Newspaper Commentaries Research Articles

Hunger, Healing, and Citizenship in Central Tanzania

Abstract:This article draws on newspaper commentary, Nyaturu hunger lore, and ethnographic research to describe how central Tanzanian villagers accessed food aid from the state during the East African food crisis of 2006. Through leveraging their political support and their participation in national development agendas, rural inhabitants claimed their rights. Yet it was through these exchanges that the state converted food aid into political power. The article argues that the highly ritualized gift of food aid naturalizes a contemporary political and economic order in which, counterintuitively, it is rural farmers who go hungry.

Introducing Militant Islam: Peoples, Places and Policing

Widespread public, policing and academic interest about militant Islam can be traced to the 2001 attacks on America. Subsequent plots and acts of terrorism have ensured that interest has remained. Throughout this period, a plethora of academic articles, books, newspaper commentaries, research reports, policy documents, guidelines and manuals have been published. Yet despite, or even because of, this extensive coverage, considerable misunderstanding, if not ignorance, exists across government, police and academic institutions.

About the Little Red Riding Hood, “Durex“and anger: Production, meaning and reception of one fairy tale and one commercial ad

By applying the semiological analysis, this paper considers planned and unplanned readings of a provocative domestic commercial, which, in order to convey its message, transposed the Little Red Riding Hood’s character in accordance with the advertised product – Durex condoms. This commercial caused furious reactions of parents who took legal action for breaching the Law on public advertising and, especially, „harming children’s sensibility and integrity“. Provocative billboards also caused numerous comments in the daily newspapers, in the Internet chat rooms, with some considering the commercial vulgar and offensive and others having no problem with it, adding that the ones who took offence belonged to those puritan and conservative layers of the society. In order to discover the reasons to this kind of reactions, I started with researching how the commercial was made and what kind of message it offered. Next, I reconsidered the meaning of the very fairy tale „The Red Riding Hood“. Its original version, which contains open sexual allusions, is quite different to the changed versions offered by Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. Their versions can be seen as fakelore, since they outrageously intervened on the plot and the meaning of the original fairy tale. However, since the Grimm brothers’ version is the most popular, it is a fact that our public reacted with such anger led by the meaning of their version, which accentuates overeating and cannibalism, and not sexual development of girls, which is the basic message of the original version. This is where the „communicational noise“ that led to those negative reactions came from. By discovering the true meaning of the tale, the answer is given to the question whether the advertising agency made a slip up, or it had actually found the right way to communicate the hidden message of the tale, and at the same time ruin the advertising campaign for which it was used. In the end, range and possibilities of the social semiological analysis of commercials are considered.

Intertextual aspects of Chinese newspaper commentaries on the events of 9/11

This article explores intertextual aspects of Chinese newspaper commentaries on the events of 11 September 2001. Newspaper commentaries in China are often a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of comprehensive news reports and opinion articles. Informed by genre theories and discussions of intertextuality in different disciplines, this article examines the micro-genres of the data collected and investigates how the Chinese writers include and use outside sources and how they position themselves as writers in relation to other sources. The analysis reveals that Chinese writers tend to use the explanatory micro-genre often with attributed but unidentified external sources or sources with high status for keeping a distance from these sources in the writing. This suggests that the writers tend to avoid personal authorship and responsibility for what they write. The article also discusses the textual and intertextual features in relation to the roles of the press in the Chinese context.

A Queer Country? A case study of the politics of gay/lesbian belonging in an Australian country town

The present paper examines the complex politics of gay/lesbian belonging through a case study of Daylesford, Victoria, an Australian country town. It contributes to two research bodies: gay/lesbian rural geographies and the politics of belonging. Daylesford hosts ChillOut, Australia's largest rural gay/lesbian festival, which provides a telling context for investigating gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We use qualitative data from the 2006 ChillOut Festival, including interviews with local residents, newspaper commentaries, and visitors’ surveys, to explore how Daylesford has been constructed, imagined, and experienced as a ‘unique’ site of gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We find that ChillOut crucially contributes to its wider reputation as a gay-friendly country town, but also, we argue, to the contested nature of gay/lesbian belonging. This was most powerfully demonstrated by the local council's refusal to fly the gay-identified rainbow flag on the Town Hall during the 2006 Festival and its subsequent banning of the display of all festival flags from that key public building. Because ChillOut was the catalyst for this protocol, the resolution was viewed as homophobic. Indeed, the homophobic and heterosexist rhetoric that ensued in the Letters to the Editor section of the local newspaper revealed some residents’ underlying antagonism towards ChillOut and the local gay/lesbian community. Moreover, appealing to a shared ‘Australian identity’ and associated normative ‘family values’, these letter writers deployed a multi-scalar politics of belonging, where a sense of gay/lesbian belonging to Daylesford at the local scale was contested by the assertion of a ‘more meaningful’ national scale of allegiance fashioned by heteronormativity.

‘Impossible is a fact’: Greek nationalism and international recognition in Euro 2004

This article explores the ways in which the ‘nation’ is discussed in the press. Theoretically, it argues that the national ‘self’ emerges through dialogue with ‘others’. Reconsidering Anderson's argument, it suggests that national identity is often the product of international recognition that enables the national community to ‘imagine’ itself. Contextually, it looks at Greek newspaper commentary following the victory of the Greek football team in the Euro 2004 tournament. The Greek national ‘self’ emerged in such commentary in many ways: first, through the uses of its Christian and Hellenic heritage that European nations admire; second, through the projection of the ‘Greek nation’ outwards, as a diasporic community; and, third, through the construction of (racist) stereotyping of ‘Greek football enemies’ and ‘friends’. The article concludes by examining the role of international praise or criticism in the promotion of a Greek political agenda abroad.

Uncle Tom mania: slavery, minstrelsy and transatlantic culture in the 1850s

Titled after Tom-Mania, the name British newspaper gave to the international sensation attending the 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, this study looks anew at the novel and the songs, plays, sketches, translations, and imitations it inspired. In particular, Sarah Meer shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how Uncle Tom's Cabin was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandized, and politicized here and abroad. Until Uncle Tom's Cabin, Meer says, little truly common ground existed on which the United States and Britain could debate slavery. In addition to cutting across class, gender, and national lines, the novel tapped into huge, preexisting transatlantic appetite for blackface performance. Even as it condemned slavery, however, Uncle Tom's Cabin was ambiguous about racial equality, and it portrayed blacks in demeaning ways. This gave copycat novels and minstrel stagings leeway to stray from Harriet Beecher Stowe's intentions. Minstrel-show versions in particular had huge influence on later incarnations of the Uncle Tom story, converting the character into a comic, or worse, proslavery stooge - scorned figure in our popular memory. To look at how and why Uncle Tom's Cabin both advocated emancipation and licensed plethora of racist imitators, Meer places it in the context of contemporary minstrel sketches, melodramas, songs, jokes, newspaper commentaries, slave narratives, travel writing, proslavery novels, and even Uncle Tom merchandise like china figurines and wall-paper. She goes on to discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe's travelogue Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and her second novel, Dred. The publication of each unleashed the political energies of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its revisions yet again.

'The Darkness Inside the Human Soul': Uncertainty in Theological Humanism and Michael Frayn's Play Copenhagen

Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen, dramatises as a ghost story the conver sation concerning the moral implications of atomic fission among Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and his wife, Margrethe Bohr, in September 1941. This paper argues that the play generalises from the famous uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics to present the necessary appearance of uncertainty at the historical, moral, and theological levels of reflection. The paper traces the meaning of uncertainty back to the 'being of the self' as a cipher for divine transcendence, and it interprets the meaning of uncertainty for the theory and method of theological humanism. How incredible it is that Michael Frayn's play, Copenhagen, is so successful on the world stage! Copenhagen won the 2000 Tony Award for best play, packed theatres in Europe and the United States, and provoked symposia and newspaper commentaries wherever it travelled. One would think that a play based on conversations among Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and his wife, Margrethe Bohr, would be a big-time bomb. Contrary to such expectations, the play is absolutely gripping. What is the secret of its success? I propose that this play surprises its audience by appealing to it at multiple levels that engage the central concerns of theological humanism. Specifically, the play is revelatory in a very odd sense that is nonetheless theological: it discloses the structure of uncertainty not just in quantum mechanics, but more importantly at the historical, moral, and theological levels of human thinking and hence experiencing. What is surprising is that ordi narily we associate revelation with certainty. In this play, however, what

Disabling the public interest: alcohol strategies and policies for England.

Disabling the public interest: alcohol strategies and policies for England.

Voices of the Marchers

The Commemorative March in 2002 transpired through the efforts of hundreds of individuals: those who helped in the planning; those who supported the march either through prayers, monetary, or food donations; those who contributed their time and energy; and those who participated in the commemorative event.' Many of those individuals shared their perspectives either while on the march or shortly after the march at one of the gatherings held to discuss the event. While some of them might not have felt comfortable enough to write an essay to include in this collection, their voices are nonetheless equally important and extremely valuable. The majority of comments contained in this article were transcribed from the tapes I made along the course of the journey, and others came from transcriptions from video or audio recordings of meetings after the event. A few others are from newspaper clippings or comments people wrote to me after the event was completed. We felt it was important to try to document as unobtrusively as possible the thoughts and feelings of participants, as most of us were deeply affected by our participation and felt transformed by the end of the experience.

Capturing the Public Interest

News media and newspaper op-eds in particular have played a significant role in the ascendancy of a free-market ideology during the past few decades, leading to the erosion of the regulatory function of government and the devaluation of planning. Here, the authors make the case that planners, especially planning academics with tenure, should become more engaged in the public debate about the role of government and public planning through the writing of newspaper commentaries.

Moral Language in Newspaper Commentary: A Kohlbergian Analysis

This study begins with the question of whether the press is conveying messages that help readers in their moral development. Using a Kohlbergian model, this study explores the question by analyzing the moral language in columns and letters to the editor from three Oregon newspapers. The study's content analysis reveals that most arguments presented in the opinion section of the three papers are done so at either Kohlberg's preconventional or conventional levels.

‘Designer families’: A discourse study of fact and accountability

Relations between event reports, explanations, and the reporter’s own credibility and involvement, are studied as discursively handled matters. A series of newspaper reports and commentaries is examined, concerning the controversial abortion of one of a pair of healthy twin foetuses. For two weeks the newspapers reported events, discussed issues, corrected errors, quoted sources, and in various ways handled issues of fact and responsibility concerning those events, including their own reporting of them. The approach taken is to analyse fact and accountability as the business being handled and managed in the texts themselves, rather than issues that the analysis attempts to resolve. This enables a study of how various descriptive and accounting categories are selected and deployed, including the reliability of sources, actors’ and informants’ intentions and motives, narrative uses of tense, journalistic categories such as the distinction between ‘news’ and ‘features’, and a wide variety of specific, rhetorically potent descriptions.

Borders, symbolism and nation‐state building: Ukraine and Russia

The Russian‐Ukrainian border question always consisted of far more than simply a territorial dispute. It inevitably became bound up with questions of state and nation‐building, the creation of new post‐Soviet national identities, and the forging of civic nations. These factors involved the revival of historical myths and the return to history to ‘prove’ first settlement. A discourse, couched in such terms, proved to be highly charged because it was one where, ‘history matters and contains a direct challenge to the political survival of every fledgling state’.’ Russian newspaper commentaries pointed out that the Russian‐Ukrainian treaty signed in late May 1997 was more difficult psychologically for Moscow to undertake than the treaties signed with Chechnya and NATO earlier in the same month. This article surveys the roots of the Ukrainian‐Russian territorial dispute and how history has been brought into play as a means to argue for the ‘right’ of first settlement. It then discusses attitudes within Ukraine to its territorial integrity.

China Since Tiananmen: Political, Economic, and Social Conflicts (review)

Reviews 253 Lawrence R. Sullivan, editor. China Since Tiananmen: Political, Economic, and Social Conflicts. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995. xx, 331 pp. Hardcover $60.00, isbn 1-56324-538-8. Paperback $19.95, isbn 1-56324-539-6. China's economic reforms since the 1980s and the remarkable changes fhat have taken place thereafter have been attracting fhe world's attention. The suppression ofthe Tiananmen pro-democracy movement of1989, however, resulted in serious setbacks to the country's otherwise thriving surge toward modernization. Again, China was at a crossroads. What course would China follow after the crisis? Lawrence R. SuUivan, a political scientist, has edited a readable book fhat attempts to analyze the ideological and social developments fhat have emerged during the post-Tiananmen period. This volume includes government documents, individual essays, newspaper commentaries, and important speeches by state leaders. Sources include mainly the foUowing: (1) the major propaganda and theoretical organs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) such as People's Daily, Beijing Review , and Qiushi (Seeking truth); (2) the provincial, regional, and organizational press; (3) individual addresses ranging from fhose ofthe President ofthe CCP to those by well-known inteUectuals; and (4) articles and commentaries from the principal media ofHong Kong and Taiwan. The 109 documents, covering the period from 1989 to 1994, are divided into four sections, each of which focuses, respectively , on political, economic, social and cultural, and science and technology issues. Following fhe briefintroductions to each section by the editor, the entire book is rich in information that is presented in an original way, with opposing views that invite readers to analyze, criticize, and draw their own conclusions. As SuUivan indicates in his introduction, the events ofJune 1989 "peacefully chaUenged die authority of the government . . . [but] the Chinese leadership has been obsessed with maintaining control" (p. xix). In addition to questions regarding the political future ofHong Kong, the Taiwan issue, international protests over human rights abuses in China, the Three Gorges Dam project, the anticorruption movement, and odier related problems, conflicts over how and to what extent the Chinese leadership should further strengthen its authority in the wake of the Tianamen incident remain the central theme. Four monfhs after the Tianamen crackdown, Jiang Zemin, General Secretary offhe CCP Central Committee , addressed fhe crowds who were celebrating fhe fortieth anniversary of the founding ofthe People's Republic ofChina. His statement set the tone for the© 1997 by University post-Tiananmen CCP strategy. Jiang reiterated that "fhe Four Cardinal Principles ofHawai'i Press^e the foundation offhe nation, whereas reform and opening to the outside world are means ofstrengthening the nation" (p. 23). The lesson diat the CCP drew from the 1989 Tiananmen incident, fhe fall of the Berlin WaU, and the col- 254 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1997 lapse of the Soviet Union was that China could not tolerate the other kind ofreform and the other way ofopening itselfto the outside—bourgeois liberalization and total Westernization. The only way to guarantee smooth sailing in China's socialist construction was to tighten the CCP's control over every aspect of society including the government, die müitary, schools, factories, and villages. Democracy within the CCP was seen only as the basis ofa centralism that served to "safeguard the party's unified fighting power" (p. 57). In order to reinforce this centralism, China's paramount leader Deng Xiaoping caUed for the restoration ofthe "fusion ofparty and government"—an obsolete form ofpolitical structure that had existed before China's reforms. Deng's statement, however, was found, by Hong Kong's South China MorningPost, to be contradictory to a speech ofhis in 1941, in which he caUed for the separation ofparty and government and for a higher degree ofmass participation. Obviously, fhe political situation after June 1989 necessitated a shift of strategy in order to secure die absolute power of fhe CCP in directing the reforms nationwide. Interestingly, Deng Xiaoping is here described as a complex man, often contradicting himselfin national policy making. The forty-three documents in diis section also reveal three basic conflicts within the CCP political structure. First, the political climate was largely characterized by conflicts between hard-liners and reformists. The...

‘Adultery à‐la‐Mode’: Privilege, the Law and Attitudes to Adultery 1770–1809

After a brief examination of the vices which were condemned as the constituent elements in an aristocratic code of licence, this article considers the complex public discussions of the duties of marriage and the relations between marriage, property and aristocratic privilege, and the attacks on adultery that took place in Britain between 1770 and 1809. In order to understand the nature of the public contentions that occurred over this issue, both parliamentary debates and reaction out‐of‐doors (in pamphlet and newspaper comments and in public debating society meetings as well as in courts of law) will be examined to see how, and with what unanimity, the attack on fashionable adultery took place. For, by the early nineteenth century, the campaign against both upper‐class infidelity and its corrosive effects on law and property was systematically and powerfully articulated. Though unsuccessful in passing a parliamentary Act to curb this activity, the work of the campaigners itself heightened public awareness of and focused public antipathy towards the code of gallantry, the sexual equivalent of the code of honour, and the privileged morality of the higher orders.

Letting the People Decide: The Dynamics of a Canadian Election, by Richard Johnston, André Blais, Henry E. Brady and Jean Crête

The authors have based the book primarily on data derived from the 1988 Canadian Election Study, for which they were co-investigators. The survey was a rolling cross-section: a daily tracking of the campaign designed explicitly to monitor electoral dynamics. The multivariate techniques commonly involved in the analysis of campaign data are presented here in an accessible way, as graphs rather than tables. Videotapes of prime time news analyses on CBC, CTV, and SRC outlets, as well as some newspaper commentaries, have been integrated into the survey. This information is contrasted with an analysis of electoral dynamics based on one hundred years of census and electoral data. The authors make a variety of significant arguments about the historical and political basis of the parties' eventual positions on the issue of free trade, the overriding importance of that issue to the 1988 election, the roles of the party leaders, and, perhaps most important, the political impact of campaigns, especially of debates and media coverage. Letting the People Decide brings the study of Canadian parties into the analytical mainstream even as it supplies a new interpretation of a century of elections.

German white collar workers before the rise of National Socialism: An interview with Hans Speier

Who were the National Socialists? More and more studies about the Nazi movement begin with this question. Even contemporaries hoped to grasp Hitler's movement by examining closely the composition of the National Socialists' adherents in order to find some explanation for the Nazis' astonishing increase. There is, of course, a very wide difference between the first newspaper commentaries reporting the analyses of contemporary social scientists right after the shock of the September 1930 election returns and the most recent studies of election returns under the aegis of modern statisticians. The years have provided technical advances in methodology that allow many critical revisions of received wisdom and afford more exact bases for judgment. This is especially true for election research, that is, for the investigation of the social, religious, and geographical roots of the National Socialist voters. On the other hand, one must certainly consider that our current state of knowledge, however indebted we are to important methodological and technical advances, suffers, nearly sixty years after the events, from a certain remoteness from sour? ces, from what one might call the contemporaneous feel for events that yields the possibility of deep insights ? insights that interested contemporaries had the resources and opportunities to make. It is especially fascinating then to speak with an author who has been concerned with the social structure of the National Socialist movement from the early 1930s. The conversation is with Hans Speier who was born in Berlin in 1905. Early in his career, Speier was a student of the economist Emil Lederer and, from 1931, a lecturer in political sociology at the Hochschule f?r Politik. Speier emigrated to the United States in 1933 and was engaged in the begin

Canadian Newspaper Reviews of Frederick Brown

Focussing upon newspaper commentaries on Frederick Brown, a British actor who emigrated to the United States in 1816 and served as the first manager of Montreal’s Theatre Royal in 1825-26, this study shows that there existed in Montreal, Quebec City, and Halifax a serious theatrical criticism in the early nineteenth century. Reviewers diagnosed the characteristic style of Brown’s acting in a variety of roles, noted the impressions he made on the audiences, and discussed the influence of theatre on society in Nova Scotia and Quebec. This paper also emphasizes the contribution of theatrical troupes to the spread of literate culture and the crucial relationship between the press and the theatre in Canadian towns.

Warrior Caste ‘Raja’ and Gentleman ‘Zamindar’: One Person's Experience in the Late Nineteenth Century

The aim of this paper is to interpret the life experience of a south Indian landholder at the end of the nineteenth century. The basis for interpretation comes from the author's analysis of the values of political economy among, chiefly, warrior castes as they adjusted to constraints of imperial rule from 1800 in Madras Presidency. The method of exposition is, for the most part, descriptive and narrative, with the intention of highlighting and contextualizing major concepts governing the man's thoughts and actions. Because the subject, a wealthy Tamilzamindar, kept English-language diaries, problems of cultural anachronism in the prose below are mitigated. Having the English vocabulary—or a small part of it—of our subject subverts the bugbear of ethnosociology, the cultural distortions inherent in using an alien language as one discusses the values of a social group. Contemporary newspaper commentary in English also lends cultural accuracy to the narrative. Memories of the subject linger still in Madurai Town, scene of many of his activities. I wrote the major part of the piece in Madurai and was honoured with a request to read it to the membership of the local Historical Society. That membership gave me paradoxical relief in saying of this cultural account, ‘She has told us nothing new about Baskara Setupati.’