Identity and the Difficulty of Emancipation

Identity and the Difficulty of Emancipation PDF Author: Volker Kaul
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030523756
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of identity in politics, featuring for the first time the question of individual emancipation. It addresses the burning questions of our times, viz. nationalism, populism, Islamic fundamentalism, multiculturalism, postsecularism and postcolonialism. The volume repudiates an easy reconciliation between identity and emancipation, such as it occurs in contemporary liberal and multicultural political theories. It shows that we cannot achieve emancipation without Kant’s help, whereas identity relentlessly draws us back to collective values and the community. The book urges for a new understanding of identity and a politics that instead of accommodating identities seeks to govern them. Identity is the buzzword in the humanities and social sciences, but also the most contentious and least conceptualized term. This book intends to bring theoretical clarity into the debate on how identity plays out in politics.

Identity and the Difficulty of Emancipation

Identity and the Difficulty of Emancipation PDF Author: Volker Kaul
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030523756
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of identity in politics, featuring for the first time the question of individual emancipation. It addresses the burning questions of our times, viz. nationalism, populism, Islamic fundamentalism, multiculturalism, postsecularism and postcolonialism. The volume repudiates an easy reconciliation between identity and emancipation, such as it occurs in contemporary liberal and multicultural political theories. It shows that we cannot achieve emancipation without Kant’s help, whereas identity relentlessly draws us back to collective values and the community. The book urges for a new understanding of identity and a politics that instead of accommodating identities seeks to govern them. Identity is the buzzword in the humanities and social sciences, but also the most contentious and least conceptualized term. This book intends to bring theoretical clarity into the debate on how identity plays out in politics.

Emancipation's Daughters

Emancipation's Daughters PDF Author: Riché Richardson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012501
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In Emancipation's Daughters, Riché Richardson examines iconic black women leaders who have contested racial stereotypes and constructed new national narratives of black womanhood in the United States. Drawing on literary texts and cultural representations, Richardson shows how five emblematic black women—Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Condoleezza Rice, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé—have challenged white-centered definitions of American identity. By using the rhetoric of motherhood and focusing on families and children, these leaders have defied racist images of black women, such as the mammy or the welfare queen, and rewritten scripts of femininity designed to exclude black women from civic participation. Richardson shows that these women's status as national icons was central to reconstructing black womanhood in ways that moved beyond dominant stereotypes. However, these formulations are often premised on heteronormativity and exclude black queer and trans women. Throughout Emancipation's Daughters, Richardson reveals new possibilities for inclusive models of blackness, national femininity, and democracy.

Illusions of Emancipation

Illusions of Emancipation PDF Author: Joseph P. Reidy
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
As students of the Civil War have long known, emancipation was not merely a product of Lincoln's proclamation or of Confederate defeat in April 1865. It was a process that required more than legal or military action. With enslaved people fully engaged as actors, emancipation necessitated a fundamental reordering of a way of life whose implications stretched well beyond the former slave states. Slavery did not die quietly or quickly, nor did freedom fulfill every dream of the enslaved or their allies. The process unfolded unevenly. In this sweeping reappraisal of slavery's end during the Civil War era, Joseph P. Reidy employs the lenses of time, space, and individuals' sense of personal and social belonging to understand how participants and witnesses coped with drastic change, its erratic pace, and its unforeseeable consequences. Emancipation disrupted everyday habits, causing sensations of disorientation that sometimes intensified the experience of reality and sometimes muddled it. While these illusions of emancipation often mixed disappointment with hope, through periods of even intense frustration they sustained the promise that the struggle for freedom would result in victory.

Mistaken Identity

Mistaken Identity PDF Author: Asad Haider
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786637383
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
A powerful challenge to the way we understand the politics of race and the history of anti-racist struggle Whether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history’s most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common ground, there is little agreement. To escape this deadlock, Asad Haider turns to the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing on the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage of identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. Weaving together autobiographical reflection, historical analysis, theoretical exegesis, and protest reportage, Mistaken Identity is a passionate call for a new practice of politics beyond colorblind chauvinism and “the ideology of race.”

The Dilemmas of Identity

The Dilemmas of Identity PDF Author: George Schöpflin
Publisher: Tallinn University Press
ISBN: 9985587014
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description


Emancipation After Hegel

Emancipation After Hegel PDF Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154992X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Hegel is making a comeback. After the decline of the Marxist Hegelianism that dominated the twentieth century, leading thinkers are rediscovering Hegel’s thought as a resource for contemporary politics. What does a notoriously difficult nineteenth-century German philosopher have to offer the present? How should we understand Hegel, and what does understanding Hegel teach us about confronting our most urgent challenges? In this book, Todd McGowan offers us a Hegel for the twenty-first century. Simultaneously an introduction to Hegel and a fundamental reimagining of Hegel’s project, Emancipation After Hegel presents a radical Hegel who speaks to a world overwhelmed by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and economic inequalities. McGowan argues that the revolutionary core of Hegel’s thought is contradiction. He reveals that contradiction is inexorable and that we must attempt to sustain it rather than overcoming it or dismissing it as a logical failure. McGowan contends that Hegel’s notion of contradiction, when applied to contemporary problems, challenges any assertion of unitary identity as every identity is in tension with itself and dependent on others. An accessible and compelling reinterpretation of an often-misunderstood thinker, this book shows us a way forward to a new politics of emancipation as we reconcile ourselves to the inevitability of contradiction and find solidarity in not belonging.

Rethinking the Age of Emancipation

Rethinking the Age of Emancipation PDF Author: Martin Baumeister
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789206332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Since the end of the nineteenth century, traditional historiography has emphasized the similarities between Italy and Germany as “late nations”, including the parallel roles of “great men” such as Bismarck and Cavour. Rethinking the Age of Emancipation aims at a critical reassessment of the development of these two “late” nations from a new and transnational perspective. Essays by an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars examine the discursive relationships among nationalism, war, and emancipation as well as the ambiguous roles of historical protagonists with competing national, political, and religious loyalties.

Universal Emancipation

Universal Emancipation PDF Author: Elisabeth Paquette
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452963703
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A vital and timely contribution to the growing scholarship on the political thought of Alain Badiou Is inattention to questions of race more than just incidental to Alain Badiou’s philosophical system? Universal Emancipation reveals a crucial weakness in the approach to (in)difference in political life of this increasingly influential French thinker. With white nationalist movements on the rise, the tensions between commitments to universal principles and attention to difference and identity are even more pressing. Elisabeth Paquette’s powerful critical analysis demonstrates that Badiou’s theory of emancipation fails to account for racial and racialized subjects, thus attenuating its utility in thinking about freedom and justice. The crux of the argument relies on a distinction he makes between culture and politics, whereby freedom only pertains to the political and not the cultural. The implications of this distinction become evident when she turns to two examples within Badiou’s theory: the Négritude movement and the Haitian Revolution. According to Badiou’s 2017 book Black, while Négritude is an important cultural movement, it cannot be considered a political movement because Négritude writers and artists were too focused on particularities such as racial identity. Paquette argues that Badiou’s discussion of Négritude mirrors that of Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1948 essay “Black Orpheus” that has been critiqued by leading critical race theorists. Second, prominent Badiou scholar Nick Nesbitt claims that the Haitian Revolution could only be considered political if its adherents had shifted their focus away from race. However, Paquette argues that not only was race a central feature of this revolution but also that the revolution ought to be understood as a political emancipation movement. Paquette also moves beyond Badiou, drawing on the groundbreaking work of Sylvia Wynter to offer an alternative framework for emancipation. She juxtaposes Badiou’s use of universality as indifference to difference with Wynter’s pluri-conceptual theory of emancipation, emphasizing solidarity over indifference. Paquette then develops her view of a pluri-conceptual theory of emancipation, wherein particular identities, such as race, need not be subtracted from a theory of emancipation.

Festivals of Freedom

Festivals of Freedom PDF Author: Mitch Kachun
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781558495289
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many African Americans began calling for "a day of publick thanksgiving" to commemorate this important step toward freedom. During the ensuing century, black leaders built on this foundation and constructed a distinctive and vibrant tradition through their celebrations of the end of slavery in New York State, the British West Indies, and eventually the United States as a whole. In this revealing study, Mitch Kachun explores the multiple functions and contested meanings surrounding African American emancipation celebrations from the abolition of the slave trade to the fiftieth anniversary of U.S. emancipation. Excluded from July Fourth and other American nationalist rituals for most of this period, black activists used these festivals of freedom to encourage community building and race uplift. Kachun demonstrates that, even as these annual rituals helped define African Americans as a people by fostering a sense of shared history, heritage, and identity, they were also sites of ambiguity and conflict. Freedom celebrations served as occasions for debate over black representations in the public sphere, struggles for group leadership, and contests over collective memory and its meaning. Based on extensive research in African American newspapers and oration texts, this book retraces a vital if often overlooked tradition in African American political culture and addresses important issues about black participation in the public sphere. By illuminating the origins of black Americans' public commemorations, it also helps explain why there have been increasing calls in recent years to make the "Juneteenth" observance of emancipation an American -- not just an African American -- day of commemoration.

Rites of August First

Rites of August First PDF Author: Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807135704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
In Rites of August First, J.R. Kerr-Ritchie provides the first detailed analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of August First Daythe most important annual celebration of the emancipation of colonial slavery throughout the British Empire. Spanning the Western hemisphere, Kerr-Ritchie successfully unravels the cultural politics of emancipation celebrations, analyzing the social practices informed by public ritual, symbol, and spectacle designed to elicit feelings of common identity among blacks in the Atlantic world.