UC Riverside

Abstract One afternoon in the mid-1990s, I walked past a bookstore in Berkeley, California and stopped to look at the window display. It featured a group of at least twenty books with wildly divergent subjects that were clearly meant to be viewed together, and I stared, puzzled, until I suddenly saw that each book title had the word "power" in it. They bore titles like Power and Accountability, Power and Beauty, Power and Civil Society, Power and Community, Power and Difference, Power and Empowerment, Power and Everyday Life, Power and Gender, and so on. Power was everywhere: Foucault had gone off like a bomb in the humanities and the social sciences.