Title: Fascist spectacle: the aesthetics of power in Mussolini's Italy
Author: Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | European History | Popular Culture | European Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history.Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Muslim rulers and rebels: everyday politics and armed separatism in the southern Philippines 
Author: McKenna, Thomas M 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Anthropology | Politics | Islam | Southeast Asia | Asian History
Publisher's Description: In this first ground-level account of the Muslim separatist rebellion in the Philippines, Thomas McKenna challenges prevailing anthropological analyses of nationalism as well as their underlying assumptions about the interplay of culture and power. He examines Muslim separatism against a background of more than four hundred years of political relations among indigenous Muslim rulers, their subjects, and external powers seeking the subjugation of Philippine Muslims. He also explores the motivations of the ordinary men and women who fight in armed separatist struggles and investigates the formation of nationalist identities. A skillful meld of historical detail and ethnographic research, Muslim Rulers and Rebels makes a compelling contribution to the study of protest, rebellion, and revolution worldwide.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Between marriage and the market: intimate politics and survival in Cairo 
Author: Hoodfar, Homa
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Homa Hoodfar's richly detailed ethnography provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of Arab Muslim families. Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The fountain of privilege: political foundations of markets in Old Regime France and England 
Author: Root, Hilton L
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | Economics and Business | European History | Sociology | French Studies
Publisher's Description: Hilton Root's new book applies contemporary economic and political theory to answer long-standing historical questions about modernization. It contrasts political stability in Georgian England with the collapse of the Old Regime in France. Why did a century of economic expansion rupture France's political foundations while leaving those of Britain intact? Comparing the political and financial institutions of the two states, Root argues that the French monarchy's tight control of markets created unresolvable social conflicts whereas England's broader power base permitted the wider distribution of economic favors, resulting in more flexible and efficient markets.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Behind the postmodern facade: architectural change in late twentieth-century America 
Author: Larson, Magali Sarfatti
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Architecture | Architecture | Philosophy | Politics | American Studies | Sociology | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Magali Larson's comprehensive study explores how architecture "happens" and what has become of the profession in the postmodern era. Drawing from extensive interviews with pivotal architects - from Philip Johnson, who was among the first to introduce European modernism to America, to Peter Eisenman, identified with a new "deconstructionist" style - she analyzes the complex tensions that exist between economic interest, professional status, and architectural product. She investigates the symbolic awards and recognition accorded by prestigious journals and panels, exposing the inner workings of a profession in a precarious social position. Larson captures the struggles around status, place, and power as architects seek to redefine their very purpose in contemporary America.The author's novel approach in synthesizing sociological research and theory proposes nothing less than a new cultural history of architecture. This is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of culture and the sociology of knowledge, as well as to architectural and urban history.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: From fascism to libertarian communism: Georges Valois against the Third Republic
Author: Douglas, Allen 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: Georges Valois is the enigma who stands at the center of French fascism. Writer, publisher, economic and political organizer, Valois went from adolescent anarchism to fascism and finally to libertarian socialism. His career has mystified scholars, as it did his contemporaries. From Fascism to Libertarian Communism is the first study of Valois to take his entire life and work as its focus, explaining how certain basic assumptions and patterns of thought took form in strikingly different ideological options. Douglas's work, based on a thorough examination of sources from police archives to personal papers and interviews, provides a convincing explanation of this quixotic figure - a man who founded French fascism only to turn to the radical left and eventually die as a resister in Bergen-Belsen.At a time when radical socialism is in decline and neofascist movements are gaining renewed support - in France and elsewhere - this original interpretation of Georges Valois's life and thought could not be more timely.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The view from Vesuvius: Italian culture and the southern question
Author: Moe, Nelson 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: European Studies | European History | Intellectual History | Politics | European Literature
Publisher's Description: The vexed relationship between the two parts of Italy, often referred to as the Southern Question, has shaped that nation's political, social, and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. But how did southern Italy become "the south," a place and people seen as different from and inferior to the rest of the nation? Writing at the rich juncture of literature, history, and cultural theory, Nelson Moe explores how Italy's Mezzogiorno became both backward and picturesque, an alternately troubling and fascinating borderland between Europe and its others. This finely crafted book shows that the Southern Question is far from just an Italian issue, for its origins are deeply connected to the formation of European cultural identity between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. Moe examines an exciting range of unfamiliar texts and visual representations including travel writing, political discourse, literary texts, and etchings to illuminate the imaginative geography that shaped the divide between north and south. His narrative moves from a broad examination of the representation of the south in European culture to close readings of the literary works of Leopardi and Giovanni Verga. This groundbreaking investigation into the origins of the modern vision of the Mezzogiorno is made all the more urgent by the emergence of separatism in Italy in the 1990s.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Stalin's forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the making of a Soviet Jewish homeland: an illustrated history, 1928-1996
Author: Weinberg, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | History | Politics | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Surviving freedom: after the Gulag
Author: Bardach, Janusz
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | European Studies | Sociology | Politics | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belarussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Twenty-two years old, he had committed no crime. He was one of millions swept up in the reign of terror that Stalin perpetrated on his own people. In the critically acclaimed Man Is Wolf to Man, Bardach recounted his horrific experiences in the Kolyma labor camps in northeastern Siberia, the deadliest camps in Stalin's gulag system. In this sequel Bardach picks up the narrative in March 1946, when he was released. He traces his thousand-mile journey from the northeastern Siberian gold mines to Moscow in the period after the war, when the country was still in turmoil. He chronicles his reunion with his brother, a high-ranking diplomat in the Polish embassy in Moscow; his experiences as a medical student in the Stalinist Soviet Union; and his trip back to his hometown, where he confronts the shattering realization of the toll the war has taken, including the deaths of his wife, parents, and sister. In a trenchant exploration of loss, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and existential loneliness, Bardach plumbs his ordeal with honesty and compassion, affording a literary window into the soul of a Stalinist gulag survivor. Surviving Freedom is his moving account of how he rebuilt his life after tremendous hardship and personal loss. It is also a unique portrait of postwar Stalinist Moscow as seen through the eyes of a person who is both an insider and outsider. Bardach's journey from prisoner back to citizen and from labor camp to freedom is an inspiring tale of the universal human story of suffering and recovery.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The cigarette papers 
Author: Glantz, Stanton A
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | Medicine | Public Policy | Law | United States History
Publisher's Description: Around-the-clock tobacco talks, multibillion-dollar lawsuits against the major cigarette companies, and legislative wrangling over how much to tax a pack of cigarettes - these are some of the most recent episodes in the war against the tobacco companies. The Cigarette Papers shows what started it all: revelations that tobacco companies had long known the grave dangers of smoking, and did nothing about it.In May 1994 a box containing 4,000 pages of internal tobacco industry documents arrived at the office of Professor Stanton Glantz at the University of California, San Francisco. The anonymous source of these "cigarette papers" was identified only as "Mr. Butts." These documents provide a shocking inside account of the activities of one tobacco company, Brown & Williamson, over more than thirty years. Quoting extensively from the documents themselves and analyzing what they reveal, The Cigarette Papers shows what the tobacco companies have known and galvanizes us to take action.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Owen Lattimore and the "loss" of China 
Author: Newman, Robert P
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | China | United States History | Politics
Publisher's Description: In March 1950 Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Owen Lattimore, a distinguished China scholar at The Johns Hopkins University, of being "the top Soviet espionage agent in the U.S." The Senate Foreign Relations Committee exonerated Lattimore four months later, but for the next two years Pat McCarran and his Senate Internal Security Committee investigated him, forcing the Justice Department to indict him for perjury. The case was eventually dismissed, but only after extraordinary efforts by the FBI failed to unearth a single reliable witness who could testify against Lattimore.Lattimore was a victim of the virulent witch hunts that took place in the U.S. in the 1950s after China, our friend and ally in World War II, went over to that reviled enemy, communism. Americans could not believe that China made this choice freely; its adherence to the World Communist Conspiracy must have been coerced by Soviet manipulation and domestic subversion by Americans. Some Communist mastermind in the American government had to be blamed for our "loss" of China. Lattimore, who had never been in the State Department but who had warned that China was not a stooge of Stalinist Russia and that Mao Zedong had come to power on his own, became the scapegoat.In this magisterial biography, Robert Newman follows the career of Owen Lattimore, scholar-adventurer, through his service in both the Chinese Nationalist and American governments in World War II, the tribulations of being Joe McCarthy's flagship heretic, his brilliant academic career in England, and finally his return to Central Asia as the foremost advocate of Mongolian nationalism and independence.Newman proves definitively that there was never any case against Lattimore. His book is based on a unique source, the Lattimore file from the FBI - 38,900 pages - arguably the most complete and candid file on a major prosecution ever released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is on the FBI's testimony - albeit testimony of the most reluctant sort - that Lattimore is finally exonerated.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Gimme some truth: the John Lennon FBI files
Author: Wiener, Jon
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Social Problems | Music | Social Theory | Cultural Anthropology | Law
Publisher's Description: When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld - along with almost 200 other pages - on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth , 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available - complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and - in some cases - the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: War of shadows: the struggle for utopia in the Peruvian Amazon
Author: Brown, Michael F. (Michael Fobes) 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American History | Politics | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: War of Shadows is the haunting story of a failed uprising in the Peruvian Amazon - told largely by people who were there. Late in 1965, Asháninka Indians, members of one of the Amazon's largest native tribes, joined forces with Marxist revolutionaries who had opened a guerrilla front in Asháninka territory. They fought, and were crushed by, the overwhelming military force of the Peruvian government. Why did the Indians believe this alliance would deliver them from poverty and the depredations of colonization on their rainforest home? With rare insight and eloquence, anthropologists Brown and Fernández write about an Amazonian people whose contacts with outsiders have repeatedly begun in hope and ended in tragedy.The players in this dramatic confrontation included militants of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), the U. S. Embassy, the Peruvian military, a "renegade" American settler, and the Asháninka Indians themselves. Using press reports and archival sources as well as oral histories, the authors weave a vivid tapestry of narratives and counternarratives that challenges the official history of the guerrilla struggle. Central to the story is the Asháninkas' persistent hope that a messiah would lead them to freedom, a belief with roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jungle rebellions and religious movements.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Willie Brown: a biography 
Author: Richardson, James 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | History | United States History | Californian and Western History | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: This is the first comprehensive biography of Willie Brown, one of California's most enduring and controversial politicians. Audacious, driven, talented - Brown has dominated California politics longer and more completely than any other public figure. James Richardson, a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee , takes us from Brown's childhood, through his years as Speaker of the State Assembly, to his election as San Francisco's mayor. Along the way we get a riveting, behind-the-scenes account of three decades of California politics.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | African Studies | Social Problems | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who - fearing government disapproval - may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited seve . . . [more]
Similar Items

Title: Rainbow's end: Irish-Americans and the dilemmas of urban machine politics, 1840-1985
Author: Erie, Steven P
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: Unprecedented in its scope, Rainbow's End provides a bold new analysis of the emergence, growth, and decline of six classic Irish-American political machines in New York, Jersey City, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Albany. Combining the approaches of political economy and historical sociology, Erie examines a wide range of issues, including the relationship between city and state politics, the manner in which machines shaped ethnic and working-class politics, and the reasons why centralized party organizations failed to emerge in Boston and Philadelphia despite their large Irish populations. The book ends with a thorough discussion of the significance of machine politics for today's urban minorities.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The state must be our master of fire: how peasants craft culturally sustainable development in Senegal
Author: Galvan, Dennis Charles
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Politics | Anthropology | African Studies | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Over several centuries, the Serer of the Siin region of Senegal developed a complex system of land tenure that resulted in a stable rural society, productive agriculture, and a well-managed ecosystem. Dennis Galvan tells the story of what happened when French colonial rulers, and later the government of the newly independent Senegal, imposed new systems of land tenure and cultivation on the Serer of Siin. Galvan's book is a painstaking and skillful autopsy of ruinous Western-style "rational" economic development policy forced upon a fragile, yet self-sustaining, society. It is also a disquieting demonstration of the general folly of such an approach and an attempt to articulate a better, more sensitive, and ultimately more productive model for change - a model Galvan calls "institutional syncretism."   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The paradox of plenty: oil booms and petro-states
Author: Karl, Terry Lynn 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | Economics and Business | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: The Paradox of Plenty explains why, in the midst of two massive oil booms in the 1970s, oil-exporting governments as different as Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Algeria, and Indonesia chose common development paths and suffered similarly disappointing outcomes. Meticulously documented and theoretically innovative, this book illuminates the manifold factors - economic, political, and social - that determine the nature of the oil state, from the coherence of public bureaucracies, to the degree of centralization, to patterns of policy-making. Karl contends that oil countries, while seemingly disparate, are characterized by similar social classes and patterns of collective action. In these countries, dependence on petroleum leads to disproportionate fiscal reliance on petrodollars and public spending, at the expense of statecraft. Oil booms, which create the illusion of prosperity and development, actually destabilize regimes by reinforcing oil-based interests and further weakening state capacity.Karl's incisive investigation unites structural and choice-based approaches by illuminating how decisions of policymakers are embedded in institutions interacting with domestic and international markets. This approach - which Karl dubs "structured contingency" - uses a state's leading sector as the starting point for identifying a range of decision-making choices, and ends by examining the dynamics of the state itself.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: High-Tech Europe: the politics of international cooperation 
Author: Sandholtz, Wayne
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Economics and Business | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: A study of cooperative efforts in the high-tech industries of Europe. Sandholtz examines why collaboration came late to these countries, how protective walls came down, how countries work together in economically sensitive areas.Governments have recognized for decades the dynamic role played by microelectronics, computers, and telecommunications in the modern economy. Although Europe's deficiencies in these crucial sectors had long been acknowledged, it was not until the 1980s that European nations began collaborating to develop and promote high-tech industries. Their collaboration gives rise to many questions. Why, for example, did the joint efforts come at such a late date rather than in the 1960s or 70s? And how is it possible that they work together in economically sensitive areas? These questions point to fundamental issues in the areas of international cooperation, international institutions, and technology policy.Before the institution of the collaborative programs ESPRIT (European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology), RACE (R & D in Advanced Communications-technologies in Europe), and EUREKA (European Research Coordination Agency) in the 1980s, each European country sought its own technological renaissance through protection of national firms behind walls of technical standards, procurement preferences, and research subsidies. Here is a thorough, carefully researched work that examines the breakdown of these walls. It will appeal to political scientists, economists, and scholars of technology and Western Europe interested in the political contours of the high-tech landscape.   [brief]
Similar Items

Title: The politics of duplicity: controlling reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania
Author: Kligman, Gail
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | Women's Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | European Studies | Politics
Publisher's Description: The political hypocrisy and personal horrors of one of the most repressive anti-abortion regimes in history came to the world's attention soon after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Photographs of orphans with vacant eyes, sad faces, and wasted bodies circled the globe, as did alarming maternal mortality statistics and heart-breaking details of a devastating infant AIDS epidemic. Gail Kligman's chilling ethnography - of the state and of the politics of reproduction - is the first in-depth examination of this extreme case of political intervention into the most intimate aspects of everyday life.Ceausescu's reproductive policies, among which the banning of abortion was central, affected the physical and emotional well-being not only of individual men, women, children, and families but also of society as a whole. Sexuality, intimacy, and fertility control were fraught with fear, which permeated daily life and took a heavy moral toll as lying and dissimulation transformed both individuals and the state. This powerful study is based on moving interviews with women and physicians as well as on documentary and archival material. In addition to discussing the social implications and human costs of restrictive reproductive legislation, Kligman explores the means by which reproductive issues become embedded in national and international agendas. She concludes with a review of the lessons the rest of the world can learn from Romania's tragic experience.   [brief]
Similar Items