Symptoms of Modernity
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€38.99
1990s
A01=Matti Bunzl
austria
Author_Matti Bunzl
Category=JBSF
Category=JH
Category=JHMC
Category=QRJ
central europe
cultural history
emancipation
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic issues
european history
geopolitical change
historians
historiography
history of sexuality
holocaust
jewish experience
judaism
late 20th century
lgbtq
marginalization
modern history
modernity
nation building
persecution
political history
postmodern analysis
public sphere
queer history
retrospective
sexual politics
vienna
viennese homosexuals
viennese jews
world war ii
wwii
Product details
- ISBN 9780520238435
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Feb 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers. "Symptoms of Modernity" traces this development in the context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity.In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. As "Symptoms of Modernity" shows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination--a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers.
"Symptoms of Modernity" gives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.
Matti Bunzl is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also directs the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.
