Böcker utgivna av Cornell University Press

"Account of James H. Billington's influence on US policy toward Russia in 1987 to 2015 and of Library of Congress programs in Russia aimed at promoting reform based on the revival of traditional Russian culture combined with democratic reforms based on Western models. Draws lessons for future US policy in Eurasia"--

The Equality of Flesh traces a new genealogy of equality before its formalization under liberalism. While modern ideas of equality are defined through an inner human nature, Brent Dawson argues that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries conceptualized equality as an ambivalent and profoundly bodily condition. Everyone was made from the same lowly matter and, as a result, shared the same set of vulnerabilities, needs, and passions. Responding to the political upheavals of colonialism and the intellectual turmoil of new natural philosophies, leading figures of the English Renaissance, including Spenser and Shakespeare, anxiously imagined that bodily commonality might undermine differences of religion, race, and class. As the period progressed, later authors developed the revolutionary possibilities of bodily equality even as new ideas of fixed racial inequality emerged. SomeâEUR"like the utopian radical Gerrard Winstanley and the republican poet John MiltonâEUR" challenged political absolutism through the idea of humans as base, embodied creatures. OthersâEUR"like the heterodox philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the French theologian Isaac La Peyrÿre, and the libertine Cyrano de BergeracâEUR"offered limited yet important interrogations of racial paradigms. This moment, Dawson shows, would pass, as bodily equality was marginalized in the liberal theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In its place, pseudoscientific racism would come to anchor inequality in the body during the Enlightenment. Contending with the lasting implications of material equality for modernity, The Equality of Flesh shows how increasingly vehement notions of racial difference eclipsed a nascent sense of human commonality rooted in the basic stuff of life.

"Beginning with Anglo-Egyptian colonialism and ending with Barack Obama's presidency, Bounds of Blackness explores the history of Black America's engagements with modern Sudan."--

"This book brings together twelve essays by senior historians who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of Stalinism as an authoritarian dictatorship determined to build a version of socialism in the Soviet Union at all costs"--

"An innovative approach to the history of Byzantine art that applies media theory to Byzantines' relationship to representations of their culture, faith, and history"-

"This book is about Presbyterian missionaries, other Americans with ideals, and their Iranian partners during the twentieth century. It analyzes the various ways in which their respective missions became manifest in Iran, particularly the national capital of Tehran, during the reign of the last Pahlavi shah"--

"Italian Forgers takes an unorthodox approach to a popular topic: art forgery. Based on original published sources as well as current and past scholarship, Italian Forgers focuses not on art forgery per se, but on the major forgery scandals in the context of a shifting art market operated by a number of Italians who fashioned a very sophisticated and self-conscious response to the constant and often intense demand for Italian objects."--

"This book contains summaries of interviews with Lithuanians who were forcefully conscripted into the Soviet army to fight in Afghanistan between 1979-1989. The text is supported by portraits of the veterans and photographs from their personal collections."--

"An account of the skills that are necessary both for individuals to flourish in the twenty-first century and for societies to approach sustainability"--Provided by publisher"--

"A reflective history of feminism, religion, and place in the intentional Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York, from the late-nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century"--

"This book includes a series of studies and reflections on Protestant and Mormon missionary encounters throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"--

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things-technologies such as literary doppelgangers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.

"Tells the story of a radical educational experiment. Built on a decade of research and the creation of several eco-schools, this book offers readers theoretical understandings and practical curricular and pedagogical implications and a map for those curious about shifting educational practices by aligning with the natural world to support mutual flourishing for all"--

"A study of the stalled/non-existent process of legally reckoning with the 1965 state-sponsored genocide in Indonesia"--

A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher. This terrible war overshadows Algeria's long and complex history and its prominence on the world economic stage--second in size among African nations, Algeria has the longest Mediterranean coastline and contains the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. Algeria, 1830-2000 is a comprehensive narrative history of the country. Benjamin Stora, widely recognized as the leading expert on Algeria, presents the story of this turbulent area from the start of formal French colonialism in the early nineteenth century, through the prolonged war for independence in the latter 1950s, to the internal strife of the present day. This book adapts and updates three short volumes published originally in French by La Découverte. For this English edition, Stora has written a new introductory chapter on Algeria's colonial period (1830-1954) and has revised the final section to bring the volume up to date.

"Includes all 150 species of venomous elapid snakes in Australia. Species accounts are illustrated with photos, distribution maps, and anatomical drawings and include natural history, range, and habitat information, identification guidelines, rate of lethality, and conservation status. Also in the book are instructions for first aid treatment of snake bites and a description of antivenoms"--

In The Last Ta'ifa, Anthony H. Minnema shows how the Banu Hud, an Arab dynasty from Zaragoza, created and recreated their vision of an autonomous city-state (ta'ifa) in ways that reveal changes to legitimating strategies in al-Andalus and across the Mediterranean. In 1110, the Banu Hud lost control of their emirate in the north of Iberia and entered exile, ending their century-long rule. But far from accepting their fate, the dynasty adapted by serving Christian kings, nurturing rebellions, and carving out a new state in Murcia to recover, maintain, and grow their power. By tracing the Banu Hud across chronicles, charters, and coinage, Minnema shows how dynastic leaders borrowed their rivals' claims and symbols and engaged in similar types of military campaigns and complex alliances in an effort to cultivate authority. Drawing on Arabic, Latin, and vernacular sources, The Last Ta'ifa uses the history of the Banu Hud to connect the pursuit of legitimacy in al-Andalus to the politics of other emerging kingdoms and emirates. The actions of Hudid leaders, Minnema shows, echoed across the region as other kings, rebels, and adventurers employed parallel methods to gain power and resist the forces of centralization, highlighting the constructed nature of legitimacy in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean.

Monuments for Posterity challenges the common assumption that Stalinist monuments were constructed with an immediate, propagandistic function, arguing instead that they were designed to memorialize the present for an imagined posterity. In this respect, even while pursuing its monument-building program with a singular ruthlessness and on an unprecedented scale, the Stalinist regime was broadly in step with transnational monument-building trends of the era and their undergirding cultural dynamics. By integrating approaches from cultural history, art criticism, and memory studies, along with previously unexplored archival material, Antony Kalashnikov examines the origin and implementation of the Stalinist monument-building program from the perspective of its goal to "immortalize the memory" of the era. He analyzes how this objective affected the design and composition of Stalinist monuments, what cultural factors prompted the sudden and powerful yearning to be remembered, and most importantly, what the culture of self-commemoration revealed about changing outlooks on the future--both in the Soviet Union and beyond its borders. Monuments for Posterity shifts the perspective from monuments' political-ideological content to the desire to be remembered and prompts a much-needed reconsideration of the supposed uniqueness of both Stalinist aesthetics and the temporal culture that they expressed. Many Stalinist monuments still stand prominently in postsocialist cityscapes and remain the subject of continual heated political controversy. Kalashnikov makes manifest monuments' intentional attempts to seduce us--the "posterity" for whom they were built.

In The Geography of Injustice, Barak Kushner argues that the war crimes tribunals in East Asia formed and cemented national divides that persist into the present day. In 1946 the Allies convened the Tokyo Trial to prosecute Japanese wartime atrocities and Japan's empire. At its conclusion one of the judges voiced dissent, claiming that the justice found at Tokyo was only "the sham employment of a legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge." War crimes tribunals, Kushner shows, allow for the history of the defeated to be heard. In contemporary East Asia a fierce battle between memory and history has consolidated political camps across this debate. The Tokyo Trial courtroom, as well as the thousands of other war crimes tribunals opened in about fifty venues across Asia, were legal stages where prosecution and defense curated facts and evidence to craft their story about World War Two. These narratives and counter narratives form the basis of postwar memory concerning Japan's imperial aims across the region. The archival record and the interpretation of court testimony together shape a competing set of histories for public consumption. The Geography of Injustice offers compelling evidence that despite the passage of seven decades since the end of the war, East Asia is more divided than united by history.

The Retrospective Muse showcases the celebrated work of Froma I. Zeitlin. Over many decades, Zeitlin's innovative studies have changed the field of classics. Her instantly recognizable work brings together anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and an acute literary sensibility to open ancient texts and ideas to new forms of understanding. A selection of her luminous essays on topics still timely today are collected for the first time in a volume that shows the full range and flair of her remarkable intellect. Together, these illuminating analyses show why Zeitlin's work on ancient Greek culture has had an enduring impact on scholars around the world, not just in classics but across multiple fields. From Homer to the Greek novel, from religion to erotics, from myth and ritual to theatrical performance, she expounds on some of the most important works of ancient writing and some of modernity's most significant critical questions. Zeitlin's writing still sheds light on the durable aspects of classics as a discipline, and this book encapsulates her achievement.

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript--a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament--Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

The medieval northern world consisted of a vast and culturally diverse region both geographically, from roughly Greenland to Novgorod and culturally, as one of the last areas of Europe to be converted to Christianity. Old Norse Folklore explores the complexities of this fascinating world in case studies and theoretical essays that connect orality and performance theory to memory studies, and myths relating to pre-Christian Nordic religion to innovations within late medieval pilgrimage song culture.Old Norse Folklore provides critical new perspectives on the Old Norse world, some of which appear in this volume for the first time in English. Stephen A. Mitchell presents emerging methodologies by analyzing Old Norse materials to offer a better understandings ofunderstanding of Old Norse materials. He examines, interprets, and re-interprets the medieval data bequeathed to us by posterity--myths, legends, riddles, charms, court culture, conversion narratives, landscapes, and mindscapes--targeting largely overlooked, yet important sources of cultural insights.

In Plato's "Letters", Ariel Helfer provides to readers, for the first time, a highly literal translation of the Letters, complete with extensive notes on historical context and issues of manuscript transmission. His analysis presents a necessary perspective for readers who wish to study Plato's Letters as a work of Platonic philosophy. Centuries of debate over the provenance and significance of Plato's Letters have led to the common view that the Letters is a motley collection of jewels and scraps from within and without Plato's literary estate. In a series of original essays, Helfer describes how the Letters was written as a single work, composed with a unity of purpose and a coherent teaching, marked throughout by Plato's artfulness and insight and intended to occupy an important place in the Platonic corpus. Viewed in this light, the Letters is like an unusual epistolary novel, a manner of semifictional and semiautobiographical literary-philosophic experiment, in which Plato sought to provide his most demanding readers with guidance in thinking more deeply about the meaning of his own career as a philosopher, writer, and political advisor.Plato's "Letters" not only defends what Helfer calls the "literary unity thesis" by reviewing the scholarly history pertaining to the Platonic letters but also brings out the political philosophic lessons revealed in the Letters. As a result, Plato's "Letters" recovers and rehabilitates what has been until now a minority view concerning the Letters, according to which this misunderstood Platonic text will be of tremendous new importance for the study of Platonic political philosophy.

The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states--love, melancholy, grief, and madness--with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources--literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents--Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428-1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470-1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479-1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451-1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason.Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in medieval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

Governing the Displaced answers a straightforward question: how are refugees governed under capitalism in this moment of heightened global displacement? To answer this question, Ali Bhagat takes a dual case study approach to explore three dimensions of refugee survival in Paris and Nairobi: shelter, work, and political belonging. Bhagat's book makes sense of a global refugee regime along the contradictory fault lines of passive humanitarianism, violent exclusion, and organized abandonment in the European Union and East Africa. Governing the Displaced highlights the interrelated and overlapping features of refugee governance and survival in these seemingly disparate places. In its intersectional engagement with theories of racial capitalism with respect to right-wing populism, labor politics, and the everyday forms of exclusion, the book is a timely and necessary contribution to the field of migration studies and to political economy.

In The Promise of Piety, Arsalan Khan examines the zealous commitment to a distinct form of face-to-face preaching (dawat) among Pakistani Tablighis, practitioners of the transnational Islamic piety movement the Tablighi Jamaat. This group says that Muslims have abandoned their religious duties for worldly pursuits, creating a state of moral chaos apparent in the breakdown of relationships in the family, nation, and global Islamic community. Tablighis insist that this dire situation can only be remedied by drawing Muslims back to Islam through dawat, which they regard as the sacred means for spreading Islamic virtue. In a country founded in the name of Muslim identity and where Islam is ubiquitous in public life, the Tablighi claim that Pakistani Muslims have abandoned Islam is particularly striking. The Promise of Piety shows how Tablighis constitute a distinct form of pious relationality in the ritual processes and everyday practices of dawat and how pious relationality serves as a basis for transforming domestic and public life. Khan explores both the promise and limits of the Tablighi project of creating an Islamic moral order that can transcend the political fragmentation and violence of life in postcolonial Pakistan.

In Schoolishness, Susan D. Blum continues her journey as an anthropologist and educator. The author defines "schoolishness" as educational practices that emphasize packaged "learning," unimaginative teaching, uniformity, constant evaluation by others, arbitrary forms, predetermined time, and artificial boundaries, resulting in personal and educational alienation, dependence, and dread.Drawing on critical, progressive, and feminist pedagogy in conversation with the anthropology of learning, and building on the insights of her two previous books Blum proposes less-schoolish ways of learning in ten dimensions, to lessen the mismatch between learning in school and learning in the wild. She asks, if learning is our human "superpower," why is it so difficult to accomplish in school? In every chapter Blum compares the fake learning of schoolishness with successful examples of authentic learning, including in her own courses, which she scrutinizes critically.Schoolishness is not a pedagogical how-to book, but a theory-based phenomenology of institutional education. It has moral, psychological, and educational arguments against schoolishness that, as Blum notes, "rhymes with foolishness."