Seeds of discontent

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Bernard Waites

"Europe can be described as the monstrous shaper of world history. By incorporating overseas regions in their dependent empires and implanting their institutions and ideologies in alien cultures, Europeans inducted most of humanity into the international society of sovereign states. By promoting intercontinental trade, and coercing native labour into the productive enterprises they controlled abroad, Europeans disseminated Western market capitalism throughout the world." "In Europe and the Third World, Bernard Waites has written a stimulating analysis of Europe's role in world history that focuses on Western economic expansion into the regions loosely known as the 'Third World'."--BOOK JACKET.

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Peter Fryer

"Surveying a legacy that encompasses over 400 years, Peter Fryer traces the development of this musical crossover. He describes how slaves, mariners, and merchants brought African music form Angola and other ports of east Africa to Latin America. In particular they brought it to Brazil - today the country with the largest black population of any outside Africa. Fryer examines how the rhythms and beats of Africa were combined with European popular music to create a unique sound and dance tradition. He focuses on the political nature of this musical integration and the role of African heritage in the cultural identity of black Brazilians today."--Book cover

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Leslie Woodhead

The music of John, Paul, George, and Ringo played a part in waking up an entire generation of Soviet youth, opening their eyes to seventy years of bland official culture and rigid authoritarianism. Soviet leaders had suppressed most Western popular music since the days of jazz, but the Beatles and the bands they inspired-both in the West and in Russia-battered down the walls of state culture. Leslie Woodhead's How The Beatles Rocked the Kremlin tells the unforgettable-and endearingly odd-story of Russians who discovered that all you need is Beatles. By stealth, by way of whispers, through the illicit late night broadcasts on Radio Luxembourg, the Soviet Beatles kids tuned in. "Bitles," they whispered, "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."

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Donald R. Wehrs

"In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but import ant body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoume's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African Fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives."--Jacket.