Tradition Of Dissent Research Articles

Wild lily, prairie fire: China's road to democracy, Yan'an to Tian'anmen, 1942-1989

This is a sourcebook of documents of democratic dissent under Chinese communism. The essays range from eye-witness accounts of a massacre to theoretical critiques of Chinese Marxist thought. The introduction maintains that the documents reveal a tradition of democratic thought and practice that traces its descent to the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and the founding generation of the Chinese Communist Party. Far from being a late 20th-century import (along with capitalist economics) from Europe, Japan and the United States, this tradition of dissent is deeply embedded in the experience of China's revolutionary movements. This book calls into question many of the usual beliefs about the relation between democracy and communism, at least in the Chinese case, which may now be seen to depart from the Soviet model in yet another crucial respect.

Tiananmen square and the politics of place

Abstract Present-day Tiananmen Square (Beijing) is the product of two distinct but intertwined spatial traditions. The Square, its morphology and its monuments historically have embodied the hegemonic political power of the Chinese state. Its ‘symbolic geography’ also incorporates a tradition of dissent or rebellion through its association with popular movements which have appropriated this space, and the orthodox tradition it represents, as the geographical focus of oppositional political practice. The power of oppositional movements rests on their ability to appropriate ‘the space of the other’ and transform it in ways which articulate their own political vision. However temporary this process of detournement may be, it leaves its permanent mark on the geography of the place that is the physical object of struggle. Through this ongoing dialectic, space is continuously produced and transformed. The paper reviews the relevant geographical literature on space, place and politics, then sketches the morphological evolution of the Square and the multiplicity of political meanings concretized in it. It examines the spatial practice of 20th century oppositional movements, focusing particularly on the struggle for Tiananmen Square in 1989, to demonstrate the extraordinary power of apparently ‘placeless’ political movements over the production and definition of space.

New Visions, New Viewers, New Vehicles: Twentieth-Century Developments in North American Political Art

isual, social and political commentary constitutes a powerful tradition of artistic expression in the Western world. Most art historians, critics and members of the educated public, however, lack extensive knowledge about the seminal developments in political art throughout the twentieth century. Until fairly recently, an ideology of modern art has dominated American and Western European cultural life. Artworks focusing on critical views of politics and society have typically been marginalized, routinely dismissed as quaint, historically outmoded or merely topical. Socially conscious artists who use their talents to call attention to such injustices as war, poverty, racism, sexism, alienation, persecution, political corruption, environmental degradation and scores of other social defects have generally worked without the status and recognition accorded to their contemporaries who eschew political content and controversy in their works. Recent developments in postmodern, feminist and multicultural theory and criticism have combined with activism from the 1960s up to the present to generate somewhat greater interest in and recognition of political art in the 1980s and 1990s. Respected scholars and writers appearing in new publications sympathetic to progressive cultural expressions, such as Community Murals (no longer publishing), High Performance, Heresies, Cultural Democracy and Z Magazine have added to the growing reputation of contemporary artists with visions critical of dominant social and political priorities and institutions. In the final decade of this century, political art has established a solid if precarious legitimacy in the art world. The cumulative efforts of politically committed artists shed enormous if disconcerting light on the precariousness of existence in a technological world beset with overwhelming social, economic and environmental problems. A systematic review of developments in the visual arts throughout the twentieth century convincingly reveals how political art has constituted a major strain of creative expression, cutting across the stylistic developments that still occupy the attention of conventional art scholars and writers. Inspired by their predecessors of many previous centuries, socially conscious artists of this century, including such luminaries as Kfithe Kollwitz, Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, Edward Kienholz, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger, have fundamentally broadened and deepened the scope of visual social commentary. By embracing new political visions, by attracting new, non-elite viewers and by initiating new vehicles of visual expression, thousands of artists have created an impressive legacy of political engagement that complements the long historical tradition of dissent in litera-

The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765-1776

The success of the American Revolution is less likely to be understood through an examination of its ideological origins than through a close analysis of the political processes by which principles, beliefs, and anxieties were translated into revolutionary action. This book offers the first detailed profile of the several hundred obscure committeemen and propagandists who took up the new revolutionary ideology and carried it that one last step: out of the realm of rhetoric and into the domain of concrete change. And participatory democracy as a principle of American government owes its realization largely to these second-rank politicians and ordinary citizens, who provided the basic muscle of Revolutionary politics. In the 1760s and early 1770s Pennsylvania lacked nearly every ingredient for revolution found elsewhere in the colonies: a strong dissenting tradition, widely felt economic grievances, or a legislature intimately acquainted with royal government. Only the painstaking enlistment of a strong leadership core, the construction of new political institutions, and the rapid mobilization of the majority of the community could overcome these deficiencies. In Pennsylvania British authority succumbed to the activity of a few hundred men who were drawn into public life by a handful of veteran politicians within just two years. To these men and to their committees Pennsylvania owes its revolution. In his book Richard Alan Ryerson focuses on the daily business of politics in the Revolutionary period--the art of motivation for radical political purposes--and its economic and social dimensions in the most prominent American city of the time. How were the colonists mobilized for resistance? What was the political process? Who were the disaffected people who became the radical leaders of the Philadelphia community? To answer these questions, Ryerson compares campaigning styles, nomination and election procedures, and local political organizations in the colonial era with their counterparts during the Revolution. He also examines the age, economic status, religious faith, and national origins of the men who formed the radical committees of Philadelphia between 1765 and 1776.

Anonymity, Dissent, and Individual Integrity in America

The restlessness of the sixties of the twentieth century has been exemplified particularly in the civil rights movement, in the student revolt, and in greatly expanded antiwar dissent. The background of this disquietude is rooted in the American tradition of dissent; in rejection of the alienation which has tended to accompany complex industrialism; and in the relatively great economic affluence which provides opportunities to think about injustice and the larger purposes of life. There is strong moral justification for the dissent of our day; and, in many respects, American moral consciousness is broader and deeper than in previous generations. For the most part, the black man has been treated as a thing, and he legitimately aspires to recognition as a human personality. The student revolt reflects a repudiation of the anonymity which so often accompanies a multiversity type of higher education. The antiwar movement represents a long-needed revolt against what is, in effect, a warfare state and a particularly unjust war in Vietnam. Although some of the dissent is doubtless a kind of compulsive revolt, much of it is an expression of genuine conscience. It is justified in terms of ends, and much of it in terms of means as well. In selecting means, the dissenter should give the benefit of the doubt to existing laws before adopting civil disobedience; he ought not to violate human personality, in the name of which he is speaking; and he ought to test his proposed action against the judgments of critics—even though he alone must make the final decision. In general, a conscientious dissenter may help overcome feelings of anonymity, counteract social inertia, and vindicate the integrity of personality.

Reflections on Religious Dissent in North Africa in the Byzantine Period

There are good reasons for historians’ preferring to write history proceeding from the earlier in time to the later. Why, after all, should they ignore time’s one-way arrow? On occasion, however, it is useful to reverse the normal procedure.The history of North African Christianity, and especially the history of the tradition of dissent in it, is a case in point. The literature of the Donatist schism of the fourth and fifth centuries is comparatively rich. It is tempting, having crystallized an image of Donatism on the strength of it, to find the same image displayed again during the Vandal or the Byzantine period, periods for which our information is very much more fragmentary. The assumption that there is such a continuity may work in either or both of two ways. It may distort the real bearings of scanty material by the concern to fit it into the pattern; also, or alternatively, it may prevent the historian from noticing affinities with movements which seem at first sight to lack the features singled out as a qualification for entry into the pattern.

French Romanticism: A Tradition of Dissent

French Romanticism: A Tradition of Dissent