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.
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
In both Japan and the United States, migration, refugee, and citizenship policies have become highly contentious political issues. Japan, traditionally a closed society with the lowest proportion of foreigners of any major industrial country, has struggled to utilize the recent influx of illegal migrants without incorporating them into Japanese society and citizenship. The United States, a country built by immigrants, today grapples with the impact of legal and illegal migrants on employment and social services.
Myron Weiner and Tadashi Hanami have assembled a distinguished group of American and Japanese demographers, economists, historians, lawyers, political scientists, and sociologists to examine Japan's and America's very different approaches to employer demands for labor, control over illegal migration, the incorporation of migrants, the legal rights and social benefits of foreign residents and illegal migrants, the claims of refugees and asylum seekers, and the issues of citizenship and nationality.
Temporary Workers or Future Citizens places the economic issues of migration in a cultural context, by revealing how the collective identities of Americans and Japanese shape the way each society regards immigrants and refugees.
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.