Download or read book The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East Central Europe written by Barbara J. Falk and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In addition to the huge list of written sources from samizdat works to recent essays, Falk's sources include interviews with many personalities of those events as well as videos and films."--Jacket.

Download or read book Living in The Merry Ghetto written by Trever Hagen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Living in the Merry Ghetto reframes how people use music to build resistance. Author Trever Hagen addresses the social context of illegal music-making in Czechoslovakia during state socialism. He tells the story of a group of rock'n'roll musicians who went underground after 1968, building a parallel world from where they could flourish: the Merry Ghetto. The book examines the case of the Czech Underground and the politics of their music and their way of life, paying close attention to the development of the ensemble The Plastic People of the Universe. Taking in multiple political transitions from the 1940s-2000s, the story focuses on non-official cultural practices such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, seeking out copied cassette tapes, listening to banned LPs, growing long hair, attending clandestine concerts, smuggling albums via diplomats, recording in home-studios and being thrown in prison for any of these activities. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Undergrounders, archival research and participant observation, Hagen shows how these practices shaped consciousness, informed bodies and promoted collective action, all of which contributed to an Underground identity.

Download or read book The Hungarian Avant Garde and Socialism written by Katalin Cseh-Varga and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence and the activities of a second public sphere in the areas of Soviet influence were intricately linked to the performative and intermedial production and usage of alternative spaces. Applying a multitude of perspectives and networked topography, The Hungarian Avant-Garde and Socialism investigates artistic strategies of spaces – namely those of the artist's studio, exhibitions, installations, clubs, apartments, cellars, event halls, and chapels – all of which existed parallel to or were interwoven with the regulated public sphere in Hungary from the beginning of the 1960s to the era immediately following the Kádár regime. This book captures and discusses the exclusionary and inclusionary mechanisms inscribed into public spheres behind the Iron Curtain in all their paradoxes through the looking glass of an artist generation that was controversially labelled “neo-”, and later, “post-avant-garde”. Cross-referencing the international tendencies in the marginal art worlds that existed between and beyond the Cold War reality of Blocs, The Hungarian Avant-Garde demonstrates how mostly non-conformist artists in Hungary, and by extension the spaces they created, reacted to the conflicting, contradictory nature of public spheres in the post-totalitarian condition.

Download or read book Justice Memory and Redress in Romania written by Lavinia Stan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any lessons Romania can teach transitional justice scholars and practitioners? This book argues that important insights emerge when analyzing a country with a moderate record of coming to terms with its communist past. Taking a broad definition of transitional justice as their starting point, contributors provide fresh assessments of the history commission, court trials, public identifications of former communist perpetrators, commemorations, and unofficial artistic projects that seek to address and redress the legacies of communist human rights violations. Theoretical and practical questions regarding the continuity of state agencies, the sequencing of initiatives, their advantages and limitations, the reasons why some reckoning programs are enacted and others are not, and these measures’ efficacy in promoting truth and justice are answered throughout the volume. Contributors include seasoned scholars from Romania, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and current and former leaders of key Romanian transitional justice institutions.

Download or read book From Revolution to Ethics Second Edition written by Julian Bourg and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award, CHOICE Magazine (2008) Winner: Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in intellectual history, Journal of the History of Ideas (2008) The French revolts of May 1968, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe, were among the most famous and colourful episodes of the twentieth century. Julian Bourg argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought - the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics. Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics shows how intellectuals and activists turned to ethics as the touchstone for understanding interpersonal, institutional, and political dilemmas. In absorbing and scrupulously researched detail Bourg explores the developing ethical fascination as it emerged among student Maoists courting terrorism, anti-psychiatric celebrations of madness, feminists mobilizing against rape, and pundits and philosophers championing humanitarianism. From Revolution to Ethics provides a compelling picture of how May 1968 helped make ethics a compass for navigating contemporary global concerns. In a new preface for the second edition published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the events, Bourg assessses the worldwide influence of the ethical turn, from human rights to the return of religion and the new populism.

Download or read book The Nonconformists written by Brian K. Goodman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How risky encounters between American and Czech writers behind the Iron Curtain shaped the art and politics of the Cold War and helped define an era of dissent. “In some indescribable way, we are each other’s continuation,” Arthur Miller wrote of the imprisoned Czech playwright Václav Havel. After a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring, many US-based writers experienced a similar shock of solidarity. Brian Goodman examines the surprising and consequential connections between American and Czech literary cultures during the Cold War—connections that influenced art and politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain. American writers had long been attracted to Prague, a city they associated with the spectral figure of Franz Kafka. Goodman reconstructs the Czech journeys of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, and John Updike, as well as their friendships with nonconformists like Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Ivan Klíma, and Milan Kundera. Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, was home to a literary counterculture shaped by years of engagement with American sources, from Moby-Dick and the Beats to Dixieland jazz and rock ’n’ roll. Czechs eagerly followed cultural trends in the United States, creatively appropriating works by authors like Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway, sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. The Nonconformists tells the story of a group of writers who crossed boundaries of language and politics, rearranging them in the process. The transnational circulation of literature played an important role in the formation of new subcultures and reading publics, reshaping political imaginations and transforming the city of Kafka into a global capital of dissent. From the postwar dream of a “Czechoslovak road to socialism” to the neoconservative embrace of Eastern bloc dissidence on the eve of the Velvet Revolution, history was changed by a collision of literary cultures.

Download or read book 1948 and 1968 Dramatic Milestones in Czech and Slovak History written by Laura Cashman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume has been published to coincide with the anniversaries of two significant milestones in Czech and Slovak history – the establishment of communist rule in 1948 and the Prague Spring of 1968 – and in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’. Given the ultimate failure of the communist system, these events and their legacy for Czech and Slovak society and politics merit continued study, particularly given the wealth of new data made available when state and Party archives were finally opened in the 1990s. The essays in this volume, by witnesses, historians and social scientists from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the USA, UK and Australia offer a reappraisal of those turbulent events. They present new and original research, based on information from archives which were not opened until after 1990 and which is not yet available to audiences who do not speak Czech or Slovak. This volume will, therefore, be of interest to both specialists and general readers who are curious to learn more about these events. This book was published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

Download or read book The Greengrocer and His TV written by Paulina Bren and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small screen, Paulina Bren looks to the "normal" of normalization, to the everyday experience of late communism. The figure central to this book is the greengrocer who, in a seminal essay by Václav Havel, symbolized the ordinary citizen who acquiesced to the communist regime out of fear. Bren challenges simplistic dichotomies of fearful acquiescence and courageous dissent to dramatically reconfigure what we know, or think we know, about everyday life under communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Deftly moving between the small screen, the street, and the Central Committee (and imaginatively drawing on a wide range of sources that include television shows, TV viewers' letters, newspapers, radio programs, the underground press, and the Communist Party archives), Bren shows how Havel's greengrocer actually experienced "normalization" and the ways in which popular television serials framed this experience. Now back by popular demand, socialist-era serials, such as The Woman Behind the Counter and The Thirty Adventures of Major Zeman, provide, Bren contends, a way of seeing—literally and figuratively—Czechoslovakia's normalization and Eastern Europe's real socialism.

Download or read book Contesting Democracy written by Jan-Werner Muller and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVThis book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age./div

Download or read book Activism across Borders since 1870 written by Daniel Laqua and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Occupy protests to the Black Lives Matter movement and school strikes for climate action, the twenty-first century has been rife with activism. Although very different from one another, each of these movements has created alliances across borders, with activists stressing that their concerns are not confined to individual nation states. In this book, Daniel Laqua shows that global efforts of this kind are not a recent phenomenon, and that as long as there have been borders, activists have sought to cross them. Activism Across Borders since 1870 explores how individuals, groups and organisations have fostered bonds in their quest for political and social change, and considers the impact of national and ideological boundaries on their efforts. Focusing on Europe but with a global outlook, the book acknowledges the importance of imperial and postcolonial settings for groups and individuals that expressed far-reaching ambitions. From feminism and socialism to anti-war campaigns and green politics, this book approaches transnational activism with an emphasis on four features: connectedness, ambivalence, transience and marginality. In doing so, it demonstrates the intertwined nature of different movements, problematizes transnational action, discusses the temporary nature of some alliances, and shows how transnationalism has been used by those marginalized at the national level. With a broad chronological perspective and thematic chapters, it provides historical context, clarifies terms and concepts, and offers an alternative history of modern Europe through the lens of activists, movements and campaigns.

Download or read book The Legacy of Division written by Ferenc Laczó and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly postnational and multicultural West. In Western Europe, voices regretting the European Union's supposedly careless and premature expansion eastward began to appear on both sides of the left–right and liberal–conservative divides. The possibility of convergence between Europe's two halves has been reconceived as a threat to the European project. In a series of original essays and conversations, thirty-three contributors from the fields of European and global history, politics and culture address questions fundamental to our understanding of Europe today: How have perceptions and misperceptions between the two halves of the continent changed over the last three decades? Can one speak of a new East–West split? If so, what characterizes it and why has it reemerged? The contributions demonstrate a great variety of approaches, perspectives, emphases, and arguments in addressing the daunting dilemma of Europe's assumed East–West divide.

Download or read book From Helsinki to Belgrade written by Vladimir Bilandžić and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2012 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the heads of state and government of almost all European countries, the USA, and Canada signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki on August 1st, 1975, little was heard about the CSCE process. However, far away from the headline-grabbing meetings between the leading politicians of the USA and the USSR as well as the Geneva negotiations on disarmament, the Helsinki process proved to be an efficient framework for the East-West negotiations. The inconclusive Belgrade CSCE Meeting of 1977-1978 - after six months the delegations were only able to agree on a brief final document - was nevertheless a significant milestone for the CSCE process itself: negotiation rules were drawn up, interpreted, negotiated and re-negotiated. The contributions to this volume offer solid insights into the follow-up meeting in Belgrade in 1977/78, the Cold War, and in particular the CSCE process.

Download or read book 1989 written by James Mark and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing Eastern Europe in a global context, this provides new perspectives on the political, economic, and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century.

Download or read book Cosmopolitanism and the Legacies of Dissent written by Tamara Caraus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The core idea shared by all cosmopolitan views is that all human beings belong to a single community and the ultimate units of moral concern are individual human beings, not states or particular forms of human associations. Nevertheless, the attempts to ground a political theory on overarching universal principles is in contradiction with the plurality of social, cultural, political, religious interpretative standpoints in the contemporary world. Is dissent cosmopolitan? Is there a legacy of dissent for a theory of cosmopolitanism? This book is a comparative, historical analysis of dissident thought and practice for contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism. Divided into two parts, the editors and contributors explore the contribution of ‘paradigmatic’ dissidents like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Havel, Sakharov, Mandela, Liu Xiaobo, Aung San Suu Kyi towards a post-universalist cosmopolitan theory. Part Two examines the inherent cosmopolitanism of the seemingly ‘peripheral’ dissent of contemporary forms of protests, resistance, direct action like NO TAV movement and Occupy Wall Street. A timely book which allows for a much needed new engagement in contemporary debates of cosmopolitanism, we learn how practical resistance to totalizing/hegemonic claims is generated, and how dissident thinking might contribute to new, enriched ways of conceiving the non-totalizing foundations of cosmopolitanism. An innovative look at what lessons can scholars of cosmopolitanism learn from dissent/dissident movements, and what the role of dissent in cosmopolitan democracy could be.

Download or read book Multiple Democracies in Europe written by Paul Blokker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a detailed analysis of democracy in Europe, with a focus on the new member states, and makes an important and original contribution to the debate on the future of European democracy.

Download or read book The Global 1989 written by George Lawson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1989 signifies the collapse of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War, a moment generally recognized as a triumph for liberal democracy and when capitalism became global. The Global 1989 challenges these ideas. An international group of prominent scholars investigate the mixed, paradoxical and even contradictory outcomes engendered by these events, unravelling the intricacies of this important moment in world history. Although the political, economic and cultural orders generated have, for the most part, been an improvement on what was in place before, this has not always been clear cut: 1989 has many meanings, many effects and multiple trajectories. This volume leads the way in defining how 1989 can be assessed both in terms of its world historical impact and in terms of its contribution to the shape of contemporary world politics.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of the Cold War 5 volumes 5 volumes written by Spencer C. Tucker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 2229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive five-volume reference on the defining conflict of the second half of the 20th century, covering all aspects of the Cold War as it influenced events around the world. The conflict that dominated world events for nearly five decades is now captured in a multivolume work of unprecedented magnitude—from a publisher widely acclaimed for its authoritative military and historical references. Under the direction of internationally known military historian Spencer Tucker, ABC-CLIO's The Encyclopedia of the Cold War: A Political, Social, and Military History offers the most current and comprehensive treatment ever published of the ideological conflict that not so long ago enveloped the globe. From the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Encyclopedia of the Cold War provides authoritative information on all military conflicts, battlefield and surveillance technologies, diplomatic initiatives, important individuals and organizations, national histories, economic developments, societal and cultural events, and more. The nearly 1,300 entries, plus topical essays and an extraordinarily rich documents volume, draw heavily on recently opened Russian, Eastern European, and Chinese archives. The work is a definitive cornerstone reference on one of the most important historical topics of our time.