Lea Ypi Volgorde van de boeken (chronologisch)

The award-winning author of Free presents a profound investigation into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination. When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Italian Alps in 1941, she confronts unsettling questions about her family's past. She had been told that all records of Leman's youth were destroyed when the police confiscated everything during the early days of communism in Albania. Yet, the image reveals Leman as a glamorous newlywed amid World War II. This discovery leads to a reimagining of the past, exploring the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the evolution of Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the rise of communism in the Balkans, all through secret police archives and fragmented memories. As Ypi seeks the truth about her family, she grapples with uncertainty regarding Leman's identity and choices. Why did she speak French if her family lived in the Ottoman Empire? What prompted her move to Tirana and her relationship with a socialist? The Albanian secret police also posed these questions. This narrative is both a sweeping story of lost worlds and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth. Through a blend of reports, court depositions, and personal anecdotes, Ypi navigates the complexities of history and memory, ultimately questioning the moral authority with which we judge past generations and our understanding of those closest to us.

Lea Ypi groeit op in Albanië, een van de meest geïsoleerde landen ter wereld, waar communistische idealen de plaats van religie innemen. Deze laatste stalinistische uithoek van Europa wordt geteisterd door schaarste en politieke executies, maar voor Lea is het haar thuis. Een plek waar mensen gelijk zijn en buren elkaar helpen – een plek van saamhorigheid en hoop. Een jaar na het neerhalen van de Berlijnse Muur komt het socialisme in Albanië in een vrije val terecht. Verkiezingen, kledingkeuze en religie worden ineens vrijgegeven, maar fabrieken sluiten, banen verdwijnen en het land gaat failliet. Terwijl de droom van haar ouders’ generatie verwordt tot de desillusie van de hare en familiegeheimen aan het licht komen, begint Lea zich af te vragen wat vrijheid nou echt betekent. 'Vrij' is een onvergetelijk boek over volwassen worden te midden van politieke onrust. Ypi verkent op ingenieuze wijze de grenzen van vooruitgang en de last van het verleden, belicht de dunne lijn tussen idealen en werkelijkheid en onderzoekt waar onderdrukking en vrijheid elkaar raken.

Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow-citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action in the real world? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant-garde political agency. Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant-garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations in response to them. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality, and derives remedial cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill-directed. Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant-garde agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, this book offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.