Era Of Repression Research Articles

Radiant Reflections: Crystal Boys, Rose Boy, and Taiwan's Queer History

“The essay delves into Taiwan's queer history through the lens of two pivotal events: the "Rose Boy" Incident and the publication of the groundbreaking novel, Crystal Boys. It explores the interconnectedness of these events and their lasting impact on Taiwanese society's perception of LGBT individuals. Crystal Boys, authored by Pai Hsien-yung in the repressive era of martial law, dared to depict the lives of gay men in Taipei's New Park, challenging societal norms and censorship. The New Park emerged as both a refuge and a perilous space for the gay community, where they formed bonds amidst societal oppression. The essay also discusses the subsequent activism sparked by Crystal Boys, leading to milestones like the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan. Conversely, the tragic death of Ye Yongzhi, dubbed the "Rose Boy," exposed the harsh realities faced by LGBT youth in Taiwan, igniting societal outrage and calls for change. Through literary analysis and historical context, the essay illustrates how art and activism intersect to shape queer narratives and propel the fight for equality in Taiwan and beyond.”.

Testimonial Narratives of Muslim Tausug: Against Militarization in Sulu (1972-1974)

In order to provide a counter history to the predominate, monochromatic, and polarizing historiography of Martial Law in the Philippines, this article investigates the use of testimonial narratives from Muslim Tausug witnesses and survivors during the early years of militarization of Sulu province in the southern Philippines (1972–1974). It focuses on the narratives of war and violence which have been silenced and subjugated, as well as the role of identities and culture in the articulation of the conflict. Their testimonies offer a different perspective on the marginalization of Muslim Mindanao under the repressive era of Ferdinand Marcos’ Martial Law. This article contributes to the study of Islam in the Philippines and Bangsamoro by exploring the ways in which Tausug Muslims use their religion to air their grievances and to fight against oppression. They were able to embrace Islam as their framework for emancipation because of their roots in postcolonial experience.

The Hare Krishnas in Bali: Localized Religion and New Religious Movement

As the Balinese sought official religious acceptance in Indonesia, they formalized their ethnic customs and transformed them into a universal religion with an Abrahamic model called “Agama Hindu Dharma”. In aligning itself with Hinduism, the Balinese had to restructure their internalized indigenous faith and share it with Hindus beyond the island, including with others in the archipelago and the religious hearth of India. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), commonly known as The Hare Krishna Movement, is a Hindu-based New Religious Movement. With their active presence in Bali, they provided an informative and devotional perspective for inquisitive Hindus. Preferring their local expression of Hinduism instead, ISKCON books and teachings were banned in 1984 for disrupting public order during the repressive era of President Suharto. The political reformation of 1998 allowed for the recognition of ISKCON, but the exclusivism of Hare Krishna members threatened many orthodox Balinese Hindus. This opposition culminated in 2020, resulting in a decree restricting all non-Balinese Hindu sects from practicing in the Hindu-majority province. This paper documents the formalization of the indigenous Balinese theology and its recent interaction with a multinational New Religious Movement.

“We are the Time”: the Dynamics of Time and the Sense of the Past in the Narratives of the Family Memory. Part II

Based on the results of the analysis of narrative interviews of three generations of residents of Lipetsk, this article identifies and comprehends the features of the representation of family time, the main types of events in family history and the forms of continuity of family traditions. The methods of constructing time and eventfulness were analyzed in the context of cultural practices of everyday life, perceived as traditions of work, everyday life and leisure. On the basis of the biographical method of Fritz Schütze, positive and negative curves of biographical stories were identified, which were compared with the “family scenarios” represented in the narratives of the people of Lipetsk. The combination of F. Schütze's biographical method and S. Jaeger's critical discourse analysis allowed us to identify and compare general tendencies that, on the one hand, turned out to be dominant in the family memory narratives of three generations of Lipetsk residents, and on the other hand, were clearly represented in the media discourse of public commemorations. The first trend was the unconditional growth of the meaningfulness of family history as the age of our respondents increased. The second most important trend was the use by respondents of the events of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 as a kind of "worldview" framework for interpreting the events of family history and its basic meanings. The third trend was the pronounced desire to avoid comprehending the tragic events of family history and the uncritical perception of the biographies of family members during the era of repression in the 1930s. The fourth trend was the absolute dominance of a strong type of continuity in relation to family traditions. It was revealed that the deployment of family temporality appears as a process of constant and dynamic interaction with the semantic space of the historical culture of the region and its practices of using the past.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan

The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan

The history of emergence and development of medical genetics in Russia

The early years of human genetics in Russia were distinguished by a pronounced interest in eugenics, pioneering methodological achievements in human cytogenetics, systematic studies of the contribution of heredity to the development of multifactorial diseases, the physical and mental human characteristics. The vast scientific infrastructure in genetics that had developed by the mid-1930s was demolished in a series of political decisions beginning with the campaigns to eradicate eugenic ideas and ending with the notorious 1948 VASKhNIL session, which entailed a complete ban on the genetics. For almost 25 years, key to the development of this science throughout the world, its progress in Russia was first completely frozen, and then retarded profoundly. The revival of medical genetics went in different ways, by virtue of many prominent specialists in various fields of human genetics, formed before the era of repression. New scientific schools were founded by them and their disciples. Despite the enormous gap in the level of domestic and world genetics, which lagged even after the ban was lifted, a series of important works in the field of radiation mutagenesis, population genetics, cytogenetics, as well as a number of world class achievements in the field of biochemical genetics and the study of metabolic diseases, should be noted. Gradually, as the state recognized the importance of genetics for medicine, an extensive medical genetic service arose in the countrys healthcare system. The conditional point of the final rehabilitation of medical genetics can be recognized in the emergence of departments of this discipline in medical schools throughout the country in the late 1980s. Despite the gap, still persisting between the worlds level of medical genetic science and the current state of it in our country, this gap has significantly reduced nowadays.

“All Art is Part of the Same Constellation”: A Conversation on Craft and Artistic Practice with Heri Dono

In this interview with Heri Dono, the artist discusses his ongoing relationship to craft and traditional art in Indonesia. Dono is an artist who intentionally blurs the boundaries between fine art and craft to subvert artistic conventions. Born in 1960 in Jakarta and raised in Semarang, Central Java, Dono is among a generation of artists who came of age during the politically repressive era of Suharto, also known as the New Order (1966–1998). Dono studied painting at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) in Yogyakarta between 1980 and 1987. He dropped out of art school to study the popular form of Javanese shadow puppetry known as wayang kulit, and became a professionally trained storyteller dalang (puppet master). That experience heavily inspired Dono’s paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances, enabling him to develop his own personal aesthetic and visual language based on the characters depicted in the wayang. Dono regularly enlists craftsmen as well as untrained members of the local community to participate in his projects as a tool of empowerment. In pieces such as Wayang Legenda (1988) and Kuda Binal (1992), Dono drew upon traditional modes of storytelling and ritual dancing as a subtle form of social critique and political commentary.

Narsisme sebagai Wujud Eksistensi Diri dalam Novel “My Name is Red” Karya Orhan Pamuk

<p>This paper discusses about socio-psychological dimension in paintings pictured in Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red. The novel shows us fi ne examples about how paintings can be a media of painters who lived in a repressive era of Sultan Murat III which established rigid rules adopted from Islamic principles of how a painting should be done. This idea manifested in the characters’ behaviour, especially Velijan Eff endi, who hold the Islamic or East principles, but dilemmatically fond of Western principles as an aesthetic way of painting. This kind of dilemma born from the presence of East and West principles intertwined in Turkey at the era pictured in the novel. Results determined that Velijan<br />Eff endi is narcistic as a result of his needs to be acknowledged, to exist in his repressed life. He uses his paintings as the media of expressing his needs.</p>

Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society by Valérie K. Orlando

Reviewed by: Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society by Valérie K. Orlando Carla Calargé (bio) Orlando, Valérie K. Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. 190pp. Valérie Orlando’s last work, Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society, is not a simple study of Moroccan films produced and distributed between 1999 and 2010. The book is also a wonderful overview of the development of the film industry in Morocco from colonial times until the present and as such, represents a valuable introduction for students and scholars interested in learning more about a vibrant and promising young cinema. Orlando’s choice of the time interval for the films she studies is justified by the drastic changes that have occurred in Morocco’s society since 1999, that is, after the death of King Hassan II and the end of what is commonly referred to as the “Lead Years,” an era of repression characterized by strong censorship, human right abuses, and the disappearance of thousands of political opponents and activists who were arrested, detained, and tortured in secret prisons. The films produced in the first decade of the new millennium, Orlando argues, reflect the magnitude of the cultural and socio-political change that has taken place in the country and constitute some of the most thought-provoking cinematic productions of the Maghreb today. Indeed, according to Orlando, contemporary Moroccan cinema is very much engaged in participating in, and thus, shaping the dialogue taking place in Morocco today around issues such as national identity, modernity, globalization, immigration, women’s rights and their place in society. While it is resolutely anchored in the present and definitely concerned with the future of Moroccan society, this cinema has also actively joined the national effort of recollection of the repressed memory of the recent past. Several films explore stories of human right abuses committed under Hassan II in order to make this dark and silenced chapter of national history known to citizens so that such atrocities can never be repeated in the future. In addition to the thematic examination of the films she analyzes, Orlando retraces the development of Moroccan cinema as an industry and identifies some of the major problems filmmakers have to face when making a film. As in the case of Francophone West African cinema, the choice of language (whether Arabic, French, Berber, or any combination of the those three languages) constitutes a big hurdle since it has significant repercussions on audience reception both in Morocco and abroad, but also, on marketing and distribution, notably in Europe and North America. And while the language chosen for the film can be dictated by the film’s funding sources, it can also be a realistic consequence of the social classes represented in the story. The increasing number of films made by Moroccan filmmakers who live abroad and whose works are [End Page 177] considered by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) as part of the national cinema raises other issues as imperative as that of the choice of language. For example, it begs the question of whether challenging socio-political and cultural norms and issues are better achieved when filmmakers are not subject to the state’s censorship since, even today, films cannot “overtly criticize the king and Islam” nor can they “promote themes that are pornographic” (xii). It is not possible to understand the present-day Moroccan cinema industry without retracing its problematic colonial beginnings, declares Orlando in the introduction to her book. She then goes on to explain that unlike in Algeria, where France tried to erase indigenous culture, language, religion, and customs, the “oriental” character of Morocco was preserved, highlighted, and exacerbated as the country was imagined and constructed as “a vast theme park for the colonizers’ unfettered exploits” (4). Furthermore, in order to protect her authority from being challenged, France encouraged schisms and divisions between Arabs and Berbers and wrote a problematic history of the nation that accentuated such invented divides; literary and filmic productions portrayed a “fictional” country plagued by internal divisions, and whose perception of its fragmented identity would be kept and maintained by Hassan II so that his...

Motherhood and Opportunities for Activism Before and After the Czech Velvet Revolution

Extant social movement research emphasizes the nexus of gender and opportunity structures in a variety of contexts, yet little work has examined how gender mediates the effects of structural opportunities on activism over time. We advance the existing literature by examining environmental activism framed around motherhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Czech Republic. Our analysis draws from rich qualitative data, collected over a ten-year span, which highlight temporal changes in mother activism in these two distinct eras. Contrary to expectation, gendered opportunities for mother activists expanded during the repressive era of the communist regime and contracted following the 1989 velvet revolution. We show how and why these dynamics occurred, and conclude by discussing implications for future social movement research on gender and gendered opportunities.

Women, Religion, and Sexuality in Contemporary Moroccan Film: Unveiling the Veiled in ﺤﺟاﺏ ﺍﺁﺤﺏ Hijab al-Hob (Veils of Love, 2009)

Women, Religion, and Sexuality in Contemporary Moroccan FilmUnveiling the Veiled in ﺤﺟاﺏ ﺍﺁﺤﺏ Hijab al-Hob (Veils of Love, 2009) Valérie K. Orlando (bio) The contemporary film industry in Morocco reflects the sociopolitical and cultural transitions that have taken place in the country since 1999. In the last decade, notably since the death of King Hassan II in July 1999, which symbolically ended Les Années de plomb (the Lead Years, c. 1963–1999) and the most repressive era in Morocco’s modern history, the country has engaged with the globalized world, becoming more open and democratic. Contemporary sociopolitical and cultural transitions in “the New Morocco” (Le Nouveau Maroc, as it has come to be known since the debut of the new millennium) have been contextualized in film, documentaries, and television series. As I have argued elsewhere in my work on the cultural production of Morocco, since the end of the Lead Years the country has sought to democratize and modernize on all levels of society: sociocultural, judicial, and political.1 In some respects, the monarchy of King Mohamed VI has attempted to turn the page on the past of his father’s repressive rule in order to shape a society that is forward thinking and inclusive. The cultural production of the county has reflected the issues and debates of the new era, particularly in the film and television industries. Both have benefited from the more open political climate freed of censure and this, in turn, has influenced themes and technical innovations on the screen. Visual media best depict both the dystopian and utopian realms of Morocco’s modernity, encouraging debate about the negatives and positives [End Page 106] of the hyperglobal capitalist systems of the twenty-first century. Additionally, and most importantly, Moroccan modernity in the age of globalization has particularly impacted women and their enfranchisement in society in both positive and negative ways. Encouraged by increased democratic transparency fostered by young King Mohammed VI (popularly known as “M6,” pronounced “emm sees” in French), men and women filmmakers explore the sociocultural and political debates of their country; a nation, like others across the Arab world, undergoing huge sociocultural and political transitions. Certainly in this period now known as the “Arab Spring,” Morocco is also witnessing upheaval, particularly among its younger generations. Like the rest of the world, 65 percent of Morocco’s population is under the age of thirty-five. Young people are more educated than their parents, more secular, and more driven by capitalism and the global market than older generations. Filmmaker Aziz Salmy’s 2009 film, Hijab al-Hob (Veils of Love), encapsulates the culture wars of the New Morocco, articulating the overarching angst shared by many Moroccans, both men and women, who find themselves caught up in the throes of globalization. Film, Cinema, and Changing Mores in Contemporary Morocco The themes taken up in films allow audiences to explore some of today’s most pressing questions and issues in Moroccan society; notably the changing mores of young people, sexuality, and women’s emancipation from taboos and stifling cultural and religious values. Some of the most thought-provoking films made in the last decade, directed by both male and female directors working in Morocco, include: Jugement d’une femme (2000, Judgment of a Woman, Hassan Benjelloun), Les Yeux secs (2002, Dry Eyes, Narjis Nejjar), Marock (2005, Leila Marrakchi), Deux Femmes sur la route (2007, Two Women on the Road, Farida Bourquia), Casanegra (2008, Nourredine Lakhmari), Les Jardins de Samira (2008, Samira’s Gardens, Latif Lahlou), Amours Voilées (2009, Veils of Love, Aziz Salmy), Les Ailes de l’amour (2011, Love in the Medina, Abdelhaï Laraki), and the 2006 TV police crime drama series El Kadia.2 This series features beautiful inspector Hajjami. She is a character who represents the overarching theme that women’s roles and place within urban culture are rooted in a burgeoning brand of Western-capitalist modernism as found particularly in Casablanca. In her lab, Hajjami dissects bodies and probes the severed members of cadavers in order to solve crimes for La Police Scientifique in the same manner as American crime drama heroines—Temperance Brennan of Bones, Megan Hunt of Body of...

Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System

Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System INTRODUCTION A COMMON ELEMENT IN DISCUSSIONS OF WHAT MAKES THE UNITED States unique is readily conveyed by the phrase “the American Dream.” While an exact definition ofthis concept eludes us, widely accepted ways of thinking about it make reference to notions of freedom, opportunity, and equality. Lurking not far beneath the surface of these lofty notions is an idea about the good society—about what is just and what is fair. As Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), one of the canon­ ical texts of the American Dream, put it, we are bound together by an “American Creed.”This creed contains ideas and values that Americans of almost any station in life can articulate, namely “inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity.” These rights were rooted in a belief in Enlightenment notions of the moral dignity, worth, and value of each individual. Such reverence for the worth of the individual demanded a sort of equality of treatment, at least before the hands of government and the authority of the state. Among other things, then, this creed calls for and is understood as requiring that we all stand equal before the law. social research Vol 73 : No 2 : Summer 2006 445 What we wish to suggest in this paper is that this ideal, this great American promise of freedom, opportunity, and equality—of a truly fair and just society where citizens stand equal before the law—is in trouble. This source of deep unquiet and anxiety about the American promise of fairness concerns the gradual but profoundly punitive transformation of the crime response complex in the United States.1 Legal scholar Michael Tonry opened a 1999 UCLA Law Review article by suggesting that: We live in a repressive era when punishment policies that would be unthinkable in other times and places are not only commonplace but also are enthusiastically supported by public officials, policy intellectuals, and much of the general public (Tonry 1999:1752). He closed by declaring that, “For a civil society, the United States has adopted justice policies that reflective people should abhor and that informed observers from other Western countries do abhor” (1789). We very much share these sentiments, especially with regard to one major facet of this era o f “unthinkable punishment,” as Tonry put it; namely, the radically disproportionate impact this repressive era has had on African Americans and African-American communities across this country. More concretely, we maintain that over the past two to three decades the United States has enacted a series of policies that have effectively reforged a historically troubled linkage between race, crime, and the functioning o f the legal system. Among the effects of these changes are a deep crisis of legitimacy for the legal system in the eyes of black America and a real threat to the promise of equality before the law. In general, we seek to render the current rates of black incar­ ceration both more politically visible and problematic. We make three empirical claims in pursuing this agenda. First, and least controver­ sially, we argue that the United States has enacted policy changes that have created an extraordinary—indeed, truly world-historic—rise in 4 4 6 social research the use of incarceration for purposes of social control. These actions have had sharply disproportionate effects on African Americans, though we hasten to add that the mechanisms of such systematic racial disproportion are more indirect, covert, and implicit than the mech­ anisms of racial bias evident in the past. Second, African Americans directly experience and are very much aware of these changes. Yet, so far, the black community is neither of one mind nor acutely politicized about these trends. Black Americans are, however, by overwhelming margins deeply disillusioned with the current situation. They regard the current situation of inequality before the law as a signal failure of progress in civil rights and o f the promise of fairness at the heart of the American Creed. Finally, this disillusionment is contributing to a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis that will have effects on how...

Street Theatre in Pakistani Punjab: The Case of Ajoka, Lok Rehas, and the Woman Question

The Parallel Movement, or Street Theatre as it is loosely called, in province of Punjab, Pakistan, emerged during repressive era of General Zia-ul-Haque's Martial Law regime (1979-1989).' This form of theatre raises several questions about nature of relationship between Pakistani Islamic state and society. The most pertinent of these for my project is question of state's coercive relationship with its female citizenry. Related to this is issue of male-female relationships in society and how these relationships are complicated by class stratifications that inevitably affect way gendered politics (and policies) actually get played out. There is also increasingly vexed issue of national versus ethnic identity-a conflict which is reflected through language politics of theatre groups; linguistic choices reveal groups' conflicting and often self-contradictory ideological stands on this question. In choosing to focus on such an area of inquiry for a (so-called) postcolonial project, I am seeking to re-site question Who decolonizes? that Gayatri Spivak insists we confront in her afterward to Imaginary Maps (1995). This question forces us to reevaluate the task of post-colonial, which, as Spivak sees it-and I agree-ought to involve a rigorous moving away from conflating Eurocentric migrancy with post-coloniality (Spivak 1995:203). In words, let us, as postcolonial critics and scholars, turn our attention to other sites of enunciation, as Walter Mignolo has urged (1993:120). This elsewhere is really a turning inward toward postcolonial nationstate in order to cast a critical gaze at a decolonizing process that has simultaneously constructed a normative constitutional subject of new nation (Spivak 1995:2o3): in Pakistan's case, middle class, urban and male, or upper class, feudal and male. Within last decade or so, Ajoka (the major Parallel group in Pakistan) as well as its regional spin-offs, notably

Reform, repression and resistance in South Africa: a case study of Alexandra township, 1979–1989

This article is a case study of reform policy and popular opposition in Alexandra, a black township in the heart of Johannesburg and Sandton's wealthiest white suburbs. First, it examines the popular response to reformist policy in the early 1980s and the transformation to ‘people's power’. ‘People's power’ was informed by an insurrectionary strategy which gave rise to hasty organisation and was based on a limited conception of state power. The demise of ‘people's power’, it is suggested, was not solely due to a clamp‐down on popular organisation by the state. Second, the nature of current reform policy and the way in which it differs from the earlier reform package is discussed. Urbanisation policy, Regional Service Councils and Joint Management Centres are complementary aspects of the new urban reform strategy. It is argued that the current era of repression in the late Eighties was a period of managing reform policy within a new ideological and institutional framework rather than a desperate resort to maintain the status quo.

The Diplomacy of Suppression: Los Revoltosos, Mexico, and the United States, 1906-1911

B EGINNING with the latter part of the nineteenth century and continuing up to and through the Red Scare of the early 1920s, there was a merging of social traditions in American life which resulted in the screening out of both the alien and the radical. Histolians like William Preston, author of Aliens and Dissenters, have dealt with the antialien and antiradical efforts of the federal government during this period. Surprisingly, however, the fate of Mexican aliens and radicals, referred to officially by the Mexican government as los revoltosos, has been overlooked by U.S. histolians during this so-called Progressive Era of Amelican history.' From the point of view of the Mexican community in the United States, this period might more accurately be described by U.S. historians as the Repressive Era of American history. Immediately before and during this period, U.S. economic interests, in the form of capital and industrial surplus, extended into Mexico and continued to expand during the administrations of Roosevelt and Taft. This was especially the case in the northern Mexican states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas where U.S. investors controlled substantial mining, timber, ranching, and agricultural enterprises. Following the lead of Roosevelt, Elihu Root and