Book reviews—Comptes rendus

Early Europe—L'Europe antique

Maurice SARTRE, L'Asie Mineure et l'Anatolie d'Alexandre à Dioclétien (IVe siècle av. JC—IIIe siècle op. JC), Annand Colin, Collection U, Paris, 1995.

Peter KINGSLEY, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic Empedocles and Pythagorean tradition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995, ix + 422 p., ISBN 0–19–814988–3.

Central and eastern Europe—L'Europe centrale et orientate

Catharina LIS, Jan LUCASSEN & Hugo SOLY eds, Before the Unions: wage earners and collective action in Europe 1300–1850, Cambridge University Press, International Review of History Supplements, Cambridge, 1994,194 p., ISBN 0–521–47954–1.

M.S. ANDERSON, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748, Longman, London & New York, 1995, xi + 248 p., ISBN 0–582–05951–8.

C.W. INGRAO, ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1994, xvi + 339 p., ISBN 1–55753–047–5.

P.W. SCHROEDER, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, xxii + 894 p,. ISBN 0–19–822119–3.

David E. BARCLAY, Frederick William IV and the Prussian Monarchy 1840–1861, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, 335 p., ISBN 0–19–820430–2 (German ed., Anarchie und guter Wille. Friedrich Wilhelm IV. und die preussische Monarchic, trartsl. by Marion Müller, Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1995, 535 p., ISBN 3–88680–463–1).

Jörg BABEROWSKI, Autokratie und Justiz. Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsstaatlichkeit und Rückständigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreieh 1864–1914, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt/M. (Veröffentlichungen des Max‐Planck‐Instituts für Europälsche Rechtsgeschichte, Ius Commune. Sonderhefte, Srudien zur Europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 78), 1996, xi + 845 p., ISBN 3465028325.

La vision de Ian Kershaw sur le pouvoir d'Hitler sur les Allemands. Deux ouvrages novateurs sur le nazisme traduits en français

Ian KERSHAW, L‘opinion allemande sous le nazisme: Bavière 1933–1945, CNRS‐Editions, collection “Histoire du XXe siècle”, Paris, 1995, 160 p.

Ian KERSHAW, Hitler: essai sur le charisme en politique, traduit de l'anglais par Jacqueline Carnaux, Gallimard, collection “NRF essais”, Paris, 1995, 240 p.

The idea of ‘Mitteleuropa’

Joseph ROTHSCHILD, Return to Diversity: a political history of East Central Europe since World War II, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1993, 299 p., ISBN 0–19–507382–7.

Peter STIRK, ed., Mitteleuropa. History and prospects, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1994, 176 p., ISBN 0–7486–0449–9.

Europe since 1945—L ‘Europe depute 1945

Geoffrey BEST, Law and War since 1945, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994, xiv + 434 p., ISBN 0198219911.

Anne‐Marie DURANTON‐CRABOL, L'Europe de l'extrême droite de 1945 à nos jours, Editions Complexe, Paris, 1991. 222 p.

Themes in cultural history—Etudes d'histoire culturelle

Mario MIEGGE, Il sogno del re di Babilonia, Feltrinelli, Milan, 1995, 210 p., ISBN 88–07–10178‐S.

Reba N. SOFTER, Discipline and Power: the university, history, and the making of an English elite, 1870–1930, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1994, viii + 308 p., ISBN 0–8047–2383–4.

Robert WOHL, A Passion for Wings: aviation and the western imagination, 1908–1918, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1994, vii + 320 p., ISBN 0300057784.     

International Solidarity in reproductive justice: surrogacy and gender-inclusive polymaternalism

Reproductive justice and gestational surrogacy are often implicitly treated as antonyms. Yet the former represents a theoretic approach that enables the long and racialised history of surrogacy (far from a new or ‘exceptional’ practice) to be appreciated as part of a struggle for ‘radical kinship’ and gender-inclusive polymaternalism. Recasting surrogacy as a dynamic contradiction in itself, full of latent possibilities relevant to early Reproductive Justice militants’ family-abolitionist aims, this article invites scholars in human geography and cognate disciplines to re-think the boundaries of surrogacy politics. As ethnographies of formal gestational workplaces, accounts of gestational workers’ self-organised resistance, and readings of the attendant public media scandals show (taking examples from India, Thailand, and New Jersey), there is no good reason to place these new economies of ‘third-party reproductive assistance’ in a ‘realm apart’ from conversations about social reproduction more generally. Surrogacy, I argue, potentially names a practice of commoning at the same time as it names a new wave of accumulation in which clinicians are capitalising on the contemporary – biogenetic-propertarian, white-supremacist – logic of kinmaking in the Global North. Ongoing experiments in the redistribution of mothering labour (‘othermothering’ in the Black feminist tradition) suggest that ‘another surrogacy is possible’, animated by what Kathi Weeks and the 1970s intervention ‘Wages Against Housework’ conceive as anti-work politics. In making this argument, the article revives the concept ‘gestational labour’ as a means of keeping the process of ‘literal’ reproduction open to transformation.     

The Connolly Association,the Catholic Church,and anti-communism in Britain and Ireland during the early Cold War

ABSTRACT

During the Cold War era, the Connolly Association, an Irish republican socialist political organisation in Britain close to the Communist Party of Great Britain, was seen by British Communists as a potential means of winning recruits amongst Britain’s growing post-war Irish community. This view was shared by the Catholic Church, which, amidst the broader ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, placed an increased emphasis on anti-communism in the early post-war years. This article will discuss clerical opposition to the Connolly Association in early Cold War Britain and Ireland, drawing chiefly on diocesan archives and Catholic periodicals.     

Hybrids of the Romantic: Frankenstein,Olimpia, and Artificial Life

Hybride der Romantik: Frankenstein, Olimpia und das künstliche Leben . Dieser Beitrag untersucht Vorstellungen über die Möglichkeit der Erzeugung künstlicher Lebewesen in der Zeit der Romantik und die damit verbundenen Ängste am Beispiel zweier fiktionaler Texte: Mary Shelleys Frankenstein und Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmanns Sandmann. Dr. Franksteins Monster und Dr. Spalanzanis Automat verkörpern – auf unterschiedliche Weise – die Möglichkeit einer Wendung wissenschaftlicher Produkte und insbesondere künstlicher Hybride ins Monströse. Ihre Geschichten thematisieren das Grauen, das vom drohenden Kontrollverlust ausgeht und als der modernen Wissenschaft innewohnende Gefahr selbst nach der Zerstörung der monströsen Kreaturen bestehen bleibt. Der Begriff des Unheimlichen, von Ernst Jentsch und Sigmund Freud mit Bezug auf Hoffmanns Sandmann formuliert und 1970 von dem japanischen Robotiker Masahiro Mori als Phänomen „des unheimlichen Tals“ (Uncanny Valley) weiterentwickelt, erlaubt weitere Einblicke in die Frage nach künstlichen Lebewesen und ihre Interaktion mit Menschen. Summary: Hybrids of the Romantic: Frankenstein, Olimpia, and Artificial Life . This essay analyzes fantasies and fears related to the possible creation of artificial humans in two influential pieces of Romantic literature, namely E.T.A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Both the automaton Olimpia and Dr. Frankenstein's monster are hybrid creatures. These dystopian figures represent the Romantic fear of the loss of control over the outcome of human endeavour, they symbolize the dangers immanent in modern science and technology. As hybrids, Olimpia and Frankenstein's monster are capable of breaking apparently unpenetrable boundaries, such as those between human and non-human, and between life and death. As such, these creatures become “unheimlich” (uncanny), a critical term developed by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, who directly referred to Hoffmann's Sandman. The term “uncanny” was further developed by the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. Mori's investigation of human responses to androids (“Uncanny Valley”), shows the persistence of doubts and fears surrounding artificial humans far beyond the Romantic times, and opens new questions related to the issues of creation, reproduction, hybrids, hubris and gender.