Materializing Democracy

For the most part, democracy is simply presumed to exist in the United States. It is viewed as a completed project rather than as a goal to be achieved. Fifteen leading scholars challenge that stasis in Materializing Democracy. They aim to reinvigorate the idea of democracy by placing it in the midst of a contentious political and cultural fray, which, the volume’s editors argue, is exactly where it belongs. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies, history, legal studies, and political theory, the essays collected here highlight competing definitions and practices of democracy—in politics, society, and, indeed, academia. Covering topics ranging from rights discourse to Native American performance, from identity politics to gay marriage, and from rituals of public mourning to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the contributors seek to understand the practices, ideas, and material conditions that enable or foreclose democracy’s possibilities. Through readings of subjects as diverse as Will Rogers, Alexis de Tocqueville, slave narratives, interactions along the Texas-Mexico border, and liberal arts education, the contributors also explore ways of making democracy available for analysis. Materializing Democracy suggests that attention to disparate narratives is integral to the development of more complex, vibrant versions of democracy. Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Chris Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Joan Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Duggan, Richard R. Flores, Kevin Gaines, Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, Michael Moon, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, Donald E. Pease

DIVInvestigates the complex histories and conflicting desires that are generally concealed behind the term & ldquo;democracy. & rdquo;/div

Commons Democracy highlights a poorly understood dimension of democracy in the early United States. It tells a story that, like the familiar one, begins in the Revolutionary era. But instead of the tale of the Founders’ high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the safe framework for democracy—a representative republican government—Commons Democracy examines the power of the democratic spirit, the ideals and practices of everyday people in the early nation. As Dana D. Nelson reveals in this illuminating work, the sensibility of participatory democratic activity fueled the involvement of ordinary folk in resistance, revolution, state constitution-making, and early national civic dissent. The rich variety of commoning customs and practices in the late colonies offered non-elite actors a tangible and durable relationship to democratic power, one significantly different from the representative democracy that would be institutionalized by the Framers in 1787. This democracy understood political power and liberties as communal, not individual. Ordinary folk practiced a democracy that was robustly participatory and insistently local. To help tell this story, Nelson turns to early American authors—Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Caroline Kirkland—who were engaged with conflicts that emerged from competing ideals of democracy in the early republic, such as the Whiskey Rebellion and the Anti-Rent War as well as the enclosure of the legal commons, anxieties about popular suffrage, and practices of frontier equalitarianism. While Commons Democracy is about the capture of “democracy” for the official purposes of state consolidation and expansion, it is also a story about the ongoing (if occluded) vitality of commons democracy, of its power as part of our shared democratic history and its usefulness in the contemporary toolkit of citizenship.

'Democratic' Discourses shows the ways that abolitionist writing shaped a powerful counterculture within a slave-holding society. Drawing on discourses about the body, gender, economics, and aesthetics, this study encourages readers to reconsider the reality and roots of freedoms experienced in the US.

Higher education is under siege. No longer viewed as a public good, it is attacked by businesses who want to refashion institutions in the image of the marketplace. Higher education is the target of cultural conservatives who have undermined academic freedom and access by deriding the academy as a hotbed of left-multicultural-radicalism and anti-Americanism. The historic mission to educate students as citizens motivated by democratic values is overshadowed by profit margins. Giroux and Giroux argue that the greatest danger faced by higher education comes from corporatization and educational apartheid. If higher education is to meet the challenges of a democratic future, it must encourage students to be critical thinkers and citizens, as it vouchsafes conditions for educators to produce scholarship in the service of an inclusive democracy.

Kassanoff shows how Wharton participated in debates on race, class and democratic pluralism at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of the world's leading social critics and educational theorists, Henry A. Giroux has contributed significantly to critical pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, social theory, and cultural politics. This new book offers a carefully selected cross-section of Giroux's many scholarly and popular writings, which bridge the theoretical and practical, integrate multiple academic disciplines, and fuse scholarly rigor with social relevance. The essays underscore the continuities and transformations in Giroux's thought, just as they offer invaluable approaches to understanding a range of social problems. Giroux's work suggests that a more humane and democratic world is possible and provides critical tools that can assist concerned citizens in bringing it into being.

This book reflects on 'the political' in queer theory and politics by revisiting two of its key categories: hegemony and heteronormativity. It explores the specific insights offered by these categories and the ways in which they augment the analysis of power and domination from a queer perspective, whilst also examining the possibilities for political analysis and strategy-building provided by theories of hegemony and heteronormativity. Moreover, in addressing these issues the book strives to rethink the understanding of the term "queer", so as to avoid narrowing queer politics to a critique of normative heterosexuality and the rigid gender binary. By looking at the interplay between hegemony and heteronormativity, this ground-breaking volume presents new possibilities of reconceptualizing 'the political' from a queer perspective. Investigating the effects of queer politics not only on subjectivities and intimate personal relations, but also on institutions, socio-cultural processes and global politics, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of critical theory, gender and sexuality, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist political theory.

An original and stimulating critique of American empire