In this foundational exploration of political expression and participation, de Certeau examines who has the right to speak, how this right is acquired, and what happens when this right is denied or inhibited. He emphasizes that all too often free speech is upheld in the abstract while social institutions work in such a way to deny access to effective communication.

A historian and former presidential speechwriter presents an unprecedented two-volume collection of the greatest speeches in American history.

The rhetorical presumption of war's necessity makes violence regrettable, but seemingly sane, and functions to shame anyone who opposes military action. Ivie proposes that the presence of dissent is actually a healthy sign of democratic citizenship, and a responsible and productive act, which has been dangerously miscast as a threat to national security. Ivie, a former US Navy petty officer, puts a microscope to the language of war supporters throughout history and follows the lives and memories of soldiers and anti-war activists who have dealt with degrees of confusion and guilt about their opposition to war. Arguing that informed dissent plays out largely in the realm of rhetoric, he equips readers with strategies for resisting the dehumanizing language used in war propaganda. Through his careful study of language strategies, he makes it possible to foster a community where dissenting voices are valued and vital.

Governance is among the most used of new ideas in the social sciences, most notably in the fields of political science, public administration, sociology, social and political theory. As ever, debates within disciplines rarely transcend disciplinary boundaries. This volume, newly available in paperback, brings together authors from these fields to elaborate on the development of governance analysis in new conceptions of political and democratic communication. It not only seeks to identify, describe and evaluate the contribution of each discipline to a theory of communicative governance, but also lays the foundation of a multidisciplinary framework for studying the mediation in communicative governance of societal concerns for effectiveness, order and participation.The book is theoretical and comparative, drawing on authors and research in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the US. It adopts an anti-foundational approach to deconstruct the essentialist discourses endemic in each discipline and the disciplinary traditions of each country. Notions such as steering and control in public administration, identities and domination in sociology, and the community and self in social and political theory are analysed in depth. The book will demonstrate clearly how the distinctive traditions of each discipline lead them to construct overlapping, loosely coupled, and sometimes incommensurable ideas about the institutions, politics and policies of governance.

This book argues that contemporary European politics creates new forms of transnational power that challenge the traditional parameters of the nation-state. Kauppi identifies and critically explores the evolving dynamics between national and transnational spaces, groups and knowledge, and suggests that European public policies and transnational institutions like the European Parliament create new spaces, types of knowledge and novel political practices. Toward a Reflexive Political Sociology of the European Union is structured around three parts. The first focuses on evolving transnational fields. The second explores the changing role of academics and universities. The third section engages with the works of Pierre Bourdieu on politics and the media. The issues discussed throughout the book revolve around the challenges to the nation-state and of knowledge production that is tied to it. This book will be an invaluable resource to academics and researchers interested in European politics, European Union studies and political sociology.

Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS. This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS. In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me (1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France. A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others examines European mistranslations and misrepresentations of black freedom dreams and self-activity as monstrous in the period of modern imperial consolidation –roughly from 1750 to 1848. This book argues that Europe’s archives of self-understanding are haunted by the traces of Black radical resistance. Just as Europe’s economy came to depend upon the raw materials, markets, and labor it secured from the colonies, European culture came to be based on fantasies and phobias derived from the unruly and unmanageable aftershocks of colonial violence and counter-insurgency. Rather than assert that European nationalist and abolitionist discourses are on the side of emancipatory movements, the book shows the limits of the promise of that discourse, and the continuation of those limitations that makes the continued pursuit of that promise a questionable activity. This book does not wish to salvage the emancipatory promises of European discourse, but considers the more difficult and uncomfortable question of why emancipatory movements represented the struggles of anticolonial and radical blackness the way they did. The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others privileges the political reading not only of literary texts but also of historical documents and visual culture.

Citizens, political theorists, and politicians alike insist that political or partisan motives get in the way of real democracy. Real democracy, we are convinced, is embodied by an ability to form collective judgments in the interest of the whole. The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy: How Deliberative Ideals Undermine Democratic Politics, by Scott Welsh, argues instead that it is our easy rejection of political motives, individual interests, and the rhetorical pursuit of power that poses the greatest danger to democracy. Our rejection of politics understood as a rhetorical contest for power is dangerous because democracy ultimately rests upon the perceived public legitimacy of public, political challenges to authority and the subsequent reconstitution of authority amid the impossibility of collective judgment. Hence, rather than searching for allegedly more authentic democracy, rooted in the pursuit of ever-illusive collective judgments, we must find ways to come to terms with the persistence of rhetorical, political contests for power as the essence of democracy itself. Welsh argues that the impossibility of any kind of public judgment is the fact that democracy must face. Given the impossibility of public judgment, rhetorical competitions for political power are not merely poor substitutes for an allegedly more authentic democratic practice, but constitute the essence of democracy itself. The Rhetorical Surface of Democracy is an iconoclastic investigation of the democratic process and public discourse.

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.

The Performance Studies Reader is a lively and much-needed anthology of critical writings on the burgeoning discipline of performance studies. It provides an overview of the full range of performance theory for undergraduates at all levels, and beginning graduate students in performance studies, theatre, performing arts and cultural studies. The collection is designed as a companion to Richard Schechner's popular Performance Studies: an Introduction (Routledge, 2002), but is also ideal as a stand-alone text. Henry Bial collects together key critical pieces from the field, referred to as 'suggested readings' in Performance Studies: an Introduction. He also broadens the discussion with additional selections. The structure and themes of the Reader closely follow those of Schechner's companion textbook. The articles in each section focus particularly on three primary areas in performance studies, theatre, anthropology and sociology/cultural studies.