Category: Blog

Star-Studded Regime: A Look at Film Celebrity in Fascist Italy

Celebrities today can perform political functions by sponsoring causes, supporting or opposing governments and shaping opinion. In Fascist Italy, celebrities also played an important role and the regime was well aware of the possible uses and dangers of their popularity. This important connection has been overlooked by scholars of both film and of Italian political history. Focusing on a period from the 1920s through 1945, Mussolini’s Dream Factory: Film Stardom in Fascist Italy looks at the star power of these often-overlooked celebrities and the fate of their careers after WWII. Author Stephen Gundle expands on these ideas and shares his thoughts on the subject, below.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of film and film stardom in Fascist Italy?

 

Stephen Gundle: There are lots of books written about fascist Italy and it seems to be a topic that endlessly fascinates.  In the last few years books have appeared on topics such as the police force, diplomacy, road-building, women’s fashions and everyday life. Yet there are few books on fascist cinema – which is largely ignored by historians and neglected by film scholars who tend to concentrate on neorealism or other aspects of postwar cinema.

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for November

Israel Studies Review
Volume 28, Issue 2
This collection of articles aims to rethink the concepts of family and familism in Israel today and analyze the changes that are taking place.

Projections
Volume 7,
Issue 2
This issue of Projections highlights the complexity of the intersection of movies and mind by integrating established traditions of analyzing media aesthetics with current research into perception, cognition and emotion.

Cambridge Anthropology
Volume 31, Issue 2
This issue features articles covering a broad spectrum of topics.

International Journal of Social Quality
Volume 3, Issue 1
The articles included in this issue of IJSQ touch on different aspects of the “sustainable growth” issue.

Asia Pacific World
Volume 4, Issue 2
The general articles cover a wide range of topics but all grew out of presentations made at IAAPS conferences,with two from the original conference in 2010, and three from the 2011 conference.

Journeys
Volume 14, Issue 2
This special issue is titled: Shaping Strangers in Early Modern English Travel Writing. The articles consider how various strangers were presented and represented in English travel writing, whether their “strangeness” be one of physical, religious, geographical, or national difference, and, simultaneously, the slippage between different kinds of strangeness.

German Politics & Society
Volume 31, Issue 3
This issue comprises articles covering a range of topics. It also features a forum section and a book reviews section.

The Myriad Measures of Achievement

Achievement is commonly defined as a successful completion of a given undertaking, but what it means to “achieve” is not a static idea the world over. Contributors to The Social Life of Achievement, published last month, examine meanings of achievement in countries and cultures throughout the world. Below, co-editor Nicholas J. Long addresses the term and provides insight into the background of the volume, from its inception to its subjects to its methodology.

 

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Berghahn Books: What drew you to the study of achievement? And what inspired you to research and write about it?

 

Nicholas J. Long: Fieldwork! In the Riau Islands – the region of Indonesia where I’ve conducted most my research – people talk and think about achievement all the time. It’s become an integral component of the citizenship syllabus: students are taught that a good Indonesian should try to seize any opportunities for ‘achievement’ that they can. And it’s an incredibly widespread trope in public culture. I quickly realised that I wasn’t going to be able to write a good ethnography of the region without engaging in some way with this achievement discourse and how it was shaping people’s lives.

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Old World Topic, New Discussion: A Look at Migration and Belonging

Who migrates, when they migrate, where they migrate, and why they migrate has a huge effect on cultural identity, acceptance and belonging. This is a hot current topic on news cycles worldwide, but it is certainly not a new phenomenon. Looking from a European perspective, editors Steven King and Anne Winter add an important contribution to this discussion with Migration, Settlement and Belonging in Europe, 1500-1930s: Comparative Perspectives, to be published this month. Below, the editors discuss the volume and their aim to make sense of these experiences across borders of place and time.

 

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The British print and online media has for the last year been awash with compelling stories about abuses of the welfare system: the mother who has 11 children and feels the state should fund her life choices; the recent immigrants who are entitled to welfare benefits notwithstanding a lack of accumulated contribution; the ‘disabled’ welfare claimants who are exposed as professional dancers or scuba divers.

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An Uprising of Historical Importance

The cyclical course of history comes into sharp focus when one looks at Greek political uprisings. The widely publicized youth dissent in recent years is nothing new, but actually has earlier roots in 1973 — with different players, but with the same activist vigor. This 1970s group — later to be known as the Polytechnic Generation — comes into clear focus in newly published Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece, by Kostis Kornetis. Following is the opening to the volume’s introduction. 

 

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In 2010 the well-known British Pakistani writer and political activist Tariq Ali commented that “were there a Michelin Great Protest guide, France would still be top with three stars, with Greece a close second with two stars.” Ali did not only refer to the 2005 riots in France and the 2008 civil disturbances in Greece, but to a longue durée structure of civil disobedience in the two countries that dates back to the 1960s and 1970s.

 

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Understanding Europe before, after 1945

In Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950, published last month, author Christian Bailey seeks to understand how Germans became such “good Europeans” after 1945. Whereas many histories of European integration tend to largely focus on the diplomatic goings-on between elites, this book focuses on how support for a united Europe was cultivated in civil society. Below, the author and his colleague Benno Gammerl share a dialogue about Bailey’s recent volume.

 

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Benno Gammerl: Your book convincingly challenges what one could call the negative founding myth of post-1945 European integration. According to this well-established narrative the European Union ultimately resulted from the wish to once and for all prevent falling back into the perils of fascism and total war. You highlight earlier visions of Europe instead that date back to the interwar period and that have at times commanded much wider popular support than the let-us-avoid-our-earlier-mistakes-rhetoric. Which positive aims and motivations sustained these European projects?

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SETI: An Alien Concept?

If there is extra-terrestrial life in the Universe, how might it communicate? In Science, SETI, and Mathematics, to be published this month, author Carl DeVito seeks to answer this question in a conversational way, explaining the role of mathematics in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). DeVito explores the science and history behind the search, and shares the many questions associated with it, especially those regarding language and communication.

 

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The early workers in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence were concerned with the technical problems of sending and receiving radio signals across inter-stellar distances.

 

Slowly, however, the deeper questions inherent in this endeavor rose to prominence: questions about the nature of intelligence, the nature of language, and the philosophical/psychological motivation behind this search.

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Hot Off the Presses – New Journal Releases for October

Girlhood Studies
Volume 6, Issue 2
This special issue of Girlhood Studies, titled Nordic Girls’ Studies: Current Themes and Theoretical Approaches, is the first GHS issue to be devoted to the study of girls living in a specific region.

Theoria
Volume 60, Issue 136
This special issue emerges from a concern with academic practice around researching and theorising race, racialism and racism; particularly within the current theoretical climate in which race is, in the majority, accepted as a social construct.

Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
Volume 22, Issue 2
This special issue is entitled Being Muslims in the Balkans: Ethnographies of Identity, Politics and Vernacular Islam in Southeast Europe. 

Learning and Teaching
Volume 6, Issue 1
This issue features a selection of articles covering South and North America and concludes with responses to ‘The Academic Rat Race’, which was published in LATISS 5.2.

Journal of Romance Studies
Volume 13, Issue 2
This issue features articles covering a range of topics from short fiction of Portuguese-language writers to Ahmadou Kourouma and Gustave Courbet to a close reading of La Raulito/Little Raoul and, finally, major themes in Jacques Hassoun’s Alexandries. This issue also includes a review article and notes on contributors.

Historical Reflections
Volume 39, Issue 3
This special issue comprises articles exploring issues of nostalgia in modern France. The topics addressed are wide-ranging, from immigration to revolution and more.

Are Law-Maker, Law-Breaker So Different?

In the past, the world’s political economy has not always been built through honorable dealings. In fact, not much may have been, according to the recently published volume The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States, which sheds light on such shadowy parts of economic history. Below, editor Renate Bridenthal develops this idea to share how those in power and those illicitly taking power may not be so different after all.

 

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A specter is haunting history. The ghostly presence of economic crime as political power has been all but absent in history writing, but not in history itself.

 

Like dark matter, its synergy has been palpable if not always visible. Yet in our time, more and more emerges from the shadows, exposed in newspapers and tried in courts, and compels us to consider the history of the illicit political economy and its effects in past and present.

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The New Namibia: Building a Nation after Apartheid

In 1990, Namibia gained its independence as a democratic state from the South African apartheid regime. Author John T. Friedman reflects on what this realistically meant and currently means for the making of a Namibian state in Imagining the Post-Apartheid State: An Ethnographic Account of Namibia, the paperback version of which was published last month after the original was published July 2011. Below the author explains his ethnographic method in an excerpt from the Introduction.

 

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At first reading, the title of this book is likely to arouse some scepticism. How is it possible for an anthropologist to present an ethnographic account of Namibia, of an entire country? As anthropologists we are accustomed to investigate the localised, the small-scale, the village community. We are specifists, not generalists. The critic will thus be quick to suggest that any such attempt can yield only two possible outcomes: either a generalised account of ‘the Namibian people’, or a superficial survey of Namibia’s ethnic groups.

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