The ideology of “Sex Love” in postrevolutionary Russia: Lenin,Kollontai, and the politics of lifestyle liberation

This paper examines the experience of the Soviet Union just after the Revolution of 1917 when there were official, although ambiguous and inconsistent, efforts to open up lifestyle options. These efforts were based in Marxian theory, especially Engels' work,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), but most of the revolutionary Bolsheviks were not enthusiastic about activism in this area. The views of Marx and Engels, Lenin, and Aleksandra Kollontai (the leading Bolshevik exponent of lifestyle freedom), and the implications of their own lifestyles, are discussed in this paper as they interacted to form early Soviet family policy. The utopian vision of Kollontai was ousted from the official sphere with the ascendancy of Stalin in the USSR, and the discussion of the fate of these efforts provides the basis for delineating six dilemmas in developing ideology and policy in the area of the family and alternative lifestyles.     

Photography and cultural memory: a methodological exploration

Recent years have seen a flowering of research and scholarship on cultural memory across the humanities and social sciences. Among the many facets of this work is a quest to extend and deepen understanding of how personal memory operates in the cultural sphere: its distinguishing features; how, where and when it is produced; how people make use of it in their daily lives; how personal or individual memory connects with shared, public forms of memory; and ultimately, how memory figures in, and even shapes, the social body and social worlds. Personal and family photographs figure importantly in cultural memory, and memory work with photographs offers a particularly productive route to understanding the social and cultural aspects of memory. Beginning with a study of one photograph, this article develops and interrogates a set of interlocking memory work methods for investigating the forms and everyday uses of ‘ordinary photography’ and how these figure in the production of memory.     

Marked by fire: brands,slavery, and identity

ABSTRACT

Perhaps one of the most visceral symbols used to represent the evils of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is the brand. The branding iron holds a profound semiotic weight due to its connotation with identity and how we collectively represent humans in opposition to animals. This article engages with the historical significance of the brand particularly in the context of slavery, tracing its influence through theories of identity as well as commodities, before exploring actual evidence of branding usage from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Understanding not only the mechanisms which governed branding but its social significance is crucial as we work to better understand the experiences of those who suffered through this trade.     

Slavery in the Americas: Resistance,liberation, emancipation

Author: BERGAD, LAIRD W.; Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888; Author: HIGGINS, KATHLEEN J.; 'Licentious Liberty' in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region. Slavery, Gender and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabara, Minas Gerais     

Surplus,excess, dirt: slavery and the production of disposability in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Centuries before apartheid, South Africa was fundamentally shaped by 176 years of slavery, a period of racialised and gendered brutality that lasted from 1658 to 1834. Enslaved people were brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from African and Asian territories around the Indian Ocean, and eventually came to constitute the majority of the population of the Colony. Françoise Vergès (2005 Vergès, F. 2005. “One World, Many Maps.” Interventions 7 (3): 342–345. doi:10.1080/13698010500268155.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) asserts that slavery in South Africa generated “processes of disposability” that transformed enslaved people and indigenous Africans, the majority of the population, into “surplus” and expendable objects. The scale of this expendability is difficult to discern today because of the invisibility of slavery in conceptions of the country’s history. In this article, I use the lens of “dirt” to render such “processes of disposability” visible. I do so by analysing two texts in which African bodies are portrayed as filthy, menacing and contaminating – the novel Unconfessed and a television advertisement titled “Papa Wag Vir Jou” (“Daddy’s Waiting for You”) – which I situate within a discussion of South Africa’s extraordinarily high rates of incarceration and sexual violence. I point to the seamless continuity in industrial levels of imprisonment employed by the colonial and the modern South African state.