Laurie Anderson's Big Science

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Alexander Reed
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Big Science ◽  
Gendered Identity ◽  
Opera House ◽  
Love Letter ◽  
Artistic Voice ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Cold War

Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of “now” when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson’s artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record’s grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately, in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.

Israel's Moment

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Herf
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Cold War

Israel's Moment is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.

scholarly journals Negotiating Cold War Culture at the Crossroads of East and West: Uplifting the Working People, Entertaining the Masses, Cultivating the Nation

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabina Mihelj
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Working People ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Economic Conflict ◽  
Cold War History ◽  
East West

Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, our understanding of Cold War history has changed considerably. The wave of new research spurred by the opening of archives and opportunities for novel East-West comparisons threw into sharper relief aspects of the Cold War contest that had received little attention previously. It has become increasingly clear that the Cold War was not only a military, political, and economic conflict, but also one profoundly implicated in, and shaped by, key transformations in twentieth-century culture. Capitalizing on the increased accessibility of primary sources from former socialist states, recent research has provided valuable insights into the politics of everyday culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and we have seen as well the publication of several transnational accounts of the cultural Cold War spanning the West and the East.

Between Global and Regional Narratives

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan J. Citino
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Mena Region ◽  
Current Events ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Regional Languages

The expansion of U.S. power across the Middle East has led to a convergence between what had previously been distinct historical fields. As U.S. foreign relations scholars turn their attention toward the Middle East and as Middle East historians address the implications of American imperialism, both groups have produced new research on the Cold War era. Since 2001, Rashid Khalidi, Juan R. I. Cole, and Ussama Makdisi have reexamined American foreign policy during the Cold War to understand the antecedents of current events. With the evolution of U.S. diplomatic history into a more cosmopolitan international history, its practitioners have consulted sources in regional languages. Recent scholarship has incorporated the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into global narratives based on the themes of superpower rivalry, decolonization, and the struggle for development. While these global narratives help to counter regional exceptionalism, historians of the Cold War would also do well to read more Middle East historiography. The growing significance of American power for the MENA region calls for greater collaboration between the two fields on common interests that they have developed, at least so far, mostly in isolation.

International practices

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emanuel Adler ◽  
Vincent Pouliot
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Strategic Interaction ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
International Action ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Cold War

In this article, we approach world politics through the lens of its manifold practices, which we define as competent performances. Studying International Relations (IR) from the perspective of international practices promises three key advances. First, by focusing on practices in IR, we can understand both IR theory and international politics better or differently. World politics can be conceived as structured by practices, which give meaning to international action, make possible strategic interaction, and are reproduced, changed, and reinforced by international action and interaction. This focus helps broaden the ontology of world politics, serves as a focal point around which debates in IR theory can be structured, and can be used as a unit of analysis that transcends traditional understandings of ‘levels of analysis’. We illustrate what an international practice is by revisiting Thomas Schelling's seminal works on bargaining. Second, with the help of illustrations of deterrence and arms control during the Cold War and of post-Cold War practices such as cooperative security, we show how practices constitute strategic interaction and bargaining more generally. Finally, a practice perspective opens an exciting and innovative research agenda, which suggests new research questions and puzzles, and revisits central concepts of our discipline, including power, history, and strategy.

scholarly journals The Research on China’s Foreign Policy in the Cold War Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liang Zhi ◽  
Shen Zhihua
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Age Distribution ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
The North ◽  
China’S Foreign Policy ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
Normal University ◽  
New Research ◽  
The Cold War

China was a very important regional power that influenced the fundamental pattern of confrontation and détente between the two blocs. With the emergence of new historical documents and the adoption of new methods, Chinese scholars have conducted a few discussions on China’s foreign policy during the Cold War period since 2001. Their research activity is important for at least three reasons: first, thanks to the analysis of new historical material Chinese scholars have opened up many new research questions; second, it has constantly enlarged the field of analysis focusing on high level external contacts and lower strata grassroots exchange; third, a research team characterised by a reasonable age distribution is being formed in China. Moreover, China has already created two major institutions for scientific research and documentary collection located in the south and the north of the country: the Centre for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University and the School of History at Capital Normal University. Certainly, there are still shortcomings in Chinese research on China’s foreign policy during the Cold War and Chinese scholars themselves are attempting to address the problems.

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