Managing the difficult past: Ukrainian collective memory and public debates on history

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943–1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.     

A tale in stone and bronze: old/new strategies for political mobilization in the Republic of Macedonia

The redesign of Skopje’s main square and the wider central area in the last six years has been a top priority of the Macedonian government. The project, called Skopje 2014, provoked intense domestic debate and controversy as well as international reaction and concern. Although officials say that project’s aim is to unify ethnic Macedonians, it has produced several lines of political, intra-ethnic/interethnic as well as intra-cultural/intercultural divisions in the fragile Macedonian society. The aim of the paper is to offer reflections about its mobilizing potential among ethnic Macedonians in a set of social, economic, and political contexts. In that sense, four areas of mobilization are suggested: (1) around new identity markers; (2) around the name dispute and against threats (real or imagined) to the ethnic and national identity; (3) against the internal Other, that is, the ethnic Albanian community, as well as critics of these identity politics; and (4) in reaction to the global financial crisis and problems within the EU.     

Ethno-racial identity (politics) by law: “Fraud” and “choice”

Following an introduction to the changes in how ethno-racial identity is conceptualized in the social sciences and humanities by the destabilization of categorical frameworks, the author looks at how law reacts to these discussions and paradigm shifts, and argues that legal and administrative approaches face severe linguistic and conceptual limitations by operating within a “choice” and “fraud” binary. The article then questions if the free choice of identity exists as a principle of international minority protection law, a legal field that arguably represents a global political and ethical consensus. The author makes two claims. First, according to the basic tenet of legal logic, a proper right to free choice of identity allowing people to opt out of racial, ethnic, or national (minority) communities would necessitate the freedom to opt in to the majority or to any chosen group. The second claim, however, is that international law would not actually construct an approach to opting in. Thus, the right to free choice of identity is not an autonomous, sui generis right under international law.     

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

Gender and Vernaculars in Digital Humanities and World Literature

Abstract

This article discusses the large-scale and world-encompassing aspirations of digital humanities and world literature and their methodological accordance with the analysis of literature in smaller languages and of texts understood in social, transnational, and gendered contexts. Are Digital Humanities and World Literature establishing themselves as fields utilizing analytical tools that are at odds with the aims and perspectives of feminist literary history and reception history as a part of literary history? We argue that gender research and theory is insufficiently developed in both computational literary history and World Literature. An unproblematic understanding of translations, canonization, English as a global language, and the use of large-scale computational methods and formalized interpretive models is in many cases not beneficial for the understanding of texts by women writers or from feminist perspectives. Drawing on feminist criticism of computational methods and arguments for specialized rather than generalized knowledge about literary history, we propose that digitization in some form, be it a bibliographical database or digitization of a corpus of texts, may be thought of as part of the research process in projects oriented towards gender and cultural exchange.     

This is your afterlife: gender,slavery, and televisual subjection

In 1957 Arries Ann Ward, who was formerly enslaved, appeared on the classic television interview-entertainment program, This Is Your Life. Despite Ward’s practices of refusal, the rare interview enacts an idealization of black female servitude and indebted obligation through performances of affection and racial benevolence. Ward’s appearance effectively works to resolve national crisis produced by widespread images of civil-rights protest and counterinsurgent violence, reifying discourses of American exceptionalism in Cold War context.     

What Mothers Do: Motherhood as a Resource for Negotiating Sick-Leave Legitimacy in Swedish Sickness Insurance Interactions

Sick leave in the Nordic countries is a gendered issue. Alongside other explanations, women’s higher levels of sick leave have been linked to their far-reaching family responsibilities. Meanwhile, studies have shown how such responsibilities induce questioning of the legitimacy of sick leave, indicating that normative aspects linking these categories cannot solely be approached in terms of causal explanations. The current study suggests an alternative way of studying this relationship, approaching motherhood as something being “done” in situated ways, to particular ends; a resource for interaction. By analysing naturally occurring interactions—meetings held by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency—the study renders visible the collaborative production of sick leave as a gendered matter, and motherhood as part of the negotiation of sickness insurance. The analysis shows the meaning and import of motherhood for sick leave to be a live issue for participants, drawing attention to how these categories are neither culturally predefined, nor dispositional, but flexibly assembled for certain purposes. Motherhood functions as a resource in two ways: (1) displaying restricted ability to care for children supports claims of impairment; (2) invoking motherhood works to account for slow or inactive rehabilitation. However, occasioning motherhood in the examined context is also risky: (3) displaying extensive mothering may be treated as indicating low commitment to rehabilitation, and (4) displaying limited mothering may be taken as indicating unfitness as a parent.     

Body and experiment – reflecting Kawabata Yasunari's counter-aesthetics

Abstract

From his earliest works, Kawabata, known as an explicit aestheticist, deals in his works with flawed and disabled bodies in contrast to beautiful ones, evoking feelings of revulsion, awkwardness, disgust and premonitions of decay and death. The dynamism created out of these tensions and ruptures in the aestheticized world is scrutizined as hidden counter-aesthetics through questions such as: Which kinds of impairments are to be observed? Can they be classified according to grades? Are there gender specificities? How are these tensions and ruptures organized, and which categories (semantic, biological, political, moral) are concerned? Which narratorial and other functions are served through the counter-image of the flawed (impaired) body? And finally, how do the findings from these investigations into the flipside, the ‘Other’ of Kawabata's aesthetic universe, contribute to complementary or alternative ways of reading and understanding his literature? In a final section, Kawabata's treatment of female bodies as a site of experimenting with extreme situations of passivity and agency is highlighted, challenging more conventional readings of this and other works. The works discussed are from a deliberately broad chronological and generic range, including canonical and popular works. They range from the newspaper novels ‘Utsukushii!’ (1927) and ‘Maihime’ (1950/1), the novel ‘Senbazuru’ (1952) to the stories and palm-of-the-hand stories ‘Ningen no ashioto’ (1925),’Izu no odoriko’ (1926), ‘Mekura to shōjo’ (1928), ‘Utsukushiki haka’ (1929) ‘Hokuro no tegami’ (1940), ‘Sasabune’ (1950), and, in the final section, ‘Kataude’ (1963/4) and ‘Nemureru bijo’ (1960/1).     

Ethnic diversity and development in Kenya: limitations of ethnicity as a category of analysis

This paper challenges the relevance of ethnic diversity in explaining the development impasse in Africa, using Kenya as a case study and arguing that the neopatrimonial and ethnic diversity theses are contradictory as explanatory variables of Africa's development crisis. The former speaks to homogeneity while the latter implies heterogeneity in the public policy process. This paper singles out the ethnic diversity thesis as the weaker of the two, arguing that ethnic groups lack a collective ethnic agenda that can be flagged as consequential for the political economy of the polity. Ethnic group intervention in the political arena is not determined by innate ethnic characteristics: it is due to the tendency for certain actors in the body politic to exploit institutional failure. With proper institutions, the assumed burden of ethnicity in African development would naturally evaporate. Focusing on supposedly ethnic problems is the wrong target.     

Corruption and identity politics in divided societies

Corruption is a major problem for populations in various parts of the world. This article argues that to understand the problems and dynamics of corruption, we need to understand how discourses and practices of corruption (and anti-corruption efforts) are intertwined with the construction and contestations of identity. Identity politics is a salient feature in peaceful political struggles, as well as in contemporary armed conflicts, which are often characterised by the politicisation of collective identity (ethnic, national, religious) for the violent pursuit of power. The article outlines and discusses four ways in which identity politics and corruption intersect. First, it points to the often blurred lines between private and collective benefit from corruption, revealing the implications of group identity for how corruption is conceptualised. Second, it shows how corruption may exacerbate grievances along identity lines. Third, it highlights how corruption can be used strategically in identity-based conflicts. Finally, it explores how corruption may encourage cross-ethnic solidarity and mobilisation that defy conflict divides.