Occupy College Street: Student Radicalism in Kolkata in the Sixties

Slavic Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 904-911
Author(s):  
Ranabir Samaddar

1968 saw a wave of protests and student radicalism in India, some of the tactics and issues of which were reminiscent of those in Europe and North America. The anti-imperialist theme was similarly strident, and the student and youth movement posed serious challenges to the old established Left, sharing traits of a global New Left agenda. The upsurge of post-independence radicalism in India, however, drew on different historical legacies, and exhibited many specific features, all of which culminated in the student and youth upsurge of 1968–69. In order to demonstrate the complex history and legacy of 60s radicalism in India, this essay takes us back to  the sixties in Kolkata when the insurgent movement in West Bengal had developed the tactic of occupation, which helped the movement crystallize and caused, ironically, the undoing of the mobilization in the end. Occupy as a tactic thus has a history, and the radicals of today perhaps in their enthusiasm for the New Left ethos have ignored the history of the insurgent tactics of the past, especially tactics developed in the postcolonial context.

Author(s):  
Marta Koval

Although Ukrainian emigration to North America is not a new phenomenon, the dilemmas of memory and amnesia remain crucial in Ukrainian-American émigré fiction. The paper focuses on selected novels by Askold Melnyczuk (What is Told and Ambassador of the Dead) and analyzes how traumatic memories and family stories of the past shape the American lives of Ukrainian emigrants. The discussion of the selected Ukrainian-American émigré novels focuses on the dilemmas of remembering and forgetting in the construction of both Ukrainian and American narratives of the past. The voluntary amnesia of the Ame- rican-born Ukrainians in Melnyczuk’s novels confronts their parents’ dependence on the past and their inability to abandon it emotionally. Memories of ‘the old country’ make them, similarly to Ada Kruk, ambassadors of the dead. The expression becomes a metaphoric definition of those wrapped by their repressed, fragmentary and sometimes inaccessible memories. Crucial events of European history of the 20th century are inscribed and personalized in the older generation’s stories which their children are reluctant to hear. For them, their parents’ memories became a burden and a shame. Using the concept of transgenerational memory, the paper explores the challenges of postmemory, and eventually its failure. 


Author(s):  
David A. Hoekema

In the past two centuries, relations among Protestant, Catholic, and Muslim communities in Uganda have been marked by competition and mistrust more than cooperation. The interfaith initiative of northern religious leadersv is a noteworthy exception. In this chapter the history of these communities is briefly reviewed, setting the background for the group’s formation. An important historical event that helped bring Catholics and Protestants together was the execution of 45 Christian pages to the Buganda king in 1886. Mention is also made of the far more prominent role that religion plays in public life in East Africa than in Europe and North America, and of the persistence of traditional beliefs and practices.


Author(s):  
Tom Conley

Michel de Certeau, a French philosopher trained in history and ethnography, was a peripatetic teacher in Europe, South America and North America. His thought has inflected four areas of philosophy. He studied how mysticism informs late-medieval epistemology and social practice. With the advent of the Scientific Revolution, the affinities the mystic shares with nature and the cosmos become, like religion itself, repressed or concealed. An adjunct discipline, heterology, thus constitutes an anthropology of alterity, studying the ‘other’ and the destiny of religion since the sixteenth century. De Certeau opens the hidden agendas that make representations of the past a function of social pressures, so that sometime histories are rearticulated in mirrored or subversive forms. This subversion makes accessible a general philosophy of invention that works within and against the strategic policies of official institutions. De Certeau’s writings also belong to activism, the history of ideological structures, psychoanalysis, and post-1968 theories of writing (écriture) as defined by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-149
Author(s):  
Terence Renaud

AbstractThe New Left that arose in West Germany during the 1960s mimicked the antifascist reformations of the 1930s. For grassroots campaigns, extraparliamentary opposition groups, and radical student organizations of the postwar decades, the Marxist humanist theories and revolutionary socialist splinter groups of the interwar years served as attractive models. At the same time, the Sixty-eighter generation rebelled against a political establishment now represented by that earlier generation of neoleftist pioneers, their parents. But generational conflict was just the symptom of a deeper problem in the history of the midcentury Left: a succession of radical new lefts arose out of periodic frustration at institutionalized politics. This article explores the missing link between Germany’s antifascist and antiauthoritarian new lefts: the so-called left socialists of the 1950s. In particular, Ossip K. Flechtheim’s science of futurology and Wolfgang Abendroth’s theory of antagonistic society translated antifascism’s legacies into a new paradigm of social protest. The left socialists’ support for the embattled Socialist German Student League laid the organizational and intellectual foundation for the sixties New Left. Recent studies of the “global sixties” have shown the transnational connections between new lefts across space; this article explains their continuity across time.


1998 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 410-419
Author(s):  
Patricia Valasco de León ◽  
Sergio RS Cevallos-Ferriz ◽  
Alicia Silva-Pineda

A new plant from the Los Ahuehuetes locality, near Tepexi de Rodríguez, Puebla, Mexico, is described based on its leaves. They are characterized by being ovate to elliptic, 4.5 cm long by 2.1 cm wide, having an entire margin, eucamptodromous venation, a midvein that is slightly curved and attenuated towards the leaf apex, seven pairs of secondary veins diverging at an acute angle from the midvein, percurrent tertiary veins forking or sometimes reticulated forming areoles, and having a petiole 1.3 cm long and 0.3 cm wide. An agglomerative nonhierarchical analysis with average linkage, based on the definition of 41 character states in 18 operational taxonomic units allows distinction between Karwinskia, Berchemia, and Rhamnus; the recognition of an extinct monotypic genus, Berhamniphyllum; and the identification of two fossil species of Karwinskia, among which the new plant from Puebla, Karwinskia axamilpense Velasco de León et al., is well defined. This new fossil leaf not only adds to the recently known Tertiary plants of the Los Ahuehuetes locality, but it gives new insights into the past flora of tropical North America and further supports the long history of some neotropical endemics, suggesting that, during the Tertiary, at least some areas in southern latitudes of North America could have been important for the origin and radiation of some taxa.Key words: Oligocene, Mexico, paleobotany, Rhamnaceae, Karwinskia.


1981 ◽  
Vol 59 (11) ◽  
pp. 2178-2188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard I. Ford

In 1855 Alphonse de Candolle challenged his contemporaries to describe and to explain the geographical and historical distribution of economic plants. It was only in the 20th century, however, that ethnobotany, the direct interrelationships between human populations and their plant environment, and paleoecology and archaeology could combine to delineate from antiquity the history of economic plant usages, to describe the ecological changes introduced by humans, and to detail the cultural determinants of new plant evolution.The prehistory of plant uses depends upon paleoecological and archaeological data. Pollen and plant macroremains have demonstrated that only during the past 2000 years in North America have humans expanded the number of taxa they used. Ecologically humans have become important agents for transforming the landscape during the same time period in areas where plant food production was practiced. Fire was the principle agent for clearing the land and plant husbandry intensified the disjunction of plant species. Humans, then, became significant ecological and evolutionary factors in the landscape with the introduction of domesticated cucurbits from Mexico in the eastern United States about 5000 years ago. It was not until 3000 years ago that indigenous North American Helianthus and Iva were domesticated and other plants were cultivated and introduced beyond their known ranges. In the Southwest com cultivation started 3000 years ago and spread rapidly as a staple and source of phytogeographical changes. Com-field farming in the past 1000 years by prehistoric Americans created new habitats and had the greatest effect on the geographical distribution of plants. Ethnobotany and its associated discipline, archaeobotany, have brought an indispensible complement to paleoecology and a new dimension to historical phytogeography.


Paleobiology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Pedro M. Monarrez ◽  
Joshua B. Zimmt ◽  
Annaka M. Clement ◽  
William Gearty ◽  
John J. Jacisin ◽  
...  

Abstract As practitioners of a historical science, paleontologists and geoscientists are well versed in the idea that the ability to understand and to anticipate the future relies upon our collective knowledge of the past. Despite this understanding, the fundamental role that the history of paleontology and the geosciences plays in shaping the structure and culture of our disciplines is seldom recognized and therefore not acted upon sufficiently. Here, we present a brief review of the history of paleontology and geology in Western countries, with a particular focus on North America since the 1800s. Western paleontology and geology are intertwined with systematic practices of exclusion, oppression, and erasure that arose from their direct participation in the extraction of geological and biological resources at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Our collective failure to acknowledge this history hinders our ability to address these issues meaningfully and systemically in present-day educational, academic, and professional settings. By discussing these issues and suggesting some ways forward, we intend to promote a deeper reflection upon our collective history and a broader conversation surrounding racism, colonialism, and exclusion within our scientific communities. Ultimately, it is necessary to listen to members of the communities most impacted by these issues to create actionable steps forward while holding ourselves accountable for the past.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 7-11
Author(s):  
Prakas Kumar Mandal

The hematology care, research, and development in West Bengal had a glorious past. Dr. J.B. Chatterjea represented the pioneers in hematology practice and research from Calcutta, West Bengal. Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine (CSTM) is considered as the birthplace of Hematology not only in India but also in whole of Asia. Dr. J.B. Chatterjea single handedly took the Hematology Department to a new height and made it a center for learning and advanced research in hematology. Subsequently, many of his able disciples spread out elsewhere in the country expanding the mission of research in hematology. The tragic untimely death of Dr. Chatterjea in 1972 was an irreparable loss to the development of hematology in this country. The glory and glamor of hematology care and research in West Bengal faded way over time. In the recent years, with the establishment of new hematology care and research units at other Government Medical Colleges, private sectors and enormous contributions from the basic scientists have helped to rescue the lost glory and shaping the present day comprehensive hematology care and research in West Bengal, India. In this brief review, the present author tries to give an overview of the past and present of hematology care and research in West Bengal and the author in the present review does not claim to have described every bit of hematology development in this part of the country.


2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridgett M vonHoldt ◽  
Matthew L Aardema

Abstract This bibliography provides a collection of references that documents the evolution of studies evidencing interbreeding among Canis species in North America. Over the past several decades, advances in biology and genomic technology greatly improved our ability to detect and characterize species interbreeding, which has significance for understanding species in a changing landscape as well as for endangered species management. This bibliography includes a discussion within each category of interbreeding, the timeline of developing evidence, and includes a review of past research conducted on experimental crosses. Research conducted in the early 20th century is rich with detailed records and photographs of hybrid offspring development and behavior. With the progression of molecular methods, studies can estimate historical demographic parameters and detect chromosomal patterns of ancestry. As these methods continue to increase in accessibility, the field will gain a deeper and richer understanding of the evolutionary history of North American Canis.


2005 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Dehem

In the light of monetary experience and theory, the EMS appears to be unsustainable. Monetary history of the past sixty years shows that every attempt to stabilise the international monetary System has been frustrated as a consequence of divergent egocentric monetary policies. The breakdown of the rules of the gold standard game in the twenties, as well as the use of money as an instrument in national macroeconomic policies under the Bretton Woods regime have ultimately led to the demise of the fixed exchange rates System. In the sixties, European views on monetary policies were quite divergent, but in the seventies institutional attempts were made to bring them apparently into line. The "snake" arrangements, initiated in 1972, soon degenerated. The more ambitious attempt of 1979, the institutionally more elaborate EMS, suffers from the same basic weakness as all the previous ones. It lacks a common monetary standard, such as the one proposed in the 1975 Ail-Saints Manifesto. Such a standard is a necessary and a sufficient condition for a sustainable common monetary System.


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