Revolutionary Institutions Research Articles

The Black American Church: A Reactionary and Ideological Apparatus of Slavery

This work argues that Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, amongst a few others, were the reactionary (dialectical) exceptions to the black church, not the norm, an (ideological) institution established to interpellate and indoctrinate blacks to accept their conditions in slavery and integrate them into the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. In other words, the aforementioned were the enslaved who used Christian dogma to (negative dialectically) respond to the barbarity of slavery by violently convicting white Christian society for not living up to its values, ideas, and ideals given the treatment of African people by so-called Christians. In the latter sense it was reactionary; in the former, it was an ideological apparatus of domination and control for the institution of slavery and black integration into the bourgeois living of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The contemporary attempt to racially vindicate the black church as a sui generis revolutionary institution overflowing with Africanisms that stood against the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism is ahistorical and ideological reaped in pseudoscientific propositions stemming from postmodern and post-structural theories.

A Penny For Your Cuppa: How Coffeehouses Revolutionized Coffee Consumption in England’s Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Amid England’s 17th and 18th centuries, coffee’s Turkish origins catalyzed a stark polarization of coffee consumption due to Turkish xenophobia. England’s long-regarded reservations towards Turkish commodities only changed because of one revolutionary institution: the coffeehouse. Unlike classically popular taverns, coffeehouses were unique, progressive establishments where patrons of all classes and genders safely shared news, debated politics, and discussed new discoveries in academia over a beverage costing mere pennies to consume. By adopting an accessible and intellectual premise, coffeehouses eclipsed England’s xenophobic predispositions towards Turkey – forever revolutionizing the social sphere and English coffee consumption.

A Penny For Your Cuppa

Amid England’s 17th and 18th centuries, coffee’s Turkish origins catalyzed a stark polarization of coffee consumption due to Turkish xenophobia. England’s long-regarded reservations towards Turkish commodities only changed because of one revolutionary institution: the coffeehouse. Unlike classically popular taverns, coffeehouses were unique, progressive establishments where patrons of all classes and genders safely shared news, debated politics, and discussed new discoveries in academia over a beverage costing mere pennies to consume. By adopting an accessible and intellectual premise, coffeehouses eclipsed England’s xenophobic predispositions towards Turkey – forever revolutionizing the social sphere and English coffee consumption.

…y no se ha de ver más que la luz: Rodolfo Walsh y Cuba en los orígenes compartidos del testimonio latinoamericano y el Tercer Cine

Este artículo explora, por medio de un análisis comparado de prácticas y discursos culturales, parte de la actividad literaria y militante de Rodolfo Walsh en relación con algunos de los aspectos más significativos en el surgimiento compartido entre el testimonio latinoamericano y el Tercer Cine. Para ello, el texto indaga en el papel jugado por las instituciones y publicaciones revolucionarias cubanas (Casa de las Américas e ICAIC; y revistas Casa de las Américas, Cine Cubano y Tricontinental) en la legitimación y difusión de estas propuestas literarias y cinematográficas. Esta política cultural formaba parte de un tipo de confluencia muy particular entre cultura y política, que se inscribía dentro de un proyecto revolucionario latinoamericanista y tercermundista. La posición cubana problematizó la cuestión del potencial revolucionario de las artes entre escritores, intelectuales y artistas, algo que alcanzaría un momento crítico con la percepción de agotamiento de ciertas formas de expresión y la trágica muerte del Che Guevara en 1967. Este contexto condujo, en definitiva, a las fuertes polémicas y propuestas radicales que darían pie a la aparición del testimonio y el Tercer Cine. Walsh, en diferentes grados, transitó esta experiencia, materializando tanto en su obra como en su experiencia militante las particularidades de toda una era cultural; una época de tal calado para Latinoamérica y el Tercer Mundo que acabaría por impactar también en el Primer Mundo.

The French School of Violin Playing between Revolution and Reaction: A Comparison of the Treatises of 1803 and 1834 by Pierre Baillot

Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) was a central figure in the development of the early nineteenth-century French School of violin playing. This school was itself the source of the twentieth-century Russian and American schools, and all the great players of the modern era can trace their lineage back to Baillot and his colleagues. The French School was the first to systematize violin teaching within an institutional framework with normative aspirations. Its history is bound up with that of the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795. Work by French scholars of the Conservatoire and its teaching has tended to assert a continuity of ideals and aesthetics across time, even an essential Frenchness, and work by English-language scholars has been more concerned with the influence of the School on developments in playing styles and composition than on the evolution of attitudes to music teaching. This analysis of the language of the two founding pedagogical texts reveals a contested cultural landscape, and explores how a revolutionary institution with lofty principles could be overtaken by cultural change in a few short decades. It finishes by questioning the traditional elision of the French and Franco-Belgian schools, and suggests that Brussels, rather than constituting a mere branch of the Paris school, rescued it from premature irrelevance.

The securitisation of life: Eastern Kurdistan under the rule of a Perso-Shi'i state

Since the 1979 Revolution, the Iranian state has adopted a sophisticated set of policies to assimilate the Eastern Kurds. The Kurds are often the main target of the Iranian state’s military operations, its assimilatory strategies, and its regime of surveillance. After the ‘conquest’ (fath) of Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhelat) in 1979, the state tried to retain control over the region through systemic militarisation, the establishment of ‘revolutionary institutions’, and new religious and cultural centres, to transform the demographic, religious and cultural profile of Kurdistan. This paper is an attempt to illuminate the state’s religious nationalism and various forms of assimilatory strategies that the Islamic Republic of Iran has employed to transform Kurdish regions.

Revolutionary myth of “proletarian dictatorship” in the Soviet constitutional doctrine of 1918 and visual communication

This article is dedicated to representation of the myth of “proletarian dictatorship” in the Soviet constitutionalism. Having emerged in the XIX century, this mythologem experienced certain transformations as a result of targeted work of the party leaders, legal experts and scholars on creating the first Soviet constitution. Later, its ideological content received normative consolidation in legislation. A symbolic reflection of revolutionary myth became the national holidays, demonstrations, cinematography and theatre, banners and other cultural phenomena that contributed to formation of the new civil consciousness. The authors trace the origin of the concept of “proletarian dictatorship”, as well as its further evolution in Lenin’s doctrine on the state. The description of symbolic practices of representation of ideological framework of the Soviet revolutionary regime allows demonstrating the practical implementation of the new type of constitutionalism – the Soviet. The article substantiates the gradual arrangement of the idea of “proletarian dictatorship” as a fundamental myth of the early Soviet State, as well as examines its visual and communicative aspects. The novelty of this historical-legal research is defined by the use of interdisciplinary approach and comprehensive analysis of the Soviet national ideology. The conclusion is made that the legal ideas contained in the Soviet constitutional doctrine proliferate and reproduce through large-scale cultural manifestations that create revolutionary institutions and examples of civil behavior. At the same time, the myth of “proletarian dictatorship” serves as distinct cultural foundation for the new political legal regime that expresses the essence of the Soviet constitutionalism.

Gilles Deleuze on Institution and Violence

Th e general idea of the article is to compare Deleuze’s theory of the institution, which emerges in the context of various infl uences of French phenomenology and philosophy of law, with Searle’s theory and the latest Anglo-Saxon theories of the institution, and the new institutionalism. Deleuze carelessly diff erentiates infl uences and fragments copied or taken over from Hume, Saint-Just, de Sade, Renard, Hauriou, Durkheim, Malinowski and others and in the end completely succeeds in relegating to oblivion his ingenious project from 1953, Instincts and Institutions (Instincts et institutions). Th e consequences of such writing and theoretical work call into question the status of the theory of the institution and replace it with intuition and recognition that the thematisation of the institution is an impossible task. Th us the author of the article attempts to ‘integrate’ this impossibility to systematically think or explain the fi gure of institution into the framework of the great and pioneering work of Saint- Just, Hume, Deleuze, Gehlen and Searle. Deleuze’s main contribution to a future imaginary theory of the institution is the concept of a revolutionary institution as the result of reversal and sudden turning, the perverting of something, that happens within the institution. Deleuze uses l’institution revolutionnaire (revolutionary institution) in his texts, certainly completely aware that this phrase has a quite chaotic and vague history during postrevolutionary periods, but also that it is perfectly in the spirit of Saint-Just’s intentions. Institutions, free of laws, linking immobilising and moralising actions. Such pure institutions would be models of free actions, anarchic, in perpetual motion, in permanent revolution, in a constant state of immorality. Revolution is re-institutionalisation (or deinstitutionalisation) which includes diff erent forms of violence. Saint-Just detects two phenomena outside of institutions: terror and corruption. Hume discovers that violence has an advantage over the contract, and that in one way or another gives institutions their dynamic. Th anks to his mixture of these two diff erent registers, Deleuze outlines the transformation of violence into institutions: 1. Institutionalisation reveals the violence that precedes it and that it interrupts (raw violence or terror), as well as the violence opposed to it (corruption). 2. Violence is minimised in the process of institutionalisation because it is performed by all or the largest possible number of actors. 3. Th e violence of institutionalisation is violence in the process of conversion (Balibar), it is subsumed into the coercion of rules, into symbolic or institutional pressure. 4. Th e revolutionary institution supposes that there is no violence that has not been turned into the “body” of the institution, without remainder, and that therefore there is nothing outside of the institution. Refs 19.

From Salvation and Impurity to Renunciation: Pilgrim Representations and Cuban Women's Militant Roles

How have the representations of the cinema of political pilgrimage turned the stereotype of Cuban women into one of political sacrifice, that is to say, woman as saviour figure and woman as figure of renunciation? How have political stereotypes defined the kind of behaviour by women that could be part of Communist society? Starting from these questions, this article discusses the beginnings of the imaginary of militant Cuban women and its connections to the revolutionary Cuban imaginary: a symbolical register negotiated between the political Other and Self, that is, between the revolutionary institutions and the Left intellectual sympathisers who from its inception have visited the Cuban Revolution and have been its political and ideological guests. Specifically, I analyse three films of this cinema of political pilgrimage (Realengo 18, Cuba 58', Soy Cuba) as some of the founding productions of the Cuban revolutionary imaginary.

¿Están convergiendo los partidos políticos en México? Papel del Estado y modelo de desarrollo en los documentos básicos del Partido Revolucionario Institucional, del Partido Acción Nacional y del Partido de la Revolución Democrática (1929-2009)

En este trabajo, se analiza la evolución de las posiciones de los principales partidos políticos mexicanos (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Partido Acción Nacional y Partido de la Revolución Democrática) en dos temas clave de la política económica: el papel del Estado en la economía y el modelo de desarrollo propuesto. Se toma como base del análisis los documentos básicos (Declaración de principios y Programa de acción) y, en menor medida, las plataformas electorales de los partidos aludidos. El estudio identifica no uno, sino tres patrones de convergencia: el primero se da entre el PRI y el PAN durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970; el segundo ocurre durante las décadas de 1980 y 1990 y concierne, en un primer momento, al PRI y al PAN y, a partir de 1990, al PRD; el tercero se da entre los tres partidos, durante la última década.

Contextualizing and Critiquing the Fantastic Prosumer: Power, Alienation and Hegemony

The ‘prosumer’ has emerged to become a central figure in contemporary culture. Through the melding of production with consumption, both mainstream and progressive analysts conceptualize prosumption to be a liberating, empowering and, for some, a prospectively revolutionary institution. In this article, these fantastic associations are critically assessed using an approach that situates prosumption activities, including contemporary online applications often referred to as ‘cocreation’, in three social-historical contexts: capitalism as a political economy dominated by mediated abstractions; capitalist society as a hierarchical order; and alienation as a pervasive norm. Among other conclusions, we find that prosumption (particularly its Web 2.0 iterations), constitutes an emerging hegemonic institution; one that effectively frames and contains truly radical imaginations while also tapping into existing predilections for commodity-focused forms of self-realization.

Dominant Party Strategy and Democratization

How do incumbent parties strategize against challengers when a new partisan cleavage cuts across the incumbent's electoral coalition? This article argues that a two‐dimensional extension of Riker's anticoordination thesis conflicts with Downsian extensions. It shows that when voters coordinate on a single challenger based on their shared preference on a cross‐cutting cleavage, a vote‐maximizing incumbent party should move away from the challenger on the primary dimension of competition, even at the risk of abandoning the center. The article develops this hypothesis with reference to dominant parties in competitive authoritarian regimes where challenger parties constantly attempt “heresthetical” moves by mobilizing regime issues into the partisan debate, and it tests the predictions with an original sample survey of national leaders of Mexico's Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI). It also spells out the implications of the findings for dominant party survivability in democratic transitions and, more broadly, for incumbents' spatial strategies in the face of new partisan cleavages.

Cuba's Political and Sexual Outlaw: Reinaldo Arenas

This detailed biographical account of Reinaldo Arenas's open opposition to Cuba's revolutionary institutions reveals the price that the well-known Cuban dissident--one of the first out-of-the-closet gay writers from Latin America--paid in his quest for political, sexual, and literary freedom. Arenas was a semiliterate peasant in Havana in 1962 when, at age 22, he began a promising literary career. His autobiographical fiction boldly explored strong homoerotic themes, and he was forced to smuggle his work out of the country for publication abroad. Rafael Ocasio presents Arenas as an ideological political outlaw and a vocal sexual dissident, tracing the key political incidents that led Arenas into confrontation with official policies about proper revolutionary behavior. Ocasio examines eyewitness accounts--appearing here for the first time in book form--of work camps founded in the mid-sixties for the internment of social deviants, homosexuals, and religious practitioners, exposing the extent of government persecution of writers in revolutionary Cuba. Using interviews with Arenas, critical reviews published both within Cuba and abroad of his work, and memoirs and recollections of Arenas's publishers, friends, and even rivals, Ocasio examines all major periods of Arenas's literary life, focusing especially on the years he lived in Havana. He corroborates Arenas's own version of his arrest by police entrapment in 1973, his flight from the courts, his imprisonment in El Morro penitentiary, and his escape from Cuba to Miami on the 1980 Mariel boatlift. With his historical overview of the Cuban Revolution's systematic campaigns against homosexuality and his examination of previouslyunpublished material from Arenas's correspondence in the Princeton University collection, Ocasio presents a compelling biography of a counterrevolutionary activist and writer of international importance.

Rojo amanecer y La ley de Herodes: cine político de la transición mexicana

With the election of the opposition candidate, Vicente Fox, over the historical regime of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) on 2 July 2002, Mexico took a significant step towards its transition to democracy. The defeat of the official party, which had ruled Mexico since 1929, was a product of a long struggle undertaken by several sectors of Mexican society. Political parties, social and cultural movements, and civil society at large, were key factors in achieving democratic change. This article seeks to analyse two essential films that shed light on the Mexican transition to democracy: Rojo amanecer (Jorge Fons, 1989), the first narrative film to deal with the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, and La ley de Herodes (Luis Estrada, 1999), a political farce about the corruption of the PRI government. These films not only prevailed against state censorship and boycotting attempts, but also galvanized civil society, the mass media, and the cinematographic community to strive for freedom of speech and acceleration of the process of democratization. These two films highlight the importance of the battles against State authoritarism waged by contemporary Mexican cinema.

Mexican Intelligence at a Crossroad

Following Vicente Fox's presidential election victory in July 2000, movement toward reform of Mexico's intelligence community emerged as one of the issues the new administration intended to address. The appointment of Adolfo Aguilar Zinser as National Security Advisor heralded a change in Mexico's traditional national security policymaking mechanisms, product of the 71-year rule of the Revolutionary Institutional Party. An examination of the Center of Intelligence and National Security and its legal underpinnings, along with an assessment of other underlying problems afflicting the wider intelligence community in Mexico reveal the challenges and pitfalls that confronted early reform attempts by the Fox administration. With this backdrop in mind, an overview of two specific intelligence reform bills recently introduced by opposition parties in Congress reveal the priorities legislators had in mind for overhauling the state security apparatus. Nevertheless, the slow pace of reform leaves unanswered several national security and intelligence challenges facing the Mexican state as the country grapples with an unprecedented political transition.

Beyond the barricades: Nicaragua and the struggle for the Sandinista press, 1979-1998

Hailed by Kent Norsworthy as groundbreaking work that fills a huge gap the published scholarship on the Nicaraguan Revolution, Beyond the Barricades tells the fascinating story of Barricada, the official daily newspaper of the ruling Sandinista Front. Throughout the 1980s, Barricada played the standard role of an official party organ, seeking to mobilize the Nicaraguan public to support the revolutionary agenda. Adams Jones shows that even during this period of sweeping transformation and outside military siege, another, more professional, agenda also motivated Barricada's journalists and editors. It resulted the establishment of a series of firewalls to limit party interference the day-to-day operations of the paper. When the Sandinistas unexpectedly fell from power the 1990 elections, Barricada gained a substantial degree of autonomy, which allowed it to explore a more balanced and nuanced journalism in the national interest. This new orientation, however, ran afoul of more orthodox party leaders, who gradually gained the upper hand the bitter internal struggle that wracked the Sandinista Front the early 1990s. The paper folded January 1998. Based on extensive archival research and dozens of in-depth interviews, Beyond the Barricades offers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at Barricada's two decades of evolution and dissolution. It also presents an intimate portrait of a key revolutionary institution and the memorable individuals who composed it.

Conservative management in neurogenic bladder dysfunction.

A few decades ago, urinary diversion, usually with an ileal conduit, was the ultimate outcome for most children with spina bifida. The revolutionary institution of clean intermittent catheterization has changed the algorithm totally. Furthermore many new drugs have been developed during the past decade and have decreased the need for surgery dramatically. In this article, we will focus on the most recent data on new modalities of therapy to help avoid urinary diversion or bladder augmentation. In addition to clean intermittent catheterization and oxybutynin treatment, a new generation of anticholinergic medications, such as tolterodine, has been developed. For patients who drop out because of the side-effects of oral administration, new methods of administration are now available, including extended release and intravesical instillation. For those unresponsive, botulinum-A toxin and resiniferatoxin are two relatively new drugs in the field, administered as intravesical injection and instillation, respectively. Intravesical or transdermal electrical stimulation, sacral nerve stimulation and biofeedback therapy are under development, but as currently administered, are not yet completely successful. Although life-saving in many respects, bladder augmentation introduces life-long risks of its own. Our goal in describing 'conservative' management is to prevent this step. Many alternatives to surgery are available now and more effective strategies are under development.

Local Justice and Rural Society in the French Revolution

This study examines the transition from seigneurial justice prior to 1789 to the revolutionary institution of the justice of the peace in order to assess the impact of the French Revolution on rural society. It argues that seigneurial justice was slow, costly, and largely inaccessible to rural denizens of Aunis and Saintonge. Hence, peasants often resorted to violence in the resolution of their quarrels. After 1789 rural dwellers had the opportunity to submit their disputes to trusted, elected justices of the peace who adjudicated cases quickly and inexpensively. Because of revolutionary reforms, above all, people in rural French society experienced the reality of equality before the law and came to accept the primacy of the state in the resolution of disputes. This study of an important institution, hitherto neglected by historians, illuminates the process by which the state penetrated rural areas just as it sheds light on the meaning of modern citizenship. Above all it challenges recent revisionist historiography by suggesting that the revolution did indeed have important social repercussions.

The Syntax of Soviet Power: The Resolutions of Local Soviets and Other Institutions, March-October 1917

During the last decade historians have considerably altered the landscape of our understanding of the February-October period of the revolution. By exploring the interaction between the mass elements of the Russian Empire's society and the revolutionary parties and institutions that strove to reconstruct the post-February Russian polity, a large group of scholars has established that Russia's lower orders were suspicious of dual power from the outset, had scant affection for the Provisional Government, and, it followed, tended to view the soviets as the sole defenders of their interests. Ronald Suny has described how, by recreating the social dimensions of the October Revolution, the new histories successfully portray it as a reflection of mass aspirations rather than as a coup; the Bolsheviks took certain actions, but hardly did so in a vacuum.2

The Mythmakers: Intellectuals and the Intelligentsia in Perspective.

Preface Acknowledgments The Sociology of Intellectual Creativity, by Don Martindale A Structural Definition of the Intellectual Against the Background of Three Historical Periods, by Aleksander Gella Intellectuals and Powers: S.M.Lipset, Julien Benda, and Karl Mannheim, by Gerald Popiel and Raj P. Mohan The Role of the Intellectual in Revolutionary Institutions, by William C. Martin The End of the Old Polish Intelligentsia, by Aleksander Gella The Third World and Developmentalism: Technology, Morality, and the Role of the Intellectual, by Jay Weinstein Selected Bibliography Index About the Contributors