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Posts tagged: excerpts

  • The History of Women's Movements in Asia and the Middle East

    The History of Women's Movements in Asia and the Middle East

    For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Middle East. Kumari Jayawardena presents feminism as it originated in the Third World, erupting from the specific struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality.

  • Post War Critical Theory: A Theoretical Glaciation

    Post War Critical Theory: A Theoretical Glaciation

    As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction are merciless. Over the last twenty-five years, radical intellectuals across the world have produced important and innovative ideas. The endeavour to transform the world without falling into the catastrophic traps of the past has been a common element uniting these new approaches.

  • The Anatomy of Racial Oppression

    The Anatomy of Racial Oppression

    Theodore W. Allen draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the “white” oppression of Native Americans and African Americans, in this excerpt from The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1, a groundbreaking analysis of the birth of racism in America.

  • Ruling the Void : The Withdrawal of the Elites

    Ruling the Void : The Withdrawal of the Elites

    Ruling the Void offers an authoritative and chilling assessment of the prospects for popular political representation today. In the long-established democracies of Western Europe, electoral turnouts are in decline, membership is shrinking in the major parties, and those who remain loyal partisans are sapped of enthusiasm. Peter Mair’s classic book weighs the impact of these changes, which together show that, after a century of democratic aspiration, electorates are deserting the political arena.

  • Commodification: Intellectual History of a Concept and Process

    Commodification: Intellectual History of a Concept and Process

    Fredric Jameson demonstrates that it is the moment of reification which enables the emergence of commodification as such; or to put it the other way around, the existence of a tendency to commodification is then what motivates reification and encourages its influence in all kinds of areas (the psychic and the cultural, for example) in which it did not previously hold sway or seem applicable.

  • Work and Leisure in Everyday Life

    Work and Leisure in Everyday Life

    Leisure and work and ‘private life’ make up a dialectical system, a global structure. Through this global structure we can reconstruct a historically real picture of man and the human at a certain step in their development: at a certain stage of alienation and disalienation.

  • The Authoritarian Personality

    The Authoritarian Personality

    Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality "represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to explore the origins of fascism not merely as a political phenomenon, but as the manifestation of dispositions that lie at the very core of the modern psyche."

  • The Origins of National Consciousness

    The Origins of National Consciousness

    The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. 

  • Women against the sex offense regime

    Women against the sex offense regime

    What about the role of women in the Sex Offense movement and their relationship to feminism, victims’ rights organizations, and survivors themselves? That role and that relationship are surprising and complex. For while there are many men in both the leadership and the rank and file—and of course, the objects of the laws are almost all men—the registrants’ rights movement is a women’s movement.  

  • Berta CĂĄceres, Rebel with a Cause

    Berta CĂĄceres, Rebel with a Cause

    Berta was eighteen years old and still weak from giving birth when she joined the war effort with the National Resistance, part of the guerrilla offensive against the Contras in El Salvador.

  • What did Henry Wallace stand for?

    What did Henry Wallace stand for?

    Henry Wallace was attacked and then dismissed because he proposed “a century of the common man and woman.” Almost eighty years of that century have passed since his dismissal, and his fight for the future is largely forgotten.