Radical History Review recent issues

Editors' Introduction

Ghamari-Tabrizi, B., Bonakdarian, M., Rahimieh, N., Sadri, A., Abrahamian, E. — 2009-09-23

The Crowd in the Iranian Revolution

Abrahamian, E. — 2009-09-23

This article analyzes the behavior of street demonstrators in the Iranian Revolution of 1977-79. It tries to show that they acted less like irrational mobs and more like the rational crowds found in George Rude's classic works. It also tries to show that the bloodshed in these street protests was far less than conventionally thought both inside and outside Iran.

Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution in the Egyptian Press: From Fascination to Condemnation

Hammad, H. — 2009-09-23

This essay analyzes how the Egyptian press covered the Iranian Revolution and the Khomeini regime in 1978-81. It discusses which issues related to the revolution and the revolutionary regime were covered, as well as the attitudes of different groups of Egyptian politicians and intellectuals toward the revolution as these found expression in the press. It shows that secular and religious opposition groups differed with each other as much as they differed from the government in their perception of events in Iran.

Iranian Anti-Zionism and the Holocaust: A Long Discourse Dismissed

Ahouie, M. — 2009-09-23

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has, for the first time since the 1979 revolution, elaborated the Holocaust revisionism as a strategy in Iran's rhetorical war against Israel. Yet his comments on the Holocaust consist of two distinct parts: denying or questioning the extent of the Holocaust, on the one hand, and linking the creation of the Jewish state to the occurrence of the Holocaust in Europe, on the other. Principally this essay argues that the second part of Ahmadinejad's standpoint on the Holocaust—considering Israel as the West's compensation for that tragedy—has precedents in Iranian prerevolutionary political discourse. By reading through the utterances of several Iranian political thinkers and activists from different ideological backgrounds, this essay maintains that all these intellectuals have shown continuity in the line of their reasoning toward Israel over the past six decades.

Revolution, Trauma, and Nostalgia in Diasporic Iranian Women's Autobiographies

Naghibi, N. — 2009-09-23

This essay argues that the 1979 Iranian Revolution constituted a traumatic break in the national imagination, a break that has paradoxically engendered productive possibilities for women's subjectivities, which manifest themselves through the explosion of diasporic Iranian women's autobiographies since 1999. These autobiographies tend to portray the revolution as an individual and collective trauma colored by a powerful nostalgia for the prerevolutionary era. In this article, I propose that the twinning of private, familial memory with public memory through revolutionary rupture and trauma frames these writers' nostalgic recollections of Iran.

The Theory of Survival: An Interview with Taraneh Hemami

Ghamari-Tabrizi, B. — 2009-09-23

Taraneh Hemami was the guest curator of an exhibition she called Theory of Survival at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The exhibition attracted considerable attention from the local media and the Iranian American communities in the Bay Area. The exhibit included the work of three other Iranian artists: London-based Reza Aramesh, Toronto-based Gita Hashemi, and Berlin-based Leila Pazooki. Each contributor presented a variety of multimedia and installation pieces through which they addressed the experiences of different generations of Iranians who participated in the revolutionary movement of the 1970s and 1980s and its aftermath. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi interviews Taraneh Hemami with the accompanying images.

Memory, Mourning, Memorializing: On the Victims of Iran-Iraq War, 1980--Present

Ghamari-Tabrizi, B. — 2009-09-23

The eight-year Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) profoundly shaped postrevolutionary Iranian society. In the early years, the war united different dominant political factions and contributed to the solidification of the Islamic Republic. Its subsequent legacy, the "blood of martyrs" and hundreds of thousands of war veterans, however, has long been a point of contention between competing political elites. The photographs in this section—the hidden faces of the "martyrs" and of those who mourn them—and the reflection of life and light at the gravesites depict the continuing significance of the war in present day Iran. Melissa Hibbard and Hamid Rahmanian took the accompanying photos in Behesht-e Zahra (Zahra's Paradise), Tehran's gargantuan cemetery.

The Revolution Will Not Be Fabricated

Moallem, M. — 2009-09-23

This essay, whose title makes reference to Gil Scott-Heron's famous song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," addresses several components of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, meaning the revolution as an event in its singularity, the revolution as experienced by the subjects who participated in it or to whom the revolution happened, and the effects that the event of revolution have produced in subjects who participated in it. I argue that the emergence of a militant Islamist movement did not have much to do with the return of Islam as an incarnation of a fixed traditions opposed to modernity, but was rather a by-product of modernity and postmodernity. I also argue that in the context of the Iranian Revolution, technologies of vision as well as gender performance (including veiling, militancy, and appearance) proved central to the formation of a modern gendered citizen-subject and its mobilization in pre- and postrevolutionary Iran. In reflecting on the effects of the revolution, I make a case for the triadic mapping of death, revolt, and sexuality, arguing that the relationships between the body, power, and knowledge, in the politics of both life and death, intersect with sexuality in the ways in which subjects are made and enabled to constitute and transform themselves as subjects of desire. This has perhaps been the most enduring effect of the Iranian Revolution for gender and women's issues both in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora.

Has Iran's Islamic Revolution Ended?

Arjomand, S. A. — 2009-09-23

The rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and of revolutionary hard-liners makes it difficult to maintain that the Islamic Revolution ended either with the victory of pragmatism and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's program of economic reconstruction in 1989, or with the rise of the reform movement under Mohammad Khatami's leadership in 1997. The sociology of revolution has typically focused on the short-term revolutionary process that ends with the victory of one of the contending groups and the elimination of the others. This process in fact merges into a more drawn-out struggle among the children of the revolution for the definition of the new political order or the constitutional politics of postrevolutionary reconstruction. The regime set up by Ruhollah Khomeini had a mixed constitution consisting of three elements: theocratic or clericalist, republican or democratic, and populist and egalitarian centered on social justice. The first was developed during the decade after his death, while Khatami's attempt to realize the republican component of the heritage failed, leaving the unclaimed populism and social-justice component to be championed by Ahmadinejad and the hard-liners in a throwback to the original revolutionism.

The Revolution and the Rural Poor

Salehi-Isfahani, D. — 2009-09-23

Critics of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 often paint the picture of a failed revolution when they focus on the structure of employment or on income inequality, neither of which indicates improvement or deep social change. I argue here that the critics miss an important dimension of social change where the revolution has had its greatest impact on Iranian society, namely, the improvement and transformation of the lives of the poor, especially the rural poor, who were socially excluded before the revolution. Poverty is now substantially lower (poverty rates are very low by developing country standards), and rural families have much greater access to basic public services such as electricity, roads, schools, health facilities, and safe water. Some of the gains are the direct result of the revolutionary government's priorities, which shifted infrastructure investment toward villages. In particular, investment in rural health facilities is responsible for a spectacular decline in fertility, as well as child and maternal mortality. Other improvements may be unintended consequences of government action. The significant rise in the education of rural girls in the postrevolutionary era was definitely helped by greater access to schools and family planning services, but it was also in part the result of the strict enforcement of the Islamic dress code and of public behavior that enabled women to leave the confines of their homes to seek more education and look for work.

Postrevolutionary Persian Literature: Creativity and Resistance

Talattof, K. — 2009-09-23

This essay offers a summary of literary activities since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, pointing out the most important poets, fiction writers, literary critics, literary journals, and literary as well as social events that have affected the production of literary shifts. In so doing, the article asserts that in the past three decades, despite fluctuations in the prominence of one or another genre, literary activities have continued to contribute to the formation of history, have influenced events, and have been influenced by societal changes.

Reflections on Literature after the 1979 Revolution in Iran and in the Diaspora

Karim, P. M. — 2009-09-23

This essay highlights the changes in literature in Iran and in the diaspora since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and it especially emphasizes the role of literature and writers in responding to the societal changes in Iran, as well as to the experience of immigration to the West. The role of women writers, in particular, is suggestive of the ways in which the revolution has enabled new voices to emerge even despite the restrictive and repressive policies of the Islamic Republic. Women have been at the forefront of the literature of the diaspora and have taken opportunities to narrate and represent their experiences, becoming the progenitors of a literary movement in the West. This literature of diaspora has reflected the tensions of Iran's relationships with the West, but it has also begun to point to a shift that reflects a more transnational perspective.

Postrevolutionary Trends in Persian Fiction and Film

Ghanoonparvar, M. R. — 2009-09-23

With a brief survey of Iranian fiction and film since the early twentieth century, this article reflects on the changes and developments in these two art forms in recent decades. It argues that although serious writers and filmmakers in the past century displayed a commitment to social and political issues in their country, and while the nature of the endeavors of the postrevolutionary literary authors and serious filmmakers have generally remained the same, the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war ,as well as the new restrictions imposed by the Islamic regime, have had considerable impact on and brought changes to the art of storytelling in Iran.

Islamic Revolution and the Circulation of Visual Culture

Lotfalian, M. — 2009-09-23

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 influenced the production of visual culture in Iran. This article reflects on the postrevolutionary emerging languages of visual culture through its multiple channels of circulation. It argues that the circulation of these productions and an interconnection of media types help us understand the emerging sensus communis, a new possibility for a shared understanding of sense perception, that is coming out of various places, different technologies, and emerging forms.

Intellectual Life after the 1979 Revolution: Radical Hope and Nihilistic Dreams

Mirsepassi, A. — 2009-09-23

This essay presents a discussion of intellectual developments in the thirty years since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, along both religious and secular lines, as they have unfolded in the wake of the prerevolutionary heritage of both the constitutional revolution-Popular Front secular universal tradition and the intellectual turning of the 1960s and 1970s that ushered in a political model of religious authenticity as the organizing axis of popular resistance. The essay points out that in the wake of the Iranian Revolution a variety of evolving intellectual tendencies have adhered to a central notion of the West as the point of reference in all political discussion, whether as an image of adulation and condemnation. This tendency is linked to a more general pattern of privileging abstract philosophical modes of discourse over sociologically specific and contextually grounded research and analysis, a orientation that has had the counterproductive effect of widening a gulf between intellectuals and their work and the real desires, perceptions, and aspirations of the general Iranian public.

Contested Narratives of the Present: Postrevolutionary Culture and Media in Iran

Akhavan, N. — 2009-09-23

This book review compares Mehdi Semati's Media, Culture, and Society in Iran: Living with Globalization and the Islamic State and Nasrin Alavi's We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. Both works recognize the significance of media in shaping and understanding contemporary Iranian society. Semati's volume aims to critically challenge the models that have become commonplace in describing and assessing Iran, while Alavi's work provides a compact collection of the kind of narratives that Semati indicates are in dire need of interrogation.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2009-09-23

Editors' Introduction

Gosse, V., McGrady, C., Drisceoil, D. O — 2009-05-26

Framing the Irish Revolution: Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Drisceoil, D. O — 2009-05-26

In his victory speech at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, having won the prestigious Palme d'Or award for best film for the Irish war of independence drama, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, director Ken Loach declared: "Our film is a little step in the British confronting their imperialist history. Maybe if we tell the truth about the past we can tell the truth about the present." This offers a neat summary of a central aim of radical history and indicates Loach's belief that one's view of the past is always framed by how one views the present. His framing of the Irish revolution in clear anti-imperialist and class terms provoked anger and criticism in Ireland and Britain, which was exacerbated by the film's popular success. This reflection offers a brief overview of the Irish revolution, incorporating comments on the portrayal of various revolutionary issues and episodes in The Wind That Shakes the Barley followed by a discussion on its radical treatment of this period of Irish history in the context of some of the popular and academic critical reaction to the film.

"Heirs of Freedom" or "Slaves to England"? Protestant Society and Unionist Hegemony in Nineteenth-Century Ulster

Miller, K. A. — 2009-05-26

Based on Ulster Presbyterian immigrant correspondence and recent research in Irish religious demography, this essay argues that Unionist cultural and political hegemony over northern Irish Protestants was constructed largely because of the massive emigrations (mostly to the United States) of Ulster Presbyterians, between the 1790s and the 1850s, who would or could not accommodate themselves to the political and socioeconomic regime fastened on the north of Ireland after the United Irishmen's failed rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union in 1800. Hence this essay directly challenges revisionist scholars who argue that Ulster Presbyterians' post-1798 embrace of the Union and the Orange Order was rapid, inevitable, and natural.

Ireland: From Racism without "Race" to Racism without Racists

Garner, S. — 2009-05-26

The Irish have been relentlessly racialized in their diaspora settings, yet little historical work engages with "race" to understand Irish history on the island of Ireland. This article provides an interpretation of two key periods of Irish history—the second half of the sixteenth century and the period since 1996—through the lens of racialization. I argue that Ireland's history is exceptional in its capacity to reveal key elements of the history of the development of race as an idea and a set of practices. The English colonization of Ireland was underpinned by a form of racism reliant on linking bodies to unchanging hierarchically stacked cultures, without reference to physical differences. For example, the putative unproductiveness of the Gaelic Irish not only placed them at a lower level of civilization than the industrious English but it also authorizes increasingly draconian ways of dealing with the Irish populace. The period since 1996, during which Ireland has become a country of immigration, illustrates how racism has undergone a transformation into the object of official state policies to eliminate it. Yet it flourishes as part of a globalized set of power relations that has brought immigrants to the developing Irish economy. In response to immigration the state simultaneously exerts neoliberal controls and reduces pathways to citizenship through residence while passing antiracism legislation. Today, the indigenous nomadic Travellers and asylum seekers are the ones that are seen as pathologically unproductive. Irish history thus demonstrates that race is not only about color but also very much about culture. It also illustrates notable elements of the West's journey from racism without race to racism without racists.

Ireland and the Empire: The Ambivalence of Irish Constitutional Nationalism

Collombier-Lakeman, P. — 2009-05-26

Throughout the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish constitutional nationalism developed an ambivalent discourse on the relationship between Ireland and the empire. As proponents of Repeal or Home Rule, Irish leaders repeatedly denounced the political, economic, and cultural domination imposed on Ireland through the union with Great Britain. And yet they avoided defining Ireland as a colony, and rather stressed Ireland's participation in British empire building as one further argument in favor of Irish legislative autonomy. Leading figures like Daniel O'Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, or John Redmond at times opposed British imperial policy, but they were not committed anti-imperialists. Only a minority of MPs including Frank Hugh O'Donnell, Alfred Webb, and Michael Davitt were more active in denouncing the excesses of British colonialism in India or South Africa. The anti-imperialism of Irish constitutional nationalists was all the more limited as Repeal of Home Rule was not meant to lead to the dismemberment of the empire. On the contrary, leading Irish nationalist MPs were aware that, with the granting of legislative autonomy to colonies like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, the very nature of the empire was changing and that autonomy and empire were perfectly compatible. Taking the newly autonomous colonies as models to follow, they contemplated the possibility of reorganizing the empire into a federation including Ireland.

The Constitutional Revolution That Never Was: Democratic Radicalism and the Sinn Fein Movement

Kissane, B. — 2009-05-26

It has become conventional wisdom that the Irish rejection of British rule between 1916 and 1922 did not involve a rejection of the British system of government, known as the Westminster model. This article challenges that assumption by uncovering a tradition of radical thinking about representative democracy from the radical newspaper and pamphlet literature of the preindependence era. This literature suggests that the crisis of constitutionalism that emerged in Ireland during the First World War was preceded by a pervasive critique of the British system of government, with its roots in a wider crisis of British liberalism. This crisis became more profound in Ireland when the Asquith government accepted partition in principle. The 1922 constitution thus had a radical pedigree obscured by later constitutional scholarship. The final section of the essay discusses why this radical impulse failed.

The Jarring Irish: Postwar Immigration to the Heart of Empire

Corbally, J. — 2009-05-26

In 1948, as citizens of Birmingham and London attempted to recover from the destructive effects of World War Two, they were perhaps unaware that another barrage was about to be unleashed upon them, this time in the shape of migrants rather than bombs. As commonwealth and Irish migrants streamed into postwar England, they instigated enduring tensions around issues of citizenship, housing, and employment, which irrevocably altered the makeup of the nation in the process. Mostly poor workers from Ireland, the Caribbean and South Asia, these migrants were welcomed bluntly with signs stating, "No Blacks, no dogs, no Irish." My study of the experiences of white and non-white immigrants in this period aims to add to existing political analyses with a sociocultural exploration of migrants' adaptations to life in post-imperial Britain. By analyzing the Irish experience as well as those of non-white immigrants, I attempt to fragment monolithic assumptions of a singular "whiteness," which implies that Irish migrants adapted in postwar British society free of the ethnic tensions that other migrants endured.

Sinn Fein and the New Republicanism in Ireland: Electoral Progress, Political Stasis, and Ideological Failure

Bean, K., Hayes, M. — 2009-05-26

This article examines the political and ideological trajectory of the Provisional Republican movement in Ireland. By providing a critical overview of Provisional strategy and tactics, the article attempts to identify the historically fragmented nature of republican ideology and praxis. At key moments, Provisionalism has emphasized and endorsed a range of ideological themes and principles including ethnonationalism, socialism, and constitutional reformism. The tensions and contradictions inherent in this conceptual frame, and the contemporary turn toward conventional electoral politics, power sharing, and cultural pluralism explains the difficulty Provisionals have had in constructing a viable political project that conforms to deeply held and long-standing republican objectives. Moreover, the emphasis on ethnic particularism and identity politics, rather than on social egalitarianism suggests that the Provisionals may no longer be an appropriate vehicle for the articulation of a progressive political agenda in Ireland.

The Irish Republicans

Noble, K. — 2009-05-26

Colonization by Documentation: British Representations of Ireland in Maps, Archives, and Travelogues

George, D. F. — 2009-05-26

Diane George reviews three recent books examining the colonial relationship between Ireland and Great Britain from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century through the lens of historical and cultural geography, history, and ethnography. The books under review examine the use of cartographical production, surveying, and travel narratives to construct an Irish landscape made available for British colonization. This review shows the significance of the ideological formation of place and space to Britain's colonial imaginary and to colonizing practices in Ireland.

Ireland, India, and the British Empire: Intraimperial Affinities and Contested Frameworks

Conley, M. — 2009-05-26

Mary Conley reviews four recent books that explore the historical and literary relationship between Ireland, India, and the British Empire. While two of the books examine literary connections between Ireland and India, another is a historical study of the intracolonial relationships between Irish and Indian nationalists in the first half of the twentieth century. The fourth book is an edited collection of essays drawn from the 2004 Galway Conference on Colonialism, which focused on the affinities between Ireland and India. Conley's review highlights the benefits and challenges of writing comparative studies of colonialism.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2009-05-26

Editors' Introduction

Ball, E., Pappademos, M., Stephens, M. — 2009-01-20

Nation and the Cold War: Reflections on the Circuitous Routes of African Diaspora Studies

Brock, L. — 2009-01-20

This essay reflects on the history of the African diaspora—both as an academic and as a political project. The study of black peoples in academic organizations from 1945 to 1990 problematically formed part of civil rights, nation-building, and Cold War agendas. The result: a distancing and isolation of people in the diaspora from each other. Today there is an explosion of African diaspora studies in the academy, but what of the political project?

The Black Panthers in London, 1967-1972: A Diasporic Struggle Navigates the Black Atlantic

Angelo, A.-M. — 2009-01-20

A group of West African and West Indian immigrants in London identified themselves as the British Black Power Movement from September 1967 to April 1968 and as the British Black Panther Movement from 1968 to 1972. As the first Black Panther Movement to form independently outside the United States, the British Panthers took aspects of their symbols, chants, and demands from the U.S. Panthers. The U.K. Panthers appropriated the U.S. Panthers' revolutionary aesthetic as a model for protest, necessary violence, and for engaging with the state. Using cultural history methodologies of both U.S. and British history, this article serves as the first in-depth study of the Black Panthers in the United Kingdom and contributes to a nascent field of transnational studies of the Black Panther Party. In this article, the nature of the confrontations between Panthers and London City police in court files from the years 1970-72 and a collection of Panther political essays are analyzed. The article demonstrates how the U.K. Panthers adapted American Black Power to suit a transnational yet also local struggle. The U.S. Panthers provided an appropriable ideology through visible cultural markers that melded with the legacy of West Indian radicalism to create a fluid, albeit short-lived, U.K. Black Panther Movement. The well-traveled "routes" of the black Atlantic allowed the British context to be the first site at which an international Panther group emerged.

"Glorifying the Jamaican Girl": The "Ten Types - One People" Beauty Contest, Racialized Femininities, and Jamaican Nationalism

Rowe, R. — 2009-01-20

The "Ten Types-One People" multiracial beauty contest was launched in 1955 in Jamaica, then a British colony on the cusp of independence. Jamaican nationalists designed "Ten Types" as a central part of the "Jamaica 300" tercentenary celebrations, the colony's first foray into imagining modern Jamaicanness as a national event. The contest comprised ten separate competitions, each of which represented a category for a particular skin tone, including "Miss Apple Blossom," "Miss Allspice," and "Miss Ebony." "Ten Types" privileged a brown visualization of Jamaicanness, and revealed brown femininity as central to a new iconography of modern Jamaica. "Miss Ebony," the category for dark-complected women, won particular public attention, for it allegorized the desirable transformation of the mass of black Jamaica into a refined modern citizenry. The "Ten Types" beauty contest provides an opportunity to examine the spectacle of the racialized female body in the construction of a multiracial modern Jamaican identity.

Visible Men: African American Boxers, the New Negro, and the Global Color Line

Runstedtler, T. — 2009-01-20

This article examines the various debates surrounding the exploits of African American boxers in France during the early 1900s as a window into the transnational struggle over the terms of race and modernity. Because of the pervasive racial segregation in U.S. boxing, black American heavyweights like Sam McVea, Joe Jeannette, and world champion Jack Johnson ventured across the ocean in search of better opportunities for fame, fortune, and personal freedom. Their incredible commercial success bolstered the myths of French color blindness that had long circulated in black communities throughout the United States. However, in reality, questions of color were at the very heart of black American boxers' great popularity in Paris. Men like McVea, Jeannette, and Johnson inspired French sports enthusiasts to publicly reflect on their own conceptions of race, manhood, civilization, and the place of Western empire in the modern world. These African American boxers provided French fans with a comfortable abstraction of the colonial question, enabling them to project a public image of enlightened benevolence. Nevertheless, African American pugilists cleverly capitalized on this French fascination with black manhood, not only articulating their own vision of what it meant to be a New Negro but also critiquing the backwardness of U.S. race relations on the world stage. As some of the first and most famous "organic intellectuals" of the African diaspora, they and their audacious brand of masculine blackness held a particular appeal for the dark proletariat. While not explicitly political, black boxers publicly embodied a New Negro masculinity grounded in working-class sensibilities that influenced the radical critiques of white supremacy later forwarded by black intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance and the Nègritude movement.

The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulations

Thomas, D. A. — 2009-01-20

This essay explores how, when, and why questions regarding the state often seem to drop out of analytic view in scholarship on the African diaspora. I argue that focusing on modes of governmentality across empires clarifies how particular state projects have been imagined and developed transnationally. Specifically, I investigate how gender and sexual norms have been mobilized by states in ways that reproduce class hierarchies through the idea of culture. I demonstrate how links were conceptualized and institutionalized among the economy, family, and political participation for communities of African descent in the United States and the British West Indies at particular moments, and I show that these links became the basis for a culturalist discursive framework applied first to black family formation and more recently to violence. This discursive framework limits our ability to offer alternative explanations of the various kinds of violence that have emerged (epistemological and actually existing) among black folk here and there. Ultimately, I argue that the classed and gendered dimensions of state projects are entangled and that this entanglement is both reproduced by and reproduces culturalist-oriented scholarship, even in the face of much transformed ways of organizing global relatedness in economic and political spheres.

Where Blackness Resides: Afro-Bolivians and the Spatializing and Racializing of the African Diaspora

Busdiecker, S. — 2009-01-20

This essay addresses the centrality of space and place in the negotiation of identity in the African diaspora. It does so through the examination of how one particular geographic region in the Bolivian Andes, the Yungas, is implicated in social constructions of blackness among black and nonblack Bolivians and in the marked scarcity of those constructions. Bolivians of African descent have been concentrated in this rural agricultural region for centuries. The area's historical and physical characteristics have long encouraged the notion that the Yungas is somehow the "closest thing to Africa" in Bolivia and thus a "natural place" for black slaves to have ended up and a "natural place" for their descendants to have stayed. The ways in which Afro-Bolivians have been naturalized into the Yungas suggests a biologizing (in other words, racializing) of blackness that is largely denied in the context of Bolivia and, further, demonstrates how blackness is spatialized and space is racialized within the global African diaspora.

Active Marooning: Confronting Mi Negra and the Bolivarian Revolution

Ramirez, C. V. — 2009-01-20

Particular historic and contemporary formations of criollo society deny the existence of an Afro-Venezuelan community, thus hindering race-based struggles for democracy. However, Afro-Venezuelan activists are challenging Venezuelan race relations through a process of active marooning, a sustained politics of liberation. This interdisciplinary essay uses ethnographic evidence from fieldwork conducted in Venezuela from 2003 to the present to discuss the tensions between the Afro-Venezuelan movement, fellow Bolivarian activists, and the Venezuelan state in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution. I argue that race-based organizing remains an important strategy for negotiating citizenship in the modern nation-state and that the Venezuelan case rests uneasily in scholarship on the African diaspora.

Indigenous Acts: Black and Native Performances in Mexico

Gonzalez, A. — 2009-01-20

While Africans and their descendants are woven into the fabric of Mexico's history, social systems and cultural institutions negate the viability of a dynamic and political black population. Although Afro-Mexicans have socially "disappeared" into the political construction of mestizaje, dances based on archetypal images of blackness such as the negritos or the danza del diablo proliferate at theater and dance festivals in the country.

Performance is a place where black identity articulates itself within a global "call- and-response" of images. Devil dances of the Pacific Costa Chica exemplify the exotic and violent archetype of the Afro-Mexican. In contrast, indigenous Native American village dancers act out inversions of blackness in masked ceremonial rituals called negritos.

These examples of Native American and Afro-Mexican performances highlight the multiple dialogues that surround the African presence in Mexico. Dance, with its gestured codes and musical accompaniments, persists as evidence of a distinctive diasporic presence in a country in which African people run the risk of invisibility.

Sovereignty, Neoliberalism, and the Postdiasporic Politics of Globalization: A Conversation about South Africa with Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, and Molefi Mafereka ka Ndlovu

Lee, C. J. — 2009-01-20

This article is an interview with Patrick Bond, Ashwin Desai, and Molefi Mafereka na Ndlovu, who are based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It was recorded in June 2007.

Transnationalism and the Construction of Black Political Identities

Cumberbatch, P. D. — 2009-01-20

In this essay I discuss teaching a seminar on the history of the interrelated intellectual discourses on the black diaspora in the context of a changing black student population. The course is designed to explore the political engagements of black people both locally and internationally as the framework for examining an emerging black global consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Black Global Metropolis: Sexual History

Mumford, K. — 2009-01-20

Introduction

McGrady, C. — 2009-01-20

To Be Real: Figuring Blackness in Modern and Contemporary African Diaspora Visual Cultures

Francis, J. — 2009-01-20

This essay explores figuration in artistic- and museum-exhibiting practices of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that undermine the authority of authentic blackness as a primary tenet of African diasporic identification. It takes its cue from the cultural theorist Stuart Hall's keen assessment: "The fact is that `black' has never been just there. It has always been an unstable identity, psychically, culturally, and politically." The essay's first section is an analysis of art by Rasheed Araeen and Roshini Kempadoo created in the 1970s and 1990s, an era during which they and other progressives of African, Asian, and Caribbean descent in the United Kingdom claimed the political and cultural position "black." The essay's second section considers the representation of blackness in three exhibitions from 1997 to 2007 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. The essay's final section examines the cartoonlike paintings of the African American artists Laylah Ali and Kojo Griffin. Figuring is the conceptual thread uniting these African diasporic moments, which, though not causally related, similarly transgress against limiting definitions of blackness in order to privilege its productive, transforming visibilities.

New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora

Wainwright, L. — 2009-01-20

Art of the African diaspora has become the focus of various curatorial interests in displaying and documenting an expanded, circum-Atlantic geography of blackness based on a notion of diaspora that once seemed promising for imagining an inter- or transnational community. However, the recent application of the diaspora concept to curatorial spaces has become susceptible to a provincializing attitude grounded in United States-centered experiences. This essay interrogates the ways in which such a U.S. locus for the African diaspora generates a hegemonic spatio-temporal scheme of new "margins" and "centers." With reference to visual examples, it recognizes attempts among artists and curators in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean to dismantle and disavow the hegemonic use of race and the diaspora concept as founding categories of art historiography and of public memory.

The African Diaspora Today: Flows and Motions

Bogues, A. — 2009-01-20

Blacks in European History

Stovall, T. — 2009-01-20

This review essay examines six monographs dealing with the history and present conditions of blacks in Europe. It argues that the recent surge in interest in black European history arises both from more diasporic conceptions of blackness in general, and from more inclusive ideas about European history. In both cases a new emphasis on transnational history has been key to this field. The article examines two books that deal with Britain, two on France, and two on Germany. It finds that some key themes unite these readings at the same time that national differences remain important.

Centering Africa in African American Diasporic Travels and Activism

Gore, D. F. — 2009-01-20

This review examines three recent historical studies that chronicle African American diasporic travels to Africa. Centering Africa as a key location in African diasporic imaginings and affiliations, these studies trace the shifting political and cultural meanings African Americans have mapped onto Africans and the African continent. Taken together these works highlights a new range of scholarship in the field and reveal some of the central questions shaping African diaspora studies.

"What's in a Name?" That Which We Call Brilliance by Any Other Name Would Read as Festus Claudius McKay

Harris, L. A. — 2009-01-20

Claude McKay, the canonically renowned Harlem Renaissance poet, has become a central subject in current sexuality, African diaspora, and postmodern Marxist studies. This review essay highlights the different contributions of four recent book-length studies specifically on McKay; it situates their theoretical contexts within larger critical dialogues and historical inquiries concerning black creative expression and transnational ideological spaces and material practices.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2009-01-20

Editors' Introduction

Ochoa, E. C., Lassalle, Y. M. — 2008-10-06

Revolutionary/Critical Pedagogy and Me: Is Democracy in the Classroom Possible?

Power, M. — 2008-10-06

Relocating Critical Pedagogy

Lam, K. D. — 2008-10-06

Ivan Illich: True Learning and the Leisure Pursuit of Free People

Valenzuela-Aguilera, A. — 2008-10-06

"Educate to Organize": Reflections on Building the Dolores Huerta Labor Institute

Delloro, J. — 2008-10-06

Critical Pedagogy: Radical History in Two Spaces

Fletcher, I. C. — 2008-10-06

Dancing with the Dilemmas of a Decolonizing Pedagogy

Tejeda, C. — 2008-10-06

Moore's Ford: A Site and Space of Praxis

babington, m. — 2008-10-06

Critical Pedagogy: Dynamic Thinking and Teaching within the Confines of No Child Left Behind

Quezada, S. — 2008-10-06

We Must Take Our Battle beyond the Classroom: Lessons from the Great Strike of 2007

Taiz, L. — 2008-10-06

Reflections of a Guerrilla Educator

Garcia, D. H. — 2008-10-06

Deconstructing Power, Privilege, and Silence in the Classroom

Ochoa, G. L., Pineda, D. — 2008-10-06

While teaching about race/ethnicity and class from a critical pedagogical standpoint, not only might we encounter student resistance to learning about systems of domination, but we should also be aware of the ways that power, privilege, and exclusion in the larger society may be reproduced in our own classrooms. In this article, we recount how we used free-writes and various discussions in an attempt to deconstruct the power dynamics in an upper division seminar on Latinas/os and education. Though a majority of the students were first generation Latinas, middle and upper middle class white students were more likely to share their perspectives and experiences in the course. This resulted in a situation where class discussions were steered away from the focus of Latinas/os and unequal educational practices to a perspective that reinforced an ideology of equality and a climate that privileged dominant modes of classroom communication. Our experiences suggest that deconstructing classroom dynamics and engaging in collaborative teaching can create more democratic spaces that enhance student learning and challenge hegemonic teaching practices and classroom structures.

Bridging the Divide: Connecting Feminist Histories and Activism in the Classroom

Blake, H., Ooten, M. — 2008-10-06

This article explores the course objectives, pedagogy, and texts/assignments of the course "Gender, Race and Activism." Learning about the historical traditions of social movements is critical for today's students. They need social justice role models in order to understand what has changed as a result of people's organized and individual efforts over time, and to learn from the successes and challenges of past movements in order to know that change is not only possible but that they, too, can be change agents. When students are exposed to the depth and breadth of activist histories - histories of which they have little to no knowledge - they think more critically about their own education in terms of what stories they have been taught and what/who have been left out. They also become inspired by the successes and challenges of past movements and seek more knowledge, including tools to effectively engage in social activism themselves. Indeed, the underlying premise of the course is to have students make connections between history, theory, and praxis. By instructing students to conduct social justice action projects, the course creates a bridge between historical knowledge and informed activism. The students leave the course more historically informed and better equipped to address present-day challenges. "Gender, Race and Activism" is one requirement of the WILL program at the University of Richmond, which combines coursework in women, gender and sexuality studies with community activism and leadership opportunities for women students.

Engaging with Public Engagement: Public History and Graduate Pedagogy

Blee, L., Horan, C., Manuel, J. T., Tochterman, B., Urban, A., Weiskopf, J. M. — 2008-10-06

Does an increased enthusiasm for publicly engaged scholarship and service learning at many universities translate into a tangible commitment for such projects? How can historians reconcile their participation in public scholarship with trends that promote neoliberal models of university finance and governance, which often put the university at odds with the public outside and inside its walls? In the fall of 2005, a group of history and American Studies PhD students at the University of Minnesota developed a student-created and student-driven seminar titled "Public History and Urban Space." This article explores the results of this innovative seminar and focuses in depth on two student projects that illustrate the opportunities and challenges of publicly engaged graduate scholarship within the neoliberal university. A public history approach to graduate research forces graduate students to rethink assumptions about the nature and political impact of historical research and scholarship while offering a unique opportunity for methodological training unavailable in many other realms of graduate pedagogy. But as seminar participants confronted theoretical and practical issues involved in creating the proposed projects, they also encountered significant challenges to completing the projects as we had envisioned them. In examining the fate of the projects in this self-designed course, this article grapples with the above questions that are at the heart of both the possibilities of public history and its limitations in the contemporary university.

Open Veins, Public Transcripts: The National Security Archive as a Tool for Critical Pedagogy in the College Classroom

Hingson, J. — 2008-10-06

Since 2004, I have used various document sets from the National Security Archive (NSA) to teach students about modern Latin American history at Georgia College and State University, a medium-sized public liberal arts university in central Georgia. The NSA has the largest non-governmental online collection of US national security government documents in the world. Its research staff compiles, introduces, contextualizes, analyzes, and sifts through thousands of declassified materials. These include inter-agency memos, embassy communications, executive directives, confidential correspondence, and other once-classified materials.

This essay will critically examine the NSA as a way of teaching the histories of US imperialism and intervention, state suppression of popular dissent, militarism, human rights abuses, and counterinsurgency tactics and training in Latin America from the beginning of the Cold War until today. First, I will provide an explanation of the assignments that I use. These consist mostly of document analysis exercises and larger research papers. I will also share which topics students tend to explore, while noting several potential methodological pitfalls in using the NSA documents. Secondly, I will share testimony on how students' views on US foreign policy have changed. The general consensus at the beginning of the semester is that one of the principal aims of US foreign policy is to promote democracy above all other values. After examining the NSA documents, however, students seriously re-examine this idea. Indeed, introducing students to the `raw material' provided by the NSA is a powerful pedagogical tool for delivering and teaching radical history.

Theater of the Assessed: Drama-Based Pedagogies in the History Classroom

Mattson, R. — 2008-10-06

This essay argues that the current crisis in history education at the K-12 levels requires creative interventions and interdisciplinary collaborations. It also offers a series of strategies for teaching critical historical thinking skills to young people. Drawing on the author's recent collaboration with a theater educator, the essay examines the radical potential of one pedagogical method in particular—a theater-based strategy called "process drama." A philosophical and experiential approach to teaching and learning, this method draws on theatrical ideas to trouble the traditional dynamics of the classroom and provoke students into critical investigation. The author roots her reflections on the power and potential of process drama for history education in a lesson she developed for a group of public school teachers from the Bronx. Interested in introducing these teachers to a diversity of visual primary source documents and in complicating the story of the Civil Rights movement, she asked participants to use a series of theater exercises to examine a set of photographs taken at civil rights protests. This work, the author argues, suggests the power of critical and creative pedagogies in the history classroom; demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary instruction, even at the K-12 levels; and offers a model for social justice history education that does not ignore the practical demands that weigh heavy on classroom teachers in this current standards-saturated public school educational climate.

Transformations through Teatro: Culture Clash in a Chicana/o History Classroom

Garcia, D. G. — 2008-10-06

This article describes the creation and implementation of a unique undergraduate history seminar dedicated to examining and engaging the work of the Chicano-Latino theater trio Culture Clash. My previous research identified similarities between Culture Clash's playwriting methods and scholarly approaches to oral history and ethnography. The course engaged these methods, requiring students to conduct oral histories and transform those interviews into performance monologues. Informed by the role of Chicana/o teatro in the social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the course challenged students to follow Culture Clash's methods of using teatro to tell the stories of those on society's margins. Culture Clash members joined the class in facilitating students' efforts to bridge historical scholarship with oral histories of everyday people. I examined excerpts of students' monologues and a spoken word piece performed as part of the course culminating public "Reader's Theater" event. Reflecting on some of the students' remarks, I discuss the seminar as contributing to a tradition of transformative history pedagogy.

Reflections on Teaching, Learning, and Performing Chicana/o History

Lopez, C. B. — 2008-10-06

"My First Lessons in Chicano History Were Heard at the Kitchen Table": An Interview with Gilbert G. Gonzalez

Ochoa, G. L. — 2008-10-06

Pedagogy and Activism in Vieques, Puerto Rico: An Interview with Ismael Guadalupe

Gutierrez, E. I. — 2008-10-06

"Young People Have a Pure Sense of Justice, Fairness, and Equality and Will Fight for It": An Interview with Sonya Mehta of Young Workers United

Ochoa, E. C. — 2008-10-06

" `Cause It's Not Just Me": Walkout's History Lessons Challenge Hollywood's Urban School Formula

Yosso, T. J., Garcia, D. G. — 2008-10-06

Democratic Movements, Self-Education, and Economic Democracy: Chartists, Populists, and Wobblies

Niemi, W. L., Plante, D. J. — 2008-10-06

Mannheim's sociology of knowledge approach is used to study the educational role of movement activities in three radical democratic movements: the British Chartists, the American Populists, and the Industrial Workers of the World. Educational practices in these movements constituted an alternative democratic ideology. The educative role of strikes, free speech and press struggles, the cultural life of jungle camps, and cooperatives created a movement identity and an opening up possibilities for a new democratic political economy; that is, their purposes were educational and ideological. Such activities were at once organizing practices, but were also integral to envisioning a more egalitarian society and fomenting change toward such ends. Pedagogically, the study of the educational role of movements is important because it illustrates that human dignity is not simply utopian. These movements were real world examples of egalitarianism, dignity, and democracy, sometimes in brutal contexts. For each of the movements studied, education was class-based in that it was directed at identifying a producerist interest within a monopolized and hierarchical societal structure that impoverished their members and excluded them from politics. This contrasts with traditional education more often aimed at socialization into existing class, gender, and racial hierarchies.

The Standardized Curriculum and Delocalization: Obstacles to Critical Pedagogy

Mulcahy, D. E., Irwin, J. — 2008-10-06

This essay explores the nature of standardized curricula and the ideological motivation behind the standards movement, beginning with President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. It focuses on how the standardizing of curricula and the embedded hierarchy of information and knowledge—produced by few and mandated for all—not only reflects a privileged epistemology but does so with the intention of maintaining a social structure that will continue to serve the elite. We address the deskilling of teachers in the K-12 classroom through centralized, mandated curricula as a means of encouraging teachers' complicity in promoting an anti-intellectual, hegemonizing school structure. In particular we examine how the New York City public school teacher is stifled by such an approach to education. In addition to a critique of the standards movement and the bureaucratized, hierarchical approach to schooling, this essay offers an alternative approach. The alternative we suggest focuses attention on the classroom over the district office. It also privileges the wants and needs of the community over those of the corporate economy and its influence on education policy. The teacher in the classroom should have the authority to engage students in a living curriculum that pertains to their daily lives. The community must determine what this curriculum is rather than federal government officials who lack local knowledge.

as flowers turn toward the sun

Hunt, A. — 2008-10-06

A Champion of Democratic History

O'Brien, J. — 2008-10-06

Academic Gulag

Brown, J. — 2008-10-06

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

2008-10-06