- Table View
- List View
The Latecomer's Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalization of China's Development Finance (Cornell Studies in Money)
by Muyang ChenIn The Latecomer's Rise, Muyang Chen reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance.Over the past few decades, China has become the world's largest provider of bilateral development finance. Through its two national policy banks, the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim), it has funded infrastructure and industrial projects in numerous emerging markets and developing countries. Yet this very surge and magnitude of capital has raised questions about the characteristics of Chinese bilateral lending and its repercussions on the international order. Drawing on a variety of novel Chinese primary sources, including interviews and official bank documents, Chen pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyzes its effects. She compares Chinese policy banks with their foreign counterparts to show that the CDB and China Exim, while state-supported, are in fact also market-oriented—they are as much government organs as they are profit-driven financial agencies that serve both state and firms' interests. This approach, which emerged out of China's particular economic history, suggests that Chinese overseas lending is not merely a tool of economic statecraft that challenges Western-led economic regimes. Instead, China's responses to extant rules, norms, and practices across given issue areas have varied between contestation and convergence.Rich with empirical detail and penetrating insights, The Latecomer's Rise demystifies the little-known workings of Chinese development finance to revise our conceptions of China's role in the international financial system.
Reflections on Stalinism (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
by J. Arch Getty and Lewis H. SiegelbaumReflections on Stalinism distills decades of historical thought and research, bringing together twelve senior scholars of Soviet history who began their careers during the Cold War to examine their views of Stalinism. They present insights into the role of personality in statecraft, the social underpinnings of dictatorship and state terrorism, historians' attachments to their subjects, historical causality, the applicability of Marxist categories to Soviet history, the relationship of Soviet history to post-Soviet Russia, and more. Essays address the transformation of a peasant country into a superpower and the causes and scale of domestic bloodshed. Reflections on Stalinism ultimately tackles an age-old question: Do powerful people make history or are they the product of it?
The Geopolitics of Culture: James Billington, the Library of Congress, and the Failed Quest for a New Russia (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
by John Van OudenarenThrough the lens of James Billington and the institution he led as Librarian of Congress during a key period of US-Russian relations, The Geopolitics of Culture examines culture as a neglected area of US foreign policy. Billington advised presidents and members of Congress and mobilized the resources of the Library of Congress to promote reform in Russia. He believed that rather than preaching to the Russians, the United States should expose the rising generation of Russian leaders to what was best in America and encourage them to rediscover positive elements in pre-Bolshevik Russian culture.The Geopolitics of Culture is the first book to chronicle Billington's influence on US engagement with Russia as it transitioned from communism to democracy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin and back to authoritarianism under Yeltsin and Putin. Drawing on published and archival sources (including recently released papers) and interviews with current and retired Library of Congress staff members, John Van Oudenaren casts new light on this era.Billington's efforts led to a remarkable degree of cooperation between the Library of Congress and Russian cultural and political institutions. Yet these efforts ultimately failed as Putin turned back toward authoritarianism. The experience of the Library of Congress during this period nonetheless holds important lessons for today. Billington believed that a transition to democracy in Russia was essential if the United States was to head off the geopolitical nightmare of a Eurasia dominated by an alliance of hostile authoritarian powers. The "geopolitics of culture" thus remains a challenge for US foreign policy.
We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law (Publicly Engaged Scholars: Identities, Purposes, Practices)
by Yxta Maya MurrayWe Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice. Defined by public protest, rule-breaking, rebellion, and resistance to governmental and institutional abuse, direct-action "artivism" draws on the aims, radical spirit, and tactics of the civil rights and feminist movements and on the struggles for disability rights, queer rights, and immigrant rights to seek legal and social change. Yxta Maya Murray traces the development of artivism as a practice from the Harlem Renaissance to Yoko Ono, Judy Baca, and Marsha P. Johnson. She also studies its role in transforming law and society. We Make Each Other Beautiful profiles the work and lives of four contemporary artivists —Carrie Mae Weems, Young Joon Kwak, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Imani Jacqueline Brown—and the artivist collective Drawn Together, combining new oral histories with sharp analyses of how their diverse and expansive artistic practices bear important aesthetic and politicolegal meanings that address a wide range of injustices.
Byzantine Media Subjects (Medieval Societies, Religions, and Cultures)
by Glenn A. PeersByzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.
Brighter Than the Sun
by Daniel AlemanA timely and thought-provoking story about a teen girl shouldering impossibly large responsibilities and ultimately learning that she doesn&’t have to do it alone from the award-winning author of Indivisible. Every morning, sixteen-year-old Sol wakes up at the break of dawn in her hometown of Tijuana, Mexico and makes the trip across the border to go to school in the United States. Though the commute is exhausting, this is the best way to achieve her dream: becoming the first person in her family to go to college. When her family&’s restaurant starts struggling, Sol must find a part-time job in San Diego to help her dad put food on the table and pay the bills. But her complicated school and work schedules on the US side of the border mean moving in with her best friend and leaving her family behind. With her life divided by an international border, Sol must come to terms with the loneliness she hides, the pressure she feels to succeed for her family, and the fact that the future she once dreamt of is starting to seem unattainable. Mostly, she&’ll have to grapple with a secret she&’s kept even from herself: that maybe she&’s relieved to have escaped her difficult home life, and a part of her may never want to return.
The Girl and the Mermaid
by Hollie HughesFrom bestselling creators of The Girl and the Dinosaur comes a new picture book about the value of imagination and storytelling, and the love between a girl and her grandmother.Alina lives in a lighthouse by the sea: a home filled with the warmth of Granny's magical stories. But Alina is worried. Granny's memories and stories are starting to fade away, and she doesn't know how to bring them back. Then, one day, Alina meets a mermaid on the rocks near the lighthouse-and she's swept into a magical adventure deep under the sea. Can the mermaid help her find the stories, and can Alina help to keep the memories shining brightly? This heartwarming picture book takes readers on a deep and fanciful journey to explore the importance of family, memory, imagination, and storytelling.
The Girl and the Mermaid
by Hollie HughesFrom bestselling creators of The Girl and the Dinosaur comes a new picture book about the value of imagination and storytelling, and the love between a girl and her grandmother.Alina lives in a lighthouse by the sea: a home filled with the warmth of Granny's magical stories. But Alina is worried. Granny's memories and stories are starting to fade away, and she doesn't know how to bring them back. Then, one day, Alina meets a mermaid on the rocks near the lighthouse-and she's swept into a magical adventure deep under the sea. Can the mermaid help her find the stories, and can Alina help to keep the memories shining brightly? This heartwarming picture book takes readers on a deep and fanciful journey to explore the importance of family, memory, imagination, and storytelling.
Rules for Camouflage
by Kirstin Cronn-MillsAtypical meets Every Last Word in this relatable and heartfelt coming of age story about a neurodivergent teen navigating school, friendships and first love. Evvie Chambers is doing her best to skate through the last month of high school to graduation. The only thing standing in her way is a biology report on foxes—and her teacher, Mrs. Audrey Dearborn. The same Mrs. Dearborn who&’s been a thorn in Evvie&’s side for years, refusing to acknowledge or accommodate her neurodiversity. Evvie would much rather be doing her report on Aretha, the octopus she cares for when she volunteers at the Minnesota Zoo but deviating from the exact assignment isn&’t allowed—and Mrs. Dearborn isn&’t going to make following the rules easy. Evvie&’s only escape from high school hell is the Lair: a safe haven for kids whose brains need some time away. But when Mrs. Dearborn refuses Evvie&’s pleas to finesse the final report assignment to her strengths, and persistent bully Vandal McDaniel directs his harassment toward Lair members, Evvie finds herself more desperate than ever for stability and support. When a shocking act of violence pushes the whole mess over the edge, Evvie, with the help of her friends and the others who love her, will have to figure out how to find her place in the wide world, while remaining true to herself.