CONTENTS

1. Andrea Boltho: What’s Wrong with Europe? As the dollar falls, pressures on torpid European economies are tightening. Behind official comparisons, how far have EU living standards truly diverged from American? Record and outlook in the world’s largest trading zone, while deflation looms.
2. Benjamin Markovits: The Colours of Sport Benjamin Markovits on John Hoberman, Darwin’s Athletes. Paradoxes of African–American success in sport, in a time of growing biological determinism.
3. Immanuel Wallerstein: Entering Global Anarchy A world-systems view of the prospects for the American imperium, after the occupation of Iraq. The confidence of the Republican Administration, the misgivings of its allies and the uncertainties of a transition to a new historical order.
4. Trevor Ngwane: Sparks in the Township South Africa as vanguard of post-colonial neoliberalism, and laboratory of its social consequences. From the townships around Johannesburg, rebellion against the privatizations of the anc regime, and the enrichment of a new political class.
5. Susan Willis: Empire’s Shadow From letters to Bin Laden to Washington’s own Tora Bora for the Federal Government, West Wing to simulations of the seizure of Panama or Kirkuk in the pinelands of North Carolina, the blurring of the fantasmatic and the unreal in a bunker society.
6. Emmanuel Terray: Law versus Politics The political and the legal as two opposite yet interdependent modes of governing societies—punctual and particular, or general and invariable—in a quartet of contrasted thinkers. The antinomies of force and justice, morals and regulations in Machiavelli and Pascal, Montesquieu and Sade.
7. Roberto Schwarz: In the Land of Elefante Brazil’s most original poet in the prism of its foremost critic. How Francisco Alvim’s lyricism unlocks the social through the colloquial, in tiny openings onto a vast space of national ambiguities and complicities.
8. Peter Wollen: Fridamania Threads from the history of Mexican surrealism: the Blue House in Coyoacán and Breton’s protegée as avant-garde antidotes or postmodern devotional objects. The components of the Kahlo cult and its basis in the artist’s own practice of self-fabulation and masquerade, concealment and display.
9. Göran Therborn: Capital’s Twilight Zone Göran Therborn on Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death. The fate of pensions in the future of capitalism, as political struggles over them escalate in North and South alike.
10. Tom Mertes: Southern Discomfort Tom Mertes on Walden Bello, Deglobalization. Ideas of another world economy, less subject to the diktats of the imf and the straitjackets of the WTO.