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Zhang Yongle,
‘No Forbidden Zone in Reading?’ For a decade, the monthly review Dushu has published some of China’s most incisive debates on the country’s culture and economy. Zhang Yongle’s survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia.

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NLR 49 was mailed to subscribers on 29th February 2008

CONTENTS

  1. Yongle Zhang: No Forbidden Zone in Reading? For a decade, the monthly review Dushu has published some of China’s most incisive debates on the country’s culture and economy. Zhang Yongle’s survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia.
  2. Alain Badiou: The Communist Hypothesis Why does the spectre of May 68 still haunt French discourse? Alain Badiou on the country’s longue durée sequences of restoration and revolt, and the place of Sarkozy’s presidency within them. Lessons in political courage from Plato and Corneille, and a call to reassert the Manifesto’s founding wager.
  3. Achin Vanaik: The New Himalayan Republic The overthrow of the monarchy in Nepal, brought about by a prolonged people’s war and massive popular mobilizations. Achin Vanaik sets out the complex socio-historical backdrop to the Second Democratic Revolution of 2006, the ensuing struggle for a new republic, and the tactical challenges facing the CPN-M.
  4. Rossana Rossanda: The Comrade from Milan Memories of war-time resistance work and the political culture of the million-strong PCI in liberated Milan, from one of the founding editors of Il Manifesto. Questions and doubts, in this portrait of an unsentimental education.
  5. Dennis Rodgers: A Symptom Called Managua Nicaragua’s capital as microcosm for the country’s transformation since the 1970s: shattered by earthquake and the depredations of the Somoza dictatorship, briefly lifted by Sandinista urban reconstruction, remade in the 1990s by narco-traffickers and the returning Miami emigration.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Tom Mertes on Jerry Hough, Changing Party Coalitions. Ethnic and confessional divisions as the origins of America’s political alignments, and the elite strategies that have culminated in today’s red–blue polarization.
  2. John Frow on Franco Moretti, ed, The Novel. Landmark collection of essays tracing the history and geography of the novel, and relations between morphology, themes and social forms.
  3. Anders Stephanson on John Lewis Gaddis, Cold War and Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Diplomatic history as mirror for presidents, with postwar geopolitics recast as morality tale.
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Articles:

  1. Eric Hazan,
    ‘Under New Management’ Dispatches from France during Sarkozy’s first hundred days. In the Elysée, echoes of a Giscardian ‘change of style’; among the Socialists, a programmatic disarray compounding a long heritage of desertions; in the streets, immigration raids, counter-demonstrations, and hints of an embattled everyday resistance.
  2. Gabriel Piterberg,
    ‘Zion’s Rebel Daughter’ Principally known for works on totalitarianism and the Eichmann trial, Hannah Arendt’s powerful and prophetic critiques of the Zionist project, written in the 1940s, have rarely been discussed. Gabriel Piterberg tracks the evolution of this brave and independent thinker.
  3. Mike Davis,
    ‘The Democrats before 2008’ With anti-war sentiment growing—if still passive—in the US, how will Democrats use their recapture of Congress? Mike Davis analyses likely outcomes on the questions—Iraq, corruption, economic insecurity—that confront a Party leadership hooked on corporate dollars, and myopically gazing towards 2008.
  4. Robert Brenner,
    ‘US Politics’ Robert Brenner reads the US mid-term results against deeper structural shifts in the American polity. The rise of the Republican right seen in the context of the long downturn and dismantling of the liberal compact: from New Deal and Great Society to the capitalist offensive under Reagan, Clinton and Bush.
  5. Alain Badiou,
    ‘Spectres of 68’ Why does the spectre of May 68 still haunt French discourse? Alain Badiou on the country’s longue durée sequences of restoration and revolt, and the place of Sarkozy’s presidency within them. Lessons in political courage from Plato and Corneille, and a call to reassert the Manifesto’s founding wager.
  6. Rossana Rossanda,
    ‘The Comrade
    from Milan’ Memories of war-time resistance work and the political culture of the million-strong PCI in liberated Milan, from one of the founding editors of Il Manifesto. Questions and doubts, in this portrait of an unsentimental education.
  7. Tom Mertes,
    ‘American Duopoly’ Tom Mertes on Jerry Hough, Changing Party Coalitions. Ethnic and confessional divisions as the origins of America’s political alignments, and the elite strategies that have culminated in today’s red–blue polarization.

Editorials:

  1. Perry Anderson,
    ‘On the Conjuncture’ A reckoning of global shifts in political and economic relations, with China emerging as new workshop of the world and US power, rationally applied elsewhere, skewed by Israeli interests in the Middle East. Oppositions to it gauged, along with theoretical visions that offer exits from the perpetual free-market present.
  2. Europe, Europe’s political landscape, revealed by the protest votes in France and the Netherlands. Mutation and dilation of the EU in the age of liberal hegemony, and lessons to be drawn from the unprecedented irruptions of discontent against it.
  3. Chechnya, Eager to embrace Putin, Western rulers and pundits continue to connive at the Russian occupation of Chechnya, as Moscow’s second murderous war in the Caucasus enters its sixth year. Traditions of resistance, popular demands for sovereignty and Russia’s brutal military response, in Europe’s forgotten colony.
  4. Iraq, With the now unanimous support of the ‘international community’, can Washington hope to recoup its gamble in Iraq? Prospects for the resistance and the Occupation, as the UN-approved government is hoisted into place.
  5. New Labour, Causes and consequences of Britain’s distinctive contribution to the repertoire of latter-day neoliberalism. The domestic and foreign record of the Blair regime, and its hybrid role in a shifting Atlantic order.
  6. Middle East, As fears are voiced within the US establishment of impending debacle in Iraq, a survey of the embattled landscape from Baghdad, Ramallah and Tehran to Beirut and Damascus. American control is slipping, Ali argues—but it is too soon to count on imperial defeat.
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