The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

The Scaffolding of Sovereignty

Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept

Edited by: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite , Stefanos Geroulanos and Nicole Jerr

In the series Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History

https://doi.org/10.7312/beni17186

Overview
Contents

About this book

The Scaffolding of Sovereignty deploys a comparative and theoretically rich conception of sovereignty to reconsider the different schemes on which it has been based or renewed, the public stages on which it is erected or destroyed, and the images and ideas on which it rests.

Author / Editor information

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite is professor of history at New York University and the author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (2005) and The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (2009).

Stefanos Geroulanos is associate professor of history and director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at New York University. He is the author of An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (2010) and Transparency in Postwar France (2017).

Nicole Jerr is assistant professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy.

Reviews

Jerrold Seigel, William J. Kenan, Jr., Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.:
This is a wide-ranging, stimulating, challenging collection of essays.

Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine:
Joining performance studies with philosophy, theology, and ethnography, the figure of the scaffold aptly evokes the symbolic supports and global visibility of sovereignty today. The contributors to this ambitious collection of essays fearlessly disclose recurrent features of sovereignty across time and space, often beginning immanently with the cosmic cartographies generated by particular regimes and projected in aesthetic displays, liturgical exercises, and citational enterprises that reveal common themes in the global drama of majesty.

Lauren Benton, author of A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in World History, 1400–1900:
This volume showcases the best of global intellectual history. Sovereignty emerges as a complex force: aesthetically layered, politically mutable, historically contingent, and consistently elusive. At the same time, despite the apparent Eurocentrism of the concept's recent lineage, readers will come away convinced of the importance of sovereignty as an analytical category, key to making sense of political culture in world history and political thought in global context.

Samuel Moyn, Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History, Harvard University:
That sovereign power is often fragile and never established once and for all is the startling proposition that organizes this spectacularly interesting sequence of investigations. Sovereignty is impossible to study, the essays propose, without attention to its ‘scaffolding,’ defined as all the symbolic management that power continually requires. Leaping across time and spanning the world, The Scaffolding of Sovereignty showcases scholarly gems that together reflect how the crown of sovereignty is kept in place—and sometimes slips.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Foreword Dick Howard Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
Editor’s Introduction Zvei Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos and Nicole Jerr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Stages
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
One. Sad Stories of the Death of Kings Sovereignty and Its Constraints in Greek Tragedy and Elsewhere Glenn W. Most Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
Two. Contested Sovereignty Heaven, the Monarch, the People, and the Intellectuals in Traditional China Yuri Pines Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
Three. Nurhaci’s Gambit Sovereignty as Concept and Praxis in the Rise of the Manchus Nicola Di Cosmo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
Four. The Living Image of the People Jason Frank Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
Part II. Courts
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Five. Public Health, the State, and Religious Scholarship Sovereignty in Idrīs al-Bidlīsī’s Arguments for Fleeing the Plague Justin Stearns Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
Six. The Dancing Despot Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Performative Symbolism of Power Stanca Scholz-Cionca Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Seven. Liberal Constitutionalism and the Sovereign Pardon Bernadette Meyler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	208
Eight. The Vanishing Slaves of Paris The Lettre de Cachet and the Emergence of an Imperial Legal Order in Eighteenth-Century France Miranda Spieler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	230
Nine. Re-touching the Sovereign Biochemistry of Perpetual Leninism Alexei Yurchak Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	246
Part III. Acts
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Ten. Hijra and Exile Islam and Dual Sovereignty in Qing China Zvi Ben-Dor Benite Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	279
Eleven. The Neurology of Rigicide Decapitation Experiments and the Science of Sovereignty Cathy Gere Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	303
Twelve. The “Millennium” of 1857 The Last Performance of the Great Mughal A. Azfar Moin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	322
Thirteen. Exit the King? Modern Theater and the Revolution Nicole Jerr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	340
Part IV. Shifts
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365
Fourteen. Revolution in Permanence and the Fall of Popular Sovereignty Dan Edelstein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	371
Fifteen. Exile Within Sovereignty Critique of “The Negation of Exile” in Israeli Culture Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	393
Sixteen. Affective Sovereignty, International Law, and China’s Legal Status in the Nineteenth Century Li Chen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	421
Seventeen. The Sovereignty of the New Man After Wagner Artist and Hero, Symbolic History, and the Staging of Origins Stefanos Geroulanos Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	440
List of Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	469
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	473

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 528

eBook

Published: July 10, 2017
ISBN: 9780231171878