This chapter continues the story of Sofia’s water supply, beginning with the political turmoil that marred urban fabrics and economies across the Ottoman Balkans from the 1790s to the 1820s and ending in 1912 when, after a long series of failed attempts, post-Ottoman Sofia received its first modern water supply system. I emphasize the similarity in the predicaments that shaped the Ottoman and Bulgarian policies in the fields of urban planning, underground infrastructures, and natural resource management. I explain how a series of extreme human-made and natural phenomena, including banditry, war, and intensified seismicity limited the capabilities of the Ottoman authorities to accomplish their modernizing intentions. In post-Ottoman Bulgaria, the modernization of urban fabrics was seen as a statement of the superiority of the nation-state over its former imperial master. However, in a series of attempts to meet the water needs of the national capital’s constantly expanding population, the post-Ottoman authorities found themselves continually unable to come up with solutions superior to the water supply practices of their predecessors. The chapter argues that throughout the long nineteenth century Sofia’s water supply functioned within the bounds of the system established by the Ottomans.

There is a certain flip-flop mentality at play when it comes to assessing the green revolution. In many popular accounts, in reflections by scientists, or in policy discourses, the green revolution often comes across as all good or all bad. In the context of the prevailing charged debate around the subject, it may be better to assess the green revolution with a historical contextualization that highlights the contingencies and pitfalls of agrarian transformation. Its history reveals that HYVs are no magic wand that can transform agrarian lives for the better anywhere, anytime. A historical analysis also implores us to not to criticize the green revolution for not solving every problem of poverty and underdevelopment.

This chapter examines the way in which the Holocaust has been brought into conversation with understandings of the modern world, with a strong focus on historical and sociological accounts (though recognizing the place of the Holocaust in postmodern literary and critical theory.) It shows the multiple ways in which concepts of modernization, modernity, and the modern have been deployed, be it to establish the Holocaust’s paradigmatic or normative character, or the reverse. It illustrates the paradoxical character of efforts to highlight the Holocaust’s distinctiveness while harnessing it to a pervasive and generic “modernity.”

This chapter focuses on ways to understand the Vietnam War through the operation of race in US interventions during the 1960s. As part of the inquiry, it examines friction between the United States and Panama in 1964 and the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. France’s legacy in Vietnam and the US adaptation of French racialized colonial policies provide a backdrop for the war. The Cold War, rather than territorial annexation or economic exploitation, provided the chief rationale for the US presence in Vietnam and provided a path for particularly American forms of racism to emerge there and in areas of US domestic life that were affected by the conflict. In the interim, Vietnam served as a laboratory in which various theories about modernization and development were evaluated and carried out. The experiences of American minorities in the military are documented, including officials’ efforts to control dissidence in the ranks. African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans experienced the war in somewhat different ways, but all found themselves confronted by leading assumptions and practices about their minoritarian status. The war led many to see themselves as racially defined in a struggle whose costs were disproportionately borne by people of color amidst discrimination at home and by Vietnamese combatants abroad. As a result new sensibilities led to transformation in American civil society.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

Focusing on journalists’ training between 1960 and 2015, this chapter captures the enduring strength of colonial logic effectuated through nonjournalistic actors, such as the education field. It shows how curricula focused on Western canonical thought reinforce a sense of liminality in a field already perceived as out of touch. It discusses the role of journalism education in inculcating specific normative assumptions about how the fields should work on the continent. It argues that journalism education now, just as at the dawn of independence, is such that the profession is heavily moored on Western understandings of journalistic doxa.

This chapter examines novels by both male and female writers who published some of their mostprominent works in and around 1884, to address issues and themes that illustrate generalarguments about the 1880s and beyond. Authors and their works are presented as aheterogeneous group of men and women whose views pose multiple perspectives on theconnection between Argentine literature and politics. Miguel Cané, Eugenio Cambaceres, JuanaManuela Gorriti, Raimunda Torres y Quiroga, Antonio Argerich, and Lola Larrosa comment oneducation, reading, writing, literature, and family relations, reflecting the frenetic changes inWestern industrialized societies at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the globalanxieties that these transformations brought to individuals across classes and territories. Theformation of Argentine literature can only be thought of as an unfinished process, with multiplesources, and in connection with other nations and regions. Setting the year 1884 as themoment in which to find the literary bases of the Argentine canon is an exercise that allows usto trace, instead of a clear origin for Argentine national literature, the germ of multiple possibleaccounts of its foundation.

The year 1963 is special for Julio Cortázar: he publishes Rayuela (Hopscotch) and visits revolutionary Cuba. The year before one of his stories was adapted into a film (La cifra impar [Odd Number]) and, as Ángel Rama points out in his essay “El boom en perspectiva” (included in the volume Más allá del boom: literatura y mercado) the sales of his books start to increase steadily: 10,500 in 1964, 49,000 en 1967, almost 80,000 in 1969. The Rayuela phenomenon is but one in a myriad transformations that were taking place in the cultural and literary fields: the end of the chasm that had separated mass audiences from Argentinean literature, the Latin-Americanization of the intellectual and artistic fields, the transformation of the publishing industry with the rise of Editorial Sudamericana, among others (in 1962 Eudeba’s edition of Martín Fierro had become a bestseller). Starting with Rayuela and other works published those years (such as Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo, which shared the Kennedy prize with Cortázar’s novel), this chapter questions the relationship between fiction and politics in a very troubled period of Latin American history.

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters concerned with the institutional development of the gacaca courts, their formation and deformation. In conjunction, these chapters chart the transition from legalism to lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda, one of two explanatory pathways traced in the book. By carefully dissecting the temporally and spatially embedded mechanisms and processes by which elites of the Rwandan Patriotic Front maneuvered to create modified arrangements of things past, these chapters excavate the microfoundations of the authoritarian rule of law in Rwanda. This chapter traces the obscure beginnings of the idea of gacaca in pre-genocide Rwanda, then accounts for the modernization of this social imaginary in the late 1990s.

How regions emerge as political, social and economic entities, how they are conceptualized and how they come to provide a basis for identities around which political relations are configured are the major themes of this chapter. It includes an account of the idea of regional society in conceptualizing regional formations as well as attention to the role of area studies in the post-war period of decolonization and the Cold War. Also implicated in the emergence of area studies is the modernization paradigm that continues to underpin ideas about regional development in the global South. The final section addresses the framework for analysis offered by postcolonial approaches and suggests that the lens needs to be adjusted to take account of important instances of non-Western colonialism in Oceania while also offering a more critical perspective on the often taken-for-granted binaries of colonizer–colonized, domination–subordination, and repression–resistance.

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers.

This chapter explores the limits of Lyndon Johnson’s capacity to empathize with and understand the peoples of the decolonizing world during his presidency and the implications of his experience for the America he left behind. It traces Johnson’s view of the decolonizing world in the context of the Cold War, showing how his understanding of revolutionary nationalism and the social, political, and economic problems left behind by European colonialism evolved – or failed to evolve – alongside his increasingly progressive definition of democracy at home. Acknowledging his truly ambitious vision of a “global Great Society,” which promised innovative global health, education, and anti-poverty initiatives to the Third World, the chapter ultimately shows how Johnson failed to fulfill his promises to redefine US national interests in the world around compassion for the marginalized. Instead, in his dealings with Third World leaders, he often reverted to the kind of transactional power politics that had served him so well in the Senate, failing to see how central the value of self-determination was to anti-colonial movements and their representatives. In the final analysis, this chapter uses Johnson’s example to investigate the limitations of compassion in US foreign relations more broadly.