Demolition on Karl Marx Square: Cultural Barbarism and the People’s State in 1968

doing, the editors, Constance Bantman, a specialist in French political exiles in late nineteenth-century Britain and anarchist transnationalism, and Ana Cl audia Suriani da Silva, a specialist in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, with a sharp interest in the transatlantic circulation and globalization of printed culture, have also rescued an object from relative oblivion: the political press in London and surroundings published by expatriates, exiles, and foreigners established in Britain. The introduction reflects on the foreign political press, rather than using phrases such as the exile press or emigr e journalism, the latter proposed by Simon Burrows in his thought-provoking transnational study French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Boydell Press 2000). Bantman adopts the term “the foreign political press” to undo a longstanding myth that press titles published in a country in a foreign language are necessarily dissident; secessionist; and, therefore, dangerous for the very stability of the country in which they appear (5–7)—an assumption traditionally made about the foreign-language press in the United States in the early twentieth century. This is only one of the edited volume’s merits, however. Through stimulating case studies spanning the long nineteenth century and covering the Portuguese, Spanish, Latin American, Italian, French, German, Russian, and Indian press in Britain, readers are invited to consider the various contexts to which these periodicals belong. The result is a thorough analysis of the print culture of these various groups back home, the tensions or imagined united identity within each group, British print culture, political identities, etc. The introduction highlights the move from the local to the global that spurred the creation of a transnational public sphere through the periodical press. This study represents the first endeavor to consider the foreign political press in Britain globally by looking at the production of these communities together, rather than in isolation, as has been the case until now. Beyond internecine community tensions or cohesion, biographies of editors and journalists at the end of the volume confirm collaboration across ethnic and linguistic boundaries, especially in anarchist circles and editorial milieux. The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance is a valuable addition to the field of Victorian periodical studies, which is increasingly embracing the transnational turn. The reference team for The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, 1800–1900, launched in 2015 and forthcoming in 2019, has announced that it is devoting a section to ethnic and language minority publications, with reference to immigration waves. In its 2017 Language Matters symposium, Transfopress, a French-based network launched in 2012 and federating scholars of the foreign-language press internationally, narrowed the focus by making the foreign-language press in Britain—rather than the foreign political press—part of its study object. Whereas most sections of The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London address press titles published in Spanish, Italian, German, French, or even Russian in Britain, Ole B. Laursen’s chapter on “The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914” deals with English-language titles, alerting us that not all of the foreign political press was published in a foreign language. This chapter adds further complexity to the theoretical coinage foreign political press, as Laursen reflects on ways in which the Indian Nationalist Press in London in this period was foreign in spirit (175–76), rather than in language or even, perhaps, nationality— Swan Sik Ko contended in Nationality and International Law in Asian Perspective that Indians in British colonial India tended to be regarded as “British subjects” after Britain assumed direct control in 1858 (Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990, 69). This chapter begs for further investigation of that phrase, to disclose the multiple levels of foreignness that the foreign political press in nineteenth-century London and Britain might have embodied, while still partaking in making the city more multicultural. The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London is a mustread for anybody with a taste for the Victorian press, Victorian politics, cosmopolitanism, and immigration in late nineteenth-century London. It resolutely convinces readers that the foreign political press is a fully fledged part of the British press. It paves the way for a more global reappraisal of that press, whose extent is still largely underestimated; because of its categorization as foreign, material difficulties of production, or subversive nature, these works were less likely than English-language titles to be preserved as national heritage. This edited volume is, therefore, also bound to interest librarians dealing with the identification, categorization, and analysis of these materials.