Arts Innovator: Luis Antonio Vilchez, Peru Watch a video of Luis Antonio Vilchez dancing in Times Square below. Passing through New York's Times Square one winter day in 2010, Lima native Luis Antonio Vilchez noticed a group of street percussionists playing a familiar Afro-Peruvian rhythm—and immediately decided to join them. Soon, a large crowd gathered as Vilchez, wearing a button-down shirt and a winter coat, burst into a dance performance that was so impressive even the drummers watched in awe. The same kind of impromptu creativity dominates Adú Proyecto Universal (Adú Universal Project), a nonprofit arts organization Vilchez founded four years ago to re-imagine Peruvian identity through dance, theater and percussion. Financed by money the group earns from its performances, Adú (which means “friend” in limeña slang) encourages its 20 members—all dancers—to combine different dance and music genres, crossing back and forth between tradition and modernity.
Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations, K. M. Fierke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 281 pp., $95 cloth. What could we learn from examining suicide bombing, self-immolation, or hunger strikes not through the lens of state security but from the position of those individuals who use such acts to achieve normative change? In addressing this question, Political Self-Sacrifice brings what seem like senseless acts of desperation into focus as strategically intelligible and culturally meaningful techniques of resistance. By disentangling the logic of “political self-sacrifice,” K. M. Fierke offers an important and timely account of the political strategies, cultural meanings, and normative aspirations associated with those participants in international affairs who, as she puts it, “play with a weak hand” (p. 8).
Topic:
International Relations, Politics, and Regime Change
The Politics of Teaching Palestine to Americans: Addressing Pedagogical Strategies, by Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xxvi + 196 pages. Notes to p. 235. Bibliography to p. 247. Index to p. 265. $85.00 cloth. JSTOR
Debates about trying and punishing terrorists reveal how the failure to construct a shared normative consensus in international criminal justice continues to bedevil the international community. The only way to achieve this consensus is to engage in the messy business of politics.
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Religions of the Book adds to a growing body of scholarship on Christian perceptions of Muslims and Jews. The collection is somewhat uneven, but several strong The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400-1660 Edited by Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 213 pp., ISBN 9780230020047.
The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes, by Avraham Burg. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. vii + 242 pages. Notes to p. 246. Index to p. 253. $26.95 hard; $16.00 paper. Israeli Culture between the Two Intifadas: A Brief Romance, by Yaron Peleg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 148 pages. Bibliography to p. 151. Index to p. 156. $60.00 hard. Simona Sharoni, associate professor of gender and women's studies and chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at the State University of New York, is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women's Resistance (Syracuse University Press, 1995)
The principal and worthwhile contribution of this book is to resituate the debate about moral realism where it belongs, in terms of its pragmatic employment and its ability to accommodate ideals and values.