Eurozine Review Dance mania and diplomatic parleying In L'Homme, sets the historical record straight on women at the Congress of Vienna; Soundings speaks to Nancy Fraser about a new wave of feminism; Genero celebrates Audre Lorde's feminist biomythography; Kultura Liberalna discusses the fourth revolution with Adrian Wooldridge; Osteuropa slams the silence of German specialists on Russia's interference in eastern Ukraine; Krytyka notes the rise of Ukrainian historians as public intellectuals; and Ord&Bild explores the violence in never being seen for who you really are. L'Homme 2/2014 Until Hazel Rosenstrauch's Congress mit Damen ("Congress with ladies"), published in German last year to great acclaim, one might have been forgiven for thinking that diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna of 1814/15 was conducted solely among men, with women having no influence on the reorganization of Europe. However, as Glenda Sluga points out in L'Homme (Austria), the Austrian historian Hilde Spiel had already attempted to put the historical record straight in the 1960s. As Spiel wrote at the time: "Never before −− or after −− has a group of statesmen and politicians, assembled solely and exclusively to deal with matters of commonweal interest, laboured so extensively and decisively under the influence of women −− not in Münster, nor in Rastatt, not in Versailles, nor yet in San Francisco." Two aristocrats from the Russian empire are of particular interest to Sluga: the Duchess of Sagan and Princess Katharine Bagration. The comparatively "innocent" bourgeois Anna Lullin−Eynard from Geneva also played a not insignificant part, including as the only woman invited to a diplomatic dinner by Talleyrand. Sluga considers these three "ambassadrices of a new kind, assisting their husbands in the soft democracy that was to become a fundamental part of modern international politics". Moreover: "Adding these women to the history of the Congress goes some way to reconnecting the history of 'dance mania' with the history of diplomatic parleying that took place in ballrooms as much as rooms of state, where statesmen and supplicants gathered at the rooms of the female leaders of Viennese society, and men and women engaged the pressing politics at stake in 1814." Women's revolutionary activism: In 1918, a century after the Congress of Vienna, Countess Károlyi and Rosika Schwimmer formed the women's An article from www.eurozine.com 1/6 debating club in Hungary. For Judith Szapor, this constitutes "a unique and previously unexplored case of women's activism" in the era of central European revolutions. The club served as a meeting place for politically active women, with the fight for women's suffrage being a priority. "The Women's Club foreshadowed and reflected the fundamental political changes in women's politics and politics at large; and as an institution straddling the private and the public, it demonstrated the limits of women's activism even in revolutionary times." The full table of contents of L'Homme 2/2014 Soundings 58 (2014) In one of several articles in Soundings (UK), bridging the gaps between different generations of feminist thinkers, Nancy Fraser explains how "ideas from the university flowed very easily into the movement and vice−versa" during the era of second−wave feminism. But "when feminism became academicized, it was harder to make these links". Nevertheless, Fraser suspects that, given the hunger for new thinking in all arenas after the 2008 crash, this is changing once again. Intergenerational feminism: Alison Winch considers the risk that feminism will become "an archived and reified movement": "Postfeminist culture frames feminism as no longer relevant, as a thing of the past, because 'gender equality' has become common sense. This is of course a 'mystique': its poster girls are middle−class, white, thin, heteronormative, able−bodied. And it is reinforced by the health and beauty industries, as well as the mainstream media, which fetishize a particular type of classed and raced youthfulness as a desirable commodity." "Participating in this new sexual contract is likely to be self−destructive and divisive", concludes Winch, "not just because hypervisibility is highly selective and short−term (it only lasts until youthful beauty fades), but because the lack of opportunities for reward throughout a woman's lifetime, now made worse by cuts to state provision, exposes the contract as a lie." All the more need then for "a more robust infrastructure" capable of supporting an intergenerational feminism and overcoming tensions such as those stemming from the perceived online/offline divide. Many young activists "first cut their teeth on in feminist digital culture", forging new alliances online via UK netmagazines such as the f word and Feminist Times and, in the US, Jezebel, Feministing and Racialicious. International relations: Ahead of Soundings' Kilburn Manifesto Conference next month, the journal carries a further instalment of the manifesto, entitled "Rethinking the neoliberal world order". The full table of contents of Soundings 58 (2014) Genero 18 (2014) An article from www.eurozine.com 2/6 There's a focus on African−American feminism in Genero (Serbia). Emilia Epstajn of the Museum of African Art in Belgrade looks at the construction of gender and race from 1851 onward, the year that Sojourner Truth (born into slavery c. 1797) delivered her famous speech "Ain't I a Woman?" at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention. And Maja Milatovic celebrates Audre Lorde's biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Milatovic considers Lorde's "visionary feminist text" as offering "the tools for rebuilding, reimagining and reclaiming marginalized subjectivities across differences". A project already suggested the quotation with which Milatovic prefaces her article, taken from Lorde's essay "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house", published two years after Zami: "In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower." As Lorde herself once remarked, Zami counters the "assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background". Milatovic's conclusion: "Destabilizing whiteness in spaces of contestation thus enables mutual recognition, dialogue and growth" and "re−centring the work of black feminists in discussions on racism and thus challenging the dominance and centrality of white scholarship" is the way forward. Also: Nada Bobicic's analysis of essays and philosophical fragments by Ksenija Atanasijevic, one of first female professors at Belgrade University. The full table of contents of Genero 18 (2014) Kultura Liberalna 311 (2014) Last year, Economist writer Adrian Wooldridge published The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, his sixth book with co−author John Micklethwait. (Micklethwait was editor−in−chief of The Economist, until stepping down to make way for Zanny Minton Beddoes, the first female editor to head up the weekly magazine since it was founded over 170 years ago. Beddoes takes up the reins next week.) The book provides the background to Lukasz Pawlowski's interview with Wooldridge in Kultura Liberalna (Poland). Wooldridge critiques free−marketeers for their willingness to shrink or even get rid of the state, suggesting that if this is what they really want, they go and sample life in Somalia where the state is virtually absent. He also dismisses the Left's reluctance to reform the state for fear of subverting it. Indeed, Wooldridge remains optimistic about the state's capacity to adapt so that it can head off the rise of radical political parties throughout Europe: An article from www.eurozine.com 3/6 "I think that the future trend will be towards taking power away from transnational institutions because they are divorced from people's lives, too distant and too big. People want something they can identify with, culturally and politically." The full table of contents of Kultura Liberalna 311 (2014) Osteuropa 9−10/2014 The weekend's shelling of Mariupol marked a new escalation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, as the number of internally displaced persons in the country swiftly approaches a million. Osteuropa (Germany) devotes a timely issue to the war in Donbass. Editors Manfred Sapper and Volker Weichsel recommend, together with contributors such as Andreas Heinemann−Grüder, nothing less than a "robust international mission to secure the lines for a ceasefire. [...] Only then will Russia be deprived of the dominance that allows it to escalate the conflict." The EU's strategy: Thomas Vogel draws attention to the way in which individual member states' bilateral relations with Russia have consistently compromised any attempts to forge a coherent policy at European Union level concerning Russia. The EU will have to deal with this, says Vogel, if it is to convey exactly what is expected of Russia as a "strategic partner", the oft−repeated phrase found in numerous official documents. Only then might member states feel any obligation to adhere to a common policy. The silence of German experts: Alluding to Horkheimer Anna Veronika Wendland remarks provocatively: "Whoever is not prepared to speak about Russia should also remain silent about Ukraine. And yet, this mixture of violence beyond national borders, organized crime and local government corruption, conducted under the aegis of a ragbag of rightwing ideologies and in the name of institutions such as the 'strong state' and the Moscow patriarchy: all this requires explaining and clear political statements. But to cut to the chase: obviously recognized specialists themselves fear delivering any such thing." It's this, says Wendland, that allows German intellectuals and certain politicians on the Left to get away with geopolitical over−simplifications and the superficial presentation of local specificities, rather than delving into Ukrainian cultural life as being at the crossroads of European cultures and treating Ukrainians as capable of making their own history. Perhaps then a more severe view would finally be taken of Russian interference in the country. The full table of contents of Osteuropa 9−10/2014 Krytyka 5−6/2014 An article from www.eurozine.com 4/6 In Krytyka (Ukraine), Julia Ioffe demands that some thought be given to possible outcomes, should western sanctions bring about Putin's fall: "Before the West celebrates the possibility of Putin being forced from the throne, we should consider what might come after him. This is not an argument against sanctions or against political change in Russia. But the country's history tells us that prolonged economic malaise often brings about political turmoil, the result of which has never been a democratic Russia." The presence of the past in public life: Historian Volodymyr Sklokin discusses the rise of Ukrainian historians as public intellectuals. The absence of the term "intelligentsia" in most discussions of the transformation of the Ukrainian intellectual community after 1991 hints at the direction that the newly established public sphere has taken, bringing the role of the historian to the forefront of public life: "As a scholar, a historian has to discover the truth about the past. As an intellectual, a historian is responsible for creating and sustaining a public sphere in which a public discussion about politics takes place −− a discussion that results in the development of critical public opinion". Expert vs dilettante: Ukrainian musicologist Olesya Naydiuk challenges the widespread opposition between "a music critic as an expert" and "a music journalist as a dilettante". The debate has received growing attention following the publication of Lidiya Melnyk's book Music Journalism: Theory, History, Strategies (2013, in Ukrainian), which Naydiuk reviews in her article. The title is the latest contribution to a scene that first emerged in 1989, when a department of music criticism was established at the Kyiv Conservatory. The full table of contents of Krytyka 5−6/2014 Ord&Bild 3−4 (2014) Ord&Bild (Sweden) devotes an issue to violence as seen, among other places, on the streets of Stockholm in 2013, or discussed in European twentieth−century philosophy or analysed in terms of the psychopathology of colonialism. Unreported violence: Sociologist Evin Ismail publishes a poetically charged text on the unreported violence that preceded the riots in the Stockholm multi−ethnic suburb of Husby in May 2013. With iterative insistence, Ismail discusses the violence inherent in segregation, class struggle and racism: "I want to talk about the violence in being surveilled, stopped and searched. I want to talk about the violence in never being seen for who you really are." The colonial world is violence: Discussing the role of violence in imperialism and western democracy, Patricia Lorenzoni (incoming Ord&Bild editor recently appointed together with Ann Ighe) writes: "In the heyday of An article from www.eurozine.com 5/6 imperialism, the expansion of European civilization was often understood as synonymous with peace. If civilization and violence are exclusive concepts, violence is defeated by the expansion of civilization −− even when it is done by military means." According to Lorenzoni there is a crucial difference between Hannah Arendt's and Walter Benjamin's discussions on violence and Frantz Fanon's analysis. Whereas Arendt and Benjamin focus on a discrete conceptual analysis, Fanon insists that violence permeates all of society: "The colonial world is violence". Short story: In "City of Black Sheriffs" by Steve Sem−Sandberg, a Swedish journalist recounts memories of his journeys to Milovice, a city controlled by the black sheriffs. But attempting to document and bring to life the city's dark past, the narrator comes to question the responsibility of the writer. "The only thing you can hope for", he states, "is to manage to freeze life just for a moment, to capture one day, one hour, when your life was protected and invulnerable." Also: Photographer Katarina Despotovic captures the expansion of Gothenburg city centre in black and white prints; and Catharina Thörn on gentrification and urban frontiers. The full table of contents of Ord&Bild 3−4 (2014) Published 2015−01−28 Original in English © Eurozine An article from www.eurozine.com 6/6