Women's Experiences in the Gwangju Uprising: Participation and Exclusion*

Because of the prevailing patriarchal ideology in Korea, studies of the Uprising in Gwangju have not attributed an active role in the resistance or even autonomous subjectivity to women who took part in the uprising. This article raises and analyzes how the Gwangju Uprising has been genderized and represented in a way that continues this genderization. All too often, women's autonomous subjectivity has been omitted. This article further analyzes women's experiences of resistance in the Gwangju Uprising as well as their experience of being excluded from formal political organizations.     

Comparing the Paris Commune and the Gwangju Uprising

This paper examines similarities and differences between the Paris Commune and the Gwangju Uprising. Although separated by more than a century, these two events contained many dynamics in common: the spontaneous emergence of popular organs of democratic decision-making; emergence of armed resistance from below; attenuation of criminal behavior in the cities; existence of genuine solidarity and cooperation among the citizenry; suspension of hierarchies of class, power and status; and appearance of internal divisions among the participants. While in Paris a previously formed group (the National Guard) seized power on March 18, in Gwangju people spontaneously formed the Citizens' Army. The Paris Commune played a role in the Gwangju Uprising through the conscious memory of many participants.     

The Socio-Economic Background of the Gwangju Uprising

The Gwangju Uprising is fully explained when it is viewed not as a single event for 10 days but as the eruption of socio-economic contradictions of South Korean society in the late 1970s. Located between the Bak Jeong-hee dictatorship and the June Breakthrough of the working class in 1987, it was an explosion of the confrontation between monopoly capitalists and the unruling classes that had been alienated in the process of industrialization in the 1960s to 1970s. This contradiction appeared as the confrontation of troops commanded by the new military coup leaders versus Gwangju citizens demanding democratization.     

A New Perspective on the Gwangju People's Resistance Struggle: 1980-1997

This paper is an attempt to suggest a new systematic interpretation of the history of the Gwangju People's Resistance Struggle and to investigate the factors that brought about the victory of the struggle. The period of that struggle is expanded from the 10-day uprising to an 18-year struggle constituting stepwise developmental stages. Factors of victory of the struggle suggested here include an enzyme remaining in the defeat of the uprising and nationwide solidarities of students, movement activists, and comprehensive democratic citizens.     

Civil Society and Political Action in Democratized Korea: Revamping Democratic Consolidation from a Participatory Perspective*

This essay aims to re-evaluate the quality of democratic consolidation in South Korea from a participatory democracy perspective. In order to do so, I, drawing on Barber's theory of strong democracy, redefine democratic consolidation in terms of the active citizenship and political dynamism that it breeds rather than in terms of stability, which overly prefers a liberal-pluralist, yet inherently conservative, civil society to a more vibrant and sometimes intractable form of civil society. Understanding democratic consolidation as an open-ended, non-teleological, and perennial struggle for citizenship, I then focus on the Koreans' collective response to the deaths of two teenage girls struck by a US military vehicle in 2002 to explore how Koreans critically re-evaluate their collective identity and actively repossess citizenship in civil society through the inculcation and practice of ch?ng, the Koreans' familial affectionate sentiment. I conclude by presenting “affectionate citizenship” as the most practicable model for Korean democracy.     

Teaching Obama: history,critical race theory and social work education

ABSTRACT

Barack Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), explores themes of race and identity up to the late 1980s in the life of the first African American president. The book emphasizes Obama's personal struggle as the son of an interracial couple, and the social and environmental context that shaped his growth and transformation. Using the tools of critical race theory, Freeman illustrates how Obama's autobiography can be used in the classroom to explore an individual's developing racial consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s, and as a prism through which students can understand what it means to live in the post-civil-rights-movement era. Obama's life history illuminates how the ideas and meanings of racial progress in the United States are contested and struggled over on a daily basis at both the micro and macro level.     

The North Korean factor in the improvement of Japanese intelligence capability

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, human rights have been a contentious issue for relations between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU), especially in the Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM). It is an issue that has constantly led to tensions in interregional cooperation. However, the ASEAN–EU dialogue on human rights has, in fact, had a significant impact on regional dynamics by stimulating the process of regional identity formation, especially in Southeast Asia. The core mechanism through which this development takes place is that of interaction, the process in which the two regional groupings engage while negotiating human rights policy. It can be argued, therefore, that interregional and intraregional human rights interactions are mutually dependent. ASEAN's rather confrontational mode of interaction with the European Union in relation to human rights has served as a catalyst for the dynamic growth of a collective definition of self in ASEAN. It has led to an ‘essentialization’ of ASEAN's idea of self as opposed to a common other, something which has undermined the possibility of maintaining an interregional dialogue that is not confrontational. However, it has also contributed to the development of a regional space for communicating about human rights and has thus played a central role in the gradual transformation of ASEAN's collective identity formation.     

Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988). By employing different modes of knowledge, the novelists draw out the micro-history embedded within the historical event, and resonate the voice of the Other, a creation of partisan politics. Bapsi Sidhwa appears as a social historian who perceives the event through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsi girl Lenny; Amitav Ghosh, akin to a modern historian, focuses on rigid and illusory territorial divisions from Thamma's (grandmother's) perspective; while Salman Rushdie emerges as a postmodern historian who draws attention to the ambiguity and opacity of both historical and fictional knowledge through Saleem Sinai, born on the day India won her independence. History, as it is perceived by the Other – each belonging to a different generation – is a palimpsest: it is always in a state of becoming, of being lived, evaluated and rewritten. Fiction, as it interprets the historical knowledge, fills in the fissures and absences between the history of the past and that of the present. The article will eventually study how fiction and history inform each other, and how the rhetoric of fiction and history together constitute a dialectical discourse on identity – mapped by borders – which sees a convergence of private and collective memories.     

Seeing White−Female Whiteness and the Purity of Children in Australian,Chinese and British Visual Culture

In this paper, I interrogate the expression and usage of ‘whiteness’ in Australian, British and Chinese visual culture. My approach is through reading local texts with an eye to transcultural systems of meaning, paying particular attention to the ways in which whiteness is used as a doubled category in sexual politics. The paper is formed through the performance of cross-cultural connectivities within an epistemological emphasis on the travelled theorist. The movement between Chinese, Australian and English ethical positions are constitutive of the perspectives expressed here; the perspectives are themselves concerned to look back and into those ethical positions. The performance works towards a recognition of the semiotic systems of power and identity, and therefore of the conditions of theoretical performance itself.     

Boricuas,African Americans,and Chicanos in the “far west”: Notes on the Puerto Rican pro‐independence movement in California, 1960s‐1980s 1

Abstract

From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Puerto Ricans developed a movement in California in support of Puerto Rico's political independence that allied itself with Anglos, African Americans, Chicanos and other Latinos. These alliances were strategic in extending the influence of the movement in solidarity with Puerto Rico's struggle beyond the relatively small and geographically dispersed Puerto Rican population in California. These implicit and explicit political alliances with other sectors led to an interesting ideological and cultural exchange between radical Puerto Rican organizations and these groups. These notes initiate an exploration of this period, through the oral histories of some of the participants in this movement. The focus of the initial exploration is on those who were in positions of leadership and influence in Northern and Southern California within the radical politics of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party—at the time, the main Puerto Rican socialist organization in Puerto Rico and the US.     

Postmodern War in the Age of Bush II

This study charts the genealogy and development of new trends in high-tech warfare that have emerged in the past decade, focusing on both the challenges and dangers. Attention is devoted to the Bush administration's military program and foreign policy moves, highlighting the ways Bush II intensifies the dangers of high-tech war while undermining efforts at collective security, environmental protection, and global peace. The argument here is that the volatile mixture of highly regressive, unilateralist, and militarist tendencies combined with high-tech weapons provides a clear and present danger of a protracted and frightening period of war. This mixture dramatically erupted in Bush's military response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and is currently intensifying dangers to world peace in the campaign some are labeling "World War III."     

The Indonesian 'New Order' as New Sovereign Space: Its Creation and Narrative of Self-concealment

This paper introduces and clarifies Carl Schmitt's analytical insights on emergencies and outlines their relevance in considerations of the creation of new sovereign spaces and polities. It then argues that Schmitt's analytical perspective may be used to understand recent and ongoing attempts by collective political actors to resolve circumstances of political and spatial unfamiliarity in East Asia. The tragic events of 30 September-1 October 1965 are examined in Indonesia's case. When perceived as an emergency, their resolution led to outcomes that were both anticipated by and beyond Schmitt's theoretical expectations. The most significant (and theoretically expected) outcomes of this historic moment - de facto sovereignty and a secure space - were so novel in the Indonesian context that their military creators were constrained to hide this fact. They did so by authoring a self-concealing narrative of both the moment itself and the political nature of the resulting 'New Order' polity. While the phenomenon of the self-concealing historical narrative was not anticipated in Schmitt's thinking, its appearance in the Indonesian case is, paradoxically, the clearest evidence of the occurrence of an emergency. Moreover, the creation and perpetuation of the new space by the emergency-ending actor, as well as the sovereign power to decide matters of identity and substance for this polity, matter more than the historical accuracy or longevity of the narrative designed to obscure their essence.     

Václav Havel's Absurd Route to Democracy

Abstract

This article examines Václav Havel's unconventional route to democracy. At the core of the enquiry is an analysis of the role his Absurdism played in the development of his thought and activism. The essay illustrates how a typically literary, non-democratic intellectual orientation sustained Havel in his struggle for democratic political change against the abuses of really existing socialism. Yet, Havel's thought did not stop there; he eyed Western liberal ism critically as well. Springing from his Absurdist sensibility was a vision of democracy that was neither wholly liberal nor socialist, yet quite practical. By making a case for reconsidering ideas that typically fall outside the purview of democratic theory, this article also suggests the possibility of critically rethinking democracy itself.     

Paul Hirst’s encounters with Economy and Society

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the homo economicus in Argentina in the context of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). While the worldviews of the military and neo-liberal economists of the time were very different, their common concern for distortions in economic and political life made them translatable. These economists provided a new economic identity that would be in tune with monetarist theory, replace ‘distorting’ collective identities and allow individuals to be governed from a distance. I argue that the homo economicus was performed through two sets of tools: consumer campaigns and the financial press. However, individuals did not always behave as expected. The contradictions of neo-liberalism, between its liberalism and its quest to create self-regulating spheres through active government intervention, led to the financial crisis of 1980. Economists later blamed the crash on the irresponsibility of market actors and expressed doubt regarding the self-regulating model they had promoted. In the conclusion, the legacy of the attempt to perform the homo economicus is assessed.     

BundOnline 2005 — The E-Government Initiative of the German Federal Administration

Abstract

The German e-govemment initiative BundOnline 2005 was launched by the German government in 2001 to ensure that citizens, enterprises and the administration itself can access the services provided by the federal administration easier, faster and at lower costs through the Internet. Euro 1.65 billion are devoted to this purpose. The German e-government initiative is characterized by central coordination, central implementation of shared components and the establishment of competence centers. Finally, the current status is presented especially with respect to the challenges applying to the German legal environment-German data protection requirements and the federal legislation.     

Romania and EUrope: Roma,Rroma and Ţigani as sites for the contestation of ethno-national identities

ABSTRACT

In November 2002 a Romanian journalist published an editorial attacking the Romanian authorities for 'playing the democratic card' and failing to prevent 'thieves, hooligans and criminals' from going to the West and disgracing all Romanians. The journalist, Lia Epure, entitled her article 'Rromania', a play on the Romanian government's spelling of Roma (i.e. 'Rroma'), and concluded that, if Romanians 'continue to accept identification with abnormals, then we will be become Rromania'. In response to vocal Romani and human rights group protests, Epure published a second article defending her right to say what 'even the president of the European Commission knows', that Romanians are not accepted as EUropean 'because of ?igani'. Woodcock explores how both elite and popular levels of Romanian discourse blame Romania's continued marginalization in EUrope on the actions of the ?igan, a fantastic Other, historically constructed out of ethno-nationalist Romanian discourses at moments of crisis for national identity. The discursive struggles for meaning with regard to the constructed ethnic Other highlight the paradox of post-socialist Romanian ethno-nationalism in an era of European Union accession: in order to be recognized as EUropean, Romanian discourse must relinquish the ?igan Other, even when it is this precise construction that has historically enabled Romania to claim a European identity.     

Theorizing identity: beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy

ABSTRACT

Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: ‘me’ and ‘us’; ‘me/us’ and ‘them’; ‘me’ and other ‘others’; ‘me’ and the transversal ‘us/them’. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.     

Servicing a heavy metal fandom posthumously: a sociosemiotic account of collective identity formation in Dio's memorial

This study is positioned in the burgeoning research field of collective memory and identity by offering a sociosemiotic account of the formation of fandom identity in the context of Ronnie James Dio's memorial. By drawing on the three major categories whereby collective memory is formed – that is artifacts, processes, places, as well as on the three key sociosemiotic metafunctions which are responsible for shaping a cultural event as sign system – the study scrutinizes the key semiotic resources that shape the experiential event of a memorial. This paper contributes to the extant literature on memory and identity by offering a nuanced, sociosemiotically informed reading of a heavy metal legend's memorial, while attending to the bespoke semiotic resources that comprise it.