Books on the topic 'French art song'

This book documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, this book shows that the “Frenchness” of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. The book makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. It shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

Exploring the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), this book examines how and why Baudelaire’s poetry has inspired so many composers to set it to music in different ways. The author proposes a new model for analysing song, through an ‘assemblage’ approach, which examines the complex relationships formed between common features of poetry and music, including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound properties/repetition, and semantics. The model also factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, revealing which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting and where composers diverge in their approach. The specific case studies that make up the second half of the book focus on Baudelaire song sets produced by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, the assemblage model is tested to uncover new findings about what happens to Baudelaire’s poetry when it is set to music. Analysing Baudelaire’s poetry within song settings uncovers richer features of the texts that we might otherwise not see or hear. Examining each song setting in close detail confirms that there are no overt resonances between the types of poems selected for musical interpretation, just as there is no single, perfect ‘ideal’ setting of Baudelaire.

Home to the troubadours and a creative monastic center, twelfth-century Occitania (the south of France) fostered a vibrant musical culture that encompassed both secular and sacred, vernacular and Latin, spanning a wealth of locally cultivated genres. Such musical-poetic impulses reflected and responded to regional practices of courtly love, chivalric ideals, votive worship, monastic theologies, pilgrimage, and Holy War. This book demonstrates the rich cross-fertilizations between early Christian Crusades and two roughly contemporaneous musical-poetic repertories of Occitania: the sacred, Latin Aquitanian versus and the vernacular troubadour lyric. These two repertories are known largely in medieval and musicological studies for reasons apart from the Crusades—for monastic piety and Marian devotion in the case of the versus, and for courtly love and authorial voices in the case of the troubadour repertory. Yet, when considered against unfolding Crusade events, these poetic-musical repertories illuminate shifting Occitanian identities and worldviews as refracted by contemporaneous devotional practices, religious beliefs, and geographies, both physical and metaphoric. The author’s contextual investigations and musical-textual interpretations reveal how Crusade songs distinctively arose out of their southern French environments, at a historical moment when Holy War and new genres of musical composition coincided. Engaging both the outer world and the poet’s subjectivity, Crusade songs shaped regional identities, enacting individual concerns, the communal homeland, religious and military aspirations, and specific historical and geopolitical positions.

After training at the Moscow Conservatory, Alexander Gretchaninov studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg, where he developed his vocal writing technique. In 1911, he published a set of five Baudelaire songs entitled Les Fleurs du mal. They are printed in parallel text, with the French alongside a Russian translation, and include a motif recurring across the set. The analysis covers: (a) the context of composition; (b) the connections established between selected poems; (c) the statistical data generated from the adhesion strength tests; and (d) how the data shape an evaluation of Gretchaninov’s settings of Baudelaire. Analysis reveals that the songs are highly entangled through the way Gretchaninov deforms the fabric of Baudelaire’s verse. Yet the songs are also accretive, because the flexible approach to text-setting enables Gretchaninov to respond to emotive aspects of the poem. These are songs whose complexity suggests that they were designed for highly trained musicians.

Chapter 1 examines the mythologization of the Hmong and other minorities by mainstream performing artists to show how those minorities have been inscribed into Vietnam’s national consciousness through popular music. The chapter traces the early history and migrations of the Hmong into the mountains of Southeast Asia to their formal identification as an ethnic group in French Indochina. From revolutionary songs (ca khúc cách mạnh) in the 1950s and 1960s to independent creative artists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the multivalent superculture that comprises the Vietnamese mediascape has perpetuated a series of stereotypes about the minorities. Songs, artists, and composers are linked to historically situated political developments to illustrate the gradual assimilation of Hmong and other minorities into Vietnamese culture and society.

The British government had not regarded the thirteen colonies, with their different social structures and political systems, as essential parts of the empire as a whole. ‘The Revolution's origins’ explains that when the French threatened to take control of the continent's interior, the colonists did not unite in the interest of the British Empire. American opponents of the Stamp Act, which Parliament passed in 1765, called themselves Sons of Liberty. This group turned resistance into full-scale revolt. The 1767 Townshend Acts, new revenue laws taxing imports into the colonies, ignited renewed political and social agitation, including a boycott of British goods.

Bodin’s experiences in the Netherlands and in England as a member of Anjou’s entourage are recounted, experiences which illustrate both his reputation as a man of learning and his risky explorations of preferment by other than French potentates. His official role in Laon as king’s proctor is described, as is the deteriorating political situation around him notwithstanding Henri III’s efforts at governmental reform. His conduct during the period of League control and consequent siege of Laon is assessed, and his apparent changes of sides are analysed in the light of the arguments presented in Lettres published over his name. The chapter’s final section turns to the programmes which Bodin developed humanist-style for physical, academic, and moral education, recommended to a German prince and to a nephew, and implemented in the upbringing of his own two sons.

This chapter argues that despite formal resemblances, Latin perfect tense BE-periphrases of the type amatus sum ‘I was loved’ are not the historical source of Romance present tense passives like Italian sono amato and French je suis aimé (both meaning ‘I am (being) loved’). Evidence comes from the observation that Late Latin has a very strong preference for the head-final order ‘past participle–BE’, which goes against the otherwise general tendency for the language to move towards a strictly head-initial TP. As an alternative, I propose that amatus sum perfects disappeared from the language, and that the analytic present tense passives are new formations. The Late Latin preference for head-final BE-periphrases is explained in terms of phonological weakening of the auxiliary. I conclude by comparing this phonological process to the oft-discussed grammaticalization of HAVE (habeo) as a marker of futurity.

When Austrian composer Alban Berg was working on his opera Lulu, he wrote three Baudelaire songs as a Konzertaria entitled Der Wein. Premiered in 1930, Der Wein is a large-scale work for voice and orchestra. Berg uses a German translation by Stefan George, but the published score is in parallel texts, accommodating the French verse line. The chapter also considers a ‘hidden’ Baudelaire setting from Berg’s 1926 Lyric Suite for string quartet. The analysis covers: (a) the context of composition; (b) the connections established between selected poems; (c) the statistical data generated from the adhesion strength tests; and (d) how the data shape an evaluation of Berg’s settings of Baudelaire. Evidence suggests that Berg’s settings of Baudelaire are loosely entangled; the highly prescriptive score affects syntax, semantics, and prosody. Yet, because Der Wein has stood the test of time, the settings are deemed loosely accretive.

This chapter describes the recordings of Vera Hall (1902–1964). On October 31, 1940, at the Livingston, Alabama, home of author, painter, and folksong collector Ruby Pickens Tartt, Vera sang “Another Man Done Gone” twice into Lomax's machine. During the first take, the partially filled recording blank ran out of space, abruptly ending the song. The second time, however, Lomax used a fresh side, allowing Vera to include all her verses. Just as she finished, but before he lifted the cutting arm and turned off the microphone, he remarked, “That's perfect.” Lomax's summation saluted more than an unmarred recording. “Another Man Done Gone” became Vera Hall's most celebrated performance. Carl Sandburg recalled listening to it more than a dozen consecutive times during a January 1944 visit to Lomax's Dallas home, later including it in his second folksong anthology and learning it himself. The poet termed it “one of the strikingly original creations of Negro singing art.”

This chapter explores the furniture music of French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Satie's pieces of furniture music are each fundamentally based on a short musical fragment, to be repeated ad lib (at one's pleasure). As such, they are intrinsically monotonous and can retain the attention of the active listener for only a short span before boredom inevitably sets in. Vexations (1893), for instance, is a short piece consisting of four repetitive phrases to be repeated 840 times. Strictly speaking, three sets of furniture music by Satie exist. The first set, from 1917, is composed for flute, clarinet, and strings, plus a trumpet for the first piece. The second set, from 1920 and labeled Sons industriels [Industrial sounds], was performed at the Galerie Barbazanges. The last piece of furniture music for small orchestra from 1923, was commissioned by Mrs. Eugè ne Meyer Jr. of Washington, D.C. Tenture de cabinet préfectoral (approximately: Upholstery for a Governor's Office) was delivered by Satie to furnish the library of her residence.

Rethinking Mendelssohn offers a new perspective on Felix Mendelssohn’s music and aesthetics, arguing for a fresh understanding of the composer, his music, and its central relationship to nineteenth-century culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, the present book sets a new tone for research on Mendelssohn. It challenges the traditional modes of discourse about this composer in moving beyond rehabilitation and source studies to engage in rigorous criticism and analysis, seeking to rethink the issues that shaped Mendelssohn, his music, and its reception from his own day to the present. This volume includes contributions from younger, emerging scholars as well as from some of the most prominent figures outside specialist Mendelssohn circles in order to open up new ways of understanding the composer and set out future directions in Mendelssohn studies. Besides offering fresh accounts of some of his most familiar orchestral pieces, particular attention is given here to Mendelssohn’s contested views on the relationship between art and religion, the analysis of his instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song tradition.

This chapter examines social dances that display national dance formation and how they rise to national status in one country, while other nations identify only one dance for hundreds of years. It first considers examples of Creole dances that have become synonymous with island identity, such as Jamaican reggae, Trinidadian calypso, Dominican merengue, and French Caribbean zouk. It then explores the Cuban dance matrix and its various segments, including Native American dance, Spanish dance, African dance, and Haitian dance. It also traces the development of Cuba's national dances, focusing on danzón, son, and rumba and suggests that national dance depends on relevance to historical conditions, which class/group is in power, and the pertinent cultural values that are encapsulated within dance movement. The chapter concludes by noting how Caribbean dances surface toward the national level, match national concerns, and become attached to the national imagination.

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.

Cet ouvrage collectif rassemble quatorze contributions scientifiques consacrées à La traduction et l’interprétation en Afrique subsaharienne. Le sous-titre Les nouveaux défis d’un espace multilingue se situe au cœur des préoccupations des auteurs, qui allient souvent une expérience professionnelle indéniable à leur statut universitaire. Rédigées en français et en anglais, leurs analyses couvrent au moins sept pays différents, lorsqu’elles ne décrivent pas des réalités et des défis qui transcendent largement les frontières. Les problématiques abordées sont nombreuses et étroitement imbriquées : enseignement multilingue, formation professionnelle des interprètes et des traducteurs, interprétation communautaire, besoins des administrations et des organisations internationales, création de ressources lexicales, ingénierie linguistique… This collective work contains fourteen scientific contributions related to Translation and Interpretation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The subtitle ‘The New Challenges in a Multilingual Space’ is at the heart of the concerns of the authors, who often blend their undeniable professional experience with their university status. Their analyses, written in French and English, cover at least seven different countries, and sometimes describe realities and challenges that largely transcend borders. Numerous issues that are closely intertwined are addressed including multilingual education, professional training of interpreters and translators, community interpreting, the needs of governments and international organizations, the development of lexical resources, language engineering, etc.

An exhaustive biography of French neuropsychiatrist Georges Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904) has never been undertaken. Gilles de la Tourette worked closely with the nineteenth-century founder of neurology in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot. His name is universally known because of the eponymous, disabling syndrome that affects 0.9% of children/adolescents. Unpublished family archives, as well as Gilles de la Tourette’s correspondence with the Parisian journalist Georges Montorgueil, conserved at the national Archives in Paris, were examined together with press and police archives to portray Georges Gilles de la Tourette’s family and professional life in an original light. These archives have never before been studied or made available to the public. How the eponymous syndrome was isolated, the errors initially made in its description, the hidden role of Jean-Martin Charcot, and the disputes with other authors are covered in detail based on multiple sources, original or already published. An in-depth analysis of the genesis of Gilles de la Tourette’s prolific neurological and psychiatric works within their historical context rounds out this biography. Major figures of neurology of the time are also featured—including Freud, Charcot and his son, Brissaud, and Babiński. Interwoven with Gilles de la Tourette’s life and times are discussions of politics, theater, literature, the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, and numerous letters exchanged with Jules Claretie of the Académie Française to highlight his significant involvement in each of these domains. The book concludes with a complete bibliography of all works written by Gilles de la Tourette, compiled for the first time.

The iconic Periodic Table of the Elements is now in its most satisfyingly elegant form. This is because all the 'gaps' corresponding to missing elements in the seventh row, or period, have recently been filled and the elements named. But where do these names come from? For some, usually the most recent, the origins are quite obvious, but in others - even well-known elements such as oxygen or nitrogen - the roots are less clear. Here, Peter Wothers explores the fascinating and often surprising stories behind how the chemical elements received their names. Delving back in time to explore the history and gradual development of chemistry, he sifts through medieval manuscripts for clues to the stories surrounding the discovery of the elements, showing how they were first encountered or created, and how they were used in everyday lives. As he reveals, the oldest-known elements were often associated with astronomical bodies, and connections with the heavens influenced the naming of a number of elements. Following this, a number of elements, including hydrogen and oxygen, were named during the great reform of chemistry, set amidst the French Revolution. While some of the origins of the names were controversial (and, indeed incorrect - some saying, for instance, that oxygen might be literally taken to mean 'the son of a vinegar merchant'), they have nonetheless influenced language used around the world to this very day. Throughout, Wothers delights in dusting off the original sources, and bringing to light the astonishing, the unusual, and the downright weird origins behind the names of the elements so familiar to us today.

As Wesley C. Hogan sees it, the future of democracy belongs to young people. While today's generation of leaders confronts a daunting array of existential challenges, increasingly it is young people in the United States and around the world who are finding new ways of belonging, collaboration, and survival. That reality forms the backbone of this book, as Hogan documents and assesses young people's interventions in the American fight for democracy and its ideals. Beginning with reflections on the inspiring example of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Hogan profiles youth-led organizations and their recent work. Examples include Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in the NAFTA era; Oakland's Ella Baker Center and its fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; the Dreamers who are fighting for immigration reform; the Movement for Black Lives that is demanding a reinvestment in youth of color and an end to police violence against people of color; and the International Indigenous Youth Council, water protectors at Standing Rock who fought to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect sovereign control of Indigenous lands. As Hogan reveals, the legacy of Ella Baker and the civil rights movement has often been carried forward by young people at the margins of power and wealth in U.S. society. This book foregrounds their voices and gathers their inventions--not in a comprehensive survey, but as an activist mix tape--with lively, fresh perspectives on the promise of twenty-first-century U.S. democracy.

Scholarship on the civilization of Polish Jews has tended to focus on elite culture and canonical literature. This volume focuses on the less explored theme of Jewish popular culture and shows how it blossomed into a complex expression of Jewish life. In addition to a range of articles on the period before the Second World War, there are studies of the traces of this culture in the contemporary world. The volume aims to develop a fresh understanding of Polish Jewish civilization in all its richness and variety. Subjects discussed in depth include klezmorim and Jewish recorded music; the development of Jewish theatre in Poland, theatrical parody, and the popular poet and performer Mordechai Gebirtig; Jewish postcards in Poland and Germany; the early Yiddish popular press in Galicia and cartoons in the Yiddish press; working-class libraries in inter-war Poland; the impact of the photographs of Roman Vishniac; contemporary Polish wooden figures of Jews; and the Kraków Jewish culture festival. In addition, a Polish Jewish popular song is traced to Sachsenhausen, the badkhn (wedding jester) is rediscovered in present-day Jerusalem, and Yiddish cabaret turns up in blues, rock ‘n’ roll, and reggae. There are also translations from the work of two writers previously unavailable in English. Space is given to new research into a variety of topics in Polish Jewish studies. The review section includes an important discussion of what should be done about the paintings in Sandomierz cathedral which represent an alleged ritual murder in the seventeenth century, and an examination of the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1968.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.