Asma Barlas.
Islam, Muslims, and the U.S.: Essays on Religion and Politics. New Delhi, India: Global Media Publications, 2004.
A collection of op-eds written for the Daily Times of Pakistan, and of talks given in the U.S. immediately following 9/11, which marks a turning point both in the public discourses on Islam in the West and in contemporary Muslim understandings of Islam. Although the essays and talks cover a wide range of issues, they cumulatively argue that in Muslim countries as well as in the U.S., power functions to silence, marginalize, and, frequently, to obliterate the Other. Given this curious symmetry in the functioning of power in both contexts, it becomes problematic to discuss politics only in terms of the religious/secular binary. In fact, labeling the politics of Muslim societies as always already religious and those of the West as secular essentializes the differences between them.
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Zillah Eisenstein.
Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy. London: Zed Press; New York: Palgrave, 2007.
In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleeza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.
Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and ‘the West.’ New York: Palgrave, 2004.
In Against Empire, Zillah Eisenstein extends her critique of neoliberal globalization. Faced with an aggressive American empire hostage to ideological extremism and violently promoting the narrowest of interests, she looks to a global anti-war movement to counter US power. Moving beyond the distortions of mainstream history, she detects the silencing of racialized, sex/gendered and classed ways of seeing. Eisenstein insists that the so-called West is as much fiction as reality, while the sexualized black slave trade emerges as an early form of globalization. Plural understandings of feminisms as other-than-western are needed. Black America, India, the Islamic world and Africa envision unique conceptions of what it is to be fully, polyversally, human. Hope for a more peaceful, just and happier world lies, she believes, in the understandings and activism of women today.
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Harvey Fireside.
Separate and Unequal: Homer Plessy and the Supreme Court Decision that Legalized Racism. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004
When Homer A. Plessy, a New Orleans shoemaker, refused to move to the “Jim Crow” railroad car set aside for Negroes by state law, he initiated a lawsuit challenging the entire system of racial segregation. Prof. Fireside traces the roots of the Supreme Court decision that enshrined racial separation in America for the next sixty years. He uncovers little-known areas of U.S. history, such as the remarkable Black Creole community that flourished as a distinct culture after Louisiana was purchased from France and Spain. Well-educated and prosperous, they threw in their lot with recently freed Negroes in the 1890s, because new racist laws relegated them both to second-class citizenship. Among the “carpetbaggers,” demonized in history as corrupt and greedy Northerners, Fireside reveals true idealists like Albion Tourgee, who argued Plessy's case without fee to the Supreme Court. Seven justices there approved segregation laws, but Justice John Marshall Harlan — a former slave owner — dissented. He memorably punctured the hypocrisy behind a law claiming to provide “separate but equal” accommodations, which were actually inferior and racist. Unfortunately, as this book argues, these standards for African Americans still exist. Photographs are featured in this compelling historical drama.
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V. P. (Chip) Gagnon, Jr.
The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004; paperback version 2006.
The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant. Most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have tried to explain the conflict using the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality. Instead, Prof. Gagnon believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.
Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon’s view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon’s noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.
The Myth of Ethnic War has won the following awards:
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Beth Harris.
Defending the Right to a Home: the Power of Anti-Poverty Lawyers. Williston, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004.
Examining the influence of legal professionals on the dynamics of state policy making, this book looks at the responses of poverty lawyers to the social welfare law reforms of US Congress and state legislatures. Against a political climate characterized by its hostility towards welfare programs, cutbacks in public assistance for poor families, the decline in available low-income housing and increasing levels of homelessness, Legal Services lawyers in several states initiated class action suits to protect families from losing their homes. Through five detailed case-studies, this book examines the influence of the anti-poverty lawyers on state policy making and explores the significance of right –to home claims in challenging the neo-liberal norms.
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Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney.
International Relations and the Problem of Difference. New York: Routledge, 2004.
This work has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. One would think that IR is in a good position to describe, explain and theorize cultural diversity, but instead it has a history of ignoring the subject. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.
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Thomas Shevory.
Notorious H.I.V: The Media Spectacle of Nushawn Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
In the fall of 1997, public authorities in Chautauqua County, New York, were granted an exception to the state’s HIV confidentiality law—and released Nushawn Williams’s name and picture to the press, deeming him a "public health threat." Williams, who is HIV-positive, had had unprotected sex with many young women and girls and infected at least nine of them.
Prof. Shevory sorts through the ensuing media panic and legal imbroglio to tell the story behind the Nushawn Williams case. Through media reports, legal documents, and interviews with many of the participants—including Williams—Shevory exposes the significant exaggerations, misunderstandings, and distortions that riddled the Williams case from the start. He contends that Williams’s portrayal as an "AIDS monster" served political purposes; specifically, representations of Williams helped to foster the passage of HIV-transmission statutes, resulting in criminalizing a public health problem in a virtually unprecedented fashion.
His work shows how media coverage robs individuals like Williams of their humanity, creating a pervasive atmosphere of threat that warps the integrity and fairness of the criminal justice and penal system. Notorious H.I.V. also traces the impact of such high-profile cases on communities.
