Parroting the past: historical continuity and change through cultures of cruelty in Brazil

ABSTRACT

In the recent Brazilian Netflix series 3% (Aguilera 2016), international audiences were presented with an array of visual reminders about the legacy of historic human rights abuses in Brazil. With the image of the pau de arara as a point of historic and semiotic reference, this paper adopts evidence and ideas from New Capitalist History to extend the interrogation of the historical memory of torture in Brazil in particular, to the rise and predominance of coercive practices in workplace cultures in free societies in general. This interrogation demonstrates the need for paradigm shifts within Western academic disciplines. First, to re-locate historically modern slavery in political philosophy as central to conceptions of “evil,” and second to overturn the notion of discontinuity and incompatibility between slavery and capitalism. Throughout this interrogation, a short story by Machado de Assis and Lissovsky’s critique of processes of memorialisation of human rights abuses open up the possibility of revisionist thinking about technologies of power, under slavery, military rule, and democratic regimes in Brazil; an approach which suggests systematic and sustained “cultures of cruelty” past and present (Giroux).     

Screening the Past: Reflexivity,Repetition and the Spectator in Lola Arias' Minefield/Campo minado (2016)

This article examines the role performed by the autobiographical body in Lola Arias' documentary play Minefield (2016). Through a ‘hypermedial’ representation of the cultural memory archive, Arias challenges dominant perspectives towards the Malvinas/Falklands conflict by repeatedly using screens, recording devices and documentary footage to highlight the mediation and subjectivity inherent in both individual and collective memories of the past. By engaging with recent work on documentary theatre and live performance, this article reflects on how Minefield's narrative repetition and formal reflexivity demand, though ultimately confound, an empathetic connection between performer and audience.     

Documenting Diaspora,Diasporising Memory: Memory and Mediation among Chilean and Uruguayan Hijxs del exilio

Addressing the absence of second-generation exiles from Southern Cone post-dictatorship memory scholarship, this paper compares two documentaries: Hora Chilena, about the British-Chilean community and Tus padres volverán, depicting Uruguayan exiles across Europe – both made by and/or about the no retornadxs (those who did not return to their countries of origin after dictatorship). The paper deploys documentary to offer a nuanced depiction of the hijxs del exilio (children of exile), finding them to be distinct to both the protagonist generation and their second-generation peers in the Southern Cone. By incorporating neglected voices and reframing post-dictatorship memory in Europe, the paper challenges memory narratives about second-generation exile.     

Perviy Kanal's Trotsky and the “Atlanticisation” of Leon Trotsky's Legacy*

Trotsky, an eight-part miniseries made in 2017 for the centenary of the Russian Revolution, has recently been made available on Netflix for global audiences. This article analyses Trotsky through the theoretical lens of neo-Eurasianism, especially as developed by the political theorist Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin's philosophy posits a civilisational divide between the “Atlantic” values of secularism, open markets, cosmopolitanism and sexual profligacy represented by the Anglo-Atlantic cultural sphere, and the “Eurasian” values of authoritarianism, cultural conservatism and religious nationalism present in a revived Russia. I argue that Trotsky's interpretation of Leon Trotsky's legacy reflects the popularisation of Dugin's neo-Eurasianist political philosophy in Russia. The article covers some of the key historical events depicted in Trotsky, discussing their accuracy with reference to existing academic biographies of Leon Trotsky. I then discuss the series’ apparent fixation on the Jewish heritage of Trotsky (who was born Lev Bronstein), which has been the focus of much of the media coverage of the series, before addressing the fraught place that Trotsky occupies in Russian historical memory. I then move on to a discussion of the political philosophy of neo-Eurasianism and its relevance and application to the political climate of modern Russia. Finally, I consider what Dugin has said about Trotsky himself. Despite (or perhaps because of) its distortions of history, the series serves as a fascinating reflection of the values and political climate of modern Russia.     

Playing the fool in the territory of memory: Jaan Kross' autobiographical fictions of the twentieth century

A study was conducted among young Latvians to test the effects of different conceptualizations of Latvian national identity on group beliefs and on attitudes towards Russians. It was hypothesized that exposure to inclusive discourse presenting Latvia as a multicultural society rather than an ethnic homeland would have a direct negative effect on feelings of vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority and helplessness with regard to the Latvian nation and a positive effect on attitudes towards Russians. The hypothesis was tested in one survey study conducted in Riga among ethnic Latvians (N?=?150).     

The Tibetan Self-Immolations as Counter-Securitization: Towards an Inter-Unit Theory of Securitization

This article argues that the Tibetan self-immolations constitute a form of counter-securitization to China’s securitization of the 2008 Tibetan uprising. Theoretically, it argues that securitization theory (1) is too focused on the intra-unit interaction between securitizing elites and audiences, (2) leaves the inter-unit dynamics underdeveloped, and (3) fails to recognize the securitized “other” as an audience. This article theorizes the linkage between unit-level and inter-unit processes by exploiting three concepts: inter-discursivity, identity, and emergency measures. Contrary to existing theories, it shows that even unsuccessful securitizing moves can set off counter-securitizations thanks to audience overlap and inter-discursivity. The Sino-Tibetan interactions around the Tibetan self-immolations uphold these theoretical positions.     

Memoria y democracia. Una relación incierta

This paper begins with a series of findings on the increasing focus on the memories of the recent past, particularly in societies that have undergone periods of political violence, dictatorships and civil wars. In analysing the moment of installation of the institutional, territorial and symbolic marks (understood as expressions produced by various actors and state policies and social movements that respond to the demands of these social actors), one can see how memories of the recent past, suffering and political violence act as stimuli for countless rituals, cultural productions, and a search for interpretations and explanations. This paper seeks to question some of the basic assumptions and basic innuendos implicit in the “duty of memory”: an exploration of the relationship between memory and justice, between memory and democracy, and between preservation-preservation and transmission. By analysing these relationships, this paper aims to relocate memories in the context of broader and longer-lasting structures and social processes; centrally linked to the persistence of multiple social inequalities and the relationship between memory and political present. To do this, some institutional state processes are analysed, both at the symbolic level and in the field of education and transmission, in order to present some situations that allow the task of rethinking and raising further questions about the relationship between memory and democracy.     

"God We Had Fun": The CIA in China and Sino-American Relations

This article deals with two sets of memories of the Partition of British India in 1947. The first is defined as “Partition memory”; the second set consists of the memories of Muslims who reside today in the state of Jharkhand, India. The author shows that the “enactment” of Partition memory — at different times, in different places and ways, and with different intentions — reinforces the original division of British India into two separate nations, along religious lines, and divides people into binary-opposed but internally homogenous communities of “Hindu locals” and “Muslim foreigners.” Drawing on interviews conducted in Jharkhand in 2000-2001, the author shows that local Muslims experienced the events of 1947 very differently from what Partition memory would suggest. Their memories, which are rarely included in the official history of Partition, challenge the dominant history by underscoring multiple identities based on region rather than on religion. The author concludes by emphasizing that memories similar to those presented in this article should be included in the official Partition history for two reasons: they challenge the threat that a one-sided presentation of Partition memory poses and they will enrich and possibly even transform official Partition history.     

“Zimbabwe is Mine”: Mugabe,Murder, and Matabeleland

Searching for Sugar Man, the celebrated 2012 documentary of Sixto Rodriguez’s musical life, opens onto (but does not adequately address) important questions concerning musical circulation and reception. It is a story of two albums, Cold Fact (1970) and Coming From Reality (1971) that traveled in very different ways in the USA and South Africa and of how these travels were shaped by cultural politics and cultural circuits. But, it is also a story about the ways that the music industry complicated these cultural circuits by muddying and interrupting financial pathways—that is, by acting as a circuit breaker. Unfortunately, the film misses an opportunity to explore any of these stories in a sustained manner, crafting instead a narrative that engages them only to the extent that they help the director, Malik Bendjelloul, present a lost-and-found narrative of musical rebirth, featuring South African fans and audiences as the supporting cast. In choosing this entertaining, but myth-making path, the film itself configures new circuits and inaugurates additional circuit breakers that must be disentangled from and read in relation to Rodriguez’s musical life.     

Black is Beautiful: cuerpos negros en Triunfo

Spaniards and African-Americans share significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other during the twentieth century. To contribute to an exploration and understanding of these shared memories – which have received relatively little scholarly attention – this essay focuses on the presence of Black America in the 1960s, that is, the period of Late Francoist Spain. More specifically, it intends to initiate the study of the impact of the Black Civil Rights and Black Power movements on Spain’s progressive press. Focusing on a selection of articles published in the iconic leftist magazine Triunfo, it examines how the traditional European fascination with blackness manifests itself during the 1960s. In Triunfo’s articles we encounter suffering, violent, and degraded bodies, as well as revolutionary, political, and eroticized bodies. This combination reveals the problematic coexistence of solidarity and inspiration with an ethnographic and voyeuristic gaze that perpetuates the spectacularity of black bodies for global consumption. While foregrounding the challenges posed by writing and representing the Other, this study is also an attempt to reconstruct more fully the 1960s cultural and intellectual history of Spain and to approach the black liberation struggle from a transnational perspective.     

El aleph de memorias y los modos de documentar la división de Corea en la contemporaneidad

The aftermath of the Korean War (1950–1953), the North Korean refugees and political prisoners in the South, the separation of families, and others painful traces of the division of Korea (1945), have occupied a central place in South Korean cinema. However, for decades, the cinematic representations of the ideological conflict did not take into account the way in which violence and horror struck the Korean diaspora. The presence of these memories in Our School (2006) and Grandmother's Flower (2008) has produced a new challenge to the ways of seeing and narrating the historical memories in visual images. In this article, I will focus on revealing the values of the past in terms of memory space. I suggest a reading from a peculiar understanding of violence, oppression and discrimination. By comparing these two acclaimed films, I have attempted to rethink the boundaries and dispute processes of appropriating historical traumas and its relation to the multiple locations of historical memories.     

Remembering the Southeast Asian Chinese massacres of 1941-45

This article examines a series of wartime massacres (sook chings) conducted at various Southeast Asian sites with a view to teasing out broader lessons about justice, compensation, apology and the uses of memory both on the side of the victims as well as the nation that perpetrated the crimes. Characteristically, the sook chings of Southeast Asia, occurring in ethnically complex societies with mostly Chinese as victims, displayed a planned character of strictly ethnic and political “cleansing” that meets broad definitions of genocide. This article also considers historical memory. Obviously, as with Japanese war crimes in China, the sook chings of Southeast Asia are remembered locally. But also, as in China, remembrance of the sook chings has been modulated by the state, mostly in the interest of good relations and business links with Japan (with some notable exceptions). But, alongside the Nanjing Massacre, much contested in Japanese historiography, the sook ching massacres remain virtually unknown to the Japanese public, and have not become an issue between Japan and the Southeast Asian countries where these events occurred.     

Eugenics and the modern woman on trial in Spain: from the Primer curso eugénico (1928) to the trial of Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira (1934)

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Spanish supporters of eugenics encountered unprecedented opportunities to propagate their ideas and influence public discourse. This article argues that, following the collapse of the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1930, images of modern femininity were used to promote eugenic ideas to new audiences and the mujer moderna (modern woman) imagined as a key consumer of the modernist ideology of race regeneration. The association of Galtonian doctrine with new models of modern femininity affected an increase in the popularity of eugenics, evident in records of the extraordinary professional advancement of adolescent propagandist for eugenic reform, Hildegart (1914–33). Nevertheless, the capacity of Spanish eugenicists to propagate their ideas and shape social reform remained limited due to lingering anxieties about the dangers of popularising scientific knowledge about sex and reproduction among those who might be classified as “unprepared” on the basis of their age and gender.     

Mobility and fusion in the literary field: the maverick poetry of Dolors Miquel

Abstract

With the aim of exploring the correlations between sociological and aesthetic areas, this article examines the mobility of poet Dolors Miquel in the Catalan literary field, where she has occupied positions ranging from the poetics of orality to ruralism, and where her work has been printed in the commercial press as well as underground publications. This paper ties that mobility in with practices of fusion such as the parodical discourse and camp, based on the hypothesis that in literatures affected by subordination, as is the case of Catalan literature, the partial overlapping of the spheres of general and restricted consumption is conducive to the emergence of dual languages. The satire, the revision of tradition, and the purposely “low-cost” tone that characterise Miquel’s poetry can be read as discourses formed by the combination of popularised stagings and elitist knowledge. Although this combination compromises the distinction between select minority and mass public audiences, it offers new answers to a question posed in the Catalan literature from the 1960s on and which continues to apply today: the question as to the space to be occupied by popular literature.     

Unifying voices,creating publics: the uses of media form in contemporary Jordanian radio

ABSTRACT

Questions of media form have not received sufficient attention in recent studies of Arabic-language media. In Jordanian radio today, however, media form is a highly relevant discursive resource for broadcasters, who strategically invoke the ways in which different types of media communication are conceived and framed, in a metapragmatic manner that goes beyond the impact of merely technical distinctions between media forms. This article examines two examples of this process: the ‘unification’ of radio station voices in a memorial programme for a martyred fighter pilot broadcast in February 2015, where radio’s limitation to sound was used ideologically to assert national unity; and references to digital media on morning talk show programmes, which allow hosts to define audiences and forms of participation in radio conversations. These metapragmatic framings of media form, further, produce specific publics for Jordanian radio: groupings that include, and legitimize, certain segments of listenership—such as ‘true’ Jordanians or ‘the Jordanian people’—while implicitly excluding others. Grounded firmly in discursive data, this article thus provides much-needed nuance to our understanding of mass media in the Arabic-speaking Middle East today—and, ultimately, the genuine significance of media form in its social and cultural context.     

The Rhythms of the Yards: Urbanism,Backyards and Housing Policy in South Africa

Modernist planners became thieves of memory. Faustian in their eagerness to erase all traces of the past in the interest of forward momentum, of growth in the name of progress, their drive-by-windscreen surveys of neighbourhoods that they have already decided to condemn to the bulldozer, have been, in their own way, as deadly as the recent drive by gang shootings in Los Angeles. Modernist planners embracing the ideology of development as progress, have killed whole communities, by evicting them, demolishing their houses, and dispersing them to edge suburbs or leaving them homeless. They have killed whole communities by not understanding the loss and grieving that go along with losing one's home and neighbourhood and friends and memories. (Sandercock 1998:208)

When watching the news, you find that the government is only concerned with shack dwellers. What about us? We are sitting with big expectations that they will build us houses. We have grown so old sitting in the backyards.

Backyard shack-dweller, Johannesburg, 1999     

Awkward Talisman: War Memory,Reconciliation and Yasukuni

Yasukuni Shrine resonates with talismanic symbolism for both its critics and proponents and that is precisely why it is so controversial within Japan and between Japan and its neighbors. Controversy over Yasukuni is rooted in the broader historical debate about war memory, responsibility, and reconciliation. Competing narratives about this past send mixed signals to neighbors and prevent reconciliation. Despite Prime Minister Koizumi’s six visits, Yasukuni is an awkward talisman and many Japanese, including conservatives, oppose these visits. The Shrine’s image has been cast and no amount of artful repackaging will obscure its indelible links with Japan’s discredited Imperial ideology and the costs it exacted. The Yasukuni dilemma involves shifting the focal point of official war remembrance away from the Shrine to a secular war memorial where people and officials can pay respect to the war dead free from political agendas and historical baggage.

Mandela and excellent African leadership: Theory and lessons for practice from an appreciative thematic analysis

Nelson Mandela is highly regarded as an example of excellent leadership. Yet little has been done in communication studies to describe his leadership communication. Significantly, little has been done to locate and to theorise about his leadership style in relation to the African moral philosophy of ubuntu. the article presents an appreciative thematic analysis of how Mandela’s leadership communication practices were eulogised in tributes written in his memory in selected South African newspapers. An innovative method of appreciative thematic enquiry is used to arrive at three key themes of praise for the leadership of Mandela. Lessons for leadership are drawn out and highlighted.     

Remembering the family home: emotions,belonging, and migrant men in multicultural Australia

Abstract

The article opens a space in which to discuss migrant men's emotions and their engagement with family life. It focuses on Australia's Goan community to explore the fluidity of ethnic identity and its relation to remembered family and childhood. The article suggests a “family” that is not only a domestic home but is constituted across both time and space. The men's memories of their childhood and family life prior to arrival in Australia are central to their constitution of self within Australia. These memories provide the men with the emotional means to contest their positioning in Australia's multicultural framework. The men's memories of childhood are experienced beyond domestic and multicultural spaces, making remembered families an important part of their work lives and sense of success in Australia.     

Demonizing the enemy: the influence of Russian state-sponsored media on American audiences

ABSTRACT

There is growing anxiety about the influence of international propaganda on public opinion. Under what conditions can countries shift foreign public opinion against an adversary? Does making people aware that news is coming from a foreign source mitigate its influence? I examine these questions in the context of Russian propaganda in the United States. I subject subgroups of Americans to an article from Russia Today (RT), a Russian international television network, criticizing the Ukrainian government. I vary whether audiences are aware of the message source, and/or the intentions, of the Russian-funded network. I show that exposure to information about Ukrainian human rights violations lowers Americans’ evaluations of Ukraine irrespective of source awareness – indicating that making people more aware of foreign propaganda does not attenuate its influence. The findings have important implications for understanding the micro-level effects of international propaganda and the effectiveness of counter-propaganda strategies.