Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Debt, Public, 1914-“

The study, based on archival sources and scientific publications, identifies a number of issues related to the history of the formation of women's educational institutions in Galicia in the early twentieth century. Coverage of the peculiarities of the formation and development of women's seminaries for teacher training in Ukraine as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is considered on the example of the State Women's Teachers' Seminary in Berezhany. It has been found that the introduction of new educational institutions – men's and women's teachers' seminaries had been based on the Austrian state school law of 1869, which introduced significant changes in the process of teacher training. From the results of the article it has been identified that women's educational institutions had been created in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to provide public (primary) schools with teachers and aimed at professional self-realization of women. The research focuses on the women's teacher's seminary in Berezhany which was opened in 1910/1911. The article analyzes archival documents from the collection of the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in L’viv, in particular the materials of the fund № 179 "Curator of the L’viv School District", case 1111 "Case of transfer of premises in Senyavsky Castle in Berezhany by the local city community for a women's seminary". Based on the documents of the case on the transfer of the Senyavsky Castle in Berezhany by the local city community for the women's seminary, the content of the official correspondence of state and local authorities regarding the location and financing of the women's teacher's seminary in Berezhany during 1913-1926 has been revealed. It has been found that before the war, the magistrate of Berezhany had handed over a house and 1 ½ of morgue - land in the center to the needs of the seminary, but the construction of the seminary building had not been started due to the war. On March 5, 1915, the Ministry of Religion and Education in Vienna granted the Berezhany community an annual subvention of 6,000 kroons as donations to a house on a needs of a teachers' seminary. The war made it impossible to further pay that subvention in the school years from 1914/1915 to 1918/1919. Therefore, the school regional council, expressing a request to the magistrate of Berezhany, appealed to the Ministry of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to support the commitment of the Ministry of Finance regarding the annual subvention payment for 1919 and 1920. The Polish government refused any legal obligations to the Berezhany community to pay debts. subventions for the years 1914-1919 instead of the Austrian government. In the case of the seminary in Berezhany, the curator of the Lviv school district, in a letter dated January 4, 1923, proposed to accept the gift of the castle in Berezhany proposed by Mr. Yakub Potocki for the use of the teacher's seminary, which was rejected by the Ministry of Education of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, based on a careful analysis of the condition of the monument. As a result of an agreement with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Religion and Education decided to distribute the community of Berezhany the amount of 20,000 Polish marks for the needs of the teachers' seminary. The article reveals that the historical experience of the formation and development of women’s education in Galicia on the example of the Berezhany Teachers’ Seminary as an important asset of Ukrainian science and education.

Abstract The 75 years history of Albina Bank reflects in its main characteristics that particularize it in the modern banking system the forms and crediting policies present in its statutes. The initial focus of the Albina Bank board was to activate a diverse palate of credit activities – in the first statute of the bank we can find no less than 15 types of loans. Few were actually accommodated, according to the possibilities of financing and also related to the social and economic background of the future debtors that came, the majority until 1918 from the rural areas. More so, the bank took into account the economic, financial and political context where the Romanian elite from Transylvania activated. Thus, in the first period of activity of the Albina bank its board will activate the most mobile types of crediting (credit of input and lending with public collaterals) wanting to increase the funding sources. Later on, after a period of stability with regard to its financing capacity the bank will activate the mortgages and credits with bills of exchange covered by mortgage more suitable for economic investments in the rural areas with the perspective to use the higher lending for larger scale investments to modernize the land properties and acquiring land properties. In the same time for the everyday needs of the small owners the bank will open the so-called peasant credits or credits on agricultural products. For the needs of merchants and craftsmen the bank will introduce the overdraft. Until 1914 the credit of input and the mortgages will predominate. The mortgages will be backed financially by the ability of the bank to issue land bills. Next in value we can find credits with bills of exchange covered by mortgage, followed by the overdraft rather unstable in earnings. The credits for peasants and the credits on agricultural products were dropped at the beginning of the 20th century. A special place had the buying of the bills of exchange that Albina has issued in the first two decades of its existence to support its own banking business. Later on, with the development of its own liquidities it started to offer credits and buy bills of exchange from a large number of Romanian banks and credit institutions this turning Albina into a major trader in bank securities intermediating buying and selling of bills of exchange between Romanian and Austro Hungarian banks until 1918, preserving this role even in the interwar period for some of the small and mid-size banks. The bank will also acquire shares and public effects to consolidate its financial capability. The negative consequences of World War 1 were reflected in the drop in the nominal and real value of the bank’s business but also the crediting policies by reevaluating the volume of the main crediting activities. Thus the value of the mortgages and the exchange credits has decreased and the overdrafts became dominant by 1924, maintaining first place in the activity of the bank even after. The major political changes after the unification and the economic changes brought in by inflation, conversion, and depreciation of the currency along with the financial practices of the Old Kingdom banking system will bring about new options in the crediting policy of the bank in the post-war period. First, the bank sought to diversify the crediting targets to expand the lending to companies and industrial enterprises. This opening towards the urban environment imposed faster trading of capital and the transformation of the credits. They became more mobile, the long-term credit being reduced gradually until its extinction. The overdraft and the credits with bills of exchange will be preferred and the credits with bills of exchange covered by mortgage will diminish until their disappearance from the accounts starting with 1934. The economic crisis between 1929 and 1933 will negatively impact the bank. The debts, especially those of the peasant clients, will be blocked. This situation will be partially resolved by the Conversion of Debt Law in April 1934 but has impacted greatly its financial capabilities. The law for the organization of banking commerce in June 1934 will help bank Albina to redefine its crediting policies towards more mobility but the rhythm of its progress will be slow until the Second World War. The accounts of the bank show a focus towards more mobility in crediting. There were two main directions in the bank activity. Of exchange credit and overdraft with titles, mortgages, and goods as collateral. Then there were the shares and titles portfolios, the debt conversions, the long-term lending (not significant and registered only until 1940), and the real estate portfolio. Concluding we note that the crediting mode of Albina was structured over time, based not just on the financial resources, intentions, and bank policies but was influenced by the changes in legislation that organized the everyday functioning of the financial and banking business, and overall they were influenced by the economic and geopolitical context.

Men’s bodies were one of the more notable sites of conflict in Northern Ireland after the 1918 armistice. Long before the war was over, Ulstermen had become part of a public legacy of blood-sacrifice and the epic mythology of warrior manliness surrounding the 36th (Ulster) Division. The predominantly Protestant north-east of Ireland revelled in heroic language and romantic sentiment about their losses and the consequences of their sacrifice. For years after their most famous battle at the Somme on the 1st of July 1916, Unionists maintained a vibrant communal memory that pointedly excluded the achievements and sacrifices of the 16th (Irish) and 10th (Irish) Divisions, to the detriment of northern Nationalist veterans. More importantly, the ramifications of northern society’s understanding of soldiering masculinities directly led to some of the more infamous physical events of The Troubles from 1920 to 1922. These episodes included the violent shipyard expulsions in Belfast, the intimidation of shell-shocked ex-servicemen, membership in vigilante paramilitary societies, and government-mandated floggings of Catholic veterans in a society that prized service in the Great War as the greatest hallmark of modern Irish masculinity. The language of sacrifice within the public sphere, witnessed in public discourse and literally imprinted upon the bodies of those deemed unworthy and unmanly, mythologized one group of men at the expense of another, making the legacy of the Great War and the actions of and upon male bodies highly significant and influential factors in Northern Ireland for the rest of the twentieth century.

In this paper, we analyze the sustainability of Italian public finances using a unique database covering the period 1862-2013. This paper focuses on empirical tests for the sustainability and solvency of fiscal policies. A necessary but not sufficient condition implies that the growth rate of public debt should in the limit be smaller than the asymptotic rate of interest. In addition, the debt-to-GDP ratio must eventually stabilize at a steady-state level. The results of unit root and stationarity tests show that the variables are non-stationary at levels, but stationary in first-differences form, or I(1). However, some breaks in the series emerge, given internal and external crises (wars, oil shocks, regime changes, institutional reforms). Therefore, the empirical analysis is conducted for the entire period, as well as two sub‐periods (1862‐1913 and 1947‐2013). Moreover, anecdotal evidence and visual inspection of the series confirm our results. Furthermore, we conduct tests on cointegration, which evidence that a long-run relationship between public expenditure and revenues is found only for the first sub-period (1862-1913). In essence, the paper’s results reveal that Italy have sustainability problems in the Republican age.

This article explores the shifting relationship between the state and the rural elites in Sichuan during the last decades of the Qing dynasty through the lens of taxation and public debt by using a creditor-debtor model as a theoretical framework. Sichuan’s unique rewarded land tax surcharge, called the “Contribution” and levied since 1864, established a relationship of symbolic and economic indebtedness of the imperial and local state to the taxpayer. Western-inspired reforms after 1898 directly attacked the symbolic and economic bonds established by the Contribution. The Railway Rent Share tax shifted the creditor-debtor relationship from the state to the public Sichuan-Hankou Railway Company by making individual taxpayers into shareholders. When Beijing eventually banned what it saw as a privatization of taxation and decided to nationalize the railway company, this ignited the Railway Protection Movement, which precipitated the 1911 Revolution in Sichuan.

Global debt has risen dangerously since the early 2000s, but most governments and central banks are more supportive of investors, because they keep printing money and buying back financial assets to provide markets and economy with liquidity. In this regard, we can see increasing concern not only about the growing debt burden of the world economy, but also about the impact of this problem on the dynamics of economic inequality. The aim of the work is to analyse and clarify the relationships between public debt and economic inequality in the USA for the period of 1910–2018. This study concludes that the level of economic inequality is not directly related to the specific level of public debt and changes under the influence of other factors, such as taxes and government spending on combating poverty, financed by the new government debt. Modern financial policies lead to increased economic inequality in wealth, which is confirmed by the data for most countries. In many developed countries, there is a progressive taxation system that curbs the rising income inequality. However, in most of them, there are complex tax relief and deduction systems for long-term investors, the problem of offshore and tax avoidance remains unresolved, which creates great obstacles to solving the problem of the growing economic inequality. In the context of the galloping inflation of financial assets, the growth rate of labor income is guaranteed to be lower than the growth rate of investment income. In the recommendations, the author justifies the modern problem of the public debt growth. The main risk in addressing this problem in the context of economic inequality regulation is the risk of increasing intergenerational economic inequality. We see how the tax burden is being transferred to future generations, while modern taxpayers have better opportunities to improve their quality of life, accumulate adequate pension capital and generally live with a higher level of financing of public goods. All this may not be the case for future generations of taxpayers due to the likely exacerbation of the debt problem in the future, since they will either have to pay more taxes on their income, pay a high inflation tax, or go to reduce public spending and finance public goods to solve the “unsolvable debt problem”. In this regard, the main recommendations today are to make every possible effort to contain the growth of public debt to a rate no higher than the growth of the economy; to develop a system of fiscal regulation of investor wealth and investment income; to optimize inheritance taxes; and, of course, to continue solving the problem of tax avoidance and offshore.

Abstract The historic Jewish Purification House Bet Tahara was erected in Olsztyn in 1913 on the basis of the debut design of Erich Mendelsohn, a world-famous architect born in Olsztyn. The most valuable element of the building is a self-supporting pyramid vault above a mourning hall. The paper presents the interesting structure of the building, its technical condition before renovation, as well as the scope of work involved in adapting it into a public utility building - MENDELSOHN HOUSE Intercultural Dialogue Centre. The undertaking was executed thanks to the commitment of the building’s leaseholder - “Borussia” Cultural Community Association, which raised money for this goal from public funds.

Un siglo después del informe Flexner en 1910 se publicó el libro titulado “Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform of Medical School and Residency”, que hizo un llamado a fortalecer la formación de la identidad profesional, integrar las ciencias básicas con el aprendizaje clínico e implementar la evaluación por competencias. La educación tradicional no es compatible con estas recomendaciones. A hacer se aprende haciendo, y la forma de lograrlo es “jugar el juego completo”.

The Portuguese First Republic (1910–1926) was marked by significant instability at the most diverse levels. With a special focus on the financial dimension of this period, the objective of this paper is to test the sustainability of the Portuguese fiscal policy, also referred to as the sustainability of public finances itself. The methodology involves testing the stationarity of public debt and budget balance and also the cointegration between state revenue and expenditure. The results obtained shows that the state’s intertemporal budgetary constraint was violated during the First Republic regime, which denotes unsustainability. This conclusion is justified by the existence of a non-stationary budget balance and the absence of cointegration between state revenue and expenditure. These results are manifestly different from those that have already been obtained for other Portuguese regimes, namely for the Estado Novo (1933–1974) and democracy (1974–present), where sustainability existed. This paper is yet another demonstration of how important it is to maintain control of state’s accounts. We hope that this paper can be useful to stimulate new research on Portuguese public finances and also on the important issue of fiscal policy sustainability.

Elizaveta Nikolaevna Vodovozova (nee Tsevlovskaya, second marriage surname - Semevskaya; born August 5(17), 1844; died March 23, 1923), a graduate of Smolny Institute, was a Russian children's writer, memoirist, and a most prominent researcher and educator of her time. In the late 1860s, together with her husband Vasily Vodovozov, she went to Europe to learn the methods of family education and raising children in public institutions. Her journalistic debut “What Stops a Woman from Becoming Independent?” was a response to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's novel What Is To Be Done? The essay was published under a pseudonym in the magazine Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya in September 1863. Vodovozova authored the most popular pre-revolutionary book for parents Mental and Moral Education of Children from the First Manifestation of Consciousness to School Age (St. Petersburg, 1871), which was re-issued seven times in pre-1917 Russia (7th ed. St. Petersburg, 1913). In this book, Vodovozova proposed to base preschool education on folk songs, games, and fairy tales. She supplemented her educational program with the manual Russian Folk Songs for One Voice and Active Games for Children (St. Petersburg, 1871). In the 1870s, Vodovozova actively published in the pedagogical journals Detskoe Chtenie, Narodnaya Shkola, and Golos Uchitelya. In 1880, she published a collection of children's stories For Leisure. In her memoirs, Vodovozova described the life and works of Konstantin Ushinsky, Vasily Vodovozov, Vasily Semevsky and other educators. Her autobiographical novel At the Dawn of Life (St. Petersburg, 1911), like other memoirs, had several reissues. Later, the novel was adopted for children and published as The Story of a Childhood to be actively published in pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia. According to Vodovozova, her magnum opus aimed at dissiminating ethnographic knowledge among young people was the three-volume The Life of the Peoples of Europe. Narratives in Geography (St. Petersburg, 1875-1883). Having revised and abridged this work, she published it as a ten-volume low-price series How People of Different Nations Live (St. Petersburg, 1894-1901), illustrated by Viktor Vasnetsov and other famous artists. In the third volume “The Life of European Nations”, she told about the history of the Rusins of Galician Rus, the national revival, the current situation, the folk and literary language, religion, traditional material and spiritual culture. The ninth volume “How people live in the world” also describes the Galician Rusins, their history, religion, education, organizations, and folk culture. The writer tried to understand the reasons for the difficult material situation of the Rusin peasants.

The May 4th Movement of 1919 is a significant period of ideological change in Chinese modern history, and in it is during this time that the ideological enlightenment of modern Chinese women made its debut. Led by modern intellectuals, they, from all angles, criticized the traditional social structure, traditional etiquette and feudal family system hindering the liberation and development of women, and further discussed the emancipation of women in terms of ideological education, economic independence, family status, freedom of marriage, ethics, social communication, as well as other relevant social issues. The intense exchange of ideas influenced public opinion, provoking enormous responses from all sections of society, particularly from women. Based on real educational and economic issues concerning women, combined with theories, real thoughts and practices, and carried out with a series of practical social reform activities, the ideological emancipation of women in the May 4th Movement of 1919 laid a solid foundation for the transition of traditional women to modern women, thus becoming the source of ideological emancipation of modern women in China.

Between 1927 and 1932, the policy-making elite of the British Government was presented with a difficult problem. Postwar attempts to explain the origins of the First World War had resulted in the belief that arms production and competition had largely been responsible for instigating the conflict. Such a view became accepted by the general public in Britain. Specifically, the pre-1914 naval competition between Germany and Great Britain was thought to be one of the key events that had contributed directly to the outbreak of the war. Such fears concerning naval armaments were touted by peace activists as having been instrumental in assuring the success of the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. Yet, this simple explanation does not adequately illustrate the intricate and complex connections that were made between naval armaments and other issues related to Britain's international affairs. Rather than the simple possession of naval arms, British leaders feared that other pressing issues would lead to a re-occurrence of hostilities. Questions concerning world oil supplies, reparations, war debts, tariffs, the value of the pound and the gold standard, and, particularly, belligerent rights and freedom of the seas, were all viewed as having the potential to generate another international conflict. Thus, the existence of armaments themselves was not Britain's primary security problem from the perspective of the policy-making elite. Rather, their common cause was how to protect Britain's position as the center of a world economic system. Safeguarding Britain's own stable position as a focus that provided leadership for the rest of the world was seen as the logical step to ensuring global stability. In order to create an atmosphere of goodwill and security that was necessary to prevent volatile issues from exploding, the British governing elite treated naval arms talks and naval armaments as a form of currency in the realm of international relations.

The 19th and 20th century in the history of Poland was primarily a time of foreign domination by neighbouring countries, mainly Russia and Germany. Except for the inter-war period of 1918–1939 when there was an attempt to rebuild an independent country, Polish culture in its social and economic dimension underwent a vicious destruction for almost 2 centuries. For that reason, political changes initiated in Poland in 1989 resulted in the emergence of new hope for the revival of its sovereignty and its restoration as a sovereign and democratic country. After years of enslavement the regenerated Poland was economically weak in almost all its dimensions. Due to decisions made in the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century there was a hope for a clear acceleration of social and economic growth. The activities required the necessity of implementation of economic and rational procedures in financial management as well as the allocation of huge financial resources mainly for investment in the area of public utilities, and also for the implementation of modern technologies and methods in nearly all areas of economic and social life. The article is dedicated to the problem of the financial security of the country in relation to the burdens of debt of local authorities, particularly those at the lowest level of the governance structure of the country. Assuming that local authorities in the Polish legal system are public-legal unions equipped with a legal identity that act in their own name and at their own responsibility, it is the members of organisations who are directly responsible for an excessive indebtedness which can affect not only the financial security of the whole public-legal union which is a local self-government, but also the financial security of citizens.

Suele considerarse a Ser y tiempo, la obra magna de Heidegger, como una obra sin historia. Los recientes estudios y la publicación de las obras, lecciones y conferencias de Heidegger del periodo que va entre 1915, fecha en la que se publica la tesis de habilitación de Heidegger, y 1927, cuando se publica Ser y tiempo, han desmentido esta idea que el propio Heidegger mediante el silenció reforzó. Estas obras publicadas póstumamente en torno a esta primera década del siglo XXI exponen la génesis de las ideas que luego originarían Ser y tiempo y lo que debe el pensamiento de Heidegger a la influencia de Husserl, así como muestran cómo de la fenomenología de este último se fue distanciando la fenomenología existencial heideggeriana. Entre esos textos que sólo ahora han visto la luz destacamos la conferencia de 1924 «El concepto de Tiempo» ya que expone la ruptura del pensamiento de Heidegger con la fenomenología husserliana y la separación entre teología y filosofía.

The aim of the article is to establish the scientific prerequisites for tractorization in Ukraine in the early twentieth century. Research methods: general-historical and special-historical methods. Main results: the article examines historical background and factors that contributed to the spread and use of the first tractors in Ukraine, the emergence of domestic tractor construction and widespread tractorization of agriculture in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic in the 20s years of the twentieth century. The author uses the term “tractorization” which has not been used in scientific sources for a long time. It means the spread of scientific, technical and everyday ideas about tractors, the creation and distribution of their various models, the introduction of these machines into domestic agriculture and other spheres of life at the beginning of the twentieth century. A list of arguments and facts confirms that 1913 was a turning point in the study, popularization and distribution of tractors both in the world and in Ukraine. The features and results of testing the first tractors on the territory of modern Ukraine are described. The outstanding role of the first scientists and engineers who organized the testing of tractors and disseminated information about the results of these tests on farms and at exhibitions (D. Artsybashev, A. Baranovsky, V. Batyushkov, K. Debu, V. Koval B. Lintvarev, M. Pigulevsky, A. Treivas) is shown. The significant contribution to the study of the tractor business and the promotion of foreign-made tractors in Ukraine made by scientific associations, state and public institutions, as well as individual scientists is highlighted. Concise conclusions: it is determined that tsarist Russia had all the conditions and resources for the development of its own tractor industry before 1917, including Ukraine. It is proven that the development of this industry was interrupted by the Bolshevik coup and the Civil War, and until the mid-1920s, the use of tractors in Ukrainian agriculture was only isolated and completely dependent on imports of this equipment. The mass production of tractors in the USSR was organized only in the early 1930s with the commissioning of Stalingrad Tractor and Kharkiv Tractor plants. Meanwhile the needs of Ukrainian agriculture in tractors were met mainly through the mass import mainly from the United States that became important for the tractorization and its technical modernization. The practical significance: recommended for use in teaching the history of science and technology of the early twentieth century. Originality: the generalization of experience of historiography research in tractorization process is used. Scientific novelty: for the first time the role of the All-Russian factory, trade-industrial, agricultural and scientific-artistic exhibition, which took place in Kyiv in the summer-autumn of 1913 and was accompanied by testing the tractors, is covered. Type of article: research.

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo la reconstrucción del concepto de terror en la primera década del siglo XX. La delimitación temporal se debe a que en ese lapso se publicó un compendio de relatos de tópico terrorífico, intitulado Cuentos malévolos (1904), del escritor peruano Clemente Palma. Para lograr la configuración semántica del término aludido, se recurre a la documentación de fuentes periodísticas de ese entorno (como El Comercio, La Prensa, Variedades, entre otros), para respaldar la percepción asumida del mismo. A través de la confrontación de estos discursos, es notoria la influencia que recibe el autor por parte de las temáticas derivadas, como la asociación del terror con la criminalidad o el oscurantismo que se desenvuelven por personas desequilibradas. Igualmente, la ideología y la filosofía que se extraen se vinculan con el ateísmo y todo lo que critica y cuestiona los dogmas de la religión judeocristiana.

Avant d’être appelé à occuper la première chaire de pathologic à l'Universitc de Genève, Friedrich Wilhelm Zahn a publié en 1871 sa these de doctoral intitules: Zur Lehre von der Entzündung und Eiterung. Ce travail, rédigé sous la direction d’ Edwin Klebs, à Berne, démontre expërimentale merit que le prétendu Microsporon septicum (un champignon infectieux identifié par ce dernier) provoque une inflammation locale ainsi que Fapparition de foyers de suppuration secondaires, a distance. Cette étude confirme apparemment Fhypothèse de Klebs selon laquelle le Microsporon septicum, habituellement present dans les plates, est la cause d' une maladie infectieuse. La recherche de Zahn fait d’emblée Fob jet d’une critique, également adressée à Klebs : V identification du microorga-nisme, de rnëme que la demonstration de son action causale ne s ont pas concluan-tes. A Fissue du debat, il est admis qu’un microorganisme ne pent être la cause d'un état infectieux qu'aux deux conditions suivantes: il doit être considéré comme identifié selon la méthode de Koch, et la relation causale qui l'unit à la maladie infectieuse doit être spédfique. C’est ce que la thèse de Zahn n’est précisément pas parvenue a dérnontrer. L’analyse du contenu de cette recherche ainsi que des critiques qu’elle a suscitées nous permet de mettre en lumière les divers arguments qui ont alimenté la controverse sur la cause de l'inflammation et de la suppuration ä l'aube de l'ère bactériologique.

The Sami author Matti Aikio from Karasjok made his debut in 1904 in Copenhagen with Kong Akab [‘King Akab’]. He was one of the world’s earliest indigenous authors, and presented his first novel to the Norwegian public with I dyreskind [‘In Hide’] in 1906. The last of a total of six novels was Bygden på elvenesset [The Parish on the Riverbank], launched posthumously in 1929. In this article I present a post-colonial reading of this last novel of his. My hypothesis is that he wrote his first Norwegian novel anew, but this time social success amongst the Sami population is dependent upon the conduct of Sami culture. All of his novels reflect upon different strategies at hand for members of an ethnic minority in times of an advancing European industry, economy and culture, heavily influenced by a social-Darwinist political and anthropological cosmology. Being the first registered Sami student of Norway, while writing his novels in Norwegian, Matti Aikio developed skills as a master of mimicry. Having experienced the importance of hybridity, he studies the limits of mimicry in his novels. This is the main project of his literary work, and with tools from post-colonial literary theories, this essay discusses the author’s attitudes to the possibilities of his own ethnic culture’s survival in the future.

BACKGROUND: HIV infection remains a public health challenge. This study assessed sexual practices among casual workers at the Cobblestone construction, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. METHODS: This was a quantitative cross-sectional study carried out among the labourers at the Cobblestone construction sites between October – December 2018. Multi-stage sampling was used to estimate the sample size. Demographic and sexual practice information were collected using a structured questionnaire. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to determine associations between variables; P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. RESULTS: We recruited 627 labourers. Majority (82.2%) were aged between 18 and 38 years; average age at onset of sexual debut was 17.9 ±2.67 and 19.14 ±2.18 years among males and females respectively. Majority (68.5%) were married; exposure to pornography was 40.2% and 32% among male and female respectively. Lifetime multiple sexual practices were prevalent (59.9% and 50.0%) among males and females respectively; extramarital sex was prevalent (66.9%) among males but protected sex was relatively low (46.2%). Being employed significantly associated with likelihood of first exposure to alcohol (P =0.029), level of education, exposure to pornography and knowledge of symptoms of STIs significantly associated with multiple sexual practices. CONCLUSION: Prevalence of risky sexual practices among the labourers were high which risks them to HIV infections. Innovative approaches to behavioural change are needed to reduce risks of HIV infection.

The paper presents the history of the development of the Budapest Time Machine (www.hungaricana.hu/en/budapest-time-machine), which started from the vision of the Venice Time Machine, despite the fact that it was never realised, but was the basis for the European Time Machine Initiative. The Budapest Time Machine was a visionary phenomenon from the moment of its debut, and it has maintained this position ever since: one of the flagships of the international Time Machine initiative from the very beginning. The development was launched by the Budapest City Archives in 2017. The background database of the Budapest Time Machine is the Hungarian public collection portal called Hungaricana, on which the Budapest City Archives continuously publishes a large amount of digitised archival sources (maps, blueprints, notarial deeds etc.). The interface of the Budapest Time Machine – whose first version was developed in 2017 provides digitized and georeferenced maps of Budapest, synchronized with each other using GPS coordinates, and vectorised historical maps of the city’s development in five different time sections (1837, 1872, 1908, 1916, 1938). The platform also allows browsing through historical documents related to the buildings, their owners or their former inhabitants: building plans, land registry inserts showing the owners, notarial deeds showing legal and administrative transactions of the period and the network of the inhabitants. Archival photographs and postcards are also easily searchable, either by address or by browsing the map. The Budapest Time Machine was completely renewed at the end of 2022. The advantage of the new version is that, unlike the previous version, it provides a single interface for accessing the data, and the maps can now be viewed in 3D. An important innovation is the publication of 3D historical reconstructions of some 30 buildings in cooperation with the University of Óbuda. The Budapest Time Machine is an example of collaboration between public collections and academic research, and we plan to include data created by NGOs in the future.

RESUMOObjetivo: avaliar a efetividade das orientações em saúde no contexto domiciliar na capacidade funcional de idosos com úlceras venosas. Método: estudo quantitativo, descritivo, do tipo estudo de múltiplos casos, realizado no Ambulatório de Reparo de Feridas e domicílios de pacientes. A coleta de dados ocorreu por meio de instrumento de avaliação da unidade de saúde, da Escala de KATZ-EIAVD, do Índice de TINETTI e de roteiro de orientações a serem prestadas aos sujeitos da pesquisa que receberam visita domiciliar. Resultados: os casos estudados apresentaram melhoras sobre a capacidade funcional após a realização de orientações em saúde. Conclusão: as melhoras percentuais observadas apontam que o enfermeiro na visita domiciliar deve considerar e avaliar as necessidades dos pacientes com úlcera venosa estabelecendo um plano assistencial. Descritores: Cuidados de Enfermagem; Úlcera Varicosa; Visita Domiciliar; Assistência Ambulatorial; Atenção à Saúde; Saúde Pública.ABSTRACTObjective: to evaluate the effectiveness of health guidelines in the home context regarding the functional capacity of older adults with venous ulcers. Method: quantitative, descriptive, multiple-case study conducted at the Wound Repair Outpatient Clinic and patient's homes. Data collection was done through a tool for evaluation of the health unit, the KATZ-EIAVD Scale, the TINETTI Index, and the script of guidelines to be provided to research subjects who received home visits. Results: the cases studied showed improvement of functional capacity after the application of health guidelines. Conclusion: the percentage of improvement observed indicates that nurses should consider and evaluate the needs of patients with venous ulcers to establish a care plan. Descriptors: Nursing care; Varicose ulcer; Home visit; Ambulatory Care; Health Care; Public Health.RESUMENObjetivo: evaluar la efectividad de las orientaciones en salud en el contexto domiciliario en la capacidad funcional de ancianos con úlceras venosas. Método: estudio cuantitativo, descriptivo, del tipo estudio de múltiples casos, realizado en el Ambulatorio de Reparo de Heridas y domicilios de pacientes. La recolección de datos fue por medio de instrumento de evaluación de la unidad de salud, de la Escala de KATZ-EIAVD, del Índice de TINETTI y de guía de orientaciones a ser prestadas a los sujetos de la investigación que recibieron visita domiciliaria. Resultados: los casos estudiados presentaron mejoras sobre la capacidad funcional después de la realización de orientaciones en salud. Conclusión: las mejorías de porcentaje observadas apuntan que el enfermero en la visita domiciliaria debe considerar y evaluar las necesidades de los pacientes con úlcera venosa estableciendo un plano asistencial. Descriptores: Atención de Enfermería; Úlcera Varicosa; Visita Domiciliaria; Atención ambulatoria; Atención a la Salud; Salud Pública.

The purpose of the study: To identify the prevalence of various forms of urinary tract infection (UTI) in the population of Ukrainian women according to age. To determine the frequency of recurrent urinary tract infection in the female population, to determine the correlation of the form, duration and course of the disease, the frequency of relapses with the treatment and the nature of the medical care received. Material and methods. We designed, validated and implemented the web-based online questionnaire on prevalence, medical history and medical care of the urinary tract infections among 539 women (18-80 years old) in Ukraine. Results. A total of 339 (62.9%) women had symptoms of UTI. The prevalence of UTI in the 18-35 age group was 48.6%, that in the 36-55 age group 76.1 %, and that among women over 55 years old 75.5%. The growth trend in the number of UTI episodes, reported by the patients, was related to their age: older women generally suffered more UTI episodes during life compared to younger respondents. It was demonstrated that the main risk factors for the debut of UTI episode were the UTI history in the mother (40.2% of all patients), sexual activity (36.1%), childhood history of UTIs (23.9%), hypothermia (22.1%), bathing in the pool or pond (20.1%) and changing a sexual partner (18.9%). All other risk factors, including dietary disorders, overheating, gynecological visits, manipulations, abortions, childbirth and the puerperium, catheterization and the use of spermicides, did not play a significant role in the debut of a UTI episode among the interviewed patient population. We found a correlation between the main UTI risk factors and the type of disease course: sexual life played the main role in recurrent forms of disease (40.3% of patients with frequently recurrent UTIs) against 14.5% of patients with a single UTI episode where more significant factors included dietary disturbance (19.2%), hypothermia (29.5%) and bathing in ponds (20.9%). Conclusions. Frequently recurring course of UTI is inherent in 14.6% of the interviewed women and defines a 12% higher symptom score, reduction of quality of life by 26.8%, decrease of social activity by 19.4%, decline of physical activity by 20.4%, and an increase in deviations in family life and sexual activity by 25.4% and 7.9% respectively as compared to patients with sporadic UTIs. Patients with a recurrent UTI report, in general, 31.6% greater restrictions on visiting public places, 31% greater manifestations of social isolation and 42.2% worse relationships with a partner or spouse.

En el Perú existe poco más de 20 revistas de psicología, esta cifra ha ido variando con el tiempo. La primera revista psicológica que se publicó en el país fue la Revista de Psicología de la Sociedad Peruana de Psicología que se editó desde 1959 hasta 1961, y que abarcó solamente cuatro números. Por su puesto que antes de ello, se publicaron otras revistas que tocaron temas psicológicos como la Revista Peruana de Psiquiatría y Disciplinas Conexas que se publicó entre 1918 y 1924, así como la Revista de Neuro-psiquiatría que se publica hasta la fecha desde 1938; ambas publicaciones fueron fundadas por Honorio Delgado (1892-1969). Su sobrino Carlos Alberto Seguín (1907-1995) fundó en 1950 la revista Estudios Psicosomáticos y en 1964 la Revista de Ciencias Psicológicas y Neurológicas, ambas duraron muy poco tiempo. Otras revistas que han tocado saberes psicológicos a través del tema del consumo de sustancias psicoactivas fueron la revista Psicoactiva y la Revista Peruana de Drogodependencias, pero ya no se publican. Hubo casos de universidades que llegaron a editar hasta tres revistas psicológicas a la vez, algunas para profesionales, otras para estudiantes, pero muy pocas especializadas. En ese sentido, a diferencia de países como Argentina, Brasil, Colombia o México, donde se publican revistas especializadas, en Perú solo existen cuatro revistas por ramas de la psicología, la revista Propósitos y Representaciones especializada en psicología educativa, la revista Interacciones especializada en psicología clínica y familia, la revista Perspectiva de Familia especializada en familia y la Revista Peruana de Historia de la Psicología. La mayoría de revistas psicológicas que se publican en el Perú son generales, y como ya se mencionó, han tenido una presencia muy regular, ya que han dejado de publicarse, han cambiado de nombre o se han publicado dejando algunas brechas en su periodicidad. Estos problemas se deben entre varias razones, a problemas presupuestales, cuestiones políticas al interior de las instituciones que las editan y la falta de contenidos por una débil red de contactos académicos tanto nacionales como internacionales. Por supuesto que existen revistas psicológicas que se han publicado de manera regular con un prestigio y calidad crecientes, pero son pocas las que se han logrado indexar en bases científicas de alto impacto. Entre ellas, debe mencionarse la Revista de Psicología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, que se ha publicado ininterrumpidamente desde 1983 y en la actualidad es la única revista psicológica que se encuentra indexada en Scopus, además de Web of Science, Scielo, Redalyc, etc. Precisamente, para dar solución a la problemática expuesta, el pasado 12 de diciembre de 2023 se convocó a diversos editores de las revistas psicológicas que se publican en Perú. La Revista de Psicología, de la Universidad Católica San Pablo estuvo presente; y en esa reunión se llegaron a algunos acuerdos que se trascribieron en un acta que implica la mayor colaboración interinstitucional para favorecer el aprendizaje mutuo, el intercambio de contenidos, y la comunicación más fluida a nivel nacional, para detectar e impulsar la publicación de revistas psicológicas de calidad al interior del país o fortalecer las que ya se publican en Lima y otras provincias que como Arequipa llegó a publicar en el 2016 hasta siete revistas psicológicas, de las cuales hoy solo sobreviven tres. Asimismo, esta reunión podría dar paso a la conformación de una Red Peruana de Revistas Académicas en Psicología, que como en el caso de Chile y Colombia, tuvo efectos muy positivos en la edición de las revistas que ya existían en esos países, consiguiendo que puedan funcionar con más regularidad y que se indexen en bases de alto impacto como Scopus. Pues bien, en este segundo número de la Revista de Psicología de la Universidad Católica San Pablo, que corresponde al volumen 13 del año 2023, se tienen contenidos muy variados de autores tanto regionales, como nacionales y extranjeros. Autores de países como Argentina y Colombia y de ciudades como Lima y Arequipa, han presentado artículos sobre historia de la psicología, neurociencia, psicología organizacional, psicometría, violencia y psicología clínica. Esperamos que estos contenidos sean bien recibidos por la comunidad académica y que permitan el desarrollo de la psicología a nivel regional y nacional. También es importante agradecer a nuestros colaboradores, a los miembros del Comité Editorial, los revisores nacionales e internacionales, los autores peruanos y extranjeros y a nuestros lectores.

The complexity of everyday life, which brings countless challenges, confrontations, obstacles and, of course, beautiful moments, certainly goes beyond the simplified picture that is visible in the public only on the basis of the final “product”. Sport is a segment of society in which the result is clearly visible, and on the basis of which those more or less successful are ranked, but there is a harsh limit beyond which the effort invested is incomparably less appreciated and the achieved result is not adequately valued in society and the media. That dividing line is usually placed before the fourth place and is symbolized by the medals and other awards to those who place above and the certainty of sinking into oblivion for the others. Through research on Yugoslav and Serbian athletes whose greatest achievement at the Olympic and Paralympic Games was the fourth place (a total of 75 Olympic and 13 Paralympic athletes) and also through subsequent conversations with some of them, this global phenomenon, which permeates the world of sports and other segments of society, comes into the limelight. At the same time, through this work, the exceptional results of the athletes from this region are saved from oblivion. Looking at the answers to the key question, it is obvious that the interviewees mostly feel regret, i.e. regret for the missed opportunity to win a medal, often mixed with the feelings of pride, especially when their results are viewed from today’s perspective, bearing in mind that athletes think of the Games as the greatest event in sports. “Being fourth” is an everlasting phenomenon having no end and no unique conclusion, getting new heroes again and again. This paper is an adapted segment, both theoretical and research-based, of the book “Being fourth: Champions without an Olympic medal” (Predrag Đ. Bajić with students of Faculty of Sport, 2021, publisher: Faculty of Sport). The book emphasizes the importance of “the fourth place” through the social and media prism and lists all the athletes whose greatest success at the Olympic and Paralympic Games was the fourth place, starting from the debut of the Olympic athletes in Stockholm in 1912 and the Paralympic athletes in Heidelberg in 1972 to the Tokyo 2021 Games. The condition for selecting athletes was that they competed under the flags of the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro and/or the Republic of Serbia. The list also included the athletes in individual sports who competed in Barcelona 1992 as independent Olympic and Paralympic participants without any national symbols, as a result of the UN Security Council’s sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Finally, the list included those who had no “playing time” but were part of the national team in team sports and those who, at some point in their lives, competed for other countries, provided that they did not win a medal at the Games under their flags. In the book “Being fourth: Champions without an Olympic medal”, the research described in this paper is a segment of a project that includes examples of the practical power of an interview as a journalistic genre in shedding light on this phenomenon through the life stories of 22 athletes whose greatest success at the Olympic and Paralympic Games was the fourth place (Boris Čukvas, Ištvan Semeredi, Franciska Ševarac, Srećko Pejović, Dragan Pantelić, Nikica Klinčarski, Miloš Šestić, Zlatko Vujović, Slobodanka Čolović Maričić, Dragana Pešić Belojević, Nataša Kolega, Svetlana Vujčić, Milan Živić, Dragutin Topić, Dejan Perić, Nedeljko Jovanović, Dragan Škrbić, Nenad Peruničić, Željko Čeliković, Zorana Arunović, Tina Krajišnik and Maja Škorić). This is also illustrated by numerous photos and newspaper reports from the day they reached the fourth place. After these interviews, 6 more athletes who, in addition to the fourth place, also have an Olympic medal, spoke about the phenomenon (Mirko Nišović, Tomislav Ivković, Radomir Rakonjac, Mirjana Đurica Vermezović, Borislava Perić Ranković and Damir Mikec). In this way, a material trace has been left for the years ahead. The collected data were sorted, supplemented and corrected through the conversations with the actual participants, emphasizing the importance of remembering and knowing the past. The project “Being fourth” started as an integral part of practical classes in sports journalism and research skills in the second year of study at the Faculty of Sport of the University “Union – Nikola Tesla” in Belgrade. It was later expanded to include students of other years of study. The goal was to present the “the fourth place” phenomenon as a relevant concept that is recognized not only in sports, but also in the wider social community, and to do so in ways specific to journalism studies. In addition to Predrag Bajić, 24 students from the department of sports journalism took part in the realization of the book. These are the following: Uroš Selenić, Aleksa Janković, Elena Deleva, Đorđe Samoilović, Dušan Fatić, Stefan Stanković, Aleksandar Stajkovac, Ognjen Borjanović, Aleksandar Filipović, Filip Ljubisavljević, Anđelija Ratić, Dušan Krstić, Miloš Dragović, David Radanović, Miloš Petrović, Sara Đorđević, Aleksandar Brežanin, Boško Petrović, Ana Ratković, Nemanja Andrić, Ivan Miletić, Stefan Branežac, Vukić Stojanović and Atanasije Nikolić. The editor was professor Radivoje Petrović, and the reviewers were professors Zoran Jevtović, Vladimir Koprivica and Zoran Aracki. The book also pays tribute to the late founder and dean of the Faculty of Sport, professor Ivanka Gajić. The book promotion was held in the main lecture hall of the Faculty of Sport in Belgrade on March 31, 2022. Among the speakers were Nedeljko Jovanović, fourth at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games in handball, professors Radivoje Petrović and Vladimir Koprivica, Jelena Arunović, who is Zorana Arunović’s coach (Zorana finished fourth in shooting both at the London 2012 and Tokyo 2021 Games) and Predrag Bajić. Moreover, on behalf of all the students who took part in the project, Elena Deleva gave a speech, Bojan Sekulić, the president of the Faculty Council, addressed the audience and the promotion program was led by Filip Ljubisavljević. Also, other participants of the book spoke at the promotion. Parts of the book were edited and published in the form of a serial in the Independent Daily Newspaper “Vesti” through 28 articles in the period between June 7 and July 9/10, 2022. They were also published on the Web portal of this daily newspaper.

Social innovations are activities aiming at implementation of social objectives, including mainly the improvement of life of individuals and social groups, together with public policy and management objectives. The essay indicates and discusses the most important contemporary problems, solving of which requires social innovations. Social innovations precondition the progress of civilisation. The world needs not only new technologies, but also new solutions of social and institutional nature that would be conducive to achieving social goals. Social innovations are experimental social actions of organisational and institutional nature that aim at improving the quality of life of individuals, communities, nations, companies, circles, or social groups. Their experimental nature stems from the fact of introducing unique and one-time solutions on a large scale, the end results of which are often difficult to be fully predicted. For example, it was difficult to believe that opening new labour markets for foreigners in the countries of the European Union, which can be treated as a social innovation aiming at development of the international labour market, will result in the rapid development of the low-cost airlines, the offer of which will be available to a larger group of recipients. In other words, social innovations differ from economic innovations, as they are not about implementation of new types of production or gaining new markets, but about satisfying new needs, which are not provided by the market. Therefore, the most important distinction consists in that social innovations are concerned with improving the well-being of individuals and communities by additional employment, or increased consumption, as well as participation in solving the problems of individuals and social groups [CSTP, 2011]. In general, social innovations are activities aiming at implementation of social objectives, including mainly the improvement of life of individuals and social groups together with the objectives of public policy and management [Kowalczyk, Sobiecki, 2017]. Their implementation requires global, national, and individual actions. This requires joint operations, both at the scale of the entire globe, as well as in particular interest groups. Why are social innovations a key point for the progress of civilisation? This is the effect of the clear domination of economic aspects and discrimination of social aspects of this progress. Until the 19th century, the economy was a part of a social structure. As described by K. Polanyi, it was submerged in social relations [Polanyi, 2010, p. 56]. In traditional societies, the economic system was in fact derived from the organisation of the society itself. The economy, consisting of small and dispersed craft businesses, was a part of the social, family, and neighbourhood structure. In the 20th century the situation reversed – the economy started to be the force shaping social structures, positions of individual groups, areas of wealth and poverty. The economy and the market mechanism have become independent from the world of politics and society. Today, the corporations control our lives. They decide what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work and what we do [Bakan, 2006, p. 13]. The corporations started this spectacular “march to rule the world” in the late 19th century. After about a hundred years, at the end of the 20th century, the state under the pressure of corporations and globalisation, started a gradual, but systematic withdrawal from the economy, market and many other functions traditionally belonging to it. As a result, at the end of the last century, a corporation has become a dominant institution in the world. A characteristic feature of this condition is that it gives a complete priority to the interests of corporations. They make decisions of often adverse consequences for the entire social groups, regions, or local communities. They lead to social tensions, political breakdowns, and most often to repeated market turbulences. Thus, a substantial minority (corporations) obtain inconceivable benefits at the expense of the vast majority, that is broad professional and social groups. The lack of relative balance between the economy and society is a barrier to the progress of civilisation. A growing global concern is the problem of migration. The present crisis, left unresolved, in the long term will return multiplied. Today, there are about 500 million people living in Europe, 1.5 billion in Africa and the Middle East, but in 2100, the population of Europe will be about 400 million and of the Middle East and Africa approximately 4.5 billion. Solving this problem, mainly through social and political innovations, can take place only by a joint operation of highly developed and developing countries. Is it an easy task? It’s very difficult. Unfortunately, today, the world is going in the opposite direction. Instead of pursuing the community, empathic thinking, it aims towards nationalism and chauvinism. An example might be a part of the inaugural address of President Donald Trump, who said that the right of all nations is to put their own interests first. Of course, the United States of America will think about their own interests. As we go in the opposite direction, those who deal with global issues say – nothing will change, unless there is some great crisis, a major disaster that would cause that the great of this world will come to senses. J.E. Stiglitz [2004], contrary to the current thinking and practice, believes that a different and better world is possible. Globalisation contains the potential of countless benefits from which people both in developing and highly developed countries can benefit. But the practice so far proves that still it is not grown up enough to use its potential in a fair manner. What is needed are new solutions, most of all social and political innovations (political, because they involve a violation of the previous arrangement of interests). Failure to search for breakthrough innovations of social and political nature that would meet the modern challenges, can lead the world to a disaster. Social innovation, and not economic, because the contemporary civilisation problems have their roots in this dimension. A global problem, solution of which requires innovations of social and political nature, is the disruption of the balance between work and capital. In 2010, 400 richest people had assets such as the half of the poorer population of the world. In 2016, such part was in the possession of only 8 people. This shows the dramatic collapse of the balance between work and capital. The world cannot develop creating the technological progress while increasing unjustified inequalities, which inevitably lead to an outbreak of civil disturbances. This outbreak can have various organisation forms. In the days of the Internet and social media, it is easier to communicate with people. Therefore, paradoxically, some modern technologies create the conditions facilitating social protests. There is one more important and dangerous effect of implementing technological innovations without simultaneous creation and implementation of social innovations limiting the sky-rocketing increase of economic (followed by social) diversification. Sooner or later, technological progress will become so widespread that, due to the relatively low prices, it will make it possible for the weapons of mass destruction, especially biological and chemical weapons, to reach small terrorist groups. Then, a total, individualized war of global reach can develop. The individualisation of war will follow, as described by the famous German sociologist Ulrich Beck. To avoid this, it is worth looking at the achievements of the Polish scientist Michał Kalecki, who 75 years ago argued that capitalism alone is not able to develop. It is because it aggressively seeks profit growth, but cannot turn profit into some profitable investments. Therefore, when uncertainty grows, capitalism cannot develop itself, and it must be accompanied by external factors, named by Kalecki – external development factors. These factors include state expenses, finances and, in accordance with the nomenclature of Kalecki – epochal innovations. And what are the current possibilities of activation of the external factors? In short – modest. The countries are indebted, and the basis for the development in the last 20 years were loans, which contributed to the growth of debt of economic entities. What, then, should we do? It is necessary to look for cheaper solutions, but such that are effective, that is breakthrough innovations. These undoubtedly include social and political innovations. Contemporary social innovation is not about investing big money and expensive resources in production, e.g. of a very expensive vaccine, which would be available for a small group of recipients. Today’s social innovation should stimulate the use of lower amounts of resources to produce more products available to larger groups of recipients. The progress of civilisation happens only as a result of a sustainable development in economic, social, and now also ecological terms. Economic (business) innovations, which help accelerate the growth rate of production and services, contribute to economic development. Profits of corporations increase and, at the same time, the economic objectives of the corporations are realised. But are the objectives of the society as a whole and its members individually realised equally, in parallel? In the chain of social reproduction there are four repeated phases: production – distribution – exchange – consumption. The key point from the social point of view is the phase of distribution. But what are the rules of distribution, how much and who gets from this “cake” produced in the social process of production? In the today’s increasingly global economy, the most important mechanism of distribution is the market mechanism. However, in the long run, this mechanism leads to growing income and welfare disparities of various social groups. Although, the income and welfare diversity in itself is nothing wrong, as it is the result of the diversification of effectiveness of factors of production, including work, the growing disparities to a large extent cannot be justified. Economic situation of the society members increasingly depends not on the contribution of work, but on the size of the capital invested, and the market position of the economic entity, and on the “governing power of capital” on the market. It should also be noted that this diversification is also related to speculative activities. Disparities between the implemented economic and social innovations can lead to the collapse of the progress of civilisation. Nowadays, economic crises are often justified by, indeed, social and political considerations, such as marginalisation of nation states, imbalance of power (or imbalance of fear), religious conflicts, nationalism, chauvinism, etc. It is also considered that the first global financial crisis of the 21st century originated from the wrong social policy pursued by the US Government, which led to the creation of a gigantic public debt, which consequently led to an economic breakdown. This resulted in the financial crisis, but also in deepening of the social imbalances and widening of the circles of poverty and social exclusion. It can even be stated that it was a crisis in public confidence. Therefore, the causes of crises are the conflicts between the economic dimension of the development and its social dimension. Contemporary world is filled with various innovations of economic or business nature (including technological, product, marketing, and in part – organisational). The existing solutions can be a source of economic progress, which is a component of the progress of civilisation. However, economic innovations do not complete the entire progress of civilisation moreover, the saturation, and often supersaturation with implementations and economic innovations leads to an excessive use of material factors of production. As a consequence, it results in lowering of the efficiency of their use, unnecessary extra burden to the planet, and passing of the negative effects on the society and future generations (of consumers). On the other hand, it leads to forcing the consumption of durable consumer goods, and gathering them “just in case”, and also to the low degree of their use (e.g. more cars in a household than its members results in the additional load on traffic routes, which results in an increase in the inconvenience of movement of people, thus to the reduction of the quality of life). Introduction of yet another economic innovation will not solve this problem. It can be solved only by social innovations that are in a permanent shortage. A social innovation which fosters solving the issue of excessive accumulation of tangible production goods is a developing phenomenon called sharing economy. It is based on the principle: “the use of a service provided by some welfare does not require being its owner”. This principle allows for an economic use of resources located in households, but which have been “latent” so far. In this way, increasing of the scope of services provided (transport, residential and tourist accommodation) does not require any growth of additional tangible resources of factors of production. So, it contributes to the growth of household incomes, and inhibition of loading the planet with material goods processed by man [see Poniatowska-Jaksch, Sobiecki, 2016]. Another example: we live in times, in which, contrary to the law of T. Malthus, the planet is able to feed all people, that is to guarantee their minimum required nutrients. But still, millions of people die of starvation and malnutrition, but also due to obesity. Can this problem be solved with another economic innovation? Certainly not! Economic innovations will certainly help to partially solve the problem of nutrition, at least by the new methods of storing and preservation of foods, to reduce its waste in the phase of storage and transport. However, a key condition to solve this problem is to create and implement an innovation of a social nature (in many cases also political). We will not be able to speak about the progress of civilisation in a situation, where there are people dying of starvation and malnutrition. A growing global social concern, resulting from implementation of an economic (technological) innovation will be robotisation, and more specifically – the effects arising from its dissemination on a large scale. So far, the issue has been postponed due to globalisation of the labour market, which led to cheapening of the work factor by more than ten times in the countries of Asia or South America. But it ends slowly. Labour becomes more and more expensive, which means that the robots become relatively cheap. The mechanism leading to low prices of the labour factor expires. Wages increase, and this changes the relationship of the prices of capital and labour. Capital becomes relatively cheaper and cheaper, and this leads to reducing of the demand for work, at the same time increasing the demand for capital (in the form of robots). The introduction of robots will be an effect of the phenomenon of substitution of the factors of production. A cheaper factor (in this case capital in the form of robots) will be cheaper than the same activities performed by man. According to W. Szymański [2017], such change is a dysfunction of capitalism. A great challenge, because capitalism is based on the market-driven shaping of income. The market-driven shaping of income means that the income is derived from the sale of the factors of production. Most people have income from employment. Robots change this mechanism. It is estimated that scientific progress allows to create such number of robots that will replace billion people in the world. What will happen to those “superseded”, what will replace the income from human labour? Capitalism will face an institutional challenge, and must replace the market-driven shaping of income with another, new one. The introduction of robots means microeconomic battle with the barrier of demand. To sell more, one needs to cut costs. The costs are lowered by the introduction of robots, but the use of robots reduces the demand for human labour. Lowering the demand for human labour results in the reduction of employment, and lower wages. Lower wages result in the reduction of the demand for goods and services. To increase the demand for goods and services, the companies must lower their costs, so they increase the involvement of robots, etc. A mechanism of the vicious circle appears If such a mass substitution of the factors of production is unfavourable from the point of view of stimulating the development of the economy, then something must be done to improve the adverse price relations for labour. How can the conditions of competition between a robot and a man be made equal, at least partially? Robots should be taxed. Bill Gates, among others, is a supporter of such a solution. However, this is only one of the tools that can be used. The solution of the problem requires a change in the mechanism, so a breakthrough innovation of a social and political nature. We can say that technological and product innovations force the creation of social and political innovations (maybe institutional changes). Product innovations solve some problems (e.g. they contribute to the reduction of production costs), but at the same time, give rise to others. Progress of civilisation for centuries and even millennia was primarily an intellectual progress. It was difficult to discuss economic progress at that time. Then we had to deal with the imbalance between the economic and the social element. The insufficiency of the economic factor (otherwise than it is today) was the reason for the tensions and crises. Estimates of growth indicate that the increase in industrial production from ancient times to the first industrial revolution, that is until about 1700, was 0.1-0.2 per year on average. Only the next centuries brought about systematically increasing pace of economic growth. During 1700- 1820, it was 0.5% on an annual average, and between 1820-1913 – 1.5%, and between 1913-2012 – 3.0% [Piketty, 2015, p. 97]. So, the significant pace of the economic growth is found only at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Additionally, the growth in this period refers predominantly to Europe and North America. The countries on other continents were either stuck in colonialism, structurally similar to the medieval period, or “lived” on the history of their former glory, as, for example, China and Japan, or to a lesser extent some countries of the Middle East and South America. The growth, having then the signs of the modern growth, that is the growth based on technological progress, was attributed mainly to Europe and the United States. The progress of civilisation requires the creation of new social initiatives. Social innovations are indeed an additional capital to keep the social structure in balance. The social capital is seen as a means and purpose and as a primary source of new values for the members of the society. Social innovations also motivate every citizen to actively participate in this process. It is necessary, because traditional ways of solving social problems, even those known for a long time as unemployment, ageing of the society, or exclusion of considerable social and professional groups from the social and economic development, simply fail. “Old” problems are joined by new ones, such as the increase of social inequalities, climate change, or rapidly growing environmental pollution. New phenomena and problems require new solutions, changes to existing procedures, programmes, and often a completely different approach and instruments [Kowalczyk, Sobiecki, 2017].

Covid 19 – living the experience As I sit at my desk at home in suburban Brisbane, following the dictates on self-isolation shared with so many around the world, I am forced to contemplate the limits of human prediction. I look out on a world which few could have predicted six months ago. My thoughts at that time were all about 2020 as a metaphor for perfect vision and a plea for it to herald a new period of clarity which would arm us in resolving the whole host of false divisions that surrounded us. False, because so many appear to be generated by the use of polarised labelling strategies which sought to categorise humans by a whole range of identities, while losing the essential humanity and individuality which we all share. This was a troublesome trend and one which seemed reminiscent of the biblical tale concerning the tower of Babel, when a single unified language was what we needed to create harmony in a globalising world. However, yesterday’s concerns have, at least for the moment, been overshadowed by a more urgent and unifying concern with humanity’s health and wellbeing. For now, this concern has created a world which we would not have recognised in 2019. We rely more than ever on our various forms of electronic media to beam instant shots of the streets of London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong etc. These centres of our worldly activity normally characterised by hustle and bustle, are now serenely peaceful and ordered. Their magnificent buildings have become foregrounded, assuming a dignity and presence that is more commonly overshadowed by the mad ceaseless scramble of humanity all around them. From there however the cameras can jump to some of the less fortunate areas of the globe. These streets are still teeming with people in close confined areas. There is little hope here of following frequent extended hand washing practices, let alone achieving the social distance prescribed to those of us in the global North. From this desk top perspective, it has been interesting to chart the mood as the crisis has unfolded. It has moved from a slightly distant sense of superiority as the news slowly unfolded about events in remote Wuhan. The explanation that the origins were from a live market, where customs unfamiliar to our hygienic pre-packaged approach to food consumption were practised, added to this sense of separateness and exoticism surrounding the source and initial development of the virus. However, this changed to a growing sense of concern as its growth and transmission slowly began to reveal the vulnerability of all cultures to its spread. At this early stage, countries who took steps to limit travel from infected areas seemed to gain some advantage. Australia, as just one example banned flights from China and required all Chinese students coming to study in Australia to self-isolate for two weeks in a third intermediate port. It was a step that had considerable economic costs associated with it. One that was vociferously resisted at the time by the university sector increasingly dependent on the revenue generated by servicing Chinese students. But it was when the epicentre moved to northern Italy, that the entire messaging around the event began to change internationally. At this time the tone became increasingly fearful, anxious and urgent as reports of overwhelmed hospitals and mass burials began to dominate the news. Consequently, governments attracted little criticism but were rather widely supported in the action of radically closing down their countries in order to limit human interaction. The debate had become one around the choice between health and economic wellbeing. The fact that the decision has been overwhelmingly for health, has been encouraging. It has not however stopped the pressure from those who believe that economic well-being is a determinant of human well-being, questioning the decisions of politicians and the advice of public health scientists that have dominated the responses to date. At this stage, the lives versus livelihoods debate has a long way still to run. Of some particular interest has been the musings of the opinion writers who have predicted that the events of these last months will change our world forever. Some of these predictions have included the idea that rather than piling into common office spaces working remotely from home and other advantageous locations will be here to stay. Schools and universities will become centres of learning more conveniently accessed on-line rather than face to face. Many shopping centres will become redundant and goods will increasingly be delivered via collection centres or couriers direct to the home. Social distancing will impact our consumption of entertainment at common venues and lifestyle events such as dining out. At the macro level, it has been predicted that globalisation in its present form will be reversed. The pandemic has led to actions being taken at national levels and movement being controlled by the strengthening and increased control of physical borders. Tourism has ground to a halt and may not resume on its current scale or in its present form as unnecessary travel, at least across borders, will become permanently reduced. Advocates of change have pointed to some of the unpredicted benefits that have been occurring. These include a drop in air pollution: increased interaction within families; more reading undertaken by younger adults; more systematic incorporation of exercise into daily life, and; a rediscovered sense of community with many initiatives paying tribute to the health and essential services workers who have been placed at the forefront of this latest struggle with nature. Of course, for all those who point to benefits in the forced lifestyle changes we have been experiencing, there are those who would tell a contrary tale. Demonstrations in the US have led the push by those who just want things to get back to normal as quickly as possible. For this group, confinement at home creates more problems. These may be a function of the proximity of modern cramped living quarters, today’s crowded city life, dysfunctional relationships, the boredom of self-entertainment or simply the anxiety that comes with an insecure livelihood and an unclear future. Personally however, I am left with two significant questions about our future stimulated by the events that have been ushered in by 2020. The first is how is it that the world has been caught so unprepared by this pandemic? The second is to what extent do we have the ability to recalibrate our current practices and view an alternative future? In considering the first, it has been enlightening to observe the extent to which politicians have turned to scientific expertise in order to determine their actions. Terms like ‘flattening the curve’, ‘community transmission rates’, have become part of our daily lexicon as the statistical modellers advance their predictions as to how the disease will spread and impact on our health systems. The fact that scientists are presented as the acceptable and credible authority and the basis for our actions reflects a growing dependency on data and modelling that has infused our society generally. This acceptance has been used to strengthen the actions on behalf of the human lives first and foremost position. For those who pursue the livelihoods argument even bigger figures are available to be thrown about. These relate to concepts such as numbers of jobless, increase in national debt, growth in domestic violence, rise in mental illness etc. However, given that they are more clearly estimates and based on less certain assumptions and variables, they do not at this stage seem to carry the impact of the data produced by public health experts. This is not surprising but perhaps not justifiable when we consider the failure of the public health lobby to adequately prepare or forewarn us of the current crisis in the first place. Statistical predictive models are built around historical data, yet their accuracy depends upon the quality of those data. Their robustness for extrapolation to new settings for example will differ as these differ in a multitude of subtle ways from the contexts in which they were initially gathered. Our often uncritical dependence upon ‘scientific’ processes has become worrying, given that as humans, even when guided by such useful tools, we still tend to repeat mistakes or ignore warnings. At such a time it is an opportunity for us to return to the reservoir of human wisdom to be found in places such as our great literature. Works such as The Plague by Albert Camus make fascinating and educative reading for us at this time. As the writer observes Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow, we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. So it is that we constantly fail to study let alone learn the lessons of history. Yet 2020 mirrors 1919, as at that time the world was reeling with the impact of the Spanish ‘Flu, which infected 500 million people and killed an estimated 50 million. This was more than the 40 million casualties of the four years of the preceding Great War. There have of course been other pestilences since then and much more recently. Is our stubborn failure to learn because we fail to value history and the knowledge of our forebears? Yet we can accept with so little question the accuracy of predictions based on numbers, even with varying and unquestioned levels of validity and reliability. As to the second question, many writers have been observing some beneficial changes in our behaviour and our environment, which have emerged in association with this sudden break in our normal patterns of activity. It has given us the excuse to reevaluate some of our practices and identify some clear benefits that have been occurring. As Australian newspaper columnist Bernard Salt observes in an article titled “the end of narcissism?” I think we’ve been re-evaluating the entire contribution/reward equation since the summer bushfires and now, with the added experience of the pandemic, we can see the shallowness of the so-called glamour professions – the celebrities, the influencers. We appreciate the selflessness of volunteer firefighters, of healthcare workers and supermarket staff. From the pandemic’s earliest days, glib forays into social media by celebrities seeking attention and yet further adulation have been met with stony disapproval. Perhaps it is best that they stay offline while our real heroes do the heavy lifting. To this sad unquestioning adherence to both scientism and narcissism, we can add and stir the framing of the climate rebellion and a myriad of familiar ‘first world’ problems which have caused dissension and disharmony in our communities. Now with an external threat on which to focus our attention, there has been a short lull in the endless bickering and petty point scoring that has characterised our western liberal democracies in the last decade. As Camus observed: The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague. So, the ceaseless din of the topics that have driven us apart has miraculously paused for at least a moment. Does this then provide a unique opportunity for us together to review our habitual postures and adopt a more conciliatory and harmonious communication style, take stock, critically evaluate and retune our approach to life – as individuals, as nations, as a species? It is not too difficult to hypothesise futures driven by the major issues that have driven us apart. Now, in our attempts to resist the virus, we have given ourselves a glimpse of some of the very things the climate change activists have wished to happen. With few planes in the air and the majority of cars off the roads, we have already witnessed clearer and cleaner air. Working at home has freed up the commuter driven traffic and left many people with more time to spend with their family. Freed from the continuing throng of tourists, cities like Venice are regenerating and cleansing themselves. This small preview of what a less travelled world might start to look like surely has some attraction. But of course, it does not come without cost. With the lack of tourism and the need to work at home, jobs and livelihoods have started to change. As with any revolution there are both winners and losers. The lockdown has distinguished starkly between essential and non-essential workers. That represents a useful starting point from which to assess what is truly of value in our way of life and what is peripheral as Salt made clear. This is a question that I would encourage readers to explore and to take forward with them through the resolution of the current situation. However, on the basis that educators are seen as providing essential services, now is the time to turn to the content of our current volume. Once again, I direct you to the truly international range of our contributors. They come from five different continents yet share a common focus on one of the most popular of shared cultural experiences – sport. Unsurprisingly three of our reviewed papers bring different insights to the world’s most widely shared sport of all – football, or as it would be more easily recognised in some parts of the globe - soccer. Leading these offerings is a comparison of fandom in Australia and China. The story presented by Knijnk highlights the rise of the fanatical supporters known as the ultras. The origin of the movement is traced to Italy, but it is one that claims allegiances now around the world. Kniijnk identifies the movement’s progression into Australia and China and, in pointing to its stance against the commercialisation of their sport by the scions of big business, argues for its deeper political significance and its commitment to the democratic ownership of sport. Reflecting the increasing availability and use of data in our modern societies, Karadog, Parim and Cene apply some of the immense data collected on and around the FIFA World Cup to the task of selecting the best team from the 2018 tournament held in Russia, a task more usually undertaken by panels of experts. Mindful of the value of using data in ways that can assist future decision making, rather than just in terms of summarising past events, they also use the statistics available to undertake a second task. The second task was the selection of the team with the greatest future potential by limiting eligibility to those at an early stage in their careers, namely younger than 28 and who arguably had still to attain their prime as well as having a longer career still ahead of them. The results for both selections confirm how membership of the wealthy European based teams holds the path to success and recognition at the global level no matter what the national origins of players might be. Thirdly, taking links between the sport and the world of finance a step further, Gomez-Martinez, Marques-Bogliani and Paule-Vianez report on an interesting study designed to test the hypothesis that sporting success within a community is reflected in positive economic outcomes for members of that community. They make a bold attempt to test their hypothesis by examining the relationship of the performance of three world leading clubs in Europe - Bayern Munich, Juventus and Paris Saint Germain and the performance of their local stock markets. Their findings make for some interesting thoughts about the significance of sport in the global economy and beyond into the political landscape of our interconnected world. Our final paper comes from Africa but for its subject matter looks to a different sport, one that rules the subcontinent of India - cricket. Norrbhai questions the traditional coaching of batting in cricket by examining the backlift techniques of the top players in the Indian Premier league. His findings suggest that even in this most traditional of sports, technique will develop and change in response to the changing context provided by the game itself. In this case the context is the short form of the game, introduced to provide faster paced entertainment in an easily consumable time span. It provides a useful reminder how in sport, techniques will not be static but will continue to evolve as the game that provides the context for the skilled performance also evolves. To conclude our pages, I must apologise that our usual book review has fallen prey to the current world disruption. In its place I would like to draw your attention to the announcement of a new publication which would make a worthy addition to the bookshelf of any international sports scholar. “Softpower, Soccer, Supremacy – The Chinese Dream” represents a unique and timely analysis of the movement of the most popular and influential game in the world – Association Football, commonly abbreviated to soccer - into the mainstream of Chinese national policy. The editorial team led by one of sports histories most recognised scholars, Professor J A Mangan, has assembled a who’s who of current scholars in sport in Asia. Together they provide a perspective that takes in, not just the Chinese view of these important current developments but also, the view of others in the geographical region. From Japan, Korea and Australia, they bring with them significant experience to not just the beautiful game, but sport in general in that dynamic and fast-growing part of the world. Particularly in the light of the European dominance identified in the Karog, Parim and Cene paper this work raises the question as to whether we can expect to see a change in the world order sooner rather than later. It remains for me to make one important acknowledgement. In my last editorial I alerted you to the sorts of decisions we as an editorial and publication team were facing with regard to ensuring the future of the journal. Debates as to how best to proceed while staying true to our vision and goals are still proceeding. However, I am pleased to acknowledge the sponsorship provided by The University of Macao for volume 42 and recognise the invaluable contribution made by ISCPES former president Walter Ho to this process. Sponsorship can provide an important input to the ongoing existence and strength of this journal and we would be interested in talking to other institutions or groups who might also be interested in supporting our work, particularly where their goals align closely with ours. May I therefore commend to you the works of our international scholars and encourage your future involvement in sharing your interest in and expertise with others in the world of comparative and international sport studies, John Saunders, Brisbane, May 2020

AbstractWe investigate the financing and performance of international entrepreneurship in an environment that was characterized by severe information problems and very weak investor protection. Despite these problems, new ventures could raise large amounts of equity and debt on the Belgian capital market between 1890 and 1914. Many of these firms were international new ventures (INVs) with their main operations abroad, often far away from Belgium. We find that INVs raised much more capital but were less likely to pay a dividend than domestic new ventures (DNVs). They were less likely to issue a bond and had a higher cost of debt when operating further away from Belgium. Performance after listing was generally bad for new ventures throughout the period, but it was much worse for INVs than for DNVs. Our findings confirm contemporary arguments that unprotected, financially illiterate investors were expropriated by INV founders.

We construct a new, comprehensive instrument-level database of sovereign debt for 18 advanced and emerging countries over the period 1913–46. The database contains data on amounts outstanding for some 3,800 individual debt instruments as well as associated qualitative information, including instrument type, coupon rate, maturity, and currency of issue. This information can provide unique insights into various policies implemented in the interwar period, which was characterized by notoriously high debt levels. We document how interwar governments rolled over debts that were largely unsustainable and how the external public debt network contributed to the collapse of the international financial system in the early 1930s.

AbstractThis paper qualitatively and quantitatively examines the development of the sovereign debt market in Prewar China under different governments. During the Beijing Era (1912–26), accompanied by the establishment of necessary financial institutions, the sovereign debt market emerged to meet fiscal needs. Surprisingly, the Nationalist government, in power from 1927, successfully cultivated a robust market characterized by its expanding size and liquidity. Setting itself apart from its predecessors, the government established credibility as a borrower in two key ways. Firstly, it demonstrated unwavering commitment to debt service by settling previous debts and offering well‐structured new ones, even during challenging times. Furthermore, the government escrowed fiscal revenue, pledged for debt repayments, to a semi‐independent committee of private bankers on behalf of debtholders, enhancing public confidence. Secondly, the government showcased its ability to secure tax revenues for debt repayments. However, starting from 1931/2, the debt market experienced a decline due to the government's compromised ability to pay resulting from external wars and shifting political priorities that weakened its commitment to debt repayments. Empirical evidence confirms the market's responsiveness to regime shifts and policy changes. This paper sheds light on how a nascent autocratic government can successfully borrow from the public.

In the first half of the twentieth century, debt played an unexpectedly large role in shaping public views of American foreign relations. Debt—specifically, the public debt of other sovereign states—seems far removed from the everyday experience of Americans seeking credit from butchers and grocers or, in the global arena, decidedly dull in contrast to headlines about wars and assassinations. Yet if articles in thousands of local newspapers are an indicator, before World War I millions of Americans had been exposed to detailed coverage of the problematic indebtedness of the nearer nations of Latin America. To engaged readers in every corner of the United States, the financial entanglements of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras must have been a familiar trope—a sign of weakness if not immorality—and, as the policy of Dollar Diplomacy emerged after 1904, a harbinger of U.S. intervention.

SummaryWe analyse German public finances against a theoretical background using a unique database, retrieved from multiple sources covering the period between 1850 and 2010.Multiple currency crises and force majeure offer anecdotal evidence contradicting the historical perception of Germany being the poster child of European public finance. Given these corresponding breaks in time series, the empirical analysis is conducted for the sub-periods 1872-1913 and 1950- 2010. In addition to anecdotal historical analysis, we conduct formal tests on fiscal sustainability, including tests on stationarity and cointegration and the estimation of Vector Autoregression (VAR) and Vector Error Correction Models (VECM). While we cannot reject the hypothesis that fiscal policy was sustainable in the period before the First World War, the tests allow for a rejection of the hypothesis of fiscal sustainability for the period from 1950 to 2010. This evidence leads to the conclusion that Germany’s public debt is in dire need of consolidation. Albeit constituting a much needed reform to this development, the incompleteness of the German debt brake and fiscal federalism will have to be addressed in the coming years, in order to ensure that fiscal consolidation actually takes place - for the sake of public debt sustainability.

AbstractWe examine the economic determinants and informational effects of credit rating affirmations (i.e., the reiteration of past credit ratings) for a sample of US public firms from 1995 to 2020. We find that credit rating affirmations typically follow major corporate events and changes in firm fundamentals that increase information uncertainty about a firm's creditworthiness, suggesting that affirmations reduce uncertainty. We further document that rating affirmations provide value‐relevant information to equity and debt investors. Using a short‐window event study method, we show that equity investors react positively to rating affirmations and that information uncertainty around affirmations diminishes. These findings are more pronounced for firms with non‐investment‐grade ratings. We further show that our results strengthen for firms with greater pre‐affirmation information uncertainty. Finally, consistent with our information uncertainty reduction results from the stock market, we report that bond yield spreads decrease for affirmed firms. Again, the effect is more pronounced for firms with non‐investment‐grade ratings. In summary, we highlight the significant capital markets’ effects of credit rating affirmations, an area that the literature has largely ignored.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Abstract The close of the First World War signalled a proliferation of newly established nation-states across Europe. However, the unilateral proclamations of these states’ independence did not guarantee their international recognition, nor did it guarantee their financial viability. This article examines the funding of two such states: the unrecognized Lithuanian (1919–23) and Irish (1919–21) republics. Both funded their wars of independence by selling ‘war bonds’ to their respective diasporas in the United States; the Lithuanians raising almost $1.9m from c. 28,000 subscribers and the Irish raising $5.8m from c. 300,000 subscribers. Communication between the organizers of these bond drives was virtually non-existent, but following the example of the US Liberty Loans they employed remarkably similar tactics. Yet, issued by self-proclaimed nation-states with neither territorial integrity nor a credible history of borrowing, the Lithuanian and Irish war bonds promised a return only when the states had received international recognition. In this sense, they were examples of what the authors term Pre-Sovereign Debt. Practically, they were a focal point for agitation for governmental recognition and rousing of American public opinion. Symbolically, they were tangible representations of the Lithuanian and Irish pretensions to statehood.

¿Cuántas cartas escribió César Vallejo a su familia? Las consignadas en el Epistolario General apenas si llegan a 12 y las encontradas cuando se publicó mi Correspondencia Completa (PUCP, 2002), 5, que sumándose a las dos inéditas de ahora, hacen en total 19 cartas. Diez de ellas, corresponden al periodo de 1912-1922 y las 9 restantes al lapso de 1923-1929. Sospecho de que debe existir un número mayor de cartas, dirigidas especialmente a sus hermanos, llámense Manuel o Víctor —con quienes mantuvo correspondencia más fluida—; pues no se conoce a la fecha ninguna carta recibida por sus padres, aunque bien sabemos por alusiones en las epístolas, que Vallejo siempre les escribió, principalmente a su padre. En este caso, Víctor Clemente Vallejo resulta ser el hermano con quien se escribió constantemente, pues a lo largo de la correspondencia vallejiana ostenta la cantidad de 10 misivas, de las cuales 6 son remitidas desde Trujillo.

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community. In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesises that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). She asks an attendant question: “why should it be writing, over and above any other art or medium,” that functions this way? It is not only that writing acquires the appearance of permanence, by surviving “its own performance,” but also that some arts are transient, like dance, while others, like painting and sculpture and music, do “not survive as voice.” For Atwood, writing is a “score for voice,” and what the voice does mostly is tell stories, whether in prose or poetry: “Something unfurls, something reveals itself” (158). Writing, by this view, conjures, materialises or embodies the absent or dead, or is at least laden with this potential. Of course, as Katherine Sutherland observes, “representation is always the purview of the living, even when the order it constructs contains the dead” (202). She argues that all writing about death “might be regarded as epitaph or memorial; such writing is likely to contain the signs of ritual but also of ambiguity and forgetting” (204). Arguably writing can be regarded as participation in a ritual that “affirms membership of the collectivity, and through symbolic manipulation places the life of an individual within a much broader, sometimes cosmic, interpretive framework” (Seale 29), which may assist healing in relation to loss, even if some non-therapeutic purposes, such as restoration of social and political order, also lie behind both rites and writing. In a critical orthodoxy dating back to the 1920s, it has become accepted wisdom that the Australian literary response to the war was essentially nationalistic, “big-noting” ephemera, and thus of little worth (see Gerster and Caesar, for example). Consequently, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out, most Australian literary output of the period has “dropped into oblivion.” In his view, neglect of writings by First World War combatants is not due to its quality, “for this is not the only, or even the essential, condition” for consideration; rather, it is attributable to a “disjunction between the ideals enshrined in the Anzac legend and the experiences recorded or depicted” (170). The silence, we argue, also encompasses literary responses by non-combatants, many of whom were women, though limited space precludes consideration here of their particular contributions.Although poetry and fiction by those of middling or little literary reputation is not normally subject to critical scrutiny, it is patently not the case that there is no body of literature from the war period worthy of scholarly consideration, or that most works are merely patriotic, jingoistic, sentimental and in service of recruitment, even though these elements are certainly present. Our different proposition is that the “lost literatures” deserve attention for various reasons, including the ways they embody conflicting aims and emotions, as well as overt negotiations with the dead, during a period of unprecedented anguish. This is borne out by our substantial collection of creative writing provoked by the war, much of which was published by newspapers, magazines and journals. As Joy Damousi points out in The Labour of Loss, newspapers were the primary form of communication during the war, and never before or since have they dominated to such a degree; readers formed collective support groups through shared reading and actual or anticipated mourning, and some women commiserated with each other in person and in letters after reading casualty lists and death notices (21). The war produced the largest body count in the history of humanity to that time, including 60,000 Australians: none was returned to Australia for burial. They were placed in makeshift graves close to where they died, where possible marked by wooden crosses. At the end of the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) was charged with the responsibility of exhuming and reinterring bodily remains in immaculately curated cemeteries across Europe, at Gallipoli and in the Middle East, as if the peace demanded it. As many as one third of the customary headstones were inscribed with “known unto God,” the euphemism for bodies that could not be identified. The CWGC received numerous requests from families for the crosses, which might embody their loved one and link his sacrificial death with resurrection and immortality. For allegedly logistical reasons, however, all crosses were destroyed on site. Benedict Anderson suggested the importance to nationalism of the print media, which enables private reading of ephemera to generate a sense of communion with thousands or millions of anonymous people understood to be doing likewise. Furthermore, Judith Herman demonstrates in Trauma and Recovery that sharing traumatic experience with others is a “precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). Need of community and restitution extends to the dead. The practices of burying the dead together and of returning the dead to their homeland when they die abroad speak to this need, for “in establishing a society of the dead, the society of the living regularly recreates itself” (Hertz qtd. in Searle 66). For Australians, the society of the dead existed elsewhere, in unfamiliar terrain, accentuating the absence inherent in all death. The society of the dead and missing—and thus of the living and wounded—was created and recreated throughout the war via available means, including literature. Writers of war-related poems and fiction helped create and sustain imagined communities. Dominant use of conventional, sometimes archaic, literary forms, devices, language and imagery indicates desire for broadly accessible and purposeful communication; much writing invokes shared grief, resolve, gratitude, and sympathy. Yet, in many stories and poems, there is also ambivalence in relation to sacrifice and the community of the dead.Speaking in the voice of the other is a fundamental task of the creative writer, and the ultimate other, the dead, gaze upon and speak to or about the living in a number of poems. For example, they might vocalise displeasure and plead for reinforcements, as, for example, in Ella M’Fadyen’s poem “The Wardens,” published in the Sydney Mail in 1918, which includes the lines: “Can’t you hear them calling in the night-time’s lonely spaces […] Can’t you see them passing […] Those that strove full strongly, and have laid their lives away?” The speaker hears and conveys the pleading of those who have given their breath in order to make explicit the reader’s responsibility to both the dead and the Allied cause: “‘Thus and thus we battled, we were faithful in endeavour;/Still it lies unfinished—will ye make the deed in vain?’” M’Fadyen focusses on soldierly sacrifice and “drafts that never came,” whereas a poem entitled “Your Country’s Call,” published in the same paper in 1915 by “An Australian Mother, Shirley, Queensland,” refers to maternal sacrifice and the joys and difficulties of birthing and raising her son only to find the country’s claims on him outweigh her own. She grapples with patriotism and resistance: “he must go/forth./Where? Why? Don’t think. Just smother/up the pain./Give him up quickly, for his country’s gain.” The War Precautions Act of October 1914 made it “illegal to publish any material likely to discourage recruiting or undermine the Allied effort” (Damousi 21), which undoubtedly meant that, to achieve publication, critical, depressing or negative views would need to be repressed or cast as inducement to enlist, though evidently many writers also sought to convince themselves as well as others that the cause was noble and the cost redeemable. “Your Country’s Call” concludes uncertainly, “Give him up proudly./You have done your share./There may be recompense—somewhere.”Sociologist Clive Seal argues that “social and cultural life involves turning away from the inevitability of death, which is contained in the fact of our embodiment, and towards life” (1). He contends that “grief for embodiment” is pervasive and perpetual and “extends beyond the obvious manifestations of loss by the dying and bereaved, to incorporate the rituals of everyday interaction” (200), and he goes so far as to suggest that if we recognise that our bodies “give to us both our lives and our deaths” then we can understand that “social and cultural life can, in the last analysis, be understood as a human construction in the face of death” (210). To deal with the grief that comes with “realisation of embodiment,” Searle finds that we engage in various “resurrective practices designed to transform an orientation towards death into one that points towards life” (8). He includes narrative reconstruction as well as funeral lament and everyday conversation as rituals associated with maintenance of the social bond, which is “the most crucial human motive” (Scheff qtd. in Searle 30). Although Seale does not discuss the acts of writing or of reading specifically, his argument can be extended, we believe, to include both as important resurrective practices that contain desire for self-repair and reorientation as well as for inclusion in and creation of an empathic moral community, though this does not imply that such desires can ever be satisfied. In “Reading,” Virginia Woolf reminds that “somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down is the form of a human being” (28-29), but her very reminder assumes that this knowledge of embodiment tends to be forgotten or repressed. Writing, by its aura of permanence and resurrective potential, points towards life and connection, even as it signifies absence and disconnection. Christian Riegel explains that the “literary work of mourning,” whether poetry, fiction or nonfiction, often has both a psychic and social function, “partaking of the processes of mourning while simultaneously being a product for public reception.” Such a text is indicative of ways that societies shape and control responses to death, making it “an inherently socio-historical construct” (xviii). Jacques Derrida’s passionate and uneasy enactment of this labour in The Work of Mourning suggests that writing often responds to the death of a known person or their oeuvre, where each death changes and reduces the world, so that the world as one knew it “sinks into an abyss” (115). Of course, writing also wrestles with anonymous, large-scale loss which is similarly capable of shattering our sense of “ontological security” (Riegel xx). Sandra Gilbert proposes that some traumatic events cause “death’s door” to swing “so publicly and dramatically open that we can’t look away” (xxii). Derrida’s work of mourning entails imaginative revival of those he has lost and is a struggle with representation and fidelity, whereas critical silence in respect of the body of literature of the First World War might imply repeated turning from “grief for embodiment” towards myths of immortality and indebtedness. Commemorating the war dead might be regarded as a resurrective practice that forges and fortifies communities of the living, while addressing the imagined demands of those who die for their nation.Riegel observes that in its multiplicity of motivations and functions, the literary work of mourning is always “an attempt to make present that which is irrefutably lost, and within that paradoxical tension lies a central tenet of all writerly endeavour that deals with the representation of death” (xix). The literary work of mourning must remain incomplete: it is “always a limiting attempt at revival and at representation,” because words inevitably “fail to replace a lost one.” Even so, they can assist in the attempt to “work through and understand” loss (xix). But the reader or mourner is caught in a strange situation, for he or she inevitably scrutinises words not the body, a corpus not a corpse, and while this is a form of evasion it is also the only possibility open to us. Even so, Derrida might say that it is “as if, by reading, by observing the signs on the drawn sheet of paper, [readers are] trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death—and the anxiety before death.” But he also concedes (after Sarah Kofman), that this process might involve “a cunning affirmation of life, its irrepressible movement to survive, to live on” (176), which supports Seale’s contention in relation to resurrective practices generally. Atwood points out that the dead have always made demands on the living, but, because there is a risk in negotiating with the dead, there needs to be good reason or reward for doing so. Our reading of war literature written by noncombatants suggests that in many instances writers seek to appease the unsettled dead whose death was meant to mean something for the future: the living owe the dead a debt that can only be paid by changing the way they live. The living, in other words, must not only remember the fallen, but also heed them by their conduct. It becomes the poet’s task to remind people of this, that is, to turn them from death towards life.Arthur H Adams’s 1918 poem “When the Anzac Dead Came Home,” published in the Bulletin, is based on this premise: the souls of the dead— the “failed” and “fallen”—drift uncertainly over their homeland, observing the world to which they cannot return, with its “cheerful throng,” “fair women swathed in fripperies,” and “sweet girls” that cling “round windows like bees on honeycomb.” One soul recognises a soldier, Steve, from his former battalion, a mate who kept his life but lost his arm and, after hovering for a while, again “wafts far”; his homecoming creates a “strange” stabbing pain, an ache in his pal’s “old scar.” In this uncanny scene, irreconcilable and traumatic knowledge expresses itself somatically. The poet conveys the viewpoint of the dead Anzac rather than the returned one. The living soldier, whose body is a site of partial loss, does not explicitly conjure or mourn his dead friend but, rather, is a living extension of his loss. In fact, the empathic connection construed by the poet is not figured as spectral orchestration or as mindful on the part of man or community; rather, it occurs despite bodily death or everyday living and forgetting; it persists as hysterical pain or embodied knowledge. Freud and Breuer’s influential Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, raised the issue of mind/body relations, given its theory that the hysteric’s body expresses psychic trauma that she or he may not recollect: repressed “memories of aetiological significance” result in “morbid symptoms” (56). They posited that experience leaves traces which, like disinterred archaeological artefacts, inform on the past (57). However, such a theory depends on what Rousseau and Porter refer to as an “almost mystical collaboration between mind and body” (vii), wherein painful or perverse or unspeakable “reminiscences” are converted into symptoms, or “mnemic symbols,” which is to envisage the body as penetrable text. But how can memory return unbidden and in such effective disguise that the conscious mind does not recognise it as memory? How can the body express pain without one remembering or acknowledging its origin? Do these kinds of questions suggest that the Cartesian mind/body split has continued valency despite the challenge that hysteria itself presents to such a theory? Is it possible, rather, that the body itself remembers—and not just its own replete form, as suggested by those who feel the presence of a limb after its removal—but the suffering body of “the other”? In Adam’s poem, as in M’Fadyen’s, intersubjective knowledge subsists between embodied and disembodied subjects, creating an imagined community of sensation.Adams’s poem envisions mourning as embodied knowledge that allows one man to experience another’s pain—or soul—as both “old” and “strange” in the midst of living. He suggests that the dead gaze at us even as they are present “in us” (Derrida). Derrida reminds that ghosts occupy an ambiguous space, “neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (41). Human mutability, the possibility of exchanging places in a kind of Socratic cycle of life and death, is posited by Adams, whose next stanzas depict the souls of the war dead reclaiming Australia and displacing the thankless living: blown to land, they murmur to each other, “’Tis we who are the living: this continent is dead.” A significant imputation is that the dead must be reckoned with, deserve better, and will not rest unless the living pay their moral dues. The disillusioned tone and intent of this 1918 poem contrasts with a poem Adams published in the Bulletin in 1915 entitled “The Trojan War,” which suggests even “Great Agamemnon” would “lift his hand” to honour “plain Private Bill,” the heroic, fallen Anzac who ventured forth to save “Some Mother-Helen sad at home. Some obscure Helen on a farm.” The act of war is envisaged as an act of birthing the nation, anticipating the Anzac legend, but simultaneously as its epitaph: “Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples write—in blood—their name.” Such a poem arguably invokes, though in ambiguous form, what Derrida (after Lyotard) refers to as the “beautiful death,” which is an attempt to lift death up, make it meaningful, and thereby foreclose or limit mourning, so that what threatens disorder and despair might instead reassure and restore “the body politic,” providing “explicit models of virtue” (Nass 82-83) that guarantee its defence and survival. Adams’ later poem, in constructing Steve as “a living fellow-ghost” of the dead Anzac, casts stern judgement on the society that fails to notice what has been lost even as it profits by it. Ideological and propagandist language is also denounced: “Big word-warriors still played the Party game;/They nobly planned campaigns of words, and deemed/their speeches deeds,/And fought fierce offensives for strange old creeds.” This complaint recalls Ezra Pound’s lines in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the dead who “walked eye-deep in hell/believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy;/usury age-old and age-thick/and liars in public places,” and it would seem that this is the kind of disillusion and bitterness that Clunies Ross considers to be “incompatible with the Anzac tradition” (178) and thus ignored. The Anzac tradition, though quieted for a time, possibly due to the 1930s Depression, Second World War, Vietnam War and other disabling events has, since the 1980s, been greatly revived, with Anzac Day commemorations in Australia and at Gallipoli growing exponentially, possibly making maintenance of this sacrificial national mythology, or beautiful death, among Australia’s most capacious and costly creative industries. As we approach the centenary of the war and of Gallipoli, this industry will only increase.Elaine Scarry proposes that the imagination invents mechanisms for “transforming the condition of absence into presence” (163). It does not escape us that in turning towards lost literatures we are ourselves engaging in a form of resurrective practice and that this paper, like other forms of social and cultural practice, might be understood as one more human construction motivated by grief for embodiment.Note: An archive and annotated bibliography of the “Lost Literatures of the First World War,” which comprises over 2,000 items, is expected to be published online in 2015.References Adams, Arthur H. “When the Anzac Dead Came Home.” Bulletin 21 Mar. 1918.---. “The Trojan War.” Bulletin 20 May 1915.An Australian Mother. “Your Country’s Call.” Sydney Mail 19 May 1915.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Random House, 2002.Caesar, Adrian. “National Myths of Manhood: Anzac and Others.” The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998. 147-168.Clunies Ross, Bruce. “Silent Heroes.” War: Australia’s Creative Response. Eds. Anna Rutherford and James Wieland. West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1997. 169-181.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 3. Trans. and eds. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Angela Richards. London: Penguin, 1988.Gerster, Robin. Big Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. M’Fayden, Ella. “The Wardens.” Sydney Mail 17 Apr. 1918.Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 76-96.Pound, Ezra. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” iv. 1920. 19 June 2012. ‹http://www.archive.org/stream/hughselwynmauber00pounrich/hughselwynmauber00pounrich_djvu.txt›.Riegal, Christian, ed. Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter. “Introduction: The Destinies of Hysteria.” Hysteria beyond Freud. Ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.Seale, Clive. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Sutherland, Katherine. “Land of Their Graves: Maternity, Mourning and Nation in Janet Frame, Sara Suleri, and Arundhati Roy.” Riegel 201-16.Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays Volume 2. London: Hogarth, 1966. 28-29.

Abstract Background Alcohol consumption constitutes a major public health problem as it has negative consequences on the health, social, psychological, and economic outcomes of individuals. Tertiary education presents students with unique challenges and some students resort to the use of alcohol in dealing with their problems. This study, therefore, sought to determine alcohol use, its effects, and associated factors among tertiary students in the Hohoe Municipaility of Ghana. Methods An institutional-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 418 tertiary students in the Hohoe Municipality of Ghana using a two-stage sampling technique. Data were collected using structured questionnaires. A binary logistic regression modelling was used to determine the strength of the association between alcohol consumption and the explanatory variables. The level of significance was set at p < 0.05. Stata version 16.0 was used to perform the analysis. Results The lifetime prevalence of alcohol consumption was 39.5%. Out of them, 49.1% were still using alcohol, translating to an overall prevalence of 19.4% among the tertiary students. Self-reported perceived effects attributed to alcohol consumption were loss of valuable items (60.6%), excessive vomiting (53.9%), stomach pains/upset (46.1%), accident (40.0%), unprotected sex (35.1%), risk of liver infection (16.4%), depressive feelings (27.3%), diarrhoea (24.2%), debt (15.2%), and petty theft (22.4%). In terms of factors associated with alcohol consumption, students aged 26 years and above were more likely to have consumed alcohol [AOR = 4.4, 95%CI = 1.74, 11.14] than those in 16–20 years group. Muslim students had lower odds of alcohol consumption compared to Christians [AOR = 0.1, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.31]. It was also found that students who had peer influence [AOR = 3.7, 95%CI = 2.31, 5.82] and those who had academic adjustment problems [AOR = 3.6, 95% CI = 2.01, 6.46] were more likely to consume alcohol. Conclusion Lifetime prevalence of alcohol consumption is high among tertiary students in the Hohoe Municipality of Ghana, with several physical, psychosocial and economic consequences. Alcohol-related education should be intensified in tertiary institutions and counseling units should be equipped with relevant assessment tools to assess and help students who are at risk and those who are already consuming alcohol.

A study of the work of an unknown to the general public painter middle XX century Serhii Doroshenko is currently at the initial stage. Thanks to the publication of the catalog and the holding of a personal exhibition, the process of putting part of his picturesque heritage into scientific circulation began. Today the life and professional path of the artist, as well as several dozen surviving works of the master are known and partially researched. The fact that the artist had to live under a fictitious name for most of his life makes it difficult to identify individual facts and documents. However, undoubted picturesque talent, a subtle sense of the landscape genre, put Serhii Doroshenko next to the best representatives of the landscape of his time. The return of the artist's name to the history of Ukrainian art will open another page for scholars and connoisseurs of painting. Roman Solovey was born in the village Pavlivka, Cherkasy region in 1915. During the Holodomor, Roman was arrested by the NKVD, but it is unknown how he resigned, and in 1936 he appeared as Serhii Doroshenko. According to the dates on the student card, from 1936 to 1939 he studied at the Kharkiv Art School. However, according to other documents from 1937, the young artist leads an active creative life on the opposite side of the Soviet Union in Buryat-Mongolia. He exhibits his works at the republican exhibition, works as an artist in the club. In 1939, Doroshenko, as a student of the Kharkiv Art School, was transferred to the 3rd year of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Ukrainian Art Institute. From 1945 Doroshenko was again a student of Kyiv Art Institute and, finally, in 1948 he received a diploma of a painter. From that time until his death he worked in the Kyiv Regional Cooperative Society of Artists. In 1949 Doroshenko made his debut at the 10th Ukrainian Art Exhibition. Since then, his favorite genre - marina - has been determined. He became a regular participant in Ukrainian and Soviet Union exhibitions, where his works are exhibited along with the best examples of landscape painting of that time. In 1950, Doroshenko became a candidate for membership in the Union of artists of Ukraine, and in the registration card indicates a non-existent place in nature of his birth. He was also a member of the board of the Ukrainian branch of the USSR art fund. His life ended on May 27, 1957 due to severe heart disease.

Abstract Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic impacted nearly all aspects of life for American families. Urologic care was also disrupted, including access to elective sterilization procedures. In the setting of these social and economic changes, it is unknown how the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the population pursuing vasectomy. Objective We sought to evaluate how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the age, paternity status, and fertility of men undergoing vasectomy. Methods We completed a retrospective cohort study of men undergoing vasectomy a single academic medical center across a ten-year period (11/1/2011-10/31/2021) that overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic start date was defined as 04/01/2020, which coincided with the implementation of government-enacted restrictions on public activities. Patients undergoing vasectomy were identified via a systematic search of the electronic medical record. Patient age, BMI, paternity status, number of children, and procedure date were abstracted. To obtain a more granular appreciation of demographic changes, vasectomized men were divided into age categories spanning 5-year increments. Fisher’s exact and chi-squared tests were performed to compare age group prevalence and paternity status before and after the pandemic. T-tests were employed to compare the distribution of age, BMI, and number of children. Results 1999 vasectomized men were included in the cohort, 1829 (91.5%) of whom underwent sterilization prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Patients undergoing vasectomy during the pandemic were approximately one year older than those getting vasectomized before the pandemic (39.6 vs. 38.5 years, p=0.04, Table 1), while BMI was similar (29.0 vs. 29.2 kg/m^2, p=0.51). Paternity data was available for 59% of the cohort (n=1180/1999), the majority of whom attained fatherhood prior to obtaining vasectomy (n=822/1180, 69.7%). Men undergoing vasectomy during the pandemic were more likely to be fathers (89.9% vs. 67.8%, p=0.0001) and had more children, on average, than men being sterilized before the advent of COVID-19 (2.2 vs. 1.7 children, p=0.0004). Interestingly, there was also a statistically significant difference in the age category distribution of vasectomized men before and during the pandemic (p=0.02, Figure 1). Relatively fewer 30-34 year-olds underwent vasectomy after the debut of COVID-19 (12.4% vs. 21.1%, p=0.02), while relatively more 45-49 year-olds were sterilized during the pandemic (17.7% vs. 11.9%, p=0.04). Further illustrating this point, only 19.4% of the pandemic group was younger than 35 years of age compared to 28.5% of the pre-pandemic group (p=0.01). Conclusions Men obtaining vasectomies during the COVID-19 pandemic were older, were more likely to be fathers, and had more children on average than men who pursued sterilization beforehand. These findings imply that men with larger families exhibited greater interest in vasectomy following the advent of the pandemic. Additional investigation is required to validate these findings and better understand the social and economic forces that drove these demographic changes. Disclosure No

En esta oportunidad tenemos el gusto de entrevistar a un Biólogo que se anima a entrar en un terreno del cual muchos escapan: las reflexiones epistemológicas. Para aquellos/as que quieran profundizar acerca de lo expresado aquí, recomendamos la lectura del capítulo de Marone, López de Casenave y González del Solar (2007) “Qué guía la investigación y la profesión ecológica: ¿los hechos o las ideas?” En: Arcucci, Lijteroff y Mangione (eds) Café Ciencia. Nueva Editorial Universitaria, San Luis. Disponible en: www.ege.fcen.uba.ar/ecodes/Publicaciones/articulo54.pdf ¿Dónde se ubica “geográficamente” el grupo de investigación del cual forma parte? Nuestro grupo, denominado Ecodes (Grupo de Investigación en Ecología de Comunidades de Desierto) es un tanto atípico porque está basado en dos sedes: los investigadores y tesistas se encuentran en la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires y en el Instituto Argentino de Investigaciones de las Zonas Áridas (IADIZA), un instituto de CONICET que está en Mendoza. Además, hoy en día tenemos a algunos miembros dispersos por el mundo (Barcelona, Bariloche, San Luis...). Es un grupo numeroso y pueden conocer a sus integrantes visitando la página web (http://www.ege.fcen.uba.ar/Ecodes/Ecodes.htm). Nuestras tareas de campo se desarrollan principalmente en la Reserva de la Biosfera de Ñacuñán y sus alrededores, en el llano mendocino, a unos 200 Km. de la ciudad de Mendoza, dentro de lo que es el desierto del Monte. ¿Cuál son los principales problemas de investigación que encara el grupo? Nuestro programa está fundamentalmente orientado a estudiar la composición y estructura (es decir, la red de influencias mutuas) del sistema constituido por las plantas, sus semillas y los animales granívoros, con el objeto de comprender en qué medida las interacciones biológicas contribuyen a moldear las comunidades naturales en ambientes desérticos.En general se piensa que los desiertos son ecosistemas simples porque en ellos la disponibilidad de agua es lo único que controla los patrones de productividad y diversidad, pero la naturaleza es siempre más compleja que lo que uno cree... Y resulta que para explicar y predecir esos patrones hay que entender también los efectos directos e indirectos de las relaciones entre las especies, como la predación, la competencia o el mutualismo. En el grupo tenemos proyectos individuales, por ejemplo sobre ecología de aves, de hormigas o de pastos, que se integran en el programa de investigación general. Algunas de las preguntas de estos proyectos individuales son: ¿qué especies de granívoros consumen cuáles semillas? ¿ejercen los granívoros efectos significativos sobre los pastos? ¿cómo afectan las fluctuaciones climáticas a productores y consumidores, y a las interacciones entre ellos? En particular, yo estuve trabajando fuertemente en la interacción entre aves y semillas (mi tesis doctoral estuvo basada en esos estudios) y, en los últimos años, he dedicado mucho esfuerzo a estudiar las hormigas granívoras de Ñacuñán y su relación con las semillas que consumen. Estamos orgullosos de tener un verdadero programa de investigación. Si bien Ecodes posee varias líneas de investigación independientes, éstas son altamente interactivas: los proyectos individuales se integran de manera de responder preguntas a diferentes niveles de manera simultánea. La teoría ecológica de comunidades y la reflexión filosófica y epistemológica son los principales motores para desarrollar nuestro programa de investigación, y el estudio de los ambientes desérticos resulta muy apropiado para aplicar estos intereses. ¿De qué manera la reflexión epistemológica contribuye con un programa de investigación en ecología? El fundamento epistemológico de nuestros proyectos es el desarrollo de explicaciones plausibles (con apoyo racional y empírico) para conseguir predicciones confiables acerca de la dinámica de las comunidades de desierto. El programa de investigación intenta poner en relación la descripción de patrones con la formulación de hipótesis sobre procesos o mecanismos que dan cuenta de ellos. Esas hipótesis se ponen a prueba a través de la observación bien diseñada y el experimento en condiciones de campo y laboratorio. Además, incorporamos como práctica usual la revisión continua de supuestos (por ejemplo, de las técnicas que usamos) y la contrastación redundante de cada hipótesis, usando distintas aproximaciones, con el objetivo de obtener resultados y explicaciones robustas. Si tuviera que ponerle rótulos, diría que nuestra investigación es explícitamente materialista, sistémica y causal. La reflexión epistemológica es un eje esencial alrededor del cual el grupo articula los proyectos individuales. Esto es el resultado de una predisposición natural de la mayor parte de los miembros del grupo (pero, en especial, de los más grandes!) por esos temas. Entiendo que es algo no muy común en el ámbito académico... pero a la vez es tan importante! He leído alguna vez -en un prestigioso libro de texto- que “los científicos no están particularmente bien equipados para enfrascarse en debates acerca de la naturaleza y el estatus de la ciencia”. Yo no comparto esa opinión: me parece saludable para la ciencia que sus principales actores, los científicos, se involucren como parte en el debate. Y además creo que el científico que posee conocimientos básicos de Epistemología está más capacitado para desarrollar su actividad cotidiana de una forma más provechosa que aquel que no los tiene. Esa idea me impulsó a profundizar en esos temas, a los que dedico buena parte de mi tiempo de estudio y de enseñanza. En ese marco, considero pertinente prestar atención a qué aportes de las corrientes y posturas epistemológicas actuales son más o menos relevantes para la disciplina que uno desarrolla y, a la vez, a identificar cuáles de los problemas propios de la disciplina están insuficientemente desarrollados o pueden servir para enriquecer el panorama general de la Epistemología. En particular, la Ecología es un terreno fértil para el análisis epistemológico, porque está basada en la estructura brindada por la teoría de la evolución (con sus características intrínsecamente contingentes), porque está enfocada en la comprensión y resolución de problemas que muy a menudo exceden -por su escala espacial o temporal- la aplicación llana de la experimentación, y porque está plagada de procesos de causalidad múltiple. Desde hace algunos años, varios integrantes de Ecodes venimos profundizando este tipo de estudios y evaluando críticamente nuestra propia disciplina. Como mencioné antes, intentamos que esos conocimientos se expresen en la práctica, guiando la forma en que realizamos nuestro trabajo cotidiano, y es también nuestra intención que este tipo de actitud se difunda, razón por la cual lo incorporamos en la mayor parte de nuestras actividades docentes. ¿Qué consecuencias concretas tiene esta aproximación sobre la forma en que proceden en sus investigaciones? Una de las consecuencias es que no estamos “orientados por el método” sino que, por el contrario, tratamos de manejar un conjunto de técnicas distintas en la medida en que el problema en cuestión (¡la pregunta!) lo requiere. Así, hacemos muestreos de campo (por ejemplo, para estimar la cobertura de pastos o la densidad de aves), usamos técnicas moleculares (para evaluar el grado de parentesco de las obreras de las colonias de hormigas), isótopos (para evaluar potenciales rutas de migración de las aves), realizamos experimentos manipulativos de campo (excluyendo, por ejemplo, algunos grupos de granívoros para ver su efecto sobre las semillas) o de laboratorio (para estudiar las preferencias de las aves por distintas semillas). Además, no creo que la investigación deba estar necesariamente dirigida a organismos o sistemas modelo: me divierte mucho más que el problema mismo sea el que me guíe al taxón o al sistema de estudio (aunque sea mucho más arduo el trabajo). Esto explica por qué, a lo largo de los años que llevo investigando la relación semillas-granívoros en el desierto del Monte, mis trabajos han abarcado estudios de semillas, plantas, aves, ratones y hormigas. Esto parece más complejo que un estudio tradicional... Pese a las dificultades intrínsecas que tiene abordar investigaciones sobre diferentes organismos, me resulta mucho más desafiante que seguir haciendo más de lo mismo... Javier López de Casenave. Es Licenciado y Doctor en Ciencias Biológicas. Se desempeña como Profesor en el Departamento de Ecología, Genética y Evolución y como Secretario Académico de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Es Investigador del CONICET y sus principales actividades e intereses académicos están repartidos entre la investigación científica, la docencia universitaria y la edición de publicaciones científicas. Es editor de El Hornero. Revista de Ornitología Neotropical, que publica desde 1917 Aves Argentinas/Asociación Ornitológica del Plata.

The book review might be thought of as a provisionally authoritative assessment designed to evaluate a book on behalf of potential readers, and to place the text within an appropriate literary context. It is, perhaps, more often associated with newly published works than established “classics,” which exist both as saleable commodities in the form of published books, and as more abstract entities within the cultural memory of a given audience. This suggests part of the difficulty of reviewing a book like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, originally published in 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II). Don Quixote is a long book, and is often referred to through ellipsis or synecdoche. Pared back to its most famous episode, Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills (Part I ch. 8: 63-5), it is frequently interpreted in terms of a comic opposition between the world of chivalric romance that determines the central character’s perceptions and actions, and the world of early modern Spain in which he is set. This seems as good a summary as any of Don Quixote’s behaviour, as the “quixotic” symbolism of this episode is easily transposed onto both the internal world of the text, and the external world in general. But Cervantes’s novel also seems to resist definition in such simple terms; as I intend to suggest, the relationship between what Don Quixote is seen to represent, and his role in the novel, can generate some interesting repercussions for the process of reviewing. Cervantes represents his character’s delusions as a consequence of the books he reads, providing the opportunity for a review (in the sense both of a survey and a critique) of various contemporary literary discourses. This process is formalised early on, as the contents of Don Quixote’s library are examined, criticised and selectively burnt by his concerned friends (Part I ch. 6: 52-8). The books mentioned are real, and the discovery of Cervantes’s own Galatea among those reprieved suggests a playful authorial reflection on the fictional quality of his work, an impression reinforced as the original narrative breaks off to be replaced by a “second author” and Arabic translator between two chapters (Part I ch. 8-9: 70-6). Part II of Don Quixote depicts characters who have read, and refer to, Part I, effectively granting Don Quixote an internal literary identity that is reviewed by the other characters against the figure they actually encounter. To complicate matters, it also contains repeated mentions of a real, but apocryphal, Part II (published in Tarragona in 1614 under the name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda), culminating in Don Quixote’s encounter with a proof copy of a (fictional) second edition in a Barcelona printing shop (ch. 62: 916). Ironically, while this text appears to question the later, authorised version from which it differs markedly, Cervantes’s mention of it within his own text allows him both to review the work of his rival, and reflect on the reception of his own. These forms of self-reflexivity suggest both a general interest in writing and literature, and a rather more perplexing sense of the text reviewing itself. In an odd sense, Don Quixote pre-empts and usurps the role of the reviewer, appearing somehow to place external reviewers in the position of being contained or implied within it. But despite these pitfalls, more reviews than usual have appeared in 2005, the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Part I. Some refer specifically to editions released for the anniversary: Jeremy Lawrance reviews two new editions in Spanish, while Paddy Bullard examines a newly-restored edition of Tobias Smollett’s 1755 translation, recommended “for readers of Cervantes who are interested in his profound influence on eighteenth-century British culture, or on the development of the novel as a modern literary genre.” This also suggests something about the way in which translations, like reviews, serve to mark and to mediate their own context. Lawrance’s verdict of “still readable” implies the book’s continuing capacity not only to entertain, but also to generate readings that throw light on the history of its reception. Don Quixote provides a perspective from which to review the concerns implied in critical interpretations of different periods. Smollett’s translation (like Laurence Sterne’s invocations of Cervantes in his Tristram Shandy) suggests an eighteenth-century interest in the relationship between Don Quixote and the novel. This may be contrasted, as Yannick Roy suggests (53-4), both with earlier perceptions of Don Quixote as a figure to be laughed at, and the post-romantic perception of a tragicomical everyman seen as representative of a human condition. Modern interpretations of Don Quixote are also complicated by the canonisation of its hero as a household word. Comparing the anniversary of Don Quixote to the attention given to the centenary of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Simon Jenkins notes “few English people read Don Quixote, perhaps because they think they know it already.” It is frequently described as a foundational text of the modern novel; however, at a thousand pages, it must also compete for readers’ time and attention with the ever-increasing gamut of long prose narratives it helped instigate. Don Quixote, the deluded knight-errant lives on, while the subtleties of Cervantes’s narrative may increasingly be dependent on sympathetic reviewers. It would seem that it is no longer necessary to read the story of Don Quixote in order to know, or even write about him. Nevertheless, not least because the book entertains a complex relationship with its character, and because it seems so conscious of its own literary enterprise, Don Quixote is a dangerous book not to have read. Responding to Jenkins’s claim that Cervantes’s work represents a more unique, and more easily grasped, achievement than Einstein’s, Stephen Matchett takes exception to a phenomenon he describes as “a bloke who tilted at windmills.” Arguing that “most of us are sufficiently solipsistic to be more comfortable with writers who chart the human condition than thinkers who strive to make sense of the universe,” he seems to consider Don Quixote as exemplary of a pernicious modern tendency to privilege literary discourses over scientific ones, to take fiction more seriously than reality. Even ignoring the incongruity of a theory of relativity presented as a paradigm of fact (which may speak volumes about textual and existential anxiety in the twenty-first century), this seems a particularly unfortunate judgement to make about Don Quixote. Matchett’s claim about the relative fortunes of science and literature is not only difficult to substantiate, but also appears to have been anticipated by the condition of Don Quixote himself. Rather than arguing that the survival of Cervantes’s novel is representative of a public obsession with fiction, it would seem more accurate, if nonetheless paradoxical, to suggest that Don Quixote seems capable of projecting the delusions of its central character onto the unwary reviewer. Matchett’s article is not, strictly speaking, a review of the text of Don Quixote, and so the question of whether he has actually read the book is, in some sense, irrelevant. The parallels are nevertheless striking: while the surrealism of Don Quixote’s enterprise is highlighted by his attempt to derive a way of being specifically from a literature of chivalry, Matchett’s choice of example has the consequence of re-creating aspects of Cervantes’s novel in a new context. Tilting at chimerical adversaries that recall the windmills upon which its analysis is centred, this review may be read not only as a response to Don Quixote, but also, ironically, as a performance of it. To say this seems absurd; however, echoing Jorge Luis Borges’s words in his essay “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “to justify this ‘absurdity’ is the primary object of this note” (40). Borges explores the (fictional) attempt of obscure French poet Pierre Menard to rewrite, word for word, parts of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Menard’s initial undertaking to “be Miguel de Cervantes,” to “forget the history of Europe between 1602 and 1918,” is rejected for the more interesting attempt to “go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard”. While Menard’s text is identical to Cervantes’s, the point is that the implied difference in context affects the way in which the text is read. As Borges states: It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself. . . . Cervantes’s text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer (41-2). Menard’s “verbally identical” Quixote can also be identified as a review of Cervantes’s text, in the sense that it is both informed by, and dependent on, the original. In addition, it allows a review of the relationship between the book as published by Cervantes, and the almost infinite number of readings engendered by the historical permutations of the last three (and now four) hundred years, from which the influence of Don Quixote cannot be excluded. Matchett’s review is of a different nature, in that it stems from an attempt to question the book’s continuing popularity. It seems absurd to suggest that Matchett himself could have served as a model for Don Quixote. But the unacknowledged debt of his piece to Cervantes’s novel, and to the opposition of discourses set up within it, reveals a supremely quixotic irony: Stephen Matchett appears to have produced a concise and richly interpretable rewriting of Don Quixote, in the persona of Stephen Matchett. References Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Trans. James E. Irby. Labyrinths. Eds. James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates. New York: New Directions, 1964. 36-44. Bullard, Paddy. “Literature.” Times Literary Supplement 8 Apr. 2005. De Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Don Quixote. Trans. John Rutherford. London: Penguin, 2003. (Part and chapter references have been included in the text in order to facilitate reference to different editions.) Jenkins, Simon. “The Don.” Review. Weekend Australian 14 May 2005. Lawrance, Jeremy. “Still Readable.” Times Literary Supplement 22 Apr. 2005. Matchett, Stephen. “A Theory on Einstein.” Review. Weekend Australian 11 June 2005. Roy, Yannick. “Pourquoi ne rit-on plus de Don Quichotte?” Inconvénient: Revue Littéraire d’Essai et de Création 6 (2001): 53-60. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Noonan, Will. "On Reviewing Don Quixote." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/03-noonan.php>. APA Style Noonan, W. (Oct. 2005) "On Reviewing Don Quixote," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/03-noonan.php>.

Swine semantics erupted into a linguistic battle between the two U.S. presidential candidates in the 2008 campaign over a lesser-known colloquialism “lipstick on a pig” reference in a speech by then Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama. This resulted in the Republicans sparring with the Democrats over the identification of the “swine” in question, claiming “sexism” and demanding an apology on behalf of then Governor Sarah Palin, the first female Republican vice presidential candidate. The Republican Party, fearful of being criticised for its own sexist and racist views (Kuhn par. 1), seized the opportunity to attack the Democrats with a proactive media campaign that made the lipstick comment a lead story in the media during a critical time less than two months before the election, derailing more serious campaign issues and focusing attention on Palin, who had just made her national political debut and whose level of experience was widely debated. Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg conducted a meme-tracking study for analysing news-cycle phrases in approximately 90 million stories from 1.6 million online sites spanning mainstream news to blogs during the final three months of the U.S. presidential election (1). They discovered that “lipstick on a pig” was “stickier” than other phrases and received “unexpectedly high popularity” (4). A simple Google search of “lipstick on a pig” resulted in 244,000 results, with more than half originating in 2008. Obama’s “Lipstick on a Pig” Reference During the final rounds of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s words at a widely televised campaign stop in Lebanon, Virginia, on 9 September, sparked a linguistic debate between the two major American political parties 56 days before Election Day. Obama attempted to debunk McCain’s strategy about change in the following statement:John McCain says he’s about change, too. [...] And so I guess his whole angle is, watch out, George Bush. Except for economic policy, healthcare policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy, and Karl Rove-style politics [...] That’s not change. That’s just calling some—the same thing, something different. But you know [...] you can put [...] lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig (“Obama’s Take”).A reporter from The New York Times commented that it was clear to the audience that Obama’s “lipstick” phrase was a direct reference to McCain’s policies (Zeleny par. 5). Known as a well-educated, articulate speaker, perhaps one considered too professorial for mainstream America, Obama attempted to inject more folksy language and humour into his dialogue with the public. However, the Republicans interpreted the metaphor quite differently. Republicans Claim “Sexism” from a “Male Chauvinist Pig” The Republican contender John McCain and his entourage immediately took offence, claiming that the “pig” in question was a sexist comment referring to Palin, who was introduced on 29 August as the first female vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket (“VP Pick”). A Republican National Committee spokeswoman quickly told the media, “Sarah Palin’s maverick record of reform doesn’t need any ‘dressing up,’ but the Obama campaign’s condescending commentary deserves some dressing down” (Chozick par. 8). McCain’s camp formed the Palin Truth Squad with 54 Republican women, primarily lawyers and politicians, on the same day as the metaphor was used, to counter negative media and Internet commentary about Palin (Harper A13). Almost immediately after Obama’s “lipstick” comment, McCain’s camp conducted a conference call with journalists and former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift, a Republican and chair of the Palin Truth Squad, who stated the lipstick comment referred to Palin, “the only one of the four—the presidential and vice presidential candidates—who wears lipstick” (Kornblut and Shear par. 12). Another member of the Squad, Thelma Drake, then a Republican Representative from Virginia, said that “it’s hard for Barack Obama to paint himself as the agent of change if he harbors the same mindset that Palin and millions of women just like her, have been fighting against their whole lives” (Applegate par. 8). Swift and others also claimed Obama was referring to Palin since she had herself used a lipstick metaphor during her Republican National Convention speech, 3 Sepember: “I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick” (“Palin’s Speech” par. 26). The Republicans also created an anti-Obama Web ad with the theme, “Ready to Lead? No. Ready to Smear? Yes,“ (Weisman and Slevin A01) with a compilation of video clips of Palin’s “lipstick” joke, followed by the latter part of Obama's “lipstick” speech, and CBS News anchorwoman, Katie Couric, talking about “sexism” in politics, that latter of which referred to an older clip referring to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the White House. Both clips on Obama and Couric were taken out of context. CBS retaliated and released a statement that the network “does not endorse any candidate” and that “any use of CBS personnel in political advertising that suggests the contrary is misleading” (Silva par. 8). YouTube pulled the Republican Web ads stating that the cause was “due to a copyright claim” (Silva par. 7). Another porcine phrase became linked to Obama—“male chauvinist pig”—an expression that evolved as an outgrowth of the feminist movement in the 1960s and first appeared with the third word, “pig,” in the media in 1970 (Mansbridge and Flaster 261). BlogHer, a blog for women, posted “Liberal Chauvinist Pigs,” on the same day as Obama's speech, asking: “Does the expression male chauvinist pig come to mind?” (Leary par. 5) Other conservative blogs also reflected on this question, painting Obama as a male chauvinist pig, and chastising both the liberal media and the Democrats for questioning Palin’s credentials as a viable vice presidential candidate. Obama “Sexist Pig Gear” protest tee-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers were sold online by Zazzle.com. Democratic Response to “Controversy” During a campaign stop in Norfolk, Virginia, the day after his “lipstick” comment, Obama called the Republican backlash the “latest made-up controversy by the John McCain campaign” and appealed for a return to more serious topics with “enough” of “foolish diversions” (“Obama Hits”). He stated that the Republicans “seize on an innocent remark, try to take it out of context, throw up an outrageous ad, because they know it’s catnip for the news media” (“Obama Hits”). Obama also referred to the situation as the “silly season of politics” in media interviews (James par. 8). Obama’s spokespeople rallied claiming that McCain played the “gender card about the use of a common analogy” (Kornblut and Shear par. 6). An Obama campaign spokesman distributed to the media copies of articles from a Chicago Tribune story in 2007 in which McCain applied the lipstick analogy about the healthcare strategy of Hillary Clinton, a previous female Democratic presidential contender (Chozick 11). Another Obama spokeswoman said that the porcine expression “was older than my grandfather’s grandfather,” (Zimmer par. 1) which also inspired the media and linguists to further investigate this claim. Evolution of “Lipstick on a Pig” This particular colloquial use of a “pig” evolved from a long history of porcine expressions in American politics. American political discourse has been rich with cultural references to porcine idioms with negative connotations. Pork barrels were common 19th-century household items used to store salt pork, and some plantation owners doled out the large barrels as rewards to slaves who then had to compete with each other to grab a portion (Maxey 693). In post-Civil War America, “pork barrel” became a political term for legislative bills “loaded with special projects for Members of Congress to distribute to their constituents back home as an act of largesse, courtesy of the federal taxpayer” (“Pork Barrel Legislation”). Today, “pork barrel” is widely used in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and other countries (“Definition Pork Barrel”) to refer to “government projects or appropriations yielding rich patronage benefits” (“Pork Barrel”). Conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh coined the term, “porkulus,” as another expression for “pork barrel” by merging the words “pork and “stimulus,” while discussing President Obama’s economic stimulus package in January 2009 (Kuntz par. 1). Ben Zimmer, an American lexicologist, explained that “many porcine proverbs describe vain attempts at converting something from ugly to pretty, or from useless to useful” (par. 2). Zimmer and other writers investigated the heritage of “lipstick on a pig” over the past 500 years from “you can't make a silk purse from a sow’s ear,” “a hog in armour is still a hog,” and “a hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog.” Zimmer connected the dots between the words “lipstick,” a 19th-century invention, and “pig” to a Los Angeles Times editor in 1926 who wrote: “Most of us know as much of history as a pig does of lipsticks” (par. 3). American Politicians Who Have Smeared “Lipstick on a Pig” Which American politicians had used “lipstick on a pig” before Obama? Both Democrats and Republicans have coloured their speech with this colloquialism to refer to specific issues, not specific people. In 2008, Elizabeth Edwards, wife of presidential hopeful John Edwards, used the porcine expression about McCain’s healthcare proposals at a Democratic campaign event and House Minority Leader John Boehner, a Republican, about weak Republican fundraising efforts during the same month (Covington and Curry par. 7-8). McCain ironically used the term twice to criticise Hillary Clinton’s healthcare proposals as “lipstick on a pig,” while they were both campaigning in 2007 (Covington and Curry par. 6). His statement received limited attention at the time. During a telephone interview in 2007, Obama also had used the pig analogy when referring to an “impossible assignment” George W. Bush gave to General Petraeus, who was then serving as the Multinational Forces Iraq Commander (Tapper par. 15). In 2004, Republican Vice President Richard Cheney applied a regional slant: “As we like to say in Wyoming, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig, but at the end of the day it's still a pig,” about the national defence record of John Kerry, then a Democratic presidential nominee (Covington and Curry par. 4). A few months earlier that year, John Edwards, Democratic vice presidential candidate, scolded the Bush administration for putting “lipstick on a pig” on “lackluster job-creation numbers” (Covington and Curry par. 3). Representative Charles Rangel, a Democrat, identified the “pig” as a tax bill the same year (Siegel par. 15-16). In 1992, the late Governor of Texas, Ann Richards, a Democrat, who was known for colourful phrases, gave the pig a name when she said: “You can put lipstick on a hog and call it Monique, but it is still a pig,” referring to the Republican administration for deploying warships to protect oil tankers in the Middle East, effectively subsidizing foreign oil (Zimmer par. 4). A year earlier, when she introduced her first budget for Texas, she said: “This is not another one of those deals where you put lipstick on a hog and call it a princess” (Zimmer par. 4). The earliest reputed recorded use of an American politician using the phrase was Texas Democrat Jim Hightower, who applied it to depict the reorganisation of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet in 1986 (Macintyre 16). Time magazine reporters (Covington and Curry par. 2) and Zimmer (par. 3) claimed that a San Francisco radio personality, Ron Lyons, was one of the earliest quoted in print with “lipstick on a pig” about renovation plans for a local park in November 1985 in the Washington Post. Author of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, Grant Barrett, uncovered a 1980 article from a small Washington state newspaper as the earliest written record with an article that stated: “You can clean up a pig, put a ribbon on it’s [sic] tail, spray it with perfume, but it is still a pig” (Guzman par. 7). A book on communication also adopted the pig metaphor in its title in 2006, Lipstick on a Pig: Winning in the No-Spin Era by Someone Who Knows the Game, by Torie Clarke, who previously served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Donald Rumsfield during the early years of the G.W. Bush Administration. Media Commentary According to The New York Times (Leibovich and Barrett), “lipstick on a pig” was one of the most popular political buzzwords and phrases of 2008, along with others directly referring to Palin, “Caribou Barbie” and “Hockey Mom,” as well as “Maverick,” a popular term used by both McCain and Palin. Many journalists played on the metaphor to express disdain for negative political campaigns. A Wall Street Journal article asked: “What's the difference between a more hopeful kind of politics and old-fashioned attacks? Lipstick” (Chozick par. 1). International media also covered the Obama-McCain lipstick wars. The Economist, for example, wrote that the “descent of American politics into pig wrestling has dismayed America’s best friends abroad” (“Endless Culture War” par. 6). Bloggers claimed that Obama’s “lipstick” speech was influenced by copy and imagery from two leading American cartoonists. The Free Republic, self-acclaimed to be “the premier online gathering place for independent, grass-roots conservatism” (Freerepublic.com), claimed that Obama plagiarized almost verbatim the language leading into the “pig” comment from a Tom Toles cartoon that ran in the Washington Post on 5 Sepember (see fig. 1).Fig. 1. Toles, Tom. Cartoon. Washington Post. 5 Sep. 2008. 30 July 2010 Another cartoon by R. J. Matson appeared in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (see fig. 2) four days before Obama’s speech that depicted Palin not just as a pig wearing lipstick, but as one using pork barrel funding. The cartoon’s caption provides an interpretation of Palin's lipstick analogy: “Question: What’s the Difference Between a Hockey Mom Reformer and a Business-As-Usual Pork Barrel-Spending Politician? Answer: Lipstick.” Newsbusters.org blogger stated: “It’s not too far-fetched to say Team Obama is cribbing his stump speech laugh lines from the liberal funnies” (Shepherd par. 3). Fig 2. Matson, R. J. Cartoon. St. Louis Post Dispatch. 5 Sep. 2008. 30 July 2010 . A porcine American character known for heavy makeup and a starring role as one of the Muppets created by puppeteer Jim Henson in the 1970s, Miss Piggy still remains an American icon. She commented on the situation during an interview on the set of “Today,” an American television program. When the interviewer asked, “Were you surprised by all the hubbub this election season over your lipstick practices?,” Miss Piggy’s response was “Moi will not dignify that with a response” (Raphael par. 6-7). Concluding Comments The 2008 U.S. presidential election presented new players in the arena: the first African-American in a leading party and the first female Republican. During a major election, words used by candidates are widely scrutinised and, in this case, the “lipstick on a pig” phrase was misconstrued by the opposing party, known for conservative values, that latched onto the opportunity to level a charge of sexism against the more liberal party. Vocabulary about gender, like language about race, can become a “minefield” (Givhan M01). With today’s 24/7 news cycle and the blogosphere, the perceived significance of a political comment, whether innocent or not, is magnified through repeated analysis and commentary. The meme-tracking study by Leskovec, Backstrom, and Kleinberg observed that 2.5 hours was the typical time lag between stories originating in mainstream media and reaching the blogosphere (8); whereas only 3.5 percent of the stories began in blogs and later permeated into traditional media (9). An English author of the history of clichés and language, Julia Cresswell, stated that the “lipstick” term “seems to be another candidate for clichéhood” (61). Although usage of clichés can prove to cause complications as in the case of Obama’s lipstick reference, Obama was able to diffuse the Republican backlash quickly and make a plea to return to serious issues affecting voters. David Greenberg analysed Obama’s presidential win and explained: And although other factors, especially the tanking economy, obviously contributed more directly to his November victory, it would be a mistake to overlook the importance of his skill at mastering the politics of negative attacks. When Obama went negative against others, he carefully singled out aspects of his opponents’ characters that, he argued, American politics itself had to transcend; he associated his foes with the worst of the old politics and himself with the best of the new. When others fired at him, in contrast, he was almost always able to turn the criticisms back upon them—through feigned outrage, among other tactics—as perpetuating those selfsame blights on our politics (70). References Applegate, Aaron. “Rep. Drake Criticizes Obama for ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Remark.” Virginia Pilot 10 Sep. 2008. 28 Jul. 2010. Chozick, Amy. “Obama Puts Different Twist on Lipstick.” Wall Street Journal 9 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010. Covington, Marti, and Maya Curry. “A Brief History of: ‘Putting Lipstick on a Pig.’” Time 11 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. Cresswell, Julia. “Let’s Hear it for the Cliché.” British Journalism Review 19.57 (2008): 57-61. “Endless Culture War.” The Economist 4 Oct. 2008: ABI/INFORM Global, ProQuest. 30 Jul. 2010. “Definition Pork Barrel.” Webster’s Online Dictionary. 30 Jul. 2010. freerepublic.com. “Welcome to Free Republic.” Free Republic 2009. 30 Jul. 2010. Givhan, Robin. “On the Subject of Race, Words Get in the Way.” Washington Post 20 Jan. 2008: M01. Greenberg, David. “Accentuating the Negative.” Dissent 56.2 (2009): 70-75. Guzman, Monica. “‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Finds Origin in Tiny State Newspaper.” Seattlepi.com 10 Sep. 2008. 17 May 2010. Harper, Jennifer. “Obama Comment Offends GOP Women; ‘Palin Truth Squad’ Sent Out to Counter ‘Lipstick on a Pig’ Remark.” Washington Times 10 Sep. 2008: A13. Huston, Warner Todd. “Did Obama Steal His Lip Stick on a Pig From a Political Cartoon?” Newsbusters.org 10 Sep. 2008. 15 Jul. 2010 . James, Frank. “Barack Obama on David Letterman.” Chicago Tribune 11 Sep. 2008. 15 Jul. 2010 http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/09/barack_obama_on_david_letterma.html>. Kornblut, Anne E., and Michael D. Shear. “McCain Camp Sees an Insult in a Saying.” Washington Post 10 Sep. 2008. 30 Jul. 2010 AR2008090903531.html>. Kuhn, David P. “GOP Fears Charges of Racism, Sexism.” Politico.com 23 Feb. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010. Kuntz, Tom. “Porkulus.” NYTimes.com 8 Feb. 2009. 30 Jul. 2010. Leary, Anne. “Liberal Chauvinist Pigs.” BlogHer 9 Sep. 2008. 2 Oct. 2010. Leibovich, Mark, and Grant Barrett. “The Buzzwords of 2008.” New York Times 21 Dec. 2008. 29 Jul. 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/ref/weekinreview/buzzwords2008.html>. Leskovec, Jure, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg. “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle.” ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Paris, 28 Jun. 2009. 30 Jul. 2010 . Macintyre, Ben. “US Politics is Littered with Dawgs, Crawdaddys and Pigs in Lipstick.” The Times [London] 27 Sep. 2008: 16. Mansbridge, Jane, and Katherine Flaster. “Male Chauvinist, Feminist, Sexist, and Sexual Harassment: Different Trajectories in Feminist Linguistic Innovation.” American Speech 80.3 (Fall 2005): 256-279. Maxey, Chester Collins. “A Little History of Pork.” National Municipal Review, Volume VIII. Concord: Rumford Press, 1919. Google Books. 30 Jul. 2010. “Obama Hits Back Against McCain Campaign.” MSNBC 10 Sep. 2008. 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Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields (1920). Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (1944). Chicago: Black Swan P, 1983. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1996. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993. Gascoyne, David. “Introduction.” The Magnetic Fields (1920) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Howell, Catherine. “City of Night: Parisian Explorations.” Public: Civic Spectacle 45 (2012): 64–77. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in André Breton’s Nadja and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles, CA: ICI P, 2007. 360–87. Matthews, J.H. Surrealism and the Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1996. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27.3 (2004): 365–87. Read, Peter. “Poets out of Uniform.” Book Review. The Times Literary Supplement. 15 Mar. 2002: 22. Shattuck, Roger. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” The History of Surrealism. Ed. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 11–34. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights of Paris (1928). Trans. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Exact Change, 1992. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003): 1–11. 20 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1›.

We ask you now, reader, to put your mind, as a citizen of the Australian Commonwealth, to the facts presented in these pages. We ask you to study the problem, in the way that we present the case, from the Aborigines’ point of view. We do not ask for your charity; we do not ask you to study us as scientific-freaks. Above all, we do not ask for your “protection”. No, thanks! We have had 150 years of that! We ask only for justice, decency, and fair play. (Patten and Ferguson 3-4) Jack Patten and William Ferguson’s above declaration on “Plain Speaking” in Aborigines Claim Citizenship Rights! A Statement of the Case for the Aborigines Progressive Association (1938), outlining Aboriginal Australians view of colonisation and the call for Aboriginal self-determinacy, will be my guiding framework in writing this paper. I ask you to study the problem, as it is presented, from the viewpoint of an Indigenous woman who seeks to understand how “sorry” has been uttered in political domains as a word divorced from the moral freight attached to a history of “degrading, humiliating and exterminating” Aboriginal Australians (Patten and Ferguson 11). I wish to argue that the Opposition leader’s utterance of “sorry” in his 13 February 2008 “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” was an indicator of the insidious ways in which colonisation has treated Aboriginal Australians as less than, not equal to, white Australians and to examine the ways in which this particular utterance of the word “sorry” is built on longstanding colonial frameworks that position ‘the Aborigine’ as peripheral in the representation of a national identity – a national identity that, as shown by the transcript of the apology, continues to romanticise settler values and ignore Indigenous rights. Nelson’s address tries to disassociate the word “sorry” from any moral attachment. The basis of his address is on constructing a national identity where all injustices are equal. In offering this apology, let us not create one injustice in our attempts to address another. (Nelson) All sorrys are equal, but some are more equal than others. Listening to Nelson’s address, words resembling those of Orwell’s ran through my head. The word “sorry” in relation to Indigenous Australians has taken on cultural, political, educational and economic proportions. The previous government’s refusal to utter the word was attached to the ways in which formations of rhetorically self-sufficient arguments of practicality, equality and justice “functioned to sustain and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia” (Augoustinos, LeCouteur and Soyland 105). How then, I wondered as I nervously waited for Nelson to begin apologising, would he transform this inherited collective discursive practice of legitimised racism that upheld mainstream Australia’s social reality? The need for an apology, and the history of political refusal to give it, is not a simple classification of one event, one moment in history. The ‘act’ of removing children is not a singular, one-off event. The need to do, the justification and rationalisation of the doing and what that means now, the having done, as well as the impact on those that were left behind, those that were taken, those that were born after, are all bound up in this particular “sorry”. Given that reluctance of the previous government to admit injustices were done and still exist, this utterance of the word “sorry” from the leader of the opposition precariously sat between freely offering it and reluctantly giving it. The above quote from Nelson, and its central concern of not performing any injustice towards mainstream Australia (“let us not” [my italics]) very definitely defines this sorry in relation to one particular injustice (the removing of Indigenous children) which therefore ignores the surrounding and complicit colonialist and racist attitudes, policies and practices that both institutionalised and perpetuated racism against Australia’s Indigenous peoples. This comment also clearly articulates the opposition’s concern that mainstream Australia not be offended by this act of offering the word “sorry”. Nelson’s address and the ways that it constructs what this “sorry” is for, what it isn’t for, and who it is for, continues to uphold and legitimate existing inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. From the very start of Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament”, two specific clarifications were emphasised: the “sorry” was directed at a limited time period in history; and that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Nelson defines this distinction: “two cultures; one ancient, proud and celebrating its deep bond with this land for some 50,000 years. The other, no less proud, arrived here with little more than visionary hope deeply rooted in gritty determination to build an Australian nation.” This cultural division maintains colonising discourses that define and label, legitimate and exclude groups and communities. It draws from the binary oppositions of self and other, white and black, civilised and primitive. It maintains a divide between the two predominant ideas of history that this country struggles with and it silences those in that space in between, ignoring for example, the effects of colonisation and miscegenation in blurring the lines between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’. Although acknowledging that Indigenous Australians inhabited this land for a good few thousand decades before the proud, gritty, determined visionaries of a couple of hundred years ago, the “sorry” that is to be uttered is only in relation to “the first seven decades of the 20th century”. Nelson establishes from the outset that any forthcoming apology, on behalf of “us” – read as non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians – in reference to ‘them’ – “those Aboriginal people forcibly removed” – is only valid for the “period within which these events occurred [which] was one that defined and shaped Australia”. My reading of this sectioning of a period in Australia’s history is that while recognising that certain colonising actions were unjust, specifically in this instance the removal of Indigenous children, this period of time is also seen as influential and significant to the growth of the country. What this does is to allow the important colonial enterprise to subsume the unjust actions by the colonisers by other important colonial actions. Explicit in Nelson’s address is that this particular time frame saw the nation of Australia reach the heights of achievements and is a triumphant period – an approach which extends beyond taking the highs with the lows, and the good with the bad, towards overshadowing any minor ‘unfortunate’ mistakes that might have been made, ‘occasionally’, along the way. Throughout the address, there are continual reminders to the listeners that the “us” should not be placed at a disadvantage in the act of saying “sorry”: to do so would be to create injustice, whereas this “sorry” is strictly about attempting to “address another”. By sectioning off a specific period in the history of colonised Australia, the assumption is that all that happened before 1910 and all that happened after 1970 are “sorry” free. This not only ignores the lead up to the official policy of removal, how it was sanctioned and the aftermath of removal as outlined in The Bringing Them Home Report (1997); it also prevents Indigenous concepts of time from playing a legitimate and recognised role in the construct of both history and society. Aboriginal time is cyclical and moves around important events: those events that are most significant to an individual are held closer than those that are insignificant or mundane. Aleksendar Janca and Clothilde Bullen state that “time is perceived in relation to the socially sanctioned importance of events and is most often identified by stages in life or historic relevance of events” (41). The speech attempts to distinguish between moments and acts in history: firmly placing the act of removing children in a past society and as only one act of injustice amongst many acts of triumph. “Our generation does not own these actions, nor should it feel guilt for what was done in many, but not all cases, with the best of intentions” (Nelson). What was done is still being felt by Indigenous Australians today. And by differentiating between those that committed these actions and “our generation”, the address relies on a linear idea of time, to distance any wrongdoing from present day white Australians. What I struggle with here is that those wrongdoings continue to be felt according to Indigenous concepts of time and therefore these acts are not in a far away past but very much felt in the present. The need to not own these actions further entrenches the idea of separateness between Indigenous Australia and non-Indigenous Australia. The fear of being guilty or at blame evokes notions of wrong and right and this address is at pains not to do that – not to lay blame or evoke shame. Nelson’s address is relying on a national identity that has historically silenced and marginalised Indigenous Australians. If there is no blame to be accepted, if there is no attached shame to be acknowledged (“great pride, but occasionally shame” (Nelson)) and dealt with, then national identity is implicitly one of “discovery”, peaceful settlement and progress. Where are the Aboriginal perspectives of history in this idea of a national identity – then and now? And does this mean that colonialism happened and is now over? State and territory actions upon, against and in exclusion of Indigenous Australians are not actions that can be positioned as past discriminations; they continue today and are a direct result of those that preceded them. Throughout his address, Nelson emphasises the progressiveness of “today” and how that owes its success to the “past”: “In doing so, we reach from within ourselves to our past, those whose lives connect us to it and in deep understanding of its importance to our future”. By relying on a dichotomous approach – us and them, white and black, past and present – Nelson emphasises the distance between this generation of Australia and any momentary unjust actions in the past. The belief is that time moves on – away from the past and towards the future. That advancement, progression and civilisation are linear movements, all heading towards a more enlightened state. “We will be at our best today – and every day – if we pause to place ourselves in the shoes of others, imbued with the imaginative capacity to see this issue through their eyes with decency and respect”. But where is the recognition that today’s experiences, the results of what has been created by the past, are also attached to the need to offer an apology? Nelson’s “we” (Anglo-Australians) are being asked to stop and think about how “they” (Aborigines) might see things differently to the mainstream norm. The implication here also is that “they” – members of the Stolen Generations – must be prepared to understand the position white Australia is coming from, and acknowledge the good that white Australia has achieved. Anglo-Australian pride and achievement is reinforced throughout the address as the basis on which our national identity is understood. Ignoring its exclusion and silencing of the Indigenous Australians to whom his “sorry” is directed, Nelson perpetuates this ideology here in his address: “In brutally harsh conditions, from the small number of early British settlers our non Indigenous ancestors have given us a nation the envy of any in the world”. This gift of a nation where there was none before disregards the acts of invasion, segregation, protection and assimilation that characterise the colonisation of this nation. It also reverts to romanticised settler notions of triumph over great adversities – a notion that could just as easily be attached to Indigenous Australians yet Nelson specifically addresses “our non Indigenous ancestors”. He does add “But Aboriginal Australians made involuntary sacrifices, different but no less important, to make possible the economic and social development of our modern [my emphasis] Australia.” Indigenous Australians certainly made voluntary sacrifices, similar to and different from those made by non Indigenous Australians (Indigenous Australians also went to both World Wars and fought for this nation) and a great deal of “our modern” country’s economic success was achieved on the backs of Blackfellas (Taylor 9). But “involuntary sacrifices” is surely a contradiction in terms, either intellectually shoddy or breathtakingly disingenuous. To make a sacrifice is to do it voluntarily, to give something up for a greater good. “Involuntary sacrifices”, like “collateral damage” and other calculatedly cold-blooded euphemisms, conveniently covers up the question of who was doing what to whom – of who was sacrificed, and by whom. In the attempt to construct a basis of equal contribution between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as well as equal acts of struggle and triumphing, Nelson’s account of history and nation building draws from the positioning of the oppressors but tries to suppress any notion of racial oppression. It maintains the separateness of Indigenous experiences of colonisation from the colonisers themselves. His reiteration that these occasional acts of unjustness came from benevolent and charitable white Australians privileges non-Indigenous ways of knowing and doing over Indigenous ones and attempts to present them as untainted and innate as opposed to repressive, discriminatory and racist. We honour those in our past who have suffered and all those who have made sacrifices for us by the way we live our lives and shape our nation. Today we recommit to do so – as one people. (Nelson) The political need to identify as “one people” drives assimilation policies (the attitude at the very heart of removing Aboriginal children on the basis that they were Aboriginal and needed to be absorbed into one society of whites). By honouring everyone, and therefore taking the focus off any act of unjustness by non-Indigenous peoples on Indigenous peoples, Nelson’s narrative again upholds an idea of contemporary national identity that has not only romanticised the past but ignores the inequalities of the present day. He spends a good few hundred words reminding his listeners that white Australia deserves to maintain its hard won position. And there is no doubt he is talking to white Australia – his focus is on Western constructs of patriotism and success. He reverts to settler/colonial discourse to uphold ideas of equity and access: These generations considered their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights. They did not buy something until they had saved up for it and values were always more important than value. Living in considerably more difficult times, they had dreams for our nation but little money. Theirs was a mesh of values enshrined in God, King and Country and the belief in something greater than yourself. Neglectful indifference to all they achieved while seeing their actions in the separations only, through the values of our comfortable, modern Australia, will be to diminish ourselves. In “the separations only…” highlights Nelson’s colonial logic, which compartmentalises time, space, people and events and tries to disconnect one colonial act from another. The ideology, attitudes and policies that allowed the taking of Indigenous children were not separate from all other colonial and colonising acts and processes. The desire for a White Australia, a clear cut policy which was in existence at the same time as protection, removal and assimilation policies, cannot be disassociated from either the taking of children or the creation of this “comfortable, modern Australia” today. “Neglectful indifference to all they achieved” could aptly be applied to Indigenous peoples throughout Australian history – pre and post invasion. Where is the active acknowledgment of the denial of Indigenous rights so that “these generations [of non-Indigenous Australians could] consider their responsibilities to their country and one another more important than their rights”? Nelson adheres to the colonialist national narrative to focus on the “positive”, which Patrick Wolfe has argued in his critique of settler colonialism, is an attempt to mask disruptive moments that reveal the scope of state and national power over Aboriginal Australians (33). After consistently reinforcing the colonial/settler narrative, Nelson’s address moves on to insert Indigenous Australians into a well-defined and confined space within a specific chapter of that narrative. His perfunctory overview of the first seven decades of the 20th century alludes to Protection Boards and Reserves, assimilation policies and Christianisation, all underlined with white benevolence. Having established the innocent, inherently humane and decent motivations of “white families”, he resorts to appropriating Indigenous people’s stories and experiences. In the retelling of these stories, two prominent themes in Nelson’s text become apparent. White fellas were only trying to help the poor Blackfella back then, and one need only glance at Aboriginal communities today to see that white fellas are only trying to help the poor Blackfella again. It is reasonably argued that removal from squalor led to better lives – children fed, housed and educated for an adult world of [sic] which they could not have imagined. However, from my life as a family doctor and knowing the impact of my own father’s removal from his unmarried teenaged mother, not knowing who you are is the source of deep, scarring sorrows the real meaning of which can be known only to those who have endured it. No one should bring a sense of moral superiority to this debate in seeking to diminish the view that good was being sought to be done. (Nelson) A sense of moral superiority is what motivates colonisation: it is what motivated the enforced removal of children. The reference to “removal from squalor” is somewhat reminiscent of the 1909 Aborigines Protection Act. Act No. 25, 1909, section 11(1) which states: The board may, in accordance with and subject to the provisions of the Apprentices Act, 1901, by indenture bind or cause to be bound the child of any aborigine, or the neglected child of any person apparently having an admixture of aboriginal blood in his veins, to be apprenticed to any master, and may collect and institute proceedings for the recovery of any wages payable under such indenture, and may expend the same as the board may think fit in the interest of the child. Every child so apprenticed shall be under the supervision of the board, or of such person that may be authorised in that behalf by the regulations. (144) Neglect was often defined as simply being Aboriginal. The representation that being removed would lead to a better life relies on Western attitudes about society and culture. It dismisses any notion of Indigenous rights to be Indigenous and defines a better life according to how white society views it. Throughout most of the 1900s, Aboriginal children that were removed to experience this better life were trained in positions of servants. Nelson’s inclusion of his own personal experience as a non Indigenous Australian who has experienced loss and sorrow sustains his textual purpose to reduce human experiences to a common ground, an equal footing – to make all injustices equal. And he finishes the paragraph off with the subtle reminder that this “sorry” is only for “those” Aboriginal Australians that were removed in the first seven decades of last century. After retelling the experience of one Indigenous person as told to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, he retells the experience of an Indigenous woman as told to a non-Indigenous man. The appropriate protocols concerning the re-using of Indigenous knowledge and intellectual copyright appeared to be absent in this address. Not only does the individual remain unacknowledged but the potential for misappropriating Indigenous experiences for non Indigenous purposes is apparent. The insertion of the story dismisses the importance of the original act of telling, and the significance of the unspeakable through decades of silence. Felman presents the complexities of the survivor’s tale: “the victim’s story has to overcome not just the silence of the dead but the indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying, brutal silencing of the surviving, and the inherent speechless silence of the living in the face of an unthinkable, unknowable, ungraspable event” (227). In telling this story Nelson unravelled the foundation of equality he had attempted to resurrect. And his indication towards current happenings in the Northern Territory only served to further highlight the inequities that Indigenous peoples continue to face, resist and surpass. Nelson’s statement that “separation was then, and remains today, a painful but necessary part of public policy in the protection of children” is another reminder of the “indelible coercive power of the oppressor’s terrifying” potential to repeat history. The final unmasking of the hypocritical and contested nature of Nelson’s national ideology and narrative is in his telling of the “facts” – the statistics concerning Indigenous life expectancy, Indigenous infant mortality rates, “diabetes, kidney disease, hospitalisation of women from assault, imprisonment, overcrowding, educational underperformance and unemployment”. These statistics are a result not of what Nelson terms “existential aimlessness” (immediately preceding paragraph) but of colonisation – theft of land, oppression, abuse, discrimination, and lack of any rights whether citizenship or Aboriginal. These contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples are the direct linear result of the last two hundred years of white nation building. The address is concluded with mention of Neville Bonner, portrayed here as the perfect example of what reading, writing, expressing yourself with dignity and treating people with decency and courtesy can achieve. Bonner is presented as the ‘ideal’ Blackfella, a product of the assimilation period: he could read and write and was dignified, decent and courteous (and, coincidentally, Liberal). The inclusion of this reference to Bonner in the address may hint at the “My best friend is an Aborigine” syndrome (Heiss 71), but it also provides a discursive example to the listener of the ways in which ‘equalness’ is suggested, assumed, privileged or denied. It is a reminder, in the same vein of Patten and Ferguson’s fights for rights, that what is equal has always been apparent to the colonised. Your present official attitude is one of prejudice and misunderstanding … we are no more dirty, lazy stupid, criminal, or immoral than yourselves. Also, your slanders against our race are a moral lie, told to throw all the blame for your troubles on to us. You, who originally conquered us by guns against our spears, now rely on superiority of numbers to support your false claims of moral and intellectual superiority. After 150 years, we ask you to review the situation and give us a fair deal – a New Deal for Aborigines. The cards have been stacked against us, and we now ask you to play the game like decent Australians. Remember, we do not ask for charity, we ask for justice. Nelson quotes Bonner’s words that “[unjust hardships] can only be changed when people of non Aboriginal extraction are prepared to listen, to hear what Aboriginal people are saying and then work with us to achieve those ends”. The need for non-Indigenous Australians to listen, to be shaken out of their complacent equalness appears to have gone unheard. Fiumara, in her philosophy of listening, states: “at this point the opportunity is offered for becoming aware that the compulsion to win is due less to the intrinsic difficulty of the situation than to inhibitions induced by a non-listening language that prevents us from seeing that which would otherwise be clear” (198). It is this compulsion to win, or to at least not be seen to be losing that contributes to the unequalness of this particular “sorry” and the need to construct an equal footing. This particular utterance of sorry does not come from an acknowledged place of difference and its attached history of colonisation; instead it strives to create a foundation based on a lack of anyone being positioned on the high moral ground. It is an irony that pervades the address considering it was the coloniser’s belief in his/her moral superiority that took the first child to begin with. Nelson’s address attempts to construct the utterance of “sorry”, and its intended meaning in this specific context, on ‘equal’ ground: his representation is that we are all Australians, “us” and ‘them’ combined, “we” all suffered and made sacrifices; “we” all deserve respect and equal acknowledgment of the contribution “we” all made to this “enviable” nation. And therein lies the unequalness, the inequality, the injustice, of this particular “sorry”. This particular “sorry” is born from and maintains the structures, policies, discourses and language that led to the taking of Indigenous children in the first place. In his attempt to create a “sorry” that drew equally from the “charitable” as well as the “misjudged” deeds of white Australia, Nelson’s “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament” increased the experiences of inequality. Chow writes that in the politics of admittance the equal depends on “acceptance by permission … and yet, being ‘admitted’ is never simply a matter of possessing the right permit, for validation and acknowledgment must also be present for admittance to be complete” (36-37). References Augoustinos, Martha, Amanda LeCouteur, and John Soyland. “Self-Sufficient Arguments in Political Rhetoric: Constructing Reconciliation and Apologizing to the Stolen Generations.” Discourse and Society 13.1 (2002): 105-142.Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997.Aborigines Protection Act 1909: An Act to Provide for the Protection and Care of Aborigines; To Repeal the Supply of Liquors Aborigines Prevention Act; To Amend the Vagrancy Act, 1902, and the Police Offences (Amendment) Act, 1908; And for Purposes Consequent Thereon or Incidental Thereto. Assented to 20 Dec. 1909. Digital Collections: Books and Serial, National Library of Australia. 24 Mar. 2008 < http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.aus-vn71409-9x-s1-v >.Chow, Rey. “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon.” In Anthony C. Alessandrini, ed. Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1999. 34-56.Felman, Shoshana. “Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust.” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001): 201-238.Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.Heiss, Anita. I’m Not a Racist But… UK: Salt Publishing, 2007.Janca, Aleksandar, and Clothilde Bullen. “Aboriginal Concept of Time and Its Mental Health Implications.” Australian Psychiatry 11 (Supplement 2003): 40-44.Nelson, Brendan. “We Are Sorry – Address to Parliament.” 14 Feb. 2008 < http://www.liberal.org.au/info/news/detail/20080213_ WearesorryAddresstoParliament.php >.Patten, Jack, and William Ferguson. Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! A Statement for the Aborigines Progressive Association. Sydney: The Publicist, 1938.Taylor, Martin, and James Francis. Bludgers in Grass Castles: Native Title and the Unpaid Debts of the Pastoral Industry. Chippendale: Resistance Books, 1997.William, Ross. “‘Why Should I Feel Guilty?’ Reflections on the Workings of White-Aboriginal Relations.” Australian Psychologist 35.2 (2000): 136-142.Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York: Cassell, 1999.