Coda

Author(s):  
Laura U. Marks

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.


Author(s):  
Kendra Taira Field

“Grandpa went back to Africa with Garvey,” my grandmother recalled. I carried this precious refrain into the archives with me. In Garvey’s place, I found Chief Sam, in the black and Indian borderlands of Oklahoma. While the Great Migration had largely displaced the preceding history of black rural emigration at the nadir, so had Garveyism displaced descendants’ memories of the Chief Sam movement. Meanwhile, scholars portrayed the movement as the product of a single charismatic charlatan and his nameless, faceless followers. Relying almost exclusively on U.S. sources and the memories of those “left behind” in an economically depressed and politically repressed Jim Crow Oklahoma, the only book-length study of the movement, written in the 1950s, argued that the Chief Sam movement illustrated “the desperate hopes of an utterly desperate group of people.” The image fit easily with twentieth-century American tropes of black victimhood and criminality....


Author(s):  
Marc Becker

Armed insurrections are one of three methods that the left in Latin America has traditionally used to gain power (the other two are competing in elections, or mass uprisings often organized by labor movements as general strikes). After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, guerrilla warfare became the preferred path to power given that electoral processes were highly corrupt and the general strikes too often led to massacres rather than a fundamental transformation of society. Based on the Cuban model, revolutionaries in other Latin American countries attempted to establish similar small guerrilla forces with mobile fighters who lived off the land with the support of a local population. The 1960s insurgencies came in two waves. Influenced by Che Guevara’s foco model, initial insurgencies were based in the countryside. After the defeat of Guevara’s guerrilla army in Bolivia in 1967, the focus shifted to urban guerrilla warfare. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new phase of guerrilla movements emerged in Peru and in Central America. While guerrilla-style warfare can provide a powerful response to a much larger and established military force, armed insurrections are rarely successful. Multiple factors including a failure to appreciate a longer history of grassroots organizing and the weakness of the incumbent government help explain those defeats and highlight just how exceptional an event successful guerrilla uprisings are.


Author(s):  
Powel H. Kazanjian

Abstract Today, most hospitals have implemented regulatory programs designed to curtail the antimicrobial misuse that has fueled resistance. In this paper, I trace the history of resistance and efforts to mitigate antibiotic overuse in the hospital. Medical investigators in the 1950s argued that the difficulties posed by resistant bacteria in the hospital were even more worrisome than the problems that antibiotics were intended to solve. These investigators sought to reform physician habits that they believed, left unchecked, would accelerate resistance and hasten the end of the antibiotic era. When their methods of education failed to change physician’s prescribing habits voluntarily, external restrictions were imposed. Today’s antimicrobial stewardship programs represent the newest version of a series of efforts that began in the mid-twentieth century to reform antibiotic misuse and to control resistant microbes in the hospital.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 77-82
Author(s):  
Sayora A. Ergasheva ◽  

The article tells about the history of ceramics and its features, which is one of the types of crafts in Surkhandarya. A scientific analysis of the social and spiritual basis for the development of crafts in Uzbekistan in the traditional national context and the thousand-year experience of folk crafts are given. Pottery is one of the national handicraft traditions of the Uzbek people, which has long been valued as one of the crafts. At the beginning of the twentieth century, various techniques and mechanisms began to be used in the production of handicrafts. This has had a significant negative impact on the quality of art production. By the 1950s and 1980s, ceramics had made many items disappear. Nevertheless, the oasis potters continued their work, remaining true to the tradition of the master apprentice


2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen Gendzel

When Professor Benjamin Parke De Witt of New York University sat down to write the first history of the progressive movement in 1915, he promised “to give form and definiteness to a movement which is, in the minds of many, confused and chaotic.” Apparently it was a fool's errand, because confusion and chaos continued to plague historians of early twentieth-century reform long after Professor De Witt laid his pen to rest. The maddening variety of reform and reformers in the early twentieth century has perpetually confounded historians' efforts to identify what, if anything, the progressives had in common. Back in the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter charitably allowed that progressives were “of two minds on many issues,” whereas Arthur Link argued that “the progressive movement never really existed” because it pursued so many “contradictory objectives.” In the 1960s, Robert Wiebe concluded that the progressives, if they constituted a movement at all, showed “little regard for consistency.” In the 1970s, Peter Filene wrote an “obituary” for progressivism by reasserting Link's claim that the movement had “never existed” because it was so divided and diffuse. In the 1980s, Daniel Rodgers tried to recast the “ideologically fluid” progressive movement as a pastiche of vaguely related rhetorical styles. By the 1990s, so many competing characterizations of progressivism had emerged that Alan Dawley wondered if “they merely cancel each other out.” In 2002, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore declared emphatically that “historians cannot agree” on progressivism. In 2010, Walter Nugent admitted that “the movement's core theme has been hard to pin down” because progressivism had “many concerns” and “included a wide range of persons and groups.”


Author(s):  
Ben Macpherson

This chapter reassesses the work of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop from the 1950s to the 1970s. It finds that, in many instances, Littlewood’s visionary approach to collaborative devising and her innovative borrowing from a breadth of theatrical traditions broadened the scope of the British musical as a vehicle for social engagement, with a legacy that is both tangible and vital as part of the history of twentieth-century musical theatre. Yet, the chapter argues that in many ways, at the root of Littlewood’s approach was an often contradictory world view: at once critical of the Establishment and simultaneously embedded within it. The chapter concludes by arguing that this paradoxical approach is what makes Littlewood’s work so innovative and, ultimately, so typically British.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-890 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Oren

AbstractIn the 1950s, the National Association of Women Lawyers (“NAWL”) undertook what it considered its “greatest project,” the drafting and promotion of a model no-fault divorce law. It launched its campaign at a time when post-war realities and the law in practice were putting increasing pressure on the law on the books which lagged behind contemporary sensibilities. NAWL acted two decades before the no-fault divorce “revolution” of the 1970s. It did so in the 1950s when women were said to be both “domestic” and “quiescent.” The Article has three aims. First, it considers NAWL's project as a missing piece in the history of divorce law, the no-fault revolution, and the rise of mass divorce in mid-twentieth century America. Second, it reflects on the implications of NAWL's undertaking for the standard narrative of “domesticity” in the 1950s, an account that has been questioned in recent years. Last, it tells a story of women's activism in the depth of the so-called “doldrums” of the organized women's moveme


2019 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 237-269
Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKellar

AbstractA very particular type of modern house in Britain — A-frames of the 1950s and 1960s — emerged from a much longer history of British and Scandinavian-German primitivism centred on the cruck-frame. This article focuses on a small number of architect-designed examples and introduces one of the main proponents of the type, Peter Boston (1918–99). The tension between the A-frame's familiarity as a universal dwelling type and its adoption as a signifier of modernity is a central theme. In the British twentieth-century context, the ‘modern’ included a strong vernacular element, and the new A-frames, which formed part of the ‘timber revival’ of the 1950s and 1960s, were informed by a long-standing interest in the history of cruck-framed construction from the Arts and Crafts onwards, which in turn was part of a wider pan-north European building culture.


Author(s):  
Andreas Broeckmann

This chapter discusses the ways in which twentieth-century artists have engaged with the aesthetic dimensions of algorithms and machine autonomy. It extends the narrative on the history of machine art from the previous chapter, beyond the program of Hultén’s 1968 “Machine” exhibition. It explains how the dialogue between art and cybernetics has evolved from the 1950s cybernetic artworks of Nicolas Schöffer, through the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” and Jack Burnham’s concept of Systems Aesthetics, to the more contemporary software and robotic artworks of Max Dean, Seiko Mikami, and others. A focus is placed on the work of Canadian artist David Rokeby who has explored the aesthetics of the human encounter and interaction with technical systems since the 1980s. The analysis aims at adding two further aspects of the aesthetics of machines to the list of five such aspects developed in the previous chapter: one is the aspect of “interactivity”, which adds the dimension of a charged dialogue and exchange between human and machine; and the other is the aspect of “machine autonomy”, which becomes a determining factor in the human experience of increasingly independent and self-referential technical systems.


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