Back to the future? France's African adventure revisited

Valette, J., La France et l'Afrique: t.1 L'Afrique subsaharienne de 1914 à 1960 (SEDES, 1994), 316pp., 110F., ISBN 2 7181 3767 3

Valette, J., La France et l'Afrique: t.2 L'Afrique française du Nord, 1914–1962 (SEDES, 1994), 515pp., 130F., ISBN 2 7181 3607 3     

Jeux de corps,Enjeux de pouvoir: New light on the history of French sport

Comite des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, Jeux et sports dans l'histoire (Editions du CTHS, 1992). Tome 1: Associations et politiques, 330pp, 360F.; Tome 2: Pratiques sportives, 400pp., 360F., ISBN 2 735 50245 7 and 2 735 50246 5

Hubscher, R., (sous la direction de), L'Histoire en mouvements: Le sport dans la société française (XIXe‐XXe siècle) (Armand Colin, 1992), 560pp., 290F., ISBN 2 200 37238 8

Rauch, A., Boxe, violence du XXème siècle (Aubier, 1992), 427pp., 180F., ISBN 2 700 72241 8     

Italy at War 1935–2005: Report on the 2005 ASMI Annual Conference,Edinburgh, 25–26 November

‘Addiopizzo’ (Goodbye protection money) is a grassroots anti-mafia movement based in Palermo that stresses the individual consumer's responsibility for maintaining the Sicilian mafia's pizzo system. If you purchase products from a business that pays the pizzo you are indirectly supporting the mafia. By encouraging Palermitans to buy from ‘pizzo-free’ businesses, Addiopizzo uses the purchasing power of the consumer to fight organised crime. The community of ‘pizzo-free’ businesses is small but steadily growing whilst the number of critical consumers pledging to buy their products appears to have peaked. This article aims to investigate the reasons why consumers may be reluctant to support ‘pizzo-free’ businesses by asking those who have already made public their decision to do so. Whilst critical consumers cannot fully explain why the majority of Palermo's citizens continue to tolerate the pizzo system their attitudes towards them do highlight differences that may help to account for wider non-participation in Addiopizzo's campaign.     

Autonomia and the Political: An Italian Cycle of Contention, 1972–1979

Sidney Tarrow has identified a ‘cycle of contention’ taking place in Italy between 1966 and 1972; Tarrow characterises the left-wing terrorism of the late 1970s as an after-effect of this cycle. However, there was a second cycle of contention between 1972 and 1979, incorporating the left-wing ‘armed struggle’ milieu alongside a group of related mass movements (notably the ‘area of Autonomia’, the ‘movement of 1977’ and the ‘proletarian youth movement’). The second cycle, unlike the first, was met with repression, and with the exclusion of its ideological and tactical innovations from the political mainstream. The difference between the two cycles relates to the role played by the Italian Communist Party, which functioned as a ‘gatekeeper’ in each case; the party's engagement with the first cycle can be characterised as inclusive, while its engagement with the second cycle was unremittingly exclusive.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.