Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders PDF Author: Mimi Sheller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351714384
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Crossing Borders examines how translocal, transnational, and internal borders of various kinds distribute uneven capabilities for moving, dwelling, and circulating. The contributors offer nuanced understandings of the politics of mobility across various kinds of borders and forms of cultural circulation, showing how people experience and practice crossing many different borders. Several chapters draw on interviews and ethnographic methods to analyze transnational migration, while others focus on material relations and cultural practices. Rather than the usual narrative of mobility as a kind of freedom, border crossing emerges here as an instrumental practice for building translocal livelihoods, a tactic for simply getting by, and a material practice potentially generating new forms of future sociality. Ultimately these diverse perspectives on crossing borders offer new ways to think about the mobility of political relations and the politics of mobile relations in a world of growing circulation across borders, but also flexible forms of (re)bordering. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders PDF Author: Mimi Sheller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351714384
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Get Book Here

Book Description
Crossing Borders examines how translocal, transnational, and internal borders of various kinds distribute uneven capabilities for moving, dwelling, and circulating. The contributors offer nuanced understandings of the politics of mobility across various kinds of borders and forms of cultural circulation, showing how people experience and practice crossing many different borders. Several chapters draw on interviews and ethnographic methods to analyze transnational migration, while others focus on material relations and cultural practices. Rather than the usual narrative of mobility as a kind of freedom, border crossing emerges here as an instrumental practice for building translocal livelihoods, a tactic for simply getting by, and a material practice potentially generating new forms of future sociality. Ultimately these diverse perspectives on crossing borders offer new ways to think about the mobility of political relations and the politics of mobile relations in a world of growing circulation across borders, but also flexible forms of (re)bordering. This book was originally published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power

Displacement, Belonging, and Migrant Agency in the Face of Power PDF Author: Tamar Mayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000604365
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This book centres the voices and agency of migrants by refocusing attention on the diversity and complexity of human mobility when seen from the perspective of people on the move; in doing so, the volume disrupts the binary logics of migrant/refugee, push/pull, and places of origin/destination that have informed the bulk of migration research. Drawn from a range of disciplines and methodologies, this anthology links disparate theories, approaches, and geographical foci to better understand the spectrum of the migratory experience from the viewpoint of migrants themselves. The book explores the causes and consequences of human displacement at different scales (both individual and community-level) and across different time points (from antiquity to the present) and geographies (not just the Global North but also the Global South). Transnational scholars across a range of knowledge cultures advance a broader global discourse on mobility and migration that centres on the direct experiences and narratives of migrants themselves. Both interdisciplinary and accessible, this book will be useful for scholars and students in Migration Studies, Global Studies, Sociology, Geography, and Anthropology.

Normal Life

Normal Life PDF Author: Dean Spade
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082237479X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Revised and Expanded Edition Wait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.

Specters of the Atlantic

Specters of the Atlantic PDF Author: Ian Baucom
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387026
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo.” Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.

Economies of Abandonment

Economies of Abandonment PDF Author: Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822350668
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Economies of Abandonment, Elizabeth A. Povinelli explores how late liberal imaginaries of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance make the global distribution of life and death, hope and harm, and endurance and exhaustion not merely sensible but also just. She presents new ways of conceptualizing formations of power in late liberalism—the shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it has responded to a series of legitimacy crises in the wake of anticolonial and new social movements and, more recently, the “clash of civilizations” after September 11. Based on longstanding ethnographic work in Australia and the United States, as well as critical readings of legal, academic, and activist texts, Povinelli examines how alternative social worlds and projects generate new possibilities of life in the context of ordinary and extraordinary acts of neglect and surveillance. She focuses particularly on social projects that have not yet achieved a concrete existence but persist at the threshold of possible existence. By addressing the question of the endurance, let alone the survival, of alternative forms of life, Povinelli opens new ethical and political questions.

Catastrophe and Redemption

Catastrophe and Redemption PDF Author: Jessica Whyte
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438448538
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Offers a striking new reading of Agamben’s political thought and its implications for political action in the present. Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics—his argument that Western politics has been “biopolitics” since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp—and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben’s thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.

Courted and Abandoned

Courted and Abandoned PDF Author: Patrick Brode
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144265791X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
A pregnancy outside of marriage was a traumatic event in frontier Canada, one that had profound legal implications, not only for the mother, but also for the woman's family, the alleged father, and for the entire community. Patrick Brode examines the history of the 'heartbalm' torts in nineteenth-century Canada – breaches of duty leading to liability for damages for seduction, breach of promise of marriage, and criminal conversation – that were part of the inherited English law and were a major feature of early Canadian law. Encompassing all ten Canadian provinces, Brode's study examines the court cases and the communities in which they arose. He illustrates the progression of these 'heartbalm' actions as women gained more and more autonomy in the late nineteenth century, until questions arose as to the applicability of these feudal remedies in a modern society. He argues that the heartbalm cases are a testament to how early Canadians tried to control sexuality and courtship, even consensual activity among adults. In mixing legal and social issues, and showing how they interact, Courted and Abandoned makes a significant contribution to legal history, women's studies, and cultural history.

Abandoned to Ourselves

Abandoned to Ourselves PDF Author: Peter Alexander Meyers
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300172052
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
Weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight to trace the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Jean-Jacques Rousseau's encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy and music.

The Politics of Bodies at Risk

The Politics of Bodies at Risk PDF Author: Maria Boikova Struble
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786601249
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
An understanding of International Relations exclusively as a sphere plagued by countless known and unknown risks, looming disasters and imminent threats leaves an important aspect of the study of politics unengaged – that of the human herself. The Politics of Bodies at Risk re-engages and re-conceptualizes politics from the point of view of the everyday experiences of human materiality living with risk across geopolitical worlds and state borders. Re-imagining human bodies as productive, singular and embodied materiality removes them from an understanding of “life” in an age of terror as pejorative, dispensable, and burdensome, enabling a novel understanding of politics as an embodiment of human bodies with risk, and not as a sphere of activity aimed primarily at managing, silencing, and normalizing the risky other. Drawing on case studies from several countries and across several disciplines, The Politics of Bodies at Risk investigates the possibility of developing an understanding of the productive possibilities contained in engaging with the human body as a site of a radical interconnectedness between politics, singularity, risk, and security.

God Save Texas

God Save Texas PDF Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.