Download or read book States Of Backwardness Visions Of Modernity written by Olajumoke Thokozile Warritay and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African development has long been described as behind or below that of 'advanced', 'First World', industrialized nations. Consequently, discourses of African progress from colonialism to the present have focused on transforming African societies from 'backwardness' and ubiquitous poverty to more prosperous, 'modern' conditions. African societies are generally understood as dichotomously configured between elites and impoverished masses. As a result, contemporary African development is aimed primarily at policing wanton elites and providing for the precarious poor. While both these objectives are worthwhile, they create a limited representation of African societies; one focused exclusively on extremes. The existence and experiences of African middle classes are largely ignored. Recently, however, reports have signaled the emergence of an African 'middle class' and forecasted its positive impact on development. This thesis investigates a particular subset of West African middle classes in development discourses at the end of empire. I argue for the longstanding existence of modern African middle classes in West Africa and describe how popular notions of African development and modernity have limited our ability to see African middle classes. I examine Western-educated segments of the middle classes at the end of colonialism, and identify them as significant middling groups because of their position between supposedly 'backwards' African traditionalism and Western modernity as well as their position astride capital and labor. Because of their middling character, Western-educated middle classes in West Africa emerged as both subjects and objects of development in the transition from colonial to nation-states. I emphasize how notions of progress created by and about Western-educated West Africans focused on the imperatives of modernization and state-led development. The thesis focuses on definitions of African middle classes, notions of African modernity, and visions of national development at the end of empire. I examine social theories about middle classes in general and African class structures in particular before discussing visions of development as expressed by influential Westerneducated Africans. I point to nationalism as a unifying class project for Western-educated Africans at the end of colonialism, and underscore how Westerneducated Africans envisioned the advent of African nations as the continent's entry into the modern world. National development then appeared as a strategy for 'backwards' nations to 'catch-up', and Western-expertise was offered as an expedient way to boost growth and modernize new nations. Examples from Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire are provided throughout the thesis to illustrate general claims and to highlight variation within West Africa. At the end of colonialism, ideas about development in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire were almost antithetical. These two countries demonstrate how differences in ideology, imperial relations, and state-led development strategies necessarily affected the size and strength of Western-educated middle classes at the end of empire. In all, this thesis highlights the power of development discourses in constructing certain images of 'African society' which, in turn, propel particular development projects. How we imagine and represent African societies has important effects. This thesis pushes the way we understand Africa's past as well as contemporary class constructions. I attempt to insert the middle classes into representations of African societies with the belief that including the middle classes will produce more accurate and realistic ideas about African development.
Download or read book Visions of Modernity written by Mary Nolan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-08-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In much the same way that Japan has become the focus of contemporary American discussion about industrial restructuring, Germans in the economic reform in terms of Americanism and Fordism, seeing in the United States an intriguing vision for a revitalized economy and a new social order. During the 1920s, Germans were fascinated by American economic success and its quintessential symbols, Henry Ford and his automobile factories. Mary Nolan's book explores the contradictory ways in which trade unionists and industrialists, engineers and politicians, educators and social workers explained American economic success, envisioned a more efficient or "rationalized" economic system for Germany, and anguished over the social and cultural costs of adopting the American version of modernity. These debates about Americanism and Fordism deeply shaped German perceptions of what was economically and socially possible and desirable in terms of technology and work, family and gender relations, consumption and culture. Nolan examines efforts to transform production and consumption, factories and homes, and argues that economic Americanism was implemented ambivalently and incompletely, producing, in the end, neither prosperity nor political stability. Vision of Modernity will appeal not only to scholars of German History and those interested in European social and working-class history, but also to industrial sociologists and business scholars.
Download or read book Visions of Modernity American Business and the Modernization of Germany written by Mary Nolan Professor of History New York University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994-06-27 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In much the same way that Japan has become the focus of contemporary American discussion about industrial restructuring, Germans in the economic reform in terms of Americanism and Fordism, seeing in the United States an intriguing vision for a revitalized economy and a new social order. During the 1920s, Germans were fascinated by American economic success and its quintessential symbols, Henry Ford and his automobile factories. Mary Nolan's book explores the contradictory ways in which trade unionists and industrialists, engineers and politicians, educators and social workers explained American economic success, envisioned a more efficient or "rationalized" economic system for Germany, and anguished over the social and cultural costs of adopting the American version of modernity. These debates about Americanism and Fordism deeply shaped German perceptions of what was economically and socially possible and desirable in terms of technology and work, family and gender relations, consumption and culture. Nolan examines efforts to transform production and consumption, factories and homes, and argues that economic Americanism was implemented ambivalently and incompletely, producing, in the end, neither prosperity nor political stability. Vision of Modernity will appeal not only to scholars of German History and those interested in European social and working-class history, but also to industrial sociologists and business scholars.
Download or read book Industry State and Society in Stalin s Russia 1926 1934 written by David R. Shearer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his reexamination of the origins of the Stalinist state during the formative period of rapid industrialization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, David R. Shearer argues that a centralized state-controlled economic system was the consciously conceived political creation of Stalinist leaders rather than the inevitable by-product of socialist industrialization. Focusing on the different economic and bureaucratic cultures within the industrial system, Shearer reconstructs the debates in 1928 and 1929 over administrative, financial, and commercial reform. He uses information from recently opened archives to show that attempts by the state's trading organizations to create a commercial economy enjoyed wide support, offering a model that combined planning and rapid industrialization with social democracy and economic prosperity. In an effort to crush the syndicate movement and establish tight political control over the economy, Stalinist leaders intervened with a program of radical reforms. Shearer demonstrates that professional engineers, planners and industrial administrators in many cases actively supported the creation of a powerful industrial state unhampered by domestic social and economic constraints. The paradoxical result, Shearer shows, was a loss of control. The overly centralized system that emerged during the first Five-Year Plan was rendered incoherent by periodic economic crises and the continuing influence of partially suppressed social and market forces.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies written by Chris Shei and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook approaches Chinese Studies from an interdisciplinary perspective while attempting to establish a fundamental set of core values and tenets for the subject, in relation to the further development of Chinese Studies as an academic discipline. It aims to consolidate the current findings in Chinese Studies, extract the essence from each affiliated discipline, formulate a concrete set of ideas to represent the ‘Chineseness’ of the subject, establish a clear identity for the discipline and provide clear guidelines for further research and practice. Topics included in this Handbook cover a wide spectrum of traditional and newly added concerns in Chinese Studies, ranging from the Chinese political system and domestic governance to international relations, Chinese culture, literature and history, Chinese sociology (gender, middle class, nationalism, home ownership, dating) and Chinese opposition and activism. The Handbook also looks at widening the scope of Chinese Studies (Chinese psychology, postcolonialism and China, Chinese science and climate change), and some illustrations of innovative Chinese Studies research methods. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies is an essential reference for researchers and scholars in Chinese Studies, as well as students in the discipline.
Download or read book Revolutionary Womanhood written by Laura Bier and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explores state feminism through a close look at how the Nasser regime took up "the woman question" as part of the attempt to build a modern Egyptian nation-state.
Download or read book Frontiers of Modernity written by Timothy Karis and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Making Peasants Backward written by Y. Kotsonis and published by Springer. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first monograph on the Russian cooperative movement before 1914, economic and social change is considered alongside Russian political culture. Looking at such historical actors as Sergei Witte, Piotr Stolypin, and Alexander Chaianov, and by tapping into several newly opened Russian local and state archives on peasant practice in the movement, Kotsonis suggests how cooperatives reflected a pan-European dilemma over whether and to what extent populations could participate in their own transformation.
Download or read book Red Ties and Residential Schools written by Alexia Bloch and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Alexia Bloch examines the experiences of a community of Evenki, an indigenous group in central Siberia, to consider the place of residential schooling inidentity politics in contemporary Russia. Residential schools established in the 1920s brought Siberians under the purview of the Soviet state, and Bloch demonstrates how in the post-Soviet era, a time of jarring social change, these schools continue to embody the salience of Soviet cultural practices and the spirit of belonging to a collective. She explores how Evenk intellectuals are endowing residential schools with new symbolic power and turning them into a locus for political mobilization. In contrast to the binary model of oppressed/oppressor underlying many accounts of state/indigenous relations, Bloch's work provides a complex picture of the experiences of Siberians in Soviet and post-Soviet society. Bloch's research, conducted in a central Siberian town during the 1990s, is ethnographically grounded in life stories recorded with Evenk women; surveys of households navigating histories of collectivization and recent, rampant privatization; and in residential schools and in museums, both central to Evenk identity politics. While considering how residential schools once targeted marginalized reindeer herders, especially young girls, for socialization and assimilation, Bloch reveals how class, region, and gendered experience currently influence perspectives on residential schooling. The analysis centers on the ways vehicles of the Soviet state have been reworked and still sometimes embraced by members of an indigenous community as they forge new identities and allegiances in the post-Soviet era.
Download or read book European Memory and Conflicting Visions of the Past written by Mano Toth and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses a number of ways in which the dialogue about Europe’s past and future could be rendered more inclusive, such as the promotion of critical and sentimental education and the creation of virtual and actual social spaces in which citizens and organised identity groups can participate. The discussion about European memory is far from being a “merely” symbolic issue with no political consequences. Imagining Europe and its past in different ways will lead to different real political outcomes. For instance, thinking about European integration as an embodiment of the values of the Enlightenment (such as human rights, liberal democracy, and reason), as a guarantor of peace on the continent, as a guarantor of prosperity, or as a guarantor that massive human rights violations like genocide will “never again” be committed on its soil, all entail different political objectives. Similarly, conflicting understandings of European memory as either a thing or a social construct, as either one memory or a plurality of memories, as either the end point of deliberation or a dialogical process, represent not merely inconsequential cultural “froth on the tides of society,” but crucially important issues with real political consequences. The book is intended to contribute to this discussion about the common European approach to the past (and thus to the future).
Download or read book Modernity and Secession written by Michel Huysseune and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006-08-01 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy’s (real or presumed) inadequacies – such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime – this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country. In response to this discourse many scholars, both in Italy and abroad, have started to question this perception of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition, Michel Huysseune provides a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy’s imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity, thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide, which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.
Download or read book Dreamscapes of Modernity written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-09-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dreamscapes of Modernity" introduces and develops the concept of "sociotechnical imaginaries," demonstrating how it helps explain the divergent ways in which states and societies conceptualize futures achievable through and supportive of advances in science and technology. The book s case studieswhich range over health security, Apartheid, rice biotechnology, Indonesian activism, and moreillustrate how different imaginations of social life and order are created in concert with imaginations of the goals, priorities, benefits, and risks of science and technologyat scales ranging from national to global. The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries adds to the theoretical repertoire of the social sciences, and in so doing extends work dealing with collective beliefs about social order that until now has not been adequately attentive to the central role of science and technology in shaping human possibilities. Through their varied disciplinary training and their willingness to join a common conversation, the contributors to this volume reveal the concept s reach from science and technology studies to neighboring fields such as anthropology, history, history of science and technology, law, sociology, and public policy. "
Download or read book Afghan Crucible written by Elisabeth Leake and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Offers a new global history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, exploring the conflict both within and beyond the framework of the Cold War. Based on extensive, multilingual research in archives across South Asia, Europe, and North America. Draws on recently declassified US documents"--
Download or read book Rethinking Geopolitics written by Simon Dalby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-22 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking Geopolitics argues that the concept of geopolitics needs to be conceptualised anew as the twenty-first century approaches. Challenging conventional geopolitical assumptions, contributors explore: * theories of post-modern geopolitics * historical formulations of states and cold wars * the geopolitics of the Holocaust * the gendered dimension of Kurdish insurgency * the cold war world * political cartoons concerning Bosnia * Time magazine representations of the Persian Gulf * the Zapatistas and the Chiapas revolt * the new cyber politics * conflict simulations in the US military * the emergence of a new geopolitics of global security. Exploring how popular cultural assumptions about geography and politics constitute the discourses of contemporary violence and political economy, Rethinking Geopolitics shows that we must rethink the struggle for knowledge, space and power.
Download or read book Nanyang written by Wang Gungwu and published by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a book of reflections and encounters about the region that the Chinese knew as Nanyang. The essays in it look back at the years of uncertainty after the end of World War II and explore the period largely through images of mixed heritages in Malaysia and Singapore. They also look at the trends towards social and political divisiveness following the years of decolonization in Southeast Asia. Never far in the background is the struggle to build new nations during four decades of an ideological Cold War and the Chinese determination to move from near-collapse in the 1940s and out of the traumatic changes of the Maoist revolution to become the powerhouse that it now is.
Download or read book The Economic Government of the World written by Martin Daunton and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic history of the people and institutions that have built the global economy since the Great Depression. In this vivid landmark history, the distinguished economic historian Martin Daunton pulls back the curtain on the institutions and individuals who have created and managed the global economy over the last ninety years, revealing how and why one economic order breaks down and another is built. During the Great Depression, trade and currency warfare led to the rise of economic nationalism—a retreat from globalization that culminated in war. From the Second World War came a new, liberal economic order. Squarely reflecting the interests of the West in the Cold War, liberalism faced collapse in the 1970s and was succeeded by neoliberalism, financialization, and hyper-globalization. Now, as leading nations are tackling the fallout from COVID-19 and threats of inflation, food insecurity, and climate change, Daunton calls for a return to a more just and equitable form of globalization. Western imperial powers have overwhelmingly determined the structures of world economic government, often advancing their own self-interests and leading to ruinous resource extraction, debt, poverty, and political and social instability in the Global South. He argues that while our current economic system is built upon the politics of and between the world’s biggest economies, a future of global recovery—and the reduction of economic inequality—requires the development of multilateral institutions. Dramatic and revelatory, The Economic Government of the World offers a powerful analysis of the origins of our current global crises and a path toward a fairer international order.
Download or read book Visions of Development written by Peter Sutoris and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of Development examines the Indian state's postcolonial development ideology between Independence in 1947 and the Emergency of 1975-77. Sutoris pioneers a novel methodology for the study of development thought and its cinematic representations, analysing films made by the Films Division of India between 1948 and 1975. By comparing these documentaries to late-colonial films on 'progress', his book highlights continuities with and departures from colonial notions of development in modern India. It is the first scholarly volume to be published on the history of Indian documentary film. Of the approximately 250 documentaries analysed by Peter Sutoris, many of which have never been discussed in the existing literature, most are concerned with economic planning and industrialisation, large dams, family planning, schemes aimed at the integration of tribal peoples (Adivasis) into society, and civic education. Almost all films analysed in this volume are available for free online viewing through the website of the Films Division. Links are provided on the companion website www.visionsofdevelopment.com.
