Contested Embrace

Scholars have long examined the relationship between nation-states and their "internal others," such as immigrants and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as "external members" such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in Japan and China, focusing on their contested relationship with the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula. Extending the constructivist approach to nationalisms and the culturalist view of the modern state to a transnational context, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethno-national populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state. Through a comparative analysis of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book shows how the configuration of geopolitics, bureaucratic techniques, and actors' agency shapes the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. Kim demonstrates that being a "homeland" state or a member of the "transborder nation" is a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement.

Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador. Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism. Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz

This transdisciplinary inquiry presents a new way of thinking about sustainability and technology that takes us beyond the familiar preoccupation with ecoefficiency, and toward the contested moral question of what most nourishes our ability to care for our world. In contrast to the technocratic aim of controlling a perilous future, the author proposes that we develop the practical craft of sustenance. Beginning with debates in environmental policy, he draws upon recent philosophical interest in ecology, technology, and moral experience to argue that the challenge of sustainability is that of undermining those traditions that present technology as somehow external to our inherent moral ambiguity. This discussion responds to the work of Langdon Winner, Albert Borgmann, Charles Taylor, Martin Heidegger, David Abram, and others.

This is a managerial survey and reinterpretation of the Enlightenment. The text offers an assessment of the nature and development of the important currents in philosophical thinking arguing that supposed national enlightenments are of less significance than the rift between conservative and radical thought.

Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories brings together intellectuals from a variety of fields, backgrounds, generations, and continents to deepen and reinvigo-rate the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. Building on recent debate within African studies that has revolved around the role of Africanists in the United States as “gatekeepers” of knowledge about Africa and Africans, this volume of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the contested character of the production of knowledge itself. In every chapter, case studies and ethnographic materials, drawn from such regions as South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Malagasy Republic, Angola, Ghana, and Senegal, demonstrate the application of theory to concrete situations.

This book takes the urban space as a starting point for thinking about practices, actors, narratives, and imaginations within articulations of memory. The social protests and mobilizations against colonial statues are examples of how past injustice and violence keep on shaping debates in the present. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the contributions to this book focus on the in/visibility and affective power of monuments and traces through political, activist, and artistic contestations in different geographical settings. They show that memories are shaped in contact zones, most often in conflict and within hierarchical social relations. The notion of decentered memory shifts the perspective to relationships between imperial centers and margins, remembrance and erasure, nationalistic tendencies and migration. This plurality of connections emerges around unfinished histories of violence and resistance that are reflected in monuments and traces.

This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary TRACES project (funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program). The case studies in this volume critically assess how and in which arrangements artistic/aesthetic methods and creative everyday practices contribute to strengthening communities both culturally and economically. They also explore the extent to which these methods emphasize minority voices and ultimately set in motion a process of reflexive Europeanisation from below which unfolds within Europe and beyond its borders. At the heart of the book is the development of a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage, which responds to the present situation in Europe of unstable political conditions and a sense of Europe in crisis. With chapters looking at difficult art exhibitions on colonialism, death masks, Holocaust memorials, and skull collections, the contributors articulate a response to the crisis in current economic-political conditions in Europe and advances brand new theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity.