Download or read book Rethinking Race Politics and Poetics written by Brett St Louis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-12-12 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics offers a critical appraisal of C.L.R. James as a major twentieth-century activist-intellectual, exploring his prolific output spanning decades within genres as diverse as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, prose fiction, and reportage. The book also analyzes some of the flaws and contradictions that surfaced within James’ writings as a consequence of the difficult circumstances in which he worked and lived as an itinerant migrant intellectual invariably involved with fringe political groups. Assessing James as a lifelong committed Marxist and humanist, the book argues that his core concern with racial, political, and cultural questions as central to human and social understanding led him to develop a distinctive critique of the modern world.
Download or read book C L R James in Imperial Britain written by Christian Høgsbjerg and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: C. L. R. James in Imperial Britain chronicles the life and work of the Trinidadian intellectual and writer C. L. R. James during his first extended stay in Britain, from 1932 to 1938. It reveals the radicalizing effect of this critical period on James's intellectual and political trajectory. During this time, James turned from liberal humanism to revolutionary socialism. Rejecting the "imperial Britishness" he had absorbed growing up in a crown colony in the British West Indies, he became a leading anticolonial activist and Pan-Africanist thinker. Christian Høgsbjerg reconstructs the circumstances and milieus in which James wrote works including his magisterial study The Black Jacobins. First published in 1938, James's examination of the dynamics of anticolonial revolution in Haiti continues to influence scholarship on Atlantic slavery and abolition. Høgsbjerg contends that during the Depression C. L. R. James advanced public understanding of the African diaspora and emerged as one of the most significant and creative revolutionary Marxists in Britain.
Download or read book Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction written by Sara Upstone and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a post-racial approach to the representation of race in contemporary British fiction, re-imagining studies of race and British literature away from concerns with specific racial groups towards a more sophisticated analysis of the contribution of a broad, post-racial British writing. Examining the work of writers from a wide range of diverse racial backgrounds, the book illustrates how contemporary British fiction, rather than merely reflecting social norms, is making a radical contribution towards the possible future of a positively multi-ethnic and post-racial Britain. This is developed by a strategic use of the realist form, which becomes a utopian device as it provides readers with a reality beyond current circumstances, yet one which is rooted within an identifiable world. Speaking to the specific contexts of British cultural politics, and directly connecting with contemporary debates surrounding race and identity in Britain, the author engages with a wide range of both mainstream and neglected authors, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, John Lanchester, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis, Jon McGregor, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hari Kunzru, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, Maggie Gee, and Neil Gaiman. This cutting-edge volume explores how contemporary fiction is at the centre of re-thinking how we engage with the question of race in twenty-first-century Britain.
Download or read book The Invention of Race written by Nicolas Bancel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection explores the genesis of scientific conceptions of race and their accompanying impact on the taxonomy of human collections internationally as evidenced in ethnographic museums, world fairs, zoological gardens, international colonial exhibitions and ethnic shows. A deep epistemological change took place in Europe in this domain toward the end of the eighteenth century, producing new scientific representations of race and thereby triggering a radical transformation in the visual economy relating to race and racial representation and its inscription in the body. These practices would play defining roles in shaping public consciousness and the representation of “otherness” in modern societies. The Invention of Race provides contextualization that is often lacking in contemporary discussions on diversity, multiculturalism and race.
Download or read book Race Science and the Nation written by Chris Manias and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the nineteenth century, scholars in Britain, France and the German lands sought to understand their earliest ancestors: the Germanic and Celtic tribes known from classical antiquity, and the newly discovered peoples of prehistory. New fields – philology, archeology and anthropology – interacted, breaking down languages, unearthing artifacts, measuring skulls and recording the customs of "savage" analogues. This was a decidedly national process: disciplines institutionalized on national levels, and their findings seen to have deep implications for the origins of the nation and its "racial composition." However, this operated within broader currents. The wide spread of material and novelty of the methods meant that these approaches formed connections across Europe and beyond, even while national rivalries threatened to tear these networks apart. Race, Science and the Nation follows this tension, offering a simultaneously comparative, cross-national and multi-disciplinary history of the scholarly reconstruction of European prehistory. As well as showing how interaction between disciplines was key to their formation, it makes arguments of keen relevance to studies of racial thought and nationalism. It shows these researches often worked against attempts to present the chaotic multi-layered ancient eras as times of mythic origin. Instead, they argued that the modern nations of Europe were not only diverse, but were products of long processes of social development and "racial" fusion. This book therefore brings to light a formerly unstudied motif of nineteenth-century national consciousness, showing how intellectuals in the era of nation-building themselves drove an idea of their nations being "constructed" from a useable past.
Download or read book Politics of Memory written by Ana Lucia Araujo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which some years ago could be observed especially in North America, has slowly emerged into a transnational phenomenon now encompassing Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and even Asia – allowing the populations of African descent, organized groups, governments, non-governmental organizations and societies in these different regions to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the slave past. This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.
Download or read book Empires and Boundaries written by Harald Fischer-Tiné and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-11-19 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings is an exciting collection of original essays exploring the meaning and existence of conflicting and coexisting hierarchies in colonial settings. With investigations into the colonial past of a diversity of regions – including South Asia, South-East Asia, and Africa – the dozen notable international scholars collected here offer a truly inter-disciplinary approach to understanding the structures and workings of power in British, French, Dutch, German, and Italian colonial contexts. Integrating a historical approach with perspectives and theoretical tools specific to disciplines such as social anthropology, literary and film studies, and gender studies, Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class, and Gender in Colonial Settings, is a striking and ambitious contribution to the scholarship of imperialism and post-colonialism and an essential read for anyone interested in the revolution being undergone in these fields of study.
Download or read book Black British Intellectuals and Education written by Paul Warmington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ask any moderately interested Briton to name a black intellectual and chances are the response will be an American name: Malcolm X or Barack Obama, Toni Morrison or Cornel West. Yet Britain has its own robust black intellectual traditions and its own master teachers, among them C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. However, while in the USA black public intellectuals are an embedded, if often embattled, feature of national life, black British thinkers remain routinely marginalized. Black British Intellectuals and Education counters this neglect by exploring histories of race, education and social justice through the work of black British public intellectuals: academics, educators and campaigners. The book provides a critical history of diverse currents in black British intellectual production, from the eighteenth century, through post-war migration and into the ‘post-multicultural’ present, focusing on the sometimes hidden impacts of black thinkers on education and social justice. Firstly, it argues that black British thinkers have helped fundamentally to shape educational policy, practice and philosophy, particularly in the post-war period. Secondly, it suggests that education has been one of the key spaces in which the mass consciousness of being black and British has emerged, and a key site in which black British intellectual positions have been defined and differentiated. Chapters explore: • the early development of black British intellectual life, from the slave narratives to the anti-colonial movements of the early twentieth century • how African-Caribbean and Asian communities began to organize against racial inequalities in schooling in the post-Windrush era of the 1950s and 60s • how, from out of these grassroots struggles, black intellectuals and activists of the 1970s, 80s and 90s developed radical critiques of education, youth and structural racism • the influence of multiculturalism, black cultural studies and black feminism on education • current developments in black British educational work, including ‘post-racial’ approaches, Critical Race Theory and black social conservatism. Black British Intellectuals and Education will be of key relevance to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics engaged in research on race, ethnicity, education, social justice and cultural studies.
Download or read book C L R James and the Study of Culture written by A. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-08-04 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first dedicated introduction to the cultural writings and analyses of the radical West Indian thinker C.L.R. James. It lays out James' account of the way in which games, books, music and film become a part of the politics and history of popular struggles.
Download or read book History of Participatory Media written by Anders Ekström and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for a historical perspective on issues relating to the notion of participatory media. Working from a broad concept of media – including essays on the 19th century press, early sound media, photography, exhibitions, television and the internet – the book offers a broad empirical approach to different modes of audience participation from the mid 19th century to the present. Using the insights from the historical case studies, the book also explores some of the key concepts in discussions on the politics of participation, arguing for a theoretical perspective sensitive to the asymmetries that characterize the distribution of agency in the relationship between media and users. Scholarly discussions on participatory media now occur in several fields. This book argues that all of these discussions are all too often obscured by a rhetoric of newness, assuming that participatory media is something unique in history, radical and revolutionary. By challenging the historiography implicit in this rhetoric, the book also engages in a discussion of issues of more general relevance to the multidisciplinary field of media history.
Download or read book Disease and Crime written by Robert Peckham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disease and crime are increasingly conflated in the contemporary world. News reports proclaim "epidemics" of crime, while politicians denounce terrorism as a lethal pathological threat. Recent years have even witnessed the development of a new subfield, "epidemiological criminology," which merges public health with criminal justice to provide analytical tools for criminal justice practitioners and health care professionals. Little attention, however, has been paid to the historical contexts of these disease and crime equations, or to the historical continuities and discontinuities between contemporary invocations of crime as disease and the emergence of criminology, epidemiology, and public health in the second half of the nineteenth century. When, how and why did this pathologization of crime and criminalization of disease come about? This volume addresses these critical questions, exploring the discursive construction of crime and disease across a range of geographical and historical settings.
Download or read book Neutrality in Twentieth century Europe written by Rebecka Lettevall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Time and again scientists and other intellectuals have claimed their endeavors to be neutral, elevated above the world of partisan conflict and power politics. This volume studies the resonances between neutrality in science and culture and neutrality in politics. By analyzing the activities of scientists, intellectuals, and politicians (sometimes overlapping categories) of mostly neutral nations in the First World War and after, it traces how an ideology of neutralism was developed that soon was embraced by international organizations. This book explores how the notion of neutrality has been used and how a neutralist discourse developed in history. As such, Neutrality in Twentieth-Century Europe presents a different perspective on the century than the story of the great belligerent powers, and one in which science, culture, and politics are inextricably mixed.
Download or read book Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge written by Joy Damousi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The case study has proved of enduring interest to all Western societies, particularly in relation to questions of subjectivity and the sexed self. This volume interrogates how case studies have been used by doctors, lawyers, psychoanalysts, and writers to communicate their findings both within the specialist circles of their academic disciplines, and beyond, to wider publics. At the same time, it questions how case studies have been taken up by a range of audiences to refute and dispute academic knowledge. As such, this book engages with case studies as sites of interdisciplinary negotiation, transnational exchange and influence, exploring the effects of forces such as war, migration, and internationalization. Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge challenges the limits of disciplinary-based research in the humanities. The cases examined serve as a means of passage between disciplines, genres, and publics, from law to psychoanalysis, and from auto/biography to modernist fiction. Its chapters scrutinize the case study in order to sharpen understanding of the genre’s dynamic role in the construction and dissemination of knowledge within and across disciplinary, temporal, and national boundaries. In doing so, they position the case at the center of cultural and social understandings of the emergence of modern subjectivities.
Download or read book Scotland and the Caribbean c 1740 1833 written by Michael Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book participates in the modern recovery of the memory of the long-forgotten relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean. Drawing on theoretical paradigms of world literature and transnationalism, it argues that Caribbean slavery profoundly shaped Scotland’s economic, social and cultural development, and draws out the implications for current debates on Scotland’s national narratives of identity. Eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Scottish writers are re-examined in this new light. Morris explores the ways that discourses of "improvement" in both Scotland and the Caribbean are mediated by the modes of pastoral and georgic which struggle to explain and contain the labour conditions of agricultural labourers, both free and enslaved. The ambivalent relationship of Scottish writers, including Robert Burns, to questions around abolition allows fresh perspectives on the era. Furthermore, Morris considers the origins of a hybrid Scottish-Creole identity through two nineteenth-century figures - Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. The final chapter moves forward to consider the implications for post-devolution (post-referendum) Scotland. Underpinning this investigation is the conviction that collective memory is a key feature which shapes behaviour and beliefs in the present; the recovery of the memory of slavery is performed here in the interests of social justice in the present.
Download or read book Historical Disasters in Context written by Andrea JANKU and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-12-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing concerns about climate change and the increasing occurrence of ever more devastating natural disasters in some parts of the world and their consequences for human life, not only in the immediately affected regions, but for all of us, have increased our desire to learn more about disaster experiences in the past. How did disaster experiences impact on the development of modern sciences in the early modern era? Why did religion continue to play such an important role in the encounter with disasters, despite the strong trend towards secularization in the modern world? What was the political role of disasters? Historical Disasters in Context illustrates how past societies coped with a threatening environment, how societies changed in response to disaster experiences, and how disaster experiences were processed and communicated, both locally and globally. Particular emphasis is put on the realms of science, religion, and politics. International case studies demonstrate that while there are huge differences across cultures in the way people and societies responded to disasters, there are also many commonalities and interactions between different cultures that have the potential to alter the ways people prepare for and react to disasters in future. To explain these relationships and highlight their significance is the purpose of this volume.
Download or read book A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages written by Irina Metzler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was it like to be disabled in the Middle Ages? How did people become disabled? Did welfare support exist? This book discusses social and cultural factors affecting the lives of medieval crippled, deaf, mute and blind people, those nowadays collectively called "disabled." Although the word did not exist then, many of the experiences disabled people might have today can already be traced back to medieval social institutions and cultural attitudes. This volume informs our knowledge of the topic by investigating the impact medieval laws had on the social position of disabled people, and conversely, how people might become disabled through judicial actions; ideas of work and how work could both cause disability through industrial accidents but also provide continued ability to earn a living through occupational support networks; the disabling effects of old age and associated physical deteriorations; and the changing nature of attitudes towards welfare provision for the disabled and the ambivalent role of medieval institutions and charity in the support and care of disabled people.
Download or read book Reassessing the Transnational Turn written by Constance Bantman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume reassesses the ongoing transnational turn in anarchist and syndicalist studies, a field where the interest in cross-border connections has generated much innovative literature in the last decade. It presents and extends up-to-date research into several dynamic historiographic fields, and especially the history of the anarchist and syndicalist movements and the notions of transnational militancy and informal political networks. Whilst restating the relevance of transnational approaches, especially in connection with the concepts of personal networks and mediators, the book underlines the importance of other scales of analysis in capturing the complexities of anarchist militancy, due to both their centrality as a theme of reflection for militants, and their role as a level of organization. Especially crucial is the national level, which is often overlooked due to the internationalism which was so central to anarchist ideology. And yet, as several chapters highlight, anarchist discourses on the nation (as opposed to the state), patriotism and even race, were more nuanced than is usually assumed. The local and individual levels are also shown to be essential in anarchist militancy.