The Politics Of The Superficial

The Politics of the Superficial argues that the increasing volume of visually communicative surfaces in public life contributes to a very particular form of public imagination and political activity.

There is a hidden country within the United States. It was formed from the astonishing number of secrets held by the government and the growing ranks of secret-keepers given charge over them. The government secrecy industry speaks in a private language of codes and acronyms, and follows an arcane set of rules and customs designed to perpetuate itself, repel penetration, and deflect oversight. It justifies itself with the assertion that the American values worth preserving are often best sustained by subterfuge and deception. Deep State, written by two of the country's most respected national security journalists, disassembles the secrecy apparatus of the United States and examines real-world trends that ought to trouble everyone from the most aggressive hawk to the fiercest civil libertarian. The book: - Provides the fullest account to date of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance program first spun up in the dark days after 9/11. - Examines President Obama's attempt to reconcile his instincts as a liberal with the realities of executive power, and his use of the state secrets doctrine. - Exposes how the public’s ubiquitous access to information has been the secrecy industry's toughest opponent to date, and provides a full account of how WikiLeaks and other “sunlight” organizations are changing the government's approach to handling sensitive information, for better and worse. - Explains how the increased exposure of secrets affects everything from Congressional budgets to Area 51, from SEAL Team Six and Delta Force to the FBI, CIA, and NSA. - Assesses whether the formal and informal mechanisms put in place to protect citizens from abuses by the American deep state work, and how they might be reformed.

"Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved or changed? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched political and racial views of contemporary white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history, which continues to shape economic, political, and social spheres. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery--compared to areas that were not--are more racially hostile and less amenable to policies that could promote black progress. Highlighting the connection between historical institutions and contemporary political attitudes, the authors explore the period following the Civil War when elite whites in former bastions of slavery had political and economic incentives to encourage the development of anti-black laws and practices. Deep Roots shows that these forces created a local political culture steeped in racial prejudice, and that these viewpoints have been passed down over generations, from parents to children and via communities, through a process called behavioral path dependence. While legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made huge strides in increasing economic opportunity and reducing educational disparities, southern slavery has had a profound, lasting, and self-reinforcing influence on regional and national politics that can still be felt today. A groundbreaking look at the ways institutions of the past continue to sway attitudes of the present, Deep Roots demonstrates how social beliefs persist long after the formal policies that created those beliefs have been eradicated."--Jacket.

A groundbreaking study of the foundations of nationalism, exposing its antiquity, strong links with ethnicity and roots in human nature.

Within a few short years after emancipation, freedpeople of the Natchez District created a new democracy in the Reconstruction era, replacing the oligarchic rule of slaveholders and Confederates with a grassroots democracy that transformed the South after the Civil War.

The deep state ranks among the most critical issues in Turkish politics. This book traces its origins and offers an explanation of the emergence and trajectory of the deep state; the meaning and function of informal and authoritarian institutions in the formal security sector of a democratic regime; the involvement of the state in organized crime; armed conflict; corruption; and massive human rights violations. This book applies an innovative methodological approach to concept formation and offers a mid-range theory of deep state that sheds light on the reciprocal relationship between the state and political regimes and elaborates on the conditions for the consolidation of democracy. It traces the path-dependent emergence and trajectory of the deep state from the Ottoman Empire to the current Turkish Republic and its impact on state-society relations. It reads state formation, consolidation, and breakdown from the perspective of this most resilient phenomenon of Turkish politics. The analysis also situates recent developments regarding AKP governments, including the EU accession process, civil-military relations, coup trials, the Kurdish question, and the Gülen Movement in their context within the deep state. Moreover, this case-study offers an analytical framework for cross-regional comparative analysis of the deep states. Addressing the lacuna in academic scholarship on the deep state phenomenon in Turkey, this book is essential reading for students and scholars with an interest in democratization, politics and Middle East Studies.

The preoccupation with “depth” and its relevance to cinema and media studies For decades the concept of depth has been central to critical thinking in numerous humanities-based disciplines, legitimizing certain modes of inquiry over others. Deep Mediations examines why and how this is, as scholars today navigate the legacy of depth models of thought and vision, particularly in light of the “surface turn” and as these models impinge on the realms of cinema and media studies. The collection’s eighteen essays seek to understand the decisive but evolving fixation on depth by considering the term’s use across a range of conversations as well as its status in relation to critical methodologies and the current mediascape. Engaging contemporary debates about new computing technologies, the environment, history, identity, affect, audio/visual culture, and the limits and politics of human perception, Deep Mediations is a timely interrogation of depth’s ongoing importance within the humanities. Contributors: Laurel Ahnert; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; Erika Balsom, King’s College London; Brooke Belisle, Stony Brook University; Jinhee Choi, King’s College London; Jennifer Fay, Vanderbilt U; Lisa Han, UC Santa Barbara; Jean Ma, Stanford U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; Susanna Paasonen, U of Turku, Finland; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State U; Pooja Rangan, Amherst College; Katherine Rochester, VIA Art Fund in Boston; Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick (UK); Jordan Schonig, Michigan State U; John Paul Stadler, North Carolina State U; Nicole Starosielski, New York U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond.