Archive That Comrade
Download Archive That Comrade PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Archive That Comrade book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Archive That, Comrade!
Archive That, Comrade! explores issues of archival theory and practice that arise for any project aspiring to provide an open-access platform for political dialogue and democratic debate. It is informed by the author’s experience of writing a memoir about his involvement in the London underground scene of the 1960s, the London street commune movement, and the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, an event that hit the world’s headlines for ten days in July 1969. After a brief introduction that sets the contemporary scene of ‘archive fever,’ the book considers what the political legacy of 1960s counter culture reveals about the process of commemoration. The argument then opens out to discuss the notion of historical legacy and its role in the ‘dialectic of generations’. How far can the archive serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishises the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future? The following section looks at the emergence of a complex apparatus of public fame and celebrity around the spectacle of dissidence and considers whether the Left has subverted or merely mirrored the dominant forms of reputation-making and public recognition. Can the Left establish its own autonomous model of commemoration? The final section takes up the challenge of outlining a model for the democratic archive as a revisionary project, creating a resource for building collective capacity to sustain struggles of long duration. A postscript examines how archival strategies of the alt-right have intervened at this juncture to elaborate a politics of false memory.
Fag Hag
"Some girls fancy sailors, others fancy soldiers. But you, my dear, are a fag hag!" Lola Miesseroff's childhood certainly predisposed her to be a rebel. She was born in Marseilles in 1947 to immigrant parents, her mother a Russian-Jewish social worker, her father an Armenian-Russian with a sandpaper-making workshop in sheds left behind by the Americans. The family ran and lived in a nudist colony, a place where the men were allowed to be feminine, the women masculine. Hers was what she calls a "degendered" childhood: "I never suffered from identity problems. There were two genocides in my background, one Jewish, the other Armenian, and my education was Russophone, naturist and libertarian, not least with respect to love and sex. In other words, we were marginal in every possible way." Lola’s picaresque memoir Fag Hag tracks her peregrinations through what she calls the "Outer Left"—always deeply committed and involved in women's liberation, sexual liberation, gay, and LBGTQ liberation—yet always on the fringe of formal organizations (or driven there) because of her belief that anarcho-communist revolution (not her term) trumps all (inter)sectional struggles without reducing them. From Marseilles to Avignon and Paris, Lola's trajectory epitomizes a far left that opposed a spirit of provocation and raillery to the austerity of many militant groupuscules and experimented enthusiastically with communal and polysexual living. "I have dredged my memory," Lola writes, "in the hope that revisiting the past might help illuminate our present; if it doesn't, I shall have failed. I want to contribute in some small measure to the struggles of today by exposing the strengths and weaknesses of the struggles of the past, and to contest fragmented identity politics in favor of all-for-one-and-one-for-all. Which is my way of continuing to challenge the power structure."
China-GDR Relations from 1949 to 1989
This book provides an in-depth and very lively analysis of relations between China and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1989. It is the first and only comprehensive and detailed analysis of East German-Chinese ties and interactions in English. Chinese-East German relations, which over the decades have experienced some "highs" but many more "lows". " Low points came to the fore in the early 1960s when the Soviet Union ordered its vassal state in East Berlin to treat its former socialist comrade and brother-in-arms in Beijing as an adversary and even an enemy. In fact, the "Sino-Soviet split" ensured that until the late 1980s East Berlin and Beijing were more likely to talk about each other than to talk to each other. The second revised and extended edition of the book draws on a wealth of East German archival material. These include documents and reports from the archives of the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), the notorious East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi), and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Together with extensive secondary literature and almost everything that was ever written about China in East German newspapers from the 1950s to 1990, this book examines selected issues and areas of East German and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, placing policies and interactions in their historical context. It offers very detailed and well-documented insights into the following aspects: 1. the bilateral "honeymoon period" from 1949 to the late 1950s, during which both sides supported and applauded each other's oppressive domestic economic policies, including Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; 2. the 1960s, when the "Sino-Soviet split" determined the quality and level of bilateral interactions and tensions; 3. the 1970s, when Beijing replaced socialist comradeship with East Berlin with trade and aid from the US and Germany; and 4. the resumption of bilateral relations in the 1980s. The 1970s, when Beijing replaced socialist comradeship with East Berlin with trade and aid from the US and West Germany; and 4. The resumption of Sino-German relations in the 1980s and the subsequent period up to the Tiananmen Square protests and the collapse of the GDR in 1989. The book will appeal to historians, political scientists and international relations scholars, as well as policymakers and diplomats interested in this under-researched area.