Politics, History, and Culture

The French Writers' War, 1940–1953, is a remarkably thorough account of French writers and literary institutions from the beginning of the German Occupation through France's passage of amnesty laws in the early 1950s. To understand how the Occupation affected French literary production as a whole, Gisèle Sapiro uses Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "literary field." Sapiro surveyed the career trajectories and literary and political positions of 185 writers. She found that writers' stances in relation to the Vichy regime are best explained in terms of institutional and structural factors, rather than ideology. Examining four major French literary institutions, from the conservative French Academy to the Comité national des écrivains, a group formed in 1941 to resist the Occupation, she chronicles the institutions' histories before turning to the ways that they influenced writers' political positions. Sapiro shows how significant institutions and individuals within France's literary field exacerbated their loss of independence or found ways of resisting during the war and Occupation, as well as how they were perceived after Liberation.

The contributors to this comprehensive anthology critique sociology's disciplinary engagement with colonialism in varied settings, while also highlighting the field's significant contributions to the theory and history of imperialism.

A detailed history explaining how and why, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Africans from the British colony of Natal transformed their ethnic self-identification, constructing and claiming a new Zulu identity.

Bourdieu and Historical Analysis explores the usefulness of Pierre Bourdieus thought for analyzing not only the reproduction of social structures but also large-scale sociohistorical change.

Uses quantitative methods and interviews to examine the social and cultural barriers that prevent college-educated black women from having the romantic relationships and families that they want.

A powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994.

A historical and philosophical argument that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self-other is a product of modernity.

An analysis of how Uzbekistans cultural and political elites engaged in a program of nation-building through culture, particularly by staging spectacular mass events, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Ethnographic study that examines how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across the generations of working-class youth in Germany and how generational gaps in national understanding inadvertently increase the appeal to neo-Nazism

This interdisciplinary work uses the concept of the ruin as an approach to the study of modernity, asking whether there is an intrinsic logic of "ruin" at work in modernity.

Explores the motives, mass media attention and narrative interpretation of the November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Ruling Oneself Out develops a sociological theory to account for collective abdications of power such as those of the German Reichstag in 1933 and the French parliament in 1940.

An assessment of Americans efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines an education in self-government in the early years of U.S. colonial rule.

A sociological study of networking that explores the relationship between networks and agency and that analyzes a rich historical antecedent of contemporary networking and the concept of self that accompanies it.

This ms studies class and race boundaries, and interracial political coalitions, in two significant 19th century social movements--the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement.

Based on interviews with ordinary Chinese citizens, this work examines how people, as opposed to Communist Party elites, are establishing the new economic order in China.

A study of how modern, Western knowledge came to be disseminated in India and came to assume its current status as the obvious, and almost the only, mode of knowing about India; further, and more dubiously, the work examines whether this knowledge is in f

A study of memory regimes in popular and official Chilean thought.

Examines the formation of the nation-state in postcolonial India, how it worked to create an identity for itself, to what extent it succeeded, and what may be the prospects for unity in a widely diverse country.

This analysis of the failure of efforts to achieve liberal reform in Egypt following its independence from Great Britain in 1922 has implications for modern-day nation-building efforts in the Mideast.

Disciplining Statistics contrasts the different ways that statistical knowledge was developed and used in England and France during the nineteenth century.

An ethnographic analysis of the ways that, during the 1990s, Turkish citizens began to express nostalgia for the secularist and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.

History of the French colonial military in Mali from WWI to 1968 that focuses on three generations of African war veterans.

Investigates friendships between anti-colonial Indians and anti-imperial 'westerners' in late-19th and early 20th centuries, claiming that such inter-cultural collaborations need to be added to annals of non-violent historiography.

A look at how the Chinese Exclusion Act and later legislation affected Chinese American communities, who created fictitious "paper families" to subvert immigration policies.

A case study of economic development in Cairo that sheds light on issues of agency and empowerment in the age of neoliberal globalization.

A postcolonial feminist study of the formation of contemporary political subjectivities in South Korea, framed by the rise and decline in 20th century militarization.

An exploration of how US' efforts to sacralize and repatriate the remains of some 2,000 soldiers killed in action in the Vietnam War might indicate some lingering corporeal and ontological uncertainties in the post-Vietnam era.

A sociology collection reviewing the state-of-historical-study in a wide range of areas while showcasing the use of poststructuralist approaches to studying family, gender, war, protest & revolution, state-making, social provisions, colonialism, trans

A journal into book collection on national memory focusing on commemorations, collective apologies, and historical revisions, now enhanced by the addition of 6 essays by senior, historical sociologists.

A critique of liberal multiculturalism through a study of state-aboriginal relations in Australia, employing an innovative hybrid of theoretical approaches from anthropology, political theory, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.

Theoretically sophisticated ethnographies of different aspects of various governments, showing the importance of such work to anthropology and to the study of states in general.

Analyses gender, sexuality, feminism, and class in the racial politics of formal German colonialism and postcolonial revanchism.