Title: Manufacturing militance: workers' movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970-1985
Author: Seidman, G
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Politics | Latin American Studies | African Studies | Labor Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Challenging prevailing theories of development and labor, Gay Seidman's controversial study explores how highly politicized labor movements could arise simultaneously in Brazil and South Africa, two starkly different societies. Beginning with the 1960s, Seidman shows how both authoritarian states promoted specific rapid-industrialization strategies, in the process reshaping the working class and altering relationships between business and the state. When economic growth slowed in the 1970s, workers in these countries challenged social and political repression; by the mid-1980s, they had become major voices in the transition from authoritarian rule.Based in factories and working-class communities, these movements enjoyed broad support as they fought for improved social services, land reform, expanding electoral participation, and racial integration.In Brazil, Seidman takes us from the shopfloor, where disenfranchized workers organized for better wages and working conditions, to the strikes and protests that spread to local communities. Similar demands for radical change emerged in South Africa, where community groups in black townships joined organized labor in a challenge to minority rule that linked class consciousness to racial oppression. Seidman details the complex dynamics of these militant movements and develops a broad analysis of how newly industrializing countries shape the opportunities for labor to express demands. Her work will be welcomed by those interested in labor studies, social theory, and the politics of newly industrializing regions.   [brief]
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Title: Colonising Egypt 
Author: Mitchell, Timothy 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History | Intellectual History | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.
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Title: The children of NAFTA: labor wars on the U.S./Mexico border
Author: Bacon, David 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.   [brief]
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Title: International development and the social sciences: essays on the history and politics of knowledge
Author: Cooper, Frederick 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Social Science | Postcolonial Studies | Anthropology | Economics and Business | Politics
Publisher's Description: During the past fifty years, colonial empires around the world have collapsed and vast areas that were once known as "colonies" have become known as "less developed countries" or "the third world." The idea of development - and the relationship it implies between industrialized, affluent nations and poor, emerging nations - has become the key to a new conceptual framework. Development has also become a vast industry, involving billions of dollars and a worldwide community of experts. These essays - written by scholars in many fields - examine the production, transmission, and implementation of ideas about development within historical, political, and intellectual contexts, emphasizing the changing meanings of development over the past fifty years.The concept of development has come under attack in recent years both from those who see development as the imperialism of knowledge, imposing on the world a modernity that it does not necessarily want, and those who see development efforts as a distortion of the world market. These essays look beyond the polemics and focus on the diverse, contested, and changing meanings of development among social movements, national governments, international agencies, foundations, and scholars.   [brief]
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Title: City for sale: the transformation of San Francisco
Author: Hartman, Chester W
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Urban Studies | Californian and Western History | Politics | California and the West
Publisher's Description: San Francisco is perhaps the most exhilarating of all American cities--its beauty, cultural and political avant-gardism, and history are legendary, while its idiosyncrasies make front-page news. In this revised edition of his highly regarded study of San Francisco's economic and political development since the mid-1950s, Chester Hartman gives a detailed account of how the city has been transformed by the expansion--outward and upward--of its downtown. His story is fueled by a wide range of players and an astonishing array of events, from police storming the International Hotel to citizens forcing the midair termination of a freeway. Throughout, Hartman raises a troubling question: can San Francisco's unique qualities survive the changes that have altered the city's skyline, neighborhoods, and economy? Hartman was directly involved in many of the events he chronicles and thus had access to sources that might otherwise have been unavailable. A former activist with the National Housing Law Project, San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, and other neighborhood organizations, he explains how corporate San Francisco obtained the necessary cooperation of city and federal governments in undertaking massive redevelopment. He illustrates the rationale that produced BART, a subway system that serves upper-income suburbs but few of the city's poor neighborhoods, and cites the environmental effects of unrestrained highrise development, such as powerful wind tunnels and lack of sunshine. In describing the struggle to keep housing affordable in San Francisco and the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness, Hartman reveals the human face of the city's economic transformation.   [brief]
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Title: Between two worlds: the construction of the Ottoman state
Author: Kafadar, Cemal 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Politics | Middle Eastern History | Middle Eastern Studies | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Cemal Kafadar offers a much more subtle and complex interpretation of the early Ottoman period than that provided by other historians. His careful analysis of medieval as well as modern historiography from the perspective of a cultural historian demonstrates how ethnic, tribal, linguistic, religious, and political affiliations were all at play in the struggle for power in Anatolia and the Balkans during the late Middle Ages.This highly original look at the rise of the Ottoman empire - the longest-lived political entity in human history - shows the transformation of a tiny frontier enterprise into a centralized imperial state that saw itself as both leader of the world's Muslims and heir to the Eastern Roman Empire.   [brief]
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Title: Paradise in ashes: a Guatemalan journey of courage, terror, and hope
Author: Manz, Beatriz 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Politics | Ethnic Studies | Sociology | American Studies | Latin American History
Publisher's Description: Paradise in Ashes is a deeply engaged and moving account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. In this compelling book, Beatriz Manz - an anthropologist who spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala - tells the story of the village of Santa María Tzejá, near the border with Mexico. Manz writes eloquently about Guatemala's tortured history and shows how the story of this village - its birth, destruction, and rebirth - embodies the forces and conflicts that define the country today. Drawing on interviews with peasants, community leaders, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces, Manz creates a richly detailed political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s. Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. With great insight and compassion, Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives.   [brief]
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Title: Ana Pauker: the rise and fall of a Jewish Communist
Author: Levy, Robert 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Politics | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In her own day, Ana Pauker was named "The Most Powerful Woman in the World" by Time magazine. Today, when she is remembered at all, she is thought of as the puppet of Soviet communism in Romania, blindly enforcing the most brutal and repressive Stalinist regime. Robert Levy's new biography changes the picture dramatically, revealing a woman of remarkable strength, dominated by conflict and contradiction far more than by dogmatism. Telling the story of Pauker's youth in an increasingly anti-Semitic environment, her commitment to a revolutionary career, and her rise in the Romanian Communist movement, Levy makes no attempt to whitewash Pauker's life and actions, but rather explores every contour of the complicated persona he found expressed in masses of newly accessible archival documents.   [brief]
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Title: Physics and politics in revolutionary Russia
Author: Josephson, Paul R
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Aided by personal documents and institutional archives that were closed for decades, this book recounts the development of physics - or, more aptly, science under stress - in Soviet Russia up to World War II. Focusing on Leningrad, center of Soviet physics until the late 1930s, Josephson discusses the impact of scientific, cultural, and political revolution on physicists' research and professional aspirations.Political and social revolution in Russia threatened to confound the scientific revolution. Physicists eager to investigate new concepts of space, energy, light, and motion were forced to accommodate dialectical materialism and subordinate their interests to those of the state. They ultimately faced Stalinist purges and the shift of physics leadership to Moscow. This account of scientists cut off from their Western colleagues reveals a little-known part of the history of modern physics.   [brief]
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Title: From the royal to the republican body: incorporating the political in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France 
Author: Melzer, Sara E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | European Literature | Cinema and Performance Arts | Politics
Publisher's Description: In this innovative volume, leading scholars examine the role of the body as a primary site of political signification in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. Some essays focus on the sacralization of the king's body through a gendered textual and visual rhetoric. Others show how the monarchy mastered subjects' minds by disciplining the body through dance, music, drama, art, and social rituals. The last essays in the volume focus on the unmaking of the king's body and the substitution of a new, republican body. Throughout, the authors explore how race and gender shaped the body politic under the Bourbons and during the Revolution. This compelling study expands our conception of state power and demonstrates that seemingly apolitical activities like the performing arts, dress and ritual, contribute to the state's hegemony. From the Royal to the Republican Body will be an essential resource for students and scholars of history, literature, music, dance and performance studies, gender studies, art history, and political theory.   [brief]
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Title: Taking back the streets: women, youth, and direct democracy
Author: Kaplan, Temma 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | Politics | Anthropology | Latin American Studies | European Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Toward the end of the twentieth century in places ranging from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe, the United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Japan, China, and South Asia, women and young people took to the streets to fight injustices they believed they could not confront in any other way. In the hope of changing the way politics is done, they called officials to account for atrocities they had committed and unjust laws they had upheld. They attempted to drive authoritarian governments from power by publicizing the activities these officials tried to hide. This powerful book takes us into the midst of these movements to give us a close-up look at how a new generation bore witness to human rights violations, resisted the efforts of regimes to shame and silence young idealists, and created a vibrant public life that remains a vital part of ongoing struggles for democracy and justice today. Through personal interviews, newspaper accounts, family letters, and research in the archives of human rights groups, this book portrays women and young people from Argentina, Chile, and Spain as emblematic of others around the world in their public appeals for direct democracy. An activist herself, author Temma Kaplan gives readers a deep and immediate sense of the sacrifices and accomplishments, the suffering and the power of these uncommon common people. By showing that mobilizations, sometimes accompanied by shaming rituals, were more than episodic - more than ways for societies to protect themselves against government abuses and even state terrorism - her book envisions a creative political sphere, a fifth estate in which ordinary citizens can reorient the political practices of democracy in our time.   [brief]
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Title: Human rights and reform: changing the face of North African politics 
Author: Waltz, Susan Eileen
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History | African History | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Independence from colonial rule did not usher in the halcyon days many North Africans had hoped for, as the new governments in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria soon came to rely on repression to reinforce and maintain power. In response to widespread human rights abuses, individuals across the Maghrib began to form groups in the late 1970s to challenge the political practices and structures in the region, and over time these independent human rights organizations became prominent political actors. The activists behind them are neither saints nor revolutionaries, but political reformers intent on changing political patterns that have impeded democratization.This study, the first systematic comparative analysis of North African politics in more than a decade, explores the ability of society, including Islamist forces, to challenge the powers of states. Locating Maghribi polities within their cultural and historical contexts, Waltz traces state-society relations in the contemporary period. Even as Algeria totters at the brink of civil war and security concerns rise across the region, the human rights groups Susan Waltz examines implicitly challenge the authoritarian basis of political governance. Their efforts have not led to the democratic transition many had hoped, but human rights have become a crucial new element of North African political discourse.   [brief]
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Title: The activist's handbook: a primer for the 1990s and beyond
Author: Shaw, Randy 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | California and the West | Urban Studies | American Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The Activist's Handbook is a hard-hitting guide to winning social change in the 1990s. Randy Shaw, attorney and longtime activist for urban issues, shows how positive change can still be accomplished despite an increasingly grim political order, if activists employ the strategies set forth in this desperately needed primer.Inspiring "fear and loathing" in politicians, building diverse coalitions, and harnessing the media, the courts, and the electoral process to one's cause are only some of the key tactics Shaw advocates and explains. Central to all social-change activism, Shaw shows, is being proactive: rather than simply reacting to right-wing proposals, activists must develop an agenda and focus their resources on achieving it. The Activist's Handbook details the impact of specific strategies on campaigns across the country: battles over homelessness, the environment, AIDS policies, neighborhood preservation, and school reform among others. Though activist groups can have widely different aims, similar tactics are shown to produce success.Further, the book offers a sophisticated analysis of the American power structure by someone on the front lines. In showing how people can and must make a difference at both local and national levels, this is an indispensable guide not only for activists, but for everyone interested in the future of progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: To have and have not: southeast Asian raw materials and the origins of the Pacific War 
Author: Marshall, Jonathan
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Public Policy | Asian History | Southeast Asia | Economics and Business | Politics
Publisher's Description: Jonathan Marshall makes a provocative statement: it was not ideological or national security considerations that led the United States into war with Japan in 1941. Instead, he argues, it was a struggle for access to Southeast Asia's vast storehouse of commodities - rubber, oil, and tin - that drew the U.S. into the conflict. Boldly departing from conventional wisdom, Marshall reexamines the political landscape of the time and recreates the mounting tension and fear that gripped U.S. officials in the months before the war.Unusual in its extensive use of previously ignored documents and studies, this work records the dilemmas of the Roosevelt administration: it initially hoped to avoid conflict with Japan and, after many diplomatic overtures, it came to see war as inevitable. Marshall also explores the ways that international conflicts often stem from rivalries over land, food, energy, and industry. His insights into "resource war," the competition for essential commodities, will shed new light on U.S. involvement in other conflicts - notably in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf.   [brief]
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Title: No there there: race, class, and political community in Oakland
Author: Rhomberg, Chris 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Politics | Ethnic Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: Challenged by Ku Klux Klan action in the '20s, labor protests culminating in a general strike in the '40s, and the rise of the civil rights and black power struggles of the '60s, Oakland, California, seems to encapsulate in one city the broad and varied sweep of urban social movements in twentieth-century America. Taking Oakland as a case study of urban politics and society in the United States, Chris Rhomberg examines the city's successive episodes of popular insurgency for what they can tell us about critical discontinuities in the American experience of urban political community.   [brief]
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Title: Representations: images of the world in Ciceronian oratory 
Author: Vasaly, Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | Literature | Politics | History | Literary Theory and Criticism | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: Ann Vasaly introduces representation theory into the study of Ciceronian persuasion and contends that an understanding of milieu - social, political, topographical - is crucial to understanding Ciceronian oratory. As a genre uniquely dependent on an immediate interaction between author and audience, ancient oratory becomes performance art.Vasaly investigates the way Cicero represented the contemporary physical world - places, topography, and monuments, both those seen and those merely mentioned - to his listeners and demonstrates how he used these representations to persuade. Her exceptionally well-written study deftly recaptures the immediacy of Cicero's oratory and makes a trenchant contribution to an important new area of inquiry in Classical Studies.   [brief]
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Title: "Mi raza primero!" (My people first!): nationalism, identity, and insurgency in the Chicano movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978
Author: Chávez, Ernesto 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | California and the West | Californian and Western History | Chicano Studies | Sociology | Politics | Social Problems | Immigration
Publisher's Description: ¡Mi Raza Primero! is the first book to examine the Chicano movement's development in one locale - in this case Los Angeles, home of the largest population of people of Mexican descent outside of Mexico City. Ernesto Chávez focuses on four organizations that constituted the heart of the movement: The Brown Berets, the Chicano Moratorium Committee, La Raza Unida Party, and the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo, commonly known as CASA. Chávez examines and chronicles the ideas and tactics of the insurgency's leaders and their followers who, while differing in their goals and tactics, nonetheless came together as Chicanos and reformers. Deftly combining personal recollection and interviews of movement participants with an array of archival, newspaper, and secondary sources, Chávez provides an absorbing account of the events that constituted the Los Angeles-based Chicano movement. At the same time he offers insights into the emergence and the fate of the movement elsewhere. He presents a critical analysis of the concept of Chicano nationalism, an idea shared by all leaders of the insurgency, and places it within a larger global and comparative framework. Examining such variables as gender, class, age, and power relationships, this book offers a sophisticated consideration of how ethnic nationalism and identity functioned in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.   [brief]
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Title: The grit beneath the glitter: tales from the real Las Vegas
Author: Rothman, Hal 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | Politics | California and the West | Urban Studies | Geography | Environmental Studies | Californian and Western History
Publisher's Description: The Grit Beneath the Glitter is the first real look at the new Las Vegas from the inside. In it, long-time residents as well as professionals reflect on the transformation of one of the fastest-growing and most famous cities on earth, yet one about which relatively little is known. They offer a lively and compelling portrait of the other side of Las Vegas: the people and institutions that support the glitter of the gaming and entertainment industry. Examining a range of topics--from the city's commercial history, labor conditions, and environmental problems to an analysis of the famous lights of the Strip--the contributors uncover the contradictions between the illusion and the reality of the city, the seam between fantasy and the life it masks. The essays in this collection explore the world that employees experience when they enter gaming palaces from an employee entrance in a back parking lot rather than through the scripted doors of casino/hotel palaces. They take readers into the neighborhoods where 1.4 million Americans now live, attend school, eat dinner, and go to work.   [brief]
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Title: Starting at home: caring and social policy
Author: Noddings, Nel
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Anthropology | Social and Political Thought | Political Theory | Public Policy | Social Problems | Public Policy | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Nel Noddings, one of the central figures in the contemporary discussion of ethics and moral education, argues that caring--a way of life learned at home--can be extended into a theory that guides social policy. Tackling issues such as capital punishment, drug treatment, homelessness, mental illness, and abortion, Noddings inverts traditional philosophical priorities to show how an ethic of care can have profound and compelling implications for social and political thought. Instead of beginning with an ideal state and then describing a role for home and family, this book starts with an ideal home and asks how what is learned there may be extended to the larger social domain. Noddings examines the tension between freedom and equality that characterized liberal thought in the twentieth century and finds that--for all its strengths--liberalism is still inadequate as social policy. She suggests instead that an attitude of attentive love in the home induces a corresponding responsiveness that can serve as a foundation for social policy. With her characteristic sensitivity to the individual and to the vulnerable in society, the author concludes that any corrective practice that does more harm than the behavior it is aimed at correcting should be abandoned. This suggests an end to the disastrous war on drugs. In addition, Noddings states that the caring professions that deal with the homeless should be guided by flexible policies that allow practitioners to respond adequately to the needs of very different clients. She recommends that the school curriculum should include serious preparation for home life as well as for professional and civic life. Emphasizing the importance of improving life in everyday homes and the possible role social policy might play in this improvement, Starting at Home highlights the inextricable link between the development of care in individual lives and any discussion of moral life and social policy.   [brief]
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Title: Learning from experience: minority identities, multicultural struggles 
Author: Moya, Paula M. L
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Chicano Studies | Gender Studies | Social and Political Thought | Politics | Social Theory | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies. This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.   [brief]
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