Columbia University Press

Danger: Diabolik (1968) was adapted from a comic that has been a social phenomenon in Italy for over fifty years, featuring a masked master criminal—part Fantômas, part James Bond—and his elegant companion Eva Kant. The film partially reinvents the character as a countercultural prankster, subverting public officials and the national economy, and places him in a luxurious and futuristic underground hideout and Eva in a series of unforgettable outfits. A commercial disappointment on its original release, Danger: Diabolik's reputation has grown along with that of its director, Mario Bava, the quintessential cult auteur, while the pop-art glamour of its costumes and sets have caught the imagination of such people as Roman Coppola and the Beastie Boys.

This study examines its status as a comic-book movie, including its relation both to the original fumetto and to its sister-film, Barbarella. It traces its production and initial reception in Italy, France, the U.S., and the UK, and its cult afterlife as both a pop-art classic and campy "bad film" featured in the final episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

In his study, Markus Jaeger explores the coalescence of Joan Baez's work as a singer and songwriter with her endeavors as a political activist throughout the last fifty years. He illustrates an American popular singer's significance as a political activist—for her audiences and for her opponents as well as for those victims of politically organized violence who have profited from her work. Mingling popular culture with political activism can be a helpful means to achieve non-violent societal progress. Joan Baez's work offers an excellent example for this hypothesis.

In this fascinating book, Johanna Emeney examines the global proliferation of new poetry related to illness and medical treatment from the perspective of doctors, patients, and carers in light of the growing popularity of the medical humanities. She provides a close analysis of poetry from New Zealand, the U.S., and the U.K. that deals with sociological and philosophical aspects of sickness, ailment, medical treatment, care, and recuperation.

Beckett's Late Stage reexamines the Nobel laureate's postwar prose and drama in the light of contemporary trauma theory. Through a series of sustained close readings, the study demonstrates how the comings and goings of Beckett's prose unsettles the Western philosophical tradition; it reveals how Beckett's live theatrical productions are haunted by the rehearsal of traumatic repetition, and asks what his ghostly radio recordings might signal for twentieth-century modernity. Drawing from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist traditions, Beckett's Late Stage explores how the traumatic symptom allows us to rethink the relationship between language, meaning, and identity after 1945.

Managing the Dollar, published four years after the Plaza Agreement took place, was the initial analysis of lessons learned and takeaways from the finance ministers' policy efforts in 1985. Based largely on interviews, immediate analysis illuminates the forces at play and the differences of opinions among the policymakers and how collaborative economic integration can be improved. The piece is being republished to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the accord and as a companion to a new long-term retrospective.

The European powers were forced to make the Kuna people of present-day Panama and Columbia an integral part of their calculus of empire. Yet the Kunas created new forms of leadership out of foreign contacts, enabling their own survival.

The turmoil that rocked Asian markets after the middle of 1997 and that spread far afield was the third major currency crisis of the 1990s. Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea suffered outright recessions in 1998. In an effort to contain the crisis, almost $120 billion was pledged in IMF-led official rescue packages. How could this happen to a group of countries that has been so highly regarded in the 1990's by private international capital markets? How could the crisis be overcome, and what changes are necessary to prevent it from happening again?

Morris Goldstein provides the answers to these questions by first explaining how the Asian financial crisis arose and spread. He traces the crisis through its three interrelated origins: financial sector weaknesses; external sector problems; and the contagion that spread from Thailand to other countries. Goldstein then outlines what needed to be done in the ASEAN-4 economies, in Japan and China, and in the design of IMF-led official rescue packages to end the crisis. Goldstein's final remarks offer specific proposals for improving the international financial architecture.

This book advocates adding more open and radical regionalism to strategies for the financing of economic and social development in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Editors Nancy Birdsall and Liliana Rojas-Suarez argue that agreements among countries within regions, rather than detracting from an open multilateral system, can promote greater integration into the global trading and financial system by helping to build the domestic institutions that developing countries need to cope with the challenges of the global economy. The essays in this volume point to the unrealized potential of regionalism in promoting not only reduction of trade barriers, but shared investment in infrastructure and enhanced policy cooperation in development of financial markets. The book also offers fresh insights on how regional development banks can catalyze collective action.