Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution: 'The Confrontation Between Black and White Explodes Into Red'

While the American and French Revolutions have regularly been commemorated in film, this article argues that their Haitian equivalent – despite its own world-historic significance and global cultural impact – still awaits serious cinematic representation. However, the idea of making just such a film stirred the imagination of the one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, the Soviet film-director Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). Eisenstein’s project – developed both in the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union, and involving sustained collaboration with Paul Robeson – would have constituted an important addition to the extensive catalogue of cultural representations of the Haitian Revolution, but the film remained unrealized. The fate of Eisenstein’s lost Haitian Revolution project, ‘one of the great unmade movies of the twentieth century’, is examined, and the film is situated in the wider dramatic context of the 1930s, when the transnational collective memory of the Revolution came to have a profound new meaning in the context of shifting Soviet power struggles as well as that of Western imperialist interventions in Ethiopia and Haiti itself. This article offers the first comprehensive account of the genesis and evolution of Eisenstein’s planned film, and explores in depth the director’s investment in this project in order to assess its significance in cultural, historical and political terms

Canadian farm women and their families : restructuring, work and decision making

This research addresses the broad research question ‘How have Canadian farm families redefined their work roles and relations over the past 20 years to respond to changes affecting the agrifamily household’ by examining the changing work and decision making roles, gender relations and gender identities of Canadian farm women and their families. The main argument presented here and illustrated by the Agrifamily Household Response Model is that Canadian farm families are active agents, responding to restructuring in agriculture, using and modifying the rules and resources of the agrifamily household, their local communities and the wider social, economic and political systems as they make decisions to respond to economic, political, environmental and social change.Data collection involved a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods that were designed to support and inform each other. Initial focus groups were held to assist in research design. These were followed by six workshops across Canada in which farm women were trained as interviewers and the questions were pre-tested. Over a 15 month period in 2002 and 2003, four separate questionnaires and time diaries were completed by up to 479 Canadian farm women, men and youth. The findings were then discussed with the farm women interviewers in four workshops held in various locations across Canada. The results of this research suggest that during the past 20 years, farm women and their families have responded to increased opportunities and pressures by expanding their work roles both on and off the farm. Farm women and men have chosen a variety of work roles in response to restructuring. These changing work roles signal gradually changing gender identities and gender relationships on the farm. The work role choices of farm women in particular are shown to have a significant impact on the resulting gender relations in the family as women, men and youth redefine and negotiate their work roles in response to structural change. Women are important role models for their children as they learn how to farm and this is especially important for female youth.Decision making on farms has traditionally been divided on the basis of gender, however, farm women’s decision-making roles are expanding to reflect recognition of their contributions to the agrifamily household through labour and capital. Broadening roles and changing gender relations and identities in the agrifamily household have affected decision making for men as well. The research indicates there are many participants in major agrifamily household decisions and many roles that are played in the process of decision making. Nevertheless, female youth play a lesser role than any other household members having potentially repercussions for the future role of women in farming. It is evident that Canadian farm women play significant roles in providing labour, capital and decision making to Canadian agriculture. However, these contributions have yet to be acknowledged at the macro level of agricultural organizations and government policy consultations

Georges Perec's Geographies

In Species of Spaces Georges Perec suggests various ‘Practical exercises’ as a means to investigate the street. The instructions propose its exhaustive exploration through attention to what would be most obvious, common and therefore usually of no interest; to take up this methodology, investigators are told to go about things ‘more slowly, almost stupidly’. As part of his project to reveal and understand the infra-ordinary, in Approaches to what, Perec makes clear that the purpose of such activity is to wrest ‘common things’ from the dross in which they remain mired and to give them a tongue, to ‘speak of what is, of what we are.’ As an artist-scholar researching ‘everyday’ places through essayistic photographic practice, I am drawn to Perec’s specific injunction ‘Force yourself to see more flatly’, which reflects for me photography’s ultimate translation of dimensional space into flat picture plane, and relates to what David Campany has described as modernist photography’s ‘heightened interest in the surfaces of the world’. This contribution emerges from photographic research, which takes up very literally the Perequian practice of seeing flatly, and attending to what is ‘most colourless’: it investigates therefore, via the constraint of black and white image-making, the material surfaces encountered along the 12 minute walk from my home to the tram stop from which I commute to my university job. That Perec makes clear his interest in ‘A town: stone, concrete, asphalt’, and recognises the ‘invisible underground proliferation of conduits’, or the ‘underneath’ of limestone, marl, chalk, gypsum, sand and lignite, encourages me to consider what lies exactly underfoot, passing unremarked on so many daily journeys. This visual essaying of the surface of a place (given that properly speaking an essay is a trial, test or experiment) will be excerpted for the current context, accompanied by a reflection upon Perecquian photographic practice as a method of artistic research, and what a determinedly superficial attention reveals about the infra-ordinariness of place

Between Censorship and Amnesia: The End of The Penal Colony in French Guiana

The article focuses on the censorship of Léon-Gontran Damas’s 1937 Retour de Guyane, a searing critique of French administration of this South American colony. The colonial authorities sought to ban Damas’s book, allegedly purchasing and burning 1,000 copies of it (of a print-run, at the author’s own expense, of only 1,500). In this book, Damas targets in particular the failure of the penal colony in the territory and suggests that the institution has impeded the development of the colony. The aim of the article is to read Damas’ work in a wider corpus of texts devoted to the penal colony, most notably Frédéric Bouyer’s travel narrative La Guyane française: notes et souvenirs d’un voyage exécuté en 1862-1863 (1867) and Albert Londres’ Au bagne (1923). It suggests, however, that Retour de Guyane was a particularly incendiary text, mixing ethnographic report with anti-colonial essay, unpopular with the authorities in that it linked the collapse of the penal colony to the inevitable end of empire.L’article se concentre sur la censure du livre de Léon-Gontran Damas, Retour de Guyane (1937), qui propose une critique acharnée de l’administration française de cette colonie sud-américaine. Les autorités coloniales ont cherché à interdire le livre de Damas, en achetant et en brûlant 1 000 exemplaires (sur un tirage, aux frais de l’auteur, de seulement 1 500 exemplaires). Damas vise en particulier l’échec du bagne sur le territoire et suggère que l’institution a entravé le développement de cette colonie. Le but de l’article est de lire l’œuvre de Damas dans un corpus plus large de textes consacrés au bagne, notamment le récit de voyage de Frédéric Bouyer La Guyane française : notes et souvenirs d’un voyage consacré en 1862-1863 (1867) et Au bagne d’Albert Londres (1923). L’article suggère, cependant, que Retour de Guyane était un texte particulièrement incendiaire, mélangeant rapport ethnographique et essai anticolonial, censuré par les autorités en ce qu’il liait l’effondrement du bagne à la fin désormais inévitable de l’empire colonial

‘Translating Cultures’, translating research

In this article, Charles Forsdick, AHRC Theme Leadership Fellow for ‘Translating Cultures’, presents the policy issues revealed and addressed by research carried out under the theme, and highlights the challenges and potential of ‘translating’ academic research to policymakers

Assessment of the impacts of anthropogenic hybridisation in a threatened non-model bird species through the development of genomic resources with implications for conservation

Interspecific hybridisation—the breeding between distinct species—can contribute to species extinction due to wasted reproductive potential, outbreeding depression, and introgression of genetic material mediated by backcrossing. Incomplete reproductive barriers can facilitate interspecific hybridisation as previously isolated species come into contact with one another. Interspecific hybridisation is relatively common among birds, but anthropogenic impacts that increase the incidence of such hybridisation between threatened native species and non-threatened species are of conservation concern due to the risks of genetic swamping, which at its most extreme may result in species extinction. While the impacts of interspecific hybridisation have previously been assessed using small numbers of genetic markers, new genomic sequencing developments now facilitate implementation of genome-wide reassessments providing greater resolution of analyses. The critically endangered kakī (black stilt; Himantopus novaezelandiae) is one such species that can benefit from these new genomic data. Anthropogenic habitat change and introduction of mammalian predators resulted in the decline of this Aotearoa New Zealand endemic wading bird during the 1900s. An intense population bottleneck resulting in an ephemeral sex-bias among the remaining kakī contributed to hybridisation with the self-introduced poaka (the Aotearoa New Zealand population of the Australian pied stilt; H. himantopus leucocephalus), a congeneric species previously thought to have diverged from a common ancestor with kakī one million years ago. Intensive conservation management including captive breeding for translocation and predator control has increased kakī numbers from ~23 adults in 1981 to approximately 169 wild adults in 2020. Previous genetic studies identified minimal evidence of introgression of poaka genetic material into kakī, and iv determined that moderate outbreeding depression in combination with stochastic processes likely limited introgression. These data informed the kakī captive breeding for translocation programme with the aim of maintaining genetic integrity. However, re-evaluation using genomic data was recommended for kakī. Using high-throughput sequencing techniques, I sequenced and assembled the first reference genomes for kakī and Australian pied stilts as tools for use in analyses of introgression. The kakī mitochondrial genome was also assembled to facilitate comparisons of contemporary and historic stilt diversity, showing that conservation management aimed at maximising genetic diversity has largely maintained mitochondrial diversity despite kakī decline, identifying three mitochondrial haplotypes present among contemporary kakī. Kakī and poaka are well-differentiated, and are estimated to have diverged from a common ancestor approximately 750,000 years ago based on Bayesian analysis of mitochondrial data. In addition, the analysis of high-resolution genomic markers generated from approximately 65% of contemporary wild kakī detected no introgression from poaka to kakī despite past hybridisation. These findings confirm the results of previous genetic analysis of introgression and the success of past conservation management. As kakī recovery continues, these combined findings will be used by the New Zealand Department of Conservation’s Kakī Recovery Programme to further maintain the genetic integrity of kakī. Overall, the genomic resources developed here have facilitated the transition from using genetic data to genomic data for kakī recovery, and contribute to our understanding of the impacts of anthropogenic hybridisation on a critically endangered taonga species