This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and ...Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War. The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms. With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.
In Germany, as in other parts of Europe, workers faced social and political challenges in the process of industrialization. Consumer cooperative societies, or coops, emerged at the end of the ...nineteenth century as an answer to these challenges. As self-help organizations of workers, they developed into a stable pillar of the German labor movement. In 1932 they counted four million members. After 1945, under Allied supervision, “denazified” coops helped to reconstruct Germany, which was then divided into two opposing political camps. After the war, former victims of the Nazi regime, perpetrators of Nazi crimes, and bystanders all preferred to avoid discussing the Nazi past. Reconstruction in both German states focused on rapidly restoring the war-damaged economy, while ignoring the other burdens of the Nazi past. Most of today’s discussion of coops’ post-war reconstruction in Germany centers on economics. Due to various historical interrelations, critical discussion of the burdensome past remains buried. In this paper, I reflect on the transformation of the consumer cooperatives during and after the Second World War, based on archival sources documenting the denazification of the Hannover Consumer Cooperative Society in the British occupation zone and the restitution of property it lost under Nazi rule. I argue that despite the nearly complete demise of German consumer cooperatives after reunification in 1990, the buried history of how they handled the Nazi past should come to light.
Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969–1989: Snakes and Ladders. By Libora Oates-Indruchová. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 384 pp.
After more than 12 rounds of negotiations, at the 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit and the third Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Summit held jointly in ...Bangkok, Thailand on 4 November 2019, India declared that it had decided to exit the RCEP. The RCEP is a proposed trade agreement between ASEAN and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. The five countries have a free trade agreement (FTA) with ASEAN. The RCEP intends to increase trade and commerce by providing greater market access for countries that do not have FTAs with the bloc countries, providing investment opportunities for the bloc countries, reducing tariffs and other barriers and standardising customs rules and procedures. It will also help in setting up supply chains in the RCEP countries to export goods outside the bloc which will further enhance economic growth. The RCEP is the largest trading bloc in the world, larger than the European Union (EU) and the region covered by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. It accounts for approximately one-third of the world's population and one-third of the global gross domestic product (GDP).
Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The ...Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the glorification of Russian medieval society and its warlords as a source of support for Putinism has yet to be explored. This book offers the first comparison of Putin’s political neomedievalism and re-Stalinization and introduces the concept of mobmemory to the study of right-wing populism. It argues that the celebration of the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s regime of state terror (1565–1572), has been fused with the rehabilitation of Stalinism to reconstruct the Russian Empire. The post-Soviet case suggests that the global obsession with the Middle Ages is not purely an aesthetic movement but a potential weapon against democracy. The book is intended for students, scholars, and non-specialists interested in understanding Russia’s anti-modern politics and the Russians’ support for the terror unleashed against Ukraine.
