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Thinking Outside the Canon traces author Michael J. Shapiro's intellectual journey as a political theorist who has adapted multidisciplinary practices and unconventional texts across his career to develop a more diverse model of doing theory. Theorizing textuality and historiography, Shapiro draws on a variety of disciplinary idioms and texts that span across genres and geographies, ranging from Caribbean fiction to Ukraine war fictional ethnographies. As well, he covers an array of scales and spaces, from the state to the individual room. As such,
Thinking Outside the Canon reflects how the field of political theory has grown and shifted through the author's own textual odyssey.
After recovering the early portion of his own political theory odyssey, Shapiro traces his departures from the canon. He recounts how, through this departure, he refashioned his scholarship via a series of textual engagements and composed the basis of an instructional inquiry focused on textuality and historiography. Finally, Shapiro relates how
Thinking Outside the Canon functions as his own learning text, as both a theorist and writer and as a student, looking towards the future of the political theory canon and its usefulness.
List of contents
- Preface
- Political Thought's Other Rhythms: Textualities and Historiographies
- Urban Dramas: 'Slums,' Shantytowns, and the Politics of Genre
- The Bio- and Geopolitics of Rooms
- "Springtime for Hitler?": A Call for Thinking
- Ukrainian Literary War Journalism: From Vasily Grossman to Yevgenia
- Epilogue
About the author
Michael J. Shapiro is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is the author of several books, including
Aesthetics of Equality; The Political Sublime; Punctuations: How the Arts Think the Political; The Cinematic Political: Film Composition as Political Theory; and
Writing Politics: Studies in Compositional Method.
