Browse

Agitating Images explores the early history of Communist organization among small dispersed groups of indigenous Evenki peoples of Central Siberia. It draws this history into an examination of the destabilizing role of photographs in the production of history. While documenting the development of Soviet Nationalities policy in context of people who were considered to be socially and technologically ‘backwards,’ the project is resolutely committed to the demonstration of what I call photographic agitation. It performs this agitation all the while presenting a ‘nervous’ history of the momentous encounter between Soviet socialism and indigenous peoples in the Siberian North. This book will have broad appeal. Not only is it the first book to present a comprehensive treatment of the remote soviet outpost called the Culture Base but it adds to a lively historical and ethnological discourse on the colonial experience of the indigenous minorities of the Siberian North. Scholars working on histories of soviet socialism will be interested in this book for its counter-narrative of socialist modernity. For scholars interested in photography’s colonial histories, Agitating Images demonstrates the muddy role of photography in producing coherent scopic regimes.

Larasati elucidates the complex, often paradoxical relationships between the dancing body and the Indonesian state since 1965. In the brief period from late 1965 to early 1966, approximately 1 million Indonesians, including a large percentage of the country’s musicians, dancers, and artists were killed, arrested, or disappeared as then-general Suharto took control of the nation, implanting his “New Order” regime, which would rule for the next thirty years. Looking back on the New Order from the context of the present, Larasati interrogates the specific ways in which female dancing bodies have been dealt with by the state: vilified, punished, then replaced with idealized, state aligned bodies. Drawing on critical ethnography and the theorization of dance as methodological approaches, the book analyses the relationship of corporeal punishment and the political economics of display to cultural production in the context of East-West cultural exchange, tourism, state diplomatic “culture missions,” and world/ ethnic dance as defined by its peripheral relationship to Europe and the US. Within this framework, Larasati seeks to expand understandings of the moving, dancing body as deployed by state power: a dual-edged rhetorical strategy that enacts the erasure of historical violence, while simultaneously providing access to mobility and a certain space for the negotiation of identity and female citizenship.

On a rainy day in May 2007, the mayor of Paris inaugurated the Jardins d’Éole, a park whose completion was hailed internationally as an exemplar of sustainable urbanism. The park was the result of a hard-fought, decadelong protest movement in a low-income Maghrebi and African immigrant district starved for infrastructure, but the mayor’s vision of urban sustainability was met with jeers. Drawing extensively from immersive, firsthand ethnographic research with northeast Paris residents, as well as an analysis of green architecture and urban design, Andrew Newman argues that environmental politics must be separated from the construct of urban sustainability, which has been appropriated by forces of redevelopment and gentrification in Paris and beyond. France’s turbulent political environment provides Newman with insights into the ways in which multiethnic coalitions can emerge⎯even amid overt racism and Islamophobia⎯in the struggle for more just cities and more inclusive societies. A tale of multidimensional political efforts, Landscape of Discontent cuts through the rhetoric of green cities to reveal the promise that environmentalism holds for urban communities everywhere.

This book-length study explores the discursive construction of pregnant migrants in Ireland as paradigmatic figures of illegal immigration; the measures that were taken in response; and the cultural, social, and economic consequences of these developments for migrants and citizens. It argues that these Irish transformations drew on and contributed to similar transformations globally, including in the United States, where controversies over pregnant migrants legitimized legal changes that rendered increasing numbers of migrants “illegal,” reconfigured multiple social hierarchies—and generated resistance. The study brings the scholarship on the social construction of illegal immigration into critical dialogue with queer theory. Immigration scholarship shows that designations of legality and illegality do not reflect individual character, but instead, stem from histories of colonialism, global capitalism, racism, and nation-building. The role of sexual regimes in shaping immigrants’ legal status designations remains overlooked, however. By using queer theory to analyze how pregnant women became constructed as illegal immigrants, this project fills that gap in immigration scholarship. The project also expands queer theory by exploring how crises over illegal immigration transform nationalist sexual norms and associated social hierarchies at interlinked local, national, and global scales.

The book traces the interactions of American allopathic medicine, industrial capitalism, and the human desire for sleep from the late 18^th century through the turn of the 21^st century. The foundation of contemporary American sleep is laid in the 19^th century, when industrial workday demands the coordination and consolidation of sleeping and waking patterns. What was lost in this transition was unconsolidated sleep – instead of two nightly periods of rest, or daily naps supplemented with nightly sleep, one eight hour period of sleep was substituted as a new norm. This norm laid the basis for the emerging field of sleep medicine, which took as its primary concern the eradication of napping and insomnia, and substituting eight regular and consolidated hours of sleep. This invention of consolidated sleep led to the eventual pathologization of many forms of sleep, and provided the basis for contemporary sleep medicine. The present interest in sleep, exemplified by advertising campaigns for “Z drugs” – a new chemical that promotes and consolidates sleep – is not so much new as an intensification of a two hundred year old interest in making “normal” American sleep. In the present, I focus on the lives of physicians, scientists, patients and their families as they deal with the social frictions that sleep disorders are accepted as causing. I argue in the conclusion that by recognizing the human limits of sleep, we can apprehend sleep’s variations as non-pathological, and that with more flexible social institutions and expectations, the medicalization of sleep might be subverted.