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Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine.

Joseph Horowitz writes: “That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.” He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian “psychology of exile” traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov’s hero Igor Stravinsky.

In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He here focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a “freedom not to matter,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration’s arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today’s fraught American national identity.

Challenging long-entrenched myths, The Propaganda of Freedom newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement.

How the U.S. empire-state transformed post-1945 Afghanistan into a key site for reimagining development
 

Established in 1961 by President Kennedy, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is often viewed as an extension of the security state, playing a constant role on the ground in Afghanistan since the early sixties. The Quiet Violence of Empire traces USAID’s long and bloody history of development work in the region, revealing an empirically rich account of the transnational entanglements of imperialism and racial capitalism.

Wesley Attewell carefully analyzes three chronological moments of development as counterinsurgency in action: the Helmand Valley Project, the Soviet–Afghan conflict, and the post-9/11 occupation in Afghanistan. These case studies expose how USAID’s very public commitment to bringing seemingly inclusionary forms of self-help, technical assistance, and market development to Afghanistan has been undergirded by longer-standing infrastructures of race war and racial management. Attewell exposes how one of the net effects of USAID’s development mission to Afghanistan has been to constrain the life chances of Afghan beneficiaries while simultaneously diverting development capital back to U.S. contractors, deftly underscoring the notion of development as a form of slow violence.

The Quiet Violence of Empire asks the critical question: how might we refuse the ruse of USAID and its endlessly deferred promise of development? Thinking relationally across the fields of human geography, global studies, and critical ethnic studies, it uncovers the explicitly racial underpinnings of international development theory and praxis.

Examines how radical bookstores and similar spaces serve as launching pads for social movements
 

How does social change happen? It requires an identified problem, an impassioned and committed group, a catalyst, and a plan. In this deeply researched consideration of seventy-seven stores and establishments, Kimberley Kinder argues that activists also need autonomous space for organizing, and that these spaces are made, not found. She explores the remarkably enduring presence of radical bookstores in America and how they provide infrastructure for organizing—gathering places, retail offerings that draw new people into what she calls “counterspaces.”

Kinder focuses on brick-and-mortar venues where owners approach their businesses primarily as social movement tools. These may be bookstores, infoshops, libraries, knowledge cafes, community centers, publishing collectives, thrift stores, or art installations. They are run by activist-entrepreneurs who create centers for organizing and selling books to pay the rent. These spaces allow radical and contentious ideas to be explored and percolate through to actual social movements, and serve as crucibles for activists to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white privilege, patriarchy, and homophobia. They also exist within a central paradox: participating in the marketplace creates tensions, contradictions, and shortfalls. Activist retail does not end capitalism; collective ownership does not enable a retreat from civic requirements like zoning; and donations, no matter how generous, do not offset the enormous power of corporations and governments. 

In this timely and relevant book, Kinder presents a necessary, novel, and apt analysis of the role these retail spaces play in radical organizing, one that demonstrates how such durable hubs manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protest. 

Through close readings of the painted images in a major sixteenth-century illustrated manuscript, this book demonstrates the critical role that images played in ethnic identity formation and politics in colonial Mexico.

The Relación de Michoacán (1539–1541) is one of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts from colonial Mexico. Commissioned by the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the Relación was produced by a Franciscan friar together with indigenous noble informants and anonymous native artists who created its forty-four illustrations. To this day, the Relación remains the primary source for studying the pre-Columbian practices and history of the people known as Tarascans or P’urhépecha. However, much remains to be said about how the Relación’s colonial setting shaped its final form.

By looking at the Relación in its colonial context, this study reveals how it presented the indigenous collaborators a unique opportunity to shape European perceptions of them while settling conflicting agendas, outshining competing ethnic groups, and carving a place for themselves in the new colonial society. Through archival research and careful visual analysis, Angélica Afanador-Pujol provides a new and fascinating account that situates the manuscript’s images within the colonial conflicts that engulfed the indigenous collaborators. These conflicts ranged from disputes over political posts among indigenous factions to labor and land disputes against Spanish newcomers. Afanador-Pujol explores how these tensions are physically expressed in the manuscript’s production and in its many contradictions between text and images, as well as in numerous emendations to the images. By studying representations of justice, landscape, conquest narratives, and genealogy within the Relación, Afanador-Pujol clearly demonstrates the visual construction of identity, its malleability, and its political possibilities.

The Repoliticization of the Welfare State grapples with the evolving nature of political conflict over social spending after the Great Recession. While the severity of the economic crisis encouraged strong social spending responses to protect millions of individuals, governments have faced growing pressure to reduce budgets and make deep cuts to the welfare state. Whereas conservative parties have embraced fiscal discipline and welfare state cuts, left-wing parties have turned away from austerity in favor of higher social spending. These political differences represent a return of traditional left-right beliefs over social spending and economic governance. 

This book is one of the first to systematically compare welfare state politics before and after the Great Recession, arguing that a new and lasting post-crisis dynamic has emerged where political parties once again matter for social spending. At the heart of this repoliticization are intense ideological debates over market regulation, social inequality, redistribution, and the role of the state. The book analyzes social spending dynamics for 28 countries before and after the crisis. It also includes in-depth country case studies representing five distinct welfare state types: Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

Stacks’s analysis shifts the focus of attention from genre--freedom song--to process and practice--freedom singing. As he shows, freedom singing after 1968 generates multilayered meanings. It can reinforce, or resist, consensus memories or dominant narratives. Stacks illuminates freedom singing’s diversity by examining it in three contexts: performance, protest, and within documentary sound recording/film.

Insightful and vividly detailed, The Resounding Revolution examines sixty years of Black music to challenge and reshape the entrenched story of the Civil Rights Movement.

Bringing to life the stories of political teatristas, feminists, gunrunners, labor organizers, poets, journalists, ex-prisoners, and other revolutionaries, The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico examines the inspiration Chicanas/os found in social movements in Mexico and Latin America from 1971 to 1979. Drawing on fifteen years of interviews and archival research, including examinations of declassified government documents from Mexico, this study uncovers encounters between activists and artists across borders while sharing a socialist-oriented, anticapitalist vision. In discussions ranging from the Nuevo Teatro Popular movement across Latin America to the Revolutionary Proletariat Party of America in Mexico and the Peronista Youth organizers in Argentina, Alan Eladio Gómez brings to light the transnational nature of leftist organizing by people of Mexican descent in the United States, tracing an array of festivals, assemblies, labor strikes, clandestine organizations, and public protests linked to an international movement of solidarity against imperialism.

Taking its title from the “greater Mexico” designation used by Américo Paredes to describe the present and historical movement of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Chicanas/os back and forth across the US-Mexico border, this book analyzes the radical creativity and global justice that animated “Greater Mexico” leftists during a pivotal decade. While not all the participants were of one mind politically or personally, they nonetheless shared an international solidarity that was enacted in local arenas, giving voice to a political and cultural imaginary that circulated throughout a broad geographic terrain while forging multifaceted identities. The epilogue considers the politics of going beyond solidarity.

Decoding the discourse: Rhetorical foundations of authoritarian power.

Fascism has resurfaced as one of the most pressing problems of our time. The rise of extremist parties and candidates in Europe, the United States, and around the globe has led even mainstream political commentators to begin using the term “fascism” to describe dangerous movements that have revived and repackaged many of the strategies long thought to have been relegated to the margins of political rhetoric. No longer just confined to the state regimes of the past, fascism thrives today as a globally self-augmenting, self-propagating rhetorical phenomenon with a variety of faces and expressions.

The Rhetoric of Fascism defines and interprets the common persuasive devices that characterize fascist discourse to understand the nature of its enduring appeal. By approaching fascism from a rhetorical perspective, this volume complements established political and sociological understandings of fascism as a movement or regime. A rhetorical approach studies fascism less as a party one joins than as a set of persuasive strategies one adopts. Fascism spreads precisely because it is not a coherent entity. Instead, it exists as a loosely bound and often contradictory collection of persuasive trajectories that have attained enough coherence to mobilize and channel the passions of a self-constituted mass of individuals.

Introductory chapters focus on general theories of fascism drawn from twentieth-century history and theory. Contributors investigate specific historical figures and their relationship to contemporary rhetorics, focusing on a specific rhetorical device that is characteristic of fascist rhetoric. A common thread throughout every chapter is that fascist devices are appealing because they speak to us in the familiar language of our culture. As we are seduced by one device at a time, we soon find ourselves part of a movement, a group, or a campaign that makes us act in ways we might never have imagined. This volume reveals that fascism may be closer to home than we think.

CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick D. Anderson / Rya Butterfield / Nathan Crick / Elizabeth R. Earle / Zac Gershberg / Stephen J. Hartnett / Marie-Odile N. Hobeika / Sean Illing / Jacob A. Miller / Fernando Ismael Quiñones Valdivia / Patricia Roberts-Miller / Raquel M. Robvais / Bradley A. Serber / Ryan Skinnell
 

On July 28, 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate the causes of unrest in urban black communities during the 1960s. Chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr., the commission ominously warned, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” And it aimed its sharpest criticism at the mainstream media, concluding: “The press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men's eyes and a white perspective.” Major news media responded by expanding and diversifying their coverage of black communities and increasing the number of African Americans in their newsrooms.

Although much has been written about the Kerner Commission, the analysis has focused primarily on its affect on the American press. In The Riot Report and the News, Thomas J. Hrach instead explores how the commission came to its conclusions, in order to understand why and how its report served as a catalyst for change. Hrach finds that such government criticism of the media can have a long-term and positive influence on the nation, an insight that remains important as the news continues to struggle with how to cover issues of race.

A deeply researched account of how battles over civil rights in the 1960s shaped today’s partisan culture wars.

In the late twentieth century, gay rights, immigration, gun control, and abortion debates all burst onto the political scene, scrambling the parties and polarizing the electorate. Neil A. O’Brian traces the origins of today’s political divide on these issues to the 1960s when Democrats and Republicans split over civil rights. It was this partisan polarization over race, he argues, that subsequently shaped partisan fault lines on other culture war issues that persist to this day.

Using public opinion data dating to the 1930s, O’Brian shows that attitudes about civil rights were already linked with a range of other culture war beliefs decades before the parties split on these issues—and much earlier than previous scholarship realized. Challenging a common understanding of partisan polarization as an elite-led phenomenon, The Roots of Polarization argues politicians and interest groups, jockeying for power in the changing party system, seized on these preexisting connections in the mass public to build the parties’ contemporary coalitions.

For many citizens, politics is depressing. How has this come to be the norm? And, how is it influencing democracy?

From rising polarization to climate change, today’s politics are leaving many Western democracies in the throes of malaise. While anger, anxiety, and fear are loud emotions that powerfully activate voters, depression is quiet, demobilizing, and less visible as a result. Yet its pervasiveness is cause for concern: after all, democracy should empower citizens.

In The Sad Citizen, Christopher Ojeda draws on wide-ranging data from the United States and beyond to explain how politics is depressing, why this matters, and what we can do about it. Integrating insights from political science, sociology, psychology, and other fields, The Sad Citizen exposes the unhappy underbelly of contemporary politics and offers fresh ideas to strengthen democracy and help citizens cope with the stress of politics.

Africa is often seen as a place to be pitied or feared as an area of instability. This book challenges these complacent assumptions, showing how our demand for oil contributes to the chronic problems plaguing the continent.

Douglas A. Yates shows how the 'scramble' by the great powers for African oil has fed corruption and undermined democracy. Yates documents how Africans have refused to remain passive in the face of such developments, forming movements to challenge this new attempt at domination.

This book is an urgent challenge to our understanding of Africa, raising questions about the consequences of our reliance on foreign resources. It will be vital reading for all those studying development and global political economy.

A sophisticated analysis of an influential Indigenous political ideology.

When the political ideology known as “Indianism” developed in Bolivia in the 1960s, it was premised on a rejection of Bolivian nationalism. Over the ensuing decades, however, it underwent several mutations as it moved out of a close circle of intellectuals to grip the urban masses that brought Evo Morales—the first Indigenous president—to power in 2006.

The Social Life of Indianism offers a fresh perspective by examining Bolivian Indigenous politics through the lens of political ideology. Through an ethnographic study of Indianism in the city of El Alto, Tathagatan Ravindran shows how canonical Indianism—the original ideology that rejects Bolivia as enslaver of the Indian nation—provided philosophical ballast for exponents of a more popular folk Indianism that accommodates the Bolivian state and pursues Indigenous empowerment within it. Synthesizing approaches from several disciplines, Ravindran demonstrates how canonical Indianism was not refuted or supplanted; it refracted, in the broader public, into a new common sense. A sophisticated analysis of a complex political landscape, The Social Life of Indianism brings much-needed nuance to one of the most prominent forms of Indigenous ideology and offers a unique framework for analyzing political ideologies across the contemporary world.

Questioning the boundaries between politics and economics

 

Jean-Louis Laville’s large body of work has focused on an intellectual history of the concept of solidarity since the Industrial Revolution. In The Solidarity Economy, his most famous distillation of this work, Laville establishes how the formations of economic solidarities (unions, activism, and other forms of associationalism) reveal that the boundaries between politics and economics are porous and structured such that politics, ideally a pure expression of ethics and values, is instead integrated with economic concerns. 

Exploring the possibilities and long histories of association, The Solidarity Economy identifies the power of contemporary social and solidarity movements and examines the history of postcapitalist practices in which democratic demands invade the heart of the economy. The Solidarity Economy ranges in focus from workers associations in France dating back to the nineteenth century, to associations of African Americans and feminists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a Brazilian landless-worker coalition in the twentieth century. 

Studying solidarity associations over time allows us to examine how we can recombine the economic and political spheres to address dependencies and inequalities. Ultimately, The Solidarity Economy has global scope and inspiring examples of associations that deepen democracy.