Free Download Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus By George Clement Bond, Nigel C. Gibson
2002 | 499 Pages | ISBN: 0813336783 | PDF | 10 MB
Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories brings together intellectuals from a variety of fields, backgrounds, generations, and continents to deepen and reinvigo-rate the theoretical and intellectual integrity of African studies. Building on recent debate within African studies that has revolved around the role of Africanists in the United States as "gatekeepers" of knowledge about Africa and Africans, this volume of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the contested character of the production of knowledge itself. In every chapter, case studies and ethnographic materials, drawn from such regions as South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Malagasy Republic, Angola, Ghana, and Senegal, demonstrate the application of theory to concrete situations.

Free Download Joost Fontein, "The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage "
English | ISBN: 1598742213 | 2006 | 264 pages | EPUB | 3 MB
This book examines the politics of landscape and heritage by focusing on the example of Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe. The controversy that surrounded the site in the early part of the 20th century, between colonial antiquarians and professional archaeologists, is well reported in the published literature. Based on long term ethnographic field work around Great Zimbabwe, as well as archival research in NMMZ, in the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and several months of research at the World Heritage Centre in Paris, this new book represents an important step beyond that controversy over origins, to focus on the site's position in local contests between, and among individuals within, the Nemanwa, Charumbira and Mugabe clans over land, power and authority. To justify their claims, chiefs, spirit mediums and elders of each clan make appeals to different, but related, constructions of the past. Emphasising the disappearance of the 'Voice' that used to speak there, these narratives also describe the destruction, alienation and desecration of Great Zimbabwe that occurred, and continues, through the international and national, archaeological and heritage processes and practices by which Great Zimbabwe has become a national and world heritage site today.

Simone Knewitz, "The Politics of Private Property: Contested Claims to Ownership in U.S. Cultural Discourse "
English | ISBN: 1793623759 | 2021 | 298 pages | PDF | 6 MB
Located at the intersections of law and culture, The Politics of Private Property provides a fresh perspective on the functions of private property within U.S. cultural discourse by establishing a long historical arch from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The study challenges the assumption of an unquestioned cultural consensus in the United States on the subject of individual property rights, instead mobilizing property as an analytical category to examine how social and political debates generate competing and contested claims to ownership. The property narratives arising out of political conflicts, the book suggests, serve to naturalize the unequal social and economic structures and legitimize the hegemonic order, which however remains to be shifting and subject to challenges. Analyzing the property narratives at the heart of the U.S. American self-conception, The Politics of Private Property addresses the gap between the ideal of the U.S. as a universal middle-class society, characterized by a wide diffusion of property ownership, and the actual social reality which is defined by unequal dissemination of wealth and race-based structures of exclusion.

Harold James, "Europe Contested: From the Kaiser to Brexit Ed 2"
English | ISBN: 1138303070 | 2019 | 520 pages | PDF | 8 MB
Europe Contested analyses the failures and achievements of an astonishing era of economic advance and political chaos, from the First World War up to the present day.

The Contested Removal Power, 1789-2010 By J. David Alvis, Jeremy D. Bailey, IV F. Flagg Taylor
2013 | 264 Pages | ISBN: 0700619224 | PDF | 2 MB
The U.S. Constitution is clear on the appointment of executive officials: the president nominates, the Senate approves. But on the question of removing those officials, the Constitution is silent-although that silence has not discouraged strenuous efforts to challenge, censure, and even impeach presidents from Andrew Jackson to Bill Clinton. As J. David Alvis, Jeremy D. Bailey, and Flagg Taylor show, the removal power has always been and continues to be a thorny issue, especially as presidential power has expanded dramatically during the past century.Linking this provocative issue to American political and constitutional development, the authors recount removal power debate from the Founding to the present day. Understanding the historical context of outbreaks in the debate, they contend, is essential to sorting out the theoretical claims from partisan maneuvering and sectional interests, enabling readers to better understand the actual constitutional questions involved.After a detailed review of the Decision of 1789, the book examines the initial assertions of executive power theory, particularly by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, then the rise of the argument for congressional delegation, beginning with the Whigs and ending with the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The authors chronicle the return of executive power theory in the efforts of Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and Cleveland, who all battled with Congress over removals, then describe the emergence of new institutional arrangements with the creation of independent regulatory commissions. They conclude by tracking the rise of the unitarians and the challenges that this school has posed to the modern administrative state.Although many scholars consider the matter to have been settled in 1789, the authors argue that a Supreme Court case as recent as 2010-Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board-shows the extent to which questions surrounding removal power remain unresolved and demand more attention. Their work offers a more nuanced and balanced account of the debate, teasing out the logic of the different institutional perspectives on this important constitutional question as no previous book has.

Joanna Shapland, "Justice, Community and Civil Society: A Contested Terrain"
English | 2008 | pages: 255 | ISBN: 1843922320, 1843922320 | PDF | 5,6 mb
Over the last decade there has arisen considerable disquiet about the relationship between criminal justice and its publics. This has been expressed in a variety of different ways, ranging from a concern that state criminal justice has moved too far away from the concerns of ordinary people (become too distant, too out of touch, insufficiently reflective of different groups in society) to the belief that the police have been attending to the wrong priorities, that the state has failed to reduce crime, that people still feel a general sense of insecurity.

Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts (Memory and Narrative) By Susannah Radstone, Katharine Hodgkin
2005 | 280 Pages | ISBN: 1412804884 | PDF | 18 MB
In the last decade, a focus on memory in the human sciences has encouraged new approaches to the study of the past. As the humanities and social sciences have put into question their own claims to objectivity, authority, and universality, memory has appeared to offer a way of engaging with knowledge of the past as inevitably partial, subjective, and local. At the same time, memory and memorial practices have become sites of contestation, and the politics of memory are increasingly prominent. This inter-disciplinary volume demonstrates, from a range of perspectives, the complex cultural work and struggles over meaning that lie at the heart of what we call memory.The chapters in this volume offer a complex awareness of the workings of memory, and the ways in which different or changing histories may be explained. They explore the relation between individual and social memory, between real and imaginary, event and fantasy, history and myth. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memory's own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book. Topics covered range from the Basque country to Cambodia, from Hungary to South Africa, from the Finnish Civil War to the cult Jim Jarmusch movie Dead Man, from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to Australia. Part I, "Transforming Memory" is concerned primarily with the social and personal transmission of memory across time and generations. Part II, "Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History," brings the after-effects of catastrophe to the fore. Part III, "Patterning the National Past," the relation between nation and memory is the central issue. Part IV, "And Then Silence," reflects on the complex and multiple meaning of silence and oblivion, wherein amnesia is often used as a figure for the denial of shameful pasts.

Keith Wilhite, "Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945-2020 "
English | ISBN: 1609388577 | 2022 | 309 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Contested Terrain explores suburban literature between two moments of domestic crisis: the housing shortage that gave rise to the modern era of suburbanization after World War II, and the mortgage defaults and housing foreclosures that precipitated the Great Recession. Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating, placeless quality of suburbia, Wilhite argues that we should reimagine suburban literature as part of a long literary tradition of U.S. regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and the environmental imperialism of urban sprawl. Wilhite produces new, unexpected readings of works by Sinclair Lewis, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Yates, Patricia Highsmith, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Ford, Jung Yun, and Patrick Flanery.

Digging Politics: The Ancient Past and Contested Present in East-Central Europe
English | 2023 | ISBN: 3110697335 | 368 Pages | PDF | 3.4 MB
Digging Politics explores uses of the ancient past in east-central Europe spanning the fascist, communist and post-communist period. Contributions range from East Germany to Poland to Romania to the Balkans. The volume addresses two central questions: Why then and why there. Without arguing for an east-central European exceptionalism, Digging Politics uncovers transnational phenomena across the region that have characterized political wrangling over ancient pasts. Contributions include the biographies of famous archaeologists during the Cold War, the wrought history of organizational politics of archaeology in Romania and the Balkans, politically charged Cold War exhibitions of the Thracians, the historical re-enactment of supposed ancient Central tribes in Hungary, and the virtual archaeology of Game of Thrones in Croatia. Digging Politics charts the extraordinary story of ancient pasts in modern east-central Europe.

The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century Literature By Stephen M. Park
2014 | 288 Pages | ISBN: 0813936659 | PDF | 11 MB
In the history of the early twentieth-century Americas, visions of hemispheric unity flourished, and the notion of a transnational American identity was embraced by artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. In The Pan American Imagination, Stephen Park explores the work of several Pan American modernists who challenged the body of knowledge being produced about Latin America, crossing the disciplinary boundaries of academia as well as the formal boundaries of artistic expression―from literary texts and travel writing to photography, painting, and dance. Park invests in an interdisciplinary approach, which he frames as a politically resistant intellectual practice, using it not only to examine the historical phenomenon of Pan Americanism but also to explore the implications for current transnational scholarship.