The inside story of a prominent Jewish politician outside Israel vehemently attacking the Israeli government and its policies, publicly and self-consciously, as a Jew

Bringing together historians, political scientists, and literary analysts, this volume shows how biographical narratives can shed light on alternative, little known or under-researched aspects of state power in African politics. Part 1 shows how biographical narratives breathe new life into subjects who, upon decolonization, had been reduced to silence - women, workers, and radical politicians. The contributors analyze the complex relationship between biographical narratives and power, questioning either the power of biographical codes peculiar to western, colonial origins, or the power to shape public memory. Part 2 reflects on the act of (auto-)biography writing as an exercise of power, one that blurs the lines between truth and invention. (Auto-)biographical narratives appear as politicized, ambiguous stories. Part 3 focuses on female leadership during and after colonization, exploring on how women gained, lost, or reinvented "power". Brought together, the contributions of this volume show that the function of biographical narratives should no longer oscillate between romanticized narratives and historical evidence; their varied formats all offer fruitful opportunities for a multidisciplinary dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds working on the African postcolonial state, the decolonization process, women’s and gender studies, and biography writing.

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the impact of current globalization processes on Jewish communities across the globe. The volume explores the extent to which nationalized constructs of Jewish culture and identity still dominate Jewish self-expressions, as well as the discourses about them, in the rapidly globalizing world of the twenty-first century. Its contributions address the ways in which Jewishness is now understood as transcending the old boundaries and ideologies of nation states and their continental reconfigurations, such as Europe or North America, but also as crossing the divides of Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, as well as the confines of Israel and the Diaspora. Which new paradigms of Jewish self- location within the evolving and conflicting global discourses about the nation, race, the Holocaust and other genocides, anti-Semitism, colonialism and postcolonialism, gender and sexual identities open up in the current era of globalisation, and to what extent might transnational notions of Jewishness, such as European-Jewish identity, create new discursive margins and centers? Chapters explore the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on cross-cultural relations between Jews and other racialized groups in the Diaspora, and discuss the ways in which recent discourses such as postcolonialism and transnationalism might relate to global Jewish cultures. The intent of the volume is to begin a process of investigation into twenty-first century Jewish identity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

As the situation in Israel/Palestine seems to become ever more intractable and protracted, the need for new ways of looking at recent developments and their historical roots is more pressing than ever. Bearing this in mind, Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan discuss the historic and contemporary dynamics in Israel/Palestine, and their international reverberations, from the unique vantage point of 'race', racialization, racism and anti-racism. They therefore offer close analysis of the 'idea' of Israel and the 'absence' of Palestine by examining the concepts of race and identity in the region. With fresh coverage of themes relating to gender, Idigeneity, the environment , surveillance and the war on terror, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race will appeal to scholars in political science, sociology and Middle East studies.

This volume contains a selection of essays based on papers presented at a conference organized at Yale University and hosted by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) and the International Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA), entitled “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.” The essays are written by scholars from a wide array of disciplines, intellectual backgrounds, and perspectives, and address the conference’s two inter-related areas of focus: global antisemitism and the crisis of modernity currently affecting the core elements of Western society and civilization. Rather than treating antisemitism merely as an historical phenomenon, the authors place it squarely in the contemporary context. As a result, this volume also provides important insights into the ideologies, processes, and developments that give rise to prejudice in the contemporary global context. This thought-provoking collection will be of interest to students and scholars of antisemitism and discrimination, as well as to scholars and readers from other fields.

The social and material production of urban nature has recently emerged as an important area in urban studies, human/environmental interactions and social studies. This has been prompted by the recognition that the material conditions that comprise urban environments are not independent from social, political, and economic processes, or from the cultural construction of what constitutes the ‘urban’ or the ‘natural’. Through both theoretical and empirical analysis, this groundbreaking collection offers an integrated and relational approach to untangling the interconnected processes involved in forming urban landscapes. The essays in this book attest that the re-entry of the ecological agenda into urban theory is vital both in terms of understanding contemporary urbanization processes, and of engaging in a meaningful environmental politics. They debate the central themes of whose nature is, or becomes, urbanized, and the uneven power relations through which this socio-metabolic transformation takes place. Including urban case studies, international research and contributions from prominent urban scholars, this volume will enable students, scholars and researchers of geographical, environmental and urban studies to better understand how interrelated, everyday economic, political and cultural processes form and transform urban environments.

Rarely has such a contentious and complex issue emerged in twenty-first century development as that of water. In this book, co-editors David Hemson, Kassin Kulindwa, Haakon Lein, and Adolfo Mascarenhas use a global spread of case studies to illustrate that water is not simply an issue of physical scarcity, but rather a complex and politically-driven issue with profound future implications, both in the developing world and outside it. The book argues that for the international community to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, governments must step in to protect the rights of the poor. Here, the links between poverty and access to clean water are explored with an eye to political reform that can end the exploitative policies of big business and help to shape a more equitable world for all.

Produced behind closed doors, disposed of discreetly, hidden by euphemism, shit is rarely out in the open in 'civilized' society, but the world of waste - and the people who deal with it, work with it and in it - is a rich one.This book takes us underground to the sewers of New York and London and overground to meet the heroes of India's sanitation movement, American sewage schoolteachers, the Japanese genius at the cutting edge of toilet technology and the biosolids lobbying team. With a journalist's nose for story and a campaigner's desire for change, Rose George also addresses the politics of this under-reported social and environmental effluent, and the consequences of our reluctance to talk about it. Witty and original, The Big Necessity proves that shit doesn't have to be a dirty word.

Issues for Nov. 1957- include section: Accessions. Aanwinste, Sept. 1957-