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.     

Reregulating for Freshwater Enclosure: A State of Exception in Canterbury,Aotearoa New Zealand

In this paper, we argue that democracy is increasingly indistinguishable from authoritarianism, in a process that is entangled with neoliberalisms. To build this argument, we examine a case study of central government intervention in regional environmental decision making in Aotearoa New Zealand through the lens of Agamben's “state of exception”. The intervention—unprecedented and unconstitutional—squeezed democratic spaces for decision making about freshwater and sought to smooth the way for capital accumulation. The audacity of government actions indicate, we argue, an abandonment of efforts to disguise neoliberal encroachments on democracy, known as the double truth tactic. Yet we also argue that in identifying this as a state of exception, we can examine it as part of a process and therefore demonstrate the possibilities for counter‐hegemonic actions to emerge.     

史学比较研究如何可能？——刘家和先生《史学、经学与思想》初读记

如何进行中西方史学比较研究以及在新的世界史背景下认识中国史学传统,是当今中国历史学界面临的重要问题,海内外学人倍加关注。刘家和先生长期从事希腊、印度与中国的古史研究,近些年来开始从思想的层面检视中西方史学,因为有着深厚的古史研究基础与通贯中西的理论修为,刘先生总能见人所不能见,于中西史学颇多新识,尤其是在方法上多能予人以启导。当然,由于中西方语文背景与思想进路的迥然不同,双方史学的比较研究,特别是西方的逻辑理性与中国的历史思维如何对接与融通,仍然存在诸多值得进一步深思的问题。     

上博简《诗论》“《汉广》之智”与《诗·汉广》篇探论——并论儒家情爱观的若干问题

上海博物馆藏战国楚竹书的第一部分,即《诗论》,其第10号简和第13号简都提到《汉广》一诗,并且进行了较多评析.这对于解决聚讼不已的《诗@汉广》的"游女"身份及诗旨等问题有很大启示.分析《汉广》诗意,可见诗人实在"不可得"与"不可能"之间犹豫徘徊.事物的"可能"与"不可能",并不受礼义界限的影响,而是基本上与礼义无关的事情.然而,事物的"可得"与"不可得"则是礼义影响的结果.《诗论》简,对于《汉广》一诗的评析在所有关于情爱诗篇的说解中显得尤为深刻而重要.孔子对于《汉广》的评析,与《韩诗外传》、《说苑》所记遇浣女事皆表明了孔子的情爱观.其情爱观的中心是赞成男女在礼义的范围内的情爱,提倡在可能的情况下对于爱情大胆追求,而不是对于男女情爱予以排诋.男女间必须授受不亲"],应当有一条不可逾越的鸿沟,这只是后儒之见,孔子之时尚未出现.     

Interrogating Madrid's “Slum of Shame”: Urban Expansion,Race, and Place‐Based Activisms in the Cañada Real Galiana

Following the spontaneous occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol in 2011, many academic accounts have found these mobilizations new and noteworthy for their technological savvy and networked capabilities. In this article, I argue that such depictions fail to capture both the influence of Spanish urbanism's material conditions on certain disadvantaged populations, and the broad diversity of these contemporary activisms. Looking to struggles over the proposed demolition of a squatter settlement in Madrid, I demonstrate how Madrid's planning has propagated racial imaginaries to legitimate dispossession and subvert anti‐poverty policies. Second, I examine how resistance and contestation emerge out of specific urban experiences of inequality, and transcend traditional modes of activist organizing through the formation of broad coalitions between various civil society actors. In doing so, I argue that Madrid's mobilizations have paradoxically opened new avenues for the inclusion minority voices, against popular understandings that read rising xenophobia during crisis.     

Disability and Social Inclusion: The Blind Songstress in Early Twentieth-Century Guangzhou

This article examines disability as a contested notion of social inclusion by focusing on the blind songstress (guji) in early twentieth-century Guangzhou (Canton). Through personal memoirs, the print press, and institutional documents, this article reconstructs the social life of guji as their experiences intersected with professional community, workplace, and charity. First, I show that the adoption of blind girls from families into training guilds managed by veteran guji was a chosen kinship strategy for blind women since the late Qing period. Second, the commercial sponsorship of guji following the establishment of the Republic not only expanded working opportunities for blind women but also exposed their vulnerability to male-dominated entertainment spheres. Third, the reformist critique of guji as an inappropriate form of sex-related consumption pushed the nascent military government to collaborate with foreign missionaries in “rescuing” blind girls from their professional households. The experiences of guji thus reveal competing ideas of what qualified a disabled person to become a member of society at the beginning of the twentieth century, as work-based inclusion gave way to charitable inclusion as an outcome of shifting social attitudes toward the employment of women with disabilities.