Embers of Empire

Embers of Empire
Author: Paul Miller
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789200237

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.

Ruptures

Ruptures
Author: Martin Holbraad
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2019-06-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787356183

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture’. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit. Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump’s election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect’ activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair’ through privately sponsored museums of Mao’s revolution in China; people’s experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner’ rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola. Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy.

Continuity and Rupture

Continuity and Rupture
Author: J. Moufawad-Paul
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2016-12-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1785354779

A philosophical examination of the theoretical terrain of contemporary Maoism premised on the counter-intuitive assumption that Maoism did not emerge as a coherent theory until the end of the 1980s.

The Nixon Administration and Cuba

The Nixon Administration and Cuba
Author: Håkan Karlsson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000384098

This book presents a detailed analysis of the U.S. policy that was adopted toward Cuba by the Richard M. Nixon administration between January 20, 1969, and August 8, 1974. Based on governmental, as well as other, sources from both the U.S. and Cuba, this book examines the rupture where the policy of “passive containment” was complemented with a policy of “dirty war.” President Nixon attempted to reestablish a confrontational and violent path of action, and once again, Cuba was exposed to a “dirty war” consisting of different forms of aggressive terrorist activities. Since the conditions for this violent route had changed dramatically both in the U.S. and in Cuba, a policy characterized by a continuity of the economic and psychological warfare came to be the central one for the Nixon administration. This book is unique since it is written from a Cuban perspective, and it therefore complements and enriches the knowledge of the U.S.–Cuban relationship during the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, and the policy adopted by the Nixon administration. It is of relevance to everyone interested in the issue, and especially for students and researchers within the disciplines of history and political science.

Charred Root of Meaning

Charred Root of Meaning
Author: Philipp W. Rosemann
Publisher: Eerdmans
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Philosophical theology
ISBN: 9780802863454

Ecologists tell us that periodic wildfires, though devastating, are necessary to the rhythm of nature. The death of the old allows something new to grow, sometimes straight back from the charred roots. Christian tradition functions much the same way, says Philipp Rosemann. In this book he examines how transgression and destruction are crucial in the foundation and preservation of tradition. Theories of tradition have emphasized the handing-down of identity rather than continuity through difference. Rosemann shows that divine revelation occurs as an irruption that challenges the existing order. The preservation of tradition, he argues, requires that this challenge be periodically repeated. Offering a historical, theological, and philosophical approach to Christian tradition, Charred Root of Meaning shows how transgression and reformation keep the Christian faith alive.

Revolution in the Air

Revolution in the Air
Author: Max Elbaum
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2018-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786634597

The first in-depth study of the long march of the US New Left after 1968 The sixties were a time when radical movements learned to embrace twentieth-century Marxism. Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of this turning point, and examines what the resistance of today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che. It tells the story of the “new communist movement” which was the most racially integrated and fast-growing movement on the Left. Thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War and Black Liberation, and spurred on by the Puerto Rican, Chicano and Asian-American movements, embraced a Third World oriented version of Marxism. These admirers of Mao, Che and Amilcar Cabral organized resistance to the Republican majorities of Nixon and Ford. By the 1980s these groups had either collapsed or become tiny shards of the dream of a Maoist world revolution. Taking issue with the idea of a division between an early “good sixties” and a later “bad sixties,” Max Elbaum is particularly concerned to reclaim the lessons of the new communist movement for today’s activists who, like their sixties’ predecessors, are coming of age at a time when the Left lacks mass support and is fragmented along racial lines. With a new foreward by Alicia Garza, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter.

Demarcation and Demystification

Demarcation and Demystification
Author: J. Moufawad-Paul
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1789042275

Marx once declared that philosophers have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. Demarcation and Demystification examines the ways in which a radical practice of philosophy is possible under the aegis of Marx's 11th thesis, arguing that philosophy's radicality is discovered by understanding that it can only ever interpret the world; that social transformation lies beyond the sphere of its operations. 'Demarcation and Demystification is a major statement on the gulf between what philosophers actually do, and what they think they do.' Matthew R. McLennan, author of Philosophy and Vulnerability

Decay and Afterlife

Decay and Afterlife
Author: Aleksandra Prica
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2022-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 022681159X

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.

The Moment

The Moment
Author: Heidrun Friese
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780853239567

This volume addresses from different perspectives the key questions posed by the moment and thereby elucidates the connection between social theory, philosophy, literary theory and history that are opened by the moment.

Continuity and Rupture in Roman Mediterranean Gaul

Continuity and Rupture in Roman Mediterranean Gaul
Author: Benjamin P. Luley
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789255694

With the decline in popularity of the term “Romanization” as a way of analyzing the changes in the archaeological record visible throughout the conquered provinces of the Roman Empire, scholars have increasingly turned to the important concept of “identity” to understand the experiences of local peoples living under Roman rule. Studies of identity in the Roman Empire have thus emphasized how local peoples, rather than simply passively copying Roman culture, actively created and recreated complex and multi-faceted identities that incorporated local traditions within the increasingly connected and “globalized” world of the empire. How did the violent nature of Roman rule in the provinces impact local communities and the ways in which individuals interacted with one another? This book provides a detailed study of the ways in which the Celtic-speaking peoples of the ancient settlement of Lattara in Roman Mediterranean Gaul fashioned their lives under two centuries of Roman rule,and in particular the ways in which the creation of these lived experiences wasentangled in the larger processes of Roman colonialism. The important archaeological settlement and port of Lattara (located today in modern Lattes in Mediterranean France), was occupied from ca 500 BCE to 200 CE, and has been the focus of extensive excavations by international teams of archaeologists for over 35 years. The author seeks to understand the ways in which the daily lives of the inhabitants of Lattara were shaped and constrained by the particular historical circumstances of Roman rule, involving the violent conquest of the province between 125-121 BCE, the pacification of numerous revolts in the in the first half of the first century BCE, and the imposition of an oppressive system of taxation, land redistribution, and grain levies. Through a detailed analysis of the large corpus of archaeological evidence dating from ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE at Lattara, the author argues that the violent establishment of Roman rule in Mediterranean Gaul engendered very different forms of social relationships and interactions that structured the community during the late first century BCE and onward. This involved a new organization of domestic space and living arrangements, new relationships structuring the production and exchange of material goods, different relationships between the community and the wider spiritual world, and new strategies for acquiring political influence and power, based upon the increasing importance of material wealth. All of this occurred by the very end of the first century BCE despite the continued persistence of many aspects of local identity, particularly evident in religious practices. Furthermore, these new social relationships were arguably paramount in the daily practices of reproducing Roman rule at Lattara, and in the larger province of Mediterranean Gaul more generally; practices that were in particular rooted in an ever-increasing socio-economic hierarchy.