FROM SINGING GIRL TO REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST: FEMALE ENTERTAINERS REMEMBERING CHINA’S SOCIALIST PAST (1949–THE PRESENT)

Abstract

This article explores a unique aspect of gendered socialism by examining the competing narratives of the state and individuals’ oral accounts, particularly the stories of former singing girls and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres. During the socialist transformation of the 1950s, singing girls-turned-revolutionary artists, as popular performers and new socialist women, found mutual interests with the CCP: political propaganda for the Party, making profit for the troupe, and self-transformation for the girls. This article argues that the Party and former singing girls enacted a uniquely gendered socialism by continuously deploying the singing girls’ cultural and financial influence colored with their erotic image. In addition, this essay treats oral history as a process of identity and history construction rather than as “fact.”     

“The (final) solution of the Gypsy-question:” continuities in discourses about Roma in Hungary, 1940s–1950s

Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens’ participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe.     

Gaspirali v. Il'minskii: Two identity projects for the muslims of the Russian Empire

As “music of commitment,” in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important purpose of providing a popular-cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of Yugoslav society. The three “music movements” that embodied the new rock’n’roll spirit – New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans – used rock music to critique the country's “new socialist culture,” with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This paper examines the New Partisans as the most radical expression of music of commitment through the works of its most important rock bands: Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin. The paper's argument is that the New Partisans' socio-cultural engagement, animated by advocacy of Yugoslavism, was a counter-logic to the nationalist dissolution of a distinctly Yugoslav fabric of a socialist community in crisis. Thus, the movement's revolutionary “spirit of reconstruction” permeating its “poetics of the patriotic” was a mechanism of socio-cultural resistance to political, cultural and moral-ethical de-Yugoslavization of Yugoslav society. Its ultimate objective was to make the case that the only way into the future – if there was to be any – rested on strategic reanimation of the Partisan revolutionary past as the only viable socio-cultural foundation of the Yugoslav socialist community.     

Rebellion in Gojam Province,Ethiopia

This article explores how and why the church in South Africa became an important civil society space and actor at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle and yet its civil society role declined following the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the release of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela. It does this by engaging in a discussion of the nature of the South African church as civil society, followed by a consideration of the church's role at various points during the democratic transition. Specifically, it explores the church as a “site of struggle” during the late stages of the anti-apartheid struggle, as engaging in mediation and negotiation during the democratic transition, and as returning to a predominantly religious organisation in the post-apartheid era. It concludes with a discussion of the reasons for and implications of the church's decreased role in public and political life following the transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy.     

Evolution of the Japanese Political Scene: Toward a Non-Issue-Oriented Two-Party System?

This article examines the nature of the two-party system in Japan. The electoral reform of 1994 has finally led to an alternation of power, but contrary to the predictions of the reformers, the competition between two major Japanese parties is not based on any substantial differences in their political programs. The Liberal Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of Japan are mixtures of various groups rather than coherent parties and the main axes of struggle on the Japanese political scene run across party divisions. Both major parties are internally divided with regard to economic as well as defense policy. The most important factor of Democratic Party of Japan's identity has been the goal of achieving an alternation of power and abolishing the Liberal Democratic Party style of policymaking. Nevertheless, the discourse on political renewal has been undertaken also by the Liberal Democratic Party. While the struggle between the partisans and the opponents of Koizumi reforms continues in the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Party of Japan is torn apart between the proponents of ‘big’ and ‘small’ government.     

China's Youth: Ravenous for the West,With No Memory of the Past

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

Party penetration of society in Hong Kong: The role of mutual aid committees and political parties

Party penetration of society can be illuminated by the study of how political parties in Hong Kong have been infiltrating Mutual Aid Committees (MACs), which are housing organisations in private and public buildings. While “administrative absorption of politics” was viewed as a hallmark of Hong Kong under British rule during the 1970s, political penetration of local administration has emerged as the feature of the body politic since the 1990s. The colonial government's neglect of the MACs in the 1990s has been inherited by the post‐colonial administration since the transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty in 1997. On the other hand, some MACs have penetrated political parties because they find that the government has swept them under the carpet and that parties can deliver various constituent services. This interpenetration of parties and MACs is an enduring feature of grassroots politics in Hong Kong today.     

The Blue (White and Red) Orchestra: a soundtrack for the country that never was

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo’s Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band’s music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar’s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar’s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band’s continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar’s Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.     

Fragmented memories in a fragmented country: memory competition and political identity-building in today's Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is politically fragmented, and so is the memory landscape within the country. Narratives of the 1992–1995 war, the Second World War, Tito's Yugoslavia, and earlier historical periods form highly disputed patterns in a memory competition involving representatives of the three “constituent peoples” of Bosnia and Herzegovina – Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks – but also non-nationalist actors within BiH, as well as the international community. By looking especially at political declarations and the practices of commemoration and monument building, the article gives an overview of the fragmented memory landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, pointing out the different existing memory narratives and policies and the competition between them in the public sphere, and analyzing the conflicting memory narratives as a central part of the highly disputed political identity construction processes in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper also discusses the question whether an “Europeanization” of Bosnian memory cultures could be an alternative to the current fragmentation and nationalist domination of the memory landscape in BiH.     

Re-enacting “Cossack roots:” embodiment of memory,history, and tradition among young people in southern Russia

This article draws upon ethnographic research which was conducted among young Cossacks (members of officially registered and informal Cossack clubs) in southern Russia. It presents young people’s participation in the Cossack “nativism” as a physical and material mode of socialization into the mnemonic community. The research puts forward an argument that such corporal and sensorial experiences is effective in recruiting some young members to the Cossack movement. At the same time, the performative character of neo-Cossack identity destabilizes contemporary Cossacks’ claims of authenticity related to the status of the legitimate heirs of historical Cossackdom. At the more general level of discussion this paper juxtaposes bodily activities, social memory, and revivalist discourses.     

Unacademic academics: Holocaust deniers and trivializers in post-Communist Romania

The Romanian Academy (and much of the country's historical establishment) is packed with Holocaust deniers and trivializers, many of whom indulge in Holocaust obfuscation against the background of the post-Communist “competitive martyrdom” between the victims of the Holocaust and the Gulag. Quite a few of these deniers and trivializers are also former secret police informers. On closer examination, however, it turns out that explaining the reluctance to face the country's “dark past” as being the independent variable resultant of the post “Romanianization” of the Communist Party and its Securitate is a partial explanation at best. A substantially more convincing one might be provided by scrutinizing the phenomenon as the product of post-mnemonic cultural traumas.     

Mémoire de la violence: du Congo des rébellions au Zaïre des pillages

The author looks into the chain of political violence, as well as into political discourse about past violence, experienced by ordinary Congolese from Independence up to the present. According to him, every major outburst of political violence underwent a discursive recuperation by Congolese/Zairian politicians and produced its own social memory. The Zairian state political culture of violence, blended with people’s experience of every day violence (economic and social), explains the generalisation of violence during the 1990s civil wars and lootings of all major and medium-sized cities.     

Discursive construction of Lithuania’s “others:” the case of Belarus

This article analyzes discursive representations of Lithuania and of Belarus as Lithuania’s “Other” in the context of the recent political crisis in Ukraine. Focusing on the media discourse of Lithuanian intellectuals regarding the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) and its legacy, it examines how Belarus and its role vis-à-vis Lithuania have been depicted. The analysis is informed by the discourse-historical approach within critical discourse analysis, using thematic content and argumentation schemes for studying the images ascribed to the GDL, Belarus, and Lithuania in the selected texts. Focus in the discourse of intellectuals on the GDL as a historical homeland is found to shift from history as a scholarly endeavor to the politics of history and the uses of the past in today’s political projects. Belarus and the GDL emerge as topics not only historically and politically salient but also potentially dangerous for Lithuania within the setting of the events in Ukraine.     

Rebuild China With an Olympic Amnesty

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

A Civil Society Emerges From the Earthquake Rubble

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

Tibetans Are Looking to the Post‐Olympic Era

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

Do Human Rights Require a Strong State?

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

The Trickle‐Down Olympics

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.     

China's High Schoolers: Pro‐American Consumers or Nationalists?

Will China's authoritarian leaders succeed in building a future by erasing the past? Can the ideology of “nationalist consumerism” obliterate memory altogether? Will the Olympic applause drown out the weak and exiled witnesses of the Tiananmen crackdown? In this section we listen to a key Tiananmen student leader two decades on as well as check in with today's young elites in Beijing. A political leader from the reformist regime in 1989 calls for justice from house arrest and a young Chinese novelist wonders what kind of identity is possible without memory.