AARC Books

An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal

Poulomi Saha
2019

Poulomi Saha offers an innovative account of women’s political labor in East Bengal over more than a century, one that suggests new ways to think about textiles and the gendered labors of their making. An Empire of Touch argues that women have articulated—in writing, in political action, in stitching—their own desires in their own terms. They produce narratives beyond women’s empowerment and independence as global and national projects; they refuse critical pronouncements of their own subjugation. Saha follows the historical traces of how women have claimed their own labor,...

Education and Racism: A Primer on Issues and Dilemmas

Zeus Leonardo
2018

Education and Racism is a concise and easily accessible primer for introducing undergraduate and graduate students to the field of race and education. Designed for introductory courses, each chapter provides an overview of a main issue or dilemma in the research on racial inequality and education and the particular approaches that have been offered to explain or address them. Theme-oriented chapters include curriculum, school (re)segregation, and high stakes testing as well as discussions on how racism intersects with other forms of marginality, like socio-economic status. The focus...

Edward Said and Education

Zeus Leonardo
2020

This volume offers a deep interpretation of Edward Said’s literary thought towards the development of educational criticism. Insofar as Said’s academic career was built around the contours of literary analysis, Leonardo demonstrates how Said’s work propels scholarship on schooling in ways that enrich our ability to generate insights about the educational enterprise. The book draws from four main themes of Said’s work – knowledge construction as part of empire, representations and reconstruction of the intellectual, the exile condition, and contrapuntal analysis. These themes cohere...

Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea

Laura C. Nelson
2000

This insightful analysis of the ways in which South Korean economic development strategies have reshaped the country's national identity gives specific attention to the manner in which women, as the primary agents of consumption, have been affected by this transformation. Past scholarship on the culture of nationalism has largely focused on the ways in which institutions utilize memory and "history" to construct national identity. In a provocative departure, Laura C. Nelson challenges these assumptions with regard to South Korea, arguing that its identity has been as much tied to...

Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education

Zeus Leonardo
2013

This is a comprehensive introduction to the main frameworks for thinking about, conducting research on, and teaching about race and racism in education. Renowned theoretician and philosopher Zeus Leonardo surveys the dominant race theories and, more specifically, focuses on those frameworks that are considered essential to cultivating a critical attitude toward race and racism. The book examines four frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxism, Whiteness Studies, and Cultural Studies, with a critique following each one in order to analyze its strengths and set its limits. The...

The Right of Sovereignty: Jean Bodin on the Sovereign State and the Law of Nations

Daniel Lee
2021

Sovereignty is the vital organizing principle of modern international law. The Right of Sovereignty examines the origins of that principle in the legal and political thought of its most influential theorist, Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596). As Daniel Lee argues in this study, Bodin’s most lasting theoretical contribution was his thesis that sovereignty must be conceptualized as an indivisible bundle of legal rights constitutive of statehood. While these uniform ‘rights of sovereignty’ licensed all states to exercise numerous exclusive powers, including the ‘absolute power’ to ‘absolve’ and...

Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought

Daniel Lee
2016

Popular sovereignty—the doctrine that the public powers of the state originate in a concessive grant of power from ‘the people’—is perhaps the cardinal doctrine of modern constitutional theory. Its classic formulation is to be found in the major theoretical treatments of the modern state, such as in the treatises of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and it functions as a model in the design of modern constitutions, by locating the source of such public power in a putative ‘We the People’ anterior to public institutions. This book explores the intellectual origins of this constitutional...

Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America

Long Le-Khac
2020

Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post–civil...

Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces

SanSan Kwan
2013

In Kinesthetic City, author SanSan Kwan explores the contentious nature of Chineseness in diaspora through the lens of moving bodies as they relate to place, time, and identity. She locates her study in five Chinese urban sites--Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles--at momentous historical turning points to parse out key similarities and differences in the construction of Chineseness. The moving bodies she considers are not only those in performances by some of the most well-known Chinese dance companies in these cities, but...

Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

SanSan Kwan
Kenneth Speirs
2004

The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.From Naomi Zack's "American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues" to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger's "...