Introduction to dalit poems

Abstract

The word dalit in Marathi, the language spoken by 50 million people in the state of Maharashtra in Western India, means “downtrodden,” “ground down,” or “depressed.” A caste-less word which ex-Untouchables have chosen for the new school of literature they have created, it includes all those who have suffered from the religio-social system. Short stories by ex-Untouchables began to appear in the 1950s, but the great swelling of creativity — poetry, novels, short stories, plays — appeared only in the late 1960s. The school is acknowledged by the Marathi literary establishment as a new and important development in the long history of Marathi literature. It represents a new voice, and its themes are protest, grievance, pride — and often revolution.     

The beginnings of a feminist consciousness: A review essay

Abstract

“Leaf abscission” is a term used by American military men to designate their chemical war in Viet Nam. The term like its sister word “defoliation,” is meant to suggest that the dumping of herbicides and other chemicals over a tiny piece of land that has also been the victim of the most intense bombing in world history has helped to thin out a few troublesome trees and shrubs while causing no significant damage to anything else at all. On the contrary, the use of herbicides and other chemicals sprayed by the American military in Viet Nam has already caused untold misery to thousands of innocent civilians.     

Melby: the mandate of heaven

Abstract

Until recently young scholars have been content to study China in a vacuum while ignoring the background and the climate in which the whole study of modern China grew up in this country. China was just another dusty attic available for scholarly rummaging. There was data for all. Few stopped to examine the people who were doing the rummaging, by whom they were being educated, and the ends to which their work was put. Even fewer cared to remind their classes, or themselves, that the work being done and the ideas being set forth were largely the products of men who had either survived or missed a purge. With rare exceptions several kinds of “China specialists” survived; the cold warriors who believed in the international communist conspiracy, and those who retreated into a kind of academic senility or liberal limbo land where value-free truth was found equidistant between any two current extremes.     

What happened in Korea? Rethinking Korean history 1945–1953

Abstract

The Pueblo incident was a stunning reminder of the hysteria and racism associated with the word Korea in the U.S. In spite of Vietnam and the great changes that have taken place within American society, the U.S. government and the military had little trouble in resuscitating the spectre of “brainwashing” and torture. The most diabolical cunning was attributed to the Koreans, who had legally captured the Pueblo and its crew. But as though at the touch of a switch, the American media and much of the nation again began to call for blood as they had done in the years 1950 to 1953. It would be a mistake to underestimate the success of America's campaign of vilification against the Korean people and the Korean revolutionary movement. At times the phobia reaches absurd proportions.     

The Web as a Marginalizing Technology: The structure of web-based resources on South Asia

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW), a potentially non-hierarchical and open mode of information presentation and sharing based on hyperlinked text, has emerged over the last few years as the most celebrated form of information access in most countries that have a well-developed telecommunications infrastructure. From the time—not long ago—when the word “internet” would produce confused looks, we have come to a time in which the terms “Internet” and “World Wide Web” are virtually synonymous and instantly understood. Much of the Web is in the process of becoming one huge overpowering corporate resource, but even in the midst of this commercial inundation, progressive political organizers and a broad swath of progressive organizations around the world have also begun utilizing the Web both for broadcasting and for collecting information.     

Facebook: An Emerging Arena for Politics of Self-Determination in northern Cyprus?

ABSTRACT

The present article aims to expand scholarship on the political role of social media by focusing on the case of Facebook and the self-determination claims of Turkish Cypriots vis-à-vis Turkey. Drawing upon a virtual ethnography of relevant Facebook sites and groups, this article scrutinises whether social media offer an innovative public platform for the politics of self-determination or on-line claims are in reality formed and negotiated in the same manner as the offline ones. The article concludes that Turkish Cypriots’ Facebook activism may very well be for strengthening their community, shielding their distinct characteristics from mainland Turkey and raising their self-esteem, rather than indicating demands for complete autonomy in the traditional political sense of the word and/or statehood.     

Communications: Exchange on the Philippines

Abstract

In the December 1973 issue you printed an article by Ms. Luzviminda Francisco in which she attempted to sketch in the “nature of America's policy of aggression, the depth of popular mass resistance to the American forces and the duration of the struggle….” (p. 3) in order to move against “Filipino false consciousness” (p. 2) of the American connection in the history of the Philippines. It is a brief survey and rather well done, although one may quibble about the relationship of excesses (what a tame word compared to the record she presents!) of war and the nature of imperialism as well as implying that there was a “nation,” a “Philippine society,” or a “national struggle” (p. 3) before the late 19th century, at the earliest.     

Crime,punishment, family violence,and the cloak of legal invisibility

Abstract

In this article, the authors trace how the Anglo-Australian system of criminal law constructs crime within the family differently from other forms of crime. The zone of legal impunity for intrafamilial crime was carved out by special defences and immunities, such as provocation and marital rape, as well as policing policies and practices that effectively decriminalised “domestic” forms of physical and sexual abuse. Legal impunity was never absolute, and there were notable exceptions where the familial and gendered aspects of the crime in fact aggravated the offence, such as the law's treatment of spousal murder by females as a form of “petty treason”, warranting the most severe punishment of burning at the stake. Reforms in the late twentieth century removed overt forms of gender discrimination from the criminal law, exposing a new legal visibility of crime within “the family”, though as the authors conclude, there are still remnants of differential treatment in fields of sentencing law and practice.     

Visions of Tsafendas: Literary Biography and the Limits of “Research”

Abstract

Research seminar, research cluster, research output. The word is almost a fetish within the contemporary academy—but what does “research” actually mean in a discipline like literature? And what happens when a research project overspills its bounds, or pushes up against disciplinary limits and protocols? In this piece, I explore such questions via the figure of Demetrios Tsafendas, the "mad Greek" who assassinated apartheid Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966, supposedly acting on instructions from a tapeworm inside him. It is one of the strangest facts in South African history; it is also, of course, a kind of fiction, and one that has been refracted into a range of literary and artistic works. Reading across both official and “creative” archives, I address a range of methodological problems that I encountered in attempting an academic treatment of Tsafendas and his (as the presiding apartheid judge put it) “useless life”.     

Sandakan no. 8 brothel

Abstract

Karayukisan is a word derived from two longer words which mean “one who has traveled to China,” but means itself an overseas prostitute who, from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the First World War, had left behind her homeland of Japan and gone abroad to sell herself to foreigners; such prostitutes went not only to China and Siberia in the north and to the countries of Southeast Asia in the south but also to India and Africa. They came from Japan as a whole, but especially, it is said, from Kyushu: from the island of Amakusa and the Shimabara Peninsula. That most shared this origin was due, basically, as I shall explain later, to the poverty of these regions, whose character derived from both natural and social causes. Indeed, these prostitutes and the poor peasant women of Shimabara and Amakusa undoubtedly represent two branches of the same tree.     

Review essay: Western Marxists in flux over Chinese Marxism

Abstract

Where is Marxism going in China? Not far, according to Chinese Marxism in Flux (1978-84). A prominent claim throughout this collection of essays is that Marxism has been used as an ideological club rather than a liberating theory and that this misuse of Marxism can be traced to metatheoretical mistakes. The result, the authors seem to claim, is that revolutionary change has been restricted to economic reforms. There is “constant stress on the reality of Marxist [and sometimes Althusserian] categories” (p. 9), and “some [most?] contributors … are quite sympathetic to aspects of the ‘left’ thinking of previous years” (p. 2).     

The weaknesses of Vietnamization

Abstract

Much stress has been put on the fact that the United States has been able to increase Saigon’s various armed forces to over 5 million men, armed with the most modern and destructive weapons. From such statistics, most Vietnam-watchers assume that the United States and the Thieu regime have been able to “extend” their control into the country-side simply through the sheer numbers of their forces and that the National Liberation Front’s “base” has naturally contracted as a result.     

The German Parliament

ABSTRACT

In the words of Louis Marie de La Haye Cormenin (1788-1864), the French lawyer, politician and pamphleteer, in the Livre des orateurs (1843), ‘Four people know the secret of the weakness of the parliamentary orator: his doctor, his confessor, his lover and his stenographer’. Stenographers worked for the first time in 1840 in the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament. The Bureau of Stenographers as a permanent office was established in 1868. For the Upper House and the House of Representatives, a joint Bureau of Stenographers was organized with two superiors, four auditors, twelve ordinary stenographers and two rotation guides. The stenographers worked at five-minute intervals with no backlog of work. The stenographic report of each session was published half an hour later after the last word had been spoken in the session room. The parliamentary stenographer was required to have a university degree and to take a shorthand exam. Journalists, lawyers, professors and also engineers were employed as stenographers. Reproductive intelligence, quick comprehension, responsiveness, and craftsmanship were some of the qualities that were required to be a qualified parliamentary stenographer.     

Letter to the Committee on Fellowships

Abstract

Thailand has historically been important to the West, especially the United States, as a stable capitalist link in the Pacific rim area of economic activity. When the political stability of the area was upset in the late 1940s and early 1950s, private and public American organizations responded with new techniques known as the green revolution, whose objective was to increase agricultural production and thus decrease the chances of revolution. It is important to stress that at this stage the long-term dangers of regional instability were more important to the development of the green revolution as a policy than were any specific American economic interests in Thailand.     

OF FIRE AND REJUVENATION: IN SEARCH OF THE ‘POST-’ IN ‘POST- APARTHEID’

ABSTRACT

In the novels, Scatter the ashes and go (Ravan 2002) and Rumours (Jacana Media 2013), Mongane Wally Serote depicts post-apartheid through a leitmotif central to which the soldier of the African National Congress military wing, ‘Umkhonto We Sizwe’ (MK), is ostensibly caught in an interrupted odyssey. In Scatter the Ashes and go, this soldier has returned from exile in various Southern African countries to a South Africa that is on the threshold of the post-apartheid era. By contrast, in Rumours, the soldier, having arrived from exile in 1990, then goes away to Mali in search of a solution for his post-traumatic stress disorder. The article imputes these disruptions on to the failure to ‘properly’ mourn the victims of apartheid's extra-judicial killing squads, and goes on to note that, as a result of Serote's attention to the subsequent angst, post-apartheid appears as a continuum of trauma. The discussion then proceeds to posit that the resolutions to these diversions are hinted at in these novels’ elaborate motifs of fire, and proposes that the depictions of this pattern recall how Batswana suture the spiritual, psychological and social fractures consequent upon death – especially the death that occurs unnaturally, and upon the breadwinner's return home from a long absence. The bulk of the exploration pays attention to the nuances of this symbol of fire, recognising it as an integral component of a social rite populated by a dynamic interplay between poetry and music.     

Sigitas Geda: Metaphorizität als Prinzip der Textkohärenz im Poem Strazdas

Abstract

This study focuses on the cycle of poems “Strazdas”, written by the Lithuanian poet Geda (1945–1992). It shows how the understanding of the reader changes with every verse. In the centre of the analysis we find the word strazdas. On the one hand, it is the name of a Lithuanian romantic poet, on the other it means thrush. Both the poet and the bird are keys to understanding these poems. The study shows the interdependence of these lines of interpretation and connects them with a third line: Lithuania. The interpretation lines are founded on semantic and syntactic analysis, using Nekvapils' concept of compounded formations.

Die sprachliche Form ist erhaben und vermeidet das Gewöhnliche <tt>o idiotikon</tt>, wenn sie fremdartige Ausdrücke <box>enikoi</box>verwendet. … Doch wenn jemand nur derartige Wörter verwenden wollte, dann wäre das Ergebnis entweder ein Rätsel {ainigma} oder ein Barbarismus <b>arbarismos</b>: wenn das Erzeugnis aus Metaphern besteht, ein Rätsel, wenn es aus Glossen besteht, ein Barabarismus. Denn das Wesen des Rätsels besteht darin, unvereinbare Wörter miteinander zu verknüpfen und hiermit gleichwohl etwas wirklich Vorhandenes zu bezeichnen.     

Les comites permanents de l'assemblee nationale constituante française mai 1848 — mai 1849

Summary

For most of this century the history of the Elizabethan and Jacobean parliaments was dominated by the interpretations of Sir John Neale and Wallace Notestein. They argued that the major feature of these parliaments was the emergence of an organized opposition which contributed greatly to the constitutional development of England through their conflicts with the monarchy. This view has recently been challenged by a number of historians who stress parliament's role as a legislative body, arguing that there was a high degree of co‐operation and agreement, and that there was no organized opposition.

This paper suggests that these two alternative models — political arena/ conflict and legislative body/co‐operation — are overstated and that a better model is to consider parliament as an arena in which different ‘interest groups’, ‘factions’ or ‘lobbies’ operated. It investigates a number of lobbies which are discernible from parliamentary, state and local archives and concludes that such a model enables us to return the organized puritan opposition to the history of these parliaments without their becoming the dominant feature. It allows for the interpretation that the primary function of parliament was legislative, and that this was achieved through co‐operation and consensus, while not under‐estimating the conflicts that legislation could provoke.     

Legitimite et droit de resistance au xxe siecle: La conscience religieuse et la guerre civile espagnole

SUMMARY

In the early nineteenth century, English common law did not recognize absolute slavery within Britain's borders. Nevertheless, slavery did exist in a number of British colonies. In 1807, thanks to the impassioned efforts of the Anti-Slavery Society, the British Parliament made the slave trade illegal. The Slavery Abolition Bill was passed by both Houses of Parliament and it received royal assent on 29 August 1833, but it did not come into force until 1 August 1834. On that date slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. Yet, despite this ban, there were many exceptions to its automatic application throughout the imperial possessions. A loyal servant of the Crown, the colonial judge Sir John Jeremie (1795–1841), conducted a personal campaign against slavery and racism in the colonies of the British Empire. His reflections, based on the reality of daily colonial life, offered a technical rather than doctrinaire contribution to the success of the anti-slavery cause. Jeremie was to pay a high price for his ideas, however, owing to deep-rooted prejudices and the strong economic influence of the powerful caste of slave traders. His Four Essays on Colonial Slavery was published in 1831. This work had considerable influence on British parliamentary debates, and it was strongly attacked by supporters of slavery. As a jurist and legal practitioner, during his cursus honorum (as lawyer, colonial judge and ultimately his appointment as Governor of Sierra Leone), Jeremie brought a practical perspective in writings to the debates which animated the Westminster Parliament, even after the approval of the Abolition Act. Despite the slave trade being abolished in the British Empire, slavery per se continued to be legal in some form for many decades to come. Hence, the issue of slavery continued to be a subject with which Jeremie was associated for the remainder of his life. Another interesting historical source is Jeremie's correspondence with Members of Parliament and the British government. This constitutes a lively exchange with London and testifies to the enlightened and progressive foreign policy vision of this active member of the Anti-Slavery Society. Sir John Jeremie was also interested in migration and integration-related issues, as can be seen from primary sources such as letters and dispatches. The wide variety of his correspondence bears testament to the battle he fought until his death.     

Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ – one more appraisal

An addition to the ocean of Lawrentiana needs an apology. The following essay was conceived at a graduate class which the present writer held at the School of History at Tel‐Aviv University in 1974 on T. E. Lawrence, the man and his image. Ten intelligent men and women, most of them in their twenties, all committed and reasonably well‐read, could not but produce in the course of an academic year ideas and thought splinters worth recording. In the interests of professional sobriety – students of political history sticking to their last – I have here cut what does not pertain to Lawrence ‘of Arabia’, regretfully and with marginal exceptions. The responsibility for the account is of course entirely mine.

That TEL should be able after this eternity to inspire balanced enthusiasm as a ‘think piece’ is in itself a testimonial.     

Film and lantern lectures

The Dutch East Indies. By Amry Vandenbosch. University of California Press. 1941. (Second Edition.)

Wanderer Between Two Worlds: An Autobiography. By Norman Bent‐wich. 8/1/2>” x 5/3/4>”. Pp. vii+358. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., Ltd. 12s. 6d.

Gertrude Bell. By M. R. Ridley. Blackie. 206 pp. Map. Four illustrations. 3s. 6d.

Modern Iran. By L. P. Elwell‐Sutton. Pp. xii+234. Illustrations, maps and plans. Routledge. 1941. 12s. 6d.

Ruz‐gar i Nau. A quarterly illustrated magazine in Persian. No. 2, Autumn, 1941. New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., Ltd.; London: Hodder and Stoughton. is. net or 20 cents.

Turkey and Britain, is.

This Impertinence. By Peter Arnott. Jenkins. 12s. 6d

Soviet Asia : Its Records and its Problems. By E. S. Bates. Pp. 191 and a map. Jonathan Cape. 8s. 6d.

Green Prison. Twenty Years in Thailand. By W. Leigh Williams. 8/1/2>” x 6”. Pp. 352. Illustrations. London. Herbert Jenkins. 12s. 6d.

The Earth is the Lord's. A novel by Taylor Caldwell. Pp. 400. Collins. 19.41. 9s. 6d.

Genius of Friendship:T. E. Lawrence. By Henry Williamson. 10/1/4>” x 6/3/4>”. Pp. 78. Faber and Faber. 12s. 6d.