Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989

Description

1989 bore witness to a number of seismic events; The fall of the Berlin Wall, protests at Tiananmen Square, the US invasion of Panama, and many more. These notable moments inspired an array of visual, sonic and literary texts that can tell us much about this watershed moment. This edited collection examines these products of 1989 to explore the sense of transformative immediacy, which defined this memorable year, and show how the events of 1989 set the path for the 21st century. Gathering together scholars across a range of disciplines, Reading the New Global Order examines specific texts to reveal key transnational issues of that year, and to highlight fundamental questions about the nature and significance of 1989 as a global moment. From speeches, manifestos and novellas, to a pop album, this book raises questions about what constitutes a 'text' in the study of history and what they can reveal about their point in time. Taken together, these chapters highlight 1989 as a cultural, intellectual and political landmark of the 20th century through the global events it saw and the texts it produced.

Kirrily Freeman is Associate Professor of History at Saint Mary's University, in Halifax, Canada. Her publications include Bronzes to Bullets: Vichy and the Destruction of French Public Statuary, 1940-1944 (2009) and Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-edited with John Munro. John Munro is Lecturer in United States History at the University of Birmingham, UK. His publications include The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945-1960 (2017) and Reading the Postwar Future: Textual Turning Points from 1944 (Bloomsbury, 2019), co-edited with Kirrily Freeman.

I am grateful for the thinkers willing to hurl themselves into the strange ending that is 1989 to find what is still alive, persistent, emergent. This book of engaged and engaging essays takes on that task, and if it arrives one-third of a century later it comes with perfect timing, at a moment when we are tangled in questions of whether the coils of nostalgia and the snares of repetition can mean anything other then revanchist violence and the stasis of circling the drain. It's a good book for grim times. It reminds me that if history is always ending this means it is always about to begin - that we live still, endure still, in the moments before history can truly commence, before actual emancipation. Ending up at that beginning is not inevitable but neither is catastrophe. We'll need to fight a lot, and we'll need to know a lot, and this book helps. * Joshua Clover, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California Davis, USA * Freeman and Munro have written a fascinating volume that illuminates the complexities of 1989. By focusing on 1989's global contours, they reveal how the year marked a new era in racial, ethnic, gendered, national, spatial, environmental, and affective reforms while also challenging previous historical interpretations. The volume offers a bold intervention! * Tiffany N. Florvil, Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico, USA *