Rethinking Resistance

"Rethinking Resistance" analyzes revolts from the nineteenth century and early colonial Africa, post-colonial rebellions and recent conflicts in African history by reinterpreting resistance studies in the light of current scholarly thought and linking them to new conceptual perspectives on the changing nature of violence.

Revolts and violence have always been features of African history but questions frequently still remain as to what and who the targets of resistance were. This volume reviews the subject of resistance in the light of current scholarly thought. Were political forms of resistance directed at the imposition or ending of colonial rule or at African elites profiting from the onset of capitalist relations of production? Or did they have purely sociological or religious roots? With contributions from historians, anthropologists and political scientists, Rethinking Resistance analyzes the concepts of resistance, violence and ideological imagination, and has chapters on uprisings and revolts in nineteenth-century pre-colonial societies and early colonial Africa, post-colonial rebellions and more recent and contemporary conflicts.

"Rhythm and Resistance offers practical lessons about how to teach poetry to build community, understand literature and history, talk back to injustice, and construct stronger literacy skils across content areas and grade levels-- from elementary school to graduate school. Rhythm and Resistance reclaims poetry as a necessary part of a larger vision of what it means to teach for justice." from cover.

Each of the country-specific chapters includes a brief historical overview followed by a series of lessons, including suggested activities and corresponding handouts for students. Both the overviews and the handouts are written to be accessible to students at the secondary level. Terms that may be unfamiliar are signaled in each chapter overview and in each lesson, and are defined in a glossary at the back of the guide. Student readings include a wealth of primary sources: newspaper articles and political cartoons from the time of the Spanish-American War, historical documents, personal testimonies, and more. Also included are a broad range of contemporary pieces, both fiction and nonfiction.

We Still Demand! recovers vibrant and unsung histories of sex and gender activism across Canada from the 1970s to the present. Departing from conventional accounts, this book demonstrates the varied nature of resistance and the productive power of remembering sex and gender struggles. In attending to the records and accounts that have slipped out of view, it also redraws the boundaries between activism and scholarship. The first part of the book remembers these struggles. Drawing on a rich history of activism, the contributors recall 1970s same-sex marriage activism; early queer union organizing; organizing against police repression; early trans organizing; the emergence of dyke marches; the organization of black queer space at Toronto Pride events. The second part of the book rethinks past and current struggles. The authors address gender “passing” in historical research; lesbian s/m porn; sex-worker organizing; problems with organizing against “human trafficking”; queer immigration and refugee struggles; and trans identity. By recovering the history of activism and outlining contemporary challenges, We Still Demand! provides a vital rewriting of the history of sex and gender activism that will enlighten current struggles and activate new forms of resistance.

Transgression as a Mode of Resistance provides the conceptual mapping for scholars, students, and practitioners to participate in the growing debate between hegemony and transgression. Through a broad perspective on philosophy, communication and cultural studies (primarily rhetorical criticism and social movement rhetoric) and history, this book demonstrates that these two modes of resistance are sometimes conflicting, oftentimes inter-related practices. Through alternative social relationships and political performances, transgressive resistors may reinvent daily life.

This collection of eighteen articles shows how conceptions of the political are expanded and revised when viewed through the lens of gender. Carefully organized to serve scholars and students across the social sciences, this book reexamines such basic notions as citizenship, collectivity, political resistance, and the state, drawing on examples with important historical and national variations. Section One, "Gender, Citizenship, and Collectivity," includes Nancy Frazer and Linda Gordon's critique of dependency and citizenship; Iris Young on women as a social collective; Ruth Bloch on the feminization of public virtue in revolutionary America; Trisha Franzen on feminism and lesbian community, and Sonia Kruks on de Beauvoir and contemporary feminism. "Collective Action and Women's Resistance," Section Two, features Louis Tilly's "Paths of Proletarianization"; Temma Kaplan's "Female Consciousness and Collective Action"; and five assessments of women's collective action worldwide: Samira Haj on Palestine, Arlene McLeod on Egypt, Gay Seidman on South Africa, Nancy Sternbach et al. on Latin America, and Anne Walthall on Japan. Concluding with a section on gender and the state, Rethinking the Political also features Bronwyn Winter on the law and cultural relativism; Sherene Razack on sexual violence; Wendy Luttrell on educational institutions; Patricia Stamp on ethnic conflict in postcolonial Kenya; Elizabeth Schmidt on patriarchy and capitalism in Zimbabwe; and Muriel Nazzari on the "woman question" in post-revolutionary Cuba.

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Başak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis

This volume explores new directions of governance and public policy arising both from interpretive political science and those who engage with interpretive ideas. It conceives governance as the various policies and outcomes emerging from the increasing salience of neoclassical and institutional economics or, neoliberalism and new institutionalisms. In doing so, it suggests that that the British state consists of a vast array of meaningful actions that may coalesce into contingent, shifting, and contestable practices. Based on original fieldwork, it examines the myriad ways in which local actors - civil servants, mid-level public managers, and street level bureaucrats - have interpreted elite policy narratives and thus forged practices of governance on the ground. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners of governance and public policy.

This cutting-edge book explores and advances contemporary geographical understandings of resistance. Calling for geographers to focus on the emergence of resistance and to avoid making assumptions on the forms it takes, chapters critically interrogate concepts of resistance and illustrate the political potential of re-thinking them.