Bøger udgivet af Academic Studies Press

ENG: The Great East Japan Disaster - a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 - has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan.RUS: Великое восточнояпонское землетрясение 2011 года -- глобальная катастрофа, открывшая новую культурную эру, в которой доминируют дискуссии о безопасности, рисках и уязвимости, восстановлении и реорганизации. В книге Мирэ Коикари национальное возрождение после катастрофы рассматривается как социальный проект, опирающийся на дискурсы гендера, расы и империи.

ENG: Between the founding of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1924 and the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930s, a nationalist cinema emerged in Uzbekistan giving rise to the first wave of national film production and an Uzbek cinematographic elite. In Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan Cloéeacute; Drieu uses Uzbek films as a lens to explore the creation of the Soviet State in Central Asia, starting from the collapse of the Russian Empire up through the eve of WWII. Drieu argues that cinema provides a perfect angle for viewing the complex history of domination, nationalism, and empire (here used to denote the centralization of power) within the Soviet sphere. By exploring all of film's dimensions as a socio-political phenomenon-including film production, film reception, and filmic discourse-Drieu reveals how nation and empire were built up as institutional realities and as imaginary constructs.RUS: Основываясь на исследованиях, проведенных в узбекских и российских государственных архивах, и на глубоком анализе четырнадцати полнометражных фильмов, Хлоя Дрийе описывает дискуссии о процессах государственного и национального строительства Узбекистана, а также о возникновении национализма в целом. Книга «Кино, нация, империя. Узбекистан, 1919-1937» помогает нам понять, как Центральная Азия, входившая в состав Российской империи, сначала была деколонизирована, а затем вновь оказалась под давлен

In Mourning Modernity, Seth Moglen argues that American literary modernism is, at its heart, an effort to mourn for the injuries inflicted by modern capitalism. He demonstrates that the most celebrated literary movement of the 20th century is structured by a deep conflict between political hope and despair--between the fear that alienation and exploitation were irresistible facts of life and the yearning for a more just and liberated society. He traces this conflict in the works of a dozen novelists and poets - ranging from Eliot, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Hurston, Hughes, and Tillie Olsen. Taking John Dos Passos' neglected U.S.A. trilogy as a central case study, he demonstrates how the struggle between reparative social mourning and melancholic despair shaped the literary strategies of a major modernist writer and the political fate of the American Left. Mourning Modernity offers a bold new map of the modernist tradition, as well as an important contribution to the cultural history of American radicalism and to contemporary theoretical debates about mourning and trauma.

The Bolshevik's 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, where it was transformed by interactions with new cultural environment and clashed with exported Russian trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation, and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants' and the Bolsheviks' contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky's disproportionate influence: if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they risked becoming irrelevant. Although Stravinsky's neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky's neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.

ENThis three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor'kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.RUThis three-volume book investigates the Russian transformations of one of the central concepts of Greek Christology, the self-humiliation or kenosis of Christ. The author applies rhetoric (paradox, metaphor, metonymy) as a means to elucidate mechanisms of theological persuasion and to trace the representations of the humiliated Christ and his imitations in various media from liturgy and iconology to everyday practice and literary fiction. The exploration of post-Christian literature of the 19th and 20th century (N. Chernyshevskii, M. Gor'kii, N. Ostrovskii, Ven. Erofeev, Vl. Sorokin) demonstrates the existence of a kenotic Christology after Christianity.

A woman wearing a ballgown singing in the snow for returning ski troops; a technician's tears ruining a master recording of a new wartime song; fresh recruits spontaneously standing and doffing their caps to a new song, thereby creating the new wartime anthem. This well researched, multi-faceted book depicts the relationship between song and society during World War II in the USSR. Chapter topics range from the creation and distribution of the songs to how the public received and shaped them. The body of song that came out of that era created a true cultural legacy which reflected both the hearts of the individuals fighting as well as the narrative of the party and state in bringing the nation to victory.

An original reading of three famous novels reveals a significant shift in the Russian tradition of psychological prose; Justin Weir develops a persuasive analysis of the complex relationship between authorial self-reflection and literary tradition in three of the most famous Russian novels of the first half of the twentieth century: Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, and Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift. All three novelists respond to a dual crisis, according to Weir: the general modernist destabilization of identity, and the estrangement from literary tradition that followed the Russian Revolution. Using various self-reflexive literary devices (such as the mise en abyme), these authors reincorporate literary tradition into their works and, in the process, generate a distinctive view of identity. Character, in these novels, is neither the outcome of a continuous process of Building, nor a direct function of the individual's relation to larger historical events. Rather, character is defined in the act of writing itself, so that every hero must be a sort of author. The outcome is a new novelistic art that focuses on the identity of the artist as revealed through his writing. With its innovative interpretation of these novels and its compelling historical, cultural, and theoretical insights, The Author as Hero offers a new view of an important moment in the evolution of Russian literature.

The Limits of Reform examines the institutional, social, and cultural foundations of bureaucratic power and authority in Imperial Russia using the deeply rooted and wide ranging Ministry of Internal Affairs as example. The author develops the concept of "Ministerial Power" to explain the enduring and highly personalized mode of authority in Russian history. This analysis and concept have implications for understanding both Soviet and post-Soviet governmental institutions.

Imperial Russia's large wolf populations were demonized, persecuted, tormented, and sometimes admired. That Savage Gaze explores the significance of wolves in pre-revolutionary Russia utilizing the perspectives of cultural studies, ecocriticism, and human-animal studies. It examines the ways in which hunters, writers, conservationists, members of animal protection societies, scientists, doctors, government officials and others contested Russia's "Wolf Problem" and the particular threat posed by rabid wolves. It elucidates the ways in which wolves became intertwined with Russian identity both domestically and abroad. It argues that wolves played a foundational role in Russians' conceptions of the natural world in ways that reverberated throughout Russian society, providing insights into broader aspects of Russian culture and history as well as the opportunities and challenges that modernity posed for the Russian empire.

How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie considers the origins and evolutions of kraevedenie, looking specifically at the role that movements and institutions that emerged in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg played in the formation of this discipline. Based on extensive work in archives in St. Petersburg, it looks at the historical preservation movement that was spearheaded by participants in the World of Art circle and contributors to the journal Starye gody. It considers the pedagogical excursion movement and specifically the influence of Ivans Grevs and Nikolai Antsiferov. It also discusses the operations and role of the Central Bureau of Kraevedenie in the 1920s.The original English-language edition of this book (Penn State University Press, 2006) received both the South Central MLA book award and the Nikolai Antsiferov Prize for the best work on St. Petersburg by a foreign author.

Celebrification has thrived for centuries in literature, theater, music, and other cultural spheres, as vividly illustrated by Byron, Sarah Bernhardt, and Paganini. It especially effloresced in cinema after the symbolically named Lumière brothers pioneered movies as light-projected ?moving life? to be contemplated and shared in the intimate darkness of theaters. Actors and actresses such as Valentino and Garbo acquired the status of divine beings whose life on and offscreen stimulated fascination and a passionate devotion most frequently invested in religious figures. The recent explosion in social media has only amplified immeasurably the scale and intensity of that adulation. Yearning for the seemingly transcendent, fans as mere mortals seek contact with celebrities as objects of worship that, like nocturnal stars, are simultaneously remote yet accessible. Starlight and Stargazers examines the multifaceted nature and specific manifestations of film celebrification in Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, Poland, Soviet Russia/Russia, and Ukraine before and after 1991.

Israel is a "Jewish state." What is the meaning of this and how does it align with the democratic nature of the country? These are the questions at the core of a contentious debate that has been raging since the establishment of the state. This volume includes 75 essays on the question of Jewish -- Israeli identity, by some of today's best thinkers -- Jews and non-Jews, from Israel and around the world. Its pages include dreams and nightmares, poetic visions and rational analyses, harsh critiques and songs of praise.This collection is a first-of-its-kind nexus of thought on nationality, religion, politics, culture, society, environment, economics, and security. It is essential reading for any future discussion of Israeli identity.

While acknowledging Dostoevsky's personal commitment to the Russian Orthodox faith, Jones argues that it is possible to understand his fictional world only in terms of the interplay of a wide variety of religious experiences and outlooks, including affirmations of faith and expressions of radical doubt and unbelief, and a constant questioning of one by the other. In their neglect of its outward expressions, Dostoevsky's novels seem to acknowledge that the Orthodox tradition has to die in order to be reborn in the light of the image of Christ and that, to use his own expression, the final 'hosanna' must pass through a 'furnace of doubt'.

Israel and the Nations: The Bible, The Rabbis, and Jewish-Gentile Relations explores the theological and legal (halakhic) aspects of Jewish thought relating to non-Jews. It analyzes biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and contemporary Jewish writings about gentiles and their religions. The book will interest both Jewish laypersons familiar with Jewish tradition as well as scholars of theology and interfaith relations

How did Gorbachev and Yeltsin get away with transforming and replacing the Soviet system and its foreign relations? Why did they act as they did in pushing for such radical changes? And how will history evaluate their accomplishments? In this unique and original study, George W. Breslauer compares and evaluates the leadership strategies adopted by Gorbachev and Yeltsin at each stage of their administrations: political rise, political ascendancy, and political decline. He demonstrates how these men used the power of ideas to mobilize support for their policies, to seize the initiative from political rivals, and to mold their images as effective problem solvers, indispensable politicians, and symbols of national unity and élan. Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders also compares these men with Khrushchev and Brezhnev, yielding new insight into the nature of Soviet and post-Soviet politics and into the dynamics of "transformational" leadership more generally. The book is an important contribution to the analysis and evaluation of political leadership. It is exceptionally well written and accessible to the nonspecialist.

Bieganski is a stereotype of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. In the 'Bieganski' stereotype, Poles exhibit the qualities of animals. Their special hatefulness is epitomized by their Polish anti-Semitism. This book discovers this stereotype in the mainstream press, scholarship, film, in Jews' self-definition, and in responses to the Holocaust.

"Extraordinary storytelling about unfathomable horror." - Library Journal (starred review)"[A] worthy tribute to the extraordinary bravery of a remarkable woman." -- Publishers WeeklyIn World War II's Poland, thirty year old Zofia Sterner and her husband Wacek refuse to be classified as Jews destined for extermination.Instead, they evade the Nazis and the Soviets in several dramatic escapes and selflessly rescue many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and a labor camp, later becoming active participants in the Warsaw Uprising where they are taken prisoner. This retelling, captured through diaries, interviews, war crime trial testimonies, and letters, detail the Sterners' heroic rescues, escapes, and ultimate survival. A true story of hope amid horrifying tragedy, How We Outwitted and Survived the Nazis illustrates how war brings out the worst and the best in people, and how true humanity and heroism of ordinary people are revealed by their willingness to risk everything and help others. This story is about being human under the most inhumane conditions.

Over one million refugees left Russia at the Bolshevik Revolution. The pain of losing one's homeland may fade, but the psyche is slow to heal. The Nansen Factor shines a light on the lives of some of these refugees.

In this book, Paul Contino offers a theological interpretation of Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov." The author introduces the concept of "incarnational realism": a method used by Dostoevsky to animate and enspirit his heroes - applying the concept especially to Alyosha Karamazov, to the person who, as the novel's hero, makes decisions and accomplishes deeds. The book examines in detail the figure of the Elder Zosima, and how, in his role as spiritual leader with his vision of responsibility for each and for all, influences Alyosha. Attention is also paid to Alyosha's brothers - to Mitya, who is trying to become a "new man," and to Ivan, who struggles with his own agonized striving toward his own sense of responsibility for the family tragedy."

In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bo¿ena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects¿pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils¿tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here ascultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, W¿adys¿aw Szlengel, Zofia Näkowska, Czes¿aw Mi¿osz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.

The Comics of Asaf Hanuka: Telling Particular and Universal Stories traces how Asaf Hanuka's comics and graphic novels reflect his own experiences of being an insider (as a Jew and Israeli) and an outsider (as a Mizrahi or Judeo-Arab) in Israeli society alongside what it means to be a parent and a spouse in contemporary Western society.

From Victory to Peace: Russian Diplomacy After Napoleon explores how Russia's diplomats understood European security as they worked to implement the edifice of pacification and peace constructed in 1814, 1815, and 1818. In response to developments across Europe and in Spanish America, Emperor Alexander I's hopes for peace, pragmatic adaptability, and commitment to act in concert with the other great powers came fully into focus. Based on sources of Russian provenance, the book challenges characterizations of Alexander's behavior as erratic and his foreign policy as heavy-handed and expansionist. Indeed, as historians assimilate the Russian perspective on European order (as well as the perspectives of other less well-studied countries), they encounter a multifaceted Restoration built upon practices of enlightened reformism and direct experience of revolution and war.

What should we make of claims by members of other groups to have moralities different from our own? Human Rights in Chinese Thought gives an extended answer to this question in the first study of its kind. It integrates a full account of the development of Chinese rights discourse with philosophical consideration of how various communities should respond to contemporary Chinese claims about the uniqueness of their human rights concepts. The book elaborates a plausible kind of moral pluralism and demonstrates that Chinese ideas of human rights do indeed have distinctive characteristics, but it nonetheless argues for the importance and promise of cross-cultural moral engagement.

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for-and the costs of-Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain.This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists-Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin-Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.

In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities-counties, townships, and villages-with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.

Taking aim at the conventional narrative that standard, national languages transform 'peasants' into citizens, Gina Anne Tam centers the history of the Chinese nation and national identity on fangyan - languages like Shanghainese, Cantonese, and dozens of others that are categorically different from the Chinese national language, Mandarin. She traces how, on the one hand, linguists, policy-makers, bureaucrats and workaday educators framed fangyan as non-standard 'variants' of the Chinese language, subsidiary in symbolic importance to standard Mandarin. She simultaneously highlights, on the other hand, the folksong collectors, playwrights, hip-hop artists and popular protestors who argued that fangyan were more authentic and representative of China's national culture and its history. From the late Qing through the height of the Maoist period, these intertwined visions of the Chinese nation - one spoken in one voice, one spoken in many - interacted and shaped one another, and in the process, shaped the basis for national identity itself.

Russia's emergence as a Great Power in the eighteenth century is usually attributed to Peter Is radical programme of Westernising reforms. But the Russian military did not simply copy European armies. Adapting the tactics of its neighbours on both sides, Russia created a powerful strategy of its own, integrating steppe defence with European concerns. In Russia's Wars of Emergence, Carol Stevens examines the social and political factors underpinning Muscovite military history, the eventual success of the Russian Empire in the 18th century, and the sacrifices made for power.

The Russian Empire 1450-1801 surveys early modern Russia as an "empire of difference," that is, the government ruled the empire primarily by tolerating the great cultural, linguistic and religious diversity of its subject peoples. Over its many lands the Moscow center used a combination of coercion, cooptation and supranational ideology to maintain power, and the book explores each of those themes. The Moscow government did not hesitate to use violence and oppression to conquer and subdue territories; it coopted elites into the imperial nobility and local administrations; it projected an image of a benevolent tsar who protected his people and used architecture and ceremony to project that unifying ideology.