Black Market

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Market ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Modern Nation State

On the eve of the Civil War, the estimated value of the U.S. enslaved population exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. Not only an object to be traded and used, the slave was also a kind of currency, a form of value that anchored the market itself. And this value was not destroyed in the war. Slavery still structured social relations and cultural production in the United States more than a century after it was formally abolished. As Aaron Carico reveals in Black Market, slavery’s engine of capital accumulation was preserved and transformed, and the slave commodity survived emancipation. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Black Market shows how a radically incomplete and fundamentally failed abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined--and now goes on to determine--economic, political, and cultural life.

Transnational Capitalism in Latina/o Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosaura Sánchez ◽  
Beatrice Pita
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Agricultural Fields ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Free Trade Zones ◽  
Female Workers ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Soil And Water

Latina/o cultural production has long dealt in different ways with the impact of transnational capital, globalization, and imperialism not only on immigration from Latin America, especially since the 1970s, but also on Latina/o residents (whether citizens or immigrants) in the United States, particularly with respect to social location, positionality, and labor conditions. Of particular importance to contemporary Latina/o writers is noting that transnational capital has led not only to the restructuring of the U.S. economy but also to the creation of free trade zones in the Global South, especially on the Mexican border, where workers, especially female workers, are extremely exploited and subject to feminicide. In view of the continued participation of a number of Chicana/o workers in the agricultural fields of the Southwest and Northwest, Chicana/o writers have also been especially concerned with ecological issues and the health of all workers subject to pollution and contamination of the air, soil, and water. These are all issues reconstructed in Chicana/o—Latina/o literature, past and present.

Divine Monarchy, Spirited Sovereignties, and the Timely Malagasy MSM Medium-Activist Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Seth Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Sex With Men ◽  
Modern Nation State

Amid ongoing political instability, sarimbavy — same-sex-desiring and/or gender-expansive male-bodied persons — are increasingly rendered opportune subjects ripe for intervention across Madagascar by HIV prevention industries, homonationalist LGBT rights projects backed by the United States Embassy, and many Christian institutions. This article diverges from these biomedical and moral panics by attending to the shifting temporal allegiances of sarimbavy spirit medium-activists. Interlocutors’ roles as mediums to spirits of former reigning monarchs (tromba) necessitated an onerous dedication to Malagasy history (tantara) and tradition (fombandrazana); simultaneously, many sarimbavy mediums were also men who have sex with men (MSM) activists, and thus deeply committed to moving beyond what they saw as the stigma-ridden past and present. These activist engagements and the sarimbavy counterpublics that they produced were uncannily facilitated by mediumship social networks. Through these practices of monarchic veneration, sarimbavy medium-activists implicitly challenged Western expectations that queer social movements must emerge through the subversion of social norms and secular, liberal, democratic reform. In surrendering to the seemingly antidemocratic weight of divine queen-kingship, sarimbavy mediums became “possessed” by political organizations irreducible to the modern nation-state and its colonial genealogies and, furthermore, produced human-spirit relationalities that thwarted Western juridicolegal visions of a bounded, rights-bearing subject.

After the Frontier: Problems with Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cleary
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
Brazilian Amazon ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Interpretation ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
Central Brazil ◽  
Frontier Development

The theoretical interpretation of social and economic change in the Brazilian Amazon has been dominated by a political economy in which the notion of the frontier, variously defined, has been central. Brazil is of course not the only country where a fuzzily defined idea of frontier development has been important, and we can think, as Turner did for the United States, of a Brazilian frontier thesis. It can be boiled down to a simple contention, although the arguments are often complicated: the frontier, now restricted to Amazonia, is the absorption of peripheral regions by an expanding capitalism. This perspective, fundamental to numerous studies of Amazonia, sees a tendency towards homogeneity in economic structure and social relations in the cycle of frontier development, with capitalism ending up as the dominant force. It regards the key subjects in the dynamic of the frontier as the peasantry, who are acted upon by the bourgeoisie and the state, and argues that the dynamic of events within the frontier is determined outside it, in the forms of capital accumulation in the national economy and the way regional economies are articulated to it. Although first formulated in the 1970s, it remains overwhelmingly the most influential theoretical approach to explaining Amazonia's modern history, irrespective, one is sometimes tempted to think, of the direction that history has actually taken.

scholarly journals The Internal Frontier: How Art at Once Problematizes Borders and Draws us Closer to Them

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Kasia Ozga
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Visual Interpretation ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
The Impact

This study combines first-person storytelling, visual interpretation, and linguistic investigation to analyze how a mixed-media artwork that Kasia Ozga produced in 2011, The Internal Frontier, represents immigrant journeys on an autobiographic, social, and discursive level. In the context of an increasingly polarized political climate, Ozga examines borders as individual experiences and geopolitical phenomena to explain how art conditions conflictual aspects of the self to coexist, promoting social consciousness and community engagement.Those in power use borders to naturalize and separate what is familiar from what is strange. As an artist, Ozga explores how our personalities are partitioned, enforced, and made from external boundaries that define our movements, and by the internal borders that we impose on ourselves. Here, reproductions of different “frontiers” around the world are literally cut from the fabric of human chest x-rays collected from immigrant long-term visa applicants, highlighting physical removal and absence. To produce these modified artifacts, shown in light-boxes in various exhibitions in France and the United States, Ozga researched the border-as-process of inclusion and exclusion linked to regulative authority in social relations, nation-building, political sovereignty, as well as personal identity formation.In the artworks, migration is transformed from an isolated act to a shared human experience. The images, at once precise and indeterminate, maintain the dual symbolism of the border as barrier and as springboard, simultaneously inhibiting and enabling interactions between individuals and select geographic locations. Just as migrants lead us to re-evaluate our physical and mental borders, critical cultural production can contest the impact and staying power of borders by underscoring how establishing and overriding boundaries enable us to claim and reclaim who we are.

Introduction

Gateway State ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sarah Miller-Davenport
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

This introductory chapter explains that global decolonization and Hawaiʻi statehood complemented U.S. efforts to promote the nation-state as the primary building block of the postwar global order. As the leading power of the noncommunist world, the United States “startlingly naturalized the free nation,” drawing on the tradition of Open Door diplomacy to advance its own political and economic interests as European colonialism collapsed. Against this background, Hawaiʻi, as an overseas colony legally distinct from the rest of the United States, appeared to many as an aberration needing resolution. Thus, the ideas on multiculturalism developed in Hawaiʻi were not mere rhetoric: poststatehood Hawaiʻi became a physical center for facilitating the new cultural encounters of the Cold War, with varying degrees of success. For those Americans seeking to sway the loyalties of people in Asia and the Pacific, Hawaiʻi was not only seen as a symbolic representation of America's commitment to democracy and diversity; it was also a place where people from both Asia and the U.S. mainland were physically transported in order to prove the veracity of that message. But those cultural encounters did not always go as planned.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Frank Towers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
The U.S

Today’s political map of North America took its basic shape in a continental crisis in the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation (1867), the end of the U.S. Civil War (1865), the restoration of the Mexican Republic (1867), and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples through the 1870s. This volume explores the tumultuous history of North American state-making in the mid-nineteenth century from a continental perspective that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach. This introduction orients readers by first exploring the meaning of key terms—in particular sovereignty and its historical attachment to the concept of the nation state—and then previewing how contributors interrogate different themes of the mid-century struggles that remade the continent’s political order. Those themes fall into three main categories: the character of the states made and remade in the mid-1800s; the question of sovereignty for indigenous polities that confronted the European-settler descended governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States; and the interaction between capitalist expansion and North American politics, and the concomitant implications of state making for sovereignty’s more diffuse meaning at the level of individual and group autonomy.

From ’48 to ’68

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 242-256
Author(s):  
Piero A. Tozzi
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Minority Class ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
The U.S

In the 1996 case Romer V. Evans, the United States Supreme Court struck down a Colorado state constitutional amendment that had prohibited municipalities and local governments within the state from enacting ordinances grant- ing special treatment to“homosexual persons.”The Court deemed the initiative to have been driven by “animus” toward an identifiable minority class, i.e., those characterized as having or engaging in “homosexual, lesbian, bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships,” and thus ran afoul of the Equal Protection Clause found in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Borderlands Poetics of Bruce Springsteen

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-241
Author(s):  
ADAM LIFSHEY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Static Images ◽  
The U.S

How does the music of Bruce Springsteen interrogate prevailing constructs of the U.S.-Mexico border region? In his folk masterpiece The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and other works that feature Spanish-speaking protagonists, Springsteen implicitly reconceptualizes the Americas as an unbordered and fluid space. His performances enact Mexico and the United States as transamerican ideations rather than discrete nations. Although the booming academic field of border studies reframes static images of both Latin America and the United States in favor of malleable transnational paradigms, it still tends to privilege cultural production emanating from the borders themselves. This propensity does not leave much space for an engagement with canonical figures of U.S. culture such as Springsteen, a singer/songwriter who theorizes the borderlands in ways that at first may seem at odds with his career-long, conscious associations with red, white, and blue semiotics. This article examines the Hispanic presences in Springsteen's oeuvre from his debut 1973 albums onward and contrasts them with the relatively fixed representations of the borderlands in the lifework of Bob Dylan.

Can National History Be De-Provincialized?

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bender
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Adoption Process ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National History ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Textbook Controversy ◽  
Political Character ◽  
Modern Nation State

This article examines two incidents of textbook controversy in the United States in the course of the last half-century. First, it addresses history's historical relationship to the modern nation-state and nationalism. How does that relationship, and the particular way it is understood, limit the boundaries of history, particularly the contest over whether American history ought to be taught as selfcontained and exceptionalist or taught within a larger global context? Second, it addresses the presence of what could be called a historical essentialism or even historical fundamentalism in textbook controversies. The article concludes with an examination of the increasingly political character of the textbook approval and adoption process, as well as the role of publishers and professional historians in the process.

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