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Throughout the 20th century, a scientifically oriented social science has dominated as the means for looking at society. Methods and Nations examines and critiques one of the primary deployments of these methods: an explanatory comparative politics whose major focus has been on "nation-building" in the "Third World", often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. Methods and Nations is essentially saying that IR theorists, operating within our dominant state, have allowed themselves to become colonized, unable to resist the "cognitive imperialism" of a state-centric social science. Shapiro seeks to bring to recognition forms of political expression - alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people(s) and spaces - that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states, and the complicit nation-building and nation-sustaining conceits of social science.
Throughout the 20th century, a scientifically oriented social science has dominated as the means for looking at society. Methods and Nations examines and critiques one of the primary deployments of these methods: an explanatory comparative politics whose major focus has been on "nation-building" in the "Third World", often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. Methods and Nations is essentially saying that IR theorists, operating within our dominant state, have allowed themselves to become colonized, unable to resist the "cognitive imperialism" of a state-centric social science. Shapiro seeks to bring to recognition forms of political expression - alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people(s) and spaces - that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states, and the complicit nation-building and nation-sustaining conceits of social science.
Preface: Politics, Methods, and Loci of Enunciation 1. Introduction: Biopolitical Conceits and the Colonization of Hawai'i 2. Nation-States: Drama and Narration 3. The Musico-Literary Aesthetics of Attachment and Resistance 4. Landscape and Nationhood 5. Film and Nation Building 6.The Nation-State and Violence: Wim Wenders Contra Imperial Sovereignty Notes
Michael Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii.
"No one writing in English today has as a wider command over diverse references or develops more profound insights from them. This is a book about the overcoding of the nation and its effects. Hence, Shapiro must address philosophy, cultural theory, film, music, novels, television, and more to pursue the target. This book makes us think again about the narrative of the nation and feel the cultural costs it continues to impose." -- William E. Connolly, author of Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed"At the time when Area Studies is being restituted (or risks to be so) to fulfill its original function (e.g., production of knowledge for national security), it is refreshing to read an epistemic indictment that places the knowing subject at the forefront and the 'Area' as a geo-historical condition of knowledge rather than a transparent object of study. In Methods and Nations, Michael J. Shapiro has made a superb contribution to the geo-politics of knowledge and a critique to the idea that the knower could be the transparent and neutral subject of a plain and objective 'area' constructed as a territory full of memories and national symbols." -- Walter D. Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director, Center for Global Studies and the Humanities; Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Research, Duke University"This engaging book looks at a question that the sits at the intellectually charged border of political science and cultural studies: how is the 'state' produced as a static space and neutral container of a homogeneous national identity? Shapiro explores this question through vivid readings of diverse texts, ranging from American social science, to literature, to landscape painting, and to film. With his incisive account of how landscape painting and cartography have worked together to foster the fiction of impartial state authority, Shapiro demonstrates what an interdisciplinary scholar can bring to understanding the modern nation-state." -- Lisa Disch, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities"With pan-disciplinary erudition, Michael Shapiro rethinks the archive of international relations through the arts, finding in esthetic narrative and form techniques for doing and undoing prescribed national oneness. From jazz to musicals to westerns to landscape paintings, he draws a different political world together by means of public attention to artistic practices that both form the nation and open us to counter-formations. Along the way he provides a deft remapping of political theory through cultural governance." -- Randy Martin, Professor of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and author of Financialization of Daily Life"Methods and Nations resists the pitfall of much postcolonial literature that romanticizes the non-West as the answer to modernity’s contradictions; it encourages us to speak truth to power whenever and wherever we encounter it. Shapiro’s Methods and Nations is a tour de force that explodes our understandings of international relations and political science in very productive ways. I suspect that we will be reading and re-reading it for some time as a provocation for both research projects and political activism." William A. Callahan, Millennium, Volume 35.2, pp 464-466
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