Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human

Author: Lucy Bollington

Publisher: University of Florida Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781683401490

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This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolom de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil's War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia and Mexico. The essays illuminate how these cultural texts broach the limits between life and death, human and animal, technology and the body, and people and the environment. They also show that these works use the category of the human to address issues related to race, gender, inequality, necropolitics, human rights, and the role of the environment. Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human demonstrates that by focusing on the boundary between the human and nonhuman, writers, artists, and scholars can open up new dimensions to debates about identity and difference, the local and the global, and colonialism and power.


The Limits of Culture

The Limits of Culture

Author: Brenda Shaffer

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 738

ISBN-13: 0262195291

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Experts analyze the effect of cultural interests on the foreign policy of states in the Caspian region, including Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan.


Sex, Culture, and Justice

Sex, Culture, and Justice

Author: Clare Chambers

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0271045949

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Autonomy is fundamental to liberalism. But autonomous individuals often choose to do things that harm themselves or undermine their equality. In particular, women often choose to participate in practices of sexual inequality&—cosmetic surgery, gendered patterns of work and childcare, makeup, restrictive clothing, or the sexual subordination required by membership in certain religious groups. In this book, Clare Chambers argues that this predicament poses a fundamental challenge to many existing liberal and multicultural theories that dominate contemporary political philosophy. Chambers argues that a theory of justice cannot ignore the influence of culture and the role it plays in shaping choices. If cultures shape choices, it is problematic to use those choices as the measure of the justice of the culture. Drawing upon feminist critiques of gender inequality and poststructuralist theories of social construction, she argues that we should accept some of the multicultural claims about the importance of culture in shaping our actions and identities, but that we should reach the opposite normative conclusion to that of multiculturalists and many liberals. Rather than using the idea of social construction to justify cultural respect or protection, we should use it to ground a critical stance toward cultural norms. The book presents radical proposals for state action to promote sexual and cultural justice.


The Limits of Westernization

The Limits of Westernization

Author: Perin Gurel

Publisher: Columbia Studies in International and Global History

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 9780231182027

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Introduction : Good west, bad west, wild west -- Over-westernization -- Narrating the mandate : selective westernization and official history -- Allegorizing America : over-westernization in the Turkish novel -- Under-westernization -- Humoring English : wild westernization and bilingual folklore -- Figuring sexualities : inadequate westernization and rights activism -- Postscript : refiguring culture in U.S.-Middle East relations


The Limits of Tolerance

The Limits of Tolerance

Author: Denis Lacorne

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0231547048

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The modern notion of tolerance—the welcoming of diversity as a force for the common good—emerged in the Enlightenment in the wake of centuries of religious wars. First elaborated by philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire, religious tolerance gradually gained ground in Europe and North America. But with the resurgence of fanaticism and terrorism, religious tolerance is increasingly being challenged by frightened publics. In this book, Denis Lacorne traces the emergence of the modern notion of religious tolerance in order to rethink how we should respond to its contemporary tensions. In a wide-ranging argument that spans the Ottoman Empire, the Venetian republic, and recent controversies such as France’s burqa ban and the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, The Limits of Tolerance probes crucial questions: Should we impose limits on freedom of expression in the name of human dignity or decency? Should we accept religious symbols in the public square? Can we tolerate the intolerant? While acknowledging that tolerance can never be entirely without limits, Lacorne defends the Enlightenment concept against recent attempts to circumscribe it, arguing that without it a pluralistic society cannot survive. Awarded the Prix Montyon by the Académie Française, The Limits of Tolerance is a powerful reflection on twenty-first-century democracy’s most fundamental challenges.


Sounding the Limits of Life

Sounding the Limits of Life

Author: Stefan Helmreich

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-10-27

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0691164819

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What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists—biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers—are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.


Single Women in Popular Culture

Single Women in Popular Culture

Author: A. Taylor

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-11-25

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0230358608

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Single Women in Popular Culture demonstrates how single women continue to be figures of profound cultural anxiety. Examining a wide range of popular media forms, this is a timely, insightful and politically engaged book, exploring the ways in which postfeminism limits the representation of single women in popular culture.


City Limits

City Limits

Author: Keith Hayward

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-18

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 1135311587

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City Limits contributes to a growing body of work under the umbrella of 'cultural criminology', which attempts to bring an appreciation of cultural change to an understanding of crime in late modernity (Hayward and Young 2004). Hayward presents an ambitious theoretical analysis that attempts to inspire a 'cultural approach' to understanding the 'crime-city nexus' and, in particular, to re-address 'strain' and the concept of 'relative deprivation' in the context of a culture of consumption. The book incorporates an impressive array of literature from beyond the boundaries of traditional criminology - including urban studies, social theory and, most strikingly, from art and architectural criticism - illustrating a multidisciplinary approach. This provides for a challenging and enlightening read, with a particularly important emphasis on the impact of consumer culture on the lived urban experience and spatial dynamics of the city and, in turn, for an understanding of transgression and criminality. Runner-up for the British Society of Criminology Book Prize (2004).


The Limits of Neoliberalism

The Limits of Neoliberalism

Author: William Davies

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2016-11-16

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 152641161X

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Brilliant...explains how the rhetoric of competition has invaded almost every domain of our existence." —Evgeny Morozov, author of To Save Everything, Click Here" "In this fascinating book Davies inverts the conventional neoliberal practice of treating politics as if it were mere epiphenomenon of market theory, demonstrating that their version of economics is far better understood as the pursuit of politics by other means." —Professor Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame "A sparkling, original, and provocative analysis of neoliberalism. It offers a distinctive account of the diverse, sometimes contradictory, conventions and justifications that lend authority to the extension of the spirit of competitiveness to all spheres of social life...This book breaks new ground, offers new modes of critique, and points to post-neoliberal futures." —Professor Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster Since its intellectual inception in the 1930s and its political emergence in the 1970s, neo-liberalism has sought to disenchant politics by replacing it with economics. This agenda-setting text examines the efforts and failures of economic experts to make government and public life amenable to measurement, and to re-model society and state in terms of competition. In particular, it explores the practical use of economic techniques and conventions by policy-makers, politicians, regulators and judges and how these practices are being adapted to the perceived failings of the neoliberal model. By picking apart the defining contradiction that arises from the conflation of economics and politics, this book asks: to what extent can economics provide government legitimacy? Now with a new preface from the author and a foreword by Aditya Chakrabortty.