Rethinking America

Jeff Maskovsky teaches Anthropology and Urban Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author most recently of New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverishment in the United States (NYU 2001). Ida Susser is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include Wounded Cities (Berg 2003, coedited with Jane Schneider).

“This book helps us to understand a relatively neglected aspect of contemporary American imperialism: its antidemocratic impact on policies and institutions within the United States. This is engaged anthropology at its best—well-informed, compassionate, and intelligently argued. Important reading for our times.” —Talal Asad, City University of New York “Jeff Maskovsky and Ida Susser have brought together fine essays that explore the multifaceted interconnections between U.S. imperialist aggression abroad and our increasingly distorted domestic political economy. The imperial power has produced, they say, an imperial homeland, economically, politically, and culturally. We need to read this book.” —Frances Fox Piven

• Introduction, Jeff Maskovsky, Ida Susser; Part I Human Rights and Imperialism at Home and Away; Chapter 1 U.S. Foreign Military Bases, Catherine Lutz; Chapter 2 JROTC and Latina/o Youth in Neoliberal Cities, Gina Pérez; Chapter 3 Human Rights in the Imperial Heartland, Sally Engle Merry; Chapter 4 Torture Is US, Lesley Gill; Chapter 5 Imperial Moralities, Ida Susser; Part II Twenty-First-Century Culture Wars; Chapter 6 Whose Homeland?, Micaela di Leonardo; Chapter 7 Home Front, August Carbonella; Chapter 8 “Ghetto Fabulous” in the Imperial United States, Roopali Mukherjee; Part III Governance in the Age of Preemptive War; Chapter 9 Torture and the Biopolitics of Race, Dorothy Roberts; Chapter 10 “Fragmented” Security, Jeff Maskovsky, Hilary Cunningham; Chapter 11 Republic of Fear, Roger N. Lancaster; Chapter 12 Liberal Social Democracy, Neoliberalism, and Neoconservatism, Don Robotham; Part IV Coercion and Class in an Era of Insecurity; Chapter 13 “In Harm’s Way”, Sandra Morgen; Chapter 14 The United States and the Underworld System, Jane Schneider, Peter Schneider; Chapter 15 One Big Labor Market, Jane Collins; Chapter 16 What’s Wrong with the U.S. Immigration Debate?, Peter Kwong;