Border Rhetorics DeChaine, D. Robert; Calafell, Bernadette Marie; Chávez, Karma R ...
2012, 2012-08-25, 20120101
eBook
Border Rhetorics is a collection of essays that undertakes a wide-ranging examination of the US-Mexico border as it functions in the rhetorical production of civic unity in the United States. A ...“border” is a powerful and versatile concept, variously invoked as the delineation of geographical territories, as a judicial marker of citizenship, and as an ideological trope for defining inclusion and exclusion. It has implications for both the empowerment and subjugation of any given populace. Both real and imagined, the border separates a zone of physical and symbolic exchange whose geographical, political, economic, and cultural interactions bear profoundly on popular understandings and experiences of citizenship and identity.  The border’s rhetorical significance is nowhere more apparent, nor its effects more concentrated, than on the frontier between the United States and Mexico. Often understood as an unruly boundary in dire need of containment from the ravages of criminals, illegal aliens, and other undesirable threats to the national body, this geopolitical locus exemplifies how normative constructions of “proper” border relations reinforce definitions of US citizenship, which in turn can lead to anxiety, unrest, and violence centered around the struggle to define what it means to be a member of a national political community.   Contributors Bernadette Marie Calafell / Karma R. Chávez / Josue David Cisneros / D. Robert DeChaine / Anne Teresa Demo / Lisa A. Flores / Dustin Bradley Goltz / Marouf Hasian Jr. / Michelle A. Holling / Julia R. Johnson / Zach Justus / Diane M. Keeling / John Louis Lucaites / George F. McHendry Jr. / Toby Miller / Kent A. Ono / Brian L. Ott / Kimberlee Pérez / Mary Ann Villarreal
After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on ...an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state's efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens' relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project.
The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet 'mature socialism' between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of 'stagnation', arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.
This book analyses the construction of collective identity and nationhood through the representation of a contested past in postsocialist Russian, Polish and Ukrainian films and media.
Across the world political liberalism is being fought for, consolidated and defended. That is the case for nations that have never enjoyed a liberal political society, for nations that have advanced ...towards and then retreated from political liberalism, for nations that have recently shifted from authoritarian to liberal political systems, and for mature democracies facing terrorism and domestic conflict.
How constructions of time shape political beliefs about what is possible-and what is inevitableTo 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 ofFear 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
Often, the process of modern state formation is founded on the
marginalization of certain groups, and Latin America is no
exception. In The Language of the In-Between , Erika
Almenara contends that ...literary production replicates this same
process. Looking at marginalized communities in Chile and Peru,
particularly writers who are travesti , trans, cuir/queer,
and Indigenous, the author shows how these writers stake a claim
for the liminal space that is neither one thing nor the other. This
allows a freedom to expose oppression and to critique a national
identity based on erasure. By employing a language of nonnormative
gender and sexuality to dispute the state projects of modernity and
modernization, the voice of the poor and racialized
travesti evolves from powerlessness to become an agent of
social transformation.
What happens to indigenous people when their homelands are declared by well-intentioned outsiders to be precious environmental habitats? In this revelatory book, Molly Doane describes how a rain ...forest in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca was appropriated and redefined by environmentalists who initially wanted to conserve its biodiversity. Her case study approach shows that good intentions are not always enough to produce results that benefit both a habitat and its many different types of inhabitants.Doane begins by showing how Chimalapas-translated as "shining rivers"-has been "produced" in various ways over time, from a worthless wasteland to a priceless asset. Focusing on a series of environmental projects that operated between 1990 and 2008, she reveals that environmentalists attempted to recast agrarian disputes-which actually stemmed from government-supported corporate incursions into community lands and from unequal land redistribution-as environmental problems.Doane focuses in particular on the attempt throughout the 1990s to establish a "Campesino Ecological Reserve" in Chimalapas. Supported by major grants from the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), this effort to foster and merge agrarian and environmental interests was ultimately unsuccessful because it was seen as politically threatening by the state. By 2000, the Mexican government had convinced the WWF to redirect its conservation monies to the state government and its agencies.The WWF eventually abandoned attempts to establish an "enclosure" nature reserve in the region or to gain community acceptance for conservation. Instead, working from a new market-based model of conservation, the WWF began paying cash to individuals for "environmental services" such as reforestation and environmental monitoring.
Stirk argues that military occupation should be regarded as a political phenomenon - a distinct form of government at the heart of which is the nature of obligation on the part of both the occupier ...and the occupied. He aims to promote a change in the understanding of occupation, thereby avoiding the perpetuation of recent failures in this area.
The Politics of State Feminismaddresses essential questions of women's movement activism and political change in western democracies. The authors-top gender and politics scholars-provide a ...comparative analysis of the effectiveness of government agencies and women's movements regarding women's policy issues-if, how, and why they form a kind of state feminism.
The central research questions are examined across five issue areas in thirteen postindustrial democracies in Europe and North America from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The authors explore a range of topics drawn from contemporary theory, interactions between descriptive and substantive representation, and the place of institutions in democratic change.
Using the innovative qualitative and quantitative methods employed by the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State, the authors have developed a new body of theories about the role of state feminism and how it can help further women's rights.
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