Sovereignty Unhinged

Sovereignty Unhinged theorizes sovereignty beyond the typical understandings of action, control, and the nation-state. Rather than engaging with the geopolitical realities of the present, the contributors consider sovereignty from the perspective of how it is lived and enacted in everyday practice and how it reflects people’s aspirations for new futures. In a series of ethnographic case studies ranging from the Americas to the Middle East to South Asia, they examine the means of avoiding the political and historical capture that make one complicit with sovereign authority rather than creating the conditions of possibility to confront it. The contributors attend to the affective dimensions of these practices of world-building to illuminate the epistemological, ontological, and transnational entanglements that produce a sense of what is possible. They also trace how sovereignty is activated and deactivated over the course of a lifetime within the struggle of the everyday. In so doing, they outline how individuals create and enact forms of sovereignty that allow them to endure fast and slow forms of violence while embracing endless opportunities for building new worlds. Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Yarimar Bonilla, Jessica Cattelino, María Elena García, Akhil Gupta, Lochlann Jain, Purnima Mankekar, Joseph Masco, Michael Ralph, Danilyn Rutherford, Arjun Shankar, Kristen L. Simmons, Deborah A. Thomas, Leniqueca A. Welcome, Kaya Naomi Williams, Jessica Winegar

Seeking new forms of democracy, progressive politics raises a fundamental question: what is the alternative to the allegedly coherent, self-contained liberal subject that represents the project of modernity? Exploring the themes of nature, race, and the divine, this book identifies the more realistic alternative in the “relational subject”: a subject that is inseparable from the global field of relations through which it emerges and yet distinct from that field because it lives a life that no one else ever has. Recognizing ourselves as such subjects allows us not only to rethink politics, but, more profoundly, to envision sovereignty as the means by which we each rejuvenate ourselves and the polities we constitute with others.

From Sovereignty to Solidarity seeks to re-imagine human mobility in ways that are de-linked from national sovereignty. Using examples from around the world, the author examines contemporary practices of solidarity to illustrate what such a conceptualization of human mobility looks like. He suggests that urban and local scales, rather than the national scale, is a better way to frame human migration and belonging. The book ultimately proposes that solidarity, rather than sovereignty, offers an alternative approach to imagine how human mobility should, and already does, occur. This book will be relevant to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as Migration Studies, Urban Studies, Human and Political Geography, and Refugee Studies. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.

Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature explores the development of ideas about sovereignty and democracy in the early United States. It looks at Puritan sermons and poetry, founding-era political debates and representations of revolutionary and anti-slavery violence to reveal how Americans imagined the elusive possibility of a democratic sovereignty.

Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, the rise of right-wing populism, the growing economic inequality and political instability, and the climate emergency, are indicative of the decomposition of the global liberal democratic order. Order, Crisis, and Redemption is a critical reflection on the limitations of Carl Schmitt's political theology, an attempt to think, with and beyond Schmitt, about the parameters of this crisis. Through a sustained critical engagement, ranging over Schmittian texts, including the lesser known, from the 1920s to the 1970s, the book elaborates three main themes that preoccupied Schmitt: order, crisis, and redemption. In times of crisis, as with the one we are currently experiencing, we are faced with the dilemma of either shoring up the current political and legal order—through ever more authoritarian measures—or radically transforming it. Redemption, in the full theological sense of the word, thus implies the possibility of a new understanding of ethics and politics, aimed at creating a more just world.

In Disability Worlds, Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, and artists in larger struggles for recognition and rights. Disability consciousness, they show, emerges in everyday politics, practices, and frictions. Chapters consider dilemmas of genetic testing and neuroscientific research, reimagining kinship and community, the challenges of “special education,” and the perils of transitioning from high school. They also highlight the vitality of neurodiversity activism, disability arts, politics, and public culture. Disability Worlds reflects the authors’ anthropological commitments to recognizing the significance of this fundamental form of human difference. Ginsburg and Rapp’s conversations with diverse New Yorkers reveal the bureaucratic constraints and paradoxes established in response to the disability rights movement, as well as the remarkable creativity of disabled people and their allies who are opening pathways into both disability justice and disability futures.

Around the turn of the century, Welsh readers thrilled to the heroic stories of Owen Rhoscomyl. Having been a cowboy, frontiersman, soldier and mercenary, Rhoscomyl was as adventurous and exotic as his stories. Roving the wilds of the American West, Patagonia and South Africa before finally settling in Wales, Rhoscomyl was a flawed hero who led a rough life that exacted a personal price in poverty, delinquency and violence. He identified deeply with the Welsh nation as a source of tradition, legitimacy and belonging within a wider imperial world. As a popular commercial writer of historical romance, imperial adventure, popular history and public spectacle, he rejected accusations of national inferiority, effeminacy and defeatism in his depictions of the Welsh as an inherently masculine and martial people, accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial enterprise. This literary biography will explore the vaulting ambitions, real achievements, and bitter disappointments of the life, work and milieu of Owen Rhoscomyl.

This book analyzes the political and material conditions driving contemporary border control policies and discusses the processes that mediate popular and official understandings of border-related fatalities.