Context Of Repression Research Articles

Bode Francisco Orelana: uma representação humorística da intelectualidade brasileira entre patrulhas ideológicas, autocensura e odarização

O artigo apresenta uma análise do personagem Bode Francisco Orelana criado pelo cartunista Henrique de Souza Filho - Henfil nos anos iniciais da década de 1970. Este personagem foi utilizado para colocar em discussão a coerção instaurada pela ditadura sobre os intelectuais e demais grupos produtores de cultura, o papel político da intelectualidade no contexto repressivo, os debates intraintelectuais e o problema da autocensura, fruto do terror propagado pela censura militar. A proposta central é assinalar a condição engajada do autor e de sua obra, apresentando-a como parte de um mecanismo de luta e um esforço de resistência que colaborou para o reavivamento e/ou para a formação de identidades nos sujeitos.

POPULAR MUSIC AS JOURNALISM IN ZIMBABWE

The paper argues that popular music can act as a variety of journalism at certain historic moments and in specific contexts. Where mass media are weak and opposition political parties are frail, music can serve as the voice of the voiceless by offering subtle avenues of expression. Popular music can perform the journalistic function of communicating daily issues in ways that challenge the powerful and give a voice to the disadvantaged. Popular music competes and rivals mainstream journalism in the ways it addresses political, social and economic realities in repressive contexts. Whereas newspapers and magazines ridicule and lampoon the powerful within opinion columns and cartoons, music radio relies on subtle wordplay to denounce the mighty and powerful. The paper discusses popular journalism in relation to the way in which postcolonial popular Zimbabwean musicians have effectively communicated everyday life problems in their country. The main focus is on how three Zimbabwean musicians, especially from 1999 to 2005, have had their work “banned” from radio because of the way it was perceived to be challenging the Zimbabwean state. Music has clearly served as journalism in Zimbabwe. The music has been popular with the people. The paper argues that this kind of music should be critically explored as a form of popular journalism.

A Neglected Document on Socialism and Sex

THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENT, Socialism and Sex, was long forgotten until this rediscovery.' In it, H. L. Small-most likely a pseudonym-provides an elegant, if concise, exposition on behalf of destigmatizing consensual sexuality between same-sex lovers. Issued in 1952, Socialism and Sex was written at a moment when few in the United States imagined, let alone expressed, so bold a philosophy of sexual liberation or so explicit a political program in favor of decriminalizing sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex. Therefore, it provides fresh evidence supplementing recent understandings that a homophile or homosexual rights consciousness was tentatively emerging within that severely repressive context. The important developments of the 1950s cataloged by scholars include the Mattachine Society (formed in 1951), ONE magazine (first issued in 1953), the Daughters of Bilitis (launched in 1955), and literary manifestations such as Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl (1956) and

Regulation of cytokine transcription in the context of chromatin

Understanding the transcriptional regulation of an important class of innate and adaptive immune system effector molecules, the cytokines, is increasingly important given the promise cytokine regulation holds for treating various autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Studies defining the mechanisms regulating cytokine transcription initially focused on identifying the cis-acting elements and trans-acting factors that activate cytokine promoters and enhancers. In the past, these studies were largely completed in the absence of constraints instituted by cellular chromatin. Over the past decade it has become obvious that changes in chromatin accessibility critically control, rather than simply correlate with, the transcriptional activation of most genes, including cytokines. Hence candidate transcriptional activators are being re-evaluated for potency in the context of cellular chromatin. Several distinct mechanisms for manipulating the generally repressive context of chromatin have been identified for cytokine genes. Most recently, single nucleotide polymorphisms in cytokine transcriptional regulatory elements have been shown to play measurable roles in regulating cytokine levels in the context of naturally selected haplotypes. Overall, subtle differences in DNA sequence and nucleoprotein complex composition, including protein post-translational modification, come together in cell type-specific combinations to explain the normal variation in cytokine transcription throughout the human populace.

Identity Work and Collective Action in a Repressive Context: Jewish Resistance on the “Aryan Side” of the Warsaw Ghetto

Research on social movements has found that activists often deploy their identity strategically, putting forth certain images of themselves in order to best achieve their goals. However, such work has focused mostly on settings in which activists are relatively free to pursue different identity-based strategies. In contrast, less is known about the strategic use of identity in more repressive contexts, where the expression of certain identities may be curtailed. This paper addresses this issue by examining the “identity work” of Jewish resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Poland. While their resistance was fueled by a strong sense of collective identity, the heavy costs associated with public displays of Jewishness meant that identity also had to be kept hidden in order for the resistance to occur. Unlike the freely chosen, “harmonic” identity work that has been described by most research, these activists' work was forced and more dissonant, characterized by the simultaneous amplification and suppression of identity and emotion. The analysis points to the need for additional studies of activism in high-risk, repressive settings.

When Art Loses its Sting: The Evolution of Protest Art in Authoritarian Contexts

Change in art is an understudied topic in sociological research. This article examines protest artworks ( arpilleras) produced by shantytown women during and shortly after the dictatorship in Chile, to explore the question why political art that is for sale changes over time. This research is based on 136 semi-structured and in-depth interviews with various members of the art world in Chile, Europe, and the United States, a year's worth of participant observation of art groups in Santiago and over five hundred photographs of arpilleras, taken by the author and analyzed thematically. Political art that is for sale can change because the intermediary (the organization connecting producers and buyers) becomes less or more politically conservative, develops a precarious financial situation, grows more afraid of repression, and has the power to enforce the changes it desires; because the original buyers are replaced with new buyers with different motivations; and because new artists with new ideas begin making the art, one artist in the group produces something different and the idea spreads, artists censor themselves, and artists have new experiences or learn about new events. Through these sources of change, international social movements, local and international political and economic developments, and global institutions impact the art. Meanings attached to the art by the different parties (intermediaries, buyers, and artists) and class differences between artists and intermediaries are also important in facilitating change. These findings, based as they are on political art made in a repressive context, not only contribute to our understanding of artistic evolution but they help correct the bias in the sociology of art toward “art” made in democratic countries of the “First World.” They are not just applicable to authoritarian regimes but also to art by politicized minority groups in democratic contexts, and to other cultural products such as newspapers, magazines, documentaries, and books.

El proceso del POUM: proceso ordinario de una justicia extraordinaria

The trial against the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista's leaders, whose instruction during the summer of 1937 and which judgment was delivered in october of 1938 has been considered to be exceptional and specialy marked by Stalin's and the communists's determination to persecute a critical party they called trotskist. This article attempt to replace this trial in its context of repression against revolutionary militants, wether CNT or POUM one, after the Barcelona riots of may 1937. We can see that the responsables of this repression where as well republicans as communists and that the terms of the last whereas anf of the sentency simply repeated those of former trials against less famous revolutionnaries. The analysis of this trial demostrates that all the political actors intempted to legitimate themselve by using the judicial tribune and the power of juridical discourse to give credence to their propaganda about recent events.

Ransoming the state: elite origins of Subaltern terror in Sierra Leone

Elite practices that valorised pillage, massified society, banalised violence and ‘sobelised’ the army are central to understanding the tragedy of subaltern terror in Sierra Leone. The appropriation of lumpen violence and thuggery by the political class undermined security and paved the way for the political ascendancy of armed marginals. By heavily recruiting thugs, criminals and rural drifters into national security apparatuses, incumbent political elites sowed the seeds of their own political demise as well as that of the state. Socially uprooted and politically alienated, lumpenised youth are inherently prone to criminal adventurism and when enlisted in the army are more likely to become ‘sobels’ or renegade soldiers. This article situates the transformation of praetorian violence from a tool of political domination to a means of criminal expropriation in the engendering context of elite parasitism and repression.

Collective Life and Social Change in The GDR

Research into East Germany's 1989 collapse often uses models developed for Western social movements which emphasize social movement organizations and activists. This approach may neglect important aspects of the social organization of everyday life in repressive contexts and how these affect social movement processes. Unlike the West, East Germany built social life around state-sponsored groups, called collectives, and these had a marked effect on the development of the opposition. Research presented here, based on interviews and archival documents, shows how collective discussions, although never oppositional in the fullest sense, facilitated grievance construction and an awareness of common political exclusion. Over the course of time, especially after Gorbachev's reforms, these practices laid the groundwork for mobilization in the relative absence of an opposition movement. Without understanding the concealed social movement processes operating within collective groups, the state's sudden, and peaceful, collapse is not easily explained.

Desde la Protesta a la Propuesta:Gender politics in transition in Chile

Throughout the 1980s, the major political debates on Latin America revolved around the transitions from military to civilian regimes and the nature of the emerging democracies. The ‘women question’ occupied a prominent position in those debates because of the central role which women had played in the opposition movements and Latin American feminists’ analyses of gender oppression within a global context of political repression. These debates have been considerably less vociferous in recent years. The silence may represent a much‐needed period of reflection on the movement's future role, but it is unnervingly reminiscent of the withdrawal from politics which followed the enfranchisement campaigns once the right to vote had been won. Was the return to democracy an end in itself? I believe it was not, but the transitions have thrown up new challenges for social movements in general and the women's movement in particular. Chile was one of the last countries in Latin America to return to civilian government. ...

It Didn't Jes Grew: The Social and Aesthetic Significance of African American Music

Our music is our Mother Tongue, our meta-language that we use for the fullest expression of self. In the preface to Paul Garon's seminal text on surrealism and Black music, Blues & the Poetic Spirit, Franklin Rosemont notes that . . . American black music originated in the culture of the slaves who were systematically deprived of the more refined instruments of human expression. Slaves were forbidden to learn to read or write, and they had no opportunity for plastic expression. Even their musical efforts were severely circumscribed; slaveholders who feared the use of drums and other instruments as means of communication between slave assemblies, and hence as tools of insurrection, banned such instruments from the plantations. Thus the spoken word, the chant, and dancing were the only vehicles of creative expression left to the slaves. The sublimative energies that in different conditions would doubtless have gone into writing, painting, sculpture, etc. were necessarily concentrated in the naked word and the naked gesture - in the field hollers, work-songs, and their accompanying rhythmic movements - in which gestated the embryo that would eventually emerge as the blues. Black music developed out of, and later side by side with, this vigorous oral poetry combined with dancing, both nourished in the tropical tempest of black magic and the overwhelming desire for freedom. The extreme repressive context of its origins, and its consequent subsumption into itself of the whole gamut of creative impulses, together give the blues its unique intensity and distinctive poetic resonance. As a living and fertile body of creative expression blues and jazz retain today their boundless integrity and provocative flare. Their role in shaping the modern sensibility is already large and shows every sign of expanding. It should be emphasized, since so many critics pretend not to notice it, that all authentic blues and jazz share a poetically subversive core, an explosive essence of irreconcilable revolt against the shameful limits of an unlivable destiny. Notwithstanding the whimpering objections of a few timid skeptics, this revolt cannot be assimilated into the abject mainstream of American bourgeois/Christian culture except by way of dilution and/or outright falsification. The dark truth of Afro-American music remains unquestionably oppositional. Its implacable Luciferian pride - that is, its aggressive and uncompromising assertion of the omnipotence of desire and the imagination in the face of all resistances - forever provides a stumbling-block for those who would like to exploit it as a mere commercial diversion, a mere form of entertainment, a mere ruse to keep the cash register ringing. Born in passionate revolt against the unlivable, blues and jazz demand nothing less than a new life. (7-8) Within the above stated context, this paper will address language as both a basic means of communication and as a tool for artistic expression; the foundational aesthetics of African American music, which I refer to as GBM (Great Black Music); and the state and significance of the four major genres of GBM in the contemporary setting - Gospel, or religious music; Blues; Jazz; and Black Pop or RB after all, we are a mixture of races. So the biological is the least important of the three elements of Blackness. Culture and consciousness are the critical elements. Culture roots the individual in a group, a community of people who share behavior, attitudes, ethos, and ideals. …

Kilusang Mayo Uno & the Rise of Social Movement Unionism in the Philippines

Abstract The paper traces the genesis and development of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) or May First movement in the Philippines as a significant component of Filipino industrial relations. The argument of the paper is that the growth has been rapid despite employer victimization and violent state repression, because of the attractiveness of a new trade union organizing style, a style which has emerged in certain Third World and other repressive state contexts. While the KMU leadership has adopted the political identity, ‘National Democratic Unionism’, I argue that the analytical concept social movement unionism is an effective way of capturing the dynamic of this new trade union form. Through the rootedness of social movementism in the workplace and in the community, through the movement's mass actions challenging state power, and through the leadership conviction that an alternative society is possible, the new form has proven viable. The optimism underlying these developments stands in sharp contrast to t...

Understandings of Justice: Institutional Legitimacy, Procedural Justice, and Political Tolerance

This research examines the linkages among institutional legitimacy, perceptions of procedural justice, and voluntary compliance with unpopular institutional decisions within the context of political intolerance and repression. Several questions are addressed, including: To what degree do judicial decisions contribute to the acceptance of unpopular political decisions? Do court decisions have a greater power to legitimize than the decisions of other political institutions? Are courts perceived as more procedurally fair than other political institutions? Do perceptions of procedural fairness—be it in a court or legislative institution—contribute to the efficacy of institutional decisions? The basic hypothesis of this research is that to the extent that an institution employs fair decisionmaking procedures, it is viewed as legitimate and citizens are more likely to comply with its decisions, even when they are unpopular. Based on an analysis of national survey data, I conclude that, although perceptions of institutional procedure have little impact on compliance, institutional legitimacy does seem to have some effect. The United States Supreme Court in particular seems to have some ability to elicit acceptance of public policies that are unpopular with the mass public. This effect is greatest among opinion leaders. I conclude with some observations about how these findings fit with the growing literature on procedural justice and with some thoughts about the implications of the findings for the protection of democratic liberty.

Ecumenism, Soviet-Dissident Style

While a good deal of research has focused on religious ecumenical movements in Western societies, far less attention has been devoted to ecumenism in non-Western contexts. Whereas religious groups in the West are generally free to pursue cooperation with other religious bodies, those operating in more repressive contexts face an additional challenge. In officially atheistic polities, the state plays an important role in shaping the character of ecumenical pursuits. The present study examines the impact of the Soviet state on independent efforts by religious bodies to build an ecumenical base. Our findings suggest that in atheistic societies the state operates as an ambivalent force affecting, in both negative and positive directions, the coalescence of ecumenically minded believers. We conclude with some cross-national observations on ecumenical formations.

The failure of repressive monetarism: Chile, 1973–83

(1984). The failure of repressive monetarism: Chile, 1973–83. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 310-326.

The repressive context of art work

Cultural freedom in the arts is not simply a formalized battle between institutionalized constraints and supports. The content of the battle is art; consequently the struggle is meaningful. Constraint, be it of the marketplace, the state, or the superego, is a stimulus for symbolic liberation and this is meaningfully embodied in superior art.' Thus the system of repression channels symbolic liberation and therefore, when an old repressive system is transformed, an art product can lose its meaning or have its meanings transformed. The movement of a cultural product from one system of repression to another graphically demonstrates this. An important contemporary case in point is the movement of artists from the political east to the political west.