Download or read book The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics written by Philip J. Brendese and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2014 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an examination of ancient, modern, and contemporary political theories and practices in order to develop a more expansive way of conceptualizing memory, how political power influences the presence of the past, and memory'songoing impact on democratic horizons.
Download or read book The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics written by Philip J. Brendese and published by . This book was released on 2014-08-24 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell famously argued that those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past. In this study of the relationship between democracy and memory, P.J. Brendese examines Orwell's insight, revealing how political power affects what is available to be remembered, who is allowed to recall the past, and when and where past events can be commemorated. Engaging a diverse panoply of thinkers that includes Sophocles, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Brendese considers the role of disavowed memory and the politics of collective memory in democratic processes throughout history. Among the cases treated are democracy in ancient Athens, South Africa's effort to transition from apartheid via its landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mexico's struggle to fortify democratic accountability after the "dirty war," and the unresolved legacy of slavery in US race relations. The Power of Memory in Democratic Politics draws on these national histories to develop a theory of memory that accounts for the ways the past lives on in unconscious, habituated practices, shaping the possibilities of freedom, action, and political imagination. P. J. Brendese is assistant professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
Download or read book Segregated Time written by P. J. Brendese and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Martin Luther King Jr. argued on behalf of civil rights he was told that he was "too soon." Today, those demanding reparations for slavery are told they are "too late." What time is it? Or perhaps the appropriate question is: whose time is it? These questions point to a phenomenon of segregated time: how a range of political subjects are viewed as occupants of different time zones, how experiences of time diverge across peoples, and how these divergent temporal spheres are mutually entwined in ways that serve the interests of white supremacy. In Segregated Time, P.J. Brendese takes a time-sensitive approach to race as it pertains to the acceleration of human disposability, dynamic identity formation, and the production and allocation of social and economic goods. Although typically conceived in terms of space, Brendese argues that racial segregation and inequality are also sustained through impositions on human time. Drawing on a range of Africana, Latinx, and Indigenous political thought, Brendese demonstrates the way in which time is weaponized against people of color and advances a theory of "white time" as a possessive, acquisitive, colonizing force. The chapters explore how migration politics involves temporal borders, how the extended lifetimes of some are built on the foreshortened lives of others, how racial stigma conveys debt and "subprime time," and how whiteness functions as a store of credit through time. In this innovative inquiry into contemporary orders of time and race, Segregated Time examines who is regarded as behind the times, who is cast out of time through racial violence, who "does time" in the prison system, and the racial divides of lives on borrowed time in an epoch of climate catastrophe.
Download or read book Memory Laws Memory Wars written by Nikolay Koposov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major contribution to our understanding of present-day historical consciousness through a study of memory laws across Europe.
Download or read book How to Rig an Election written by Nic Cheeseman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control Contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote. In this engaging and provocative book, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas expose the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratization, and reveal the six essential strategies that dictators use to undermine the electoral process in order to guarantee victory for themselves. Based on their firsthand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States—touching on the 2016 election. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.
Download or read book Never Forget National Humiliation written by Zheng Wang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wang follows the Chinese Communist Party's ideological re-education of the public through the exploitation of China's humiliating modern history, tracking the CCP's use of history education to glorify the party, re-establish its legitimacy, consolidate national identity, and justify one-party rule in the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era.
Download or read book Remembrance History and Justice written by Vladimir Tismaneanu and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, creating collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that have emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts, such as Germany, Romania, Russia and others.
Download or read book Memory History Forgetting written by Paul Ricoeur and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Conservatism and Memory Politics in Russia and Eastern Europe written by Katalin Miklóssy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the diverse practices and discourses of memory politics in Russia and Eastern Europe. It argues that currently prevailing conservativism has a long tradition, which continued even in Communist times, and is different to conservatism in the West, which can accommodate other viewpoints within liberal democratic systems. It considers how important history is for conservatism, and how history is reconstituted according to changing circumstances. It goes on to examine in detail values which are key to conservatism, such as patriotism, Christianity and religious life, and the traditional model of the family, the importance of the sovereign national state within globalization, and the emphasis on a strong paternal state, featuring hierarchy, authority and political continuity. The book concludes by analysing how far states in the region are experiencing a common trend and whether different countries’ conservative narratives are reinforcing each other or are colliding.
Download or read book After Gun Violence written by Craig Rood and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-05-20 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mass shootings have become the “new normal” in American life. The same can be said for the public debate that follows a shooting: blame is cast, political postures are assumed, but no meaningful policy changes are enacted. In After Gun Violence, Craig Rood argues that this cycle is the result of a communication problem. Without advocating for specific policies, Rood examines how Americans talk about gun violence and suggests how we might discuss the issues more productively and move beyond our current, tragic impasse. Exploring the ways advocacy groups, community leaders, politicians, and everyday citizens talk about gun violence, Rood reveals how the gun debate is about far more than just guns. He details the role of public memory in shaping the discourse, showing how memories of the victims of gun violence, the Second Amendment, and race relations influence how gun policy is discussed. In doing so, Rood argues that forgetting and misremembering this history leads interest groups and public officials to entrenched positions and political failure and drives the public further apart. Timely and innovative, After Gun Violence advances our understanding of public discourse in an age of gridlock by illustrating how public deliberation and public memory shape and misshape one another. It is a search to understand why public discourse fails and how we can do better.
Download or read book Goliath written by Matt Stoller and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every thinking American must read” (The Washington Book Review) this startling and “insightful” (The New York Times) look at how concentrated financial power and consumerism has transformed American politics, and business. Going back to our country’s founding, Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis. A concentration of power—whether by government or banks—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy. In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse. They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal. In Goliath, Matt Stoller explains how authoritarianism and populism have returned to American politics for the first time in eighty years, as the outcome of the 2016 election shook our faith in democratic institutions. It has brought to the fore dangerous forces that many modern Americans never even knew existed. Today’s bitter recriminations and panic represent more than just fear of the future, they reflect a basic confusion about what is happening and the historical backstory that brought us to this moment. The true effects of populism, a shrinking middle class, and concentrated financial wealth are only just beginning to manifest themselves under the current administrations. The lessons of Stoller’s study will only grow more relevant as time passes. “An engaging call to arms,” (Kirkus Reviews) Stoller illustrates here in rich detail how we arrived at this tenuous moment, and the steps we must take to create a new democracy.
Download or read book Disremembering the Dictatorship written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most accounts of the Spanish transition to democracy have been celebratory exercises at the service of a stabilizing rather than a critical project of far-reaching reform. As one of the essays in this volume puts it, the “pact of oblivion,” which characterized the Spanish transition to democracy, curtailed any serious attempt to address the legacies of authoritarianism that the new democracy inherited from the Franco era. As a result, those legacies pervaded public discourse even in newly created organs of opinion. As another contributor argues, the Transition was based on the erasure of memory and the invention of a new political tradition. On the other hand, memory and its etiolation have been an object of reflection for a number of film directors and fiction writers, who have probed the return of the repressed under spectral conditions. Above all, this book strives to present memory as a performative exercise of democratic agents and an open field for encounters with different, possibly divergent, and necessarily fragmented recollections. The pact of the Transition could not entirely disguise the naturalization of a society made of winners and losers, nor could it ensure the consolidation of amnesia by political agents and by the tools that create hegemony by shaping opinion. Spanish society is haunted by the specters of a past it has tried to surmount by denying it. It seems unlikely that it can rid itself of its ghosts without in the process undermining the democracy it sought to legitimate through the erasure of memories and the drowning of witnesses' voices in the cacaphony of triumphant modernization.
Download or read book Out of Joint written by Nomi Claire Lazar and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How constructions of time shape political beliefs about what is possible—and what is inevitable To secure power in a crisis, leaders must sell deep change as a means to future good. But how could we know the future? Nomi Claire Lazar draws on stories across a range of cultures and contexts, ancient and modern, to show how leaders use constructions of time to frame events. These frames carry an implicit promise to secure or subvert an expected future, shaping belief in what is possible—and what is inevitable. “Ranging imaginatively across history and geography, this elegant book probes temporal sources of order and transformation. Its analytical wisdom discloses how calendars and representations of time shape political legitimacy, dispositions, and action.”—Ira I. Katznelson, author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time “Great political leaders, for good or ill, seek to shape our daily lives by playing with time itself. That is the central insight of this elegant, erudite volume, one that means I will henceforth listen to speeches and manifestos with new ears and new tools to rebut them.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America “Nomi Lazar gives us a fascinating exploration of the political construction of time itself, as structured by calendars, dating systems, and other mechanisms used for legitimation, revolution, and a myriad of other political purposes. A memorable and endlessly interesting book.”—Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School
Download or read book Symbolic Power Politics and Intellectuals written by David L. Swartz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-04-12 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition. In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.
Download or read book Politics Is for Power written by Eitan Hersh and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant condemnation of political hobbyism—treating politics like entertainment—and a call to arms for well-meaning, well-informed citizens who consume political news, but do not take political action. Who is to blame for our broken politics? The uncomfortable answer to this question starts with ordinary citizens with good intentions. We vote (sometimes) and occasionally sign a petition or attend a rally. But we mainly “engage” by consuming politics as if it’s a sport or a hobby. We soak in daily political gossip and eat up statistics about who’s up and who’s down. We tweet and post and share. We crave outrage. The hours we spend on politics are used mainly as pastime. Instead, we should be spending the same number of hours building political organizations, implementing a long-term vision for our city or town, and getting to know our neighbors, whose votes will be needed for solving hard problems. We could be accumulating power so that when there are opportunities to make a difference—to lobby, to advocate, to mobilize—we will be ready. But most of us who are spending time on politics today are focused inward, choosing roles and activities designed for our short-term pleasure. We are repelled by the slow-and-steady activities that characterize service to the common good. In Politics Is for Power, pioneering and brilliant data analyst Eitan Hersh shows us a way toward more effective political participation. Aided by political theory, history, cutting-edge social science, as well as remarkable stories of ordinary citizens who got off their couches and took political power seriously, this book shows us how to channel our energy away from political hobbyism and toward empowering our values.
Download or read book Citizenship in Hard Times written by Sara Wallace Goodman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative study of how citizens define their civic duty in response to current threats to advanced democracies.
Download or read book Pierre Bourdieu and Democratic Politics written by Loïc Wacquant and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-06-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pierre Bourdieu was a brilliant sociologist and social thinker; he was also an intensely political man whose work is of profound significance for rethinking democracy. This original volume presents and develops Bourdieu's distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of democratic politics. It explicates and illustrates his core concepts of political field and field of power, his historical model of the bureaucratic state, and his influential analyses of the practices and institutions involved in the paradoxical phenomenon of political representation - starting with the enigma of delegation, or what he called the "mystery of ministry." The fruitfulness of Bourdieu's approach is demonstrated in a series of integrated studies of voting, public opinion polls, party dynamics, class rule, and state-building, as well as by careful analyses of Bourdieu's own civic engagements and his theoretical treatment of the politics of reason and recognition in contemporary society. Charting the connections between Bourdieu's political views, the main nodes of his sociology of democratic representation, and the implications of this sociology for progressive civic thought and action, this book will be of interest to students and scholars across the gamut of disciplines as well as to citizens concerned with renewing struggles for social justice.
