Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.     

The French turn in the United States: James P. Cannon and the Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party, 1934–1937

Abstract

To expand dissident communism’s influence in 1934 Trotsky urged his supporters to join the French Socialist Party. A fusion of the Trotskyist Communist League of America (Opposition) led by James P. Cannon, and a radicalizing American Workers Party headed by A. J. Muste, formed the Workers Party (WP) in 1934–1935. The WP soon followed this entryist orientation in 1936. This article challenges a previous historiography, addressing the ways in which Cannon charted a controversial course inside the Socialist Party. Cannon stressed the importance of mass work in the unions and in various political campaigns, such as support for republican insurgents in the Spanish Civil War and defense of Trotsky against the slanders of the Moscow Trials of 1937. This Trotskyist political work built the SP, but it also exposed acute differences separating the fractured leadership of the Party from the revolutionary policies and practices animating a growing left wing. After little more than one year of this kind of agitation, the Trotskyist entryists were expelled. They had won over almost 1000 supporters, many of whom contributed mightily to the Socialist Workers Party, founded in 1938.     

Spatially strong: Dead Sea Works Ltd. and the building up of the southeast of Israel, 1948–1964

This is the story of the formative years of one of Israel’s big corporations – the Dead Sea Works Ltd. (DSW). It concerns the interrelations between space and labor, told through an account of four transitions: (1) The transfer of the company from England to Israel with its establishment in 1952; (2) The move of its central office from Jerusalem to Be’er Sheva; (3) The dismantling of the original workers’ camp near the factory (in Sodom) and the move of the workers’ dwellings to three different towns; and (4) The transfer of representation from Tel Aviv to Be’er Sheva. The case of the DSW, I argue, is a ‘geohistory’ of labor that exemplifies the construction of the northeastern Negev’s social space, especially the making of scale. This ‘scale-making’ was an ongoing process of scaling up (from the local to the regional) and scaling down (from the global to the state level, and from the center to the periphery). Through this process of scale-making, the workers of the DSW gained a great deal of power and became spatially strong.     

Chōra/Chōros: Samuel R. Delany and the masculine semiotic in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012)

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic chōra continues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction in La revolution du langage poétique – the fate of the chōra was left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term in Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusively prohibitive conception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal law generates certain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of the chora with the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding the chōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semiotic chōra does indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by adding chōros, the masculine form of chōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.     

Getting a `Get' – the Limits of Law's Authority? N. v. N. (Jurisdiction: Pre-Nuptial Agreement) [1999] 2 F.L.R. 745

This note examines the decision of the Family Division of the High Court in N. v. N. (Jurisdiction: Pre-Nuptial Agreement) in which, in the context of Jewish divorce proceedings, the Court found that it had no jurisdiction to order a husband, by specific performance of a marriage agreement, to go through the procedure to obtain a ‘get’ (a hand-written bill of divorcement) allowing his wife to remarry. First, discussion of the case is contextualised broadly within the debate on the (de)merits of employing legal means in order to redress social wrongs. Secondly, adopting a theoretical perspective upon the difficulties involved in using law to achieve social change, the note goes on to examine more specifically why women from minority cultures may choose to go to the law of the dominant culture in order to obtain relief. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The genesis of a scientific community: the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and the field of industrial relations in Britain,c.1950–1983

Scholarship dealing with labour-related topics has been prevalent in Britain from the early twentieth century, but a scientific field dedicated exclusively to the study of industrial relations did not emerge until the second half of the century. Although the socio-economic context of the post-war years provided a fertile ground for the field's emergence, the reason for its eventual development was a socialization process that took place in the early 1950s with the establishment of an informal group of industrial relations scholars. The group would grow to become the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and its activities would help the emerging community develop a ‘disciplinary identity’ and form the institutions that would subsequently define the field of Industrial Relations.     

Political Life in the Shadows: the post suffrage political career of S. Margery Fry (1874–1958)

Drawing upon research on the working life of the penal reformer and educationalist S. Margery Fry (1874–1958) and her role as a policy-maker, this article argues that there were alternative ways in which women could participate in post-suffrage political culture, other than through elected office or party politics. The article positions Margery Fry both as a feminist and a public intellectual and argues that the First World War and the granting of women's suffrage allowed a step change to take place in Fry's career, taking her from a regional political stage to a national and international one. It also contends that she was able to wield considerable power ‘in the shadows’ as a policy advisor.     

All the labor problems fit to print: the New York Times and the cultural production of the U.S ‘labor problem’, 1870–1932

The period that spanned the Gilded Age to the onset of the Great Depression saw the rise and relative decline of the US labor movement. The salient events of labor movements over these years undoubtedly shaped public perception about labor issues, and some scholars have been attempting to unpack the mechanisms through which depictions and characterizations of the ‘labor problem’ were produced in authoritative venues that could have shaped the future of the movement. This study goes beyond the standard practice of explaining news report volume to feature the political valance of the reports on the labor problem over a 63-year time period. The aforementioned period also saw significant changes in news reporting practices, with the rise of objective informational writing and the embrace of journalism as a profession. The change within journalism itself could potentially shape the depiction of the labor problem, yet such change has been overlooked by existing literature pertaining to the topic. This research makes a theoretical case for integrating social processes central to the labor movement and journalism from 1870 to 1932 and explains patterns in the cultural production of the labor problem in the New York Times by analyzing these two tracks of history in conjunction using both qualitative and quantitative data.     

Rosa Vogelstein and her work: in search of the sources of success of the Stettin Women’s Association (Stettiner Frauenverein) at the turn of the twentieth century

At the turn of the twentieth century, Stettin, the major city of the Prussian Province of Pomerania, was the home of the Stettin Women’s Association (Stettiner Frauenverein). It engaged in welfare work as well as educational activity using modern forms of social work focused mostly on supporting lower-class women and children. This article presents the results of research into the sources of success of this organisation. It is worth attention because the organisation was established in a city where, similarly to the entire province, women’s movement demanding changes to behaviour patterns attributed to sex and background did not attract much support. In the light of preserved archives, it was Rosa Vogelstein, the wife of a local rabbi, who wielded decisive influence on this and who with full awareness resigned from exposing her role in the establishment and operations of the association which led to the memory of her achievements gradually fading.     

‘It is caused of the womans part or of the mans part’: the role of gender in the diagnosis and treatment of sexual dysfunction in early modern England

Philip Barrough wrote in 1590 that barrenness ‘is caused of the womans part or of the mans part’. By the eighteenth century, however, barrenness was perceived as a female disorder distinguished from male impotence. Few historians have addressed the uncertainty surrounding early modern definitions of infertility, choosing instead to adopt set terms that fit comfortably with modern ideas. This article will highlight the difficulties surrounding the gender distinction of the terms ‘barrenness’ and ‘impotence’ during this period. Moreover, the discussion will examine the role of gender in diagnosing these disorders to sufferers. The article will argue that ideas of gender were more central to diagnosis of poor sexual health than to effectual treatment. Although it appears that barrenness and impotence were treated with separate remedies, many treatments were described as effectual for both sexes. Additionally, the ingredients used in such recipes were often sexual stimulants explained without reference to gender.     

‘The Women's Branch of the Commonwealth Relations Office’: the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women and the long life of empire migration

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women from its formation in 1919 to its closure in 1964 upon the withdrawal of the Treasury grant that provided the bulk of its funding. Describing the imperial network of voluntary organisations and migrants, through which the Society operated, it shows continuity in its activities, geographical remit and personnel from the interwar period despite efforts, especially by the 1960s, to reframe the Society's imperial mission with the rhetoric of Commonwealth and development. It highlights the persistence of imperial institutions and networks after the Second World War.