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Eminent political scientist Alfred Stepan analyzes the subjective responses of individuals when asked how their conditions have changed and how they see the future without necessarily connecting them to the policies. His findings unequivocally show that a rising proportion of the people say their fortunes are improving while a declining proportion say the opposite. This trend also carries over to their expectations for the future economic prospects.

This chapter examines the political implications of communal vernacular online art such as memes, mashups, and more. The tensions between these communal processes, and the various claims to authority, ownership, and censorship by institutions such as nation-states and media corporations, have erupted in epic cultural clashes regarding the very nature of art, freedom of speech, and politics. Such new moves challenge dominant regimes and dominant modes of thought, and are reconfiguring people’s relationship to the nation-state, traditional media, and corporate ownership of culture.

Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of area studies. Within departments of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and Iberian Studies, the Transatlantic approach critically engages the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in the Americas and Africa. Like its objects of study, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries instead of assuming the nation-state as a sort of epistemic building-block. But it attempts to do so without dehistoricizing the texts and other cultural products it brings under analysis. The thirty-five essays comprised in this volume are geared toward an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty colleagues who teach transatlantically oriented courses. They encompass nearly every decade in the last two centuries: from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the spring of 1808 and the subsequent movements of Latin American independence, through the transatlantic avant-garde, to current migration movements between Latin America, Africa, and the former Iberian metropoles. While each essay addresses a specific topic, our contributors also open up new questions for discussion and research, point to further readings, and suggest specific primary sources that can be used in the classroom.

This chapter contains an essay by Charles Turner that investigates the reluctance to accept a mythic understanding of politics. The relevance of myth is that it is particularistic and communitarian, and represents an originating act. Turner explores the concept of myth and relates its importance to the human future, knowledge, politics, Europe, Nation State, and representation of political reality in the post-World War II setting. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of interpretation and re-interpretation of narratives or myths to preserve a world that its inhabitants knew.

Chapter 2, Making Harmful Traditional Practices, examines the Ghanaian problematization of cutting as a “harmful traditional practice,” and contextualizes it within governance discourses and policies that conceptualize poverty in northern Ghana as an effect of harmful traditions. It shows that the codification of harmful traditions is embedded in the larger frameworks of modernization and development that have shifted over time. The national discourse of harmful traditions is the primary mode of problematizing northern poverty; it draws on neoliberal technologies of recognizing scarcity while shifting the responsibility for it to northern Ghanaians and their traditions. I suggest that anti-cutting campaigns employ this notion to mediate the fraught relationship between Ghana’s North and South and the place of the North in the Ghanaian polity. I suggest that the public embrace of this problematization results from the construction of northern Ghana as a counterpoint to southern civilization and modernity and a site for displacing national lack, shame, and disorder.

Imperialism—the political doctrine of world domination and infinite expansion—is actually the intellectual origin of the global financial crisis. Building upon Arendt's analysis of imperialism as one of the elements underlying the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century, this chapter argues that modern age has seen a shift from localized and limited goals of national interest to the limitless pursuit of power after power with no certain nationally and territorially prescribed purpose and hence with no predictable direction. Limitless power entails the growth of the invisible government, which in turn leads to an erosion of the space in which human beings belong and live as citizens. One result is that nations are increasingly governed on principles of economic growth freed from political limits. The rise of such unlimited economic thinking is one underlying cause of the extraordinary economic imbalances of our age.