Author Archives: Dr Sian Adiseshiah

New title from Verso

Seumas Milne’s new book The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century is out next month. The blurb reads:

“One of Britain’s foremost political writers confronts ten years of murderous delusion.

In 2001, Tony Blair declared that those who opposed the war on terror had been ‘proved wrong’ – along with critics of unfettered corporate power and free market capitalism.

Ten years later, the critics have been comprehensively vindicated and the champions of the New World Order proved catastrophically wrong. The evidence on hand includes the disastrous occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and the failure of an economic model that has brought the Western World to its knees.

The Revenge of History is a powerful corrective to the discredited dominant account of the first decade of the twenty-first century. As Seumas Milne shows in a panoramic narrative that reaches from 9/11 to beyond the Arab uprisings, crisis and war have turned the orthodoxies of a generation on their head. The neoliberal market, hailed as the only economic option, crashed with devastating consequences; calamitous western military interventions demonstrated the limits of US global power; the rise of China challenged both; while Latin America has embraced social and economic alternatives that were said no longer to exist.

In a culture dominated by eager apologists of power, Milne has consistently written against the grain. This book offers a compelling perspective on the convulsions that have brought us to today’s crisis and the shape of the emerging politics of the future – and an indictment of a global and corporate empire in decline.”

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1165-the-revenge-of-history

Welcome

Welcome to the blog of the 21st Century Research Group. The group met last week for the first time this academic year and members from Media, Art & Design, Business & Law, and English were present. We discussed the following questions:

What is the 21st century besides dates? How are we to start thinking about the new period? In what ways is it significant that the new century is also a new millennium? What do we see as the political, economic and social markers of the new century? In what ways are our particular fields of study constructing/contesting the new century? Within our own fields, do we consider there to be particular characteristics, trends or paradigms that we would regard as peculiarly 21st century? And are there similarities/differences/tensions between the disciplines on these questions?

It was an excellent way to begin an interdisciplinary dialogue about 21st century studies and I’m sure we will come back to these questions in future meetings.

See Events and Conferences (on the right hand side) for details of past and future activities.