Results by title

An essential reflection on the haunting legacy of the transatlantic slave trade from award-winning French filmmaker and writer Fabienne Kanor.

A century and a half after the passage of the last known slave ship, the hold—in which captives were imprisoned together under inhuman conditions—still haunts collective memory, particularly that of Afro-descendant artists, thinkers, and writers. With The Poetics of the Hold, scholar, writer, and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor offers a series of meditations on the transatlantic slave trade and on how the experience of the Middle Passage has been represented in modern culture of the United States, Francophone Africa, and the French West Indies.

In this important book, Kanor draws from a multitude of sources—history, literature, art, philosophy, the Négritude tradition, and Caribbean thinkers—to take readers on a journey from colonial archives to public spaces, museums, and other places of commemoration. Throughout, the image of the hold serves as a spectral monument, the traumatic reverberations of which can be felt in both the texts Kanor examines and in her own writing. While archives, logbooks, and sea reports provide information about slave ships, the stories of the slaves themselves too often remain shrouded in silence. This powerful and poetic book seeks to rectify that amnesia and to wrestle with these neglected histories and their afterlives.

Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue  reexamination of Wang’s impact on cultural memory of WWII in China.

In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang’s lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public’s posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.

Biological warfare is a menacing twenty-first-century issue, but its origins extend to antiquity. While the recorded use of toxins in warfare in some ancient populations is rarely disputed (the use of arsenical smoke in China, which dates to at least 1000 BC, for example) the use of "poison arrows" and other deadly substances by Native American groups has been fraught with contradiction. At last revealing clear documentation to support these theories, anthropologist David Jones transforms the realm of ethnobotany in Poison Arrows.

Examining evidence within the few extant descriptive accounts of Native American warfare, along with grooved arrowheads and clues from botanical knowledge, Jones builds a solid case to indicate widespread and very effective use of many types of toxins. He argues that various groups applied them to not only warfare but also to hunting, and even as an early form of insect extermination. Culling extensive ethnological, historical, and archaeological data, Jones provides a thoroughly comprehensive survey of the use of ethnobotanical and entomological compounds applied in wide-ranging ways, including homicide and suicide. Although many narratives from the contact period in North America deny such uses, Jones now offers conclusive documentation to prove otherwise.

A groundbreaking study of a subject that has been long overlooked, Poison Arrows imparts an extraordinary new perspective to the history of warfare, weaponry, and deadly human ingenuity.

This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both informed and non-specialist readers. The essays consider why and how PiS, Law and Justice, the party of Jarosław Kaczynski, returned to power, and the why and how of its policies while in power. They help to make sense of how “history” plays a key role in Polish public life and politics.

The descriptions of PiS in Western media tend to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was simply successful in understanding its electorate, and just helped Poland to revert to its normal state. This new Normal seems quite similar to the old one: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist.

The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Western-looking Poland and an inward-looking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, and working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition.

The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.

An insightful examination of Latin America’s contemporary democratic landscape and how it is marked by patterns of polarization and volatility.

Although Latin American democracies have shown considerable resilience, today they face new forms of political polarization and instability. These challenges are closely connected to the legacies of the region’s “left turn,” which sought to transform entrenched inequalities and social hierarchies in the early twenty-first century. Unprecedented in its scope and duration, the left turn reflected an underlying realignment of political contestation in a highly unequal region. Yet despite notable achievements in addressing social needs, leftist parties struggled to deepen democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they faced powerful elite backlashes.

Through a comparative analysis of seven South American countries, Santiago Anria and Kenneth M. Roberts trace the different origins and trajectories in power of the populist and social democratic currents that emerged within the left turn. Anria and Roberts argue that today’s democratic orders face intensifying polarization and institutional fragility, even where social democratic parties made explicit efforts to build broad coalitions and temper political conflict. They show how activist networks and social movements on the left and the right triggered latent political conflicts and are now reshaping democratic competition and the terms of social inclusion in South American politics.

This book fills a gap in the existing literature on how parties and party systems are developing in the new democracies of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. It provides the first detailed, empirically based examination from a structural and organizational perspective of the new parties and political groupings that have emerged in Poland since the collapse of communism in 1989.

The author develops his argument on the basis of an analysis of five key structural and organizational variables: the internal distribution of power and modes of representation within the parties; the role of the party bureaucracy; the relationship between parties and their electorates; the development of parties as membership organizations; and the relationship between parties and the state.

As the first in-depth, empirically grounded single-country study of party structure and organization in post-communist Eastern Europe, the book provides an opportunity to draw broader conclusions about the process of Central and East European party development and will contribute significantly towards the development of a post-communist political party model. Szczerbiak sheds light on an important aspect of the more general process of post-communist democratization in the region and provides a major contribution to one of the least-explored areas of transition.

The police forces of the transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe have to undergo profound reform to be able to respond to the needs of society; to serve the public and not just the government, and to prove that they can effectively combat crime. This volume is the result of a survey by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee concerning the mode and extent of changes police forces of the post-communist countries have undergone since 1989 – 1990. Information is provided about the relevant tasks, organization, personnel, accountability, and international relations of the national police forces and about the coercive measures they are entitled to use.

Written by internationally acknowledged experts of policing and representatives of human-rights organizations, Police in Transition deals with the questions of transition, European trends in the governance of the police, the relationship between police and criminality, the role of the police in the constitutional framework, the limits of policing, police brutality, civilian oversight of the police and the possibilities of a democratic reform of police forces in Central and Eastern Europe. 

Founded by Peter the Great in 1718, Russia’s police were key instruments of tsarist power. In the reign of Alexander II (1855-1881), local police forces took on new importance. The liberation of 23 million serfs from landlord control, growing fear of crime, and the terrorist violence of the closing years challenged law enforcement with new tasks that made worse what was already a staggering burden. (“I am obliged to inform Your Imperial Highness that the police often fail to carry out their assignments and, when they do execute them, they do so poorly because of their moral corruption…”) This book describes the regime’s decades-long struggle to reform and strengthen the police. The author reviews the local police’s role and performance in the mid-nineteenth century and the implications of the largely unsuccessful effort to transform them. From a longer-term perspective, the study considers how the police’s systemic weaknesses undermined tsarist rule, impeded a range of liberalizing reforms, perpetuated reliance on the military to maintain law and order, and gave rise to vigilante justice.

While its primary focus is on European Russia, the analysis also covers much of the imperial periphery, discussing the police systems in the Baltic Provinces, Congress Poland, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia.