Against the World

Historian Tara Zahra's new book Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars is out!

Prior to World War I, many people enthusiastically envisioned a borderless world—one with unrestricted travel, migration, and trade. International movements for women’s rights and world peace were also strong. Yet reaction was also growing, with strong support for nationalism. There was also recognition that the global economy threatened homegrown and local foods, domestically produced goods, and back-to-the-land communities. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about migration, while the Great Depression intensified demands for economic autonomy. Immigration restrictions and punitive tariffs increased, yet social protections increased, colonialism lost favor, and there were efforts to make the global economy more equitable. Popular revolt against globalization took hold in democracies and dictatorships alike. Tara Zahra’s archival research in five languages will be informative reading for all who seek to understand the anti-global currents of the twentieth century, and today’s battles over international trade, immigration, public health and global inequality.

Magnetic Woman Expands its International Reach

Through the magic of Worldcat, and the Polish NUKAT (Union Catalog of Polish Research Libraries), I see that a copy of Magnetic Woman can now be found in Łódź at the Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego!

This is in addition to library copies in the British Isles (Maynooth, Fife, London), elsewhere in continental Europe (Paris, Leioa in Spain's Basque country, Barcelona, Lausanne, Berlin, Stockholm, Munich, Heidelberg, Würzburg, Zürich), and Wellington, New Zealand. This is in addition to copies at many US university and public libraries and one in Montreal.

While I've sent copies to a good many Czech institutions, apparently none of them report to Worldcat.

If your library doesn't yet have Magnetic Woman, do ask them to order it! You can point out that it is a prize-winning study of a fascinating gender-ambiguous surrealist. And if you've read it, please consider reviewing it, whether for a scholarly journal or on Amazon or Goodreads!

Spread the word about Toyen and Czech surrealism!

Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands

New books are coming out in profusion! Here's another title of interest: Prague and Beyond: Jews in the Bohemian Lands, edited by Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval. While you may need to wait to get the hardcover, it looks like the e-book is already available.

I'm being very quick-and-dirty about posting this as I'm in the middle of the annual Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop, hosted by University of Pittsburgh this year. It's free to sign up and attend and continues through Sunday.

Prague: Belonging in the Modern City

I'm pleased to report that fellow Czech specialist Chad Bryant's new book Prague: Belonging in the Modern City will be out in May. In Prague, belonging has often been linked to a sense of nation. Grand medieval buildings and national monuments emphasize a glorious, shared history. Governmental architecture has melded politics and nationhood. Yet not all inhabitants have been included in this nurturing of national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and Vietnamese have all been subjected to persecution in their home city.

In this book, Chad "tells the stories of five marginalized individuals who, over the last two centuries, forged their own notions of belonging in one of Europe’s great cities." Though not famous people, their lives are revealing, speaking to "tensions between exclusionary nationalism and on-the-ground diversity." This aspiring guidebook writer, German-speaking newspaperman, Bolshevik carpenter, actress of mixed heritage coming of age during the Communist terror, and Czech-speaking Vietnamese blogger all "struggle against alienation and dislocation, forging alternative communities in cafes, workplaces, and online. While strolling park paths, joining political marches, or writing about their lives, these outsiders came to embody a city that, on its surface, was built for others."

I'm eager to read this! We can pre-order here.

Photofascism

Another new book of interest is Vanessa Rocco's Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy, published by Bloomsbury. As the publisher points out,

"The 1930s provides a potent case study for every generation, and it is as urgent as ever in our global political environment to deeply understand the central role of visual imagery in what transpired. Photofascism demonstrates precisely how dictatorial regimes use photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with display, to persuade the public with often times highly destructive-even catastrophic-results."

This is an important study and should be of considerable interest to both scholars and the wider public, given the present rise of authoritarian-tending regimes in many parts of the world.

The Last Ghetto

Today seems like the right time to give a shout out to Anna Hájková's new book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt. This book uses extensive sources, including victim testimonies, that were collected in 99 archives from ten countries on three continents and were written in nine languages. Reviews are already enthusiastic, and according to the publisher, it is the "first modern study of the Theresienstadt ghetto." You can read more about this book here and order your own copy.

The author, much of whose research has focused on women's experience in the Nazi concentration camps and on sexual economics within the camps, has been the target of some attempted censorship as a result of her investigation of lesbian relationships within the camps. You can read more about this at The New Fascism Syllabus, which also offers the opportunity to sign a petition supporting her (I am one of the many scholars to have signed).

Haunted Bauhaus

I'm thrilled to report that my pal and mentor Elizabeth Otto's recent book Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics, has won the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association’s 2020 Peter C. Rollins Book Prize, awarded annually for innovative scholarship in the fields of American and popular culture by a writer living or working in New York or New England.

The author says, “Throughout Haunted Bauhaus, I sought to show how this art movement was bound up with pressing issues of its own time, that it was more of a movement to reform daily life that drew ideas from its surrounding cultural context than many knew. At the same time, I emphasize how many of the ideas being hashed out at the Bauhaus – on spirituality, gender, sex and politics – are close to ideas we are still grappling with.”

You can read more about the book, its author, and the prize here.

Marking Modern Movement

I've just learned that Susan Funkenstein's Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic is now available from University of Michigan Press! I can recommend this, as not only do I know Susan (I sat in on her Design History course when I was in grad school and we run into each other every now and then) but her PhD dissertation was useful to me in thinking about the importance of modern dance in Czech modernism and Czech feminism.

You can read more about it here, and you can get this book in any of three formats:

Paper | 6 x 9 | 342pp. 49 B&W Images, 28 Color Images, 1 Table.
ISBN 978-0-472-05461-9 | $39.95

Hardcover | 6 x 9 | 342pp. 49 B&W Images, 28 Color Images, 1 Table.
ISBN 978-0-472-07461-7 | $85.00

Also available in ebook.

Save 30% by using promotion code UMFUNKENSTEIN at press.umich.edu before 12/31/20.