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Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad--as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith--to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.
Drawing on visual materials (film, art, graffiti, street-art, public advertisement, memorials), the essays of this collection offer detailed views on the cultural and political dynamics that preceded and emerged in the wake of the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s.
As old white men continue to dominate the national and international stages, the needs of women and minorities are constantly ignored. International politics are shaped by a ruthless competition for advantage, and the world is full of conflicts, crises and wars. Things have to change. Activist and political scientist Kristina Lunz is on a mission to do just that. In her work from New York to Bogotá, from Germany to Myanmar, she became aware of a stubborn unwillingness to think past the status quo and to embrace new, innovative voices from marginalized groups. She also saw that the tradition of feminist activism combined brilliantly with diplomacy: both require grim tenacity, boundless creat...
This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe’s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists’ strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.
"How do centralized, institutional religions make peace with the modern state's displacement of their traditional prestige and power? What are the factors that can promote the mutual acceptance of religious communities and the secular rule of law? These are the questions posed in Jonathan Laurence's new book, which argues that Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam have trod surprisingly similar paths in their respective histories. Contemporary Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam both descend from religious states and empires, the Papacy in the case of Catholicism and the Caliphate in the case of Islam. As religio-political orders, the Western Church and the Islamic Caliphate ruled vast territories...
This volume examines the specific gender roles in peace and security. The authors analyse the implementation process of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in various countries and discuss systemic challenges concerning the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Through in-depth case studies, the authors shed new light on topics such as the gender-related mechanisms of peace processes, gender training practices for police personnel, and the importance of violence prevention. The volume studies the role of women in peace and security as well as questions of gender mainstreaming by adopting various theoretical concepts, including feminist theories, concepts of masculinity, organizational and security studies. It also highlights regional and transnational approaches for the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, namely the perspectives of the European Union, NATO, the UN bureaucracy and the civil society. It presents best cases and political advice for tackling the problem of gender inequality in peace and security.
How feminism is used to attack immigration in Europe In recent years, opponents of 'political correctness' have surged to prominence from both left and right, shaping a discourse in which perpetrators are 'defiantly' imagined as Muslim refugees, i.e. outsiders/others, while victims are identified as 'our women'. This poisonous and regressive situation grounds Hark and Villa's theorisation of contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, they argue, the logic of 'differentiate and rule' thoroughly permeates the social; our entire 'way of life' is premised on endless subtle hierarchical distinctions, which determine whole populations' attitudes, feelings and actions. How can learn to value difference, sabotaging all attempts to enlist difference in the service of domination? Hark and Villa make a compelling case for the urgent necessity for a detoxification of feminism as a matter of urgency; and for an ethical mode of living-with the world, that is, living with alterity.
The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin. The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Su...
Warsaw is one of the most dynamically developing cities in Europe, and its rich history has marked it as an epicenter of many modes of urbanism: Tzarist, modernist, socialist, and--in the past two decades--aggressively neoliberal. Focusing on Warsaw after 1990, this volume explores the interplay between Warsaw's past urban identities and the intense urban change of the '90s and '00s. Chasing Warsaw departs from the typical narratives of post-socialist cities in Eastern Europe by contextualizing Warsaw's unique transformation in terms of both global change and the shifting geographies of centrality and marginality in contemporary Poland.
Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.