The Cultural Revolution at the Margins

The Cultural Revolution at the Margins
Author: Yiching Wu
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2014-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674419863

Mao Zedong envisioned a great struggle to "wreak havoc under the heaven" when he launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. But as radicalized Chinese youth rose up against Party officials, events quickly slipped from the government's grasp, and rebellion took on a life of its own. Turmoil became a reality in a way the Great Leader had not foreseen. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins recaptures these formative moments from the perspective of the disenfranchised and disobedient rebels Mao unleashed and later betrayed. The Cultural Revolution began as a "revolution from above," and Mao had only a tenuous relationship with the Red Guard students and workers who responded to his call. Yet it was these young rebels at the grassroots who advanced the Cultural Revolution's more radical possibilities, Yiching Wu argues, and who not only acted for themselves but also transgressed Maoism by critically reflecting on broader issues concerning Chinese socialism. As China's state machinery broke down and the institutional foundations of the PRC were threatened, Mao resolved to suppress the crisis. Leaving out in the cold the very activists who had taken its transformative promise seriously, the Cultural Revolution devoured its children and exhausted its political energy. The mass demobilizations of 1968-69, Wu shows, were the starting point of a series of crisis-coping maneuvers to contain and neutralize dissent, producing immense changes in Chinese society a decade later.

Revolution at the Margins

Revolution at the Margins
Author: Frederick M. Hess
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2004-05-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780815798576

For more than a decade, school choice has been a flashpoint in debates about our nation's schooling. Perhaps the most commonly advanced argument for school choice is the notion that markets will force public schools to improve, particularly in those urban areas where improvement has proved so elusive. However, the question of how public schools respond to market conditions has received surprisingly little attention. Revolution at the Margins examines the impact of school vouchers and charter schooling on three urban school districts, explores the causes of the behavior observed, and explains how the structure of competition is likely to shape the way it affects the future of public education. The book draws on research conducted in three school districts at the center of the school choice debate during the 1990s: Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; and Edgewood, Texas. Case studies examine each of these three districts from the inception of their local school choice program through the conclusion of the 1999 school year. The three school districts studied did not respond to competition by emphasizing productivity or efficiency. Instead, under pressure to provide some evidence of response, administrators tended to expand public relations efforts and to chip holes in the rules, regulations, and procedures that regulate public sector organizations. Inefficient practices were not rooted out, but some rules and procedures that protect employees and vocal constituencies were relaxed. Public school systems are driven by political logic, according to Hess, and their incentives lead them to respond generally through symbolic and metaphorical gestures. Choice-induced changes in public school systems will be shaped by public governance, the market context in which they operate, and their organizational characteristics. Revolution at the Margins encourages scholars and policymakers to think more carefully about the costs and benefits of educational competi

Marx at the Margins

Marx at the Margins
Author: Kevin B. Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022634570X

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.

The Cultural Revolution at the Margins

The Cultural Revolution at the Margins
Author: Yiching Wu
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2014-06-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674728793

The Cultural Revolution began from above, yet it was students and workers at the grassroots who advanced the movement's radical possibilities by acting and thinking for themselves. Resolving to suppress the resulting crisis, Mao set events in motion in 1968 that left out in the cold those rebels who had taken it most seriously, Yiching Wu shows.

Rethinking Life at the Margins

Rethinking Life at the Margins
Author: Michele Lancione
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2016-04-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317063996

Experimenting with new ways of looking at the contexts, subjects, processes and multiple political stances that make up life at the margins, this book provides a novel source for a critical rethinking of marginalisation. Drawing on post-colonialism and critical assemblage thinking, the rich ethnographic works presented in the book trace the assemblage of marginality in multiple case-studies encompassing the Global North and South. These works are united by the approach developed in the book, characterised by the refusal of a priori definitions and by a post-human and grounded take on the assemblage of life. The result is a nuanced attention to the potential expressed by everyday articulations and a commitment to produce a processual, vitalist and non-normative cultural politics of the margins. The reader will find in this book unique challenges to accepted and authoritative thinking, and provides new insights into researching life at the margins.

Shared Margins

Shared Margins
Author: Samuli Schielke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2021-07-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 311072636X

Shared Margins tells of writers, writing, and literary milieus in Alexandria, Egypt’s second city. It de-centres cosmopolitan avant-gardes and secular-revolutionary aesthetics that have been intensively documented and studied since 2011. Instead, it offers a fieldwork-based account of various milieus and styles, and their common grounds and lines of division. Structured in two parts, Shared Margins gives an account of literature as a social practice embedded in milieus that at once enable and limit literary imagination, and of a life-worldly experience of plurality in absence of pluralism that marks literary engagements with the intimate and social realities of Alexandria after 2011. Literary writing, this book argues, has marginality as an at once enabling and limiting condition. It provides shared spaces of imaginary excess that may go beyond the taken-for-granted of a societal milieu, and yet are never unlimited. Literary imagination is part and parcel of such social conflicts and transformations, its role being neither one of resistance against power nor of guidance towards norms, but rather one of open-ended complicity.

Along the Integral Margin

Along the Integral Margin
Author: Stephen Campbell
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 150176490X

In recent years anthropologists have focused on informal, unfree, and other nonnormative labor arrangements and labeled them as "noncapitalist." In Along the Integral Margin, Stephen Campbell pushes back against this idea and shows that these labor arrangements are, in fact, important aspects of capitalist development and that the erroneous "noncapitalist" label contributes to obscuring current capitalist relations. Through powerful, intimate ethnographic narratives of the lives and struggles of residents of a squatter settlement in Myanmar, Campbell challenges narrow conceptions of capitalism and asserts that nonnormative labor is not marginal but rather centrally important to Myanmar's economic development. Campbell's narrative approach brings individuals who are often marginalized in accounts of contemporary Myanmar to the forefront and raises questions about the diversity of work in capitalism.

Memory from the Margins

Memory from the Margins
Author: Bridget Conley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2019-03-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030134954

This book asks the question: what is the role of memory during a political transition? Drawing on Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and scholarly fields concerned with memory, museums and trauma, the author reveals a complex picture of global, transnational, national and local forces as they converge in the story of the creation and continued life of one modest museum in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa—the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. It is a study from multiple margins: neither the case of Ethiopia nor memorialization is central to transitional justice discourse, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is sidelined in contemporary politics. From these nested margins, traumatic memory emerges as an ambiguous social and political force. The contributions, meaning and limitations of memory emerge at the point of discrete interactions between memory advocates, survivor-docents and visitors. Memory from the margins is revealed as powerful for how it disrupts, not builds, new forms of community.

Blood and Politics

Blood and Politics
Author: Leonard Zeskind
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 670
Release: 2009-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1429959339

More than fifteen years in the making, Blood and Politics is the most comprehensive history to date of the white supremacist movement as it has evolved over the past three-plus decades. Leonard Zeskind draws heavily upon court documents, racist publications, and first-person reports, along with his own personal observations. An internationally recognized expert on the subject who received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work, Zeskind ties together seemingly disparate strands—from neo-Nazi skinheads, to Holocaust deniers, to Christian Identity churches, to David Duke, to the militia and beyond. Among these elements, two political strategies—mainstreaming and vanguardism—vie for dominance. Mainstreamers believe that a majority of white Christians will eventually support their cause. Vanguardists build small organizations made up of a highly dedicated cadre and plan a naked seizure of power. Zeskind shows how these factions have evolved into a normative social movement that looks like a demographic slice of white America, mostly blue-collar and working middle class, with lawyers and Ph.D.s among its leaders. When the Cold War ended, traditional conservatives helped birth a new white nationalism, most evident now among anti-immigrant organizations. With the dawn of a new millennium, they are fixated on predictions that white people will lose their majority status and become one minority among many. The book concludes with a look to the future, elucidating the growing threat these groups will pose to coming generations.

A Social History of Maoist China

A Social History of Maoist China
Author: Felix Wemheuer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107123704

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.