Congresses versus caudillos: the untold history of democracy in Latin America,with special emphasis on New Granada (Colombia), 1830–60. A new research agenda

SUMMARY

Since their origins, congresses played significant roles in the emerging states of Latin America following independence from Spain. Yet their protagonism has been overshadowed by the so-called caudillos, the strongmen who seem to have dominated the politics of the region during most of the nineteenth century. This article argues that congresses were central political actors in Latin America during the century and it does so by examining their various functions. Congresses served to form governments, to define the legislative agenda and to limit the power of the executive. Congress was the institution around which political parties and their leaders were formed, while the practices of representative government developed.     

Why Weren’t We Taught? Exploring Frontier Conflict Through the Lens of Anzac

This article examines public understandings of two key strands of Australian history that sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of remembrance: frontier conflict and Anzac. The former, W. E. H. Stanner argued in 1968, was subsumed in a vacuum of silence, lost to popular consciousness in a wilful act of forgetting. Despite a wealth of subsequent scholarship documenting the violence and dispossession that characterised European colonisation, considerable gaps in public awareness about these foundational events remain. Anzac, in contrast, has become a defining narrative of Australian history for large segments of the general population and the political class. Recent scholarship suggests that this prominence has served to mask other, important histories of the continent, including frontier conflict. In this article, we argue that this is neither a necessary nor essential binary, and further, that one can inform the other. The written reflections of 320 tertiary students enrolled in a course about Australian military history provide insights into the ways that frontier conflict is popularly understood and how the fascination with Anzac can be leveraged to raise awareness of the violent historical dimensions of colonisation.     

An Honourable Profession: Public Employees and Identity Construction in Chile, 1880–1920

This paper analyses how public employees at two Chilean government offices constructed their occupational identities. In contrast to the vast majority of previous work, which took the 1920s as its starting point, this study focuses on the period between 1880 and 1920. Additionally, the construction of identity is analysed in direct relation to performance in the workplace. The paper asserts that public criticism of their performance prompted public employees to develop an image of themselves based on the concept of their honourability as competent and honest workers.     

“发展”话语下的韩国新村运动

本文结合韩国学者对新农村运动的众多类研究,试图指出韩国新村运动是顺应西方“发展”话语的产物。而这套在西方形成的话语体系,在韩国的新村运动中落实,实际上经过了两次“本土化”的过程。第一次是总统朴正熙采取了拉平城乡差距的发展方略;但这个策略欲图实现的目的,却在韩国传统乡村的社会结构中加以实施的时候遭到了扭曲。因此,韩国新村运动也是“发展”本身无法完全自上而上取得成功的典型个案。     

The ambivalent Apostle of 1953: a liminal reading of the centenary of José Martí

This article has common Cuban motifs at its core: the prevalent obsession with the notion of collective identity, the ideological and psychological importance of national anniversaries, and the omnipresence of the archetypal patriot José Martí. It approaches all from a particular theoretical perspective, however, and thus presents a new reading of the so-called ideario martiano and of the Cuban “national narrative” at a critical moment of the island’s historical trajectory: 1953, the centenary of Martí’s birth. Taking its lead from cultural anthropology (and particularly from the work of Victor Turner), this article presents the half-century since independence in 1902 as a post-colonial “rite of passage” punctuated by a series of turning points, or “limens,” within which the sense of national identity was exposed to sustained scrutiny by public intellectuals and activists. The article provides evidence of such intense collective introspection in 1953 when commemorations of Martí’s centenary stimulated a re-examination of the Republic in the light of his luminous example. Importantly, this turning point is also exposed as a battleground on which antagonistic interpretations of martiano heroism, Republican history, and national identity faced each other in exegetical strife.     

Apartheid,Jim Crow,and Comparative Literature

This article examines John Greyson’s film, Proteus, for the way it figures queer masculinity and race in South Africa’s national historical narrative. The film offers an esthetic rendering of an eighteenth century interracial sodomy trial set on Robben Island. Drawing on contemporary queer theory and recent South African narratives of masculinity that privilege heternormativity and nationalism, this paper argues that the film carves out a space for queer identity within national history where it had previously been denied. The paper traces the way that the film interjects queer narratives into South Africa’s national identity, disrupts the heteronormalization of various sites of national iconography on South Africa’s historical terrain (such as Robben Island), and offers a queer masculinity that resists racial segregation. Moreover, this paper traces the ways that the film has implications for contemporary queer communities within South Africa.     

“Os Bons Colonizadores”: Cuba's Educational Mission in Angola, 1976–1991

This article examines the rhetorical construction of race and racial identities by letter writers in a US-based, South African newsletter. I highlight the rhetoric of crime, the strategic rhetoric of implying race, the construction of blackness, the rhetoric of white victimization, and the relationship between whiteness and nationality. I conclude with a brief query as to whether these letters are exemplary of racist discourse.     

Scottish parliamentary record scholarship in the devolution era

In 1707 Scotland’s parliament ceased to exist. Yet it has since been the subject of two monumental acts of record scholarship; the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland (1814-1875) in the nineteenth century and the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland (2007) in the twenty-first. Using the first of these as a touchstone, this article examines the ways in which the records of the pre-1707 parliament are presented, positioned and interpreted in the second. Unlike the nineteenth-century edition, which was produced in an era when adherence to the 1707 Act of Union with England went all but unquestioned, the twenty-first-century version was created during a period of constitutional devolution amidst a national debate over the question of independence from the United Kingdom. Approaching this new edition of parliamentary records as a cultural product, shaped and informed by the context in which it was created, therefore enables us to learn much about how the relationship between history and national identity in Scotland has changed since its predecessor was published. From there, the article questions the assumption that present-day understandings of Scottish identity are primarily civic and forward-looking, and argues that they are in fact partly based on claims which, whether secessionist or devolutionist, are fundamentally historical.     

The new electoral power brokers: macro and micro level effects of ‘born-free’ South Africans on voter turnout

The emergence of a born-free South African generation holds significant implications for voter turnout. At the macro level, the youth bulge has changed aggregate turnout patterns, supporting Franklin’s [(2004). Voter turnout and the dynamics of electoral competition in established democracies since 1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press] argument that demographics shifts produce changes in aggregate political behaviour even when individuals do not change their behaviour. At the micro level, born-free South Africans exhibit attitudinal and cognitive differences from their older, partisan-led counterparts when deciding to vote, lending some support to Dalton’s [(1984). Cognitive mobilization and partisan dealignment in advanced industrial democracies. The Journal of Politics, 46(1), 264–284] cognitive mobilisation thesis.