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A Desire Called America examines the relationship between American exceptionalism and U.S. literature. It focuses on how literary works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon draw on the utopian energies of American exceptionalism only to overturn exceptionalism’s investments in capitalism and the nation-state. The book analyzes what it terms the excluded middle between American exceptionalism and its critique, or the conceptual and libidinal space in which critique and complicity mutually determine one another. The book also offers a theory of the relationship between biopolitics and utopia, arguing that in the context of American literature, bodies become figures for alternative forms of social life. It pays particular attention to how these figures contribute to a literary commons, or the imagination of non-capitalist forms of cooperation and non-sovereign forms of democratic self-governance. In doing so, it articulates a model of literary history linking nineteenth-century literature to contemporary literature by way of the rise and decline of American hegemony. The book draws on and contributes to the fields of American Studies, American literary history, Marxist criticism, queer theory, political theory, continental philosophy, and utopian studies.

This book explores Ottoman local governance during the liberal-capitalist state formation of the long 19^th century (1789-1922) with a particular focus on the administrative and judiciary councils of the Vidin County in the second half of the 19^th century. It explains the structure and procedures of these councils and provides an analysis of their function in local politics and economics in addition to an examination of their correspondence and people who worked in the governmental sphere dominated by these councils. Between 1396 and 1878, Vidin was a town under Ottoman administration and became a county centre in the Danube Province when an imperial reform restructured provincial governance and redefined imperial administrative divisions in 1864. The processes explored here focus mostly on the individuals’ rights to the means of production because a majority of the disputes within and petitions from the provinces during the nineteenth century were concerned with property and taxation. Local agents and groups engaged with each other within the judicio-administrative sphere dominated by these councils and sought to advance their interests by using the language, rules and practices of Ottoman governance. This book argues that in 19^th century Vidin, we do not see a binary opposition between a state that coerces transformation against a society that opposes reforms. Vidiners, including the notables and the less wealthy inhabitants utilized the judicio-administrative sphere as a hegemonic domain to pursue their strategies as they problematized proper governance (debating matters of property, security, market order and population) as part of Ottoman biopolitics.

This book explores the possibilities for a genuinely radical critique of globalized culture and politics—at a time when intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike struggle to understand the configuration of the contemporary world. This book seeks to unsettle a naturalized and commonsensical assumption: that democracy and the economic market must be viewed as either united or at odds. Against both neoliberalists and cultural pluralists, the book argues that the state is not yielding to the market, but that the universe now turns on a “duopoly” between statist and global forms, one that generates not only economic and cultural sites but also ways of knowing, a postdemocratic episteme. Touching upon current issues such as terrorism, human rights, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the notion of the “people”, delving into the idea of biopolitics, and investigating the essential relation between language and political praxis, the book engages with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others.

This is a book which aims to overturn existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. As the book shows, this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life against an enemy defined simply by a contradictory will for the destruction of human life as commonly supposed by its liberal advocates. It is a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being put to the test if not rejected outright.

The United States government has spent billions of dollars this century to prepare the nation for bioterrorism, despite the extremely rare occurrence of biological attacks in modern American history. Germ Wars argues that bioterrorism has emerged as a prominent fear in the modern age through the production of new forms of microbial nature and changing practices of warfare. Revolutions in biological science have made visible a vast microscopic world in the last century, and in this same era we have watched the rise of a global war on terror. Though these movements appear to emerge separately, this book argues that they are deeply entwined. New scientific knowledge of microbes makes possible new mechanisms of war. The history of the work done to harness and control germs, whether to create weapons or to eliminate disease, is an important site for investigating how biological natures shape modern life. Germ Wars aims to convince students and scholars as well as policymakers and activists that the ways in which bioterrorism has been produced have consequences in how people live in this world of unspecifiable risks.

“Welcome to the European Family!” is the banner under which East European countries joined the European Union following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989. This book offers an analysis of the imbrication of the ensuing imagined European kinship with its corollary: the traffic in women. The book revisits Claude Lévi-Strauss concept of kinship, as well as its re-articulation by second-wave feminists, Gayle Rubin most prominently, in order to remind the reader that kinship has been traditionally anchored in the traffic in women. This is not the traffic in women invoked by the media to refer to sex trafficking per se, but a broad anthropological concept that describes the circulation of women between kinship groups, traditionally through marriage. Reading recent cinematic texts that critically frame the European traffic in women, the book shows that, in today’s Europe, racialized East European migrant women are “exchanged” so they can engage in labor traditionally performed by wives within the institution of marriage. Following a pattern of what the book calls Americanization, East European migrant women, alongside women from the global South, become responsible for the biopolitical labor of reproduction, whether they work as domestics, nannies, nurses, sex workers, or wives. A feminist intervention in the heated debate on the making and unmaking of Europe, the book argues that the critical project of pluralizing post-1989 Europe needs to account for the Europe brought together through the traffic in East European women.

Attempts at educational equity amount to local activities performed within unequal and disjunctive political forces. As a politics, educational equity is redolent of the conditions that produce unequal schooling in the first place. Based on a four-year multi-modal study, this book identifies the forces that produced unequal schooling opportunities for Black families in Toronto, Canada, while simultaneously identifying the conditions that generated an Africentric Alternative School for these families and the Black community. The book identifies how the conditions that created unequal schooling were some of the very conditions that produced educational equity in the form of the school. This includes four preconditions to relay an account of the school’s origin, including biopolitics, neoliberalism, the politics of recognition, and the city and its relationships to ideologies of race and multiculturalism. Each precondition is discussed in a separate chapter and in relation to a significant policy event that precipitated the becoming of the Africentric Alternative School. The book utilises an unique feature by developing a ‘subtext’ that accompanies each chapter, whereby the authors reflect upon the theoretical and methodological choices in each corresponding chapter. The book concludes how this particular analysis of education policy can be used to map constellations of power and force that have a large degree of influence over policy subjects and policy actors, in concerted attempts to identify the important preconditions that shape recurring attempts at racial justice.

What is the state? How is it implicated in the reproduction of relations of domination? Theorists from Marx to Weber, from Durkheim to Gramsci, from Abrams to Foucault have pondered these questions. In The Encrypted State, anthropologist David Nugent sheds new light on these questions by focusing on disorder and delusion, rather than order and rationality. Nugent analyzes mid-century Peru, where the government experienced a crisis of rule. Officials believed that their efforts to govern were being systematically thwarted by an underground political party called APRA that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. APRA’s ability to disrupt official processes of rule produced deep paranoia among officials. They concluded that the party had established a vast subterranean polity of remarkable power and potency, to which virtually everyone secretly belonged. This episode of paranoia and delusion is especially puzzling because immediately prior everyday administration had been entirely normal and routine. In seeking to understand how irrationality and disorder could emerge out of rationality and order, Nugent finds that government projects had always been delusional. During periods of apparent order and rationality, however, officials had disguised their delusion—from themselves and others—by employing a series of bureaucratic and documentary mechanisms. The Encrypted State identifies these mechanisms and shows how they operated. The book also explores when these mechanisms succeeded in creating a facade of order and rationality and when they failed. In the process, the volume advances a radically new way of thinking about the state.

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the opportunity for political change is located in the agonistic relation between sovereignty and democracy and thus demands a radical rethinking.

For many of their contemporaries, the nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar kind of zealotry: theirs was the story of a population deranged--socially, sexually, even racially--by the extravagances of belief they chose to name “religion.” This book offers a counterhistory of early Mormonism, tracking the Latter-day Saints from the period of their emergence as a dissident sect, fired by a heterodox and scandalizing carnal imagination, through to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these unruly decades, the Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, “Mohammedan” tyrants, refugees, colonizers, and, eventually, as reluctant monogamists, enfranchised at last into the secular nation and its empire of white settlers. Reading Mormonism across these registers, the book fashions a synthesizing critical idiom that uses religious history, Native Studies, political theology, and queer critique to tell a new story about secularism as a regulatory, disciplinary, and racializing metaphysics: about, that is, the biopolitics of secularism. It argues that, in the eyes of their countrymen, the Mormons were a people who persistently failed at being secular--whose beliefs were understood to have depraved them, and whose marriage-defiling depravity made them dubious white people--and were disciplined, at high and violent cost, into becoming so. It offers a story of orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in a secularizing nineteenth-century America.

Alegal reveals modern Okinawa to be suspended in a perpetual state of exception: it is neither an official colony of Japan or the U.S., nor an equal part of the Japanese state. Today it is the site of one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases globally—a truly exceptional condition stemming from Japan’s abhorrence toward sexual contact around bases in its mainland that factored into securing Okinawa as a U.S. military fortress. This book merges Foucauldian biopolitics with Japanese Marxist theorizations of capitalism to trace the formation of a Japanese middle class that disciplined and secured the population from perceived threats, including the threat of miscegenation. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and autobiography, it reveals how this threat came to symbolize the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, was met with great ambivalence in Okinawa. As a borderland of the Pacific, racial politics internal to the U.S. collided with colonial politics internal to the Asia Pacific in base towns centered on facilitating encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women. By examining the history, debates, and cultural representations of these actors from 1945 to 2015, this book shows how they continually failed to “become Japanese.” Instead, they epitomized Okinawa’s volatility that danced on the razor’s edge between anarchistic insurgency and fascistic collaboration. What was at stake in their securitization was the attempt to contain Okinawa’s alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the law.

The Two cines con niño  is the first genre study of Spanish-language child-starred cinemas. It illuminates continuities in the political use of the child protagonist in over fifty years of cinema from Spain and how the child-starred genres use the concept of childhood to define the nation’s past, present, and future. From Francoist popular to oppositional auteur films, and including Latin American cinema, this monograph examines dialogism in aesthetics, narratives, and genre functions. It demonstrates the impact of these narratives within Spanish film history and Francoist biopolitics, as well as providing a broader transatlantic perspective on the genre in select productions from Chile and Argentina. In-depth inquiry within its pages examines films by Pedro Almodóvar, Antonio del Amo, Montxo Armendáriz, Benjamín Ávila, Juan Antonio Bayona, José Luis Cuerda, Guillermo del Toro, Víctor Erice, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Arantxa Lazkano, Luis Lucía, Paula Markovtich, Javier Ruiz Caldera, Carlos Saura, Imanol Uribe, Ladislao Vajda, Agustí Villaronga, and Andrés Wood.

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.

Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this collection, Amy Allen, Geoffrey Bennington, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, Pierre Macherey, Michael Naas, and Judith Revel, among others, trace this exchange in debates over the possibilities of genealogy and deconstruction, immanent and transcendent approaches to philosophy, and the practical and theoretical role of the archive.