Browse

This book tells the story of an apparently territorial journey—the one between the village and the city—to capture some of the core fantasies and anxieties of the Indian civilization in the past hundred years. It looks at the vicissitudes of the metaphor of journey; profiles various heroes as they negotiate the transitions from the village to the city and back to the village; and focuses on the psychopathological journey from a poisoned village into a self-annihilating city. It contends that the decline of the village in the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades has altered the meaning of this journey drastically. And that even the true potentialities of Indian cosmopolitanism and urbanity cannot be realized without rediscovering the myth of the village.

Over the past half-century, two overarching topics have dominated the study of mass political behaviour: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are they from a normative perspective? This book provides a novel goal-based approach to these questions, one that compels a wholesale rethinking of the roots of responsible democratic citizenship. The central claim of the book is that partisan identity comes in qualitatively different forms, with distinct political consequences. Blind partisan loyalty, as the pejorative label implies, facilitates bias and reduces attention to valuable information. Critical loyalty, by doing the opposite, outperforms standard measures of political engagement in leading to normatively desirable judgments. Drawing on both experimental and survey methods—as well as five decades of American political history—this book examines the nature and quality of mass political judgment across a wide range of political contexts, from perceptions of the economy, to the formation, updating, and organization of public policy preferences, to electoral judgment and partisan change. Contrary to much previous scholarship, the empirical findings reveal that rational judgment—holding preferences that align with one's material interests, values, and relevant facts—does not hinge on cognitive ability. Rather, breaking out of the apathy-versus-bias prison requires critical involvement, and critical involvement requires critical partisan loyalty.

This volume discusses criminology and policy analysis of adolescence. The focus is on the principles and policy of a separate and distinct system of juvenile justice. The book opens with an introduction of the creation of adolescence, presenting a justification for the category of the juvenile or a period of partial responsibility before full adulthood. Subsequent sections include empirical investigations of the nature of youth criminality and legal policy towards youth crime. At the heart of the book is an argument for a penal policy that recognizes diminished responsibility and a youth policy that emphasizes the benefits of letting the maturing process continue with minimal interruption. The book concludes with applications of the core concerns to five specific problem areas in current juvenile justice: teen pregnancy, transfer to criminal court, minority overrepresentation, juvenile gun use, and youth homicide.

This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set against a panoramic background, it draws on the intersections of the late Meiji period in Japan and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within-and against-the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. In addition to countering the imperialist subtext of Okakura's The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East against Tagore's radical critique of Nationalism, it inflects the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory by highlighting the subtleties of beauty and the interstices of homosociality and love. Spanning geographical boundaries, across the cities of Tokyo, Boston, and Calcutta, the book offers new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia, stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism.

With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other “disorderly” people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and public safety, many cities have wholeheartedly embraced “zero-tolerance” or “broken window” policing efforts to clear the streets of unwanted people. Through an almost completely unnoticed set of practices, these people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return—effectively banished from public places. This book offers an exploration of these new tactics that dramatically enhance the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, the chapters chart the rise of banishment in Seattle, a city on the leading edge of this emerging trend, to establish how it works and explore its ramifications. They demonstrate that, although the practice allows police and public officials to appear responsive to concerns about urban disorder, it is a highly questionable policy—it is expensive, does not reduce crime, and does not address the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Moreover, interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives and their path to self-sufficiency immeasurably more difficult. At a time when ever more cities and governments in the U.S. and Europe resort to the criminal justice system to solve complex social problems, the book provides a challenge to exclusionary strategies that diminish the life circumstances and the rights of those it targets.

The 500 million Muslims who live in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute roughly one-third of the world’s Muslims. Their lives in the twenty-first century are challenging and diverse. Too often in recent years, they have been unfairly associated with terrorism, as anyone with a Muslim name who has passed through a Western airport will attest. But South Asian Muslims do what other people do: they educate their children, earn livings, travel widely, discuss their faith, settle disputes, arrange marriages, cope with politics, struggle with governments, and support football teams. United by shared adherence to the Holy Quran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims of South Asia speak numerous languages, follow different local customs, and have varied aspirations for their own lives and those of their children. The essays in this book probe such aspects of Muslim life. The authors’ concerns range from great political debates that have affected Muslim lives to marriage on the east coast of Sri Lanka, schools and media in Pakistan, women’s groups in Bangladesh, and football teams in Kolkata. This work will interest readers who wish to discover the multi-faceted lives of South Asia’s Muslims.

This book examines interracial intimacy in the beginning of the twenty-first century, an era rife with racial contradictions in which interracial relationships are increasingly seen as forward-thinking symbols of racial progress, even as old stereotypes about illicit eroticism endure. With extensive qualitative research, this book examines the racial dynamics of everyday life for lesbian, gay, and heterosexual Black/White couples. It disputes the notion that interracial partners are enlightened subjects who have somehow managed to “get beyond” race. Instead, for many partners interracial intimacy represents not the end, but rather the beginning of a sustained process of negotiating racial differences. This research reveals the ordinary challenges that partners frequently face and the myriad ways in which race shapes partners’ interactions with each other, as well as with family members, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers.This book analyzes contemporary interracial lives through the lens of “racework”: the everyday actions and strategies by which individuals maintain close relationships in a society with deeply rooted racial inequalities. It explores how racework operates in three realms: public spaces, the internal dynamics of relationships, and in the construction of interracial identities. Comparing the experiences of gay and lesbian partners with heterosexual partners, it argues that sexuality and gender play a significant role in how partners use racework in negotiating public spaces and identities, but a minor role in how partners deal with inequalities inside their relationship. With a focus on racework, this book positions interracial intimacy as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular accomplishment.

This book revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro over the course of the twentieth century. Through the dual lens of political agency and critical historical events, this book follows the transformation of the neighborhood from being predominantly black at the beginning of the twentieth century into a largely white upper-middle-class and commercial neighborhood by the century’s conclusion. Employing the insights of an array of scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, James Scott, Cathy Cohen, William Julius Wilson, and Mary Pattillo, the book argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere victims of large-scale socioeconomic, structural, and political changes such as deindustrialization of the local and national economy, urban renewal, and the growing federal intervention into urban America following World War II. As the book shows, black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intraracial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. Whereas most urban studies analyze multiple facets of black life over the span of a few decades, the book extends the chronology to nearly a century, capturing events such as banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led antiurban renewal mobilization, and the changing politics emergent in post–civil rights Philadelphia.

National governments around the world are turning to branding consultants, public relations advisers, and strategic communications experts to help them “brand” their jurisdiction. Using the tools, techniques, and expertise of commercial branding is believed to help nations articulate a more coherent and cohesive identity, attract foreign capital, and maintain citizen loyalty. In short, the goal of nation branding is to make the nation matter in a world where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete. But what actually happens to the nation when it is reconceived as a brand? How does nation branding change the terms of politics and culture in a globalized world? Through case studies in twelve countries and in-depth interviews with nation-branding experts and their national clients, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the social, political, and cultural discourses constitutive of the nation have been harnessed in new and problematic ways, with far-reaching consequences for both our concept of the nation and our ideals of national citizenship. Branding the Nation challenges the received wisdom about the power of brands to change the world, and offers a critical perspective on these new ways of conceiving value and identity in the globalized twenty-first century.

The emergence of a visible, commodified leisure culture in the form of cafés, targeted at and appropriated by, young adults from the middle classes, is a striking phenomenon in the transformation of urban life in India since economic liberalization in 1991. Café Culture in Pune is an ethnographic snapshot, taken in 2008, tracing the effects of globalization from the perspective of young middle class urbanites in post-liberalization Pune, India. Documenting with meticulous detail their lifeworld, from clothing to hanging out, friendship, dating, education, and marriage, it captures new forms of socializing, consumption, self-improvement and relationship-management. These practices set the young generation apart–the first to grow up with mass-consumerism – as a group in historical time, in relation to other lifeworlds in India, to ‘western’ versions and as a rounded life world in itself. The study considers two questions: How do free global market economy and ‘globalization’ change the way people see themselves and the world? And to what extent might Indian practices modify the practices of ‘western’ individualism implicit in Indian modernity? The young café culture crowd in its practices was domesticating ‘the global’ while transcending ‘the local’. They were negotiating to follow their hearts, while preserving strong family bonds and inter-generational dependencies. They were thus modifying what it meant to be middle class Indians in our contemporary globalized world. The Indian middle class was reinventing India as a global player in a post-Cold war world by constructing a narrative of pivotal change.