06 Words of Power, the Power of Words. The Twentieth-Century Communist Discourse in International Perspective

This volume proposes a collection of nineteen essays on the history of international communism during the twentieth century. The first part is dedicated to the Italian Communist Party, the most important communist party in Western Europe. The book then moves on to an analysis of the parties of Eastern Europe, for example in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Finally, the analysis goes beyond the European boundaries, focusing on communism in Latin America, with Chilean communism and the Ecuadorian Left, and in Eastern Asia, with the Vietnamese and the Chinese Communist parties. The book offers a global and interdisciplinary approach, merging the analysis of political-cultural processes with the study of political discourse and language, textual or iconic, thanks to studies by historians, linguists, philosophers, and historians of language.

Giulia Bassi, with a PhD in Contemporary History from the University of Trieste with a co-tutorship agreement with the University of Reading, is currently a research fellow in Contemporary History at the University of Eastern Piedmont and Adjunct Professor at the University of Parma. Her research focuses on the history of political thought, and particularly on the Italian Communist Party and the Italian Left, and on the history of twentieth-century Marxist historiography.