DIVInvestigates the complex histories and conflicting desires that are generally concealed behind the term “democracy.”/div

This volume traces how American literature evolved in response to widespread conflicts over the very nature of US democracy in the early republic and antebellum eras. It examines how American writers reacted to three moments of profound divisiveness in the 1790s, 1830s, and 1850s.

In Ingenious Citizenship Charles T. Lee centers the daily experiences and actions of migrant domestic workers, sex workers, transgender people, and suicide bombers in his rethinking of mainstream models of social change. Bridging cultural and political theory with analyses of film, literature, and ethnographic sources, Lee shows how these abject populations find ingenious and improvisational ways to disrupt and appropriate practices of liberal citizenship. When voting and other forms of civic engagement are unavailable or ineffective, the subversive acts of a domestic worker breaking a dish or a prostitute using the strategies and language of an entrepreneur challenge the accepted norms of political action. Taken to the extreme, a young Palestinian woman blowing herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket questions two of liberal citizenship's most cherished values: life and liberty. Using these examples to critically reinterpret political agency, citizenship practices, and social transformation, Lee reveals the limits of organizing change around a human rights discourse. Moreover, his subjects offer crucial lessons in how to turn even the worst conditions and the most unstable positions in society into footholds for transformative and democratic agency.

Higher education is under siege. No longer viewed as a public good, it is attacked by businesses who want to refashion institutions in the image of the marketplace. Higher education is the target of cultural conservatives who have undermined academic freedom and access by deriding the academy as a hotbed of left-multicultural-radicalism and anti-Americanism. The historic mission to educate students as citizens motivated by democratic values is overshadowed by profit margins. Giroux and Giroux argue that the greatest danger faced by higher education comes from corporatization and educational apartheid. If higher education is to meet the challenges of a democratic future, it must encourage students to be critical thinkers and citizens, as it vouchsafes conditions for educators to produce scholarship in the service of an inclusive democracy.

Kassanoff shows how Wharton participated in debates on race, class and democratic pluralism at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of the world's leading social critics and educational theorists, Henry A. Giroux has contributed significantly to critical pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, social theory, and cultural politics. This new book offers a carefully selected cross-section of Giroux's many scholarly and popular writings, which bridge the theoretical and practical, integrate multiple academic disciplines, and fuse scholarly rigor with social relevance. The essays underscore the continuities and transformations in Giroux's thought, just as they offer invaluable approaches to understanding a range of social problems. Giroux's work suggests that a more humane and democratic world is possible and provides critical tools that can assist concerned citizens in bringing it into being.

This book reflects on 'the political' in queer theory and politics by revisiting two of its key categories: hegemony and heteronormativity. It explores the specific insights offered by these categories and the ways in which they augment the analysis of power and domination from a queer perspective, whilst also examining the possibilities for political analysis and strategy-building provided by theories of hegemony and heteronormativity. Moreover, in addressing these issues the book strives to rethink the understanding of the term "queer", so as to avoid narrowing queer politics to a critique of normative heterosexuality and the rigid gender binary. By looking at the interplay between hegemony and heteronormativity, this ground-breaking volume presents new possibilities of reconceptualizing 'the political' from a queer perspective. Investigating the effects of queer politics not only on subjectivities and intimate personal relations, but also on institutions, socio-cultural processes and global politics, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of critical theory, gender and sexuality, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist political theory.

An original and stimulating critique of American empire

Taking a novel approach to the contradictory impulses of violence and care, illness and healing, this book radically shifts the way we think of the interrelations of institutions and experiences in a globalizing world. Living and Dying in the Contemporary World is not just another reader in medical anthropology but a true tour de forceÑa deep exploration of all that makes life unbearable and yet livable through the labor of ordinary people. This book comprises forty-four chapters by scholars whose ethnographic and historical work is conducted around the globe, including South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Bringing together the work of established scholars with the vibrant voices of younger scholars, Living and Dying in the Contemporary World will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, health scientists, scholars of religion, and all who are curious about how to relate to the rapidly changing institutions and experiences in an ever more connected world. Ê

“Out of many, one.” But how do the many become one without sacrificing difference or autonomy? This problem was critical to both identity formation and state formation in late 18th- and 19th-century America. The premise of this book is that American writers of the time came to view the resolution of this central philosophical problem as no longer the exclusive province of legislative or judicial documents but capable of being addressed by literary texts as well. The project of E Pluribus Unum is twofold. Its first and underlying concern is the general philosophic problem of the one and the many as it came to be understood at the time. W. C. Harris supplies a detailed account of the genealogy of the concept, exploring both its applications and its paradoxes as a basis for state and identity formation. Harris then considers the perilous integration of the one and the many as a motive in the major literary accomplishments of 19th-century U.S. writers. Drawing upon critical as well as historical resources and upon contexts as diverse as cosmology, epistemology, poetics, politics, and Bible translation, he discusses attempts by Poe, Whitman, Melville, and William James to resolve the problems of social construction caused by the paradox of e pluribus unum by writing literary and philosophical texts that supplement the nation’s political founding documents. Poe (Eureka), Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Melville (Billy Budd), and William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience) provide their own distinct, sometimes contradictory resolutions to the conflicting demands of diversity and unity, equality and hierarchy. Each of these texts understands literary and philosophical writing as having the potential to transform-conceptually or actually-the construction of social order. This work will be of great interest to literary and constitutional scholars.