Methods and Nations Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject [Paperback]

Methods and Nations critiques one of the primary deployments of twentieth-century social science: comparative politics whose major focus has been nation-building in the Third World, often attempting to universalize and render self-evident its own practices. International relations theorists, unable to resist the cognitive imperialism of a state-centric social science, have allowed themselves to become colonized. Michael Shapiro seeks to bring recognition to forms of political expression-alternative modes of intelligibility for things, people, and spaces-that have existed on the margins of the nationhood practices of states and the complicit nation-sustaining conceits of social science.

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 alãƒ