Elevate Difference

Reviews of Stanford University Press

Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China

Heroin. AIDS. Migration. Development programs. Gender roles. In Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, Shao-hua Liu examines each of these issues and how they relate to Nuoso youth. An anthropological researcher, the author delves into how China’s evolution from the traditional to the modern intersects with drug use, disease, and development.

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

In Multidirectional Memory, Michael Rothberg offers an alternative to competitive memory, or the idea that the capacity to remember historical injustices is limited and that any attention to one injustice diminishes our capacity to memorialize another. Rothberg also disputes the idea that comparisons between atrocities erase differences between them and imply a false equivalence.

"What is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays

"What Is an Apparatus?" and Other Essays, is a collection of three essays by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Although only fifty pages, this collection is quite difficult for the reader unfamiliar with Agamben's work. In the first essay, “What is an Apparatus,” the author engages with Foucault’s concept of the apparatus (_dispositif _in French).

Legacies of Race: Identities, Attitudes, and Politics in Brazil

Legacies of Race answers many of my personal questions about a strict notion of racial identification among the “black and white” in Brazil. When I visited Rio de Janeiro for the first time in 1993, I was intrigued by the notion of the “Afro-Brazilian” population who viewed themselves as “mixed race” rather than the distinctive “white” or “black” of the United States.