This book offers an account of the swiftly developing discipline of contemporary literary theory, and of its consequences for future literary study.

The controversy over Jacques Derrida's legacy is one of the most effective engines driving the contemporary debate, far beyond the bounds of philosophy. By now, the variety of contesting positions is so wide that it calls for a critical assessment to achieve a unified theoretical scheme. The dyad of deconstruction and reconstruction, to which the title of the volume refers, aims at composing a kind of map of this debate. The three sections of the book include essays that investigate specific aspects of Derrida's reception, from the view of 1. philosophy, 2. literary studies and 3. politics and law. These contributions study the implications of deconstruction beyond its original scope and intervene by taking stock of its most relevant aporias.

Agamben’s thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically, and often implicitly) the work of Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor. The book begins by examining the development of Agamben’s key concepts—infancy, Voice, potentiality—from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and shows how these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts of Derrida. The second part examines the political turn in Agamben’s and Derrida’s thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

This new edition of Drucilla Cornell's highly acclaimed book includes a substantial new introduction by the author, which situates the book within current feminist debates. In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a container that curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy. In response to these movements, Beyond Accommodation strives to broaden the scope of feminist theory by articulating a platform, under the concept of relative universalism, which proposes the idea that women are not a unified and homogenous group although they are positioned as women in patriarchy. Cornell's theory allows for differences in women's situations without giving up on the idea that women are fighting a common phenomenon called patriarchy.

A highly original reading of Heidegger in light of the deconstruction movement and the work of philosophers including Derrida, Marx, Lacan and Zizek.

How do socially constructed concepts of race dominate and limit understandings and practices of multicultural education? Since race is socially constructed, how do we deconstruct it? In this important book Mahiri argues that multicultural education needs to move beyond racial categories defined and sustained by the ideological, social, political, and economic forces of white supremacy. Exploring contemporary and historical scholarship on race, the emergence of multiculturalism, and the rise of the digital age, the author investigates micro-cultural practices and provides a compelling framework for understanding the diversity of individuals and groups. Descriptions and analysis from ethnographic interviews reveal how people’s continually evolving, highly distinctive, micro-cultural identities and affinities provide understandings of diversity not captured within assigned racial categories. Synthesizing the scholarship and interview findings, the final chapter connects the play of micro-cultures in people’s lives to a needed shift in how multicultural education uses race to frame and comprehend diversity and identity and provides pedagogical examples of how this shift can look in teaching practices. “Jabari Mahiri’s superb Deconstructing Race is the best modern book on multiculturalism in education. More than that, it can be the beginning of a vital transformation of the field and of our views about diversity.‘ —James Paul Gee, Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Regents’ Professor, Arizona State University "Deconstructing Race provides a framework for a new American narrative on race based on irrefutable research and inspirational evidence." —Yvette Jackson, chief executive officer of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education

"Double rethinking" seeks to rethink time in terms of our experience of it and attempts to rethink our selves in terms of the results of that initial rethinking. This book undertakes a critical reformulation of the project through discussions of Derrida, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger.