The Holocaust: Commemorated but not remembered? Post-colonial and post-traumatic perspectives on the reception of the Holocaust memory discourse in Poland

The argument focuses on the reception of the globalized narrative of the Holocaust in the regional memories of East-Central Europe, in particular Poland. It is argued that this narrative has not been successfully integrated into the regional memory, partly because of the narrative's own deficiencies and partly due to the specific nature of the way in which regional memories have been produced. Instead, it has contributed to the split of collective and social memories in the region as well as to further fragmentation of each of these two kinds of memory. In result we may say that in post-communist Poland the Holocaust has been commemorated on the level of official institutions, rituals of memory, and elitist discourses, but not necessarily remembered on the level of social memory. It is claimed that to understand this phenomenon we should put the remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust in the context of the post-communist transformation, in which the memory of the Holocaust has been constructed rather than retrieved in the process of re-composition of identities that faced existential insecurity. The non-Jewish Poles, who in the 1990s experienced the structural trauma of transformation, turned to the past not to learn the truth but to strengthen the group's sense of continuity in time. In this process many of them perceived the cosmopolitan Holocaust narrative as an instrument of the economic/cultural colonization of Eastern Europe in which the historical suffering of the non-Jewish East Europeans is not properly recognized. Thus the elitist efforts to reconnect with the European discourse and to critically examine one's own identity has clashed with the mainstream's politics of mnemonic security as part of the strategy of collective immortalization that contributed to the development of antagonistic memories and deepened social cleavage.     

The Universal King? Memory,Globalization, and Martin Luther King,Jr.

This article examines how Martin Luther King, Jr. is remembered and represented by journalists in Ghana, South Africa, and Mexico, looking at coverage of “critical discourse moments” from King's life and legacy (1963–2016). I argue that representations of King vary in terms of local resonance—how well foreign figures or events align with local myths, values, and expectations—and global salience—the perceived world historical importance of a past figure or event. I then propose a new typology of global memory reception.     

Sex in Health Education: Official Guidance for Schools in England, 1928–1977

Abstract  This article examines official policy discourses on sex within the health education curriculum of schools during the period 1928–77. The article begins with an account of the origins of sex education in schools, and of why, in the early twentieth century, its inclusion in the health education curriculum was problematical. In the main section, the article examines the content of consecutive editions of the government published "handbooks of health education", and of an important supplementary guidance pamphlet, published during the Second World War. It traces the gradual shifts over time in official discourses of "sex education", and in the sets of understandings about children, sexuality and the role of parents, for example, which underlay them. The shifts in official guidance discourses on sex within the health education curriculum of schools are explained through locating changes in their broader social and political contexts, especially the impact of the Second World War on sexual morality and the post-war emergence of youth as a significant social grouping. The article concludes by evaluating the handbooks as a source for the history of school-based health and sex education and by drawing attention to the wider historical and sociological significance of official discourses on sex education.     

'Ladettes' and 'Modern Girls': 'troublesome' young femininities

‘Ladettes’ are argued to be a sign, and product, of contemporary development and change; their fortunes are presented as inextricably related to the conditions of late modernity. Using the past to shed light on the present, this paper considers whether fears and claims about the behaviour of some contemporary young women in Britain are exclusive to the present. Two data sets inform the discussion: first, representations of ladettes in national and local newspapers from 1995 to 2005; second, materials relating to the ‘modern girl’ published in the popular print media between 1918 and 1928. Although there have been important changes in the conditions of girlhood since the 1920s, this historical comparison highlights continuities in the representation of ‘troublesome’ youthful femininities. We explore similarities and differences in the characteristics attributed to the modern girls of the twenties and the ladettes of recent years, and the dominant discourses that underpin popular constructions of troublesome young women.     

A Matter of Time: Examining Collective Memory in Historical Perspective in Postwar Berlin

Abstract  This article examines how officially designated memorial sites marking resistance to and persecution by the Nazi regime in Berlin have changed in the postwar era. Clearly the content of memorial culture changes over time. So, however, do the political and bureaucratic channels through which memorial landscapes themselves are created, and thus the avenues through which states (in this case the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic) construct landscapes of official collective memory. Such an analysis reveals not only the changes and continuities in the form and content of official representations, but also the changing relationship between a state, its people, and the collection of officially approved objects in the urban landscape designed to convey representations of a city's and a country's past. Looking closely at these intersections also makes clear that the landscape of official memorials must not be identical with collective memory understood more broadly.     

Bilingual-intercultural education for indigenous children: the case of Mexico in an era of globalization and uprisings

The past 25 years have brought upheaval to the indigenous people of Mexico due to two opposing forces: modernization and globalization, on the one hand, and indigenous uprisings on the other. Suddenly, the topic of indigenous languages and education was brought into official discussions at the national level. This paper examines the tensions that emerge between the political discourses which emanate from within the indigenous communities and from the national government, and the actual implementation of educational policy models. The political–educational discourse shifted from Spanishization [castellanización], assimilation, and integration to bilingualism, interculturalism, and participation. We demonstrate that this shift was not a smooth transition, but rather an abrupt change that occurred in the early 1990s. Further, despite the shift to new discourses that respected indigenous languages and cultures, institutional factors have not been altered sufficiently to improve the conditions of indigenous education or their well-being in Mexico. Thus, ultimately, the new discourse of bilingualism and interculturalism in education serves to obfuscate the socio-political-economic work that must be done to truly allow the indigenous people to participate in the nation’s political life.     

Ephemeral and Ludic Strategies of Remembering in the Streets: A Springboard for Public Memory in Chile

This article examines a profound turn in the commemoration and representations of the dictatorial past in Chile (1973–1990), where young people who did not experience firsthand the authoritarian order are publicly creating fleeting images, practices, and objects to remember the military dictatorship. These are urban ephemeral and ludic mnemonic assemblages (Freeman, Nienass, and Daniell 2015) that connect past and present events and demand new ways of talking, acting, and thinking about the past, thereby appropriating the public space. The participants in these actions stress the original, carnivalesque, and public dimensions of their practices, challenging the official politics of memory that has focused on the recognition of victims within the walls of museums or memorials. The following question guides this article: How do new public, ludic, and ephemeral strategies interact with and potentially change official ways of narrating the past? How do they create the space for political participation in postconflict societies? Drawing upon a qualitative and multimethod study that combines 60 in‐depth interviews, participant observations, and archival work, I maintain that, although this blossoming of the Chilean public memory has opened up new territories for activating memory, it has a transient temporality and, consequently, may have transitory political potential.     

From the Freak Show to the Living Room: Cultural Representations of Dwarfism and Obesity1

This article examines how cultural representations of deviant bodies vary based on historically informed narratives of bodily stigma. Using content analysis of 40 episodes of reality television programming, I contrast cultural representations of dwarfism and obesity. Over time, dwarfism became constructed as an identity project with the aim of bodily acceptance, whereas obesity became regarded as a body project with the goal of body transformation through weight loss. The mostly positive historical characterizations of dwarfs allowed them to easily adopt the tenets of the disability rights movement as they evolved from freak show performances to television as an educational platform. They have adopted a social model of disability, positive social identity, self‐acceptance, and full social participation. By contrast, the past and contemporary representations of obesity have been overwhelmingly negative. Obese freak show performers were openly mocked, and classifying obesity as a disability has not yet gained traction as a civil rights movement. Instead, obesity is viewed through the lens of individual responsibility and limits of social participation are emphasized. Body modification through weight loss constructs an identity based on self‐change. Generally, this article suggests that cultural representations as de‐stigmatization projects are enabled or constrained by historical factors and the nature of the bodily stigma.     

One cleans,the other doesn't

ABSTRACT

The title of this article conveys the idea which shapes it: that the positioning and identities of ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ are affected by the performance of different social practices. The highly symbolic activity of cleaning inverts the distribution of groups that would usually be divided according to the one/other dichotomy, in that gendered, class and racial others usually clean for their social ‘betters’. This redistribution allows for a look at the dynamics of social and psychic identification within an altered or inverted frame. In three different discursive locations — psychoanalytic theory, feminist film and theory, and advertising and popular culture — I examine diverse representations and implications of cleaning scenes. Each scene symptomatically collapses or merges sexual difference with other social distinctions conventionally marked by the labour involved in cleaning. As each of these discourses is concerned with articulations of identity, whether explicitly or critically (psychoanalytic theory and feminism) or implicitly (advertising and popular culture), these scenes reveal crucial links between social and symbolic practices and the vicissitudes of gender identity. In effect, gender emerges as a cleaning strategy, a representational system that masks or obfuscates the significance of other social differences.     

Two Poems on the Death of Akhmatova: Dialogues,Private Codes,and the Myth of Akhmatova’s Orphans

Abstract

In Serhiy Zhadan’s recent novel Voroshylovhrad (2010), memory and emptiness form a duality of being and non-being, as represented by remembering and forgetting. This framework is proposed here as a metaphor for understanding some of the challenges facing Ukraine today. Using the concept of post-socialist memory as an entry point, this article positions Voroshylovhrad at the productive intersection of memory and literature, offers interpretations for several crucial scenes of the narrative, and contends that the novel recalibrates common paradigms of separation from a traumatic past. Finally, an argument is put forth that the book’s textual voids cast the reader as a key agent of recollection. This analysis of literary mechanisms involved in the memoryemptiness dichotomy contributes to an on-going exploration of strategies contemporary Ukrainian writers employ to engage in cultural and historical discourses, as well as to the studies of memory and literature in the post-Soviet regions of the world.     

Shamans’ Pragmatic Gendered Negotiations with Mapuche Resistance Movements and Chilean Political Authorities

In this article, I look at the ways in which gendered national discourses and the discourses of Mapuche resistance movements coerce and construct shamans (machi) and the ways in which machi appropriate, transform, and contest these images. I explore the contradictions between machi’s hybrid practices and their traditional representations of self and why they choose to represent themselves as they do. My interest lies in the ways in which studying gendered representations by and about machi, especially machi’s nonideological political practices, can contribute to current discussions of power and resistance, agency and structure, and the practice of power itself. Recent anthropological work has focused on the particular historical, social, political, and economic contexts shaping how and why indigenous groups decide to protect and promote particular images of themselves. I focus not on the community politics in which machi are involved, but on machi’s public faces in relation to national political figures and Mapuche political leaders such as longko.     

Discourses of Volunteering and Civic Action in the USA

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Inspired by Foucault’s genealogical approach, this paper examines the historical discourses of popular engagement in...     

艾什尔里派及其中道主义思想

艾什尔里派是伊斯兰教（学）派中较为特殊的一个派别，该派曾于公元11世纪下半叶风靡阿拉伯东部，成为塞尔柱王朝的官方学派，其所倡导的中道主义思想曾一度成为那一时期的主流思想。艾什尔里派的产生有其特定的社会和文化背景，是伊斯兰思想发展过程中的一个必然现象，而艾什尔里派的中道主义思想最终被包括伊斯兰教四大教法学派在内的大多数教（学）派所接受，更说明了它存在的合理性。     

TV VIEWING AS GOOD CITIZENSHIP? POLITICAL RATIONALITY,ENLIGHTENED DEMOCRACY AND PBS

This article draws on theories of political rationality, governmentality and cultural policy as well as historical analysis to examine how a philosophy of ‘enlightened democracy’ informed the historical formation of PBS. I analyse its early campaign to turn TV viewers into active citizens and show how the citizen subjectivities constructed presupposed a set of knowledge-power relations defined and managed by ‘opinion leaders’. Following a cultural studies approach I analyse policy and popular discourses to show how requirements of professionalism, reason, civility and detached objectivity served as a means of differentiating good citizens and as a form of social control.     

The Strange Career of the Canadian Beaver: Anthropomorphic Discourses and Imperial History

Abstract  This article traces the shifting representational history of the "beaver" in the Canadian imaginary through analyzing a range of images from explorers' narratives, to commercial discourses, mass media representations to the ubiquitous sexual slang. I argue that dominant representations of the national rodent have suggested important social territories, like the norms of industry, bodily decorum, sexual respectability and racial progress. At the same time, I also explore how the subterranean language of sexual slang is the logical underside of the narratives found in more "legitimate" representations.     

Undercut

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider some representations of the figure of the indigene in contemporary Australia, and their implications for a range of issues and debates in cultural theory. In particular, I examine the positioning of the indigenous body within two related discourses that I term ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘hybridity’, or the discourses of happy hyphenation and happy hybridization, respectively. These discourses, I want to suggest, raise specific problems in an Australian historical context, where the effects of scientific racism are being confronted by indigenous peoples in relation to land rights claims and, more generally, the dominant culture's demands for an ‘authentic’, visible and unproblematic Aboriginality that can be both clearly marked and contained. The figure of Truganini has particular significance in these debates, precisely because her body has figured as the site of geneticist practices and discourses. Simultaneously I locate these representations in the context(s) of the monument year of 1993, contexts that encompass a mesh of interrelated cultural concerns sometimes simplified under the heading of ‘Australian national identity’.     

Mothers behaving badly: chaotic hedonism and the crisis of neoliberal social reproduction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the significance of the plethora of representations of mothers ‘behaving badly’ in contemporary anglophone media texts, including the films Bad Moms, Fun Mom Dinner and Bad Mom’s Christmas, the book and online cartoons Hurrah for Gin and the recent TV comedy dramas Motherland, The Let Down and Catastrophe. All these media texts include representations of, first, mothers in the midst of highly chaotic everyday spaces where any smooth routine of domesticity is conspicuous by its absence; and second, mothers behaving hedonistically, usually through drinking and partying, behaviour that is more conventionally associated with men or women without children. After identifying the social type of the mother behaving badly (MBB), the article locates and analyses it in relation to several different social and cultural contexts. These contexts are: a neoliberal crisis in social reproduction marked by inequality and overwork; the continual if contested role of women as ‘foundation parents’; and the negotiation of longer-term discourses of female hedonism. The title gestures towards a popular British sitcom of the 1990s, Men Behaving Badly, which popularized the idea of the ‘new lad’; and this article suggests that the new lad’s counterpart, the ladette, is mutating into the mother behaving badly, or the ‘lad mom’. Asking what work this figure does now, in a later neoliberal context, it argues that the mother behaving badly is simultaneously indicative of a widening and liberating range of maternal subject positions and symptomatic of a profound contemporary crisis in social reproduction. By focusing on the classed and racialised dynamics of the MBB – by examining who exactly is permitted to be hedonistic, and how – and by considering the MBB’s limited and partial imagining of progressive social change, the article concludes by emphasizing the urgency of creating more connections between such discourses and ‘parents behaving politically’.     

Identity and History: Class and Regional Consciousness in Rural Languedoc

Abstract The history of the peasants of Languedoc has been marked by continual struggles to defend a livelihood against the combined forces of capitalist development and state integration. Constant references to this history of contentiousness in popular representations of the past have been critical in the emergence of a culture of opposition among the Languedoc peasantry. This paper explores the relationship between historical consciousness, identity construction and expressions of resistance in class and regionalist ideologies of political struggle in rural southern France.