The Specter

Explores the significance of Indian control spirits as a dominating force in nineteenth-century American Spiritualism. The Specter of the Indian unveils the centrality of Native American spirit guides during the emergent years of American Spiritualism. By pulling together cultural and political history; the studies of religion, race, and gender; and the ghostly, Kathryn Troy offers a new layer of understanding to the prevalence of mystically styled Indians in American visual and popular culture. The connections between Spiritualist print and contemporary Indian policy provide fresh insight into the racial dimensions of social reform among nineteenth-century Spiritualists. Troy draws fascinating parallels between the contested belief of Indians as fading from the world, claims of returned apparitions, and the social impetus to provide American Indians with a means of existence in white America. Rather than vanishing from national sight and memory, Indians and their ghosts are shown to be ever present. This book transports the readers into dimly lit parlor rooms and darkened cabinets and lavishes them with detailed séance accounts in the words of those who witnessed them. Scrutinizing the otherworldly whisperings heard therein highlights the voices of mediums and those they sought to channel, allowing the author to dig deep into Spiritualist belief and practice. The influential presence of Indian ghosts is made clear and undeniable.

Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

Leading thinkers’ critiques of award-winning Postcolonial Theory, as well as the author’s responses and reformulations Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital was hailed on publication as “without any doubt … a bomb,” and “the most substantive effort to dismantle the field through historical reasoning published to date.” It immediately unleashed one of the most important recent debates in social theory, ranging across the humanities and social sciences, on the status of postcolonial studies, modernity, and much else. This book brings together major critics of Chibber’s work to assess the efficacy of his argument from differing perspectives. Included are Chibber’s own spirited responses and reformulations in light of these criticisms. With contributions by Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Bruce Robbins, Ho-fung Hung, William H. Sewell, Jr., Bruce Cumings, George Steinmetz, Michael Schwartz, David Pederson, Stein Sundstøl Eriksen, and Achin Vanaik.

This book dismantles the stereotype of Spenser as one who blurs earlier epic traditions. John Watkins's examinations of Spenser's major poetry reveal a poet keenly attuned to dissonances among his classical, medieval, and early modern sources. By bringing Virgil into an intertextual dialogue with Chaucer, Ariosto, and Tasso, and several Neo-Latin commentators, Spenser transformed the most patriarchal of genres into a vehicle for praising the Virgin Queen.

In this rethinking of Marxism and its blind spots, Dick Howard argues that the collapse of European communism in 1989 should not be identified with a victory for capitalism and makes possible a wholesale reevaluation of democratic politics in the U.S. and abroad. The author turns to the American and French Revolutions to uncover what was truly "revolutionary" about those events, arguing that two distinct styles of democratic life emerged, the implications of which were misinterpreted in light of the rise of communism. Howard uses a critical rereading of Marx as a theorist of democracy to offer his audience a new way to think about this political ideal. He argues that it is democracy, rather than Marxism, that is radical and revolutionary, and that Marx could have seen this but did not. In Part I, Howard explores the attraction Marxism held for intellectuals, particularly French intellectuals, and he demonstrates how the critique of totalitarianism from a Marxist viewpoint allowed these intellectuals to see the radical nature of democracy. Part II examines two hundred years of democratic political life—comparing America's experience as a democracy to that of France. Part III offers a rethinking of Marx's contribution to democratic politics. Howard concludes that Marx was attempting a "philosophy by other means," and that paradoxically, just because he was such an astute philosopher, Marx was unable to see the radical political implications of his own analyses. The philosophically justified "revolution" turns out to be the basis of an anti-politics whose end was foreshadowed by the fall of European communism in 1989.

Specter of Peace challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. Histories of peacemaking, the volume argues, sharpens our understanding of colonialism and empire.

Unnatural capital: Chinese state investment and its travails in Africa -- Varieties of accumulation: profit maximization and beyond -- Labor bargains: regimes of exploitation and exclusion -- Managerial ethos: collective asceticism versus individual careerism -- Contesting capital: aspiration and capacity from below -- Eventful global China -- Appendix: an ethnographer's odyssey: the mundane and the sublime of researching China in Zambia

Explores the significance of Indian control spirits as a dominating force in nineteenth-century American Spiritualism. The Specter of the Indian unveils the centrality of Native American spirit guides during the emergent years of American Spiritualism. By pulling together cultural and political history; the studies of religion, race, and gender; and the ghostly, Kathryn Troy offers a new layer of understanding to the prevalence of mystically styled Indians in American visual and popular culture. The connections between Spiritualist print and contemporary Indian policy provide fresh insight into the racial dimensions of social reform among nineteenth-century Spiritualists. Troy draws fascinating parallels between the contested belief of Indians as fading from the world, claims of returned apparitions, and the social impetus to provide American Indians with a means of existence in white America. Rather than vanishing from national sight and memory, Indians and their ghosts are shown to be ever present. This book transports the readers into dimly lit parlor rooms and darkened cabinets and lavishes them with detailed séance accounts in the words of those who witnessed them. Scrutinizing the otherworldly whisperings heard therein highlights the voices of mediums and those they sought to channel, allowing the author to dig deep into Spiritualist belief and practice. The influential presence of Indian ghosts is made clear and undeniable. Kathryn Troy teaches in the Department of Social Sciences and Criminal Justice at Suffolk County Community College and the Department of History, Politics, and Geography at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York.