Why Dominican Feminism Moved to the Right: Class,Colour and Women's Activism in the Dominican Republic, 1880s–1940s

This article analyses feminism in the Dominican Republic, and the rightward shift of the women's movement in the 1930s and 1940s, by examining the historical development of female activism in the Dominican Republic from the 1880s until the first decade of General Rafael Trujillo's regime in the 1940s. The article argues that elite female activists, most of whom were white or light‐skinned, allied themselves with the right‐wing politics of General Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship because his vision of elite women's activism complemented the class and colour interests of a select group of female reformers. Dominican feminism's rightward shift also resulted from the monopolisation of political power under the Dominican Party; the veneration of elite, bourgeois womanhood in official state iconography; the elaboration of Hispanidad nationalism; and the rejection of feminism's early roots in the political philosophy of Eugenio María de Hostos. As a result, Dominican feminism's origins in left‐leaning, potentially radical politics were ignored and erased by leading activists.     

Intimate bordering: Intimacy,anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border

This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.     

Embodied negotiations: identity,space and livelihood after trade zones in the Dominican Republic

In this article, I analyze socio-spatial processes of subject-making at the center of the restructuring of export industries. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘embodied negotiations’ to explain the spatial and corporeal experience of trade zone workers reproduced as migrants with the collapse of garment exports in the Dominican Republic. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine ‘rural return’ as both a livelihood strategy and a discourse shaped by inter-related gender and racial ideologies of labor as well as the uneven transnationalization of rural and urban localities. I show how the negotiation of social position by subjects marked by race, gender and class is always also a negotiation of spatial position in and between localities structured through raced, gendered and class relations. Men's efforts to remain in urban areas as a form of social ‘whitening’ are compared to women's resistance to rural return as an attempt to stay in circulation as paid labor. Overall, I argue that feminist research on global production should be ‘spatialized’ by attending to livelihoods and practices of subject-making that emerge in parallel to export restructuring.     

‘Protection against the Lust of Men’: Progressivism,Prostitution and Rape in the Dominican Republic under US Occupation, 1916–24

This article explains the disparity between the United States (US) military government's efforts to defend and empower local women during the first occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) and its reputation for tolerating sexual assault. It argues that US officials, inspired by a progressive ideology that linked the social, economic and political spheres, set out to reshape Dominican sexual and gender norms as a means to ensure political stability. Yet, these efforts fell victim to both Dominican and US Marines’ conceptions of gender and normative sexuality. Building upon a thriving body of scholarship that addresses the significance of US efforts to redefine Dominican gender norms, this article analyses the military government's policies towards women and provost courts’ responses to sexual assault. It concludes that, combined with an aggressive anti‐prostitution campaign, the military government's reforms succeeded only in creating an atmosphere favourable to crimes against women. Moreover, rape and the way it was prosecuted revitalised the patriarchal norms that US officials had set out to transform, thus setting the stage for the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, whose thirty‐year dictatorship depended on the conspicuous control of women. Thus, US policies and attitudes not only ensured the failure of progressive reform but also contributed to the ongoing subjugation of the very women the military government had pledged to empower.     

Mission boys, civilized men, and marriage: educated African men in the Missions of Southern Rhodesia, 1920-1945

This paper examines what marriage may have meant to African men within the Christian elite of Southern Rhodesia. Using mission and government sources, it argues that domestic, Christian marriage was important to elite African men as a way of allowing them to achieve adulthood while remaining in good standing with mission sponsors who generally objected to or feared indigenous ideas of patriarchal male adulthood. Tracing life histories of two American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions ministers, one who succeeded in remaining within the mission system and one who left, blacklisted, it explores how domestic, Christian marriage defused many of the missions' suspicions of elite African men, while providing a way to acquire the economic, social and political power associated with full adulthood within the local context.     

Foreigners under U.S. Occupation in the Caribbean

This article investigates the experiences of third-country diplomats, private citizens, and subjects during U.S. occupations in the Caribbean, specifically in Haiti (1915–34) and the Dominican Republic (1916–24). It asks how their treatment by occupation forces and others might have affected the occupations and finds that they did so negatively. Although important differences marked the experiences of white Europeans - Germans, Spaniards, French, and British - members of all groups suffered in some ways from U.S. occupation and led many to grow disenchanted and even join in negative public denunciations. In the case of the French and British, this anti-occupation sentiment contradicted their governments’ official stance. Non-whites and non-Europeans - Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Ricans, Syrians, and West Indians - were far greater in number and suffered largely because of their race. Even in the rare case where the metropole presented their case before Washington, non-white victims of abuse could not obtain justice. The overall frustrations of foreigners eventually turned many against U.S. occupations in the Caribbean.     

As the drone flies: Configuring a vertical politics of contestation within forest conservation

This paper explores how the use of new monitoring technologies, including drones, are being incorporated into forest conservation, with emphasis on what is at stake politically for forest-based communities. This is a critical area to consider, as the cheapness and easy availability of drones has fostered their rapid proliferation in conservation practices, for activities as diverse as wildlife counting and fire prevention. Many have raised political concerns about these technological developments, and their potential to be used for the surveillance and spatial discipline of minority groups. For example, recent scholarship within political ecology, human geography and conflict studies makes clear that the regulatory frameworks of international conservation are being appropriated by states to pursue racialised agendas of social exclusion in former conflict zones – often with the support of international environmental actors. By justifying increased military presence; surveillance technologies; and stop-and-searches, conservation frameworks have facilitated the containment of “risky” populations and the production of new kinds of borders. However, few have yet explored what it will mean to incorporate drones into the production of territorial claims that can protect commons-based livelihoods and resist new forms of spatial enclosure. By examining the introduction of drones in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR) in the Petén region of Guatemala, I reveal how satellite technologies and drones are also being used as part of community-led resistance to dispossession. Here, drones are used as part of everyday conservation practices, as part of a socio-legal process that I describe as the configuration of a vertical politics of contestation. Following the history of technological innovation in the MBR leads me to show how, despite their associations with military containment, such technologies can be used to rework spatial orders imposed by states, international actors, the army and the national elite.     

Conservation values,the authorised heritage discourse and the conservation-planning assemblage

The focus of this paper is the practice of conservation applied through the English planning system, termed conservation-planning. It argues that a distinct conservation-planning social entity has developed that may be described as an ‘assemblage’ and that the values and validated practice of conservation-planning are constructed as an authorised heritage discourse (AHD). Emphasis is placed upon the way that the AHD maybe mobilised by the conservation-planning assemblage in relation to other elite discourses, explored through the way that relationships have developed between the policy spheres of conservation-planning, regeneration and economic development. In doing so, it is argued conservation has successfully repositioned itself from being regarded as a barrier to development to being regarded as an active agent of change. Furthermore, the paper proposes that within the conservation-planning AHD we might detect sub-AHDs, organised around the short-hand labels of Conservation Principles, The Heritage Dividend and Constructive Conservation, each with a somewhat different rhetorical purpose. Through this analysis, we can better understand conservation-planning as a distinct heritage social entity and process. It shares values with other heritage activities but also has distinct differences, intimately related to its political relationship with other domains of urban management.     

Scurvy‐related Morbidity and Death among Christopher Columbus' Crew at La Isabela,the First European Town in the New World (1494–1498): An Assessment of the Skeletal and Historical Information

This article explores the living conditions and specifically the possible etiologies of subperiosteal reactions among those seafarers who did not survive Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the Americas and died at La Isabela, the first permanent European settlement in the New World, which is located in the present‐day Dominican Republic. The town was founded in 1494 by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) and occupied for only 4 years. This study analyses the macroscopic and histological evidence of the skeletal series excavated from this contact cemetery, which is presently curated at the Museo del Hombre Dominicano. Twenty of the 27 systematically scored individuals reveal subperiosteal bone accretions, and in at least 15 individuals, these accretions appear bilaterally. The morphology, distribution and healing stages of the majority of these lesions provide new, direct evidence suggesting severe adult scurvy, a condition caused by sustained vitamin C deprivation, which was common among seafarers before the 18th century. The historical context surrounding the individuals' death at the European contact settlement and the conditions and duration of Christopher Columbus' second transatlantic voyage to the New World represent key elements in the interpretation of these lesions. In this case, the evidence also corroborates the known failure of Columbus' crew to exploit the locally available foods rich in vitamin C. Scurvy probably contributed significantly to the outbreak of sickness and collective death within the first months of La Isabela's settlement, an aspect that inflects the current discussion about the degree of virulence of New World infections that decimated the European newcomers, who we conclude to have been already debilitated and exhausted by scurvy and general malnutrition. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Constitution‐writing,nationalism and the Turkish experience

Until recently there has been relatively little attention paid to the question of how the relationship between the state, its citizens and the nation is articulated in constitutional texts. This paper seeks to address this gap through an examination of how the rules of belonging to the nation are discussed by the political elite and how these discussions find their final formulation in the constitutional texts. The analysis focuses on the Turkish case at two constitution‐writing moments (1924 and 1961). While such moments have conventionally been assumed to be ‘revolutionary’, the data on Turkey highlights continuities rather than radical changes over time. More particularly, it underscores the resilience and salience of the principle of nationalism over time.     

‘Writing’ Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–16

This article explores the intersection of race, class and womanhood during the early years of the Cuban Republic. It focuses on the writings of elite women who published in the black press between 1904 and 1916. While legal reforms and the expansion of the educational system facilitated new gender expectations, racial ideologies positioned upper‐class white women as the standard of ideal womanhood. I argue that elite women of African descent employed modernising gender norms in order to counter anti‐black racism and to affirm their identification with upper‐class whites. In particular, they published articles that promoted the dominant values regarding marriage, education and public comportment. They disparaged unmarried unions and the practice of African cultural traditions among the labouring poor. Elite black women's writings drew from the model of the enlightened caretaker also to engage broader debates regarding feminism and black civic unity. Yet their emphasis on ideals that promoted white superiority helped reinforce the anti‐black tenets of Cuban citizenship they hoped to undermine. By analysing elite black women's articles, poetry and letters, the article demonstrates the importance of understanding how women of African descent forged an intellectual trajectory, and thus contributes to the historiography of gendered racial ideologies in Latin America and the Caribbean.     

Eco-socialism and the political ecology of forest conservation in the Greater Khingan Range,China

State-owned forestry enterprises (SOFEs) in China, established during the Maoist era for forest exploitation, have undergone significant reorganization under the Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP). In this study, drawing on the perspectives of political ecology and a case study from a SOFE in the Greater Khingan Range in northeast China, we develop an eco-socialist perspective to understand this particular approach to forest conservation. The concept of eco-socialism is mobilized to describe how, as a form of all-encompassing social organization with overwhelming political, social, and economic power in the forestry regions, the eco-restructuring of SOFEs is key to the success of forest conservation. Four eco-restructuring processes have been identified: (1) declining timber sales and increasing central subsidies; (2) restructuring of work-units; (3) creating redundancies; and (4) developing new sustainable economic activities. Furthermore, these eco-restructuring processes, both mandated and supported by the central government, have a significant impact on state-society relationship. While the resources given by the central government allow SOFEs to maintain a stable relationship with some workers by providing them a relatively stable livelihood, the laid-off workers are the major victims of the process, as they suffer from loss of income, economic stability, and social self-esteem. This study enriches the literature by incorporating eco-socialist governmentality into the political ecology of forest conservation and illustrating how the political ecology perspective can be a powerful tool in the collective effort to craft sustainable and socially just futures in China.     

The Battle of the Camel: Revolution,transition and tourism in Cairo

This article asks how the 25 January 2011 revolution in Egypt led to the entrenchment of existing forms of privilege and marginality. To answer this question, critical scholars have taken for granted the revolution's linear temporality and focused largely on institutional processes at the state level following the fall of President Hosni Mubarak. In contrast, I provide an original take on this question through extensive ethnographic engagement, focusing on moments of rupture and urban spaces of contestation at the time of the revolution and beyond. More specifically, I trace the significance of an understudied moment during the revolution: the ‘Battle of the Camel’, when horse/camel drivers who sell rides to tourists at the Pyramids charged at protestors in Tahrir Square. An ethnography of this moment allows me to draw out the complex temporalities of the revolution by recognizing diverse moments of contestation by marginalized subjects at its different ‘stages’. This article traces how these alternative temporalities were driven but also obscured by longer-term patterns of tourism and urban development. It finds that relations of power and marginality were reproduced through tourism and elite Egyptian visions of temporality and authenticity in the key urban spaces relevant to this battle – the Pyramids of Giza and Tahrir Square. These sites were positioned as spaces of Egypt's ‘authentic’ past and future respectively, reinforcing a colonial and neoliberal narrative of development that made possible the protection of tourism and elite priorities and the remarginalization of ‘underdeveloped’ camel drivers and street vendors in these sites.     

Visitor Management,the Development of Sustainable Cultural Tourism and Local Community Participation at Chogha Zanbil,Iran

Abstract

Chogha Zanbil, an Elamite ziggurat and UNESCO World Heritage Site in Iran, has considerable potential as a cultural tourism destination but currently it receives a surprisingly small number of visitors. The site has seen a successful international conservation project over the past decade: now it needs a complete heritage strategy, which will give sufficient weight to developing sustainable tourism in a way that ensures the site's conservation, as well as its effective presentation to the public. This paper combines existing approaches to sustainable cultural development with primary research in Iran, including interviews with different stakeholders. It uses the Chogha Zanbil case study to suggest how visitor management strategies and cultural tourism can equip a site with the necessary tools to receive visitors and manage their impact while generating revenue for the site's maintenance and preservation. It also highlights the importance of local community participation in this process and provides examples of how local villagers can participate in, and benefit from, the development of sustainable cultural tourism at Chogha Zanbil.     

Neither Dowlati nor Khosusi: Islam,Education and Civil Society in Contemporary Iran

Private universities are a rapidly expanding form of education in Iran, and increasingly include Islam and the social sciences alongside the hard sciences too. What implications does the privatization of religious and social scientific knowledge have for the Islamic Republic? Scholarship has so far responded by looking at the ways in which the Iranian authoritarian state has monopolized religion, repressed the social sciences and hollowed out student activism. Complicating these arguments, this article provides a historical and institutional comparison of higher education in Iran in order to look at the evolving degree of autonomy of academic institutions and the ability of actors that operate within them to contribute to critical debate, social activism and novel discourse. The article proposes that while state universities and Islamic Azad suffer from politicization and control, a small set of privately owned “Islamic” universities is using its elite connections, financial independence and socio-pedagogical ties to the seminary and modern academia to secure enhanced levels of free debate and independent thinking.     

Conservation,extraction and social contracts at a violent frontier: Evidence from eastern DRC’s Itombwe Nature Reserve

Conservation efforts must develop strategies to perform at violent frontiers where environmental values, mineral extraction and conflict intersect. Using war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Itombwe Nature Reserve as an illustrative example, this article explores how community conservation is implemented and received at a violent frontier. Taking inspiration from an emerging body of literature which portrays conservation as a form of ‘social contract’ in regions where the nation state is weak or absent, it explores some of the expectations and obligations that surround community conservation initiatives. It draws the conclusion that conservation social contracts are likely to produce unintended consequences when left unfulfilled or broken. Conservation actors perceived to be breaking the terms of (implicit) social contracts can inadvertently encourage local communities to embrace alternative contracts with other actors seeking to extract value from the resources located in frontiers, such as industrial mining companies.     

Indifferent but Mobilized: Rural Politics during the Interwar Period in Eastern and Western Europe

What did peasants discuss at party meetings? Were they mobilized by ethnic politics or indifferent to them altogether? The end of the First World War brought about universal male suffrage in much of Europe, and with it the process of mass politics began. The concept of national indifference is important in understanding interwar politics, because this period is often studied teleologically with attention focused on extremism and nationalism as the primary mobilizing issue

Agrarian movements have been under-researched, and when Agrarians have been studied, it has been through the prism of elite politics. This comparative paper seeks to redress this omission by looking at grassroots rural politics. The interwar countryside was marked by profound political, economic and social transformation but also in terms of what Robert Paxton has described as the ‘triple crisis of the countryside’ – worsening economic conditions, the declining status of the countryside and inadequate political representation. The paper will explore how reform and crisis impacted how agrarian politics functioned at a local level by asymmetrically comparing cases from Romania, Poland and Ireland, with the final case helping to contextualize Eastern Europe within the wider European experience This paper argues that the rural population was mobilized, but primarily in the context of local issues rather than national ethno-political questions. Local party organization was, to paraphrase James C Scott, the site ‘of an exchange of small arms fire’ in rural class conflict, as questions regarding the control of public space, generational conflict and power within the village mobilized peasants. Thus, I argue that it was the underlying socio-economic issues that mobilized the rural population, not nationalism. The dynamics of these conflicts were shaped by local economic, political and social power dynamics, and by using indifference as a concept, we can look more deeply at interwar politics from a grassroots perspective and develop a more nuanced understanding of local, national and European politics.     

Indigenous Professionalization: Transnational Social Reproduction in the Andes

Indigenous professionalization is occurring throughout Latin America at an increasing pace as new careers open up in social development. Under what is heralded as socially inclusive neoliberalism, a "development with identity" paradigm is producing new university courses focused on indigenous issues. Influenced by discourses of social and human capital and addressing intersections of multiculturalism and development, these courses mobilize and help shape definitions of indigeneity; they also create spaces where donors and indigenous activists contest and debate understandings of development. Operating in a range of institutions, indigenous professionalization courses are led by a small elite group of academics and practitioners who move between programs and countries. Students also move transnationally. We argue that these courses, their classrooms and their curricula are intent on understanding intercultural situations transnationally, galvanizing international funding and support from bilateral and multilateral agencies as well as local and state actors. The social reproduction of indigenous professionalization is therefore transnational, yet grounded. At times, indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced by jumping scale; at other times, it works through established social and spatial hierarchies. This essay examines how indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced as a contested process through which notions of "good" and "culturally appropriate" development are constituted and consolidated.     

Empowerment,transformation and the construction of ‘urban heritage’ in post-colonial Hong Kong

In recent years, there have been many political and economic debates in Hong Kong, and heritage conservation has been used as a political and economic weapon by some members of the community. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper analyses how buildings of a small street built in the 1950s were constructed as ‘heritage’, and how a community heritage discourse was used by a group of local residents (Kiefang), university students and professionals to object to the urban renewal project led by the Hong Kong government. In this context, heritage was used to obtain political rights and to express anger against the increasing gap between the rich and poor of Hong Kong. Though the immediate objectives of this group were not achieved, the protest process empowered a group of local residents, and has marked the commencement of a politicalized heritage conservation movement in post-colonial Hong Kong.