Fordham University Press – serie

George Washington: Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Leader is a revised edition of the author's George Washington, published in 1979. Totally updated to include the author's extensive research conducted in the intervening two decades, the book is a concise but complete biography of Washington as gentleman planter, colonial rebel, American general, and U.S. president. The book provides a full and even-handed portrait of the first president, with special emphasis on how he took his rather commonplace talents and transformed them with self-discipline into extraordinary leadership in a time of turmoil. The book pays special attention to Washington's struggles during the Revolution and his tenure as president and deals with his gradual conversion from advocate of nonpartisan politics to a strict Federalist. This book synthesizes the current research in a readable style that affords the general reader an understanding of Washington's special character and his vital role in the making of the United States.

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a "macroscosmic journey" of the individual sleeper to "the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides." Benjamin's effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history.The "passages" are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin's effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin's later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin's undertaking.

In Teaching Bodies, leading scholar of Christian thought Mark D. Jordan offers an original reading of the Summa of Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Reading backward, Jordan interprets the main parts of the Summa, starting from the conclusion, to reveal how Thomas teaches morals by directing attention to the way God teaches morals, namely through embodied scenes: the incarnation, the gospels, and the sacraments. It is Thomas's confidence in bodily scenes of instruction that explains the often overlooked structure of the middle part of the Summa, which begins and ends with Christian revisions of classical exhortations of the human body as a pathway to the best human life. Among other things, Jordan argues, this explains Thomas's interest in the stages of law and the limits of virtue as the engine of human life.Rather than offer a synthesis of Thomistic ethics, Jordan insists that we read Thomas as theology to discover the unification of Christian wisdom in a pattern of ongoing moral formation. Jordan supplements his close readings of the Summa with reflections on Thomas's place in the history of Christian moral teaching—and thushis relevance for teaching and writing in the present. What remains a puzzle is why Thomas chose to stage this incarnational moral teaching within the then-new genres of university disputation—the genres we think of as "Scholastic." Yet here again the structure of the Summa provides an answer. In Jordan's deft analysis, Thomas's minimalist refusal to tell a new story except by juxtaposing selections from inherited philosophical and theological traditions is his way of opening room for God's continuing narration in the development of the human soul.The task of writing theology, as Thomas understands it, is to open a path through the inherited languages of classical thought so that divine pedagogy can have its effect on the reader. As such, the task of the Summa, in Mark Jordan's hands, is a crucial and powerful way to articulate Christian morals today.

A critical engagement with and interrogation of the dominant tropes of racial violenceThis volume brings together a diverse cohort of contributors working to trace the genealogies, geographies, and the entanglements of anti-Asian violence. Representing a range of critical perspec­tives, these essays—a collection of works by scholars, students, and community organizers—open up lines of inquiry that unsettle the taken-for-granted framings of anti-Asian violence as simply a matter of ""hate.""Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence makes crucial connections enabled by transnational, inter­sectional, comparative, and critical lenses, collectively interrogating the complex linkages between imperialist and settler colonial histories, modalities of violence, and the geopolitical formation of Asia and Asianness.Working through and between a range of critical frameworks, including but not limited to the Black radical tradition, feminist and queer critiques, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, critical pedagogies, and the anti-caste movement, this volume provides an original and layered interven­tion that strives to complicate the discourse of anti-Asian violence and attends to the multiple and different ways Asia and its diasporas can be located in relation to varied permutations of violence.Importantly and powerfully, the insights offered in Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence point toward the possibilities for solidarities and movement-building across racial, ethnic, class, and gendered lines in the contemporary moment.

A critical engagement with and interrogation of the dominant tropes of racial violenceThis volume brings together a diverse cohort of contributors working to trace the genealogies, geographies, and the entanglements of anti-Asian violence. Representing a range of critical perspec­tives, these essays—a collection of works by scholars, students, and community organizers—open up lines of inquiry that unsettle the taken-for-granted framings of anti-Asian violence as simply a matter of ""hate.""Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence makes crucial connections enabled by transnational, inter­sectional, comparative, and critical lenses, collectively interrogating the complex linkages between imperialist and settler colonial histories, modalities of violence, and the geopolitical formation of Asia and Asianness.Working through and between a range of critical frameworks, including but not limited to the Black radical tradition, feminist and queer critiques, Indigenous and decolonial perspectives, critical pedagogies, and the anti-caste movement, this volume provides an original and layered interven­tion that strives to complicate the discourse of anti-Asian violence and attends to the multiple and different ways Asia and its diasporas can be located in relation to varied permutations of violence.Importantly and powerfully, the insights offered in Intimacies of Anti-Asian Violence point toward the possibilities for solidarities and movement-building across racial, ethnic, class, and gendered lines in the contemporary moment.

Not mere biological entities, bodies are conceptual and political battlegrounds, either instruments of domination or avenues of liberation. Throughout history and across cultures, bodies have been used to express social, racial, class, and gender differences. They have also been imagined as means: means for reproducing life and labor, means understood to be inscribed within a ""natural"" order. This concept has run through the entire history of Western metaphysics and culture, and its persistence and development has contributed to the establishment of cultural and political dominance by Western rationality and the white men who conceived it.This book asks us to reconsider the theoretical and political power of means in relation to bodies. Stimilli problematizes the role of means in a hypertechnological era in which politics has come to be seen merely as administration, with no pretence of elaborating higher meanings or purposes. Are means, she asks, truly instruments subordinate to purposes unrelated to them, or could they be something else?In a philosophical investigation into the meaning of means, Stimilli elaborates the political power of bodies as means, arguing that they are never neutral and lie at the origin of collective phenomena whose potential is still to be explored. From the United States to South America and Europe, from North Africa to the Middle East and beyond, bodies are at the center of enormous transnational and intersectional movements as non-instrumental means for new forms of social reproduction. A new sexuation of the world is now the order of the day.

Not mere biological entities, bodies are conceptual and political battlegrounds, either instruments of domination or avenues of liberation. Throughout history and across cultures, bodies have been used to express social, racial, class, and gender differences. They have also been imagined as means: means for reproducing life and labor, means understood to be inscribed within a ""natural"" order. This concept has run through the entire history of Western metaphysics and culture, and its persistence and development has contributed to the establishment of cultural and political dominance by Western rationality and the white men who conceived it.This book asks us to reconsider the theoretical and political power of means in relation to bodies. Stimilli problematizes the role of means in a hypertechnological era in which politics has come to be seen merely as administration, with no pretence of elaborating higher meanings or purposes. Are means, she asks, truly instruments subordinate to purposes unrelated to them, or could they be something else?In a philosophical investigation into the meaning of means, Stimilli elaborates the political power of bodies as means, arguing that they are never neutral and lie at the origin of collective phenomena whose potential is still to be explored. From the United States to South America and Europe, from North Africa to the Middle East and beyond, bodies are at the center of enormous transnational and intersectional movements as non-instrumental means for new forms of social reproduction. A new sexuation of the world is now the order of the day.