Review: Contested Lands
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200806300126 |
| Author | Jane Boulden |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
| Reviews |
| 242 | International Journal | Winter 2007-08 |
Despite the “irresistible” in her title, DeGrazia emphasizes European
resistance to the US commercial onslaught, especially prior to World War
II. One of the most powerful aspects of the book is the stark contrasts it
presents: Duluth vs. Dresden; George Babbitt vs. Thomas Mann; chain
stores vs. corner shops; mass culture vs. bourgeois snobbery; individual
freedoms vs. social security; consumer citizenship vs. social citizenship.
This method may downplay differences within each of the juxtaposed sites,
but it helps de Grazia make her case for a transatlantic clash of civiliza-
tions—even as the dichotomies become increasingly tied to Nazi policies:
Ford workers vs. death camp inmates; bargain basement sales vs. rationing
and shortages; branded consumer goods vs. ragged and famished Soviet
troops straggling past the bombed out ruins of the Leipzig trade fair build-
ing. Only in the final chapters do transatlantic divergences become less pro-
nounced as the business practices that de Grazia codes as American
increasingly win out across a continent devastated by total war.
Even as de Grazia mines rich new archival and topical terrain, her
adherence to an export model of US practices places her book squarely in
the “Americanization of the world” vein of scholarship. True, de Grazia
acknowledges European economic competitiveness in the concluding
pages as she looks toward the “inexorable decline of the Market Empire”
(480). But for most of her period, the story is one of American hegemony.
The result is an account that for all its considerable brilliance and scope
leaves questions about the reciprocity of capitalist crossings and the ways
that competing imperial systems together affected consumption regimes
across the modern world.
Kristin Hoganson/The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
CONTESTED LANDS
Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka
Sumantra Bose
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 329pp, US$27.95 cloth (ISBN
978-0674024472)
When I visited Bosnia in 1998 it was the first time in a year and a half that
I had felt at home anywhere. Amidst the shattered shells of homes, the
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