Hope, Struggle and Defeat: The Communist International and the Global Fight for Freedom The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of this transnational organisation founded in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky and dissolved by Stalin in 1943, telling the story through the eyes of the activists who became its “professional revolutionaries.” Studer follows such figures as Willi Münzenberg, Mikhail Borodin, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, Tina Modotti, Agnes Smedley and many others less well-known as they are despatched to the successive political hotspots of the 1920s and ’30s, from revolutionary Berlin to Baku, from Shanghai to Spain, from Nazi Germany to Stalin’s Moscow. It traces their journeys from revolutionary hope to accommodation, defeat or death, looking at questions of motivation and commitment, agency and negotiation, of life and love, conflict and frustration. In doing so, it reveals a forgotten Comintern, the expression of a multi-dimensional revolutionary moment, which attracted not only working-class but feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activists, highlighting the role of women in the Comintern and the centrality of anti-colonialism to the Communist project. The book concludes with a reflection on the ultimate demise of a historically unique undertaking.
Le 7 février 1971 les Suissesses obtiennent le droit de vote. Pour que les femmes suisses accèdent à un droit accordé aux hommes en 1848 déjà, il aura fallu 120 ans et plus de 90 votations – communales, cantonales, fédérales. Pour y arriver, les femmes se sont organisées et largement mobilisées, parfois soutenues par des hommes féministes. Elles ont écrit des essais et des pamphlets, fait campagne, donné des conférences, pétitionné. Pendant tout ce temps, la ligne de partage pour l’accès aux droits démocratiques reste une ligne de genre, qui accorde à tous les hommes ce dont toutes les femmes sont exclues. Cette exclusion, dite « naturelle » par certains, est contestée et débattue pendant plus d’un siècle. La citoyenneté politique forme en effet le coeur des démocraties modernes. Son rôle pour la constitution de l’État, de la société et de la chose publique est fondamental. L’exemple de la Suisse démontre de manière remarquable à quel point le concept et la pratique de la citoyenneté sont historiquement marqués par la différenciation de genre. Le particularisme suisse, ce retard, est un révélateur non seulement des principes, mais aussi des usages et des représentations de la démocratie moderne. Fondamentalement, l’histoire du suffrage féminin met en lumière le fait que la définition de la démocratie est un enjeu politique et sociétal, objet de luttes et de controverses parfois extrêmement violentes.
Alle Schweizer sind vor dem Gesetz gleich", hiess es in der 1848 geschaffenen Verfassung des neuen Bundesstaates. Doch die Kämpfe waren lang und zäh bis zur Einführung des Frauenstimmrechts 1971. Es gibt viele Einzeluntersuchungen dieser Entwicklungsgeschichte, aber keine umfassende Darstellung, die den Bogen über den gesamten Zeitraum spannt und bislang unerschlossene Kantone integriert. Diese Lücke schliesst das Buch von Brigitte Studer und Judith Wyttenbach. Im historischen Teil werden unter anderem die vielschichtigen Ausschlussmechanismen analysiert. Und der juristische Teil greift erstmals jedes einzelne Urteil zur Frage des Frauenstimmrechts chronologisch und mit knapper Darstellung auf. In der Synthese zum Schluss zeigen die Autorinnen, weshalb der ganze Prozess in der Schweiz so lange gedauert hat.
The Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of this transnational organisation founded in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky and dissolved by Stalin in 1943, telling the story through the eyes of the activists who became its "professional revolutionaries". Studer follows such figures as Willi Mnzenberg, Mikhail Borodin, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, Tina Modotti, Agnes Smedley and many others less well-known as they are despatched to the successive political hotspots of the 1920s and '30s, from revolutionary Berlin to Baku, from Shanghai to Spain, from Nazi Germany to Stalin's Moscow. It traces their journeys from revolutionary hope to accommodation, defeat or death, looking at questions of motivation and commitment, agency and negotiation, of life and love, conflict and frustration. In doing so, it reveals a forgotten Comintern, the expression of a multi-dimensional revolutionary moment, which attracted not only working-class but feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activists, highlighting the role of women in the Comintern and the centrality of anti-colonialism to the Communist project. The book concludes with a reflection on the ultimate demise of a historically unique undertaking.
Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought? In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India. Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.
The East German uprising of 1989 was not a male revolution. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of the fall of East Germany, compared to that of other East European nations, was the presence of women demanding a political role in the newly emerging social order. As one slogan proclaimed, "Without Women There Is No State." Yet despite the determination of these women--and of West German feminist groups--to help shape the future of the German state, their influence remained, in the end, very limited. In Triumph of the Fatherland, political scientist Brigitte Young draws on in-depth interviews, archival sources, newspapers, and her own observations from 1989 to 1991 to study the goals, strategies, and eventual fate of the German women's movements during this tumultuous period. Young focuses on the relationship between the state and its citizenry, outlining the mobilization of women in four states: the East German and West German states before unification; the "stateless state" in East Germany after the collapse of the Wall, and the West German state during unification. Ultimately she finds that the political opportunity structures opened during the "stateless state" closed again with unification, resulting in what Young calls "double gender marginalization." Brigitte Young is Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Otto-Suhr-Institute, Free University Berlin, Germany.
Focusing on intermediality, The Material Image situates film within questions of representation familiar from the other arts: What is meant by figuring the real? How is the real suggested by visual metaphors, and what is its relation to illusion? How is the spectator figured as entering the text, and how does the image enter our world? The film's spectator is integral to these concerns. Cognitive and phenomenological approaches to perception alike claim that spectatorial affect is "real" even when it is film that produces it. Central to the staging of intermediality in film, tableaux moments in film also figure prominently in the book. Films by Scorsese, Greenaway, Wenders, and Kubrick are seen to address painterly, photographic, and digital images in relation to effects of the real. Hitchcock's films are examined with regard to modernist and realist effects in painting. Chapters on Fassbinder and Haneke analyze the significance of tableau for the body in pain, while a final chapter on horror film explores the literalism of psychopathic tableau. Here, too, art and the bodyimages and the realare juxtaposed and entwined in a set of relations.
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