Virtual Library

What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality—the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to the nation—has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the ‘imagined communities’ of nationality.

Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.

Endangered life is often used to justify humanitarian media intervention, but what if suffering humanity is both the fuel and outcome of such media representations? Pooja Rangan argues that this vicious circle is the result of immediation, a prevailing documentary ethos that seeks to render human suffering urgent and immediate at all costs. Rangan interrogates this ethos in films seeking to “give a voice to the voiceless,” an established method of validating the humanity of marginalized subjects, including children, refugees, autistics, and animals. She focuses on multiple examples of documentary subjects being invited to demonstrate their humanity: photography workshops for the children of sex workers in Calcutta; live eyewitness reporting by Hurricane Katrina survivors; attempts to facilitate speech in nonverbal autistics; and painting lessons for elephants. These subjects are obliged to represent themselves using immediations—tropes that reinforce their status as the “other” and reproduce definitions of the human that exclude non-normative modes of thinking, being, and doing. To counter these effects, Rangan calls for an approach to media that aims not to humanize but to realize the full, radical potential of giving the camera to the other.

The racial and gendered politics of the 1996 welfare reform movement incorporated an anti-immigrant stance that fundamentally altered non-citizens' access to public benefits. This article focuses on community mobilization efforts to reframe the discourse of the “immigrant welfare problem” in order to restore benefits in the aftermath of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Drawing from two years of participatory research in community organizations, I found immigrant rights groups engaged in a variety of counter-rhetorical strategies. These strategies invoked a rhetoric of moral reasoning in order to promote the en-titlement of non-citizens to remain eligible for public benefits. Utilizing social movement framing perspectives, I examine the claims-making strategies that appeal to common beliefs about aging, frailty, disability, and the obligation of the United States to its veterans. However, collective action frames comprised moral constructions of human rights for only specific immigrant groups that lost specific benefits. I consider the broader implications of such findings for immigrant and welfare rights movements. This case illustrates the significance of, and the dilemmas confronting, counter-framing strategies within community mobilization efforts.

This book argues that the colonial confrontation was central to the formation of international law and, in particular, its founding concept, sovereignty. Traditional histories of the discipline present colonialism and non-European peoples as peripheral concerns. By contrast, Anghie argues that international law has always been animated by the ‘civilizing mission’—the project of governing non-European peoples, and that the economic exploitation and cultural subordination that resulted were constitutively significant for the discipline. In developing these arguments, the book examines different phases of the colonial encounter, ranging from the sixteenth century to the League of Nations period and the current ‘war on terror.’ Anghie provides a new approach to the history of international law, illuminating the enduring imperial character of the discipline and its continuing importance for peoples of the Third World. This book will be of interest to students of international law and relations, history, post-colonial studies and development studies.

This book traces the origins of the illegal alien in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.

In Close Association is the first English-language study of the local networks of women and men who built modern Japan in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Marnie Anderson uncovers in vivid detail how a colorful group of Okayama-based activists founded institutions, engaged in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, promoted social reform, and advocated “civilization and enlightenment” while forging pathbreaking conceptions of self and society. Alongside them were Western Protestant missionaries, making this story at once a local history and a transnational one.

Placing gender analysis at its core, the book offers fresh perspectives on what women did beyond domestic boundaries, while showing men’s lives, too, were embedded in home and kin. Writing “history on the diagonal,” Anderson documents the gradual differentiation of public activity by gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meiji-era associations became increasingly sex-specific, though networks remained heterosocial until the twentieth century.

Anderson attends to how the archival record shapes what historians can know about individual lives. She argues for the interdependence of women and men and the importance of highlighting connections between people to explain historical change. Above all, the study sheds new light on how local personalities together transformed Japan.

In the Event of Women outlines the stakes of what Tani Barlow calls “the event of women.” Focusing on the era of the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century's Cultural Revolution, Barlow shows that an event is a politically inspired action to install a newly discovered truth, in this case the mammal origins of human social evolution. Highbrow and lowbrow social theory circulating in Chinese urban print media placed humanity's origin story in relation to commercial capital's modern advertising industry and the conclusion that women's liberation involved selling, buying, and advertising industrial commodities. The political struggle over how the truth of women in China would be performed and understood, Barlow shows, means in part that an event of women was likely global because its truth is vested in biology and physiology. In so doing, she reveals the ways in which historical universals are effected in places where truth claims are not usually sought. This book reconsiders Alain Badiou's concept of the event; particularly the question of whose political moment marks newly discovered truths.

Scientists, activists, state officials, NGOs, and others increasingly claim to speak and act on behalf of “humanity.” The remarkable array of circumstances in which humanity is invoked testifies to the category’s universal purchase. Yet what exactly does it mean to govern, fight, and care in the name of humanity? In this timely collection, leading anthropologists and cultural critics grapple with that question, examining configurations of humanity in relation to biotechnologies, the natural environment, and humanitarianism and human rights. From the global pharmaceutical industry, to forest conservation, to international criminal tribunals, the domains they analyze highlight the diversity of spaces and scales at which humanity is articulated.

The editors argue that ideas about humanity find concrete expression in the governing work that operationalizes those ideas to produce order, prosperity, and security. As a site of governance, humanity appears as both an object of care and a source of anxiety. Assertions that humanity is being threatened, whether by environmental catastrophe or political upheaval, provide a justification for the elaboration of new governing techniques. At the same time, humanity itself is identified as a threat (to nature, to nation, to global peace) which governance must contain. These apparently contradictory understandings of the relation of threat to the category of humanity coexist and remain in tension, helping

Over the last decade China has undergone a transformation. After the dark days of the Cultural Revolution, it has emerged as one of the twenty-first century's most powerful economies, with millions of citizens now entering the middle class. Yet, despite these rapid changes, China's human rights record remains abysmal, and a heavy shroud of secrecy protects the one-party system from accountability. In In the Shadow of the Rising Dragon, Chinese citizens from all walks of life share their stories of brutality and oppression. While inconceivable in the West, public beatings, grueling official questioning, unexplained detentions, and house arrest have become common-place occurrences, requiring only a minor infraction to set into motion. Those that dare to push the boundaries of the totalitarian regime, including one essayist's visit to the human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, are sentenced to life-long imprisonment, subjected to physical and psychological torture, and, frighteningly, made to "disappear." What emerges is a pattern of harassment directed, not at opposition figures, but ordinary citizens who live in crippling uncertainty of their future. Edited by two Chinese scholars, both of whom have experienced surveillance, control, abduction, and detention, this is a probing and revealing look at life under the police state of the world's most populous country.

 In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"--the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness--Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.