Impressions from Paris: Women Creatives in Interwar Years France

Edited by Sylvie Eve Blum-Reid, University of Florida

‘Impressions from Paris’ studies the contributions of various women artists and writers who lived in Paris during the Interwar Years, from the 1920s to 1940. The “Roaring Twenties” constituted years of experimentation and freedom to test new techniques and lifestyles at a time affected by serious political changes leading to World War II. Their trajectories have left traces that can be mapped out, studied, and addressed today, a hundred years later. The volume revisits their experiences through various lenses that include art history, gender, fashion, literary analysis, psychology, philosophy, as well as film and food. The volume revisits the artistic, literary, and journalistic contributions of women worldwide, including France, as they flocked to Paris from the 1920s to 1940. The overall principle lies in the inclusion of female painters, visual artists, and writers from diverse international and national backgrounds. Scholars who participate in the volume explore the possibilities presented in a modern literary and artistic history while building on previous scholarship. Two seminal books and a documentary film inspire this project: Shari Benstock’s ‘Women of the Left Bank. Paris 1900-1940’ (Texas UP 1986) and Andrea Weiss’s ‘Paris was a woman. Portraits from the Left Bank’ (HarperSanFrancisco 1995), which in turn produced an eponymous film (Greta Schiller/Andrea Weiss 1996). These works highlight the community of women artists, editors and writers during the interwar years in Paris. There is scholarship in the area, although most of it is scattered in single monographs, crossing various genres, and various languages, from (recent) graphic novels, to fiction, biographical studies, cultural histories as well as scholarly artistic and literary studies.

The Holy Warrior: Osama Bin Laden and His Jihadi Journey in the Soviet-Afghan War

2nd Edition

Reagan Fancher, Texas Woman’s University

Fought between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet-Afghan War provided vital combat experience for Osama bin Laden and his senior lieutenants in al-Qaeda, allowing them to hone their newly acquired skills in guerrilla warfare to later support Islamist insurgencies worldwide. Yet the ruthless al-Qaeda chief’s success depended on the Soviet leadership’s reluctant prolonging of its military occupation out of fear of leaving Afghanistan in hostile hands. As relative latecomers to the ferocious Afghan frontlines, the inexperienced Arab fighters benefitted militarily from the combat training unwittingly provided by their Soviet foes. After skillfully obtaining this command and battle experience by working within the wartime atmosphere, bin Laden channeled al-Qaeda’s efforts in a global jihadi campaign targeting a second superpower and its allies. While allegations of U.S. support for the Arab jihadis have contributed to a popular image of bin Laden and al-Qaeda as C.I.A. creations, the historical facts appear to demonstrate that the combat opportunities provided by the Soviet occupation forces played a far larger role in transforming them into seasoned guerrilla fighters. In this second edition, Reagan Fancher updates and expands his monograph in an Afterword elaborating on the contemporary U.S.-U.K. perceptions of bin Laden's wartime actions and their results as he applied his battle-honed guerrilla tactics, judo skills, and recruitment capabilities in tactically helping Yemen's anti-communist Salafi guerrillas to emerge victoriously in their country's 1994 Civil War before concluding with an assessment of the founding al-Qaeda leader's impact on history. It offers an opportunity for today's decision-makers to learn from history and avoid creating new generations of Osama bin Ladens.

Women, Children, and the Collective Face of Conflict in Europe, 1900-1950

Edited by Nupur Chaudhuri, Texas Southern University and Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

Europe was in turmoil during the first half of the twentieth century. The political stability that emanated from nineteenth-century political liberalism began to break down, reaching climaxes in the Great War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. Revolutions in Russia and Spain threatened parliamentary governments, and the Armenian genocide that began in 1915 foreshadowed the systematic destruction of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Dictators seized power and established authoritarian regimes that stymied democratic expression and censored the press. Much of the scholarship on each of the conflicts has tended to focus on the military (male) and the civilian (female) binary. Women and children experienced every conflict during this tumultuous period as civilians, consumers, victims, exiles, and combatants. As histories of women and war suggest, there are exciting new areas of research and scholarship that resist simplistic binaries. Women were not simply civilians or victims. They were actors in the minutiae of wars, revolutions, dictatorships, and genocides. Children were present in these conflicts and not invisible, as many histories suggest. They too were actors and often politicized by propagandist literature and sectarian education through their own experiences and the politics of their families. This collection seeks to complicate the child/ adult distinction and examine the experiences of women and children as lenses to view a more collective face of conflict. While the volume brings to attention conflicts in Europe, the editors acknowledge the global ramifications of the revolutions, wars, and genocides, as well as the multitude of individual experiences. This collection seeks to expand understanding of the personal as the political in European conflicts from 1900-1950. We believe the focus on women and children offers a diverse perspective on five tumultuous decades of European history.

The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect

Visual Arts Series

Edited by Nancy Wellington Bookhart, Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

'The Aestheticization of History and the Butterfly Effect: Visual Arts Series' introduces the audience to philosophical concepts that broach the beginning of the history of Western thought in Plato and Aristotle to that of more modern thought in the theoretician Jacques Rancière in which the main conceptual framework of this anthology is predicated. The introduction is mainly concerned with Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible, which is the arrangement of things accessible to our senses, what we experience in real-time and space— compartmentalization and categorization of all things. These things do not just involve tangible items, but audible speech, written language, and visibilities. Rancière’s theory of the regimes of art is undertaken as the unfolding of the distribution. Such is evoked in the various genres of visual art forms, from two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional sculptures and architectures. Understanding the aesthetic regime of art is crucial for grasping how art performs time travel. One way of understanding this phenomenon is in terms of embodied philosophy imbued vis-à-vis art forms, which are subsequently challenged by contemporary artists. The contributing essays examine these reiterations, reevaluations—performances. Aesthetics is a term deriving from the 18th-century European Enlightenment. It is here that aesthetics as the study of beauty is probed for its political potential after the failure of the French Revolution. Many major thinkers during this period signed on to the aesthetic moment, recognizing that Reason in its present state failed to develop humankind beyond barbarism. J.E.B. Stuart's statue is part of an equestrian theme that approximates the Western canon of power and class in the pursuit of domination. But such power and domination will be dethroned in the restaging of history and the redistribution of said canon. This reimagining of the form not only alters perception but constitutes a new narrative.

Revisiting Diaspora Spaces in India: A Contemporary Overview

Edited by Joydev Maity, Raiganj University, India

This edited volume is a detailed and critical study of Indian diaspora writings and its diverse themes. It focuses on dynamics and contemporary perspectives of Indian diaspora writings and analyzes emerging themes of this field like the experience of the Bihari diaspora, migration to Gulf countries, the relation between diasporic experience and self-translation, uprootedness and resistance discourse through ecocritical praxis and many more. With the aid of a subtle theoretical framework, the volume closely examines some of the key texts such as 'Goat Days, Baumgartner’s Bombay, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Circle of Reason', and authors including Shauna Singh Baldwin, M.G. Vassanji, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, V.S. Naipaul and others. The book also explores diaspora literature written in regional language and later translated into English and how they align with the fundamental Indian diaspora writings. A significant contribution to Indian diaspora writings; this volume will be of great importance to scholars and researchers of diaspora literature, migration and border studies, cultural, memory, and translation studies.