Unlike anticorruption institutions elsewhere, China’s anticorruption practices follow a self-regulatory model: it is regulated by the very institution that is targeted by anticorruption. Compared with its role in judicial affairs, the Party’s involvement in anticorruption investigation is much more forefront, direct, and prominent. In this chapter, I track the origin and institutional evolution of the Party’s disciplinary system during 1927-2012. I point out that the Party’s institutional design is founded on the cardinal principle to preserve the unified (absolute) command of the Party Center. Thereby, how to reconcile between the imperative to uphold this principle and the need to provide a measure of autonomy for disciplinary institutions to avoid capture has been the main theme of the disciplinary institution-building process. The introduction of a tiered interlocking disciplinary decision-making structure, the segmented investigation process, and the “dual-leadership” model are the direct outcomes of the Party’s efforts to balance the conflicting needs mentioned above. These arrangements had fueled the rise of the CCDI but also brought several problems and challenges, including legal deficiency, jurisdictional frictions, resource shortage, incentive issues, and abuse, which had set the stage for Xi Jinping’s unprecedented anti-corruption campaign and disciplinary reform upon his taking power in 2012.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

The standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. John Updike in his criticism explicitly placed himself in the realist tradition of American fiction he traced to William Dean Howells, and Updike’s connection to realism was widely recognized. But the Rabbit novels do not merely continue the older fictional conventions of realism. Rather, they make use of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness narration, and they describe aspects of life absent from earlier realism. They regard mass culture as a significant element of the world they represent, and provide an alternative to the theory of mass culture proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the first two of thesde, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux, music is a significant part of this. What Updike’s novels suggest is not just a new way of telling a story, but that there was a new reality as electronic mass media took up an increasing amount of attention.

Messianism and imperialism permeate the schizophrenic Russian state. A lack of borders is praised as an attribute of Russia’s schizophrenic ‘state-civilisation’ identity. Russia’s schizophrenic identity is especially visible in its relationship with Ukraine and the West, where it is exhibited in an angry, xenophobic and militarily aggressive manner. Russia’s ‘state-civilisation’ is touted as superior to the West, irrespective of the fact social data disproves this claim. Russians claim they are more spiritual than the public in the Western countries, and yet Church attendance in Russia is similar to that found in the EU and half that found in Ukraine and the US. Russia’s schizophrenic messianism and imperialism should be understood in five ways. Firstly, Soviet nostalgia is combined with a schizophrenic blaming of Vladimir Lenin for cultivating an ‘artificial’ Ukrainian identity. Secondly, Russia’s fascist dictatorship accuses Ukraine of being ‘nationalist/fascist/Nazi’ while supporting the far right in Europe. Thirdly, Russian claims of Ukraine dominated by ‘nationalism/fascism/Nazism’ are not evident in their electoral unpopularity. Fourthly, Russia’s colonial history of genocide and the imperial nature of the Soviet Union are obfuscated by using Soviet anti-colonialist propaganda to fight alleged Western colonialism in the Global South and against the ‘Global Majority’. Fifthly, Russia’s superior civilisation as the guardian of true European values, which have been lost in the EU and ‘collective West’, compensates for Russian feelings of dependence, poverty and humiliation.

August Wilson’s Century Cycle, which consists of ten plays written between 1984 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and 2005’s Radio Golf, with each of the ten plays taking place in a different decade of the twentieth century, must be understood as essentially realist. Not only is Wilson’s general motive for his project—to represent African American experience during the twentieth century—clearly realist, but each play is in dialogue and staging in keeping with the theatrical realism going back to Ibsen and Chekov, and informing the American dramatic tradition of O’Neill, Miller, Hansberry, and many others. The Century Cycle, however, takes this realism in a profoundly new direction in the representation of the African American experience over the course of the twentieth century. The Cycle has as much in common with nineteenth-century novels as it does with these theatrical predecessors. Wilson wants to represent the complexity of social life and its contradictions over the span of 100 years by giving us ten dramatic moments. Yet Wilson’s realism is complicated by his inclusion of fantastical elements within otherwise entirely plausible dramas. I show that realism prevails despite such elements as ghosts and a 300 year-old woman.

Putin’s xenophobia is an outgrowth of the belief of Russian imperial nationalists the West is supporting an ‘artificial’ Ukraine and Ukrainian people as a Russophobic conspiracy to divide the ‘Russian’ people and weaken Russia. The Kremlin conjures up a Ukrainian hand in practically every unpleasant event for Russia. Russia has fluctuated between seeking to catch up with the West and viewing the West xenophobically. Russia’s pursuit of good relations with the West was an aberration: Mikhail Gorbachev was preceded by Joseph Stalin and Soviet conservative leaders, while Boris Yeltsin was succeeded by imperial nationalist Vladimir Putin. For liberalisers, catching up with the West was to modernise Russia/USSR, improve its economic and military potential, and attract foreign investment, and technology. For imperial nationalists, the West is a negative ‘Other’ that has imposed alien values on the USSR/Russia, which is spiritually superior. The West and Ukraine are attacked in four ways. Firstly, Western interference in Eurasia, which has always been viewed as Russia’s exclusive sphere of influence. Secondly, Russia’s ruling siloviki are anti-Western xenophobes and possess a Soviet conspiracy mindset. Thirdly, anti-Western xenophobia is linked to a cult of war and search for internal and external enemies. Fourthly, Russian imperial nationalist obsession with Ukraine.

The 1910 Revolution uncovered deep racial divisions among Oaxaca’s residents who lived along the Costa Chica. Afro-Mexicans and Mixtecos had a history of political and military mobilizations dating back to independence, and they served against one another on some occasions. During the revolution, Mixtecos embraced Emiliano Zapata’s radical land reform agenda. Afro-Mexicans, in contrast, aligned with the more conservative wing of Venustiano Carranza’s supporters. Members of both groups had numerous reasons to mobilize militarily, but why did they choose to fight on opposing sides? Using evidence from newspapers, legal cases, and official correspondence, this chapter analyzes the roots of these divisions. The evidence suggests that Mexico’s liberal economic transformation essentially compounded the social, economic, and cultural factors that pushed Costa Chica residents in opposite directions. Afro-Mexicans and Mixtecos therefore had divergent experiences during this economic and political transformation, which eventually led to violent confrontations during the revolution and beyond.

Chapter 5 moves from Washington, DC, to New York and details the brief collaboration between Siegfried Kracauer and Gregory Bateson, the husband of Margaret Mead, in the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art as an intriguing encounter in American intellectual history, the history of film and media studies, and the history of German Studies. I look at the Frankfurt School as part of the 1940s memorandum culture and thereby reconsider the historiography of critical theory during this formative period within a broader intellectual landscape, that is, in dialogue and institutional competition with further projects to study the Nazi German enemy, in this case, the Culture and Personality School. My argument takes Bateson’s and Kracauer’s analyses of a song in the Nazi movie Hitlerjunge Quex as a case in point and develops some of Kracauer’s and Bateson’s most important methodical innovations and insights into Nazi German propaganda that underlie Kracauer’s famous film historical study From Caligari to Hitler.

I remember vividly the first time I heard this amusing little ditty. My late grandfather was an avid storyteller, and one especially hot afternoon during my summer vacation in Kolkata, he ventured to talk to me about the Second World War. He had been only a boy in Jessore (east Bengal) when the War struck, but he had remembered his abhigyata (that is, how he had experienced the War). It was not just a memory of being afraid of air strikes, what the Japanese would do if they actually came to Bengal, the horror of the famine of 1943 and the (later) tribulation of making a cross-border journey in 1947. It was also a memory of what he called ‘the sahebs being afraid’. This statement was followed by a chuckled reciting of the ditty quoted earlier.

The introductory Chapter 1 sketches an outline of the book’s object of study: the gray literature produced by American and European intellectuals during World War II in the study of Nazi Germany. I point to two unexpected protagonists, who rose to the challenge of the moment during World War II: Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. I describe the improvised intellectual networks, funded by government institutions, universities, as well as philanthropies and point to Hans Kohn’s career to spell out some of the complexities one encounters while studying the European-American encounter during World War II. The second part of the introductory chapter approaches the memorandum through its fictional rendering in Sinclair Lewis’ Gideon Planish, before diving into the making of one of its most famous texts, the “American Century” by Henry Luce.

This chapter introduces the analytical framework of the book. It presents a typology of two modes of governance – the command-and-control and popular corporatism logics – with examples from China. It presents each logic in its extreme form to emphasize their differences in the dynamic relation between the state, platform firms, and users. In the command-and-control logic, platform firms are intermediaries that follow and implement the policies of the state, while popular corporatism emphasizes the important role of platform firms. According to this alternative framework, large profit-driven platform firms have bargaining power against the state. That implies they not only refuse to comply without being authorized to do so by the state but also receive concessions from the state. The source of such business power stems from data that is produced by citizens. While positive incentives draw users to platforms, users may engage less or move to alternative platforms when given choices. In this way, users signal their bottom line to platforms through the actions taken on the platform. In authoritarian contexts, this dynamic may lead to conflicts with demands from political elites, thus motivating noncompliance and resistance by platforms.

This chapter focuses on past literature on resource-wealthy countries and examines how alluvial diamond wealth may present unique challenges for states. State theory is discussed, and the “opaque” state concept is compared and contrasted with these. Then, an overview of different arguments that have been made to explain the relative decline of Zimbabwean institutions is given. Most of these can fall into three central categories: the psychology of leaders in ZANU-PF, the failure of economic policy, and external sanctions. The large diamond find in eastern Zimbabwe in 2006 is presented as a “critical juncture” for Zimbabwean institutions. Thus, this chapter places Zimbabwe in the overall population of cases when it comes to resource wealth and compares and contrasts how past approaches to resource politics, which have heavily focused on the oil sector, provide a roadmap for examining alluvial diamond wealth. However, this research must also be built upon as different resources, particularly a rapid increase in alluvial diamond wealth in the case of Zimbabwe, bring various challenges to state capacity and democratization.

Fifty of the Soviet Union’s sixty-nine years were led by Joseph Stalin and conservative Communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. The USSR experienced only three short periods of liberalisation. Stalinism holds a strong influence over Soviet history, Putin’s socialisation into Soviet life and Soviet Russian imperial nationalism. Cults of the Great Patriotic War and Stalin are closely linked. Stalin is Putin’s hero alongside Peter II and Catherine I. Stalin defeated the Nazis, extended Soviet territory and built a new Soviet empire and transformed the USSR into a superpower with nuclear weapons. The USSR was viewed as an equal with the US in a multipolar world. A cult of Stalin and lack of introspection of his and Tsarist imperial crimes have had four important ramifications. Firstly, these have facilitated the evolution of Putin’s regime from authoritarianism to a fascist dictatorship. Secondly, they have facilitated a continued disrespect for human life at home towards Russians, Chechens and other national minorities, and abroad, towards Georgians, Syrians and Ukrainians. Thirdly, these have fed a growing cult of war, foreign military interventions, messianism, territorial expansionism and belief in Russia’s natural condition is to be an empire. Fourthly, the continuation of Russian imperial innocence and perpetration of war crimes in Ukraine.

This chapter centers the early Mexican War of Independence as it took place in Veracruz and its Sotavento hinterland from 1812 until 1814 through the story of José Antonio Martínez, Veracruz’s most significant Black Insurgent. It assesses the ways by which Afro-descendant agency in Veracruz defined the regional political, military, and ideological parameters of the Insurgency through the figure of a formerly enslaved Black man turned Insurgent leader. It argues that Martinez’s growth and role as a Black Insurgent leader echoed Insurgent ideological stances of equality and belonging that challenged Spanish exclusions of Black men from New Spain’s wartime politics. Following the narrative arc of Martínez’s Insurgency, this chapter explores the rise and fall of Black-led rebellion in Veracruz’s hinterland ironically resulting from the imposition of Criollo nationalist identity and belonging tropes under the frameworks of Mestizaje, which excluded Blackness from Mexican ideological and leadership roles as early as 1814.

Royal tribute was a tax based on ancestry that linked free people to the colonial government and the Spanish monarch. For families, royal tribute was about more than the immediate pressure of tax payment. Registration as a taxpayer could alter a family’s status, or calidad, for generations. Using tax rolls and case studies of people who resisted registration, this chapter argues that families took varied strategies to try to keep off the tax registers and establish alternative expressions of their loyalty to the Spanish crown. The cases demonstrate the interpersonal, political, and gendered conflicts that arose when individuals with African ancestry resisted the obligation of royal tribute. Officials and bureaucrats denounced the actions of those who confronted agents of the tribute regime. By refusing registration, or discouraging others from complying, men and women prompted officials to reflect on what loyalty from Afro-descendants entailed.