Liberation And Its Limits

This book, first published in 1987, examines the experience of the North Vietnamese economy during the struggle for national reunification and the Vietnam war. It chronicles the impact of war and Socialist Construction upon an extremely poor area left undeveloped by French colonial exploitation. The analysis focuses on the severe restraints that faced socio-economic development in North Vietnam, and the adverse effects of forced development based upon neo-Stalinist institutional models. Deep problems were encountered in attempting to implement Socialist Construction in the North, and wartime aid from fraternal Socialist countries masked the fundamental economic imbalances created by the development effort. After national reunification in 1975 the structural difficulties of the Northern economy and the shortcomings of its economic management system crushed the expectations of rapid peacetime development and led to the economic crisis of the late 1970s.

Anticolonial struggles of the interwar epoch were haunted by the question of how to construct an educational practice for all future citizens of postcolonial states. In what ways, vanguard intellectuals asked, would citizens from diverse subaltern situations be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world? In circumstances of cultural and social crisis imposed by colonialism, these vanguards sought to refashion modern structures and technologies of public education by actively relating them to residual indigenous collective forms. In Indigenous Vanguards, Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of literary engagements with structures and representations of public teaching and learning by cultural vanguards in the colonial world from the 1920s to the 1940s. He shows how modernizing educative projects existed in complex tension with impulses to indigenize national liberation movements, and how this tension manifests as a central aspect of modernist literary practice. Offering new readings of figures such as Alain Locke, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Baer discloses the limits and openings of modernist representations as they attempt to reach below the fissures of class that produce them. Establishing unexpected connections between languages and regions, Indigenous Vanguards is the first study of modernism and colonialism that encompasses the decisive way public education transformed modernist aesthetics and vanguard politics.

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From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, in the midst of the Cold War and second-wave feminism, the RCMP security service – prompted by fears of left-wing and communist subversion – monitored and infiltrated the women’s liberation movement in Canada and Quebec. Just Watch Us investigates why and how this movement was targeted, weighing carefully the presumed threat its left-wing ties presented to the Canadian government against the defiant challenge its campaign for gender equality posed to Canadian society. Based on a close reading of thousands of pages of RCMP documents declassified under Canada’s Access to Information Act and the corresponding Privacy Act, Just Watch Us demonstrates that the security service’s longstanding anti-Communist focus distorted its threat assessment of feminist organizing. Combining gender analysis and critical approaches to state surveillance, Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt consider the machinations of the RCMP, including its bureaucratic evolution, intelligence-gathering operations, and impact, as well as the evolution of the women’s liberation movement from its broad transnational influences to its elusive quest for unity among women across lines of ideology and identity. Significantly, the authors also grapple with the historiographical, methodological, and ethical difficulties of working with declassified security documents and sensitive information. A sharp-eyed inquiry into spy policies and tactics in Cold War Canada, Just Watch Us speaks to the serious political implications of state surveillance for social justice activism in liberal democracies.

How far are the real lives of millions of poor women really catered for in liberation and feminist theologies? Vuola argues here that traditional liberation theology's notion of praxis (as in L .Boff and E. Dussel) is limited by its essentialist notion of 'poor' and its neglect of the issue of poor women's reproductive rights. Classical feminist theologies, on the other hand, are fraught with their own essentialist notions ('women's experience'). Both discourses are inadequate to deal with poor women's suffering: widespread maternal mortality, high rates of botched, illegal abortions, and an overall lack of reproductive rights. As a response to this lack, Vuola nurtures a form of Latin American feminist liberation theology that addresses directly the suffering and death of these millions of women.

In this concise and startling book, the author of One-Dimensional Man argues that the time for utopian speculation has come. Marcuse argues that the traditional conceptions of human freedom have been rendered obsolete by the development of advanced industrial society. Social theory can no longer content itself with repeating the formula, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," but must now investigate the nature of human needs themselves. Marcuse's claim is that even if production were controlled and determined by the workers, society would still be repressive—unless the workers themselves had the needs and aspirations of free men. Ranging from philosophical anthropology to aesthetics An Essay on Liberation attempts to outline—in a highly speculative and tentative fashion—the new possibilities for human liberation. TheEssay contains the following chapters: A Biological Foundation for Socialism?, The New Sensibility, Subverting Forces—in Transition, and Solidarity.