History Of Liberation Research Articles

Back to Marx: reflections on the feminist crisis at the crossroads of neoliberalism and neoconservatism

Contemporary feminism is currently at a crossroads, facing a concerted onslaught from both neoliberal and neoconservative ideologies. While these ideologies are inherently different—neoliberalism often appropriates feminist language to serve capitalist ends, and neoconservatism typically attacks feminist principles—they similarly reinforce the traditional role of families as providers of welfare. This crisis of alienation in feminism is characterized by three key factors: the gender divisions brought about by feminism’s shift to identity politics, the obscuring of feminist critique of capitalism by the spread of commercialization, and the instrumentalization of feminism in politics. These challenges have resulted in increased class antagonism and the further marginalization of lower-income women, reinforcing one another. To address this multifaceted crisis, a return to Marxist thought is deemed necessary for women’s liberation. The historical foundation of women’s issues can be traced back to class oppression, which stems from the primacy of material production over reproductive labor. In this context, gender oppression becomes an instrument that perpetuates class oppression. Only by interpreting women’s bodily autonomy and power from the perspective of material life and class reproduction, and by uniting various social forces against capitalism with practical actions, can feminism regain its vitality. Although the current global women’s movement is full of internal divisions, contradictions, and struggles, there is still hope for achieving unity. When the day comes, history will confirm that true gender equality is not merely the promotion of individual choice for a few, but the emancipation of all, and Marxism will be recorded once again in the history of human liberation. To accomplish this grand objective, the vital step is to end the marginalization of Marxist Feminism.

"Gay Equals Left?": Conservatism in Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany and the United States

Abstract: The history of gay liberation in the 1970s has primarily been told through the prism of radical or left-alternative activists, focusing on groups like the Gay Liberation Front in New York or the Homosexual Action West Berlin. Complicating this narrative, this article analyses "cultures of conservatism" in male homosexual politics, comparing the Federal Republic with the United States in the 1970s. Zooming in on discourses of responsibility and caution, while focusing on the identifications of some gay men as "ordinary" and "sensible," and their rejection of confrontation and flamboyance, this article shows that concepts such as "liberation," "emancipation," or even "gay power" have no fixed meanings, far less meanings that are inherently "radical" or "conservative."

Women Liberation Politics Explained in Kaalakkanavu – Modern Drama

Ideas like Women’s Liberation, Women’s rights, Women’s Development, Feminism, Women’s Law, Equality for women, resistance against male chauvinism are sounding all over the world. Women are voicing everyday to attain her independent space. But her voices are chocked by male chauvinistic voices. Even after all her voices for liberation, her revolutionary history has been denied and dissembled. Women’s history of liberation has been constructed by men here. Periyarist and Feminist researcher V. Geetha has collected Women’s history and she has written this as a play under the title of “KAALAKKANAVU”. Professor A. Mangai direct this play and she published this text as a book. This research paper has been pertaining to women liberation thoughts highlighted in this kaalakkanavu modern Drama.

Situating Blackness and Antiracism in a Global Frame: Key Works for a Study of the Dominican Republic

This syllabus provides a starting point for those interested in learning and teaching about race and Blackness in the Dominican Republic, both within and beyond the U.S. academic context. While the dominant narrative emerging from the United States tends to cast all Dominicans as both anti-Black and anti-Haitian, the Dominican Republic has a long history of Black liberation that can be understood only if we pay attention to the complicated, nuanced, and historical ways in which race and national identities, as in all places, have been constructed by various groups and forces. This reading list provides a point of departure for understanding the many scholarly and public-facing works in English that have, over the past decade, grappled with these many complications of race, nation, and identity-making. Specifically, it traces the three main frameworks that have become axiomatic in the field for contextualizing Dominican concepts of race and nation: (1) island-wide struggles for sovereignty and emancipation across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, (2) the powerful forces of neocolonialism that facilitated U.S. occupation of the island in the early twentieth century, and (3) the struggles for modern sovereignty and the legacies of occupation that resulted in dictatorial leadership across Hispaniola, namely by François and Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti and Rafael Trujillo and Joaquín Balaguer in the Dominican Republic.

Black Pathways: Examining the History of Race Considerations in College Admissions at Highly Selective Campuses

This paper addresses policies and practices related to college admissions to bring attention to its impact on access for Black students who seek admission into large predominantly White public institutions (PWIs). This critical essay hopes to create a discussion around these issues of college access and opportunity. It presents a historical context that outlines what Black people have endured to secure an education and what they currently face. This conversation provides a continuum and breadth of knowledge that allows for a deeper understanding about Black education.This work looks at education as a viable tool to combat the unjust nature of society and the constraints placed upon those disenfranchised. This critical piece sees education as a way out of systematic turmoil, as well as way of reimagining the self and sharpening one's tools to be equipped for more opportunities. While there are many other solutions to consider, education is one that has a long-standing history of liberation for those oppressed.

A history of lesbian politics and the psy professions.

This article explores the relationship between lesbian activists and the “psy professions” (especially psychology and psychiatry) in England from the 1960s to the 1980s. We draw on UK-based LGBTQIA+ archive sources and specifically magazines produced by, and for, lesbians. We use this material to identify three key strategies used within the lesbian movement to contest psycho-pathologisation during this 30-year period: from respectable collaborationist forms of activism during the 1960s; to more liberationist oppositional politics during the early 1970s; to radical feminist separatist activism in the 1980s. Whilst these strategies broadly map onto activist strategies deployed within the wider lesbian and gay movement during this time, this article explores how these politics manifested in particular ways, specifically in relation to the psy disciplines in the UK. We describe these strategies, illustrating them with examples of activism from the archives. We then use this history to problematise a linear, overly reductionist or binary history of liberation from psycho-pathologisation. Finally, we explore some complexities in the relationship between sexuality, activism and the psy professions.

Introduction. Amílcar Cabral and the Idea of Anticolonial Revolution

Abstract This article intends to be a contribution to the present issue, entirely dedicated to Amílcar Cabral and the Idea of the Anticolonial Revolution. The main goal is to shift and decentralize the emphasis so far exclusively laid upon the historical weight of Cabral as an individual. In other words, we propose a more inclusive analysis and an approach that does not overlook the multiplicity of interactions and connexions, as well as how several interconnected elements hardly related to the figure of Cabral fostered the process of the liberation struggle of Guinea and Cabo Verde and brought it into fruition. In this introductory considerations we will address three main topics. First, we address Amílcar Cabral and PAIGC’s liberation project of struggle in relation with the domestic and transnational wave of decolonization from the same period. Secondly, we briefly outline the different topics so far discussed in the academic and non-academic works related to the history of liberation of Guinea and Cabo Verde, as well as how certain perspectives influenced the understanding of this history. Finally, we highlight the pertinence of the topic of this volume and identify the contribution of each of the different case studies presented in the articles.

Pact with the People?

Pact with the People?

Beyond Master Narratives: Local Sources and Global Perspectives on Sport, Apartheid, and Liberation

Drawing mainly on a set of oral and written primary sources situated in their proper historical and geographical context, this article explores how multiple forms of agency and memory shaped the history of sport, apartheid and liberation in South Africa. In doing so, it argues that a new revisionist history is needed in order to problematize the entrenched ‘master narrative’ of South African sport history, which privileges national redemption and patriotic heroism at the expense of more complex individual, local and global dynamics. The article concludes with suggestions for future research directions in order to assist a process of decolonizing sport history in South Africa.

“A Black Future in the Air Industry?”

This essay charts a history of black liberation and complicity in the struggle for economic advancement at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) from the late 1950s into the 1980s. Joining scholars who have explored commercial aviation as a site of black mobility and immobility as well as those who have theorized Black Power's intersections with municipal policymaking, labor organizing, business and community development projects, and affirmative action programs, I examine the spheres of airport employment and entrepreneurialism to show how struggles to overcome social and spatial confinement in the Bay Area were often shaped by the entanglements of heterogeneous actors and systems. Indeed, such efforts at SFO responded to and were made possible by shifting interfaces of public and private capital investment; government action and inaction; the work of local and national networks of business elites, labor organizers, and activists; the efforts of individual black people to make their lives better; and a concomitant symbolic economy regarding the black presence in the Bay Area. As this story concludes in the 1980s, it demonstrates that despite some successes, such struggles had advanced in the Bay Area only so far as offering a precarious and patchy inclusion: a kind of holding pattern characterized by piecemeal professional integration and the more widespread consignment of black men and women to low-wage, low-skilled work, intermittent employment, and unemployment.

‘Three Years History of Liberation’ which is Emphasize Left-Right Conflict in the High School History Textbooks

‘Three Years History of Liberation’ which is Emphasize Left-Right Conflict in the High School History Textbooks

Gold Mountain Turned to Dust: Essays on the Legal History of the Chinese in the Nineteenth Century American West by John R. Wunder

231 Reviews 230 OHQ vol. 120, no. 2 these stories live and work for us in bettering diverse human relations and protecting our fragile planet — whether through ambitious new practices such as decolonization, or more familiar ones such as reconciliation — remains the challenge. Robert E. Walls University of Notre Dame ELEANOR BALDWIN AND THE WOMAN’S POINT OF VIEW: NEW THOUGHT RADICALISM IN PORTLAND’S PROGRESSIVE ERA by Lawrence M. Lipin Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2017. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 272 pages. $27.95 paper. Lawrence M. Lipin’s Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View is a finely crafted portrait of a Progressive Era Portland journalist and speaker that offers students and scholars of American feminism and radicalism key insights into the texture and complexity of movements for social change. Through this readable and intellectually vibrant account, readers come face to face with the contradictions linking Baldwin, a labor rights advocate and critic of finance capitalism with an abolitionist heritage, to women’s rights, New Thought enthusiasm, and anti-Catholic diatribes associated with the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. Baldwin was the daughter of a New England Methodist circuit preacher and abolitionist who stressed voluntary individual conscience over tradition and hereditary church affiliations. Abolition offered a historical precedent for putting aside self-interest and acting on one’s moral compass. Baldwin and her brother Henry, a monetary radical supporter of the Greenback and Populist parties, saw exploitation of wage labor in the late-nineteenth-century industrial economy as another form of bondage that was furthered by an unholy alliance of corporate and government leaders protecting a restrictive monetary system. Between 1906 and 1909, Baldwin produced a daily column, “The Woman’s Point of View,” on the editorial page of the Portland Telegram . Building on Victorian tropes of female moral character to suggest that sympathy and benevolence were qualities that justified the influence of independent women in all aspects of economic and social life, she insisted that women in Progressive Era America were central to building a better world. Although some columns linked crass materialism with male power and corruption, others explored a variety of social feminist issues such as proper parenting, child labor, settlement-house life and the need for residences for wage-earning women, the dangers of vaccination, social hygiene and the single standard of sexual behavior, egalitarian marriages, and compassionate approaches to the poor and to criminal offenders. Citing female citizenship as the prerequisite for reform, her columns warmly supported woman suffrage. In no arena, however, did Baldwin speak truth to power more explicitly than in her critique of capitalism. Bridging middle-class women’s culture and radical political economy, she pointed to profit seeking by fashion, meatpacking, and milk interests at the expense of nature and family well-being. Although not identifying as a socialist, Baldwin called on women readers as consumers to recognize the benefits of government -run banks and mines while supporting the labor movement. Capitalism’s problem, she insisted,“wasunder-consumptionbythemasses, caused by the unequal power relations that concentrated wealth in the hands of a few” (p. 153). Utilizing the radical labor theory of value, Baldwin preached a cooperative approach to social relations. Yet she emphasized that the key to revolutionary progress lay in the mind, a major strand of New Thought teaching that collective thinking could shape the material world. As a “religion of social protest” that connected body and spirit, New Thought sought to break down both Victorian moral conventions limiting women’s sphere and impulses toward violence and greed (p. 142). In the years after publishing Money Talks (1915), for example, Baldwin lectured trade unionists on currency as a “spontaneously created social force or energy” (p. 153). World War I intensified Baldwin’s dedication to the mystical faith that fluid thought was bound together by forces of attraction. She assured readers of the postwar Oregon Labor Press, for example, that the Bolshevik Revolution was part of the history of human liberation and that communist opposition to ecclesiasticism did not connote animosity to religion in its spiritual sense. Indeed, the anti-institutional perspective of New Thought teaching set the grounds for her subsequent denunciation of the Roman Catholic...

The liberation of history and the end of South Africa: some notes towards an Azanian historiography in Africa, South1

In this article we will argue that beyond its general status and identity as the supreme law of South Africa, the 1996 constitution2 (hereinafter the constitution) is also a historiographical paradigm. We shall begin by providing general description and overview of Azanian critical philosophy focussing on its relationship to the constitution. This will be followed by a discussion on the nature of history itself and the relationship between historical knowledge and power. We will then turn to the history of South Africa in particular, which is understood both as a history of conquest as well as the conquest of history. The final parts of the article will argue that the wholesale resumption of the history of liberation is the most crucial possibility condition for the liberation of history itself.

6. Chinese Papercut Poster Collection

For the past five months, I have been working on researching and digitizing a set of twenty-four Chinese papercut posters at W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections. Using the web publishing platform Omeka, the project combined the digital images of the papercut posters and all the metadata including title, translation, historical background and dimensions. This set of papercuts reflects the history of the Chinese revolution from the founding of the Chinese Communist Party to the establishment of People's Republic of China. This set includes the most representative events in all stages of the revolution creating a microcosm of the history of the Chinese people seeking liberation. Among these historical events, the majority of them were also displayed in the film “The East Is Red” which is a “song and dance epic” filmed in 1965 for celebrating the 15th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese papercut posters online collection preserves and increases accessibility to these rare materials of which there is only one other collection online. By accessing to this site, more scholars can study this unique collection without time and location limitation.
 Website Link: http://postercollection.omeka.net/collections/show/1

History from the View of the Cross: An Exploration of Lonergan and Latin American Theologies of Liberation

The article deals with questions of the relationship of theories of history and theologies of liberation. More specifically, the guiding question is what theory of history does a theology of liberation require. To answer this, Marx and Lonergan are brought into dialogue with Latin American liberation theologians to compare and test the cogency of these two thinkers with Latin American thought.

South Africa’s History of Struggle and Liberation

South Africa’s History of Struggle and Liberation

America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (review)

America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (review)

The Quest for Liberation in South Africa: Contending Visions and Civil Strife, Diaspora and Transition to an Emerging Democracy

Introduction: Purpose of this contribution To write an inclusive history of liberation and transition to democracy in South Africa is almost impossible. To do so in the course of one paper is even more demanding, if not daunting. Not only does "the liberation struggle" in South Africa in its broadest sense span more than a century. It also saw the coming and going of movements, the merging and evolving of others and a series of principled and/or pragmatic pacts in the process. The author is attempting here to provide a rather descriptive (and as far as possible, chronological) look at and rudimentary outline to the main organisational levels of liberation in South Africa since roughly the 1870' s. I will draw on my own work in the field over the past fifteen years as well as other sources. A wide variety of sources and personal experiences inform this contribution, even if they are not mentioned here. Also needless to say, one's own subjectivities may arise – even if an attempt is made towards intersubjectivity.

Contraception Controversies: The Clinic, the Pill, and the Birth Control Movement

Contraception Controversies: The Clinic, the Pill, and the Birth Control Movement Susan L. Smith (bio) Cathy Moran Hajo. Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916–1939. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010. ix + 295 pp. Abbreviations, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00. Elaine Tyler May. America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. New York: Basic Books, 2010. vii + 214 pp. Notes and index. $25.95. The history of birth control continues to capture the interest of American history scholars and students alike. Specialists in gender and women’s history, as well as the history of medicine, have produced important scholarship on the history of abortion, sterilization, and contraception. Cathy Moran Hajo, in Birth Control on Main Street: Organizing Clinics in the United States, 1916–1939, and Elaine Tyler May, in America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, provide the latest additions to the history of reproduction. They illuminate some of the key contraception controversies of the past and among historians, reminding us of the significance of the fight for reproductive rights to the history of modern America. In Birth Control on Main Street, Cathy Moran Hajo explores the development of birth control clinics, arguing that they were the center of the birth control movement in the early twentieth century. Hajo is an adjunct assistant professor in the Archives and Public History Program at New York University and an associate editor of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project. In her book she draws on a rich set of primary sources to provide details about the birth control movement at the local level across the U.S., focusing on the 1920s and 1930s. Evidence from more than 600 clinics reveals what birth control activists did, not just what they said. It reveals the birth control movement from the perspective of clinic workers and local activists who served approximately 300,000 clients. Hajo suggests that, to date, historical studies have either painted merely the broad strokes of the national story or they have provided detailed case studies of a single location. In this work she reveals the nationwide story of how birth control activists put ideas into practice. [End Page 684] Hajo explores the constant debates at the local level over who should organize and control the clinics, who should be served there, and what should be provided to clients. Like historian Rosemarie Holz, Hajo turns to the clinics and finds a variety of clinic models, admission policies, and clinic activists. Hajo identifies three major types of birth control clinics: clinics within institutions, such as hospitals and public health agencies; clinics within settlement houses; and independent clinics. The independently run, freestanding clinics made up over half of the 654 clinics that she found. Clinics went by a number of names. According to Hajo: “Clinics in the 1920s and 1930s called themselves ‘Birth Control Clinics,’ ‘Maternal Health Clinics,’ ‘Family Relations Centers,’ ‘Sex Hygiene Services,’ or ‘Mothers’ Clinics’” (p. 184). No doubt this variety added to the confusion for clients attempting to locate birth control services. In all three settings, the clinics served as a medical facility that disseminated birth control information and provided contraception. In the interwar years, the clinics promoted the diaphragm with spermicidal jelly as the solution to women’s contraceptive needs. These community-based centers were usually founded and funded by laywomen, with working-class women as the target client for clinic services. Hajo devotes one chapter to addressing the impact of eugenics and racism on the work of birth control clinics. First, she examines how the concepts of “fit” and “unfit” played out in clinic practices, arguing that birth control activists provided services to all white women, despite the eugenic rhetoric they sometimes employed. She indicates that eugenic language was evident, but not eugenic practices. Clinic workers neither denied access to contraception to those deemed fit nor forced contraception on those women deemed unfit to be mothers. Second, the chapter demonstrates that the clinics discriminated against African Americans through neglect, exclusion, and segregation. In line with other scholars, Hajo finds that white activists sought to aid European immigrant women but not poor black women. Instead, she...

Book Review: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation

Book Review: America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation