Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age

Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age
Author: Colin Barker
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2021-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 164259489X

This ambitious volume examines revolutionary situations during a non-revolutionary historical conjuncture--the neoliberal era. The last three decades have seen an increase in the number of political upheavals that challenge existing power structures, many of them taking the form of urban revolts. This book compellingly explores a series of such upheavals--in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa (including Congo, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso) and Egypt. Each chapter studies the ways in which protest movements developed into insurgent challenges to state power, and the strategies that regimes have deployed to contain and repress revolt. In addition to empirical chapters, the book engages in theorization of revolution, dealing with questions such as the patterning of revolution in contemporary history, the relationship between class struggle and social movements, and the prospects of socialist revolution in the twenty-first century.

Revolution without Revolutionaries

Revolution without Revolutionaries
Author: Asef Bayat
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503603075

A study of the Arab Spring and its aftermath alongside the revolutions of the 1970s. The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact. In this book, noted author Asef Bayat—whose Life as Politics anticipated the Arab Spring—uncovers why this occurred, and what made these uprisings so distinct from those that came before. Revolution without Revolutionaries is both a history of the Arab Spring and a history of revolution writ broadly. Setting the 2011 uprisings side by side with the revolutions of the 1970s, particularly the Iranian Revolution, Bayat reveals a profound global shift in the nature of protest: as acceptance of neoliberal policy has spread, radical revolutionary impulses have diminished. Protestors call for reform rather than fundamental transformation. By tracing the contours and illuminating the meaning of the 2011 uprisings, Bayat gives us the book needed to explain and understand our post–Arab Spring world. Praise for Revolution without Revolutionaries “Bayat is in the vanguard of a subtle and original theorization of social movements and social change in the Middle East. His attention to the lives of the urban poor, his extensive field work in very different countries within the region, and his ability to see over the horizon of current paradigms make his work essential reading.” —Juan Cole, University of Michigan “An astute analyst of the Middle East, Asef Bayat is one of the very few researchers equipped to historicize the region’s contemporary uprisings. In Revolution without Revolutionaries, he deftly and sympathetically employs his own observations of Iran, immediately before and after the 1979 revolution, to reflect on the epochal shifts that have re-worked the political regimes, economic structures, and revolutionary imaginaries across the region today.” —Arang Keshavarzian, New York University “Bayat provocatively questions the Arab Spring’s apparent moderation, tracing its softness to decades of neoliberalism that have undermined the national state and discarded old-fashioned forms of revolutionary violence. This groundbreaking book is not an obituary for the Arab Spring but a hopeful glimpse at its future.” —Olivier Roy, author of The Failure of Political Islam

The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams

The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams
Author: John Adams
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN:

The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams presents the principal shorter writings in which Adams addresses the prospect of revolution and the form of government proper to the new United States. Though one of the principal framers of the American republic and the successor to Washington as president, John Adams receives remarkably little attention among many students of the early national period. This is especially true in the case of the periods before and after the Revolution, in which the intellectual rationale for independence and republican government was given the fullest expression. The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams illustrates that it was Adams, for example, who before the Revolution wrote some of the most important documents on the nature of the British Constitution and the meaning of rights, sovereignty, representation, and obligation. And it was Adams who, once the colonies had declared independence, wrote equally important works on possible forms of government in a quest to develop a science of politics for the construction of a constitution for the proposed republic.

The Road to Concord

The Road to Concord
Author: John Leonard Bell
Publisher: Journal of the American Revolu
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781594162497

In the early spring of 1775, on a farm in Concord, Massachusetts, British army spies located four brass cannon belonging to Boston's colonial militia that had gone missing months before. British general Thomas Gage had been searching for them, both to stymie New England's growing rebellion and to erase the embarrassment of having let cannon disappear from armories under redcoat guard. Anxious to regain those weapons, he drew up plans for his troops to march nineteen miles into unfriendly territory. The Massachusetts Patriots, meanwhile, prepared to thwart the general's mission. There was one goal Gage and his enemies shared: for different reasons, they all wanted to keep the stolen cannon as secret as possible. Both sides succeeded well enough that the full story has never appeared until now. The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America's War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. Drawing on archives in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, the book creates a lively, original, and deeply documented picture of a society perched on the brink of war.

Tracing the Eagle's Orbit

Tracing the Eagle's Orbit
Author: Gautam Maitra
Publisher: Tracing the Eagle's Orbit
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2007
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1425106706

Like the Eagle, the United States roves round a definite orbit defined by its foreign policies. It has its own set of values and principles, interests and goals that form the bedrock of its foreign policies guided by the Declaration of Independence. These values and principles, serve as lodestar that help keep the United States flying towards the furthest points in that orbit through the efforts towards the completion of the still unfinished jobs of the Declaration and the War of Independence. The perimeters of these concentric circles happen to be those crucial phases that America attained through the successful conduct of its foreign policies at the various crossroads in that independent nation's journey towards the future. The combined sagacity and 'burning will' of the American founding fathers triggered off a 'political' big bang that not only caused a great upheaval in the geopolitical foundations of European monarchic powers but also made American thoughts and ideals so powerful a 'religion' as to pervade the entire landmass of our planet for quite sometime to come. With the abrupt termination of the bipolar world order in the early 1990s, the scepter of the dark and the chaotic Middle Age loomed. Instead of deciding to 'rule' the rest of the world by the power of sword that had characterized the Middle Age or instead of cornering the gains of modern scientific-technological inventions through colonial 'ploys' that had possessed several erstwhile European powers, ever-dynamic United States rather set on a post modern, neo-liberal course. As a result, 'non-imperial' United States now faces a dilemma in shaping the rest of the world in its own image. This book is unique in that it goes to the heart of that riddle.

Tracing Global Democracy

Tracing Global Democracy
Author: Vladimir Biti
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2016-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110457067

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

Revolutionary Feminisms

Revolutionary Feminisms
Author: Brenna Bhandar
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788737784

A unique book, tracing forty years of anti-racist feminist thought In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action. Through interviews with key revolutionary scholars, Bhandar and Ziadah present a thorough discussion of how anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminisms are crucial to building effective political coalitions. Collectively, these interviews with leading scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Silvia Federici, and many others, trace the ways in which black, indigenous, post-colonial and Marxian feminisms have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another. Focusing on migration, neo-imperial militarism, the state, the prison industrial complex, social reproduction and many other pressing themes, the range of feminisms traversed in this volume show how freedom requires revolutionary transformation in the organisation of the economy, social relations, political structures, and our psychic and symbolic worlds. The interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.

Thirteen Clocks

Thirteen Clocks
Author: Robert G. Parkinson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469662582

In his celebrated account of the origins of American unity, John Adams described July 1776 as the moment when thirteen clocks managed to strike at the same time. So how did these American colonies overcome long odds to create a durable union capable of declaring independence from Britain? In this powerful new history of the fifteen tense months that culminated in the Declaration of Independence, Robert G. Parkinson provides a troubling answer: racial fear. Tracing the circulation of information in the colonial news systems that linked patriot leaders and average colonists, Parkinson reveals how the system's participants constructed a compelling drama featuring virtuous men who suddenly found themselves threatened by ruthless Indians and defiant slaves acting on behalf of the king. Parkinson argues that patriot leaders used racial prejudices to persuade Americans to declare independence. Between the Revolutionary War's start at Lexington and the Declaration, they broadcast any news they could find about Native Americans, enslaved Blacks, and Hessian mercenaries working with their British enemies. American independence thus owed less to the love of liberty than to the exploitation of colonial fears about race. Thirteen Clocks offers an accessible history of the Revolution that uncovers the uncomfortable origins of the republic even as it speaks to our own moment.

Revolution within the Revolution

Revolution within the Revolution
Author: Michelle Chase
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2015-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469625016

A handful of celebrated photographs show armed female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success has only now received comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution," Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process. Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture
Author: Gillian Russell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1137474319

This volume argues for the enduring and pervasive significance of war in the formation of British Enlightenment and Romantic culture. Showing how war throws into question conventional disciplinary parameters and periodization, essays in the collection consider how war shapes culture through its multiple, divergent, and productive traces.