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3 books match the query '1889-1964'

cover of Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism

Beyond Belief

India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism

Srirupa Roy

Duke University Press, 2007

Beyond Belief is a bold rethinking of the formation and consolidation of nation-state ideologies. Analyzing India during the first two decades following its foundation as a sovereign nation-state in 1947, Srirupa Roy explores how nationalists are turned into nationals, subjects into citizens, and the colonial state into a sovereign nation-state. Roy argues that the postcolonial nation-state is consolidated not, as many have asserted, by efforts to imagine a shared cultural community, but rather by the production of a recognizable and authoritative identity for the state. This project—of making the state the entity identified as the nation’s authoritative representative—emphasizes the natural cultural diversity of the nation and upholds the state as the sole unifier or manager of the “naturally” fragmented nation; the state is unified through diversity.

Roy considers several different ways that identification with the Indian nation-state was produced and consolidated during the 1950s and 1960s. She looks at how the Films Division of India, a state-owned documentary and newsreel production agency, allowed national audiences to “see the state”; how the “unity in diversity” formation of nationhood was reinforced in commemorations of India’s annual Republic Day; and how the government produced a policy discourse claiming that scientific development was the ultimate national need and the most pressing priority for the state to address. She also analyzes the fate of the steel towns—industrial townships built to house the workers of nationalized steel plants—which were upheld as the exemplary national spaces of the new India. By prioritizing the role of actual manifestations of and encounters with the state, Roy moves beyond theories of nationalism and state formation based on collective belief.

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cover of She Devils at the Door

She Devils at the Door

Eliza Smith Brown

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023

The true story of the Gilded Age’s “political twins” who brought women’s suffrage and political reform to the city of Pittsburgh.

Sometimes troublemakers emerge from the most unlikely of places. This true story follows the lives of two daughters of the Gilded Age—Lucy and Eliza Kennedy—who were educated at Vassar College and became leaders of the suffrage movement. Then, after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, they spent the next forty years fighting corruption in politics and government.

Tenacious, smart, and witty, they captivated crowds, disarmed their opponents, and instilled particular dread among the corrupt politicians who were the unfortunate targets of their nonpartisan crusade. Their entry across the threshold of Pittsburgh’s City-County Building would reportedly invoke a flurry of hushed warnings through the halls: “The She Devils are at the door!” Together, Lucy and Eliza fought for the vote, empowered women to use it wisely, forced a mayor out of office in disgrace, took control of the city budget, exposed a series of scandals, spearheaded police reform, and launched a campaign that would eventually clear Pittsburgh of its smoky veil.

Featuring the true story of two powerful women, this book comes at a propitious time, reminding us how far women have come and how vigilant we must remain.
 
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cover of The Well at Morning: Selected Poems, 1925–1971

The Well at Morning

Selected Poems, 1925–1971

Bohuslav Reynek

Karolinum Press, 2017

Springtide
 
A chaffinch in a tree
of cherry sings merrily
spring’s introit.
 
Its blazing bobble dwells
in leaves, alive, and swells
in scarlet.
 
The flowers are flares of white.
The chaffinch has gone quiet
and turned sky-gazer.
 
My eyes close on the day:
an orb revolves in grey
and red and azure.
 
Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obscurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at the hands of the Communist regime, he cannot be numbered among the dissident poets of Eastern Europe who won acclaim for their political poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, Reynek belongs to an older pastoral-devotional tradition—a kindred spirit to the likes of English-language poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas. The Well at Morning presents a selection of poems from across his life and is illustrated with twenty-five of his own color etchings. Also featuring three essays by leading scholars that place Reynek’s life and work alongside those of his better-known peers, this book presents a noted Czech artist to the wider world, reshaping and amplifying our understanding of modern European poetry.
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