Browsing by Subject "Communism"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The clarity of the Cold War: truth and literary communism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the era of postmodern globalization.
    (2012-07) Gill, Meredith Morgan
    This dissertation examines the cultural logic of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as a symptom of postmodern globalization. Following Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1947 proclamation that Cold War propaganda should be crafted as "clearer than truth," this study investigates the complicated relationships among truth, production, and interpretation that emerged in similar manners between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War period. In particular, I consider literary, visual, and critical texts that contest a logic of truth which seeks to dissociate truth from its conditions of production. In so doing, I assert that a second Cold War took place between a global creative class, which has been termed "the multitude," and the (unwittingly) allied forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accordingly, I argue that the Cold War cannot be understood simply as a battle between East and West, capitalism and communism, two world orders, or disparate modes of production. In chapter one, I explore the transition to postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, to detail the changing conditions for aesthetic and political dissent against the neo-liberal management of American capitalism and the socialist management of Soviet state capitalism. I explore diplomatic correspondences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as well as a number of examples of aesthetic dissent ranging from popular magazines to Soviet subcultures to Leftist American avant-garde visual art and a ten-year old American schoolgirl's quest to discover the truth about the Cold War. In chapter two, I provide a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a meta-fictional, "autobiographical" novel about political life during the Cold War period. I read this text alongside Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, to examine the complexities of locating truth that have resulted from postmodernity's complication of the distinction between subjects and objects. Chapter three presents a historical case study of how the concept of truth was contested within samizdat, the underground late-Soviet self-publishing movement. In particular, I look at Metropol, a 1979 samizdat literary anthology, which, I argue exemplifies a form of literary communism within the creative block of actually lived "communism." The fourth and final chapter explores the autobiography of Assata Shakur--communist, former Black Panther, and escaped convict who writes from socialist Cuba. I argue that the complex interplay of narrative forms in her text, as well as her use of intuition as a methodology, exposes a logic of truth that is non-representational, points to similarities between late capitalist and prison temporalities, and radically remaps the discursive parameters of the Cold War.
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    Organizing in the Depression South: a communist's memoir
    (MEP Publications, 2001) Allen, James S.
    In 1930 Alabama, the Great Depression was pushing both sharecroppers and urban workers from poverty into starvation. Jim Crow segregation and lynch law perpetuated semifeudal conditions; Black civil and political rights were nonexistent. Into this nightmare came 24-year-old James S. Allen and his wife Isabelle as organizers. Combining stealth and bravado, they started the weekly Southern Worker, published in secrecy but widely circulated as an open publication of the Communist Party. Their aim was "subversive," to change the social order, to uproot its remnants of slavery, and to humanize relations between Blacks and whites with socialism as a future goal. The Southern Worker became the organizing tool to shatter taboos with nonsegregated trade-union and civil rights meetings, to form the first racially integrated unions of sharecroppers, and to rescue victims of Southern courts. The Allens were eyewitness to the brutality, murder, and arson endured and resisted by African Americans in the Deep South. Covering the Scottsboro case as a reporter, James Allen learned details (included here) unrecorded in standard histories. This political memoir records the heavy toll paid, in arrests, beatings, and lynchings, by Black and white Communists and their allies in struggle. James and Isabelle Allen's front-line soldiering suggests reconsideration of the starting date conventionally assigned to the Civil Rights movement.
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    Representing communism: discourses of heritage tourism and economic regeneration in Nowa Huta, Poland.
    (2008-11) Otto, Judith Emily
    This geographical case study of the `new town' of Nowa Huta - a Soviet-financed district of Kraków built for Poland's largest steelworks and its workers in the 1950s -- explores the representations of place produced for tourist consumption and their relationship to neoliberalizing discourses of economic regeneration. Since 1989, Nowa Huta has suffered from a tarnished image due to its associations with the repudiated communist regime. In the last several years, however, local entrepreneurs have begun to organize tours for Western visitors eager to see beyond the mass-market tourism of Krakow's Old Town, while local residents, dismayed by the image of their district in the popular imagination, have begun to find new ways of rebuilding its reputation. My project identifies alternative discourses about Nowa Huta that challenge its dominant representation as a dreary urban wasteland and a failed social experiment. Moreover, this struggle to control space echoes a much larger issue that resonates through all post-socialist countries: how the communist past is reframed to support specific representations of national identity. This case study makes clear the desires of the state (at multiple scales) to marginalize emphasis on the communist period in order to forge new national identities and to attract global capital. Understanding the congruence (or lack thereof) between tourist-driven entrepreneurship, grassroots identity formation, and economic development activity is essential in assessing the long-term viability of communist heritage tourism, and indeed, the potential for these states to rise out of positions of marginality within the European Union and the global economy.