moved we are by the redemptive role of forgiveness, how alluring and inviting the example of those like Martin Luther King Jr. or Christians in the Philippines."



Look this: Womans Guide to Making Therapy Work or The American Medical Association Essential Guide to Hypertension

Masculinities: An Anthropology of Football, Polo and Tango

Author: Eduardo P Archetti

The complex relationship between nationalism and masculinity has been explored both historically and sociologically with one consistent conclusion: male concepts of courage and virility are at the core of nationalism. In this ground-breaking book, the author questions this assumption and advances the debate through an empirical analysis of masculinity in the revealing contexts of same-sex (football and polo) and cross-sex (tango) relations. Because of its rich history, Argentina provides the ideal setting in which to study the intersection of masculine and national constructs: hybridization, creolization and a culture of performance have all informed both gender and national identities. Further, the author argues that, counter to claims made by globalization theorists, the importance of performance to Argentinian men and women has a long history and has powerfully shaped the national psyche.

But this book takes the analysis far beyond national boundaries to address general arguments in anthropology which are not culture-specific, and the discussion poses important comparative questions and addresses central theoretical issues, from the interplay of morality and ritual, to a comparison between the popular and the aristocratic, to the importance of 'othering' in national constructions - particularly those relating to sport.

This book represents a major contribution, not only to anthropology, but to the study of gender, nationalism and culture in its broadest sense.



Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction: Frameworks and Perspectives1
Pt. IHybridization21
Ch. 1Situating Hybridity and Hybrids23
Ch. 2Male Hybrids in the World of Football46
Ch. 3Hybridization and Male Hybrids in the World of Polo77
Pt. IIMasculine Moralities111
Ch. 4Locating Masculinities and Moralities113
Ch. 5Masculinities and Morality in the Poetics of the Argentinian Tango128
Ch. 6Masculine National Virtues and Moralities in Football161
Ch. 7The Masculine Imagery of Freedom: the World of Pibes and Maradona180
Epilogue190
Bibliography194
Index208