I. Introduction

A. Overview

Like histamines and pasta, some people just don't like imperialism. Why? Does it even exist anymore? Well, something like a phenomenon, imperialism—the hegemony of monopoly capital and capitalist nation-states—has not, as some theorists would have you believe, "come to an end". In fact, says Pablo Gonzales Casanova, "there is every indication that the phenomenon of imperialism not only persists in the midst of recent, world-historic changes, but has intensified the control that the great powers exercise over the so-called Third World and the so-called socialist countries.".¹ To quote Atilio A. Boron, "It still exists, and it still oppresses peoples and nations and creates pain, destruction and death."² Thus, while this phenomenon continues, so does "the struggle of workers and peoples in the dominated countries against domination and exploitation."³

B. Scope

This bibliography plan will look at these "struggles of workers and peoples in the dominated countries against domination and exploitation." It will be restricted in time period to the 21^st century. It will utilize the classical definitions of imperialism as defined by Hilferding, Lenin, Bukharin, and Rosa Luxemburg (as opposed to the less precise class-neutral term developed by Chinese propagandists as applied to the Soviet Union and "social-imperialism"⁴ or analytically misconceived poetic abstractions of empire as put forth by Hardt and Negri in their book Empire⁵)--imperialism being characterized by the concentration of capital, the overwhelming predominance of monopolies, the increasingly important role played by financial capital, the export of capital and the division of the world into different 'spheres of influence'.⁶ There will be a focus on U.S. imperialism.

C. Audience

The audience is anyone engaging in anti-imperialist struggles. The bibliography plan is prepared in hopes of providing, to recycle Atilio A. Boron's words on correct theory, "an invaluable tool with which the popular movements that resist neoliberal globalization can navigate, with a reasonable amount of accuracy, through the troubled waters of contemporary capitalism."⁷

II. Search Strategy

A. Library of Congress Subject Headings

I used the print version of Library of Congress Subject Headings⁸ to determine appropriate subject headings. There was an entry for ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENTS, which is described thusly:

Here are entered works discussing collectively organizations and movements, whose stated purpose is to work against what they regard as imperialism, i.e. the policy or practice of a country extending power over other states or areas of the world, often by annexing territory.

Related headings included IMPERIALISM and NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS, which is described thusly:

Here are entered works dealing with minority or other groups in armed rebellion against a colonial government, or against a national government charged with corruption or foreign domination. In general this heading is applicable only to the post World War II period.

I also located the possibly relevant headings IMPERIALISM IN ART, IMPERIALISM IN LITERATURE, and IMPERIALISM IN MOTION PICTURES.

B. Balay's Guide to Reference Books⁹

Since the reference guide I used was published in 1996, it did not have anything directly relevant to the topic. I began searching "imperialism" in the index, which took me to a not quite relevant entry on modern European imperialism 1815-1972. There were some possibly relevant bibliographies listed under the sections "Political Science" and "History", but nothing dealing directly with the topic. The organization of this guide book was not conducive to locating bibliographies and reference books about the topic. Most of the possibly relevant sources I found were similar to the Oxford Companion To Politics Of The World,¹⁰ which had a few relevant entries, but on the whole, dealt with topics outside the scope of this bibliography plan.

C. Library of Congress Classification call numbers

I used the Library of Congress Classification Web ¹¹ to locate call numbers. Except for IMPERIALISM (political theory), there were no call numbers associated with any of the subject headings, so I had to use some broader terms and different keyword searches to locate possibly relevant call numbers. The broader term for ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENTS is SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, which is associated with a call number. The broader term for NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS is REVOLUTIONS. This led to two different call numbers. The other call numbers I found by scrolling through the different call numbers. The relevance of the call numbers is listed in the appendix to this bibliography plan under Library of Congress classification call numbers.

HM876 Revolutions

HM881 Social Movements

HM886 Violence

JC328.5 Political Theory of Insurgency

JC328.6 Political Theory of Political Violence

JC359 Political Theory of Empire of Imperialism

JC491 Political Theory of Revolutions

K3269 Law-Resistance to government

PN56.I465 Literature-special topics-Imperialism

Z7164.I34 Subject Bibliography-special topics-Imperialism

D. OnLine Databases

1. Academic Search Premier ¹²

I started searching by looking at the database's subject heading guide and I saw that the headings were quite similar to the ones from the Library of Congress. My initial search was using the controlled vocabulary: ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENTS. This yielded a set of results in the hundreds. Some of the articles were highly relevant, such as an article by James Petras titled Anti-Imperialist Politics: Class Formation and Socio-Political Action,¹³ but others fell completely outside the scope. Since the result set is organized by date, I only looked at articles written after 2000. This is a method I was able to use for most databases. Of course, a good number of articles written after 2000 are written about anti-imperialist movements of, for example, the late 1800s and are therefore not relevant to the scope. Next, I searched NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS, and found the same phenomenon as with the previous search. Some highly relevant results, but the set needed a bit of weeding to find them. My next search used natural language. "Imperialism AND resistance" turned out a nicely sized result list that was also generally highly relevant to the topic. Looking at some of the other keywords and subject headings within the different result articles, I saw that ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT was a subject heading that frequently appeared. A search using this term yielded results similar to the other controlled vocabulary subject heading searches.

2. Alt-PressWatch ¹⁴

This database has a long and detailed list of controlled vocabulary, which in many cases can then be narrowed down by more controlled vocabulary. My first searched was IMPERIALISM narrowed by REBELLIONS. This only turned out a handful articles, but they were generally relevant to the topic. I then searched the term IMPERIALISM by itself to broaden the set of results and got a return in the hundreds. The articles were generally relevant with some of them highly relevant. I then added a natural language term, ("resistance"), to IMPERIALISM. The result set was about a third of the size, but still substantial and the articles were highly relevant. This database yielded a unique set of articles coming from alternative journals such as one from the People’s Weekly World on Iraqi Trade Unionists.¹⁵

3. Ethnic News Watch ¹⁶

This database utilized the same format as Alt-PressWatch and had almost identical controlled vocabulary, so I started off searching IMPERIALISM AND "resistance". However, the results were not as on topic as the other database. I then searched IMPERIALISM narrowed by REBELLIONS and received a result list that was much more on topic, but with only a few dozen total results.

4. Lexis Nexis Academic ¹⁷

This database does not have any controlled vocabulary, but it does have a date limiter. All my searches were within the past two years. I started searching with "anti-imperialism" and got no results. I then attempted "imperialism". This had a large yield, however, a large number of the articles dealt with a racing horse named Imperialism and were thus completely irrelevant to the topic. However, the remainder of the articles were for the most part on topic. I next attempted to focus the search by adding the term "resistance" to the "imperialism" query. This ended up yielding a highly relevant search return. One example would be the article “AFRICA: CAIRO TO HOST ANTI-OCCUPATION, IMPERIALISM CONFERENCE” from IslamOnline.net.¹⁸

5. Video Librarian Plus!¹⁹

This database enables searching a database of movie reviews. The search did not have many options, but it did enable searching both title and text. I tried a number of searches with single terms, but the total results were very limited, and even more so when coupled with the fact that they were reviews of movies outside the date range of my scope. This database was not very helpful and yielded only a few movies that might be relevant to the topic.

6. Historical Abstracts Database Online ²⁰

This database had an enormous amount of controlled vocabulary dealing with anti-imperialism. However, searches using these terms all brought up results that were well out of the date range of the scope. This is not a useful database for this topic.

7. World News Connection ²¹

This database has a limited set of controlled vocabulary topics to choose from, none of which I could be sure would give greater precision to my searching. I searched "imperialis?" in the Search Entire Article field and "200?" in the Publication Date field. Using the truncated date (200?) would have been a good idea in earlier searches perhaps. The result list was enormous, numbering in the thousands. The first bunch of articles dealt exclusively with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Some of the links were on topic and others were not. I added "resistance" to the search query. This narrowed the field to about 1000. The results seemed slightly more relevant. All of the articles in this database seem to deal with "official" news, that is, news coming from or about governments or heads of states. I next tried searching just the head and lead paragraph for the terms. This yielded about 50 results, and these results were slightly more relevant.

8. MARCIVE ²²

This database was not conducive to searching this topic. A variety of searches for "imperialism" yielded nothing relevant, nor did clicking through the links and cross indexes and whatnot.

9. IMDb ²³

I had a very difficult time searching this database (the Internet Movie Database) for anti-imperialist movies. My initial search yielded a decent number of results, separated into a number of categories (such as title, director, keyword) with the movies in these fields that matched the query listed below. However, almost all of the movie results were of movies of the 20^th century and hence, outside my scope. I was never able to figure out how to organize results by date, or for that matter, how to perform an advanced search that would yield a set that was easy to sift through and might contain relevant results. After playing around for a while, I became frustrated and gave up on the site without finding a single relevant movie, other than movies I already knew the titles of and typed in specifically to test out the database.

E. Web Site Searches

1. NarcoNews.com ²⁴

The Narco News Bulletin is an onLine newsletter that reports on the Drug War and Democracy from Latin America. The search function it features is an in-site google search. Therefore there is no controlled vocabulary. Not knowing what I was going to find, I started off searching "imperialism" and got a good sized result set with mostly relevant results. "Imperialism resistance" yielded a highly relevant set list, including links to articles about the book We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism²⁵

2. ZNet/Z Magazine ²⁶

"Z Magazine is an independent monthly print periodical on political, cultural, social, and economic life in the U.S. The online version of Z Magazine reproduces the print as closely as possible and has a public archive though current issues are only for subscribers and/or for ZNet Sustainers. ZNet is a huge website updated daily...to convey information and provide community with articles, watch areas and sub-sites, translations, archives, links to other progressive sites, daily commentary program, and more." The site does have its own controlled vocabulary, the most relevant term being IMPERIALISM. The result list was in the hundreds and contained some relevant and some not so relevant results. There is also a keyword search, however, I could not figure out how to combine the two types of searches in order to add a word and narrow the search. A natural language result for "imperialism AND resistance" yielded an enormous result list, which also happened to be relevant to the topic. This is a good database for finding on-topic contemporary articles.

3. www.indymedia.org ²⁷

"Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth." A search in the search bar for "imperialism" yielded hundreds of results. Almost all of the results appeared to be highly relevant to the topic. The results screen enables you to "refine your search" by entering more words or, by searching by topic. It appears this site has its own controlled vocabulary, including the heading IMPERIALISM AND WAR. Adding this yielded a few dozen highly relevant results. Searching only the subject heading yielded hundreds of results, but they were not as relevant as before.

III. Conclusion

This assignment crystallized the fact that I do not work well with due dates and I need to work on improving my organization of time when dealing with multiple long range projects. It also made me remember (for the first time since I started library school) just exactly why I love libraries. The act of browsing through the stacks with direct physical access to the nigh-inconceivable amounts of information is an intoxicating experience that remains incomparable to the technologies of Internet browsing.

Making a bibliography plan, coupled with the concurrent study of classification schemes in cataloging class, made me think a lot about how we structure our information. Current organization schemes can be quite frustrating, while others show themselves to be uniquely fortuitous. I find that this depends largely on what topic you happen to be researching and in my still untrained eyes, appears rather arbitrary. Because of this, this assignment has shown me the need to be familiar with multiple sources of information, and to have the ability to alter your search strategy in the middle of the search process. Flexibility is important, because what works for one topic does not work for another, and even within a topic, a strategy that works for one source, does not work for another.

I found some really intriguing books about my topic, as well as being informed of different groups and web sites that deal with these issues. And I found it extremely interesting, while searching the different databases, to see the many ways the topic is currently manifested throughout a variety of discourses.

IV. Appendix: Search Term Relevance Table

Relevance Scale:

Highly Relevant

Relevant

Slightly Relevant

Not Relevant

Search Type:

ALL CAPITAL LETTERS = controlled vocabulary

"in quotes" = natural language

Boolean searches contain AND and OR

?,* denote wildcards

A. Library of Congress classification call numbers

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
HM876 Revolutions	Not Relevant
HM881 Social Movements	Highly Relevant
HM886 Violence	Slightly Relevant
JC328.5 Political Theory of Insurgency	Relevant
JC328.6 Political Theory of Political Violence	Slightly Relevant
JC359 Political Theory of Empire of Imperialism	Highly Relevant
JC491 Political Theory of Revolutions	Not Relevant
K3269 Law-Resistance to government	Not Relevant
PN56.I465 Literature-special topics-Imperialism	Slightly Relevant
Z7164.I34 Subject Bibliography-special topics-Imperialism	Relevant

B. Academic Search Premier

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
(DE "ANTI-IMPERIALIST MOVEMENTS")	Relevant
(DE "NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS")	Relevant
"imperialism AND resistance"	Highly Relevant
(DE "ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT")	Relevant

C. Alt-PressWatch

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
LSU({IMPERIALISM}) AND LSU({REBELLIONS})	Relevant
LSU({IMPERIALISM})	Relevant
LSU({IMPERIALISM}) AND "resistance"	Highly Relevant

D. Ethnic News Watch

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
LSU({IMPERIALISM}) AND "resistance"	slightly relevant
LSU({IMPERIALISM}) AND LSU({REBELLIONS})	relevant

E. Lexis Nexis Academic

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"anti-imperialism"	not relevant
"imperialism"	slightly relevant
"imperialism AND resistance"	highly relevant

F. Video Librarian Plus!

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"imperialism"	not relevant
"resistance"	not relevant
"revolution"	not relevant

G. Historical Abstracts Database Online

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
ANTI-IMPERIALISM	not relevant

H. World News Connection

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"imperialis? AND 200? (entire article)	relevant
"imperialis? AND resistance AND 200? (entire article)	relevant
"imperialis? AND resistance AND 200? (headline and lead paragraph)	relevant

I. MARCIVE

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"imperialism"	not relevant

J. IMDB

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"imperialism"	not relevant

K. NarcoNews.com

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"imperialism"	relevant
"imperialism AND resistance"	highly relevant
"anti-imperialist"	highly relevant

L. Znet/Z Magazine

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
IMPERIALISM	relevant
"imperialism and resistance"	relevant

M. www.indymedia.org

SEARCH TERM	RELEVANCE
"imperialism"	highly relevant
"imperialism" AND IMPERIALISM AND WAR	highly relevant
IMPERIALISM AND WAR	relevant

Anti-imperialist movements of the 21st century:

a plan for a bibliography

Click here for bibliography

I. Introduction

A. Overview

B. Scope

C. Audience

II. Search Strategy

A. Library of Congress Subject Headings

B. Balay's Guide to Reference Books9

C. Library of Congress Classification call numbers

D. OnLine Databases

1. Academic Search Premier12

2. Alt-PressWatch14

3. Ethnic News Watch16

4. Lexis Nexis Academic17

5. Video Librarian Plus!19

6. Historical Abstracts Database Online20

7. World News Connection21

8. MARCIVE22

9. IMDb23