Constructing national history in political discourse: Coherence and contradiction (Moldova, 2001–2009)

History is one of the many instruments available for the persuasive construction of a nation. In Moldova, the Party of the Communists of the Republic of Moldova (PCRM), in office from 2001 to 2009, advocated for a Soviet-based version of the Moldovan nation. This “Moldovanism” boasted of the existence of a “Moldovan People” and was relied upon to justify the independence of the former Romanian province. Vladimir Voronin, the party's leader and president of the Republic during this period, promoted this “civic” Moldovan nation and created what seemed to be a coherent and ad hoc construction of an independent Moldovan nation.

This paper focuses on communist political discourse during this eight year period. Through the use of Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper focuses on the discursive construction of the Moldovan nation. It is based on Voronin's official speeches and messages from key occasions such as Independence Day and Victory Day.

This paper demonstrates the varied use of history in these speeches which improves understanding of the process of the construction of a nation. Moreover, it demonstrates that this construction, far from being coherent, was also sometimes contradictory. Indeed, discourse was adapted to the immediate context and audience. Finally, the paper explains how an explicitly “civic” discourse can be implicitly and, sometimes even explicitly, “ethnic” and “exclusive”.     

Pašić and Trumbić: The Kingdom of Serbs,Croats and Slovenes

Based on statistical sources, this paper examines to what extent citizens of the most advanced provincial cities in fin-de-siècle Hungary were multilingual. I argue that multilingualism was a far less present phenomenon than scholarship suggests. The exact features of multilingualism were closely connected to the local social relations (religion, gender, etc.) and market of languages. The growing nationalism promoted by the Hungarian government and the expansion of Magyar public space had an ambiguous impact on multilingualism, depending on the local society.     

MASCULINITIES,PERSISTENCE, AND DESISTANCE

In life‐course criminology, when gender has been the focus of study, it has predominantly been treated as a variable. Studies that explore the gendered nature of criminal careers through the lived experiences of offenders are rare, even though these studies can make important contributions to our understanding of crime and the life course. Analyzing qualitative data, this article uses life‐history narratives of a small sample of male juvenile delinquents (N = 25), born in 1969–1974, to explore the possible link among masculinities, persistence, and desistance from crime. The findings of the study suggest that processes of persistence and desistance are imbued with age‐specific norms of what it means to “be a man” and successfully do masculinity in different stages of life. Analyzing these gender‐specific practices gives a deepened understanding of processes that underlie the offenders’ lives as they go through stages of continuity and change in crime. The findings of the study further suggest a complex intersection between gendered biographies and gendered structures, with fruitful contributions to life‐course criminology. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The threat of ‘woolly-haired grandchildren’: Race,the colonial family and German nationalism

The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably ‘German’ families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of ‘half-castes’ (Mischlinge) that refused the white–black, master–slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero–Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the Holocaust that refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.     

Reproduction and family building strategies in early modern Japan: Evidence from two northeastern farming villages

Drawing data from the local population registers called “ninbetsu-aratame-cho," this study examines the patterns and covariates of reproduction and family building in two farming villages in northeastern Japan in 1716–1870. Marriages in these villages were very early and universal for both sexes, but reproduction within marriage was very low, due in part to curtailment of reproduction at relatively young ages, but also to long intervals between recorded births. Stopping and spacing of family building were achieved primarily by an extensive use of sex- and parity-specific infanticide, which enabled peasant couples to control the size and gender-sequence of their progeny. Women's positions within their household and in the village also influenced their family building processes. Peasant couples in these preindustrial Japanese farming villages were active planners of their reproductive life.     

Two cultural worlds in one family

The author discusses the problem of continuity and discontinuity over three generations of a Russian family while describing cultural change in everyday practice during a long historical period. The issue of cultural transmission is investigated because the couples' lineages belonged to conflicting cultural worlds representing two ideologically alien discourses during the Soviet times. While analyzing these two cultural worlds as systems and the conflict between them, the author seeks to answer the question on why both cultural models were rejected by the next generation. What was the character and mechanism of transmission in this case? What are the consequences of cultural conflict for the future of the family itself and for the wider social context in the future cultural discourse in Russia?     

The dark side of the family: paternal child homicide in Australia

Abstract

Feminist scholars have produced an extensive literature on the social, economic, psychological, and criminological aspects of female infanticide. By contrast, there have been few historical studies of fathers who have murdered their children. This article analyses the problem of paternal filicide in three ways. First, it contextualises state responses to child homicide in relation to the government's wider treatment of violence in the home. Second, it analyses men's stated motivations for child murder, highlighting the significance of their conceptions of fatherhood and family to their violent actions. And finally, it interrogates onlookers' understandings of male violence, showing that the family was central to the boundaries onlookers drew between understandable and incomprehensible violence. Overall, the article shows that fathers' violent acts stemmed from significantly different social pressures to maternal child killing. The various interpretations of male violence tell us much about historical understandings of fathers' responsibilities, men's family roles, and the place of violence in the home.     

FROM SINGING GIRL TO REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST: FEMALE ENTERTAINERS REMEMBERING CHINA’S SOCIALIST PAST (1949–THE PRESENT)

Abstract

This article explores a unique aspect of gendered socialism by examining the competing narratives of the state and individuals’ oral accounts, particularly the stories of former singing girls and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres. During the socialist transformation of the 1950s, singing girls-turned-revolutionary artists, as popular performers and new socialist women, found mutual interests with the CCP: political propaganda for the Party, making profit for the troupe, and self-transformation for the girls. This article argues that the Party and former singing girls enacted a uniquely gendered socialism by continuously deploying the singing girls’ cultural and financial influence colored with their erotic image. In addition, this essay treats oral history as a process of identity and history construction rather than as “fact.”     

The Mechanism of State Charter School Policy Adoption: The Case of American States

This article concentrates on charter school policy that is regarded as the fastest growing innovative policy in America. Its adoption is more impressive than other innovative policies in the public educational area. By 2008, 40 states among 50 American states have passed charter school law since Minnesota became the first pathfinder to create charter school law about two decades ago. However, 10 states have not adopted charter school law. Based on this dichotomous policy phenomenon, the primary research question of the study focuses on clarifying what factors drive American states to adopt charter school policy. To obtain answers for this research question, the study dedicates to analyzing main hypotheses from the regional diffusion model and state characteristics, using event history analysis. The results demonstrate that the three predictor variables—regional diffusion, similar innovation, and gubernatorial political tendency—positively have significant effects in explaining the adoption of American state charter school policy.     

自然与历史的关系--马克思与现代西方哲学的一个比较研究

自然与历史的关系问题是现代西方哲学中的一个难题.自新康德主义以来,这两者或是借形式规定性或是借自然主义仅仅达到了虚假的统一.前者借历史之名使历史凌驾于自然之上,后者又借自然之名呤唱怀旧恋曲.马克思在此问题上的贡献却一直没有得到应有的重视.自然与历史的真实统一,在马克思那里是通过实践关系为中介才得以实现的.