Joel Wendland-Liu

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Articles

Hu Yamin’s new book on Chinese Marxist literary criticism

Jan 13, 2025 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Hu Yamin is a prominent Chinese scholar specializing in comparative Marxist literary criticism. Her recent work, The Contemporary Construction of the Chinese Form of Marxist Literary Criticism, offers a historical-geographic comparative analysis of Western and Chinese Marxist literary theories. Her previous translated work includes a two-volume edited set titled Keywords in Western Literary Criticism and Contemporary China (Routledge, 2020).
New Biography of “China’s First Communist” Reveals Nuances for English-Speaking Readers

Dec 1, 2024 | monthlyreview.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

As a college student, Li would come to “embrace modern values” and transformed himself into a “globally oriented intellectual.” Like many of his republican-aligned classmates, he “shared [the prevailing] mood of absorbing new cultural elements” from many international sources (35). These included cultural and philosophical concepts from Russia, Germany, and France; political theory from the United States and United Kingdom; and a modernization agenda funneled through Japan.
A true American horror story: ‘Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum’

Oct 31, 2024 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Award-winning journalist Antonia Hyldon’s new book Madness might work, if it weren’t entirely factual, as the premise of a Jordan Peele horror film. In 1911, twelve Black men were ordered to build the first structure for what would become the Maryland Hospital for the Negro Insane. They were that asylum’s first patients.
New book opens imaginative doors to understanding Lenin’s global legacy

Oct 2, 2024 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Lenin: The Heritage We (Don’t) Renounce is an intriguing book. Edited by Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, this collection of brief commentaries on Lenin’s life, thought, and enduring influences celebrates the revolutionary’s contribution to human progress. With over 100 short essays and more than a dozen artistic and photographic contributions, the book features an array of writers and artists from diverse political backgrounds, geographical locations, and occupations.
‘Their Example Will Inspire Us: Five Black Communist Women’: A book review

Sep 12, 2024 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Historical amnesia, unfortunately, conditions much of our present consciousness. Dominant social institutions—media, schooling, and the political system—promote the deliberate habit of forgetting. This is especially true when it comes to our working-class history, the radical, even revolutionary struggles of workers against racism, exploitation, war, and the general submission to capitalist rule.
‘Transnational Communism Across the Americas’ offers valuable insights despite its anti-communist tropes

Aug 14, 2024 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Historical research on communist parties and their multiple international relationships has flourished in the past two decades. One remarkable contribution to this field is the book Transnational Communism Across the Americas. This collection of multiply-authored chapters digs into the communist parties of various Latin American countries, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, and Brazil, providing fresh and in-depth perspectives in most cases.
‘Mute Compulsion’: A Danish Marxist examines the economic power of capital

Jun 14, 2024 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Why does capitalism not simply break down on its own internal contradictions? This is an age-old question for Marxists, and it instigated Søren Mau’s recent book, Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital. In it, the author borrows from Marx’s Capital the phrase “mute compulsion” and develops its meanings as the logic of capitalism that is “transhistorical” and universal to all capitalist societies and absent any geohistorical specificities.
‘Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation’

May 17, 2024 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

When wealthy, Harvard-trained ultra-right Senator Tom Cotton described racial slavery as a “necessary evil” in 2020, he made two crucial admissions. First, the enslavement and consequent genocide of millions of Africans by Europeans and Euro-Americans between 1492 and the 1880s was a necessary feature for the development of capitalism (and consequent European and U.S. imperialism into the present).
Hands off the Solomon Islands!

Dec 8, 2023 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu

Recent U.S. intelligence and media reports are “unfair” and use a “bombardment of rumors” against the Solomon Islands, says a former Solomon Islands government (SIG) official who spoke with the People’s World on condition of anonymity. The U.S. government and Australia are targeting the Solomon Islands as part of a campaign for a new Cold War on China. The Solomon Islands is an archipelago of 992 islands in the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
Before he was a Bolshevik: Claude McKay’s radicalization is subject of new book

Nov 22, 2023 | peoplesworld.org | Joel Wendland-Liu |Winston James

Like a thunderbolt into the heart of Black letters and radical politics, Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” blasted its warnings and promises onto the pages of the July 1919 issue of The Liberator.