RIGHTS HELD
All rights in all languages except audio, motion picture, radio and television
AUTHOR Rob Nixon
TITLE Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
CATEGORY literature monograph
NUMBER OF PAGES 164 6 halftones PUBLICATION MONTH June
AUTHOR BIO Rob Nixon was born in South Africa in 1954. Educated at Rhodes University, the University of Iowa and Columbia University, he is now Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He the author of three books, most recently Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy published by Picador in 2000.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Through detailed environmentalist readings of a range of postcolonial writers, Rob Nixon brings environmental and postcolonial literatures into a dialogue that is long overdue and shows how postcolonial literary studies can transform our understanding of paradigmatic environmental literature, and vice versa, with profound intellectual and pedagogic consequences.
We are accustomed to conceiving of violence in terms that are immediate, explosive and instantly visible. But events like climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, biomagnification, ocean acidification, and the lethal environmental aftermaths of wars cause violence that is delayed and elusive.
In this book, Rob Nixon argues that we need urgently to rethink politically, theoretically, and imaginatively the relative invisibility of such calamities whose fatal repercussions are neither spectacularly immediate nor instantaneous, but dispersed across space and postponed across time. He addresses the need for environmentalists to find ways to devise arresting stories and symbols adequate to the elusive violence of delayed effects.
RIGHTS HELD
All rights in all languages
AUTHOR Martha C. Nussbaum
TITLE Creating Capabilities The Human Development Approach
CATEGORY philosophy trade
NUMBER OF PAGES 228 PUBLICATION MONTH March
AUTHOR BIO Martha Nussbaum was born in New York City. Educated at NYU and Harvard University she is now Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. She is the author of a number of books including Frontiers of Justice published by HUP in 2005 and translated into both complex and simplified character Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
This book outlines the new theoretical paradigm that has come to be known as the "human development approach" or the "human capabilities" approach which, for Nussbaum, is connected to the idea of "a basic level of social justice where a decent society is one that will deliver to all its citizens a basic threshold level of a group of Central Human Capabilities." Martha Nussbaum has, together with Amartya Sen, created a new theoretical paradigm in the developing world that has come to be known as “the human capabilities approach”. For Professor Nussbaum, the use of this approach is connected to the idea of a basic level of social justice. A decent society is one that will deliver to all its citizens a basic threshold level of a group of Central Human Capabilities.
In this book, she enumerates these central human capabilities and why they are essential human rights for all people throughout the world. She then elaborates on how such rights can be framed as constitutional entitlements that will ensure social justice and defends then against other philosophical approaches and diverse cultural customs. She moves from the approach of striving for justice in the nation to using the approach across national lines with a goal of global justice.
RIGHTS HELD
All rights in all languages
AUTHOR Julia Ott
TITLE When Wall Street Met Main Street The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy
CATEGORY history monograph
NUMBER OF PAGES 334 29 halftones, 2 maps, 1 graph PUBLICATION MONTH June
AUTHOR BIO Julia Ott was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1974. Educated at Princeton and Yale she is now Assistant Professor in the History of Capitalism at Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research in New York. This is her first book.
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Brings together business, social, political, and cultural history in order to tell the story of how Wall Street was transformed from the repository of the money of the very rich into that of the dreams and savings of most working Americans.
Floundering retirement accounts, high rates of unemployment, and staggering bail-out bills have made Americans keenly aware of the enormous impact of financial securities markets and institutions on the economic well-being of the nation and its citizenry. How did financial markets and institutions – commonly understood as marginal at the beginning of the twentieth century – first come to be seen as the bedrock of American capitalism? How did stock market investment – once perceived as disreputable and dangerous – first become a mass practice?
When Wall Street Met Main Street tells the story of how Americans’ relationships with the financial securities markets were transformed in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Between the rise of the giant industrial corporation and the Great Crash of 1929, first the federal government, then corporations and financial institutions campaigned to universalize investment not simply to raise new capital, but to pursue particular political goals. As these distributors of stocks and bonds established this first broad, national market for financial securities, they transformed the culture and politics of the United States.
At the dawn of the industrial age, the United States experienced economic consolidation, financial volatility, pronounced inequality, surging immigration, class conflict, and a reduction in the ranks of independent proprietors. Fearing for the future of democracy, first the federal government, next certain corporations, and finally, financial institutions took deliberate steps to promote bond and stock ownership. These securities distributors and their ideological allies envisioned that broad-based investment would reconcile corporate capitalism with traditional political ideals that held property ownership to be the foundation of citizenship and the route to social mobility and economic independence. Even so, disagreements arose over the role of the government in promoting investment, directing financial capital, and regulating the financial system to protect citizen-investors. At stake were fundamental questions about the distribution of economic power and the meaning of citizenship under modern capitalism.
Corporations and financial firms pitted mass investment against the welfare state and labor unions, asserting that laissez-faire financial securities markets best distribute economic risk and promote economic growth, equity, and security. In contrast, progressives demanded regulation to encourage widespread investment. Ultimately, this logic gave birth to New Deal securities regulation. The financial crisis that began in 2008 revived debate over the proper role of government in the financial markets. By recovering the full range of the conversation around mass investment during its first incarnation, When Wall Street Met Main Street enriches contemporary debates over economic reform.
Share with your friends: |