{"title":"“A Clean Conscience behind the Dark Bars”","authors":"Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10302835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10302835","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The iconification of political prisoners enhances their visibility, credibility, and power. Nevertheless, iconification may also reduce, reimagine, or otherwise distort the biographies and experiences of political prisoners. Moreover, iconicity’s blurring of prisoners’ views and activities may result in the recirculation of their stories in the service of political projects that do not fully align with their own. The incarceration of the Islamist icon Şule Yüksel Şenler (1938–2019) in 1971 presents an excellent vantage point from which to analyze these dynamics and how gender informs them in fundamental ways. The diverse media representations of Şule Yüksel Şenler demonstrate how historical tropes became entangled with critical references to the law, religion, and the discourses of freedom and democracy in the iconification of an Islamist political prisoner in Cold War Turkey. Şenler’s legacy and the recent references to her story show how the tendency of iconification to occlude or distort prisoners’ ideological investments and activities may in fact enhance their ability to integrate into new political projects. This case study of a right-wing political prisoner exposes how the histories of political incarceration, combined with the discourses of injustice and victimization, may also be used to legitimize authoritarian political regimes and new incarcerations.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41783997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Uncle Sugar’s Belles”","authors":"Kathleen E. Alfin","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10302821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10302821","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the confinement of Liberian women by US Army Forces in Liberia (USAFIL) for the purpose of regulated prostitution during World War II. The racial makeup of USAFIL as an overwhelmingly African American unit and its deployment to the only sovereign Black republic in Africa created what US Army officials called “an exceptional situation.” This essay explores what army leaders meant by “exceptional” and the resultant creation of “exceptional measures” to control sexual liaisons between American soldiers and women in Liberia. Sexual relations between Black GIs and Liberian women defied the racist segregationist logic used by American military leaders to police Black GIs’ sexuality elsewhere during the war. USAFIL officials consequently racialized venereal disease and prostitution to justify confining and regulating Black Liberian women’s bodies in the name of soldiers’ health, as well as to uphold their racial and military authority. Shifting perspectives, this case study then considers how women in Liberia resisted army regulation of their sexuality and what they gained and lost through sex work, despite their confinement. Finally, this essay analyzes USAFIL’s regulation of prostitution in a transnational comparative context to illuminate the exceptional authority US Army officials assumed and asserted over women and prostitution in Liberia.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42569895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Very Valley of the Shadow of Death”","authors":"Christian Høgsbjerg","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063692","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores the Black Trinidadian revolutionary historian C. L. R. James’s little-theorized engagement with questions of the environment and natural world from the 1930s to the 1980s, situating this within his wider oeuvre as a Marxist who not only experienced colonial domination in the Caribbean but also witnessed other catastrophes endemic to twentieth-century capitalism, from the Great War to the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and the Holocaust, the Second World War, and then the use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The essay first examines how James might be seen to have helped inspire contemporary theorizing around the “plantationocene” in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938). As early as 1951, James (and his fellow thinkers) noted: “It is not the world of nature that confronts man as an alien power to be overcome. It is the alien power that he has himself created.” The choice ahead, for James, was one of socialism or barbarism, rebellion or extinction. In 1958, evoking biblical language and imagery, he noted that we are already entering “the very valley of the shadow of death.”","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43390935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Critical Border Zones and Anti-extractive Thinking","authors":"M. Coletta","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063755","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While the notion of the Anthropocene signals the urgency for a climate transition, it stops short of restructuring the anthropocentric principles of the dominant economic and societal model. Pluriversal decolonial designs being debated and practiced in Latin America treat the crisis of the current civilizational model as an opportunity to propose alternatives that seek to reconceptualize the ways in which we organize social life. This article brings to light nondualistic epistemologies and argues that the anti-extractivist designs needed for building regenerative futures go hand in hand with anti-colonial epistemic resistance. A central part of the analysis focuses on the Aymara-Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, whose relational ontology allows us not only to confront the colonial legacy of the Anthropocene but also to acknowledge the global diffusion of coloniality. Through the Aymara linguistic concept of ch’ixi—a parallel coexistence of difference—Rivera Cusicanqui proposes new ways of building community beyond colonial dualisms and around socioecological knowledges.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46742562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anthropocene Narratives of Living with Resource Extraction in Africa","authors":"Iva Peša","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063818","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 African experiences have so far not been central to Anthropocene debates. While the Anthropocene usefully theorizes the planetary dimensions of environmental change, how do its propositions hold when applied to specific and widely divergent settings? Drawing from three examples—copper mining in Zambia, gold mining in South Africa, and oil drilling in Nigeria—this article examines varied experiences of environmental change in the Anthropocene. Resource extraction, which moves tons of earth and heavily pollutes the air and soils, epitomizes the Anthropocene. In order to grasp ways of living with extraction and its toxic legacies in African localities, it is necessary to consider situated histories of capitalism and colonialism and how these have generated intersectional positionalities, in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, and race. These histories inform actors’ abilities to envisage alternatives to the Anthropocene in the present and future. Inspired by decolonial frameworks, this article begins to chart more plural ways to write the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44867869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“In Difesa della Natura”","authors":"F. Martone, Rosa Jijón","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063907","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This contribution, inspired by critical debates on the Anthropocene and by the ideas of key Latin American thinkers and academics such as Maristella Svampa, aims at offering an overview of selected works of artists who operate in Latin America. Their work highlights some of the key contradictions and emerging arguments in the debate around the Anthropocene, notably its colonial and patriarchal character. Some of them represent the current systemic crisis induced by extractive capitalism, and underline the relevance of Indigenous peoples’ worldview and traditional knowledge or the connection between the exploitation of feminine bodies and extractivism. Their direct engagement and collaboration with Indigenous communities that resist extractivism visibilizes their agency and active contribution to radical transformation and ecological change, while contributing to challenge the power structures in which these operate.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41788097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"If It’s Vacant Take It","authors":"Zoe Goldstein","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063869","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reframes the current housing crisis in Oakland, California as environmental injustice and as an ongoing effect of racial capitalism. It also highlights recent examples of citizen-led land reclamation, which it argues retaliate against city-sponsored erasure of precariously housed residents and offer the potential to address economic, racial, and environmental injustice simultaneously. By disrupting the status quo of real estate price gouging and visibly reestablishing community on Oakland’s streets, these movements demonstrate alternatives to the capitalist dehumanization and manufactured scarcity at the heart of Oakland’s housing crisis.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46691228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Vast Bed of Combustible Fuel”","authors":"Matthew Shutzer, Arpitha Kodiveri","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063567","url":null,"abstract":"Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explores how contemporary debates about climate and sovereignty are connected to deeper histories of empire and capitalism in the global South. Arguing against recent critical appraisals of sovereignty that emphasize the elision of nature from formal political and legal theory, the article reconstructs a genealogy of sovereign power in the major fossil fuel-producing territories of India spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. It brings to light three historical articulations of sovereignty that undergird contemporary modes of extractive dispossession enforced by the Indian state: the discovery of fossil fuels as subjects of sovereign power during an early colonial project to build prison complexes in Indian coal mines; the juridical remaking of “land” under Benthamite-inspired laws of “real property;” and the politicization of fossil fuels as an underground commons belonging to the abstract entity of the postcolonial nation.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46398283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Germinations","authors":"A. Dawson, A. Paik","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063488","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The idea of the Anthropocene has spread far beyond its origins in geology, becoming common in contemporary activist and intellectual circles. But who is responsible for the mounting disasters associated with the age of anthropos, and who should be made to pay reparations? What if the onset of the Anthropocene was tenaciously resisted in various different historical moments and parts of the planet? This issue recuperates the alternative worlds, orientations, and subaltern environmental movements that constitute radical historical alternatives to the Anthropocene. We conceptualize these alternatives as seeds of ecological insurrection, sometimes lying long dormant but always ready to rise up again when the time is right. At a moment when elites have intransigently refused to decarbonize society, we must look back to histories of revolt to broaden the repertoire of militant tactics available to face the environmental emergency.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48416693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Abolish the Monopolizing of the Earth”","authors":"Adam E. Quinn","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063606","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an industrial capitalist order stretched its grasp across the globe, placing control of farms, mines, and forests in the hands of wealthy industrialists. Living through this period of rapid and unequal economic and environmental change, anarchists denounced what they called the monopolizing of the earth and its products. Anarchists were deeply critical of the privatization of the environment and saw restricting access to nature as a core component of inequality and poverty. This article considers the environmental politics of transnational anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With anarchism’s geographically and ideologically diverse participants in mind, it incorporates the natural science-informed utopian visions of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, the revolutionary and anti-colonial food and land politics of Ricardo Flores Magón, and the nature-informed radical sex politics of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. It finds that “anarchism” did not just mean the destruction of the state and capitalism to its advocates, but the construction of a new political-economic-natural system that saw the liberation of people and the defense of nature as inextricably connected. The article concludes with a call to both include anarchism as a part of the genealogy of environmentalism and consider anarchism’s environmental politics in ongoing conversations about the relationships between environmental crises and human inequalities.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47471700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}