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Today, by a number of measures, the ex-socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe are among the most globalized in the world. This book argues that the origins of Central and Eastern Europe’s heavily transnationalized economies should be sought in their socialist past and the efforts of reformers in the 1970s and 1980s to expand ties between domestic industry and transnational corporations (TNCs). The book’s comparative-historical analysis examines the trajectories of six socialist and postsocialist economies, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The second part of the book focuses on the region’s deepening specialization in the 2000s as a TNC-dominated transnational manufacturing hub. It identifies three international market roles that the region’s state came to occupy in the transformation: assembly platform, intermediate producer, and combined. It explains divergence within the region through the comparative analysis of the politics of institutional adjustment after socialism.

This book provides a historically informed examination of independent moving image works made between 1990 and 2010 in China. Showcasing an evolving personal mode of narrating memory, documenting reality, and inscribing subjectivity in over sixteen selected works that range from narrative film and documentary to experimental video and digital media (including a multimedia avant-garde play), this book presents a provocative portrait of the independent filmmakers as a peculiarly pained yet active group of historical subjects of the transitional, postsocialist era. Through a connected investigation of cultural and cinematic concepts including historical consciousness, personal memory, narrative, performance, subjectivity, spatiality, and the body, Wang weaves a critical narrative of the formation of a unique postsocialist cultural consciousness that enables independent cinema and media to become a highly significant and effective conduit for historical thinking in contemporary China. Covering filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Wang Bing, Wang Guangli, Duan Jinchuan, Cui Zi'en, Shi Tou, and Tang Danhong, this book is essential reading for all students and scholars in Chinese film and culture.

This book explores religious transformation among a Siberian people known as Buryats across changing political economies. It argues that under conditions of rapid social transformation such as those that accompanied the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, certain persons, and especially their bodies became key sites through which Buryats have articulated their relationship with the Russian state and the larger Tibeto-Mongol and Eurasian worlds. Despite the Russian government’s continuing reluctance to see their Buddhist subjects cross borders, Buryats have employed characteristically Buddhist “body politics” to maintain their long-standing mobility, which can both conform to and diplomatically challenge Russian logics of political rule. Through presenting particular case studies of such emblematic bodies— dead bodies of famous monks, temporary bodies of reincarnated lamas, ascetic and celibate bodies of Buddhist monastics, and dismembered bodies of lay disciples given as imaginary gifts to spirits— the book looks at the specific ways in which religion and politics have intersected in this context. This study is intended as a contribution to the growing literature on postsocialism and cross-disciplinary studies of sovereignty that focus on the body as a site of sovereign power, as well as new developments in Buddhist studies where issues related to embodiment have become a central focus of inquiry.