Books about Imposing from Amazon.com

Feminists, socialists, Afro-Puerto Rican activists, and elite politicians join laundresses, prostitutes, and dissatisfied wives in populating the pages of Imposing Decency. Through her analyses of Puerto Rican anti-prostitution campaigns, attempts at reforming marriage, and working-class ideas about free love, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay exposes the race-related double standards of sexual norms and practices in Puerto Rico between 1870 and 1920, the period that witnessed Puerto Rico’s shift from Spanish to U.S. colonialism.
In showing how political projects and alliances in Puerto Rico were affected by racially contingent definitions of “decency” and “disreputability,” Findlay argues that attempts at moral reform and the state’s repression of “sexually dangerous” women were weapons used in batttles between elite and popular, American and Puerto Rican, and black and white. Based on a thorough analysis of popular and elite discourses found in both literature and official archives, Findlay contends that racialized sexual norms and practices were consistently a central component in the construction of social and political orders. The campaigns she analyzes include an attempt at moral reform by elite male liberals and a movement designed to enhance the family and cleanse urban space that ultimately translated into repression against symbollically darkened prostitutes. Findlay also explores how U.S. officials strove to construct a new colonial order by legalizing divorce and how feminist, labor, and Afro-Puerto Rican political demands escalated after World War I, often focusing on the rehabilitation and defense of prostitutes.
Imposing Decency forces us to rethink previous interpretations of political chronologies as well as reigning conceptualizations of both liberalism and the early working-class in Puerto Rico. Her work will appeal to scholars with an interest in Puerto Rican or Latin American studies, sexuality and national identity, women in Latin America, and general women’s studies.
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Price: $22.53 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Arusha National Park in northern Tanzania, known for its scenic beauty, is also a battleground Roderick Neumann's illuminating analysis shows how this park embodies all the political-ecological dilemmas facing protected areas throughout Africa. The roots of the ongoing struggle between the park on Mount Meru and the neighboring Meru peasant communities go much deeper, in Neumann's view, than the issues of poverty, population growth, and ignorance usually cited. These conflicts reflect differences that go back to the beginning of colonial rule. By imposing a European ideal of pristine wilderness, Neumann says, the establishment of national parks and protected areas displaced African meanings as well as material access to the land. He focuses on the symbolic importance of natural landscapes among various social groups in this setting and how it relates to conflicts between peasant communities and the state..
Price: $6.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Policing, environmental protection, and tax administration have much more in common than practitioners in these areas often recognize Their cultures and traditions have, for the past few decades, incorporated a classic enforcement mentality, based on the underlying assumption that a ruthless and efficient investigative and enforcement capability would produce compliance through the mechanisms of deterrence. In these fields, and perhaps in many other enforcement or compliance oriented professions, Sparrow believes the traditional "enforcement" approach is under stress. There are too many violators, too many laws to be enforced, and not enough resources to get the job done. In this book, Sparrow draws out remarkable parallels in the ways these professions are adapting to meet their current challenges, as they reject their traditional reliance on retrospective, case-by-case, after-the-fact enforcement. Rather than perpetuating their dependence on processes, procedures, and "coverage," these professions are each developing new capacities for analyzing important patterns of noncompliance, prioritizing risks, and designing intelligent interventions using a much broader range of tools. Sparrow extracts the essence of the transformations underway, explores the critical implications for information management, and lays out the issues that need resolution before the emerging compliance strategies can reach maturity. This book is required reading for all those concerned with either the theory or the practice of the compliance side of government..
Price: $3.58 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Imposing Harmony is a groundbreaking analysis of the role of music and musicians in the social and political life of colonial Cuzco. Challenging musicology's cathedral-centered approach to the history of music in colonial Latin America, Geoffrey Baker demonstrates that rather than being dominated by the cathedral, Cuzco's musical culture was remarkably decentralized. He shows that institutions such as parish churches and monasteries employed indigenous professional musicians, rivaling Cuzco Cathedral in the scale and frequency of the musical performances they staged.

Building on recent scholarship by social historians and urban musicologists and drawing on extensive archival research, Baker highlights European music as a significant vehicle for reproducing and contesting power relations in Cuzco. He examines how Andean communities embraced European music, creating an extraordinary cultural florescence, at the same time that Spanish missionaries used the music as a mechanism of colonialization and control. Uncovering a musical life of considerable and unexpected richness throughout the diocese of Cuzco, Baker describes a musical culture sustained by both Hispanic institutional patrons and the upper strata of indigenous society. Mastery of European music enabled elite Andeans to consolidate their position within the colonial social hierarchy. Indigenous professional musicians distinguished themselves by fulfilling important functions in colonial society, acting as educators, religious leaders, and mediators between the Catholic Church and indigenous communities..
Price: $19.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]