复境权内涵之辨

早自上个世纪30年代,便有学人开始向国人介绍复境权的概念,然此后对该制度的认识竟至几无进展。国内法学界对复境权的认知,长久地停留在这样的层面:罗马士兵被俘以后一旦返回便得恢复先前的身份及权利。实际上,复境权制度的适用并非向来就只限于士兵及其返回的情况。它起源于和平态势下的人口迁徙,只是在共和末期以后,随着罗马政治军事力量的变化,其适用的范围才逐渐限缩。     

Coping with Life in Rebel Captivity and the Challenge of Reintegrating Formerly Abducted Boys in Northern Uganda

In this qualitative study of 134 formerly abducted adolescentboys at four rehabilitation centres in Northern Uganda, theboys described their lives in rebel captivity and coping strategiesand suggested ways of reintegration. They witnessed, enduredand participated in hideous atrocities while in rebel captivity.Vigilance, absolute obedience, and cooperation with their captors;prayer and hope; denial, blaming others, constant preparednessto flee; use of traditional medicine; and resilience and perseverance,were some of the coping strategies they employed while in captivityand during escape. Once out of captivity, they suggested a reintegrationagenda sensitive to their economic wellbeing and social relationsin the context of their culture and tradition. They proposedpsychosocial activities, vocational and entrepreneurial skillstraining, provision of credit facilities, and an education systemthat recognizes their background and needs. However, all theseshould be viewed in the context of huge resource limitationsand the continuing conflict.     

Ma Rainey’s phonograph

This essay engages a series of performance routines by the blues artist Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, as a way of critiquing the epistemological tenets of sound reproduction technology. Between 1923 and 1925 Gertrude “Ma” Rainey carried out an elaborate quasi-burlesque performance routine in which she sang while hidden inside a giant phonograph; this routine precisely references and troubles the legacy of black sounds and bodies and their conflicted forms of capture andembodiment through sonic technologies. I think about how black sounds and bodies have been rendered as documentary objects within sonic and visual performance contexts and how this history is both referenced and complicated in Ma Rainey’s performances. I argue further that Rainey’s performance illustrates how sonic technologies always require, what I term black documentary embodiment, through the sonic and the visual. To this end I illustrate how reducing black art to an evidentiary object was central to the phonograph’s material and epistemological construction. In addition to analyzing Rainey’s performance I briefly engage the contemporaneous visual culture of the blues as a means to trace the legacy of black documentary embodiment within a longer visual-sonic tradition.