Why, Timothy Melley asks, have paranoia and conspiracy theory become such prominent features of postwar American culture? InEmpire of Conspiracy, Melley explores the recent growth of anxieties about ...thought-control, assassination, political indoctrination, stalking, surveillance, and corporate and government plots. At the heart of these developments, he believes, lies a widespread sense of crisis in the way Americans think about human autonomy and individuality. Nothing reveals this crisis more than the remarkably consistent form of expression that Melley calls "agency panic"-an intense fear that individuals can be shaped or controlled by powerful external forces. Drawing on a broad range of forms that manifest this fear-including fiction, film, television, sociology, political writing, self-help literature, and cultural theory-Melley provides a new understanding of the relation between postwar American literature, popular culture, and cultural theory.
Empire of Conspiracyoffers insightful new readings of texts ranging from Joseph Heller'sCatch-22to the Unabomber Manifesto, from Vance Packard'sHidden Persuadersto recent addiction discourse, and from the "stalker" novels of Margaret Atwood and Diane Johnson to the conspiracy fictions of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, Don DeLillo, and Kathy Acker. Throughout, Melley finds recurrent anxieties about the power of large organizations to control human beings. These fears, he contends, indicate the continuing appeal of a form of individualism that is no longer wholly accurate or useful, but that still underpins a national fantasy of freedom from social control.
Reassessing Cold War Europe Autio-Sarasmo, Sari; Miklossy, Katalin
2011, 20101018, 2010, 2010-10-18, 20110101, Letnik:
14
eBook
This book presents a comprehensive reassessment of Europe in the Cold War period, 1945-91. Contrary to popular belief, it shows that relations between East and West were based not only on ...confrontation and mutual distrust, but also on collaboration. The authors reveal that - despite opposing ideologies - there was in fact considerable interaction and exchange between different Eastern and Western actors (such states, enterprises, associations, organisations and individuals) irrespective of the Iron Curtain.
This book challenges both the traditional understanding of the East-West juxtaposition and the relevancy of the Iron Curtain. Covering the full period, and taking into account a range of spheres including trade, scientific-technical co-operation, and cultural and social exchanges, it reveals how smaller countries and smaller actors in Europe were able to forge and implement their agendas within their own blocs. The books suggests that given these lower-level actors engaged in mutually beneficial cooperation, often running counter to the ambitions of the bloc-leaders, the rules of Cold War interaction were not, in fact, exclusively dictated by the superpowers.
Notes on Contributors Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations List of tables Acknowledgments Introduction: The Cold War from a New Perspective - Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy 1. The Soviet Union’s Acquisition of Western Technology after Stalin: Some Thoughts on People and Connections - Philip Hanson 2. Economic Interest in Soviet Post-War Policy on Finland - Tatiana Androsova 3. CoCom and Neutrality: Western Export Control Policies, Finland and the Cold War, 1949–1958 - Niklas Jensen-Eriksen 4. Knowledge through the Iron Curtain - Soviet Scientific-Technical Cooperation with Finland and West Germany - Sari Autio-Sarasmo 5. Learning from the French: The Modernisation of Soviet Winemaking, 1956-1961 - Jeremy Smith 6. Soft Contacts through the Iron Curtain - Riikka Nisonen-Trnka 7. Internal Transfer of Cybernetics and Informality in the Soviet Union: The Case of Lithuania - Eglė Rindzevičiūtė 8. New Advantages of Old Kinship Ties. Finnish–Hungarian Interactions in the 1970s - Katalin Miklóssy 9. Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women’s International Democratic Federation - Melanie Ilic 10. Overcoming Cold War Boundaries at the World Youth Festivals - Pia Koivunen 11. Room to Manoeuvre? National Interests and Coalition-Building in the CMEA, 1969–1974 - Suvi Kansikas Bibliography Index
Sari Autio-Sarasmo is a Senior Researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute (Finnish Centre of Russian and Eastern European Studies), University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor at the University of Tampere, Finland.
Katalin Miklóssy is a Researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki and Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well ...competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in contemporary Britain.
An unflinching examination of the moral and professional
dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan
Project. After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took
possession of a box of ...private family materials. To his surprise,
the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information
about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project.
Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented
ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project,
organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at
Alamogordo, escorted the "Little Boy" bomb from Los Alamos to the
Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the
irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Participation on the
project challenged Dr. Nolan's instincts as a healer. He and his
medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty
and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life.
Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to
maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear
radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize
delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the
harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors
struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using
the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human
drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity. A vital and vivid
account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic
Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that
ordinary people face in extraordinary times.
Why have some former enemy countries established durable peace while others remain mired in animosity? When and how does historical memory matter in post-conflict interstate relations? Focusing on ...two case studies, Yinan He argues that the key to interstate reconciliation is the harmonization of national memories. Conversely, memory divergence resulting from national mythmaking harms long-term prospects for reconciliation. After WWII, Sino-Japanese and West German-Polish relations were both antagonized by the Cold War structure, and pernicious myths prevailed in national collective memory. In the 1970s, China and Japan brushed aside historical legacy for immediate diplomatic normalization. But the progress of reconciliation was soon impeded from the 1980s by elite mythmaking practices that stressed historical animosities. Conversely, from the 1970s West Germany and Poland began to de-mythify war history and narrowed their memory gap through restitution measures and textbook cooperation, paving the way for significant progress toward reconciliation after the Cold War.
Though the extreme right was not particularly successful in the 1999 European elections, it continues to be a major factor in the politics of Western Europe. This book, newly available in paperback, ...provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the extreme right in the Netherlands (Centrumdemocraten, Centrumpartij'86), Belgium (Vlaams Blok) and Germany (Die Republikaner, Deutsche Volksunion). On the basis of original research - using party literature - the author concludes that though individual parties might stress different issues, the extreme right party family does share a core ideology of nationalism, xenophobia, welfare chauvinism, and law and order. The author's research and conclusions clearly have broader implications for the study of the extreme right phenomenon and party ideology in general, and the book should be of interest to anyone studying or researching in the areas of European politics, political ideologies, political parties, extremism, racism or nationalism.
Diverse Communities is a critique of Robert Putnam's social capital thesis, re-examined from the perspective of women and cultural minorities in America over the last century. Barbara Arneil argues ...that the idyllic communities of the past were less positive than Putnam envisions and that the current 'collapse' in participation is better understood as change rather than decline. Arneil suggests that the changes in American civil society in the last half century are not so much the result of generational change or television as the unleashing of powerful economic, social and cultural forces that, despite leading to division and distrust within American society, also contributed to greater justice for women and cultural minorities. She concludes by proposing that the lessons learned from this fuller history of American civil society provide the normative foundation to enumerate the principles of justice by which diverse communities might be governed in the twenty-first century.
The Architecture of Neoliberalism pursues an uncompromising critique of the neoliberal turn in contemporary architecture. This book reveals how a self-styled parametric and post-critical architecture ...serves mechanisms of control and compliance while promoting itself, at the same time, as progressive. Spencer's incisive analysis of the architecture and writings of figures such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn and Alejandro Zaera-Polo shows them to be in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought. Analysing architectural projects in the fields of education, consumption and labour, The Architecture of Neoliberalism examines the part played by contemporary architecture in refashioning human subjects into the compliant figures - student-entrepreneurs, citizen-consumers and team-workers - requisite to the universal implementation of a form of existence devoted to market imperatives.
Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a 'memoryland' - littered ...with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this 'memory phenomenon' is related to the changing nature of identities - especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe - and with what effects.
Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands argues for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the cultural assumptions involved in relating to the past. It theorizes the various ways in which 'materializations' of identity work and relates these to different forms of identification within Europe. The book also addresses questions of methodology, including discussion of historical, ethnographic, interdisciplinary and innovative methods. Through a wide-range of case-studies from across Europe, Sharon Macdonald argues that Europe is home to a much greater range of ways of making the past present than is usually realized - and a greater range of forms of 'historical consciousness'. At the same time, however, she seeks to highlight what she calls 'the European memory complex' - a repertoire of prevalent patterns in forms of recollection and 'past presencing'.
The examples in Memorylands are drawn from both the margins and metropolitan centres, from the relatively small-scale and local, the national and the avant-garde. The book looks at pasts that are potentially identity-disrupting - or 'difficult' - as well as those that affirm identities or offer possibilities for transcending national identities or articulating more cosmopolitan futures. Topics covered include authenticity, temporalities,
