Revolutionary Context Research Articles

The archive in the field: document, discourse, and space in Mexico's agrarian reform

In the immediate aftermath of Mexico's revolution (1910–1920), increasing numbers of surveyors, agronomists, and agrarian bureaucrats headed out to the countryside to implement the agrarian reforms promised in the decree of 1915 and the Constitution of 1917. In this essay I ask a very basic set of questions about the use, evaluation, and making of spatial knowledge in a revolutionary context: when bureaucrats went in to the field after the revolution, what did they do? What roles, if any, did local inhabitants themselves play in the processes that unfolded? And what constituted the acceptable body of knowledge—the archive—necessary to resolve persistent boundary questions that impeded the reform? I examine these questions by looking closely at the textual and personal interactions between one agrarian bureaucrat and the inhabitants and authorities in the villages to which he had been sent in central Veracruz. Their interactions reveal the degree to which campesinos in the countryside appropriated and deployed different aspects of revolutionary rhetoric in an effort to shape new spaces, or recreate previous ones, in the 1920s.

The Private Lives of Systems: Rukeyser, Hayden, Middle Passage

The Private Lives of SystemsRukeyser, Hayden, Middle Passage Eben Wood (bio) Words at War Writing to New York Public Library trustee Henry James in the spring of 1943, Left poet Muriel Rukeyser proposed an exhibition that would examine what she and her colleagues in the Office of War Information's Graphics Division called "the nature of total war." The plan behind a series of single images may best be illustrated by such a series as the Graphics Division has carried out. The series on the Enemy does not show the Germans and the Japanese, for example, as brutalized and individual soldiers. It isolates a set of characteristics—suppression, starvation, slavery, torture, and murder—stamps them as the method of the enemy, and makes the positive answer of the United Nations: We Fight to Build a Free World. The qualities we fight against are contained in the images; the answer which implements daily life in America, as we wish to see it functioning to fight fascism, is contained in the text.1 Words at War, installed in a first-floor corridor of the NYPL's main branch on 5th Avenue, ran from June 18 to August 13, 1943. It was followed in the autumn by a weekly reading and discussion series whose participants included Rukeyser, exhibition coorganizer William Rose Benét, James Agee, W.H. Auden, Padraic Colum, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Patchen, and William Carlos Williams [Fig. 1].2 In its critical juxtaposition of text and visual image, Words at War extended the Left avant-garde's earlier experimentation with the "social production of culture … and the new method of [End Page 201] literary representation / production that accompanied it, factography."3 As Benjamin H.D. Buchloch has argued, factography was the distillation of Soviet constructivism's effort not merely to apply modernism's technical innovations (particularly in film and photomontage) and formalist experimentation to a revolutionary context, but to involve artists "with materials and objects in actual space and the social processes that occur within it." In doing so, constructivists hoped to "transcend the historical limitations of modernism," moving from aesthetic mediation to direct participation in the processes of cultural production.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. E. McKnight Kauffer's cover design for the Words at War exhibition catalog (1943). The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Rejecting liberalism's presumptive private/public divide and its geopolitical analogies, Words at War contested many of the contradictions that emerged when earlier factographic and photomontage techniques were utilized in an already industrialized American context, contradictions that for Buchloch are exemplified by Herbert Bayer's photomurals for Edward Steichen's 1942 MoMA exhibition, Road to Victory. The site of Rukeyser's exhibition is significant in this regard: its location in the NYPL's main corridor and its disjunctive, pedagogical technique emphasized "useful information and technical instruction," in direct contrast to MoMA's contemporaneous "modernization of what had come to be known among museum professionals as the 'aesthetic theory of museum management.'"5 Likewise, Words at War retains a dialectical tension [End Page 202] between domestic American life and international fascism, implying that U.S. culture itself must be re-fashioned to counter totalitarianism both at home and abroad. Rather than channeling earlier leftwing political and artistic engagement directly into wartime propaganda, Rukeyser signals an ongoing conflict that emerged with the dismantling of the WPA, the move of "many arts projects participants … into the war information agencies," and the complex, mid-century transformation of American public culture.6 Expanding Buchloch's narrow focus on the plastic and visual arts, Rukeyser's contemporaneous literary work explored the ways in which—as it interrogated the divisions of cultural labor that separate poetic technique from visual communication, historical knowledge, and political action—"the program of productivism and the methods of factographic production" informed specific literary/artistic projects, decades before these methods found more direct expression in the mid- to late-1960s.7 In a globalizing postwar political landscape, domestic U.S. preoccupation with the production, transmission, and reception of networked information...

The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture Scott McGill Craig Kallendorf . The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 252. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-19-921236-1. One of the ways opponents of the so-called "pessimistic" readers of Virgil's Aeneid have sought to discredit them is through the charge of presentism. In this argument, interpreters who emphasize the poem's "further voices" drown out Virgil's own and foist a modern distrust of war and empire onto a staunchly pro-Augustan epic. As Craig Kallendorf demonstrates, however, any attempt to portray "pessimistic" responses to the Aeneid as strictly contemporary critical constructs finds itself belied by history. For throughout the early modern period, readers show themselves to be attuned to the attention Virgil gives to the human cost of the Roman mission, and to the ambivalence in his portrayal of Aeneas. This successful attempt at historicizing the Harvard School (to echo the title of one of Kallendorf's articles; see p. x, n.8) breathes new life into the story of Virgil's reception. Along the way, Kallendorf provides a model of how to avoid presentism while still applying current thinking to the past, as he turns to literary theory and cultural studies to illuminate themes that, he convincingly relates, lie within the early modern texts, and to deepen our understanding of how those works operated in their historical settings. Along with a preface, introduction, and conclusion, The Other Virgil contains three sections, each of which contains three parts. The first section (17–66), "Marginalization," centers upon Francesco Filelfo's fifteenth-century Sphortias, written for Francesco Sforza. Kallendorf argues that we should not read this epic as a univocal panegyric of its namesake, but rather should recognize that it expresses reservations about the protagonist and his martial achievements, even as it also praises them. By imitating the Aeneid, Kallendorf continues, Filelfo gives a darker hue to Sforza's ascent to power (see esp. 50–61). For Kallendorf, this stands as an instance where imitation reveals interpretation: Filelfo saw ambiguity in Virgil's treatment of Aeneas and the Romans, and activated it in his own poem via intertextual borrowing. This stimulating reading is only one of several fine aspects of the section. Notable are Kallendorf's survey of Renaissance approaches to the Aeneid, with an illuminating catalogue of "pessimistic" responses (30–50), and his strong Foucauldian analysis of the relationship between literature and power (63–66). Section Two, "Colonization," which treats how early modern poems "pick up on the colonial theme in the Aeneid . . . [and] on the complexities with which [End Page 507] Virgil treated this theme (76)," is more diffuse and uneven than its predecessor. In it, Kallendorf examines Ercilla's sixteenth-century Spanish epic La Araucana (77–102), Shakespeare's The Tempest (102–26), and the seventeenth-century Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's lyric poetry (126–37). Kallendorf's inquiry strains to unite under one thematic rubric very different texts that reuse Virgil quite differently. So too the analysis of Sor Juana is a bit abrupt. Still, the section has many things to recommend it. These include remarks on constructions of the Other that seem all the more intelligent for being free of jargon (see esp. 68–73), and an overview, with good theoretical observations, of the portrayal of colonization and difference in the Aeneid (73–76). In his excellent reading of The Tempest, Kallendorf also provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare and Virgil speak to postcolonial concerns from the European canon. The final section of The Other Virgil opens with Kallendorf examining another canonical heavyweight, Milton's Paradise Lost (138–69), before moving to Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus and Columbiad (169–95) and Le Plat's travesty Virgile en France (196–212). As the title "Revolution" indicates, all the poems arise in revolutionary contexts (English, American, and French, respectively); and Kallendorf explores how each uses the Aeneid to criticize monarchy and to support republicanism. Like its immediate predecessor, the section does not entirely cohere into a unity. Yet it is only...

Mexican Chicago: race, identity, and nation, 1916-39

Mexican Chicago builds on previous studies of Mexicans in the United States while challenging static definitions of “American” and underlying assumptions of assimilation. Gabriela F. Arredondo contends that because of the revolutionary context from which they came, Mexicans in Chicago between 1916 and 1939 were not just another ethnic group working to be assimilated into a city that has a long history of incorporating newcomers. Suggesting a new understanding of identity formation, she argues that Mexicans wielded tools of identification forged in revolutionary Mexico to collectively battle the prejudices of ethnic groups that included Poles, Italians, and the Irish, as well as African Americans. By turning inward, however, Mexicans also highlighted tremendous differences among themselves, such as gender and class. In discussing this distinctive process of becoming “Mexican” in Chicago during the early twentieth century, Arredondo not only explores how that identity was constructed but also provides telling insight into the repercussions of that identity formation process.

The Cuban Revolution

Five Cuban intelligence agents sit in federal penitentiaries across the United States because they infiltrated antirevolutionary groups in Miami intent on doing violence in Cuba. These five men represent a long line of those who have acted from an understanding of their roles in the long human historical drama. The Cuban Revolution did for radical youth of the 1950s what the Bolsheviks did for their ancestors. You could play a role in history and see the results. And in the early stages they looked very good. The more cautious Mensheviks and the more radical Bolsheviks agreed that it was absurd to think of building socialism in one country. In 1917 attempts to duplicate the overthrow of capitalism failed in Europe and socialism did develop in the largest land mass in the world. The Soviet Union endured as a painfully inefficient state-directed economy and a repressive society for some 70 years before it imploded. In 1959, Cuban leaders echoed similar sentiments. A revolution on one island? The actions of guerrillas of the mountains and the underground were rooted in a larger revolutionary context, one supplied by Bolivar, O'Higgins, and the other Latin American liberators. Cuba began to export revolution? at least ideas?to Caribbean islands and to the South and Central American countries as well.

Junta, regencia y representación: La elección de los suplentes americanos a las primeras cortes

This article discusses the election of the American representatives to the Cortes de Cádiz in 1810. The Revolutionary context of the Junta Central and the creation of the liberal State are the main topics approached. The importance of this election is not about the number of the representatives, it's concerned with the principle of their representation. It was the first time in the history of the Monarchy that the colonies had a place in the new liberal institutions.

Projetos políticos na revolução constitucionalista na Bahia (1821-1822)

Part of the systemic crisis of the Portuguese Ancien Regime, Bahia received with enthusiasm the news on the Porto Liberal Revolution (1820). From then on, a number of political actions occurred in the capital (Salvador), which aimed mainly to reassure a fast and decisive adhesion to the constitutional system. Observing the liberal discourse, different social segments positioned themselves against the absolute government and, in February 1821, proclaimed the Revolution Constitutionalist linking, thus, the Bahian Province to the "General, Extraordinary and Constituents Courts of the Portuguese Nation". The article focuses on how the constitutional political turmoil favored the elaboration of distinct liberal projects, making possible the political participation political of the popular classes in a revolutionary context whose horizons were still to be defined.

Les réminiscences spartiates dans les discours et la politique de Robespierre de 1789 à thermidor

Maxime Rosso, The allusions to Sparta in the speeches and politics of Robespierre from 1789 to Thermidor. Ancient Greece is one of the richest sources of Western political thought. The reflections of its philosophers and the institutions of its cities have served as models and supported intellectual constructions from the end of the Ancient World until the twentieth century, when, it is true, the classical references have slightly faded. Two separate systems distinguish themselves from the others, and have sustained attention not only by their historical importance, but by the persistent practice of later authors of contrasting their laws and their respective social rules : Athens and Sparta. One knows rather well the connection between the Ancient Greek city and the idea of democracy. But the heritage of Sparta is more difficult to define, notably in France. Yet until the end of the eighteenth century, in the realm of political ideas, Sparta was ahead of Athens, and nearly the equal of Rome. Maximilien Robespierre is at the end of the line of reflections about the city of Lycurgus ; he offered a synthesis about it, and promoted the Spartan ideal in Revolutionary France. Indeed, he could find examples and answers for his own aspirations in the history of this city. The submission to the law, the devotion to the patrie, or the regeneration of the citizen through education, are so many traits that made up the reputation of Sparta. The revolutionary context was especially propitious to the revival of these values. Robespierre, then, gave meaning to the use of Sparta in France from the Reformation to the Revolution. He illustrated its role in the construction of republican ideas.

'Pensamos que somos historia porque sabemos que somos historia': Context, Self and Self-construction in Women's Testimonial Writing from Revolutionary Cuba

This article presents a group of women-authored testimonial texts published between 1959–1989 in revolutionary Cuba. Despite the recent scholarly debates within Latin American Cultural Studies regarding Latin American testimonio, these texts have received little or no critical or theoretical attention within or outside Cuba. The article therefore starts by situating them within the specific context of revolutionary culture, especially with reference to questions of gender, genre and publication. Having established that the texts as a whole privilege the collective revolutionary context and revolutionary experience over gendered or generic aspects, the seven texts are then grouped under a more specific contextual category, as narratives of voluntary work (participation and observation), in order to provide a clearer structure for their description and analysis. Each of the texts is then described within its sub-group, and the article ends by indicating how such texts challenge testimonio paradigms by posit...

When “No” Means “Yes to Revolution”

The lessons of history suggest that pluralist constitutional structures present myriad ways for opponents to block radical overhaul of social and economic structures. Antimajoritarian checks and balances make redistribution of wealth and changes in property regimes difficult to implement. When these mechanisms fail, the capitalist class seems willing and able to abandon constitutional politics and fall back upon the state's night-watchman, the military. In dependent nations, the weight and resources of the hegemon can be brought to bear to influence the outcome. Often, however, institutional and extraconstitutional tools of reaction are unnecessary in polyarchies.' Elections themselves seem to suck the life blood out of revolutionary movements. The Venezuelan recall election of August 15, 2004, evidently accelerated rather than retarded revolutionary momentum. On that day Venezuelans went to the polls in extraordinary numbers to vote on an opposition petition to revoke (hence, revocatorio) President Hugo Chivez's electoral mandate two years before he was to complete his term. To achieve this objective and thereby terminate the Bolivarian Revolution, the opposition Coordinador Democritica (CD) needed to win more votes than the president had received in his second electoral victory of July 2000 (following the adoption of the new constitution). Not only did the CD fail to exceed that number but the No option triumphed with 59 percent of the vote. The majority said yes to the Chavista revolutionary project. This article will examine the ways in which electoral politics and defense of a revolutionary regime were made compatible in Venezuela. After a review of some theoretical perspectives on elections and social change, a comparison of the Venezuelan case with earlier episodes of electoral politics in a revolutionary context (Nicaragua and Chile), and a review of the political and constitutional issues that had to be resolved to allow the recall election to take

The Frankfurt Edition of Hölderlin’s Hymns: A Review Article

THE FRANKFURT EDITION OF HOLDERLIN'S HYMNS: A REVIEW ARTICLE Friedrich Holderlin, samtliche werke. Frankfurter Ausgabe, vols vn: gesdngeI and vm: gesdngeII. Ed. by D. E. Sattler. Frankfurta.M. and Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern. 2000 [appeared 2001]. 1023 pp. ?228. ISBN 3-87877-462-1. Friedrich Holderlin, hesperische Gesdnge. Ed. by D. E. Sattler. Bremen: neue bremer presse. 2001. 144 pp. ?24.60. ISBN 3-926683-31-7. D. E. Sattler has been working on Holderlin's manuscripts for thirty-odd years. Almost single-handed (though he has had collaborators and a supportive pub? lisher) he has changed editorial practice not just for Holderlin but for Kleist, Trakl, and other writers whose works have appeared in editions inspired by his example. When the introductory volume of the Frankfurter Ausgabe came out in 1975, setting out its principles and justifying the need for a new edition, it was intended, and understood, as a direct challenge to the GroBe Stuttgarter Ausgabe which had been appearing under the editorship of Friedrich Beissner and Adolf Beck since 1943 and was still not quite complete. This latter edi? tion, which for the first time applied the techniques of classical philology to the works of a modern writer, had already established itself as a model of tex? tual scholarship. The extremely complex manuscripts that contain Holderlin's later work were separated out into different layers of composition, and different versions of several poems were extricated from the apparent confusion of the sources. Many of these had as their basis fair copies, but a few were arrived at through a combination of excluding the extraneous and, tentatively and occasionally, joining passages from different manuscripts together, sometimes giving the impression of a definite stage of composition which in fact never existed . Beissner's principle was to leave no word of Holderlin's unedited, but he worked towards an ideal of 'clean', definitive, readable texts which he produced in one volume ('Text') while printing what had been removed to achieve this in a separate volume ('Lesarten'). It was above all this separation, and its hierarchical implications, that the Frankfurt editors reacted against. For them, nothing was extraneous, and they took as their motto a late jotting of Holderlin's: 'die aprioritat des Individuellen iiber das Ganze', blending his revolutionary context and their own (the edition has the impulse of 1968 behind it, and the Verlag Roter Stern had mostly pub? lished political pamphlets before coming to Holderlin). Their method was to produce facsimiles ofthe manuscripts, give a 'typographisch differenzierte Umschrift ' of everything on them, and only then, from that base which everyone could now see for themselves, set about editing, poem by poem, the different phases of work that seemed to be revealed. But whereas Beissner had a bias towards earlier stages of composition, tending to reserve later reworkings for his 'Lesarten', Sattler tended to privilege the later stages. Thus in the volume devoted to the elegies, which appeared in 1976 co-edited with Wolfram Groddeck , 'Heimkunft', of which there exist two fair copies and an 1802 printing that all show only slight differences from one another, appears (after facsimile, CHARLIE LOUTH 899 transcript, and demonstration of the early phases) in a version ('emendierter Text') which follows the later and better of these fair copies and also, in the same typeface and font size, in another version ('konstituierter Text') which integrates some later revisions Holderlin made in the fair copy. This gives the impression that he was aiming for and even completed a new independent ver? sion that replaces the Reinschrift. He may have done (it seems possible that Holderlin prepared new fair copies, now lost, of the three elegies that open the large manuscript known as the Homburger Folioheft, 'Heimkunft', 'Brod und Wein', and 'Stutgard', incorporating the changes he made there), but at least in the case of 'Heimkunft' the manuscripts and printings do not neces? sarily lead to that conclusion, and it seems better to read the late reworkings as revisitings, disruptions, antagonistic quarrellings with the earlier 'finished' work, an impulse that perhaps lacks an integrative intention and in some sense works against it. No great harm is done though, since the editorial steps are perfectly clear...

Afterimage of the Revolution: Kevin O’Higgins and the Irish Revolution

KEVIN O'Higgins once famously referred to himself as one of most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful (2) This comment, however revealing, seems to have obscured later historical views of O'Higgins, which have largely focused on the conservative and ignored the revolutionary side of his legacy. Recent works, in fact, have depicted him as the arch counter-revolutionary, helping to snuff out any promise of radical change inherent in the Irish revolution. His own boast notwithstanding, the term counter-revolutionary is misleading when applied to O'Higgins. As used in the literature on the Irish revolution, the term is often conceptually vague and assumes that there was in fact one monolithic Irish revolution that Kevin O'Higgins and his cronies struggled to overturn. There were, instead, multiple ideas and ideals contained within the Irish revolution, and O'Higgins--like de Valera, Collins, or any other Irish revolutionary--drew on a number of these in constructing his vision of post-independence Irish society. Certainly, O'Higgins's focus on self-determination and self-government was part of the Sinn Fein tradition, and to describe him as a counter-revolutionary masks the deep changes that he sought to make in Irish political culture, falsely disconnect him from the Irish revolution that brought him to power. O'Higgins's own vision of the revolution centered on self-determination, which he saw as its greatest fruit. For O'Higgins Irish self-government would have to be accompanied by a change in the Irish political mentality whereby the Irish people would assume responsibility for their own affairs and accept that the Dail was the proper place to settle those affairs. Britain could no longer be blamed for all of Ireland's problems, nor could every violation of law be seen as heroic and politicized. Ireland, according to O'Higgins, needed to develop a sense of civic virtue, understanding the fact that rights and responsibilities flowed both ways between state and people. This was the heart of Kevin O'Higgins's revolution. This relationship between Kevin O'Higgins and the Irish revolution needs to be reexamined and recovered, and he needs once again to be placed in his revolutionary context. Arguably, O'Higgins was much more important in the development of modern Ireland than Michael Collins, whose early death robbed him of a chance to make much more than an indirect mark on the new Irish Despite this, the larger-than-life Collins has received considerably more attention from historians than the less dashing O'Higgins. There has still been only one full-length biography of O'Higgins: Terence de Vere White's Kevin O'Higgins, first published in 1948. (3) After over fifty years this biography remains the most favorable treatment of O'Higgins, depicting him as a committed democrat who was tragically misunderstood by colleagues, enemies, and the Irish public alike. De Vere White also characterized O'Higgins as the strongman of the Cumann na nGaedheal government, the person who unwaveringly and almost singlehandedly crushed the anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War. F.S.L. Lyons's textbook, Ireland since the Famine, is also fairly complimentary to O'Higgins, recognizing his ability and vision as well as the tremendous void left by his premature death. (4) A recent work by Tom Garvin--much of whose analysis of Civil War republicanism could have been written by O'Higgins himself--also gives credit to technical virtuosity displayed by the pro-Treaty leaders in putting together a new, democratic, and generally law-bound state. (5) However, this has not been the usual view of O'Higgins, whose reputation has suffered generally at the hands of historians. Overall assessments have ranged from outright condemnation to benign neglect, but generally when O'Higgins is discussed his conservative, reactionary, or counter-revolutionary credentials have been placed at the forefront. …

Les animaux dans leur jardin : l’architecte Jacques Molinos et la ménagerie du Muséum d’histoire naturelle à Paris, 1795-1827

Animals in their garden : the architect Jacques Molinos and the Menagerie of the Museum of Natural History in Paris (1795-1827). The plan to set up a menagerie in the Museum of Natural History was on foot during the French Revolution, but carried out by the architect Jacques Molinos from 1795 to 1827. The idea was to create a new kind of establishment, the zoological garden for which Lacépède gave a detailed program. The history of the successive plans reveals to what point resorting to the landscape model was dependent on the revolutionary context, as well as on the sensualist theories of the Enlightment. The Western part of the Jardin des plantes was to be arranged as a tree garden with picturesque fabriques scattered here and there to house the animals. The different programs given to the architect in the following years show how, along with the evolution of scientific ideas and of physiology, the landscape model gave place to the gallery system. The setting of the Menagerie concerned as a public establishment, devoted to exhibitions and scientific research, appeared as a model for all the zoological gardens built in the first half of the 19th century.

How to Tell a Mestizo from an Enchirito¯: Colonialism and National Culture in the Borderlands

One of the most crucial questions facing leftist activists and intellectuals today is the question of nationalism and its relation to liberation struggles. 1 A century ago, the period [End Page 102] of nation-state consolidation in Europe seemed to come to an end with the unification of Germany and Italy. European leftists of the era tended to address "the national question" primarily with regard to those European nations that were shut out or suppressed by nation-state formation. Debates about national culture resurfaced in a revolutionary context when independence movements swept Africa and Asia during and after World War II, and a substantial body of literature attempting to integrate anticolonial struggle, national liberation, and socialism arose from the capitalist "periphery." Much of this literature, and the wars for independence out of which it grew, adapted the language of nationalism to its own purposes. These movements gave new hope that national liberation struggles would prove compatible with greater human freedom and equality. Despite that hope, the destructive effects of nationalism are today visible everywhere: for example, the devastating wars in the Balkans, the repression of indigenous peoples by national bourgeoisie throughout the Americas, religious-national strife between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka, the vertiginous intensification of national chauvinism in the United States, Western Europe, and Australia. Simultaneously, and in the context of feminist criticisms of nationalism [see, for example, Chatterjee, Nation; Lutz et al.; Mosse], attempts to unite the struggle to liberate "the nation" from colonial or neocolonial domination with progressive struggles against capitalist exploitation and against sexual- and gender-based domination continue [see, for example, Trask]. In Latin America, anticapitalist struggles lauded by Western socialists regularly take the form of national liberation struggles, such as the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [Zapatist National Liberation Army]) in Mexico and the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional [Sandinist National Liberation Front]) in Nicaragua. Additionally, lesbian and gay activists and theorists in the United States have frequently sought to appropriate nationalist rhetoric even as black and Chicano nationalist movements have been on the decline [see, for example, Berlant and Freeman; Moraga 145-74].

Revoluciones y campesinos: una ecuación difícil. Análisis y crítica de las políticas agrarias sandinistas, 1979-1989

<p>El presente trabajo pretende analizar críticamente la transformación social y económica que supuso la reforma agraria sandinista y sus alcances. Los objetivos del sector agropecuario en el contexto revolucionario eran tres: autoabastecimiento alimentario, generación de divisas a través del sector agroexportador y la organización social y política de la producción. Otro aspecto de la reforma agraria fue la transformación de la organización social de la producción y la consiguiente vinculación política de los actores productivos mediante las organizaciones gremiales.</p>

Britain and the transformation from empire to Commonwealth

In the middle years of the century, many Britons hoped that the Commonwealth would be a kind of halfway house between empire and normal international relations. Although constituted of independent states, it was expected that dealings between Commonwealth members would have a special character—one which would be especially advantageous to Britain. And for quite a while—probably until the 1970s—and on a number of issues, successive British governments at least purported to believe that this was indeed its nature. However, as a working diplomatic arrangement it is hard to imagine that such a halfway situation could exist for long: the relations of states tend to have their own self‐interested imperatives. In practice there is very little evidence to suggest that a special Commonwealth actually existed after the Second World War. In particular, a series of important events in the years immediately following 1945 undermined the credibility of the idea. Britain, however, did not draw the obvious conclusions from these developments, notwithstanding their salience and the fact that it was intimately involved in a number of them. Short of revolutionary contexts it is often hard to grasp the depth of contemporary change, not least when that change is adverse to one's own position. British responses were also testimony to the hold which the imperial idea had, and perhaps also to the depth of the psychological need to believe that their country was still a power of substantial consequence. More prosaically, some Britons doubtless hoped that the changing nature of the Commonwealth would somehow compensate for increasing indications of her relative international decline. And their hopes were, to some degree, to receive emotional and sentimental validation. But by the end of the reign of George VI in 1952 it should have been abundantly clear that as a more or less coherent international unit the Commonwealth had disintegrated. It had never been more than a brief and increasingly insubstantial phenomenon—a reflection of transition rather than of settled behaviour. The legacy of the British empire was a species of international organisation, not a uniquely well‐integrated and cosy association of a familial kind.

The disenchantment of art: the philosophy of Walter Benjamin

Fifty years after committing suicide at the French-Spanish border, Walter Benjamin remains one of the great cultural critics of this century. Yet despite his wide acclaim, his philosophical ideas remain elusive to most, often considered an intentionally desegregated set of thoughts not meant to cohere. Rainer Rochlitz brings a new perspective to Benjamin's work, arguing that throughout his writings runs a constant theme, that of the struggle to clarify and disenchant language. Providing an insightful, systematic analysis of Benjamin's works and applying them to current philosophical debates, The Disenchantment of Art is the first book to lay claim to his status as a philosopher. Beginning with Benjamin's early works, Rochlitz highlights his search for truth in art. Benjamin believed that art constituted a pure language directly related to God. This language existed prior to the everyday language we use to communicate, and only it could express truth. Benjamin was convinced that analytic philosophy, which had broken away from theology, had no chance to discover truth on its own. As Rochlitz shows, Benjamin's views later changed to a more materialist conception of art based on the idea that it was necessary for politics to take the place of theology as the basis of aesthetics. Further, he felt that traditional art and its aura had to be sacrificed to mass reproduction and immediate efficiency in the revolutionary context of the 1930s. In his later works, Benjamin addressed this sacrifice as a danger for the emancipatory potentials of art. For him, critical history (art criticism included) provided a look at the past and contained all the struggles of humanity to overcome mythicalobscurity, oppression, and violence. Offering critical discussions of Benjamin's ideas in the context of his time and exploring their application to current philosophical thought, The Disenchantment of Art will appeal to readers with an interest in philosophy, literature, cultural studie

Backstreets, Barricades, and Blackouts: Urban Terrains of Resistance in Nepal

In this paper I apply aspects of sociospatial theory to the revolutionary context of urban Nepal during the democratic uprisings of 1990. The urban spaces of Kathmandu and Patan were two of the most important sites within which power was contested, and terrains upon which space itself was contested. As I will show, the location of struggle emerged from conscious movement choices (as to tactics, efficacy of mobilization, etc) and influenced the character of collective action. An analysis of the spatial mediation of social movement agency provides us with what 1 term the ‘terrain of resistance’—the specific geographical, historical, political, economic, ecological, and cultural context of movement agency. Such analysis can provide us with important insights into why movements occur where they do, the spatiocultural specificity of movement practice, and the language by which people articulate their discontent, understood through the ‘cultural expressions of resistance’.

The French Revolution: Blake's Epic Dialogue with Edmund Burke

Even though French Revolution is more firmly rooted in contemporary events than any of Blake's other Prophetic Books, most critics have considered the poem's political content as little more than a backdrop for his evolving philosophical system. For instance, in one of the most extended readings that the poem has received, John Beer casually dismisses its revolutionary context: begin with the poem is written in favor not of revolution but of liberty. distinction is important. Blake was no headlong supporter of political revolution.' And recently, Barton R. Friedman has presented a more sophisticated, more historically informed version of this same argument, identifying French Revolution as an example of Universal History: The use of one nation's experience -here specifically the American and French Revolutions and the agony they cause Albion -as a microcosm ... of the whole cosmic design. 2 But while Blake undoubtedly thought the French Revolution an event of potentially cosmic significance, he 3 was also keenly aware of its specific social and political ramifications. In contrast to Blake's later, more thoroughly mythologized narratives, French Revolution provides a detailed, if somewhat inaccurate, account of early stages of the Revolution, and, with few exceptions, its characters are larger-than-life versions of the actual historical figures. In fact, rather than an otherworldly prophecy, I believe that French Revolution is essentially a political tract in epic form that represents Blake's most public attempt to enter the ongoing English debate over the French Revolution. Writing in 1791, Blake -like Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine -seeks to counter the chief conservative voice of the time, Edmund Burke, whose 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France had eroded much of the initial English sympathy for the revolutionary movement. What results is a poetic dialogue in which Blake challenges the underlying assumptions of Burke's counterrevolutionary text.4 At the heart of this dispute is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of the French Revolution. To Burke, the Revolution represents a tremendous upheaval in the course of human history, a total inversion of the natural order:

The Power of Sex: English Plays by Women, 1958–1988

Reading backwards, through the feminist critique, Sue-Ellen Case explores the role of sexuality in women's lives as portrayed in the work of British women playwrights during the past three decades. She illustrates the way in which the oppressive uses of sexuality in the patriarchy, identified by the social movement as rape and pornography, have been dramatized through dramatic narrative and character construction. In contrast to this representation of oppression, she discusses how the liberating role of pleasure and of women reclaiming their own desires provide a revolutionary feminist stage practice, in both heterosexual and lesbian social contexts. Sue-Ellen Case is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, and her works includeFeminism and TheatreandPerforming Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre.