Showing papers on "Ideology published in 1993"

Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract: This paper discusses some principles of critical discourse analy- sis, such as the explicit sociopolitical stance of discourse analysts, and a focus on dominance relations by elite groups and institutions as they are being enacted, legitimated or otherwise reproduced by text and talk. One of the crucial elements of this analysis of the relations between power and discourse is the patterns of access to (public) discourse for different social groups. Theoretically it is shown that in order to be able to relate power and discourse in an explicit way, we need the cognitive interface of models. knowledge, attitudes and ideologies and other social represen- tations of the social mind, which also relate the individual and the social, and the micro- and the macro-levels of social structure. Finally, the argu- ment is illustrated with an analysis of parliamentary debates about ethnic affairs.

Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

Abstract: In Moral Boundaries Joan C. Tronto provides one of the most original responses to the controversial questions surrounding women and caring. Tronto demonstrates that feminist thinkers have failed to realise the political context which has shaped their debates about care. It is her belief that care cannot be a useful moral and political concept until its traditional and ideological associations as a "women's morality" are challenged.Moral Boundaries contests the association of care with women as empirically and historically inaccurate, as well as politically unwise. In our society, members of unprivileged groups such as the working classes and people of color also do disproportionate amounts of caring. Tronto presents care as one of the central activites of human life and illustrates the ways in which society degrades the importance of caring in order to maintain the power of those who are privileged.

Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses.

Abstract: Many people in "literate" societies, when asked to define literacy, almost always do so in terms of reading and writing abilities This narrow interpretation of literacy, an offspring of reductionist psychology, has reigned supreme in many academic and educational contexts for decades, greatly shaping literacy theories and classroom practices Within the past ten years, however, a large body of multidisciplinary research has begun to undermine the authority of this perspective by situating literacy in larger social practices

Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation

Abstract: The topics of race and racism are often treated narrowly in social psychological and other social scientific literature, usually being presented as subcategories of stereotyping or prejudice or attitudes. In this new book, Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter extend their work on the use of discourse analysis in social science to cover racism and to include issues of social structure, power relations and ideology. Part 1 provides the theoretical framework within which representations of race can be studied, part 2 an empirical illustration from New Zealand of the arguments of part 1.

Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology

Abstract: In the space of barely more than five years, with the publication of four pathbreaking books, Slavoj Žižek has earned the reputation of being one of the most arresting, insightful, and scandalous thinkers in recent memory. Perhaps more than any other single author, his writings have constituted the most compelling evidence available for recognizing Jacques Lacan as the preemient philosopher of our time. In Tarrying with the Negative , Žižek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Žižek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various discursive practices and where our subjectivity is dispersed through a multitude of ideological positions? No is his answer, and the way out is a return to philosophy. This revisit to German Idealism allows Žižek to recast the critique of ideology as a tool for disclosing the dynamic of our society, a crucial aspect of which is the debate over nationalism, particularly as it has developed in the Balkans—Žižek's home. He brings the debate over nationalism into the sphere of contemporary cultural politics, breaking the impasse centered on nationalisms simultaneously fascistic and anticolonial aspirations. Provocatively, Žižek argues that what drives nationalistic and ethnic antagonism is a collectively driven refusal of our own enjoyment. Using examples from popular culture and high theory to illuminate each other—opera, film noir, capitalist universalism, religious and ethnic fundamentalism—this work testifies to the fact that, far more radically than the postmodern sophists, Kant and Hegel are our contemporaries.

Race In North America: Origin And Evolution Of A Worldview

Abstract: IntroductionSome Theoretical ConsiderationsThe Etymology of the Term Race in the English LanguageAntecedents of the Racial WorldviewThe Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in AmericaThe Arrival of Africans and Descent into SlaveryComparing Slave Systems: The Significance of Racial ServitudeThe Rise of Science: Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Classifications of Human DiversityLate Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of RaceAntislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial WorldviewA Different Order of Being: Nineteenth-Century Science and the Ideology of RaceScience and the Growth and Expansion of Race Ideology Twentieth-Century Developments in Race IdeologyDismantling the Scientific Construction of Race: New Perspectives on Human Variation in Science Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: Transformations of an Ideology

Language, Ideology and Point of View

Abstract: This systematic introduction to the concept of point of view in language explores the ways in which point of view intersects with and is shaped by ideology. It specifically focuses on the way in which speakers and writers linguistically encode their beliefs, interests and biases in a wide range of media. The book draws on an extensive array of linguistic theories and frameworks and each chapter includes a self-contained introduction to a particular topic in linguistics, allowing easy reference. The author uses examples from a variety of literary and non-literary text types such as, narrative fiction, advertisements and newspaper reports.

Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation

Abstract: In Cultural Capital, John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over "multiculturalism" and the current "crisis of the humanities." Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of representing social groups in the canon than of distributing "cultural capital" in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, the practices of reading and writing. He declines to reduce the history of canon formation to one of individual reputations or the ideological contents of particular works, arguing that a critique of the canon fixated on the concept of authorial identity overlooks historical transformations in the forms of cultural capital that have underwritten judgments of individual authors. The most important of these transformations is the emergence of "literature" in the later eighteenth century as the name of the cultural capital of the bourgeoisie. In three case studies, Guillory charts the rise and decline of the category of "literature" as the organizing principle of canon formation in the modern period. He considers the institutionalization of the English vernacular canon in eighteenth-century primary schools; the polemic on behalf of a New Critical modernist canon in the university; and the appearance of a "canon of theory" supplementing the literary curriculum in the graduate schools and marking the onset of a terminal crisis of literature as the dominant form of cultural capital in the schools. The final chapter ofCultural Capital examines recent theories of value judgment, which have strongly reaffirmed cultural relativism as the necessary implication of canon critique. Contrasting the relativist position with Pierre Bourdieu's very different sociology of judgment, Guillory concludes that the

Family Feuds Gender Nationalism and the Family

Abstract: All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, snd all are dangerousdangerous, not in Eric Hobsbawm's sense as having to be opposed, but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalism, as Ernest Gellner notes, invents nations where they do not exist, and most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are of recent invention (Gellner, 1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellner tends to assimilate 'invention' to 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. Anderson, by contrast, views nations as 'imagined communities' in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community (Anderson, 1991: 6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed. Nationalism becomes, as a result, radically constitutive of people's identities, through social contests that are frequently violent and always gendered. But if the invented nature of nationalism has found wide theoretical currency, explorations of the gendering of the national imaginary have been conspicuously paltry. All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. Despite nationalisms' ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference. No nation in the world gives women and men the same access to the rights and resources of the nation-state. Rather than expressing the flowering into time of the organic essence of a timeless people, nations are contested systems of cultural representation that limit and legitimize peoples' access to the resources of the nation-state. Yet with the notable exception of Frantz Fanon, male theorists have seldom felt moved to explore how nationalism is

To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature

Abstract: This powerful book argues that White culture in America does not exist apart from Black culture. The revolution of the rights of man that established America collided long ago with the system of slavery, and we have been trying to re-establish a steady course for ourselves ever since. "To Wake the Nations" is urgent and rousing: we have integrated our buses, schools, and factories, but not the canon of American literature. That is the task Eric Sundquist has assumed in a book that ranges from politics to literature, from Uncle Remus to African-American spirituals. But the hallmark of this volume is a re-evaluation of the glory years of American literature - from 1830 to 1930 - that shows how White literature and Black literature form a single interwoven tradition. By examining African-America's contested relation to the intellectual and literary forms of white culture, Sundquist reconstructs the main lines of American literary tradition from the decades before the Civil War through the early 20th century. An opening discussion of Nat Turner's "Confessions", recorded by a white man, Thomas Gray, establishes a paradigm for the complexity of meanings that Sundquist uncovers in American literary texts. Focusing on Frederick Douglass's autobiographical books, Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno", Martin Delany's novel "Blake; or the Huts of America", Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson", Charles Chesnutt's fiction, and W.E.B. Du Bois's "Souls of Black Folk" and "Darkwater", Sundquist considers each text against a rich background of history, law, literature, politics, religion, folklore, music and dance. These readings aim to lead to insights into components of the culture at large: slavery as it intersected with post-colonial revolutionary ideology; literary representations of the legal and political foundations of segregation; and the transformation of elements of African and ante-bellum folk consciousness into the public forms of American literature.

Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America

Abstract: Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic “liberal democratic” society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870–1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.

Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua

Abstract: 'Rambo took the barrios by storm: Spanish videotapes of the movie were widely available, and nearly all the boys and young men had seen it, usually on the VCRs of their family's more affluent friends...As one young Sandinista commented, 'Rambo is like the Nicaraguan soldier. He's a superman. And if the United States invades, we'll cut the marines down like Rambo did.' And then he mimicked Rambo's famous war howl and mimed his arc of machine gun fire. We both laughed' - from the book. There is a Nicaragua that Americans have rarely seen or heard about, a nation of jarring political paradoxes and staggering social and cultural flux. In this Nicaragua, the culture of machismo still governs most relationships, insidious racism belies official declarations of ethnic harmony, sexual relationships between men differ starkly from American conceptions of homosexuality, and fascination with all things American is rampant. Roger Lancaster reveals the enduring character of Nicaraguan society as he records the experiences of three families and their community through times of war, hyperinflation, dire shortages, and political turmoil. Life is hard for the inhabitants of working class barrios like Dona Flora, who expects little from men and who has reared her four children with the help of a constant female companion; and life is hard for Miguel, undersized and vulnerable, stigmatized as a cochon - a 'faggot' - until he learned to fight back against his brutalizers. Through candid discussions with young and old Nicaraguans, men and women, Lancaster constructs an account of the successes and failures of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, documenting the effects of war and embargo on the cultural and economic fabric of Nicaraguan society. He tracks the break up of families, surveys informal networks that allow female-headed households to survive, explores the gradual transformation of the culture of machismo, and reveals a world where heroic efforts have been stymied and the best hopes deferred. This vast chronicle is sustained by a rich theoretical interpretation of the meanings of ideology, power, and the family in a revolutionary setting. Played out against a backdrop of political travail and social dislocation, this work is a story of survival and resistance but also of humor and happiness. Roger Lancaster shows us that life is hard, but then too, life goes on.

Discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology...

Abstract: Modern social theory is awash with talk of discourse and ideology. Sometimes the two concpets are used interchangeably and at other times they are counterposed. The paper seeks to make sense of the part played by these concepts in contemporary debates. It proposes an exercise on retrieval which suggests that our two key terms form distinct theoretical traditions which, while they can be distinguished, can both be made good use of. The AA. review : 1) Larrain's distinction between a negative and a positive conception of ideology ; 2) Foucault's version of discourse theory ; 3) Laclau's and Mouffe's position for a rupture between discourse and ideology, contrasted with the Gramscian position espoused by Stuart Hall. The theory of ideology proposed by the AA. supplements discourse theory rather than opposing it. It is a version of ideology theory that is different from that bequeathed by Marx.

The idea of demographic transition and the study of fertility change: a critical intellectual history.

Abstract: The position is argued that progress in the further study of fertility change rests on a reappraisal of the recent intellectual history of demography. Principally recognition needs to be given to the policy influences which were apparent even before the 1950s. The notion of demographic transition as merely a descriptive term is unproductive and impedes a wider range of approaches to the field. The discussion was an examination of the methodological constraints and the reasons for the continuing reliance on descriptive notions of demographic transition. The theory of demographic transition in 1944-45 and the contrasts between Thompsons 1929 notions and the 1945 notions in the United States were discussed as influenced by the changing institutional context important new intellectual developments and the impact of political events. Notesteins ideas were a primary reference point for discussion as reflecting the distinct change in thinking between 1947 and 1949. Democratic stability and long-term prosperity were hinged on the whole process of modernization and widespread economic development; fertility non-regulation was related to lack of motivation. Notestein and Kingsley Davis were thus at the helm of advocating government sponsored policies on family planning for pretransitional countries. "Peasants were not stupid" they were economically rational and the notion of awkward nonrational institutions and social mores was ignored. The impact of the fall of China and Chiang Kai-sheks nationalist regime and the change in foreign affairs on the Princeton Office and demographic intellectual life was discussed in some detail. The ideological competition of the 1960s and 1970s thwarted self reflection on the inadequacies and flaws in the supply centered activism of the international family planning industry and the "overly dogmatic commitment and rigidity to demographic transition." The historical model (Talcott Parsons variations in classifications) was too fluid and general as a causal explanation for change but it became an irrefutable theory. Modernization became the dominant theory in the 1950s and 1970s even though it could not generate unambiguous testable hypotheses about the specific causes of fertility change. Hodgson and Demeny recognized these inadequacies. Demographic transition theory was both a product of a conception in social science and a means for examining predicting and guiding social change. Current schools of thought are the deductivist the contextualist or interpretative and various realist approaches which interact with the aims of control understanding and intervention. There is a need for historical reconstruction in specific contexts of fertility and perceived costs of childrearing.

BELIEVING IS SEEING: Biology as Ideology

Abstract: Western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behavior and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the “naturalness” of gendered behavior and gendered social statuses. What we believe is what we see—two sexes producing two genders. The process, however, goes the other way: gender constructs social bodies to be different and unequal. The content of the two sets of constructed social categories, “females and males” and “women and men,” is so varied that their use in research without further specification renders the results spurious.

The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars

Abstract: This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two World Wars, when racial differences were no longer attributed to cultural factors. Professor Barkan considers the social significance of this transformation, particularly its effect on race relations in the modern world. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote between the wars, he argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies came from the inclusion of outsiders (women, Jews, and leftists) who infused greater egalitarianism into scientific discourse. But even though the emerging view of race was constrained by a scientific language, he shows that modern theorists were as much influenced by social and political events as were their predecessors.

Contestable categories and public opinion

Abstract: The social world is a kaleidoscope of potential realities, which can be readily evoked by altering the ways in which observations are framed and categorized. Classification schemes are therefore central to political maneuver and political persuasion. Typically, they are driven by the dominant elite's ideology and prejudice rather than by rigorous analysis or the aspiration to solve social problems. This article provides examples of common questionable categorizations of government policies and contestable metaphors used for public figures.

There's No Such Thing as Free Speech...and it's a good thing too

Abstract: In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

Ideology in Consumer Research, 1980 and 1990: A Marxist and Feminist Critique

Abstract: This article presents textual evidence drawn from the 1980 and 1990 volumes of the Journal of Consumer Research ( JCR ) to demonstrate the dominance of masculine ideology in consumer research. Through both Marxist and feminist perspectives, it argues for the recognition and inclusion of previously muted voices and invisible constituencies, especially those of groups currently excluded from achieving social and economic equality.

Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Abstract: The essays about womens status in Eastern European countries and some independent states of the former USSR focuses on the post-communist era and gender politics. Social and economic changes in these countries reflect quite different experiences from Western notions and are shaped by philosophical cultural as well as political and economic contexts. The Eastern and Central European changes are all encompassing and are directed to specific issues such as the equality of women. The views in this book reflect the influences of Western feminist thinking (acceptance rejection or transformation). Differences in terminology are an important source of misunderstanding. The organization by country highlights the enormous cultural and historical differences in conflicts between the system and social integration in the presence or absence of social and political persons or groups in the strategies used to control womens bodies and in the extent of womens organization. Women do not suddenly become liberated due to the recent changes to market driven economies and more democratic orders. Womens groups were organized during the 1970s and 1980s in the German Democratic Republic the former Yugoslavia and some former Soviet Republics. Neoconservatism began long before the 1980s. In Hungary Czechoslovakia and the Slovak Republics and the former USSR value systems are in conflict. In Yugoslavia there was moral confusion under the old regime. In 1989 even time has taken on new meaning in the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The state versus the family has been the focus of discussion rather the Western notion of private versus public. No feminist philosophy is possible under the constructed ideology of state socialism and its emphasis on holistic and collectivist thinking. Liberation is in terms of class struggle and paid employment. State interpretations of equality have to be broken down. Individuals and individual rights are subsumed; many ideas reflect hostility toward women. Western feminism is suspect as another "ism." "Patriarchal emancipation helps create the triple burden on women."

"Gender-related traits and gender ideology: Evidence for a multifactorial theory": Correction.

Abstract: Male (n = 95) and female (n = 221) college students were given 2 measures of gender-related personality traits, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, and 3 measures of sex role attitudes. Correlations between the personality and the attitude measures were traced to responses to the pair of negatively correlated BSRI items, masculine and feminine, thus confirming a multifactorial approach to gender, as opposed to a unifactorial gender schema theory.

Rethinking translation : discourse, subjectivity, ideology

Abstract: "Rethinking Translation" aims to make the translator's activity more visible by engaging with recent developments in critical theory to study the discourses and institutions which determine the production, circulation and reception of translated texts. Animated by different varieties of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism and poststructuralism and written in some cases by practising translators, this book constitutes a rethinking of translation that is both philosophical and political. Translations in a number of genres are examined, including Gothic tales, modern poetry, scientific treatises and postmodern narratives, and various national literatures are addressed - French, German, Italian, Latin, American, Quebecois and Arabic. "Rethinking Translation" challenges the marginality of translators by demonstrating the power they wield in the formation of literary canons, the functioning of cultural institutions and the construction of national identities.

The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of the Popular Media

Abstract: Part One Ideology and Democracy 1. Ideology and Ideologies 2. The Democratic Ideal Part Two The Development of Political Ideologies 3. Liberalism 4. Conservatism 5. Socialism and Communism: From More to Marx 6. Socialism and Communism After Marx 7. Fascism Part Three Political Ideologies Today and Tomorrow 8. Liberation Ideologies and the Politics of Identity 9. "Green" Politics: Ecology as Ideology 10. Radical Islamism 11. Postscript: The Future of Ideology

ESL, Ideology, and the Politics of Pragmatism

Abstract: This article discusses how all forms of ESL instruction are ideological, whether or not educators are conscious of the political implications of their instructional choices. Those choices can encourage students to think critically about their education and about society, or they can discourage questioning the status quo in and out of school. This article asserts that ideology is unavoidable, a position supported by various L1 and L2 scholars whose work is surveyed here. Finally, the "accommodationist" politics of apparently neutral pragmatism in English for academic purposes is discussed.

Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia

Abstract: In his extraordinarily influential book "Orientalism," Edward Said argued that Western knowledge about the Orient in the Post-Enlightenment period has been "a systematic discourse by which Europe was able to manage--even produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively." According to Said, European and American views of the Orient created a reality in which the Oriental was forced to live. Although Said's work deals primarily with discourse about the Arab world, much of his argument has been applied to other regions of "the Orient."Drawing on Said's book, Carol A. Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, and the contributors to this book explore the ways colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.One common theme that links the essays in "Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament" is the proposition that Orientalist discourse is not just restricted to the colonial past but continues even today. The contributors argue that it is still extremely difficult for both Indians and outsiders to think about India in anything but strictly Orientalist terms. They propose that students of society and history rethink their methodologies and the relation between theories, methods, and the historical conditions that produced them."Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament" provides new and important insights into the cultural embeddedness of power in the colonial and postcolonial world.

Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism

Abstract: How and why has Cuba's national identity been cast in terms of a cross-cultural synthesis called ""mestizaje"", and what roles have race, gender, sexuality and class played in the construction of that synthesis? What specific cultural, political and economic interests does ""mestizaje"" represent? Exploring these and other questions, the author focuses on images of the ""mulata"" in 19th- and 20th-century Cuban poetry, fiction and visual arts. These images, she argues, are at the heart of Cuba's peculiar form of multiculturalism. ""Mestizaje"" and related cross-cultural paradigms that have developed in other parts of the Caribbean, in Hispanic America and Brazil, are controversially tied to nationalist interests and ideologies. But do they really mark the promise of a diverse cross-culture? Or do they constitute a form of ethnic ""lynching""? According to Kutzinski, ""mestizaje"" in Cuba and elsewhere celebrates racial diversity, while at the same time refusing to acknowledge a historical reality of racial conflict. In ""Sugar's Secrets"", she examines traces of this fundamental paradox in Cuban literature and popular culture. The foundation of the author's argument is that Cuban ""mestizaje"" is a distinctly masculine concept. It articulates itself through the female racial stereotype of the ""mulata"", which becomes a symbol for the reconciliation of Spanish and African elements in Cuban culture. Women, especially non-white women, are excluded from this inter-racial vision of cultural and political bonding. Though ""mestizaje"" assumes heterosexual disguises, the unifying fiction it projects is often the product of male homoerotic desire, across racial lines. Kutzinski is interested in how the ""mulata"" has been used by Cuban cultural institutions, as well as by writers of various racial affiliations, either to maintain or expose that fiction. This study focuses on constructions of inter-racial masculinity hidden behind racially mixed femininity; constructions that have had the effect of legitimising male social, economic and political power.

Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India

Abstract: This study describes and analyses the new social movements that have arisen in India over the past two decades, in particular the anti-caste movement (of both the untouchables and the lower-middle castes), the women's liberation movement, the farmers' movement (centred on struggles arising out of their integration into a state-controlled capitalist market), and the environmental movements (opposition to destructive development, including resistance to big dam projects and the search for alternatives). Rooted in participant observation, it focuses on the ideologies and self-understanding of the movements themselves. The central themes of this book are the origin of movements in the socio-economic contradictions of post-independence India; their effect on political developments, in particular the disintegration of Congress hegemony; their relation to "traditional Marxist" theory and Communist practice; and their groping toward a synthesis of theory and practice that constitutes a new social vision distinct from traditional Marxism.

Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic

Abstract: 'Fanatic', 'dogmatic', 'fundamentalist' - these are the words most often used in the West to describe the Ayatollah Khomeini. The essays in this book challenge that view, arguing that Khomeini and his Islamic movement should be seen as a form of Third World political populism - a radical but pragmatic middle-class movement that strives to enter, rather than reject, the modern age. Ervand Abrahamian, while critical of Khomeini, asks us to look directly at the Ayatollah's own works and to understand what they meant to his principal audience - his followers in Iran. Abrahamian analyzes political tracts dating back to 1943, along with Khomeini's theological writings and his many public statements in the form of speeches, interviews, proclamations and fatwas (judicial decrees). What emerges, according to Abrahamian, is a militant, sometimes contradictory, political ideology that focuses not on issues of scripture and theology but on the immediate political, social, and economic grievances of workers and the middle class. These essays reveal how the Islamic Republic has systematically manipulated history through televised 'recantations', newspapers, school textbooks, and even postage stamps. All are designed to bolster the clergy's reputation as champions of the downtrodden and as defenders against foreign powers. Abrahamian also discusses the paranoia that permeates the political spectrum in Iran, contending that such deep distrust is symptomatic of populist regimes everywhere.

Language and ideology in children 's fiction

Abstract: Resena de libro: John Stephens: Language and Ideology in Children 's Fiction London and NewYork: Longman. 1992, 308 pages

The American School, 1642-1993

Abstract: Introduction to the 3rd edition: Instructional methodology and historical interpretations religion and authority in colonial education nationalism, moral reform and charity in the new republic the ideology and politics of the common school organizing the American school: the 19th-century schoolmarm education as deculturalization: native Americans and Puerto Ricans education and segregation: Asians, African Americans and Mexican Americans schooling and the new corporate order education and human capital meritocracy: the experts take charge the politics of education big bird: movies, radio and television join schools as public educators the great civil-rights movement education and national policy the conservative reaction and the politics of education.