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In this wide-ranging and insightful work, Soma Marik defends the legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, arguing against many of its detractors that the early communist regime was centrally concerned with both the liberation of women and the expansion of democracy. Soma Marik teaches Women's Studies and History at Jadavpur University.
"In 1949, revolutionary women from Asia who fought colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression gathered in Beijing for the Asian Women's Conference. Together, they drew from their experiences to develop a political strategy for women's internationalism that sought to end imperialism and build socialism. Connected with the Women's International Democratic Federation, women from Latin America, the Caribbean, and North, West, and Southern Africa also joined the conversation before the rise of Afro-Asian solidarity movements gained the name. Their strategy for internationalism demanded that women from occupying colonial nations contest imperialism with the same dedication as women whose countries were occupied"--
The Trouble with Marriage is part of a new global feminist jurisprudence around marriage and violence that looks to law as strategy rather than solution. In this ethnography of lawyer-free family courts and mediations of rape and domestic violence charges in India, Srimati Basu depicts everyday life in legal sites of marital trouble, reevaluating feminist theories of law, marriage, violence, property, and the state. Basu argues that alternative dispute resolution, originally designed to empower women in a less adversarial legal environment, has created new subjectivities, but, paradoxically, has also reinforced oppressive socioeconomic norms that leave women no better off, individually or collectively.
Work and Struggle: Voices from U.S. Labor Radicalism focuses on the history of U.S. labor with an emphasis on radical currents, which have been essential elements in the working-class movement from the mid nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Showcasing some of labor's most important leaders, Work and Struggle offers students and instructors a variety of voices to learn from -- each telling their story through their own words -- through writings, memoirs and speeches, transcribed and introduced here by Paul Le Blanc. This collection of revolutionary voices will inspire anyone interested in the history of labor organizing.
The current political climate of uncompromising neoliberalism means that the need to study the logic of our culture—that is, the logic of the capitalist system—is compelling. Providing a rich philosophical analysis of democracy from a negative, non-identity, dialectical perspective, Vasilis Grollios encourages the reader not to think of democracy as a call for a more effective domination of the people or as a demand for the replacement of the elite that currently holds power. In doing so, he aspires to fill in a gap in the literature by offering an out-of-the-mainstream overview of the key concepts of totality, negativity, fetishization, contradiction, identity thinking, dialectics and corporeal materialism as they have been employed by the major thinkers of the critical theory tradition: Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Bloch and Holloway. Their thinking had the following common keywords: contradiction, fetishism as a process and the notion of spell and all its implications. The author makes an innovative attempt to bring these concepts to light in terms of their practical relevance for contemporary democratic theory.
Doug Greene takes an in-depth and critical look at the life and ideas of Michael Harrington, one of America's most important democratic socialists. A Failure of Vision discusses one of the most important champions for democratic socialism in the United States. Michael Harrington (1928–1989) is widely recognized for writing The Other America, a seminal expose of poverty in the United States that inspired the War on Poverty. He was also the founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is currently the largest socialist organization in the United States. Michael Harrington hoped to transform democratic socialism from a marginal view into a major political force in the United S...
Few works of history have succeeded so completely in forcing their readers to take a fresh look at the evidence as Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down – and that achievement is rooted firmly in Hill's exceptional problem-solving skills. Traditional interpretations of the English Civil War concentrated heavily on a top-down analysis of the doings of king and parliament. Hill looked at ‘history from below,’ focusing instead on the ways in which the people of Britain saw the society they lived in and nurtured hopes for a better future. Failing to understand these factors – and the impact they had on the origins and outcomes of the wars of the 1640s – means failing to understand the historical period. In this sense, Hill's influential work is a great example of the problem-solving skills of asking productive questions and generating alternative possibilities. It forced a generation of historians to re-evaluate the things they thought they knew about a key pivot point in British history – and went on to influence the generations that came after them.
Rethinking Place Through Literary Form regards the relationship between place and linguistic form as challenging real and perceived configurations of place and renegotiating geopolitically determined categories of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. The volume argues that the rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban and alienated geographies, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. By looking at narrative re-imaginings of forgotten and interrupted intimacies between habitation and place from diverse parts of the world, the twelve chapters address the growing need to expand and alter approaches to literary representations of modernity and modes of self-location.
This Handbook addresses the role of women in communism as a global, social and political movement for the first time, exploring their lives, forms of activism, political strategies and transnational networks. Comprising twenty-five chapters, based on new and primary research, the book presents the lives of self-identified communist women from a truly international perspective and outlines their struggles against fascism and colonialism, and for women’s emancipation and national liberation. By using the lens of transnational political biography, the chapters capture the broader picture of these women’s lives, unpacking the links between the so-called public and private, the power structur...
As Marko Dumančić writes in his introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War, "despite the centrality of gender and sexuality in human relations, their scholarly study has played a secondary role in the history of the Cold War. . . . It is not an exaggeration to say that few were left unaffected by Cold War gender politics; even those who were in charge of producing, disseminating, and enforcing cultural norms were called on to live by the gender and sexuality models into which they breathed life." This underscores the importance of this volume, as here scholars tackle issues ranging from depictions of masculinity during the all-consuming space race, to the vibrant activism of Indian peasant women during this period, to the policing of sexuality inside the militaries of the world. Gender, Sexuality, and the Cold War brings together a diverse group of scholars whose combined research spans fifteen countries across five continents, claiming a place as the first volume to examine how issues of gender and sexuality impacted both the domestic and foreign policies of states, far beyond the borders of the United States, during the tumult of the Cold War.