Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: American public policy with respect to private corporations is without doubt �exceptional.� Scholars from Alexis de Tocqueville to James S. Coleman have noted Americans� unusual propensity for �associating,� or organizing privately, without the assistance of the state. Most explain this particular feature of American social behavior as the result of either the unique �norms and habits� of the American people or the absence of state-regulated bodies that might otherwise have performed necessary public functions. These perspectives overlook the role of corporate law in the history of American associationalism in general and the pre-revolutionary origins of American corporate law in particular. This paper explores the colonial origins of American corporate law and seeks to relate them to the 19th century proliferation of both for-profit and non-profit private corporations. Incorporation is, by definition, a legal privilege granted and protected by the state. Post-colonial American legislatures created the legal norm of �freedom of incorporation� in light of their forebears� frustration with an English system in which corporate charters were rarely granted and in which colonial assemblies� right to grant such charters remained ambiguous. Two brief examples are discussed: the early colonial struggle to charter America�s first universities and the post-Revolutionary fight over the incorporation of state and national banks. The former case � the colonial fight over the issuance of college charters, represents a key �turning point� in the political development of the United States. In an effort to construct a new explanation of the long-standing differences between American and Canadian political culture, counter-examples from the history of Canadian legal and economic development are discussed as well.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Despite the extensive research efforts devoted to understanding the factors that facilitate or impede intermarriages, no comprehensive yet focused sketch of the socioeconomic characteristics of interracial couples has been completed. In this study, we fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the 2000 U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) along three key dimensions�interracial combinations, age groups, and geographical variations. Compared to their monoracial counterparts, interracial couples tend to have higher educational attainments and employment rates, although comparable family income, and similar occupational prestige. While these patterns are consistent across age groups and geographical regions, our analyses suggest that considerable variations exist within the pan-category of interracial couples. Asian-man/white-woman interracial couples display the highest socioeconomic status among all interracial combinations, followed by white-man/Asian-woman, white-man/Hispanic-woman, and white-man/ black-woman couples. These interracial advantages can be partially explained by the high educational achievements of interracial couples. Finally, previous studies suggested that individuals of higher racial statuses (e.g., whites) are more likely to marry partners of lower racial status (e.g., blacks) but higher educational attainments. Our analyses show that, on the descriptive level, the educational gap between interracial spouses may reflect more of the norms of specific sex/race groups.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I will historicize the shifting meanings of race that have arisen in the post-9/11 environment. In looking at the inter-relationships between race, nationhood and Islam through the lenses of politics and culture, I want to examine and place Afro-Asian Islam within the long and prolific history of diasporic radicalism of the 20th century that will not only hope to reconfigure Orientalist and Black Atlantic discourses, but will also seek to contribute to the discussions around comparative and transnational understandings of race, culture and the politics of identity. In mapping these intertwined histories and overlapping diasporas, this paper hopes to reveal the manner in which racialized subjects envision themselves not as national minorities but as global majorities, poetically linking themselves with larger communities of resistance that transcend the limiting structures of the modern nation-state.
Just as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, the Black Arts Movement and hip-hop culture has also done, I will explore jazz as a space in which African American cultural activists mapped the anti-racist struggles and the meanings of race domestically onto the global imaginary of the Muslim worlds during the post-World War II era. In tracing this history, I will explore how the idiom of jazz became a site for the reconstruction and reconstitution of Black identities vis-�-vis Islam and the Muslim worlds in a segregationist and hostile America during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. In exploring these trajectories, this paper will explore how jazz musicians such as Ahmad Jamal, Yusef Lateef, Art Blakey and others converted to Islam and constructed diasporic identities that not only were refracted through the prisms of the burgeoning Afro-Asian internationalist solidarity of the moment, but that also came to be reflected in the stylistic and formal elements of their music itself, as more global and pan-African elements became infused with the already dynamic cultural productions taking place in the world of jazz. In this way, these cultural activists not only expanded and broadened jazz aesthetics by inflecting it with a multiplicity of ideas and influences, but they also contributed to the already existing and often contested debates about what the relationships were between jazz music, race and the American nation.
While no doubt providing an historical lens on a very contemporary phenomenon that has profound implications for our understandings of Muslims and American Studies, this paper seeks to explore how these artists works helped to map out and shape the contours of a broader Afro-Asian solidarity that reveals the rich and shared histories between African American Muslims and the Islamic worlds. By not viewing these as separate and discrete histories and formations, but instead as overlapping histories and diasporas that have woven together a rich tapestry of redemption and renewal, this paper hopes to remap our traditional understandings of the relationships between the global and the local, race and nation, the sacred and the secular, and the shared histories of slavery and colonialism.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Burns, Deneen, Deutsch, Easton, Festinger, Frankl, Lasswell, Maslow, Rawls, Skinner, Tillich, and Wiener have each made significant contributions to democratic theory that seem to slip through our fingers. This essay analyzes portions of their contributions towards a theory of political leadership, employing components of systems dynamics theory, humanistic psychology, cybernetics, value theory and democratic philosophy. The theory, tentatively labeled “integrated dissonance theory” (IDT) is then used to interpret some of the multiple meanings of religion in politics, including democratic faith. Illustrative applications include current foreign policy concerns with religious belief systems such as the “clash of civilizations” problem that pits the interpretive frameworks of the current “great religions” against each other and against democratic faith. Further illustrations examine American domestic problems filtered through ideologies that pit racial and ethnic beliefs against each other, and issues such as size of government, whether budgets should be balanced, and so on. It concludes with an agenda for further research employing three distinct paradigms: science, philosophy, and historical practice.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper is part of a project that explores the claim of scholars loosely associated with the English School that the diplomatic corps is an important, yet neglected, constitutive manifestation of a diplomatic culture which, in turn, underpins and constitutes the international society of states. In the traditional view of the diplomatic corps, diplomats posted in the same capital share a corporate existence based on a common professional interest in protecting their privileges, immunities, and lifestyle. In seeking to revise and expand this view, the paper considers the proposition that the diplomatic corps may on closer examination be significantly more than the sum of its putatively Realist, self-serving embassy parts. In short, the diplomatic corps is a microcosm of Grotian international society. To help test this claim, the paper draws on evidence from Stockholm and Hanoi. The diplomatic corps is evident in both capitals, but in significantly different ways. These variations are heavily influenced by the nature and history of the host country and its capital. Thus, any generalizations about the world's 190 or so diplomatic corps will need to be sensitive to such variations. Still, the generalizations that arise suggest an institution that is under-estimated as a socializing and constitutive force in international relations.