Sovereign Fictions

An exploration of Russian realist fiction reveals a preoccupation with the absolutist state. The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to owe its basic social imaginaries to the ideologies, institutions, and practices of modern civil society. In Sovereign Fictions, Ilya Kliger asks what happens to the novel when its fundamental sociohistorical orientation is, as in the case of Russian realism, toward the state. Kliger explores Russian realism’s distinctive construals of sociality through a broad range of texts from the 1830s to the 1870s, including major works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin, Lermontov, Goncharov, and Turgenev, and several lesser-known but influential books of the period, including Alexander Druzhinin’s Polinka Saks (1847), Aleksei Pisemsky’s One Thousand Souls (1858), and Vasily Sleptsov’s Hard Times (1865). Challenging much current scholarly consensus about the social dynamics of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Sovereign Fictions offers an important intervention in socially inflected theories of the novel and in current thinking on representations of power and historical poetics.

The book deeply analyses the bilateral relations between Switzerland and the European Union and their effect on the former's sovereignty in the context of Europeanisation. This touches on philosophical debates on the complexity of sovereignty. What sovereignty is at stake when talking about Swiss-EU relations? This issue not only faces the elusiveness of sovereignty as a concept, but also the proliferation of hypocrisy on its presence within states. The book encounters the deconstructionist hypothesis stating that there is nothing to worry about but the belief there is something to worry about. Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty allows indeed one to grasp the fictional essence of sovereignty based on the metaphysics of presence. The presence of self-positing sovereign ipseity is fictional since absent in the present, but spectrally present in the belief of its presence to come. Sovereignty is a matter of credibility, or the credible promise of a normative statement to come. Hence, the book challenges the realist/neorealist argument stating that states are credibly sovereign until proven otherwise and explains that the debate on state sovereignty calls for the unveiling of this hypocritical epistemology cunningly disguised as an objective presence. Swiss-EU relations thus become the cornerstone to not only theorise but also test sovereignty and deconstruct the two ontological and epistemological sides of the same coin, or the modern hypocrisy of sovereignty. This deconstruction constitutes the very problématique of any attempt to understand whether and how a state can be sovereign and solve the problem as to how to neutralise the différance and identify the difference between credible and incredible claims of sovereignty. This problématique connects the theory and practice of sovereignty innovatively, providing positivist evidence on the arguable credibility of the Swiss claim of sovereignty and confirming the presence of a theological dimension within politics.

Ruth Ann wondered if she and her brother would ever fully trust each other again. When Ruth Ann Teller learns the shocking truth her brother Matthew brings back from the coal mines in Choctaw Nation, she is devastated beyond words. Determined to piece her family back together, Ruth Ann resolves to find and hire the best lawyer in Indian Territory. But the best lawyer happens to be the Teller family’s opposition: Tecumseh Shoemaker, who is determined to bring justice by pitting the family against one another. Broken trust with her brother pushes Ruth Ann to an unlikely alliance with the one person who promises to help her—Pepper Barnes. But Pepper harbors his own agenda, one that includes wrangling Ruth Ann into traveling to Washington, D.C. with a political delegation from the Choctaw Nation, serving as a reporter for the Choctaw Tribune. In D.C., Ruth Ann’s hope turns to full-blood Choctaw lawyer Benjamin Nakishi, a man on the cusp of greatness—and who has his own troubled past and reasons not to return with her to Indian Territory. With a wounded heart and the future of her family hanging in the balance, Ruth Ann is caught in the swirl of politics, historical injustices, and romance in a bustling city full of its own stories and secrets. A judgment is coming that will affect the Teller family forever—but will justice truly be served? *** About the Choctaw Tribune Historical Fiction series: These books let you explore the old Choctaw Nation with Matthew and Ruth Ann Teller, a Choctaw brother and sister pair who own a newspaper, the Choctaw Tribune. They're in the midst of shootouts and tribal upheavals with the coming Dawes Commission in the 1890s. The changes in Indian Territory threaten everything they've known and force them to decide if they are going to take a stand for truth, even in the face of death. A clean historical fiction series with a Western flair, the Choctaw Tribune explores racial, political, spiritual, and social issues in the old Choctaw Nation—and beyond. Books in the series: The Executions (Book 1) Traitors (Book 2) Shaft of Truth (Book 3) Sovereign Justice (Book 4) Fire and Ink (Book 5) (Coming August 2023) Choctaw Tribune Boxset (Books 1 -3)

Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn’t until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book’s publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today’s Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Indira Allegra, Louise Esme Cruz, Paula Gunn Allen, Qwo-Li Driskill, Laura Furlan, Janice Gould, Carrie House, Daniel Heath Justice, Maurice Kenny, Michael Koby, M. Carmen Lane, Jaynie Lara, Chip Livingston, Luna Maia, Janet McAdams, Deborah Miranda, Daniel David Moses, D. M. O’Brien, Malea Powell, Cheryl Savageau, Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, James Thomas Stevens, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, William Raymond Taylor, Joel Waters, and Craig Womack

The powerful transgender teenage superhero returns in this action-packed sequel to Dreadnought. Only nine months after her debut as the superhero Dreadnought, Danny Tozer is already a scarred veteran. Protecting a city the size of New Port is a team-sized job and she’s doing it alone. Between her newfound celebrity and her demanding cape duties, Dreadnought is stretched thin, and it’s only going to get worse. When she crosses a newly discovered billionaire supervillain, Dreadnought comes under attack from all quarters. From her troubled family life to her disintegrating friendship with Calamity, there’s no lever too cruel for this villain to use against her. She might be hard to kill, but there's more than one way to destroy a hero. Before the war is over, Dreadnought will be forced to confront parts of herself she never wanted to acknowledge. And behind it all, an old enemy waits in the wings, ready to unleash a plot that will scar the world forever. “Daniels doesn’t just perfectly “queer the capes,” she delivers a book that’s tightly packed with brilliantly rendered fights, nail-biting scenes of peril, emotional authenticity, and a perfect first kiss.”—Kirkus Reviews “An extremely compelling narrative…An uplifting kind of book.”—Tor.com “Danny is so real that even when she is flying around in space throwing punches at a bazillion miles per hour, she is 100% believable.”—Locus “A well-crafted story, filled with charming characters and nerve-wracking narratives that keep the reader enthralled.”—Lambda Literary

Considers the problems of sovereignty through the work of Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida.

Political Magic examines early modern British fictions of exploration and colonialism, arguing that narratives of intercultural contact reimagine ideas of sovereignty and popular power. These fictions reveal aspects of political thought in this period that official discourse typically shunted aside, particularly the political status of the commoner, whose “liberty” was often proclaimed even as it was undermined both in theory and in practice. Like the Hobbesian sovereign, the colonist appears to the colonized as a giver of rules who remains unruly. At the heart of many texts are moments of savage wonder, provoked by European displays of technological prowess. In particular, the trope of the first gunshot articulates an origin of consent and political legitimacy in colonial showmanship. Yet as manifestations of force held in abeyance, these technologies also signal the ultimate reliance of sovereigns on extreme violence as the lessthan-mystical foundation of their authority. By examining works by Cavendish, Defoe, Behn, Swift, and Haywood in conjunction with contemporary political writing and travelogues, Political Magic locates a subterranean discourse of sovereignty in the century after Hobbes, finding surprising affinities between the government of “savages” and of Britons.

This volume offers a new point of entry into questions about how the law conceives of states and firms. Because states and firms are fictitious constructs rather than products of evolutionary biology, the law dictates which acts should be attributed to each entity, and by which actors. Those legal decisions construct firms and states by attributing identity and consequences to them. As the volume shows, these legal decisions are often products of path dependence or conceptual metaphors like "personhood" that have expanded beyond their original uses. Focusing on attribution, the volume considers an array of questions about artificial entities that are usually divided into doctrinal siloes. These include questions about attribution of international legal responsibility to states and state-owned entities, transnational attribution of liabilities to firms, and attribution of identity rights to corporations. Durkee highlights the artificiality of doctrines that construct firms and states, and therefore their susceptibility to change.