Cheating the Censor: Romanian Writers under Communism

Abstract

The Romanian Communist Party enjoyed considerable success in exploiting literature for its own ends. This article asks why those writers who challenged censorship were few in number, and why, even in the final year of Nicolae Ceau?escu’s rule, the chorus of protest was weak. Most Romanian writers failed to oppose censorship, and were deeply marked by it even when they believed that they were ‘cheating’ the censor. In some ways self-censorship proved to be more damaging to creativity than overt repression. The exceptions nevertheless comprise an important category, deserving examination and recognition. The fall of Communism in Romania has allowed a discussion of these themes to be more fully informed and to this end English translations of open letters from a number of writers are appended. Some of these were passed to the author for dissemination in 1989.     

Universities in inclusive regional innovation systems: Academic engagement and uneven knowledge use in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to spatially and regionally examine academic engagement within Brazil, identifying patterns. Moreover, our investigation can contribute to a better understanding of how knowledge can be turned into a tool to fight regional inequality. We depart from two hypotheses: first, universities situated in peripheral regions interact more with companies from relatively more dynamic regions, and second, in the absence of industrial knowledge demand, universities tend to collaborate more closely with a diverse range of stakeholders in the region. To evaluate these hypotheses and find empirical evidence, we consider 4497 research groups and 4603 nonacademic organizations as “nodes” connected by 8830 collaborations throughout all Brazilian regions. Social network tools are used to illustrate the spatial and regional dimensions of academic engagement more accurately. The results show that academic engagement is not regionally homogeneous, demonstrating essential differences regarding local nonacademic partnerships. Innovation policies, which encourage only university–firm interactions, perpetuate regional inequality.     

The Takarazuka Girls’ Revue in the West: public–private relations in the cultural diplomacy of wartime Japan

This essay examines wartime Japan’s establishment of culture bureaus and its promotion of the Takarazuka Girls’ Revue in allied European nations and the United States in a moment of international crisis. This overseas cultural policy was part of a series of alternative strategies employed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an effort to persuade the West to acknowledge Japan’s self‐appointed role as a leader in East Asia, capable of producing advanced cultural products on a par with those of western nations. Key features of this essay include the negotiation between state goals and private interests in the performance of cultural diplomacy, as well as the aesthetic articulation of a hybrid Japanese culture which was traditional yet fully modern, particularly as presented on stage through a display of the female body.     

Miami's Little Havana: Yard Shrines,Cult Religion and Landscape

The urban square has been a distinguishing characteristic of European cities for millennia. However, in the context of small towns, where the square is often the sole identifier of their physical urbanity, its role differs from that of large towns. This fact is substantial within national administrative systems that endorse desirable urban status to rural settlements endowed with urban morphology. It is also important in times of extensive EU-subsidized actions aimed at improving the quality of public space in small underresourced towns. However, many projects fail to draw from and respond to the specifics of the local context, and, by focusing on the details and disregarding the basics, they may defeat their purpose. Departing from extensive field observations in Poland, this paper puts theoretical framework and current trends in urban design into relation to various elements of a square's spatial configuration in order to arrive at degrees of their urban significance. By interpreting the fundamental values embedded in the morphology of market squares, this paper attempts to isolate the cultural archetypes that shape our perception of such places as urban. The proposed analysis could be used to meet the main goal of market square revitalization, namely to visually articulate urbanity.     

Terminal Pleistocene–Early Holocene lithic technological organization around Lake Mojave,California

Abstract

The surface lithic scatters at two areas around Soda Lake were intensively surveyed and 3133 artifacts were analyzed in the field using four main variables to infer how Terminal Pleistocene–Early Holocene foragers organized lithic technology around pluvial Lake Mojave, California. Results indicate that early stage bifaces and flake tool blanks were created at a fine-grained volcanic (felsite) quarry/workshop complex in the Soda Mountains survey area and transported elsewhere. In addition, fine-grained volcanic bifaces were reduced and bifaces and flake tools of cryptocrystalline silicates and obsidian were finished, used, and/or discarded at a habitation area on the ancient shorelines near Little Cowhole Mountain. Comparisons with nearby sites of similar ages (at Ft. Irwin and China Lake) reveal many similarities in lithic technological organization. Lake Mojave—an important locus of prior research—can now be integrated into recent Mojave Desert and Great Basin technological organization studies.     

Railways as a Factor of Change in the Distribution of Population in Spain, 1900–1970

Abstract

The central focus of this work is to test a new methodology to measure the impact of the railway on the distribution of population, in this case in Spain. To achieve this, it was necessary to previously integrate data relating to population and railway lines into a geographical information system. The result was a spatial database that includes population data from homogeneous census series obtained for the municipal scale and the evolution of the railway network in service at corresponding points in time. This allowed the authors to apply spatial-temporal analysis. By so doing, this work constitutes an analysis of a new methodology, as they used exploratory spatial data analysis and geographically weighted regression to detect spatial patterns and estimate the influence of the railway and distance from the coast on population change. The results obtained show that the influence of the railway was very pronounced in some areas, while in others it was just one of the factors that could explain major changes in population distribution.     

The missing revolution: The totalitarian democracy in light of 1776

During much of his prolific career, the late historian Jacob Talmon was preoccupied with revolutionary movements, and was especially unsettled by, and attracted to, the force displayed by the French and Russian Revolutions. The young United States’ long and bloody war against the British Empire, followed by the creation of a republican novus ordo seclorum, supposedly fitted Talmon's revolutionary model and narrative. Hence, it is hard to account for the complete absence of the American Revolution from Talmon's extensive and celebrated trilogy.

This paper examines how Talmon understood revolutions and how the major historiographical schools interpreting the American Revolution could not accommodate, for different reasons, Talmon's paradigm of the nature and essence of revolutions. The paper further demonstrates how not only the failings of different historical interpretive schemes convinced Talmon to ignore the American Revolution. Rather, since the American Revolution could be conceived either as Lockean or Machiavellian, but in any event not as Rousseauian, Talmon overlooked its Atlantic nature; he chose to focus solely on messianic Europe. The paper will thus analyze the meaning and consequence of the fact that Talmon left the examination of the pursuit of happiness to Americanists, and chose to leave 1776 out of his corpus. Indeed, a missing revolution.     

Struggles for the Folk. Politics of Culture in Czechoslovak Ethnography, 1940s–1950s

Focusing on politics of culture in early socialist era, this article explores struggles for imposing particular visions of “folk” during the revolutionary zeal characterizing the post-1948 period's development in the discipline of Czechoslovak ethnography. It examines the self-proclaimed turn from previous ethnographic traditions, accused of bourgeois nationalism, to socialist orientation towards studying “true folk”. By tracing struggles around the re-conceptualization of constitutive criteria and boundaries defining the essential object of ethnographic inquiry, the socialist ethnographers readjusted to the changes by focusing on more “progressive” traditions and shifted towards the “working-class” seen as possessing revolutionary spirit and the true authentic essence of the nation. The article argues that the new ethnographic wave ultimately re-inscribed the essentialist categories they virtually combatted by embedding them within the same structural framework rooted in the national order of things.