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Ethnic Mobilization in World Politics: The Primordial Perspective
John F. Stack, Jr.
This volume is a contribution to the already large body of literature analyzing ethnicity throughout the world. While no theory of ethnic mobilization or the politicization of ethnonationalism is proposed here, it may be helpful to highlight a number of recent conceptual contributions to the study of ethnicity. Although neglected in most of the recent literature, the concept of primordial attachments as defined by Clifford Geertz is a useful perspective from which to analyze the dynamics of ethnicity throughout the world.
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Immigration and the Politics of Ethnicity and Class in Metropolitan Miami
John F. Stack, Jr.
Miami is an urban area that had long been referred to by its boosters as “the magic city." In the 1980s, however, more people have come to refer to this metropolitan area as "paradise lost."
In virtually all discussion and analysis of the changes that have affected the Miami area, immigration has invariably been given primary attention. This chapter explores the effects of immigration on the politics of metro- politan Miami. Our purpose is to analyze how increasing ethnic and so- cioeconomic heterogeneity, which patterns of immigration have created, poses special political and economic problems affecting the governance of the greater Miami area. These problems are analyzed with regard to (1) the area's changing demography, (2) the origin and structure of Dade County's unique two-tiered government, (3) patterns of participation, and (4) the resultant character of local government decision making.
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American Foreign Policy in an Era of Transition
John F. Stack, Jr.
As this book goes to press five events during the last year dramatically illustrate the challenges confronting American foreign policy in the 1980s: the British-Argentine War in the South Atlantic, the Israeli battles with Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, upheaval in Central America, the 1982 Versailles Summit of Western heads-of-state, and the peril of nuclear war. The fierce fighting in the Falkland/Malvinas Islands, and in Lebanon, as well as increasing military activities in Central America underscore the delicate balance of forces that separates war from peace-a precarious balance found in nearly every region of the world. The economic summit in Paris and President Reagan's subsequent visit to England, Italy, West Germany, and Belgium document the unprecedented levels of interdependence in economics, politics, and military affairs that bind the United States to the West, and Western Europe to America. Thus, the realities of war and peace in a world characterized by increasing patterns of mutual dependence in the West and elsewhere throughout the world suggest the crucial choices confronting the makers of United States foreign policy. In the Falklands War, U.S. diplomatic initiatives attempted to balance the geopolitical and economic significance of Latin America against traditional American cultural and political ties to Great Britain. In the case of Israel, the United States must weigh its thirty-four year commitment to the sovereignty of that state against its commitment to the political and economic stability of the Middle East. Increasing guerrilla activities in El Salvador and Honduras also raise disturbing questions about appropriate political and military Involvement in a Third World country. Fear of a Soviet-Cuban Communist insurgency in Latin America and the Caribbean stand in sharp contrast to fears of a new Vietnam-like involvement in the jungles of Central America. Simultaneously, the economic summit at Versailles demonstrated that while there are no unilateral solutions to the West's problems of inflation, currency stability, and balance-of-payments,. meaningful multi· lateral cooperation continues to be elusive. The complexities and ambiguities symbolized by these events are magnified ten-fold when one considers the full extent of United States global interests. The prospects of nuclear annihilation and the destruction of human civilization in the West and perhaps the world has mobilized significant segments of public opinion in the United States and Europe. But the international system constitutes only part of the foreign policy-making process.
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Is There A Text In This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
Stanley Fish
Fish begins by examining the relation between a reader and a text, arguing against the formalist belief that the text alone is the basic, knowable, neutral, and unchanging component of literary experience. But in arguing for the right of the reader to interpret and in effect create the literary work, he skillfully avoids the old trap of subjectivity. To claim that each reader essentially participates in the making of a poem or novel is not, he shows, an invitation to unchecked subjectivity and to the endless proliferation of competing interpretations. For each reader approaches a literary work not as an isolated individual but as part of a community of readers. “Indeed,” he writes, “it is interpretive communities, rather than either the text or reader, that produce meanings.”
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International Conflict in an American City : Boston's Irish, Italians, and Jews, 1935-1944
John F. Stack, Jr.
This is a study of the Irish, Italians, and Jews of Boston as they reacted to a number of issues of the 1930s and 1940s fascism, Nazism, anti-Semitism, isolationism, and the coming of World War II. Its basic argument is that the international system served as a catalyst for the outbreak of ethnic conflict among Boston's Irish, Italians, and Jews. This study takes issue with the traditional notion that world politics is exclusively comprised of over one hundred and fifty sovereign, indivisible, and independent entities called states. Rather, it argues that world politics in the twentieth century is a patchwork of actors that include states as well as nongovernmental organizations such as multinational corporations and ethnic groups. Because ethnicity transcends the boundaries of states, ethnic, groups may become directly involved in world politics.
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Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature
Stanley Fish
Esteemed as the foremost theoretical statement and practical criticism of 17th-century texts from the standpoint of reader response. The artifacts of the title are Plato's Paedrus, Augustine's On Christian Doctrine, Donne's Death's Durell, Bacon's Essays, Herbert's The Temple, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Burton's The Anaotomy of Melancholy, Milton's The Reason of Church Government, and Browne's Religio Medici. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
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