Political Sympathies Research Articles

Reversing the view of ‘political pilgrims’: re-examining Italian travelogues about China in the 1950s

Scholars often consider the mostly positive representations of China by Italian visitors in the 1950s as the false and embellished depictions of political pilgrims. This article challenges this oversimplified interpretation. Based on evidence from commonly cited travel accounts, this article argues that Italian writers’ leftist political sympathies did not necessarily lead to self-censorship or intentional embellishment of China, nor did the host country’s control and surveillance over foreigners simply make Italian visitors willing to cooperate or produce positive feedback. Putting these travel accounts in their social and historical contexts, the article shows that Italian intellectuals’ positive representations of China in the 1950s, as well as the severe criticisms that were raised in the 1960s and 1970s, were rooted in reality and reflected the radical changes in Chinese society and Sino-Italian relations over the course of the Maoist era (1949–1976).

In the Midst of Fire and Blood: Union Soldiers, Unionist Women, Military Policy, and Intimate Space during the American Civil War

In the Midst of Fire and BloodUnion Soldiers, Unionist Women, Military Policy, and Intimate Space during the American Civil War Laura Mammina (bio) Eight years after the war, Katherine Couse, the thirty-four-year-old daughter of northern immigrants, could still remember the campfires. During the week that Union soldiers stayed on her family's prosperous farm, the night was "brilliantly illuminated by hundreds of [them] in every direction." The Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse brought three of the five corps of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's army near the home of these staunch unionists. Their parents dead and their older brothers in New York City, the three young women remained in Virginia to oversee the farm. They welcomed thousands of men to their property, giving up their house and barn to be used as hospitals and allowing the dead to be buried in their lawn. The troops ate their food, trampled their clover fields, and used every piece of wood. But Couse did not begrudge them. Even after the soldiers left, she and her sisters shared their last few morsels with the wounded. Couse hardly exaggerated when she said that she and her family had sacrificed "everything but their honor . . . to the cause of the union."1 As the interactions between the Couse women and Federal soldiers illustrate, the American Civil War often threw Union soldiers and unionist women together in the most private of southern spaces: the home. These interactions reveal that the [End Page 146] Click for larger view View full resolution Field Hospital of the 5th Corps (Genl. Warren) at Spotsylvania Court House, Va. "Laurel Hill," the Couse family farm in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near where three corps of the Union army camped during the spring of 1864. Katherine Couse recorded in her journal that the artist, Edwin Forbes, had tea with her and her sisters on the day he completed the drawing, May 12, 1864. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) idea of "intimate space" is central to the study of the war. The "intimate" represents the bodily experiences of soldiers and civilians as well as the ways cooperation and conflict reverberated from individual homes to the halls of power, blurring boundaries between public and private, loyal and disloyal, and citizen and alien.2 The war revealed domestic space to be an elaborate fiction, for the private realm had never been outside the concern of governing bodies. This can be seen in the [End Page 147] fact that nineteenth-century Americans often understood their place in the nation in terms of the place they occupied in the household.3 White men's authority conferred status on white women, granting them responsibility for rearing republican citizens while emotionally and materially supporting families—and, during war, soldiers and armies—through household production. White women's special status as wives, mothers, and dependent citizens allowed them to claim the protection of the U.S. government and its military.4 Enslavement and racial prejudice meant that black women lacked such standing or even control over their labor and their families. Unable to enjoy white women's status or privileged roles as republican mothers and patriotic housewives, black women's relationship to the Union military largely grew out of their value as laborers.5 Wartime highlighted the relationship between intimate space and women's political sympathies, a relationship that figured prominently in southern women's interactions with Union soldiers. Loyal white women's political leanings were inextricably tied to domestic spaces, since many nineteenth-century Americans believed women's politics followed those of their husbands and fathers. Since commonly held ideas questioned whether women could have loyalty to country or nation independent of their male relatives, it is more appropriate to discuss women's political sympathies rather than their loyalties. For the purposes of this article, unionist women were those women, white and black, enslaved and free, who resided in the Border States [End Page 148] and Confederacy during all or part of the American Civil War and whose political sympathies lay with the Union for all or part of the war. This could entail anything from opposition to secession, to support for the Union's...

Darlings of the Weather Underground

The figure of the fugitive woman radical has occupied a curiously important place in the American popular imagination. Early depictions of women whose political sympathies have drawn them into radical activism and terrorist plots include Susan Isaacson in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971) and Marge Piercy’s eponymous heroine in her novel Vida (1979). Fictional characters loosely based on such activist-fugitives as Bernardine Dohrn abound in more recent works as well. Meredith “Merry” Levov, in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), is no doubt the best known, but radical activist women similarly on the lam include Marin Douglas in Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer (1977). Alice Mellings in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist (1977), Jenny Shimada in Susan Choi’s American Woman (2003), Anna Xenos (nom de guerre Dial) in Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self (2008), Reno in Rachel Kushner’s recent The Flamethrowers (2013), and others. The figure of what Robin Morgan terms the “token terrorist” seems to have survived her immediate political moment and continues to resonate within the American imaginary of a “postpolitical” age. Against the backdrop of recurring contemporary fears about “domestic terrorism” and taking as my primary example Russell Banks’s The Darling (2004), this essay considers the recurrent fictions of the radical woman terrorist and fugitive within the horizon of the eclipse of radical activism and the rise of anxieties accompanying the resurgence of terrorism.

Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition Jacques Berlinerblau (bio) Andy Connolly. Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. 292 pp. $105.00. Donald J. Trump's ascension to the presidency of the United States might be seen as the exclamation point on an American liberal tradition sentenced to decades of decline. Philip Roth never sought to predict or explain that decline. Still, a few of his major novels offer insights into the challenges, tensions, and instabilities that have roiled this political philosophy—a political philosophy that most, but certainly not all, American Jews have embraced with passion since the New Deal. Andy Connolly's Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition seeks to make sense of the author's interrogation of liberalism by focusing on the American Tetralogy (i.e., American Pastoral, 1997; I Married a Communist, 1998; The Human Stain, 2000; The Plot Against America, 2004), and Exit Ghost (2007). Connolly opens by discussing one of Roth's thematic obsessions: the contradiction between trying to produce art unsullied by the vicissitudes of life and the manner in which those vicissitudes sully all artistic production. These lengthy discussions of Nathan Zuckerman's formalist/New Critical pretensions are learned, yet not immediately germane to the subject of political liberalism. Too, it is hard for scholars to break much new ground on this issue. When it comes to how the artist processes experience, Roth usually beats his critics to the punch; he has relentlessly—and recursively—canvassed every inch of this dilemma in works like My Life as a Man (1974) and The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988). Roth's musings on liberalism, however, are far less picked over by either the author or his critics. It is here where Connolly's work stands to make an original contribution. Following the lead of earlier scholars, Connolly sets his analysis of I Married a Communist within the context of the "New York Intellectuals." The latter broke with the stridency of Communist views, in favor of a "more tame politics of centrist liberalism" (62). Their thinking about art and its relation to politics bears affinities with the views of New Critics. It is in [End Page 97] this crisscross between New Critics and New York Intellectuals that Connolly situates Nathan Zuckerman and Murray Ringold's dialogue. Their epic conversation is about "the fate of progressive politics in post-war American life" and "the struggle for relevance of literary culture during this period" (62). Like Murray, the New York Intellectuals rejected Communism's adulation of the collective, its facile moralizing, and its tidy historical schemata. For these thinkers, art revealed a different truth, a sovereign truth, and a truth truer than the one coughed out by materialist meta-narratives. Murray thus appears as an avatar of the "unimpassioned, self-scrutinizing, and yet still morally engaged liberal" (80). Leo Glucksman (Nathan's cape-clad instructor and would-be seducer) similarly espouses such ideas, passionately rejecting any art placed in the service of political expedience. Connolly is more cautious about pinning down Zuckerman's relation to the New Critics/New York Intellectuals. After all, the novelist's own encounter with crypto-Communist Ira Ringold was, initially, one of admiration and discipleship. It was from Ira that Nathan learned that art must "enshrine the struggles of the embattled" (Communist 38). Connolly's most inspired readings occur in his discussion of American Pastoral. This novel's engagement with Vietnam-era politics helps us understand how American Jewish political sympathies were soon to be fractured across not two, but three lines. The decade fomented New Left radicals, such as Merry Levov, who reacted with violence to the New Deal status quo favored by their liberal elders. Yet the tumultuous 1960s is also the decade in which the seeds of Jewish neoconservatism were planted. Connolly cleverly parses Swede Levov as an example of a "de-vitalized center" and a harbinger of a Jewish shift to the Right (Connolly 120). Levov's unthinking nostalgia for America augurs the cheap nationalism of later Red State patriots. His decision to move the Newark Maid factory out of the country for cheaper labor foreshadows neoliberal economic policies. His abandonment...

Heidegger’s First-Personal Forgetfulness and the Foundations of Community

Heidegger’s National Socialist political sympathies are plainer and more troubling to contemporary readers than ever before. This paper examines the relation of leader to society Heidegger uses to ground his account of the state. Heidegger draws on Aristotle and Kant to make his case in the 1930s. But breakthroughs in the previous decade, in Being and Time in particular, make the political ontology he endorses less than compelling. The power of the leader over the society he or she leads cannot repeat the relation of Being over entities. The ontological difference is different from, and incompatible with, all possible statements of political community. Ontologically speaking, totalitarianism is a category mistake. Confusing the transcendental domain for its ontic content, Heidegger refuses to learn his own lesson in ways Eric Voegelin helps us detect.

POLITICAL PREFERENCES OF THE COSSACKS AND THE PEASANTRY OF THE DON ARMY REGION ON THE EVE AND DURING THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1917-1918

The author reveals in the context of the analysis of the work of historians existing in the Soviet and modern historiography the main problems of Cossack and non-resident population of the don, analyzes the political preferences and sympathies of the Cossacks and the peasantry of the don Cossacks before and during the revolution of 1917-1918гг, determining the value of discussion and unexplored issues of this important topic. Specifics of the process of regional patogeneza all the main political directions. Defined: among some of the frontline (the average of the Cossack middle peasants) and Cossacks, and especially of the poor in 1917-1919.g became popular and the idea of popular Soviet and socialist democracy. It is concluded that many factors contributed to the aggravation of contradictions between different social groups of the Cossacks and Cossack, the peasant and the provinces, the working population of the region. The lack of understanding, lack of experience of the culture of political and social compromise, mutual concessions complex interweaving of elements of the century and inter-class hatred, sometimes burdened with ethno-cultural and inter-religious hostility, severity and complexity “of the agrarian question", belittling the status of non-resident and working population of the region, has led to a gradual slide towards bloody civil war. “Don Vendee" in the end, was the beginning of the global Russian civil war.

Western Ethnic Borderlands in the Influence of Russian-Soviet Propagangda Before and in the Years of the Second World War

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR.
 Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics

The monarchical engagement of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil: A case of nineteenth-century transnational politics

ABSTRACTThis article examines the transnational political practices of the Portuguese immigrant community in Brazil during the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In the light of fresh empirical evidence, it aims to prove the true impact of the political engagement of those Portuguese living abroad during the course of late nineteenth-century political changes in Portugal. It focuses particularly on the struggle between Portuguese monarchist and republican parties to captivate the political sympathy of the emigrants and, later on, on the transatlantic monarchical counter-revolutionary network created after the republican revolution in 1910. It argues that this sort of migrant political activity can be analyzed beyond the framework of the diffusion of domestic politics and acknowledged as a truly transnational phenomenon. Therefore, it seeks to demonstrate how the transnational nature of these Portuguese migrants’ action was decisive to their success on seriously compromising the first republican experience in Portugal.

En opplyst samtale: Om rettsvitenskapens oppgaver i kriminalpolitikken

English title: Title in English: An enlightened public discourse: On the tasks of legal research regarding criminal politicsWhat are the primary tasks of legal research regarding the politics of crime? Political decisions on crime are decided and executed by politicians, the courts and administrators. Researchers should not avoid politically hot issues, but must take care not to let their political sympathies influence their statements when they give opinions qua legal experts. Academic freedom implies a duty for researchers to take part in enlightened public debates.

Między obroną wolności a drogą do rewolucji. Strajk nauczycielski 1937 r.

W marcu 1936 r. ukazał się poświęcony Związkowi Sowieckiemu numer wydawanego przez ZNP czasopisma dla młodzieży „Płomyk". Część ów­czesnej prasy określiła go jako element sowieckiej propagandy. W obronie swojego dobrego imienia wydawcy pisma wytoczyli jednej z gazet proces, który przegrali. Półtora roku później, we wrześniu 1937 r., rząd zawiesił Za­rząd Główny ZNP i wyznaczył kuratora. Jednym z zarzutów, oprócz tych dotyczących nieprawidłowości finansowych, były prokomunistyczne sym­patie polityczne.W odpowiedzi na działania rządu część pracowników Zarządu Głów­nego zorganizowała strajk okupacyjny, wkrótce poparty przez samych na­uczycieli i wiele organizacji związkowych i politycznych. Strajk okazał się zwycięski, najpierw rząd odwołał dotychczasowego i powołał nowego ku­ratora, a następnie zjazd ZNP wyłonił nowy Zarząd Główny, złożony z klu­czowych działaczy sprzed strajku.Dla badaczy bliskich ZNP działania rządu stanowiły zamach na wol­ności związkowe, a strajk miał charakter jedynie obrony wolności i swobód obywatelskich. Można jednak odnaleźć ślady bezpośrednich kontaktów KPP z inicjatorkami strajku i dążeń — przynajmniej niektórych działaczy, jak Wanda Wasilewska i Janina Broniewska — do eskalacji konfliktu i wy­wołania strajku generalnego.

Revolting Sympathies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man

Jennifer Deren, “Revolting Sympathies in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” (pp. 135–160) Building on recent scholarship that explores Mary Shelley’s advocacy for sympathy in The Last Man (1826), this essay traces the complexity of interpersonal and reader-text relations as they play out in the novel and in the experience of reading it. I argue that moments of intimacy explicitly called “sympathy” in the novel are often idealizations that turn “revolting” as sympathy becomes something other than the beneficial exchange that participants expect of it. These scenes delineate a politics of sympathy that challenges the dominant model with a portrayal of human intimacy as uncontrollable, amoral, and infectious. Shelley encodes in the novel’s infamous plague her concern that the experience of sympathy that underlies nineteenth-century politics of community- and nation-formation can and sometimes does generate violence, discord, and inequality alongside mutually beneficial relationships. Exploring readers’ uncertain responses to the novel alongside the novel’s representation of sympathy as revolting, I suggest that the novel’s framing “Introduction” reveals an aesthetics of sympathy in which reader-text relations are constitutively unstable. Readers’ resistance to Lionel’s effusive narration is a revolting response written into the novel’s sympathetic design. By making sympathetic reading a revolting experience, Shelley advances a revision of sympathy that forces us to rethink the possibilities and the consequences of human relationships and invites us to reimagine a communal future that makes room for those realities.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

KUBAN COSSACKS, ORTHODOX CLERGY AND OTHER ESTATES AT THE END OF THE 19 CENTURY AND IN THE PERIOD OF REVOLUTIONARY EVENTS 1917: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Article is devoted to the comparative analysis of a spiritual condition of the population of the Kuban Region at the end of the 19 century and in days of the February and October revolutions. On the basis of the analysis of various sources the conclusion that the spiritual crisis which has captured all layers of the Russian society became the main reason of revolutionary shocks of 1917 is drawn. His manifestation in Kuban is lit and also the reasons of falling of monarchic moods in the Cossack region are considered. In work the interrelation between change of social composition of the population of the Kuban Region, promoting of the liberal ideas and growth of protest moods is traced. A lot of attention is paid to consideration of the reasons, mass support by residents of Kuban of the February revolution. The interrelation between the imperial policy directed to prevention of existence of especially Cossack region and weakening of monarchic moods in the Kuban region is for the first time carried out. In article the factors which have exerted impact on position of clergy in Kuban such as are also allocated: 1) spiritual - defining degree of a moral condition of society; 2) economic inseparably linked with financial position; 3) the social, designating social status of clergy in class hierarchy; 4) political, presented by political addictions and sympathies of clergymen. Many place is allocated also to an explanation of the reasons of various relation of the Kuban clergy to revolutionary events of 1917, the attention to its non-uniform structure is for the first time paid, in a research three currents to which by 1917 the clergy of Kuban has broken up are designated: radical, conservative and reformist.

MAIN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF NEO-FASCISM

The article examines the main historiographical trends in the neo-fascism studies. A brief theoretical justification for the collapse of the fascist dictatorship and the reasons for the birth of neo-fascism are proved. In the article analyses the main vectors of the historiography of neo-fascism and the causes of the opposite evaluation of this ideology. The article examines the conceptual approaches to the study of this problem in historiography. The author critically examines the various historical schools, and the most important works of their main representatives, with an emphasis on foreign historiography. The author takes into account the negative contribution that brought the cold war and total confrontation between the two systems, in which the neo-fascism acted as an instrument of anticommunist struggle. The article explains the importance of studying the main historiographical trends in the study of neo-fascism. This allows more independently investigate this political ideology. At the same time it is important to take into account the specific historical conditions and personal sympathies authors as factors influencing into the objectivity of the study. Main theoretical directions differ in methodological basis, which is precisely determined by the political sympathies of the authors. A distinctive feature of all the studies of neo-fascism is a continuity of the theoretical framework to the study of fascism, which narrows the opportunities for political analysis.

Narracja medialna wyrażona na okładkach wybranych tygodników opinii podczas parlamentarnej kampanii wyborczej 2015 roku

Analysis of the covers if news weeklies such as „Do Rzeczy”, „Newsweek Polska”, „Polityka”, „Wprost” has become an area of discourse about media narrative, which is visible in studied materials in the period of the 2015parliamentary campaign. Determination of political sympathies, verification of the degree of politicizing, studying materials and marking the dominating subject matter on the 44 covers, is the aim of conducted research work. The analysed covers were also use to show the fields of antagonisms appearing in the media narrative.

ВОПРОСЫ МОДЕРНИЗАЦИИ СУДЕБНОЙ И ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЙ СИСТЕМЫ ПОРЕФОРМЕННОЙ РОССИИ НА СТРАНИЦАХ ГАЗЕТЫ «РУССКИЕ ВЕДОМОСТИ» (1870-Е ГГ.)

The activities of the liberal newspaper “Russkiye Vedomosti” were mainly focused on the struggle for social modernization of Russia and implementation of the liberal reforms of the 1860-1870s. The newspaper actively defended the liberal principles for the implementation of the judicial reform and the education system. The editorial staff members were well-known liberal scholars N.S.Skvortsov, A.I. Chuprov, A. Postnikov, and others. N.S. Skvortsov’s “liberal team” believed that it was necessary to consistently implement the Judicial statutes of 1864 and develop the jury system. “Russkiye Vedomosti” was opposed to the idea of “people’s trial”, proposed by M.N. Katkov. The lack of lawyers hampered the development of the legal profession, so the newspaper made a project on the involvement of lawyers and their assistants. The newspaper consistently defended the principles of the Charter of 1863, it supported the autonomy of universities. “Russkiye Vedomosti” informed in detail its readers of the conflict of liberal professors Dmitriev and Chicherin with the leadership of the Moscow University. The newspaper actively campaigned for the prison reform. The liberal paper’s staff believed that the main obstacle to the development of the judicial - legal system was the cultural backward-ness of the country and the despotic form of government. The newspaper actively defended freedom of expression. Liberal commentators denounced revolutionary terror, because it violated the law and the right, but the political sympathies of the newspaper were on the side of the students.

Media Cultural Politics and the Politics of Sympathy—Queen Seondeok: Dramatized Conspiracy Theory as “Power-Narrative”

In this paper I reveal the mutual interaction between drama, history, and reality, and analyze the cultural operating principle of “the political.” I achieve this by analyzing the narrative of, and viewer reactions to, the television drama Queen Seondeok, which serves as a prominent example of popular K-drama culture in 21 st century Korea. First, I explain that conspiracy theory forms the core of the Queen Seondeok narrative arc, showing how it creates a shared bond of sympathy both with and among the audience in the context of popular disillusionment and resistance to “the political.” Viewing the drama with a critical eye focused on the conspiracies fabricated by the political persons that appear in the show, viewers come to support and sympathize with the conspiracy in the narrative, internalizing it as a lens through which to assess the world. In the process, a paradoxical interaction is revealed. To prove this, I analyze the paradoxical approach adopted by the viewers of the drama: by sympathizing with the narrative the audience recognizes “the political” as a “natural” lens. This stems from the way the drama satirizes and “reenacts” modern and contemporary Korean political history. Finally, I unveil specific mechanisms employed by the characters in Queen Seondeok to disguise their emotions and to win the competitive power game. All these elements together show both the operating principles of cultural politics in the medium of TV drama, and the empowerment inherent in the act of watching.

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy Stephen Schryer (bio) Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams by Anna Siomopoulos. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 166. $125.00 cloth. In her insightful new book Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal, Anna Siomopoulos explores how 1930s and 1940s US popular cinema mediates popular anxieties about the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the New Deal. Deftly moving between readings of Gabriel over the White House (1933), Bullets or Ballots (1936), Fury (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), The Emperor Jones (1933), Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Killers (1946) and expositions of welfare-state theory by 1930s intellectuals and public figures, her work offers a compelling and precisely contextualized account of how state policies shape cultural productions and vice versa. At the book’s heart is Siomopoulos’s careful delineation of a homology between New Deal presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema. On the one hand, much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s popularity rested on his use of melodrama to generate sympathy for the Great Depression’s victims and support for New Deal programs. This rhetoric helped “offset the advanced rationalization of new government bureaucracy and . . . justify the encroachment of the state into the private lives of U.S. citizens” (2). On the other hand, Depression-era films gave expression to public fears and fantasies about FDR’s policies; their melodramatic conclusions, [End Page 683] however, ultimately endorsed New Deal ideology. In particular, both FDR and 1930s and 1940s cinema used melodrama to affirm a conventionally liberal individualism in ways that helped undermine public support for more radically redistributive social policies. In developing this argument, Siomopoulos enters into a long-standing debate about the ideology of melodrama. For Lewis Mumford and other mass-culture critics of the 1930s, melodrama was a conservative form that reinforced existing social hierarchies. In the past forty years, beginning with the work of Peter Brooks, critics have challenged this assessment. Brooks highlighted melodrama’s origins in the French Revolution, describing it as a potentially revolutionary genre; more recently, critics like Linda Williams have argued that melodrama plays a crucial role in establishing sympathy for marginal social groups. Siomopoulos’s position more closely approximates Mumford’s than Brooks’s or Williams’s. Drawing her subtitle (“public daydreams”) from Mumford’s work, she argues that “Hollywood melodramas of the ’30s and ’40s maintained their resemblance to private daydreams— individual fantasies with no public valence—at the same time that the melodramatic conventions of these films consistently supported New Deal public policy” (4). For her, the politics of sympathy that Williams discovers in Hollywood melodrama is precisely the problem with these films; both presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema draw on the language of sympathy in order to perpetuate individualistic solutions to economic crisis. Both FDR and Hollywood melodrama focus on “private individuals rather than public movements and on private solutions to public problems” (5). In criticizing this politics of sympathy, Siomopoulos draws on Hannah Arendt; compassion, she complains, “is not a critical or rational enough emotion upon which to base social justice because it responds to suffering with simple, self-evident solutions” (66–67). Sympathy promotes individual acts of charity rather than systemic social change. Unlike Mumford, however, Siomopoulos carefully highlights the ideological contradictions that run through her chosen films. Her readings all follow a similar pattern; she shows how the films mediate Depression-era dissatisfaction with the New Deal but then affirm New Deal policies in their final, melodramatic scenes. Gabriel over the White House, for instance, released shortly after FDR’s first inauguration, registers public fears that FDR would expand the powers of the presidency for corrupt personal gain. The film draws a series of analogies between an ineffective president (Judd Hammond, played by Walter Huston) and [End Page 684] his archnemesis, a mafia crime boss; both are equally ruthless and equally dedicated to private consumption. However, after a Road-to-Damascus-style conversion, President Hammond learns to channel his gangster-like energies toward the public interest, morphing into a benevolent dictator who increasingly resembles FDR. Interestingly, Siomopoulos suggests that this filmic tension between critique and affirmation of New Deal ideology...

Soccer as a Means of Political Sympathies: Reflections on Newspapers in 2015 Parliamentary Election Campaigns in Turkey

Soccer as a Means of Political Sympathies: Reflections on Newspapers in 2015 Parliamentary Election Campaigns in Turkey

Protecting human rights defenders at risk: asylum and temporary international relocation

The response of the international community and civil society to human rights defenders at risk has thus far failed to take adequate account of the international refugee regime. The refugee regime can offer a meaningful remedy to human rights defenders at risk. More specifically, human rights defenders at risk seeking asylum abroad can qualify as refugees and receive meaningful protection from the international refugee regime. In a more organised manner, temporary international relocation initiatives (TIRIs) for human rights defenders at risk provide good examples of the emerging regime of protection for human rights defenders intersecting with the international refugee regime. Human rights defenders at risk within and those who manage TIRIs frequently grapple with issues concerning asylum – and the fundamental tension between TIRIs and asylum seeking. However, TIRIs also reveal a set of similarities between the two regimes: their shared recognition of the failure of states to fulfil their human rights obligations; their shared focus on (and contestation) of risk; a similarly shared focus (and contestation) of who is and within and outside each regime; and similar attempts to translate political sympathy into protection. These similarities can assist in charting a more productive, and explicit, engagement between the two regimes in the future that provides for better protection for human rights defenders at risk.