Stanford University Press strana 2 z 3

There are two popular and competing viewpoints on sports. Many consider them a mere distraction from important social and political problems. Others champion sports as a powerful force for good: teaching character, promoting peace, and encouraging racial and gender equality. Andrew Bertoli shows that these dominant perspectives underestimate the full extent to which sports impact modern life. Sports can worsen relations between nations, divide countries internally, and disadvantage individuals from underprivileged backgrounds. Sports can also, however, build social capital, make people feel more connected, and provide participants with physical and cognitive benefits. Much depends on how people approach sports, both at the individual and societal levels.   This book highlights some of the profound and startling ways that sports and politics have interacted throughout recent history, including: how the Olympic torch relay was started by the Nazis and reflected Hitler's ambition to dominate Europe; the twentieth-century feminist movement to keep women out of the Olympics and the motivations of the female sports leaders who led it; how Michael Jordan's determination to stay out of politics during his career may have made him the most politically impactful athlete in history. Bertoli's insightful analysis challenges many conventional views while also helping readers understand how they can better utilize sports for themselves, their families, and their communities.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is among the six largest national space agencies in the world, along with China's CNSA, US's NASA, and Russia's Roscosmos. JAXA's budget is more than $1 billion USD—bigger than France or Germany individually, and more than that of Italy, India, Canada, and the UK combined. And yet, Japan's significant contributions have largely been absent in the history of space exploration, and space exploration largely absent in the history of technology in Japan. The Islands and the Stars corrects this conspicuous oversight. Through meticulous archival research in Japanese and anglophone archives, Subodhana Wijeyeratne examines the history of Japan's space exploration efforts over nearly a century.   Wijeyeratne traces the evolution of Japan's space program from its early origins in the 1920s, through the postwar period of rapid technological innovation, to the consolidation of its various institutional elements into JAXA in 2003. He situates Japan's space programs within the broader history of the country's postwar recovery, economic growth, and cultural identity, while also considering their place within global trends in space exploration. Through this narrative, Wijeyeratne not only illuminates Japan's centrality to the global history of science and technology, but also offers insights into the future of global space exploration, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices and perspectives in the quest to understand our place in the cosmos.

For most of their history, the people around the Persian Gulf littoral were socially intertwined and economically interdependent. But the twentieth century ushered in nationalization projects, British imperial intervention, and border regulations, all of which posed challenges to everyday mobility in this oceanic world. Those crossing the water became the primary foil for bordering spaces, restricting and regulating movement, and defining difference more generally. Belonging on Both Shores tells the story of people's struggles to move freely between Iran and the Arab shores of the Gulf as the unregulated mobility that had characterized everyday life in the nineteenth century was increasingly policed in the twentieth.   Using a wide range of Arabic, Persian, and English sources, Lindsey Stephenson demonstrates how state officials refined notions of territorial belonging against the movement of Iranians, the most visible mobile "group" in the Persian Gulf arena. Engaging migrant voices, Stephenson narrates how Iranians challenged a perceived requirement to belong to a single place and highlights the techniques these migrants employed to remain connected to both shores. Tracing the movement of Iranians across and around the Persian Gulf and investigating how the technologies of state and mobility transformed fluidity and people's understanding of movement, this book tells a new story of how the modern Gulf was formed.

During his early years in Basel, as professor of classical philology, Nietzsche develops an original understanding of ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, and culture, alongside a biting critique of contemporary German society and a call for its reform. These years see him publish his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, where tragic drama is understood as the harmonizing of Apollonian and Dionysian drives. In it, Nietzsche traces the rise of tragedy as an art form, diagnoses its demise at the hands of Socratic rationalism, and champions its revival in Wagnerian music drama, as part of a larger project of German national renewal. The unpublished texts gathered here allow us to see The Birth of Tragedy within the larger context of Nietzsche's concerns at this time and chart the compositional and interpretive development of that first book while revealing some roads not taken. Included also are three book-length projects: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, a literary presentation of a program for sweeping educational reform in the name of producing the genius; Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books, a set of short philosophical, cultural, and historical interventions; and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, an investigation of early Greek philosophy in its cultural context. The celebrated essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," and two short pro-Wagner pieces, "Exhortation to the Germans" and "A New Year's Word for the Editor of the Weekly Im neuen Reich," round out this essential collection of early writings. Extensive translators' annotations supply critical background information and context for Nietzsche's comments on ancient Greek and contemporary German culture.

During the twentieth century, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers underwent a profound physical transformation, one that mirrored the region's political shift from imperial rule to nation-state. Here, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey took shape in the wake of the Ottoman Empire, and the two rivers became sites of economic development planning and large-scale environmental engineering. It is a modern conceit that industrial, technological societies transcend ecological change, that technology and ecology operate separately. With this book, Dale J. Stahl instead centers riverine ecologies within the context of social and political projects and shows how natural processes encounter human intentions to manage, control, or modernize.   Weaving imperial and national histories with ecological ones, Two Rivers Entangled undermines familiar accounts of the invention of states, the advance of nations, and the triumphs of technical expertise. Stahl entangles a wide range of human and nonhuman actors—knitting together the movement of engineers and bureaucrats with that of salt particles, linking the disappointment of revolutionaries to the dissolution of unreliable rock, and following the flow of water over embankments and into poetry. Ultimately, this book offers an alternative account of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history, one subject as much to ecological change as to human visions and intentions.

International stabilization interventions in so-called fragile states have failed everywhere they have been tried. In the Sahel, US, French, and United Nations-led missions were recently expelled following a series of military coups d'états. They left conditions of even greater instability than when they were deployed over a decade earlier. Casey McNeill takes these failures as a jumping off point to rethink the spatial logics and imaginaries that ground diagnoses of fragile states and interventions to stabilize them. These have been premised on the assumption that territorial governance is a necessary foundation for global security. McNeill historicizes and politicizes this assumption, showing how the modern equation of security with territorial control has displaced a diversity of approaches to ordering and securing collective life. This book models alternative, non-territorial practices of political order and collective security that are highly relevant to rethinking security more broadly, in the Sahel and beyond.

Pioneering field work reveals how infrastructural systems—buildings, laws, algorithms, excavators, regulations, toxins—maintain white supremacy within the urban landscape For decades, Detroit residents, politicians, planners, and advocacy organizations have campaigned for the elimination of empty buildings from city neighborhoods. Leveling these structures, many argue, is essential to making space for Detroit's majority-Black populace to flourish in the wake of white flight and deindustrialization. In 2013, the city set out to demolish more than twenty thousand empty buildings by the end of the decade, with administrators suggesting it would offer an innovative model for what other American cities could do to combat the effects of racist disinvestment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with city residents, demolition workers, and public officials, as well as analyses of administrative archives, Demolishing Detroit examines the causes, procedures, and consequences of empty-building demolitions in Detroit. Contrary to stated goals of equity, the book reveals how racism and intersecting inequities endured despite efforts to level them. As calls to dismantle racist systems have become increasingly urgent, this book provides cautionary tales of urban transformations meant to combat white supremacy that ultimately reinforced inequality. Bridging political analyses of racial capitalism, infrastructures, and environments in cities, Nick Caverly grapples with the reality that tearing down unjust policies, ideologies, and landscapes is not enough to end racist disparities in opportunities and life chances. Doing so demands rebuilding systems in the service of reparative futures.

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 schematics 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.

In this masterful new work, film critic and philosopher Eyal Peretz forges a new connection between the concept of "America" and the medium of film. Through exemplary close readings of six fundamental American films—John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette—Peretz demonstrates the way the connection between "America" and film is enabled through the development of a philosophical concept of medium that allows both "America" and film to be thought anew. As Peretz shows, "America" can be understood as a medium providing a new framework for understanding human life in modernity—an era that's seen the demise of theology (or the "death of god," as Nietzsche declared). Through incisive readings of the films mentioned above, Peretz shows each to function in its own singular fashion as an allegory of the way that "America"—that is, the demand to ground human life non-theologically—becomes the notion around which the medium of Hollywood film circulates.

At the end of the Reagan administration, American public opinion polls showed there were no discernible differences based on political party in response to the question, "Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?" However, in the early 1990s, a partisan gulf between conservatives and liberals emerged around environmental issues. Today, half as many Republicans self-identify as environmentalists when compared to Democrats. Political stagnation on climate action, in turn, has led to a growing number of Americans of all ages who experience ecological grief (known as solastalgia) and eco-anxiety (a chronic fear of environmental doom). These emotions emerged in response to the existential distress associated with living in a world of relentless environmental damage and irreversible ecological losses: a world of wounds. This book offers an antidote to political frustration and hopelessness. Nancy J. Manring provides an indispensable analysis of the multi-decade, conservative war against American environmentalism and maps out realistic strategies for rebuilding a bipartisan environmental movement. Nurturing authentic hope, in contrast to blind optimism or false promises, begins with an unflinching look at both planetary and political realities. Choosing authentic hope is an ongoing process that requires emotional honesty, courage, and action. This forceful book serves as both a tool for change and a spirited scholarly intervention.

The intensified securitization of the borderlands between Europe and the Middle East/North Africa over the past decade has turned the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard. This book delves into the most vulnerable, yet understudied, area of the EU's anti-immigrant security regime: the port cities in border zones on major refugee routes. Turam shifts the predominant focus from the global scale of fear to the urban scale of native–migrant solidarity in Greece and Sicily—Europe's two major entrance points in the East and Central Mediterranean. Building upon a rapidly growing scholarship on emotional geographies and affective geopolitics, Turam brings emotions to the center and emphasizes their role in forming, transforming, contesting, interrupting, and even evading the securitization of migration. Within the context of rising racism, nativism, and Islamophobia, readers will discover surprising and inspiring acts of day-to-day resistance to securitization empowered by a sense of safety and local trust, as well as cooperation between municipalities, pro-migrant locals, and asylum-seekers. Uncovering how racialized migrants become the catalyst of transformation from the violent legacy of borderlands to peaceful resistance, the ethnography reveals how intense emotions affect pro-migrant practices, contribute to the formation of safe places, and open the way for dynamic Black and Muslim migrant activism and solidarity at Europe's racial borders.

In this timely work, Lars Cornelissen argues that the category of race constitutes an organizing principle of neoliberal ideology. Using the method of intellectual history and drawing on insights from critical race studies, Cornelissen explores the various racial constructs that structure neoliberal ideology, some of which are explicit, while others are more coded. Beginning in the interwar period and running through to recent developments, Neoliberalism and Race shows that racial themes have always pervaded neoliberal thinking. The book''s key argument is that neoliberal thought is constitutively racialized?its racial motifs cannot be extracted from neoliberalism without rendering it theoretically and politically incoherent. The book aptly explores a wide variety of racial constructs through the structure of neoliberal ideology, deconstructing the conceptualizations of landmark thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Peter Bauer, Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, and others from the early twentieth century to the present. In this novel?perhaps controversial?critique, Cornelissen asserts that neoliberal thinkers were not just the passive recipients of racial discourse but directly impacted it.

The oldest ideas are the best. This book is a defense of an ancient way of thinking about international politics: realism. Patrick Porter, a scholar of international relations, defends the realist approach to understanding the world by addressing head-on the most robust critiques of the tradition. Drawing from a wide literature, Porter restages three prominent criticisms of realism: that it is immoral, unrealistic, and provincial. In erudite, clear, and at times morbidly funny prose, Porter makes the case that realism is, in fact, everything its critics believe it is not: moral in its commitment to securing the polity and its interests in a world where there is no higher government; realistic and the best starting point for explaining how human groups tend to behave; and practical for use by everyone, everywhere, including beyond the Euro-Atlantic. From Thucydides to Kautilya to Machiavelli, realists claim that the world is an inherently dangerous place defined by the shadow of conflict, whether we like it or not. As the 21st century grapples with multiple interlocking crises concerning economic dislocation, climate crisis, and war, we need realism now more than ever. This book is for readers who are looking for sensible guidance on how to work within that reality and survive in an increasingly hostile world.

A riveting and unapologetic account of Palestinian resistance, the story of one family''s care for their land, and a reflection on love and heartache while living under military occupation. In 1967, Sireen Sawalha''s mother, with her young children, walked back to Palestine against the traffic of exile. My Brother, My Land is the story of Sireen''s family in the decades that followed and their lives in the Palestinian village of Kufr Ra''i. From Sireen''s early life growing up in the shadow of the ''67 War and her family''s work as farmers caring for their land, to the involvement of her brother Iyad in armed resistance in the First and Second Intifada, Sami Hermez, with Sireen Sawalha, crafts a rich story of intertwining voices, mixing genres of oral history, memoir, and creative nonfiction. Through the lives of the Sawalha family, and the story of Iyad''s involvement with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hermez confronts readers with the politics and complexities of armed resistance and the ethical tensions and contradictions that arise, as well as with the dispossession and suffocation of people living under occupation and their ordinary lives in such times. Whether this story leaves readers discomforted, angry, or empowered, they will certainly emerge with a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament.

Financing Sovereignty rewrites the story of one of the great financial frauds of the nineteenth century: Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish mercenary and self-proclaimed cacique of Poyais, borrowed massive sums on the City of London's burgeoning South American sovereign debt market by selling bonds of the State of Poyais. The only problem—Poyais did not exist. At least, that is what MacGregor was quickly accused of by the press and public opinion at the time. From then on, MacGregor has embodied the figure of the swindler par excellence, the con artist behind the most audacious financial fraud in history. In Damian Clavel's deeply researched retelling of the Poyais story, MacGregor is less an unscrupulous adventurer aiming to defraud English investors than a luckless intermediary between Indigenous Miskitu elites and British financiers. From the coasts of Moskitia to the trading floors of London, Clavel traces the genesis, development, and downfall of the Poyais project, detailing how these events were the outcome of a failed attempt to finance the making of a new country in Central America. A microhistory set against the backdrop of global history, Financing Sovereignty offers a new lens through which to view the political, economic, legal, and social dynamics of the nineteenth-century revolutionary, financial, and imperial transformations that took place across the Atlantic.

Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity provides a comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism through the Kabbalistic concept of ?i? m. The onset of modernity, Eli Rubin argues, was heralded by this startling idea: existence itself is predicated on a self-inflicted "rupture" in the infinite assertion of divinity. Centuries of theoretical disputations concerning ?i? m ultimately morphed into religious and social schism. These debates confronted the meaning of being and forged the animating ethos of Chabad, the most dynamic movement in modern Judaism. Chabad's distinctive character and self-image, Rubin shows, emerged from its spirited defense of Hasidism's interpretation of ?i? m as an act of love leading to rapturous reunion. This interpretation ignited a literal conflagration, complete with book burnings, denunciations, investigations, and arrests. Chabad's subsequent preoccupation with ?i? m was equally significant for questions of legitimacy, authority, and succession, as for existential questions of being and meaning. Unfolding the story of Chabad from the early modern period to the twentieth century, this book provides fresh portraits of the successive leaders of the movement. Innovatively integrating history, philosophy, and literature, Rubin shows how Kabbalistic ideas are crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.