Superfluous People describes Hannah Arendt's political and philosophical views on Nazi totalitarianism and the Shoah. In her contemplation of evil, Arendt initially spoke of the Shoah as a 'radical evil, ' a term used by Kant. However, unlike Kant, Arendt's radical evil cannot be explained by human motives. Many years later she changed her mind and spoke of 'the banality of evil, ' characterized by an inability to think and judge. Superfluous People seriously considers the question of whether thinking and judging can prevent ev

Inspiring oral history of the impact of cultural and educational exchange between South Africa and the United States during apartheid. For almost forty years, under the watchful eye of the apartheid regime, some three thousand South Africans participated in cultural and educational exchange with the United States. Exposure to American democracy brought hope during a time when social and political change seemed unlikely. In the end the process silently triumphed over the resistance of authorities, and many of the individuals who participated in the program later participated in South Africa’s first democratic elections, in 1994, and now occupy key positions in academia, the media, parliament, and the judiciary. In Outsmarting Apartheid, Daniel Whitman, former Program Development Officer at the US Embassy in Pretoria, interviews the South Africans and Americans who administered, advanced, and benefited from government-funded exchange. The result is a detailed account of the workings and effectiveness of the US Information Agency and a demonstration of the value of “soft power” in easing democratic transition in a troubled area. “Outsmarting Apartheid is a major contribution to the study of ‘soft diplomacy.’ It is a wonderful picture of how the public diplomacy section of an embassy works and the positive impact it can have on advancing US interests. The detail of daily life under apartheid for South Africans of all races is fascinating and will become more important as memories of that period recede.” — John Campbell, author of Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink, Updated Edition “This book fills an important void in the literature—it provides great insight, from the point of view of actual participants, in the dismantling of apartheid and the construction of a postapartheid democratic system in South Africa.” — John Mukum Mbaku, author of Corruption in Africa: Causes, Consequences, and Cleanups

This monograph deals with the figurative and symbolic system in the novel “Oblomov” by I. A. Goncharov: it presents different interpretations of the image of Oblomov, demonstrates its complexity, organic combination of the typical and the individual. The author reveals the most significant artistic techniques of creating characters, typical for the novel and for the writer’s individual style in general. The study gives aesthetic characteristics of the novel characters, defines their artistic role and reveals polysemanticism in the novel structure. The “Supplement” presents a reflective hero in Russian literature and Soviet cinema (from Onegin and Oblomov to Zilov). The characteristic features of the literary type of “superfluous person” are highlighted in N. Mikhalkov’s film “A Few Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov,” as well as in A. Vampilov’s play “Duck Hunting” and in its film adaptation “Vacation in September,” directed by V. Melnikov. The monograph is addressed to teachers and pupils, professors and students of philological faculties, as well as to everyone who reads and loves literature.

Prison Nation is a distant dispatch from a foreign and forbidden place--the world of America's prisons. Written by prisoners, social critics and luminaries of investigative reporting, Prison Nation testifies to the current state of America's prisoners' living conditions and political concerns. These concerns are not normally the concerns of most Americans, but they should be. From substandard medical care the inadequacy of resources for public defenders to the death penalty, the issues covered in this volume grow more urgent every day. Articles by outstanding writers such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Noam Chomsky, Mark Dow, Judy Green, Tracy Huling and Christian Parenti chronicle the injustices of prison privatization, class and race in the justice system, our quixotic drug war, the rarely discussed prison AIDS crisis and a judicial system that rewards mostly those with significant resources or the desire to name names. Correctional facilities have become a profitable growth industry, for companies like Wackenhut that run them and companies like Boeing that use cheap prison labor. With fascinating narratives, shocking tales and small stories of hope, Prison Nation paints a picture of a world many Americans know little or nothing about.

This fifth and final volume of Joseph Frank's biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky details the last decade of the writer's life, a time that won him the universal approval towards which he always aspired.

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living. Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism. This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth. Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.

Welchen Beitrag kann eine humanistische Pädagogik im Kontext einer Migrationsgesellschaft leisten? Den defizitorientierten Assimilationszwang, dem Fremde häufig ausgesetzt sind, zeigt der Autor an drei Beispielen auf: der Chicagoer Schule der Immigrationsforschung, des Salzburger Landesintegrationskonzeptes 2008 sowie Hartmut Essers Integrationsstufenplans. Die an diesen Modellen exemplarisch geübte Kritik stützt sich auf Edward W. Saids Othering-Theorem, Zygmunt Baumans Diagnosen zur Moderne sowie auf gesellschaftskritische Überlegungen von Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno. Auf diese Weise gelingt es dem Autor, Bausteine für eine humanistische Pädagogik in der Migrationsgesellschaft zu entwickeln und als universalistische Alternative zu den vorherrschenden partikularistischen Ansätzen in der zeitgenössischen Pädagogik darzustellen.