Bøger udgivet af Stanford University Press

The years 1989-2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years - specifically the post-baby-boom generation of writers born between the late 1950s and early 1970s - responded to neoliberalism by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity. How, and in what way, these writers ask, can you mean what you say, and avow what you feel, when what you say and feel can be bought and sold on the market? What is authentic art in an historical moment when the artist has become a model for neoliberal subjectivity rather than its negation? Through six chapters focused on key writers of the period - including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallace - the book explores these central questions while intervening critically in a set of debates in contemporary literary studies concerning aesthetics, economy, gender, race, class, and politics. Offering the capstone articulation of a set of influential arguments made by the author over a decade and more, New Sincerity constitutes a field-defining account of a period that is simultaneously recent and historically bound, and of a generation of writers who continue to shape the literary landscape of the present.

This volume of the Complete Works provides the first English translation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes from Summer 1886 through Fall 1887. In these writings we find drafts of new prefaces for the second editions of his earlier works, notes for the soon-to-appear On the Genealogy of Morality, and crucially, fragments and plans for an anticipated "master work" under the title "The Will to Power." This projected work, as is now well-known, was never written by Nietzsche; instead, it was fraudulently assembled by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and his friend Heinrich Köselitz (aka Peter Gast), and published under Nietzsche's name after his death. Only now, with the publication of this volume and the ones that precede and follow it, are English readers able to examine for themselves the full set of unpublished writings of the last creative period of Nietzsche's life. Taking into account the latest editorial work on his final notebooks, and including a detailed account by Mazzino Montinari of Nietzsche's decision not to complete a "master work," this volume documents the evolution of Nietzsche's thinking on such important themes as nihilism, eternal recurrence, and the revaluation of all values as it presents his late Nachlass free from the distortions perpetrated against it over a century ago.

From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticismcan create. This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode--particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no--people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create. The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.

Despite growing political, social, and economic integration between countries over the last two decades, states have erected walls at their borders at a pace unmatched in history. Nonetheless, legal scholarship on the phenomenon of walling is sparse, as the walls are seen as existing independently of the law. Building Walls, Constructing Identities uses the U.S.-Mexico border wall as a frame to provide a new understanding of the relationship between the law and wall building. Increasingly, law is recognized as emerging from whatever knowledge is privileged in a given context, and that it is legislated by people with cultural biases. In other words, it is never a neutral set of rules, just as walls are never neutral structures. Marie-Eve Loiselle expands on this trend, arguing that the dynamic interaction between law and wall-building reveals insights about space, belonging, and national identities. Informed by two episodes of wall-building in American history--the Act of August 19, 1935, and the Secure Fence Act of 2006--the book identifies two discursive processes by which the law and the wall come together to communicate legal knowledge about territorial and cultural limits.

Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Robbinstraces the emergence of a cosmopolitan postwar recognition of atrocity. Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the concept even exist before people could accuse their own country of mass violence committed against the inhabitants of another country? Posing this cosmopolitan question to a vast archive of representations, Bruce Robbins seeks to give atrocity a literary history. In the presence of atrocity, what we want most is for someone to bear witness. What is it literature can do with atrocity that simple testimony cannot? As a work of literary history, the book answers that question, showing how literature goes beyond the legal paradigm of accusation. Meanwhile, as a work of literary history, the book uses the long history of representations of mass violence, from the Bible to Zadie Smith, to pursue the bold proposition that, in the midst of relentlessly repetitive slaughter and nameless, shapeless, irredeemable suffering, humanity's moral history might include a cosmopolitan arc. With penetrating insight, Robbins takes up such literary representations of atrocity as Bartolomé de las Casas's account of his fellow Spaniards' atrocities, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Grimmelshausen's 1668 novel Simplicissimus, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homero Aridjis's short novel Smyrna in Flames, and Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. What's achieved is a profound exploration of the longer trajectory of abhorrence and indignation and a critical examination of the conditions that have yielded the cosmopolitan postwar recognition of atrocity.

ReadingSilent Springas an outgrowth of Rachel Carson's love with Dorothy Freeman, Maxwell argues for the power of queer love now in the fight against climate change. There is something major missing from most accounts of Silent Spring and its impact: namely, Dorothy Freeman, with whom Rachel Carson had a love relationship for over a decade. Freeman had a summer house with her husband, Stan, on the island of Southport, Maine, where Carson settled after the success of her first bestseller, The Sea Around Us. Correspondence shows the women developing strong feelings as they connect over their shared pleasure in the rocky coast. In this moving new book, political theorist Lida Maxwell offers close readings that suggest Carson's relationship with Freeman was central to her writing of Silent Spring--a work whose defense of vibrant nonhuman nature allowed Carson and Freeman's love to flourish and for the pair to become their most authentic selves. What Maxwell calls Carson and Freeman's "queer love" unsettled their heteronormative ideas of the good life as based in bourgeois private life, and led Carson to an increasingly critical view of capitalism and its effects on nonhuman nature and human lives alike. From these women's experience Maxwell compellingly makes the case for an alternative democratic climate politics based on learning how to tune into authentic desire. Read through this lens, Carson's work begins to look different and shows us not that the human incursion into nature is dangerous, but that a particular relationship is: the loveless using up of nature for capitalism. When Carson and Freeman correspond in excited detail about the algae, anemones, and veery thrushes of the Maine coast, they give us a glimpse of a different, more loving use of nature. Inspired by Carson and Freeman's deep care for one another, Maxwell reveals how a form of loving available to all of us can help reshape political desire amidst contemporary environmental crises.

The logistics revolution has stretched capitalist production across planetary supply chains, leaving nothing unscathed: art and culture included. The Arts of Logistics takes a unique approach to studying culture and supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. With chapters on the merchant ship, the oil barrel, the shipping container, and the drone, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a surprisingly pervasive means of artistic production. Bringing together critical logistics research with Marxist cultural analysis, Boyle uses sculpture, theater, installation art, and popular culture to narrate the long history of art's connection to logistical infrastructure, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing today in the dream of a workerless world peddled by Amazon. The global reach of the artists considered reflects the geographies of supply chain capitalism, spanning from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. The Arts of Logistics takes meticulous stock of how aesthetics is entangled in capitalist trade and racialized labor regimes, analyzing influential work by artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude alongside that of contemporary figures including Walead Beshty, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Selina Thompson. With this incisive study, Boyle demonstrates that art is both an opportunity to reexamine the violent history of supply chain capitalism, and an active participant in shaping this history.

The Chinese revolution was a forestry revolution. For decades, tree planting has been at the heart of Chinese environmental endeavors, and forestry is pivotal to its environmentalism and green image more generally. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the "Greening the Motherland" campaign also promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms explores the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation from the early twentieth century through to the present day. Examining ethnic borderlands, the Beijing political center, and China's growth on the world stage, this book demonstrates the strength of Chinese environmentalism to adapt and survive through tumultuous change lies in what seems to be a weakness: its inconsistency and contestation. Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of Chinese conservationist ideas, showing that they acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability. Li situates Chinese environmental science within the context of global scientific knowledge transfer, probing the dynamics underlying conservationist ideas that energize environmental impulses in China, and shedding light on authoritarian environmentalism from cultural and historical perspectives.

While premodern kabbalistic texts were not chronicles of historical events, they provided elaborate models for understanding the secret divine plan guiding human affairs. Hartley Lachter analyzes innovative kabbalistic doctrines, such as the idea of reincarnation and the notion of multiple successive universes, through which Jewish mystics sought to demonstrate that the misfortunes of Jewish history were in fact necessary steps toward redemption. Lachter argues that these works, mostly composed between the early 14th century and the generation affected by the Spanish expulsion in the early 16th century, enabled Jewish readers to make sense of the troubling misfortunes of their own time. Kabbalah and Catastrophe uncovers the remarkable variety of ways that kabbalists deployed esoteric tradition to argue that God had not abandoned the Jews to the inscrutable forces of history. Instead, they suggested to readers that Jews are history's primary actors, and that despite their small numbers and lack of military power, Jews nonetheless secretly push history forward. For scholars of Jewish mysticism and medieval Jewish history, Lachter articulates how premodern mystical texts can be crucial sources of insight into how Jews understood the meaning of history.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a key site of oil production. International companies recruited workers from across the Middle East and Asia to staff their expanding oil projects. Unruly Labor considers the working conditions, hiring practices, and, most importantly, worker actions and strikes at these oil projects. It illuminates the multiple ways workers built transnational solidarities to agitate for better working conditions, and how worker actions informed shifting understandings of rights, citizenship, and national security. Andrea Wright highlights the increasing associations between oil, governance, and racialized management practices to map how labor was increasingly depoliticized. From the 1940s to 1971, a period that includes the end of formal British imperialism in the Arabian Sea and the development of new state governments, citizenship became both an avenue for workers to advocate for their rights, while simultaneously, a way to limit other solidarities. Examining the interests of workers, government officials, and oil company managers alike, Wright offers a new history of Middle Eastern oil and twentieth-century capitalism--a history that illuminates how labor management and national security concerns have shaped state governance and economic policy priorities.

How can the judgment calls we make in everyday life create or help eradicate social inequality? Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Two questions that seem simple on their face, but which invite a host of tangled responses. In this book, Jessi Streib and Betsy Leondar-Wright offer a new way of understanding how inequalities persist by focusing on the individual judgment calls that lead us to decide what's racist, what's sexist, and what's not. Racism and sexism often seem like optical illusions--with some people sure they see them and others sure they're not there--but the lines that most consistently divide our decisions might surprise you. Indeed, white people's views of what's racist and sexist are increasingly up for grabs. As the largest racial group in the country and the group that occupies the most and the highest positions of power, what they decide is racist and sexist helps determine the contours of inequality. By asking white people--Southerners and Northerners, Republicans and Democrats, working-class and professional-middle-class, men and women--to decide whether specific interactions and institutions are racist, sexist, or not, Streib and Leondar-Wright take us on a journey through the decision-making processes of white people in America. By presenting them with a variety of scenarios, the authors are able to distinguish the responses as being characteristic of different patterns of reasoning. They produce a framework for understanding these patterns that invites us all to engage with each other in a new way, even on topics that might divide us. Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? will leave you questioning how you decide whether a joke, a hiring decision, or a policy change is or isn't racist or sexist, and will give you new tools for making more accurate and productive judgment calls.

The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. This book considers the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, offering a new history of the interrelation between state building and nongovernmental humanitarianism and philanthropy in the interwar period. Doina Anca Cretu argues that Romania was a laboratory for transnational intervention, as various state builders actively pursued, accessed, and often instrumentalized American assistance in order to accelerate reconstructive and modernizing projects after World War I. At its core, this is a study of how local views, ambitions, and practical agendas framed trajectories of humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors in postimperial Central and Eastern Europe. Conversely, it is a reflection on the ways that architects and practitioners of foreign aid sought to transfer notions of democracy, civilization, and modernity within shifting local and national contexts in the aftermath of the war and after the collapse of European empires. At the intersection of the history of interwar Europe and international philanthropy and humanitarianism, this book's innovative and explicitly transnational approach provides a new framework for understanding the contours of European nationalism in the twentieth century.

More than half the population will experience menopause; it is time for the law to acknowledge it. Menopause is a stage of life that half the population will inevitably experience. But it remains one of the last great taboo topics for discussion, even among close friends and family members. Silence and stigmas around many aspects of reproductive health--from menstruation to infertility to miscarriage to abortion--have historically created the conditions in which bias and discrimination can flourish. Menopause exemplifies that phenomenon, and in Hot Flash, authors Emily Gold Waldman, Bridget Crawford and Naomi Cahn set out to replace the silence surrounding menopause with a deeper understanding. Hot Flash explores the culturally specific stereotypes that surround menopause as well as how menopause is treated in law and medicine. The book contextualizes menopause as one of several stages in a person's reproductive life. Taking U.S. law regarding pregnancy and breastfeeding as an entry point, the authors suggest changes in existing legislation and workplace policies that would incorporate menopause as well. More broadly, they push us to imagine how law can support a more equitable future. A broader framework further enables the authors to explore menopause discrimination as it is experienced by trans men and gender nonbinary people. They ultimately make the case for a new wave of intersectional feminism that encompasses gender, disability, age, and race.

The spread of democracy across the global south has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country's citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions and infrastructures that are meant to ensure a democracy's transparency and are charged with the task of holding leaders and initiatives accountable for the ideals they claim to serve. Taking the case of Mexico's National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (also known as CONEVAL), Graizbord is able to deeply theorize the processes for creating and employing this very particular kind of expertise. By analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain accountability techniques as a form of expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of a future technodemocracy--a vision of a democratic future that hinges on the power of these evaluation experts who, with their everyday work as civil servants, shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.

Nonreciprocal preferential trade arrangements are a defining feature of the relationship between developed and developing countries dating back to the colonial era. In the late 1950s, these arrangements started to take a multilateral form when members of the European Economic Community established special trade arrangements with their colonies. Since then, several trade arrangements have featured African countries among the preference-receiving countries. Yet it is not always clear how preferential these arrangements are and whether they in fact help African countries or instead lead them to perpetual dependence on specific markets and products. Richard E. Mshomba carefully examines the history of these programs and their salient features, and analyzes negotiations between the EU and African countries to form Economic Partnership Agreements. Nonreciprocal preferential trade arrangements are often unpredictable, since the duration and magnitude of preferences are at the discretion of the preference-giving countries. However, when used in conjunction with other development programs and with laws and regulations that encourage long-term investment and protect employees, they can increase economic opportunities and foster human development. This book recognizes the potential impact of nonreciprocal preferential trade arrangements and provides recommendations to increase their viability.

This collection of five essays by Germany's most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann's social theory to the question "What is modern about modernity?" and shows the origins and context of his theory.In the introductory essay, "Modernity in Contemporary Society," Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls "social differentiation," thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. "European Rationality" defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox.In the third essay, "Contingency as Modern Society's Defining Attribute," Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a "preadaptive advance" through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In "Describing the Future," Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with "The Ecology of Ignorance," in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas "for sponsors who have yet to be identified."

If the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to rigorous and thoroughgoing analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology, and narratology, might it invalidate the approach to the 'Oedipus complex' that Freud derived from his psychoanalytic experience? This book answers 'yes', arguing that instead of the Oedipus complex explaining the myth, the Oedipus myth explains the complex. The author argues that the Oedipus myth is an historical anomaly, a myth of failed royal investiture or of avoided masculine initiation. Does this mean that we must return to the wisdom of tradition and strike out twenty-five centuries of Oedipal history? The author knows very well that such a solution would be fantasy, and he concludes by speculating on how his analysis might contribute to a vision that has eluded Freudian psychoanalysis: how to surpass the Oedipus complex, with all the ethical consequences this would entail.

Arguing that the Sephardic experience played a much more vital role in the development of modern nationalism and literary history than has been generally acknowledged, this book demonstrates how modern writers from Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and India have used Sephardic history to explore the role and status of minorities and dissidents.

The Constitution of Literature examines Restoration and eighteenth-century literary criticism as a debate over theories of reading and argues that literary criticism emerged as a reaction against the role associated with print in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.

This book provides a lively introduction to the work of Roland Barthes, one of the twentieth century's most important literary and cultural theorists. The book covers all aspects of Barthes's writings including his work on literary theory, mass communications, the theatre and politics. Moriarty argues that Barthes's writing must not be seen as an unchanging body of thought, and that we should study his ideas in the contexts within which they were formulated, debated and developed.

"Lederman, Maloney, and Serven offer an excellent empirical investigation into the impacts of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the Mexican economy. . . . The authors pay close attention to the experiences of other Latin American countries and the European Union while avoiding ideological debates."--CHOICE"Lessons from NAFTA is important perhaps less for what it tells us about changes under a free-trade agreement and more for its nuanced and careful empirical investigation of how trade can actually make people better off. This, indeed, is the 'big story' of NAFTA and the potential for free trade agreements in the region."--Political Science Quarterly