In NLR 18, Gavan McCormack:
‘North Korea in the Vice’ Abductions and missiles in Pyongyang; plans and postures of Washington and Tokyo, as the DPRK pursues survival. In Northeast Asia, the prospects for the last front of the Cold War and next battle against the Axis of Evil.

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CONTENTS

  1. Gavan McCormack: North Korea in the Vice Abductions and missiles in Pyongyang; plans and postures of Washington and Tokyo, as the DPRK pursues survival. In Northeast Asia, the prospects for the last front of the Cold War and next battle against the Axis of Evil.
  2. Immanuel Wallerstein: New Revolts Against the System The longue durée of resistance to the established order: after a hundred and twenty years of socialist and nationalist revolts, does the World Social Forum represent a qualitatively new alignment of forces and strategies for change?
  3. Jeremy Adelman: Andean Impasses Social and political turmoil is spreading in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, as recession deepens throughout Latin America. The historical roots of the current crisis in the region, and the watershed of the last decades.
  4. Stefan Collini: Defending Cultural Criticism Is cultural criticism condemned to the gestures of an anti-political disdain, whether Right or Left in origin? Replying to Francis Mulhern in NLR 16, Stefan Collini argues to the contrary that it signifies an indispensable moment of committed reflection.
  5. Rossana Rossanda: The Defeat of Goodness In Dostoevsky’s Idiot alone, the moral virtue that defies aesthetic representation found a credible hero. But to be realized in fiction, could it avoid being comprehensively defeated? Russian dilemmas and their after-shock in Kurosawa.
  6. Brendan O'Leary: In Praise of Empires Past Mourning the Ottoman world of his Baghdadi forebears, Elie Kedourie produced the most influential modern critique of nationalism. Brendan O’Leary unravels the background and logic of this classic of the conservative imagination.

BOOK REVIEWS

  1. Robin Blackburn on Will Hutton, The World We’re In. Does a critique of the Anglo-American version of capitalism have to appeal to a stumbling European variant, as sentimental antithesis?
  2. Tony Wood on Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique. From Eisenstein to Deleuze, luminous snapshots of the cinema that would substitute a single regime for historical periods.
  3. David Fernbach on Robert Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle. Towering poet-prophet of German purity, wished away by Nazis, anti-fascists and the gay community alike.
  4. Sarah James on Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture. Art in the maw of corporate sponsors: how privatization whetted its knife on museums and exhibitions before moving on to prisons and hospitals.