Documentary Intimacies

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual n

Up to this point we have concentrated our analysis on two themes: first, on how various theoretical paradigms have attempted to account for the phenomenon of racism and its role in shaping social and political relations in contemporary societies; second, on the various historical contexts within which ideas about race were developed and on the historically specific and transformative nature of racialised ideologies and racist exclusions. Both of these themes are closely interrelated to a somewhat broader question, namely the linkages between racism and forms of social inequality that have been characterised as either racial in origin or racial in character. In developing our account of the theoretical and historical dimension we have inevitably touched upon the ways in which racial ideologies and practices have helped to structure social and political relations in particular societies, and have in turn been shaped by specific sets of social relations or national political contexts. Indeed it is clear that much of the sociological literature on race and racism has been concerned with this question. At the same time, the question of racial inequality has been a core preoccupation in public policy debates about racism.

The J/Jota in Jenni Deborah R. Vargas (bio) Jenni Rivera was to banda music as banda music was to the cultural imaginary of 1990s Los Angeles, Mexico.1 Born Dolores Janney Rivera Saavedra on July 2, 1969, in Long Beach, California, to Pedro and Rosa—undocumented immigrants from Sonora and Jalisco, Mexico—Jenni was the eldest of six children.2 As her career unfolded, Jenni was anointed by her fans and the music press alike as "la diva de la banda," and at the time of her passing in December 2012, she was arguably one of the most powerful music icons in Mexican banda, narcocorrido, and ranchera music. In the years before her untimely death, Jenni was gaining recognition by an even wider Spanish-language viewing public through producing and appearing on the television shows I Love Jenni and La Voz, Mexico's version of The Voice. Jenni Rivera had an especially strong fan base among mexicanas across Mexico and Mexican ranchera and narcocorrido music fan bases in cities across the [End Page 26] United States, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix.3 Mexicanas seemed especially drawn to Rivera's way of openly and assertively recounting the challenges in her life conveyed in her musical and personal narratives. Songs such as "Escándalo" (Scandal), "Las traficantes" (Drug traffickers), and "Mi vida loca" (My crazy life) represented her disregard for following the rules of mujeres decentes, or decent women; rather, she seemed to approach her cultural work in the manner she had worked during her entire life, churning out, cranking out, and calling out. Her approach to making music conveyed struggle and an unrelenting exertion of labor that symbolized a notable Latina welfare-class immigrant tenacity. Her fans adored Jenni for the ways her journey to stardom was flawed and unrefined and for the manner in which she seemed always messy, the vernacular for a life in disorder and chaos. As the outpouring of public grief demonstrated at the time of her death, Jenni had amassed a devoted following, a fandom whose characteristics (mostly Mexican immigrant and working/welfare-class mexicanas) connected with gendered representations produced in Jenni's musical performances, especially the irreverent figures produced in songs like "La Chacalosa" and "Las Malandrinas." These two songs, in particular, emblematized a mexicana subjectivity fashioned through indecent, graceless, and brusque performances of femininity. In fact, Jenni's media representation—produced through her own life narratives in interviews as well as in song—was consistently shaped by suspect discourses. While the 1980s and 1990s especially have been explored in terms of remarkable queer musical sound analysis—ranging from music by Prince, Madonna, and Wham, not to mention the house music that fuels queer clubs and PRIDE festivals—this essay contributes a focus on Spanish-language Mexican musical genres to such studies that overwhelmingly distinguish non-English-language music as other to the discursive construction of US pop music. Here, I consider the potential of queer cultural politics in relationship to popular music by paying particular attention to the ways neoliberalism and Mexican immigration created the context for the emergence of "la diva de la banda" and her aberrant mexicana [End Page 27] femininity. Given the twenty-year anniversary of Cathy Cohen's prominent essay "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" I return to Cohen's remarkable theorization of "queer" to consider non-normative mexicana gender and sexuality, made possible by Jenni's music performances, which, drawing from Cohen, we may recognize as "some of whom may fit in the category heterosexual … [yet] are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy."4 Moreover, constructions of normativity within dominant same-sex civil rights agendas have required us to think of queer sites, performances, vernaculars, and cultural politics in spaces and sites not always marked by same-sex identity categories.5 This essay, then, is a queer gesture to symbolically add the uncompliant femininities of malandrinas, indecentes, and maleducadas to Cohen's queer worlds of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens. Rivera, whose irreverent popular cultural representation was shaped as much by song lyrics about shameless women as by personal life dramas (including verbal fights with record industry people and...

Crime causes significant damage to the society and property. Different kinds of physical or direct methods are devised by the law and order department to spot out the criminals involved in the crime. This techniques will explore the evidences at crime site. For instance if it finds a fingerprint then the system will capture and send it to forensic department for fingerprint matching, which can be later used for identifying the suspects or criminals by investigations etc. Yet, it is a huge challenge for them to find the criminal due to less or no evidence and incorrect information, which can change the direction of investigation to the end. This paper proposes a data analysis approach to help the police department by giving them first-hand information about the suspects. It automates the manual process for finding criminal and future crime spot by using various techniques such as pattern matching, biometric and crime analytics. Based on the availability of information, the system is able to produce the expected accuracy.

Since 2011, a collaborative territorial network for urgent care has been deployed in Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau area, which allows direct and early transfer of patients with frailty from the hospital emergency department (ED) to other healthcare settings according to the destination's adequacy. This study aimed to identify factors associated with inappropriate intravenous antibiotic treatment prescribed on referral of patients with frailty based on microbiological culture and analyse the effect of inappropriate prescription on ED reconsultations for any cause 30days after hospital discharge. This observational, retrospective study was performed at a tertiary hospital between March 2018 and February 2019 and included 264 patients. A multivariate analysis, including variables with a P-value <.2 in the previous univariate analysis, was conducted. The variables included in the analysis were age, sex, patient comorbidities (COPD, diabetes and chronic kidney disease), antibiotic treatment in the last 30days and patient referral (nursing home or family home). Multidrug-resistant bacteria were isolated from 85 patients (51.5% of the isolates). In total, 159 patients received carbapenem, of whom 87 (54.7%) had non-drug-resistant bacteria. The antibiotic was considered inappropriate in 33 patients (12.5%) according to an antibiogram. Only 71 (26.8%) patients had a definitive culture on discharge. Moreover, 73 (28.3%) patients were readmitted after 30days. Patients with an inappropriate antibiotic treatment had more reconsultations within 30days than those with adequate treatment (59.3% vs 24.5%; P<.001). In a multivariate analysis, an inappropriate prescription was significantly associated with a higher number of reconsultations at 30days (OR, 3.22 [1.37-7.57]). In patients discharged from the ED with intravenous antibiotics, the empirical prescription of an inappropriate drug according to the final culture is a frequent problem and is related to a higher number of reconsultations. This highlights the need to implement early communication strategies with outpatient units to optimize antibiotic therapy once microbiological results are known.

The political relations between the Arab Republic of Egypt and Rwanda have deep historical roots that trace back to the early years of Rwanda’s independence. This connection is founded not only on good neighborliness within the African continent but also on a shared commitment to the principles of non-alignment and regional development. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explain and analyze the strategic mechanisms employed by Egypt and Rwanda to transform their bilateral interactions into a sustainable lever of geopolitical influence within Africa’s regional structure. This objective includes identifying the transition from traditional diplomacy to a development-oriented soft-power model through the activation of economic and technical channels. The central question is as follows: How have Egypt and Rwanda succeeded, through adopting a hybrid soft-power strategy and institutionalizing complex interdependence via commercial and technical channels, in consolidating their strategic partnership, thereby advancing the political and regional ambitions of both countries? The findings indicate that the bilateral relations between Egypt and Rwanda exemplify a notable model of South–South diplomacy, whose primary aim is to strengthen Egypt’s regional position through non-military and economic instruments. Rather than relying on traditional mechanisms of power balancing, this partnership is founded upon a hybrid strategy of soft power and the development of complex interdependence. By focusing on the transfer of technical expertise (such as free-zone management and pharmaceutical memoranda of understanding) and by facilitating the active presence of non-state commercial actors, Egypt and Rwanda have expanded their influence from the level of high-level political engagement to deeper layers of the region’s economic structure. Despite the initial gap between trade volume and political potential, persistent follow-ups at ministerial and diplomatic levels have removed trade barriers and emphasized regional platforms such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Ultimately, these relations demonstrate how the regional influence of a major power (Egypt) can advance its long-term geopolitical objectives through the engineering of soft-power penetration and the institutionalization of intersecting interests, while the smaller partner (Rwanda) benefits from the advantages of this economic integration.

This article examines the ways that Danish gang exit programs engage police officers and gang defectors in a pervasive work on belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. In urban Denmark, the majority of gang exit candidates are of ethnic-minority background and form part of the street-gang environment in marginalized migrant neighborhoods. This is an intimate social environment constituted by diasporic kinship networks, where gang formations are entangled with kinship formations. Hence, when gang defectors leave their gang, they also often leave their family and childhood home for a life in unfamiliar places and positions. As I show, gang desistance is thus a highly dilemmatic process in which gang defectors find themselves “unhinged” from meaningful social and kinship relationships and in search of new ways of embedding themselves into a social world. Based on an ethnographic study of gang exit processes in Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus, this article shows how police officers and gang defectors seek to (re)shape ties of belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. The process, I argue, illuminates the intimate aspect of the notion of belonging, in which kin and state relatedness is deeply rooted in interpersonal spaces and relationships.

Two forms of interest intermediation in particular - bureaucratic enfranchisement and policy incorporation - have arisen in the United States as substitutes for or complements to traditional party political and parliamentary forms of citizen access to government and of the political processing of their demands, interests, and claims. Large American cities were an important arena for the new political relationships, produced out of the intersection of new federal programs aimed at lower income neighborhoods, of political movements attacking government legitimacy, and mass violence in the form of ghetto riots. The chapter examines the characteristics and historical development of social conflicts and movements in urban settings in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to the formation of new incorporation strategies. It analyzes the specific modes of incorporation which have in fact emerged, both in parliamentary terms through the Green Party, and in administrative terms through linkages between a select number of movement organizations and the state bureaucracy.

Guest Editor's Introduction

What role do ‘middle classes’ play in ending poverty, or do they, rather, perpetuate continuous impoverishment? How is poverty socially and racially constructed? What can we learn from comparative and decentred research on poverty? These and other questions are at the forefront in Victoria Lawson’s (2012) essay, which analyzes and theorizes processes and provides facts that cause and reiterate persistent poverty on a global scale. Her writing goes beyond common authoritative framings of poverty, where the poor are defined primarily in terms of lack of income or as a consequence of specific class, gender or racial relations that generate exclusion and impoverishment. Furthermore, poverty is also hegemonically explained in terms of personal inabilities, inappropriate behaviour and lack of entrepreneurial engagement, often attributed to bad governance and overall cultural disposition. These predominant views in mainstream media and in political discourse frame popular perceptions and attitudes to poverty as a measurable fact expressed in statistics, categories and benchmarks used to indicate social change and progress. The results are primarily quantitative analyses of poverty trends and achieved goals, such as expressed in the UN Millennium Development Goals. Nevertheless, do these statistics and standards really tell us about the wellbeing of individuals or communities, and do they in fact help deconstruct the structural reasons and motivations behind poverty generation and poverty maintenance? By introducing the concept of relational poverty Lawson provides the theoretical foundation for understanding persistent poverty as the result of deeply entrenched, historically developed economic and political relations (also see Mosse, 2010). The resulting social categorization reproduces and reiterates inequality and makes continuous exploitation possible. The fact that impoverished people are simultaneously excluded and dominated by the current social, economic and political system becomes the major argument in this thought-provoking essay. Lawson (2012: 5) provides a detailed critique of the conventional quantitative, authoritative approach on poverty research, which basically ‘deemphasizes structural dimensions of poverty’ and responds to these ideological and ontological limits by arguing that ‘people are poor because of powerful others’. This new spin to the debate on poverty in the work of Lawson and the Middle Class Poverty Politics Research Group focuses on the role of middle classes, and the mechanisms in place for acting in opposition to or in solidarity with the poor. Their investigation of the political potential of middle class/subaltern struggles around poverty in Argentina, Canada, South Africa, Thailand, the US and India is anchored in a comparative methodology that will help to understand the integration of communities and places into globalized processes and assist in the interpretation of resulting processes and structures that produce and maintain poverty. bs_bs_banner

Nakajima appears as a paradoxically untimely figure of timely intervention: strangely present, even pivotal, yet overlooked. Nakajima’s performance work in the oddly unstructured, expanding spaces of commuting through trains, stations, and streets predates similar and better-known explorations by avant-gardists in Tokyo and beyond. His chanting, free-form, often collaborative public performances across Europe likewise demand consideration within the broader contemporaneous explorations of ritual, ceremony, and bodily possibility in art in the 1960s. Nakajima repeatedly played a role in jump-starting spaces of possibility, from Tokyo to Ubbeboda, from Spui Square and the Dutch Provos to Antwerp and Sweden.Nakajima’s work presented a realized actuality of transformative, unbounded practices that, despite or because of their imperfect intelligibility, allowed others to see and experience the world differently. Following that elusive actuality, in turn, reveals the potential of such art and politics to emerge at any time—unpredictably, beyond intention or design; untimely but perhaps made more graspable by a bit of openness, by attention to the unusual. In this essay I consider Nakajima across our intertwined investigations. Following contemporaneous critic Yoshida Yoshie, I consider the relations of art, politics, and violence in the 1960s and the very possibilities of art.

The currently growth of Brazilian population has caused profound changes in social, political, economic, health system, and family relationships. The family is the focus of attention of the nurse education, representing a link between the elderly and the health service to take care in your home. The aim of this study is to identify which guidelines would be provided to elderly dependent-at-home's family caregivers; describe the daily care of the family home to the elderly. It will be expected to contribute to the systematization of guidelines for family caregivers of dependent-at-home elderly; promoting to client a better care and broadening nurses's scope of work for improvement in efficiency and quality of its services. This study is the project of professional master of nursing care of Federal Fluminense University of Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Qualitative study with case management; For data collecting it was used techniques such as participant observation and semi structured interviews with elderly people participant in the program of home hospitalization at a general public hospital of Rio de Janeiro. The data information will be submitted to content analysis and further discussion in the light of authors who approach the subject.

Статтю присвячено вивченню особливостей ставлення російської суспільно-політичної еліти до факту існування незалежної України. Проаналізовано основні геополітичні концепції та нормативно-правові документи з питань зовнішньої політики, які визначали російську політику щодо держав пострадянського простору, та місце в них України. Акцентовано на прагненні російської суспільно-політичної еліти повернути Україну в поле своїх інтересів. Визначено вплив геополітичних концепцій на сучасну політику РФ щодо України.

The article based on the analysis of public sources examines the structure, goals and main directions of works of foreign scientific and educational centers in the field of transport policy - an independent area of the state activity that has (due to the infrastructural nature of the object of its regulation which is transport) characteristics of universality and reveal the close relationship and overlapping with many other areas (economic, social, innovation, industrial, regional, etc.). Transport policy as a field of research has links and intersections with the goals of a number of other political science areas and sub-disciplines (primarily with public policy and management, political regionalism, international relations and geopolitics, etc.). The authors state that theoretical and applied research in this complex and interdisciplinary field are carried out by organizations that are structural units of educational institutions and by independent institutions. The main trend of their research on general and special issues of transport policy is interdisciplinary approach used during the analysis. As for training, it is carried out by a number of foreign universities - both classical and specialized (mainly technical) universities. At the same time, it is primarily interdisciplinary in nature, based on a combination of areas such as politics, public administration, strategic management, transport economics, etc., which is reflected in the curriculum and in the content of individual disciplines. However, such training has not yet become a widespread phenomenon, and the diverse possibilities of political science in many courses remain underused. The article makes a general conclusion that theoretical and applied research, as well as training in the field of transport policy retain significant reserves, which are still very far from being exhausted. This is especially true of political science, whose heuristic and educational potential for the needs of the transport industry remains undiscovered.

Like many inhabitants of booming metropolises, Machiavelli alternated between love and hate for his native city. He often wrote scathing remarks about political myopia, corruption, and servitude, but also wrote about Florence with pride, patriotism, and confident hope of better times. Despite the alternating tones of sarcasm and despair he used to describe affairs, Machiavelli provided a stubbornly persistent sense that his city had all the materials and potential necessary for a wholesale, triumphant, and epochal political renewal. As he memorably put it, Florence was truly a great and wretched city.Mark Jurdjevic focuses on the dimension of Machiavelli's political thought, revealing new aspects of his republican convictions. Through The Prince, Discourses, correspondence, and, most substantially, Florentine Histories, Jurdjevic examines Machiavelli's political career and relationships to the republic and the Medici. He shows that significant and as yet unrecognized aspects of Machiavelli's political thought were distinctly in inspiration, content, and purpose. From a new perspective and armed with new arguments, A Great and Wretched City reengages the venerable debate about Machiavelli's relationship to Renaissance republicanism. Dispelling the myth that politics offered Machiavelli only negative lessons, Jurdjevic argues that his contempt for the city's shortcomings was a direct function of his considerable estimation of its unrealized political potential.