Books published by Palgrave USA

This volume is a synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber re-examines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange and argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects.

In The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville , Nadine George-Graves provides an historical narrative of their achievements and uses black feminist theories, feminist theories of performance, and theories of class and popular culture to analyze the many layers of performance in which the Whitman Sisters participated, on and off the stage.

Sikes traces the shifting role of performance in the fashioning of subjectivity from the Modern to the Postmodern eras. The book joins history and historiography and is grounded in a body of research about varied performance subjects from court dance, ballet, opera, festivals, celebrations, propaganda films, Hollywood movies to reality TV.

The academic profession faces new challenges everywhere. The pressures of mass higher education, accountability, fiscal constraints, distance education and the new technologies, and changing attitudes concerning academic work have combined to place unprecedented strains on the professoriate. There is no country that has avoided these challenges, although the changes vary. This book brings together some of the best analysts of the academic profession in a wide ranging comparative analysis of the changing academic workplace. The stress here is on middle income and developing countries, but the issues discussed are relevant everywhere. This book, precisely because of its comparative and international perspective, is useful worldwide. Among the topics considered in the case study chapters are: - The changing demographics of the academic profession, including the role of gender in the professoriate - New developments in academic appointments, including the terms of academic work, evaluation of professors, and the tenure system - External pressures on the academic profession, including demands for accountability, threats to academic freedom, and others - The changing nature of academic work, including patterns of teaching and evaluation of students and increases in teaching responsibilities - The role of research in a changing academic environment - The impact of the new technologies and distance education - Future prospects for the professoriate.

The study of twentieth-century Argentine history is undergoing a radical transformation. Both Argentine and U.S. historians of Argentina are recasting the great debates in the historiography by challenging the Buenos Aires-centered focus of most of the existing historical scholarship and offering a new perspective on the country's modern history. Argentina's supposed 'exceptionalism' is being challenged by these historians. The persistence of political clientilism and oligarchic rule, enclave economies and pre-capitalist social relations, the role of traditional institutions such as the Church and family, intense class conflict and working class militancy, all approximate Argentina closer to the Latin American experience than the previous historiography would suggest. This book is a unique collaboration between Argentine and U.S. historians of this 'other Argentina.'

From 1978-1996 Holocaust denial emerged as a major concern for the liberal democracies of Europe and North America. Holocaust Denial and the Law relates how courts in four countries (Canada, France, Germany and the United States) resolved the dilemmas posed by Holocaust-denial litigation.

When Gertrude Williams retired in 1998, after forty-nine years in the Baltimore public schools,The Baltimore Sun called her "the most powerful of principals" who "tangled with two superintendents and beat them both."

The Great American Makeover is a collection of essays that explore the American makeover mythos that has been recently repackaged in the form of popular makeover television programs such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Supernanny, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Coups from Below represents the first major effort at studying coups carried out by the lumpen section or the subalterns of the armed forces of African states. No previous study has attempted to examine coup making by those in the bottom ranks of the military as a distinct pattern of intervention in African studies.

Made in India examines seemingly disparate and high profile events in postcolonial India that captured national and transnational/diasporic interest since the 1990s: The emergence of the Indian homosexual, the new trans/national heterosexual woman, lesbian suicides, marriage and kinship contracts in small towns around India and the simultaneous.

The U.S. is the most violent industrialized country in the world, and lynching - that is, murder endorsed by the community - may be a key to understanding America's heritage of violence and perhaps point to solutions that can eradicate it.

Using the Pagans as a case study, Barner-Barry shows how their experiences demonstrate that both the law affecting nondominant religions and the judiciary that interprets this law are significantly biased in favor of the dominant religion, Christianity.

In Overcoming Religious Illiteracy, Harvard professor and Phillips Academy teacher Diane L. Moore argues that though the United States is one of the most religiously diverse nations in the world, the vast majority of citizens are woefully ignorant about religion itself and the basic tenets of the world's major religious traditions.

This volume sets out current debates about Puerto Rico. The title simultaneously refers to the results of a non-binding 1998 plebiscite held in San Juan to determine Puerto Rico's political status, the ambiguities that have historically characterized its political agency, and the complexities of its ethnic, national, and cultural identifications.

While some see the Miss American Pageant as hokey vestige of another era, many remain enthralled by the annual Atlantic City event. Founded in 1921, the Miss America Pageant has provided a fascinating glimpse into how American standards of femininity have been defined, projected, maintained, and challenged.

This collection charts the terrain of contemporary Japanese animation, one of the most explosive forms of visual culture to emerge at the crossroads of transnational cultural production in the last twenty-five years.

This book investigates whether the theory of deliberative democracy - developed in the West to focus democratic theory on the legitimation that deliberation can afford - has any application to Chinese processes of democratization. It discovers pockets of theory useful to guide Chinese practices, and also Chinese practice that can educate the West.

One way and another, nearly all of Shakespeare's countrymen and women (including the playwright himself) spent at least parts of their lives as servants of someone else.

Firstly it examines the nexus between the illegal narcotics enterprise as a social phenomenon and political economy as a scholarly issue area. Secondly it explores the regional and global contexts of the political economy of illegal narcotics operations in the Caribbean.

Iain McLean reexamines the radical legacy of AdamSmith, arguing that Smith was a radical egalitarian and that his work supported all three of the slogans of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. This book brings Smith into full view, showing how much of modern economics and political science is in Smith.

This edited volume puts forth a theoretically and empirically rigorous analysis of Japanese foreign policy. Nine case studies on Japan's security, economic, and environmental policies in this volume examine how norms do or do not guide Japanese foreign policy and how they interact with interests and power.

This book exposes and traces a previously unrecognized performance tradition of extraordinary Jewish women in the Diaspora, from Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt in Nineteenth Century France to Roseanne and Sandra Bernhard in late Twentieth Century America.

Explaining changes in the political consciousness of the oppressed using the ideas of Paulo Freire, Albert Memmi, and Jungian psychology, this original book explores how psychological bonds of oppression are broken and offers a psychopolitical theory for the analysis of the autobiographies of four Native people in Guatemala and Canada.