Julius Nyerere, Ujamaa, and Political Morality in Contemporary Tanzania

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Aude Fouéré
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Political Morality ◽  
Moral Stature ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract:Since the 2000s, Tanzania has witnessed the return in the public sphere of a reconfigured version of Ujamaa as a set of moral principles embodied in the figure of the first president of Tanzania, Julius Kambarage Nyerere. The persisting traces of Nyerere and Ujamaa are not so evident in actual political practices or economic policies, but rather in collective debates about politics and morality—in short, in contemporary imaginaries of the nation. Contributing to a long-standing discussion of the moral stature of Tanzania’s “father of the nation,” the article explores how and why a shared historical memory of Nyerere is being built or contested to define, mediate, and construct Tanzanian conceptions of morality, belonging, and citizenship in the polis today.

Technologies of the Afterlife

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonah S. Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Franco Dictatorship ◽  
Democratic Constitution

In August 2011, I attended the exhumation of Severiano Clemente González, conducted by the Forum for Memory in the Castilian town of La Toba, Guadalajara. Mr González was one of the over 130,000 civilian victims of the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Even after Spain’s democratic constitution in 1978, most families could not recover their loved ones, owing to an unofficial ‘Pact of Silence’ whereby major political actors agreed not to legislate, litigate or discuss the still controversial past in the public sphere (Encarnación 2014). Since 2000, however, civil society organisations such as the Forum for Memory and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) have been leading a series of forensic exhumations – modelled after similar state-led interventions in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe (Ferrándiz 2010; Rubin 2014).

The Social Origins of Nostalgia for Ottomanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 40-67
Author(s):  
M. Hakan Yavuz
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
State Identity ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter outlines six social factors that augmented a rise in Ottoman nostalgia as a countering identity and ideology against the Turkish Republic’s Westernizing reforms: the demographic makeup of Turkey as a republic of refugees who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in the Balkans and Caucasus; the Westernization project of Turkey’s founding fathers for creating a European nation-state by suppressing the legacy of the Ottoman Empire; the process of democratization (i.e., mobilization of masses to move into political domains and bringing a multiplicity of identities to redefine state identity and policies); the expansion of the public sphere with newspapers, journals, and digital media to accommodate discussions of various identities and formerly taboo subjects; the introduction of market forces aligned with Turgut Özal’s neoliberal economic policies and the rise of the new Anatolian bourgeoisie; and finally, the shift from factual history to imagined memory.

scholarly journals Thinking with ‘White Dee’: The Gender Politics of ‘Austerity Porn’

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Allen ◽  
Imogen Tyler ◽  
Sara De Benedictis
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Potential Object

Focusing on Benefits Street, and specifically the figure of White Dee, this rapid response article offers a feminist analysis of the relationship between media portrayals of people living with poverty and the gender politics of austerity. To do this we locate and unpick the paradoxical desires coalescing in the making and remaking of the figure of ‘White Dee’ in the public sphere. We detail how Benefits Street operates through forms of classed and gendered shaming to generate public consent for the government's welfare reform. However, we also examine how White Dee functions as a potential object of desire and figure of feminist resistance to the transformations in self and communities engendered by neoliberal social and economic policies. In this way, we argue that these public struggles over White Dee open up spaces for urgent feminist sociological enquiries into the gender politics of care, labour and social reproduction.

The silent inquisition: Islamophobic microaggressions and Spanish Moroccan identity negotiations in contemporary Madrid

2021 ◽  
pp. 003776862110209
Author(s):  
Anwar Ouassini
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Racial Microaggressions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Identity Negotiations ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Muslim Spain

This article explores Spanish Moroccan experiences with Islamophobic microaggressions in contemporary Madrid. It seeks to fill an important gap in the literature on religion and racial microaggressions by moving beyond the usual psychologistic explanations to show how these acts reflect Spanish historical-racialized structures, where Muslims were regarded as the Other. In utilizing in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observations, the author reveals how Spanish Moroccans are negotiating and responding to Islamophobic microaggressions at work, educational institutions, and the public sphere. Ultimately, this research shows how these microaggressions reinforced a Muslim-first identity framework, which allowed them to strategically link their experiences and identities to a collective, historical memory of Muslim Spain.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Habermas, Cultural Hegemony, and the Educational Public Sphere

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This study explores Habermas’s work in terms of the relevance of his theory of the public sphere to the politics and poetics of the Arab oral tradition and its pedagogical practices. In what ways and forms does Arab heritage inform a public sphere of resistance or dissent? How does Habermas’s notion of the public space help or hinder a better understanding of the Arab oral tradition within the sociopolitical and educational landscape of the Arabic-speaking world? This study also explores the pedagogical implications of teaching Arab orality within the context of the public sphere as a contested site that informs a mode of resistance against social inequality and sociopolitical exclusions.

The Dynamics of Egypt’s “Semi-opposition,” 2004–11

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 83-103
Author(s):  
Mai Mogib Mosad
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political System ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship

This paper maps the basic opposition groups that influenced the Egyptian political system in the last years of Hosni Mubarak’s rule. It approaches the nature of the relationship between the system and the opposition through use of the concept of “semi-opposition.” An examination and evaluation of the opposition groups shows the extent to which the regime—in order to appear that it was opening the public sphere to the opposition—had channels of communication with the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper also shows the system’s relations with other groups, such as “Kifaya” and “April 6”; it then explains the reasons behind the success of the Muslim Brotherhood at seizing power after the ousting of President Mubarak.

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