The Drama of Dictatorship uncovers the role played by rival Communist parties in the conflict that culminated in Ferdinand Marcos's declaration of martial law in 1972. Using the voluminous radical literature of the period, Joseph Scalice reveals how two parties, the PKP and the CPP, torn apart by the Sino-Soviet dispute, subordinated the explosive mass struggles of the time behind rival elite conspirators. The PKP backed Marcos and the CPP, his bourgeois opponents. The absence of an independent mass movement in defense of democracy made dictatorship possible. The Drama of Dictatorship argues that the martial law regime was not fundamentally the outcome of Marcos's personal quest to remain in power but rather a consensus of the country's ruling elite, confronted with mounting social unrest, that authoritarian forms of rule were necessary to preserve their property and privileges. The bourgeois opponents of Marcos did not defend democracy but, like Marcos, plotted against it.

Focusing on portrayals of Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia in U.S. films, magazine and newspaper articles, books, plays, speeches, and other texts, Benjamin Alpers traces changing American understandings of dictatorship from the late 1920s through the early years of the Cold War. During the early 1930s, most Americans' conception of dictatorship focused on the dictator. Whether viewed as heroic or horrific, the dictator was represented as a figure of great, masculine power and effectiveness. As the Great Depression gripped the United States, a few people--including conservative members of the press and some Hollywood filmmakers--even dared to suggest that dictatorship might be the answer to America's social problems. In the late 1930s, American explanations of dictatorship shifted focus from individual leaders to the movements that empowered them. Totalitarianism became the image against which a view of democracy emphasizing tolerance and pluralism and disparaging mass movements developed. First used to describe dictatorships of both right and left, the term "totalitarianism" fell out of use upon the U.S. entry into World War II. With the war's end and the collapse of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, however, concerns about totalitarianism lay the foundation for the emerging Cold War.

Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000) was a Jewish Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and intellectual. A cosmopolitan writer concerned with the problems of Jewish identity and history, Bassani was deeply affected by the persecution and deportation of Italian Jews under Mussolini. His personal experience of this period and its aftermath was fundamental to the creation of his masterwork, the Romanzo di Ferrara (Romance of Ferrara). In The Drama of the Assimilated Jew, Lucienne Kroha makes Bassani’s personal and literary journey accessible to English-language readers. Kroha’s close, intertextual reading of Bassani’s novels and short stories reveals Bassani’s focus on the issue of Jewish masculinity and his profound engagement with the work of Freud, Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann, whose ideas he appropriated and re-cast to construct the fictional story of his own personal struggle.

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.

An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot D az, H ctor Tobar, Cristina Garc a, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form --- that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.

This book reflects on the role of Argentinean cinema in the construction of social memory. It observes the melancholic scene of Argentina’s first decade post-dictatorship as a context without the necessary social understanding to frame the traumatic experiences of the 1976-1983 military repression. Hence, it interprets such conditions as facilitating processes of intersubjective forgetting, fostered by sociopolitical institutions organizing the discourse of truth within a neoliberal re-democratization endeavor. The book proposes that the non-hegemonic cinema of 1985-1996 operated as a symbolic mediation with which a post-dictatorial, poetic, negotiated truth emerged within the historical process of collective memorialization of social trauma. The book draws from research on Latin American cinema and popular culture, subaltern studies, memory and trauma studies, and the notion of cultural hegemony.

Click here to hear Anne-Marie Brady's BBC World Service radio documentary titled "The Message from China" China's government is no longer a Stalinist-Maoist dictatorship, yet it does not seem to be moving significantly closer to democracy as it is understood in Western terms. After a period of self-imposed exclusion, Chinese society is in the process of a massive transformation in the name of economic progress and integration into the world economy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is seeking to maintain its rule over China indefinitely, creating yet another "new" China. Propaganda and thought work play a key role in this strategy. In this important book, noted China scholar Anne-Marie Brady answers some intriguing questions about China's contemporary propaganda system. Why have propaganda and thought work strengthened their hold in China in recent years? How has the CCP government strengthened its power since 1989 when so many analysts predicted otherwise? How does the CCP maintain its monopoly on political power while dismantling the socialist system? How can the government maintain popular support in China when the uniting force of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology is spent and discredited? What has taken the place of communist ideology? Examining propaganda and thought work in the current period offers readers a unique understanding of how the CCP will address real and perceived threats to stability and its continued hold on power. This innovative book is a must-read for everyone interested in China's growing role in the world community.

For hundreds of years, dictators have ruled Russia. Do they still? In the late 1980s, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev launched a series of political reforms that eventually allowed for competitive elections, the emergence of an independent press, the formation of political parties, and the sprouting of civil society. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, these proto-democratic institutions endured in an independent Russia. But did the processes unleashed by Gorbachev and continued under Russian President Boris Yeltsin lead eventually to liberal democracy in Russia? If not, what kind of political regime did take hold in post-Soviet Russia? And how has Vladimir Putin's rise to power influenced the course of democratic consolidation or the lack thereof? Between Dictatorship and Democracy seeks to give a comprehensive answer to these fundamental questions about the nature of Russian politics.

The subject of Detente, Democracy and Dictatorship has been with us since the breakdown of the Cold War and the termination of the Soviet system, indeed, if not since the origins of Bolshevism. No more vigorous critic of the uneasy co-existence of democracy and dictatorship exists than the greatest writer that the Soviet era of Russian history produced, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.This third edition is based on major addresses, especially aimed at Americans, delivered in 1975 in Washington, D.C. and New York, and again, in 1978, at Harvard University in Cambridge, all on the subject of detente, democracy and dictatorship. It also includes Solzhenitsyn's final 2007 interview with the German publication Der Spiegel.These major statements are brilliant and forthright comment on the risks of confusing ideology with diplomacy. But more than that, they summarize the Soviet debacle, the theoretical underpinnings, and distill Solzhenitsyn's multi-volumed masterpiece, the Gulag Archipelago.