bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Kukreja Reena
Published: January 2023

This chapter covers the marriage crisis in India. It explores the new form of non-customary marriage-making that emerged among Hindus and Muslims in rural North India. The aforementioned matrimonies were largely correlated to a discourse of bridal slavery, bride trafficking, and low societal worth accorded to Indian women, which resulted in a tragic outcome of skewed sex ratios and girl dis-preference. The chapter explores the phases of contemporary cross-region marriages in North India. It also looks into the notion of marriage migration as 80 percent of lifetime migrants in India are women citing marriage as the reason for leaving their place of birth. Moreover, the hyper-commercialization of marriage within India through the practice of dowry permeated due to the demand for cash to act as seed capital for small business ventures or satisfy demands for consumer goods.
The Lament of the Poor
Authors: Kukreja Reena
Published: January 2023

This chapter expounds on the concept of dowry as a capital accumulation strategy. It highlights the influence of coercive accumulation on rural impoverishment. In India, the structural violence of neoliberalism gets initiated at an intimate gendered level through the commodity fetishism of eligible local grooms. The men's families capitalize on the societal disproval of families with unmarried daughters to maximize asset transfer amidst marriage deals. The chapter covers the dispossession of matrimonial choice, which forced women to marry men considered social rejects that would eventually lead to dispossession, dislocations, cultural alienation, and being uprooted from natal families. It also considers fair skin as a marriage capital. Additionally, neoliberal dispossession and neoliberal accumulative processes extend to intimate relations which shrunk marital choices and affect women from socioeconomically marginalized communities such as the Dalits or the Muslims.
From Evil Intentions To Unintended Consequences
Authors: Crandell Doug
Published: January 2023

This chapter traces past generations that held very different opinions about why someone was born with developmental disabilities: Some religious families believed a child born with disabilities was punishment for sins, specifically sex out of wedlock. The chapter reviews the difficulties of separating the history of treatment and care and, in some instances, the mistreatment and physical and sexual abuse of people with significant disabilities from the views held by the general public, leaders, and physicians who drove the interventions. The chapter talks about the modern system of disability classification that has an insidious connection to one of the world's most shameful and evil periods. It mentions Richard and Lina Kretschmar, who wrote to the Nazi Party to plead for permission to legally kill their son born with disabilities as they believed he was an abomination and not in line with the pursuit of Adolf Hitler's goal of genetic perfection.
The Olmstead supreme court decision and freedom fighters
Authors: Crandell Doug
Published: January 2023

This chapter talks about Leo Sonnenburg and Gerald Hartnett, who filed a class action lawsuit on May 23, 1974 to seek compensation for labor performed while they were patients in Indiana state institutions. The complaint contended that the plaintiffs were entitled to payment under the minimum-wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. It emphasizes how human services, especially disability services, tends to alter language to make the programs and services sound more palatable. The chapter analyzes the understanding of the interplay between intellectual and behavioral health disabilities, noting how clinical assessments and research fail to consider how diagnostic labels impact a specific human being. It cites the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) of 1980, which was passed to protect confined people with intellectual disabilities and mental health disabilities in institutions, including people living in nursing homes.
The Nightmare In Atalissa
Authors: Crandell Doug
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the plight of the fifty-two men of Indian origin who were held against their will by the John Pickle Company. It mentions Robert Canino, who took the Pickle case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and won in court in 2006 amidst the argument of the company's attorneys that the practice used to pay foreign workers had some legal merit. It also mentions the Wage and Hour Division at the United States Department of Labor, which became involved with Henry's Turkey Service and investigated the facility's methods of paying men with intellectual disabilities. The chapter analyzes the view on the operations of the farm and the treatment of the men with intellectual disabilities, wherein a kind of livestock analogy was at play. It looks at social role valorization, which provides a lens of critical analysis regarding the roles assigned to people with disabilities.
Oregon, Rhode Island, And The Promise Of A Way Forward
Authors: Crandell Doug
Published: January 2023

This chapter talks about Vanita Gupta, who oversaw a wide range of criminal and civil-enforcement efforts to ensure equal justice and protect equal opportunity for all. Gupta didn't shy away from cases involving disability rights, such as those that could be explained away with faux pity, the misapplication of the concept of self determination, and involvement from lobbyists for the disability industrial complex. The chapter recounts the Oregon case, which highlighted a new and intimidating development for the non-profits running employment programs that relied on paying workers subminimum wages. The chapter describes the ACCSES affiliate in New Jersey, which was concerned about the precedents from the cases in Oregon and Rhode Island. It reviews the issue that arises from the significant confusion inside the disability industrial complex, the muddled relationship between the operators of the sheltered workshops, and the workers with disabilities.
A Legislative Fix Was In
Authors: Crandell Doug
Published: January 2023

This chapter talks about “Training through Placement,” which was a sheltered-workshop program in Rhode Island with several subminimum-wage contracts with businesses in the community. The chapter highlights the interim settlement agreement that was reached between Rhode Island and the Department of Justice, wherein almost 130 workers with disabilities had been sent to Training through Placement and considered special education at the feeder program in Birch Academy. Students at Birch and other special education programs were rarely offered supported-employment services and instead headed straight to subminimum wages. The chapter details how Rhode Island had agreed to a permanent, more detailed, ten-year consent decree that would revamp and update the disability and employment systems in 2014. It explores how the Employment First initiatives, along with the class action lawsuits in Oregon and Rhode Island, influenced policy making in relation to the special education practices provided to students with disabilities.
Ohio And The Future Of Subminimum Wages
Authors: Crandell Doug
Published: January 2023

This chapter reviews the growth of the disability industrial complex on landing contracts associated with high-profile companies. It explores the belief of the disability industrial complex that if they could put a prominent brand on their marketing brochures, they could interest other companies to also outsource some of their packaging and assembly tasks. The chapter also describes sessions in conferences that claimed to help sheltered-workshop leaders learn how to engage with businesses, noting how marketing and sales techniques became part of the new lingo. The chapter details how large and small companies began sending their work to the local sheltered workshops to do jobs on site for real pay rather than inside the sheltered workshop for subminimum wages. It looks back at the story of subminimum wages for Americans with disabilities whose painful consequences must not be forgotten.
The Pragmatic Ideal
Authors: McGarvie Mark Douglas
Published: January 2023

Following the life of a charismatic woman committed to reform, this book provides an introduction to the politics that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century, ideas that are the basis for much of today's progressive thought. As one of the “new women” who came of age during the Progressive era, Mary Field Parton, a close friend of Clarence Darrow, pursued social justice as a settlement house worker and as a leading writer on labor organizing, transforming pragmatic principles into action. The book shows how, following the upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, liberals such as Mary Field Parton turned to pragmatism, hoping to generate greater social awareness from constructions of values rooted in personal experiences instead of philosophical or religious truths. The book reveals how Mary Field Parton sought to expand her rights as a woman while nonetheless denigrating rights as artificial legal impediments to social progress. The issues she faced and the options she considered find important currency in the political divisions confronting Americans a century later.
Expanded Opportunities Beyond The Home, 1896–1905
Authors: McGarvie Mark Douglas
Published: January 2023

This chapter follows the time when Mary Field Parton graduated from high school in 1897 and went to college. It reviews how Mary benefited greatly from the country's changing attitudes regarding education. Public education soared after 1880, especially for girls. Her college years infused Mary with a new sense of purpose, compelling her to reconsider her place in society and the roles she might play. The chapter then tracks how she pursued a challenging course of study at the University of Michigan, choosing philosophy and history as majors, while also enjoying sociology, which exposed her to social unrest, alternative political and economic systems, and stories of social radicals. The chapter mentions how her philosophy courses exposed her to the writings of William James, and looks at how she identified with the need for her generation to develop new truths as bases for reevaluating society. James's pragmatic approach, when combined with his religious beliefs, would be meaningful to her throughout her life. The chapter delves into the rise of collectivist thought in the United States and introduces pragmatists William James and John Dewey. It emphasizes that pragmatism offered young people a compelling call to action, rooted in an acceptance of people's ability to empathize with their fellows and create social progress from a moral need to do so.
Liberalism’S Decline During And After The Great War, 1914–1924
Authors: McGarvie Mark Douglas
Published: January 2023

This chapter begins with a discussion on the second decade of the twentieth century which opened with tremendous hope and enthusiasm for liberal Americans. It investigates how progressivism appeared to be dead, as the United States turned sharply to the right and the always tenuous alliance between liberals of somewhat different orientations fractured under the weight of war and inconsistent policy goals. The chapter also describes how Mary Field Parton experienced a very stressful few years beginning in 1912 and how she had fully repudiated her earlier Republican Party preferences in 1912 and had become a devoted Democrat. The chapter then shifts to consider the United States' entry into the war, noting that many Americans saw it as rooted in imperialist desires, conceptions of racial and religious superiority, and the president's own Progressive agenda. The decision to enter the war divided liberals and drove a dagger into the heart of the Progressive movement. The chapter shows how the tensions Mary felt over her role in her sister Sara's life expressed the ironies and inconsistencies of a progressive, even revolutionary, young woman raised in a devoutly Christian home in the United States during the Victorian era, who came of age in an era of great social upheaval and cultural transition.
A Rights Revival In The Roaring Twenties, 1924–1929
Authors: McGarvie Mark Douglas
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates the political shift to the right during the 1920s, and how it expressed widespread dissatisfaction with the subordination of individual rights and liberties to communitarian goals. It particularly pays attention to Mary Field Parton's and Clarence Darrow's earlier worldviews, then examines how it shifted, somewhat uncomfortably, toward a greater embrace of individual rights. By the mid-1920s, Mary had undertaken to write a book. She decided to write Mary Harris “Mother” Jones's biography. The chapter then recounts Mary's reconstruction of the book within a month and how she shared the draft with Darrow to ask him to write the introduction. As the chapter shows, the fissures in the worldviews of the author and the writer of the introduction could not be hidden. Darrow's shift toward libertarianism and away from communitarianism is evident in his introduction. Relying on emotionally compelling stories of the suffering of workers, the cruelty of industrialists, and government's corrupt complicity in the latter's cause, Mary hoped to engender compassion, moral outrage, and a hunger for societal change. The chapter concludes by focusing on the two prominent trials that transformed Clarence from the greatest attorney of his generation into the most famous litigator in US history.
A New Deal For Liberalism And The United States, 1929–1969
Authors: McGarvie Mark Douglas
Published: January 2023

This chapter talks about the first three decades of the twentieth century. It discusses how Mary Field Parton and her husband Lemuel Parton lived very well during the Great Depression. Lem and Mary had purchased an apartment house in Greenwich Village about a year before the crash. They, like so many other Americans, believed the economic growth of the 1920s would continue. The chapter examines Franklin Delano Roosevelt's solutions to the nation's economic crisis in 1932. He both reinvigorated and redefined the nation's unique brand of liberalism. The calamitous economic conditions of the 1930s prompted unprecedented governmental responses from the new administration. The chapter explicates how the New Deal redefined liberalism by legitimatizing the active participation of government in the economy. New Deal liberalism recognized a need for the government to give shape and direction to the economy. The chapter considers the importance of the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It also reviews how the Wagner Act provided tremendous protections to unions as businesses operating as third parties in the employer-employee relationship.
The Paradise Notebooks
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This book takes us across the spectacular Sierra Nevada mountain range on a journey illuminated by incandescent poetry and fascinating fact. Over the course of twenty-one pairs of short chapters, the book's authors contemplate the natural phenomena found in the Sierra Nevada. From granite to aspen, to fire, to a rare, endemic species of butterfly, these chapter pairs explore the natural history and mystical wonder of each element with a balanced and captivating touch. As they weave in vignettes from their ninety-mile backpacking trip across the range, the authors powerfully reconceive the Sierra Nevada as both earthly matter and transcendental offering, letting us into a reality in which nature holds just as much spiritual importance as it does physical. In a time of rapid environmental degradation, the book offers a way forward—a whole-minded, learned, loving attention to place that rekindles our joyful relationship with the living world.
River
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter studies the rivers of the Sierra Nevada. Rivers have ferried all matter of fragmented stone to the central valley, on to the muddy bay of San Francisco, and to the Pacific Ocean. The names of the Sierra's great rivers bear the imprint of tongues of those who knew and traveled the land: Native, Spanish, Anglo. Some names are familiar, knowable, but other names have been lost, obscured, erased from cultural memory, or perhaps remembered by only a few. As rivers shape the material of the Sierra, so does the arcing and concentrated movement of our ideas, actions, and spirit shape our days and months. What a river teaches is to follow a course forward based on a river's ancient recommendations: a suppleness of mind, a communion with land, a certainty of joy, an openness to light, and a surety of destination.
Fire
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses the primeval relationship of the Sierra Nevada with fire. For millennia, lightning-ignited—and eventually Native-tended—fires fed among the Sierra's mid-elevation forests and helped maintain complex, diverse quilts of patchy forest habitat in various stages of fire recovery and forest succession. Indigenous peoples used fire in the Sierra's mid-elevation forests as one tool in a suite of horticultural technologies to tend to the wild. The natural rhythms of fire, complemented by this time-honored practice of fire gardening, produced a varied mosaic of forest habitat that included lichen-flocked old-growth forests. The chapter then considers how policies of fire suppression enacted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned the forests of the Sierra into a colossal, unintentional ecological experiment.
Aspen
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on aspens, which grow in fur-thick groves along the stream banks of the Sierra's eastern escarpment. The leaf stem (or petiole) of most plants is round in cross section, rolling easily between the fingers, but the aspen's is as lean as a blade; it resists such absentminded turning. This is because it is made for other purposes. The distinctive design of the aspen petiole—like an oar shaft flattened at right angles to the round paddle of its leaf—allows it to bend at the slightest provocation. Readiness is the centermost quality of the aspen leaves. It is teaching us that we need to make sure our minds are open to the minute offerings and sweeping patterns in the hours and days.
Whitebark and Nutcracker
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter addresses the whitebarks and the nutcrackers. The whitebark pine is the only tree that grows in the highest elevations of the northern and central Sierra. The nutcracker's bill, long and slightly decurved, is as black as obsidian and as pointed and purposive as a sailor's fid. With this singular tool, the bird hammers the whitebark's pitch-bound cone until it shatters, revealing the nutritious, caloric seeds within. The nutcracker is also the whitebark's wings, its ever faithful seed-bearer; the tree thrives because a bird cares for it, and the bird thrives for the care of a tree. In their uncanny collaboration, the whitebark and nutcracker nurture more than just each other. Ultimately, the whitebark pine teaches us that our project is to ready a life worth giving away, in hope to provoke a kindling and a flourishing of further life.
Pileated Woodpecker
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes the pileated woodpecker, which approaches the task of roost and nest excavation with great vigor, chiseling out cavernous hollows into the trunks of dead or decaying trees until they can accommodate its crow-sized body along with several nestlings. All of this industrious labor has profound effects on the forest. Numerous species of birds and mammals reside in the cavities abandoned by the woodpeckers. The birds' prodigious foraging and excavation activities introduce fungal spores to dead or dying trees, facilitating their decay and the cycling of their nutrients into the forest soil. Woodpecker foraging also exposes insects, making them both more accessible to other species of birds and more vulnerable to extremes of temperature, all of which help to regulate insect populations. Ultimately, what the pileated woodpecker teaches us is our responsibility to others.
Belding’s Ground Squirrel
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the Belding's ground squirrel of the Sierra Nevada. The Belding's calendar is marked by days of danger and seasons of deprivation. The squirrels must consume a year's worth of calories in the span of a few green months, gorging on vegetation as they watch the sky and meadow for movement. On sighting a raptor, a Belding's hurries for cover as it chirps out a high-pitched alarm call. Learning from the Belding's, we can see what we must do in dark times. We can sound warnings, offer protection, make together a place of safety, and find the sustenance we need in our season of warm sunlight. To take on these responsibilities, in such times, is nothing more or less than to seek the special form that love must take in these times if we are to survive.
Mountain Chickadee
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter studies the mountain chickadees of the Sierra Nevada. Using sophisticated acoustic analyses, observant biologists have learned that the songs of mountain chickadees at higher elevations are different—in the timing and frequency of their notes—from the songs of their kin dwelling lower down. Such distinctions may signal to prospective mates their fitness for the rigors of high country living. In addition, the high elevation mountain chickadee's hippocampus—a region of the brain associated with spatial memory—is larger and more neuron-dense than that of its lowland relative, giving them a superior ability to find cached stores of seed—a life-saving skill at high elevations where conditions are harshest. The chickadee is just like the improbable life that moves in us when things are at their worst. If we listen, we can attend to an interior world that holds and concentrates all the beauties of the natural world.
Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog
Authors: Nevle Richard J. , Nightingale Steven , Lanas Mattias
Published: January 2023

This chapter highlights the mountain yellow-legged frog—a frog of two species found in the high, clear streams and lakes speckling the Range of Light. Rana sierrae dwells in the Sierra north of Mather Pass and the Monarch Divide; whereas her sister species, the longer legged Rana mucosa, inhabits the range to the south—and a few pocket-sized refuges in California's Transverse and Peninsular ranges. In the 1970s, biologists began finding scores of emaciated, dying, and dead frogs in streams and lakes of the Sierra Nevada. The cause, which would not be discovered for at least two more decades, was the disease known as chytridiomycosis, or chytrid. As with that of any disappearing species, the fate of the mountain yellow-legged frog raises a briar-patch of ethical questions—regarding our responsibility to prevent its total annihilation from the face of the planet and the cost of measures needed to do so relative to other urgent environmental and humanitarian disasters.
At the Heart of Darkness
Authors: Exeler Franziska
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the wartime choices Belarusian people had to make under the extreme constraints of Nazi rule and the options offered by the Germans. It mentions the impossibility of keeping whatever life people had prior to the war. The chaotic transition from Soviet to German authority, the murder of Belarus's Jewish community, and the growth of the Soviet partisan movement showcase individual preferences and motivations, local dynamics of violence, and multicausal situational factors that forced individuals to make choices. The chapter expounds on the history of the Holocaust. It also covers how returning Soviet authorities were not concerned much about moral gray zones of occupations when judging a person's wartime behavior following the war.
Determining Guilt
Authors: Exeler Franziska
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the Soviet politics of retribution amidst the reconquest phase in 1941. It highlights how the Soviet authorities were determined to punish local participation in the atrocities of the Nazis. The prosecution of individuals involved with Germans correlates to the reaffirmation of Moscow's authority in former German-occupied regions. According to top secret reports sent to the Communist Party, the Soviet Union's punitive practices conflicted between ideological imperatives and pragmatic concerns. The tensions coincide with the treatment of former policemen-turned-partisans and the inconsistent treatment of people who worked under the Germans. The chapter clarifies that the prosecution of Soviet citizens accused of wartime treason took place in secret.
The Violent Production of Urban Divides
Authors: Jensen Steffen Bo , Hapal Karl
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores the production of Bagong Silang as a marginal space on the edge of the urban political economy where particular forms of social, gendered, and generational moralities emerged. It outlines the history of Bagong Silang to relate it to the continuing displacement of the urban poor in the light of the creeping encroachment of the “new” city. It also shows the extent to which violence and violent dislocation as critical events that have always been at the center of politics. The chapter describes the war on drugs as a specific critical event in a violent history and as one instantiation of a long history of violence in which polite society has waged something akin to war on the unwanted, the surplus people, of the Philippines. The chapter illustrates how displacement was central in producing a gendered and generational underclass of people in need of discipline.
Community Activism
Authors: Jensen Steffen Bo , Hapal Karl
Published: January 2023

This chapter describes the evolution of the popular struggle in Bagong Silang prior to, during, and after the establishment of the place through the history of community activists. In examining the struggle, the chapter illustrates the change from militant action to its erosion, and in some instances, co-optation. It also provides key insights regarding relationships that inform local politics and illustrates that while patron–client relationships persist, there is a constant echo of other, more egalitarian ways to imagine society. The chapter introduces and explores the life worlds of a series of central characters in Bagong Silang, like Emilio, Lita, and Arnel. In various forms, they have embodied the struggles and paradoxes of life in Bagong Silang for decades and continue to do so as they try to position themselves in Rodrigo Duterte's and the Philippine elite's drug war.
Imaginaries of Affirmation
Authors: Matlon Jordanna
Published: January 2023

This chapter looks at the emergence of the Black Atlantic as a self-referential category, and examines how it has played an important role in vindicating difference outside the register of whiteness. Tasked with subverting the most visible tools of negation, the chapter explores how the imaginaries of affirmation forged connections and borrowed across oceans to reinvent the meaning of Africanity and to transform the reified Black body into an essence of power and beauty—insisting as they did that representation cannot but be a political act. The chapter also analyses how hegemonic racial constructions compelled particular responses. It uncovers how claims to agency via a repertoire of colonial and Black Atlantic imaginaries, negated or affirmed, operated within this dialectic. These imaginaries formed subjectivities and inspired subcultures alongside social movements. The chapter puts this analysis of imaginaries in dialogue with the material conditions, spatial distinctions, and ideological framework that structured experiences of labor and manhood in Abidjan—in other words, the lived experience of racial capitalism for Abidjanais men.
Political Imaginaries
Authors: Matlon Jordanna
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates the Sorbonne, a predominantly male, nationalist, and pro-Gbagbo speakers' corner in Plateau, and the organization of orators who made it their place of work. Predominantly underemployed spectators and orators filled their otherwise idle time with Sorbonne activity. It was a protected space for Gbagboist autochthons to enact, by embracing the correct rhetoric and appurtenances, a hyperbole of modern manhood. The chapter then explores how a market iteration of the évolué ideal maintained a firm grip on men's aspirational identities and livelihood strategies. While socially and financially dependent on their political networks, orators aspired to enter the world of business as state-financed entrepreneurs in a postconflict Côte d'Ivoire. The chapter also looks at how the privileged relationship they had forged with the Gbagbo regime provided little steady work in the present. It unfolds how orators and audience members alike collapsed narratives of modernity, masculinity, and citizenship.
Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples
Authors: Edgar Adrienne
Published: January 2023

This book examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single “Soviet people.” Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, the book argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply “Soviet.” Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the “official” nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak “their own” native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. The book is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.
Dilemmas of Identity and Belonging
Authors: Edgar Adrienne
Published: January 2023

This chapter investigates the experiences and identities of the offspring of mixed marriages, analyzing the ways in which they coped with the expectation that every Soviet citizen would possess a single nationality. The chapter concentrates on the adult children of mixed marriages in Soviet Central Asia. For the most part, these were individuals born between the 1950s and the 1980s whose parents had crossed significant cultural and identity boundaries in order to form a family. The chapter talks about the children of Soviet mixed marriages that were unquestionably better off than their counterparts in many other parts of the world. The child of a mixed African-American and white couple in the United States who married in the 1950s would have faced severe discrimination in employment, housing, and education.
Building Hotels and Housing For The Rich and The Rest
Authors: Harp Stephen L.
Published: January 2023

This chapter discusses how mass tourism influenced both the hotel industry and the resulting housing options for local inhabitants on the French Riviera. All of France faced an acute housing shortage after World War II. On the Riviera, which saw comparatively less destruction during the war, the crisis in housing was nonetheless equally dire, due to the arrival of so many tourists whose money worked, in various ways, to make housing unaffordable for many locals. In a period when the Fourth Republic worked to guarantee French citizens the “right to comfort,” interpreted as a right to decent housing with modern conveniences, many locals on the Riviera waited several years for that comfort, in large part because tourists and second homeowners got it first. In considering the arrival of so many Europeans from the French empire, the chapter suggests the colonial and postcolonial nature of the postwar Riviera.
Reconstructing the Riviera, Sleeping in Squats and Shantytowns
Authors: Harp Stephen L.
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines squats and shantytowns on the French Riviera. While some French families had no option besides squatting in one of the villas or apartments abandoned by owners during the war, most had alternative housing by the end of the 1950s. The situation was worse for the North African workers who had gotten jobs building the new hotels, apartments, and public housing complexes. Many had no option besides squats or shantytowns until the 1970s. The chapter tracks their housing options as well as their work. It highlights a contradiction as the men who built new housing struggled to find lodging. The chapter establishes a backdrop for the other chapters, as North African workers were equally critical in the other construction projects that transformed the postwar Riviera—even though they did not appear in the imagined Riviera of tourist accounts or tourist propaganda, let alone subsequent popular histories.
Remaking Roads and Disciplining Drivers
Authors: Harp Stephen L.
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on automobiles, which brought relatively few tourists to Nice in 1946; they brought most by 1975. In the process, the promenade des Anglais in Nice and the Croisette in Cannes grew wider and longer in order to accommodate ever more traffic. As tourists arrived by car, concerns about aesthetics forced moves of junkyards and dumps that suddenly seemed like eyesores for tourists' gaze. Noise and air pollution became important concerns for citizens and local governments. To facilitate access to the Riviera, the area received France's first postwar autoroute. Its extension in 1976 along the Var River bed led to the destruction of France's last large shantytown. Here North African workers had made their home for twenty years, as they worked on the airport, the autoroute, and other construction projects in western Nice.
Introduction
Authors: Carroll Christina B.
Published: January 2023

This chapter provides an overview of the landscape of French political culture in the nineteenth century. It tackles the concept of empires and republics. Moreover, the transition between the Second Empire and the Third Republic also provides new insights into the relationship between republicanism, liberalism, and empire, which has been the focus of most existing scholarship on French understandings of empire. The chapter looks into the influence of varying texts like political speeches and novels in the discussion of the continental empire and colonial empires. It examines the French representations of the empire being affected by the longstanding internal political conflicts because discourses of European racial superiority over colonial others intersected with older arguments about the ideal organization of the French state.
Expeditions and Expansion between Algeria and Senegal
Authors: Carroll Christina B.
Published: January 2023

This chapter tackles the dynamics of exploration and colonial expansion. It considers how coverage of expeditions and technocratic projects, such as the Trans-Saharan railroad, popularized the idea of colonial expansion and simultaneously transformed debates over the notion of empires. Throughout the 1870s and the 1880s, the structure of the French conversation about the empire was designed to exclude colonial subjects in both Algeria and Senegal. The attempts to reconfigure the colonial empire had limited success since representations of exploration were unstable, and numerous state-funded expeditions in the 1870s and early 1880s ended in disaster. The chapter considers the growing literature on theorizing colonization in the early Third Republic.
Conclusion
Authors: Carroll Christina B.
Published: January 2023

This chapter looks into the imperial paradoxes of French republicanism. It highlights how French understandings of Napoleon III's notion of empire remained contested and fraught throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The collapse of the Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War further sharpened republicans' criticisms of the empire. The chapter elaborates on the political concerns surrounding the concept of empire and republicanism. Moreover, the debates about empire struck significant consequences for French understanding of the nation and national identity. The chapter also cites the rise of the term “colonial empire” to refer to France's overseas colonies before republicans attempted to rearticulate its definition to correlate better with the republic, the nation, and overseas territory.
From Berenstadt to Boston
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This chapter takes a look at Horace Kallen's formative years. Horace Kallen was born in Berenstadt, Germany (today Poland), in 1882. Five years later, his family immigrated to Boston's North End, an immigrant neighborhood first populated by the Irish and later by Jews and Italians. Kallen's childhood thus encompassed his journey from Old World to New. The young Kallen encountered ideas, embraced them, fought with them, lived them. Years before he developed the term cultural pluralism in 1924, he had already enjoyed a multitude of experiences that he would use to fashion his ideas on diversity. Friendship, however, did not appear to be one of them.
The Talented among the Tenth
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This chapter takes a look at how Alain Locke developed his cultural and political sensitivities through his childhood and education. Well educated and middle class, Locke belonged to what was known as “the Black Bourgeoisie.” Additionally, the chapter shows that while he was a philosopher and a lover of wisdom, he also loved culture and refused to be placed in a box. From his earliest days, he yearned for the knowledge experience brings. Shaped by his background, Locke refused to be limited by it. Instead, he used it as a springboard to a richer, more cosmopolitan existence, an existence colored by his unique interpretation of his African American ancestry.
Locke and Kallen, Student and Teacher
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This chapter considers the fateful encounter between Alain Locke and Horace Kallen during an academic discussion. They had met the previous year, but this time Kallen was the teacher, and Locke his pupil. The chapter reveals how these conversations in an academic setting led to the development of the friendship between Kallen and Locke and, from that friendship, the idea of cultural pluralism. It shows that Kallen and Locke maintained their elitist sensibilities, but like so many American elitists before them, they believed in an aristocracy of “merit,” a purportedly objective standard. At Harvard, Kallen and Locke would first judge each other worthy of respect as individuals. The assistant system made that relationship possible. Eventually they would become friends.
Plural in Culture, Universal in Religion
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This chapter examines how the religious trajectory of Horace Kallen and Alain Locke, parallel if not linked, demonstrates the secular nature of their cultural pluralism. For both men, the world of culture was the world of the particular, vast and diverse. Religion existed in a variety of forms, but they all led to individualized experiences of the ineffable. Their version of religion was the idea of unity amid the diversity of humankind. This perspective led Locke to the Baha'i faith. For Kallen, it emerged in an acceptance of religious experience. Both men feared elements of mainstream religion, especially the absolutism, rigidity, and rejection of pluralism that Locke saw in Christianity and Kallen saw in Catholicism and in Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Their idiosyncratic views of religion reinforced their ideas of cultural pluralism.
Locke’s Legacy, Kallen’s Memory
Authors: Weinfeld David
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores Alain Locke's legacy and Horace Kallen's perspective on their friendship. It reveals Kallen's version of Locke's story: Locke as the “first black ‘cultural pluralist’” and “authentic Zionist.” It is unclear whether Locke would have accepted either of these designations. Yet Kallen's recollections, expressed only a few months before his death, point back to his description of the origins of cultural pluralism, that the term emerged from his youthful conversations with his student and then friend Locke at Harvard and Oxford. By recasting Locke as a reincarnated pluralist, Kallen presented his friend's intellectual development as the mirror image of his own, from Spinozistic monism to racialized pluralism to modern, rooted cosmopolitanism. By lauding Locke's contribution to the development of cultural pluralism, Kallen validated his overcoming the Eurocentrism of his youth. Locke's advancement of Black culture became a means to a Kallenist end.
Western Self-Contempt
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This book travels through civilizations since antiquity, examining major political events and the literature of ancient Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and the United States, to study evidence of cultural self-hatred and its cyclical recurrence. The book explores oikophobia, described by its coiner Sir Roger Scruton as “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’,” in its political and philosophical applications. The book analyzes the theories behind oikophobia along with their historical sources, revealing why oikophobia is best described as a cultural malaise that befalls civilizations during their declining days. The book gives a framework for why today's society is so fragmented and self-critical. It demonstrates that oikophobia is the antithesis of xenophobia. By this definition, the US riots and civil unrest in the summer of 2020 were an expression of oikophobia. Excessive political correctness that attacks tradition and history is an expression of oikophobia. The book argues that if we are to understand these behaviors and attitudes, we must understand oikophobia as a sociohistorical phenomenon. The book is a systematic analysis of oikophobia, combining political philosophy and history to examine how Western civilizations and cultures evolve from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to states of self-loathing and decline. Concluding with a philosophical portrait of an increasingly interconnected Western civilization, the book reveals how past events and ideologies, both in the United States and in Europe, have led to a modern culture of self-questioning and self-rejection.
Introduction
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This chapter heads back to the beginnings of the West and travels through time and space up to the present day. It reveals the cyclicality of societies through history and philosophical trends, among which oikophobia appears and reappears. As the chapter highlights, the simplest way of defining “oikophobia” is to state that it is the opposite extreme of xenophobia. Oikophobia means the fear or hatred of home or one's own society. It argues that oikophobia and xenophobia are pathologies of a cultural sort, which develop in particular sociohistorical circumstances. The chapter also stresses that oikophobia is a natural outgrowth of the way cultures, and certainly Western cultures, develop. The chapter links several disparate strands of thought in order to increase our overall understanding of oikophobia and of our Western culture that gives rise to it. It examines why oikophobia is a type of decadence or “falling off” once we will have looked at the historical circumstances under which it tends to arise.
Oikophobia in Ancient Greece
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This chapter emphasizes that Western civilization rests on two pillars: the Greco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian. Noting that the West begins with Greece, the chapter traces the first clear case of oikophobia. It delves into the period of the city-states, because apart from archaeological remains, the culture of the so-called Mycenaean Greeks survives only in the tales told by Homer several centuries later, in the Iliad and Odyssey, and these are only weak reflections of that culture. The chapter then analyses how Archaic Greeks developed and moved slowly from myth to science and rationalism through the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers in the sixth and early fifth centuries BC. The chapter reveals a repetitive pattern, namely that with wealth comes an unwillingness to die for one's civilization, and with that unwillingness, oikophobia goes hand in hand. The chapter elaborates on the first very clear trace of oikophobia that appears in the later Classical era: in the time of Socrates and his entourage.
Oikophobia as Relativism
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This chapter explores how arriving immigrants in Europe, which come from more universalist cultures, slowly marginalized the scraps of cultural truth remaining in a far more relativist European society. It argues that both relativism and oikophobia follow from a society's success, noting that relativism becomes the easiest hook by which oikophobia can attach itself to the Zeitgeist and become profuse. The chapter then shifts to dissect a few features of relativism as it applies in a social context, that is cultural and moral issues. It elaborates on the most obvious and therefore oft-repeated, logical protest against relativism. And that is that it falls by its own logic, as a sort of liar's paradox. As the chapter highlights, even though relativism claims the truths of all cultures to be of equal value, relativism is itself a Western idea. Because of this very specific cultural and philosophical background, the chapter underlines that relativism must itself be labeled as a sort of ethnocentrism, precisely that which the relativists purport to be rejecting. It concludes by considering many facets of relativism that make it tempting and attractive as a society moves toward oikophobia.
Oikophobia in Rome
Authors: Beckeld Benedict
Published: January 2023

This chapter focuses on the next great Western people of culture, the Romans. In the rise of their monarchy and subsequently of their republic, the chapter chronicles how the Romans gain a sense of their own power. The chapter discusses the Romans first major contacts with the Greeks. These events are a cultural turning point in the Romans' meddling in the affairs of other peoples, and roughly mark the time when Greek culture begins to influence the Roman elite. The chapter also describes a conservative and even xenophobic reaction as the cultural influence of Greece makes itself felt. It shows the paradigmatic example of the conservative Roman at this time: Cato the Elder, Rome's first significant prose writer. As this peak of Roman power comes and goes, the chapter unveils how a stage of nascent oikophobia naturally sets in. With the attainment of enough wealth and power to afford a large and largely permanent leisure class, and at least some leisure even for the middle classes, oikophobia slowly arrives. The chapter investigates one example of the Roman oikophobe during the empire: Seneca the Younger (first two-thirds of the first century AD), who harbors the regret regarding past depravities that every civilization comes to feel once it has exhausted itself.