After the Berlin Wall tells the inside story of an international financial institution, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), created in the aftermath of communism to help the countries of central and eastern Europe transition towards open market-oriented democratic economies.
The first volume of a history in two parts, After the Berlin Wall charts the EBRD’s life from a fledgling high-risk start-up investing in former socialist countries from 1991 to become an established member of the international financial community, which (as of April 2020) operates in almost 40 countries across three continents.
This volume describes the multilateral negotiations that created this cosmopolitan institution with a ‘European character’ and the emergence of the EBRD’s unique business model: a focus on the private sector and a mission to deliver development impact with sustainable financial returns. The author recounts the challenges that ‘transition’ countries faced in moving from a defunct to a functioning economic system and maps the EBRD’s response to critical events, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the safe confinement of the Chernobyl disaster site, the debt default in Russia and the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.
The end of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union reassured people around the world who had lived in fear of a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. Yet the early euphoria over "peace dividends" and a "new world order" was premature. Conflicts within and between nation-states are springing up around the globe, challenging world leaders and ordinary citizens to find peaceful means for national, group, and individual self-determination.
In this book of specially commissioned essays, twenty world leaders assess the possibilities and perils of the new strategic, political, and economic interrelationships that are emerging around the world. They tackle such fundamental questions as: What is the future of the international system as we approach the twenty-first century? What will be the fate of disintegrating nation-states, and how will the international community respond? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness? Are we beginning to witness the complete breakdown of the international system?
The contributors are:
Rhetoric, Power, and Possibilities
Thirty years after the publication of Antoinette Clark Wire’s groundbreaking The Corinthian Women Prophets, an interdisciplinary, international, and intergenerational group of scholars reflects upon Wire’s impact on New Testament scholarship. Essays pursue further historical and theoretical possibilities, often in search of marginalized people, including the women of Corinth, using feminist, rhetorical, materialist, decolonizing, queer, and posthumanist approaches to interpret Paul’s letters and the history of ancient Mediterranean assemblies. Contributions from Cavan Concannon, Arminta Fox, Joseph A. Marchal, Shelly Matthews, Anna Miller, Jorunn Økland, and Antoinette Clark Wire reconsider how both the methods and results of Wire’s work reveal the possibilities of other people beside Paul who are worth our attention and effort. The essays in this collection introduce students and scholars to the possibilities of interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches for engaging the broader Pauline corpus.
Recent research and the release of newly declassified U.S. government documents underscore the importance of reading Guatemala's current history through the lens of 1954. Scholars and researchers who have worked in Guatemala from the 1940s to the present articulate how the coup fits into ethnographic representations of Guatemala. Highlighting the voices of individuals with whom they have lived and worked, the contributors also offer an unmatched understanding of how the events preceding and following the coup played out on the ground.
Contributors are Abigail E. Adams, Richard N. Adams, David Carey Jr., Christa Little-Siebold, Judith M. Maxwell, Victor D. Montejo, June C. Nash, and Timothy J. Smith.
Calling Samuel Johnson the greatest literary critic since Aristotle, Richard B. Schwartz assumes the perspective of that quintessential eighteenth-century man of letters to examine the critical and theoretical literary developments that gained momentum in the 1970s and stimulated the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.
Schwartz speculates that Johnson—who revered hard facts, a wide cultural base, and common sense—would have exhibited scant patience with the heavily academic approaches currently favored in the study of literature. He considers it probable that the combatants in the early struggles of the culture wars are losing energy and that, in the wake of Alvin Kernan’s declaration of the death of literature, new battlegrounds are developing. Ironically admiring the orchestration and staging of battles old and new—"superb" he calls them—he characterizes the entire cultural war as a "battle between straw men, carefully constructed by the combatants to sustain a pattern of polarization that could be exploited to provide continuing professional advancement."
In seven diverse essays, Schwartz calls for both the broad cultural vision and the sanity of a Samuel Johnson from those who make pronouncements about literature. Running through and unifying these essays is the conviction that the cultural elite is clearly detached from life: "Academics, fleeing in horror from anything smacking of the bourgeois, offer us something far worse: bland sameness presented in elitist terms in the name of the poor." Another theme is that the either/or absolutism of many of the combatants is "absurd on its face [and] belies the complexities of art, culture, and humanity."
Like Johnson, Schwartz would terminate the divorce between literature and life, make allies of literature and criticism, and remove poetry from the province of the university and return it to the domain of readers. Texts would carry meaning, embody values, and have a serious impact on life.
Contributors. Ralph G. Carter, Richard Clark, A. Lane Crothers, I. M. Destler, Ole R. Holsti, Steven W. Hook, Christopher M. Jones, James M. McCormick, Jerel Rosati, Jeremy Rosner, John T. Rourke, Renee G. Scherlen, Peter J. Schraeder, James M. Scott, Jennifer Sterling-Folker, Rick Travis, Stephen Twing
In this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Roth's American Pastoral, Morrison's Paradise, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, Eugenides's Middlesex, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation’s past, After the End of History challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature.
At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political “end of history” claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, After the End of History offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.
Explores the cultural function of the concept of “the end.”
Apocalyptic thought is hardly unique to the end of the twentieth century; it’s been a fixture of American culture for decades. Currently, the media are rife with omens and signs, and we’re bombarded with warnings that “the end is near.” But as James Berger argues here, the end never comes. There is always something left.
In this study of the cultural pursuit of the end and what follows, Berger contends that every apocalyptic depiction leaves something behind, some mixture of paradise and wasteland. Combining literary, psychoanalytic, and historical methods, Berger mines these depictions for their weight and influence on current culture. He applies wide-ranging evidence-from science fiction to Holocaust literature, from Thomas Pynchon to talk shows, from American politics to the fiction of Toni Morrison-to reveal how representations of apocalyptic endings are indelibly marked by catastrophic histories. These post-apocalyptic visions reveal as much about our perception of the past as they do about conceptions of the future. Berger examines the role of such historical crises as slavery, the Holocaust, and the Vietnam War and describes how these traumas continue to generate cultural symptoms. The shadow of impending apocalypse darkens today’s vision of the future, but it’s a familiar shadow: traumas we have already experienced as a culture are recycled into visions of new endings. Our “endings” are already after the end. Berger demonstrates that post-apocalyptic representations are both symptoms and therapies. Contemporary culture continually draws on these traumatic histories, trying to forget, remember, deny, and recover. After the End puts these visions in context, revealing them in some cases as dangerous evasions, in others as crucial tools for cultural survival. ISBN 0-8166-2932-3 Cloth £00.00 $47.95xxISBN 0-8166-2933-1 Paper £00.00 $18.95x248 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 MarchTranslation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press"Suppose," Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers.
To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become.
Looking back at a lifetime of rich experience from Wisconsin’s driftless hills
We all dream of finding the place we can be most ourselves, the landscape that seems to have been crafted just for us. The poet Paul Zimmer has found his: a farm in the driftless hills of southwestern Wisconsin, a region of rolling land and crooked rivers, "driftless" because here the great glaciers of the Patrician ice sheet split widely, leaving behind a heart-shaped area untouched by crushing ice. After the Fire is the story of Zimmer’s journey from his boyhood in the factory town of Canton, Ohio, and his days as a soldier during atomic tests in the Nevada desert, to his many years in the book business as a writer and publisher, and the rural tranquillity of his present life.
Zimmer juxtaposes timeless rustic subjects (tending the land, country people and their ways, the ever-changing beauty of his natural surroundings) with flashbacks to key moments: his first and only boxing match, hearing Count Basie play and discovering his lifelong love of jazz, his return to the France of his ancestors, his painful departure from the publishing world after forty years. These stories are full of humor and pathos, keen insights and poignant meditations, but the real center of the book is the abiding beauty of the driftless hills, the silence and peace that is the source of and reward for Zimmer’s hard-won wisdom. Above all, it is a meditation on the ways that nature provides deep meaning and solace, and a consideration of the importance of finding the right place.Contributors. Ruth Beilin, Tim Bonyhady, John Bradley, Tom Conley, Michael Crizier, Thomas Lahusen, Artemis Leontis, Anders Linde-Laursen, Robert M. Markley, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Susan Willis
Traditionally, the critical reputation of Nobel Prize-winning American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968) has rested on his achievements of the 1930s, especially In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (19370, The Long Valley (1938), and, of course, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), one of the most powerful – and arguable on of the greatest – American novels of this century.
Book reviewers and academic critics often turned antagonistic toward Steinbeck when he no longer produced work with the sweeping reach and social consciousness of The Grapes of Wrath. He was accused of selling out, or co-opting his talent, when in fact the inordinate public success of Grapes and especially its attendant notoriety had caused a backlash for Steinbeck. As a result he became self-conscious about his own ability, and suspicious of that “clumsy vehicle,” the novel. The very act of researching and writing Grapes, which occupied him fully for several years and which he had already conceived as his final book on proletarian themes, changed him drastically.
No longer willing to be the chronicler of Depression-era subjects, Steinbeck went afield to find new roots, new sources, new forms. For example, in the six years following the publication of Grapes, Steinbeck completed a suit of love poems; a full-length novel (bastardized by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1943 film, Lifeboat); a nonfiction scientific book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (with Edward F. Ricketts); a documentary film, The Forgotten Village; a documentary book to help the war effort, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team; a series of articles he wrote as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune (later collected as Once There Was a War); and two novels, The Moon Is Down and Cannery Row.
Steinbeck came to define himself less as a novelist and more as a man of letters, a restless experimenter with form and subject matter, and a prophetic postmodernist whose key subject for the rest of his career was the dilemma of individual choice and ethical consciousness. Thus, Steinbeck’s later fiction, from The Moon Is Down (1942) through The Winter of Our Discontent (1962), and his later nonfiction, from Sea of Cortez (1941) through Travels with Charley (1962) and America and Americans (1966), often shows a different set of stylistic, thematic, and philosophical bearings from his earlier work and underscores his dramatic shift toward “individual thinking.” A full appreciation of Steinbeck’s mid-career metamorphosis and, consequently, of his later achievement requires a corresponding shift in critical approach – a departure from the traditional New Critical norms. Instead of marginalizing these works, all the contributors to this volume agree that Steinbeck’s later publications merit – indeed, demand – closer scrutiny.
Written especially for this collection in honor of Professor Tetsumaro Hayashi, the distinguished founder and editor-in-chief of the Steinbeck Quarterly, on his retirement from Ball State University and his move to Kwassui Women’s College in Nagasaki, Japan, these essays explore new ways of addressing Steinbeck’s later work and career, and include forays into subjects as diverse as ethnicity and music. They range from treatment of his post-structuralist use of language in Sea of Cortez and his involvement as a speech writer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reelection bid in 1944 to the influence of Charles Darwin’s theories of sexual selection in The Wayward Bus, his revision of the myth of Cain in The Winter of Our Discontent, and his employment of Arthurian quest values in his last book, America and Americans.
For this group of critics – which includes respected veteran Steinbeck scholars Robert DeMott, John Ditsky, Mimi Gladstein, Cliff Lewis, Robert Morsberger, Susan Shillinglaw, and Roy Simmonds, as well as talented new voices Debra Barker, Kevin Hearle, Michael Meyer, Brian Railsback, Eiko Shiraga, and Geralyn Strecker – The Moon is Down and The Wayward Bus loom as significant works in the post 1930s re-evaluation (two essays each appear on these works). The book also includes Donald Coers’s interview with the writer’s widow, Elaine Steinbeck, the first of its kind ever published. After The Grapes of Wrath opens with eminent Americanist Warren French’s appreciation of Professor Hayashi’s distinguished career and his influence in Steinbeck studies; a bibliography of Hayashi’s major publication concludes this honorary gathering.
Over the last twenty years, a concerted effort has been made to uncover the history of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Now, with the archives opened and the essential story told, it becomes possible to explore in detail what happened after the Holodomor and to examine its impact on Ukraine and its people.
In 2008 the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University hosted an international conference entitled “The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present.” The papers, most of which are contained in this volume, concern a wide range of topics, such as the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor and its subsequent effect on Ukraine’s people and communities; World War II, with its wartime and postwar famines; and the impact of the Holodomor on subsequent generations of Ukrainians and present-day Ukrainian culture. Through the efforts of the historians, archivists, and demographers represented here, a fuller history of the Holodomor continues to emerge.
20,000 BC, the peak of the last ice age—the atmosphere is heavy with dust, deserts, and glaciers span vast regions, and people, if they survive at all, exist in small, mobile groups, facing the threat of extinction.
But these people live on the brink of seismic change—10,000 years of climate shifts culminating in abrupt global warming that will usher in a fundamentally changed human world. After the Ice is the story of this momentous period—one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods—and one in which we find the origins of civilization itself.
Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, human genetics, and environmental science, After the Ice takes the reader on a sweeping tour of 15,000 years of human history. Steven Mithen brings this world to life through the eyes of an imaginary modern traveler—John Lubbock, namesake of the great Victorian polymath and author of Prehistoric Times. With Lubbock, readers visit and observe communities and landscapes, experiencing prehistoric life—from aboriginal hunting parties in Tasmania, to the corralling of wild sheep in the central Sahara, to the efforts of the Guila Naquitz people in Oaxaca to combat drought with agricultural innovations.
Part history, part science, part time travel, After the Ice offers an evocative and uniquely compelling portrayal of diverse cultures, lives, and landscapes that laid the foundations of the modern world.
Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Augusto Espiritu, Karen Fang, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Robert Gregg, Terri Hasseler, Clement Hawes, Douglas M. Haynes, Kristin Hoganson, Paula Krebs, Lara Kriegel, Radhika Viyas Mongia, Susan Pennybacker, John Plotz, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Heather Streets, Hsu-Ming Teo, Stuart Ward, Lora Wildenthal, Gary Wilder
After the Nation proposes a series of groundbreaking new approaches to novels, essays, and short stories by Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon within the framework of a hemispheric American studies. García-Caro offers a pioneering comparativist approach to the contemporary American and Mexican literary canons and their underlying nationalist encodement through the study of a wide range of texts by Pynchon and Fuentes which question and historicize in different ways the processes of national definition and myth-making deployed in the drawing of literary borders. After the Nation looks at these literary narratives as postnational satires that aim to unravel and denounce the combined hegemonic processes of modernity and nationalism while they start to contemplate the ensuing postnational constellations. These are texts that playfully challenge the temporal and spatial designs of national themes while they point to and debase “holy” borders, international borders as well as the internal lines where narratives of nation are embodied and consecrated.
"After the Nazi Racial State offers a comprehensive, persuasive, and ambitious argument in favor of making 'race' a more central analytical category for the writing of post-1945 history. This is an extremely important project, and the volume indeed has the potential to reshape the field of post-1945 German history."
---Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego
What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks---arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany---the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.
After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration---and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate---are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.
Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan.
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.
Cover illustration: Human eye, © Stockexpert.com.
Victorian Aestheticism has often been traded as a frivolous elevation of art above the concerns of political and social life. This book reinterprets Aestheticism as a significant exploration of what it might mean to produce works of art in the modern world. The chapters address not only "art for art's sake" but also linkages with the realms of science and morality. A major concern is the relationship between art and sexuality, from the experiments of the Rossetti circle in the 1860s to the male nude in late-Victorian sculpture. Both homosexual and heterosexual eroticism emerge as key issues in the artistic debates of the late-Victorian period.
As a complement to the existing literature on Pre-Raphaelitism, this collection is essential reading for all students of nineteenth-century art, literature, and culture.
Contributors are: Caroline Arscott, Robyn Asleson, Colin Cruise, Whitney Davis, Kate Flint, Alastair Grieve, Michael Hatt, Anne Koval, Alison Smith, and Robin SpencerScholars have described the eighteenth century in China as a time of “state activism” when the state sought to strengthen its control on various social and cultural sectors. The Taiping Rebellion and the postbellum restoration efforts of the mid-nineteenth century have frequently been associated with the origins of elite activism. However, drawing upon a wide array of sources, including previously untapped Qing government documents, After the Prosperous Age argues that the ascendance of elite activism can be traced to the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns in the early nineteenth century, and that the Taiping Rebellion served as a second catalyst for the expansion of elite public roles rather than initiating such an expansion.
The first four decades of the nineteenth century in China remain almost uncharted territory. By analyzing the social and cultural interplay between state power and local elites of Suzhou, a city renowned for its economic prosperity and strong sense of local pride, from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, Seunghyun Han illuminates the significance of this period in terms of the reformulation of state-elite relations marked by the unfolding of elite public activism and the dissolution of a centralized cultural order.
In the twentieth century, American society has experienced a “rights revolution”: a commitment by the national government to promote a healthful environment, safe products, freedom from discrimination, and other rights unknown to the founding generation. This development has profoundly affected constitutional democracy by skewing the original understanding of checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights. Cass Sunstein tells us how it is possible to interpret and reform this regulatory state regime in a way that will enhance freedom and welfare while remaining faithful to constitutional commitments.
Sunstein vigorously defends government regulation against Reaganite/Thatcherite attacks based on free-market economics and pre–New Deal principles of private right. Focusing on the important interests in clean air and water, a safe workplace, access to the air waves, and protection against discrimination, he shows that regulatory initiatives have proved far superior to an approach that relies solely on private enterprise. Sunstein grants that some regulatory regimes have failed and calls for reforms that would amount to an American perestroika: a restructuring that embraces the use of government to further democratic goals but that insists on the decentralization and productive potential of private markets.
Sunstein also proposes a theory of interpretation that courts and administrative agencies could use to secure constitutional goals and to improve the operation of regulatory programs. From this theory he seeks to develop a set of principles that would synthesize the modern regulatory state with the basic premises of the American constitutional system. Teachers of law, policymakers and political scientists, economists and historians, and a general audience interested in rights, regulation, and government will find this book an essential addition to their libraries.
When the United States goes to war, the nation’s attention focuses on the president. As commander in chief, a president reaches the zenith of power, while Congress is supposedly shunted to the sidelines once troops have been deployed abroad. Because of Congress’s repeated failure to exercise its legislative powers to rein in presidents, many have proclaimed its irrelevance in military matters.
After the Rubicon challenges this conventional wisdom by illuminating the diverse ways in which legislators influence the conduct of military affairs. Douglas L. Kriner reveals that even in politically sensitive wartime environments, individual members of Congress frequently propose legislation, hold investigative hearings, and engage in national policy debates in the public sphere. These actions influence the president’s strategic decisions as he weighs the political costs of pursuing his preferred military course.
Marshalling a wealth of quantitative and historical evidence, Kriner expertly demonstrates the full extent to which Congress materially shapes the initiation, scope, and duration of major military actions and sheds new light on the timely issue of interbranch relations.
The 1894 Pullman strike and the rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters played major roles in the century-long development of union organizing and labor-management relations in the Pullman Company. Susan Eleanor Hirsch connects the stories of Pullman car builders and porters to answer critical questions like: what created job segregation by race and gender? What role did such segregation play in shaping the labor movement?
Hirsch illuminates the relationship between labor organizing and the racial and sexual discrimination practiced by both employers and unions. Because the Pullman Company ran the sleeping-car service for American railroads and was a major manufacturer of railcars, its workers were involved in virtually every wave of union organizing from the 1890s to the 1940s.
In exploring the years of struggle by the men and women of the Pullman Company, After the Strike reveals the factors that determined the limited success and narrow vision of most American unions.
In a range of politically inflected essays by philosophers, community activists, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and cultural and postcolonial theorists—many of whom are diasporic or resident South Africans—this special issue of SAQ provides a critical look at the realities of black majority governance, at the African National Congress, and at the costs of ANC rule to the populace. One essay draws a condemning sketch of poverty and violence in the townships and the growing communities of squatters that continue despite the emergence of democracy. A philosophical piece contemplates the practice of human rights in a South African society grappling with the memory of apartheid abuses. The fiction and poetry in the collection explore sexual identity, including issues created by the AIDS epidemic, and offer critiques of government policies. Using comic strips, another contributor demonstrates the ability of South African popular culture to satirize the nation’s political status quo. Taken together, the essays in After the Thrill Is Gone open a sobering perspective on South Africa’s recent history, its present, and its future.
Contributors. Rita Barnard, Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Grant Fared, Michiel Heyns, Shaun Irlam, Neil Lazarus, Michael MacDonald, Zine Magubane, Richard Pithouse, Lesego Rampolokeng, Adam Sitze
Has South Africa dealt effectively with the past, and is the country ready to face the future? What are the challenges facing both government and civil society in the years ahead? These and other questions are explored in this collection of essays by international and local commentators on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
A range of perspectives on whether the TRC met its objectives of truth and reconciliation is presented. The areas of particular contention-the payment of reparation, the granting of amnesty, and memorialization-are also examined.
Finally, the major challenges facing South Africa are identified, and ways of meeting these challenges and developing the assets of the nation are explored.
Contributors: Haribert Adam, Kanya Adam, Alex Boraine, Colin Bundy, Mary Burton, John de Gruchy, Richard Goldstone, Willem Heath, Wilmot James, Jeffrey Lever, Mahmood Mamdani, Gary Minkley, Njabulo Ndebele, Dumisa Ntsebeza, Kaizer Nyatsumba, Grace Naledi Pandor, Mamphela Ramphele, Ciraj Rassool, Albie Sachs, Patricia Valdez, Linda van de Vijver, Jan van Eck, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, Charles Villa-Vicencio, Francis Wilson, and Leslie Witz
A world-renowned anthropologist, Anatoly M. Khazanov offers a witty, insightful, and cautionary analysis of ethnic nationalism and its pivotal role in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
“Khazanov’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history and culture of post-Soviet societies, combined with field research there since the 1960s, informs the case studies with a singular authoritative voice. This volume is destined to be an absolutely necessary reference for the understanding of ethnic relations and the politics of minorities in the ex-USSR into the next century.”—Leonard Plotnicov, editor of Ethnology
First Paperback Edition
In her fiction, Jessie Brown Pounds preserved the flavor of Ohio’s rural village culture as the nineteenth century drew to a close. This anthology rediscovers Pounds’s varied works and reminds modern students that Middle-Western culture included women writers as social critics and mythmakers. Included are short stories, sketches, one undated short story published posthumously in 1921, and Rachael Sylvestre, a first-person historical novel written in 1904.
Swallowtail butterflies frolic on the wind. Vireos and rock wrens sing their hearts out by the recovering creek. Spiders and other predators chase their next meal. Through it all, John Alcock observes, records, and delights in what he sees. In a once-burnt area, life resurges. Plants whose seeds and roots withstood an intense fire become habitat for the returning creatures of the wild. After the Wildfire describes the remarkable recovery of wildlife in the Mazatzal Mountains in central Arizona.
It is the rare observer who has the dedication to revisit the site of a wildfire, especially over many years and seasons. But naturalist John Alcock returned again and again to the Mazatzals, where the disastrous Willow fire of 2004 burned 187 square miles. Documenting the fire’s aftermath over a decade, Alcock thrills at the renewal of the once-blackened region. Walking the South Fork of Deer Creek in all seasons as the years passed, he was rewarded by the sight of exuberant plant life that in turn fostered an equally satisfying return of animals ranging from small insects to large mammals.
Alcock clearly explains the response of chaparral plants to fire and the creatures that reinhabit these plants as they come back from a ferocious blaze: the great spreadwing damselfly, the western meadowlark, the elk, and birds and bugs of rich and colorful varieties. This book is at once a journey of biological discovery and a celebration of the ability of living things to reoccupy a devastated location. Alcock encourages others to engage the natural world—even one that has burnt to the ground.
In January 1990, the New York Harbor suffered a major oil spill when an underwater pipe at an Exxon refinery leaked into the Arthur Kill, the fifteen-mile strait that runs between New Jersey and Staten Island. The waterway is home to herons and egrets, fiddler crabs and sea turtles, and a favorite place for recreational fishing, bird-watching, hiking, and boating. It is also lined with refineries and a busy corridor for oil tankers. Because this industrial activity posed such an imposing threat to the fragile ecosystem, biologists had been monitoring the region’s water, soil, vegetation, and wildlife for some time before the oil spill. Thus, we have before -and-after data about the habitat—the only oil spill anywhere for which this is true.
This unique book discusses the human consequences of the oil spill as well as providing detailed studies of its effects on the plants and animals of the Arthur Kill. Biologists, environmentalists, lawyers, and officials worldwide will find this book an essential guide to dealing with—and possibly preventing—future environmental disasters.
The contributors areJohn Brzorad, Angela Christini, Keith Cooper, Lynn Frink, Michael Gochfeld, Paul Hauge, Gordon Johnson, Alan D. Maccarone, Katherine Parsons, Carolyn Summers, Robert Tucker.
By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism.
Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.
Roger Sale invites us to discover anew some of the great works of children's literature, works that have been read and loved but seldom given the benefit of serious literary assessment. It takes a critic of special gifts—receptiveness, discrimination, clarity of perception, independence of judgment—to discuss these books as illuminatingly as Sale does.
This is not a survey but a very personal book: Sale writes about stories and books with which he feels an imaginative sympathy. As it happens, they include a great many of the classic children's texts, works as disparate as “Beauty and the Beast” and Alice, The Wind in the Willows and Babar, “The Snow Queen” and Peter Rabbit, the Jungle Book and the Oz books. He conveys a fresh sense of what is special and memorable about each of them.
While avoiding conventional literary history, he sketches the circumstances of the author's life when they provide insight into the works. Unlike Bettelheim and others, Sale is not concerned with the “uses” of children's literature. He writes for adults, with the conviction that adults can find delight in these books. Many already do, and perhaps with his stimulus, many more will.
In one essay, two prominent intersex activists reflect on their often controversial work on behalf of the Intersex Society of North America to achieve change in medical policy over the last ten years. Other essays explore the impact of the categorization of intersexuality as a “disorder of sex development” and of the treatment guidelines published in 2006 by the Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development. An essay by the issue’s guest editor takes a comprehensive look at the relationship between intersexuality and the study of gender and sexuality. The issue also includes a portfolio of photographs as well as a roundtable discussion that brings together intersex experts from medicine, law, psychology, and the humanities.
Contributors. Sarah M. Creighton, Alice D. Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, Julie A. Greenberg, April Herndon, Iain Morland, Katrina Roen, Vernon A. Rosario, Nikki Sullivan, Del LaGrace Volcano
London Fashion Week is the pinnacle of the fashion season, and it features an array of native designers, from Burberry and Vivenne Westwood to Alexander McQueen and Nicole Farhi. The roots of London’s place as the international epicenter of haute couture and prêt-à-porter stretch back centuries, and they are explored here by Alistair O’Neill.
Arguing that fashion was central to the impact of modernity in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century London, O’Neill maps the progress of fashion against the city’s neighborhoods and streets. Carnaby Street, Soho, Jermyn Street, and King’s Road each get their turn in London, along with many others, revealing the intersection between London’s urban history and the development of fashion. O’Neill’s analysis is not merely confined to clothing—from the popularity of tattooing in the 1890s to the diverse uses of chintz in the 1980s design aesthetic, he traces the history of fashion in its various manifestations and explores how particular figures were key to disseminating fashion throughout British and international cultures. Participating in fashion, Londonshows, was not only a pleasurable aspect of modern urban life, but also a fundamental element of contemporary cultural sensibilities. London unearths vital moments of revolution in fashion that reflect deeper changes in London’s history and culture, contending that these historic changes are unfairly marginalized in accounts of transformation in the city’s culture.
A fascinating look at style and urbanism, London offers an intriguing reconsideration of the role of fashion in city life and fills in long overlooked gaps in the history of London and modern design.
Governance everywhere is concerned with spatial relationships. Modern states “map” local communities, making them legible for the purposes of control. Ethiopia has gone through several stages of “mapping” in its imperial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary phases.
In 1986 The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia, a cross-disciplinary collection edited by Don Donham and Wendy James, opened up the study of center/periphery relations in the Ethiopian empire until the fall of the monarchy in 1974. This new volume examines similar themes, taking the story forward through the major changes effected by the socialist regime from the revolution of 1974 to its overthrow in 1991, and then into the current period that has been marked by moves toward local democracy and political devolution.
Topics include the changing fortunes of new and historic towns and cities, the impact of the Mengistu regime’s policies of villagization and resettlement, local aspects of the struggle against Mengistu and its aftermath, and the fate of border regions. Special attention is given to developments since 1991: to new local institutions and forms of autonomy, the links between the international diasporas of Ethiopia and the fortunes of their home areas. The collection draws on the work of established scholars as well as a new generation of Ethiopian and international researchers in the disciplines of anthropology, political science, history, and geography.
Most analyses of Egyptian politics present the limitations and failures of official political life as the complete story of politics in Egypt. Raymond Baker's direct observation of Egyptian politics has convinced him that alternative political groups have sustained themselves and carved out spaces for promising political action despite official efforts at containment.
In this compelling study, Baker recreates the public worlds of eight groups on the periphery of Egyptian politics. They range in their political stances from Communists to the Muslim Brothers and include shifting clusters of critical intellectuals who gather around influential journals or in research centers, as well as the quiescent aestheticists of the Wissa Wassef community. Taken together, the experiences of Egyptians in alternative groups reveal that Egyptians are more than the objects of diverse external pressures and more than the sufferers from multiple internal problems. They are also creative political actors who have stories to tell about the human potential to struggle for humane values and goals in the modern world.
In examining Egypt from the margins rather than from the center, Baker proposes a new direction for Third World political studies. He suggests a way out of the impasse in the current development literature, which is fixed on a scientific study of causes and determinants, by focusing on actual political struggles and alternative political visions.
Paul Rogers is one of the world's leading security experts. Since the 11 September attacks, he has been a regular guest on TV news channels throughout America and Britain, where he has offered expert advice on the real implications of 9/11 and Bush's 'war on terror'. His articles in newspapers around the world, and in the web journal Open Democracy, have become essential reading for many thousands of people, including government officials, senior military, heads of UN agencies, opinion formers, journalists and peace activists.
A War on Terror is Paul Roger's radical assessment of Bush's new policy, the way it has affected world security and the grave implications that it holds for future peace, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. Moving from the war in Afghanistan and its aftermath to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the continuing development of al-Qaida and its associates through to the war on Iraq, Rogers presents a uniquely cogent analysis of these rapid and traumatic events.
In a world in which the US and other states of the Atlantic community are increasingly speaking a different language to that of the majority of the world, Paul Rogers offers a vital critical assessment of the language of dominance and control as 'the New American Century' unfolds.
For the US, in particular, the post-9/11 world is one in which it is essential to maintain firm control of international security, extending to pre-emptive military action. In this book, Rogers demonstrates how futile, mistaken and deeply counter-productive that belief is, and points the way to more effective routes to a more just and secure world.
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