Parité, la nouvelle ‘exception française’

This article shows how a movement for gender parity in politics, distinct from the second-wave women's liberation movement, formed in the 1990s, and how the subsequent parity reforms, which public opinion strongly favoured, gained support among political elites. It highlights the triumph of a conception of democracy based on the idea that political representation is to be shared between two equal and different sexes. Nevertheless, what appears to be a common sense victory, namely, the establishment of a universalism finally made real by the increase in the number of women in elected assemblies, is in fact ambiguous, especially when considered in relation to the feminism of the 1970s.     

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism,socialist nation and anti-nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.     

Les revues françaises d’astronomie,un cas d’interactivité scientifique

Astronomical data issued from observatories find multiple uses on land, as well as on sea. Due to their structure and periodicity, scientific reviews are particularly adapted to peer review and sharing of data between astronomers as well as between astronomers and hobbyists. During the 19^th century regional observatories first gather together professionals interested in the practical applications of the observations and later, under the influence of personalities such as Camille Flammarion, they bring together a larger non-professional audience. Being the epicentre of scientific exchange, the reviews have in the 20^th century found their place on the websites of academic institutions as well as users forums.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Notes Towards the “Big Book” of His Generation: Man Descending in the Sociopolitical Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Guy Vanderhaeghe’s historical novels starting with The Englishman’s Boy (1996) have been widely discussed and celebrated in academic books and journals, but his first collection of stories, Man Descending (1982), has been largely neglected by the academic critics. An examination of sociopolitical references, with a special focus on gender and masculinity, in a coherent group of these stories (“The Watcher,” “Drummer,” Cages,” “Man Descending,” and “Sam, Soren and Ed”), reveals a writerly personality that, while acutely sensitive to contemporary social and political developments, and itself deeply implicated in these trends, nevertheless stands uncomfortably apart from and assumes a critical attitude toward the prevailing, generally progressive, sociopolitical trends of the 1960s and 1970s. In the last story of Man Descending, the protagonist-narrator Ed emerges as an aspiring thirty-year-old author who has attempted, but could not finish, two novels of his society and times, and these early stories constitute Vanderhaeghe’s own notes toward a never fully realized “Big Book” of his generation of Saskatchewan men, born in the early 1950s, coming to young adulthood in the socially and politically transformative 1960s and 1970s, and surviving into an embattled early manhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time, as it is depicted in these stories, in which the aspirations of 1960s progressivism were hardening into a conformist sociopolitical orthodoxy.     

From water to tears: extra-curricular activities and the search for substance in China’s universities

ABSTRACT

Why do university students participate in extra-curricular activities in China? What do they seek in a meaningful education? This paper explains the rising interest in extra-curricular activities by looking into students’ frustration about classroom-bounded education in China’s universities. A transforming socio-economic landscape and increasing imagination about global modernity have inspired new neoliberal demands for practical knowledge and personal meaning. And yet, China’s universities have failed to keep up with students’ changing visions of education, success, and productive personhood. This paper explores students’ agentive pursuit of sociability and emotional sensitivity through extra-curricular activities as a lens to examine the fluidity of meaning-making in contemporary China. In the process, I discuss why self-reported aspirations in skill cultivation cannot encompass the range of motivations that have driven students to extra-curricular participation, and explain how the ethnographic method can help to address gaps of knowledge in inquiries about youthful aspirations.     

In Search of the Absolute: the Nouvelle Revue française,and Uses and Meanings of the Orient (1920–1930)

In the intellectual history of the interwar period, the Nouvelle Revue française (NRF) occupies centre-stage. Valéry's essay La crise de l'esprit (1919), published in the review following the Great War, announced a crisis of faith in Western values and traditions. As elsewhere, intellectuals in France looked to the East for new inspirations. This article traces the interest and attraction of the East for certain key NRF writers, including André Malraux, and the teacher and philosopher, Jean Grenier, whose essay Sur l'Inde was published in the review in 1930. The article is informed partly by the correspondence of Jean Paulhan, the editor of the NRF.     

From Racecourse to People’s Park and People’s Square: The historical changes and the symbolic meaning

Shanghai Racecourse was established at 1850, it was finally transformed into People’s Park and People’s Square in 1951. The Racecourse was originally just a simple recreational center. However, with the change of its own function and the trend of thought, it changed into a casino of cheating and murder, a place of discrimination against Chinese, a stage for the imperialists to show off their power and violence and a symbol of all evil things. The appeal to change the Racecourse echoed to the demand of opposing imperialism, taking back the concession, desire for civilization and democracy. From 1930s to 1950s, even though great change took place in the ruling party and the political power, there was an obvious continuity in the domain of thought and ideology.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

Political travel across the ‘Iron Curtain’ and Communist youth identities in West Germany and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This article explores tours through the Iron Curtain arranged by West German and Greek pro-Soviet Communist youth groups, in an attempt to shed light on the transformation of European youth cultures beyond the ‘Americanisation’ story. It argues that the concept of the ‘black box’, employed by Rob Kroes to describe the influence of American cultural patterns on Western European youth, also applies to the reception of Eastern Bloc policies and norms by the Communists under study. Such selective reception was part of these groups’ efforts to devise a modernity alternative to the ‘capitalist’ one, an alternative modernity which tours across the Iron Curtain would help establish. Nevertheless, the organisers did not wish such travel to help eliminate American/Western influences on youth lifestyles entirely: the article analyses the excursions’ aims with regard to two core components of youth lifestyles in Western Europe since the 1960s, which have been affected by intra-Western flows, the spirit of ‘doing one’s own thing’ and transformations of sexual practices. The article also addresses the experience of the travellers in question, showing that they felt an unresolved tension: the tours neither served as a means of Sovietisation nor as an impulse to develop an openly anti-Soviet stance.     

Between ideology and pragmatism: the ČSSR,the GDR and West European companies in the 1970s and 1980s

The article deals with Czechoslovakia's and East Germany's relations with West European enterprises and private businessmen in the 1970s and 1980s, and explores more specifically their licensing agreements and credit policy. The author shows their importance for technological modernisation and the realisation of so-called consumer socialism in both countries. It focuses on the political and business elites of both countries, and devotes special attention to the question of the ideological versus technocratic approach of the politicians and company directors as well as their impact on economic planning.     

‘Marriage’, ‘Massage', Metaphor and Gender in US–Iranian Relations During the 1960s

Abstract

Although they were allies, during the 1960s relations between the United States and Iran were fraught with tensions. For American policymakers, Iran was an important Cold War client and oil-supplier in a turbulent region. It was vital, therefore, to maintain a good relationship with the Shah of Iran. Indeed, United States policy was based in large part on American assessments of the Shah as an individual. This article seeks to assess how the language and metaphors used by American policymakers to describe and understand the Shah reflected and informed United States policy. Officials within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the Shah through a highly gendered lens that magnified perceptions of him as a weak, highly sensitive and irrational leader – characteristics deemed to be overly feminine. This article therefore contends that US policy towards Iran was influenced by gender stereotypes as policymakers lamented their reliance on the Shah, who they deemed to be insufficiently 'masculine'.