Underground Is Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-150
Author(s):  
Trever Hagen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Ecology ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Practices ◽  
Multi Temporal ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
Underground Music ◽  
The Universe

The survival of the Underground after 1989 rests on the collective memory it has shaped in relation to establishments. This relational pair is the convention that holds the Underground together: the pathway of underground-establishment is continuous, the communist era being articulated into the multi-temporal meaning and use of establishment. This chapter addresses the nature of transformation in the Underground after 1989—although the ecology embraces change and technology, the musical material remains the same. The Plastic People of the Universe have now become the oft-quoted rock group of the Czech Underground, symbolizing Eastern bloc communist oppression, Cold War logics of liberty and freedom, and music’s borderless humanity. The Plastics maintain this legacy in local and foreign discourse while performing repertoire from their forty-five years of ensemble history. Yet the chapter also points to how new musical practices and meanings have grown in the Merry Ghetto, suggesting an Underground Renaissance. The contemporary Underground festival U Skaláka functions as an environment to reaffirm these articulations between musicking and forms of freedom, politics and historical identity. Continuing to play and to listen to Underground music nowadays provides conditions for Undergrounders to continue living within their cultural ecology and thus helps us to understand self-reflexive notions of the political during communism as not ending with 1989 but rather adapting to different forms of creative and political suppression in contemporary times.

Late Spanish Fascists in a Changing World: Latin American Communists and East European Reformism, 1956–1975

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 358-371
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
Third Way ◽  
East European ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThe main aim of this article is to show how the political evolution of Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War cannot be fully understood without analysing the political experiences of countries like Spain, which were not at the centre of the period's political decisions but whose evolution was inspired and suggested by strategies outside the political mainstream. In this respect, the internal evolution of Francoist Spain from the mid-1950s through the 1960s portrays a peculiar political situation demonstrating the capillarity of political and social experiences across the Iron Curtain in Europe and Latin America. A minority of influential sectors linked to the Single Spanish Party, the Falange, pursued its own third way, ignoring the Cold War models. They instead looked to what was happening in Eastern Bloc countries, especially after the events in Hungary in 1956, as well as to the political experiments in Latin America, especially the Cuban revolution.

scholarly journals The Socialist Countries, North Africa and the Middle East in the Cold War: The Educational Connection

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Constantin Katsakioris
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
Educational Assistance ◽  
Mutual Economic Assistance ◽  
The Cold War

This article revisits the Eastern Bloc's educational assistance provided to North Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War. It highlights the political and economic premises, interests and policies at play, and investigates the role of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. It examines the creation of schools in North Africa and the Middle East and the training of students in the socialist countries. The article argues for the centrality of education in the international policy of the Eastern Bloc, further demonstrating its importance in the political economy of the relations with the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.

The Great European Jamboree : The East, the West, the Non-Aligned and the Neutrals at the Pan-European Meeting (CSCE). (Helsinki-Geneva-Helsinki, November 1972-August 1975)

Res Publica ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-57
Author(s):  
Hugo Walschap
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Modus Vivendi ◽  
Actual Outcome ◽  
Calculated Risk ◽  
European Meeting ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

lts early roots reaching as far as 1954, the great Buropean Post War Conference (CSCB), which lasted three years from 1972 to 1975, had to overcome the vicissitudes of the Cold War and the setbacks of thediplomatie normalization between Bast and West afterwards, before taking its final shape. Hence the multiple changes of its characteristics and purposes over the years.Resulting from a global rapprochement between the Super Powers and a cautious modus vivendi between the German twin States in Burope (Ostpolitik), the CSCB, although an old Russian dream, was finally seen by the other parties as a calculated risk and possibly a beneficial one.In the end, Western scepticism and criticism of the Helsinki Final Act were less founded on the actual outcome then on traditional reluctance towards the Bast and more vocal because of a darkening international outlook : the deepening economie crisis, the political disarray in Southern Burope (Portugal, ltaly, Greece, Turkey) and a disheartened public opinion (Watergate, Vietnam, etc.).A more sober view might nevertheless appreciate not only the balance of modest mutual gains for all participants, but moreover the outline and hope for a «rebirth of Europe's historical identity» (PresidentFord) as well as the first diplomatic acceptance of the BBC-entity and last, but not least, the «inevitability of reason», as expressed in the policy of détente and the general «vested interest» in it.

Political risks of recovering and discovering meanings in the collective memory of a perverse religious organisation

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Eduardo Acuña Aguirre
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Influences ◽  
Conversion Event ◽  
Political Risks ◽  
Political Actions ◽  
The Catholic Church

This article refers to the political risks that a group of five parishioners, members of an aristocratic Catholic parish located in Santiago, Chile, had to face when they recovered and discovered unconscious meanings about the hard and persistent psychological and sexual abuse they suffered in that religious organisation. Recovering and discovering meanings, from the collective memory of that parish, was a sort of conversion event in the five parishioners that determined their decision to bring to the surface of Chilean society the knowledge that the parish, led by the priest Fernando Karadima, functioned as a perverse organisation. That determination implied that the five individuals had to struggle against powerful forces in society, including the dominant Catholic Church in Chile and the political influences from the conservative Catholic elite that attempted to ignore the existence of the abuses that were denounced. The result of this article explains how the five parishioners, through their concerted political actions and courage, forced the Catholic Church to recognise, in an ambivalent way, the abuses committed by Karadima. The theoretical basis of this presentation is based on a socioanalytical approach that mainly considers the understanding of perversion in organisations and their consequences in the control of anxieties.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

State Failure and the Political Violence Phenomenon: A Comparative Analysis of Iraq and Syria Cases

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Failure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

The concept of failed state came to the fore with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Political violence is central in these discussions on the definition of the concept or the determination of its dimensions (indicators). Specifically, the level of political violence, the type of political violence and intensity of political violence has been broached in the literature. An effective classification of political violence can lead us to a better understanding of state failure phenomenon. By using Tilly’s classification of collective violence which is based on extent of coordination among violent actors and salience of short-run damage, the role played by political violence in state failure can be understood clearly. In order to do this, two recent cases, Iraq and Syria will be examined.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

Testimonio at 50

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Guadalupe Escobar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
The Political ◽  
Extractive Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Revolutionary Period

A reassessment of the testimonio genre over the past five decades reveals continuities of state-sponsored violence from the revolutionary period to the present. An analysis of Pamela Yates’s 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) and Katia Lara’s Berta vive (Berta Lives, 2016) shows Cold War reverberations, unfolding deeper histories of dispossession and legacies of resistance. The first uncovers entangled issues of Guatemalan genocide disavowal and extractive industry while the second denounces the political feminicide of the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres. Both testimonial documentaries mobilize an “archive effect” to contest the optic of colonial capitalism through the ecofeminist perspectives of indigenous women activists. Una reevaluación del género del testimonial durante las últimas cinco décadas revela la continuidad de la violencia estatal desde el período revolucionario hasta el presente. Un análisis de 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) de Pamela Yates y Berta vive (2016) de Katia Lara da cuenta de las reverberaciones de la Guerra Fría, desplegando historias más profundas de desposesión y legados de resistencia. La primera obra muestra los intrincados hilos en torno a la negación del genocidio guatemalteco y la industria extractiva, mientras que el segundo denuncia el feminicidio político de la activista ambiental hondureña Berta Cáceres. Ambos documentales testimoniales utilizan un “efecto de archivo” para impugnar la óptica del capitalismo colonial a través de las perspectivas ecofeministas de las activistas indígenas.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

scholarly journals Decolonization, the Cold War, and Africans’ routes to higher education overseas, 1957–65

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-191
Author(s):  
Eric Burton
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Cold War ◽  
North America ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
African Students ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Gain Access

AbstractFrom the late 1950s, Africans seeking higher education went to a rapidly increasing number of destinations, both within Africa and overseas. Based on multi-sited archival research and memoirs, this article shows how Africans forged and used new routes to gain access to higher education denied to them in their territories of origin, and in this way also shaped scholarship policies across the globe. Focusing on British-ruled territories in East Africa, the article establishes the importance of African intermediaries and independent countries as hubs of mobility. The agency of students and intermediaries, as well as official responses, are examined in three interconnected cases: the clandestine ‘Nile route’ from East Africa to Egypt and eastern Europe; the ‘airlifts’ from East Africa to North America; and the ‘exodus’ of African students from the Eastern bloc to western Europe. Although all of these routes were short-lived, they transformed official scholarship provisions, and significantly shaped the postcolonial period in the countries of origin.

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