Reading the New Global Order

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 *