Review Essay: Critical Secularism Studies in These Times

Patricia Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963–1975 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), xviii + 322 pp. US $18.00 (paper), $46.00 (cloth). Sara Evans, Tid...

On Violence, Seen Remotely Elspeth Iralu (bio) Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. By Caren Kaplan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 312 pages. $104.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War. By Ronak Kapadia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 352 pages. $104.95 (cloth). $28.95 (paper). Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze. By Roger Stahl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 224 pages. $120.00 (cloth). $30.95 (paper). On Friday, June 5, amid protests of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the District of Columbia Department of Public Works painted two blocks of 16th Street by Lafayette Square, across from the White House, with the words black lives matter. The block letters stood thirty-five feet tall, yellow paint on black asphalt, followed by a DC flag, three stars in a row above two horizontal lines. On the same day, Black Lives Matter DC decried the mural on Twitter, calling the mural a "performative distraction" from the necessity of defunding the police. The following day, activists added to the mural. They painted over the three stars, leaving the two horizontal lines, and added another phrase so that the mural read: "black lives matter = defund the police." Over the next two weeks, dozens of similar murals appeared on city streets across the country. Drawing both critique and celebration, the murals have stirred a robust debate as to whether these murals are symbol without substance or a challenge to authority. What is striking about the murals is the impossibility of seeing them all at once from the ground. Photographs taken on the ground show only fragments of the murals. One must squint to decipher what letters the people in the photos are standing on. From the ground, you cannot read the whole phrase, let alone fit the entirety of one letter in the camera's frame while also including enough scope in the photo to identify landmarks or storefronts around the murals that might distinguish one city from the next. On social media, people share [End Page 1047] photos taken from above obliquely or vertically, thanking the photographers for climbing on top of a roof or flying a drone overhead to take the photo. Two weeks after the DC mural's appearance, Google maps updated the satellite imagery near the White House in Washington, DC, revealing the newly painted mural with both its sanctioned and insurgent halves. This perspective is also how we are asked to make sense of militarized police violence against Black lives: at a distance, from above. What does this remote mode of seeing reveal about how we relate to imperial and colonial state violence? How has the aerial perspective been normalized as way of seeing? How do militarized modes of seeing generate a structure of feeling such that we can sense from a distance? This review essay considers three recent monographs by Ronak Kapadia, Caren Kaplan, and Roger Stahl, all of which take on these questions to reckon with how war infiltrates contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the United States. All three books further situate themselves within a genealogy of scholarship on violence and visual culture, drawing from such scholars as Paul Virilio and Nicholas Mirzoeff. They build on and initiate conversation with scholarship from critical geography, media studies, and critical surveillance studies. These books ask how militarized technologies such as satellites, aerial photographs, drones, and biometrics shape not only how we look but what we look for, and suggest how we might expose the blinders these technologies erect. Kaplan's Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above traces the history of the aerial perspective as a tool and project of war. Kaplan's archive spans four centuries and four continents. With chapters arranged chronologically, Kaplan examines mapped military surveys, the technology of the hot-air balloon, the development of the panorama, aerial photography, and other aerial imagery to demonstrate how the aerial view-from-above is a "world-making visual culture" (26) that generates ways of knowing and structures of feeling. While Kaplan states that she began the project with an understanding that "aerial observation is...

This essay reviews three recently published books that stand at the intersection of queer/trans studies and critical prison studies. These books show the multiple and complex ways that queerness pervades the US prison system and the devastating effects of criminalization and incarceration on queer, gender- and sexual-nonconforming, and LGBT people. The author argues that this scholarship also demonstrates the need for queer and trans studies to engage with the US prison system and for critical prison studies to use queer analytics and examine the incarceration of queer and LGBT people.

Yoga has the power to change this and turn challenges into possibilities. It can also influence people’s positive perspectives. To reach greater goals, one can improve cognition, use setbacks as stepping stones, and advance in life. Yoga has a methodical approach to self-realization that is not time-bound. A constant effort is made to improve oneself. We must learn to become “Observers” if we are to develop our personalities and progress towards harmonious perfection, much like a doctor must first become an observer before engaging in clinical practise and treating patients. A rational and scientific method of self-discovery is yoga philosophy. Adibhautik, Adidaivik, and Adyatmik are the three elements of human life that yoga addresses. The philosophical definition of communication states that it is an inward quest for the genuine self or a means of obtaining the true knowledge. It suggests that communication and yoga philosophy must be connected. An outline of the connections between Patanjali Yoga Philosophy and Communication is presented in this review essay.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Siobhan B. Somerville, “Notes toward a Queer History of Naturalization,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 660. 2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). 3. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 96. 4. Marouf Hasian Jr. and Emily Plec, “Remembrance of Things Past: A Postcolonial Critique of the Human Genome Diversity Project,” in New Approaches to Rhetoric, ed. Patricia A. Sullivan and Stephen R. Goldzwig (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 111–27. 5. Étienne Balibar, “Is There a Neo-Racism?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 17–28. 6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 7. For praise of the movement, see Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activism Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Charlotte Bunch, “Women's Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 12 (1990): 486–98. For critique of the movement, see Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 8. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 9. Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence of Seattle,’” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125–51. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSara L. McKinnonSara L. McKinnon is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Critical media studies have long been interested in racial representations. One of the first articles in media studies to address whiteness explicitly was Richard Dyer's 1988 essay White, which appeared in Screen. Although questions about the politics of racial representation had certainly been on the table long before that-in the regulations of the motion picture industry, as well as critical writing, Dyer turned our attention to the study of whiteness and its representational power. Since that time, studies in whiteness have flourished in communication studies and beyond. While it might not be necessary to point out, but I still ijisist on doing so, that discussions about whiteness are not new. Whiteness and its conflation with nationality has long been reflected in legislative discourses about immigration and citizenship restrictions to popular discourses about who is American. People of color as well have long held practical knowledge about the workings of whiteness for their own survival in a white-dominated society. Knowledge about when to speak out and when to remain silent, when to look and when to avert gazes, have all played important roles in the ways that whiteness functions. Whiteness, however, is a slippery topic precisely because whiteness is not a fixed property per se. It does not inhere in bodies. Instead, whiteness serves a number of social functions that serve to reinforce a system of domination, not only in relation to race, but sexuality, gender, class, location, and, certainly, nationality. As Sarah Projansky and Kent Ono conclude in their analysis of films that appear to challenge whiteness, issue is not whiteness, but what whiteness is so often used to do (771). The two review essays here offer differing perspectives on the critical study of whiteness in the media. Raka Shome's essay, Outing Whiteness,focuses on the ways that whiteness serves as domination yet outs itself in the process of securing its social position. Her review of popular images demonstrates the ways that whiteness serves as the organizing principle yet remains dynamic in differing contexts to resecure its positionality. She argues that we need to study whiteness from a critical perspective despite the risk ofrecentering whiteness. In contrast, Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg's essay, Passing or Whiteness on the Edge of Town, takes the margin as her starting point and the role of passing in negotiating relations with whiteness.

Pashtun resistance to state authority has been interpreted in light of stereotypical colonial theories in colonial and post-colonial periods. Pashtuns were presented as marshals and wild people who resisted every kind of state authority in the colonial era. Perceptions about Pashtun’s resistance to state authority based on politically motivated stereotypes resonate in the British colonial regime. This study focuses on the stereotypes and myths associated with Pashtun's resistance to state authority in the colonial period and its effect on them in post-colonial periods. The British colonial regime faced resistance in the Pashtun indigenous society (now known as emerged districts). The findings of this study reveal that the Pashtun resistance to state authority is not part of their culture. Pashtun were against the exploitative policies of the British and it was genuine resistance. It reveals that their resistance was labelled as a normative part of their culture to legitimize the oppressive policies in this region. Moreover, in the post-colonial period, Pakistan also applied the same tactics and labelled genuine resistance as part of their culture. Stereotypes associated with Pashtun's resistance to the state should be deconstructed. References Akhtar, A. S. (2022). The checkpost state in Pakistan’s War of Terror: Centres, peripheries, and the politics of the universal. Antipode, 54(5), 1365-1385. Ali, H. & Zhibin, H. (2021). A Comparative Analysis of Mahsud and Afridi Tribe Resistance Movement Against the British 1849-1897. European Journal of Humanities and Educational Advancements, 2(9), 34-41 Arbab, S. (2019). The ecstasy and anarchy of nonviolence: The Khudai Khidmatgar resistance in the north-west frontier of British India. University of California, Los Angeles. Asif, D. M. (2024). THE COMPLEXITIES OF BIOTERRORISM: CHALLENGES AND CONSIDERATIONS. International Journal of Contemporary Issues in Social Sciences, 3(3), 2175–2184. Retrieved from https://ijciss.org/index.php/ijciss/article/view/1391 Bala, S. (2013). Waging Nonviolence: Reflections on the history writing of the Pashtun nonviolent movement Khudai Khidmatgar. Peace & Change, 38(2), 131-154. Bangash, S. (2015). Tribal Belt and the Defence of British India: A Critical Appraisal of British Strategy in the North-West Frontier during the First World War. Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, 2, 63. Bansode, R. (2020). Book Review: Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class, and Inequality in Twenty-First-Century India. Sociological Research Online, 25(1), 154-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780419830099. BATY, E. (1980). British policy and the Pashtun experience before the South Asian partition. Britis Undergraduate History, 21(2), 1. Borthakur, A. (202). The Pashtun Trajectory: From the Colonially Constructed Notion on ‘Violent’Pashtun Tribe to ‘Non Violent’Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 15(3), 360-378. https://doi.org/10.1080/25765949.2021.1992584 Caroe, O. (1960). The Pathans. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 108(5052), 920-939. Cherniak, K. (2021). Sociology from the Global South and the Global North: Systematising characteristics and relations. Соціологічні студії, (1 (18)). Epstein, C. (2014). The postcolonial perspective: an introduction. International Theory, 6(2), 294-311 Eswarappa, K. (2024). The complexity of the “Tribal” question in India: The case of the particularly vulnerable tribal groups. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 59(3), 858-875. Green, N. (2016). Afghanistan’s Islam: from conversion to the Taliban (p. 354). University of California Press. Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan. Palestine. Iraq. John Wiley & Sons. Hakur, M. K. (2013). Book Review: Writing India: Colonial Ethnography in the Nineteenth Century. Sociological Research Online, 18(2), 225-226. https://doi.org/10.1177/136078041301800203 Hanifi, S.M. (2016). The Pashtun counter-narrative. Middle East Critique, 25(4), 385-400. Haroon, S., & Green, N. (2017). Competing views of Pashtun Tribalism, Islam, and society in the Indo-Afghan borderlands. Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban. Oakland: University of California Press. doi, 10, 9780520967373-014. Hussain, I., Xingang, W., & Fatima, A. (2022). British Colonial Imperialism and Pashtun Resistance Jamil Hanifi, M. (2011). Review Essay: Vending distorted Afghanistan through patriotic ‘anthropology’. Critique of Anthropology, 31(3), 256-270. Khan, A. (2020). The British Colonial Policies in the North West Frontier of India: 1849-1901. FWU Journal of Social Sciences, 14(2), 164-179. Khan, I., Israr, M., & Khan, Z. (2019). Pakhtun radicalization in fata: A qualitative approach for their effective integration in Pakistan. JL & Soc'y, 50, 73. Khan, U., Cheng, Y., Shah, Z.A., Ullah, S., & Jianfu, M. (2021). Reclaiming Pashtun Identity: The role of informal spaces in developing an alternative narrative. Interventions, 23(8), 1166-1186. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1845769 Khan, U., Cheng, Y., Shah, Z. A., & Ullah, S. (2020). Resistance in disguise and the re-construction of identity: a case of the Pashtuns in Pakistan. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 21(3), 374-391. Kharroubi, L. (2022). To What Extent Did The Anti-Colonial Struggle Impact Pashtuns Leading Up to South Asia’s Parti-tion?. Historia Nova, 12. Kiwanuka, M. S. (2018). Colonial policies and administrations in Africa: The myths of the contrasts. In The colonial epoch in Africa (pp. 1-22). Routledge. Leonard, Z. (2016). Colonial Ethnography on India's North-West Frontier, 1850–1910. The Historical Journal, 59(1), 175-196. Lundberg, C.E. (2016). From Defeat to Glory: The First Anglo-Afghan War and the Lindholm, C., 1980. Images of the Pathan: The usefulness of colonial ethnography. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 21(2), 350-361. Mahmud, T. (2010). Colonial Cartographies, Postcolonial Borders, and Enduring Failures of International Law: The Unending War along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 20(1), 10-11. Manderson, D. (2012). The Law of the Image and the Image of the Law: Colonial Representations of the Rule of Law. NYL Sch. L. Rev., 57, p.153. Mir, N.A. (2018). Pashtun nationalism in search of political space and the state in Pakistan. Strategic Analysis, 42(4), 443-450. Mische, A. (2011). Relational sociology, culture, and agency. The Sage handbook of social network analysis, 80-97. Nimesh, A. (2022). The Idea of Self-Governance and Tribal Revolts in Colonial Period. In Tribe, Space and Mobilisation: Colonial Dynamics and Post-Colonial Dilemma in Tribal Studies (pp. 133-150). Singapore: Springer Singapore. Pant, S. (2018). The Frontier Crimes Regulation in Colonial India: Local Critiques and Persistent Effects. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 41(4), pp.789-805 Pathmavathy, M. B. (2024). EXPLORING THE NEGLECTED NARRATIVES OF TRIBAL RESISTANCE MOVEMENTS AGAINST COLONIALISM IN INDIA. Journal of Digital Economy, 3(1), 424-431. Reynolds, J. (2016). Empire, emergency and the law. International Community Law Review, 3(3), pp.4-6. Saeed, S., Shah, R. and ul ain Jafeer, Q. (2020). Colonial Literary Sources and the Image of Pashtuns: A Historical Analysis. Journal of Asian Civilizations, 43(2), 201-213. Saikal, A. (2010). Afghanistan and Pakistan: The Question of Pashtun Nationalism?. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 30(1), pp.5-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602001003650572 Siddique, A. (2014). The Pashtun question: The unresolved key to the future of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hurst & Company. Sohail, M., Ahmad, S. M., & Inamullah, H. M. (2014). The Educational Services and Philosophy of Bacha Khan. J. Appl. Environ. Biol. Sci, 4(7S), 157-165. Sōkefeld, M. (2005). From colonialism to postcolonial colonialism: changing modes of domination in the Northern areas of Pakistan. The Journal of Asian Studies, 64(4), 939-973. Tripodi, C. (2016). Edge of empire: The British political officer and tribal administration on the north-west frontier 1877–1947. Routledge. Ullah, A., Hayat, R. and Khan, F.U. (2021). Khudai Khidmatgars’ Resistance against Colonial Rule and its Search for Affiliation. Pakistan Languages and Humanities Review, 5(2), 661-672. Vázquez, R. (2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of the time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109-115. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1990 Verghese, A. (2016). British rule and tribal revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar. Modern Asian Studies, 50(5), 1619-1644. Wagner, K.A. (2013). Edge of Empire. The British Political Officer and Tribal Administration on the North-West Frontier 1877–1947. By Christian Tripodi. White, J.T. (2008). The shape of frontier rule: Governance and transition, from the Raj to the modern Pakistani frontier. Asian Security, 4(3), 219-243. Williams, S. and Law, I. (2012). Legitimising racism: An exploration of the challenges posed by the use of indigeneity discourses by the far right. Sociological Research Online, 17(2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.2554 Yousaf, F. (2019). Pakistan’s “tribal” Pashtuns, their “violent” representation, and the Pashtun Tahafuz movement. Sage Open, 9(1), 2158244019829546. Yousaf, F. (2021). The ‘savage’Pathan (Pashtun) and the postcolonial burden. Critical Studies on Security, 9(1), 3. Yousaf, F. and Wakhu, S. (2020). Security in the ‘Periphery’of post-colonial states: analyzing Pakistan’s ‘tribal’Pashtuns and Kenyan-Somalis. Social Identities, 26(4), 515-532 https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2020.1776599

Book Review| March 17 2023 Cultural Gradients and the Sociotechnics of Data The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies. Edited by Jonathan Roberge and Michael Castelle. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. Xv. 289 pp. Cloth, $109.99; paper, $79.99; e-book, $75.99.Data / Set / Match [exhibition]. London: Photographers’ Gallery, 2019–2020. Tyler Shoemaker Tyler Shoemaker Tyler Shoemaker is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the DataLab at the University of California, Davis. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature 10575190. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575190 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Tyler Shoemaker; Cultural Gradients and the Sociotechnics of Data. American Literature 2023; 10575190. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-10575190 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2023 by Duke University Press2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews and Review Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

The question of whether IPE journals are boring, in Benjamin Cohen's provocative words, provides us with a useful opportunity to introspect on the state of the field. Briefly, to set the stage, Cohen argues that IPE has begun to mimic the methodological approach of most of the economics field—leading to a focus on mid-level theory—rather than on the big picture that characterized IPE in the early 1970s and 1980s. Cohen argues that journal editors have an important role to play to rectify this lack of imaginative thinking and writing. Specifically, he develops three well-articulated solutions. First, he suggests that the field would benefit from more review essays and that editors should actively solicit such articles. Second, he argues that symposia on various themes could help spice up the debate in the field. And third, he notes that changing submission policies to encourage commentaries and provocative arguments would enhance the prospects for greater creativity. One might simply dismiss these concerns about the obsession with quantitative techniques and large data sets as just another fad. After all, much of political science (particularly the study of international conflict) was dominated by the “scientific” approach to studying conflict in the 1970s. UN voting studies are an example of obsession with quantification. The Correlates of War (COW) data set and analysis are the most prominent exemplars of this phenomenon in conflict studies. Since then, COW data has been extensively used, but at the same time, there has been backlash against the original statistical approaches. Many alternatives, including formal modeling, qualitative techniques, and critical security studies, among others, have been developed to overcome what was often seen as “mindless number crunching.” So maybe it is just a matter of time before the pendulum swings back. This symposium might then be seen as an effort to give …

While popular imagination has “the digital” opposed to “the book,” the two are now inextricably linked. This review essay looks at the range of digital tools available for conducting book history; the importance of software studies, platform studies, critical code studies, and media archaeology for book historians; and the intertwined connections between print and digital in the production and dissemination of today’s books. The authors argue for understanding the necessities of understanding the myriad relationships between page and screen, and the abiding materiality of the digital form.

Performing the Caribbean in American Studies Frances R. Aparicio (bio) The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Second Edition. By Antonio Benítez Rojo. Translated by James E. Maraniss. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 350 pages. Price $49.95 (cloth). $17.95 (paper). The American in American studies, now mediated by the forces of globalization, still carries the weight of colony and empire. The term has yet to be replaced by the plural, hemispheric and multicultural Americas, despite the scholarly incursions of comparative Americanists such as José David Saldívar and Suzanne Oboler, among others, and the institutional overtures of the American Studies Association (ASA) towards internationalism. 1 The ASA’s historical efforts to establish ties with Americanists on the international sphere, however laudatory, continue to reify the strong boundaries between the “domestic” and the “foreign.” This is most evident in the linguistic attitudes and practices of American Studies, which privilege English over the knowledge of other languages that are internal to the United States yet deemed “foreign” despite historical evidence to the contrary. 2 In addition, American studies has slowly incorporated ethnic studies partly because this field addresses cultural difference clearly within the geopolitical borders of the United States. While African American studies, Chicano studies and Latino studies emerged as domestic fields, focusing with social urgency on the populations and cultures from within, the fact is that migration always already destabilizes any preconceived, [End Page 636] modern notions of nation and identity. Today, American studies as a field constructs itself, epistemologically, linguistically, and socially, within the U.S. borders. It resists being transformed into Studies of the Americas. Yet the growing tensions and fruitful overlap between the American and the Americas are creating new intellectual possibilities for both Latin Americanists and U.S. scholars, as funding previously allocated to race and ethnicity studies is now being funneled into “international” and “global” studies. These brief comments may explain why I am reviewing here Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, now a classic, foundational book in Caribbean studies, eight years after its original publication in Spanish. Its 1992 English translation by James Maraniss, published by Duke University Press, marked its entry into scholarship in English; having received the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize enhanced its visibility within the U.S. academe. To introduce The Repeating Island, now in its second edition in English (1996), to an American studies audience is not only a potentially fruitful, although tardy, gesture but a necessary one as well. Previous reviewers of the book have called it a masterpiece of Cuban studies and an impeccable instance of the Caribbean essay, delimiting the text to the traditional disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism and Caribbean studies. 3 Without failing to summarize Benítez Rojo’s central arguments, however, this review essay will reflect on the need for rethinking the U.S. as also Caribbean and the Caribbean as a major link between South and North Americas. The long, historical ties of the United States to the Caribbean region will be revisited in 1998 as scholars, cultural critics, anthropologists, and historians reflect on the power of imperialism during 1848 and 1898. Thus, it seems fitting to re-read The Repeating Island in 1998 within the context of American studies. The Caribbean, as a geocultural space and as a U.S. satellite for economic and military power, has been a repressed narrative in the construction of the U.S. nation-state. Likewise, Caribbeanists whose work has focused exclusively on the “islands” need to rethink what is “Caribbeanness” beyond geographical boundaries, as Benítez-Rojo exhorts his readers. They also need to relocate it within the U.S. borders, bringing together what have been the discrete spaces of African American and Latino studies, a route which Benítez-Rojo, unfortunately, chooses not to take. As a postmodern text, The Repeating Island is about the impossibility of definitions and, in particular, of defining the Caribbean. It proposes chaos [End Page 637] theory as an interdisciplinary approach, as an alternative to the dominant binary of unity versus diversity that has framed most Caribbean scholarship, an area of inquiry that, according to the author, needs more interlingual...

The Corona pandemic has led to the deepest economic slump since World War II. Economic crises in the past have often led to a change of direction in the development of capitalism. What are the consequences of the Corona crisis? How do experts and policy advisors articulate the desirable steps for economic recovery? This review essay takes stock of some 20 books published since 2020 on the topic of corona and the economy, in economics, critical social studies, political economy, and related disciplines. Even if many books avoid clear statements on the further development of our economic system, a common leitmotif can be identified. It is very clear that a less liberal economic system is expected in the near future. In any case, most of the analyses see the state as being significantly strengthened, as it will again intervene more strongly in the economy in the future, not only for social and economic stabilization after the pandemic but also in combating climate change. Whether this change will also translate into more social security and less inequality, however, remains unclear.

This review essay is intended as a state of the field, outlining an emerging design for disability that is inflected by thinking from Critical Disability Studies. The article notes how this thinking draws from the tradition of Universal Design and presents five keywords that characterize the newer approach.

This is a review essay which engages with William Lucy's jurisprudential monograph, Understanding and Explaining Adjudication. Lucy's text argues that there are unexpected commonalities between critical legal studies approaches to jurisprudence and the 'mainstream' targets of their critique. He aspires to build bridges between these schools of thought, and in so doing, to build a further bridge between jurisprudence and the broader methodological conundrums facing the social sciences and humanities as a whole. My review essay begins by summarising the main claims of the book which take place on two levels: first, a descriptive account of the differing claims made by orthodox and heretical jurisprudence about the process and grounds of judging, and secondly, a critical-analytical account of the assumptions underpinning both orthodox and heretical jurisprudence in relation to method, accounts of causality and the place of values in adjudication. I then argue that despite achieving much in doing the above, Lucy sidesteps one of the key challenges of what he terms 'heretical' approaches to jurisprudence. This is because his preference for determinacy, closure and resolution causes him to reject any 'ground' for the claims of jurisprudence in a manner which grants contradictions and contingency rather than trying to eliminate them. In a sense, the terms of his argument devour, I would argue, the real challenge of heretics, by constantly eliminating contradiction and contingency. I elaborate my challenge in three steps: first, by exploring the way in which the concept of ideology is deployed by Lucy, second by suggesting that Lucy's emphasis on the distinction between critical and non-critical accounts of ideology is less salient than a distinction between epistemological critique and power critique that rescues ideology from redundancy. Thirdly, I present three ways in which ideology does active (and arguably distinctive, at least in comparison to orthodox) work in heretical jurisprudence. I conclude by suggesting that a fruitful way forward for reopening dialoguebetween 'orthdoxy' and 'heresy' in jurisprudence is to take a sociological rather than philosophical approach to the constitutive paradox that is core to deconstructionist strands of heretical jurisprudence

Food, Diet Reform, and Obesity Politics in the American Imagination EATING RIGHT IN AMERICA: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health. By Charlotte Biltekoff. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2013.FAT SHAME: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. By Amy Erdman Farrell. New York: New York University Press. 2011.WEIGHING IN: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. By Julie Guthman. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011.CULTIVATING FOOD JUSTICE: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. 2011.During a 2008 interview with journalist Amy Goodman, University of California, Berkeley, journalism professor Michael Pollan argued, There's an enormous amount of wisdom [. . . and] contained in a cuisine.1 Here, Pollan implies that valuing the localized knowledge embedded in cuisine is one way of rethinking the surrounding food in the most intimate ways; that is, through understanding food sources, growers, growing locations, farmer practices, and values about the food consumers might buy or even grow. However, the interdisciplinary scholarship included in this review essay critically examines the cultural authority embedded in cuisine from entirely different perspectives, engaging the ways in which food, nutritional science, body politics, and dietary health pursuits are constructed within specific social, historical, and economic contexts. This is not to say that the authors do not consider themselves food activists. Each firmly situates themselves within an array of environmental and food activist work. Yet, using diet, body size, and nutritional health as lenses, and working across fields such as food studies, fat studies, critical nutrition studies, and political ecology, each of the texts reveals intersectional identity politics and diverse histories of naturalized social hierarchy.This is a moment of heightened awareness, anxiety, and political engage- ment with the far-reaching social implications of food, diet, and body politics. In the 2009 documentary Food, Inc., Stoneybrooke Farm CEO Gary Hirshberg notes, When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we're for local or not, organic or not.2 Access to good food is a right not a privilege as Alice Waters suggests. Yet, some of the most prominent proposals and widely recognized faces of food tend to push voting with the wallet and lifestyle shifts-just buy organic grapes at the farmers' market rather than Nike shoes, Alice Waters argues on 60 Minutes; return to the land, eat locally, can your own tomatoes, as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2008) suggests; cook and prioritize whole foods rather than processed, as Jamie Oliver argues in Jamie's Food Revolution (2011). While these may prove excellent options for some, food politics will remain within privileged, predominantly white, and firmly middle-class frameworks without increased intersectional scholarship and coalition-building to provide counter perspectives, and critically examine the social constructedness of key presumptions embedded in common understandings about food, health, and the body.3 I do not here situate myself against criticisms of industrialized food systems or food movements writ large, nor do I suggest the scholarship included in this review essay claims such a stance. Research by the authors included in this review, Charlotte Biltekoff, Amy Farrell, Julie Guthman, and Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, pushes for more: from food systems, from dietary reform, from environmental movements, and from presumptions about health and body politics.Amidst continued interdisciplinary scholarly interest in the burgeoning fields of food studies and fat studies, very little studies scholarship has engaged the systemic dimensions of food, health, nutrition, and body politics through a critical lens. …