Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics offers a critical appraisal of C.L.R. James as a major twentieth-century activist-intellectual, exploring his prolific output spanning decades within genres as diverse as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, prose fiction, and reportage. The book also analyzes some of the flaws and contradictions that surfaced within James’ writings as a consequence of the difficult circumstances in which he worked and lived as an itinerant migrant intellectual invariably involved with fringe political groups. Assessing James as a lifelong committed Marxist and humanist, the book argues that his core concern with racial, political, and cultural questions as central to human and social understanding led him to develop a distinctive critique of the modern world.

Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics offers a critical appraisal of C.L.R. James as a major twentieth-century activist-intellectual, exploring his prolific output spanning decades within genres as diverse as history, philosophy, sociology, literary and cultural criticism, prose fiction, and reportage. The book also analyzes some of the flaws and contradictions that surfaced within James’ writings as a consequence of the difficult circumstances in which he worked and lived as an itinerant migrant intellectual invariably involved with fringe political groups. Assessing James as a lifelong committed Marxist and humanist, the book argues that his core concern with racial, political, and cultural questions as central to human and social understanding led him to develop a distinctive critique of the modern world.

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists envisioned, experienced, and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. While many histories of diplomatic, economic, and intellectual connections between the United States and the Soviet Union can be found, none has yet examined how Americans’ encounters with Russian/Soviet society shaped their representations of a Russian/Soviet ‘other’ and its relationship with an American ‘west.’ The essays in this volume critically engage with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter, repressing native voices that must be recovered. Unlike western imperialists and their colonial subjects, Americans and Russians long co-existed in a tense parity, regarding each other as other-than-European equals, sometime cultural role models, temporary allies, and political antagonists. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their ‘Russian experience,’ the contributors to this volume closely analyze these texts, locate them in their sociopolitical context, and gauge how their producers’ profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality. The volume also explores the blurred boundaries between national identities and representations of self/other after the Soviet Union’s fall.

This edited volume reassesses the ongoing transnational turn in anarchist and syndicalist studies, a field where the interest in cross-border connections has generated much innovative literature in the last decade. It presents and extends up-to-date research into several dynamic historiographic fields, and especially the history of the anarchist and syndicalist movements and the notions of transnational militancy and informal political networks. Whilst restating the relevance of transnational approaches, especially in connection with the concepts of personal networks and mediators, the book underlines the importance of other scales of analysis in capturing the complexities of anarchist militancy, due to both their centrality as a theme of reflection for militants, and their role as a level of organization. Especially crucial is the national level, which is often overlooked due to the internationalism which was so central to anarchist ideology. And yet, as several chapters highlight, anarchist discourses on the nation (as opposed to the state), patriotism and even race, were more nuanced than is usually assumed. The local and individual levels are also shown to be essential in anarchist militancy.

Expeditionary journeys have shaped our world, but the expedition as a cultural form is rarely scrutinized. This book is the first major investigation of the conventions and social practices embedded in team-based exploration. In probing the politics of expedition making, this volume is itself a pioneering journey through the cultures of empire. With contributions from established and emerging scholars, Expedition into Empire plots the rise and transformation of expeditionary journeys from the eighteenth century until the present. Conceived as a series of spotlights on imperial travel and colonial expansion, it roves widely: from the metropolitan centers to the ends of the earth. This collection is both rigorous and accessible, containing lively case studies from writers long immersed in exploration, travel literature, and the dynamics of cross-cultural encounter.

This book is a sweeping historical survey of the origins, development and nature of state power. It demonstrates that Eurasia is home to a dominant tradition of arbitrary rule mediated through military, civil and ecclesiastical servants and a marginal tradition of representative and responsible government through autonomous institutions. The former tradition finds expression in hierarchically organized and ideologically legitimated continental bureaucratic states while the latter manifests itself in the state of laws. In recent times, the marginal tradition has gained in popularity and has led to continental bureaucratic states attempting to introduce democratic and constitutional reforms. These attempts have rarely altered the actual manner in which power is exercised by the state and its elites given the deeper and historically rooted experience of arbitrary rule. Far from being remote, the arbitrary culture of power that emerged in many parts of the world continues to shape the fortunes of states. To ignore this culture of power and the historical circumstances that have shaped it comes at a high price, as indicated by the ongoing democratic recession and erosion of liberal norms within states that are democracies.

This book is an analytic and historical portrait of the volatile decades at the beginning of the 20th century. Engaging with avant-garde art and thought, and concentrating on two of the most controversial and still culturally relevant personalities of Viennese modernism - Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schoenberg - it tells the story of a cultural experiment of unprecedented proportions, an experiment that attempted to redesign the senses and the concept of individual identity. The book describes the shape of this identity through its mutually overlapping artistic and intellectual dimensions, as it explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and music.