Imagined Sovereignties

Imagined Sovereignties PDF Author: Kevin Olson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107113237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Imagined Sovereignties provokes new ways of imagining popular politics by critically examining the idea of 'the power of the people'.

Imagined Sovereignties

Imagined Sovereignties PDF Author: Kevin Olson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107113237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Imagined Sovereignties provokes new ways of imagining popular politics by critically examining the idea of 'the power of the people'.

What Is a People?

What Is a People? PDF Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541716
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

Beyond the People

Beyond the People PDF Author: Zoran Oklopcic
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192519840
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Beyond the People develops a provocative, interdisciplinary, and meta-theoretical critique of the idea of popular sovereignty. It asks simple but far-reaching questions: Can 'imagined' communities, or 'invented' peoples, ever be theorized without, at the same time, being re-imagined and re-invented anew? Can polemical concepts, such as popular sovereignty or constituent power, be theorized objectively? If, as this book argues, the answer to these questions is no, theorists who approach the figure of a sovereign people must acknowledge that their activity is inseparable from the practice of constituent imagination. Though widely accepted as important, even vital, for the development of political concepts, the social practice of imagination is almost always presumed to operate either historically or impersonally, but seldom individually. Those who theorize the figures of popular sovereignty do not see that they are, in effect, 'conjurors' of peoplehood. This book invites constitutional, international, normative, and other political and legal theorists of sovereign peoplehood to embrace the conjuring-side of their professional identities, as a way of exploring the possibility of moving beyond eternally recurring, insolvable, and increasingly irrelevant questions. Instead of asking: Who is the people? What is the function of constituent power? Where may the people exercise its right to self-determination? Beyond the People asks the reader to consider the prospect of a riskier and more adventurous theoretical road, that opens with the question: What do I as a 'theorist-imaginer', or 'conjuror of peoplehood', assume, anticipate, and aspire to as I theorize the vehicles that mediate the assumptions, anticipations, and aspirations of others? This question is examined throughout the book as it interrogates the idea of peoplehood beyond disciplinary boundaries, showing how polemical, visual, affective, conceptual, and allegorical language critically shapes our idea of peoplehood. It offers a nuanced account of the contested relationship between the social imaginary of peoplehood on the ground, and the imaginative practices of the professional 'conjurors' of peoplehood in the academy.

Vernacular Sovereignties

Vernacular Sovereignties PDF Author: Manuela Lavinas Picq
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816537356
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"Shows how Indigenous women are important political agents in reshaping state sovereignty"--Provided by publisher.

Subaltern Silence

Subaltern Silence PDF Author: Kevin Olson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231560354
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Subordination did not simply fade away in the aftermath of colonialism. Instead, this illuminating book shows, a host of subtle new techniques have arisen that dominate vast categories of people by rendering them silent. Kevin Olson investigates how contemporary societies silence the subaltern: sometimes a literal silencing, often a metaphor for other ways of making people unheard. Such forms of silence make some people invisible, push others to the margins, and devalue the voices and actions of still others. Subaltern Silence traces the development of these techniques to the early years of European colonialism, focusing on Haiti’s revolution and postcolonial trajectory. Exploring rich archives from Europe and the postcolonial world, Olson critiques fundamental modern institutions and technologies, such as the public sphere, the free press, and even progressively minded democratic revolution, as sites of exclusion. With the emergence of postcoloniality, he argues, subordination has become increasingly abstract, virtual, and symbolic. Nonetheless, it lies at the heart of contemporary racial politics, divides Global South from Global North, and allocates privileges and burdens in ways that are often scarcely perceptible. Engaging deeply with the thought of Gayatri Spivak and Michel Foucault, Subaltern Silence offers a new genealogy of colonialism and postcoloniality that is both historically informed and theoretically rich.

Kafka’s Stereoscopes

Kafka’s Stereoscopes PDF Author: Isak Winkel Holm
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501347845
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
In 1911, Franz Kafka encountered the Kaiser Panorama: a stereoscopic peep show offering an illusion of three-dimensional depth. After the experience, he began to emulate the apparatus in his literary sketches, developing a style we might call "stereoscopic," juxtaposing, like the optical stereoscope, two images of the same object seen from slightly different perspectives. Isak Winkel Holm argues that Kafka's stereoscopic style is crucial to an understanding of the relation between literature and politics in Kafka's work. At the level of content, the stereoscopic style offers a representation of the basic order of a specific community. At the level of form, the stereoscopic style is structured as the juxtaposition of two dissimilar images of the same community. At the level of function, finally, the style provokes a reconsideration, and perhaps even a reconfiguration, of the social order itself. With insights from literary studies, philosophical aesthetics and political theory, Kafka's Stereoscopes offers a detailed but highly readable argument for the relevance of Kafka's literary works in today's political reality.

Sweet Science

Sweet Science PDF Author: Amanda Jo Goldstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645858X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science, Amanda Jo Goldstein returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” back into conversation with the openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, J. G. Herder, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Such poetic sciences, Goldstein argues, share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organized nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and symbolic processes that give it viable and recognizable form. They summon De rerum natura for a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power and to make a monumental case for poetry’s role in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.

Constitutional Semiotics

Constitutional Semiotics PDF Author: Martin Belov
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1509931414
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This book offers an outline of the foundations of a theory of constitutional semiotics. It provides a systematic account of the concept of constitutional semiotics and its role in the representation and signification of meaning in constitution, constitutional law, and constitutionalism. The book explores the constitutional signification of meaning that is stretched between rational entrenchment and constitutional imagination. It provides a critical assessment of the rationalist entrapment of constitutional modernity and justifies the need to turn to 'shadow constitutionalisms': textual, symbolic-imaginary and visual constitutionalism. The book puts forward innovative incentives for constitutional analysis based on constitutional semiotics as a paradigm for representation of meaning in rational, textual, symbolic-imaginary and visual constitutionalism. The book focuses on the textual, imaginative, and visual discourse of constitutionalism, which is built upon collective constitutional imaginaries and on the peculiar normativity of constitutional geometry and constitutional mythology as borderline phenomena entrenched in rational, textual, symbolic-imaginary and visual constitutionalism. The book analyses concepts such as: constitutional text and texture, authoritative constitutional narratives and authoritative constitutional narrators, constitutional semiotic community, constitutional utopia, constitutional taboo, normative ideology and normative ideas, constitutional myth and mythology, constitutional symbolism, constitutional code and constitutional geometric form. It explores the textual entrenchment of constitutionalism and its repercussions for representation and signification of meaning.

The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty

The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty PDF Author: Rebecca Bryant
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501755765
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

Social Imaginaries

Social Imaginaries PDF Author: Suzi Adams
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607778
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Written by members of the Social Imaginaries Editorial Collective, these programmatic essays showcase new critical interventions in understandings of social imaginaries and the human condition. They include a new comparative approach to theorizing Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor; the rethinking of the creative imagination in relation to common sense; analyses of political imaginaries in neoliberal and constitutional contexts from perspectives drawing on Gauchet and Lefort; and the taking up questions of historical continuity and discontinuity in civilizational worlds. In addressing pressing questions concerning social imaginaries, the book advances the field as a whole. The book includes a Foreword by George H. Taylor. This book is a must-read for all scholars interested in social and political imaginaries and will appeal to researchers and graduate students working across a wide variety of disciplines in the human sciences.