Yugoslavia,an ‘Almost Forbidden Word’ Cultural policy in times of nationalism—interview with Dubravka Ugresic

In the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia many intellectuals, including writers, artists, and scholars, supported nationalist right-wing regimes and promoted narratives of national exceptionalism to justify relevant political decisions and cultural policies. The intellectuals who opposed these regimes were frequently silenced (censored and/or assassinated) and many of them eventually left the country. The following interview features the renowned writer Dubravka Ugresic, who analyzes Croatia's cultural and political climate at the outset of the war and explains how her opposition to the wartime Croatian regime led to her public ostracism and subsequent decision to emigrate to the Netherlands. Emphasizing the role that nationalist intellectuals played in altering former Yugoslav cultural policies, Ugresic discusses the politics of language, literature, and literary canon in the new states that emerged from Yugoslavia's violent dismemberment. Ugresic also reflects on how the new politics of ethnic identity affects international book markets in terms of publishing decisions, distribution of literature, and classification of writers according to national affiliation. In this process, Ugresic notes, Yugoslavia itself has become an “almost forbidden word,” and its nurturing of multiethnic and supranational literature and culture has been supplanted by narrowly nationalist cultural policies.     

African American Art in a Post-Black Era

The term “post-black art” was invented in the late 1990's by Thelma Golden, curator and executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and Glenn Ligon, an African American artist. This paper examines the origins of the term, its definition and the extent to which the phrase challenges cultural practices that adversely impact artists of color and women. A discussion of the works of two African American artists who worked in the early part of the 20th century provides historical perspective on the origins of damaging cultural practices which prevailed for many decades. Though the civil rights movement instigated real change, the era unwittingly played a role in introducing cultural policies and practices that continued to limit the way in which the work of women and artists of color was presented and interpreted to the public. The paper concludes by observing the work of individual artists who circumvented those limiting cultural policies and practices and who in their imaginatively inventive ways of engaging the public were the precursors to the current "post-black" point of view.     

Anjela duval: Breton poet, peasant and militant

In 1981 Brittany lost one of its national heroes, a self-educated woman of extraordinary vision and talent, an adamant defender of her native Breton language, and a full-time farmer. Anjela Duval began writing poetry when she was in her early fifties, and within 10 years was recognized by many of her compatriots as one of the most accomplished and powerful poets of the language. A frequent theme of her poetry was the necessity for Bretons to reclaim their language and their culture from the encroachments of the French: as has literary fame spread, so did her prominence as a leader in the cultural and linguistic revival in Britanny during the 1960s and '70s. Her modest farm became a mecca for poets, writers, singers, and other artists and intellectuals committed to the promotion of the Breton language and culture: her literary and emotional impact on contemporary Bretons has been enormous.This article sketches in the main outlines of this unusual woman's life, filling them in with selected examples of her copious poems (which the author has translated from the Breton). A brief consideration of Duval from a feminist perspective is provided in the final section.     

the new woman and ‘the dusky strand’: the place of feminism and women's literature in early Jamaican nationalism

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves.     

The National and International in Making a Feminist: the case of Alexandra Gripenberg

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the interdependence of the national and international in Alexandra Gripenberg's (1859–1913) feminist activism in her native country Finland, as well as in her international work, particularly within the International Council of Women, and in doing so contributes to the research on transfers and networking across borders in the formation of feminist politics. The national and international were seen by Gripenberg as inseparable and both aspects were particularly intertwined in her work to encourage the establishment of national councils of the ICW in various countries. The analysis discloses how the negotiation between the national and transnational was intersected and complicated by class-related politics, exemplified by Gripenberg's ambivalence towards the introduction of universal suffrage in 1906 Finland. The article also sheds light on the difficulties in creating a shared sisterhood across borders and how nation was used as a criterion in classifying more and less advanced nations in terms of gender equality. Influenced by the prevalent manner many Western European and US feminists had of viewing themselves as superior, Gripenberg defined Protestant, Anglo-American and Scandinavian countries as models for other nations. Finally the article addresses how Gripenberg responded to occasions when her national and international loyalties conflicted and shows the importance of internationalism in coping with the distress on home ground. International feminist sisterhood offered an opportunity to enjoy life with social equals.     

Impossible Hosting: D'lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

“(L)Activists and Lattes”: Breastfeeding Advocacy as Domestic Performance

This article considers how “lactivists” (lactation activists) consciously stage the act of public breastfeeding as a means of political advocacy, cultural resistance, and ideological subversion. Through the exploration of a specific nurse-in protest (the 2004 Nurse at Starbucks campaign in Silver Spring, Maryland), the author explores how the “domestic performance” of nurse-ins force spectators to confront (and hopefully, reconsider) latent and overt assumptions about motherhood in relation to parenting proficiency, civic responsibility, maternal sexuality, and political efficacy. In so doing, the author discloses how nurse-ins subvent traditional perceptions of mothers and mothering as a way of instigating social change.     

Italian Feminisms

The article focuses on the politics of representation in Kosova since the United Nations took over ‘peace management’ in 1999. It uses UN propaganda posters (political pedagogy) and local nationalist political advertising as a way to read the multiple gendered discourses of representation. It shows how gender is used relationally between competing forces – the ‘international community’ and nationalists – as a tool to ensure UN's imposition of Western policies and norms and as a mechanism for local politicians to consolidate their domination of the domestic/private sphere. Moreover, it discusses the price paid to mimic the West: how Kosovar politicians have sought to ‘undo’ national identity in favour of a Western self-representation through a gendered abnegation of Islam. Thus, as an intrinsic part of the discourse of ‘peace-building’, these images represent the site of power production, domination, negotiation, and rejection, involving the collaboration of different actors, institutions, and individuals. Three specific points will be made: first, the article seeks to show that a Western political modernization discourse has, paradoxically, reinforced patriarchal relations of power and traditional gender roles in Kosova through the subjugation of women. Second, it explains the inability to resolve competing Albanian narratives – one relying on the legacy of peaceful resistance and the other on the armed struggle against Serbian domination during the 1990s. Third, through the intermeshing of international peace-keepers and local nationalist patriarchs, it will show how the militarization of culture is perpetuated through, and in relationship to, gender.     

‘A Little Tragedy of Two Races and Two Traditions’: gender and nationality in the historical fiction of Hilda Vaughan

This article discusses the representation of gender and nationality in the historical fiction of Hilda Vaughan, a Welsh woman writing in English during the early twentieth century. It offers a detailed discussion of her second novel, Here are Lovers (1926), but also makes reference to other texts. These texts are located within the historical context of the interwar period when nationality was a key issue for both feminist campaigners and emerging Welsh nationalist politics. The article draws upon the theoretical work of Williams and Foucault and argues that Vaughan's fiction offers a particularly sustained exploration of the gendering and classing of national identity.     

feminist-nation building in Afghanistan: an examination of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)

Women-led political organizations that employ feminist and nationalist ideologies and operate as separate from, rather than associated with, male-dominated or patriarchal nationalist groups are both significant and under-explored areas of gender, feminist, and nationalism studies. This article investigates the feminist and nationalist vision of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). RAWA exemplifies an effective political movement that intersects feminist and nationalist politics, where women are active, rather than symbolic, participants within the organization, and help to shape an ideological construction of the Afghan nation. RAWA subsequently links its struggle for women's rights (through feminism) with its nationalist goals for democracy and secularism. This article also analyses RAWA's use of conservative nationalist methods to reproduce the future of the organization and to develop ‘citizens’ for its idealized nation, while countering existing patriarchal social and familial structures through a re-configuration of women's roles in the family, community, and nation. This inquiry is based on geographic and feminist examinations of RAWA's organizational structure, literature, and political goals obtained through content analyses of RAWA's political literature and through interviews with RAWA members and supporters living as refugees in Pakistan in the summer of 2003 and winter of 2004/05. RAWA is an instructive example of counter-patriarchal and nationalist feminist politics that questions patriarchal definitions of the nation and its citizenry by reconfiguring gender norms and redefining gender relations in the family as a mirror of the nation.     

Homonormative Collusions and the Subject of Rights: Reading <Emphasis Type="Italic">Terrorist Assemblages</Emphasis>

This essay provides an analytic review of Jasbir Puar’s book, Terrorist Assemblages (2007), situating her discussion and analysis of “homonationalism” within the context of recent developments in queer theory in the USA, and specifically, critiques of queer liberalism and gay imperialism; racial analyses of hetero- and homo-normative formations; and challenges to identity politics and representational frameworks that dominate LGBT studies. It takes up Puar’s interest in finding new methods and ‘reading’ practices to track certain shifts in LGBT politics and to account for alignments between (white) queerness and normative, nationalist and imperial interests. Engaging with and expanding on her analysis, this paper discusses the challenge that Terrorist Assemblage poses to the identity categories that undergird human rights campaigns, and addresses the racist and nationalist sentiments that she locates within them.     

Marketing edwardian feminism: Dora Marsden,votes for women and the freewoman

Although Dora Marsden had resigned from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and repudiated the principles of the women's suffrage movement by the time she founded The Freewoman in 1911, she recognised the marketing potential of her suffragette persona. Thus, despite envisioning her journal as a post-suffragist ‘little magazine’, she used her status as a famed WSPU organiser prior to The Freewoman's publication to garner suffragette subscribers and advertisements for women's goods and services. After The Freewoman's debut, Marsden lost most of her original advertisers and subscribers, many of whom accused the editor of having misled them as to the nature of her journal. The author argues that Marsden's rejection of the journalistic model provided by the mainstream suffrage press and willingness to allow The Freewoman to slide into bankruptcy signalled a strategic bid for the ‘cultural capital’ that accrues to writers who forego mass readerships in order to gain avant-garde reputations     

Imperialist Women and Conservative Activism in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain: the political world of Violet Milner

While elite women's imperialist activism in early-twentieth-century Britain is now well recognised, little attention has been paid to how this female imperialism was integrated into broader right-wing politics. The adherence of many right-wing women to a conventionally ‘masculine’ model of empire is also under-researched. This article explores the connections between imperial and wider right-wing politics, the new forms of Conservative activism for women they generated, and the ‘masculinist’ gender model of this imperial Conservatism, through an investigation of the political life of Violet Milner (1872–1958). It emphasises the impact of the South African war in forming imperial ideologies which influenced attitudes to ‘domestic’ as well as imperial politics; highlights the degree to which elite women participated in the campaigns of the Edwardian radical right over tariff reform, national service and Ulster, and in the interwar ‘diehard’ campaigns over India; and traces the enduring influence of turn-of-the-century imperial attitudes into the post-war era as demonstrated by her revival of the ‘Milner religion’ and her editorship of the National Review.     

Theorising The Everyday

This article reflects on the gender politics integral to theories and cultural histories of the everyday in the contemporary Humanities and (to a lesser extent) Social Sciences. Since the 1990s feminist scholars have observed the gender bias integral to many canonical twentieth-century theories of the everyday. In spite of these observations, I suggest that much everyday life theory and recent studies that map a cultural and intellectual history of the everyday continue to reflect this gender bias. I suggest that one possible reason for this is women’s historical exclusion from the realm of theoretical discourse broadly conceived, and propose that in order to trace alternative critiques and histories of the everyday feminist scholars need to look to alternative modes of cultural and discursive production—for example, literature, the essay and art—through which to trace implicit and explicit analyses of the everyday by women. The second part of the article turns to the work of the twentieth-century photographer Dorothea Lange as a case in point. While Lange’s work has never been discussed in studies of the everyday, the concept underpins her practice and her work offers some suggestive points of comparison to approaches to the everyday both in Lange’s time and in contemporary theory. Focusing on her little-known essays ‘Documentary Photography’ and ‘Photographing the Familiar’ and some of her images of rural California during the Depression years, I examine her account of the role of the ‘familiar’ and everyday to the social, aesthetic and ethical potential of documentary photography as a medium at the time.     

Recovering hurston, reconsidering the choreographer

This article addresses the 'invisibilization' of Zora Neale Hurston's staging of black diasporic folk dance in the 1930s and queries the politics of restoring her to dance history. The recovery of Hurston's dance practice, I argue, provides an opportunity to re-assess the very terms we use to talk about dance as a form of cultural production and, more specifically, raises questions about who merits the designation 'choreographer.' At the same time, the article explores the risks of claiming for Hurston a status she did not seek—and one that was not available to her as a black woman—in her lifetime.     

Bridging cross-cultural feminisms: annie besant and women's rights in England and India, 1874-1933

Abstract

Annie Besant was a Victorian radical whose outspoken views included advocacy of women's rights and opposition to British imperial policies. In her mid-forties she went to live in India. Contesting British attempts to Westernize Indian society, Besant found herself in the seemingly anomalous position of defending traditional Indian patriarchy and resisting efforts to reform the status of Indian women. Such conservatism brought on Besant criticism not only from Western liberals and Christian missionaries, but also from many Indian social reformers. When she gradually shifted her views and voiced her support for Indian women's rights, Indian nationalists condemned her as a British imperialist. The conflict between loyalty to national heritage and opposition to traditional patriarchy is one that colonized women have commonly experienced. By examining how an anti-imperialist British feminist responded to the question of women's reform in India, this paper offers another perspective on the complexities of this dilemma.     

Assessing the impact of women's movements: Sisterhood and after

Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project, illuminates the impact of women's movements in the UK in tracing the life histories of key UK-based activists and intellectuals, but it more directly eludicates the biographical consequences of activism. This, I suggest, has a different but also important value, not simply in terms of understanding the impact on the many individuals who do become life-long activists, but as a contribution to cultural memories that show how gender relations can be different and better. In this respect, oral history projects can be part of a process of feminist influence that goes beyond the more measurable aspects of campaigns.