Masquerading Politics

Masquerading Politics PDF Author: John Thabiti Willis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253031451
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
“Willis should be commended for penetrating a complex and socially guarded ritual resource to glean the hidden histories manifested therein.” —African Studies Review In West Africa, especially among Yoruba people, masquerades have the power to kill enemies, appoint kings, and grant fertility. John Thabiti Willis takes a close look at masquerade traditions in the Yoruba town of Otta, exploring transformations in performers, performances, and the institutional structures in which masquerade was used to reveal ongoing changes in notions of gender, kinship, and ethnic identity. As Willis focuses on performers and spectators, he reveals a history of masquerade that is rich and complex. His research offers a more nuanced understanding of performance practices in Africa and their role in forging alliances, consolidating state power, incorporating immigrants, executing criminals, and projecting individual and group power on both sides of the Afro-Atlantic world. “Willis cites oral traditions, archival sources, and publications to draw attention to the link between economic development and spectacular and historically influential masquerade performances.” —Babatunde Lawal, author of The Gelede Spectacle “Important in its emphasis on the history of an art form and its specific cultural context; of interest to academic audiences as well as general readers.” —Henry Drewal, editor of Sacred Waters “Willis’s work should be a must-read for students and established scholars alike.” —Africa

Masquerading Politics

Masquerading Politics PDF Author: John Thabiti Willis
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253031451
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book

Book Description
“Willis should be commended for penetrating a complex and socially guarded ritual resource to glean the hidden histories manifested therein.” —African Studies Review In West Africa, especially among Yoruba people, masquerades have the power to kill enemies, appoint kings, and grant fertility. John Thabiti Willis takes a close look at masquerade traditions in the Yoruba town of Otta, exploring transformations in performers, performances, and the institutional structures in which masquerade was used to reveal ongoing changes in notions of gender, kinship, and ethnic identity. As Willis focuses on performers and spectators, he reveals a history of masquerade that is rich and complex. His research offers a more nuanced understanding of performance practices in Africa and their role in forging alliances, consolidating state power, incorporating immigrants, executing criminals, and projecting individual and group power on both sides of the Afro-Atlantic world. “Willis cites oral traditions, archival sources, and publications to draw attention to the link between economic development and spectacular and historically influential masquerade performances.” —Babatunde Lawal, author of The Gelede Spectacle “Important in its emphasis on the history of an art form and its specific cultural context; of interest to academic audiences as well as general readers.” —Henry Drewal, editor of Sacred Waters “Willis’s work should be a must-read for students and established scholars alike.” —Africa

Masquerade Politics

Masquerade Politics PDF Author: Abner Cohen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520912578
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Carnival, that image of sensuous frivolity, is shown by Abner Cohen to be a masquerade for the dynamic relations between culture and politics. His masterful study details the transformation of a local, polyethnic London fair to a massive, exclusively West Indian carnival, known as "Europe's biggest street festival," which in 1976 occasioned a bloody confrontation between black youth and the police and which has since become a fiercely contested cultural event. Cohen contrasts the development of the London carnival with the development of other carnivalesque movements, including the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of California. His valuable analysis of these relatively little-explored urban cultural movements advances further the theoretical formulations developed in his previous studies.

Masquerades of War

Masquerades of War PDF Author: Christine Sylvester
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317608909
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This collection explores the concepts and practices of masquerade as they apply to concepts and practices of war. The contributors insist that masquerades are everyday aspects of the politics, praxis, and experiences of war, while also discovering that finding masquerades and tracing how they work with war is hardly simple. With a range of theories, innovative methodologies, and contextual binoculars, masquerade emerges as a layered and complex phenomenon. It can appear as state deception, lie, or camouflage, as in the population-centric American warfare in Iraq that was sold as good for the local people, or the hidden violence Russian military forces used on each other and on local men in Chechnya. Masquerade can also be part of a people's war logic as exemplified by the Maoist movement in India. Yet masquerade can also be understood as a normal social mask that people don to foreground an identity or belief from one's cluttered repertoire in order to gain agency. Elements of masquerade can appear in texts that proclaim seemingly unequivocal positions while simultaneously yet subtly suggesting opposing positions. Masquerades of all kinds also seem ubiquitous in fieldwork research and in resistance movements in war zones. Perhaps masquerade, though, is ultimately the denial of death lurking behind the clarion call of security, a call that bolsters war by making militarized policing normal to secure populations from terrorists. These interpretations and others comprise Masquerades of War. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, critical security, conflict studies and IR in general.

Sexual Politics

Sexual Politics PDF Author: Kate Millett
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541724
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett's analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature's patriarchal myths and their extension into psychology, philosophy, and politics. Her eloquence and popular examples taught a generation to recognize inequities masquerading as nature and proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett's work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Hunger and Fury

Hunger and Fury PDF Author: Jasmin Mujanović
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190877391
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Less than two decades after the Yugoslav Wars ended, the edifice of parliamentary government in the Western Balkans is crumbling. This collapse sets into sharp relief the unreformed authoritarian tendencies of the region's entrenched elites, many of whom have held power since the early 1990s, and the hollowness of the West's "democratization" agenda. There is a widely held assumption that institutional collapse will precipitate a new bout of ethnic conflict, but Mujanovic argues instead that the Balkans are on the cusp of a historic socio-political transformation. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, with a unique focus on local activist accounts, he argues that a period of genuine democratic transition is finally dawning, led by grassroots social movements, from Zagreb to Skopje. Rather than pursuing ethnic strife, these new Balkan revolutionaries are confronting the "ethnic entrepreneurs" cemented in power by the West in its efforts to stabilise the region since the mid-1990s. This compellingly argued book harnesses the explanatory power of the striking graffiti scrawled on the walls of the ransacked Bosnian presidency during violent anti-government protests in 2014: 'if you sow hunger, you will reap fury'.

The View from Flyover Country

The View from Flyover Country PDF Author: Sarah Kendzior
Publisher: Flatiron Books
ISBN: 1250189985
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES and MIBA BESTSELLER From the St. Louis–based journalist often credited with first predicting Donald Trump’s presidential victory. "A collection of sharp-edged, humanistic pieces about the American heartland...Passionate pieces that repeatedly assail the inability of many to empathize and to humanize." — Kirkus In 2015, Sarah Kendzior collected the essays she reported for Al Jazeera and published them as The View from Flyover Country, which became an ebook bestseller and garnered praise from readers around the world. Now, The View from Flyover Country is being released in print with an updated introduction and epilogue that reflect on the ways that the Trump presidency was the certain result of the realities first captured in Kendzior’s essays. A clear-eyed account of the realities of life in America’s overlooked heartland, The View from Flyover Country is a piercing critique of the labor exploitation, race relations, gentrification, media bias, and other aspects of the post-employment economy that gave rise to a president who rules like an autocrat. The View from Flyover Country is necessary reading for anyone who believes that the only way for America to fix its problems is to first discuss them with honesty and compassion. “Please put everything aside and try to get ahold of Sarah Kendzior’s collected essays, The View from Flyover Country. I have rarely come across writing that is as urgent and beautifully expressed. What makes Kendzior’s writing so truly important is [that] it . . . documents where the problem lies, by somebody who lives there.”—The Wire “Sarah Kendzior is as harsh and tenacious a critic of the Trump administration as you’ll find. She isn’t some new kid on the political block or a controversy machine. . . .Rather she is a widely published journalist and anthropologist who has spent much of her life studying authoritarianism.” —Columbia Tribune

How to Rig an Election

How to Rig an Election PDF Author: Nic Cheeseman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300235216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
An engrossing analysis of the pseudo-democratic methods employed by despots around the world to retain control Contrary to what is commonly believed, authoritarian leaders who agree to hold elections are generally able to remain in power longer than autocrats who refuse to allow the populace to vote. In this engaging and provocative book, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas expose the limitations of national elections as a means of promoting democratization, and reveal the six essential strategies that dictators use to undermine the electoral process in order to guarantee victory for themselves. Based on their firsthand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States—touching on the 2016 election. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.

The Female King of Colonial Nigeria

The Female King of Colonial Nigeria PDF Author: Nwando Achebe
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253222486
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
While providing critical perspectives on women, gender, sex and sexuality, and the colonial encounter, she considers how it was possible for this woman to take on the office and responsibilities of a traditionally male role.

Failure Masquerading as Success

Failure Masquerading as Success PDF Author: Rudolph Cumberbatch
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1452042470
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
President Lincoln in 1865 said: To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan. This quote was later adapted as the VAs motto. General Omar N Bradleys VA Mission Statement We are dealing with veterans, not procedures- with their problems, not ours has been quoted repeatedly during the seventy five years since. In 1982 President Reagan approved $55.6 million in financial aid toMeharryMedicalCollege. An acute care facility was established atMurfreesboroVAfor training Meharry students. Bob Stump [Rep, Arizona], the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, recently heard that, in some VAs, incompetent managers are not fired on the spot, but instead, reassigned or transferred. The fix was the immediate removal of Konik as the failed director at theSalisburyVAand recycling him as our new director in the summer of 1996. . On Tuesday April 14th, 1998, an E-Mail was disseminated with following quotation: Weak leadership at the York VA Medical Center has prompted changes in the hospitals administration staff, with hospital Director Gene Konik reportedly asking for reassignment, VA officials said. Mr. Dandridge began to initiate his long-term plan for integratingMurfreesboroandNashvilleVA.One of his famous quotations was: Practice, practice makes perfect. Another of his public quotations was: Having theNashvilleVAsurgical residents perform the surgery would provide world-class surgery to the area veterans. . In the last five years, York has seen four different directors. Gordons office has been bombarded with complaints from ailing veterans and their families about lack luster care. Those whove died as a result of the administrative and service changes cant complain anymore. Current York VA Director David Pennington has never spoken to the press about anything, but did send a memo to the medical staff warning them to get online or get out! Our last crop of veterans is dying because of VA medical mismanagement, and our next batch is being loaded onto airplanes to fly back to an uncertain future. Mr. Sullivan, a gulf War I vet and VA project manager stated: This administration is so absolutely corrupt, incompetent and malevolent; it pales anything that came before it. Why is our economy tanking? The war, the war, the war.

Blackface, White Noise

Blackface, White Noise PDF Author: Michael Rogin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520921054
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
The tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics are at the heart of Michael Rogin's arresting and unnerving book. Looking at films from Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump, Rogin explores blackface in Hollywood films as an aperture to broader issues: the nature of "white" identity in America, the role of race in transforming immigrants into "Americans," the common experiences of Jews and African Americans that made Jews key supporters in the fight for racial equality, and the social importance of popular culture. Rogin's forcefully argued study challenges us to confront the harsh truths behind the popularity of racial masquerade.