Changes

''What Is a [[People]]?'' seeks to reclaim “people” as an effective [[political ]] [[concept ]] by revisiting its uses and abuses over [[time]]. [[Alain ]] [[Badiou ]] surveys the [[idea ]] of a people as a productive force of [[solidarity ]] and emancipation and as a [[negative ]] tool of categorization and [[suppression]]. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic [[analysis ]] of “popular” and its transformation of [[democracy]], beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. [[Judith ]] [[Butler ]] calls out those who use [[freedom ]] of assembly to create an exclusionary “we,” while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist’s perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national [[categories]], and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of [[populism ]] when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a “people” is too diffuse to support [[them]]. By engaging this topic [[linguistically]], ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume [[help ]] [[separate ]] “people” from its fraught [[associations ]] to pursue more vital formulations.