“A pacesetter, at the forefront in recognizing the persisting importance of ‘ethnicity as a force both in building nations and in tearing them apart,’ it is also a work of literary merit, crafted by a master wordsmith.” So comments Lucian Pye in reflecting on this classic work in political science and sociology about group identities bending and shaping themselves under the pressure of political change. These transformations seem to have basic similarities, whether they take place in Little Rock or Kenya, Vietnam or Pakistan, Belgium or Biafra.Isaacs sorts out some fundamentals in forming group identity: the body, names, language, history of origins, religion, and nationality. These are dynamic elements that are melded together but have the possibility of creating new pluralisms. Diane Ravitch wrote in Commentary: “Isaacs's survey of global pluralism is enormously helpful in broadening our perspective, and should be required reading for anyone who cares about the shape of ethnicity in America.”

Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change

Politics & Social Sciences

Harold R. Isaacs

Anthropology

Harper&Row

India's ex-Untouchables (Studies / Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for International Studies)

Harper and Row

Straw Sandals is a collection of 23 stories, a play, and a poem by 16 Chinese writers selected to represent the radical literature produced in China between 1918 and 1933. It was assembled in Peking in 1934 by Harold R. Isaacs with the advice and guidance of Lu Hsün, China's foremost literary figure of this century, and Mao Tun, leading novelist of the younger group that had gathered around Lu Hsün in those tumultuous years. The first half of the collection, including several of Lu Hsün's most famous stories, typifies work that appeared in the first years of China's modern cultural renaissance—short stories written in vernacular Chinese that rejected surviving Chinese traditionalism with its philosophic and social outlooks, its rules of behavior for family life and relationships between men and women. The second group of stories represents the growing ideological and political turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s. Straw Sandals is introduced by Professor Isaacs, who describes the historical setting in which this short-lived and violence-ridden literary movement tried to make its way. He vividly presents the Shanghai of that period, where many of these writers struggled to pursue their craft and were caught between the pressures of Kuomintang repression (many were imprisoned and executed) and the demands for total conformity inside the Communist movement. His account adds an ironic perspective to the collection in light of all that has happened since that time—for the writers who survived Kuomintang repression and the war against Japan to see the Communist victory they had fought so hard and so long to bring about ultimately fell in their turn in the repeated purges that marked the Communist regime's imposition of total control over all art and literature. The English translations of a number of these stories first appeared in the China Forum, a journal that Professor Isaacs edited and published in Shanghai from 1932 to 1934. They were made by a distinguished Chinese language scholar, the late George A. Kennedy, while he was teaching in a Shanghai school. The rest of the collection was translated by several Chinese collaborators and then edited by Isaacs. The book includes updated biographical notes on the writers, many of which were originally supplied by the writers themselves, and an appendix, Mao Tun's "Notes on Chinese Left-wing Literary Magazines."

Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories 1918-1933

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

The MIT Press

Straw Sandals, Chinese Short Stories, 1918-1933

Short Stories & Anthologies

The story of contemporary China typically dates back to Mao’s 1949 revolution. But in this classic work of Marxist scholarship, historian Harold Isaacs uncovers how workers and peasants struggled for a different kind of revolution, one built from the bottom up, in the 1920s. The defeat of their heroic efforts profoundly shaped the further course of modern Chinese history.Harold Isaacs was an acclaimed Marxist historian who identified with Leon Trotsky’s critique of the Soviet Union’s degeneration under Stalinism during the 1920s. The Tragedy, his major work, is dedicated to the “martyrs” of the 1925-1927 revolution, who fought for a truly democratic society.

The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution

History

Asia

Stanford University Press

Scratches On Our Minds

Taylor & Francis Group

Idols of the Tribe Group: Identity and Political Change (Hardcover) (Chinese Edition)

Guangxi Normal University Press

Re-encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule

Joint Publishing (Hong Kong) Co Ltd

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Books by Harold R. Isaacs