This collection of documents, political speeches as well as academic articles, by the internationally admired theater director, Heinz-Uwe Haus, reflects positions and actions, which he shared with the majority of the people in his country during the fall of the Wall and the re-unification of the German nation. The reader is reminded of the sheer joy of the peaceful revolution in autumn of 1989. The texts reflect how millions of people reclaimed their basic human freedoms, ending not only the post-WWII division of the country, but de-legitimizing the concept of socialist rule.
In late 19th-century New Orleans, social constraints are strict, especially for a married woman. Edna Pontellier leads a secure life with her husband and two children, but her restlessness grows within the confined societal norms, and the expectations placed upon her – from her husband and the world around her – create increasing pressure. During a trip to Grand Isle, an island off the coast of Louisiana, her life is turned upside down by an intense love affair, and passion forces her to question the foundations of her – and every woman’s – existence. Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening caused a scandal with its outspokenness when it was published in 1899. The novel’s openly sexual themes and disregard for marital and societal conventions led to it not being reprinted for fifty years. It wasn't until the 1950s that Chopin’s work was rediscovered, and The Awakening received significant acclaim. Today, it is not only seen as an early feminist milestone but also as a classic. KATE CHOPIN [1851–1904] was born in St Louis. She had six children during her marriage, and it wasn't until after her husband's death in 1882 that she emerged as a writer. She published short stories in magazines such as Vogue and The Atlantic, gaining appreciation and recognition for her depictions of the American South. However, she was also criticized for her disregard for social traditions and racial barriers.
Bassam Tibi offers a radical solution to the problems faced by Islam in a rapidly changing and globalizing world. He proposes a depoliticization of the faith and the introduction of reforms to embrace secular democracy, pluralism, civil society and individual human rights. The alternative to this is the impasse of fundamentalism. The pivotal argument is that Islam is being torn between the pressure for cultural innovation and a defensive move towards the politicization of its symbols for non-religious ends.
This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as a historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyzes the link between the awakening of China as a historical narrative and the awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we say that China "woke up" in this century. Fiction and fashion, architecture and autobiography, take their places alongside politics and history, and the reader is asked to move about among writers, philosophers, ethnographers, revolutionaries, and soldiers who would seem to have little in common. Rumor is sometimes taken as seriously as truth, novels are consulted as frequently as documents, and dreams are given a prominence normally reserved for facts in the writing of history. This book follows the legend of China's awakening from its origins in the European imagination, to its transmission to China and its encounter with a lyrical Chinese tradition of ethical awakening, to its incorporation and mobilization in a mass movement designed to wake up everyone. The idea of a national awakening crossed all discursive boundaries to make room for nationalist politics in personal culture and helped to conscript personal culture into service of the revolutionary state. The book focuses on the Nationalist movement in south China, highlighting the role of Sun Yat-sen as director of awakenings in the Nationalist Revolution and the place of Mao Zedong as his successor in the politics of mass awakening. Of special interest is the previously untold story of Mao's role in the NationalistPropaganda Bureau, showing Mao as a master of propaganda and discipline, rather than as peasant movement activist.
Despite Chinese efforts to stop foreign countries from granting him visas, the Dalai Lama has become one of the most recognizable and best loved people on the planet, drawing enormous crowds wherever he goes. By contrast, China's charismatically-challenged leaders attract crowds of protestors waving Tibetan flags and shouting "Free Tibet!" whenever they visit foreign countries. By now most Westerners probably think they understand the political situation in Tibet. But, John Powers argues, most Western scholars of Tibet evince a bias in favor of one side or the other in this continuing struggle. Some of the most emotionally charged rhetoric, says Powers, is found in studies of Tibetan history. narratives.
This book demonstrates how certain African American writers radically re-envisioned core American ideals in order to make them serviceable for racial justice. Each writer's unprecedented reconstruction of key American values has the potential to energize American citizenship today.
The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy. "Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History "[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology "Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.
This lively and provocative collection of essays on the social upheavals of the 1960s is a major contribution to our understanding of that tumultuous decade. Written by a group of former sixties activists, most of whom are now academics, it combines a unique transracial dialogue on that activism with incisive analyses of the context within which radicalism developed.
Until this book, there has been no comprehensive, methodologically aware study of all aspects of Chinese political culture. The book is organized into three major areas: Chinese identities and popular culture (regional identities, anti-politics attitudes, Hong Kong identity); public opinion surveys (the Beijing area, Chinese workers, the Shanghai area); and ideological debates (the "new" Confucianism, masculinity and Confucianism, why authoritarianism is popular in China, the decline of Chinese official ideology). Here is the first work that reveals just how much, how rapidly, and how dramatically China is changing and why our perceptions of China must keep pace.
