Since the 1940s, Marxist thought has developed considerably in Nigeria. Long gone are the days when Marxism meant imported pamphlets and a rootless foreign ideology. The history of “Naija” or Nigerian Marxism is also that of the country’s labor movement, its feminist movement, its social thought, and its political economy. Drawn from three years of research in Nigeria and elsewhere, Naija Marxisms breaks new ground in tracing the historical trajectories of leftist movements since the 1940s. Adam Mayer explores the international context of Nigerian Marxism and provides core chapters on key thinkers including Mokwugo Okoye, Ikenna Nzimiro, and Eskor Toyo, among many others.

Displaying the particular vitality of the global traditions of Marxism and neomarxism at the beginning of the twenty-first century, New AsianMarxisms collects essays by a diverse group of scholars—historians, political scientists, literary scholars, and sociologists—who offer a range of studies of the Marxist heritage focusing on Korea, Japan, India, and China.

While some of these essays take up key thinkers in Marxist history or draw attention to outstanding problematics, others focus on national literature and discourse in North and South Korea, the "Mao Zedong Fever" of the 1990s, the implications of Li Dazhao's poetry, and the Indian Naxalite movement.  Illustrating the importance of central analytical categories like exploitation, alienation, and violence to studies on the politics of knowledge, contributors confront prevailing global consumerist fantasies
with accounts of political struggle, cultural displacement, and theoretical strategies.

Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Dai Jinhua, Michael Dutton, D. R. Howland, Marshall Johnson, Liu Kang, You-me Park, William Pietz, Claudia Pozzana, Alessandro Russo, Sanjay Seth, Gi-Wook Shin, Sugiyama Mitsunobu, Jing Wang

The German social democratic movement was the first mass, working-class party in world history, and a prototype for one of the major features of twentieth-century politics. Gary P. Steenson presents an introduction to the origins and development of German social democracy up to the First World War, by drawing upon protocols of the German Social Democratic Party, the party press, correspondence of leading figures, and scholarly research. Steenson also offers biographical sketches of prominent party officials, and translations of party programs and bylaws in the appendix.

In 1949 construction of the planned town of Nowa Huta began on the outskirts of Kraków, Poland. Its centerpiece, the Lenin Steelworks, promised a secure future for workers and their families. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Solidarity movement and the ensuing shock therapy program of the early 1990s rapidly transitioned the country from socialism to a market-based economy, and Nowa Huta fell on hard times.

Kinga Pozniak shows how the remarkable political, economic, and social upheavals since the end of the Second World War have profoundly shaped the historical memory of these events in the minds of the people who lived through them. Through extensive interviews, she finds three distinct, generationally based framings of the past. Those who built the town recall the might of local industry and plentiful jobs. The following generation experienced the uprisings of the 1980s and remembers the repression and dysfunction of the socialist system and their resistance to it. Today’s generation has no direct experience with either socialism or Solidarity, yet as residents of Nowa Huta they suffer the stigma of lower-class stereotyping and marginalization from other Poles.

Pozniak examines the factors that lead to the rewriting of history and the formation of memory, and the use of history to sustain current political and economic agendas. She finds that despite attempts to create a single, hegemonic vision of the past and a path for the future, these discourses are always contested—a dynamic that, for the residents of Nowa Huta, allows them to adapt as their personal experience tells them.