Author: Arjun AppaduraiPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9781452900063
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Fear of Small Numbers
Author: Arjun AppaduraiPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387549
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
The period since 1989 has been marked by the global endorsement of open markets, the free flow of finance capital and liberal ideas of constitutional rule, and the active expansion of human rights. Why, then, in this era of intense globalization, has there been a proliferation of violence, of ethnic cleansing on the one hand and extreme forms of political violence against civilian populations on the other? Fear of Small Numbers is Arjun Appadurai’s answer to that question. A leading theorist of globalization, Appadurai turns his attention to the complex dynamics fueling large-scale, culturally motivated violence, from the genocides that racked Eastern Europe, Rwanda, and India in the early 1990s to the contemporary “war on terror.” Providing a conceptually innovative framework for understanding sources of global violence, he describes how the nation-state has grown ambivalent about minorities at the same time that minorities, because of global communication technologies and migration flows, increasingly see themselves as parts of powerful global majorities. By exacerbating the inequalities produced by globalization, the volatile, slippery relationship between majorities and minorities foments the desire to eradicate cultural difference. Appadurai analyzes the darker side of globalization: suicide bombings; anti-Americanism; the surplus of rage manifest in televised beheadings; the clash of global ideologies; and the difficulties that flexible, cellular organizations such as Al-Qaeda present to centralized, “vertebrate” structures such as national governments. Powerful, provocative, and timely, Fear of Small Numbers is a thoughtful invitation to rethink what violence is in an age of globalization.
Author: Arjun AppaduraiThe Ethnic Avant-Garde
Author: Steven S. LeePublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540116
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.
Critique of Information
Author: Scott LashPublisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1847876528
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
This penetrating book raises questions about how power operates in contemporary society. It explains how the speed of information flows has eroded the separate space needed for critical reflection. It argues that there is no longer an ′outside′ to the global flows of communication and that the critique of information must take place within the information itself. The operative unit of the information society is the idea. With the demise of depth reflection, reflexivity through the idea now operates external to the subject in its circulation through networks of humans and intelligent machines. It is these ideas that make the critique of information possible. This book is a major testament to the prospects of culture, politics and theory in the global information society.
Flexible Citizenship
Author: Aihwa OngPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322696
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Book Description
Ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the transnational practices of Chinese elites, showing how they constitute a dispersed Chinese public, but also how they reinforce the strength of capital and the state.
Author: Arjun AppaduraiModernity and Cultural Decline
Author: Matthew Alexandar SarrafPublisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030329844
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Book Description
This book argues that despite the many real advantages that industrial modernity has yielded—including large gains in wealth, longevity, and (possibly) happiness—it has occurred together with the appearance of a variety of serious problems. Chief among these are probable losses in subjective existential purpose and increases in psychopathology. A highly original theory of the ultimate basis of these trends is advanced, which unites prior work in psychometrics and evolutionary science. This theory builds on the social epistasis amplification model to argue that genetic and epigenetic changes in modernizing and modernized populations, stemming from shifts in selective pressures related to industrialization, have lowered human fitness and wellness.
Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey
Author: Sibel BozdoganPublisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295800186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.
The Fabric of Space
Author: Matthew GandyPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262028255
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 363
Book Description
A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.
