By Viren Murthy
Etienne Balibar. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Duke University Press, 2014. 365 pp.
The concepts of equality and liberty form the core of modern political culture. And yet, the definition of these terms changes depending on the qualifiers that are attached to them. For example, political theorists have long debated distinctions of positive or negative liberty, formal or real equality.
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By Joshua Neves
Yomi Braester. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Duke University Press, 2010. 405 pp.
Robin Visser. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Duke University Press, 2010. 362 pp.
Yomi Braester’s Painting the City Red and Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside offer complementary engagements with urban transformation in P.R. China—though Braester also has a single chapter on Taipei.[1] Each takes as their focus the cultural restructuring that has shaped and been shaped by (post)socialist urbanization and the shifting designs on the city.
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By Nicholas Jon Crane
Fabio Lanza. Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing. Columbia University Press, 2010. 320 pp.
The story of a truly political movement is one of dispersed elements that come together in often unexpected and apparently accidental ways, and also, necessarily, of the movement’s distance from and subsequent re-encounter with the State.
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By Leslie Sklair
Thomas Campanella. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Xiangming Chen. Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Since the 1980s, China has built more skyscrapers; more office buildings; more shopping malls and hotels; more housing estates and gated communities; more highways, bridges, subways, and tunnels; more public parks, playgrounds, squares, and plazas; more golf courses and resorts and theme parks than any other nation on earth—indeed, than probably all other nations combined (Campanella 14).
These words, from the Introduction of Thomas Campanella’s brilliant book, decisively set the scene for what can truly be described as the world-historical phenomenon of how the Chinese authorities working closely with local and transnational entrepreneurs of various types have stormed into the twenty-first century.
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By Peter Hitchcock
Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2007. 420 pp.
This is a brave and provocative book by a writer who gave us some of the most brilliant critiques of geopolitics and geoeconomics of recent years. Arrighi described his projects as comparative historical-sociology which in terms of the works themselves is another way of thinking the world system as such (in contradistinction to the methodologies and conclusions of Wallerstein and Brenner).
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