In a neoliberal era, when the ideology of the free market governs community development as much as international trade, a conflict between capital and tradition is inevitable. Issues such as the value ascribed to honour and social prestige are difficult to negotiate with economic opportunity. Using the example of a 'traditional' Nepalese market town, Katharine Neilson Rankin explores how economic liberalization has blended with local cultures of value. Utilizing the ethnographic method of anthropology and the comparative and normative thrust of geography, Rankin undertakes a critique of neoliberal approaches to development. She demonstrates how market-led development does not expand opportunity, but rather deepens existing injustice and inequality, which is further exacerbated by planners – eager to implement market-led approaches – relying on naively idealistic notions of 'social capital' to expand poor people's access to the market. The Cultural Politics of Markets makes a clear case for a strategic merger between anthropological and planning perspectives in thinking about the issue of market transformation.

With contributions from Homi Bhabha, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Will Hutton, Jürgen Habermas and Amartya Sen, among others, this dazzling compendium of some of the world’s most prominent and diverse thinkers examines the question, ‘What is the future of culture in the age of globalization?’ These essays represent a major theoretical and methodological challenge to the social sciences, and question the nature of globalization and the culture of change.

First published in 1989, Cultural Politics in Contemporary America is a radical attempt to lay out the complex ways in which the American media and American culture is powerfully interlocked. At the end of the 20th century, the media exerted an overwhelming influence on the formation of social identity through the production and consumption of images. The Hollywood Presidency of Ronald Reagan was founded on the skills of the 'Great Communicator'; Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' was used by Chrysler Corporation to assure that 'the pride is back'; feminists and right-wing militants converged to oppose pornography. The media, American culture, and political power were bound together in a gamble, the stakes of which increased daily. 'Cultural Politics' incorporates the struggles of race, gender and class; the economy of the commercial media system; the myths of hegemony and imperialism; the crises of privacy and of the intellectual; and such diverse issues as postmodernism, the American automobile, advertising as communication, and television. While political actors have changed and media technology has advanced rapidly, the outcome of this research still holds true for the 21st century and is of importance to students of media studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, postcolonial studies and political science.

Salvos of sane and humorous dissent from the worship of the almighty market.

Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle scrutinises ways in which current conflicts of 'race', class, and gender have their origins in the cultural politics of the last fin de siècle, whose influence stretched from the 1890s, when economic depression signalled the end of Britain's role as 'the workshop of the world', to 1914 when world war accelerated imperial decline. This collaborative venture by new and established scholars includes discussion of the 'New Woman', the reconstruction of masculinities, and of feminism and empire. The imperialist theme is pursued in essays on Yeats and Ireland, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the figure of the vampire. The rise of socialism and psychoanalysis, and the relationship between nascent modernism and late twentieth-century postmodernism are also addressed in this radical account.

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Covering a wide range of areas including international politics, colonial history, critical pedagogy, postcolonial literature and applied linguistics, this book examines ways to understand the cultural and political implications of the global spread of English. Including a useful mixture of theory, research and practice, this will be of use to advanced students of education, English and applied linguistics, for courses on teaching second languages, critical pedagogy, comparative education and world Englishes. It will also be of interest to students of postcolonial literature and international relations.