After the Cosmopolitan? argues that both racial divisions and intercultural dialogue can only be understood in the context of the urbanism through which they are realized.
All the key debates in ...cultural theory and urban studies are covered in detail:
the growth of cultural industries and the marketing of cities
social exclusion and violence
the nature of the ghetto
the cross-disciplinary conceptualization of cultural hybridity
the politics of third-way social policy.
In considering the ways in which race is played out in the world's most eminent cities, Michael Keith shows that neither the utopian naiveté of some invocations of cosmopolitan democracy, nor the pessimism of multicultural hell can adequately make sense of the changing nature of contemporary metropolitan life.
Authoritative and informative, this book will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers of anthropology, cultural studies, geography, politics and sociology.
1. Introduction: Globalisation, Urbanism and Cosmopolitanism Fever 2. The Mirage at the Heart of the Myth? Thinking About the White City 3. After the Cosmopolitan? The Limits of the Multicultural City and the Mutability of Racism 4. The Ghetto: Knowing your Place and the Performative Cartographies of Racial Subordination 5. Ethnic Entrepreneurs and Street Rebels: Looking Inside the Inner City 6. The Street: Street Sensibility? 7. The Cultural Quarter: Globalization, Hybridity and Curating Exotica. 8. Tagging the City: Graffiti Practice and Transcultural Communication 9. The Cartographies of Community Safety. Mapping Danger and Rumours of Risk 10. The Plan Knowing Urbanism: Between the Allure of the Cosmopolitan and the Horror of the Postcolony
Public opinion in recent years has soured on multiculturalism, due in large part to fears of radical Islam. In Multiculturalism without Culture, Anne Phillips contends that critics misrepresent ...culture as the explanation of everything individuals from minority and non-Western groups do. She puts forward a defense of multiculturalism that dispenses with notions of culture, instead placing individuals themselves at its core. Multiculturalism has been blamed for encouraging the oppression of women--forced marriages, female genital cutting, school girls wearing the hijab. Many critics opportunistically deploy gender equality to justify the retreat from multiculturalism, hijacking the equality agenda to perpetuate cultural stereotypes. Phillips informs her argument with the feminist insistence on recognizing women as agents, and defends her position using an unusually broad range of literature, including political theory, philosophy, feminist theory, law, and anthropology. She argues that critics and proponents alike exaggerate the unity, distinctness, and intractability of cultures, thereby encouraging a perception of men and women as dupes constrained by cultural dictates.
This book discusses the role of cultural practices and policy for sustainable development in West Africa across different artistic disciplines, including performance, video, theatre, community arts ...and cultural heritage. Based on ethnographic field research in local communities, the book presents findings on current debates of cultural sustainability in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Benin. It provides a unique perspective connecting cultural studies, conflict studies and practical peacebuilding approaches through the arts. The first part pays particular attention to aspects of social cohesion and the circumstances of internally displaced persons e. g. caused by the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeast Nigeria. The second part focuses on cultural policy issues and challenges in the context of sustainable development, investigating participatory approaches and bottom-up processes, the role of governments and civil society, as well as performing arts organizations and universities in policy making and implementation processes. Performing Sustainability in West Africa presents research results and new methods on the role of artistic and cultural practices in conflict situations as well as current debates in cultural policy for researchers, academics, NGOs and students in cultural studies, sustainable development studies and African studies.
A highly original and readily accessible examination of the cultural dimension of international politics, this book provides a sophisticated and nuanced account of the relevance of cultural ...categories for the analysis of world politics.
The book's analytical focus is on plural and pluralist civilizations. Civilizations exist in the plural within one civilization of modernity; and they are internally pluralist rather than unitary. The existence of plural and pluralist civilizations is reflected in transcivilizational engagements, intercivilizational encounters and, only occasionally, in civilizational clashes. Drawing on the work of Eisenstadt, Collins and Elias, Katzenstein's introduction provides a cogent and detailed alternative to Huntington's. This perspective is then developed and explored through six outstanding case studies written by leading experts in their fields. Combining contemporary and historical perspectives while addressing the civilizational politics of America, Europe, China, Japan, India and Islam, the book draws these discussions together in Patrick Jackson's theoretically informed, thematic conclusion.
Featuring an exceptional line-up and representing a diversity of theoretical views within one integrative perspective, this work will be of interest to all scholars and students of international relations, sociology and political science.
Culture is a constant reference in debates surrounding Islam in Europe. Yet the notion of culture is commonly restricted to conceptual frames of multiculturalism where it relates to group identities, ...collective ways of life and recognition. This volume extends such analysis of culture by approaching it as semiotic practice which conjoins the making of subjects with the configuration of the social.Examining fields such as memory, literature, film, and Islamic art, the studies in this volume explore culture as another element in the assemblage of rationalities governing European Islam.From this perspective, the transformations of European identities can be understood as a matter of cultural practice and politics, which extend the analytical frames of political philosophy, historical legacies, normative orders and social dynamics.
The 2005 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity is a landmark agreement in modern international law of culture. It reflects the diverse and pluralist understanding of culture, as well as its growing ...commercial dimension. Thirty diplomats, practitioners and academics explain and assess this important agreement in a commentary style. Article by article, the evolution, concepts, contents and implications of the Convention are analysed in depth and are complemented by valuable recommendations for implementation. In an unprecedented way, the book draws on the first-hand insights of negotiators and on the experience of practitioners in implementation, including international cooperation, and combines this with a good deal of critical academic reflection. It is a valuable guide for those who deal with the Convention and its implementation in governments, diplomacy, international organizations, cultural institutions and non-governmental organizations and will also serve as an important resource for academic work in such fields as international law and international relations.
The Court of Justice has often been characterised both as a motor of integration and a judicial law-maker. This book examines the Court's jurisprudence over more than half a century, and assesses the ...extent to which this is a fair description.
In theory, republican orthodoxy does not acknowledge the political dignity of any intermediary body between free and equal individuals, stripped of all particularism, and the sovereign nation. This ...is why, right up to the present, the French public debate has been marked by an entrenched suspicion towards all forms of «communitarism», and by the proscription of the very concept of multicultural politics. But have the policies actually pursued by republican France been consistent with the proclaimed principles? Is it genuinely possible to claim that cultural identities have never been publicly «recognised»? This multidisciplinary investigation proposes to address the ambiguous relations between theory and practice in the Republican management of cultural pluralism.
In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which declared that every human being, without "distinction of any kind," possesses a set of ...morally authoritative rights and fundamental freedoms that ought to be socially guaranteed. Since that time, human rights have arguably become the cross-cultural moral concept and evaluative tool to measure the performance-and even legitimacy-of domestic regimes. Yet questions remain that challenge their universal validity and theoretical bases. Some theorists are "maximalist" in their insistence that human rights must be grounded religiously, while an opposing camp attempts to justify these rights in "minimalist" fashion without any necessary recourse to religion, metaphysics, or essentialism. InGrounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World, Grace Kao critically examines the strengths and weaknesses of these contending interpretations while also exploring the political liberalism of John Rawls and the Capability Approach as proposed by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum. By retrieving insights from a variety of approaches, Kao defends an account of human rights that straddles the minimalist-maximalist divide, one that links human rights to a conception of our common humanity and to the notion that ethical realism gives the most satisfying account of our commitment to the equal moral worth of all human beings.
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