Slavs and Tatars: Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (2013)

Beginning as an investigation into the apparently disparate events that bookend the twentieth and twenty-first century – the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Revolution in Iran – Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz traces unlikely points of convergence in Iran and Poland’s economic, social, political, religious and cultural histories.

Drawing on Slavs and Tatars’ multi-disciplinary practice encompassing research, installations, lecture-performances and print media, this publication embraces new contributions in the form of essays, interviews, and archival presentation on subjects that range from seventeenth-century Sarmatism to the twenty-first-century Green Movement, taking in along the way, tales of the Polish Exodus, Wojtek the bear, craft, hospitality, Passion plays and taziyeh and the political lessons of a Polish slow burn-revolution for contemporary Iran.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China and is joined here by Agata Araszkiewicz, Ramin Jahanbegloo and Adam Michnik, Mara Goldwyn, Shiva Balaghi and Michael D. Kennedy.

Edited by Mara Goldwyn
Publisher Book Works and Sharjah Art Foundation in association with Raster, Warsaw
ISBN 9781906012427
184 pages

authors

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Alberto Toscano: Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010)

A genealogy of fanaticism—unearthing its long history, before it became a tool in the Clash of Civilizations.

The idea of fanaticism as a deviant or extreme variant of an already irrational set of religious beliefs is today invoked by the West in order to demonize and psychologize any non-liberal politics. Alberto Toscano’s compelling and erudite counter-history explodes this accepted interpretation in exploring the critical role fanaticism played in forming modern politics and the liberal state. Tracing its development from the traumatic Peasants’ War of early sixteenth-century Germany to contemporary Islamism, Toscano tears apart the sterile opposition of ‘reasonableness’ and fanaticism. Instead, in a radical new interpretation, he places the fanatic at the very heart of politics, arguing that historical and revolutionary transformations require a new understanding of his role. Showing how fanaticism results from the failure to formulate an adequate emancipatory politics, this illuminating history sheds new light on an idea that continues to dominate debates about faith and secularism.

Publisher Verso, 2010
ISBN 184467424X, 9781844674244
277 pages

review (Steven Poole, The Guardian)
review (Evgeni V. Pavlov, Rethinking Marxism)
review (Tom Eyers, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books)

publisher
google books

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querelles-net, Rezensionszeitschrift für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (2000-2011-) [German]

querelles-net erschließt die Vielzahl fachspezifischer, inter- und transdisziplinärer Veröffentlichungen im Bereich der Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung/Gender Studies. Wissenschaftliche Rezensionen geben einen Überblick über wichtige Publikationen und aktuelle Forschungsschwerpunkte. Die fortlaufend aktualisierte Bibliographie informiert über die Neuerscheinungen des Feldes.

querelles-net erscheint seit 2000 in Ergänzung zu Querelles. Jahrbuch für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (1996 ff.).

querelles-net ist Teil des Publikationsförderprogramms zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung an der Freien Universität Berlin.

Redaktionsleitung: Marco Tullney
Redaktion: Valeria Raupach, Anita Runge, Marco Tullney
Published by Freien Universität Berlin
ISSN 1862-054X
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany License (from Issue 2009 / 1)

PDF (Vol 12 Issue 2; 2011; EPUB)
View online (all issues; HTML articles)