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Importing Fascism: The Italian Community’s Fascist Experience in Interwar Scotland (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right)
by Remigio PetrocelliImporting Fascism analyses the mechanisms of the Italian fascist regime in incorporating the Italian-Scottish diaspora into their nation- and fascism-building project via its transnational efforts between the rise of fascism in 1922 and Italy’s declaration of war on Britain in June 1940.Drawing extensively on a range of unpublished Italian and British sources from local and national archives as well as original contemporary press, the book reconstructs minutely the activities of the fasci in Scotland and demonstrates the impact fascism had on forging Italians’ community and national identity. Moreover, by shedding light on this largely neglected chapter of the history of fascism and Scotland’s Italian diaspora, the monograph offers new points of reflection on long-standing issues of cultural, political, and propaganda activity under the regime.This volume is ideal for postgraduate students and scholars of fascism, modern Italian and British history, and diaspora studies.
Imposed Rationality and Besieged Imagination: Practical Life and Social Pathologies (Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations #9)
by Gustavo PereiraSocial pathologies are social processes that hinder how individuals exercise their autonomy and freedom. In this book, Gustavo Pereira offers an account of such phenomena by defining them as a cognitive failure that affects the practical imagination, thus negatively interfering with our practical life. This failure of the imagination is the consequence of the imposition of a type of practical rationality on a practical context alien to it, caused by a non‑conscious transformation of the individuals’ set of beliefs and values. The research undertaken provides an innovative explanation in terms of microfoundations based on the mechanism of “availability heuristic”, by which the diminished exercise of the imagination turns the intuitively available or prevailing rationality into the one that regulates behaviour in inappropriate contexts. Additionally, this incorrect regulation results in a progressive distortion of the shared sense of the affected practical contexts, which becomes institutionalized. Consumerism, bureaucratism, moralism, juridification, some forms of corruption and the particular Latin American case of “malinchism” can be interpreted as social pathologies insofar as they imply such distortion. This way of conceptualizing social pathologies integrates the traditional sociological macro‑explanation manifested through the negative consequences of the processes of social rationalization with a micro‑explanation articulated around the findings of cognitive psychology such as availability heuristic. Understanding social pathologies as a cognitive failure allows us to identify the introduction of normative friction as the main way to counteract their effects. One of the potential effects of normative friction, as a specific form of cognitive dissonance, is the intense exercise of the imagination, thus operating as a condition of possibility for the exercise of autonomy and reflection. Democratic ethical life, understood as a shared democratic culture, as well as social institutions and narratives, are the privileged social spaces and means to trigger reflective processes that can counteract social pathologies through a reflective reappropriation of the meaning of the shared practical context. An extraordinary contribution by a Critical Theorist to the return of the concept of imagination today. It takes up the challenge once taken by Kant to think about imagination as the pivotal activity not only of knowledge and experience, but above all, for action. The author claims that imagination makes criticism possible (pathologies) and it allows us to envision alternative views into the path for social transformation. Without imagination nothing is possible. María Pía Lara, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico
Imposible (Hermanos Carsington #Volumen 2)
by Loretta ChaseUna romántica, chispeante y divertida historia de amor entre dos seres absolutamente incompatibles en el Egipto de 1821... Segunda novela de la saga de los «Hermanos Carsington». Rupert Carsington es una fuente de quebraderos de cabeza para su noble familia. Irresistiblemente guapo, aterradoramente masculino e irreparablemente temerario, los problemas crecen allá donde va. Con todo, jamás se ha metido en un enredo del que no pudiera salir... Hasta ahora. Se encuentra en Egipto, desamparado en una infame mazmorra de El Cairo, y su única manera de salir es aceptar la peligrosa propuesta de una inteligente, bella e inflexible viuda. Dafne Pembroke necesita a alguien que la proteja mientras intenta descubrir el paradero de su hermano, que ha sido secuestrado. Y, aunque alberga serias dudas respecto al señor Carsington, no tendrá más remedio que confiar en este jovial e indisciplinado aristócrata que le han recomendado en el consulado británico. Han cerrado un trato estrictamente profesional: ella será el cerebro y él pondrá los músculos. Fácil en teoría pero, quizá sea por el calor abrasador del desierto, las tensiones afloran y las vergüenzas se pierden... Nunca había sido tan difícil descifrar los jeroglíficos de la pasión.
Imposible (Hermanos Carsington #Volumen 2)
by Loretta ChaseUna romántica, chispeante y divertida historia de amor entre dos seres absolutamente incompatibles en el Egipto de 1821... Segunda novela de la saga de los «Hermanos Carsington». Rupert Carsington es una fuente de quebraderos de cabeza para su noble familia. Irresistiblemente guapo, aterradoramente masculino e irreparablemente temerario, los problemas crecen allá donde va. Con todo, jamás se ha metido en un enredo del que no pudiera salir... Hasta ahora. Se encuentra en Egipto, desamparado en una infame mazmorra de El Cairo, y su única manera de salir es aceptar la peligrosa propuesta de una inteligente, bella e inflexible viuda. Dafne Pembroke necesita a alguien que la proteja mientras intenta descubrir el paradero de su hermano, que ha sido secuestrado. Y, aunque alberga serias dudas respecto al señor Carsington, no tendrá más remedio que confiar en este jovial e indisciplinado aristócrata que le han recomendado en el consulado británico. Han cerrado un trato estrictamente profesional: ella será el cerebro y él pondrá los músculos. Fácil en teoría pero, quizá sea por el calor abrasador del desierto, las tensiones afloran y las vergüenzas se pierden... Nunca había sido tan difícil descifrar los jeroglíficos de la pasión.
Imposible que lo olvide: Los desaparecidos de ayer y de hoy siguen vivos
by Jorge GestosoLuego de 35 años de carrera como uno de los periodistas más influyentes de habla hispana, Jorge Gestoso acerca su experiencia sobre una de las deudas más crudas —y ostensiblemente hipócritas— en Latinoamérica: la de darles la espalda a los desaparecidos. En la cúspide de su carrera se emitió en CNN en Español su documental Jorge Gestoso investiga: En busca de la doble desaparecida, su investigación sobre el terrorismo de Estado en América Latina (ganador del prestigioso premio DuPont de la Universidad de Columbia de Nueva York a la excelencia periodística); poco después se interrumpió abruptamente su contrato. Muchos se preguntaron si ese es el precio que hay que pagar por ir a desenterrar lo que deliberadamente se quiere ocultar. Los años posteriores no le han hecho más que confirmar que planificadamente el velo sigue intacto y los crímenes se perpetúan. En su visión, la guerra que ayer fue terrorismo de Estado ha tomado distintas dimensiones y asumido diversos rostros en las últimas décadas. Hoy el llamado lawfare usa herramientas legales “como si fueran balas”, por ejemplo a través de juicios contra importantes liderazgos progresistas, la criminalización de los movimientos de avanzada y los golpes a la economía en los países donde despertó la conciencia popular, junto al control de la palabra. Rememorando aprendizajes y valiosos testimonios de los principales referentes, escribe estas páginas con el afán de despertar la memoria y dar luz al presente.
Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920
by Eileen J. FindlayFeminists, socialists, Afro-Puerto Rican activists, and elite politicians join laundresses, prostitutes, and dissatisfied wives in populating the pages of Imposing Decency. Through her analyses of Puerto Rican anti-prostitution campaigns, attempts at reforming marriage, and working-class ideas about free love, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay exposes the race-related double standards of sexual norms and practices in Puerto Rico between 1870 and 1920, the period that witnessed Puerto Rico's shift from Spanish to U.S. colonialism. In showing how political projects and alliances in Puerto Rico were affected by racially contingent definitions of "decency" and "disreputability," Findlay argues that attempts at moral reform and the state's repression of "sexually dangerous" women were weapons used in batttles between elite and popular, American and Puerto Rican, and black and white. Based on a thorough analysis of popular and elite discourses found in both literature and official archives, Findlay contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders. The campaigns she analyzes include an attempt at moral reform by elite male liberals and a movement designed to enhance the family and cleanse urban space that ultimately translated into repression against symbollically darkened prostitutes. Findlay also explores how U.S. officials strove to construct a new colonial order by legalizing divorce and how feminist, labor, and Afro-Puerto Rican political demands escalated after World War I, often focusing on the rehabilitation and defense of prostitutes. Imposing Decency forces us to rethink previous interpretations of political chronologies as well as reigning conceptualizations of both liberalism and the early working-class in Puerto Rico. Her work will appeal to scholars with an interest in Puerto Rican or Latin American studies, sexuality and national identity, women in Latin America, and general women's studies.
Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco
by Geoffrey BakerImposing Harmony is a groundbreaking analysis of the role of music and musicians in the social and political life of colonial Cuzco. Challenging musicology's cathedral-centered approach to the history of music in colonial Latin America, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that rather than being dominated by the cathedral, Cuzco's musical culture was remarkably decentralized. He shows that institutions such as parish churches and monasteries employed indigenous professional musicians, rivaling Cuzco Cathedral in the scale and frequency of the musical performances they staged. Building on recent scholarship by social historians and urban musicologists and drawing on extensive archival research, Baker highlights European music as a significant vehicle for reproducing and contesting power relations in Cuzco. He examines how Andean communities embraced European music, creating an extraordinary cultural florescence, at the same time that Spanish missionaries used the music as a mechanism of colonialization and control. Uncovering a musical life of considerable and unexpected richness throughout the diocese of Cuzco, Baker describes a musical culture sustained by both Hispanic institutional patrons and the upper strata of indigenous society. Mastery of European music enabled elite Andeans to consolidate their position within the colonial social hierarchy. Indigenous professional musicians distinguished themselves by fulfilling important functions in colonial society, acting as educators, religious leaders, and mediators between the Catholic Church and indigenous communities.
Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora
by Neha VoraIndian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians--even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate--disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential--yet impossible--citizens of Dubai.
Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century
by Simon KuperFrom the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little.Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighbourhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change.This century, it has globalised, gentrified, and been shocked into realising its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the "Grand Paris" project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs.This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian clichés.
Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century
by Simon KuperAn entertaining and openhearted tale of a naïf eventually getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel society - at least a little. When Simon Kuper left London for Paris in his early thirties, he wasn't planning to make a permanent move. Paris, however, had other plans. Kuper has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, seen his American wife through life-threatening cancer, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on their neighborhood. Over two decades of becoming something of a cantankerous Parisian himself, Kuper has watched the city change. This century, it has globalized, gentrified, and been shocked into realizing its role as the crucible of civilizational conflict. Sometimes it's a multicultural paradise, and sometimes it isn't. This decade, Parisians have lived through a sequence of shocks: terrorist attacks, record floods and heatwaves, the burning of Notre Dame, the storming of the city by gilets jaunes, and then the pandemic. Now, as the Olympics come to town, France is busy executing the "Grand Paris" project: the most serious attempt yet to knit together the bejewelled city with its neglected suburbs. This is a captivating memoir of the Paris of today, without the Parisian clichés.
Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)
by Chandra MukerjiThe Canal du Midi, which threads through southwestern France and links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was an astonishing feat of seventeenth-century engineering--in fact, it was technically impossible according to the standards of its day. Impossible Engineering takes an insightful and entertaining look at the mystery of its success as well as the canal's surprising political significance. The waterway was a marvel that connected modern state power to human control of nature just as surely as it linked the ocean to the sea. The Canal du Midi is typically characterized as the achievement of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and entrepreneur for the canal. Yet Chandra Mukerji argues that it was a product of collective intelligence, depending on peasant women and artisans--unrecognized heirs to Roman traditions of engineering--who came to labor on the waterway in collaboration with military and academic supervisors. Ironically, while Louis XIV and his treasury minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert used propaganda to present France as a new Rome, the Canal du Midi was being constructed with unrecognized classical methods. Still, the result was politically potent. As Mukerji shows, the project took land and power from local nobles, using water itself as a silent agent of the state to disrupt traditions of local life that had served regional elites.Impossible Engineering opens a surprising window into the world of seventeenth-century France and illuminates a singular work of engineering undertaken to empower the state through technical conquest of nature.
Impossible Escape: A True Story of Survival and Heroism in Nazi Europe
by Steve Sheinkinrom three-time National Book Award finalist and Newbery Honor author Steve Sheinkin, a true story of two Jewish teenagers racing against time during the Holocaust—one in hiding in Hungary, and the other in Auschwitz, plotting escape. <p><p> It is 1944. A teenager named Rudolf (Rudi) Vrba has made up his mind. After barely surviving nearly two years in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, he knows he must escape. Even if death is more likely. <p><p> Rudi has learned the terrible secret hidden behind the heavily guarded fences of concentration camps across Nazi-occupied Europe: the methodical mass killing of Jewish prisoners. As trains full of people arrive daily, Rudi knows that the murders won’t stop until he reveals the truth to the world—and that each day that passes means more lives are lost. <p><p> Lives like Rudi’s schoolmate Gerta Sidonová. Gerta’s family fled from Slovakia to Hungary, where they live under assumed names to hide their Jewish identity. But Hungary is beginning to cave under pressure from German Nazis. Her chances of survival become slimmer by the day. <p><p> The clock is ticking. As Gerta inches closer to capture, Rudi and his friend Alfred Wetzler begin their crucial steps towards an impossible escape. <p><p> This is the true story of one of the most famous whistleblowers in the world, and how his death-defying escape helped save over 100,000 lives.
Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford Studies In Middle Eastern And Islamic Societies And Cultures Ser.)
by Orit BashkinBetween 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or transit camps, relegating them to poverty. In the tents and shacks of the camps, their living conditions were squalid and unsanitary. Basic necessities like water were in short supply, when they were available at all. Rather than returning to a homeland as native sons, Iraqi Jews were newcomers in a foreign place. Impossible Exodus tells the story of these Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel. Faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, Iraqi Jews resisted: they joined Israeli political parties, demonstrated in the streets, and fought for the education of their children, leading a civil rights struggle whose legacy continues to influence contemporary debates in Israel. Orit Bashkin sheds light on their everyday lives and their determination in a new country, uncovering their long, painful transformation from Iraqi to Israeli. In doing so, she shares the resilience and humanity of a community whose story has yet to be told.
Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder
by Adnan MorshedThe advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and &‘30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment.The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss&’s Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller&’s Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes&’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World&’s Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into &“master builders,&” these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension.By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular &“superman&” discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America&’s propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.
Impossible Histories: The Soviet Republic of Alaska, the United States of Hudsonia, President Charlemagne, and Other Pivotal Moments of History That Never Happened
by Hal JohnsonAcross 1400 years and six continents (sorry, Australia), Impossible Histories examines pivotal moments in history from both sides—what happened and what would have happened had things gone differently. The results are by turns strange, hilarious, tragic…and always fascinating.Imagine a world in which...- Hitler builds a thousand-year Reich- Columbus gets driven from the Americas by mounted knights- Robespierre decapitates Caesar Augustus- The Inca Empire has an air force- Jimmy Carter presses the ButtonThese brave new worlds are merely our own, familiar world—if something small had happened differently. We're all one elephant away from peace in the Middle East, one knife thrust away from nuclear Armageddon. This book examines twenty pivotal moments in history, asks what if?...,and drags the answers kicking and screaming into the light. History--factual and counterfactual has never been so entertaining.A whirlwind ride through history as it never happened--but could have.
Impossible Knowledge: Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Truth (Conspiracy Theories)
by Todor HristovConspiracy theorists claim impossible knowledge, such as knowledge of the doings of a secret world government. Yet they accept this impossible knowledge as truth. In effect, conspiracy theories detach truth from knowledge. Knowledge without power is powerless. And the impossible knowledge claimed by conspiracy theorists is rigorously excluded from the regimes of truth and power – that is not even wrong. Yet conspiratorial knowledge is potent enough to be studied by researchers and recognized as a risk by experts and authorities. Therefore, in order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to think of truth beyond knowledge and power. That is impossible for any scientific discipline because it takes for granted that truth comes from knowledge and that truth is powerful enough to destroy the legitimacy of any authority that would dare to conceal or manipulate it. Since science is unable to make sense of conspiracy theories, it treats conspiracy theorists as individuals who fail to make sense, and it explains their persistent nonsense by some cognitive, behavioral, or social dysfunction. Fortunately, critical theory has developed tools able to conceive of truth beyond knowledge and power, and hence to make sense of conspiracy theories. This book organizes them into a toolbox which will enable students and researchers to analyze conspiracy theories as practices of the self geared at self-empowerment, a sort of political self-help.
Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason
by Robert LehmanImpossible Modernism reads the writings of German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) to examine the relationship between literary and historical form during the modernist period. It focuses particularly on how they both resisted the forms of narration established by nineteenth-century academic historians and turned instead to traditional literary devices--lyric, satire, anecdote, and allegory--to reimagine the forms that historical representation might take. Tracing the fraught relationship between poetry and history back to Aristotle's Poetics and forward to Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, Robert S. Lehman establishes the coordinates of the intellectual-historical problem that Eliot and Benjamin inherited and offers an analysis of how they grappled with this legacy in their major works.
Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion
by Michael Taylor“Vivid with a Mesozoic bestiary” (Tom Holland), this on-the-ground, page-turning narrative weaves together the chance discovery of dinosaurs and the rise of the secular age. When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country’s southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the “first” ichthyosaur, and over the next seventy-five years—as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures—everything changed. Beginning with the archbishop who dated the creation of the world to 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC, and told through the lives of the nineteenth-century men and women who found and argued about these seemingly impossible, history-rewriting fossils, Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind’s place in the world.
Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora
by Iraida LopezIn this one-of-a-kind volume, Iraida López explores various narratives of return by those who left Cuba as children or adolescents. Including memoirs, semi-autobiographical fiction, and visual arts, many of these accounts feature a physical arrival on the island while others depict a metaphorical or vicarious experience by means of fictional characters or childhood reminiscences. As two-way migration increases in the post-Cold War period, many of these narratives put to the test the boundaries of national identity. Through a critical reading of works by Cuban American artists and writers like María Brito, Ruth Behar, Carlos Eire, Cristina García, Ana Mendieta, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Ernesto Pujol, Achy Obejas, and Ana Menéndez, López highlights the affective ties as well as the tensions underlying the relationship between returning subjects and their native country. Impossible Returns also looks at how Cubans still living on the island depict returning émigrés in their own narratives, addressing works by Jesús Díaz, Humberto Solás, Carlos Acosta, Nancy Alonso, Leonardo Padura, and others. Blurring the lines between disciplines and geographic borders, this book underscores the centrality of Cuba for its diaspora and bears implications for other countries with widespread populations in exile.
Impossible Saints: A Novel
by Clarissa HarwoodSet in England in 1907, Impossible Saints is a novel that burns as brightly as the suffrage movement it depicts, with the emotional resonance of Tracy Chevalier and Jennifer Robson. Escaping the constraints of life as a village schoolmistress, Lilia Brooke bursts into London and into Paul Harris’s orderly life, shattering his belief that women are gentle creatures who need protection. Lilia wants to change women’s lives by advocating for the vote, free unions, and contraception. Paul, an Anglican priest, has a big ambition of his own: to become the youngest dean of St. John’s Cathedral. Lilia doesn’t believe in God, but she’s attracted to Paul’s intellect, ethics, and dazzling smile. As Lilia finds her calling in the militant Women’s Social and Political Union, Paul is increasingly driven to rise in the church. They can’t deny their attraction, but they know they don’t belong in each other’s worlds. Lilia would rather destroy property and serve time in prison than see her spirit destroyed and imprisoned by marriage to a clergyman, while Paul wants nothing more than to settle down and keep Lilia out of harm’s way. Paul and Lilia must reach their breaking points before they can decide whether their love is worth fighting for.
Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film
by Christopher HanscomIn what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as if they were before our very eyes.Christopher P. Hanscom questions this understanding of political art by examining four figures central to recent Korean fiction, film, and public discourse: the migrant laborer, the witness to or survivor of state violence, the refugee, and the socially excluded urban precariat. Instead of making these marginalized figures intelligible to common sense, this book reveals the capacity of art to address the “impossible speech” of those who are not asked, expected, or allowed to put forward their thoughts, yet who in so doing expand the limits of the possible.Impossible Speech proposes a new approach to literature and film that foregrounds ostensibly “nonpolitical” or nonsensical moments, challenging assumptions about the relationship between politics and art that locate the “politics” of the work in the representation of content understood in advance as being political. Recasting the political as a struggle over the possibility or impossibility of speech itself, this book finds the politics of a work of art in its power to confront the boundaries of what is sayable.
Impossible Subjects
by Mae M. NgaiThis book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
by Mae NgaiThis book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and imported contract workers. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the "illegal alien," a new legal and political subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social reality but a legal impossibility--a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal status created new challenges for liberal democratic society and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.Ngai's analysis is based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the twentieth century.
Impossible Takes Longer: 75 Years After Its Creation, Has Israel Fulfilled Its Founders' Dreams?
by Daniel GordisOn Israel's seventy-fifth anniversary comes a nuanced examination of the country's past, present, and future, from the two-time National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Israel.In 1948, Israel’s founders had much more in mind than the creation of a state. They sought not mere sovereignty but also a “national home for the Jewish people,” where Jewish life would be transformed. Did they succeed? The state they made, says Daniel Gordis, is a place of extraordinary success and maddening disappointment, a story of both unprecedented human triumph and great suffering.Now, as the country marks its seventy-fifth anniversary, Gordis asks: Has Israel fulfilled the dreams of its founders? Using Israel's Declaration of Independence as his measure, Gordis provides a thorough, balanced perspective on how the Israel of today exceeds the country’s original aspirations and how it has fallen short. He discusses the often-overlooked reasons for the establishment of the State of Israel; the flourishing of Jewish and Israeli culture; the nation's economy and its transformative tech sector; the Israeli-Arab conflict; the distinct form of Judaism that has emerged in the Jewish state; the nation's complex relationship with the Diaspora; and much more.Offering new angles of thinking about Israel, Gordis brings moderation and clarity to the prevailing discourse. And through weighing Israel’s successes, critiquing its failures, and acknowledging its inherent contradictions, he ultimately suggests that the Jewish state is a success far beyond anything its founders could have imagined.
Impossible Victories: Ten Unlikely Battlefield Successes (Cassell Military Paperbacks Ser.)
by Bryan PerrettA military historian takes an in-depth look at a selection of surprising battlefield successes. Victory on the battlefield is sometimes achieved against the odds—victory snatched from the jaws of apparently inevitable defeat. A daring counterattack, an unexpected maneuver, a stubborn refusal to be beaten, and the impossible victory is won. In the ten dramatic episodes in this book, military historian Bryan Perrett revisits battles from the Peninsula War of 1811 to Vietnam in 1967, via colonial action in two world wars.