NLR 109

article
Susan WatkinsWhich Feminisms?

The American anti-discrimination paradigm, generated in the 1960s to neutralize the threat of radical black protests, has provided the palimpsest for global feminism for the past twenty years. How will it be challenged by the eruption of new gender protests, from Buenos Aires to Warsaw, Washington to Rome?

interview
Herman Daly & Benjamin KunkelEcologies of Scale

Eco-economist Herman Daly presents a practical programme for an egalitarian, steady-state economy. From Smith and Mill to Georgescu and Schumacher, Daly and Benjamin Kunkel debate problems of development, quantitative and qualitative, and biophysical equilibrium. If the world economy is conceived as a sub-system of a larger eco-system, what are the limits to growth?

article
Emilie BickertonA New Proletkino?

Is it possible to detect the contours of a new genre of proletarian cinema operating across the widely contrasted films of Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Aki Kaurismäki and Pedro Costa? What does this body of work say about contemporary working-class experience and its representations on the silver screen?

reviews
Finance and Power

Geoffrey Ingham on Tony Norfield, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance. A former banker’s Marxist account of the imperialist dynamics of international finance and the preponderance of the Square Mile as the bureau de change of the world.

Intaglio as Philosophy

Alice Bamford on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Le graveur et le philosophe: Albert Flocon rencontre Gaston Bachelard. Meditations on art and philosophy, science and reflexivity, sparked by a Surrealist collaboration in postwar Paris.

Worlds and Letters

Peter Morgan on Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature. Local literatures and their bonding into greater unities; the cosmopolitan residues of great empires; vernaculars and national literatures. A framework for comparison from Sumeria to the globalized present.