Youth Festival Research Articles

Re‐Territorializing Transnationalism: Chinese Americans and the Chinese motherland

A youth festival sponsored by the Chinese (P.R.C.) government for overseas Chinese youth (hua yi) who visit China represents a political ritual of the Chinese state that draws upon a long history of invoking discourses of Chinese culture to create connections to the Chinese abroad. Though framed in a context of continuity, the festival ironically produces new knowledges about different ways of being Chinese, exposing the fissures within the assumed nexus of race, culture, and nation, and thus complicating notions of what constitutes a transnational community. [China, Chinese diaspora, transnationalism, identity, race and culture, modernity].

Rediscovering Sources of Nigerien History: The Dosso Archives

This is a report on provisional efforts to reorganize a regional archive in Dosso, Niger. The information is provided in hopes that it will be of some use to students of West African history, and will arouse the interest of archivists.While conducting research in the Dosso region of Niger during 1981 and 1982, I had occasion to work with historical materials in the Prefectural archives of the Department of Dosso. At the time of my arrival in Dosso, the archival documents were stored in more than twenty metal and wooden cabinets and files, and on open shelves. These were located inside a very large room without electric lights, illuminated dimly during the daylight hours by a single small window, permanently open and paneless, high on as eastward facing wall. The disorder of the cabinets inside the room was such at the beginning that it was impossible to penetrate more than a few feet. In some cabinets the contents were more or less uniform, but in most there was considerable disarray, said to date from the late 1970s when a national youth festival was held in Dosso. As a result, it was not uncommon to find mimeographed reports from the 1970s alongside registers of handwritten.entries dating from the early 1900s, and typescripts from the 1930s and 1940s. In others, voracious termites left for years to eat as they liked, had caused considerable destruction, consuming the documents, and in the case of wooden construction, the cabinets and shelves that contained them.

Berlin and American Foreign Policy?

Even at such a relative side-show as the Communist-sponsored youth festival in Helsinki last July, the American delegation was able to note that two countries were the chosen targets of all propaganda: the United States and West Germany. The very consistency and crudity or the Soviet design is impressive: the old adage of divide et impera is practised with every available means, at times through brutal attack, at other times through the basest flattery. The goal at all times is to isolate the United States from Europe and isolate Germany within Europe.

On Giving a Good Account of Ourselves

* Every American abroad is an ambassador of his country. Wittingly or unwittingly he contributes to the foreign image of the United States. With every passport it issues the State Department encloses a form letter from President Eisenhower informing the recipient that to all the varied peoples he may meet abroad, he will represent the United States of America-you represent us all in bringing assurance to the people you meet that the United States is a friendly nation and one dedicated to the search for world peace and to the promotion of the well-being and security of the community of nations. During the past few years it has been my job to help Americans prepare to represent their country abroad. While most of those with whom I have worked have been appointees of the United States Information Agency, I have also been concerned with the preparation of foreign service officers of the State Department, technical and economic experts, guides for the United States pavilion at the Brussels Fair, young people of the International Farm Youth Exchange, and numerous other groups. It is on the basis of this varied experience that I would make certain observations and suggestions to those Americans who would seek conscientiously to carry out the president's charge. First of all, Americans must organize their knowledge of America. During the 1957 youth festival in Moscow Soviet youths exclaimed in surprise when they found their American counterparts inarticulate, Surely, you must know your ideology better than that.

A Youth Festival in Munich

A Youth Festival in Munich