Twentieth-century Revolutions Research Articles

Alternative Histories of Global Sovereignty

Abstract Between 1979 and 1983 soldiers, workers, and students in Ghana launched a revolution to destroy the neo-imperial order. In the Ghanaian historical imagination that era is not remembered for its radical populism but as a time of violent chaos before the nation-state followed the road to purported neoliberal stability. The sudden rise and fall of revolutionary Ghana reveals both the possibility of alternative modes of political power in Africa and how these forms have been contained through both violence and the control of representational practices. In the contemporary moment, it is hard to theorize alternate ideas of freedom and political difference. If we start a study of twentieth-century revolution with a coup d’état in 1979 Accra, Ghana—rather than student upheavals in 1968 Paris, for example—it reorients our understanding of power by showing how young radicals sought an African-grounded sovereignty, an alternate future now forgotten.

Revolution andRevellion

It has been increasingly common to hear talk of the need for “revolutionary action” to break the Anthropocene/Capitalocene trajectory of northern petroculture. Sometimes this talk is deployed by transition-oriented political movements like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion. At other times, it is the mild liberal-consumerist “join the revolution” discourse put forward by green capitalist ventures. In both cases it raises the question of what is meant by revolution, a term that Arendt observed has both radical and conservative valences. As we contemplate revolutionary solarity in the twenty-first century, we must further settle accounts with the legacy of twentieth-century revolutions, many of which were predicated on energy-intensive and technoaccelerationist principles. This essay discusses what should and should not belong to revolutionary solarity and puts forth an alternate ethical and practical horizon of “revellion” in which the violent legacies of revolution are displaced by a politics that seeks to rewire the overheated pleasure circuits of northern civilization toward the pursuit of humbler joys and playful relations.

Educated acquiescence: how academia sustains authoritarianism in China

As a presumed bastion of the Enlightenment values that support a critical intelligentsia, the university is often regarded as both the bedrock and beneficiary of liberal democracy. By contrast, authoritarian regimes are said to discourage higher education out of fear that the growth of a critical intelligentsia could imperil their survival. The case of China, past and present, challenges this conventional wisdom. Imperial China, the most enduring authoritarian political system in world history, thrived in large part precisely because of its sponsorship of a form of higher education closely tied to state interests. Although twentieth-century revolutions brought fundamental change to Chinese politics and pedagogy, the contemporary party-state also actively promotes higher education, cultivating a mutually advantageous state-scholar nexus and thereby reducing the likelihood of intellectual-led opposition. As in the imperial past, authoritarian rule in China today is buttressed by a pattern of educated acquiescence, with academia acceding to political compliance in exchange for the many benefits conferred upon it by the state. The role of educated acquiescence in enabling Chinese authoritarianism highlights the contributions of a cooperative academy to authoritarian durability and raises questions with prevailing assumptions that associate the flourishing of higher education with liberal democracy.

As the Crow Flies: Yi Sang’s Aerial Poetics

AbstractThis essay rereads the work of Yi Sang (1910–37) against the early twentieth-century revolution in aerial photographic technologies. It argues that the aerial view (and the problem of “blind sight” that attends it) functions as a dynamic organizing principle for understanding the complex network of technoscientific, political, and existential concerns driving Yi’s literary and graphic practice, across both his Japanese and his Korean works. Bringing together a comparative framework with select close readings, the essay shows how aeriality furnished Yi with a particular set of structures and signs with which to engage larger questions around the nature of seeing, the limits of objectivity and rationality, and the possibilities and politics of creative expression.

Women’s Liberation and Anti-Superstition in Wartime Communist Propaganda, 1943-1950

This article seeks to bridge the hitherto disconnected studies of the “woman question” and “religious question” in the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. It focuses on the issues of women’s liberation and anti-superstition in Communist propaganda through Xiao Erhei jiehun (Young Blackie gets married), a popular novel by the Communist writer Zhao Shuli (1906-70) published in 1943, and examines its impact in comparative context in wartime Communist base areas. Drawing on the religious culture of the author’s native southern Shanxi, this revolutionary classic promoted freedom of marriage through attacking “feudal superstition.” The article compares wartime religious and revolutionary culture in Zhao’s rural Shanxi with the CCP’s cultural and political agendas in its headquarters of Yan’an. Despite its immense success, the novel’s original messages of women’s liberation and anti-superstition gradually became marginal in the early PRC years – both discourses gave way to the party-state’s higher ideological goal of class struggle, and were subsumed into the metanarrative celebrating the absolute leadership of the Communist Party and Mao Zedong.

Gastric acid-dependent diseases: a twentieth-century revolution.

Gastric acid-dependent diseases: a twentieth-century revolution.

From kang (炕) to kongtiao (空调): China’s Twentieth Century Cooling

Abstract This essay suggests an alternative strategy for thinking about changes in Chinese society in recent decades, using not economic data or theories of development, but the metaphor of temperature. It argues that the cultural imperative in China has, in recent decades, switched from that of keeping warm to that of keeping cool. This change is made tangible through two key objects: the kang (炕), the northern Chinese heated bed, and the kongtiao (空调), the air conditioner. The antiquity of the kang is explored as an object that is key to the development of Chinese civilization in the inhospitable northern climes. Moving between physical and metaphorical ideas of heat, the essay argues that throughout much of the twentieth-century, heating remained the main focus. Twentieth-century revolutions and mass campaigns under Mao Zedong were undeniably ‘hot,’ aiming to stoke the fire of revolution and radical social change. Under the reforms following Mao’s death, however, politics ‘cooled off:’ the political system crystalized and the frenzy of mass campaigns cooled down. This was accompanied by social changes, including what can be called the rise of individual cool, defined by ironic detachment, hedonism and narcissism. The new cool society and cool persona find their architectural accompaniment in the kongtiao, the air conditioner, which has become a must for urban living, even in north China. The kongtiao is presented as an ultimately unsocial device, a machine with intensive energy requirements that dumps heat into communal spaces in the effort to preserve individual comfort.

Game Changer: The Role of Sport in Revolution

Sport is generally understood as a conservative social institution that reaffirms the established values and norms of a society. It is not seen as a mechanism for radical political or social change but a means for individual transformation within a society. This article explores that notion by examining how sport has been used by twentieth-century political revolutions. While considering twentieth-century revolutions, it takes the Cuban Revolution as a particular case study to illuminate the use of sport in remaking of society and persons. The article begins with a general discussion of revolution and sport's relationships to it before briefly considering the two most prominent twentieth-century revolutions, the Russian and Chinese. The thrust then focuses on how the idea of revolution was understood in Cuba prior to the success of 1959 as well as immediately after. The article then examines the Cuban revolutionary state's explicit emphasis on sport as a means for producing the New Man. In all, the article argues that contrary to the common assumption that sport and revolution do not mix, sport can play an important role in the major social and political transformations.

How Not to Arm a State

Today’s “Iron River of Guns” flowing from the United States into Mexico has a long backstory. From Mexico’s independence movement in the early nineteenth century through its early twentieth-century revolution, the international arms trade in general and arms transfers from the U.S. in particular have often confounded the project of national governance. The vagaries of global arms markets, the dangers of arming the state on credit, the difficulties of maintaining government arsenals, and the misfortune of sharing land borders with major arms producers all shaped Mexico’s first independent century in surprising and neglected ways. This history offers a fresh perspective on the contemporary crisis and the policy debate surrounding it.

Wetenschapsgeschiedenis op lange termijn: flexibiliteit en fragiliteit van disciplines

Long-term history of science: on the flexibility and fragility of scientific disciplines Most scientific disciplines, such as chemistry, biology and physics, are now about two centuries old. Using physics as a case study the present paper aims to account for this longevity. What kept the physics discipline together from the early nineteenth century onwards? Literature on the rise of physics suggests that the discipline was formed around energy, the ether, or other theoretical notions. Yet the twentieth-century revolutions in physics showed that the discipline could prosper without some of its most 'fundamental' concepts. Some scholars conclude that internal factors are therefore irrelevant and disciplinary identity and continuity are purely institutional. Drawing on the work of Thomas Kuhn, Peter Galison and Andrew Warwick, this paper defends a different point of view. Although there is no intellectual core of disciplines, the prolonged existence of disciplines cannot be explained without some degree of internal continuity. If there is a revolution of a theoretical level, there may still be continuity on the level of experimental practices (and vice versa). It is this flexibility that accounts for the fact that disciplines may adapt to different circumstances. In addition, an educational tradition is required to transmit knowledge from one generation to the next.

Propaganda and Sovereignty in Wartime China: Morale Operations and Psychological Warfare under the Office of War Information

AbstractDuring the later years of the War of Resistance to Japan (1937–1945), United States (US) propaganda activities intensified in both Japanese military-occupied and ‘free’ regions of China. One of the most important organizations behind these activities was the Office of War Information (OWI). This paper examines the OWI, and particularly its Overseas Office, as key institutional actors within a broader US total war effort which touched the lives of civilian populations in East Asia as well as combatants, arguing that:•US propaganda institutions and propagandists played demonstrable roles in representing and shaping the experience of war in China;•these institutions, which included Asians and individuals of Asian descent, simultaneously acted to advance US goals in the wartime ‘Far East’;•while cooperation between US and Chinese governments was sporadic in the area of psychological warfare, conflicts over control often undermined or limited operations;•despite these shortcomings, US propaganda institutions (which included both the OWI and offices within the Department of State) had developed comparatively wide-ranging capabilities by the end of the war, and continued operations into the Civil War of 1945–1949.By 1945 propaganda had become an activity which regularly targeted allied populations as well as enemies. This process was facilitated by the early twentieth-century communications revolution, but was planned and controlled by the new engineers of the post-war order.

Candida Rifkind. Conrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada

CANDIDA RIFKIND Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada Toronto, Buffalo, London; University of Toronto Press, 2009. viii + 268 pp. Recipient of the Ann Saddlemyer scholarly book award at the 2010 conference of the CATR/ACRT, Candida Rifkind's Comrades and Critics expands the vital field of scholarship that is rewriting our knowledge and our analyses of left-wing Canadian modernism. In the 1930s, Canadian women writers and cultural workers including Dorothy Livesay, Ruby Ronan, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, Toby Gordon Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Elsie Park Gowan, Minnie Evans Bicknell, Mary Reynolds, and Jim (Jean) Watts made crucial contributions to English-Canadian communist and social democratic journalism, poetry, fiction, and theatre. Rifkind surveys this work in historical context and addresses its place in national cultural memory and its reception in English-Canadian literary history. An introductory chapter on the Encounter points to the double duty of the English-Canadian literary left, to give creative expression to socialism and overturn the dominant literary (4), and goes on to frame the book's most original insights, which have to do with the gendered terms of the Socialist-Modernist encounter and its impact on the period's women artists and on their work. I would say, in my second-wave sort of way, that this book exposes the pervasive sexism of the most progressive discourses of English Canada in the 1930s. As Rifkind explains, the problem was not only that gender issues were explicitly subordinated to class and other struggles during the Comintern period, and then subordinated again in relation to the fight against fascism during the period of the Popular Front, although this did happen and it needs to be remembered. (My own view, and I know that I am not alone in this, is that one of the most important lessons of the twentieth-century revolutions is that we humans must not ever again leave our humanity behind in order to storm the barricades and expect to be able to pick it up again on the other side. But I digress.) The problem is more acute because the explicit sidelining of gender issues in the 1930s was exacerbated by the discursive and symbolic linkages between rugged masculinity, socialist progress, and modernist aesthetics, on one hand; and femininity, a decadent and despised bourgeoisie, and bad art, on the other: Women on the political left often had to subordinate questions of gender to those of class and ethnicity, and by the 1930s the gains made by pre-war socialist feminists and the suffrage movement of an earlier generation faltered (Newton 171). Across the Canadian left by the end of the 1920s, women's issues were being subordinated to class struggle and then, with the rise of European fascism in the early 1930s, fighting racisms and anti-Semitism at home and overseas. Women who were both socialists and modernists in 1930s Canada had to consequently find ways to accommodate themselves to the downplaying of women's issues in leftist politics and the contempt for any aesthetic perceived as feminine in modernist literature. Each of the women I foreground in this book struggled to do this in a different way; what unites them is an attempt to disassociate their female identities from the feminine metaphors and images typically used to criticize conservative artistic tradition as well as liberal bourgeois politics. (11) Add to this the fact that real economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of men, and the discouragements and detours performed by these women artists seem merely inevitable. …

Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts. Joseph Horowitz. (New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Pp. xix, 458. Illustrations. $27.50.)

<i>Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts</i>. Joseph Horowitz. (New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Pp. xix, 458. Illustrations. $27.50.)

Quantum weirdness and surrealism

A joint exploration of early modern physics and the surreal art movement shows these twentieth-century revolutions had more in common than we thought, explains Philip Ball.

History's locomotives: revolutions and the making of the modern world

This masterful comparative history traces the West's revolutionary tradition and its culmination in the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Unique in breadth and scope, History's Locomotives offers a new interpretation of the origins and history of socialism as well as the meanings of the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Soviet regime, and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. History's Locomotives is the masterwork of an esteemed historian in whom a fine sense of historical particularity never interfered with the ability to see the large picture. Martin Malia explores religious conflicts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, the revolutions in England, American, and France, and the twentieth-century Russian explosions into revolution. He concludes that twentieth-century revolutions have deep roots in European history and that revolutionary thought and action underwent a process of radicalization from one great revolution to the next. Malia offers an original view of the phenomenon of revolution and a fascinating assessment of its power as a driving force in history.

Nothing Is More Important than Thinking Dialectically

Nothing Is More Important than Thinking Dialectically Grace Lee Boggs (bio) I would like to share some of the ideas that I have been developing from outside the academy for more than sixty years, most of that time as an Asian American woman living in the African American community. Historically significant ideas do not come out of books but out of movement struggles. Thus the very concepts of Asian Americans and the discipline of Asian American studies were born out of the struggles of the 1960s when the civil rights and Black Power movements and the struggles of the Vietnamese people made Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Japanese Americans (the main population groups in that period) realize that the time had come for them to stop being model minorities and identify themselves as Asian Americans in order to expand and deepen the struggle against racism and imperialism. If you forget that history, and become only academics, the chances are that you will end up on the defensive, as is already happening with African American studies programs. [End Page 1] We must also never forget that reality is constantly changing and that what may have been progressive at one stage is not necessarily progressive as time marches on. For example, when the Asian American struggle got under way in the late 1960s, few of us imagined that one day: • There would be two Asian Americans in the cabinet of the most reactionary and dangerous president in U.S. history; • Asian Americans would be among the most sought after fashion models and TV news anchors; • China's economy would grow so fast that it would compete with the United States for access to energy sources in the Middle East and Latin America, at the same time triggering massive protests by Chinese villagers against pollution and takeovers of their farmlands; • Asian banks in Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and India could plunge this country into the greatest of all financial crises by moving their foreign exchange out of the dollar and into Euro or other currencies; • Migration, which was largely eastward during the twentieth century, would be on the way to reversing itself in the twenty-first century. These historical world developments are likely to create enormous tensions between East and West and new challenges to all Americans, especially those of Asian descent. To prepare ourselves for these new developments, nothing is more important than thinking dialectically; that is to say, recognizing that what built the movement in the past is unlikely to build it in the present or future. For much of the twentieth century, movement building centered on the struggles of oppressed peoples for rights and for the political power necessary to change institutions. There was little, if any, recognition of the need for two-sided transformation, not only of institutions but of the oppressed who, especially in the modern world of the mass media, absorb the values of their oppressors. [End Page 2] There was also little, if any, understanding that concentrating on taking state power results in the popular movement being coopted by the state; little, if any, recognition that a movement only begins when the oppressed begin seeing themselves—as the participants in the highly disciplined Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights struggles in the South did—not only as victims but as pioneers in creating new and more human relationships that advance the evolution of the human race. In recent years, however, the degeneration of actual twentieth-century revolutions and the increasing pathology of global capitalism—its commoditization of all aspects of our lives, its destruction of communities and of natural wealth in order to create paper wealth, its pushing the life-support systems of the planet to the point of collapse, and its systematic creation of an over-consuming global north and an impoverished global south—have inspired a new kind of revolutionary movement. The most dramatic example of this new kind of movement has been the Zapatistas who, on January 1, 1994 (the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect), occupied Mexican cities, not to take power but to create the space for everyone in the indigenous...

VIRTUAL REPATRIATION: THE PITTSBURGH–KONSTANZ ARCHIVAL PARTNERSHIP

During the 1920s and 1930s, a group of German and Austrian thinkers pioneered an approach to philosophy that shaped much of the discipline's subsequent development. These thinkers were “inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions in logic, mathematics and mathematical physics” and “aimed to create a similarly revolutionary scientific philosophy purged of the endless controversies”1 that had traditionally occupied philosophers. The result was a style of doing philosophy known as logical positivism. Berlin and Vienna were its main centers. The proponents of logical positivism included, among others, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Carl Carl Hempel, and Hans Reichenbach. The logical . . .

The Life and Times of Pancho Villa

Alongside Moctezuma and Benito Juarez, Pancho Villa is probably the best-known figure in Mexican history. Villa legends pervade not only Mexico but the United States and beyond, existing not only in the popular mind and tradition but in ballads and movies. There are legends of Villa the Robin Hood, Villa the womanizer, and Villa as the only foreigner who has attacked the mainland of the United States since the War of 1812 and gotten away with it. Whether exaggerated or true to life, these legends have resulted in Pancho Villa the leader obscuring his revolutionary movement, and the myth in turn obscuring the leader. Based on decades of research in the archives of seven countries, this definitive study of Villa aims to separate myth from history. So much attention has focused on Villa himself that the characteristics of his movement, which is unique in Latin American history and in some ways unique among twentieth-century revolutions, have been forgotten or neglected. Villa's Division del Norte was probably the largest revolutionary army that Latin America ever produced. Moreover, this was one of the few revolutionary movements with which a U.S. administration attempted, not only to come to terms, but even to forge an alliance. In contrast to Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, Villa came from the lower classes of society, had little education, and organized no political party. The first part of the book deals with Villa's early life as an outlaw and his emergence as a secondary leader of the Mexican Revolution, and also discusses the special conditions that transformed the state of Chihuahua into a leading center of revolution. In the second part, beginning in 1913, Villa emerges as a national leader. The author analyzes the nature of his revolutionary movement and the impact of Villismo as an ideology and as a social movement. The third part of the book deals with the years 1915 to 1920: Villa's guerrilla warfare, his attack on Columbus, New Mexico, and his subsequent decline. The last part describes Villa's surrender, his brief life as a hacendado, his assassination and its aftermath, and the evolution of the Villa legend. The book concludes with an assessment of Villa's personality and the character and impact of his movement.

State regulations update: The twentieth century revolution in state employment law

Employment Relations TodayVolume 26, Issue 3 p. 107-113 Departments State regulations update: The twentieth century revolution in state employment law Thomas Christopher, Thomas Christopher tchristopher@kilstock.com Thomas Christopher is a partner in the Atlanta office of Kilpatrick Stockton LLP and specializes in employment and labor law. He coauthored Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: A Guide for Employers (Business Council of Georgia, 1990), “Employee Drug Testing: A Constitutional Perspective,” published in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal (Vol. 4, No. 4, December 1991), and The Americans with Disabilities Act: A Handbook for the Business Community (Georgia Chamber of Commerce, 1992). He also contributed a chapter to the book Employment Law for Georgia Employers.Search for more papers by this author Thomas Christopher, Thomas Christopher tchristopher@kilstock.com Thomas Christopher is a partner in the Atlanta office of Kilpatrick Stockton LLP and specializes in employment and labor law. He coauthored Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: A Guide for Employers (Business Council of Georgia, 1990), “Employee Drug Testing: A Constitutional Perspective,” published in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal (Vol. 4, No. 4, December 1991), and The Americans with Disabilities Act: A Handbook for the Business Community (Georgia Chamber of Commerce, 1992). He also contributed a chapter to the book Employment Law for Georgia Employers.Search for more papers by this author First published: 16 January 2007 https://doi.org/10.1002/ert.3910260310Citations: 2 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume26, Issue3Autumn (Fall) 1999Pages 107-113 RelatedInformation

Pour une typologie des relations culturelles russo-ukrainiennes

Vadim Skuratovsku, For a typology of cultural relationship between Russia and Ukraine. The cultural relations between Russia and Ukraine have often been analyzed from various standpoints; however, their specific nature, — in so far as they were "extra-ethnic" relations, particularly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — , has not always been stressed. This article tries to show how the "huge Ukrainian" cultural exports to Russia account for it. Later on, during the narodnichestvo and the twentieth-century revolutions, those relations have been interspersed with interethnic factors, which turned into "international" (mezhnatsional'nye) ones. However, the significant presence of Ukrainian culture in Russian culture may be a guarantee of the normalization of cultural as well as political relationship between the two countries.