Analytical Paper: Recommended Novels - Intro to International Studies Fall 2014

Tugrul Keskin – Introduction to International Studies

Fall 2014 – Monday and Wednesday 2:00 – 3:50 PM

International Studies - http://www.pdx.edu/intl/home

http://internationalstudiesandsociology.blogspot.com/

http://introtoglobalstudies.com/blog/

Analytical Paper: In this requirement, you will select a book written by a famous international novelist, and will review (summarize and critique) the novel based on our textbooks. This paper should be at least 1500 words in length. You will find a list of recommended novelists on http://internationalstudiesandsociology.blogspot or D2L. You must provide a word count at the end of your paper. The paper is due on Saturday November 30^th. Some recommended well-known novelists include John Steinbeck, Orhan Pamuk, Leo Tolstoy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Naguib Mahfouz, Azar Nafisi, Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy, and etc. You will find detailed information and recommended novels on http://internationalstudiesandsociology.blogspot. Everyone will select a different novel. No one will read the same novel. Your selection must be approved and registered by a teaching assistant, Rosie David rosa@pdx.edu; therefore you must contact her directly regarding your selection. The deadline for selecting/registering your novel with teaching assistant, Rosie Davis is Sunday, October 27. The deadline for submitting your review is Sunday November 30. Late submissions will not be accepted.

If you choose a novel different than ones shown in the list below, I will need to approve your selection. 

For this paper, you will use our sample format, which is posted on D2L. Please follow the same structure.   

Please check the list below, select a book from this list, and then send Rosie David (Graduate Teaching Assistant) an e-mail rosa@pdx.edu specifying on which book you would like to write your review.

Teaching Assistant: Rosie David

Email: rosa@pdx.edu

Office: East Hall 330

Office Hours: Wednesday 4-6 PM or by appointment

 

Recommended Novels

Arabs-Turks-Iranians-Jewish

1.     The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi

2.     Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories by Ghassan Kanafani

3.     Black Box by Amos Oz

4.     The Cheapest Nights by Yusuf Idris

5.     The Committee by Sun' Allah Ibrahim

6.     The Story of Layla & Majnun by Nizami

7.     The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat

8.     The Yacoubian Building: A Novel by Alaa Al Aswany

9.     Snow by Orhan Pamuk

10.  A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

11.  My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

12.  Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz

13.  Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk

14.  My Michael by Amos Oz

15.  Homesick by Eshkol Nevo

16.  The Story of Zahra: A Novel by Hanan al-Shaykh

17.  The Story of Zahra: A Novel by Hanan al-Shaykh

18.  To Know a Woman (Harvest in translation) by Amos Oz

19.  Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

20.  Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz

21.  The Book Saladin by Tariq Ali

22.  Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik

23.  Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif

24.  A Sultan in Palermo by Tariq Ali

25.  The Trench by Abdelrahman Munif

26.  Elsewhere, Perhaps by Amos Oz

27.  Children of the Alley by Naguib Mahfouz

28.  To the End of the Land by David Grossman

29.  The Man who lost his shadow Fathy Ghanem and Desmond Stewart

30.  Karnak Café by Naguib Mahfouz

31.  Dreams by Naguib Mahfouz

32.  Cairo Modern by Naguib Mahfouz

33.  A Perfect Peace by Amos Oz

34.  The Fairest Among Women by Shifra Horn

35.  Maryam's Maze by Mansoura Ez-Eldin

36.  The Lover by Abraham B. Yehoshua

37.  Diary of a Country Prosecutor by Tawfik al-Hakim

38.  A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev

39.  Wedding Night by Yusuf Abu Rayya

40.  Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea

41.  The Savage Night by Mohammed Dib

42.  A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

43.  Things I've Been Silent About: Memories by Azar Nafisi

44.  The Sirens of Baghdad by Yasmina Khadra

45.  The Attack by Yasmina Khadra

46.  In the Name of God by Yasmina Khadra

47.  See Under: Love by David Grossman

48.  A Grave in Gaza by Matt Beynon Rees

49.  Arabesques: A Novel by Anton Shammas

50.  Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar

51.  Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua

52.  The Zigzag Kid by David Grossman

53.  The Blue Mountain by Meir Shalev

China

1.     The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: … by Lu Xun

2.     Red Sorghum: A Novel of China by Mo Yan

3.     Love in a Fallen City  by Eileen Chang

4.     Bound Feet & Western Dress: A Memoir by Pang-Mei Chang

5.     The Rice Sprout Song by Eileen Chang

6.     Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas by Su Tong

7.     On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year … by Lisa See

8.     Shanghai Express: A Thirties Novel (Fiction … by Hen-Shui Chang

9.     The Rouge of the North by Eileen Chang

10.  Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A … by Dai Sijie

11.  Shanghai Girls: A Novel by Lisa See

12.  Beijing Coma: A Novel by Ma Jian

13.  Family by Pa Chin

14.  Dreams of Joy: A Novel by Lisa See

15.  Peach Blossom Pavilion by Mingmei Yip

16.  Rickshaw: The Novel Lo-t'o Hsiang Tzu by She Lao

17.  Dragon Bones: A Red Princess Mystery (Red … by Lisa See

18.  Fortress Besieged by Zhongshu Qian

19.  Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

20.  Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min

21.  Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now by Jan Wong

22.  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See

23.  The Bonesetter's Daughter: A Novel (Ballantine … by Amy Tan

24.  Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman

25.  Empress Orchid by Anchee Min

26.  Red Dust: A Path Through China by Ma Jian

27.  China in Ten Words by Yu Hua

28.  The Interior: A Red Princess Mystery (Red … by Lisa See

29.  The Last Empress: A Novel by Anchee Min

30.  To Live: A Novel by Yu Hua

31.  Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng

32.  Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of Chin... by Chen Guidi

33.  Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society by Adeline Yen Mah

34.  The Concubine's Children by Denise Chong

35.  Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chine... by Adeline Yen Mah

Latin and Central America

1.     Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges

2.     Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas

3.     Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly … by Laura Esquivel

4.     Daughter of Fortune: A Novel (P.S.) by Isabel Allende

5.     One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

6.     Ines of My Soul: A Novel Isabel Allende

7.     Island Beneath the Sea: A Novel (P.S.) by Isabel Allende

8.     Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

9.     Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

10.  Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo

11.  Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

12.  Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah'... by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

13.  The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa

14.  The Autumn of the Patriarch (P.S.) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

15.  The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

16.  The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel (FSG Classics) by Carlos Fuentes

17.  By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano

18.  Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul

19.  In a Free State: A Novel by V.S. Naipaul

20.  Waiting for the Barbarians (Penguin Great Books... by J. M. Coetzee

21.  A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul

22.  Body Snatcher by Juan Carlos Onetti

23.  Hopscotch (Pantheon Modern Writers … Julio Cortazar

24.  Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

25.  Death's Dark Abyss by Massimo Carlotto

26.  Blow-Up: And Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

27.  The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes

28.  The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto

29.  Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses by Isabel Allende

30.  Zorro: A Novel (P.S.) by Isabel Allende

31.  The Slum (Library of Latin America) by Aluísio Azevedo

32.  Born in Blood and Fire: Latin American Voices John Charles Chasteen

33.  Paradiso by José Lezama Lima

34.  I, the Supreme by Augusto Antonio Roa Bastos

35.  The President by Miguel Angel Asturias

36.  The Hour of the Star (Second Edition) by Clarice Lispector

Africa

1.     Things Fall Apart: A Novel by Chinua Achebe

2.     The God of Small Things: A Novel by Arundhati Roy

3.     A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe

4.     Facing Mount Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta

5.     No Sweetness Here and Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo

6.     A Grain of Wheat (African Writers Series) by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

7.     Tsotsi: A Novel by Athol Fugard

8.     So Long a Letter (African Writers Series) by Mariama B

9.     Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta

10.  Purple Hibiscus: A Novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

11.  The River Between by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

12.  Efuru (African Writers) by Flora Nwapa

13.  Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

14.  Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

15.  God's Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane

16.  July's People by Nadine Gordimer

17.  Mother to Mother (Bluestreak) by Sindiwe Magona

18.  Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe

19.  Girls at War by Chinua Achebe

20.  One is Enough (African Women Writers Series) by Flora Nwapa

21.  Xala by Ousmane Sembene

22.  Khabzela: The Life and Times of a South African by Liz McGregor

23.  The Slave Girl: A Novel by Buchi Emecheta

24.  Never Again (Africa Women Writers Series) by Flora Nwapa

25.  African Perspectives on Colonialism (The Johns H... by A. Adu Boahen

26.  Changes: A Love Story by Ama Ata Aidoo

27.  Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (Revised Edition) (Lon... by D T Niane

28.  African Short Stories by Chinua Achebe

29.  Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol (African Writers) by Okot P'Bitek

30.  The Famished Road by Ben Okri

31.  The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of... by Amos Tutuola

32.  Chaka (African Writers) by Thomas Mofolo

33.  Houseboy (African Writers) by Ferdinand Oyono

34.  The Concubine by Elechi Amadi

35.  Yoruba Trickster Tales by Oyekan Owomoyela

36.  No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe

37.  Death and the King's Horseman (Norton Critica... by Wole Soyinka

38.  Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage) by Wangari Maathai

39.  Scarlet Song by Mariama Ba

40.  Nehanda by Yvonne Vera

41.  Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa by Ama Ata Aidoo

42.  Oroonoko (Penguin Classics) by Aphra Behn

43.  Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta

44.  Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf

45.  The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An … by Tepilit Ole Saitoti

46.  Ake: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka

47.  Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa

48.  The Poor Christ of Bomba by Mongo Beti

49.  A Walk in the Night and Other Stories by Alex La Guma

50.  Weep Not, Child (African Writers) by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

51.  The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (African … by Ayi Kwei Armah

52.  Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa by Kofi Awoonor

53.  This Earth, My Brother by Kofi Awoonor  This Earth, My Brother by Kofi Awoonor

Leo Strauss' Political Philosophy: Reviled But Redeemed

By Peter Berkowitz

Real Clear Politics - August 16, 2014

“Always assume that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.” This is the counsel Leo Strauss, among the most consequential teachers and scholars of political philosophy in the 20th century, offered an advanced graduate student who had asked for a general rule about teaching.  In a short essay published in the early 1960s, “Liberal Education and Responsibility” (based on a public lecture he gave), Strauss elaborated on his exquisite advice. “Do not have too high an opinion of your importance,” he said, “and have the highest opinion of your duty, your responsibility.”   A German-born Jew who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and who, at the peak of his career—from 1949 to 1967—served as a professor in the University of Chicago political science department, Strauss was the author of more than a dozen books and some 150 articles and reviews about political philosophy. He examined the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns on the importance of religion, the moral and scientific premises of the social sciences, the impact of persecution on the manner in which great works of political philosophy were composed and, not least, the centrality to politics and justice of education. He was a brilliant and beloved teacher. 

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A New Book: Leftover Women The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China

Leta Hong Fincher

Zed Books, 2014

A century ago, Chinese feminists fighting for the emancipation of women helped spark the Republican Revolution, which overthrew the Qing empire. After China's Communist revolution of 1949, Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky." In the early years of the People's Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations with expansive initiatives such as assigning urban women jobs in the planned economy. Yet those gains are now being eroded in China's post-socialist era. Contrary to many claims made in the mainstream media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of many rights and gains relative to men.

Leftover Women debunks the popular myth that women have fared well as a result of post-socialist China's economic reforms and breakneck growth. Laying out the structural discrimination against women in China will speak to broader problems with China's economy, politics, and development.



Table of Contents
Introduction
1. China's 'leftover' women
2. How Chinese Women were shut out of the biggest accumulation of real-estate wealth in history
3. China's giant gender wealth gap
4. Back to the Ming dynasty
5. Wives caught in China's web of abuse
6. Fighting back

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A New Book: Expulsions By Saskia Sassen

Expulsions
Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy

Saskia Sassen

Harvard University Press, 2014

Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies: today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in the usual terms of poverty and injustice, according to Saskia Sassen. They are more accurately understood as a type of expulsion—from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible.
This hard-headed critique updates our understanding of economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project.
Sassen draws surprising connections to illuminate the systemic logic of these expulsions. The sophisticated knowledge that created today’s financial “instruments” is paralleled by the engineering expertise that enables exploitation of the environment, and by the legal expertise that allows the world’s have-nations to acquire vast stretches of territory from the have-nots. Expulsions lays bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to trace lines of responsibility for the displacements, evictions, and eradications it produces—and equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations.

 Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Savage Sorting
• 1. Shrinking Economies, Growing Expulsions
• 2. The New Global Market for Land
• 3. Finance and Its Capabilities: Crisis as Systemic Logic
• 4. Dead Land, Dead Water
• Conclusion: At the Systemic Edge

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A New Book: Topographies of Faith Religion in Urban Spaces

Edited by Irene Becci, Marian Burchardt, and José Casanova

Brill, 2013

Topographies of Faith offers a unique and compelling analysis of contemporary religious dynamics in metropolitan centers. While most scholarship on religion still sidelines questions of spatiality and scale, this book creatively draws on perspectives from urban studies to study the spatiality of religion in modern cities. It shows how globalization, transnational migration and urban expansion in big cities engender new religious forms and practices and their spatial underpinnings. Space affects urban religious diversity, religious innovations, decline or vitality. But it also shapes the relationships between religion and social equalities. Spanning distances between New York, Delhi and Johannesburg, the book also engages with issues of secularity and religious vitality in genuinely new ways.
Based on ethnographic explorations in cities across the globe,

Contents:

• Introduction: Religion Takes Place: Producing Urban Locality

• Alevis in Cemevis: Religion and Secularism in Turkey

• Somalis in Johannesburg: Muslim Transformations of the City

• Urban Aspirations in Mumbai and Singapore

• Excarnation and the City: The Tower of Silence Debates in Mumbai

• Connecting the Local, National and Transnational Powers of a Religious Youth Organisation in Berlin

• Religious Associations, Religious Innovations and Denominational Identities in Contemporary Global Cities

• The Geopolitics of Religious Spatiality and Falun Gong’s Campaign in New York

• Religious Involvements in a Post-Socialist Urban Space in Berlin

• Belonging and Success: Religious Vitality and the Politics of Urban Space in Cape Town

• Porous Boundaries: Hindu-Muslim Demarcation and Crossings in Delhi

• ‘Exit’ and ‘Inclusion’: The Changing Paradigm of Pentecostal Expression in the Nigerian Public Space

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A New Book: Max Weber: Modernisation as Passive Revolution

A Gramscian Analysis

Jan Rehmann, Union Theological Seminary and Free University, Berlin

BRILL, 2015

Basing his research on Gramsci's theory of hegemony, Rehmann provides a comprehensive socio-analysis of Max Weber's political and intellectual position in the ideological network of his time. Max Weber: Modernisation as Passive Revolution shows that, even though Weber presents his science as ‘value-free’, he is best understood as an organic intellectual of the bourgeoisie who has the mission of providing his class with an intense ethico-political education. Viewed as a whole, his writings present a new model for bourgeois hegemony in the transition to ‘Fordism’. Weber is both a sharp critic of a ‘passive revolution’ in Germany tying the bourgeois class to the interests of the agrarian class, and a proponent of a more modern version of passive revolution, which would foreclose a socialist revolution by the construction of an industrial bloc consisting of the bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy.

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A New Book: Social Movements and Globalization How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World

By Cristina Flesher Fominaya

Palgrave - 2014

Globalization and social movements are inextricably linked. Contemporary social movements both shape and are shaped by globalization. Social Movements and Globalization explores this link, providing a fascinating insight into the dynamics, challenges and opportunities of contemporary social movements in a globalized world, whilst simultaneously revealing the effects, critiques and limitations of globalization. Engaging and accessible, the book's comprehensive introduction to the definitions, theories and debates surrounding social movements and globalization is richly illustrated by case studies from around the world - from Anonymous, to 15-M/Indignados, to the Zapatistas, the Arab Spring and more. In drawing on cutting-edge research, up-to-date analysis, and offering coverage of key areas of study - with chapters on the 'Global Justice Movement', cultural resistance, media, cyberactivism and the recent 'Global Protest Wave' of anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements - the book makes a vital and original contribution to a range of disciplines, not least Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Media Studies and Cultural Studies.

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A New Book: Applying Ibn Khaldun The Recovery of a Lost Tradition in Sociology

By Syed Farid Alatas

Routledge 2013

The writings of Ibn Khaldun, particularly the Muqaddimah (Prolegomenon) have rightly been regarded as being sociological in nature. For this reason, Ibn Khaldun has been widely regarded as the founder of sociology, or at least a precursor of modern sociology. While he was given this recognition, however, few works went beyond proclaiming him as a founder or precursor to the systematic application of his theoretical perspective to specific historical and contemporary aspects of Muslim societies in North Africa and the Middle East. The continuing presence of Eurocentrism in the social sciences has not helped in this regard: it often stands in the way of the consideration of non-Western sources of theories and concepts.

This book provides an overview of Ibn Khaldun and his sociology, discusses reasons for his marginality, and suggests ways to bring Ibn Khaldun into the mainstream through the systematic application of his theory. It moves beyond works that simply state that Ibn Khaldun was a founder of sociology or provide descriptive accounts of his works. Instead it systematically applies Khaldun’s theoretical perspective to specific historical aspects of Muslim societies in North Africa and the Middle East, successfully integrating concepts and frameworks from Khaldunian sociology into modern social science theories. Applying Ibn Khaldun will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology and social theory.

Introduction.

 1. The Errors of History and the New Science: Introduction to the Muqaddimah

 2. Ibn Khaldūn’s Theory of State Formation

 3. Ibn Khaldūn and Modern Sociology: An Aborted Tradition

 4. Pre-modern Readings andApplications of Ibn Khaldūn

 5. A Khaldūnian Theory of Muslim Reform

 6. Ibn Khaldūn and the Ottoman Modes of Production

 7. The Rise and Fall of the Safavid State in a Khaldūnian Framework

 8. A Khaldūnian Perspective on Modern Arab States: Saudi Arabia and Syria

 9. Towards a Khaldūnian Sociology of the State

 10. Bibliographic Remarks and Further Reading. Bibliography

Book Review: Liberalism by Edmund Fawcett

By Jonathan Derbyshire 

Prospect  / July 17, 2014

Political philosophers may find Edmund Fawcett’s assertion that “liberty is the wrong place to begin” when telling the story of liberalism rather startling. They tend to be in the business of deriving conclusions about the legitimate activity of the state from a set of assumptions about liberty, consent and individual rights. In Fawcett’s account, by contrast, liberalism is not a settled doctrine arrived at through rational argument but a “political practice” with a history. As for liberty, it’s certainly something liberals believe in, Fawcett writes, but then so too do “most non-liberals.”

In place of the tattered standard of liberty, he puts four key ideas—tolerance of conflict, resistance to power, belief in progress and civic respect. And taking these as his guiding thread through a long history that starts in the first half of the 19th century, Fawcett is able to find family resemblances between thinkers and statesmen otherwise as diverse as François Guizot and William Gladstone, John Stuart Mill and Pierre Mendès France.

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Xi proposes trilateral work group on transcontinental South American railway

English.news.cn | 2014-07-17

BRASILIA, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping suggested here Wednesday that Peru and Brazil join his country in forming a work group to promote their cooperation on a planned railway across the South American continent.
During a meeting with Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, Xi noted that the three countries will issue a joint statement later in the day on the railway project, which will run all the way from the Peruvian Pacific coast to the Brazilian Atlantic coast.
The Chinese president proposed that a trilateral work group be established to navigate their cooperation in all related aspects, including the planning, design, construction and operation of the transcontinental rail.

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Our Moral Tongue

Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking

The New York Times - JUNE 20, 2014

By BOAZ KEYSAR and ALBERT COSTA 

ON June 20, 2003, employees of the Union Pacific Railroad faced a difficult decision as a runaway train headed toward downtown Los Angeles: Should they divert the train to a side track, knowing it would derail and hit homes in the less populated city of Commerce, Calif.? Did the moral imperative to minimize overall harm outweigh the moral imperative not to intentionally harm an innocent suburb?

They chose to divert the train, which injured 13 people, including three children who were sent to the hospital.

This extreme real-life situation resembles a philosophical thought experiment known as the trolley problem, which was designed to probe our moral commitments. It goes like this: Imagine you are standing on a footbridge over rail tracks. An approaching trolley is about to kill five people farther down the tracks. The only way to stop it is to push a large man off the footbridge and onto the tracks below. This will save the five people but kill the man. (It will not help if you jump; you are not large enough.) Do you push him?

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Students, faculty up in arms against 'elitist academy' at China's Peking University

By  Patrick Boehler and Anne Yi

South China Morning News - Friday, 11 July, 2014

The head of China’s Peking University said plans to build a new elite academy on its picturesque campus was up for debate, constituting a small victory for students and scholars who fear the prestige project would sow divisions and elitism.
On Friday, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s top newspaper, quoted university president Wang Enge as saying that details about the establishment of the Yenching Academy, set to host a prestigious fellowship programme, would be discussed with students and staff before plans would be finalised.
Yenching Academy would become a symbol of elite privilege, said one graduate student majoring in the English language.
“These 100 Yenching students will live on the school’s best plot of land, have the best teachers, they will have bright and spacious class and dorm rooms,” the student said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They will be the privileged elite and all the other Peking University students will be second-class citizens.”

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A Sociological History of Soccer Violence

How social and cultural rifts manifest themselves through sports—especially when fans identify intensely with their team

By Tiffanie Wen

The Atlantic - Jul 14 2014

After yesterday’s relatively uneventful World Cup final, it’s likely that Brazil’s devastating semi-final loss to Germany will be the most memorable match of the tournament. Brazilian soccer fans reportedly dealt with the loss by setting a bus on fire, as Rio dispatched riot police to keep disappointed fans from getting out of control.
In Israel, where I’m based, the Israel Defense Forces are knee-deep in a military campaign in Gaza, and hundreds of rockets have been launched into Israel by Hamas since Monday. It's been reported that all six suspects charged with the brutal murder of Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, a crime which acted as a catalyst for the current conflict, are fanatical supporters of Beitar Jerusalem, an Israeli club soccer team whose fans have a reputation for their anti-Arab sentiments.

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Living in the Interregnum

Nadine Gordimer

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS - January 20, 1983 

The following essay is based on the James Lecture presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on October 14, 1982.

I live at 6,000 feet in a society whirling, stamping, swaying with the force of revolutionary change. The vision is heady; the image of the demonic dance is accurate, not romantic: an image of actions springing from emotion, knocking deliberation aside. The city is Johannesburg, the country South Africa, and the time the last years of the colonial era in Africa.
It’s inevitable that nineteenth-century colonialism should finally come to its end there, because there it reached its ultimate expression, open in the legalized land- and mineral-grabbing, open in the labor exploitation of indigenous peoples, open in the constitutionalized, institutionalized racism that was concealed by the British under the pious notion of uplift, the French and Portuguese under the sly notion of selective assimilation. An extraordinarily obdurate crossbreed of Dutch, German, English, French in the South African white settler population produced a bluntness that unveiled everyone’s refined white racism: the flags of European civilization dropped, and there it was, unashamedly, the ugliest creation of man, and they baptized the thing in the Dutch Reformed Church, called it apartheid, coining the ultimate term for every manifestation, over the ages, in many countries, of race prejudice. Every country could see its semblances there; and most peoples.

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Joel Kotkin on The New Class Conflict

The role of oil and gas in the Syrian conflict

By Ziad Ghosn

ALAKHBAR -  Wednesday, June 25, 2014    

With the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Nusra Front in control of several oil fields in Syria, the two radical Islamist groups entered the “oil exporters’ club,” with Western enablement. This, in addition to the closely anticipated hydrocarbon discoveries in Syria’s territorial waters and other pertinent developments, has made the oil issue a strong factor in the Syrian crisis, albeit one that has so far remained behind the scenes.

Damascus: Professor Adnan Mustafa, a Syrian physicist, banks on his years of experience as minister of oil and mineral resources in the 1970s, and his tenure as assistant secretary-general of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries OAPEC, to settle a crucial question related to the role of energy in the regional and international conflict currently raging over Syria. Mustafa, speaking to Al-Akhbar, stressed that Syria’s limited oil and gas output did not ultimately affect the perspective of what he calls the petroleum empire of darkness, which he said eventually decided that Syria was “a major obstacle to its plan for a new world order, and therefore, had to be removed from the new Middle East.”

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My father’s double life

He told me she was a friend, and he was just looking out for her seven children. The truth changed my world

Josefina Gonzalez

SALON.COM - Tuesday, Mar 25, 2014

Growing up, I thought I was an only child. My parents were typical Mexican immigrants, hardworking and poor by society’s standards, though we always had enough. But one detail made my childhood different.
Every few weeks, my dad took me on trips to visit some “friends.” There was a lady my dad’s age and her four children, a number that eventually grew to seven. I played with the kids while my father and the woman hung out. My dad often reminded me I shouldn’t tell my mom about this. She was very jealous.
Looking back, it’s all so obvious. They even called my father “Dad,” though he was quick to explain he was only a “father figure.” But I was a little girl, who believed what she was told. I asked my dad once why he visited that woman so often, buying things for the family and taking them to the grocery store. He told me he’d been in the Vietnam War with her husband, and when he died, my father agreed to help her raise her children. I guess it’s a good story, except for the part where my father never served in Vietnam, and most of her kids were born long after the war’s end.

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Peace Corps announces major changes to application process

By T. Rees Shapiro

THE WASHINGTON POST - July 14, 2014

The Peace Corps, formed more than 50 years ago to send Americans abroad to perform good works, is in the midst of its most serious challenge, with the number of applicants falling rapidly, leaving the volunteer force at its lowest level in more than a decade.  Recognizing that the organization envisioned by President John F. Kennedy could be endangered, its leaders are scheduled to announce Tuesday a series of steps to make it more attractive, including allowing candidates to choose the country where they want to serve, shortening the year-long application period, and recruiting more minorities and young people.  “The Peace Corps is a great brand, but we really needed to bring it into the 21st century,” Carrie Hessler-Radelet, director of the organization, said ahead of the announcement. “This is the most extensive reform effort our agency has ever undertaken.”

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BRICS establish $100bn bank and currency pool to cut out Western dominance

RUSSIA TODAY - July 15, 2014

The group of emerging economies signed the long-anticipated document to create the $100 bn BRICS Development Bank and a reserve currency pool worth over another $100 bn. Both will counter the influence of Western-based lending institutions and the dollar.
The new bank will provide money for infrastructure and development projects in BRICS countries, and unlike the IMF or World Bank, each nation has equal say, regardless of GDP size.
Each BRICS member is expected to put an equal share into establishing the startup capital of $50 billion with a goal to reach $100 billion. The BRICS bank will be headquartered in Shanghai, India will preside as president the first year, and Russia will be the chairman of the representatives.
“BRICS Bank will be one of the major multilateral development finance institutions in this world,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday at the 6th BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil.

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Why I’m Not a Liberal

By Robin Marie Averbeck

Jacobin - 7.15.14

To many liberals, injustice is a product of misunderstanding, the result of faceless processes that no one really benefits from.

I was standing in the National Mall, surrounded by nearly a quarter million people, when I realized I wasn’t a liberal.  I had come to Washington, along with 215,000 others, to participate in Jon Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” an event inspired by Glenn Beck’s “Rally to Restore Honor.” The festival reached its height as the spectators were treated to a video montage of fire-breathing pundits from all the major news networks denouncing their political opponents.  The message was clear: Those who tell you there are fundamental differences between Americans that are worth getting emphatically angry about are lying to you.  This divided America — an America that contains people with radically different values and radically different ideas of what a just, moral society looks like — does not exist. If it seems otherwise, it is simply because, as one sign at the rally put it, we fail to use our “inside voices.”

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Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust

British policies killed nearly 4 million Indians in the 1943-44 Bengal Famine

Rakesh Krishnan Simha

TEHELKA.COM - June 13, 2014, Issue 25 Volume 11

The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th century. Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.  What is remarkable about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World War II was at its peak and the Germans were rampaging across Europe, targeting Jews, Slavs and the Roma for extermination. It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines.  Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh.

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A New Book: On the State By Pierre Bourdieu

On the State By Pierre Bourdieu POLITY PRESS, 2014

What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life?  In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly
of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation.  While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order.  At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.

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Wall Street gets former NSA chief to help banks create ‘cyber war council’

Russia Today - July 08, 2014

The top trade group on Wall Street wants the White House to assemble a “cyber war council,” according to a new report, as America’s banks continue to brace for hackers to hit their computer systems with an unprecedented attack.
Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday this week that its journalists have viewed an internal document from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or Simfa, calling for the United States government to create such a council “to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances” by way of a cyberattack previously unseen on US servers.
According to Bloomberg journalist Carter Dougherty, the unpublished Simfa draft proposes that executives and deputy-level representatives from no fewer than eight US agencies join forces to ensure that the banking industry can withstand a severe cyberattack.
“We are concerned that the industry may not have the capabilities that we would like to effectively defend against this newer form of potential attack, the capability that we would like to stop such an attack once commenced from spreading to other financial institutions, or the capability we would like of effectively recovering if an initial attack is followed by waves of follow-on attacks,” Dougherty quotes from the document, reportedly dated June 27.

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How Birth Year Influences Political Views

By AMANDA COX   

The New York Times - JULY 7, 2014

A new model of presidential voting suggests President Obama’s approval rating — currently in the low 40s — will inform not only the 2016 election, but also the election in 2076. The model, by researchers at Catalist, the Democratic data firm, and Columbia University, uses hundreds of thousands of survey responses and new statistical software to estimate how people’s preferences change at different stages of their lives.
The model assumes generations of voters choose their team, Democrats or Republicans, based on their cumulative life experience — a “running tally” of events. By using Gallup’s presidential approval rating as a proxy for those events, Yair Ghitza, chief scientist at Catalist, and Andrew Gelman, a political scientist and statistician at Columbia University, were able to estimate when political preferences are formed.

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When Beliefs and Facts Collide

By BRENDAN NYHAN

The New York Times - July 5, 2014

Do Americans understand the scientific consensus about issues like climate change and evolution?
At least for a substantial portion of the public, it seems like the answer is no. The Pew Research Center, for instance, found that 33 percent of the public believes “Humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time” and 26 percent think there is not “solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades.” Unsurprisingly, beliefs on both topics are divided along religious and partisan lines. For instance, 46 percent of Republicans said there is not solid evidence of global warming, compared with 11 percent of Democrats.
As a result of surveys like these, scientists and advocates have concluded that many people are not aware of the evidence on these issues and need to be provided with correct information. That’s the impulse behind efforts like the campaign to publicize the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists believe human activities are causing global warming.

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Why PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi Can't Have It All

"If you ask our daughters," she said in a frank interview on work-life balance, "I'm not sure they will say that I've been a good mom."

Conor Friedersdorf

The Atlantic - Jul 1 2014

ASPEN, Colo.—While interviewing Indra K. Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiC0, at the Aspen Ideas Festival Monday*, David Bradley, who owns The Atlantic, asked two questions that elicited as frank a discussion of work-life balance as I've seen from a U.S. CEO. Below is a lightly edited transcript. The second question was preceded by a brief discussion of Anne-Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."

Q. You come home one day as president of the company, just appointed, and your mom is not that impressed. Would you tell that story?
This is about 14 years ago. I was working in the office. I work very late, and we were in the middle of the Quaker Oats acquisition. And I got a call about 9:30 in the night from the existing chairman and CEO at that time. He said, Indra, we're going to announce you as president and put you on the board of directors... I was overwhelmed, because look at my background and where I came from—to be president of an iconic American company and to be on the board of directors, I thought something special had happened to me.

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Book Review: The Globalization Paradox

Book Review: The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can’t Coexist by Dani Rodrik

Reveiwed by Kate Saffin

The School of Economics and Political Science - April 14, 2012

Dani Rodrik is Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University and has been a vocal critic for over a decade of what he sees as the unbridled tide of globalisation present in today’s worldwide economy. Rodrik’s 1997 book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? was hailed as one of the best economics books of that decade by Business Week, and was a forerunner to The Globalisation Paradox, in which Rodrik sets out the perils of financial globalization without any constraints, as he says perfectly evidenced by the most recent financial crisis and the rapid domino effect that it had around the world.
He cautions that the crisis was predictable and that economists – both academic and practising – became blind to obvious pitfalls because they believed too strongly in their own invented narrative: “markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful”.
Rodrik believes in the power of globalisation to lift millions out of poverty and create widespread good but only if it is done more thoughtfully. The paradox is essentially that in order for globalisation to bring proper economic benefits that are broadly distributed throughout society, national democracies need to be strengthened and international rules need to be in place, that protect all players, whilst still allowing for manoeuvrability and enterprise. This is in contrast to the oft-cited doctrine that the true powers of globalisation can only be harnessed when there is a complete free flow of capital with minimal regulation.

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