Ideological Baggage Research Articles

Politically Charged Media Sites: The “Right,” the “Left,” and the Self in Research

Ideological assumptions about right-wing and left-wing regimes sometimes influence how scholars understand media industries in other countries as well as the research that analyzes these industries. In nations with right-wing dictatorships, the media are often understood as part of the totalitarian system, while the media in nations with left-leaning leaders are regularly depicted in romanticized terms. Even when left-wing regimes have incorporated dictatorial practices that impact media industries, scholars have tended to overlook these repressive tactics. Often, politically charged sites come with ideological baggage that skews scholarly conversations and limits the writing and reception of new research. Using my project of prerevolutionary Cuban television as a point of departure, I discuss the difficulties of writing about media industries located in nations strongly identified with the left. The piece also provides advice to young scholars on navigating these sites and preparing for the reception of their research.

Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties

An important shift is under way in the scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War. This special issue on the Global Sixties presents many of the leading academic voices of that historiographical movement. In part, today's shift is influenced by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological baggage carried by those who witnessed and participated in the political struggles and artistic exuberance of the 1960s as they occurred. With this shift, we are finally reaching a point where more historia than memoria. is being written. Without question, the numerous memoirbased narratives written by participants have helped to inform our understanding of the epoch, providing rich primary-source narratives of personal recollection and witness. The new historical investigations build on these memoirs, yet are firmly grounded in archival research. In turn, this archival research has fleshed out old historical questions and brought to the forefront many new ones. The results have often been fundamentally revisionist interpretations of the prevailing assumptions of the period.

Introduction: Latin America in the Global Sixties

An important shift is under way in the scholarship on Latin America during the Cold War. This special issue on the Global Sixties presents many of the leading academic voices of that historiographical movement. In part, today's shift is influenced by a new generation of historians unencumbered by the ideological baggage carried by those who witnessed and participated in the political struggles and artistic exuberance of the 1960s as they occurred. With this shift, we are finally reaching a point where more historia than memoria. is being written. Without question, the numerous memoirbased narratives written by participants have helped to inform our understanding of the epoch, providing rich primary-source narratives of personal recollection and witness. The new historical investigations build on these memoirs, yet are firmly grounded in archival research. In turn, this archival research has fleshed out old historical questions and brought to the forefront many new ones. The results have often been fundamentally revisionist interpretations of the prevailing assumptions of the period.

Lotman’s tradition: Semiotics of culture from a Latin American perspective

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World on a Wire: Sound as Sensual Objects

In the mid-20th century a new conceptual paradigm rose to prominence in the sciences that captured the imaginations of the burgeoning counterculture and its most forward-thinking artists. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, a branch of systems theory called cybernetics was presented as a way to understand complex systems. Cybernetic thought has continued to exert a hegemonic, if unintended, influence in the field of experimental and technology-driven arts. The author argues that the idealistic and techno-utopian character of cybernetic thought, including the holistic view of emergence, does not serve us in grave political and ecological times and suggests new ways to understand emergence in sound art that are free of the ideological baggage of cybernetic thought.

To a Question of New Strategies of Ethnocultural Policy of Modern States

Today, when practically everywhere the structure of modern national states loses the uniformity, and explosive forces of multiculturalism generate very serious political and sociocultural problems, the question foregrounds, whether it is possible to find an adequate equivalent to reach a unification of the civil and ethnic nation. This article is an attempt to answer this question.The author undertook comparative research of the German, French and British models of multiculturalism and came to a conclusion that in Europe it is possible to speak about multiculturalism with a considerable bit of convention. The source of modern interethnic problems is rather not in cultural, but in the social and economic spheres without solving which the preservation of the multicultural society can be put under doubts. For the Russian Federation such comparison is very important as multicultural strategy, having become part of ideological baggage of liberal reforming of the Russian society, is as well vulnerable for criticism. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p23

Inward and Outward Patriotism

Much current philosophical discourse on patriotism either adopts an apologetic approach to patriotic sentiment or rejects it wholesale. When this discourse clings on some notion of patriotism it differentiates it from nationalism and tries to avoid the ideological baggage and socio-theoretical cost that accompanies the love of a specific collectivity: it responds to criticisms of nationalism by turning to what can be called ‘inward’ patriotism. However, in doing so, it typically dispenses with ‘outward’ patriotism. The latter is then totally conceded to aggressive and regressive nationalism. This move is accompanied with a related shift from ethnic to civic patriotism. The present article aims to expose the problems of such moves and to defend the need for more conceptual work. It retrieves a cautious outward patriotism for the sake of a fully-fledged patriotism that is compatible with, and even conducive to, cosmopolitanism. Nothing blocks this fully-fledged patriotism from being self-critical to the collectivity’s treatment of outsiders. On the contrary, it is argued, outward patriotism can make patriots more aware of how their collectivity has treated otherness and more determined to pressure their collectivity to mend its ways.

The Cyndi Lauper Affect: Bodies, Girlhood and Popular Culture

Using a collective biography method informed by a Deleuzian theoretical approach (Davies and Gannon 2009, 2012), this article analyses embodied memories of girlhood becomings through affective engagements with resonating images in media and popular culture. In this approach to analysis we move beyond the impasse in some feminist cultural studies where studies of popular culture have been understood through theories of representation and reception that retain a sense of discrete subjectivity and linear effects. In these approaches, analysis focuses respectively on decoding and deciphering images in terms of their normative and ideological baggage, and, particularly with moving images, on psychological readings. Understanding bodies and popular culture through Deleuzian notions of “becoming“ and “assemblage“ opens possibilities for feminist researchers to consider the ways in which bodies are not separate from images but are, rather, becomings that are known, felt, materialized and mobilized with/through images (Coleman 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2009, 2011; Ringrose and Coleman 2013). We tease out the implications of this new approach to media affects through three memories of girls' engagements with media images, reconceived as moments of embodied being within affective flows of popular culture that might momentarily extend upon ways of being and doing girlhood.

Hear Then No More Parables: The Case against ‘Parable’

Scandalous racial ideas are woven into the very fabric of some of the most cherished concepts of modern biblical scholarship. In his book Racializing Jesus, Shawn Kelley argues that race plays an essential role in the construction of a dizzying amount of cherished scholarly categories. Central to his argument is the claim that the category of parable is decidedly problematic because it emerges from, and is rendered coherent by, some of the most toxic elements of modern racialized ideology. Parable scholarship has long drawn its fundamental interpretive ideas from specific, modern views concerning the nature and power of symbolic and metaphoric language. Unfortunately these categories have a long and rather unseemly history, and they derive their power from this history. Behind the moving language of art, freedom and higher consciousness lurk the less appealing world of nationalism, race and ethnic purity. Escaping the later almost certainly means, at least for a time, learning to live without the former. This means that New Testament scholars and historical Jesus scholars would do well to put aside the category of parable. Parable scholarship envisions the powerful words forcing the hearer to make a stark choice, but perhaps the choice belongs instead to the biblical scholars: embrace these aesthetic categories along with their deeply troubling ideological baggage, or give up on the scholarly category of parable in its entirety.

<em>Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order</em>, by Paul Young

Reviewed by: Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order Joseph W. Childers (bio) Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, by Paul Young; pp. x + 249. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $89.00. The very title of Paul Young’s book, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, raises a number of issues that drive the arguments of this excellent new study, underscoring Young’s thoughtfulness as he struggles with the assumptions that surround discussions of the Great Exhibition and Victorian culture. From the outset, Young notes that one of the main terms with which he has chosen to frame his project, globalization, is fraught with intellectual and ideological baggage that makes it a difficult signpost for the analysis he is undertaking. Yet he also recognizes that a large part of what his study attempts is to come to terms with how an event like the Great Exhibition generated a “coherent and compelling story about the world” (4). In order for his own account to have some purchase, Young realizes that he must rely on a broad and useful conception of globalization, and he draws on Roland Robertson’s pithy characterization of the phenomenon as a “compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (qtd. in Young 4). Of course many concerns are raised by this definition, not least the Eurocentric (indeed, Anglocentric) features of the narrative that emerged from the Crystal Palace in 1851. Young is aware of and attentive to the problems with such a characterization. He goes to some pains in his introduction to outline the subtleties of his argument. In a moment of notable even-handedness, he points out that while recent historians have been “right to warn against interpreting the [Great Exhibition] in simplistic, triumphalist terms,” we must nonetheless “hold on to the fact” that the narrative it generated was informed by “a potent combination of political economy, Enlightenment rationale, and the Industrial Revolution” and that this combination did indeed lend itself to “a simplistic, triumphalist Victorian understanding of the world” (5). This very dichotomy is a grounding feature of the structure of Young’s book. Although his study foregrounds the belief that the Great Exhibition announced a new world order, it does not argue for a consensus around that belief. Thus, the first half of the book, especially, “links the display with a totalizing imperative to make perfect sense of the world,” yet is true to its intent not to “confuse expectation and ambitions with achievement” (7). The second portion of this study is more in line with what might be expected from an ideological-historical study of this sort: it examines the ways in which the Exhibition itself produces shortcomings in the narrative it ostensibly promotes. And while this [End Page 555] perhaps undoes any surprises we might hope to glean from Young’s readings, his analysis itself is insightful and makes a useful contribution to the current scholarship surrounding the Exhibition. For Young, the Exhibition stands as a kind of metonym—and an ideological starting point—for the “hegemonic forms of globalization” that have created the very real inequities that persist in our own century. And, to his credit, Young is always concerned to identify the inconsistencies of the totalizing narrative that emerged in relation to this symbol. Emphasizing the insistence of free-market capitalism and, implicitly, the Victorians’ residual faith in the dulcifying effects of participation in commerce, Young’s analysis begins with a look at the concerted Anglo-European effort to establish what he terms “Victorian internationalism” as the predominant, organizing ethos of the new world order (15). This new understanding—and organization—of the world depends partly on naturalizing capitalist impulses, creating a network of exchange in accordance with the then-dominant principles of political economy. This network, as Young puts it, is informed by a “fantasy” that suggests all are culturally (and thus “naturally”) inclined to participate in it (30, 37). From such a premise, the Exhibition could be read as revealing what Young describes as an “international commercial symmetry” enabled by a “geographical fantasy” that allowed for...

The Beauty and the Loser: Cultural Representations of Gender in Late State Socialism

Research on gender under state socialism has been predominantly concerned with women in the labor force, including issues such as the double burden, state and private patriarchy, and welfare. Little research has so far been published on the discursive space open for negotiation of gender or the creation of new meanings or positions. Based on a sample of official bureaucratic rhetoric and journalistic and popular texts (including the novels For Reasons Unknown, by Zdena Frýbová, and Memento, by Radek John), this article argues for the existence of diverse discourses of gender in late state socialism, from an unchallenged and unremarked residual patriarchal discourse to protofeminist elements and even alternatives to both. While the dominant emancipatory discourse conserved some traditional preconceptions about the gender order, traditional attributes of femininity also had a resistant, even subversive, potential. The emancipatory discourse fashioned with the facade of traditional femininity opened a textual space for limited protofeminist imagery. Traditional models of masculinity, however, did not have the same resistant or subversive potential but instead were either co-opted by the authoritative ideological discourse for its state-socialist hero or tied up with images of criminal or semicriminal behavior. In the absence of acceptable models of masculinity that would be free from ideological baggage, an alternative discourse of masculinity that places the male body at its center emerges in the textual sample I examine. Imperfect and incomplete as the state-socialist emancipation project may have been, it did broaden the range of discursive positions available to women, although not to men.

Death Sentences

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 61 Delisle’s detached observations and carefully metered visual narrative is a book that allows the reader to explore the territory without the ideological baggage often tagging along with a story like this. Delisle is not ignorant to the suffering that confronts him on his stay, but he presents it through an apolitical filter that sees it as a human problem rather than an ethnic or political one. The graphic novel is certainly no stranger to the autobiography or the travelogue. In Guy Delisle, though, we have an exceptional creator who has delivered a stylistically consistent and topically timely body of work in under a decade. They constitute a major contribution to the body of vital graphic novels being published to a global audience right now. Jerusalem, the latest limb to spring from that corpus, is as close to a must-read work as any enthusiast of world graphic literature is likely to find this year. Rob Vollmar University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Kawamata Chiaki. Death Sentences. Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens , tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. isbn 9780816654550 Paris, 1948. In local cafés, surrealists “ruined by the war” gather regularly around visionary guru André Breton . On this afternoon, in the Café Blanche, Breton awaits young FrenchChinese poet Hu Mei, whom he first met five years earlier while an exile in New York. Then Hu Mei sought Breton’s “diagnosis” of his first prose poem, “Another World,” which Breton found obsessively seductive. When Hu Mei gives Breton “The Gold of Time,” reading it will ultimately prove fatal. But first, Breton will unwittingly enable the poem to go viral, ultimately to precipitate death on an apocalyptic scale. Lethal literature is a common conceit in the fantastic: the eponymous sanity-destroying play in Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895), the Necronomicon and other eldritch tomes in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. But in Death Sentences, Kawamata Chiaki is up to something more subtle. The fate of those who suffer the narcotic experience of Hu Mei’s poem raises issues both metaphysical and ontological. For while the reading kills the body, it does something quite different to the soul. Written in the style of a fastpaced airport novel, Death Sentences surprises with its originality and conceptual depth. For within this thriller about a plague of poetry lurk lacerating critiques of corporate militarism , of the capitalist conception of culture as commodity, and of the complicity of artists in what William S. Burroughs called “the control machine,” the mechanisms whereby power structures use language to create the “reality studio” in which we “marks” unwittingly live and serve. Kawamata has been publishing fiction, criticism, and nonfiction since 1972. Death Sentences, his sixteenth novel, was published (as Genshi -gari) in 1984, promptly became a best-seller, and won the Nihon SF Taisho Award, the grand prize of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan. Subsequently, he turned primarily to military fiction, both historical and science fictional. Kawamata grounds the early section of Death Sentences, set among Lutz Bassmann We Monks and Soldiers Jordan Stump, tr. University of Nebraska Press Dark and visceral, this collection of stories chronicles the declining days of humanity and the often-futile attempts to assist those in their last moments. We Monks and Soldiers is an inventive and poetic expression of the inevitability of total destruction (see WLT, Sept. 2008, 64). Kevin Barry City of Bohane Graywolf Press It’s 2053, and the city of Bohane has long been in decline due to gang violence and tribal division. Under the control of gangster Logan Hartnett, a new threat appears in the city when his nemesis returns. Hartnett also finds trouble at home with his wife in this tale that intertwines past, present, and future. Nota Bene 62 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews the surrealists in New York and Paris, in fact. He brings to vivid life Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, and others, and even takes the title of Hu Mei’s killer poem from a key phrase in Breton’s The Surrealist Manifesto (1924), later inscribed in the epitaph on his tombstone: “I seek the gold of time.” Were the...

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City

60 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY Fiction Guy Delisle. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Helge Dascher, tr. Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. isbn 9781770460713 Guy Delisle is comics’ travelographer du jour, a restless Quebecois whose thoughtful graphic narratives of extended stays in foreign locales first began washing up on anglophone shores in 2005, five years or so after he’d begun releasing them in the French market. Jerusalem, his latest graphic novel, builds on the strengths of his earlier works but adds in a layer of urgency due to the story’s proximity to violence and a greater complexity afforded by the length of the book. Delisle structures his autobiographical excursions in short, easily digestible units that stand ably on their own. Jerusalem’s span necessitates a second scaffolding as the vignettes are grouped by months that slowly tick away as the book proceeds. While Delisle’s earlier works offered the reader an opportunity to follow him working as an animator in China (Shenzhen, 2006; see WLT, Mar. 2007, 65) and North Korea (Pyongyang, 2005), Jerusalem finds him attending to his children while his girlfriend works for Doctors Without Borders, as in The Burma Chronicles (2008). This arrangement offers both him and the reader more opportunities to interact with the location as he spends more time exploring its nuances and sketching its sights in his few free hours. This devotion to his sketchbook pays dividends throughout the work. Delisle’s iconically rendered characters inhabit a world where the architecture and landscapes are reflective of their real-world counterparts and yet possess a designerly quality that communicates meaning to the reader more directly than that of a mechanical draftsman’s reproduction. The sum of Enrique Vila-Matas’s parody of apocalypse. Fiction, page 70 John Montague’s speech lessons. Verse, page 74 Tanure Ojaide’s African literary ethos. Miscellaneous, page 78 REVIEW WORLD LITERATURE IN NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2012 61 Delisle’s detached observations and carefully metered visual narrative is a book that allows the reader to explore the territory without the ideological baggage often tagging along with a story like this. Delisle is not ignorant to the suffering that confronts him on his stay, but he presents it through an apolitical filter that sees it as a human problem rather than an ethnic or political one. The graphic novel is certainly no stranger to the autobiography or the travelogue. In Guy Delisle, though, we have an exceptional creator who has delivered a stylistically consistent and topically timely body of work in under a decade. They constitute a major contribution to the body of vital graphic novels being published to a global audience right now. Jerusalem, the latest limb to spring from that corpus, is as close to a must-read work as any enthusiast of world graphic literature is likely to find this year. Rob Vollmar University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Kawamata Chiaki. Death Sentences. Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens , tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. isbn 9780816654550 Paris, 1948. In local cafés, surrealists “ruined by the war” gather regularly around visionary guru André Breton . On this afternoon, in the Café Blanche, Breton awaits young FrenchChinese poet Hu Mei, whom he first met five years earlier while an exile in New York. Then Hu Mei sought Breton’s “diagnosis” of his first prose poem, “Another World,” which Breton found obsessively seductive. When Hu Mei gives Breton “The Gold of Time,” reading it will ultimately prove fatal. But first, Breton will unwittingly enable the poem to go viral, ultimately to precipitate death on an apocalyptic scale. Lethal literature is a common conceit in the fantastic: the eponymous sanity-destroying play in Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895), the Necronomicon and other eldritch tomes in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. But in Death Sentences, Kawamata Chiaki is up to something more subtle. The fate of those who suffer the narcotic experience of Hu Mei’s poem raises issues both metaphysical and ontological. For while the reading kills the body, it does something quite different to the soul. Written in the style of a fastpaced airport novel, Death Sentences surprises with its originality and conceptual depth. For...

Conceptualising global health: theoretical issues and their relevance for teaching

BackgroundThere has long been debate around the definition of the field of education, research and practice known as global health. In this article we step back from attempts at definition and instead ask what current definitions tell us about the evolution of the field, identifying gaps and points of debate and using these to inform discussions of how global health might be taught.DiscussionWhat we now know as global health has its roots in the late 19th century, in the largely colonial, biomedical pursuit of ‘international health’. The twentieth century saw a change in emphasis of the field towards a much broader conceptualisation of global health, encompassing broader social determinants of health and a truly global focus. The disciplinary focus has broadened greatly to include economics, anthropology and political science, among others. There have been a number of attempts to define the new field of global health. We suggest there are three central areas of contention: what the object of knowledge of global health is, the types of knowledge to be used and around the purpose of knowledge in the field of global health. We draw a number of conclusions from this discussion. First, that definitions should pay attention to differences as well as commonalities in different parts of the world, and that the definitions of global health themselves depend to some extent on the position of the definer. Second, global health’s core strength lies in its interdisciplinary character, in particular the incorporation of approaches from outside biomedicine. This approach recognises that political, social and economic factors are central causes of ill health. Last, we argue that definition should avoid inclusion of values. In particular we argue that equity, a key element of many definitions of global health, is a value-laden concept and carries with it significant ideological baggage. As such, its widespread inclusion in the definitions of global health is inappropriate as it suggests that only people sharing these values may be seen as ‘doing’ global health. Nevertheless, discussion of values should be a key part of global health education.SummaryOur discussions lead us to emphasise the importance of an approach to teaching global health that is flexible, interdisciplinary and acknowledges the different interpretations and values of those practising and teaching the field.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. 432p. $27.95.

Since early 2011 there have been significant changes in North Africa and the Middle East. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had ruled Tunisia for 20 years, and Hosni Mubarak reigned in Egypt for 30 years. Yet their bravest challengers were 20- and 30-year-olds without ideological baggage, violent intentions, or clear leaders. Political change in these countries inspired activists across the region. Some tough authoritarian governments responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, others with policy concessions, welfare spending, and cabinet shuffles. The groups that initiated and sustained protests had few meaningful experiences with public deliberation or voting, and little experience with successful protesting. These young citizens were politically disciplined, pragmatic, and collaborative. Where did they come from? How do young people growing up in modern, entrenched, authoritarian regimes find political inspirations and aspirations? Are digital media important parts of the contemporary recipe for democratization?

(Ship)wrecked Shakespeare in Romanian Tempest s

Increasingly popular on the Romanian stage post-1989, The Tempest has become fertile terrain for exploring the current function of Shakespeare and theatre in the country. Comparing two 2009 productions, directed by Cristi Juncu and Cătălina Buzoianu respectively, this essay discusses the rediscovered topicality of Shakespeare, the reworking of The Tempest into concept productions, and the negotiation of collaborative authorship. Juncu kept his Tempest sparse, using sound to construct the spectacle of the storm off-stage, and reducing the island to a sand-box infused with a specific blend of domesticity and dreamlike metamorphosis. Conversely, Buzoianu's production was criticised for being too busy. High-tech projection screens framed a high-concept journey through the history of human violence, heavy with unsubtle analogy and plagued with interpretive inconsistencies. As with Prospero and Ariel's magic, these productions explored collaborative theatrics, with authorial attribution being given wholly neither to Shakespeare nor to either director or translator. Unburdened with the ideological baggage of other plays The Tempest here represents a "new world" for Romanian theatre, in which to explore such matters - theatrical and political - previously missed.

What colour is the South African rainbow?: The ANC’s racial transformation

What colour is the South African rainbow? The ANC’s racial transformation Irina Filatova (bio) Over two decades ago, after De Klerk’s famous speech of 2 February 1990, announcing the formal end of apartheid, journalists started to speak of the ‘South African miracle’ – the almost unthinkable possibility of a peaceful transition to a democratic future in a united society. Not every black South African was happy about the fact that, after long and difficult negotiations, the new national anthem featured ‘Die Stem’ together with ‘Nkosi Sikelela Afrika’, that several representatives of the National Party became ministers in the government of national unity and that, having become president, Nelson Mandela did not show any willingness to revenge himself upon old enemies. Not every white South African was happy about the new constitutional arrangements in the wake of the negotiated settlement. But the expectations of the black majority were so high, and the feeling of relief among their white compatriots so overwhelming, that petty grudges did not matter. For a few years the country lived in a state of euphoria, and Bishop Desmond Tutu proclaimed that South Africa had already become a ‘rainbow nation’. Alas the term did not last: it is only with irony that ‘the rainbow nation’ is mentioned today. The miracle has not yet happened: a high proportion of both blacks and whites are disillusioned and disappointed. The national reconciliation that seemed almost a reality at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, when former torturers asked their victims for forgiveness and cried together with them in front of the TV cameras, still evades South Africans, and South African society is still divided by law, emotions, economy, ethnicity and policy. So, what has gone wrong? Why is it that the ‘rainbow nation’ obstinately does not want to form? There are [End Page 23] many reasons for this, but one has to begin with the ideology and policy of the ruling party. Ideology The ANC has been conceptualising South Africa’s ethno-racial1 relations from its inception in 1912, and they remain the focus of the party’s ideology to the present day. This is not surprising in the context of the nature of the ANC as an African nationalist organisation and of the history of a country whose state structures were based on race discrimination for centuries and on apartheid’s racial engineering for more than four decades. The ANC’s approach to ethno–racial issues in South Africa significantly changed over time – the process that has been sufficiently covered in the academic literature.2 There is, however, one aspect of the ANC’s ideological baggage which continues to define its policy on race today that deserves to be mentioned here: a contradiction between two approaches to the race issue as defined in the ANC’s two policy documents and thus between its two images of South Africa’s society and its future. One document is the Freedom Charter which has been the party’s programme since its adoption in 1955 and which asserted that ‘South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white’ (Karis and Carter 1977: 205). The other is Strategy and Tactics of the ANC, adopted by the party’s conference in Morogoro in 1969. This second document which repeated the main points of the 1962 Programme of the South African Communist Party (South African Communist Party 1963), stated that the main contents of the struggle in South Africa was the ‘national liberation’ of the biggest and worst exploited group of South Africa’s population – the African people (African National Congress 1970). The authors of the Freedom Charter saw South Africa as one society, though deeply unequal and divided by race and class. For them the struggle was for political and social equality. The authors of the Strategy and Tactics assumed that South Africa was a colony, albeit of a special type, because it was situated on the same territory as its colonial power. For them, the ANC’s struggle was a national revolution – the ‘national democratic revolution’ (NDR), as it was called, following the Soviet lead. 3 Equality and ‘internationalism’ were to come later, at the second stage of...

The Good Fight and Good History: the Spanish Civil War

Historiography of the Spanish Civil War was for years impossible inside Spain, and outside the country it was dominated by sweeping, synthetic works that said little about the lived experience of the conflict and its aftermath. Even in the decades after Franco's death, Spain was slow to begin writing the story of the vanquished, having accepted the terms of the transition: to move forward and forget. Today, history and memory and their relationship have become topics of daily newspaper articles as mass graves are dug up and the descendants of the combatants at long last discuss the war. This article addresses the problem of how to create a new historiography of an event that has been saddled with oblivion, repression, ideological baggage, and, now, personal reminiscence.

Television News Coverage Of Postpartum Disorders and the Politics of Medicalization

This article argues that although postpartum disorders can potentially disrupt the hegemonic discourse of essential/good motherhood, as represented in television news, such disorders are domesticated by the use of news routines and are defined as “real” diseases that are temporary disruptions in women's natural ability to mother. This understanding of postpartum disorders not only engages in a process of medicalizing what is often a social problem, but also reifies a particularly harmful understanding of motherhood. Television news coverage exemplifies the problematic ideological baggage attached to the diagnoses of postpartum depression and psychosis, and demonstrates the need for more diverse reporting of women's health issues.

How to Visit a Socialist Country

Travelers from the United States to Cuba cross more than ninety miles of sea: they cross decades of history. They may be limited to one suitcase, but they carry trunks full of ideological baggage, including biases about Cuba, beliefs about communists, commitments as to what a good society should be like, and a collection of conventional poli-sci formulas about power, government, and human behavior…Members of delegations usually have planned itineraries, visiting various institutions and cultural events. They will learn about health care, education, cultural and sport resources, commitment to an ecological pathway of development, urban agriculture, equitable distribution through the rationing system, full employment, formal aspects of the political and judicial systems, achievements in gender and racial equality. These are all real, and demonstrate how far a poor country can go with so little. But it is obviously not the full story. There is nothing sinister in this. These are the things in which Cuba has pioneered, and of which Cuba is most proud and eager to show the world…My own experience has been that the more committed revolutionaries have the most serious, complex, and thoughtful criticisms, while counterrevolutionaries mostly complain about particular hardships or unpleasant incidents.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.