Minor Threats and the Biopolitics of Youth

In contemporary France, the problem of “immigrant youth”—French citizens, born to migrant parents, often from former French colonies—symbolizes the question of minority and national belonging. The development and disciplining of immigrants have, for several decades, formed the focus of sociological, anthropological, as well as political discourse, especially in the wake of the 2005 urban riots. Considering their case can help us to understand the history and the present-day predicament of “minority” in order to reimagine it beyond restrictive and racist frames.

Urban Hopes, Sexual Horrors

Academic discussions of women and the eruption of urban riots in India focus on a range of women’s testimonies. From this perspective, Hindu women who belong to prominent and powerful right-wing organisations demonstrate religious and physical prowess, while minority and unprotected Muslim women are victims during outbreaks of communal violence. This article aims, if not to undermine, but to unsettle these gendered binaries in women’s experiences as victims or perpetrators of urban violence. We suggest that poor women on both sides of exclusionary propaganda and nationalistic discourses experience the actual violent eruption of hostilities as personal suffering and collective loss. Our analysis highlights how these experiences are intimately related to women’s domestic and family relations, bereavement, mobility, their peripheral socio-economic position, anxieties about the integrity of female bodies, etc., over and above women’s disillusionment with the state, secular and faith-based organisations.

La signoria rurale nell’Italia del tardo medioevo. 3 L’azione politica locale

Rural lordship is one of the classic medieval themes of recent decades, but its specific developments of the late Middle Ages have long been neglected by research, especially engaged in considering other processes in these centuries, such as the construction of regional states, the economic dynamics, the urban riots. This volume, as part of a large research project coordinated by Sandro Carocci, intends to help fill this gap by offering a wide sample of cases, relating to very different areas of the Italian peninsula. Local realities are investigated here from a very specific perspective, that is, in their strictly political dimension: while taking into account the broad contexts (economic, settlement and social) in which the rural lordships are located, the main questions of this volume focus on forms of the lordly domain and its relations with the subjects, with the regional states and with the other lordly powers.

Understanding Urban Riots

Urban riots are intense and highly destructive outbursts of collective violence. Intrinsically “explosive” and “volatile,” they often seem, at least at first sight, to lack any discernible and comprehensible political agenda. For this reason, riots are often miscast as “wantonly criminal,” “senseless,” or “irrational”—this was the view of early scholars working in this space and it persists in some corners today. Yet this perspective is simplistic and belies the fact that there is invariably an underlying logic to these violent events, even if this is difficult to decode and understand. The majority of contemporary research on urban riots—much of it empirical—recognizes the complexity of these events and seeks to unravel the web of causal factors, from crowd dynamics to broader social and political context, that frames the outbreak of riots. This work builds on the rational approaches to understanding crowd behavior that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century and provides for a more holistic understanding of their nature and causes. Riots are unique in the sense that every outbreak is the product of a distinct combination of drivers and contextual factors. At the same time, these events often share common features—political marginalization, economic deprivation, problematic police-public interactions—that make their broader life cycle a familiar one. This means that despite the seemingly chaotic nature of riots, researchers have been able to develop empirically informed analytical frameworks that provide for deep understanding of how these violent social events come about.

In the Matter of Nat Turner

In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. This book penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution. Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. This book provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. The book also undertakes a critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots. A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, the book is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.