This chapter opens the book with a puzzle. It starts by delineating two tales about the Chinese internet – one emphasizing state control and the other digital innovation and the rapid growth of China’s tech industry. To make sense of these two seemingly contradictory stories of greater openness to support digitalization while also increasing political control – also referred to as digital dilemma – the chapter introduces the core elements of popular corporatism and looks at how it differs from the more familiar command and control that builds on strong hierarchically organized state-centered logics. It considers existing work on digital dilemma and posits that its digital governance approach to the Chinese model is based on the dynamic relationship between the state, platform firms, and citizens. Because voluntary participation of citizens is important for the state to obtain feedback about their policies as well as for the companies to develop their organizational and informational resources in the state–company partnership, it focuses on two examples of digital participatory spaces in this book – social media platforms and the social credit system (SCS) – to illustrate the Chinese model during Hu and Xi’s leaderships.

This chapter delves into the implications of citizen participation in commercial SCS for their support of the state’s digital policies. Unlike the focus on general political trust in Chapter 5, the attention here now turns to assessing support for a specific digital policy. This chapter finds that citizens are highly supportive of state, compared to company, involvement in managing the SCS. It explores potential explanations such as media exposure, social interaction, and potential network effects. However, high levels of state support can only be fully understood once how people experience policy implementation on the ground is taken into account. When these experiences are mostly financial in nature, individuals are more likely to believe that the chances of their data being used for political purposes is low. Therefore, they become more supportive of the state’s involvement in the SCS overall. For most citizens, a primarily financially oriented SCS is acceptable, but its use as a political tool is not.

This chapter explores the methods and theories used in anthropology and music to understand Mexico's African presence and its relevance after the 1910 Revolution. Despite disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical differences at midcentury, Mexican scholars, chiefly anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and musicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster, focused on the colonial period and the postrevolutionary present. Their histories glossed over the nineteenth century. Their debates about how to study Afro-Mexico in the 1940s—and the research methodologies that buttressed them—elucidate why the history of nineteenth-century Afro-Mexico continues to be ignored in the historiography about Mexico’s place in the African diaspora. The intellectual and cultural histories explored in this chapter also explore why concerns about Mexico’s African presence have continued to loom over the field of Afro-Mexican studies.

Erik H. Erikson’s book Childhood and Society, started, as I show in Chapter 7, with his “remote” psychoanalysis of Adolf Hitler. I present the transatlantic history of the concepts “identity” and “reeducation,” which may serve as a prime example for the impact of the study of Nazi Germany’s alterity on postwar intellectual discourse. The final chapter traces the use of the two concepts in a microhistorical account in order to arrive at macrohistorical revisions. I show how the conception of reeducation migrated from Native American reservations to the wartime pathologization of the Nazi German enemy. Only then – in collaboration with Margaret Mead – it became the name of the policy according to which the United States planned and initially attempted to subject, as occupation power, the postwar German society in order to reintegrate the outcast nation back into the family of man.

Chapter 2 starts with a meditation on David Riesman’s concept of “other-direction,” laid out in his classic study The Lonely Crowd as a theoretical baseline for my book, moving from other-direction to émigré-direction to enemy-direction. I consider various paradigmatic experiences of transatlantic migration and their consequences for American sociality, with a special focus on conceptions theorized by Black intellectuals, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Alain Locke, and their consequences for a symmetrical approach to the intellectual history of American-European collaborations in World War II. The chapter provides a theoretical outline for understanding the sources and aspirations of the cool-headedness observed in these collaborations.

The Epilogue reflects on the afterlife and legacies of the rise of gray literature during World War II. Most of the ephemeral texts produced in the memorandum culture analyzing Nazi Germany were discarded and only few texts survived as part of the historical record. The institutions fostering gray literature on Nazi Germany either focused on new problems or were disbanded entirely. The majority of intellectuals involved in the memorandum culture quickly moved on, some, like Thomas Mann, returning to Europe, and others, like Gregory Bateson, staying on to shape the intellectual life in the United States. The basic practices of World War II text production and distribution, however, had a second life during the Cold War era, as they were employed for the circulation of underground literature in the context of newly emerging artistic groups and political movements.

realism continues to be misunderstood under the influence of 1970s literary and film theory and its continuing import underrecognized in literary and cultural histories. My approach to realism is formalist in the sense that Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction is formalist: it is a “descriptive poetics.” My argument is motivated primarily by what I regard as serious persistent errors in academic discourses.These errors are in large measure the result of arguments within the Left. My goal in this book is not to restore realism to the place Georg Lukács once assigned it as the only politically correct kind of literature, but rather to show the continued vitality of realism in late-20th century American culture