bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Georgian and Soviet
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This book investigates the constitutive capacity of Soviet nationhood and empire. The Soviet republic of Georgia, located in the mountainous Caucasus region, received the same nation-building template as other national republics of the USSR. Yet Stalin's Georgian heritage, intimate knowledge of Caucasian affairs, and personal involvement in local matters as he ascended to prominence left his homeland to confront a distinct set of challenges after his death in 1953. This book argues that the postwar and post-Stalin era was decisive in the creation of a “Georgian” Georgia. This was due not only to the peculiar role played by the Stalin cult in the construction of modern Georgian nationhood but also to the subsequent changes that de-Stalinization wrought among Georgia's populace and in the unusual imperial relationship between Moscow and Tbilisi. The book describes how the Soviet empire could be repressive yet also encourage opportunities for advancement—for individual careers as well as for certain nationalities. The creation of national hierarchies of entitlement could be as much about local- and republic-level imperial imaginations as those of a Moscow center. The book reveals that the entitled, republic-level national hierarchies that the Soviet Union created laid a foundation for the claims of nationalizing states that would emerge from the empire's wake in 1991. Today, Georgia still grapples with the legacies of its Soviet century, and the Stalin factor likewise lingers as new generations of Georgians reevaluate the symbiotic relationship between Soso Jughashvili and his native land.
Expulsions and Ethnic Consolidation
Authors: Kaiser Claire P.
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how expulsion operations expanded from piecemeal border-cleansing efforts to the wholesale removal of entire nationalities to Central Asia and Siberia. The chapter highlights that this process has been portrayed by scholars as a culmination of the retreat from the nation-building efforts of the 1920s, as ethnic cleansing, and as genocide, in each case emphasizing how Moscow perceived minority, non-Russian populations to be a threat. Discussing the postwar expulsions from Georgia, the chapter shows how a Soviet tool of imperial population management could just as much be an instrument of nation-building and national homogenization at the local level. To better understand the course of postwar deportations from Georgia, the chapter also accounts for the peculiar center-periphery dynamics at play between Tbilisi and Moscow in the late Stalin era. It examines how Georgians and others from the Caucasus played an outsized role in Union-level affairs at this time. The chapter assesses how postwar expulsions built on Soviet practices honed during the prewar and wartime eras in the Caucasus and throughout the Union.
Introduction
Authors: Meerwijk Maurits Bastiaan
Published: May 2023

This chapter analyzes the Dutch response to plague in Java. It stands at the intersection of colonial, medical, and environmental histories of Southeast Asia and outlines how plague triggered a tremendous expansion of Dutch state power and cultural influence at a time when—as has been suggested—the “gangrene” had already set its claws into the colonial project. The chapter argues that plague prompted a colonial health intervention that was both unprecedented in scale and uniquely invasive in scope. It presents two significant contributions to the body of scholarship on this disease. First, plague has tended to be studied and framed as a “house disease” with a distinct urban preference. Second, plague scholarship has shown a tendency to focus on epidemic outbreak moments and the immediate responses they triggered—with less attention given to their endemic afterlives. To elucidate the importance of this disease to colonial governance despite its modest burden to the Indies death rate, the chapter suggests that plague and plague control in Java offered the Dutch a platform: an epidemic drama against which they could assert themselves locally, nationally, and internationally as an advanced colonial and scientific power.
Plague, Rats, and the House in Java
Authors: Meerwijk Maurits Bastiaan
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the initial outbreak of plague in the district Malang in March 1911 as the fulfilment of a period of “anxious suspense” in which physicians and officials feared the introduction of plague into the Dutch East Indies. Despite enduring concerns that plague could find its way into the Dutch East Indies, the chapter emphasizes that the colonial government and its health services were poorly prepared when the disease was recognized. It investigates how plague, a predominantly urban disease, somehow leaped over major port cities and apparently entrenched itself in the rural interior of East Java. How were existing notions of the role of the house in plague transmission rearticulated to situate the traditional bamboo dwellings of the Javanese at the center of Dutch anxieties for this disease. The chapter suggests how plague offered Dutch state agents an opportunity to subject these “idyllic” dwellings to a thorough quasi-medical examination. The subsequent framing of the Javanese house as a link in the transmission chain of plague from rat to human on account of its very materiality and design provoked an unparalleled intervention in the built environment of Java.
Conclusion
Authors: Neidorf Leonard
Published: May 2023

This concluding chapter explores the Beowulf poet's plans and symbolisms for the epic poem. The poet had been hesitant to let Beowulf be bested by a monster with satanic characteristics since he wished to emphasize the omnipotence of God. Moreover, the poet avoided making any theological statement that could make God appear cruel, arbitrary, or less than omnipotent. The chapter also elaborates on the interpretation of the epic poem's ominous that involves a critical agenda aiming to expose something fundamentally wrong about the world it depicts, which includes the valorization of treasure, fame, revenge, and other institutions. It acknowledges how the poem does not possess any thematic unity but does achieve compositional unity that reflects the author's unique sense of decorum.
Introduction
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter argues that tourism aggravated tensions between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. It emphasizes that tourism performs and can transform state territory. It also mentions that Taiwan's staging of state sovereignty bifurcated into the Taiwan that performed as a part of China for group tourists versus the Taiwan experienced as a site of everyday life by local residents and some independent tourists. The chapter treats territory as a political practice and pattern of relations that names, claims, calculates, and bounds space. It states territorialization as referring to the particular practices by which space is rendered or configured as belonging to and bounded by a collective actor imagined as a particular state.
Taiwan as Tourist Heterotopia
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about the tour of Taiwan's most visited sites, paying particular attention to their geopolitical characteristics. It analyzes Taiwan's national iconography, presenting a field of paradoxes to both residents and visitors, and producing a sense of exceptional and even multiple and overlapping sovereignties. It also mentions how Chinese visitors to Taiwan are able to overlook markers of national-territorial difference and insist in interviews that Taiwan is still obviously a part of China. The chapter highlights the simultaneous overlap and disjuncture between the Taiwan of its residents and the Taiwan of its Chinese tourists that finds an evocative analogy in the novelist China Miéville's work of speculative fiction, The City and the City. It assesses the perception of Sun Moon Lake and other Taiwanese places as being “in China.”
The Varieties of Independent Tourist Experience
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses the far more varied experiences and interpretations of independent tourists, unleashed as they are from the political and economic imperatives that determine group tour management. It follows an account composed of observational and interview data collected between June 2012 and April 2015. It also highlights the variety and diversity of independent tourist narratives and interpretations of Taiwan's political history and trajectory and to tease out factors that likely affected their perceptions and statements. The chapter traces the social circuits and territorial narratives remade through the practices of independent tourism, reviewing the emergent keywords and tourist types. It discusses the interviews with independent visitors to Taiwan that include relatives of Chinese nationals who have married Taiwanese.
Waves of Tourists, Waves of Protest, and the End of “One China”
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines the role of tourism at the end of the “1992 Consensus” under which Taiwan's Ma administration had engaged with the People's Republic of China (PRC). It traces a line between the 2014 Sunflower Movement, a massive protest against a trade agreement that included tourism provisions, and the subsequent electoral collapse of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also considers the PRC's use of the tourism industry as a political weapon against the new Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration, which disavowed the KMT's “one China” policy and looked to strengthen ties with the United States, Japan, and other regional neighbors. The chapter examines how Ma Ying-jeou's continued push for China-centric economic policies triggered the profound renewal of oppositional politics. It confirms why Chinese tourism was not an overt point of contention for Taiwan's Sunflower Movement but was much more at issue in and around the Umbrella Movement.
Epilogue
Authors: Rowen Ian
Published: May 2023

This chapter addresses the COVID-19 pandemic and contemplates the crisis's implications for tourism and territory in Taiwan and beyond. It demonstrates that as much as tourism served to signify China's global integration, its conduct remained constrained by the geopolitical imperatives of its governing party-state. It also emphasizes how tourism provoked a backlash, illuminating the limits of and contradictions between tourism's intertwined instrumentalities for capital accumulation and state territorialization. The chapter highlights that the COVID-19 pandemic effectively ended cross-strait tourism and put all of global tourism on an indefinite hiatus. It examines the pandemic's impacts in the Taiwan Strait, reflecting on the role of tourism and territory in realizing and reconfiguring life in Taiwan, China, and beyond.
Introduction
Authors: Strach Patricia , Sullivan Kathleen S.
Published: May 2023

This chapter details how cities developed the capacity for sanitation services, transforming Americans' lives and life expectancies and their relation to the state. It examines the extraordinary resources that the cities relied on to analyze the garbage problem and come up with possible solutions, to generate the political will to do something about it, to develop the ability to collect and dispose of trash, to enforce citizen compliance, and to deflect blame. It also looks at the scholars' conceptualization of state capacity that has largely focused on the administrative state and the ability of bureaucracies to administer policy through human, budgetary, or institutional resources. The chapter traces the early years of garbage collection wherein cities drew on resources that might be considered private, cultural, or inappropriate. It explains how local governments met the need for expertise, political will and ability, resident compliance, and political blame.
The Politics of Garbage Collection
Authors: Strach Patricia , Sullivan Kathleen S.
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers lessons learned about state capacity, political development, and gender and racial politics. As a study in political development, the chapter shows how innovations in technology and state capacity usher in new relations between a state and its residents. Viewing governance through the resources that the state enlists to get its work done illuminates not just formal resources but those informal, unseemly resources. The chapter points out that factors such as corruption, gender and racial hierarchies, and the intersection are enlisted when governments tackle public problems. It explains how the use of these factors explains why old ideas get incorporated into modernized regimes and state capacity and how they last over time.
Introduction
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the political role of cultural spaces in communist East Germany and Poland. In both states, it argues that such spaces were a public sphere in which many actors contested visions of the public good. For communist regimes, East Germany and Poland served as vehicles to spread Marxist thought and shape their subjects' attitudes and values. The chapter charts the rise of an intermediate space between state and society in which private individuals debated and advanced the common good. It reviews the concept of the public sphere, which is closely associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere that was published in West Germany in 1962.
Takeover
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter talks about cultural spaces that not only publicized the Soviet model but also helped adapt it to local conditions. In the first postwar years especially, administrators relied on artists to promote communist visions and root them in national cultures. The chapter builds on Irena Grudzińska-Gross's concept of war as revolution by calling attention to the institutional foundations of communist rule. The chapter then looks beyond wartime destruction to postwar rebuilding, showing how the administrative structures recreated at the local level in the aftermath of war enabled the communist seizure of power. It emphasizes how reconstruction was revolution across postwar Eastern Europe.
Planning
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter recounts how the Eastern Bloc governments embarked on radical campaigns of social engineering, reorganizing public life through central planning. Eastern Bloc governments treated culture as a tool to bolster plan fulfillment by helping workers visualize the glorious future. The chapter mentions Mieczysław Serwin-Oracki's painting in 1952 that exemplifies the era's dominant artistic idiom, Socialist Realism, which aimed to shape and showcase the world that socialism was making. The chapter explores how the effort to bring culture to the factories reflected a belief that it could raise factory output. Cultural life was harnessed to economic goals, transforming how and where East European artists worked.
Nationalism
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter analyzes how human nature proved less malleable than expected as workers rebelled against communist rule in East Germany and Poland, often targeting cultural symbols. It describes spaces of art that turned into outlets for political critique and nationalist sentiment and are used by state officials to tout their willingness to change and advertise a new, inclusive form of rule. It also talks about how cultural matrix, which is built to mold publics to the plan, came to function as a public sphere. The chapter delves into the co-opting symbols of national culture that became a way to show that state officials had changed their stripes. Revamped cultural policies were a key form of communist legitimation after Joseph Stalin, as Eastern Bloc regimes worked to develop more inclusive forms of rule.
Consumerism
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter recounts how both Polish and German Democratic Republic (GDR) leaders decided to diversify their programming. By offering the public more variety and choice, Polish and GDR leaders sought to draw more people into government structures. The chapter describes cultural spaces that were designed to showcase the new abundance, teaching East Europeans how to be cultured consumers. Starting in the late 1950s, consumption emerged as a point of emphasis for Eastern Bloc regimes and European states preached frugality in the wake of World War II, tamping down consumer demand amid widespread shortages. The chapter points out how officials framed capitalist abundance as illusory, selfish, and exploitative, juxtaposing Western materialism to socialist culture.
Reform
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses how the Poles and East Germans used cultural spaces to present their own visions for society, demanding that National Communism become truly accountable to the nation through the state cultural matrix. While officials worked to confine ferment to the arts, cultural activity exploded into political activism. The chapter discusses how new leaders in both Poland and East Germany tightened the reins and limited the public sphere they had created to reassert their power. The chapter then looks at the project of National Communism that was in effect a controlled revolt as it involved letting the people speak without allowing their demands to spiral out of the party's grasp. Controlled revolt promised to give communist regimes new life by winning over their biggest skeptics, but in the end, it proved impossible to control.
Dissent
Authors: Kunakhovich Kyrill
Published: May 2023

This chapter analyzes tighter political restraints that went hand in hand with higher living standards as communist leaders focused on the here and now rather than dream about a different future. Both Poland and East Germany slashed funding for the arts, frustrating many artists and spurring dissent. The chapter points out how dissent had become a transnational problem and city officials looked for all the help they could get. The chapter also looks at protest letters that brought dissent into the spotlight with proposed revisions to describe Poland as a socialist state rather than a people's democracy and proclaim the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) as its leading political force. It details the formation of the Workers' Defense Committee (KOR) created in September 1976 to support victims of state repression.
Making Mestizos
Authors: Winkelmann Tessa
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the changing discourse surrounding the mixed-race children of American–Filipino liaisons. It considers how Americans perceived a preexisting tolerance for mestizos in the Philippines, and how this understanding imbued colonialist thinking about the “natural” place for American mestizos. American mestizos themselves understood their socioracial position within the Philippines and pushed back against the colonialist characterization of mixed-race people. Narratives of colonialist philanthropic organizations and stories of elite American mestizo society shifted the discourse of child abandonment in the Philippines into American benevolence, responsibility, and settler respectability. The chapter looks into the parental advice of Mrs. Winifred O'Connor Pablo in raising American mestizo children.
To Save Heaven and Earth
Authors: Burnet Jennie
Published: May 2023

This book considers people who risked their lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsi to try and save those targeted for killing. Many genocide perpetrators were not motivated by political ideology, ethnic hatred, or prejudice. By shifting away from these classic typologies of genocide studies and focusing instead on hundreds of thousands of discrete acts that unfold over time, the book highlights the ways that complex decisions and behaviors emerge in the social, political, and economic processes that constitute a genocide. The book explores external factors, such as geography, local power dynamics, and genocide timelines, as well as the internal states of mind and motivations of those who effected rescues. Framed within the interdisciplinary scholarship of genocide studies and rooted in cultural anthropology methodologies, the book presents stories of heroism and of the good done amid the evil of a genocide that nearly annihilated Rwandan Tutsi and decimated the Hutu and Twa who were opposed to the slaughter.
Dynamics of Violence in the Gray Zone
Authors: Burnet Jennie E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter describes the macro- and meso-level conditions, policies, events, actors, and sociopolitical dynamics that shaped violence during the Rwandan genocide. It highlights thw social categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa that were a foundational condition to making the genocide possible. It also points out how Rwanda's history of racialized violence and competition for political power made Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa salient in ordinary people's lives. Rwandan historiography after the 1959 social revolution that brought Hutu to power created a national founding narrative that cast Tutsi political power as a menace to Hutu people and the nation. The chapter details the civil war that began in 1990, the proliferation of racist propaganda, and political polarization in the new multiparty system that generated widespread uncertainty and made genocide possible.
Agency and Morality in the Gray Zone
Authors: Burnet Jennie E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter outlines the theoretical framework at the foundation of the analysis on Rwandan genocide. It explains how the analysis applies actor-network theory to illuminate the complex and diffuse origins of human agency in genocide. Through a method of analysis and theoretical framework, the chapter considers agency as an emergent property of networks of relations between heterogeneous network components. These components can include human and nonhuman actors, inanimate objects, and contextual factors. It merges actor-network theory with Primo Levi's concept of the moral gray zone of genocide to expose the moral ambiguity of the choices demanded of ordinary people in the extraordinary conditions of genocide.
Altruism, Agency, and Martyrdom in the Gray Zone
Authors: Burnet Jennie E.
Published: May 2023

This chapter questions the common assumptions that rescuers are morally exceptional people and religious piety increases the likelihood of rescue by examining the cases where Hutu gave their lives while trying to save Tutsi from the genocide. It looks at the cases of Sister Félicité Niyitegeka at the Saint Pierre Pastoral Center in Gisenyi and Hamza Habimana and Mohamed Hakuzimana at a mosque in Kibagabaga on the outskirts of Kigali. It also explores how and why some people persisted in their rescue efforts even in the face of almost certain death. The chapter demonstrates that martyrs refused the moral compromise necessitated by the genocide's gray zone. It considers the immense symbolic potency of martyrs in the aftermath of genocide and why some martyrs are widely recognized while others are largely ignored.
The City in Flames
Authors: Corsín Jiménez Alberto , Estalella Adolfo
Published: May 2023

This chapter details how autonomous projects and public art institutions mutually allured one another and generated a tension between a certain intellectual avant-garde and a burgeoning experience of the city as commons. It seeks to describe how digital autonomous in Madrid found their way out into the city and chartered novel territories of encounters, diffractions, and antagonisms between the public, the commons, and the libre. It also reviews that the sentiment in response to the Madrid bombings nurtured a deep feeling of shared affection and emotion that called for an experience of togetherness. The chapter discusses the existential indignation felt about the inhumanity of the bombing attacks that merged with the indignation felt about its political and informational mishandle. The year Madrid rose in flames and tears signaled the coming of age of the free culture movement as an urban movement.
Assembling Neighbors
Authors: Corsín Jiménez Alberto , Estalella Adolfo
Published: May 2023

This chapter assesses how assemblies took residence in the open air, in plazas and streets and how they negotiated the hospitality to strangers of public spaces. It also talks about how assemblies had to furnish themselves with a paraphernalia of equipment and improvisational methodologies to become perdurable urban objects. The chapter discusses the requirement of assemblies to experiment with their own textual and archival forms, as well as their conditions as territorial boundary objects, where the material trafficking and political pressures of assembling often transgressed and redrew the geographical scales and dynamics of neighborhoods. It explains that the words vecino and barrio acquired a new political and social valence. The social form of the assembly inscribed Madrid with a revitalized practice of neighborly politics.
Auto-Construction Redux
Authors: Corsín Jiménez Alberto , Estalella Adolfo
Published: May 2023

This chapter follows the steps of the guerrilla architectural collectives Basurama and Zuloark. It pays close attention to Basurama and Zuloark's practices of auto-construction that function as methods for both building and navigating social and material relations in contexts of precarity and periphery and as recursive models for designing habitats and inhabiting modes of grappling-with. It also highlights the notion of bricolages of apprenticeships, a meditation on the recursive materiality of learning, and its implications for both Madrid and social theory. The chapter confirms what infrastructural, operational, or archival resources hold fields together as sites of praxis, mutuality, and returning hermeneutics. It points out what arts of bricolage and installation are involved in thinking Madrid together.
Notes on Intransitive Urbanism
Authors: Corsín Jiménez Alberto , Estalella Adolfo
Published: May 2023

This chapter revisits some of the elements of the history of Spain's transition to democracy in the 1970s and reworks them through a long ethnographic passage. It articulates a humble caution against recent transitional approaches to sustainable futures. It also draws a parallel between the skepticism of the 1970s neighborhoods movement toward the transitional arrangements of post-Francoist democratization and that of the free culture movement toward the so-called Culture of the Transition. The chapter opens up a space for imagining the contours of a modest theory of intransitive urbanism, one driven less toward transitional aims than toward intransitive becomings. It discusses that austerity urbanism offered a venue for integrating a deeply public approach to municipal governance with the barrio-centered approach developed by the many-headed hydra of the neighborhood movement in the early 1970s.
Governing Death, Making Persons
Authors: Liu Huwymin Lucia
Published: May 2023

This book tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into “modern” citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. The book's author writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, the author sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.
Individualism, Interrupted
Authors: Liu Huwy-min Lucia
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers the promotion of personalized funerals by funeral parlors. It cites that personalized funerals handled the dead as individuals. States attempted to transform dead bodies into individualized subjects and the unexpected consequences of such governance. Shanghai people primarily conceptualized the dead through collectively shared social conventions based on socialist, religious, Confucian, and relational ethical ideas of person and death. Thus, market-driven ideas of person and death, such as authenticity and individualism, were of only marginal importance. The chapter explains that promoting personalized funerals increased the distrust between grassroots state practitioners and the bereaved over the commemoration of the death.
Dying Religious in a Socialist Ritual
Authors: Liu Huwy-min Lucia
Published: May 2023

This chapter elaborates on religious versions of memorial meetings taking over the majority of contemporary urban Chinese funerals. It demonstrates that what makes secular, socialist, relational, and religious ideas of person and death commensurable is the fact that these differences were dealt with within rituals. Moreover, rituals as a kind of social action created the conditions of possibility for living with differences. Pluralist subjectivity was made possible by merging modular framing and a perspective on rituals following external social conventions. The chapter mentions how Protestants attempted to transform memorial meetings that denote the meaning more important instead of the frame of ritual.
Decolonial Genealogies
Authors: Kim Suzy
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter elaborates on how common and often women were erased from history, which includes the largely unknown Korean War. History often hears the story of victors and the triumphant narrative about the Cold War conclusion relegates the histories on the “other side” of that conflict as simply a prelude. According to Korean columnist Yu Ho-jun, Korean women partisans were not waging an isolated struggle but were part of the global women's movement, fighting alongside Soviet and Chinese women. The chapter details how the women's press showcases the women's movement of the transnational cultivating ties across the world. It also covers the anticolonial roots of Korean communism.
Women against the Korean War
Authors: Kim Suzy
Published: May 2023

This chapter looks into buried histories to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternal strategies. It clarifies that maternalism was not imposed to maintain traditional Confucian gender roles or by idolizing Kim Il Sung's mother and wife. The Korean War galvanized international women to promote women's rights and launch the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Moreover, Cold War historiography distorted the understanding of the international women's movement and dismissed serious efforts against the Korean War as bogus peace ventures. The chapter elaborates on the work of the Women's International Democratic Federation, which was the largest international women's organization to form after the end of World War II.
Struggle between Two Lines
Authors: Kim Suzy
Published: May 2023

This chapter follows the fluctuation of the international women's peace movement in which Korean women took part. It examines the increasing friction between those still struggling against colonial violence and the shift in Soviet policy after the Sino-Soviet split. The culmination of maternalist strategies led to the 1955 World Congress of Mothers, which was organized by the Women's International Democratic Federation to reach across partisan divisions. However, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution exposed the fragility of Soviet hegemony, ultimately leading to the end of the Cominform (Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties). The chapter also details the rise of the Third World and the 1958 Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference.
Women’s Work Is Never Done
Authors: Kim Suzy
Published: May 2023

This chapter discusses the way housewifisation was replaced by working classization to support women's entry into the workforce. The chapter tackles the conceptual division between production and reproduction often made in economic theories attributing sexual inequity to the gendered division of labor. However, according to Marxist feminists, women's reproductive work undergirds capitalist accumulation. The chapter explains the continued shame attached to working women, despite the changes brought by social revolution and war. It elaborates on the national gatherings: the 1959 National Conference of Women Socialist Builders, the National Mothers Congress, and the 1965 Third Congress of the Korean Democratic Women's Union.
Communist Women around the World
Authors: Kim Suzy
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the representations of women. Building on the Soviet experience, Korea and China developed their own versions of communist feminism that would contribute to their global circulation. Nationalist works conventionally associated with solidifying the leadership in the 1970s find influences and resonances across the socialist world with the global circulation of militant women archetypes from works such as Mother, The White-Haired Girl, and Sea of Blood and The Flower Girl. However, critique on desexualized aesthetics of female characters inadvertently relies on a binary concept of gender that reifies sexual differences. The chapter considers the communist feminists' strategy concerning the desexualization of women to combat their representation as sex objects.
Seward's Law
Authors: Hoffer Peter Charles
Published: May 2023

This book argues that William H. Seward's legal practice in Auburn, New York, informed his theory of relational rights—a theory that demonstrated how the country could end slavery and establish a practical form of justice. This theory, the book demonstrates, had ties to Seward's career as a country lawyer. Despite his rise to prominence, and indeed preeminence, as a US secretary of state, Seward's country-lawyer mentality endured throughout his life, as evinced in his personal attitudes and professional conduct. Relational rights are communal and reciprocal, what everyone owed to every other member of their community. Such rights are at the center of a jurisprudential outlook that arises directly from living in a village. Though Seward was limited by the Victorian mores and the racialist presumptions of his day, the concept of relational rights that animated him was the natural antithesis to the theories and practices of slavery. In the legal regime underpinning the institution, masters owed nothing to their bondmen and women, while those enslaved unconditionally owed life and labor to their masters. The irrepressible conflict was, for Seward, jurisprudential as well as moral and political. The book's leading assumption is that a lifetime spent as a lawyer influences how a person responds to everyday challenges. Seward remained a country lawyer at heart, and that fact defined the course of his political career.
“There Is No Law of This State Which Recognizes Slavery”
Authors: Hoffer Peter Charles
Published: May 2023

This chapter covers the 1871 autobiography of William Henry Seward. It notes that Seward was becoming one of the most important politicians of his generation since he was a reformer that rallied on welcoming immigrants, Roman Catholics, Native Americans and technological advancement. The autobiography documented Seward's connection with the newspaper mogul and master politician Thurlow Weed. As sectional conflict loomed larger in the decades before the war, lawyers seemed to play a more visible role in the nation's guidance, which led lawyers like Seward and Abraham Lincoln to believe that law and politics were closely intertwined. In his autobiography, Seward clarifies that political party affiliation and religious sect membership did not mean so much to him as his idea of benefit to the community.
“There Is a Higher Law Than the Constitution”
Authors: Hoffer Peter Charles
Published: May 2023

This chapter tackles the speeches William Henry Seward made when he took office as a US senator from New York. It explains how the relationship between law and politics in his life changed, referencing his admiration for John Quincy Adams and his tenure. Some of Seward's speeches highlighted his developing philosophy of public law. Some of his speeches involve Henry Clay's proposed compromise bill to bring California into the Union as a free state and make abetting a fugitive slave escape a national crime. The chapter cites how Seward could not see any fruition in his program if he stayed with the Whig Party.
“The Union Has Been Rescued from All Its Perils”
Authors: Hoffer Peter Charles
Published: May 2023

This chapter acknowledges William Henry Seward's major foreign affairs achievement during the Johnson administration, which was the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Seward's methods of diplomacy clearly demonstrate relational rights. However, the acquisition of Alaska was the last hurrah for Seward and lacked the energy to negotiate the acquisition of additional foreign territories. The chapter details the literary projects Seward took in the last half-year of his life, one of which was an autobiography that exhibits his pre-war thinking and an uncritical account of American progress. It cites that Seward empowered diversity through his jurisprudence of relational rights that indicate the reciprocal relations within a community.
Displaced in War and Peace
Authors: Bernstein Seth
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Soviet forced laborers and prisoners of war (POWs) who were deported to work for the Germans and their allies. Repatriation became a shameful chapter in the history of the USSR that raised uncomfortable questions about the Soviet experience of World War II. How had the Soviet Union allowed so many of its people to be taken as forced laborers and POWs? Was it only force that brought people to Germany? Through intimidation and arrest, Joseph Stalin's regime suppressed repatriates' story of the war. In the West, Soviet repatriation became known as a notorious moment of Allied complicity with Stalin's regime. Using new archival evidence released in the 2010s in Russia and Ukraine—especially secret police investigations of repatriates from Ukraine—the book connects Soviet displacement to the history of Europe's war and postwar, in which violence and turmoil created fluid identities and, at times, agency in society.
Forced Labor Empire
Authors: Bernstein Seth
Published: May 2023

This chapter examines forced labor communities, looking at encounters between Eastern Workers and non-Soviet foreign workers from the German wartime empire. The Germans treated Eastern Workers as a coherent group of racial inferiors but also promoted divisions between them. The meager rations Germans allotted to forced laborers created animosity not only toward the camp administration but also toward campmates. Regional groups jockeyed for more provisions, and camp “specialists” gained privileges. Paradoxically, these tribulations created solidarity and vibrant social life at the barracks level. The same logic of deprivation shaped Eastern Workers' contacts with other foreign workers. The relative privilege allotted to groups the Germans viewed as racial superiors allowed them to profit from Eastern Workers. Sexual interactions between female Eastern Workers and others, even in the context of romantic relationships, usually had elements of barter. Ultimately, deliberate German policies, social factors, and economic realities atomized Eastern Worker society.
Return After Stalin
Authors: Bernstein Seth
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores how, after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, repatriation efforts gained new force when the Soviet government under Nikita Khrushchev initiated an effort called Return to the Motherland. Under the supervision of the Committee for State Security (the KGB, the secret police), more than eight thousand people came to Soviet Ukraine alone from 1954 to the end of the decade. The Return to the Motherland campaign attempted to mobilize individual families in the diaspora to return to the big family of the USSR. The effort united a conception of ethnic belonging with the aim of building a socialist state that would outshine capitalism. Although the campaign nominally targeted postwar nonreturners who would have been familiar with Soviet life, most migrants were re-émigrés. Many of these migrants became disenchanted with their new homelands. KGB officers became intermediaries where it was possible, resolving problems with local authorities such as arranging for apartments and jobs. The more tenacious problem was that a large number, especially among the re-émigrés, learned that their hopes of finding a homeland were mistaken. The lands they left had been transformed, and they themselves had changed from years or decades of life abroad.
Introduction
Authors: d’Appollonia Ariane Chebel
Published: May 2023

This introductory chapter elaborates on the ethnoracial violence pervasive across America. It cites the historical continuity of both racism and violence since the birth of the republic. The historic and current use of violence by various ethnoracial groups is a result of socio-economic competition. However, violence became an instrumental identity strategy to secure symbolic and material resources. The chapter considers different forms of violence that either aim to propagate adversity or respond to adversity, which also highlights the centrality of the dichotomy between white and black people. It explains the main contributions of social movement theory with three distinct yet interrelated perspectives: reactive identification, identity politics, and contentious politics.
From Past to Present Ethnoracial Identification Strategy
Authors: d’Appollonia Ariane Chebel
Published: May 2023

This chapter focuses on the ethnoracial identification strategy. It starts with a historical overview of group identification showcasing the racialization process ingrained in American society. Non-white groups engaged in new types of competition and more aggressive forms of the “politics of recognition.” Meanwhile, the mobilization of racial conservatives was the result of a white backlash response to a zero-sum struggle of African Americans and minorities attempting to secure their rights. The chapter highlights contentious identity politics as part of American society's “deep structure.” It explains that greater racial and ethnic diversity complicated established patterns of identification, further exacerbating conflicts over the (re)distribution of resources.
From Identity Politics to Ethnoracial Identity Crisis
Authors: d’Appollonia Ariane Chebel
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores identity politics and ethnoracial identity crisis. It tackles the dynamic interaction between actual and perceived adversity, threats, and patterns of mobilization. Even though American society is becoming more amenable to various forms of diversity and greater inter-communal tolerance, significant ethnoracial inequalities, racial prejudice, and resilient negative attitudes remain persistent in America. The impact of multiracialism and the consequential acceptance of different differences radically transformed the ethnoracial landscape. The chapter covers the study of assimilation in super-diverse times presented by Richard Alba and Jan Willem Duyvendak. It considers the invisibility of Hispanic and Asian minorities in America that results from their respective identity crises.
Is a Violent Society America’s Only Possible Future?
Authors: d’Appollonia Ariane Chebel
Published: May 2023

This chapter considers the possible futures of contentious politics in America. Some controversial issues that have been politically racialized may become less divisive, such as racial considerations shaping public opinion on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and other healthcare reforms. However, other processes of fragmentation may persist over time. Racism fuels a wide range of grievances that will provide the foundation for further conflict as long as ethnoracial categorizations remain the most static and salient aspect defining what it means to be American. The chapter also covers the possible future that involves greater cooperation based on new forms of interracial coalition building.
Everyday War
Authors: Uehling Greta Lynn
Published: May 2023

This book provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war. What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. The author of this book engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas that began in 2014 and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete. In Ukraine, landscapes filled with death and destruction prompted attentiveness to human vulnerabilities and the cultivation of everyday, interpersonal peace. The book explores a constellation of social practices where ethics of care were in operation. People were also drawn into the conflict in an everyday form of war that included provisioning fighters with military equipment they purchased themselves, smuggling insulin, and cutting ties to former friends. Each chapter considers a different site where care can produce interpersonal peace or its antipode, everyday war. Bridging the fields of political geography, international relations, peace and conflict studies, and anthropology, the book considers where peace can be cultivated at an everyday level.
Introduction
Authors: Uehling Greta Lynn
Published: May 2023

This chapter explores the conflict over the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, explaining the subjective experience of war and forced displacement. It is intended to provide an accessible lens through which to grasp something of what non-combatant civilians go through in a war zone. It is also an invitation to think about war in a more complex and personal way and the human capacity to deliver comfort and care in spite or because of military conflict. The chapter expands the boundaries of what is considered as war as contemporary military conflicts are increasingly being fought in residential areas. It highlights friend, family, and romantic partner relationships to illuminate the specific ways in which war can reconfigure intimacy while intimate relationships are the site of a different, everyday kind of war.
Welcome to Café Patriot! Militarization and a Themed Café
Authors: Uehling Greta Lynn
Published: May 2023

This chapter describes a military-themed café, Café Patriot. It demonstrates how the café's proprietors and war veterans are aimed to heighten conscious awareness of military conflict, although the literature on militarization emphasizes the unconscious ways in which militarization infects and spreads through a society. The goal of the café was to have an antidepressive effect on fighters and to provoke critical thinking about war among non-combatant patrons. The chapter highlights the café's place in the territorial conflict that can only be understood after recalling that the Ukrainian military had been significantly downsized. The strategic way in which Café Patriot elevated the position of veterans exemplifies everyday war.