Democratic Moment Research Articles

Racial Attraction: Tracing the Historiographical Alliances between South Africa and the United States

Many of South Africa's leading antiapartheid social historians met at University of Witwatersrand History Workshop in July 1994 to reflect on democracy: popular precedents, practice, and culture in wake of first nonracial general election in South Africa. The event marked need of historians to participateeven if unspectacularly-in reinvention of a nation and to stake a claim in democratic moment. It also reflected professional soul-searching that has accompanied political transformation, focusing on nature of historical enterprise in academy and its relevance to whole of South African society. The gathering inJuly underlined eventual failure of the unique attempt by a minority to construct and impose a version of past fashioned according to dictates of Afrikaner nationalism. It also signified whatJeffrey Brian Peires, a history professor until his recent election to South African Parliament as an African National Congress (ANC) member, has called break-up of radical consensus that created the charmed circle of mutual admiration among antiapartheid intellectuals of 1980s. The breakup coincided with a shift in research agenda of socially relevant knowledge, from questions of resistance to questions of reconstruction.' Looking at responses to JAH questionnaire that was launched at eighty-sixth annual meeting of Organization of American Historians at Anaheim, California, in April 1993, I was immediately struck by similarly fractured state of American history. The search for relevance seems to be an overriding demand in both historical domains, each of which is apparently awestruck by pros-

A ‘democratic moment’: political education in the Chinese liberation struggle

This paper revisits the Chinese experience of liberation struggle, from the 1920s to the 1940s. It begins by justifying an examination of the learning dimension of the Chinese liberation struggle. The early rural political and educational work of the Chinese Communists is then described. The next section of the paper examines the approach to political education that emerged in the Chinese Communist army. The educational process that developed during land reform is then discussed in some detail. The final section of the paper assesses the contemporary significance of the Chinese experience of political education. It is argued that the period of liberation war and land reform in China constituted a ‘democratic moment’, in which a dialectic of cadres (educators) and people (learners) created a participatory and creative process of learning in social action. The elements of this process included: specific, materialist analysis of learners’ culture and social context; strategic and reflective analysis; experiential education; and direct instruction.

The Destiny of Freedom: Political Cycles in the Twentieth Century

Buultjens addresses the problem of integration and fragmentation in considering the cyclical patterns of democracy and the question of whether or not his most recent democratic moment will hold. His work builds on a basic question as to how citizens and leaders can “adhere to the middle of the road paved by traditional values when the course of history is moving groups and nations toward narrowly defined, self-serving solutions.” He finds some reasons for optimism in the new political realities that are potential sources for constructive integration. He discusses the future prospects for democracy by asking whether the present “democratic starburst” can be translated into durable systems and working institutions.

The Democratic Moment

The Democratic Moment