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1

Santose, Rachel A. "An Engaging Remembrance: A Review of the American Battle Monuments Commission Website." DttP: Documents to the People 44, no. 1 (September 7, 2016): 22. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/dttp.v44i1.6062.

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Over 100,000 US military personnel died during World War I, with many of these deaths occurring directly on foreign battlefields. Public Law 389, enacted by the 66th Congress, as well as Public Law 360, enacted by the 80th Congress, allowed for a family’s repatriation of soldier remains to the United States for burial in a national or private cemetery. In 1919, however, the US War Department decided to establish permanent American military cemeteries in Europe and offered this option as an alternative to repatriation. To persuade family members to consent, the War Department needed to ensure these cemeteries were impressive and significant symbols of the American sacrifice on foreign soil; therefore, the War Department detailed a group of Army officers to serve as the Battle Monuments Board in 1921. Two years later, on March 4, 1923, Congress passed the Act for the Creation of an American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which established one authoritative organization under Title 36 of the United States Code to control the construction of monuments and memorials to the American military in foreign countries.
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Bergman, Teresa. "War and Remembrance: The Story of the American Battle Monuments Commission." Journal of American History 106, no. 3 (December 1, 2019): 779–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaz590.

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Lissovsky, Mauricio, and Ana Lígia Leite e Aguiar. "The Brazilian dictatorship and the battle of images." Memory Studies 8, no. 1 (October 8, 2014): 22–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1750698014552404.

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In contrast to other South American countries, in Brazil, where a military dictatorship (1964–1985) incarcerated, tortured and ‘disappeared’ countless opponents, there have been very few initiatives to construct a public memory in the form of memorials and museums. Only recently, when the National Truth Commission was set up in 2012, debates on the importance of memory re-emerged, including a significant increase in the number of proposals to construct memorials of national importance, taking as their point of reference the coup in which the military seized power 50 years ago. This text offers a study of news sections dealing with memories of the Brazilian dictatorship and the activities of the National Truth Commission as they were reported in the daily press between 2012 and 2014 as well as visits to some of the monuments and memorials erected or planned after the end of the dictatorship in various parts of the country. Cases studied are divided into two groups: first, monuments stemming from the transition to democracy and the political pact that underwrote it, and second, cases that reflect the fragility of this pact and the efforts to undertake a revision of its terms. Rather than one succeeding the other, these two versions of memory are interdependent and have contested the hegemony of public initiatives to shape our memory of the period.
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Szymoniczek, Joanna. "Instytucjonalizacja współpracy w zakresie grobownictwa wojennego." Rocznik Polsko-Niemiecki, no. 23 (April 29, 2015): 88–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.35757/rpn.2015.23.04.

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Resting places of fallen soldiers – war cemeteries – are monuments to soldiers’ heroism, and thus are of special significance not only for those who have lost their loved ones, but also for entire nations, countries and communities. Therefore, such cemeteries are created under the provisions of relevant authorities, and then put under the special protection of the public. These issues are closely regulated by international law established throughout the twentieth century. Cemeteries are protected by the state on whose territory individual objects are placed. However, the problem of cemeteries is more and more often the responsibility of social organizations. According to the international humanitarian law of armed conflict, specific tasks in this respect are assigned to the tracing services of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, who deal with the registry of exhumation, inhumation and body transfer, hold deposits, establish the fate of victims of war and issue death certificates. Institutions that deal with exploration, keeping records, exhumation of remains and the construction or revaluation of the graves of fallen citizens buried outside the borders of their own countries include the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, the German People’s Union for the Care of War Graves, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Austrian Red Cross (Österreichisches Schwarzes Kreuz), the American Battle Monuments Commission, the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad and the Italian Commissariat General for the Memory of Killed in War (Commissariato Generale per le Onoranze Caduti in Guerra). For political reasons, tasks related to war cemeteries are assigned to social organizations, because their actions are believed to be more effective and less bureaucratic than those of states.
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Zegveld, Liesbeth. "The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and international humanitarian law: A comment on the Tablada Case." International Review of the Red Cross 38, no. 324 (September 1998): 505–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0020860400091294.

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On 30 October 1997, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereafter the Commission) adopted its report in the so-calledTabladacase. The case concerned an attack launched by 42 armed persons on military barracks of the national armed forces in 1989 at La Tablada, Argentina. The attack precipitated a battle lasting approximately 30 hours and resulting in the deaths of 29 of the attackers and several State agents. The surviving attackers filed a complaint with the Commission alleging violations by State agents of the American Convention on Human Rights (hereafter the American Convention) and of rules of international humanitarian law. In its report the Commission examined in detail whether it was competent to apply international humanitarian law directly. It answered this question in the affirmative.
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Kolyagina, Natalia K. "Moscow Memorials to the Heroes of the Great Patriotic War of the Late 1990s - Middle 2000s in the Context of the Soviet and American-European Tradition of War Commemoration." Observatory of Culture, no. 5 (October 28, 2015): 110–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.25281/2072-3156-2015-0-5-110-116.

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The article reviews the monuments to events and participants of the Great Patriotic War which were built in Moscow during the first ten years of functioning of the Moscow City Commission for Monumental and Decorative Art. The mechanics of new monuments’ adjustment and installation in Moscow is analyzed in the article. Applying to the war memorial conceptions by J. Mayo, G. Mosse, E. Linenthal, J. Winter and others, the author endeavors to show what such monuments can symbolize in modern Moscow, which history will be chosen by their initiators to be fixed in the collective consciousness, and vice versa, what the monuments will never expose.
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LeMahieu, Michael. "Post-54: Reconstructing Civil War Memory in American Literature after Brown." American Literary History 33, no. 3 (August 5, 2021): 635–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajab059.

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Abstract From a cultural fad of Confederate flags to a spate of schools named after Confederate generals, the 1954 Brown v. Board decision revived the memory of the US Civil War. In their collective effort of “massive resistance,” white southerners considered themselves carrying on the legacy of their Confederate ancestors, rebelling against the federal government and insisting upon states’ rights. In response to this revival, many mid-century writers revised Civil War memory. Ralph Ellison, for example, considered the Brown decision as yet another battle in an ongoing Civil War. The works of Black writers such as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Pauli Murray, and Margaret Walker, as well as white writers such as Robert Lowell, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Robert Penn Warren, revise Lost Cause cultural narratives as they reconstruct four sites of Civil War memory: monuments, schools, textbooks, and grandparents. Writers in the twenty-first century have extended the interest in Civil War memory, from the essays of Ta-Nehisi Coates to the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks, to the fiction of George Saunders to the poetry of Natasha Trethewey and Kevin Young. The return of Civil War memory in twenty-first-century literature anticipates and represents the resurgence of civil rights protest against ongoing, state-sanctioned racial violence.
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Kielbowicz, Richard B. "Origins of the Junk-Mail Controversy: A Media Battle over Advertising and Postal Policy." Journal of Policy History 5, no. 2 (April 1993): 248–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898030600006734.

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On 30 June 1971, the tradition-bound U.S. Post Office, long steeped in politics, ceased operating as a cabinet-level department. The next day marked the birth of the U.S. Postal Service, a government corporation. This transformation, arguably the most fundamental restructuring of a major federal agency in American history, ended 180 years of congressional postal ratemaking. By ceding ratemaking authority to a commission, Congress hoped to elevate sound pricing principles and scrupulous administrative procedures over the impressionistic claims and political influences that had characterized the legislative process. Yet the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act could not wipe away two centuries of history. Ratemakers—whether legislators before 1971 or administrators thereafter—frequently found themselves confronted with mailers invoking tradition, history, and social values to bolster their arguments. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the struggle to find junk mail's proper place in postal policy.
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Hilton, Adam. "The Path to Polarization: McGovern-Fraser, Counter-Reformers, and the Rise of the Advocacy Party." Studies in American Political Development 33, no. 1 (February 18, 2019): 87–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0898588x19000014.

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American politics has been transformed by the emergence of the advocacy party—a form of organization in which extraparty interest groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements substitute for the diminished institutional capacity and popular legitimacy of the formal party apparatus. Many scholars have rightly pointed to the presidential nomination reforms made by the Democratic Party's post-1968 Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission) as a key contributor to polarization by increasing the influence of ideological activists. However, I argue that polarization is not the direct result of the actions of McGovern-Fraser reformers, but rather the outcome of their pitched battle with intraparty opponents of reform, who, while failing to prevent changes to presidential nominations, were ultimately successful in defeating the party-building dimension of the reformers’ project of party reconstruction. The product of their intraparty struggle was a hybrid institutional amalgam that layered new participatory arrangements over a hollow party structure, thus setting the Democratic Party on a path toward the advocacy party and its polarizing politics.
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Gaido, Daniel. "Archive Marxism and the Union Bureaucracy: Karl Kautsky on Samuel Gompers and the German Free Trade Unions." Historical Materialism 16, no. 3 (2008): 115–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156920608x315266.

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AbstractThis work is a companion piece to ‘The American Worker’, Karl Kautsky's reply to Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906), first published in English in the November 2003 edition of this journal. In August 1909 Kautsky wrote an article on Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, on the occasion of the latter's first European tour. The article was not only a criticism of Gompers's anti-socialist ‘pure-and-simple’ unionism but also part of an ongoing battle between the revolutionary wing of German Social Democracy and the German trade-union officials. In this critical English edition we provide the historical background to the document as well as an overview of the issues raised by Gompers' visit to Germany, such as the bureaucratisation and increasing conservatism of the union leadership in both Germany and the United States, the role of the General Commission of Free Trade Unions in the abandonment of Marxism by the German Social-Democratic Party and the socialists' attitude toward institutions promoting class collaboration like the National Civic Federation.
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11

Goeteyn, Geert. "EU Aviation Scene: Major Developments December 2007 — June 2008." Air and Space Law 33, Issue 6 (November 1, 2008): 444–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.54648/aila2008037.

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This article gives an overview of the major developments on the EU aviation scene between 1 December 2007 and 30 June 2008. In particular: — There were important EU external aviation policy developments during the period under review. The main development was the coming into force of the EU/US Open Skies Agreement. In addition, the Commission has continued its drive to conclude a number of horizontal air services agreements. — Partly as a result of the EU/US Open Skies Agreement and partly due to other economic factors including, in particular, the worsening economic climate,rocketing fuel prices and overcapacity (especially in the US), a number of consolidation transactions were announced (mergers or integrated alliances) during the period under review. They include the Delta/Northwest merger and the alliance arrangements between Continental, United Airlines and a number of other Star Alliance carriers. American Airlines and British Airways were also rumoured to be preparing another application for antitrust immunity (the two earlier applications failed). — There were also a number of other important competition law developments.The Commission continued its vigorous pursuit of infringement proceedings against carriers that have allegedly participated in illegal cartel behaviour. The battle between Aer Lingus and Ryanair also continued to rage, with Aer Lingus failing to obtain interim measures from the Court of First Instance stopping Ryanair from exercising voting rights linked to its minority shareholding in Aer Lingus. — There was a lot of activity in the State aid field during the period under review.There were certain noteworthy developments in the various ongoing Olympic investigations, while the loan granted by the Italian government to Alitalia also came under scrutiny. The Commission launched a number of investigations into start–up aid granted to Ryanair at a number of regional airports, which the Commission considers may be incompatible with the EU State aid rules. Finally,Ryanair also continued its fight trying to protect its business model, with developments in Ryanair’s appeal against the Commission’s Charleroi decision and the launch of proceedings against the Commission for alleged failure to act with regard to two complaints Ryanair submitted against alleged illegal airport aid granted to Lufthansa and Air France. — Finally, there were a number of important regulatory developments during the period under review, including (a) the European Parliament’s first reading of the Commission’s proposal for a new CRS Code of Conduct; (b) the adoption by the Commission of a Communication providing its views on a number of issues resulting from the review process of the present Slot Code of Conduct; (c) the adoption by the Council of Ministers for the Environment of a common position with regard to the Commission’s proposal to include aircraft emissions in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme; and (d) the publication by Consumer Commissioner Kuneva on the interim results of a crackdown on misleading aviation websites. Each of these points will be examined in greater detail in the sections below.
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12

Scholten, Frits. "De apotheose van de held: Bartholomeus Eggers en het monument voor Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam in Den Haag, I667." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 109, no. 1-3 (1995): 63–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501795x00359.

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AbstractIn I665 Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam, admiral of the Dutch fleet, was killed while waging the Battle of Lowestoft against the English. Almost immediately after Holland's defeat, the States General decided to honour the admiral with a monument. In the light of this defeat and the harsh criticism of Van Wassenaer's leadership, the initiative may be seen as a political ploy to camouflage the debacle. A design submitted by the sculptor Rombout Verhulst was rejected in favour of one by the younger and less experienced Bartholomeus Eggers, who was given a fairly unexpected chance to submit an alternative design. Posthumous claims, recorded in various archivalia, that the originator of the design was C. Moninx, a painter of The Hague, appear to be unfounded: Moninx' heirs were probably out for financial gain, acting in the same spirit as the late painter, whose reputation was already tarnished by accusations of forgery shortly before his death. In any case, in view of Moninx' artistic achievements it seems unlikely that he would have been capable of providing such a design for the Van Wassenaer monument. Furthermore, his name does not occur in official documents of the States General pertaining to the commission, the specifications and the fee for the monument. In terms of form and iconography, the Van Wassenaer monument is exceptional. The choice of a splendid canopied monument reflects the aspiration to emulate Hendrick de Keyser's tomb for William of Orange. In opting for this form, moreover, the designer was employing the most important motif of royal exequies in I6th and I7th-century Europe: the catafalque. This architectural motif, derived from Roman burial rites, was the ephemeral focus of many royal funerals; since the death of Emperor Charles V (I558) such catafalques had been appearing all over Europe, notably for deceased Hapsburg monarchs. Illustrated descriptions of such exequies were partly responsible for making catafalque types widely known. The use of this regal funerary motif in the monument for Van Wassenaer Obdam reflects the ambition of the body that ordered it - the States General - to present itself as an able, sovereign power in the Netherlands. The iconography of the monument is exceptional in that Van Wassenaer is shown as a standing, living naval commander. Eggers may well have had in mind the series of sculpted portraits of four Stadtholders of Orange in Huis ten Bosch at The Hague, made by François Dieussart in about I646-I647. With this standing portrait form Van Wassenaer was honoured like an Antique hero, as implied by the epithet 'alter Hercules' in the inscription. The group behind the hero, consisting of Fame and an eagle with a globe and thunderbolts in its claws, may be interpreted as an image of consecratio or apotheosis in keeping with Roman tradition. Eggers or his patrons could have found a direct model for this unusual iconography in the Antique manner in Joachim Oudaen's Roomse Moogentheid of I664. States General patronage as embodied in monuments to naval heroes peaked shortly after I65o: during the Stadtholderless Period (I65I-I672) the most numerous and most important tombs for naval heros were paid for by the public purse. As well as representing the nation's tribute to the heroes who had laid down their lives for their country, these monuments could be understood as political (anti-Stadtholder) propaganda for the Republican cause. By causing public monuments to be built, the States General rendered manifest its function as a sovereign power and gave form to the 'dignity, glory and honour of the nation', concepts previously embodied by the Stadtholders of Orange. To a certain extent naval heroes, as exempla virtutis, could compensate for the loss of a Stadtholder as the personification of the nation. Their funerals were spectacles on a par with those of the Stadtholders and thus likewise some compensation for the lack of viceregal pomp. In Van Wassenaer's case there was a more compelling reason for a monument than otherwise: it enabled the States General to gloss over its admiral's defeat and its own consequent loss of face by presenting the dead commander as an Antique hero, in keeping with the finest funerary traditions, under a catafalque. That they were successful is borne out by a passage in an English tourist's travel diary of I705, in which Van Wassenaer is described as a valiant hero.
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Blair, John. "Battle Abbey. The Eastern Range and the Excavations of 1978–80. By J. N. Hare. 30×21 cm. Pp. 208, 61 figs., 27 pls. London: Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (Archaeological Report No. 2), 1985. ISBN 1-85074-062-3. £25.00 (p/b)." Antiquaries Journal 67, no. 1 (March 1987): 187–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0003581500026846.

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Burganova, Maria A. "LETTER FROM THE EDITOR." Scientific and analytical journal Burganov House. The space of culture 17, no. 5 (December 10, 2021): 8–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.36340/2071-6818-2021-17-5-8-9.

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Dear readers, We are pleased to present to you Issue 5, 2021, of the scientific and analytical journal Burganov House. The Space of Culture. Upon the recommendation of the Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission, the journal is included in the List of Leading Peer-reviewed Scientific Journals and Publications in which the main scientific results of theses for the academic degrees of doctor and candidate of science must be published. The journal publishes scientific articles by leading specialists in various humanitarian fields, doctoral students, and graduate students. Research areas concern topical problems in multiple areas of culture, art, philology, and linguistics. This versatility of the review reveals the main specificity of the journal, which represents the current state of the cultural space. The journal traditionally opens with the Academic Interview rubric. In this issue, we present an interview with Alexander Burganov, Academician of the Russian Academy of Arts, an outstanding Russian sculptor, National Artist of Russia, Doctor of Art History, Professor, Director of the Burganov House Moscow State Museum, interviewed by Irina Sedova, the Head of the 20th Century Sculpture Department of the State Tretyakov Gallery. This dialogue became part of the sculptor’s creative evening at the State Tretyakov Gallery, which included a personal exhibition, donation of the sculptural work Letter, screening of a special film and a dialogue with the audience in the format of an interactive interview. In the article “The Apocalypse Icon from the Kremlin’s Assumption Cathedral. Dating and Historical Context”, T. Samoilova points out the similarities between some motifs of the Apocalypse iconography and the motifs of Botticelli’s illustrations to the Divine Comedy, as well as the role of a line in both artworks which testifies to the influence of the Renaissance art on icon painting of the late 15th — early 16th centuries. Studying palaeography and stylistic features of the icon, the author clarifies the dates and believes that the icon was most likely painted after 1500, in the first decade of the 16th century. P. Tsvetkova researches the features of the development of the Palladian architectural system in Italy, in the homeland of Andrea Palladio. On the examples of specific monuments, drawings and projects created during two and a half centuries, the author analyses the peculiarities of the style transformation in the work of Palladio’s followers, the continuity of tradition, deviations from canonical rules. In the article “Artistic Features of the Northern White Night Motif in the Landscapes of Alexander Borisov and Louis Apol”, I. Yenina conducts art analysis and compares the works of the Russian “artist of eternal ice”, A. Borisov, and the Dutch “winter artist”, L. Apol. They were the first to depict such a phenomenon as a white night in the Far North. V. Slepukhin studies the artworks of the first decades of the Soviet era in the article “Formation of the Image of a New Hero in Russian Art of 1920- 1930”. The author concludes that the New Hero in the plastic arts of the 1920s–1930s was formed as a reflection of social ideals. The avant-garde artists searched for the Hero’s originality in the images of aviators, peasants, women. The artists of socialist realism began to form the images of the “typical” heroes of the time — warriors, athletes, rural workers, scientists, as new “people of the Renaissance”. In the article “Dialogues of the Avant-garde”, A. N. Lavrentyev presents a comparative analysis of spatial constructions created by the Russian Avant-Garde Artist Alexander Rodchenko and the famous kinetic European and American artist Alexander Calder in the first half of the 20th century. Wei Xiao continues his analysis of contemporary art in the article “Chinese Sculpture in the New Era”. The author notes that the art of sculpture is in many ways a reflection of social change, both in terms of cultural content and practice. The author emphasises the need for cultural identity to preserve national traditions and spirituality. Xu Yanping’s article “The Dynamics of the Choral Culture Development in China in the 1930s on the Example of Huang Tzi’s Oratorio Eternal Regret” is a scientific study of a particular phase of the active entry of Chinese choral music into the sphere of the oratorio genre, directly related to the name of the great Chinese composer, Huang Tzi. It also highlights the issues of the country’s political life in the 1930s, which actively influenced the creation of nationwide singing movements and new choral works in the country. The author believes that the oratorio Eternal Regret presented in the article is a unique creation that organically combines ethnic musical material and Western composition techniques. The publication is addressed to professionals specialising in the theory and practice of the fine arts and philology and all those interested in the arts and culture.
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"American battle monuments: a guide to military cemeteries and monuments maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission." Choice Reviews Online 27, no. 10 (June 1, 1990): 27–5494. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/choice.27-5494.

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16

Trout, Steven. "War and remembrance: the story of the American battle monuments commission." First World War Studies, November 12, 2020, 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2020.1848020.

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Witthaus, Michael, Laena Hines, Eric Mathews, Marni Rabinowitz, Steven Hudak, and Ronald Rabinowitz. "Walt Whitman, John Mahay, and Urotrauma in the American Civil War." International Journal of Urologic History 3, no. 1 (September 24, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.53101/ijuh.3.1.092401.

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Objectives Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a visionary American poet who inspired innovation within the literary landscape, choosing to preserve real, complex life with poetic imagery. He also chose to volunteer as a nurse during the American Civil War, daring to confront the violent, painful reality of war’s aftermath with precision and unflinching honesty. The United States Sanitary Commission organized volunteer nursing for the Union Army during the Civil War (1861-1865). Our objective is to investigate the urologic management and perspectives of Walt Whitman during his service as a nurse during the American Civil War. Methods We conducted a review of the literature pertaining to Walt Whitman, his clinical practice, and his relationship to John Mahay during the Civil War. A review of textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, works of prose, and government archives was performed. Original publications and images were reviewed through the Walt Whitman Archive, Library of Congress, the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and the archives of the International Journal of Urologic History. Results During the Civil War, Whitman cared for numerous patients, including Private John Mahay, who sustained a penetrating GU injury during the second battle of Bull Run (August 29th, 1862). He passed several bone fragments per urethra, suggesting a PFUI (pelvic fracture urethral injury). Mahay continued his chronic urologic care with Walt Whitman. The entry and exit wounds resulted in fistulas to the urinary tract with documented blood, pus, and urine drainage. Mahay ultimately died on October 24th, 1863, after nearly a year of chronic urologic care. Several urinary stones were removed from Mahay’s bladder on autopsy and archived. Whitman’s account of John Mahay preserved him as a living person, his travails, and sufferings prior to the advent of modern urologic care. Conclusions Walt Whitman’s Civil War writings chose to confront reality with honesty, precision, and eloquence. His commitment to John Mahay’s care during the Civil War underscores the essential human aspects involved in acute and chronic urologic care following traumatic injury.
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Schmid, David. "Murderabilia." M/C Journal 7, no. 5 (November 1, 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2430.

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Online shopping is all the rage these days and the murderabilia industry in particular, which specializes in selling serial killer artifacts, is booming. At Spectre Studios, sculptor David Johnson sells flexible plastic action figures of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy and plans to produce a figure of Jack the Ripper in the future. Although some might think that making action figures of serial killers is tasteless, Johnson hastens to assure the potential consumer that he does have standards: “I wouldn’t do Osama bin Laden . . . I have some personal qualms about that” (Robinson). At Serial Killer Central, you can buy a range of items made by serial killers themselves, including paintings and drawings by Angelo Buono (one of the “Hillside Stranglers”) and Henry Lee Lucas. For the more discerning consumer, Supernaught.com charges a mere $300 for a brick from Dahmer’s apartment building, while a lock of Charles Manson’s hair is a real bargain at $995, shipping and handling not included. The sale of murderabilia is just a small part of the huge serial killer industry that has become a defining feature of American popular culture over the last twenty-five years. This industry is, in turn, a prime example of what Mark Seltzer has described as “wound culture,” consisting of a “public fascination with torn and open bodies and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound” (1). According to Seltzer, the serial killer is “one of the superstars of our wound culture” (2) and his claim is confirmed by the constant stream of movies, books, magazines, television shows, websites, t-shirts, and a tsunami of ephemera that has given the figure of the serial murderer an unparalleled degree of visibility and fame in the contemporary American public sphere. In a culture defined by celebrity, serial killers like Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are the biggest stars of all, instantly recognized by the vast majority of Americans. Not surprisingly, murderabilia has been the focus of a sustained critique by the (usually self-appointed) guardians of ‘decency’ in American culture. On January 2, 2003 The John Walsh Show, the daytime television vehicle of the long-time host of America’s Most Wanted, featured an “inside look at the world of ‘murderabilia,’ which involves the sale of artwork, personal effects and letters from well-known killers” (The John Walsh Show Website). Featured guests included Andy Kahan, Director of the Mayor’s Crime Victim Assistance Office in Houston, Texas; ‘Thomas,’ who was horrified to find hair samples from “The Railroad Killer,” the individual who killed his mother, for sale on the Internet; Elmer Wayne Henley, a serial killer who sells his artwork to collectors; Joe, who runs “Serial Killer Central” and sells murderabilia from a wide range of killers, and Harold Schechter, a professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Despite the program’s stated intention to “look at both sides of the issue,” the show was little more than a jeremiad against the murderabilia industry, with the majority of airtime being given to Andy Kahan and to the relatives of crime victims. The program’s bias was not lost on many of those who visited Joe’s Serial Killer Central site and left messages on the message board on the day The John Walsh Show aired. There were some visitors who shared Walsh’s perspective. A message from “serialkillersshouldnotprofit@aol.com,” for example, stated that “you will rot in hell with these killers,” while “Smithpi@hotmail.com” had a more elaborate critique: “You should pull your site off the net. I just watched the John Walsh show and your [sic] a fucking idiot. I hope your [sic] never a victim, because if you do [sic] then you would understand what all those people were trying to tell you. You [sic] a dumb shit.” Most visitors, however, sympathized with the way Joe had been treated on the show: “I as well [sic] saw you on the John Walsh show, you should [sic] a lot of courage going on such a one sided show, and it was shit that they wouldnt [sic] let you talk, I would have walked off.” But whether the comments were positive or negative, one thing was clear: The John Walsh Show had created a great deal of interest in the Serial Killer Central site. As one of the messages put it, “I think that anything [sic] else he [John Walsh] has put a spark in everyones [sic] curiousity [sic] . . . I have noticed that you have more hits on your page today than any others [sic].” Apparently, even the most explicit rejection and condemnation of serial killer celebrity finds itself implicated in (and perhaps even unwittingly encouraging the growth of) that celebrity. John Walsh’s attack on the murderabilia industry was the latest skirmish in a campaign that has been growing steadily since the late 1990s. One of the campaign’s initial targets was the internet trading site eBay, which was criticized for allowing serial killer-related products to be sold online. In support of such criticism, conservative victims’ rights and pro-death penalty organizations like “Justice For All” organized online petitions against eBay. In November 2000, Business Week Online featured an interview with Andy Kahan in which he argued that the online sale of murderabilia should be suppressed: “The Internet just opens it all up to millions and millions more potential buyers and gives easy access to children. And it sends a negative message to society. What does it say about us? We continue to glorify killers and continue to put them in the mainstream public. That’s not right” (Business Week). Eventually bowing to public pressure, eBay decided to ban the sale of murderabilia items in May 2001, forcing the industry underground, where it continues to be pursued by the likes of John Walsh. Apart from highlighting how far the celebrity culture around serial killers has developed (so that one can now purchase the nail clippings and hair of some killers, as if they are religious icons), focusing on the ongoing debate around the ethics of murderabilia also emphasizes how difficult it is to draw a neat line between those who condemn and those who participate in that culture. Quite apart from the way in which John Walsh’s censoriousness brought more visitors to the Serial Killer Central site, one could also argue that few individuals have done more to disseminate information about violent crime in general and serial murder in particular to mainstream America than John Walsh. Of course, this information is presented in the unimpeachably moral context of fighting crime, but controversial features of America’s Most Wanted, such as the dramatic recreations of crime, pander to the same prurient public interest in crime that the program simultaneously condemns. An ABCNews.Com article on murderabilia inadvertently highlights the difficulty of distinguishing a legitimate from an illegitimate interest in serial murder by quoting Rick Staton, one of the biggest collectors and dealers of murderabilia in the United States, who emphasizes that the people he sells to are not “ghouls and creeps [who] crawl out of the woodwork”, but rather “pretty much your average Joe Blow.” Even his family, Staton goes on to say, who profess to be disgusted by what he does, act very differently in practice: “The minute they step into this room, they are glued to everything in here and they are asking questions and they are genuinely intrigued by it . . . So it makes me wonder: Am I the one who is so abnormal, or am I pretty normal?” (ABCNews.Com). To answer Staton’s question, we need to go back to 1944, when sociologist Leo Lowenthal published an essay entitled “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” an essay he later reprinted as a chapter in his 1961 book, Literature, Popular Culture And Society, under a new title: “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Lowenthal argues that biographies in popular magazines underwent a striking change between 1901 and 1941, a change that signals the emergence of a new social type. According to Lowenthal, the earlier biographies indicate that American society’s heroes at the time were “idols of production” in that “they stem from the productive life, from industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or represent a serious attitude toward their art” (112-3). Sampling biographies in magazines from 1941, however, Lowenthal reaches a very different conclusion: “We called the heroes of the past ‘idols of production’: we feel entitled to call the present-day magazine heroes ‘idols of consumption’” (115). Unlike the businessmen, industrialists and scientists who dominated the earlier sample, almost every one of 1941’s heroes “is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve society’s basic needs (e.g., the worlds of entertainment and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially productive agent” (115). Lowenthal leaves his reader in no doubt that he sees the change from “idols of production” to “idols of consumption” as a serious decline: “If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result . . . the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the movies, the ball parks, and the night clubs” (116). With Lowenthal in mind, when one considers the fact that the serial killer is generally seen, in Richard Tithecott’s words, as “deserving of eternal fame, of media attention on a massive scale, of groupies” (144), one is tempted to describe the advent of celebrity serial killers as a further decline in the condition of American culture’s “mass idols.” The serial killer’s relationship to consumption, however, is too complex to allow for such a hasty judgment, as the murderabilia industry indicates. Throughout the edition of The John Walsh Show that attacked murderabilia, Walsh showed clips of Collectors, a recent documentary about the industry. Collectors is distributed by a small company named Abject Films and on their website the film’s director, Julian P. Hobbs, discusses some of the multiple connections between serial killing and consumerism. Hobbs points out that the serial killer is connected with consumerism in the most basic sense that he has become a commodity, “a merchandising phenomenon that rivals Mickey Mouse. From movies to television, books to on-line, serial killers are packaged and consumed en-masse” (Abject Films). But as Hobbs goes on to argue, serial killers themselves can be seen as consumers, making any representations of them implicated in the same consumerist logic: “Serial killers come into being by fetishizing and collecting artifacts – usually body parts – in turn, the dedicated collector gathers scraps connected with the actual events and so, too, a documentary a collection of images” (Abject Films). Along with Rick Staton, Hobbs implies that no one can avoid being involved with consumerism in relation to serial murder, even if one’s reasons for getting involved are high-minded. For example, when Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison in 1994, the families of his victims were delighted but his death also presented them with something of a problem. Throughout the short time Dahmer was in prison, there had been persistent rumors that he was in negotiations with both publishers and movie studios about selling his story. If such a deal had ever been struck, legal restrictions would have prevented Dahmer from receiving any of the money; instead, it would have been distributed among his victims’ families. Dahmer’s murder obviously ended this possibility, so the families explored another option: going into the murderabilia business by auctioning off Dahmer’s property, including such banal items as his toothbrush, but also many items he had used in commission of the murders, such as a saw, a hammer, the 55-gallon vat he used to decompose the bodies, and the refrigerator where he stored the hearts of his victims. Although the families’ motives for suggesting this auction may have been noble, they could not avoid participating in what Mark Pizzato has described as “the prior fetishization of such props and the consumption of [Dahmer’s] cannibal drama by a mass audience” (91). When the logic of consumerism dominates, is anyone truly innocent, or are there just varying degrees of guilt, of implication? The reason why it is impossible to separate neatly ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ expressions of interest in famous serial killers is the same reason why the murderabilia industry is booming; in the words of a 1994 National Examiner headline: “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” Christopher Sharrett has suggested that: “Perhaps the fetish status of the criminal psychopath . . . is about recognizing the serial killer/mass murderer not as social rebel or folk hero . . . but as the most genuine representative of American life” (13). The enormous resistance to recognizing the representativeness of serial killers in American culture is fundamental to the appeal of fetishizing serial killers and their artifacts. As Sigmund Freud has explained, the act of disavowal that accompanies the formation of a fetish allows a perception (in this case, the Americanness of serial killers) to persist in a different form rather than being simply repressed (352-3). Consequently, just like the sexual fetishists discussed by Freud, although we may recognize our interest in serial killers “as an abnormality, it is seldom felt by [us] as a symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering” (351). On the contrary, we are usually, in Freud’s words, “quite satisfied” (351) with our interest in serial killers precisely because we have turned them into celebrities. It is our complicated relationship with celebrities, affective as well as intellectual, composed of equal parts admiration and resentment, envy and contempt, that provides us with a lexicon through which we can manage our appalled and appalling fascination with the serial killer, contemporary American culture’s ultimate star. References ABCNews.Com. “Killer Collectibles: Inside the World of ‘Murderabilia.” 7 Nov. 2001. American Broadcasting Company. 9 May 2003 http://www.abcnews.com>. AbjectFilms.Com. “Collectors: A Film by Julian P. Hobbs.” Abject Films. 9 May 2003 http://www.abjectfilms.com/collectors.html>. BusinessWeek Online. 20 Nov. 2000. Business Week. 9 May 2003 http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_47/b3708056.htm>. Freud, Sigmund. “Fetishism.” On Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin Books, 1977. 351-7. The John Walsh Show. Ed. Click Active Media. 2 Jan. 2003. 9 May 2003 http://www.johnwalsh.tv/cgi-bin/topics/today/cgi?id=90>. Lowenthal, Leo. “The Triumph of Mass Idols.” Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961. 109-40. National Examiner. “Serial Killers Are as American as Apple Pie.” 7 Jun. 1994: 7. Pizzato, Mark. “Jeffrey Dahmer and Media Cannibalism: The Lure and Failure of Sacrifice.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 85-118. Robinson, Bryan. “Murder Incorporated: Denver Sculptor’s Serial Killer Action Figures Bringing in Profits and Raising Ire.” ABCNews.Com 25 Mar. 2002. American Broadcasting Company. 27 Apr. 2003 http://abcnews.com/>. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sharrett, Christopher. “Introduction.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999. 9-20. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Schmid, David. "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>. APA Style Schmid, D. (Nov. 2004) "Murderabilia: Consuming Fame," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/10-schmid.php>.
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19

Starr, Paul. "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera." M/C Journal 2, no. 2 (March 1, 1999). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1747.

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This article is a brief attempt to outline some of the difficulties involved in reconciling a film like Enemy of the State to itself. Perhaps a short synopsis: Will Smith plays a lawyer who unexpectedly encounters an old acquaintance who passes him something before being murdered. The acquaintance had become privy to a conspiracy involving members of the NSA who are responsible for the death of a politician. The politician was obstructing the passage of a new surveillance Bill, and the conspiracy is one of expanding the possibilities of invasive surveillance by the state, or at least rogue elements of the state. The conspirators work at watching and hounding Will Smith until they can retrieve the information. Jon Voight plays the lead conspirator. What this synopsis didn't mention is that Gene Hackman plays a reclusive, grouchy ex-NSA agent and surveillance expert. What the film doesn't mention is that he has done this before, in Francis Ford Coppola's early 1970s film The Conversation. Hackman's character in the earlier film has been described as "a private and suspicious man who lives with as little traceable human reference as possible, as if fearful of the threat of surveillance" (Thomson, America 185). Such a description is entirely applicable to his character in Enemy of the State. It is worth comparing certain aspects of these films not as simply an exercise in critical or textual analysis, but because the differences are illustrative of some key points pertaining to contemporary Hollywood film culture. One such point is that Enemy of the State can throw into relief the fraught relationship between special effects and the technologies of surveillance, a relation even more fraught for its visibility in an action film with a very large budget. The film of Tom Clancy's novel, Patriot Games, starred Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan. There is a sequence in that film that illustrates some of the binds in which Hollywood films can find themselves when they attempt to moralise about the invasive potential of image technologies. A live satellite feed has been arranged for American intelligence viewing of a raid on a suspected terrorist training camp. Low resolution, high angle pictures are recorded and relayed to the American audience of commando units acting on the intelligence analysis (image analysis) of that same audience. The data dies live to air. Ford's Jack Ryan is drawn into watching the fruits of his previous scrutiny. He is eventually disgusted by the armchair quarterbacking of the other viewers and turns away from the images. Not before we, the viewers have had enough time to recognise what we have seen and perhaps reacted to the "gee whiz" potential of that coupling of new image and new image technology. Ryan's disgust is actually a little intrusive on our appreciation. But there is enough of Indiana Jones in Jack Ryan for us to be convinced he truly believes in the integrity of acting at first-hand rather than at an inter-continental remove. Harrison Ford's character in Coppola's The Conversation has no adventurer's taint. More like one of the replicants in Blade Runner, with a liberal dose of Richard Gere's pretty poise in American Gigolo. Ford is genuinely bland and genuinely menacing under Coppola's direction in The Conversation. That film, made almost as a penitential act after The Godfather1, confines its special effects budget almost entirely to the soundtrack. Sounds, and their editing, are much of the surveillance of the film. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, "the best bugger on the West Coast", a surveillance expert for hire, with a somewhat shadowy background of bugs half-legend. Part of that background concerns a triple murder where information he provided to a client caused the deaths of three people. Caul is haunted by the chance of that happening again. Hired to bug a couple conversing in a crowded square, Caul and his people take photos and record a conversation that he subsequently edits into audibility. Increasingly afraid that the infidelity his surveillance uncovered will cause the deaths of the couple involved, Harry attempts to prevent the transfer of the data. His attempts are for nothing, as it turns out the couple murder the corporate executive husband of the overheard woman, Caul himself is under their surveillance, or perhaps just the surveillance of corporate underling Harrison Ford. Caul demolishes his apartment at the end of the film, fruitlessly trying to find the bugs. Enemy of the State's most basic problem is the casting in the male lead role of Will Smith. This is a film about paranoia, and release publicity deployed paranoiac pop culture jokes of some staleness such as "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you". The male lead is scripted as the site at which real anxieties about intrusive levels of government surveillance are to be deployed and made visible. Will Smith, with Independence Day and Men in Black recently behind him, does not function in such a register. It is the persona of the comedian that lingers (and is cultivated by directors and producers) over Smith as an actor, a persona in part defined by the desire for attention, the wish for surveillance. At some level, the film is Smith's wish-fulfilment of more attention than he can handle -- except that he does handle it. Think of how different the entire film would have been with Denzel Washington as the lead, or Spike Lee. The fact is that conspiracies have become one of the great comforts of Western popular culture. The security of knowing that in spite of visible chaos someone out there knows what is really going on. The vogue for conspiracy is a nostalgia for metanarratives. In Enemy the conspirators are rogue elements of the State. What has been displaced is the entirely more edgy prospect suggested by Coppola's film, in which corporations commission acts of surveillance, or elements within corporations spy on each other. Rogues within rogues. Enemy, on the other hand, gives us the individual, the family man, in a desperate battle against the massed resources of the State. But this is not all there is to see or say. For me, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Enemy of the State is the relation between the special effects of the film and the invasive technologies of surveillance whose misuse the film is critiquing. This is not the time to address the issue of the varying aesthetics of special effects, save to note that there certainly are a range of aesthetic criteria on which spectator judgments about effects "quality" are made. At least one of these criteria is that special effects should visualise the new. Related to this is that they should provide new visual experiences2. Enemy has as its new visual experience the expanded resources of contemporary satellite surveillance technologies, along with various miniaturised surveillance devices. The only "conventional" big special effect is a building exploding. The rest of the film is engaged with using surveillance footage as special effects, in on-screen chases and pursuits. The crucial problem on which the film founders is that in generating viewing pleasure from the invasive application of these technologies, a double marking of the technology as special effect and the technology as invasive is made available to the viewer. The pleasure and the object of criticism share the same sign. The result is a vacillation. The screen jockeys in the film, childishly willing accomplices of Jon Voight and the rogue State, taking the pleasure of "cool" from a new image, are the viewers of the film, taking pleasure in a cool special effect. The attempts to render those spectators morally culpable for the plots of the film are, not surprisingly, shallow. To me, this film functions as a sort of limit case for special effects. It is as if the distance between effect and subject has been allowed to shrink a little too far, leading to a sort of collapse. As a note in closing, I would like to suggest that in the genre of the Hollywood action film, perhaps the only close relative of Enemy of the State is the "failed Arnie", Last Action Hero. Whereas that film deployed reflexivity about special effects and entertainment and hence to some degree trivialised the pleasures of its audience, it similarly marks a problematic convergence of special effects technology and spectators' acceptance of the moral consequences of vision. Footnotes David Thomson has written that: The Conversation has the reputation of being the intense chamber work of a director otherwise employed on large movies where spectacle takes precedence over private themes. The modesty of scale, after The Godfather, is regarded as a token of gravity. It was made clear as the picture opened that Coppola had used some of his own profits from the big movies to make this study in intimate anxiety. In sanctioning that gloss, Coppola appeared to be grappling with the demands of the industry and the inner responsibilities of the artist. The film is therefore a parable about talent, private satisfaction, and public duty. But it is the most despairing and horrified film Coppola has made. (Thomson, Overexposures 298) The first does not necessitate the second. It is entirely possible to visualise the new in such conventional fashion that it is meaningless to consider such to be a "new visual experience". References Thomson, David. America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Thomson, David. Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking. New York: William Morrow, 1981. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Starr. "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.2 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/enemy.php>. Chicago style: Paul Starr, "Special Effects and the Invasive Camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 2 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/enemy.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Starr. (1999) Special effects and the invasive camera: Enemy of the State and The Conversation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(2). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9903/enemy.php> ([your date of access]).
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20

Arps, Arnoud. "Performative Memories." M/C Journal 25, no. 4 (October 5, 2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2924.

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Introduction Indonesian cultural productions use the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949) as inspiration for the war’s remembrance in popular culture such as in films (Arps; Irawanto), music, and mobile games, while a special emphasis on wearing historical costumes is made during the anniversary of Indonesia’s declaration of independence. Nowhere is this clearer than in Indonesian historical re-enactment. Although Indonesia has seen a rise in historical re-enactment groups for the last couple of years, the absence of scholarly research on the topic reflects how Indonesian historical re-enactment is still an understudied mode of cultural remembering in the nation. Yet in their uses of costume and media, these groups construct a complex form of remembering where local interests and national aspirations play a key role. Based on principal fieldwork carried out over a period of seven months in 2017 and 2018, the central case study here is the remembrance of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret 1949 (“General Offensive of 1 March 1949”, hereafter: Serangan Umum) by the Yogyakarta-based re-enactor group Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945. On the basis of participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis, this article critically analyses the re-enactors, their performances in public spaces, and the representations of their performances on social media. The one-hour interviews were conducted in Indonesian or English, whichever the respondents preferred. The re-enactors (six male, five female) were between eighteen and thirty-four years old. Most recently completed levels of education ranged from a high school diploma to a university’s Master’s degree. Amongst them were university students, a high school student, an elementary school teacher, an entrepreneur, an artist, a photographer, and a manager. With a special emphasis on claimed authentic clothing and attributes, they present their ‘image’ through two main media: teatrikals (public street performances) and the use of the social medium Instagram. The performance of memory, or “doing memory”, is related to agency (Plate and Smelik 2-3; 15). Even though such doing-acts are at times habitual, cultural memory can be understood as the product of collective agency (Bal vii). This is indeed prevalent in historical re-enactment communities where the collective constructs a version of the past. More important still are the role of narratives herein as “narrative memories, even of unimportant events, differ from routine or habitual memories in that they are affectively colored, surrounded by an emotional aura that, precisely, makes them memorable” (Bal viii). The collective act of Indonesian historical re-enactment becomes a memorable form of cultural recall that is consciously performed and constructed as a narrative memory. The body in historical re-enactment functions as a vehicle for meaning-making (Agnew, Lamb, and Tomann 7). As the body becomes the medium upon and through which memory is performed, the individual historical re-enactor becomes a producer and consumer of cultural memory. Subsequently, historical re-enactment communities can be seen as user communities that actively participate in content creation. As such, the role of the consumer, user, producer, and creator is inextricably interwoven through the performance (Bruns). This is performatively demonstrated by Indonesian re-enactment groups through both costume and media. This article answers how teatrikals and Instagram, as different forms of mediation, shape performative memories of the Indonesian War of Independence. Drawing from media, re-enactment, and cultural memory studies the article lays bare how embodied and mediated memories are created by combining local and national identity formation through a drive for authenticity in clothing and story. I argue that there is no clear divide between embodiment and mediation of the past, as both are folded into each other for the re-enactors. Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 Komunitas Djokjakarta 1945 (hereafter: Komunitas D45) is a historical re-enactment community, comprised of approximately sixty-five core members of whom practically all are male, although its composition varies. They re-enact the history of Indonesia and in particular the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, focussing on the violent era from 1943 until 1949. The community is modelled after the Brigade X, which was once led by lieutenant colonel Suharto, later the second president of Indonesia. In their re-enactments, they try to be as authentic as possible towards their clothing and attributes of that specific period in time. The combination of Yogyakarta as décor of significant historical events during the war; the subsequent widely circulating representations of these events in popular culture; the city’s role as cultural node for the performing arts within the country; and the commemorations in the city itself (Ahimsa-Putra 165) add to the significance of Komunitas D45’s representations of the past. This significance also lies in a paradox: although the reasons above give Yogyakarta gravitas when it comes to representing the war, community members are adamant that the city is undervalued in national commemorations of it. Komunitas D45’s main annual re-enactment is that of the Serangan Umum, which was partly re-enacted during the re-enactments I studied in 2017 and 2018. This specific battle is significant as it is seen as a crucial moment during the Indonesian War of Independence. The Serangan Umum was an offensive in the early morning of the first of March 1949 in which Indonesian fighters attacked Dutch-occupied Yogyakarta. The Indonesian fighters were able to take hold of Yogyakarta for six hours, before retreating and with that returning control back to the Dutch. With their practices, Komunitas D45 is a memory community which is based on the establishment of an experiential site during their performances. A historical re-enactment consisting of re-enactors, fireworks, sound effects, and an engaged audience can be considered an experiential site where prosthetic memory emerges, meaning artificial memories (as opposed to memories based on lived experiences) that are sensuous and based on the experience of mass-mediated representations (Landsberg 20). Costume is a means to mediate the past and it is one of the key elements for the re-enactors of Komunitas D45. The teatrikal of the Serangan Umum 1 Maret 1949 “That, that’s an A1 gun. From England,” one re-enactor explained as he showed me a gun. “This is a Sten Gun, Mk. II,” he continued, “that one is usually used by regular soldiers. This one is usually used by someone that portrays lieutenant colonel Suharto.” The relationship between re-enactors and their possessions are “deeply contextualized in the knowledge and use of these objects, embedded in the sense of themselves as creative individuals.” (Hall in Gapps 397). This is on the one hand demonstrated by the re-enactors' historical knowledge of the costumes worn and weapons used, and on the other hand by their ability to build lifelike imitations of these attributes. To make sure that the battles look as authentic as possible, the re-enactors of Komunitas D45 make use of various props and attributes. Some of the actors use sachets of fake blood, made by mixing honey and food colouring or condensed milk, to recreate being shot. During the re-enactments, they bite the sachets and let the fake-blood run down their faces and clothes, imitating being wounded. The military costumes they wear are based on historical books and photos. Some weapons are bought, others are self-made imitations from wood and metal, which cost about a month or two to create. Just like other re-enactors they “go to extraordinary lengths to acquire and animate the look and feel of history” (Gapps 397). Stephen Gapps addresses this need for authenticity as ‘the Holy Grail’ for re-enactors although he mentions that they “understand that it [authenticity] is elusive – worth striving for, but never really attainable” (397). While authenticity indeed seems to be the ‘holy grail’ for Indonesian re-enactors, what authenticity looks like and how it is performed differs. In the case of Komunitas D45, authenticity is firstly constructed in terms of costume and attributes, although the desire to be authentic also resonates in the construction of historical veracity of the narrative and in costumes as a pedagogical tool to create embodied memories. This interplay between narrative and costume is needed at the risk of objects remaining inanimate (Samuel 384). Objects, Raphael Samuel writes, must be “restored to their original habitat, or some lifelike replica of it, if they are to be intelligible in their period setting” (Samuel 384). This is precisely what re-enactors do with costume and props, resulting in the re-enactment of events “in such a way as to convey the lived experience of the past.” (Samuel 384). Yet these re-enactors have not lived experiences of the war, and hence prosthetically embody memories of the past. The desire for authenticity structurally returned in the interviews I conducted with the community members. Thus, the whole performance is produced with the community’s underlying desire to be as authentic as possible with the main focus on their costumes and attributes. This is common for historical re-enactors as they are able to “describe their clothing and equipment in great detail, for the authentic object is deeply bound up with the way history might feel” (Gapps 398). Stephen Gapps goes even further by suggesting that “like historians, reenactors not only tell stories but also cite evidence: the footnote to the historian is the authentic (recreated) costume to the reenactor” (398). The costume is a means to construct a memory narrative, to perform a memory, for re-enactors. Costume is thus a mnemonic device and the central argument has to do with ‘the image’. An analysis of the community presents conflicting statements on the exact role of authenticity. There is not a clear course for it as it reveals a jumping nature. There are multiple authenticities and veracity is only one of its intentions. During the re-enactments, costume and prop are the things that enable claims about authenticity. In the photographs on social media, the affordances show something different. What appears to be more important than historiography or studying an authentic past, for instance, is the so-called ‘image’ of historical re-enactment. This has an equivocal and concomitant meaning in that it means image as a resemblance of the past; image as an impression to others; and image as visual reproduction. Image, thus, crosses boundaries between re-enactment and photographic representation. It is through conventions of authenticity that re-enactors comprehend, translate, and appreciate one another’s creativity. Through a desire for authenticity, the past is made concrete and perceptible. Yet, interestingly this ‘authenticity’ does not only refer to the re-enactment itself, but extends to the photographs they publish and circulate via their Instagram account, or what the re-enactor Mas Nicholas (M, 18, high school student) called “the image later”. When I interviewed Mas Nicholas, I asked him whether a uniform or gun could be part of the teatrikal when it does not resemble those from that historical period. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”, he answered, “It will merusak citra nanti (“ruin the image later”)”. Authenticity and Authority over the Past The drive for authenticity also plays a role in selecting “one or more best pictures” for their personal social media. During the teatrikal, many photographs are taken and they present a careful selection publicly via their Instagram account. When modern items such as mobile phones are spotted, the re-enactors deem the photographs as “foto bocor” (“leaky photos”), because the present seeps in. Similarly, in previous teatrikals, smiling passerby and pens forgotten in pockets of costumes have made the photo “bocor” (“leak”) or “mengurangi nilai keindahan foto” (“reduce the value of the beauty of the photo)”. Besides the importance of re-enactment and costume in their photos, their Instagram page also constructs a discourse of authenticity by using Instagram’s affordances and through the content of the photographs. Social media affordances can be seen as the perceived range of possible actions linked to the features of a social media platform (Bucher and Helmond 3). On the basis of such an understanding, three patterns can be discerned with which a discourse of historical accuracy is constructed, which invokes historical veracity. The first pattern is constructed through the use of a filter, making photos black and white. This is a common technique in popular culture to simulate the look of historical photographs. It is also used in the second pattern that evokes authenticity: the re-enactment of historical photographs. Again, the Instagram filter is used to create a sense of authenticity, but memory is also actively embodied by positioning themselves similarly to the people on the original photo as well as copying the dress of the original photographed people. The last pattern that can be recognised is the portrayal of the community’s ostensible secondary activities. These range from visiting independence museums to clean weapons in the collections and taking detailed pictures of them; cleaning of monuments dedicated to the Indonesian War of Independence in fear of neglect; performing teatrikals at schools to educate the public; and conversing with the Chief of Staff of the Indonesian Air Force signifying military approval. All whilst dressed in historical costume. This shows that there is no clear distinction between how the teatrikals are staged in costume and the activities beyond it. The images of these activities function as an additional argument for a claim to truth. It displays a further engagement with history and shows their relation with authoritative persons and institutions, constructing them too as authoritative. The image constructed on Instagram is one of diligent volunteers, thorough researchers, and good patriots. In all, this validates the re-enactors and their re-enactments. Costumes are thus continuously used in the discursive image of historical re-enactment. In their use of Instagram’s affordances and the careful selection of photos, media is used to perform a specific memory that combines local and national identity formation. A key aspect of this mediated culture of remembrance is how it is grounded in the concrete location that is Yogyakarta. The Indonesian historical re-enactments by Komunitas D45 are an example of such regional remembrance, producing local memory from the region of Yogyakarta. The secondary activities in particular underscore the politics of remembrance. It is a feeling, explicitly communicated by several community members, that the role of Yogyakarta in national history is underplayed when it comes to the Indonesian War of Independence. In particular, the idea that the Serangan Umum was not only an important battle for the city of Yogyakarta, but for the whole nation, as Indonesia put itself on the world map due to the battle. Authenticity and authority over the past is combined here into one event. The ‘Image’ of Indonesian Historical Re-Enactment I have tried to illustrate how Indonesian historical re-enactment forms performative memories through costume and media. Komunitas D45 constructs an idea of authenticity through the look and feel of their costumes. Moreover, in the way in which they position themselves through media, authenticity is constructed by black and white imagery, re-enactments of historical photographs, and their secondary activities. With this authenticity, Komunitas D45 creates a discourse of historical accuracy. But how do embodied memories and mediated memories come together? There is no clear divide between embodiment and mediated memories as they are folded into each other for the re-enactors. Embodiment and mediated memory are two parts of the same coin. That coin being a mnemonic image-event. Re-enactment (costume) together with how it is subsequently presented (media) can be considered as what Karin Strassler has called an “image-event”, that is, “a political process set in motion when a specific image or set of images erupts onto and intervenes in a social field, becoming a focal point of discursive and affective engagement across diverse publics” (9-10). The circulating depictions of the Serangan Umum, both through costume and media, constitute an unfolding mnemonic image-event that negotiates with democratic ideals from Indonesia’s Reformasi movement such as “openness, accountability, authenticity, the free circulation of information, and popular participation” (9). In short, Komunitas D45 deals with the complex question of how to remember the Indonesian War of Independence. Strassler’s emphasis on the political in image-events, “in which images become the material ground of generative struggles to bring a collectivity into view and give shape to its future”, not only relates to the past, but also the present (10). Both the local Yogyakartan and national Indonesian past during the Indonesian War of Independence are remembered simultaneously through the historical re-enactments. Authenticity in clothing and in the constructed online narrative is used as a tool for authority over the image of historical re-enactment in its threefold meaning: the likeness of the past they re-enact; how others perceive their re-enactment; and how they circulate the re-enactment to others. Thus, while Indonesian historical re-enactment searches authenticity in the past, it performs prosthetic memories for the future. Acknowledgements The research for this article was funded by a ‘PhD in the Humanities’ grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). References Agnew, Vanessa, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field. London: Routledge, 2019. Ahimsa-Putra, Heddy Shri. “Remembering, Misremembering and Forgetting: The Struggle over Serangan Oemoem 1 Maret 1949 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.” Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia. Eds. Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon. Singapore: NUS P, 2012. 156-182. Arps, Arnoud. “An Animated Revolution: The Remembrance of the 1945 Battle of Surabaya in Indonesian Animated Film.” Southeast Asian Media Studies 2.1 (2020): 101-117. Bal, Mieke. “Introduction.” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. viii-xvii. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond. “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” The SAGE Handbook of Social Media. Eds. Jean Burgess, Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick. London: SAGE, 2018. 1-41. Gapps, Stephen. “Mobile Monuments: A View of Historical Reenactment and Authenticity from Inside the Costume Cupboard of History.” Rethinking History 13.3 (2009): 395-409. Irawanto, Budi. “Spectacularity of Nationalism: War, Propaganda and Military in Indonesian Cinema during the New Order Era.” Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945-1998). Eds. Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, and Mary J. Ainslie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2020. 111-130. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik (eds.). Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994. Strassler, Karen. Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia. Durham: Duke UP, 2020. Zurbuchen, Mary. “Historical Memory in Contemporary Indonesia.” Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present. Singapore: NUS P, 2005. 3-37.
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Dufresne, Lachelle. "Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles." Voices in Bioethics 9 (June 24, 2023). http://dx.doi.org/10.52214/vib.v9i.11638.

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Abstract:
Photo by niu niu on Unsplash ABSTRACT Shackling prisoners has been implemented as standard procedure when transporting prisoners in labor and during childbirth. This procedure ensures the protection of both the public and healthcare workers. However, the act of shackling pregnant prisoners violates the principles of ethics that physicians are supposed to uphold. This paper will explore how shackling pregnant prisoners violates the principle of justice and beneficence, making the practice unethical. INTRODUCTION Some states allow shackling of incarcerated pregnant women during transport and while in the hospital for labor and delivery. Currently, only 22 states have legislation prohibiting the shackling of pregnant women.[1] Although many states have anti-shackling laws prohibiting restraints, these laws also contain an “extraordinary circumstances” loophole.[2] Under this exception, officers shackle prisoners if they pose a flight risk, have any history of violence, and are a threat to themselves or others.[3] Determining as to whether a prisoner is shackled is left solely to the correctional officer.[4] Yet even state restrictions on shackling are often disregarded. In shackling pregnant prisoners during childbirth, officers and institutions are interfering with the ability of incarcerated women to have safe childbirth experiences and fair treatment. Moreover, physicians cannot exercise various ethical duties as the law constrains them. In this article, I will discuss the physical and mental harms that result from the use of restraints under the backdrop of slavery and discrimination against women of color particularly. I argue that stereotypes feed into the phenomenon of shackling pregnant women, especially pregnant women of color. I further assert that shackling makes it difficult for medical professionals to be beneficent and promote justice. BACKGROUND Female incarceration rates in the United States have been fast growing since the 1980s.[5] With a 498 percent increase in the female incarceration population between 1981 and 2021, the rates of pregnancy and childbirth by incarcerated people have also climbed.[6],[7] In 2021, over 1.2 million women were incarcerated in the United States.[8] An estimated 55,000 pregnant women are admitted to jails each year.[9],[10] Many remain incarcerated throughout pregnancy and are transported to a hospital for labor and delivery. Although the exact number of restrained pregnant inmates is unclear, a study found that 83 percent of hospital prenatal nurses reported that their incarcerated patients were shackled.[11] I. Harms Caused by Shackling Shackling has caused many instances of physical and psychological harm. In the period before childbirth, shackled pregnant women are at high risk for falling.[12] The restraints shift pregnant women’s center of gravity, and wrist restraints prevent them from breaking a fall, increasing the risk of falling on their stomach and harming the fetus.[13] Another aspect inhibited by using restraints is testing and treating pregnancy complications. Delays in identifying and treating conditions such as hypertension, pre-eclampsia, appendicitis, kidney infection, preterm labor, and especially vaginal bleeding can threaten the lives of the mother and the fetus.[14] During labor and delivery, shackling prevents methods of alleviating severe labor pains and giving birth.[15] Usually, physicians recommend that women in labor walk or assume various positions to relieve labor pains and accelerate labor.[16] However, shackling prevents both solutions.[17] Shackling these women limits their mobility during labor, which may compromise the health of both the mother and the fetus.[18] Tracy Edwards, a former prisoner who filed a lawsuit for unlawful use of restraints during her pregnancy, was in labor for twelve hours. She was unable to move or adjust her position to lessen the pain and discomfort of labor.[19] The shackles also left the skin on her ankles red and bruised. Continued use of restraints also increases the risk of potentially life-threatening health issues associated with childbirth, such as blood clots.[20] It is imperative that pregnant women get treated rapidly, especially with the unpredictability of labor. Epidural administration can also become difficult, and in some cases, be denied due to the shackled woman’s inability to assume the proper position.[21] Time-sensitive medical care, including C-sections, could be delayed if permission from an officer is required, risking major health complications for both the fetus and the mother.[22] After childbirth, shackling impedes the recovery process. Shackling can result in post-delivery complications such as deep vein thrombosis.[23] Walking prevents such complications but is not an option for mothers shackled to their hospital beds.[24] Restraints also prevent bonding with the baby post-delivery and the safe handling of the baby while breast feeding.[25] The use of restraints can also result in psychological harm. Many prisoners feel as though care workers treat them like “animals,” with some women having multiple restraints at once— including ankles, wrists, and even waist restraints.[26] Benidalys Rivera describes the feeling of embarrassment as she was walking while handcuffed, with nurses and patients looking on, “Being in shackles, that make you be in stress…I about to have this baby, and I’m going to go back to jail. So it’s too much.”[27] Depression among pregnant prisoners is highly prevalent. The stress of imprisonment and the anticipation of being separated from their child is often overwhelming for these mothers.[28] The inhumane action has the potential to add more stress, anxiety, and sadness to the already emotionally demanding process of giving birth. Shackling pregnant prisoners displays indifference to the medical needs of the prisoner.[29] II. Safety as a Pretense While public safety is an argument for using shackles, several factors make escape or violence extremely unlikely and even impossible.[30] For example, administering epidural anesthesia causes numbness and eliminates flight risk.[31] Although cited as the main reason for using shackles, public safety is likely just an excuse and not the main motivator for shackling prisoners. I argue that underlying the shackling exemplifies the idea that these women should not have become pregnant. The shackling reflects a distinct discrimination: the lawmakers allowing it perhaps thought that people guilty of crimes would make bad mothers. Public safety is just a pretense. The language used to justify the use of restraint of Shawanna Nelson, the plaintiff in Nelson v. Correctional Medical Services, discussed below, included the word “aggressive.”[32] In her case, there was no evidence that she posed any danger or was objectively aggressive. Officer Turnesky, who supervised Nelson, testified that she never felt threatened by Nelson.[33] The lack of documented attempts of escape and violence from pregnant prisoners suggests that shackling for flight risk is a false pretense and perhaps merely based on stereotypes.[34] In 2011, an Amnesty International report noted that “Around the USA, it is common for restraints to be used on sick and pregnant incarcerated women when they are transported to and kept in hospital, regardless of whether they have a history of violence (which only a minority have) and regardless of whether they have ever absconded or attempted to escape (which few women have).”[35] In a 2020 survey of correctional officers in select midwestern prisons, 76 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with restraining pregnant women during labor and delivery.[36] If a correctional officer shackles a pregnant prisoner, it is not because they pose a risk but because of a perception that they do. This mindset is attributed to select law enforcement, who have authority to use restraints.[37] In 2022, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill prohibiting the use of restraints on pregnant inmates. However, legislators amended the bill due to the Tennessee Sherriff Association’s belief that even pregnant inmates could pose a “threat.”[38] Subjecting all prisoners to the same “precautions” because a small percentage of individuals may pose such risks could reflect stereotyping or the assumption that all incarcerated people pose danger and flight risk. To quell the (unjustified) public safety concern, there are other options that do not cause physical or mental harm to pregnant women. For example, San Francisco General Hospital does not use shackles but has deputy sheriffs outside the pregnant women’s doors.[39] III. Historical Context and Race A. Slavery and Post-Civil War The treatment of female prisoners has striking similarities to that of enslaved women. Originally, shackling of female slaves was a mechanism of control and dehumanization.[40] This enabled physical and sexual abuses. During the process of intentionally dehumanizing slaves to facilitate subordination, slave owners stripped slave women of their feminine identity.[41] Slave women were unable to exhibit the Victorian model of “good mothering” and people thought they lacked maternal feelings for their children.[42] In turn, societal perception defeminized slave women, and barred them from utilizing the protections of womanhood and motherhood. During the post-Civil War era, black women were reversely depicted as sexually promiscuous and were arrested for prostitution more often than white women.[43] In turn, society excluded black women; they were seen as lacking what the “acceptable and good” women had.[44] Some argue that the historical act of labeling black women sexually deviant influences today’s perception of black women and may lead to labeling them bad mothers.[45] Over two-thirds of incarcerated women are women of color.[46] Many reports document sexual violence and misconduct against prisoners over the years.[47] Male guards have raped, sexually assaulted, and inappropriately touched female prisoners. Some attribute the physical abuse of black female prisoners to their being depicted or stereotyped as “aggressive, deviant, and domineering.”[48] Some expect black women to express stoicism and if they do not, people label them as dangerous, irresponsible, and aggressive.[49] The treatment of these prisoners mirrors the historical oppression endured by black women during and following the era of slavery. The act of shackling incarcerated pregnant women extends the inhumane treatment of these women from the prison setting into the hospital. One prisoner stated that during her thirty-hour labor, while being shackled, she “felt like a farm animal.”[50] Another pregnant prisoner describes her treatment by a guard stating: “a female guard grabbed me by the hair and was making me get up. She was screaming: ‘B***h, get up.’ Then she said, ‘That is what happens when you are a f***ing junkie. You shouldn’t be using drugs, or you wouldn’t be in here.”[51] Shackling goes beyond punishing by isolation from society – it is an additional punishment that is not justified. B. Reproductive Rights and “Bad Mothers” As with slaves not being seen as maternal, prisoners are not viewed as “real mothers.” A female prison guard said the following: “I’m a mother of two and I know what that impulse, that instinct, that mothering instinct feels like. It just takes over, you would never put your kids in harm’s way. . . . Women in here lack that. Something in their nature is not right, you know?”[52] This comment implies that incarcerated women lack maternal instinct. They are not in line with the standards of what society accepts as a “woman” and “mother” and are thought to have abandoned their roles as caretakers in pursuit of deviant behaviors. Without consideration of racial discrimination, poverty issues, trauma, and restricted access to the child right after delivery, these women are stereotyped as bad mothers simply because they are in prison. Reminiscent of the treatment of female black bodies post-civil war and the use of reproductive interventions (for example, Norplant and forced sterilization) in exchange for shorter sentences, I argue that shackles are a form of reproductive control. Justification for the use of shackles even includes their use as a “punitive instrument to remind the prisoner of their punishment.”[53] However, a prisoner’s pregnancy should have no relevance to their sentence.[54] Using shackles demonstrates to prisoners that society tolerates childbirth but does not support it.[55] The shackling is evidence that women are being punished “for bearing children, not for breaking the law.”[56] Physicians and healthcare workers, as a result, are responsible for providing care for the delivery and rectifying any physical problems associated with the restraints. The issues that arise from the use of restraints place physicians in a position more complex than they experience with regular healthy pregnancies. C. Discrimination In the case of Ferguson v. City of Charleston, a medical university subjected black woman to involuntary drug testing during pregnancy. In doing so, medical professionals collaborated with law enforcement to penalize black women for their use of drugs during pregnancy.[57] The Court held the drug tests were an unreasonable search and violated the Fourth Amendment. Ferguson v. City of Charleston further reveals an unjustified assumption: the medical and legal community seemed suspicious of black women and had perhaps predetermined them more likely to use drugs while pregnant. Their fitness to become mothers needed to be proven, while wealthy, white women were presumed fit.[58] The correctional community similarly denies pregnant prisoners’ medical attention. In the case of Staten v. Lackawanna County, an African American woman whose serious medical needs were treated indifferently by jail staff was forced to give birth in her cell.[59] This woman was punished for being pregnant in prison through the withholding of medical attention and empathy. IV. Failure to Follow Anti-Shackling Laws Despite 22 states having laws against shackling pregnant prisoners, officers do not always follow these laws. In 2015, the Correctional Association of New York reported that of the 27 women who gave birth under state custody, officers shackled 23 women in violation of the anti-shackling laws.[60] The lawyer of Tracy Edwards, an inmate who officers shackled unlawfully during her twelve-hour labor stated, “I don’t think we can assume that just because there’s a law passed, that’s automatically going to trickle down to the prison.”[61] Even with more restrictions on shackling, it may still occur, partly due to the stereotype that incarcerated women are aggressive and dangerous. V. Constitutionality The Eighth Amendment protects people from cruel and unusual punishment. In Brown vs. Plata, the court stated, “Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons.”[62] In several cases, the legal community has held shackling to be unconstitutional as it violates the Eighth Amendment unless specifically justified. In the case of Nelson v. Correctional Medical Services, a pregnant woman was shackled for 12 hours of labor with a brief respite while she pushed, then re-shackled. The shackling caused her physical and emotional pain, including intense cramping that could not be relieved due to positioning and her inability to get up to use a toilet.[63] The court held that a clear security concern must justify shackling. The court cited a similar DC case and various precedents for using the Eighth Amendment to hold correctional facilities and hospitals accountable.[64] An Arkansas law similarly states that shackling must be justified by safety or risk of escape.[65] If the Thirteenth Amendment applied to those convicted of crimes, shackling pregnant incarcerated people would be unconstitutional under that amendment as well as the Eighth. In the Civil Rights Cases, Congress upheld the right “to enact all necessary and proper laws for the obliteration and prevention of slavery with all its badges and incidents.”[66] Section two of the Thirteenth Amendment condemns any trace or acts comparable to that of slavery. Shackling pregnant prisoners, stripping them of their dignity, and justification based on stereotypes all have origins in the treatment of black female slaves. Viewed through the lens of the Thirteenth Amendment, the act of shackling would be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the Thirteenth Amendment explicitly excludes people convicted of a crime. VI. Justice As a result of the unconstitutional nature of shackling, physicians should have a legal obligation, in addition to their ethical duty, to protect their patients. The principle of justice requires physicians to take a stand against the discriminatory treatment of their patients, even under the eye of law enforcement.[67],[68] However, “badge and gun intimidation,” threats of noncompliance, and the fear of losing one’s license can impede a physician’s willingness to advocate for their patients. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) finds the use of physical restraints interferes with the ability of clinicians to practice medicine safely.[69] ACOG, The American Medical Association, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, and other organizations oppose using restraints on pregnant incarcerated people.[70] Yet, legislators can adopt shackling laws without consultation with physicians. The ACOG argues that “State legislators are taking it upon themselves to define complex medical concepts without reference to medical evidence. Some of the penalties [faced by OBGYNs] for violating these vague, unscientific laws include criminal sentences.”[71] Legislation that does not consider medical implications or discourages physicians’ input altogether is unjust. In nullifying the voice of a physician in matters pertaining to the patient’s treatment, physicians are prevented from fulfilling the principle of justice, making the act of shackling patients unethical. VII. Principle of Beneficence The principle of beneficence requires the prevention of harm, the removal of harm, and the promotion of good.[72] Beneficence demands the physician not only avoid harm but benefit patients and promote their welfare.[73] The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation states that physicians must work with other professionals to increase patient safety and improve the quality of care.[74] In doing so, physicians can adequately treat patients with the goal of prevention and healing. It is difficult to do good when law enforcement imposes on doctors to work around shackles during labor and delivery. Law enforcement leaves physicians and healthcare workers responsible not only to provide care for the delivery, but also rectify any ailments associated with the restraints. The issues arising from using restraints place physicians in a position more complex than they experience with other pregnancies. Doctors cannot prevent the application of the shackles and can only request officers to take them off the patient.[75] Physicians who simply go along with shackling are arguably violating the principle of beneficence. However, for most, rather than violating the principle of beneficence overtly, physicians may simply have to compromise. Given the intricate nature of the situation, physicians are tasked with minimizing potential harm to the best of their abilities while adhering to legal obligations.[76] It is difficult to pin an ethics violation on the ones who do not like the shackles but are powerless to remove them. Some do argue that this inability causes physicians to violate the principle of beneficence.[77] However, promoting the well-being of their patients within the boundaries of the law limits their ability to exercise beneficence. For physicians to fulfill the principle of beneficence to the fullest capacity, they must have an influence on law. Protocols and assessments on flight risks made solely by the officers and law enforcement currently undermine the physician’s expertise. These decisions do not consider the health and well-being of the pregnant woman. As a result, law supersedes the influence of medicine and health care. CONCLUSION People expect physicians to uphold the four major principles of bioethics. However, their inability to override restraints compromises their ability to exercise beneficence. Although pledging to enforce these ethical principles, physicians have little opportunity to influence anti-shackling legislation. Instead of being included in conversations regarding medical complexities, legislation silences their voices. Policies must include the physician's voice as they affect their ability to treat patients. Officers should not dismiss a physician's request to remove shackles from a woman if they are causing health complications. A woman's labor should not harm her or her fetus because the officer will not remove her shackles.[78] A federal law could end shackling pregnant incarcerated people. Because other options are available to ensure the safety of the public and the prisoner, there is no ethical justification for shackling pregnant prisoners. An incarcerated person is a human being and must be treated with dignity and respect. To safeguard the well-being of incarcerated women and the public, it is essential for advocates of individual rights to join forces with medical professionals to establish an all-encompassing solution. - [1] Ferszt, G. G., Palmer, M., & McGrane, C. (2018). Where does your state stand on shackling of Pregnant Incarcerated Women? Nursing for Women’s Health, 22(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nwh.2017.12.005 [2] S983A, 2015-2016 Regular Sessions (N.Y. 2015). https://legislation.nysenate.gov/pdf/bills/2015/S983A [3] Chris DiNardo, Pregnancy in Confinement, Anti-Shackling Laws and the “Extraordinary Circumstances” Loophole, 25 Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 271-295 (2018) https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/djglp/vol25/iss2/5 [4] Chris DiNardo (2018) [5] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1980. " Prisoners in 1980 – Statistical Tables”. Retrieved April 20, 2023 (https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p80.pdf). [6] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2022. " Prisoners in 2021 – Statistical Tables”. Retrieved April 20, 2023 (https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/p21st.pdf). [7] U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (1980) [8] Sufrin C, Jones RK, Mosher WD, Beal L. Pregnancy Prevalence and Outcomes in U.S. Jails. Obstet Gynecol. 2020;135(5):1177-1183. doi:10.1097/AOG.0000000000003834 [9] Kramer, C., Thomas, K., Patil, A., Hayes, C. M., & Sufrin, C. B. (2022). Shackling and pregnancy care policies in US prisons and jails. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 27(1), 186–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-022-03526-y [10] House, K. T., Kelley, S., Sontag, D. N., & King, L. P. (2021). Ending restraint of incarcerated individuals giving birth. AMA Journal of Ethics, 23(4). https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2021.364 [11] Goshin, L. S., Sissoko, D. R., Neumann, G., Sufrin, C., & Byrnes, L. (2019). Perinatal nurses’ experiences with and knowledge of the care of incarcerated women during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic &amp; Neonatal Nursing, 48(1), 27–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2018.11.002 [12] Shackling and separation: Motherhood in prison. (2013). AMA Journal of Ethics, 15(9), 779–785. https://doi.org/10.1001/virtualmentor.2013.15.9.pfor2-1309 [13] King, L. (2018). Labor in chains: The shackling of pregnant inmates. Policy Perspectives, 25, 55–68. https://doi.org/10.4079/pp.v25i0.18348 [14] King, L. (2018). [15] AMA Journal of Ethics (2013) [16] Lawrence, A., Lewis, L., Hofmeyr, G. J., & Styles, C. (2013). Maternal positions and mobility during first stage labour. Cochrane database of systematic reviews, (8). [17] Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses. (2011). AWHONN position statement: Shackling incarcerated pregnant women. Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, & Neonatal Nursing, 40(6), 817–818. doi:10.1111/j.1552-6909.2011.01300.x [18] Ferszt, G. G., Palmer, M., & McGrane, C. (2018). Where does your state stand on shackling of Pregnant Incarcerated Women? Nursing for Women’s Health, 22(1), 17–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nwh.2017.12.005 [19] Thompson, E. (2022, August 30). 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Hope, Cathy, and Bethaney Turner. "The Right Stuff? The Original Double Jay as Site for Youth Counterculture." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (September 18, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.898.

Full text
Abstract:
On 19 January 1975, Australia’s first youth station 2JJ (Double Jay) launched itself onto the nation’s airwaves with a NASA-style countdown and You Only Like Me ‘Cause I’m Good in Bed by Australian band Skyhooks. Refused airtime by the commercial stations because of its explicit sexual content, this song was a clear signifier of the new station’s intent—to occupy a more radical territory on Australian radio. Indeed, Double Jay’s musical entrée into the highly restrictive local broadcasting environment of the time has gone on to symbolise both the station’s role in its early days as an enfant terrible of radio (Inglis 376), and its near 40 years as a voice for youth culture in Australia (Milesago, Double Jay). In this paper we explore the proposition that Double Jay functioned as an outlet for youth counterculture in Australia, and that it achieved this even with (and arguably because of) its credentials as a state-generated entity. This proposition is considered via brief analysis of the political and musical context leading to the establishment of Double Jay. We intend to demonstrate that although the station was deeply embedded in “the system” in material and cultural terms, it simultaneously existed in an “uneasy symbiosis” (Martin and Siehl 54) with this system because it consciously railed against the mainstream cultures from which it drew, providing a public and active vehicle for youth counterculture in Australia. The origins of Double Jay thus provide one example of the complicated relationship between culture and counterculture, and the multiple ways in which the two are inextricably linked. As a publicly-funded broadcasting station Double Jay was liberated from the industrial imperatives of Australia’s commercial stations which arguably drove their predisposition for formula. The absence of profit motive gave Double Jay’s organisers greater room to experiment with format and content, and thus the potential to create a genuine alternative in Australia broadcasting. As a youth station Double Jay was created to provide a minority with its own outlet. The Labor government committed to wrenching airspace from the very restrictive Australian broadcasting “system” (Wiltshire and Stokes 2) to provide minority voices with room to speak and to be heard. Youth was identified by the government as one such minority. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) contributed to this process by enabling young staffers to establish the semi-independent Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) (Webb) and within this a youth station. Not only did this provide a focal point around which a youth collective could coalesce, but the distinct place and identity of Double Jay within the ABC offered its organisers the opportunity to ignore or indeed subvert some of the perceived strictures of the “mothership” that was the ABC, whether in organisational, content and/or stylistic terms. For these and other reasons Double Jay was arguably well positioned to counter the broadcasting cultures that existed alongside this station. It did so stylistically, and also in more fundamental ways, At the same time, however, it “pillaged the host body at random” (Webb) co-opting certain aspects of these cultures (people, scheduling, content, administration) which in turn implicated Double Jay in the material and cultural practices of those mainstream cultures against which it railed. Counterculture on the Airwaves: Space for Youth to Play? Before exploring these themes further, we should make clear that Double Jay’s legitimacy as a “counterculture” organisation is observably tenuous against the more extreme renderings of the concept. Theodore Roszak, for example, requires of counterculture something “so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all” (5). Double Jay was a brainchild of the state: an outcome of the Whitlam Government’s efforts to open up the nation’s airwaves (Davis, Government; McClelland). Further, the supervision of this station was given to the publicly funded Australian national broadcaster, the ABC (Inglis). Any claim Double Jay has to counterculture status then is arguably located in less radical invocations of the term. Some definitions, for example, hold that counterculture contains value systems that run counter to culture, but these values are relational rather than divorced from each other. Kenneth Leech, for example, states that counterculture is "a way of life and philosophy which at central points is in conflict with the mainstream society” (Desmond et al. 245, our emphasis); E.D. Batzell defines counterculture as "a minority culture marked by a set of values, norms and behaviour patterns which contradict those of the dominant society" (116, our emphasis). Both definitions imply that counterculture requires the mainstream to make sense of what it is doing and why. In simple terms then, counterculture as the ‘other’ does not exist without its mainstream counterpoint. The particular values with which counterculture is in conflict are generated by “the system” (Heath and Potter 6)—a system that imbues “manufactured needs and mass-produced desires” (Frank 15) in the masses to encourage order, conformity and consumption. Counterculture seeks to challenge this “system” via individualist, expression-oriented values such as difference, diversity, change, egalitarianism, and spontaneity (Davis On Youth; Leary; Thompson and Coskuner‐Balli). It is these kinds of counterculture values that we demonstrate were embedded in the content, style and management practices within Double Jay. The Whitlam Years and the Birth of Double Jay Double Jay was borne of the Whitlam government’s brief but impactful period in office from 1972 to 1975, after 23 years of conservative government in Australia. Key to the Labor Party’s election platform was the principle of participatory democracy, the purpose of which was “breaking down apathy and maximising active citizen engagement” (Cunningham 123). Within this framework, the Labor Party committed to opening the airwaves, and reconfiguring the rhetoric of communication and media as a space of and for the people (Department of the Media 3). Labor planned to honour this commitment via sweeping reforms that would counter the heavily concentrated Australian media landscape through “the encouragement of diversification of ownership of commercial radio and television”—and in doing so enable “the expression of a plurality of viewpoints and cultures throughout the media” (Department of the Media 3). Minority groups in particular were to be privileged, while some in the Party even argued for voices that would actively agitate. Senator Jim McClelland, for one, declared, “We say that somewhere in the system there must be broadcasting which not only must not be afraid to be controversial but has a duty to be controversial” (Senate Standing Committee 4). One clear voice of controversy to emerge in the 1960s and resonate throughout the 1970s was the voice of youth (Gerster and Bassett; Langley). Indeed, counterculture is considered by some as synonymous with a particular strain of youth culture during this time (Roszak; Leech). The Labor Government acknowledged this hitherto unrecognised voice in its 1972 platform, with Minister for the Media Senator Doug McClelland claiming that his party would encourage the “whetting of the appetite” for “life and experimentation” of Australia’s youth – in particular through support for the arts (160). McClelland secured licenses for two “experimental-type” stations under the auspices of the ABC, with the youth station destined for Sydney via the ABC’s standby transmitter in Gore Hill (ABCB, 2). Just as the political context in early 1970s Australia provided the necessary conditions for the appearance of Double Jay, so too did the cultural context. Counterculture emerged in the UK, USA and Europe as a clear and potent force in the late 1960s (Roszak; Leech; Frank; Braunstein and Doyle). In Australia this manifested in the 1960s and 1970s in various ways, including political protest (Langley; Horne); battles for the liberalisation of censorship (Hope and Dickerson, Liberalisation; Chipp and Larkin); sex and drugs (Dawson); and the art film scene (Hope and Dickerson, Happiness; Thoms). Of particular interest here is the “lifestyle” aspect of counterculture, within which the value-expressions against the dominant culture manifest in cultural products and practices (Bloodworth 304; Leary ix), and more specifically, music. Many authors have suggested that music was pivotal to counterculture (Bloodworth 309; Leech 8), a key “social force” through which the values of counterculture were articulated (Whiteley 1). The youth music broadcasting scene in Australia was extremely narrow prior to Double Jay, monopolised by a handful of media proprietors who maintained a stranglehold over the youth music scene from the mid-50s. This dominance was in part fuelled by the rising profitability of pop music, driven by “the dreamy teenage market”, whose spending was purely discretionary (Doherty 52) and whose underdeveloped tastes made them “immune to any sophisticated disdain of run-of-the-mill” cultural products (Doherty 230-231). Over the course of the 1950s the commercial stations pursued this market by “skewing” their programs toward the youth demographic (Griffen-Foley 264). The growing popularity of pop music saw radio shift from a “multidimensional” to “mono-dimensional” medium according to rock journalist Bruce Elder, in which the “lowest-common-denominator formula of pop song-chat-commercial-pop-song” dominated the commercial music stations (12). Emblematic of this mono-dimensionalism was the appearance of the Top 40 Playlist in 1958 (Griffin-Foley 265), which might see as few as 10–15 songs in rotation in peak shifts. Elder claims that this trend became more pronounced over the course of the 1960s and peaked in 1970, with playlists that were controlled with almost mechanical precision [and] compiled according to American-devised market research methods which tended to reinforce repetition and familiarity at the expense of novelty and diversity. (12) Colin Vercoe, whose job was to sell the music catalogues of Festival Records to stations like 2UE, 2SER and SUW, says it was “an incredibly frustrating affair” to market new releases because of the rigid attachment by commercials to the “Top 40 of endless repeats” (Vercoe). While some air time was given to youth music beyond the Top 40, this happened mostly in non-peak shifts and on weekends. Bill Drake at 2SM (who was poached by Double Jay and allowed to reclaim his real name, Holger Brockmann) played non-Top 40 music in his Sunday afternoon programme The Album Show (Brockmann). A more notable exception was Chris Winter’s Room to Move on the ABC, considered by many as the predecessor of Double Jay. Introduced in 1971, Room to Move played all forms of contemporary music not represented by the commercial broadcasters, including whole albums and B sides. Rock music’s isolation to the fringes was exacerbated by the lack of musical sales outlets for rock and other forms of non-pop music, with much music sourced through catalogues, music magazines and word of mouth (Winter; Walker). In this context a small number of independent record stores, like Anthem Records in Sydney and Archie and Jugheads in Melbourne, appear in the early 1970s. Vercoe claims that the commercial record companies relentlessly pursued the closure of these independents on the grounds they were illegal entities: The record companies hated them and they did everything they could do close them down. When (the companies) bought the catalogue to overseas music, they bought the rights. And they thought these record stores were impinging on their rights. It was clear that a niche market existed for rock and alternative forms of music. Keith Glass and David Pepperell from Archie and Jugheads realised this when stock sold out in the first week of trade. Pepperell notes, “We had some feeling we were doing something new relating to people our own age but little idea of the forces we were about to unleash”. Challenging the “System” from the Inside At the same time as interested individuals clamoured to buy from independent record stores, the nation’s first youth radio station was being instituted within the ABC. In October 1974, three young staffers—Marius Webb, Ron Moss and Chris Winter— with the requisite youth credentials were briefed by ABC executives to build a youth-style station for launch in January 1975. According to Winter “All they said was 'We want you to set up a station for young people' and that was it!”, leaving the three with a conceptual carte blanche–although assumedly within the working parameters of the ABC (Webb). A Contemporary Radio Unit (CRU) was formed in order to meet the requirements of the ABC while also creating a clear distinction between the youth station and the ABC. According to Webb “the CRU gave us a lot of latitude […] we didn’t have to go to other ABC Departments to do things”. The CRU was conscious from the outset of positioning itself against the mainstream practices of both the commercial stations and the ABC. The publicly funded status of Double Jay freed it from the shackles of profit motive that enslaved the commercial stations, in turn liberating its turntables from baser capitalist imperatives. The two coordinators Ron Moss and Marius Webb also bypassed the conventions of typecasting the announcer line-up (as was practice in both commercial and ABC radio), seeking instead people with charisma, individual style and youth appeal. Webb told the Sydney Morning Herald that Double Jay’s announcers were “not required to have a frontal lobotomy before they go on air.” In line with the individual- and expression-oriented character of the counterculture lifestyle, it was made clear that “real people” with “individuality and personality” would fill the airwaves of Double Jay (Nicklin 9). The only formula to which the station held was to avoid (almost) all formula – a mantra enhanced by the purchase in the station’s early days of thousands of albums and singles from 10 or so years of back catalogues (Robinson). This library provided presenters with the capacity to circumvent any need for repetition. According to Winter the DJs “just played whatever we wanted”, from B sides to whole albums of music, most of which had never made it onto Australian radio. The station also adapted the ABC tradition of recording live classical music, but instead recorded open-air rock concerts and pub gigs. A recording van built from second-hand ABC equipment captured the grit of Sydney’s live music scene for Double Jay, and in so doing undercut the polished sounds of its commercial counterparts (Walker). Double Jay’s counterculture tendencies further extended to its management style. The station’s more political agitators, led by Webb, sought to subvert the traditional top-down organisational model in favour of a more egalitarian one, including a battle with the ABC to remove the bureaucratic distinction between technical staff and presenters and replace this with the single category “producer/presenter” (Cheney, Webb, Davis 41). The coordinators also actively subverted their own positions as coordinators by holding leaderless meetings open to all Double Jay employees – meetings that were infamously long and fraught, but also remembered as symbolic of the station’s vibe at that time (Frolows, Matchett). While Double Jay assumed the ABC’s focus on music, news and comedy, at times it politicised the content contra to the ABC’s non-partisan policy, ignored ABC policy and practice, and more frequently pushed its contents over the edges of what was considered propriety and taste. These trends were already present in pockets of the ABC prior to Double Jay: in current affairs programmes like This Day Tonight and Four Corners (Harding 49); and in overtly leftist figures like Alan Ashbolt (Bowman), who it should be noted had a profound influence over Webb and other Double Jay staff (Webb). However, such an approach to radio still remained on the edges of the ABC. As one example of Double Jay’s singularity, Webb made clear that the ABC’s “gentleman’s agreement” with the Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters to ban certain content from airplay would not apply to Double Jay because the station would not “impose any censorship on our people” – a fact demonstrated by the station’s launch song (Nicklin 9). The station’s “people” in turn made the most of this freedom with the production of programmes like Gayle Austin’s Horny Radio Porn Show, the Naked Vicar Show, the adventures of Colonel Chuck Chunder of the Space Patrol, and the Sunday afternoon comic improvisations of Nude Radio from the team that made Aunty Jack. This openness also made its way into the news team, most famously in its second month on air with the production of The Ins and Outs of Love, a candid documentary of the sexual proclivities and encounters of Sydney’s youth. Conservative ABC staffer Clement Semmler described the programme as containing such “disgustingly explicit accounts of the sexual behaviour of young teenagers” that it “aroused almost universal obloquy from listeners and the press” (35). The playlist, announcers, comedy sketches, news reporting and management style of Double Jay represented direct challenges to the entrenched media culture of Australia in the mid 1970s. The Australian National Commission for UNESCO noted at the time that Double Jay was “variously described as political, subversive, offensive, pornographic, radical, revolutionary and obscene” (7). While these terms were understandable given the station’s commitment to experiment and innovation, the “vital point” about Double Jay was that it “transmitted an electronic reflection of change”: What the station did was to zero in on the kind of questioning of traditional values now inherent in a significant section of the under 30s population. It played their music, talked in their jargon, pandered to their whims, tastes, prejudices and societal conflicts both intrinsic and extrinsic. (48) Conclusion From the outset, Double Jay was locked in an “uneasy symbiosis” with mainstream culture. On the one hand, the station was established by federal government and its infrastructure was provided by state funds. It also drew on elements of mainstream broadcasting in multiple ways. However, at the same time, it was a voice for and active agent of counterculture, representing through its content, form and style those values that were considered to challenge the ‘system,’ in turn creating an outlet for the expression of hitherto un-broadcast “ways of thinking and being” (Leary). As Henry Rosenbloom, press secretary to then Labor Minister Dr Moss Cass wrote, Double Jay had the potential to free its audience “from an automatic acceptance of the artificial rhythms of urban and suburban life. 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Currie, Susan, and Donna Lee Brien. "Mythbusting Publishing: Questioning the ‘Runaway Popularity’ of Published Biography and Other Life Writing." M/C Journal 11, no. 4 (July 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.43.

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Abstract:
Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. “1363.0 Book Publishers, Australia, 2003–04.” 2005. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1363.0>. Bair, Deirdre “Too Much S & M.” Sydney Morning Herald 10–11 Sept. 2005: 17. Basset, Troy J., and Christina M. Walter. “Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891–1906.” Book History 4 (2001): 205–36. Brien, Donna Lee, Leonie Rutherford, and Rosemary Williamson. “Hearth and Hotmail: The Domestic Sphere as Commodity and Community in Cyberspace.” M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 1 June 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/10-brien.php>. Carter, David, and Anne Galligan. “Introduction.” Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007. 1–14. Corporall, Glenda. Project Octopus: Report Commissioned by the Australian Society of Authors. Sydney: Australian Society of Authors, 1990. Dempsey, John “Biography Rewrite: A&E’s Signature Series Heads to Sib Net.” Variety 4 Jun. 2006. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117944601.html?categoryid=1238&cs=1>. Donaldson, Ian. “Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography.” Australian Book Review 286 (Nov. 2006): 23–29. Douglas, Kate. “‘Blurbing’ Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography.” Biography 24.4 (2001): 806–26. Eliot, Simon. “Very Necessary but not Sufficient: A Personal View of Quantitative Analysis in Book History.” Book History 5 (2002): 283–93. Feather, John, and Hazel Woodbridge. “Bestsellers in the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 23.3 (Sept. 2007): 210–23. Feather, JP, and M Reid. “Bestsellers and the British Book Industry.” Publishing Research Quarterly 11.1 (1995): 57–72. Galligan, Anne. “Living in the Marketplace: Publishing in the 1990s.” Publishing Studies 7 (1999): 36–44. Grossman, Lev. “Time’s Person of the Year: You.” Time 13 Dec. 2006. Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. Starck, Nigel. “Capturing Life—Not Death: A Case For Burying The Posthumous Parallax.” Text: The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs 5.2 (2001). 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct01/starck.htm>.
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24

-, Upendra Kumar Srivastava. "A Study of Global Trade War and Its Impact on Indian Economy." International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research 6, no. 2 (March 13, 2024). http://dx.doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2024.v06i02.14813.

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Introduction 1. In an era of globalization, international trade is inevitable. When we walk into a supermarket and find South American bananas, Malaysian rubber products, Brazilian coffee, we simply experience the impact of global trade. Global trade allows all countries around the world to publicise their markets and to supply goods and services that otherwise would not have been open to the domestic economy. As all goods and services are available at relatively cheaper prices in the international market, therefore domestic market becomes more competitive. People have got choices for competitive products. Therefore, the difference in the prices of goods of the foreign economy and domestic economy results in international trade. 2. Why nations trade with each other ? Not a single nation alone can generate all the goods and services for its households in today’s world of limitless desires. There is an unequal distribution of factors of production over the countries of the world. Countries of the world differ from each other in terms of natural resources, technology, entrepreneurial and managerial skills which determine the ability of the country concerned, at the lowest cost of production, to manufacture goods and services. For example, South Korea can manufacture cars or microelectronic products effectively in comparison with any other nation in the world, similarly Malaysia could produce rubber and palm oil more efficiently. The ability to manufacture these products, such as electronics or rubber, is much greater than their ability to consume these goods within the country so that they can sell these goods at comparatively cheaper prices to other countries around the world. Similarly, India and Brazil can import certain products from South Korea and Malaysia at lower prices and can in exchange, import Brazilian coffee or Indian textiles at a lower price. Therefore, generally trade benefits all the countries of the world provided it is free trade. If one country has a belief in free trade and the other beliefs in the opposite, only the previous one will end practicing free trade and suffering in the end. Economists say that trade conflicts safeguard economic interests and are advantageous to the local market, but critics claim that they ultimately hurt local companies, consumers, and the economy in long run. Protectionist policies always harm the concept of globalization. According to the World Commission on the social dimension of globalization (2004). “Globalisation should benefit all the countries and should raise the welfare of all people throughout the world”. Advocates of protectionist view put arguments in favour of restrictions of the trade like the expansion of the home market, keeping money at home, counteracting foreign low wages, defence or national security arguments, protection of infant industry, anti-dumping arguments, and balance of payment arguments. Trade restrictions are of two types; tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers. The tariff barrier is the most common barrier to trade. It is the tax or duties that one country imposes on exported or imported goods. There are various types of tariff barriers in international trade. If the tariff is imposed based on the physical weight of some goods, imported or exported, called a specific tariff. • If a tariff is imposed on the value of some goods, imported or exported is called “Ad Valorem tariff”. • If different rates of the tariff are imposed on different countries called discriminatory tariffs. • If the same rates of a tariff are imposed on different countries, called non-discriminatory tariff’. • If the main purpose of imposing a tariff is to produce revenue, called a revenue tariff. • And the most commonly used tariff is the Protective tariff. if the tariff is imposed mainly to protect domestic industries from foreign competitions are called the protective tariff 4. Followers of the protectionist policy argue that tariff imposition has two impacts; revenue increases after the imposition of tariff and home production increases which is called protective effect but if other countries retaliate in the same manner, the trade war is inevitable. A situation of trade war erupts when one nation or economy strike back against another economy by imposing trade barriers. The application of trade restrictions is not a new concept in international trade. If we study the background of the global trade war, we find that countries frequently used trade restrictions in global trade. The situation was aggravated after the second world war. Most of the countries were intentionally devaluing their currency to increase their export and minimise imports. This was also the reason for the currency war between countries. 5. We can divide the world trade in the pre-Bretton Woods and post Bretton Woods period. An efficient international monetary system is very essential for the smooth functioning and expansion of international trade. From the early 19th century until the first world war, the era was regarded as a period of internationalism. Most of the major industrialised nations of the world started participating in world trade. After the second world war and the hectic slump and currency war that followed it all the countries of the world wished to return to normalcy. Two causes were responsible for this wish: - • Reconstruction of the economies ravaged by the war. • To end the currency war. As far as the second cause is concerned many countries or the trading partners of the world started devaluating its currency to improve the conditions of their BOP. This resulted in a trade war between nations. Therefore, in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, members of 44 countries met to discuss these problems and to find realistic solutions for them. This conference proposed the establishment of: - • The International Monetary Fund (IMF), to help member countries to meet their BOP deficit problem. • IBRD, to reconstruct and develop economies of member countries. • An International Trade Organisation (ITO), to solve the problem of international trade and proper liberalisation of it. 6. However, the proposal for the International Trade Organisation did not materialise and the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) was formed. The GATT was established in 1948 with a big and important objective of “free trade” and “no trade war”. Its main purpose was to remove trade restrictions which sooner or later converts into a trade war. The first seven rounds of GATT were focussed on the removal of trade barriers only. Despite these discussions in several rounds of GATT, it couldn’t provide a useful forum for discussion on international trade issues. 7. The 8th round of GATT is called Uruguay Round which started in 1986. Member countries negotiated in the areas of Tariffs, Non-Tariff Measures, Tropical Production, Natural resource-based products, Agriculture, GATT articles, Safeguards, Multilateral trade negotiation agreement, Subsidies, Disputes Settlement, Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPPS), Trade-Related Investments measures (TRIMS), Functioning of GATT system (FOGS). Despite serious discussion on these issues’ agreement could not be reached and member countries kept on using trade and non-trade barriers on each other. 8. COVID-19 pandemic, which started in March 2020, has adversely affected global trade. As per WTO statistics, a 3% fall in the volume of merchandise (export and import) trade is seen in the first quarter of 2020. Lockdown in many economies of the world aggravated the problem and declines are historically large. Strict social distancing and majors and restrictions on travel and transport adversely affected the service sector of the world economy which is the main contributor to gross domestic product (GDP) of many countries. Therefore, the economic recovery from the COVID situation is highly uncertain. This situation might give a boost to the global trade war which will be the endeavour during the research to be found out and a description of the same has been covered in Chapter 3. The research has tried to reveal how the pandemic has crippled the world economy and aggravating the pre-existing problem of the trade war. The recent trade war between China and the USA is an apt example. Recent Examples of Trade War​​ 9. Since the year 2018 world has been witnessing trade conflict which was earlier currency conflict between the USA and its economic partners mainly the EU and China. But in this conflict US’s all-weather friend Canada and Mexico were also hit. However, retaliation by other countries has been very limited. In March 2018, the United States announced the imposition of additional tariffs under Section 232 on imports of steel (25%) and aluminium (10%) from China to the United States. This might harm the Chinese economy as China is the major contributor of crude and finished steel in the world. 10. In the same month, the US President announced his strategy to endorse restrictions against China over its Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policies which were severely affecting its stakeholders. In this sanction, the US raised tariffs by 24 to 25% on selected Chinese products which were valued to the tune of approximately $50 billion. By adopting the policy of quid pro quo China on 01 April responded with 25% tariffs on $50 billion in US exports on various American products, like agriculture, pork, and cars. On 3rd April 2018, the US administration released a list of 1,333 goods equivalent to $50 billion in trade, which it said would enforce a 25% tariff. 11. These Chinese products mainly belong to the category of important sectors like robotics, rail and shipping, information technology, health care, and medicine, and high-technology. China retaliated and published a list of 106 products on which 25% tariffs were imposed and its value was worth $50 billion in trade. Thus, quid pro quo tactics kept ongoing between China and the US. The US plans to tax $50 billion worth of Chinese imports was replied with threats by China to impose tariffs on American products worth $50 billion. China announced to hit back with additional taxes on American chemicals, automobiles, and other products. Interestingly all these 106 American products are produced in those regions of the US where President Trump enjoys great support of his people. Earlier this year both countries signed the first phase of the trade agreement to reduce trade pressures between them, which last year weakened global growth and scaled-down business investment around the world. But due to the blame game over the pandemic, progress has been derailed. 12. Apart from the above, the subsidy has been one of the major causes of dispute amongst countries of the world. According to the WTO agreement on agriculture, developed economies had to reduce their subsidies by 21% in six years and developing countries by 12% in 10 years. Recently restriction on Indian agriculture produce by US, EU, Canada, Brazil, and Japan has been imposed in August 2020. They have questioned that India is not following the WTO peace clause for surpassing the limit on support or, subsidy it can render to its peasants. In the platform of WTO, the ceiling for subsidy is 10% of the value of the produce. India provided the WTO with details that the value of its rice production in 2018 was $43.6 billion and subsidies were worth just $5 billion. Subsidies have therefore remained a major bone of contention between the various countries of the world, but there is one peace arrangement in the WTO that protects the WTO members’ food procurement program for developing countries from taking action in the event of a violation of the subsidy cap. It will also be a litmus test to observe if in circumstances like the ongoing pandemic, WTO members grant food security pre-eminence to emerging economies or whether developed nations are pursuing market entree. Globalisation has reached a few obstructions in recent times, following decades of surges in world trade, worldwide tourism, and global cooperation, as some of the development achieved in the past has been undone by the re-emergence of patriotism and protectionism. The COVID-19 pandemic is predicted to trigger an unprecedented deterioration in global trade after trade growth decelerated dramatically in 2019, owing in huge part to trade conflict between the United States and China. As per the forecasts of the WTO, merchandise business is going to plunge between 12.98% and 31.88% this year, depending on how easily the coronavirus is controlled and trade will return to pre-crisis levels. According to the WTO Director-General, Roberto Azevêdo, the swift and robust rebound is only possible through the focus on free trade. Global markets have to be kept open and predictable, in addition to promoting a more desirable business climate. 13. Though before the onset of the pandemic, the Indian economy was not affected much by the ongoing trade conflict between the USA and China because of the combined effect of the pandemic and trade war India’s GDP shrunk by 23.9% in the first quarter of FY 2020-21. In the first quarter, the worst-hit industry was construction, which contracted by 50 percent. The hotel industry contracted by 47%, production by 39.3%, and mining by 23.3%. Agriculture, which posted a 3.4 percent rise, was the only industry that managed to survive the recession. The economy is believed to have suffered the most during the June quarter as a result of the nationwide lockdown. 14. In January 2019, as the trade war was raging, India also placed anti-dumping duties on more than 99 Chinese goods to protect its domestic markets, such as anti-dumping duties on chemicals, petrochemicals, fabrics, yarn, pharmaceutical equipment, rubber, and steel products. As a follower of protectionist policy Indian government also imposes anti-dumping duty on imports of steel products, an alloy of aluminium. The total value of duty imposed was $13.07 per ton to $ 173.1 per ton, which is a big amount. China, Vietnam, South Korea for five years in June 2020. India needs to take some major steps and reforms to bounce back its economy back on track. 15. Review of Literature… To complete the research number of books, literatures in the forms of articles, journals, independent views of various economists have been reviewed and referred. Books…. ​Various books reviewed and which have contributed in the course of the research include the following: - (a) ​Trade War Are Class War: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Mathew C. Klein and Michael Pettis published by Yale University Press, May 19, 2020. ​The roots of today’s trade wars are traced by Klein and Pettis to decisions taken over the past thirty years by policymakers and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States. The authors include a coherent narrative in this book that demonstrates how the growing injustice of class wars is a challenge to the global economy and international peace, and what the ways ahead are. (b)​ Has China Won by Kishore Mahbubani published by PublicAffairs, March 2020. ​​The author of this book aims to provide an insight into the trade war between the USA and China. He also claims that China is not as is claimed, an expansionist country. By extending its trade, diplomacy and military might in the region, it secures its national interest. But his view appears to be skewed toward the Chinese target. (c)​ Superpower Showdown: How the Battle between Trump and Xi Threaten a New Cold War by Bob Davis and Lingling Wei published by HarperCollins, June 9, 2020. ​As told by two Wall Street Journal reporters, one based in Washington, D.C., the other in Beijing, who had more access to the decision-makers in the White House and China’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound than anyone else, this is the inside story of the US-China trade war, how ties between these superpowers unravelled, darkening prospects for global peace and prosperity. Over the seven years, they have collaborated on writing for the Wall Street Journal, Davis and Wei have conducted hundreds of interviews with government and business officials in both nations. They explain how we have reached this turning point and look at where we might be going, evaluating U.S.-China ties. (d) ​COVID-19 Challenges for the Indian Economy: Trade and Foreign Policy Effects by EEPCINDIA and AIC, 2020. ​​A study entitled ‘COVID-19: Challenges for the Indian Economy – Trade and Foreign Policy Consequences’ was developed by the ASEAN-India Centre(AIC) Research and Information System for Developing Countries(RIS) in collaboration with the Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC), it presents freshly written 40 primary comments on India’s trade and foreign policy challenges raised by this crisis and the way forward by Indian professors, economists, and practitioners. (e ) ​Global Economic Effects of COVID-19 by Congressional Research Service August 2020 by James K. Jackson, Martin A. Weiss, and Rebecca M. Nelson.​ It’s a Congressional Research paper published to analyse the effects of the pandemic on the world economy particularly, the USA. It’s a crystal gazing done by two seasoned economists and gives an excellent perspective of ongoing trade and its likely directions post COVID-19. Research is full of authentic data, facts and Pictures gathered from governmental and non-governmental sources. (f) ​Trade is Not a Four-Letter Word: How Six Everyday Products make the case for Trade, January 2014 by Fred Hochberg published by Simon and Schuster. ​Fred P. Hochberg breaks down colourful and convincing real-world examples through the prism of six traditional American items to reject the common myths and misunderstandings surrounding trade. Mr. Hochberg illustrates the story of America’s most unexpected business partnerships by using six commonly consumed American products; the taco salad, the minivan, the banana, the iPhone, the college degree, and the HBO series Game of Thrones – thus sharing the fundamentals of trade that everybody should know. (g) ​Indian Economy by Dutta and Sundhram published by S. Chand, New Delhi, 66th Revised Edition.​This book analyses structure of the Indian Economy, national income, study of human and natural resources in the context of economic development, pattern of foreign trade of India, broad cross-section of the Indian economy. Chapter 6 of this book deals with foreign trade in India and its balance of payment position which is significant for my study. (h) ​International Economics by Francis Cherunilam published by Tata McGraw Hill Publishing Company Limited, New Delhi, Third Edition. The author is a professor at the School of Management Studies at Cochin University of Science and Technology. This book deals with the conflicting national interest, international economic relations, and solutions of conflicting interests. Chapter 3 of this book shows the picture of international trade. Chapter 9th and 10th clear the picture of free trade versus protection and different types of trade barriers. (i) ​International Economics by H.G. Mannur published by Vikas Publishing House Private Limited, Second Revised Edition. ​The author of this book, H.G. Mannur paid his gratitude to the school of social sciences of the university of science in Penang Malaysia, which provided him a great opportunity to learn about the International economics of Malaysia related to the world. This book is dealing with the International economy of Malaysia which is the highest foreign trade-dependent economy. Chapter 1 explains why do nations trade with each other. Chapter 7 of this book deals with obstacles to trade and trade restrictions. (j) ​International Economics by Dominick Salvatore by Wiley, January 1, 2014. ​​Dominick Salvatore, the author of international economics is an American economist. This book presents theories of international economics and its relevance through real-world examples and applications. Articles. ​ Several articles on the subject relating to the global trade, trade conflict and its effects on world have been written by many noted columnists and authors. Apart from that in last 10 months number of organisations and research bodies also carried out the analysis and likely effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world trade and ongoing trade conflict. Articles from publications such as ‘The Economics Times’, ‘Business Today’, ‘The Hindu’, ‘National Council of Applied Economic Research’, ‘BBC Economic Research’, ‘Economic Research and Statistics Division (ERSD)’, ‘Investopedia’ and ‘Business Insider’ form a part of the literature review for the research. In addition to the articles and journals by various writers certain data were also taken from the governmental and non-governmental reports like United Nations Conference on Trade and Development(UNCTAD), WTO Press releases and Economic Survey of India. The existing literature provides great insight into the reasons of trade between the countries, trade conflict and its catalyst and how an unforeseen event like the pandemic brings the entire world to a standstill where even largest and strongest have no solution. There are number of literature and research available which brings out many scenarios where the current trade conflict can go. Besides, a large number of research papers have also been written about the likely recovery of the world trade in various different scenarios. Study of some of has definitely given an insightful perspective on the subject. There is, however a void in the research writings on the subject from Indian government’s concerned ministry like Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Trade and Commerce and Ministry of Agriculture. The Economic Survey of India was the only document where authentic data could have been found but that too was almost six to eight months old. The updated analytical facts and data from the ministry’s sites will go a long way in helping a researcher for his work. A critical study of books and articles mentioned above has assisted in the research to address the issues identified. ​16. Statement of Problem.​ The research seeks to investigate: - (a) ​How the current global trade war (GTW) has impacted the nations having a considerable share in world trade? (b) ​How has the Global Trade War (GTW) impacted the Indian economy? (c)​What are the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Global Trade War? (d) ​What are the likely effects of the COVID -19 pandemic on the Indian economy? 17. Statement of Problem.​ The research seeks to investigate: - (a) ​How the current global trade war (GTW) has impacted the nations having a considerable share in world trade? (b) ​How has the Global Trade War (GTW) impacted the Indian economy? (c)​What are the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Global Trade War? (d) ​What are the likely effects of the COVID -19 pandemic on the Indian economy? 18. Objectives of the Study. The specific objectives of the study are as under: - (a) ​To study the reasons and effects of the global trade war on nations having a major share in world trade. (b) ​To study the effects of COVID-19 pandemic and GTW on international trade with specific emphasis on the Indian economy. 19. Hypothesis The research is intended to deliberate and validate the following hypothesis: - (a) ​Global Trade War has severely impacted nations from having a major share in world trade. (b) ​India has not been affected much by the Global Trade War. (c)​COVID-19 pandemic is going to aggravate the Global Trade War. (d) ​Indian economy will be adversely affected by the ongoing pandemic. 20. The relevance of the Study… This study will contribute to academia with an in-depth insight into the existent trend of international trade and trade war. The present study will evaluate the effect of COVID-19 on international trade and its role in aggravating trade war. Besides, this study will also endeavour to furnish both analysis and suggestions towards: - (a) ​Trend of global trade and reasons behind trade war. (b) ​Likely direction of international trade post-COVID-19. (c)​Its impact on the Indian economy and recommendations for future economic policies. 21. Research Methodology Owing to the current and contemporary nature of the topic, research was based on the primary and secondary method of data collection wherein the number of books, open-source articles, internet blogs, periodicals, and research papers were referred and perused. Apart from the same reports and analysis of both governmental and non-governmental agencies, which were available in the open domain, were also accessed during the research. To support the arguments, an online public opinion, based on close-ended questionnaire, was be taken through Google forms. The survey questionnaire was analysed based on responses using Likert Scale. Non-random convenient sampling was used for selection of participants. A total of 114 respondents took part in the survey. 22. Organisation of the Research Research has been completed under five chapters. Headings of the chapters and their broad contents have been covered in succeeding paragraphs. (a) ​Chapter 1: Introduction and Research Methodology. In this chapter background of global trade, particularly after World War II, the role of WTO for free and fair trade amongst member nations along with research methodology have been covered in detail. (b) ​Chapter 2: Background of Global Trade War and Situation up to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemics. In this chapter issues like background of trade war, currency war and current state of global trade amidst ongoing trade conflict between the USA and China has been covered in detail. Apart from the same it has also been brought out in this chapter that which are the countries and which all products and services have been severely affected. All the affected nations are adopting their own policies to deal with the current situation of COVID-19 and ripples of trade dispute. Same have also been brought forward in this chapter. (c)​Chapter 3: Likely Directions of Global Trade War post-COVID-19 pandemics. COVID-19 pandemic has added a new dimension to the way nations were doing trade with each other, particularly in the light of disruption in production, supply chain, unpredicted market, and labour issues. Apart from that, it has severely affected the ongoing global trade war. The revival of the economy is incumbent on medical success in finding the vaccine for the disease. In this chapter likely direction of the trade war has been discussed in details. Apart from the foregoing, long and short term effects of the pandemic on global trade have also been covered in this chapter. (d) ​Chapter 4: Impact of Global Trade War and COVID-19 pandemics on the Indian Economy. The Indian economy was not affected much by the global trade war but since the onset of a pandemic, the combined effect of COVID-19 and trade war has started affecting the Indian economy. Apart from the same in this chapter impact on export and import capability of India during pandemic times have also been covered in detail. Recent development at Galwan valley in Eastern Ladakh which includes the steps taken by India and its likely implications on the trade between India and China has also been covered in this chapter. In the end an analysis of the Online survey with the help of Google form has been covered to check the hypothesis. (e)​ Chapter 5: Way Ahead for the Indian Economy, Recommendations and Conclusion. ​In continuation of the previous chapter, this chapter contains nthe state of global trade in the current times along with certain recommendations which can be followed to have a fair world trade. During COVID-19 pandemic the Indian government has taken large number of fiscal measures to control to the damage and bring the economy back on track and same have been covered in great details in this chapter. Apart from that actions which Indian government should take to minimise the impact of trade dispute between other nations have also been recommended. In last way ahead for the Indian economy has been recommended.
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25

Almila, Anna-Mari. "Fabricating Effervescence." M/C Journal 24, no. 1 (March 15, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2741.

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Introduction In November 2020, upon learning that the company’s Covid-19 vaccine trial had been successful, the head of Pfizer’s Vaccine Research and Development, Kathrin Jansen, celebrated with champagne – “some really good stuff” (Cohen). Bubbles seem to go naturally with celebration, and champagne is fundamentally associated with bubbles. Yet, until the late-seventeenth century, champagne was a still wine, and it only reached the familiar levels of bubbliness in the late-nineteenth century (Harding). During this period and on into the early twentieth century, “champagne” was in many ways created, defined, and defended. A “champagne bubble” was created, within which the “nature” of champagne was contested and constructed. Champagne today is the result of hundreds of years of labour by many sorts of bubble-makers: those who make the bubbly drink, and those who construct, maintain, and defend the champagne bubble. In this article, I explore some elements of the champagne bubble, in order to understand both its fragility and rigidity over the years and today. Creating the Champagne Bubble – the Labour of Centuries It is difficult to separate the physical from the mythical as regards champagne. Therefore the categorisations below are always overlapping, and embedded in legal, political, economic, and socio-cultural factors. Just as assemblage – the mixing of wine from different grapes – is an essential element of champagne wine, the champagne bubble may be called heterogeneous assemblage. Indeed, the champagne bubble, as we will see below, is a myriad of different sorts of bubbles, such as terroir, appellation, myth and brand. And just as any assemblage, its heterogeneous elements exist and operate in relation to each other. Therefore the “champagne bubble” discussed here is both one and many, all of its elements fundamentally interconnected, constituting that “one” known as “champagne”. It is not my intention to be comprehensive of all the elements, historical and contemporary. Indeed, that would not be possible within such a short article. Instead, I seek to demonstrate some of the complexity of the champagne bubble, noting the elaborate labour that has gone into its creation. The Physical Champagne and Champagne – from Soil to Bubbles Champagne means both a legally protected geographical area (Champagne), and the wine (here: champagne) produced in this area from grapes defined as acceptable: most importantly pinot noir, pinot meunier (“black” grapes), and chardonnay (“white” grape). The method of production, too, is regulated and legally protected: méthode champenoise. Although the same method is used in numerous locations, these must be called something different: metodo classico (Italy), método tradicional (Spain), Methode Cap Classique (South Africa). The geographical area of Champagne was first legally defined in 1908, when it only included the areas of Marne and Aisne, leaving out, most importantly, the area of Aube. This decision led to severe unrest and riots, as the Aube vignerons revolted in 1911, forcing the inclusion of “zone 2”: Aube, Haute-Marne, and Seine-et-Marne (Guy). Behind these regulations was a surge in fraudulent production in the early twentieth century, as well as falling wine prices resulting from increasing supply of cheap wines (Colman 18). These first appellations d’origine had many consequences – they proved financially beneficial for the “zone 1”, but less so for the “zone 2”. When both these areas were brought under the same appellation in 1927, the financial benefits were more limited – but this may have been due to the Great Depression triggered in 1929 (Haeck et al.). It is a long-standing belief that the soil and climate of Champagne are key contributors to the quality of champagne wines, said to be due to “conditions … most suitable for making this type of wine” (Simon 11). Already in the end of the nineteenth century, the editor of Vigneron champenois attributed champagne’s quality to “a fortunate combination of … chalky soil … [and] unrivalled exposure [to the sun]” (Guy 119) among other things. Factors such as soil and climate, commonly included in and expressed through the idea of terroir, undoubtedly influence grapes and wines made thereof, but the extent remains unproven. Indeed, terroir itself is a very contested concept (Teil; Inglis and Almila). It is also the case that climate change has had, and will continue to have, devastating effects on wine production in many areas, while benefiting others. The highly successful English sparkling wine production, drawing upon know-how from the Champagne area, has been enabled by the warming climate (Inglis), while Champagne itself is at risk of becoming too hot (Robinson). Champagne is made through a process more complicated than most wines. I present here the bare bones of it, to illustrate the many challenges that had to be overcome to enable its production in the scale we see today. Freshly picked grapes are first pressed and the juice is fermented. Grape juice contains natural yeasts and therefore will ferment spontaneously, but fermentation can also be started with artificial yeasts. In fermentation, alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2) are formed, but the latter usually escapes the liquid. The secret of champagne is its second fermentation, which happens in bottles, after wines from different grapes and/or vineyards have been blended for desired characteristics (assemblage). For the second fermentation, yeast and sugar are added. As the fermentation happens inside a bottle, the CO2 that is created does not escape, but dissolves into the wine. The average pressure inside a champagne bottle in serving temperature is around 5 bar – 5 times the pressure outside the bottle (Liger-Belair et al.). The obvious challenge this method poses has to do with managing the pressure. Exploding bottles used to be a common problem, and the manner of sealing bottles was not very developed, either. Seventeenth-century developments in bottle-making, and using corks to seal bottles, enabled sparkling wines to be produced in the first place (Leszczyńska; Phillips 137). Still today, champagne comes in heavy-bottomed bottles, sealed with characteristically shaped cork, which is secured with a wire cage known as muselet. Scientific innovations, such as calculating the ideal amount of sugar for the second fermentation in 1836, also helped to control the amount of gas formed during the second fermentation, thus making the behaviour of the wine more predictable (Leszczyńska 265). Champagne is characteristically a “manufactured” wine, as it involves several steps of interference, from assemblage to dosage – sugar added for flavour to most champagnes after the second fermentation (although there are also zero dosage champagnes). This lends champagne particularly suitable for branding, as it is possible to make the wine taste the same year after year, harvest after harvest, and thus create a distinctive and recognisable house style. It is also possible to make champagnes for different tastes. During the nineteenth century, champagnes of different dosage were made for different markets – the driest for the British, the sweetest for the Russians (Harding). Bubbles are probably the most striking characteristic of champagne, and they are enabled by the complicated factors described above. But they are also formed when the champagne is poured in a glass. Natural impurities on the surface of the glass provide channels through which the gas pockets trapped in the wine can release themselves, forming strains of rising bubbles (Liger-Belair et al.). Champagne glasses have for centuries differed from other wine glasses, often for aesthetic reasons (Harding). The bubbles seem to do more than give people aesthetic pleasure and sensory experiences. It is often claimed that champagne makes you drunk faster than other drinks would, and there is, indeed, some (limited) research showing that this may well be the case (Roberts and Robinson; Ridout et al.). The Mythical Champagne – from Dom Pérignon to Modern Wonders Just as the bubbles in a champagne glass are influenced by numerous forces, so the metaphorical champagne bubble is subject to complex influences. Myth-creation is one of the most significant of these. The origin of champagne as sparkling wine is embedded in the myth of Dom Pérignon of Hautvillers monastery (1638–1715), who according to the legend would have accidentally developed the bubbles, and then enthusiastically exclaimed “I am drinking the stars!” (Phillips 138). In reality, bubbles are a natural phenomenon provoked by winter temperatures deactivating the fermenting yeasts, and spring again reactivating them. The myth of Dom Pérignon was first established in the nineteenth century and quickly embraced by the champagne industry. In 1937, Moët et Chandon launched a premium champagne called Dom Pérignon, which enjoys high reputation until this day (Phillips). The champagne industry has been active in managing associations connected with champagne since the nineteenth century. Sparkling champagnes had already enjoyed fashionability in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century, both in the French Court, and amongst the British higher classes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, champagne found ever increasing markets abroad, and the clientele was not aristocratic anymore. Before the 1860s, champagne’s association was with high status celebration, as well as sexual activity and seduction (Harding; Rokka). As the century went on, and champagne sales radically increased, associations with “modernity” were added: “hot-air balloons, towering steamships, transcontinental trains, cars, sports, and other ‘modern’ wonders were often featured in quickly proliferating champagne advertising” (Rokka 280). During this time, champagne grew both drier and more sparkling, following consumer tastes (Harding). Champagne’s most important markets in later nineteenth century included the UK, where the growing middle classes consumed champagne for both celebration and hospitality (Harding), the US, where (upper) middle-class women were served champagne in new kinds of consumer environments (Smith; Remus), and Russia, where the upper classes enjoyed sweeter champagne – until the Revolution (Phillips 296). The champagne industry quickly embraced the new middle classes in possession of increasing wealth, as well as new methods of advertising and marketing. What is remarkable is that they managed to integrate enormously varied cultural thematics and still retain associations with aristocracy and luxury, while producing and selling wine in industrial scale (Harding; Rokka). This is still true today: champagne retains a reputation of prestige, despite large-scale branding, production, and marketing. Maintaining and Defending the Bubble: Formulas, Rappers, and the Absolutely Fabulous Tipplers The falling wine prices and increasing counterfeit wines coincided with Europe’s phylloxera crisis – the pest accidentally brought over from North America that almost wiped out all Europe’s vineyards. The pest moved through Champagne in the 1890s, killing vines and devastating vignerons (Campbell). The Syndicat du Commerce des vins de Champagne had already been formed in 1882 (Rokka 280). Now unions were formed to fight phylloxera, such as the Association Viticole Champenoise in 1898. The 1904 Fédération Syndicale des Vignerons was formed to lobby the government to protect the name of Champagne (Leszczyńska 266) – successfully, as we have seen above. The financial benefits from appellations were certainly welcome, but short-lived. World War I treated Champagne harshly, with battle lines stuck through the area for years (Guy 187). The battle went on also in the lobbying front. In 1935, a new appellation regime was brought into law, which came to be the basis for all European systems, and the Comité National des appellations d'origine (CNAO) was founded (Colman 1922). Champagne’s protection became increasingly international, and continues to be so today under EU law and trade deals (European Commission). The post-war recovery of champagne relied on strategies used already in the “golden years” – marketing and lobbying. Advertising continued to embrace “luxury, celebration, transport (extending from air travel to the increasingly popular automobile), modernity, sports” (Guy 188). Such advertisement must have responded accurately to the mood of post-war, pre-depression Europe. Even in the prohibition US it was known that the “frivolous” French women might go as far as bathe in champagne, like the popular actress Mistinguett (Young 63). Curiously, in the 1930s Soviet Russia, “champagne” (not produced in Champagne) was declared a sign of good living, symbolising the standard of living that any Soviet worker had access to (at least in theory) (Gronow). Today, the reputation of champagne is fiercely defended in legal terms. This is not only in terms of protection against other sparkling wine making areas, but also in terms of exploitation of champagne’s reputation by actors in other commercial fields, and even against mass market products containing genuine champagne (Mahy and d’Ath; Schneider and Nam). At the same time, champagne has been widely “democratised” by mass production, enabled partly by increasing mechanisation and scientification of champagne production from the 1950s onwards (Leszczyńska 266). Yet champagne retains its association with prestige, luxury, and even royalty. This has required some serious adaptation and flexibility. In what follows, I look into three cultural phenomena that illuminate processes of such adaptation: Formula One (F1) champagne spraying, the 1990s sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, and the Cristal racism scandal in 2006. The first champagne bottle is said to have been presented to F1 grand prix winner in Champagne in 1950 (Wheels24). Such a gesture would have been fully in line with champagne’s association with cars, sport, and modernity. But what about the spraying? Surely that is not in line with the prestige of the wine? The first spraying is attributed to Jo Siffert in 1966 and Dan Gurney in 1967, the former described as accidental, the latter as a spontaneous gesture of celebration (Wheels24; Dobie). Moët had become the official supplier of F1 champagnes in 1966, and there are no signs that the new custom would have been problematic for them, as their sponsorship continued until 1999, after which Mumm sponsored the sport for 15 years. Today, the champagne to be popped and sprayed is Chanson, in special bottles “coated in the same carbon fibre that F1 cars are made of” (Wheels24). Such an iconic status has the spraying gained that it features in practically all TV broadcasts concerning F1, although non-alcoholic substitute is used in countries where sale of alcohol is banned (Barker et al., “Quantifying”; Barker et al., “Alcohol”). As disturbing as the champagne spraying might look for a wine snob, it is perfectly in line with champagne’s marketing history and entrepreneurial spirit shown since the nineteenth century. Nor is it unheard of to let champagne spray. The “art” of sabrage, opening champagne bottle with a sable, associated with glamour, spectacle, and myth – its origin is attributed to Napoleon and his officers – is perfectly acceptable even for the snob. Sparkling champagne was always bound up with joy and celebration, not a solemn drink, and the champagne bubble was able to accommodate middle classes as well as aristocrats. This brings us to our second example, the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. The show, first released in 1992, featured two women, “Eddy” (Jennifer Saunders) and “Patsy” (Joanna Lumley), who spent their time happily smoking, taking drugs, and drinking large quantities of “Bolly” (among other things). Bollinger champagne may have initially experienced “a bit of a shock” for being thus addressed, but soon came to see the benefits of fame (French). In 2005, they hired PR support to make better use of the brand’s “Ab Fab” recognisability, and to improve its prestige reputation in order to justify their higher price range (Cann). Saunders and Lumley were warmly welcomed by the Bollinger house when filming for their champagne tour Absolutely Champers (2017). It is befitting indeed that such controversial fame came from the UK, the first country to discover sparkling champagne outside France (Simon 48), and where the aspirational middle classes were keen to consume it already in the nineteenth century (Harding). More controversial still is the case of Cristal (made by Louis Roederer) and the US rap world. Enthusiastically embraced by the “bling-bling” world of (black) rappers, champagne seems to fit their ethos well. Cristal was long favoured as both a drink and a word in rap lyrics. But in 2006, the newly appointed managing director at the family owned Roederer, Frédéric Rouzaud, made comments considered racist by many (Woodland). Rouzard told in an interview with The Economist that the house observed the Cristal-rap association “with curiosity and serenity”. He reportedly continued: “but what can we do? We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business”. It was indeed those two brands that the rapper Jay-Z replaced Cristal with, when calling for a boycott on Cristal. It would be easy to dismiss Rouzard’s comments as snobbery, or indeed as racism, but they merit some more reflection. Cristal is the premium wine of a house that otherwise does not enjoy high recognisability. While champagne’s history involves embracing new sorts of clientele, and marketing flexibly to as many consumer groups as possible (Rokka), this was the first spectacular crossing of racial boundaries. It was always the case that different houses and their different champagnes were targeted at different clienteles, and it is apparent that Cristal was not targeted at black rap artists. Whereas Bollinger was able to turn into a victory the questionable fame brought by the white middle-class association of Absolutely Fabulous, the more prestigious Cristal considered the attention of the black rapper world more threatening and acted accordingly. They sought to defend their own brand bubble, not the larger champagne bubble. Cristal’s reputation seems to have suffered little – its 2008 vintage, launched in 2018, was the most traded wine of that year (Schultz). Jay-Z’s purchase of his own champagne brand (Armand de Brignac, nicknamed Ace of Spades) has been less successful reputation-wise (Greenburg). It is difficult to break the champagne bubble, and it may be equally difficult to break into it. Conclusion In this article, I have looked into the various dilemmas the “bubble-makers” of Champagne encountered when fabricating what is today known as “champagne”. There have been moments of threat to the bubble they formed, such as in the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and eras of incomparable success, such as from the 1860s to 1880s. The discussion has demonstrated the remarkable flexibility with which the makers and defenders of champagne have responded to challenges, and dealt with material, socio-cultural, economic, and other problems. It feels appropriate to end with a note on the current challenge the champagne industry faces: Covid-19. The pandemic hit champagne sales exceptionally hard, leaving around 100 million bottles unsold (Micallef). This was not very surprising, given the closure of champagne-selling venues, banning of public and private celebrations, and a general mood not particularly prone to (or even likely to frown upon) such light-hearted matters as glamour and champagne. Champagne has survived many dramatic drops in sales during the twentieth century, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the post-financial crisis collapse in 2009. Yet they seem to be able to make astonishing recoveries. Already, there are indicators that many people consumed more champagne during the festive end-of-year season than in previous years (Smithers). For the moment, it looks like the champagne bubble, despite its seeming fragility, is practically indestructible, no matter how much its elements may suffer under various pressures and challenges. References Barker, Alexander, Magdalena Opazo-Breton, Emily Thomson, John Britton, Bruce Granti-Braham, and Rachael L. Murray. “Quantifying Alcohol Audio-Visual Content in UK Broadcasts of the 2018 Formula 1 Championship: A Content Analysis and Population Exposure.” BMJ Open 10 (2020): e037035. <https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/8/e037035>. Barker, Alexander B., John Britton, Bruce Grant-Braham, and Rachael L. Murray. “Alcohol Audio-Visual Content in Formula 1 Television Broadcasting.” BMC Public Health 18 (2018): 1155. <https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-6068-3>. Campbell, Christy. 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European Commission. “Wine.” 4 Mar. 2021 <https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farming-fisheries/plants-and-plant-products/plant-products/wine_en#:~:text=Related%20links-,Overview,consumption%20and%2070%25%20of%20exports>. French, Phoebe. “Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders to Star in Absolutely Champers.” The Drinks Business 20 Dec. 2017. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2017/12/joanna-lumley-and-jennifer-saunders-to-star-in-absolutely-champers/>. Greenburg, Zack O. “The Real Story behind Jay Z's Champagne Deal.” Forbes 6 Nov. 2014. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2014/11/06/why-jay-zs-champagne-news-isnt-so-new/?sh=6e4eb8f07528>. Gronow, Jukka. “Caviar with Champagne Good Life and Common Luxury in Stalin's Soviet Union.” Suomen Antropologi 4 (1998). Guy, Colleen M. When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 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Leszczyńska, D. “A Cluster and Its Trajectory: Evidence from the History of the French Champagne Production Cluster.” Labor History 57.2 (2016): 258-276. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0023656X.2016.1161140>. Liger-Belair, Gérard, Guillaume Polidori, and Philippe Jeandet. “Recent Advances in the Science of Champagne Bubbles.” Chemical Society Reviews 37 (2008): 2490–2511. <https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2008/cs/b717798b#!divAbstract>. Mahy, Aude, and Florence d’Ath. “The Case of the ‘Champagner Sorbet’ – Unlawful Exploitation or Legitimate Use of the Protected Name ‘Champagne’?” EFFL 1 (2017): 43-48. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26451418?seq=1>. Micallef, Joseph V. “How Champagne Is Bouncing Back after the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Forbes 15 Nov. 2020. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemicallef/2020/11/15/how-champagne-is-bouncing-back-after-the-covid-19-pandemic/?sh=3300e4125784>. Phillips, Rod. A Short History of Wine. London: Penguin, 2000. Remus, Emily A. “Tippling Ladies and the Making of Consumer Culture: Gender and Public Space in ‘Fin-de- Siècle’ Chicago.” The Journal of American History 101.3 (2014): 751-77. <https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/101/3/751/796447?login=true>. Ridout, Fran, Stuart Gould, Carlo Nunes, and Ian Hindmarch. “The Effects of Carbon Dioxide in Champagne on Psychometric Performance and Blood-Alcohol Concentration.” Alcohol and Alcoholism 38.4 (2003): 381-85. <https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/article/38/4/381/232628>. Roberts, C., and S.P. Robinson. “Alcohol Concentration and Carbonation of Drinks: The Effect on Blood Alcohol Levels.” Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine 14.7 (2007): 398-405. <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17720590/>. Robinson, Frances. “Champagne Will Be Too Hot for Champagne Research Warns.” Decanter. 12 Jan. 2004. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/champagne-will-be-too-hot-for-champagne-research-warns-103258/>. Rokka, Joonas. “Champagne: Marketplace Icon.” Consumption Markets & Culture 20.3 (2017): 275-283. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10253866.2016.1177990?journalCode=gcmc20>. Schneider, Marius, and Nora Ho Tu Nam. “Champagne Makes the Dough Sour: EUIPO Board of Appeal Allows Opposition against Registration of Champagnola Trade Mark Based on Evocation of Champagne PDO.” Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 15.9 (2020): 675-676. <https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article/15/9/675/5905791>. Schultz, Abby. “20 Minutes With: Frédéric Rouzaud on Cristal, Biodynamics, and Zero Dosage.” Penta. 31 Dec. 2018. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.barrons.com/articles/20-minutes-with-frederic-rouzaud-on-cristal-biodynamics-and-zero-dosage-01546280265>. Simon, André L. The History of Champagne. London: Octobus, 1972. Smith, Andrew F. Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Smithers, Rebecca. “Britons Turn to Luxury Food and Drink to See Out Dismal 2020 in Style.” The Guardian 28 Dec. 2020. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/28/britons-turn-luxury-food-drink-see-out-dismal-2020-style?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail>. Teil, Geneviève. “No Such Thing as Terroir? Objectivities and the Regimes of Existence of Objects.” Science, Technology & Human Values 37.5 (2012): 478-505. <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0162243911423843>. Wheels24. “Champagne Returns to F1 podium.” 2 Aug. 2017. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.news24.com/wheels/FormulaOne/champagne-returns-to-f1-podium-20170802>. Woodland, Richard. “Rapper Jay-Z Boycotts ‘Racist’ Cristal.” Decanter 16 June 2006. 4 Mar. 2021 <https://www.decanter.com/wine-news/rapper-jay-z-boycotts-racist-cristal-94054/>. Young, Robert K. “Out of the Ashes: The American Press and France's Postwar Recovery in the 1920s.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 28.1 (2002): 51-72. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299224?seq=1>.
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26

Musgrove, Brian Michael. "Recovering Public Memory: Politics, Aesthetics and Contempt." M/C Journal 11, no. 6 (November 28, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.108.

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1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.
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Hart, Dean. "Advance Directives and Research Advance Directives." Voices in Bioethics 7 (August 3, 2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.52214/vib.v7i.8594.

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Photo by Matteo Vistocco on Unsplash ABSTRACT This paper explores a way to ensure a person’s autonomy and legacy are preserved during the experience of dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Due to the profound effect the disease has on memory, the “person of the lifetime” (the person’s past experiences and their future aspirations prior to disease progression) becomes seemingly disconnected from the “person of the moment,” or the person experiencing memory loss. Thus, directives are important to recognize and maintain continuity of person. Yet, a person’s “legacy,” based on the person’s values and philosophy, can serve as a bridge between those two identities. Ultimately, people with significant memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease are unable to secure their own legacy due to the diminishing ability to make autonomous decisions as the disease progresses. A legal system that codifies the ability to create a requirement to honor ADs and research advance directives (RADs) can best secure the autonomy of the person of the lifetime, and thus the person’s legacy, of the person Alzheimer’s disease. INTRODUCTION At present, there is no effective treatment or cure for Alzheimer’s disease’s cognitive decline and ensuing dementia. While the definitive diagnosis is confirmed only after death via brain autopsy, Alzheimer’s is diagnosed by symptoms and scans.[1] Over the course of an eight-to-twelve-year post-diagnosis period, people progressively lose memory and cognitive functions in an irreversible pattern.[2] Because Alzheimer’s disease remains incurable despite significant scientific research into its causes, its biological qualities,[3] and its symptoms, many people with Alzheimer’s disease may wish to document care choices in advance while they have capacity to do so. Those experiencing early-stage Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment wanting to determine the best path for their private and public future life’s agenda must have the legal tools needed to make sound plans for their future. l. Preserving Legacy: The Benefits of Advance Directives for People with Alzheimer’s Disease A legacy is the part of a patient that will persist into the future, even after death. Autonomy can be increased by permitting Alzheimer’s patients to document their legacy and wishes prior to significant cognitive impairment. Whether a legacy is in others’ memories of personality traits or is something concrete like a business, named building, charity, or a cookie recipe, many people with Alzheimer’s disease wish their person of a lifetime to be remembered. Many do not want to be remembered only as they are in the end of life, or as the cognitively impaired person of the moment. I argue that the best legacy for oneself is defined by one’s own autonomy and his or her most personal, private philosophy and values. When third-party caregivers or healthcare workers seek to impose their views of the best interests on the person of the moment, they may be disrespecting that person’s legacy interests. Having an AD that the caregivers must respect can help all stakeholders make decisions with moral legitimacy. The preservation of the person of the lifetime can be maximized by focusing on both past and present life experiences. Significant memory loss from Alzheimer’s disease interrupts the usual relationship between the person of the lifetime and the person of the moment, who may understand the present but may experience near-complete short- and long-term memory loss.[4] Reconciling these two “personhoods” in one person in a formal process best serves the legacy for Alzheimer’s patients by assessing various perspectives and providing a decision-making framework for caregivers and stakeholders. I assert that the autonomy of the person of the lifetime deserves equal or more weight than a decision-making third party when the person of the moment lacks capacity to make a healthcare decision. This argument is compatible with Samuel Dale’s argument that “precedent autonomy morally authorizes ADs when dementia renders patients medically incompetent because it respects their dignity as persons, not merely pleasure-seeking creatures.”[5] Dale relies on Dworkin’s view that critical interests should carry more weight than “experiential interests.”[6] The pursuit of critical interests gives meaning to human life and is encoded in ADs to represent the whole person.[7] Nevertheless, the person of the moment has value and can enjoy the pursuit of happiness. Treatment for Alzheimer’s disease focuses on comfort and happiness as a driver for the patient’s best interests, thus attending to the needs of the person of the moment while balanced with the interests in an AD if it conflicts, to not damage the legacy. The person of the moment needs care to avoid pain and arguably to achieve some happiness, while simultaneously relying, insofar as still possible, on the person of the lifetime to obtain peace and contentment.[8] Respecting Alzheimer’s ADs is consistent with the strong individualism inherent in the US. The rule of law attempts to maximize autonomy and theoretically to ensure individual rights.[9] In the US and other liberal democracies, recognizing the power and inalienable rights of the individual involves securing the right to make one’s own decisions. Yet, as with other individual rights, there are situations where ADs are not absolute and where laws limit their full effect. Some statutory and regulatory restrictions make it legally difficult to honor ADs, especially with respect to nutrition and hydration directives.[10] Arguably that is a poorly considered approach; notably, at least one scholar, Corinna Porteri, argues that “statutes that disregard or invalidate ADs are discriminatory against the life lived.”[11] ll. The Benefits of Research Advance Directives for People with Alzheimer’s Disease The scientific research necessary to better treat people who have Alzheimer’s disease requires engaging patients in research. A major bioethical question immediately arises: how can we obtain informed consent from a person unable to weigh different options and risks/rewards properly? Research advance directives (RADs) could allow advanced consent for participation in research and could place limits on the consent.[12] People who have Alzheimer’s disease should be able to express their desires in ADs during the early stages or before diagnosis. Directives must be able to allow people to express a desire to join clinical trials. The National Bioethics Advisory Committee in the US recommended RADs,[13] which allow people to join studies when the treatment or medicine would benefit them, and possibly when it would benefit the larger public and has some potential to benefit the person.[14] Porteri asserts that RADs should include consent based on the type and degree of risk, as it is impossible to predict the types of treatment or the anticipated side effects in future studies.[15] Ultimately, the person’s autonomy of a lifetime should take precedence because further research offers patients hope for both their legacy and the legacies of others. Still, there may be cases in which the societal interest in protecting the person takes precedence. Societal interests may include preserving dignity and avoiding suffering. It may be necessary to safeguard people by limiting participation to low-risk studies and requiring additional consent from a proxy or caregiver. RADs are appealing because they guide decisions, as do ADs; their unique appeal that is specific to RAD as part of AD is that the certainty of a permanently preserved legacy of valuing medical research in writing could take precedence over the uncertainty facing the person of the moment. At present, these are still tenuous grounds, requiring philosophical and other solutions. A moral question arises regarding the ability to change one’s mind after the threshold established for ADs and RADs takes effect. How can it be known if patients would have changed their minds given current circumstances and the often-lengthy progress of Alzheimer’s disease? If a person wanted to withdraw an AD or RAD and expressed an unwillingness to engage in research, there is a moral argument that the person of the moment must not be deprived of a right to withdraw. By limiting the AD and RAD to treatment and research decisions after significant memory loss occurs, those with mild cognitive impairment certainly would decide about research for themselves, possibly with the input of family, friends, or doctors. Early diagnosis permits time for the patient to alter ADs before they develop significant memory loss. When patients understand the progression of the disease, their autonomous decisions regarding their care should be honored. Porteri asserts the ADs are the necessary proof of the person’s desires and thus should govern when capacity is lost.[16] Bodily integrity, philosophical belief, and autonomy must be respected once the capacity to make decisions is lost. lll. Recommendations Capacity is task-specific; therefore, determining when the healthcare AD should be implemented must be based on capacity testing.[17] This process turns ADs into a framework for interpreting the person of the lifetime’s wishes as applied to the person of the moment. For example, dying in battle is quite a different memorial outcome compared to experiencing a vegetative state while fed artificial hydration and nutrition through a feeding tube. Establishing the desired legacy of the person with Alzheimer’s disease in an AD allows the patient more autonomy to choose how they wish to be remembered.[18] One problem with our current system for ADs is that it deviates substantially from state to state. The Patient Self Determination Act does not prescribe how state laws should address significant memory loss.[19] Therefore continuity of person is not assumed in all state laws. A federal law that supports the acknowledgment of ADs would be preferable. The right to determine how you live and die is a fundamental choice and should not depend on the state in which one lives. Fortunately, perspectives between stakeholders and other parties align in many cases, and their expressed wishes respect the person of a lifetime. To maintain the patient’s dignity during disease progression for a greater proportion of Alzheimer’s patients, states should honor ADs and RADs. Currently, ADs offer an unpredictable degree of protection, especially as patients move from state to state. Unpredictable factors include judicial discretion, shifts of thinking within the body politic, and the power of stakeholders with interests at odds with those of the person of the lifetime. Judicial discretion should be limited to invalidating only those ADs that were based on fraud, undue influence, or incapacity at their inception. Administrative personnel and other stakeholders should not have authority to redefine a person’s legacy once the person reaches the stage at which they no longer have capacity. ADs and RADs could include dispute resolution mechanisms as well as directives with respect to those persons the person of the moment does not want involved in their care. In declaring the continuity of person yet acknowledging the differences due to significant memory loss, Giovanni Boniolo concludes, “We have to respect them and their choices and decisions as long as they are capable of choosing and deciding. Then, when this capacity has vanished, we must continue respecting not only them, but also the choices and decisions they made.”[20] Boniolo is absolutely correct; one is capable of creating AD until they are not. A sharper scientific approach would base the point at which one no longer has capability to make decisions on biological or clinical markers. The law should ensure that ADs and RADs made prior to that point govern care and research decisions. CONCLUSION Permitting an unfaithful surrogate or an administrator with a different philosophy to reinterpret patient desires based on current circumstances would create a “slippery slope,” compromising the known wishes of a person with Alzheimer’s disease as preserved in writing. ADs and RADs are the best opportunities for people with early Alzheimer’s disease, or those who recognize the risk of dementia, to preserve their legacy and to use their autonomy to govern care of the significantly memory-impaired person of the moment. Preserving the legacy of patients in binding documents avoids the quagmire of courts, doctors, surrogates, and caregivers. Ultimately, ADs and RADs can maintain continuity of the person of a lifetime’s dignity even when that person experiences cognitive impairment, evolving into the person of the moment. [1] Weller J, Budson A. Current Understanding of Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis and Treatment. F1000Res. 2018;7:F1000 Faculty Rev-1161. Published 2018 Jul 31. doi:10.12688/f1000research.14506.1 [2] Gauthier S, Leuzy A, Racine E, Rosa-Neto P. Diagnosis and management of Alzheimer's disease: Past, present and future ethical issues. Progress in Neurobiology. 2013;110:102-113; Naylor M, Karlawish J, Arnold S et al. Advancing Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, treatment, and care: Recommendations from the Ware Invitational Summit. Alzheimer's & Dementia. 2012;8(5):445-452. [3] The combination of Tau proteins becoming defective, creating neurofibrillary tangles, and β amyloid plaques building up in the neural connections of the brain prevents neural functioning, resulting in brain cell incapacity and death; Zetterberg H, Schott J. Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease beyond amyloid and tau. Nat Med. 2019;25(2):201-203.; Qin K, Zhao L, Gregory C, Solanki A, Mastrianni J. “Dual Disease” TgAD/GSS mice exhibit enhanced Alzheimer’s disease pathology and reveal PrPC-dependent secretion of Aβ. Sci Rep. 2019;9(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-019-44317-w; Qin K, Zhao L, Gregory C, Solanki A, Mastrianni J. “Dual Disease” TgAD/GSS mice exhibit enhanced Alzheimer’s disease pathology and reveal PrPC-dependent secretion of Aβ. Sci Rep. 2019;9(1). [4] Kitwood T. Dementia Reconsidered, Revisited: The Person Still Comes First. 2nd ed. New York: Open University Press; 2019. [5] Dale S. Personhood, Critical Interests, and the Moral Imperative of Advances Directives in Alzheimer's Cases. Voices in Bioethics. 2021;7:1-6. [6] Dale S. Personhood, Critical Interests, and the Moral Imperative of Advances Directives in Alzheimer's Cases. Voices in Bioethics. 2021;7:1-6, citing Dworkin R. (1994) Life’s Dominion; An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, And Individual Freedom. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books. [7] Dale S., 2021. [8] Person M, Hanssen I. Joy, Happiness, and Humor in Dementia Care: A Qualitative Study. Creative Nursing. 2015;21(1):47-52.; Yeaman P, Ford J, Kim K. Providing Quality Palliative Care in End-Stage Alzheimer Disease. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine®. 2012;30(5):499-502. [9] Kim S. The Ethics of Informed Consent in Alzheimer Disease Research. Nature Reviews Neurology. 2011;7(7):410-414.; Porteri C. Advance Directives as A Tool to Respect Patients’ Values and Preferences: Discussion on The Case Of Alzheimer’s Disease. BioMed Central Medical Ethics. 2018;19(1).; Naue U. ‘Self-care without a self’: Alzheimer’s Disease and The Concept of Personal Responsibility for Health. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy. 2008;11(3):315-324. [10] Sieger CE, Arnold JF, Ahronheim JC. Refusing artificial nutrition and hydration: does statutory law send the wrong message?. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2002;50(3):544-550. doi:10.1046/j.1532-5415.2002.50124.x [11] Porteri C. Advance Directives as A Tool to Respect Patients’ Values And Preferences: Discussion On The Case Of Alzheimer’s Disease. BioMed Central Medical Ethics. 2018;19(1). [12] Buller T. Advance Consent, Critical Interests and Dementia Research. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2014;41(8):701-707.; Jongsma K, van de Vathorst S. Dementia Research and Advance Consent: It Is Not About Critical Interests. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2014;41(8):708-709.; Jongsma K, Perry J, Schicktanz S, Radenbach K. Motivations for people with cognitive impairment to complete an advance research directive – a qualitative interview study. BioMed Central Psychiatry. 2020;20(1). [13] National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) Research Involving Persons with Mental Disorders That May Affect Decision-making Capacity. Rockville: National Bioethics Advisory Commission; 1998. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12747354/ [14] Porteri C. Advance Directives as A Tool to Respect Patients’ Values and Preferences: Discussion on The Case Of Alzheimer’s Disease. BioMed Central Medical Ethics. 2018;19(1). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29458429/ ; Jongsma K, van de Vathorst S. Dementia Research and Advance Consent: It Is Not About Critical Interests. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2014;41(8):708-709. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.997.8037&rep=rep1&type=pdf [15] Porteri C. Advance directives as a tool to respect patients’ values and preferences: discussion on the case of Alzheimer’s disease. BioMed Central Medical Ethics. 2018;19(1). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29458429/ [16] Porteri C. Advance directives as a tool to respect patients’ values and preferences: discussion on the case of Alzheimer’s disease. BioMed Central Medical Ethics. 2018;19(1). [17] McDonald A, D'Arcy R, Song X. Functional MRI On Executive Functioning in Aging and Dementia: A Scoping Review Of Cognitive Tasks. Aging Medicine. 2018;1(2):209-219; Sclan S, Reisberg B. Functional Assessment Staging (FAST) in Alzheimer's Disease: Reliability, Validity, and Ordinality. Int Psychogeriatr. 1992;4(3):55-69; Appelbaum P, Grisso T. Assessing Patients' Capacities to Consent to Treatment. New England Journal of Medicine. 1988;319(25):1635-1638; Fisher C, Appelbaum P. Diagnosing Consciousness: Neuroimaging, Law, and the Vegetative State. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. 2010;38(2):374-385. [18] Menzel P. Ethical Perspectives on Advance Directives for Dementia - The Hastings Center. The Hastings Center; 2018. https://www.thehastingscenter.org/ethical-perspectives-advance-directives-dementia. Accessed December 8, 2018. [19] HR 5835 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, Title IV, Section 4206. US Congress. [20] Boniolo, G. Demented Patients and The Quandaries of Identity: Setting the Problem, Advancing A Proposal. HPLS 43, 21 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00365-y
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28

Burns, Alex. "Doubting the Global War on Terror." M/C Journal 14, no. 1 (January 24, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.338.

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Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Declaring War Soon after Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the “Global War on Terror”. This underpinned the subsequent counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and the United States invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Media pundits quickly applied the Global War on Terror label to the Madrid, Bali and London bombings, to convey how Al Qaeda’s terrorism had gone transnational. Meanwhile, international relations scholars debated the extent to which September 11 had changed the international system (Brenner; Mann 303). American intellectuals adopted several variations of the Global War on Terror in what initially felt like a transitional period of US foreign policy (Burns). Walter Laqueur suggested Al Qaeda was engaged in a “cosmological” and perpetual war. Paul Berman likened Al Qaeda and militant Islam to the past ideological battles against communism and fascism (Heilbrunn 248). In a widely cited article, neoconservative thinker Norman Podhoretz suggested the United States faced “World War IV”, which had three interlocking drivers: Al Qaeda and trans-national terrorism; political Islam as the West’s existential enemy; and nuclear proliferation to ‘rogue’ countries and non-state actors (Friedman 3). Podhoretz’s tone reflected a revival of his earlier Cold War politics and critique of the New Left (Friedman 148-149; Halper and Clarke 56; Heilbrunn 210). These stances attracted widespread support. For instance, the United States Marine Corp recalibrated its mission to fight a long war against “World War IV-like” enemies. Yet these stances left the United States unprepared as the combat situations in Afghanistan and Iraq worsened (Ricks; Ferguson; Filkins). Neoconservative ideals for Iraq “regime change” to transform the Middle East failed to deal with other security problems such as Pakistan’s Musharraf regime (Dorrien 110; Halper and Clarke 210-211; Friedman 121, 223; Heilbrunn 252). The Manichean and open-ended framing became a self-fulfilling prophecy for insurgents, jihadists, and militias. The Bush Administration quietly abandoned the Global War on Terror in July 2005. Widespread support had given way to policymaker doubt. Why did so many intellectuals and strategists embrace the Global War on Terror as the best possible “grand strategy” perspective of a post-September 11 world? Why was there so little doubt of this worldview? This is a debate with roots as old as the Sceptics versus the Sophists. Explanations usually focus on the Bush Administration’s “Vulcans” war cabinet: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who later became Secretary of State (Mann xv-xvi). The “Vulcans” were named after the Roman god Vulcan because Rice’s hometown Birmingham, Alabama, had “a mammoth fifty-six foot statue . . . [in] homage to the city’s steel industry” (Mann x) and the name stuck. Alternatively, explanations focus on how neoconservative thinkers shaped the intellectual climate after September 11, in a receptive media climate. Biographers suggest that “neoconservatism had become an echo chamber” (Heilbrunn 242) with its own media outlets, pundits, and think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and Project for a New America. Neoconservatism briefly flourished in Washington DC until Iraq’s sectarian violence discredited the “Vulcans” and neoconservative strategists like Paul Wolfowitz (Friedman; Ferguson). The neoconservatives' combination of September 11’s aftermath with strongly argued historical analogies was initially convincing. They conferred with scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel P. Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson to construct classicist historical narratives and to explain cultural differences. However, the history of the decade after September 11 also contains mis-steps and mistakes which make it a series of contingent decisions (Ferguson; Bergen). One way to analyse these contingent decisions is to pose “what if?” counterfactuals, or feasible alternatives to historical events (Lebow). For instance, what if September 11 had been a chemical and biological weapons attack? (Mann 317). Appendix 1 includes a range of alternative possibilities and “minimal rewrites” or slight variations on the historical events which occurred. Collectively, these counterfactuals suggest the role of agency, chance, luck, and the juxtaposition of better and worse outcomes. They pose challenges to the classicist interpretation adopted soon after September 11 to justify “World War IV” (Podhoretz). A ‘Two-Track’ Process for ‘World War IV’ After the September 11 attacks, I think an overlapping two-track process occurred with the “Vulcans” cabinet, neoconservative advisers, and two “echo chambers”: neoconservative think-tanks and the post-September 11 media. Crucially, Bush’s “Vulcans” war cabinet succeeded in gaining civilian control of the United States war decision process. Although successful in initiating the 2003 Iraq War this civilian control created a deeper crisis in US civil-military relations (Stevenson; Morgan). The “Vulcans” relied on “politicised” intelligence such as a United Kingdom intelligence report on Iraq’s weapons development program. The report enabled “a climate of undifferentiated fear to arise” because its public version did not distinguish between chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons (Halper and Clarke, 210). The cautious 2003 National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) report on Iraq was only released in a strongly edited form. For instance, the US Department of Energy had expressed doubts about claims that Iraq had approached Niger for uranium, and was using aluminium tubes for biological and chemical weapons development. Meanwhile, the post-September 11 media had become a second “echo chamber” (Halper and Clarke 194-196) which amplified neoconservative arguments. Berman, Laqueur, Podhoretz and others who framed the intellectual climate were “risk entrepreneurs” (Mueller 41-43) that supported the “World War IV” vision. The media also engaged in aggressive “flak” campaigns (Herman and Chomsky 26-28; Mueller 39-42) designed to limit debate and to stress foreign policy stances and themes which supported the Bush Administration. When former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey’s claimed that Al Qaeda had close connections to Iraqi intelligence, this was promoted in several books, including Michael Ledeen’s War Against The Terror Masters, Stephen Hayes’ The Connection, and Laurie Mylroie’s Bush v. The Beltway; and in partisan media such as Fox News, NewsMax, and The Weekly Standard who each attacked the US State Department and the CIA (Dorrien 183; Hayes; Ledeen; Mylroie; Heilbrunn 237, 243-244; Mann 310). This was the media “echo chamber” at work. The group Accuracy in Media also campaigned successfully to ensure that US cable providers did not give Al Jazeera English access to US audiences (Barker). Cosmopolitan ideals seemed incompatible with what the “flak” groups desired. The two-track process converged on two now infamous speeches. US President Bush’s State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on 5 February 2003. Bush’s speech included a line from neoconservative David Frumm about North Korea, Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil” (Dorrien 158; Halper and Clarke 139-140; Mann 242, 317-321). Powell’s presentation to the United Nations included now-debunked threat assessments. In fact, Powell had altered the speech’s original draft by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Cheney’s chief of staff (Dorrien 183-184). Powell claimed that Iraq had mobile biological weapons facilities, linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Mohamed El-Baradei, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Institute for Science and International Security all strongly doubted this claim, as did international observers (Dorrien 184; Halper and Clarke 212-213; Mann 353-354). Yet this information was suppressed: attacked by “flak” or given little visible media coverage. Powell’s agenda included trying to rebuild an international coalition and to head off weather changes that would affect military operations in the Middle East (Mann 351). Both speeches used politicised variants of “weapons of mass destruction”, taken from the counterterrorism literature (Stern; Laqueur). Bush’s speech created an inflated geopolitical threat whilst Powell relied on flawed intelligence and scientific visuals to communicate a non-existent threat (Vogel). However, they had the intended effect on decision makers. US Under-Secretary of Defense, the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, later revealed to Vanity Fair that “weapons of mass destruction” was selected as an issue that all potential stakeholders could agree on (Wilkie 69). Perhaps the only remaining outlet was satire: Armando Iannucci’s 2009 film In The Loop parodied the diplomatic politics surrounding Powell’s speech and the civil-military tensions on the Iraq War’s eve. In the short term the two track process worked in heading off doubt. The “Vulcans” blocked important information on pre-war Iraq intelligence from reaching the media and the general public (Prados). Alternatively, they ignored area specialists and other experts, such as when Coalition Provisional Authority’s L. Paul Bremer ignored the US State Department’s fifteen volume ‘Future of Iraq’ project (Ferguson). Public “flak” and “risk entrepreneurs” mobilised a range of motivations from grief and revenge to historical memory and identity politics. This combination of private and public processes meant that although doubts were expressed, they could be contained through the dual echo chambers of neoconservative policymaking and the post-September 11 media. These factors enabled the “Vulcans” to proceed with their “regime change” plans despite strong public opposition from anti-war protestors. Expressing DoubtsMany experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. This doubt came from three different and sometimes overlapping groups. Subject matter experts such as the IAEA’s Mohamed El-Baradei and weapons development scientists countered the UK intelligence report and Powell’s UN speech. However, they did not get the media coverage warranted due to “flak” and “echo chamber” dynamics. Others could challenge misleading historical analogies between insurgent Iraq and Nazi Germany, and yet not change the broader outcomes (Benjamin). Independent journalists one group who gained new information during the 1990-91 Gulf War: some entered Iraq from Kuwait and documented a more humanitarian side of the war to journalists embedded with US military units (Uyarra). Finally, there were dissenters from bureaucratic and institutional processes. In some cases, all three overlapped. In their separate analyses of the post-September 11 debate on intelligence “failure”, Zegart and Jervis point to a range of analytic misperceptions and institutional problems. However, the intelligence community is separated from policymakers such as the “Vulcans”. Compartmentalisation due to the “need to know” principle also means that doubting analysts can be blocked from releasing information. Andrew Wilkie discovered this when he resigned from Australia’s Office for National Assessments (ONA) as a transnational issues analyst. Wilkie questioned the pre-war assessments in Powell’s United Nations speech that were used to justify the 2003 Iraq War. Wilkie was then attacked publicly by Australian Prime Minister John Howard. This overshadowed a more important fact: both Howard and Wilkie knew that due to Australian legislation, Wilkie could not publicly comment on ONA intelligence, despite the invitation to do so. This barrier also prevented other intelligence analysts from responding to the “Vulcans”, and to “flak” and “echo chamber” dynamics in the media and neoconservative think-tanks. Many analysts knew that the excerpts released from the 2003 NIE on Iraq was highly edited (Prados). For example, Australian agencies such as the ONA, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Defence knew this (Wilkie 98). However, analysts are trained not to interfere with policymakers, even when there are significant civil-military irregularities. Military officials who spoke out about pre-war planning against the “Vulcans” and their neoconservative supporters were silenced (Ricks; Ferguson). Greenlight Capital’s hedge fund manager David Einhorn illustrates in a different context what might happen if analysts did comment. Einhorn gave a speech to the Ira Sohn Conference on 15 May 2002 debunking the management of Allied Capital. Einhorn’s “short-selling” led to retaliation from Allied Capital, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and growing evidence of potential fraud. If analysts adopted Einhorn’s tactics—combining rigorous analysis with targeted, public denunciation that is widely reported—then this may have short-circuited the “flak” and “echo chamber” effects prior to the 2003 Iraq War. The intelligence community usually tries to pre-empt such outcomes via contestation exercises and similar processes. This was the goal of the 2003 NIE on Iraq, despite the fact that the US Department of Energy which had the expertise was overruled by other agencies who expressed opinions not necessarily based on rigorous scientific and technical analysis (Prados; Vogel). In counterterrorism circles, similar disinformation arose about Aum Shinrikyo’s biological weapons research after its sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on 20 March 1995 (Leitenberg). Disinformation also arose regarding nuclear weapons proliferation to non-state actors in the 1990s (Stern). Interestingly, several of the “Vulcans” and neoconservatives had been involved in an earlier controversial contestation exercise: Team B in 1976. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assembled three Team B groups in order to evaluate and forecast Soviet military capabilities. One group headed by historian Richard Pipes gave highly “alarmist” forecasts and then attacked a CIA NIE about the Soviets (Dorrien 50-56; Mueller 81). The neoconservatives adopted these same tactics to reframe the 2003 NIE from its position of caution, expressed by several intelligence agencies and experts, to belief that Iraq possessed a current, covert program to develop weapons of mass destruction (Prados). Alternatively, information may be leaked to the media to express doubt. “Non-attributable” background interviews to establishment journalists like Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward achieved this. Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has recently achieved notoriety due to US diplomatic cables from the SIPRNet network released from 28 November 2010 onwards. Supporters have favourably compared Assange to Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND researcher who leaked the Pentagon Papers (Ellsberg; Ehrlich and Goldsmith). Whilst Elsberg succeeded because a network of US national papers continued to print excerpts from the Pentagon Papers despite lawsuit threats, Assange relied in part on favourable coverage from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. However, suspected sources such as US Army soldier Bradley Manning are not protected whilst media outlets are relatively free to publish their scoops (Walt, ‘Woodward’). Assange’s publication of SIPRNet’s diplomatic cables will also likely mean greater restrictions on diplomatic and military intelligence (Walt, ‘Don’t Write’). Beyond ‘Doubt’ Iraq’s worsening security discredited many of the factors that had given the neoconservatives credibility. The post-September 11 media became increasingly more critical of the US military in Iraq (Ferguson) and cautious about the “echo chamber” of think-tanks and media outlets. Internet sites for Al Jazeera English, Al-Arabiya and other networks have enabled people to bypass “flak” and directly access these different viewpoints. Most damagingly, the non-discovery of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction discredited both the 2003 NIE on Iraq and Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation (Wilkie 104). Likewise, “risk entrepreneurs” who foresaw “World War IV” in 2002 and 2003 have now distanced themselves from these apocalyptic forecasts due to a series of mis-steps and mistakes by the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda’s over-calculation (Bergen). The emergence of sites such as Wikileaks, and networks like Al Jazeera English and Al-Arabiya, are a response to the politics of the past decade. They attempt to short-circuit past “echo chambers” through providing access to different sources and leaked data. The Global War on Terror framed the Bush Administration’s response to September 11 as a war (Kirk; Mueller 59). Whilst this prematurely closed off other possibilities, it has also unleashed a series of dynamics which have undermined the neoconservative agenda. The “classicist” history and historical analogies constructed to justify the “World War IV” scenario are just one of several potential frameworks. “Flak” organisations and media “echo chambers” are now challenged by well-financed and strategic alternatives such as Al Jazeera English and Al-Arabiya. Doubt is one defence against “risk entrepreneurs” who seek to promote a particular idea: doubt guards against uncritical adoption. Perhaps the enduring lesson of the post-September 11 debates, though, is that doubt alone is not enough. What is needed are individuals and institutions that understand the strategies which the neoconservatives and others have used, and who also have the soft power skills during crises to influence critical decision-makers to choose alternatives. Appendix 1: Counterfactuals Richard Ned Lebow uses “what if?” counterfactuals to examine alternative possibilities and “minimal rewrites” or slight variations on the historical events that occurred. The following counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all. Fact: The 2003 Iraq War and 2001 Afghanistan counterinsurgency shaped the Bush Administration’s post-September 11 grand strategy. Counterfactual #1: Al Gore decisively wins the 2000 U.S. election. Bush v. Gore never occurs. After the September 11 attacks, Gore focuses on international alliance-building and gains widespread diplomatic support rather than a neoconservative agenda. He authorises Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and works closely with the Musharraf regime in Pakistan to target Al Qaeda’s muhajideen. He ‘contains’ Saddam Hussein’s Iraq through measurement and signature, technical intelligence, and more stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Minimal Rewrite: United 93 crashes in Washington DC, killing senior members of the Gore Administration. Fact: U.S. Special Operations Forces failed to kill Osama bin Laden in late November and early December 2001 at Tora Bora. Counterfactual #2: U.S. Special Operations Forces kill Osama bin Laden in early December 2001 during skirmishes at Tora Bora. Ayman al-Zawahiri is critically wounded, captured, and imprisoned. The rest of Al Qaeda is scattered. Minimal Rewrite: Osama bin Laden’s death turns him into a self-mythologised hero for decades. Fact: The UK Blair Government supplied a 50-page intelligence dossier on Iraq’s weapons development program which the Bush Administration used to support its pre-war planning. Counterfactual #3: Rogue intelligence analysts debunk the UK Blair Government’s claims through a series of ‘targeted’ leaks to establishment news sources. Minimal Rewrite: The 50-page intelligence dossier is later discovered to be correct about Iraq’s weapons development program. Fact: The Bush Administration used the 2003 National Intelligence Estimate to “build its case” for “regime change” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Counterfactual #4: A joint investigation by The New York Times and The Washington Post rebuts U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United National Security Council, delivered on 5 February 2003. Minimal Rewrite: The Central Intelligence Agency’s whitepaper “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs” (October 2002) more accurately reflects the 2003 NIE’s cautious assessments. Fact: The Bush Administration relied on Ahmed Chalabi for its postwar estimates about Iraq’s reconstruction. Counterfactual #5: The Bush Administration ignores Chalabi’s advice and relies instead on the U.S. State Department’s 15 volume report “The Future of Iraq”. Minimal Rewrite: The Coalition Provisional Authority appoints Ahmed Chalabi to head an interim Iraqi government. Fact: L. Paul Bremer signed orders to disband Iraq’s Army and to De-Ba’athify Iraq’s new government. Counterfactual #6: Bremer keeps Iraq’s Army intact and uses it to impose security in Baghdad to prevent looting and to thwart insurgents. Rather than a De-Ba’athification policy, Bremer uses former Baath Party members to gather situational intelligence. Minimal Rewrite: Iraq’s Army refuses to disband and the De-Ba’athification policy uncovers several conspiracies to undermine the Coalition Provisional Authority. AcknowledgmentsThanks to Stephen McGrail for advice on science and technology analysis.References Barker, Greg. “War of Ideas”. PBS Frontline. Boston, MA: 2007. ‹http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/newswar/video1.html› Benjamin, Daniel. “Condi’s Phony History.” Slate 29 Aug. 2003. ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2087768/pagenum/all/›. Bergen, Peter L. The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda. New York: The Free Press, 2011. Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2003. Brenner, William J. “In Search of Monsters: Realism and Progress in International Relations Theory after September 11.” Security Studies 15.3 (2006): 496-528. Burns, Alex. “The Worldflash of a Coming Future.” M/C Journal 6.2 (April 2003). ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php›. Dorrien, Gary. Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ehrlich, Judith, and Goldsmith, Rick. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Berkley CA: Kovno Communications, 2009. Einhorn, David. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Ellison, Sarah. “The Man Who Spilled The Secrets.” Vanity Fair (Feb. 2011). ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102›. Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002. Ferguson, Charles. No End in Sight, New York: Representational Pictures, 2007. Filkins, Dexter. The Forever War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Friedman, Murray. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Halper, Stefan, and Jonathan Clarke. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Hayes, Stephen F. The Connection: How Al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Heilbrunn, Jacob. They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Rev. ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. Iannucci, Armando. In The Loop. London: BBC Films, 2009. Jervis, Robert. Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 2010. Kirk, Michael. “The War behind Closed Doors.” PBS Frontline. Boston, MA: 2003. ‹http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/›. Laqueur, Walter. No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Continuum, 2003. Lebow, Richard Ned. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Ledeen, Michael. The War against The Terror Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Leitenberg, Milton. “Aum Shinrikyo's Efforts to Produce Biological Weapons: A Case Study in the Serial Propagation of Misinformation.” Terrorism and Political Violence 11.4 (1999): 149-158. Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Morgan, Matthew J. The American Military after 9/11: Society, State, and Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Mueller, John. Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. 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Walt, Stephen M. “‘Don’t Write If You Can Talk...’: The Latest from WikiLeaks.” Foreign Policy 29 Nov. 2010. ‹http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/29/dont_write_if_you_can_talk_the_latest_from_wikileaks›. Wilkie, Andrew. Axis of Deceit. Melbourne: Black Ink Books, 2003. Uyarra, Esteban Manzanares. “War Feels like War”. London: BBC, 2003. Vogel, Kathleen M. “Iraqi Winnebagos™ of Death: Imagined and Realized Futures of US Bioweapons Threat Assessments.” Science and Public Policy 35.8 (2008): 561–573. Zegart, Amy. Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2007.
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Paull, John. "Beyond Equal: From Same But Different to the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence." M/C Journal 11, no. 2 (June 1, 2008). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.36.

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A same-but-different dichotomy has recently been encapsulated within the US Food and Drug Administration’s ill-defined concept of “substantial equivalence” (USFDA, FDA). By invoking this concept the genetically modified organism (GMO) industry has escaped the rigors of safety testing that might otherwise apply. The curious concept of “substantial equivalence” grants a presumption of safety to GMO food. This presumption has yet to be earned, and has been used to constrain labelling of both GMO and non-GMO food. It is an idea that well serves corporatism. It enables the claim of difference to secure patent protection, while upholding the contrary claim of sameness to avoid labelling and safety scrutiny. It offers the best of both worlds for corporate food entrepreneurs, and delivers the worst of both worlds to consumers. The term “substantial equivalence” has established its currency within the GMO discourse. As the opportunities for patenting food technologies expand, the GMO recruitment of this concept will likely be a dress rehearsal for the developing debates on the labelling and testing of other techno-foods – including nano-foods and clone-foods. “Substantial Equivalence” “Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?” asks Clover in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. By way of response, Benjamin “read out to her what was written on the wall. There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”. After this reductionist revelation, further novel and curious events at Manor Farm, “did not seem strange” (Orwell, ch. X). Equality is a concept at the very core of mathematics, but beyond the domain of logic, equality becomes a hotly contested notion – and the domain of food is no exception. A novel food has a regulatory advantage if it can claim to be the same as an established food – a food that has proven its worth over centuries, perhaps even millennia – and thus does not trigger new, perhaps costly and onerous, testing, compliance, and even new and burdensome regulations. On the other hand, such a novel food has an intellectual property (IP) advantage only in terms of its difference. And thus there is an entrenched dissonance for newly technologised foods, between claiming sameness, and claiming difference. The same/different dilemma is erased, so some would have it, by appeal to the curious new dualist doctrine of “substantial equivalence” whereby sameness and difference are claimed simultaneously, thereby creating a win/win for corporatism, and a loss/loss for consumerism. This ground has been pioneered, and to some extent conquered, by the GMO industry. The conquest has ramifications for other cryptic food technologies, that is technologies that are invisible to the consumer and that are not evident to the consumer other than via labelling. Cryptic technologies pertaining to food include GMOs, pesticides, hormone treatments, irradiation and, most recently, manufactured nano-particles introduced into the food production and delivery stream. Genetic modification of plants was reported as early as 1984 by Horsch et al. The case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty resulted in a US Supreme Court decision that upheld the prior decision of the US Court of Customs and Patent Appeal that “the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of the patent law”, and ruled that the “respondent’s micro-organism plainly qualifies as patentable subject matter”. This was a majority decision of nine judges, with four judges dissenting (Burger). It was this Chakrabarty judgement that has seriously opened the Pandora’s box of GMOs because patenting rights makes GMOs an attractive corporate proposition by offering potentially unique monopoly rights over food. The rear guard action against GMOs has most often focussed on health repercussions (Smith, Genetic), food security issues, and also the potential for corporate malfeasance to hide behind a cloak of secrecy citing commercial confidentiality (Smith, Seeds). Others have tilted at the foundational plank on which the economics of the GMO industry sits: “I suggest that the main concern is that we do not want a single molecule of anything we eat to contribute to, or be patented and owned by, a reckless, ruthless chemical organisation” (Grist 22). The GMO industry exhibits bipolar behaviour, invoking the concept of “substantial difference” to claim patent rights by way of “novelty”, and then claiming “substantial equivalence” when dealing with other regulatory authorities including food, drug and pesticide agencies; a case of “having their cake and eating it too” (Engdahl 8). This is a clever slight-of-rhetoric, laying claim to the best of both worlds for corporations, and the worst of both worlds for consumers. Corporations achieve patent protection and no concomitant specific regulatory oversight; while consumers pay the cost of patent monopolization, and are not necessarily apprised, by way of labelling or otherwise, that they are purchasing and eating GMOs, and thereby financing the GMO industry. The lemma of “substantial equivalence” does not bear close scrutiny. It is a fuzzy concept that lacks a tight testable definition. It is exactly this fuzziness that allows lots of wriggle room to keep GMOs out of rigorous testing regimes. Millstone et al. argue that “substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept because it is a commercial and political judgement masquerading as if it is scientific. It is moreover, inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests. It therefore serves to discourage and inhibit informative scientific research” (526). “Substantial equivalence” grants GMOs the benefit of the doubt regarding safety, and thereby leaves unexamined the ramifications for human consumer health, for farm labourer and food-processor health, for the welfare of farm animals fed a diet of GMO grain, and for the well-being of the ecosystem, both in general and in its particularities. “Substantial equivalence” was introduced into the food discourse by an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report: “safety evaluation of foods derived by modern biotechnology: concepts and principles”. It is from this document that the ongoing mantra of assumed safety of GMOs derives: “modern biotechnology … does not inherently lead to foods that are less safe … . Therefore evaluation of foods and food components obtained from organisms developed by the application of the newer techniques does not necessitate a fundamental change in established principles, nor does it require a different standard of safety” (OECD, “Safety” 10). This was at the time, and remains, an act of faith, a pro-corporatist and a post-cautionary approach. The OECD motto reveals where their priorities lean: “for a better world economy” (OECD, “Better”). The term “substantial equivalence” was preceded by the 1992 USFDA concept of “substantial similarity” (Levidow, Murphy and Carr) and was adopted from a prior usage by the US Food and Drug Agency (USFDA) where it was used pertaining to medical devices (Miller). Even GMO proponents accept that “Substantial equivalence is not intended to be a scientific formulation; it is a conceptual tool for food producers and government regulators” (Miller 1043). And there’s the rub – there is no scientific definition of “substantial equivalence”, no scientific test of proof of concept, and nor is there likely to be, since this is a ‘spinmeister’ term. And yet this is the cornerstone on which rests the presumption of safety of GMOs. Absence of evidence is taken to be evidence of absence. History suggests that this is a fraught presumption. By way of contrast, the patenting of GMOs depends on the antithesis of assumed ‘sameness’. Patenting rests on proven, scrutinised, challengeable and robust tests of difference and novelty. Lightfoot et al. report that transgenic plants exhibit “unexpected changes [that] challenge the usual assumptions of GMO equivalence and suggest genomic, proteomic and metanomic characterization of transgenics is advisable” (1). GMO Milk and Contested Labelling Pesticide company Monsanto markets the genetically engineered hormone rBST (recombinant Bovine Somatotropin; also known as: rbST; rBGH, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone; and the brand name Prosilac) to dairy farmers who inject it into their cows to increase milk production. This product is not approved for use in many jurisdictions, including Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan. Even Monsanto accepts that rBST leads to mastitis (inflammation and pus in the udder) and other “cow health problems”, however, it maintains that “these problems did not occur at rates that would prohibit the use of Prosilac” (Monsanto). A European Union study identified an extensive list of health concerns of rBST use (European Commission). The US Dairy Export Council however entertain no doubt. In their background document they ask “is milk from cows treated with rBST safe?” and answer “Absolutely” (USDEC). Meanwhile, Monsanto’s website raises and answers the question: “Is the milk from cows treated with rbST any different from milk from untreated cows? No” (Monsanto). Injecting cows with genetically modified hormones to boost their milk production remains a contested practice, banned in many countries. It is the claimed equivalence that has kept consumers of US dairy products in the dark, shielded rBST dairy farmers from having to declare that their milk production is GMO-enhanced, and has inhibited non-GMO producers from declaring their milk as non-GMO, non rBST, or not hormone enhanced. This is a battle that has simmered, and sometimes raged, for a decade in the US. Finally there is a modest victory for consumers: the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) requires all labels used on milk products to be approved in advance by the department. The standard issued in October 2007 (PDA, “Standards”) signalled to producers that any milk labels claiming rBST-free status would be rejected. This advice was rescinded in January 2008 with new, specific, department-approved textual constructions allowed, and ensuring that any “no rBST” style claim was paired with a PDA-prescribed disclaimer (PDA, “Revised Standards”). However, parsimonious labelling is prohibited: No labeling may contain references such as ‘No Hormones’, ‘Hormone Free’, ‘Free of Hormones’, ‘No BST’, ‘Free of BST’, ‘BST Free’,’No added BST’, or any statement which indicates, implies or could be construed to mean that no natural bovine somatotropin (BST) or synthetic bovine somatotropin (rBST) are contained in or added to the product. (PDA, “Revised Standards” 3) Difference claims are prohibited: In no instance shall any label state or imply that milk from cows not treated with recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST, rbST, RBST or rbst) differs in composition from milk or products made with milk from treated cows, or that rBST is not contained in or added to the product. If a product is represented as, or intended to be represented to consumers as, containing or produced from milk from cows not treated with rBST any labeling information must convey only a difference in farming practices or dairy herd management methods. (PDA, “Revised Standards” 3) The PDA-approved labelling text for non-GMO dairy farmers is specified as follows: ‘From cows not treated with rBST. No significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBST-treated and non-rBST-treated cows’ or a substantial equivalent. Hereinafter, the first sentence shall be referred to as the ‘Claim’, and the second sentence shall be referred to as the ‘Disclaimer’. (PDA, “Revised Standards” 4) It is onto the non-GMO dairy farmer alone, that the costs of compliance fall. These costs include label preparation and approval, proving non-usage of GMOs, and of creating and maintaining an audit trail. In nearby Ohio a similar consumer versus corporatist pantomime is playing out. This time with the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) calling the shots, and again serving the GMO industry. The ODA prescribed text allowed to non-GMO dairy farmers is “from cows not supplemented with rbST” and this is to be conjoined with the mandatory disclaimer “no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rbST-supplemented and non-rbST supplemented cows” (Curet). These are “emergency rules”: they apply for 90 days, and are proposed as permanent. Once again, the onus is on the non-GMO dairy farmers to document and prove their claims. GMO dairy farmers face no such governmental requirements, including no disclosure requirement, and thus an asymmetric regulatory impost is placed on the non-GMO farmer which opens up new opportunities for administrative demands and technocratic harassment. Levidow et al. argue, somewhat Eurocentrically, that from its 1990s adoption “as the basis for a harmonized science-based approach to risk assessment” (26) the concept of “substantial equivalence” has “been recast in at least three ways” (58). It is true that the GMO debate has evolved differently in the US and Europe, and with other jurisdictions usually adopting intermediate positions, yet the concept persists. Levidow et al. nominate their three recastings as: firstly an “implicit redefinition” by the appending of “extra phrases in official documents”; secondly, “it has been reinterpreted, as risk assessment processes have … required more evidence of safety than before, especially in Europe”; and thirdly, “it has been demoted in the European Union regulatory procedures so that it can no longer be used to justify the claim that a risk assessment is unnecessary” (58). Romeis et al. have proposed a decision tree approach to GMO risks based on cascading tiers of risk assessment. However what remains is that the defects of the concept of “substantial equivalence” persist. Schauzu identified that: such decisions are a matter of “opinion”; that there is “no clear definition of the term ‘substantial’”; that because genetic modification “is aimed at introducing new traits into organisms, the result will always be a different combination of genes and proteins”; and that “there is no general checklist that could be followed by those who are responsible for allowing a product to be placed on the market” (2). Benchmark for Further Food Novelties? The discourse, contestation, and debate about “substantial equivalence” have largely focussed on the introduction of GMOs into food production processes. GM can best be regarded as the test case, and proof of concept, for establishing “substantial equivalence” as a benchmark for evaluating new and forthcoming food technologies. This is of concern, because the concept of “substantial equivalence” is scientific hokum, and yet its persistence, even entrenchment, within regulatory agencies may be a harbinger of forthcoming same-but-different debates for nanotechnology and other future bioengineering. The appeal of “substantial equivalence” has been a brake on the creation of GMO-specific regulations and on rigorous GMO testing. The food nanotechnology industry can be expected to look to the precedent of the GMO debate to head off specific nano-regulations and nano-testing. As cloning becomes economically viable, then this may be another wave of food innovation that muddies the regulatory waters with the confused – and ultimately self-contradictory – concept of “substantial equivalence”. Nanotechnology engineers particles in the size range 1 to 100 nanometres – a nanometre is one billionth of a metre. This is interesting for manufacturers because at this size chemicals behave differently, or as the Australian Office of Nanotechnology expresses it, “new functionalities are obtained” (AON). Globally, government expenditure on nanotechnology research reached US$4.6 billion in 2006 (Roco 3.12). While there are now many patents (ETC Group; Roco), regulation specific to nanoparticles is lacking (Bowman and Hodge; Miller and Senjen). The USFDA advises that nano-manufacturers “must show a reasonable assurance of safety … or substantial equivalence” (FDA). A recent inventory of nano-products already on the market identified 580 products. Of these 11.4% were categorised as “Food and Beverage” (WWICS). This is at a time when public confidence in regulatory bodies is declining (HRA). In an Australian consumer survey on nanotechnology, 65% of respondents indicated they were concerned about “unknown and long term side effects”, and 71% agreed that it is important “to know if products are made with nanotechnology” (MARS 22). Cloned animals are currently more expensive to produce than traditional animal progeny. In the course of 678 pages, the USFDA Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment has not a single mention of “substantial equivalence”. However the Federation of Animal Science Societies (FASS) in its single page “Statement in Support of USFDA’s Risk Assessment Conclusion That Food from Cloned Animals Is Safe for Human Consumption” states that “FASS endorses the use of this comparative evaluation process as the foundation of establishing substantial equivalence of any food being evaluated. It must be emphasized that it is the food product itself that should be the focus of the evaluation rather than the technology used to generate cloned animals” (FASS 1). Contrary to the FASS derogation of the importance of process in food production, for consumers both the process and provenance of production is an important and integral aspect of a food product’s value and identity. Some consumers will legitimately insist that their Kalamata olives are from Greece, or their balsamic vinegar is from Modena. It was the British public’s growing awareness that their sugar was being produced by slave labour that enabled the boycotting of the product, and ultimately the outlawing of slavery (Hochschild). When consumers boycott Nestle, because of past or present marketing practices, or boycott produce of USA because of, for example, US foreign policy or animal welfare concerns, they are distinguishing the food based on the narrative of the food, the production process and/or production context which are a part of the identity of the food. Consumers attribute value to food based on production process and provenance information (Paull). Products produced by slave labour, by child labour, by political prisoners, by means of torture, theft, immoral, unethical or unsustainable practices are different from their alternatives. The process of production is a part of the identity of a product and consumers are increasingly interested in food narrative. It requires vigilance to ensure that these narratives are delivered with the product to the consumer, and are neither lost nor suppressed. Throughout the GM debate, the organic sector has successfully skirted the “substantial equivalence” debate by excluding GMOs from the certified organic food production process. This GMO-exclusion from the organic food stream is the one reprieve available to consumers worldwide who are keen to avoid GMOs in their diet. The organic industry carries the expectation of providing food produced without artificial pesticides and fertilizers, and by extension, without GMOs. Most recently, the Soil Association, the leading organic certifier in the UK, claims to be the first organisation in the world to exclude manufactured nonoparticles from their products (Soil Association). There has been the call that engineered nanoparticles be excluded from organic standards worldwide, given that there is no mandatory safety testing and no compulsory labelling in place (Paull and Lyons). The twisted rhetoric of oxymorons does not make the ideal foundation for policy. Setting food policy on the shifting sands of “substantial equivalence” seems foolhardy when we consider the potentially profound ramifications of globally mass marketing a dysfunctional food. If there is a 2×2 matrix of terms – “substantial equivalence”, substantial difference, insubstantial equivalence, insubstantial difference – while only one corner of this matrix is engaged for food policy, and while the elements remain matters of opinion rather than being testable by science, or by some other regime, then the public is the dupe, and potentially the victim. “Substantial equivalence” has served the GMO corporates well and the public poorly, and this asymmetry is slated to escalate if nano-food and clone-food are also folded into the “substantial equivalence” paradigm. Only in Orwellian Newspeak is war peace, or is same different. It is time to jettison the pseudo-scientific doctrine of “substantial equivalence”, as a convenient oxymoron, and embrace full disclosure of provenance, process and difference, so that consumers are not collateral in a continuing asymmetric knowledge war. References Australian Office of Nanotechnology (AON). Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources (DITR) 6 Aug. 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.innovation.gov.au/Section/Innovation/Pages/ AustralianOfficeofNanotechnology.aspx >.Bowman, Diana, and Graeme Hodge. “A Small Matter of Regulation: An International Review of Nanotechnology Regulation.” Columbia Science and Technology Law Review 8 (2007): 1-32.Burger, Warren. “Sidney A. Diamond, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks v. Ananda M. Chakrabarty, et al.” Supreme Court of the United States, decided 16 June 1980. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=447&invol=303 >.Curet, Monique. “New Rules Allow Dairy-Product Labels to Include Hormone Info.” The Columbus Dispatch 7 Feb. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2008/02/07/dairy.html >.Engdahl, F. William. Seeds of Destruction. Montréal: Global Research, 2007.ETC Group. Down on the Farm: The Impact of Nano-Scale Technologies on Food and Agriculture. Ottawa: Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Conservation, November, 2004. European Commission. Report on Public Health Aspects of the Use of Bovine Somatotropin. Brussels: European Commission, 15-16 March 1999.Federation of Animal Science Societies (FASS). Statement in Support of FDA’s Risk Assessment Conclusion That Cloned Animals Are Safe for Human Consumption. 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fass.org/page.asp?pageID=191 >.Grist, Stuart. “True Threats to Reason.” New Scientist 197.2643 (16 Feb. 2008): 22-23.Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery. London: Pan Books, 2006.Horsch, Robert, Robert Fraley, Stephen Rogers, Patricia Sanders, Alan Lloyd, and Nancy Hoffman. “Inheritance of Functional Foreign Genes in Plants.” Science 223 (1984): 496-498.HRA. Awareness of and Attitudes toward Nanotechnology and Federal Regulatory Agencies: A Report of Findings. Washington: Peter D. Hart Research Associates, 25 Sep. 2007.Levidow, Les, Joseph Murphy, and Susan Carr. “Recasting ‘Substantial Equivalence’: Transatlantic Governance of GM Food.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 32.1 (Jan. 2007): 26-64.Lightfoot, David, Rajsree Mungur, Rafiqa Ameziane, Anthony Glass, and Karen Berhard. “Transgenic Manipulation of C and N Metabolism: Stretching the GMO Equivalence.” American Society of Plant Biologists Conference: Plant Biology, 2000.MARS. “Final Report: Australian Community Attitudes Held about Nanotechnology – Trends 2005-2007.” Report prepared for Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources (DITR). Miranda, NSW: Market Attitude Research Services, 12 June 2007.Miller, Georgia, and Rye Senjen. “Out of the Laboratory and on to Our Plates: Nanotechnology in Food and Agriculture.” Friends of the Earth, 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://nano.foe.org.au/node/220 >.Miller, Henry. “Substantial Equivalence: Its Uses and Abuses.” Nature Biotechnology 17 (7 Nov. 1999): 1042-1043.Millstone, Erik, Eric Brunner, and Sue Mayer. “Beyond ‘Substantial Equivalence’.” Nature 401 (7 Oct. 1999): 525-526.Monsanto. “Posilac, Bovine Somatotropin by Monsanto: Questions and Answers about bST from the United States Food and Drug Administration.” 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.monsantodairy.com/faqs/fda_safety.html >.Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “For a Better World Economy.” Paris: OECD, 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.oecd.org/ >.———. “Safety Evaluation of Foods Derived by Modern Biotechnology: Concepts and Principles.” Paris: OECD, 1993.Orwell, George. Animal Farm. Adelaide: ebooks@Adelaide, 2004 (1945). 30 Apr. 2008 < http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george >.Paull, John. “Provenance, Purity and Price Premiums: Consumer Valuations of Organic and Place-of-Origin Food Labelling.” Research Masters thesis, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 2006. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://eprints.utas.edu.au/690/ >.Paull, John, and Kristen Lyons. “Nanotechnology: The Next Challenge for Organics.” Journal of Organic Systems (in press).Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA). “Revised Standards and Procedure for Approval of Proposed Labeling of Fluid Milk.” Milk Labeling Standards (2.0.1.17.08). Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, 17 Jan. 2008. ———. “Standards and Procedure for Approval of Proposed Labeling of Fluid Milk, Milk Products and Manufactured Dairy Products.” Milk Labeling Standards (2.0.1.17.08). Bureau of Food Safety and Laboratory Services, Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, 22 Oct. 2007.Roco, Mihail. “National Nanotechnology Initiative – Past, Present, Future.” In William Goddard, Donald Brenner, Sergy Lyshevski and Gerald Iafrate, eds. Handbook of Nanoscience, Engineering and Technology. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007.Romeis, Jorg, Detlef Bartsch, Franz Bigler, Marco Candolfi, Marco Gielkins, et al. “Assessment of Risk of Insect-Resistant Transgenic Crops to Nontarget Arthropods.” Nature Biotechnology 26.2 (Feb. 2008): 203-208.Schauzu, Marianna. “The Concept of Substantial Equivalence in Safety Assessment of Food Derived from Genetically Modified Organisms.” AgBiotechNet 2 (Apr. 2000): 1-4.Soil Association. “Soil Association First Organisation in the World to Ban Nanoparticles – Potentially Toxic Beauty Products That Get Right under Your Skin.” London: Soil Association, 17 Jan. 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/848d689047 cb466780256a6b00298980/42308d944a3088a6802573d100351790!OpenDocument >.Smith, Jeffrey. Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Fairfield, Iowa: Yes! Books, 2007.———. Seeds of Deception. Melbourne: Scribe, 2004.U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC). Bovine Somatotropin (BST) Backgrounder. Arlington, VA: U.S. Dairy Export Council, 2006.U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA). Animal Cloning: A Draft Risk Assessment. Rockville, MD: Center for Veterinary Medicine, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 28 Dec. 2006.———. FDA and Nanotechnology Products. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 2008. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.fda.gov/nanotechnology/faqs.html >.Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS). “A Nanotechnology Consumer Products Inventory.” Data set as at Sep. 2007. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Project on Emerging Technologies, Sep. 2007. 24 Apr. 2008 < http://www.nanotechproject.org/inventories/consumer >.
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Hartman, Yvonne, and Sandy Darab. "The Power of the Wave: Activism Rainbow Region-Style." M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (September 18, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.865.

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Introduction The counterculture that arose during the 1960s and 1970s left lasting social and political reverberations in developed nations. This was a time of increasing affluence and liberalisation which opened up remarkable political opportunities for social change. Within this context, an array of new social movements were a vital ingredient of the ferment that saw existing norms challenged and the establishment of new rights for many oppressed groups. An expanding arena of concerns included the environmental damage caused by 200 years of industrial capitalism. This article examines one aspect of a current environment movement in Australia, the anti-Coal Seam Gas (CSG) movement, and the part played by participants. In particular, the focus is upon one action that emerged during the recent Bentley Blockade, which was a regional mobilisation against proposed unconventional gas mining (UGM) near Lismore, NSW. Over the course of the blockade, the conventional ritual of waving at passers-by was transformed into a mechanism for garnering broad community support. Arguably, this was a crucial factor in the eventual outcome. In this case, we contend that the wave, rather than a countercultural artefact being appropriated by the mainstream, represents an everyday behaviour that builds social solidarity, which is subverted to become an effective part of the repertoire of the movement. At a more general level, this article examines how counterculture and mainstream interact via the subversion of “ordinary” citizens and the role of certain cultural understandings for that purpose. We will begin by examining the nature of the counterculture and its relationship to social movements before discussing the character of the anti-CSG movement in general and the Bentley Blockade in particular, using the personal experience of one of the writers. We will then be able to explore our thesis in detail and make some concluding remarks. The Counterculture and Social Movements In this article, we follow Cox’s understanding of the counterculture as a kind of meta-movement within which specific social movements are situated. For Cox (105), the counterculture that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s was an overarching movement in which existing social relations—in particular the family—were rejected by a younger generation, who succeeded in effectively fusing previously separate political and cultural spheres of dissent into one. Cox (103-04) points out that the precondition for such a phenomenon is “free space”—conditions under which counter-hegemonic activity can occur—for example, being liberated from the constraints of working to subsist, something which the unprecedented prosperity of the post WWII years allowed. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the counterculture emerged, a wave of activism arose in the western world which later came to be referred to as new social movements. These included the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, pacifism and the anti-nuclear and environment movements. The new movements rejected established power and organisational structures and tended, some scholars argued, to cross class lines, basing their claims on non-material issues. Della Porta and Diani claim this wave of movements is characterised by: a critical ideology in relation to modernism and progress; decentralized and participatory organizational structures; defense of interpersonal solidarity against the great bureaucracies; and the reclamation of autonomous spaces, rather than material advantages. (9) This depiction clearly announces the countercultural nature of the new social movements. As Carter (91) avers, these movements attempted to bypass the state and instead mobilise civil society, employing a range of innovative tactics and strategies—the repertoire of action—which may involve breaking laws. It should be noted that over time, some of these movements did shift towards accommodation of existing power structures and became more reformist in nature, to the point of forming political parties in the case of the Greens. However, inasmuch as the counterculture represented a merging of distinctively non-mainstream ways of life with the practice of actively challenging social arrangements at a political level (Cox 18–19; Grossberg 15–18;), the tactic of mobilising civil society to join social movements demonstrates in fact a reverse direction: large numbers of people are transfigured in radical ways by their involvement in social movements. One important principle underlying much of the repertoire of action of these new movements was non-violence. Again, this signals countercultural norms of the period. As Sharp (583–86) wrote at the time, non-violence is crucial in that it denies the aggressor their rationale for violent repression. This principle is founded on the liberal notion, whose legacy goes back to Locke, that the legitimacy of the government rests upon the consent of the governed—that is, the people can withdraw their consent (Locke in Ball & Dagger 92). Ghandi also relied upon this idea when formulating his non-violent approach to conflict, satyagraha (Sharp 83–84). Thus an idea that upholds the modern state is adopted by the counterculture in order to undermine it (the state), again demonstrating an instance of counterflow from the mainstream. Non-violence does not mean non-resistance. In fact, it usually involves non-compliance with a government or other authority and when practised in large numbers, can be very effective, as Ghandi and those in the civil rights movement showed. The result will be either that the government enters into negotiation with the protestors, or they can engage in violence to suppress them, which generally alienates the wider population, leading to a loss of support (Finley & Soifer 104–105). Tarrow (88) makes the important point that the less threatening an action, the harder it is to repress. As a result, democratic states have generally modified their response towards the “strategic weapon of nonviolent protest and even moved towards accommodation and recognition of this tactic as legitimate” (Tarrow 172). Nevertheless, the potential for state violence remains, and the freedom to protest is proscribed by various laws. One of the key figures to emerge from the new social movements that formed an integral part of the counterculture was Bill Moyer, who, in conjunction with colleagues produced a seminal text for theorising and organising social movements (Moyer et al.). Many contemporary social movements have been significantly influenced by Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (MAP), which describes not only key theoretical concepts but is also a practical guide to movement building and achieving aims. Moyer’s model was utilised in training the Northern Rivers community in the anti-CSG movement in conjunction with the non-violent direct action (NVDA) model developed by the North-East Forest Alliance (NEFA) that resisted logging in the forests of north-eastern NSW during the late 1980s and 1990s (Ricketts 138–40). Indeed, the Northern Rivers region of NSW—dubbed the Rainbow Region—is celebrated, as a “‘meeting place’ of countercultures and for the articulation of social and environmental ideals that challenge mainstream practice” (Ward and van Vuuren 63). As Bible (6–7) outlines, the Northern Rivers’ place in countercultural history is cemented by the holding of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 and the consequent decision of many attendees to stay on and settle in the region. They formed new kinds of communities based on an alternative ethics that eschewed a consumerist, individualist agenda in favour of modes of existence that emphasised living in harmony with the environment. The Terania Creek campaign of the late 1970s made the region famous for its environmental activism, when the new settlers resisted the logging of Nightcap National Park using nonviolent methods (Bible 5). It was also instrumental in developing an array of ingenious actions that were used in subsequent campaigns such as the Franklin Dam blockade in Tasmania in the early 1980s (Kelly 116). Indeed, many of these earlier activists were key figures in the anti-CSG movement that has developed in the Rainbow Region over the last few years. The Anti-CSG Movement Despite opposition to other forms of UGM, such as tight sands and shale oil extraction techniques, the term anti-CSG is used here, as it still seems to attract wide recognition. Unconventional gas extraction usually involves a process called fracking, which is the injection at high pressure of water, sand and a number of highly toxic chemicals underground to release the gas that is trapped in rock formations. Among the risks attributed to fracking are contamination of aquifers, air pollution from fugitive emissions and exposure to radioactive particles with resultant threats to human and animal health, as well as an increased risk of earthquakes (Ellsworth; Hand 13; Sovacool 254–260). Additionally, the vast amount of water that is extracted in the fracking process is saline and may contain residues of the fracking chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive matter. This produced water must either be stored or treated (Howarth 273–73; Sovacool 255). Further, there is potential for accidents and incidents and there are many reports—particularly in the United States where the practice is well established—of adverse events such as compressors exploding, leaks and spills, and water from taps catching fire (Sovacool 255–257). Despite an abundance of anecdotal evidence, until recently authorities and academics believed there was not enough “rigorous evidence” to make a definitive judgment of harm to animal and human health as a result of fracking (Mitka 2135). For example, in Australia, the Queensland Government was unable to find a clear link between fracking and health complaints in the Tara gasfield (Thompson 56), even though it is known that there are fugitive emissions from these gasfields (Tait et al. 3099-103). It is within this context that grassroots opposition to UGM began in Australia. The largest and most sustained challenge has come from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, where a company called Metgasco has been attempting to engage in UGM for a number of years. Stiff community opposition has developed over this time, with activists training, co-ordinating and organising using the principles of Moyer’s MAP and NEFA’s NVDA. Numerous community and affinity groups opposing UGM sprang up including the Lock the Gate Alliance (LTG), a grassroots organisation opposing coal and gas mining, which formed in 2010 (Lock the Gate Alliance online). The movement put up sustained resistance to Metgasco’s attempts to establish wells at Glenugie, near Grafton and Doubtful Creek, near Kyogle in 2012 and 2013, despite the use of a substantial police presence at both locations. In the event, neither site was used for production despite exploratory wells being sunk (ABC News; Dobney). Metgasco announced it would be withdrawing its operations following new Federal and State government regulations at the time of the Doubtful Creek blockade. However it returned to the fray with a formal announcement in February 2014 (Metgasco), that it would drill at Bentley, 12 kilometres west of Lismore. It was widely believed this would occur with a view to production on an industrial scale should initial exploration prove fruitful. The Bentley Blockade It was known well before the formal announcement that Metgasco planned to drill at Bentley and community actions such as flash mobs, media releases and planning meetings were part of the build-up to direct action at the site. One of the authors of this article was actively involved in the movement and participated in a variety of these actions. By the end of January 2014 it was decided to hold an ongoing vigil at the site, which was still entirely undeveloped. Participants, including one author, volunteered for four-hour shifts which began at 5 a.m. each day and before long, were lasting into the night. The purpose of a vigil is to bear witness, maintain a presence and express a point of view. It thus accords well with the principle of non-violence. Eventually the site mushroomed into a tent village with three gates being blockaded. The main gate, Gate A, sprouted a variety of poles, tripods and other installations together with colourful tents and shelters, peopled by protesters on a 24-hour basis. The vigils persisted on all three gates for the duration of the blockade. As the number of blockaders swelled, popular support grew, lending weight to the notion that countercultural ideas and practices were spreading throughout the community. In response, Metgasco called on the State Government to provide police to coincide with the arrival of equipment. It was rumoured that 200 police would be drafted to defend the site in late April. When alerts were sent out to the community warning of imminent police action, an estimated crowd of 2000 people attended in the early hours of the morning and the police called off their operation (Feliu). As the weeks wore on, training was stepped up, attendees were educated in non-violent resistance and protestors willing to act as police liaison persons were placed on a rotating roster. In May, the State Government was preparing to send up to 800 police and the Riot Squad to break the blockade (NSW Hansard in Buckingham). Local farmers (now a part of the movement) and activist leaders had gone to Sydney in an effort to find a political solution in order to avoid what threatened to be a clash that would involve police violence. A confluence of events, such as: the sudden resignation of the Premier; revelations via the Independent Commission against Corruption about nefarious dealings and undue influence of the coal industry upon the government; a radio interview with locals by a popular broadcaster in Sydney; and the reputed hesitation of the police themselves in engaging with a group of possibly 7,000 to 10,000 protestors, resulted in the Office for Coal Seam Gas suspending Metgasco’s drilling licence on 15 May (NSW Department of Resources & Energy). The grounds were that the company had not adequately fulfilled its obligations to consult with the community. At the date of writing, the suspension still holds. The Wave The repertoire of contention at the Bentley Blockade was expansive, comprising most of the standard actions and strategies developed in earlier environmental struggles. These included direct blocking tactics in addition to the use of more carnivalesque actions like music and theatre, as well as the use of various media to reach a broader public. Non-violence was at the core of all actions, but we would tentatively suggest that Bentley may have provided a novel addition to the repertoire, stemming originally from the vigil, which brought the first protestors to the site. At the beginning of the vigil, which was initially held near the entrance to the proposed drilling site atop a cutting, occupants of passing vehicles below would demonstrate their support by sounding their horns and/or waving to the vigil-keepers, who at first were few in number. There was a precedent for this behaviour in the campaign leading up to the blockade. Activist groups such as the Knitting Nannas against Gas had encouraged vehicles to show support by sounding their horns. So when the motorists tooted spontaneously at Bentley, we waved back. Occupants of other vehicles would show disapproval by means of rude gestures and/or yelling and we would wave to them as well. After some weeks, as a presence began to be established at the site, it became routine for vigil keepers to smile and wave at all passing vehicles. This often elicited a positive response. After the first mass call-out discussed above, a number of us migrated to another gate, where numbers were much sparser and there was a perceived need for a greater presence. At this point, the participating writer had begun to act as a police liaison person, but the practice of waving routinely was continued. Those protecting this gate usually included protestors ready to block access, the police liaison person, a legal observer, vigil-keepers and a passing parade of visitors. Because this location was directly on the road, it was possible to see the drivers of vehicles and make eye contact more easily. Certain vehicles became familiar, passing at regular times, on the way to work or school, for example. As time passed, most of those protecting the gate also joined the waving ritual to the point where it became like a game to try to prise a signal of acknowledgement from the passing motorists, or even to win over a disapprover. Police vehicles, some of which passed at set intervals, were included in this game. Mostly they waved cheerfully. There were some we never managed to win over, but waving and making direct eye contact with regular motorists over time created a sense of community and an acknowledgement of the work we were doing, as they increasingly responded in kind. Motorists could hardly feel threatened when they encountered smiling, waving protestors. By including the disapprovers, we acted inclusively and our determined good humour seemed to de-escalate demonstrated hostility. Locals who did not want drilling to go ahead but who were nevertheless unwilling to join a direct action were thus able to participate in the resistance in a way that may have felt safe for them. Some of them even stopped and visited the site, voicing their support. Standing on the side of the road and waving to passers-by may seem peripheral to the “real” action, even trivial. But we would argue it is a valuable adjunct to a blockade (which is situated near a road) when one of the strategies of the overall campaign is to win popular backing. Hence waving, whilst not a completely new part of the repertoire, constitutes what Tilly (41–45) would call innovation at the margins, something he asserts is necessary to maintain the effectiveness and vitality of contentious action. In this case, it is arguable that the sheer size of community support probably helped to concentrate the minds of the state government politicians in Sydney, particularly as they contemplated initiating a massive, taxpayer-funded police action against the people for the benefit of a commercial operation. Waving is a symbolic gesture indicating acknowledgement and goodwill. It fits well within a repertoire based on the principle of non-violence. Moreover, it is a conventional social norm and everyday behaviour that is so innocuous that it is difficult to see how it could be suppressed by police or other authorities. Therein lies its subversiveness. For in communicating our common humanity in a spirit of friendliness, we drew attention to the fact that we were without rancour and tacitly invited others to join us and to explore our concerns. In this way, the counterculture drew upon a mainstream custom to develop and extend upon a new form of dissent. This constitutes a reversal of the more usual phenomenon of countercultural artefacts—such as “hippie clothing”—being appropriated or co-opted by the prevailing culture (see Reading). But it also fits with the more general phenomenon that we have argued was occurring; that of enticing ordinary residents into joining together in countercultural activity, via the pathway of a social movement. Conclusion The anti-CSG movement in the Northern Rivers was developed and organised by countercultural participants of previous contentious challenges. It was highly effective in building popular support whilst at the same time forging a loose coalition of various activist groups. We have surveyed one practice—the wave—that evolved out of mainstream culture over the course of the Bentley Blockade and suggested it may come to be seen as part of the repertoire of actions that can be beneficially employed under suitable conditions. Waving to passers-by invites them to become part of the movement in a non-threatening and inclusive way. It thus envelops supporters and non-supporters alike, and its very innocuousness makes it difficult to suppress. We have argued that this instance can be referenced to a similar reverse movement at a broader level—that of co-opting liberal notions and involving the general populace in new practices and activities that undermine the status quo. The ability of the counterculture in general and environment movements in particular to innovate in the quest to challenge and change what it perceives as damaging or unethical practices demonstrates its ingenuity and spirit. This movement is testament to its dynamic nature. References ABC News. Metgasco Has No CSG Extraction Plans for Glenugie. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-22/metgasco-says-no-csg-extraction-planned-for-glenugie/4477652›. Bible, Vanessa. 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Dobney, Chris. “Drill Rig Heads to Doubtful Creek.” Echo Netdaily Feb. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2013/02/drill-rig-heads-to-doubtful-creek/›. Ellsworth, William. “Injection-Induced Earthquakes”. Science 341.6142 (2013). DOI: 10.1126/science.1225942. 10 July 2014 ‹http://www.sciencemag.org.ezproxy.scu.edu.au/content/341/6142/1225942.full?sid=b4679ca5-0992-4ad3-aa3e-1ac6356f10da›. Feliu, Luis. “Battle for Bentley: 2,000 Protectors on Site.” Echo Netdaily Mar. 2013. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2014/03/battle-bentley-2000-protectors-site/›. Finley, Mary Lou, and Steven Soifer. “Social Movement Theories and Map.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Some Preliminary Conjunctural Thoughts on Countercultures”. Journal of Gender and Power 1.1 (2014). 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Moyer, Bill. “The Movement Action Plan.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. NSW Department of Resources & Energy. “Metgasco Drilling Approval Suspended.” Media Release, 15 May 2014. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/516749/Metgasco-Drilling-Approval-Suspended.pdf›. Reading, Tracey. “Hip versus Square: 1960s Advertising and Clothing Industries and the Counterculture”. Research Papers 2013. 15 July 2014 ‹http://opensuic.lib.siu.edu/gs_rp/396›. Ricketts, Aiden. “The North East Forest Alliance’s Old-Growth Forest Campaign.” Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Ed. Helen Wilson. Lismore: Southern Cross UP. 2003. 121–148. Sharp, Gene. The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle. Boston, Mass.: Porter Sargent, 1973. Sovacool, Benjamin K. “Cornucopia or Curse? Reviewing the Costs and Benefits of Shale Gas Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking).” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2014): 249–64. Tait, Douglas, Isaac Santos, Damien Maher, Tyler Cyronak, and Rachael Davis. “Enrichment of Radon and Carbon Dioxide in the Open Atmosphere of an Australian Coal Seam Gas Field.” Environmental Science & Technology 47 (2013): 3099–3104. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Thompson, Chuck. “The Fracking Feud.” Medicus 53.8 (2013): 56–57. Tilly, Charles. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: UCP, 2006. Ward, Susan, and Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63–79.
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Callaghan, Michaela. "Dancing Embodied Memory: The Choreography of Place in the Peruvian Andes." M/C Journal 15, no. 4 (August 18, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.530.

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Abstract:
This article is concerned with dance as an embodied form of collective remembering in the Andean department of Ayacucho in Peru. Andean dance and fiesta are inextricably linked with notions of identity, cultural heritage and history. Rather than being simply aesthetic —steps to music or a series of movements — dance is readable as being a deeper embodiment of the broader struggles and concerns of a people. As anthropologist Zoila Mendoza writes, in post-colonial countries such as those in Africa and Latin America, dance is and was a means “through which people contested, domesticated and reworked signs of domination in their society” (39). Andean dance has long been a space of contestation and resistance (Abercrombie; Bigenho; Isbell; Mendoza; Stern). It also functions as a repository, a dynamic archive which holds and tells the collective narrative of a cultural time and space. As Jane Cowan observes “dance is much more than knowing the steps; it involves both social knowledge and social power” (xii). In cultures where the written word has not played a central role in the construction and transmission of knowledge, dance is a particularly rich resource for understanding. “Embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing” (Taylor 3). This is certainly true in the Andes of Peru where dance, music and fiesta are central to social, cultural, economic and political life. This article combines the areas of cultural memory with aspects of dance anthropology in a bid to reveal what is often unspoken and discover new ways of accessing and understanding non-verbal forms of memory through the embodied medium of dance. In societies where dance is integral to daily life the dance becomes an important resource for a deeper understanding of social and cultural memory. However, this characteristic of the dance has been largely overlooked in the field of memory studies. Paul Connerton writes, “… that there is an aspect of social memory which has been greatly ignored but is absolutely essential: bodily social memory” (382). I am interested in the role of dance as a site memory because as a dancer I am acutely aware of embodied memory and of the importance of dance as a narrative mode, not only for the dancer but also for the spectator. This article explores the case study of rural carnival performed in the city of Huamanga, in the Andean department of Ayacucho and includes interviews I conducted with rural campesinos (this literally translates as people from the country, however, it is a complex term imbedded with notions of class and race) between June 2009 and March 2010. Through examining the transformative effect of what I call the chorography of place, I argue that rural campesinos embody the memory of place, dancing that place into being in the urban setting as a means of remembering and maintaining connection to their homeland and salvaging cultural heritage.The department of Ayacucho is located in the South-Central Andes of Peru. The majority of the population are Quechua-speaking campesinos many of whom live in extreme poverty. Nestled in a cradle of mountains at 2,700 meters above sea level is the capital city of the same name. However, residents prefer the pre-revolutionary name of Huamanga. This is largely due to the fact that the word Ayacucho is a combination of two Quechua words Aya and Kucho which translate as Corner of the Dead. Given the recent history of the department it is not surprising that residents refer to their city as Huamanga instead of Ayacucho. Since 1980 the department of Ayacucho has become known as the birthplace of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the ensuing 20 years of political violence between Sendero and counter insurgency forces. In 2000, the interim government convened the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC – CVR Spanish). In 2003, the TRC released its report which found that over 69,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict and hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homes (CVR). Those most affected by the violence and human rights abuses were predominantly from the rural population of the central-southern Andes (CVR). Following the release of the TRC Report the department of Ayacucho has become a centre for memory studies investigations and commemorative ceremonies. Whilst there are many traditional arts and creative expressions which commemorate or depict some aspect of the violence, dance is not used it this way. Rather, I contend that the dance is being salvaged as a means of remembering and connecting to place. Migration Brings ChangeAs a direct result of the political violence, the city of Huamanga experienced a large influx of people from the surrounding rural areas, who moved to the city in search of relative safety. Rapid forced migration from the country to the city made integration very difficult due to the sheer volume of displaced populations (Coronel 2). As a result of the internal conflict approximately 450 rural communities in the southern-central Andes were either abandoned or destroyed; 300 of these were in the department of Ayacucho. As a result, Huamanga experienced an enormous influx of rural migrants. In fact, according to the United Nations International Human Rights Instruments, 30 per cent of all people displaced by the violence moved to Ayacucho (par. 39). As campesinos moved to the city in search of safety they formed new neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. Although many are now settled in Huamanga, holding professional positions, working in restaurants, running stalls, or owning shops, most maintain strong links to their community of origin. The ways in which individuals sustain connection to their homelands are many and varied. However, dance and fiesta play a central role in maintaining connection.During the years of violence, Sendero Luminoso actively prohibited the celebration of traditional ceremonies and festivals which they considered to be “archaic superstition” (Garcia 40). Reprisals for defying Sendero Luminoso directives were brutal; as a result many rural inhabitants restricted their ritual practices for fear of the tuta puriqkuna or literally, night walkers (Ritter 27). This caused a sharp decline in ritual custom during the conflict (27).As a result, many Ayacuchano campesinos feel they have been robbed of their cultural heritage and identity. There is now a conscious effort to rescatar y recorder or to salvage and remember what was been taken from them, or, in the words of Ruben Romani, a dance teacher from Huanta, “to salvage what was killed during the difficult years.”Los Carnavales Ayacuchanos Whilst carnival is celebrated in many parts of the world, the mention of carnival often evokes images of scantily clad Brazilians dancing to the samba rhythms in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, or visions of elaborate floats and extravagant costumes. None of these are to be found in Huamanga. Rather, the carnival dances celebrated by campesinos in Huamanga are not celebrations of ‘the now’ or for the benefit of tourists, but rather they are embodiments of the memory of a lost place. During carnival, that lost or left homeland is danced into being in the urban setting as a means of maintaining a connection to the homeland and of salvaging cultural heritage.In the Andes, carnival coincides with the first harvest and is associated with fertility and giving thanks. It is considered a time of joy and to be a great leveller. In Huamanga carnival is one of the most anticipated fiestas of the year. As I was told many times “carnival is for everyone” and “we all participate.” From the old to the very young, the rich and poor, men and women all participate in carnival."We all participate." Carnavales Rurales (rural carnival) is celebrated each Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival before Lent. Campesinos from the same rural communities, join together to form comparsas, or groups. Those who participate identify as campesinos; even though many participants have lived in the city for more than 20 years. Some of the younger participants were born in the city. Whilst some campesinos, displaced by the violence, are now returning to their communities, many more have chosen to remain in Huamanga. One such person is Rómulo Canales Bautista. Rómulo dances with the comparsa Claveles de Vinchos.Rómulo Bautista dancing the carnival of VinchosOriginally from Vinchos, Rómulo moved to Huamanga in search of safety when he was a boy after his father was killed. Like many who participate in rural carnival, Rómulo has lived in Huamanga for a many years and for the most part he lives a very urban existence. He completed his studies at the university and works as a professional with no plans to return permanently to Vinchos. However, Rómulo considers himself to be campesino, stating “I am campesino. I identify myself as I am.” Rómulo laughed as he explained “I was not born dancing.” Since moving to Huamanga, Rómulo learned the carnival dance of Vinchos as a means of feeling a connection to his place of origin. He now participates in rural carnival each year and is the captain of his comparsa. For Rómulo, carnival is his cultural inheritance and that which connects him to his homeland. Living and working in the urban setting whilst maintaining strong links to their homelands through the embodied expressions of fiesta, migrants like Rómulo negotiate and move between an urbanised mestizo identity and a rural campesino identity. However, for rural migrants living in Huamanga, it is campesino identity which holds greater importance during carnival. This is because carnival allows participants to feel a visceral connection to both land and ancestry. As Gerardo Muñoz, a sixty-seven year old migrant from Chilcas explained “We want to make our culture live again, it is our patrimony, it is what our grandfathers have left us of their wisdom and how it used to be. This is what we cultivate through our carnival.”The Plaza TransformedComparsa from Huanta enter the PlazaEach Sunday during the three weeks leading up to the official time of carnival the central Plaza is transformed by the dance, music and song of up to seventy comparsas participating in Carnavales Rurales. Rural Carnival has a transformative effect not only on participants but also on the wider urban population. At this time campesinos, who are generally marginalised, discounted or actively discriminated against, briefly hold a place of power and respect. For a few hours each Sunday they are treated as masters of an ancient art. It is no easy task to conjure the dynamic sensory world of dance in words. As Deidre Sklar questions, “how is the ineffable to be made available in words? How shall I draw out the effects of dancing? Imperfectly, and slowly, bit by bit, building fragments of sensation and association so that its pieces lock in with your sensory memories like a jigsaw puzzle” (17).Recalling the DanceAs comparsas arrive in the Plaza there is creative chaos and the atmosphere hums with excitement as more and more comparsas gather for the pasecalle or parade. At the corner of the plaza, the deafening crack of fire works, accompanied by the sounds of music and the blasting of whistles announce the impending arrival of another comparsa. They are Los Hijos de Chilcas from Chilcas in La Mar in the north-east of the department. They proudly dance and sing their way into the Plaza – bodies strong, their movements powerful yet fluid. Their heads are lifted to greet the crowd, their chests wide and open, eyes bright with pride. Led by the capitán, the dancers form two long lines in pairs the men at the front, followed by the women. All the men carry warakas, long whips of plaited leather which they crack in the air as they dance. These are ancient weapons which are later used in a ritual battle. They dance in a swinging stepping motion that swerves and snakes, winds and weaves along the road. At various intervals the two lines open out, doubling back on themselves creating two semicircles. The men wear frontales, pieces of material which hang down the front of the legs, attached with long brightly coloured ribbons. The dancers make high stepping motions, kicking the frontales up in the air as they go; as if moving through high grasses. The ribbons swish and fly around the men and they are clouded in a blur of colour and movement. The women follow carrying warakitas, which are shorter and much finer. They hold their whips in two hands, stretched wide in front of their bodies or sweeping from side to side above their heads. They wear large brightly coloured skirts known as polleras made from heavy material which swish and swoosh as they dance from side to side – step, touch together, bounce; step, touch together, bounce. The women follow the serpent pattern of the men. Behind the women are the musicians playing guitars, quenas and tinyas. The musicians are followed by five older men dressed in pants and suit coats carrying ponchos draped over the right shoulder. They represent the traditional community authorities known as Varayuq and karguyuq. The oldest of the men is carrying the symbols of leadership – the staff and the whip.The Choreography of PlaceFor the members of Los Hijos de Chilcas the dance represents the topography of their homeland. The steps and choreography are created and informed by the dancers’ relationship to the land from which they come. La Mar is a very mountainous region where, as one dancer explained, it is impossible to walk a straight line up or down the terrain. One must therefore weave a winding path so as not to slip and fall. As the dancers snake and weave, curl and wind they literally dance their “place” of origin into being. With each swaying movement of their body, with each turn and with every footfall on the earth, dancers lay the mountainous terrain of La Mar along the paved roads of the Plaza. The flying ribbons of the frontales evoke the long grasses of the hillsides. “The steps are danced in the form of a zigzag which represents the changeable and curvilinear paths that join the towns, as well as creating the figure eight which represents the eight anexos of the district” (Carnaval Tradicional). Los Hijos de ChilcasThe weaving patterns and the figure eights of the dance create a choreography of place, which reflects and evoke the land. This choreography of place is built upon with each step of the dance many of which emulate the native fauna. One of the dancers explained whilst demonstrating a hopping step “this is the step of a little bird” common to La Mar. With his body bent forward from the waist, left hand behind his back and elbow out to the side like a wing, stepping forward on the left leg and sweeping the right leg in half circle motion, he indeed resembled a little bird hopping along the ground. Other animals such as the luwichu or deer are also represented through movement and costume.Katrina Teaiwa notes that the peoples of the South Pacific dance to embody “not space but place”. This is true also for campesinos from Chilcas living in the urban setting, who invoke their place of origin and the time of the ancestors as they dance their carnival. The notion of place is not merely terrain. It includes the nature elements, the ancestors and those who also those who have passed away. The province of La Mar was one of the most severely affected areas during the years of internal armed conflict especially during 1983-1984. More than 1,400 deaths and disappearances were reported to the TRC for this period alone (CVR). Hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes and in many communities it became impossible to celebrate fiestas. Through the choreography of place dancers transform the urban streets and dance the very land of their origin into being, claiming the urban streets as their own. The importance of this act can not be overstated for campesinos who have lost family members and were forced to leave their communities during the years of violence. As Deborah Poole has noted dance is “…the active Andean voice …” (99). As comparsa members teach their children the carnival dance of their parents and grandparents they maintain ancestral connections and pass on the stories and embodied memories of their homes. Much of the literature on carnival views it as a release valve which allows a temporary freedom but which ultimately functions to reinforce established structures. This is no longer the case in Huamanga. The transformative effect of rural carnival goes beyond the moment of the dance. Through dancing the choreography of place campesinos salvage and restore that which was taken from them; the effects of which are felt by both the dancer and spectator.ConclusionThe closer examination of dance as embodied memory reveals those memory practices which may not necessarily voice the violence directly, but which are enacted, funded and embodied and thus, important to the people most affected by the years of conflict and violence. In conclusion, the dance of rural carnival functions as embodied memory which is danced into being through collective participation; through many bodies working together. Dancers who participate in rural carnival have absorbed the land sensorially and embodied it. Through dancing the land they give it form and bring embodied memory into being, imbuing the paved roads of the plaza with the mountainous terrain of their home land. For those born in the city, they come to know their ancestral land through the Andean voice of dance. The dance of carnival functions in a unique way making it possible for participants recall their homelands through a physical memory and to dance their place into being wherever they are. This corporeal memory goes beyond the normal understanding of memory as being of the mind for as Connerton notes “images of the past are remembered by way of ritual performances that are ‘stored’ in a bodily memory” (89). ReferencesAbercrombie, Thomas A. “La fiesta de carnaval postcolonial en Oruro: Clase, etnicidad y nacionalismo en la danza folklórica.” Revista Andina 10.2 (1992): 279-352.Carnaval Tradicional del Distrito de Chilcas – La Mar, Comparsas de La Asociación Social – Cultural “Los Hijos de Chilcas y Anexos”, pamphlet handed to the judges of the Atipinakuy, 2010.CVR. Informe Final. Lima: Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003. 1 March 2008 < http://www.cverdad.org.pe >.Bigenho, Michelle. “Sensing Locality in Yura: Rituals of Carnival and of the Bolivian State.” American Ethnologist 26.4 (1999): 95-80.Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1989.Coronel Aguirre, José, M. Cabrera Romero, G. Machaca Calle, and R. Ochatoma Paravivino. “Análisis de acciones del carnaval ayacuchano – 1986.” Carnaval en Ayacucho, CEDIFA, Investigaciones No. 1, 1986.Cowan, Jane. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.Garcia, Maria Elena. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education and Multicultural Development in Peru. California: Stanford University Press, 2005.Isbelle, Billie Jean. To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1985.Mendoza, Zoila S. Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Poole, Deborah. “Andean Ritual Dance.” TDR 34.2 (Summer 1990): 98-126.Ritter, Jonathan. “Siren Songs: Ritual and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 11.1 (2002): 9-42.Sklar, Deidre. “‘All the Dances Have a Meaning to That Apparition”: Felt Knowledge and the Danzantes of Tortugas, New Mexico.” Dance Research Journal 31.2 (Autumn 1999): 14-33.Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982.Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.Teaiwa, Katerina. "Challenges to Dance! Choreographing History in Oceania." Paper for Greg Denning Memorial Lecture, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 14 Oct. 2010.United Nations International Human Rights Instruments. Core Document Forming Part of the Reports of States Parties: Peru. 27 June 1995. HRI/CORE/1/Add.43/Rev.1. 12 May 2012 < http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/3ae6ae1f8.html >.
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