Synopses & Reviews
The Year 2000 is at hand. The end of the millennium means many things to many people, but it has significance for almost everyone. A thousand years ago, monks stopped copying manuscripts and religious building projects came to a halt as panic swept Europe. Today, anxiety about global warming, government power, superviruses, even recycling, is on some level rooted in the fear of irreversible cataclysm. In a landscape shadowed by racial conflict, technological upheaval, AIDS, and nuclear weapons, we reasonably fear the end of history. 2000 looms large in our religious, political, and cultural imagination. But while 2000 brings dread it also raises the prospect of transformation. There is hope to be found in the apocalyptic.
This panoramic volume explores how the Year 2000 operates in contemporary political discourse, from Black evangelical politics to radical right-wing rhetoric. One section is devoted specifically to apocalyptic violence, analyzing twentieth-century cults and cultural movements, from David Koresh--who renamed his Waco compound Ranch Apocalypse and perished in a modern-day Armageddon that fueled the millennialist angst of other extremist groups--to environmental campaigns like Earth First! that also rely on the language of violence and imminent doom in their greening of the Apocalypse.
Review
“It addresses a powerful topic. It is a conceptually creative piece of scholarship, forged from a sophisticated interdisciplinary viewpoint.”
-The Law and Politics Book Review,
Review
“Commendably and profoundly, the author maps the numerous uncharted waters of racial discrimination showing how anthropology and culture intermix with law to form wide-ranging and lasting policies of exclusion.”
-New York Law Review,
Review
“A rich and exceptionally clear account of the meaning-making context and constitution of citizenship.”
-Christine Harrington,Institute for Law and Society, New York University
Review
“Mark Weiner provides a rare and radical insight into the racial structures of American law. Reading this racial history through the rhetoric of case law decisions—juridical racialism—provides a dramatic sense of the anthropological scope of what law has done and potentially continues to do.”
-Peter Goodrich,Cardozo School of Law
Review
“An enthralling mixture of personages and cases that reveals much about the intimate combining of law and “American” imperialism, including the complicities of scholarship.”
-Peter Fitzpatrick,Birkbeck School of Law, University of London
Synopsis
A fascinating collection of predictions for the end-times in the year 2000
The Year 2000 is at hand. The end of the millennium means many things to many people, but it has significance for almost everyone. A thousand years ago, monks stopped copying manuscripts and religious building projects came to a halt as panic swept Europe. Today, anxiety about global warming, government power, superviruses, even recycling, is on some level rooted in the fear of irreversible cataclysm. In a landscape shadowed by racial conflict, technological upheaval, AIDS, and nuclear weapons, we reasonably fear the end of history. 2000 looms large in our religious, political, and cultural imagination. But while 2000 brings dread it also raises the prospect of transformation. There is hope to be found in the apocalyptic.
This panoramic volume explores how the Year 2000 operates in contemporary political discourse, from Black evangelical politics to radical right-wing rhetoric. One section is devoted specifically to apocalyptic violence, analyzing twentieth-century cults and cultural movements, from David Koresh--who renamed his Waco compound Ranch Apocalypse and perished in a modern-day Armageddon that fueled the millennialist angst of other extremist groups--to environmental campaigns like Earth First that also rely on the language of violence and imminent doom in their greening of the Apocalypse.
Synopsis
Americans Without Law shows how the racial boundaries of civic life are based on widespread perceptions about the relative capacity of minority groups for legal behavior, which Mark S. Weiner calls “juridical racialism.” The book follows the history of this civic discourse by examining the legal status of four minority groups in four successive historical periods: American Indians in the 1880s, Filipinos after the Spanish-American War, Japanese immigrants in the 1920s, and African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s.
Weiner reveals the significance of juridical racialism for each group and, in turn, Americans as a whole by examining the work of anthropological social scientists who developed distinctive ways of understanding racial and legal identity, and through decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court that put these ethno-legal views into practice. Combining history, anthropology, and legal analysis, the book argues that the story of juridical racialism shows how race and citizenship served as a nexus for the professionalization of the social sciences, the growth of national state power, economic modernization, and modern practices of the self.
About the Author
The author and editor of numerous books, including
Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America,
Charles B. Strozier is Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Michael Flynn is Lecturer in Psychology at York College, City University of New York, and, with Charles Strozier, co-editor of Trauma and Self and Genocide, War, and Human Survival. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Chicago.