Tracing the Communist Past: Toward a Performative Approach to Memory in Tourism

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Stach
Keyword(s):  
Communist Past

Komunistki

2020 ◽  
pp. 671-692
Author(s):  
Aga Skrodzka
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Visual Memory ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Status Of Women

This article argues for the importance of preserving the visual memory of female communist agency in today’s Poland, at the time when the nation’s relationship to its communist past is being forcefully rearticulated with the help of the controversial Decommunization Act, which affects the public space of the commons. The wholesale criminalization of communism by the ruling conservative forces spurred a wave of historical and symbolic revisions that undermine the legacy of the communist women’s movement, contributing to the continued erosion of women’s rights in Poland. By looking at recent cinema and its treatment of female communists as well as the newly published accounts of the communist women’s movement provided by feminist historians and sociologists, the project sheds light on current cultural debates that address the status of women in postcommunist Poland and the role of leftist legacy in such debates.

Man and Nature in China

1967 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhoads Murphey
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
New Order ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Contemporary China ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Individual Actions ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Chinese View

After nearly two decades of revolutionary rule in China, the break with the past which Communist direction has seemed to represent is increasingly being seen in a wider perspective. Few scholars would attempt to argue that the Communists have not brought a genuine revolution or that their ascendancy is merely the equivalent of a new dynasty. But as the character of the new order has become clearer with time and as an analysis both more detailed and less concerned with short-term matters has become possible, many scholars have been as much impressed by continuities with the pre-Communist past as by discontinuities. To take perhaps the clearest example, the current Chinese view of their relation to the rest of the world appears to represent little change from the traditional Sinocentric image. Ideological absolutism is also not new to China with Mao Tse-tung, nor is the conception of individual subsevience to public good, the unquestioned rightness of close social limits on individual actions. And contemporary China retains, for all its professed egalitarianism, a strongly elitist and hierarchial pattern.

Liberal attitudes and religion. The moderating effects of a communist past

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 375-389
Author(s):  
Giorgi Babunashvili ◽  
Anano Kipiani
Keyword(s):  
Moderating Effects ◽  
Communist Past

The What-Has-Been and the Now of a Communist Past in Malaya in the Films of Amir Muhammad

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-65
Author(s):  
Carlo Bonura
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Village People ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Malayan Emergency ◽  
The Village ◽  
Communism Today ◽  
Aesthetic Forms

This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir’s films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir’s films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir’s films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.

scholarly journals Consequences of the Totalitarian past on the Albanian Post- Communist Society

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 181
Author(s):  
Matilda Pajo
Keyword(s):  
Annual Reports ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Qualitative Nature ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes ◽  
Hybrid Regime ◽  
Freedom House

Enver Hoxha's communist regime lasted 45 years, leaving unstudied long-term consequences in the Albanian society. Still today, after 26 years of transition, the path of democratization of Albania remains unclear. Albania has been for more than four decades under one of the most isolated communist regimes in Europe. The transition from a communist totalitarian state to a democratic state is still incomplete even after 26 years since the fall of communism. Annual reports carried out by Freedom House noted a delay in the processes of democratic governance in Albania. In these reports, since 2007, based on the democratic indicators, Albania is defined as e hybrid regime. The aim of this paper is to argue that one of the reasons delaying democratization is the missing detachment, or the non-separation from the mentality of communist past. The methodology of this paper is qualitative nature, based on the international philosophical and political science literature. Also the author has studied countries, who have had similar experiences of totalitarian regimes and who later embraced democracy. This paper attempts to explain, that the bad governance is linked to the anti-democratic character of governance in Albania. Throughout Eastern Europe, Albania was the most radical, on the adaptation of Stalinist totalitarianism type, and nevertheless still today, is not seeking punishment of crimes of communism and has not implemented a law on lustration. The past can become an obstacle to the future when is not studied, recognized and confronted with.

Living in A Non–Communist versus in A Post–Communist European Country Moderates the Relation between Conservative Values and Political Orientation: A Multilevel Study

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Barni ◽  
Alessio Vieno ◽  
Michele Roccato
Keyword(s):  
European Social Survey ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
Communist Country ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Social Survey ◽  
Personality Psychology ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Conservative Values ◽  
Moderating Role

We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis using the 2012 European Social Survey dataset (N = 41 080, nested in 20 countries) to study how living in a non–communist versus in a post–communist country moderates the link between individual conservative values (drawn on Schwartz's theory of basic human values) and political orientation (assessed as self–placement on the left–right axis and attitude towards economic redistribution). The results supported the moderating role of living in a non–communist versus in a post–communist country in the case both of political self–placement and of attitude towards economic redistribution, even controlling for the countries’ degree of individualism, power distance and democracy. Specifically, conservative values were positively related to a rightist political self–placement among participants living in countries without a communist past, and to a favourable attitude towards economic redistribution in countries with a communist past. The limitations, implications and future directions of this study are discussed. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology

Dealing with the communist past: Its role in the disintegration of the Czech Civic Forum and in the emergence of the Civic Democratic Party

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lubomír Kopeček
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Civic Forum ◽  
Do So

The end of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989 has opened the thorny question of how to deal with the communist legacy. This paper focuses on important aspects of decommunization at the beginning of the 1990s and analyzes the role they played in the disintegration of the Civic Forum and in the emergence of the Civic Democratic Party. The paper shows that the decommunization agenda gradually became a significant divisive factor within the Civic Forum and served as one of the key issues through which the Civic Democratic Party defined itself. It also provided an opportunity for politicians skilled enough to grasp this issue to do so and to incorporate it into their wider political agendas.

Coming to (a Short) Life: The Czechoslovak Parliament 1989-1992

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Adéla Gjuričová
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Short Life ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Velvet Revolution ◽  
Unitary State ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Formal Procedures

The Czechoslovak federal parliament was designed in 1968 to replace the National Assembly of a unitary state and thus formally express equality between Czechs and Slovaks in the newly established federation. After the crash of the Prague Spring reforms, the socialist parliament lost most of its sovereignty, while preserving its federal character and formal procedures, thus providing a sort of “backup” legislature. The Velvet Revolution of 1989, with its proclaimed respect to peace and legality, logically found the ancient régime’s parliament in the centre of new politics. In the revolutionary parliament of 1989-1990, the concept of socialist parliamentarianism began to clash with new motives, such as the national unity, a break with the Communist past, liberal democracy, or subsidiarity. Various blends of socialist, revolutionary and liberal democratic views of the parliament consequently came to life, while each of these concepts as well as every practical policy was perceived and accepted in conflicting manners by the Czech and Slovak publics as well as political representations. Some of these differences turned out to be irreconcilable and the federal parliament eventually played a key role in administering the break-up of Czechoslovak federation in 1992.

Corps de femmes et maisons d’enfants dans Enfants du diable de Liliana Lazăr

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Andreea Bugiac ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Common Interest ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Orphaned Children ◽  
Personal Consequences ◽  
Children’S Homes ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Nicolae Ceausescu

Women Bodies and Children’s Homes in Liliana Lazar’s Enfants du diable [The Devil’s Children]. Many contemporary Romanian writers who chose French as a literary language seem to share a common interest in revisiting through fiction Romania’s relatively recent communist past, thus exposing the dysfunctionalities of the ‘multilaterally developed socialist society’ during the last years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In her novel, Enfants du diable (2016), Liliana Lazar’s merit is to emphasize the abusive nature of the Romanian totalitarian regime by exploring a topic which is normally less taken into account by post-communist Romanian fiction, namely the private body of women transformed into a public, even political body after the implementation of the Anti-abortion Decree 770/1966. Our aim is to examine the way in which Lazar’s book deals with this topic and its social and personal consequences, as well as its denunciation of a less evident form of the communist carceral system, namely the institutionalization of orphaned children. Keywords: communism, totalitarian regime, women’s body, orphanage, carceral system, Liliana Lazar, Nicolae Ceaușescu

Banishing Remains

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-50
Author(s):  
Maya Nadkarni
Keyword(s):  
Early Years ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
National History ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The City ◽  
Cover Up

This chapter narrates the early years of postsocialist transformation as Hungarians sought to make remake themselves as new national subjects amid the remains of multiple discredited pasts and failed historical trajectories. It explores how politicians, activists, and public officials initially conceptualized the problem of socialist remains in terms of physical remainders perceived to be emblematic of the former regime. Politicians, activists, and public officials battled to “spring clean” remains of the communist past in order to restore Hungary to the “authentic” course of national history. The chapter also focuses on the debates that resulted in the removal of Budapest's socialist-era statues to a Statue Park Museum on the outskirts of the city. Supporters justified the creation of the park as a democratic solution to the outrage that communist monuments inspired. Yet the removal of these statues was not a response to a crisis of defacements and public dissatisfaction, but an attempt to cover up the fact that little such crisis existed.

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