Search Results

Thoreau’s Walden Pond experience is, at least in part, an individualistic response to the popular communal living experiments of the 1840s in the United States. This chapter examines one key aspect of those experiments—the desire to unify the self—in light of Thoreau’s successes and failures in his own living experiment. This chapter argues that Thoreau’s privatist political theory, which provides the backbone for the Walden sojourn, aids Thoreau in maintaining the goal of providing a sound foundation for a unified experience of selfhood in the changing nineteenth century.

This chapter interrogates the definitions of Grit Lit and Rough South and moves away from both categories to consider, via Raymond Williams and David Harvey, amongst others, the structures of feeling that emerge in contemporary southern literature to reveal the wider shift to liquidity in the form of financial capital and its socio-economic ramifications on poor whites. The chapter focuses on works by Toni Morrison, John Biguenet, Colson Whitehead, Barbara Kingsolver, and Tim McLaurin, and explores the ways these writers represent the impact of various political, economic and environmental changes and disasters including Reaganomics, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis. It considers communalism and the alternatives that appear in these literary works for measuring time and worth beyond monetary values.

The conclusion underscores the book’s interest in neoliberalism or financial capitalism and reflects on the ways contemporary literary texts represent the realities of poverty. It engages with the idea of oppositional literature that challenges not merely stereotypical accounts of the poor but proposes alternatives to the neoliberal consensus, often in terms of communalism or communitarianism. It argues for the relevance of the humanities in political debates and the need to locate poverty within socio-economic policies rather than regional contexts and behaviors.

The introduction highlights the tension between nationalism and religious identification and explains how earlier scholarship takes an all-or-nothing approach to the meaning of religious identity. Others have ignored religion by privileging secular nationalism or have attributed all meaningful history to religious distinctions and communities. Instead, the introduction lays the basis for seeking to understand the relationship between Christians and nationalism by exploring the formation of their religious and national identities. This approach is similar to recent work on communalism and sectarianism in other parts of the colonial world. In addition, this chapter introduces the reader to some of the most pertinent historical details and variations between Arab Christian denominations in Palestine.

The conclusion stresses the importance of reconsidering the exclusivity of national and communal identities, arguing that Palestinian Christians provide a strong example of dual identity. The importance of this finding is that because identification is a constant process based on particular social and political possibilities, seemingly sharp lines of societal division are neither inevitable nor immutable. Instead, an array of options is available at any given moment, and Middle Eastern Christians, as individuals and as a community, decide how much emphasis to place on one mode of identification over another at a given moment. They, like other peoples, are bound by neither national nor communal identity, but can change (and have changed) their allegiance to meet new demands and possibilities

This chapter covers Peter Clark’s life from birth through the end of his first stage of political consciousness and activism. Set against the backdrop of the uniquely oppressive racial and social conditions in Cincinnati, this chapter sets the stage for Clark’s eventual rise to local and state prominence. While this book is a political and intellectual biography, personal relationships forged in his youth played a crucial role in raising his consciousness and molding him into the leader he would become.

This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to 1976 as well as in other extant archival sources related to gay communalism. As a clearinghouse for gay men involved in radical, back-to-the-land ventures, RFD provides a complex view of the creation of a largely white, gay male counterculture spirituality that fused the sexual politics of early gay liberationists with ecofeminist, animist, New Age understandings of sexuality, the natural world, and spirit. Gay men who were or who wanted to live in communal spaces nationwide sent letters and stories into RFD, which was published in a variety of gay male communal spaces during these years.

This chapter examines Madan Mohan Malaviya’s efforts to improve Hindu–Muslim relations in India. It first considers Malaviya’s stand on communalism and nationalism and goes on to discuss the communal riots of 1922–24 involving Hindus and Muslims and their impact on Malaviya’s strategy and future course of action. It then explores the conflict between the Indian National Congress and the Khilafat movement following breakdown of the non-cooperation movement, along with Mahatma Gandhi’s release in February 1924 and his detailed talks with several top leaders including Motilal Nehru, Hakim Ajmal Khan, and Malaviya. It also assesses the Unity Conference convened at Delhi in September 1924 to discuss the situation arising out of the tragic events in Kohat, the controversy surrounding the issue of playing music in front of mosques, and Malaviya’s involvement in the dispute regarding the Ramlila celebrations in Allahabad.

"In Their Own Words" informs contemporary discussions and analysis of this organization by mobilizing the vast corpus of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba's (LeT) own writing. In this work, I analyze a sample of LeT's own publications and present new information about the organization, its recruits, the families that produce them and the external and domestic political imperatives that motivate LeT's operations within and beyond Pakistan. I draw from these materials to advance two key claims about the organization. First, LeT's ability to conduct complex terror attacks in India and Afghanistan--coupled with its loyalty to the Pakistani security establishment--render it incredibly useful as a reliable and obedient proxy. Second, because LeT argues against violence against other Muslims and Pakistan's religious minorities, it is a critical partner of the deep state's efforts to quell violence within Pakistan.

Most scholars of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba/Jamaat ud Dawah (LeT/JuD) tend to view the tanzeem as a proxy militia for the Pakistani army. While the organization certainly performs this role, this narrow understanding undervalues the full scope of activities it performs, alongside the full range of political and social perquisites that the organization affords the Pakistani state, and thus, the importance that the state attaches to it. Presumably, the formation of the Milli Muslim League (MML) will further entrench this alliance between the state and the LeT/JuD. This chapter demonstrates that LeT/JuD performs a critical role in assisting the deep state to secure its domestic objectives as well as its foreign policies in India and Afghanistan.