Political Articulation Research Articles

US foreign policy, public memory, and autism: representing September 11 and May 4

In this article, we examine the social production of autism in US foreign policy discourse. Autism, we argue, is evident in the active forgetting of US foreign policy and its consequences, both in the US and abroad. It is this forgetting, promoted by the US state, that enabled many Americans to respond to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ The explanation for the social production of an autistic attitude in US foreign policy, we argue, lies in the relations between institutional power and competing narratives and articulations of US foreign policy and domestic politics. The argument is illustrated through analysis of the politics of public memory at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where, on May 4, 1970, 13 students were shot, four fatally, while protesting the US invasion of Cambodia.

The Politics of Origins: Collective Creation Revisited

The Politics of Origins:Collective Creation Revisited Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Ph.D. candidate (bio) Is collective creation a figment of the nineteenth-century imagination? Have folklorists long since surpassed communal theories of creativity? That, at least, is the official position of the United States government. Who knew the government even has a position on the origins of folklore? That, in and of itself, warrants further exploration. More important, this position carries consequences that extend to international politics and trade. These consequences illustrate the nexus between theory and policy, to which folklorists (in spite of appointments to public offices) have long been remarkably indifferent. Theory and practice are divorced in a bifurcated field, rendering the political articulations of folklore theory all but invisible.1 What follows is an attempt to render visible the political dimension of concepts of creativity that are widely accepted (yet rarely articulated) among folklorists in the United States. The official U.S. position on the origins of folklore was put forward at the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore at the Geneva headquarters of WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) in December 2002.2 In her opening statement, the head of the U.S. delegation (Linda Lourie of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) questioned the notion that folklore is "communally developed," referring to the reports prepared by the WIPO Secretariat for this meeting that indicate traditional knowledge "is generally understood as being the result of creation and innovation by a collective originator: the community" (WIPO 2002c:31).3 The chief delegate of the United States scoffed at what she described as "nineteenth-century notions" and claimed that, on the contrary, folklore is "always individually created and then adopted by the community" (author's notes, December 9, 2002). Her statement gave this folklorist pause. Perhaps a little context will help explain why. Some ninety-four national delegations,4 eighteen intergovernmental organizations,5 [End Page 300] and fifty-four nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)6 were represented at the meeting of this committee, the purpose of which was to evaluate the need for legal protection of folklore and traditional knowledge at the international level and, if the need is recognized, to propose mechanisms for providing such protection.7 The problem that the committee was to address is that, although intellectual property rights (copyright, patents, industrial design protection, and so forth) offer strong protection to creations that are original, novel, and attributable to an individual creator/owner (person or corporation), they systematically exclude products of the creativity of a large part of humankind—creations that may be considered traditional.8 A great number of member states have frequently brought this matter up in the organizations of the United Nations in the past three decades, but so far to little avail (cf. Brown 1998). Despite the official Model Provisions for National Laws on the Protection of Expressions of Folklore against Illicit Exploitation and Other Prejudicial Actions adopted jointly in 1982 by WIPO and UNESCO and the equally official (and equally nonbinding) Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore from UNESCO in 1989 (Honko 1990a, 1990b; Seitel 2001), next to no progress has been made at the international level.9 To be sure, copyright and other intellectual property regimes have been globalized through various treaties and accords signed during this period, but they still exclude all creations that cannot be considered original/novel and whose origination cannot be attributed to a specific person or company. Meanwhile, ever greater parts of collective imaginaries, traditional knowledge, and technology formerly held in common have been privatized through intellectual property regimes as the reach of those regimes is extended and the protection they offer is deepened (e.g., Coombe 1998; Lessig 2001; Vaidhyanathan 2001; McCann 2003; also noteworthy is an old "dialogue" between Gershon Legman and Charles Seeger in Western Folklore [Legman 1962; Seeger 1962]). WIPO's Intergovernmental Committee was set up as a compromise between "developed" and "developing" countries, with the former pushing for global enforcement of intellectual property rights and the latter demanding equitable protection for their traditional know-how and expressions of culture. The idea was to keep these concerns of the developing countries out...

Childhood, Politics and Ambiguity

This article examines the relationship between children, young people and the world of politics. Whilst the past decade or so has seen the development of initiatives that draw children within the political sphere, there are powerful political and social forces that position children as dependent subalterns and thus exclude them from political participation.We address this ambiguous situation by referring to competing discourses on childhood: the discourse on children’s needs that foregrounds their transitional social status and an imperative to protect, and a set of ideas that revolves around children having collective ‘interests’ that require political articulation. In drawing out these competing discourses, the article addresses a range of ‘inclusive’ policies at global, national and local levels.

The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines

This article examines the related but distinct roles of two kinds of technologies—the cell phone, on the one hand, and crowds, on the other,—in the articulation of popular politics surrounding People Power II. It asks about the contrasting ways by which these telecommunicative technologies alternately promoted and contained expectations for radical change, and reflects on the messianic understanding of justice and freedom in the contemporary Philippines.

Radio days: Media-politics in Indonesia

In the recent excitement about the democratizing potential of the 'new' electronic media, theorists have largely ignored the role of the oldest of the electronic 'mass' media, that is, radio. This paper suggests several parallels between the oldest and the newest electronic media in the transmission of anti-authoritarian politics in Indonesia. While the Internet aided sections of the civil society in subverting the state's control over public discourse, in the post-authoritarian politics, radio may remain by far the more significant technology of democratization. Radio's importance is only in part explained by the economic limits on the distribution of the Internet in Indonesia. We need to look at the particular tessellation of culture, politics and technology in Indonesia to understand the role of radio in the articulation of local politics, in a democratization process whose success depends on the politics of ethno-cultural decentralization and devolution of power from urban elites.

The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines

This article examines the related but distinct roles of two kinds of technologies—the cell phone, on the one hand, and crowds, on the other,—in the articulation of popular politics surrounding People Power II. It asks about the contrasting ways by which these telecommunicative technologies alternately promoted and contained expectations for radical change, and reflects on the messianic understanding of justice and freedom in the contemporary Philippines.

Laclau or Mouffe? Splitting the Difference

The majority of those who comment upon the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - both supporters and critics - treat the work of the two authors as a coherent unity. I see acute differences that demarcate the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe: differences that impede any straightforward delimitation of the authorial identity `Laclau and Mouffe'. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the incommensurate political differences that separate the work of the two authors, and to establish the superiority of Mouffe's position. At its most basic both authors view politics as described in their co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: i.e. `as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153). This agreement, however, conceals the fact that the authors describe the political articulation of social relations in distinct ways, and that those descriptions are implicated in, and reinforce, contrasting ethico-political commitments and prescriptions. These differences reflect the differences between the politics of the Marxist tradition retained by Laclau - albeit understood as a negative apparition of its former (ultimately) fully positive self - and Mouffe's radical democratic pluralism. This latter perspective - in its more recent formulations - represents a political compound of civic-republicanism with a defense of liberalism; this is a political imaginary that retains little if anything from the Marxist tradition.

Civic Education and the New American Patriotism Post-9/11

This study analyzes the theoretical and practical political frameworks behind the two main approaches to civic education in America, 'civics' and 'service'. The first focuses on educating students about the formal political process. It is associated with liberal political theory and also with a justice-oriented, distributive politics that in practice has increasingly become consumer-oriented--fights over 'who gets what'. The second, 'service' (or community service or service learning) is associated with communitarian political theory and also with politics known internationally as neo-liberalism or the 'Third Way'. Neither liberalism nor communitarianism has been able to mount a significant alternative to what editors of a recent CJE issue call 'educational Darwinism' in education, in which less powerful groups are losers; to the spread generally of marketplace ways of thinking in every arena of society; or to the increasingly militarist and unilateralist foreign policy of the United States and the UK. Only the articulation of a different politics--best described as populist or civic populist in the United States, and 'popular democratic' in South Africa and elsewhere--can generate the power, political energy, and vision of a serious alternative. Populist politics has a different definition of politics itself, including productive as well as distributive dimensions. It has a different view of civic education, focused on the habits of public work, the skills of empowerment, and democratic organizing for cultural change in government, as well as educational and other mediating institutions. Finally, it has a different foreign policy, based on a patriotism that is internationally oriented and cognizant of global interdependence.

Discursos ocultos de resistencia: tradición oral y cultura política en comunidades negras de la costa pacífica colombiana

El texto presenta una muestra de la literatura oral de poblaciones afrocolombianas, incluyendo coplas y versos inéditos recogidos por el autor en Guapi, en la costa caucana del Pacífico. Se resalta la importancia de los ancianos, sabios y decimeros en los procesos actuales de re-construcción de memoria colectiva en el Pacífico, y cómo sus narrativas revelan un sentido de lugar que habla de patrones históricos de asentamiento, migraciones y viajes reales e imaginarios. Se sostiene que la tradición oral y sus formas poéticas como documento literario constituyen “discursos ocultos de resistencia” que desafían a las representaciones dominantes del Pacífico y sus pobladores, y que se dejan movilizar como articulación política en la lucha por el reconocimiento de derechos culturales y territoriales de comunidades negras en Colombia.

Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm: Reconciling Feminism and Anti-Imperialism?

The nature of the relationship between (proto-)feminism and (anti-)imperialism is highly contested. A case in point is the work of Olive Schreiner, and the articulation of gender politics with (anti-)imperialism which has been subjected to repeated scrutiny in the last twenty years. One strand of criticism, exemplified by critics like Laura Chrisman, Anne McClintock and Carolyn Burdett, argues that Schreiner generally successfully integrates a (proto-)feminist politics with criticism of imperialism in her writing produced after The Story of an African Farm . However, her first novel is viewed as more problematic in this regard. While acknowledging it as a major early text of the women's movement, such critics see the novel as in large measure endorsing prevailing Victorian ideologies of racial hierarchy. Drawing on the methodology of Sub-altern Studies, Moore-Gilbert proposes a rather different interpretation of The Story of an African Farm . Following the lead of Ranajit Guha and his colleagues, he seeks to trace the impact of (the resistance of) the colonized subaltern on the colonizer's unconscious and how this is reflected in the colonizer's regimes of representation and self-image. He proposes that Waldo can be read 'catachrestically' as a figure of the (partially resistant) colonized who at the manifest level occupy only a marginal role in Schreiner's text. The aim is not to overturn readings of Waldo that see him as an exemplary 'modern', embodying many of the characteristics of western civilization at the time. Rather, the argument is that such a 'catchrestic' reading can co-exist simultaneously with these received interpretations of his role, thus corroborating the perception of the Subaltern Studies historians on the existence of conflicts and contradictions in the colonizer's unconscious that mark the (oppositional) presence of the (historically effaced) subaltern. Against their emphasis, however, Moore-Gilbert suggests that the colonizer's unconscious can also be the seat of 'progressive' drives. And the presence of such drives on Schreiner's novel suggests that its racial politics are more consonant with those of her later work than is commonly assumed.

Democracy and Cultural Rights: Is There a New Stage of Citizenship?

The issue of cultural rights has been considered an unsolvable problem for democracies from many different points of view. Communitarians, as critics of rights language, have asserted that “the rights discourse” diminishes “social trust,” develops “absolutist claims,” and reduces “complex social issues to simple slogans.”1 Ronald Beiner, for example, has claimed that “the whole point of asserting a rights claim is to identify an aspect of human existence that is so fundamental that its violation, anywhere, at any time, constitutes an affront to human dignity as such.” Thus, Beiner concludes, “applying this logic to the problem of the moral status of nationalities raises a problem, for it puts moralistic language at the disposal of nationalists everywhere, who, as such, are in the business of playing the ethnic grievances game.”2 From a different perspective, Seyla Benhabib argues that the paradox of the politics of “identity/difference” is that they pose the contingency of their identity definitions, while, at the same time, making claims about their essentiality. Like Beiner, Benhabib argues that identity claims are always expressed as “fundamental, non-negotiable,” yet, paradoxically, the new cultural turn understands them “as processes of social and political mobilization and cultural articulation.”3 Thus, argues Benhabib, “despite its emancipatory intentions, multicultural group politics, particularly if it leads to group differentiated rights claims, may carry seeds of a new form of political authoritarianism.”4 From both these perspectives, it seems clear that cultural rights and democracy are regarded as a highly dangerous liaison. The goal of this paper is to provide a possible answer to such objections and, at the same time, to analyze on a normative basis how it is possible to conceive of cultural rights as parts of democratic rights, that is, as a dimension of democratic citizenship. I would like to claim that we need to frame “multicultural” claims for recognition as processes of widening the democratic scope of constitutional rights. If this is possible, then these processes must be formulated as explicit steps towards universalization and integration, or as simultaneous processes of democratizing and disaggregating rights. Thus, I would like to develop a normative argument about the possibility of conceiving “cultural rights,” and in doing so, I would like to revise Marshall’s and Habermas’s notions of citizens’ rights and their “democratic evolution.” In the last part of this essay, I will examine the objections to multicultural rights expressed by feminists, and,

Reasonably radical: deliberative liberalism and the politics of identity

Liberalism and the politics of identity seem incompatible. Liberalism starts from the capacity of reasonable individuals to order their lives. The politics of feminism and multiculturalism, however, argue that liberal individualism glosses over structural inequalities and relies on unjust normalizing pressures. Modern political philosophy must reconcile these two viewpoints if it is to move forward. Reasonably Radical synthesizes both approaches in a new form of liberal theory: deliberative liberalism.Anthony Simon Laden demonstrates that liberal theory can accommodate deep diversity once it recasts its understanding of the legitimization of just principles. Liberalism traditionally argues for the legitimacy of liberal political principles on the basis of citizens' consent, but derives that consent from what it regards as common human attributes. Laden, however, drawing on Rousseau and Hegel, two thinkers often ignored by contemporary liberals, claims that legitimacy cannot be so derived.According to deliberative liberalism, citizens' actual deliberation confers legitimacy on political principles in virtue of its being reasonable, regardless of whether it yields consensus. Laden argues that political deliberation can only be reasonable under certain social conditions, however. These include a reciprocal distribution of power and respect for deep diversity. Reasonable principles thus require radical politics, and both find a home in this clear theoretical articulation of identity politics which is at the same time a strong new vision of liberalism.

Globalisation and the Cultural Politics of Educational Change: The Controversy over Teaching of English in West Bengal

(Globalisation and the Cultural Politics of Educational Change: The Controversy over the Teaching of English in West Bengal) – This article deals with the articulation of educational policy, cultural politics, and social class in the era of globalization. It analyses the policy of the Government of West Bengal to remove the teaching of English from the primary school syllabus in the state in the early 1980s and its subsequent reintroduction from the beginning of the school year in 2000. The author argues that English is a crucial component of the middle classes' cultural capital and is essential to their future employment success, especially in a globalising work environment. This is supported by interviews conducted during 1998/1999 with middle-class Bengalis. For governments of postcolonial, developing societies, this dispute highlights an essential dichotomy between, on the one hand, the ideal of broad-based educational policies and, on the other hand, the need to prepare children for employment at home and abroad in the context of globalisation.

RDAs, Sub-Regional Partnerships and Local Regeneration

This article examines the structures and relationships being formed between regional, sub-regional and local levels of governance. It highlights how traditional methods for the delivery of regeneration, based on Weberian formalization, centralization and bureaucratic procedures, are being challenged by the call for more flexible arrangements with decentralized decision-making and wider participation, a key philosophy of contemporary regeneration management. It is suggested that the implementation of programmes is problematic because cultural and professional differences emerge between professional regeneration managers an d the recipients of regeneration projects. By focusing on the emergence of four Sub-Regional Partnerships (SRPs), a new intermediary in regeneration, in the North East of England, this article will be of interest to both practitioners and academics. Early evidence tends to indicate that through SRPs, the governance of regeneration appears to be an other ‘managerial fix’ rather than a new form of political articulation.

Kunst und politische Artikulation: Die chinesische Karikatur 1934-1937 (review)

Reviewed by: Kunst und politische Artikulation: Die chinesische Karikatur 1934-1937 (Art and political articulation: The Chinese cartoon, 1934-1937) Barbara Mittler (bio) Heike Frick . Kunst und politische Artikulation: Die chinesische Karikatur 1934-1937 (Art and political articulation: The Chinese cartoon, 1934-1937). Berliner China-Studien, vol. 27. München: Minerva Publikation, 1995. 231 pp. Paperback, ISBN 3-597-10647-1. Not much has been written on the art of cartoons and caricature in China, and thus Heike Frick's book—an excellent study of cartoons that appeared in specialized cartoon magazines in Shanghai between 1934 and 1937—is a welcome addition to this undeservedly small subfield of Chinese studies. As Frick herself points out, cartoons are indeed an invaluable source for the study of political, social, intellectual, and artistic trends and discursive formations especially during periods of social upheaval and change. They reflect not just the points of view of the artists who made them but also, inevitably, through the use of stereotyped images, the commonly held beliefs and attitudes of their times (p. 16). They are thus ideal sources for the study of the mentalité of a people in a given period. It is for this reason that cartoons and caricatures ought to be taken much more seriously by historians (p. 15). In addition to the introduction (part 1) and the conclusion (part 4), Frick's study consists of two main parts: part 2, "Socio-cultural and Art-historical Aspects of Cartoons in China" (pp. 32-66), and part 3, "Everyday Conflicts of the 1930s in Contemporary Cartoons" (pp. 67-211). In part 2, Frick deals briefly and comparatively with the development of cartoons and caricature in both China and the West and discusses the production and readership of cartoons in China of the 1930s. In part 3, she analyzes some fifty cartoons, which she divides into four [End Page 108] major categories: (1) the political elite, (2) particular social types, (3) social criticism, and (4) foreigners. Her analyses of these cartoons, which take up the bulk of the book (part 3 , pp. 67-211), offer valuable insights for anyone studying this period. These cartoons present yet another discursive angle—next to the better-studied media such as literature, film, or the press—on Chinese society in this particular time of change. It is one of the strengths of her book that Frick is ready to point especially to some of the parallels with literary discourse, as she does in the cases of the "superfluous" and ineffective—and thus typical—May Fourth intellectual, the question of individualism, or the figure of the policeman and the rickshaw puller, respectively. Frick is able to show that the arguments brought up in cartoons are reflections of rather general topics of discussion. Thus, she illuminates the function of caricature within the discursive field of the time, as she has promised in the introduction (p. 18). Of course, one could always hope for more contextualizations. For example, the depictions of women in these cartoons—prostitutes in particular—could have been compared fruitfully to similar images presented in some of the silent films produced in Shanghai during the same period.1 In some cases, it might also have been useful to provide a historical dimension. With regard to prostitutes, the parallels with earlier portrayals in the print media (in editorials, news reports, poetry, and illustrations) are striking: here and there prostitutes appear as women who are both admired and despised—and subdued—by men. As such, they become the symbol for a China that was subordinated to the foreign powers from at least the late Qing.2 In view of these historical precedents, what is the particular quality of the discourse on prostitution in the cartoons of the 1930s? Similarly, how do the antiforeign cartoons of the 1930s compare with some of the earlier anti-Western cartoons published in newspapers and magazines since the late Qing? Many of the themes alluded to by Frick in her approach to the topic appear in these earlier publications in rather similar form.3 How do the images change and how do they remain the same? What does this tell us about the particular significance of cartoons as...

The Human in the Humanities

In 1948 the literary critic Leo Spitzer published his celebrated essay Linguistics and Literary History. Originally titled Thinking in the Humanities when it was delivered a lecture at Princeton to the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, it became a foundational text and curricular staple in the burgeoning field of Comparative Literature and in the sciences generally. From Spitzer to Paul de Man, etymological method fired debates around the postwar humanist legacy, structural semiotics and intertextuality. It informed deconstruction's rhetorical practice, and, in political terms, it gave substance to linguistic and national claims, or more precisely, to language wars around philological heritage, patrimony, and the origins of literary culture. The fact that the French term racine (with its accrued, overlapping associations around verbal roots and the roots of national culture) may have stirred Gilles Deleuze to invent the counter-nationalist, nomadological rhizome or anti-root only attests to the monumentality of philological thinking. In what follows, I will be looking specifically at the role of what I'm calling the racial in Spitzer's concept of philology, testing a hypothesis that this etymon calibrates the shifting status of the in the humanities, from philology to philosophy, and from philosophy to the genetics of language. As the category of the subject begins to suffer signs of fatigue in contemporary critical theory, the category of the human acquires new significance. First, because it speaks to an intellectual surround dominated by the genome project, and the ethical dilemmas attendant on breakthroughs in cloning, reproductive technology, and biological engineering. Second, because, Thomas Keenan has pointed out, the human, a general category partnered uneasily with humanitarianism, serves, however problematically, as the name of that which would precede geographical divisions and political articulations, of that which is by definition essentially unbordered.I And third, because the represents a possible

Russian Poetry: The Lives or the Lines?

I need hardly say this, but will nevertheless ask for your indulgence while I do so, that to be elected President of the MHRA is a great honour for me personally. There is a broader and much more important reason why I am gratified to have been elected. Many misfortunes have come the way of Russia in recent years, and they continue to accumulate, to the Schadenfreude of the foreign media and the discomfiture of people such as myself who are professionally and personally committed to Russia and the Russians. As a result, foreign interest in the academic study of the country has tended to diminish rather than the opposite; our society seems to worship success, even the pseudo-success of the Soviet era, in its time and after, and disdainfully loses interest when less pernicious things seem to be going wrong. In the political world, and in the academic world that reflects it more and more directly, a tendency has begun for Russia to be marginalized. Influential people increasingly seem to want to exclude Russia from Europe, and especially from its principal political articulations, which begin with the EU. The idea that Europe ends at the Vistula, which seems to have been gaining ground in the decisions of politicians and even, alas, in the mind of the general public, is for me and my fellow Russianists not simply an absurdity, but a dangerous absurdity.1 It is mainly for this reason that I am delighted to accept the earnest of Russia's being included that has been made by the MHRA through my person. I am going to talk today about Russian poetry, a subject that has preoccupied me throughout my academic career. I want to begin by identifying the idea about it that seems to me to be more widely held than any other; I shall go on to argue that this idea is misleading, in the sense that it distorts the way Russian poetry is approached, by academics in particular, and to explore what might be the principal reasons for this; I shall conclude by suggesting a change of emphasis that might perhaps improve things. I am speaking of the idea, crudely stated, that in Russia, poetry matters more than it does anywhere else. I need to qualify this formulation immediately, switch to the past tense, and say that poetry used to matter more, especially in the Soviet period, since the situation has changed in the last ten years.2 Knowledgeable people have been saying since his death, for example, that Joseph Brodsky was the last Russian Poet with a capital 'P', and that there is now a wasteland or a backwater where poetry used to be on the

Political Uncertainties And Natural Disasters: Montserratian Identity and Colonial Status

When a violent and unpredictable volcano erupted on the small Caribbean island of Montserrat the implications for the people who lived there were to be profound. Not only was this a natural disaster which forced people out of their homes and, for many, away from their island, it was also a point of conflict of political and cultural identity. Montserrat is a British Dependent Territory (BDTO) and Montserratians currently have no formal citizenship rights. However, the constitutional status of the BDTOs is the subject of a British Government White Paper published in March 1999. The potential changes to be introduced are that all residents of BDTOs (not just those in Gibraltar and The Falklands) will have British Citizenship and that the territories are renamed simply as British Territories. It is a reinscription of colonialism which at the same time is constructed around a political rhetoric of partnership and mutual concerns with positive futures. Indeed, the rewriting of the constitutional arrangements between Britain and the BDTOs is very much a reflection of the desires and political articulations of the majority of people who reside in these remnants of colonialism. The majority of Montserratians have lost everything they have ever owned, they have lost their homes, their villages, and communities have been totally destroyed. Two-thirds of the island lies under molten rock and ash, and the devastation is intense. Yet, literally, out of the ashes, Montserratians, those who remain on the island and those who have relocated to other places, are maintaining their cultural identities and forging new ones as a resistance to the profound damage wrought by the natural disaster. This essay explores the cultural, political and constitutional fall-out which has revolved around this colony, the local Montserratian Government, the British Government, neighbouring Caribbean island states and the Montserratians themselves.

Transformation of State Socialism: From Communism to Chaotic Capitalism?

Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997, £45.00 (£14.95 pbk), 378 pp. (ISBN 0-7456-1312-8).Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, £40.00 (£14.00 pbk), 298 pp. (ISBN 0-691-01132-X).Joseph R. Blasi, Maya Kroumova and Douglas Kruse, Kremlin Capitalism: Privatising the Russian Economy, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997, 16.95 pbk), xix+190 pp. (ISBN 0-8014-8396-4).Annika Thunborg, Public and Non-Profit Interaction: U.S. Assistance to Eastern European Media 1989-1995, Lund: Lund University Press, 1997, SKr 223 pbk, x+271 pp. (ISBN 911-7966-419-9).The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the state socialist system has put an end to a sub-discipline of political science (communist politics), to the study in sociology of an ‘alternative’ framework of industrial society and it has also led to philosophical speculation about the ‘end of history’. In its train the collapse has generated new sets of problems in the field of ‘transitology’. The distinctive features of the transformation of state socialism are that, unlike in the political movement from autocracy to polyarchy characterising southern European states such as Spain and Greece, the structural elite-induced changes under post-communism involve simultaneously transformations of the value system, forms of integration and legitimacy, types of political management and interest articulation and the economic mechanism, including the ownership of property.

EL VEZ IS 'TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS': THE INTER/NATIONAL APPEAL OF CHICANO POPULAR MUSIC

This article introduces El Vez, an important performance artist and musician, whose translation of Elvis extends far beyond local audiences. In our historical moment of shrinking public outlets for the circulation and discussion of alternative and oppositional perpectives, his creator, Robert Lopez, has opened up a discursive space – on the terrain of popular music, in the unlikely genre of Elvis impersonation – that enables both critique of the status quo and dialogue concerning progressive social transformation. This article investigates Lopez's artful superimpositions of Chicana and Chicano realities and cultural icons on to the iconography, soundings and lyrics that cluster around Elvis, and claims that Lopez subverts both the myth of ‘Elvis as the embodiment of the American Dream’ and the reactionary assumption that American national identity and cultural belonging are (or should be) equated with exclusionary representations of whiteness. This article also argues that the content of his live and recorded stage shows (which are part strip-tease, part Chicana/o studies, part labour history, and part history of popular music course) respond to hegemonic discourses that fault racialized immigrants and working-class people for the consequences of global economic restructuring, and that his aesthetics of resistance subvert both dominant and subaltern dictates for strict, unyielding definitions of identity, sexuality and citizenship. Finally, it suggests that the positive reception of Lopez's performances by racialized, marginalized, displaced and economically outcast youth in Germany speaks to an identification with Chicana/o struggles that is not based on a specific ethnicity, but instead on an articulation of oppositional politics. In this context, Lopez's music enables the possibility of building coalitions beyond the constraints of the nation-state.