Books published by Stanford University Press

Economics has long modeled its theories on bakers and butchers, rather than on husbands, wives, lovers, and prostitutes. This book argues that exchanges involving sex and intimacy, far from being external or exceptional in relation to the workings of the economy, come closest to the reality of capitalist money. Undertaking an inquiry into the sexual economy of capitalism, Noam Yuran analyzes the erotic and gendered meanings that suffuse basic economic concepts, from money to the commodity. It is not entirely true, Yuran shows, that in capitalism everything has its price. In fact, the category of things money cannot buy, including love, forms a central axis around which capitalist economic life is organized. It is inscribed on goods and economic motivations and conduct, and distinguishes capitalism from pre-capitalist economies in which marriage was an exchange and wives were owned. In conversation with psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and the heterodox tradition of economic thought, this book maps the erotic dimension of capitalism onto concrete economic questions around money, goods, private property, and capital. Yuran offers readers a powerful understanding of capitalism in its unique articulation of love, sex, and money.

The years 1989-2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years - specifically the post-baby-boom generation of writers born between the late 1950s and early 1970s - responded to neoliberalism by developing in their fiction an aesthetics of sincerity. How, and in what way, these writers ask, can you mean what you say, and avow what you feel, when what you say and feel can be bought and sold on the market? What is authentic art in an historical moment when the artist has become a model for neoliberal subjectivity rather than its negation? Through six chapters focused on key writers of the period - including Susan Choi, Helen DeWitt, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, George Saunders, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead, and David Foster Wallace - the book explores these central questions while intervening critically in a set of debates in contemporary literary studies concerning aesthetics, economy, gender, race, class, and politics. Offering the capstone articulation of a set of influential arguments made by the author over a decade and more, New Sincerity constitutes a field-defining account of a period that is simultaneously recent and historically bound, and of a generation of writers who continue to shape the literary landscape of the present.

Despite growing political, social, and economic integration between countries over the last two decades, states have erected walls at their borders at a pace unmatched in history. Nonetheless, legal scholarship on the phenomenon of walling is sparse, as the walls are seen as existing independently of the law. Building Walls, Constructing Identities uses the U.S.-Mexico border wall as a frame to provide a new understanding of the relationship between the law and wall building. Increasingly, law is recognized as emerging from whatever knowledge is privileged in a given context, and that it is legislated by people with cultural biases. In other words, it is never a neutral set of rules, just as walls are never neutral structures. Marie-Eve Loiselle expands on this trend, arguing that the dynamic interaction between law and wall-building reveals insights about space, belonging, and national identities. Informed by two episodes of wall-building in American history--the Act of August 19, 1935, and the Secure Fence Act of 2006--the book identifies two discursive processes by which the law and the wall come together to communicate legal knowledge about territorial and cultural limits.

The logistics revolution has stretched capitalist production across planetary supply chains, leaving nothing unscathed: art and culture included. The Arts of Logistics takes a unique approach to studying culture and supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. With chapters on the merchant ship, the oil barrel, the shipping container, and the drone, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a surprisingly pervasive means of artistic production. Bringing together critical logistics research with Marxist cultural analysis, Boyle uses sculpture, theater, installation art, and popular culture to narrate the long history of art's connection to logistical infrastructure, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing today in the dream of a workerless world peddled by Amazon. The global reach of the artists considered reflects the geographies of supply chain capitalism, spanning from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific. The Arts of Logistics takes meticulous stock of how aesthetics is entangled in capitalist trade and racialized labor regimes, analyzing influential work by artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude alongside that of contemporary figures including Walead Beshty, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Selina Thompson. With this incisive study, Boyle demonstrates that art is both an opportunity to reexamine the violent history of supply chain capitalism, and an active participant in shaping this history.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a key site of oil production. International companies recruited workers from across the Middle East and Asia to staff their expanding oil projects. Unruly Labor considers the working conditions, hiring practices, and, most importantly, worker actions and strikes at these oil projects. It illuminates the multiple ways workers built transnational solidarities to agitate for better working conditions, and how worker actions informed shifting understandings of rights, citizenship, and national security. Andrea Wright highlights the increasing associations between oil, governance, and racialized management practices to map how labor was increasingly depoliticized. From the 1940s to 1971, a period that includes the end of formal British imperialism in the Arabian Sea and the development of new state governments, citizenship became both an avenue for workers to advocate for their rights, while simultaneously, a way to limit other solidarities. Examining the interests of workers, government officials, and oil company managers alike, Wright offers a new history of Middle Eastern oil and twentieth-century capitalism--a history that illuminates how labor management and national security concerns have shaped state governance and economic policy priorities.

More than half the population will experience menopause; it is time for the law to acknowledge it. Menopause is a stage of life that half the population will inevitably experience. But it remains one of the last great taboo topics for discussion, even among close friends and family members. Silence and stigmas around many aspects of reproductive health--from menstruation to infertility to miscarriage to abortion--have historically created the conditions in which bias and discrimination can flourish. Menopause exemplifies that phenomenon, and in Hot Flash, authors Emily Gold Waldman, Bridget Crawford and Naomi Cahn set out to replace the silence surrounding menopause with a deeper understanding. Hot Flash explores the culturally specific stereotypes that surround menopause as well as how menopause is treated in law and medicine. The book contextualizes menopause as one of several stages in a person's reproductive life. Taking U.S. law regarding pregnancy and breastfeeding as an entry point, the authors suggest changes in existing legislation and workplace policies that would incorporate menopause as well. More broadly, they push us to imagine how law can support a more equitable future. A broader framework further enables the authors to explore menopause discrimination as it is experienced by trans men and gender nonbinary people. They ultimately make the case for a new wave of intersectional feminism that encompasses gender, disability, age, and race.

This collection of five essays by Germany's most prominent and influential social thinker both links Luhmann's social theory to the question "What is modern about modernity?" and shows the origins and context of his theory.In the introductory essay, "Modernity in Contemporary Society," Luhmann develops the thesis that the modern epistemological situation can be seen as the consequence of a radical change in social macrostructures that he calls "social differentiation," thereby designating the juxtaposition of and interaction between a growing number of social subsystems without any hierarchical structure. "European Rationality" defines rationality as the capacity to see the difference between systems and their environment as a unity. Luhmann argues that, in a world characterized by contingency, rationality tends to become coextensive with imagination, a view that challenges their classical binary opposition and opens up the possibility of seeing modern rationality as a paradox.In the third essay, "Contingency as Modern Society's Defining Attribute," Luhmann develops a further and probably even more important paradox: that the generalization of contingency or cognitive uncertainty is precisely what provides stability within modern societies. In the process, he argues that medieval and early modern theology can be seen as a "preadaptive advance" through which Western thinking prepared itself for the modern epistemological situation. In "Describing the Future," Luhmann claims that neither the traditional hope of learning from history nor the complementary hope of cognitively anticipating the future can be maintained, and that the classical concept of the future should be replaced by the notion of risk, defined as juxtaposing the expectation of realizing certain projects and the awareness that such projects might fail. The book concludes with "The Ecology of Ignorance," in which Luhmann outlines prospective research areas "for sponsors who have yet to be identified."

If the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to rigorous and thoroughgoing analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology, and narratology, might it invalidate the approach to the 'Oedipus complex' that Freud derived from his psychoanalytic experience? This book answers 'yes', arguing that instead of the Oedipus complex explaining the myth, the Oedipus myth explains the complex. The author argues that the Oedipus myth is an historical anomaly, a myth of failed royal investiture or of avoided masculine initiation. Does this mean that we must return to the wisdom of tradition and strike out twenty-five centuries of Oedipal history? The author knows very well that such a solution would be fantasy, and he concludes by speculating on how his analysis might contribute to a vision that has eluded Freudian psychoanalysis: how to surpass the Oedipus complex, with all the ethical consequences this would entail.

The Constitution of Literature examines Restoration and eighteenth-century literary criticism as a debate over theories of reading and argues that literary criticism emerged as a reaction against the role associated with print in the English Civil Wars of the 1640s.

"Of all the books inspired by the Columbian quincentenary, this is easily one of the most challenging. Bodmer uses early Spanish chronicles to take the reader on a journey of exploration. . . . A richly detailed analytical history of the gradual awakening of a critical consciousness concerning accepted versions of the discovery and conquest of America."--Canadian Journal of History "A quite splendid book."--Journal of Latin American Studies

In Identity Capitalists, legal scholar Nancy Leong reveals how powerful people and institutions use diversity to their own advantage and how the rest of us can respond-and do better.

This book transcends the boundaries of Chinese studies and scholarship on Western literature and critical theory, bringing together the two fields in a way that questions both the application of Western theory to Chinese materials and the resistance to theory in sinological scholarship. Recognizing that social and historical reality is external to discourse and that knowledge has an inevitable ethical import, the author argues for the importance of reality and lived experience in understanding a culture as well as the moral responsibility of such understanding.The book examines the discrepancies between various Western representations of China and the reality of China; inquires into the cultural, historical, and political contexts within which such discrepancies arise; and points out the distortion of reality in the tendency toward cultural dichotomies, the tendency to view China as the conceptual opposite of the West.From a comparison of biblical exegesis and commentaries on the Confucian classics to the contemporary assimilation of Western critical theories in China, this book discusses a wide range of topics that situates the understanding of China and Chinese literature and culture in the broad perspective of East-West comparative studies. It studies not only the Confucian tradition, modern Chinese literature, and the students' movement for democracy in China, but also such Western topics as Origen and biblical interpretation, Montaigne and cultural critique, Jameson and postmodern theory, and the reception of Said's Orientalism in China.

"The true story of a vigilante group of Holocaust survivors who conspired to kill six million Germans, Nakam (Hebrew for 'vengeance') tells the story of 'the Avengers' (Nokmim), a group of young Holocaust survivors led by poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner, who undertook a mission of revenge against Germany following the crimes of the Holocaust. Motivated by both the atrocities they had endured and the realization that murderous antisemitic attacks on survivors continued long after the Nazi surrender, these fifty young men and women sought retaliation at a level commensurate with the devastation caused by the Holocaust, making clear to the world that Jewish blood would no longer be shed with impunity. Had they been successful, they would have poisoned city water supplies and loaves of bread distributed to German POWs, with the aim of killing six million Germans. Kovner and his followers went to great lengths to carry out their plans, going so far as to obtain the plans for Nuremberg's municipal water system, secure large quantities of poison, infiltrate a POW camp and the bakery that supplied it, and distribute poisoned bread to prisoners - but their plots were ultimately stymied. Most of the members of Nakam eventually returned to Israel, where for decades many of them refused to speak publicly about their roles in the group. While the Avengers' story began to come to light in the 1980s, details of the relations between the group and Zionist leadership and the motivations of its members have remained unknown. Drawing on rich archival sources and in-depth interviews with the Avengers in their later years, historian Dina Porat examines the formation of the group and the clash between the formative humanistic values held by its members and their unrealized plans for violent retribution."--

Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance has been widely recognized for its important and influential concepts in areas of motivation and social psychology. The theory of dissonance is here applied to the problem of why partial reward, delay of reward, and effort expenditure during training result in increased resistance to extinction. The author contends that a state of impasse exists within learning theory largely because some of its major assumptions stand in apparent opposition to cetain well-established experimental results. The book puts forward a new theory that seems to reconcile these data and assumptions. This new theory can account for data with which other theories have difficulty: it integrates empirical phenomena that have been regarded as unrelated, and it is supported by the results of experiments designed specifically to test its implications. These experiments are fully described in the text.

"For Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being--modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today. Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he engaged with key problems in political theory--the paradox of foundations, the vicious circles of sovereign power, the fragility of the people--to produce a body of radical democratic art and thought. Scenes of green and growing life, circular structures, and images of a groundless world emerge as forms for understanding democracy as a collective project in flux. In Melville's experimental aesthetics, Greiman finds a significant precursor to the tradition of radical democratic theory in the US and France that emphasizes transience and creativity over the foundations and forms prized by liberalism. Such politics, she argues, are necessarily aesthetic: attuned to material and sensible distinctions, open to new forces of creativity"--

"This book explores the dynamic role of love in German-Jewish lives, from the birth of the German Empire in the 1870s, to the 1970s, a generation after the Shoah. During a remarkably turbulent hundred-year period when German Jews experienced five political regimes, rapid urbanization, transformations in gender relations, and war and genocide, the romantic ideals of falling in love and marrying for love helped German Jews to develop a new sense of self. Appeals to romantic love were also significant in justifying relationships between Jews and non-Jews, even when those unions created conflict within and between communities. By incorporating novel approaches from the history of emotions and life-cycle history, Christian Bailey moves beyond existing research into the sexual and racial politics of modern Germany and approaches a new frontier in the study of subjectivity and the self. German Jews in Love draws on a rich array of sources, from newspapers and love letters to state and other official records. Calling on this evidence, Bailey shows the ways German Jews' romantic relationships reveal an aspect of acculturation that has been overlooked: how deeply cultural scripts worked their way into emotions; those most intimate and seemingly pre-political aspects of German-Jewish subjectivity"--

"Valuable reading for anyone interested in learning about South Korea corporate culture, and also for those interested in the issues of how culture is maintained and remade in a rapidly changing society. The book represents first-rate scholarship with meticulous description based onparticipant observation and insightful analysis of the findings."--Journal of Asian Studies"The brilliance of Janelli's study lies in its intellectual debunking of the prevailing view of organizational behavior."--Economic Development and Cultural Change

"This book reassesses the history of Italian communism in international perspective. Analyzing the rise and fall of the Italian Communist Party as a case study in the global history of communism, Silvio Pons considers a wide range of relational and temporal contexts, from the practices of internationalism to the training of militants and leaders, and to networks established not only in Europe but also in the colonial and postcolonial world. Pons focuses on the attempts of the Italian Communist Party to forge an intellectually defensible party program that combined the international demands of Moscow with the Italians' attempts to develop their own foreign and domestic policies according to their own political circumstances. Following three leaders of the Italian Communist Party (Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, and Enrico Berlinguer) from the First World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, Silvio Pons considers the broader relationship between communism and Cold War history, the history of decolonization, and the rise of "Europe" as a political category"--