Virtual Library

One of the most memorable slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl illustrates the overarching evil and pervasive depravity of the institution of slavery. In great and painful detail, Jacobs describes her life as a Southern slave, the exploitation that haunted her daily life, her abuse by her master, the involvement she sought with another white man in order to escape her master, and her determination to win freedom for herself and her children. From her seven years of hiding in a garret that was three feet high, to her harrowing escape north to a reunion with her children and freedom, Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl remains an outstanding example of one woman's extraordinary courage in the face of almost unbeatable odds, as well as one of the most significant testimonials in American history.

Gender and legal scholars argue that law enforcement personnel govern gendered violence by selectively protecting “good victims” and imposing social control. This article shows why these theories are not universally applicable. Using 26 months of participant observation and interview data with law enforcement personnel in the state of West Bengal, India, this article identifies an alternate set of governmental practices termed incorporation. Law enforcement personnel incorporated women by reassigning casework and encouraging extralegal repossessions and punishment. This governmental model rewarded women with organizational connections, not women who were “good victims.” And instead of expanding state control, it delegated authority to civilians. These findings underscore how low enforcement capacity and political mobilization influence the way law enforcement governs gendered violence in a postcolonial, developing context.

As the global ‘data revolution’ accelerates, how can the data rights and interests of indigenous peoples be secured? Premised on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this book argues that indigenous peoples have inherent and inalienable rights relating to the collection, ownership and application of data about them, and about their lifeways and territories. As the first book to focus on indigenous data sovereignty, it asks: what does data sovereignty mean for indigenous peoples, and how is it being used in their pursuit of self-determination? 

The varied group of mostly indigenous contributors theorise and conceptualise this fast-emerging field and present case studies that illustrate the challenges and opportunities involved. These range from indigenous communities grappling with issues of identity, governance and development, to national governments and NGOs seeking to formulate a response to indigenous demands for data ownership. While the book is focused on the CANZUS states of Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the United States, much of the content and discussion will be of interest and practical value to a broader global audience.

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.”

Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.

Paul Farmer has battled AIDS in rural Haiti and deadly strains of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the slums of Peru. A physician-anthropologist with more than fifteen years in the field, Farmer writes from the front lines of the war against these modern plagues and shows why, even more than those of history, they target the poor. This "peculiarly modern inequality" that permeates AIDS, TB, malaria, and typhoid in the modern world, and that feeds emerging (or re-emerging) infectious diseases such as Ebola and cholera, is laid bare in Farmer's harrowing memoir rife with stories about diseases and human suffering.

Using field work and new scholarship to challenge the accepted methodologies of epidemiology and international health, Farmer points out that most current explanatory strategies, from "cost-effective treatment" to patient "noncompliance," inevitably lead to blaming the victims. In reality, larger forces, global as well as local, determine why some people are sick and others are shielded from risk. Yet this moving autobiography is far from a hopeless inventory of insoluble problems. Farmer writes of what can be done in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, by physicians and medical students determined to treat those in need: whether in their home countries or through medical outreach programs like Doctors without Borders. Infections and Inequalities weds meticulous scholarship in medical anthropology with a passion for solutions—remedies for the plagues of the poor and the social illnesses that have sustained them.

The Arab Uprisings of 2011 can be seen as a turning point for media and information studies scholars, many of whom newly discovered the region as a site for theories of digital media and social transformation. This work has argued that digital media technologies fuel or transform political change through new networked publics, new forms of connective action cultivating liberal democratic values. These works have, surprisingly, little to say about the United States and other Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region. It is as if the Arab Spring was a vindication for the universal appeal of Western liberal democracy delivered through the gift of the Internet, social media as manifestation of the ‘technologies of freedom’ long promised by Cold War. We propose an alternate trajectory in terms of reorienting discussions of media and information infrastructures as embedded within the resurgence of idealized liberal democratic norms in the wake of the end of the Cold War. We look at the demise of the media and empire debates and ‘the rise of the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as modes of intraimperial competition that complicate earlier Eurocentric narratives media and empire. We then outline the individual contributions for the special collection of essays

Between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement--including the renowned Texas Rangers--killed Mexican residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. Monica Muñoz Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story.

Operating in remote rural areas enabled the perpetrators to do their worst: hanging, shooting, burning, and beating victims to death without scrutiny. Families scoured the brush to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. Survivors suffered segregation and fierce intimidation, and yet fought back. They confronted assailants in court, worked with Mexican diplomats to investigate the crimes, pressured local police to arrest the perpetrators, spoke to journalists, and petitioned politicians for change.

Martinez reconstructs this history from institutional and private archives and oral histories, to show how the horror of anti-Mexican violence lingered within communities for generations, compounding injustice by inflicting further pain and loss. Yet its memorialization provided victims with an important means of redress, undermining official narratives that sought to whitewash these atrocities. The Injustice Never Leaves You offers an invaluable account of why these incidents happened, what they meant at the time, and how a determined community ensured that the victims were not forgotten.

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship. Arguing that state protection has become far more multifaceted than what Marshall's triadic model suggests, the article shows how this protection frequently transcends the logic of individual rights while increasing the reliance of citizens on the modern state. The last section formulates a critique of the idea formulated by theorists like Manuel Castells that globalization favors a rapid decline of state power. Yet, state protection may not necessarily grow indefinitely, and tax cuts, for example, the ones recently enacted in the United States, could seriously jeopardize a state's capacity to raise revenues and effectively fight older and newer forms of insecurity.

This article discusses the transformation of the classical nation-state, as articulated in contemporary struggles for recognition. Elaborating neoinstitutional world polity theory, it analyses global institutional changes that underlie those transformations. It is claimed that the worldwide diffusion of the classical nation-state model itself has had paradoxical consequences, which have in the long run generated a new model of multicultural citizenship, legitimating the decoupling of state membership, individual rights and national identity. The argument is based on empirical evidence from a semantic analysis of international legal discourse on human rights, particularly in the field of religion. Documentary sources suggest that the content of human rights has changed in the second half of the 20th century; the close link between human rights and national self-determination was superseded by the idea that the protection of human rights requires states to recognize a diversity of primordial or traditional identity groups.

The institutionalization of distinct collective memories of hate and cultural traumas as law and bureaucracy is examined comparatively for the case of hate crime law. A dehistoricized focus on individual victimization and an avoidance of major episodes of domestic atrocities in the United States contrast with a focus on the Holocaust, typically in the context of the destruction of the democratic state, in Germany. Such differences, in combination with specifics of state organization and exposure to global scripts, help explain particularities of law and law enforcement along dimensions such as internationalization, coupling of minority and democracy protection, focus on individual versus group rights, and specialization of control agencies.