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This book offers a unique and timely reading of the early Frankfurt School in response to the recent 'affective turn' within the arts and humanities. It revisits some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The book focuses on the work of Walter Benjamin, whose varied engagements with the subject of melancholia prove to be far more mobile and complex than traditional accounts. It also looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory's engagement with the world of objects, exploring the affective politics of hope. Situating the affective turn and the new materialisms within a wider context of the 'post-critical', it explains how critical theory, in its originary form, is primarily associated with the work of the Frankfurt School. The book presents an analysis of Theodor Adorno's form of social critique and 'conscious unhappiness', that is, a wilful rejection of any privatized or individualized notion of happiness in favour of a militant and political discontent. A note on the timely reconstruction of early critical theory's own engagements with the object world via aesthetics and mimesis follows. The post-Cold War triumphalism of many on the right, accompanied by claims of the 'end of history', created a sense of fearlessness, righteousness, and unfettered optimism. The book notes how political realism has become the dominant paradigm, banishing utopian impulses and diminishing political hopes to the most myopic of visions.
in Second World War historiography about how far Fascism and Nazism influenced the NDH (Kallis 2015 ); they still laid foundations that would transform again as the Yugoslav region negotiated the geopolitics of the Cold War. Venetian formations of race In October 2015, the Croatian football club HNK Rijeka, nicknamed ‘Bijeli’ (‘Whites’) for their all-white home strip, wore an unusual fourth kit against nearby Opatija: a purple shirt half-covered by a black-skinned, turbaned head, with prominent red lips and gold-rimmed eyes
its extra geopolitics of Non-Alignment are commonly part of the globe, or even the Europe, theorised by critical race scholarship. Stam and Shohat ( 2012 : 80), indeed, sum up US spatialised hierarchies of knowledge production about the world by noting the bounding of ‘Latin American/Caribbean’, ‘Asian/Pacific’, ‘African’ and ‘Middle East’ studies on one hand, versus western Europe and the US as the ‘quietly normative headquarters’ that ‘strategically mapped’ all other areas – yet east European or Soviet studies, equally products of the Cold War, are not even part
the number of great powers in the international system during any period. He distinguishes between bipolar systems (two great powers) and multipolar systems (more than two great powers). Waltz argues that bipolar systems are more stable than multipolar systems. Waltz's view is that bipolar systems will be more stable because in a bipolar system ‘who is a danger to whom is never in doubt’ (Waltz, 1979 : 171). During the Cold War of the latter half of the twentieth century, it was clear to both the United States and the Soviet Union who the enemy was – and as both
, language, territory and sovereignty would also have been held by inhabitants of the region in the medieval and early modern past, or even the late Ottoman and Habsburg periods (Fine 2006 ; Judson 2007 ; Blumi 2011b ); used evidence about ethnopolitical conflict dynamics from the region for broader theory-building about nationalism and ethnicity (Brubaker 1996 ) or post-Cold-War international security (Posen 1993 ); investigated how alternative, multi-ethnic models of belonging were marginalised by Yugoslav constitutional logics, erased before and during the wars
, from the perspective of connected sociologies (Bhambra, 2014 ), this chapter looks at the segregation cases in the frame of global politics at the time. Whilst some scholars point out that the US desegregation process has to be understood within the broader Cold War context (Dudziak, 2004 ; Bader Ginsburg, 2005 ; Goldston, 2017 ), Romani school segregation cases played an important role in shaping the global politics of postsocialist transitions and EU integration (Chang and Rucker-Chang, 2020 : 38–51). Nonetheless, global politics has not had such a decisive
until 2003 by bifurcating Europe’s previously shared (western) framework of collective memory. By questioning the status of 1945 and the Holocaust as the focal points of European memory politics, the accession of postcommunist Europe has forced continental institutions and existing members of the EU to ‘negotiate the past’ in new and disruptive ways. 6 The post-Cold War ‘revenge of memory’ – as Tony Judt refers to this phenomenon in the epigraph to this chapter – also sparked memory-based conflicts between neighbours, further threatening the surprisingly thin
through the wars' origins and course (see Woodward 1995 ; Bougarel, Helms and Duijzings (eds) 2007 ; Archer, Duda and Stubbs (eds) 2016 ). Although the wars and their aftermath required a ‘double lens’ seeing the region as postsocialist and post-conflict, to most Western non-specialists they were plain and simply an example of violent ethnic conflict. In this capacity, they informed post-Cold-War Western dynamics of race and an emerging ‘migration–security nexus’ (Faist 2006 ) where policymakers evaluated migrations as security threats. To
whose expertise was needed for reconstruction. Since these postwar governments had to recreate functioning democracies while simultaneously dealing with the geopolitical problems engendered by the emerging Cold War, working through the past was not their top priority: ‘Economic recovery and political legitimacy, not additional purges, were the proper medicine. Democratic renewal went hand in hand with silence.’ 2 A mere twenty years after the end of the Second World War, all of this had changed. The silence of the late 1940s and 1950s was followed by an explosive
of a global consumer culture that commercialises racialised gazes and desires into exotica (Gilroy 2000 ) and of the complex global imagination of ‘America’: indeed, African-American music and musicians were important for US cultural diplomacy during the Cold War (Von Eschen 2006 ), towards Non-Aligned Yugoslavia (Vučetić 2012 ) as well as the USSR. Sounds, songs, stars and genres deeply embedded in US racial politics, from jazz to Michael Jackson through Motown, were also cultural artefacts that entered Yugoslavia as symbols of Americanness, coolness and