Cornell University Press

Russia's World Order explores the ideas underlying the undeclared New Cold War between Russia and the West. The first Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and communism; most Western politicians and policymakers imagine the new one to be a struggle between democracy and autocracy. Russia's World Order explains that in Russian eyes, the conflict is about something very different: it is a fight between two incompatible visions of where history is leading.

Russia's World Order describes the civilizational theory that has come to dominate Russian official discourse, and that has come to dominate Russian official discourse and that is being used by the Russian state to justify its clashes with the West. Whereas the West promotes a vision of history that drives all nations toward convergence on a single social, political, and economic model (that of modern Western liberalism), Russia's political leaders increasingly portray the world as consisting of numerous distinct civilizations, each diverging toward its own unique destination. The Russian state portrays itself as defending the right of all civilizations to chart their own independent path of development and is having some success in using this logic to win allies around the world.

Paul Robinson recounts how ideas of inevitable convergence once dominated Russian thought as well but were gradually pushed out by civilizational theories. He outlines where these theories came from, what they propose, and how they became popular. Russia's World Order thereby reveals the true nature of today's New Cold War and the challenge that Russian civilizationism poses to the West.

Silicon Valley has become shorthand for a globally acclaimed way to unleash the creative potential of venture capital, supporting innovation and creating jobs. In The Venture Capital State Robyn Klingler-Vidra traces how and why different states have adopted distinct versions of the Silicon Valley model.

Venture capital seeks high rewards but is enveloped in high risk. The author's deep investigations of venture capital policymaking in East Asian states (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) show that success does not reflect policymakers' ability to replicate the Silicon Valley model. Instead, she argues, performance reflects their skill in adapting a highly lauded model to their local context. Policymakers are "contextually rational" in their learning; their context-rooted norms shape their preferences. The normative context for learning about policy-how elites see themselves and what they deem as locally appropriate-informs how they design their efforts.

The Venture Capital State offers a novel conceptualization of rationality, bridging diametrically opposed versions of bounded and conventional rationality. This new understanding of rationality is simultaneously fully informed and context based, and it provides a framework by which analysts can bring domestic factors to the very heart of international diffusion of policy. Klingler-Vidra concludes that states have a visible hand in constituting even quintessentially neoliberal markets.

Tropical Despotisms reveals the alarm that spread among France's Caribbean possessions during the period between the Seven Years' War and the Revolution and the determination to cultivate a new patriotic community rooted in the Enlightenment principles of honor and civic virtue.

Following France's humiliating defeat at the hands of the British, a loose coalition of frustrated and enlightened reformers hoped to promote imperial regeneration in order to restore France's wounded national pride, stabilize and strengthen the Antillean colonies, and bind them more closely to the metropole.

David Allen Harvey describes the historical relationship between capitalism and slavery in the making of the modern world economy and seeks to move beyond simplistic arguments on either extreme by discussing the contingent and evolving relationship between the two. As a result, he reveals how capitalism and slavery developed in tandem in the eighteenth century Caribbean, but that reformers sought to enact a gradual transition to a free wage labor regime more in keeping with capitalism's ideal of free and voluntary contractual relationships between formally equal parties.

Tropical Despotisms provides a new perspective on the social and demographic structure of the in the French Antilles and the wider French Atlantic world. Through the eyes of enlightened reformers, Harvey uncovers not only the deep and critical debates around the issues of slavery and race, but also the efforts by enlightened reformers, as they proposed a rethinking the political and economic structures by which the empire had hitherto been ruled, rationalizing governing institutions, and liberalizing trade.

Between the opposing claims of reason and religious subjectivity may be a middle ground, William J. Wainwright argues. His book is a philosophical reflection on the role of emotion in guiding reason. There is evidence, he contends, that reason functions properly only when informed by a rightly disposed heart.The idea of passional reason, so rarely discussed today, once dominated religious reflection, and Wainwright pursues it through the writings of three of its past proponents: Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman, and William James. He focuses on Edwards, whose work typifies the Christian perspective on religious reasoning and the heart. Then, in his discussion of Newman and James, Wainwright shows how the emotions participate in non-religious reasoning. Finally he takes up the challenges most often posed to notions of passional reason: that such views justify irrationality and wishful thinking, that they can't be defended without circularity, and that they lead to relativism. His response to these charges culminates in an eloquent and persuasive defense of the claim that reason functions best when influenced by the appropriate emotions, feelings, and intuitions.

From Popular Front to Cold War tells the story of the International Workers Order (IWO), an organization founded in 1930 to provide life, burial, and health insurance to its members. But as the essays gathered by Elissa Sampson and Robert M. Zecker make clear, the IWO broadened its mission to promote interracial solidarity, support labor unions, combat racism and antisemitism, and champion progressive social programs from the Great Depression into the postwar era.

At its height, the IWO had almost two hundred thousand members drawn from a broad ethnic and racial spectrum of the working class-Jews, Blacks, Poles, Slovaks, Italians, Hispanics, and others. It operated summer camps, published foreign-language newspapers, and supported a wide range of cultural activities. An early advocate for the United States' entry into World War II, the IWO was also ahead of its time in championing the nascent civil rights movement. After the war, it was declared a subversive organization due to its ties to the Communist Party and disbanded in 1954, though its legacy as a model for working-class cooperation across racial and ethnic differences endures to this day.

Contributors: Felicia Bevel, Paul Buhle, Matthew Calihman, Annabel Gottfried Cohen, Dylan Kaufman-Obstler, Paul C. Mishler, Ben Ratskoff, Elissa Sampson, Henry Srebrnik, Lauren B. Strauss, Nerina Visacovsky, Jennifer Young, Robert M. Zecker

On August 7, 1970, a revolt by Black prisoners in a Marin County courthouse stunned the nation. In its aftermath, Angela Davis, an African American activist-scholar who had campaigned vigorously for prisoners' rights, was placed on the FBI's "ten most wanted list." Captured in New York City two months later, she was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. Her trial, chronicled in this "compelling tale" (Publishers Weekly), brought strong public indictment. The Morning Breaks is a riveting firsthand account of Davis's ordeal and her ultimate triumph, written by an activist in the student, civil rights, and antiwar movements who was intimately involved in the struggle for her release.First published in 1975, and praised by The Nation for its "graphic narrative of [Davis's] legal and public fight," The Morning Breaks remains relevant today as the nation contends with the political fallout of the Sixties and the grim consequences of institutional racism. For this edition, Bettina Aptheker has provided an introduction that revisits crucial events of the late 1960s and early 1970s and puts Davis's case into the context of that time and our own-from the killings at Kent State and Jackson State to the politics of the prison system today. This book gives a first-hand account of the worldwide movement for Angela Davis's freedom and of her trial. It offers a unique historical perspective on the case and its continuing significance in the contemporary political landscape.

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches. In negotiating their beliefs about the devil's powers, both women and men embedded womanhood in the discourse of depravity.Puritan ministers insisted that women and men were equal in the sight of God, with both sexes equally capable of cleaving to Christ or to the devil. Nevertheless, Reis explains, womanhood and evil were inextricably linked in the minds and hearts of seventeenth-century New England Puritans. Women and men feared hell equally but Puritan culture encouraged women to believe it was their vile natures that would take them there rather than the particular sins they might have committed.Following the Salem witchcraft trials, Reis argues, Puritans' understanding of sin and the devil changed. Ministers and laity conceived of a Satan who tempted sinners and presided physically over hell, rather than one who possessed souls in the living world. Women and men became increasingly confident of their redemption, although women more than men continued to imagine themselves as essentially corrupt, even after the Great Awakening.

Indonesian Languages and Literatures provides both an overview and in-depth studies of the multifaceted linguistic landscape of Indonesia as it informs the study of complex multilingual societies. Indonesia is home to about 700 languages, roughly ten percent of the global total, including Indonesian-an emergent major world language spoken as a first or second language by some 280 million people. The instantiation and development of Standard Indonesian as a national language, the increasing number of Indonesians reporting use of Indonesian as a primary language, the language contact scenarios between Indonesian and hundreds of other languages of Indonesia (Austronesian, non-Austronesian and colonial), and the implications of the shift toward Indonesian and other regional linga franca in the endangerment of hundreds of languages are all part of the dynamic linguistic situation in Indonesia. The essays assembled in this volume address these issues focusing on documentation, description, and analysis; language endangerment and language vitality; and language use in multilingual contexts.

Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929) is recognized not only as one of the century's preeminent art and Renaissance historians but also as a founder of twentieth-century methods in iconology and cultural studies in general. Warburg's 1923 lecture, first published in German in 1988 and now available in the first complete English translation, offers at once a window on his career, a formative statement of his cultural history of modernity, and a document in the ethnography of the American Southwest. This edition includes thirty-nine photographs, many of them originally presented as slides with the speech, and a rich interpretive essay by the translator.

A Zona Tropical Publication"The words 'tropical rainforest' may conjure up vistas populated by jaguars, brilliant macaws, and flowers amid the grandeur of towering buttressed trees. But the eager, expectant visitor is not regaled with the sight of charismatic vertebrates, gaudy birds, and luminous orchids. In the rainforest, close encounters with life that moves are usually rare but brilliant episodes; one is bedazzled for an instant and then left alone in the quiet greenery. Under such conditions, one must see the episode as part of a process; tracing the connections between organisms is the essence of rainforest appreciation."-Nature of the RainforestNature of the Rainforest is a breathtaking tour of an environment that is the pinnacle of biodiversity and evolutionary sophistication by an award-winning author and two photographers who love the rainforest, understand its intricacies, and have spent considerable time there documenting its wildlife and complexity. Adrian Forsyth draws on four decades of personal encounters with the animals of the rainforest-including poison-dart frogs, three-toed sloths, bushmasters, and umbrellabirds-as a starting point to communicate key ecological topics such as biodiversity, coevolution, rarity, chemical defense, nutrient cycling, and camouflage. The luminous photographs capture stunning and rare creatures in action, including the now- extinct golden toad mating, a jaguar on the prowl, and the hermit hummingbird feeding. The behaviors and characteristics of the rainforest inhabitants featured here not only illustrate the text but also advance the scientific narrative and exemplify the critical importance of conservation. Thematic chapters are interspersed with four chapters devoted to specific habitats and regions of Costa Rica and Peru, areas with some of the most diverse arrays of plant and animal species in the world. The result is an exuberant celebration of the rainforest in text and images.

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination.European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention.Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape.His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

Tales from the Netherworld explores the theme of katabasis, the descent to the underworld, in Russian literature from its earliest secular texts-folktales-until the end of the New Economic Policy (1921-1928), when official dictates affected the subjects that writers might safely explore. Barbara Henry argues that descent is a means of tracing and claiming ancestry and inheritance, and that the proliferation of netherworld themes tends to coincide with significant generic and formal shifts in Russian literature itself as well as, less frequently, momentous events in history.

In ancient and pagan literature, the land of the dead is a place not just of punishment, but of transformation and rebirth and it is these ideas that predominate in Russian literature. This book focuses on texts that typify the underworld descent story, offering a lens through which to observe the comic and tragic range of the form in the Russian context. With the exception of the folktales, whose dates of origin are difficult if not impossible to establish, each work is separated from the others by roughly thirty years and represents a generational inflection point in the motif's development.

As Tales from the Russian Netherworld shows, Russian stories about the land of the dead range from the very funny to the utterly devastating, which demonstrates the flexibility of the theme and its continued relevance today. Even in its grimmest exemplars, the katabasis asserts that death is not the end-not of life, or consciousness, or love, or art.

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state.

As this 25th anniversary edition-featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author-makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

Reds, Revolutions, and Rebellions investigates how insurgent strategies from three revolutionary states-Mao's China, Guevara's Cuba, and Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam-shaped the tactics of armed movements across the Global South. The afterlife of twentieth century communist guerilla warfare still echoes in contemporary warfare as armed Islamist groups, often seen as violently opposed to leftist principles, adopt these same military methods and tactics that Chinese leader Mao Zedong once espoused. Investigating the strategic thought of communist revolutionary movements in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, within the framework of the Global Cold War and the theoretical tensions that existed within and around the Third World Left, expose how they became the centers of revolutionary strategy and offered the most viable examples for decolonization.

To examine the historical trajectory and genealogy of communist insurgency strategy from the Chinese and Cuban revolutions to the present day, Benjamin R. Young draws on declassified intelligence reports, memoirs, and security studies scholarship to follow the migration of insurgent ideas and reveal how armed groups have studied and repurposed leftist military doctrine. He traces the ways in which communist military theory traveled far beyond its original context, challenging the assumption that insurgency was always local or ideologically fixed.

In showing how leftist revolutionary war theory became a global language of resistance, Reds, Revolutions, and Rebellions reframes our understanding of both insurgency and counterinsurgency and provides a reason why, long after their revolutions, China, Cuba, and Vietnam still shape how rebels fight and how empires respond.

Blending travelogue, memoir, and environmental reportage, Walking Chicago's Coast takes readers on an urban journey. Michael McColly begins his walk at his far North Side Chicago apartment and proceeds for two long days along the shore of Lake Michigan to the Indiana Dunes National Park. As he walks, McColly reflects on the layers of history, the constructed magnificence, and the troubling divides in this polyglot mecca of the Midwest.

From its descriptions of grand parks and architecture to packed sandy beaches to polluted neighborhoods called "sacrifice zones" along industrial waterways and rivers, Walking Chicago's Coast shows how such urban hiking lets one contemplate a city's grandeur and history, confront environmental and social realities, and trigger emotions and memories. Through Superfund sites, brownfields, scrapyards, and industrial ruins, McColly discovers the remarkable patterns of urban nature and the surprising beauty along his path.

Thinking whimsically makes serious science accessible. That's a message that should be taken to heart by all readers who want to learn about evolution. Do Elephants Have Knees? invites readers into serious appreciation of Darwinian histories by deploying the playful thinking found in children's books. Charles R. Ault Jr. weds children's literature to recent research in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Inquiring into the origin of origins stories, Ault presents three portraits of Charles Darwin-curious child, twentysomething adventurer, and elderly worm scientist. Essays focusing on the origins of tetrapods, elephants, whales, and birds explain fundamental Darwinian concepts (natural selection, for example) with examples of fossil history and comparative anatomy.

The imagery of the children's story offers a way to remember and recreate scientific discoveries. By juxtaposing Darwin's science with tales for children, Do Elephants Have Knees? underscores the importance of whimsical storytelling to the accomplishment of serious thinking. Charles Darwin mused about duck beaks and swimming bears as he imagined a pathway for the origin of baleen. A "bearduck" chimera may be a stretch, but the science linking not just cows but also whales to moose through shared ancestry has great merit. Teaching about shared ancestry may begin with attention to Bernard Wiseman's Morris the Moose. Morris believes that cows and deer are fine examples of moose because they all have four legs and things on their heads. No whale antlers are known, but fossils of four-legged whales are. By calling attention to surprising and serendipitous echoes between children's stories and challenging science, Ault demonstrates how playful thinking opens the doors to an understanding of evolutionary thought.