Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives ed. by Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone, and: Mass Dictatorship and Modernity ed. by Michael Kim, Michael Schoenhals, and Yong-Woo Kim, and: Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past ed. by Jie-Hyun Lim, Barbara Walker, and Peter Lambert, and: Imagining Mass Dictatorships: The Individual and the Masses in Literature and Cinema ed. by Michael Schoenhals and Karin Sarsenov, and: Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship: Collusion and Evasion Ed. by Alf Lüdtke (review)

The book series "Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century" represents a broad intellectual project exploring modern forms of political rule. This ambitious endeavor had its genesis in the six international conferences sponsored by the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture at Hanyang University in Seoul, Korea, between 2003 and 2008, and in a seventh, cosponsored by Lund University, in Sweden in 2010. Jie-Hyun Lim, a comparative historian, has led this large-scale effort at rethinking the history of twentieth-century dictatorships. Michael Schoenhals—an expert in Mao's China, coeditor of two volumes, and the only author who published contributions in four of the five books—can also be regarded as a key author of the whole project. Renowned scholars such as Peter Lambert, Alf Lüdtke, and Karen Petrone have also played important roles as members of the editorial board and coeditors. Forty-six scholars overall have contributed chapters. Of those contributors, ten work in research centers or universities in Korea, ten in Sweden, nine in North America, seven in Germany, and five in the United Kingdom, with the remaining authors hailing from Canadian, Italian, Japanese and Taiwanese institutions. As a whole, the series privileges a historical perspective, but it introduces an interdisciplinary approach that serves to substantially broaden its scope. In the second volume, we hear from an important number of specialists in film studies and literary criticism, while the first volume features contributions by scholars of gender. After the publication of five volumes, it is time to take stock and assess the contribution of the series to our understanding of modern dictatorships.

The book series is responding to a patent dissatisfaction with former conceptual approaches to the study of modern dictatorships, particularly with the notion of totalitarianism and the old Marxist paradigm. The authors propose to replace them with the concept of mass dictatorship as a tool to engage with the very wide range of twentieth-century dictatorships from a transnational and comparative perspective. The series does not pretend to be all-encompassing; yet it is based on empirical research about many different regimes across the world, including Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, East Germany, 1930s Japan, Socialist Poland, North Korea, and Maoist China, among others. According to Lim, the concept of mass dictatorship allows us not only to carry out a global study of dictatorship but also to observe disturbing intersections between mass dictatorship and mass democracy.

As Lim clarifies in the "Series Introduction" in Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship, "mass dictatorship is dictatorship appropriating modern statecraft and egalitarian ideology" (3). This definition not only transcends East-West dichotomies; it locates mass dictatorships and mass democracies within a transnational space of modernity. It also leads us to grasp the "shared objective" of mass democracy and mass...