Electoral and parliamentary arenas play a crucial role in the configuration and dynamics of modern polities. This book explores the practices of citizenship and unveils the fabric of representation in the Iberian countries, during a significant period of liberal politics, that is, from its apogee to its collapse (from the 1870s to the 1920s). Part One examines the evolution of electoral norms and behaviour, as well as the recruitment profile of MPs. Portugal and Spain share fundamental features, such as the extensive clientelistic mobilisation of voters, the dissemination of fraud and corruption, the supremacy of governmental parties and the prevalence of the politics of notables. Part Two focuses on Parliament, questioning constitutional models, internal procedures, legislative action and political activity, as well as coetaneous perceptions and images of the institution and its actors as portrayed in novels, newspaper chronicles, cartoons and photographic reports. This collection of essays offers a detailed and cogent analysis, as well as a vivid picture, of the politics of representation in Portuguese and Spanish liberalism, revealing significant similarities and differences through cross-country comparisons.

This book examines the inherently problematic nature of representation and description of living people, specifically in ethnography and more generally in anthropological work as a whole. In this book, the editor brings together a group of international scholars who, through their fieldwork experiences, reflect on the epistemological, political, and personal implications of their own work. To do so, they focus on such topics as ethnography, anthropologists' engagement in identity politics, representational practices, the contexts of anthropological research and work, and the effects of personal choices regarding self-involvement in local causes that may extend beyond purely ethnographic goals.

Literacy and the Politics of Representation aims to uncover the constructed nature of public understandings of literacy by examining detailed examples of how literacy is represented in a range of public contexts.

Based on interviews and conversations in the Bosnian Federation with women survivors of war rape, children born of rape and armed conflict, leaders of NGOs who work with survivors, and people who lived through the war and who experienced it in different ways, this book challenges one dimensional representations of the Yugoslav war and subsequent peacebuilding processes. Relying on feminist ethnography and autoethnography, this volume offers systematic engagement with the politics of representation of Bosnia and survivors of war in post-war journalism and scholarship. Through rich and varied individual experiences of wartime violence and recovery that go beyond simple ‘us’ versus ‘them’ narratives of ethnic identity and intolerance, the book shows how public and private, individual and collective discourses actively shape one another and contribute to complex forms of engagement in recovery, healing and rebuilding. The author draws upon archival material to undermine the fetishization of ethnicity as a determining category that often underpins journalistic and scholarly accounts of post-war Bosnia. By retracing and repairing separations between individual and collective remembrance, and by complicating linear and monolithic conception of this process, the narratives in the book actively contest reductionist and instrumentalist accounts of the civil war in Bosnia. The book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in memory, peacebuilding, national identity, gendered violence and processes of reconciliation

Uses poststructuralist theory to connect inclusion, exclusion and identity, using real-world case studies from British culture, politics and lawLasse Thomassen applies a fresh, poststructuralist approach to reconcile the theoretical and practical issues surrounding inclusion, exclusion and representation. He opens up debates and themes including Britishness, race, the nature and role of Islam in British society, homelessness and social justice. Thomassen argues that the politics of inclusion and identity should be viewed as struggles over how these identities are represented. He develops this argument through careful analysis of cases from the last four decades of British multiculturalism, including public debates about the role of religion in British society, Gordon Brown and David Cameron's contrasting versions of Britishness, legal cases about religious symbols and clothing in schools, and the Nick Hornby novel How to Be Good.

This anthology critically analyzes how cultures around the world make social categories of race, class, gender and sexuality meaningful in particular ways. The collection uses a wide range of readings to examine how contemporary issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality are constructed, mobilized, and transformed. Unlike many books in this area, the U.S. is not analytical center.

Singapore and Malaysia are rapidly modernising, globalising Asian states which, although being distinct nations since 1965, share common elements in the on-going struggle over the meaning of gender and sexuality in their societies. This is the first book to discuss a range of discourses around gender in these two countries. Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia: Engendering Discourse in Singapore and Malaysia seeks to give an overview of how gender and representation come together in various configurations in the history and contemporary culture of both nations. It examines the discursive construction of gender, sexuality and representation in a variety of areas, including the politics of everyday life, education, popular culture, literature, film, theatre and photography. Chapters examine a range of tropes such as the Orientalist "Sarong Party Girl," the iconic "Singapore Girl" of Singapore Airlines, and the figure of pious Muslim femininity celebrated by Malaysian NGO IMAN, all of which play important roles in delineating limitations for gender roles. The collection also draws attention to resistance to these gender boundaries in theatre, film, blogs and social media, and pedagogy. Bringing together research from a variety of humanistic and social science fields, such as film, material culture, semiotics, literature and pedagogy, the book is a comprehensive feminist survey that will be of use for students and scholars of Women’s Studies and Asian Studies, as well as on courses on gender, media and popular culture in Asia.

This book sheds new light on gender-based inequalities in a globalized world. Interdisciplinary in scope, it reveals new avenues of research on gendered citizenship, analysing the possibilities and pitfalls of being represented and of representing someone. Drawing on contexts both historical and contemporary, it queries what it means to have access to representation, which power structures regulate and produce representation, and who counts as a citizen. Situating its arguments in the global struggle for hegemony, it answers such thought-provoking questions as whether one can represent someone or be represented without recourse to citizenship and, conversely, whether it is possible to be a citizen if one does not have access to representation. This engaging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, media studies, political science, literature, gender studies and cultural studies.div div>

This edited collection explores the representations of identity in comedy and interrogates the ways in which “humorous” constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, class and disability raise serious issues about privilege, agency and oppression in popular culture. Should there be limits to free speech when humour is aimed at marginalised social groups? What are the limits of free speech when comedy pokes fun at those who hold social power? Can taboo joking be used towards politically progressive ends? Can stereotypes be mocked through their re-invocation? Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak breaks new theoretical ground by demonstrating how the way people are represented mediates the triadic relationship set up in comedy between teller, audience and butt of the joke. By bringing together a selection of essays from international scholars, this study unpacks and examines the dynamic role that humour plays in making and remaking identity and power relations in culture and society.

This study explores how Dalits in north India have used literature as a means of protest against caste oppression. Including fresh ethnographic research and interviews, it traces the trajectory of modern Dalit writing in Hindi and its pivotal role in the creation, rise and reinforcement of a distinctive Dalit identity. The book challenges the existing impression of Hindi Dalit literature as stemming from the Dalit political assertion of the 1980s and as being chiefly imitative of the Marathi Dalit literature model. Arguing that Hindi Dalit literature has a much longer history in north India, it examines two differing strands that have taken root in Dalit expression — the early ‘popular’ production of smaller literary pamphlets and journals at the beginning of the 20th century and more contemporary modes such as autobiographies, short stories and literary criticism. The author highlights the ways in which such various forms of literary works have supported the proliferation of an all-encompassing identity for the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes. She also underscores how these have contributed to their evolving political consciousness and consolidation of newer heterogeneous identities, making a departure from their long-perceived image. The work will be important for those in Dalit studies, subaltern history, Hindi literature, postcolonial studies, political science and sociology as well as the informed general reader.