Representation is integral to the functioning and legitimacy of modern government. Yet political theorists have often been reluctant to engage directly with questions of representation, and empirical political scientists have closed down such questions by making representation synonymous with congruence. Conceptually unproblematic and normatively inert for some, representation has been deemed impossible to pin down analytically and to defend normatively by others. But this is changing. Political theorists are now turning to political representation as a subject worthy of theoretical investigation in its own right. In their effort to rework the theory of political representation, they are also hoping to impact how representation is assessed and studied empirically. This volume gathers together chapters by key contributors to what amounts to a "representative turn" in political theory. Their approaches and emphases are diverse, but taken together they represent a compelling and original attempt at re-conceptualizing political representation and critically assessing the main theoretical and political implications following from this, namely for how we conceive and assess representative democracy. Each contributor is invited to look back and ahead on the transformations to democratic self-government introduced by the theory and practice of political representation. Representation and democracy: outright conflict, uneasy cohabitation, or reciprocal constitutiveness? For those who think democracy would be better without representation, this volume is a must-read: it will question their assumptions, while also exploring some of the reasons for their discomfort. Reclaiming Representation is essential reading for scholars and graduate researchers committed to staying on top of new developments in the field.

Develops a theory of political authority in which institutions are public and, consequently, are authoritative by virtue of speaking in the name of citizens, not merely for them. The theory accounts for major legal doctrines including the separation of powers, limits of privatization, public property, and the use artificial intelligence.

This book examines Egypt’s turbulent and contradictory political period (2011-2015) as key to understanding contemporary politics in the country and the developments in the Arab region after the mass protests in 2010/11, more broadly. In doing so, it breaks new ground in the study of political representation, providing analytical innovation to the study of disenchantment with politics, democracy fatigue and social cohesion. Based on five years of intense fieldwork, the author provides rare insights into local and national ideas on politics, justice and identity, and on how people situate themselves and Egypt in the regional and global context. It analyzes how the creation of an alternate, political system was discussed and negotiated among the Egyptian population, the military, the government, public figures, the media, and international actors, and yet nevertheless today, Egypt has a new political regime that is the most repressive in the countries’ modern history. Finally, it recalls the emotions and perceptions of individuals and collectives and interlinks these local perspectives to national events and developments through time. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of democratization and authoritarianism, Middle East Studies, political representation and informality, collective action, and more broadly to cultural studies and international relations.

With the tomboy figure currently operating in a liminal space between extinction and resurgence, Reclaiming the Tomboy: The Body, Identity, and Representation is an unabashed celebration of her rebellious, independent, and pioneering spirit. This collection examines the tomboy as she appears throughout history, in the arts and in real-life. It also addresses how she has changed over the centuries, adapting to the world around her and breaking new boundaries in new ways (sometimes with a "simple" selfie). While this collection addresses the claim of the tomboy as being antiquated or even "problematic," it more vigorously offers examples of where she is thriving and benefiting from her tomboy identity. Ultimately, this book underscores the tomboy's legacy as well as why she is still relevant, if not needed, today.

Where are all the bodies? Political institutions are populated by living, breathing human beings, who eat, sleep, gesture, desire and suffer. And yet participants of the political realm are often depicted as disembodied minds, detached and distinct from their corporeal existence. Amanda Machin considers six embodied modes of democratic politics: representation, deliberation, disagreement, protest, occupation and counsel. Drawing on diverse thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, Simone de Beauvoir, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, she offers an absorbing illustration of the ways human bodies are not only the disciplined objects of politics, but the generative subjects of democracy.

'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.

This compilation was inspired by an international symposium held on the Legon campus in September 2003. Hosted by the CODESRIA African Humanities Institute Programme, the symposium had the theme 'Canonical Works and Continuing Innovation in African Arts & Humanities'.

Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century offers a critical valuation of literature composed by black female writers and examines their projects of reclamation, rememory, and revision. As a collection, it engages black women writers’ efforts to create more inclusive conceptualizations of community, gender, and history, conceptualizations that take into account alternate lived and written experiences as well as imagined futures. Contributors to this collection probe the realms of gender studies, postcolonialism, and post-structural theory and suggest important ways in which to explore connections between home, motherhood, and history across the multifarious narratives of African American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. Together they argue that it is through their female characters that black women writers demonstrate the tumultuous processes of deciphering home and homeland, of articulating the complexities of mothering relationships, and of locating their own personal history within local and national narratives. Essays gathered in this collection consider the works of African American women writers (Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Audre Lorde, Lalita Tademy, Lorene Cary, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sherley Anne Williams) alongside the works of black women writers from the Caribbean (Jamaica Kincaid and Gisèle Pineau), Guyana (Grace Nichols), and Cuba (María de los Reyes Castillo Bueno).

Created in 2000 following a long-standing regional movement, Jharkhand-the land of forests-represents an important experiment in regional autonomy and self-determination for indigenous communities in a postcolonial democracy. Over two decades, Jharkhand has experienced a volatile political environment as competing political groups have mobilised indigenous subaltern communities for different ends. In Reclaiming Indigeneity and Democracy in India's Jharkhand, Ipshita Basu contributes to scholarship on critical social justice and indigeneity by highlighting 'relations of justification' as a central feature of group-based claims-making for social groups identifying with indigeneity in diverse ways. Specifically, the book focuses on reclaiming political recognition for Adivasis within the contemporary dynamics of majoritarian populism and the market economy. Uniting perspectives from philosophy (social justice), politics (democracy and public reasoning), and culture studies (identity), and based on ethnographic and archival research, the author indicates that when 'relations' are at the epicentre of claims-making, expressive attachments determine political activism over the instrumental choices that groups are compelled to make in the context of large power differentials. This book is a timely account of indigenous politics and is an attempt to foreground the complex 'political nature' of social justice claims-making in a democracy such as India.

Revolutionary Republicanism provides a history of French republicanism seen through a seminal episode of its creation – the 1848 revolution. The process of reinventing republicanism in 1848 gave rise to two opposite understandings of republicanism: a moderate one that merely adapted the institutions of representative government to popular sovereignty, and a more radical, ‘social- democratic’ notion of republicanism, based on inclusive forms of representation and aiming at the emancipation of the proletariat. These two notions of republicanism unfolded over the course of the few critical months between the revolution of February 1848 and the uprising of June 1848, which saw the victory of the moderate one. Playing devil’s advocate to the traditional republican history that casts 1848 as a mere step in the continuous history of French republicanism, the book demonstrates that the events of the revolution amounted to a repression of all that the ‘Republic’ had meant up until that point, particularly the forms of participation and popular representation hitherto seen as constituting a republican regime. The text also sets out to chart the history of the ‘democratic and social Republic’, as the socialist and worker revolutionaries of 1848 called the radical republicanism they dreamed of founding and believed would fulfil the republican promise of emancipation. This book will appeal to all those with an interest in the French revolutions, and the history of radical ideas.