Volume 56 part 3 (December 2011)

Summaries

Sidney Chalhoub. The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century).
One of the main features of slavery in Brazil was that slaves had a better chance of achieving freedom than was the case in other slave societies. However difficult freedom may have been to obtain, significant rates of manumission resulted in a high percentage of free and freed people of color in the population of the country throughout the nineteenth century. This article analyzes facets of the structural precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. It deals with such themes as the constitutional restrictions on the political rights of freed persons; the masters’ interdiction of their slaves’ learning how to read and write; the practice of granting conditional manumissions; the masters’ right to revoke liberties; the illegal enslavement of free people of color; and police profiling of free and freed blacks under the allegation that they were suspected of being slaves. The idea is to highlight situations which often blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom, therefore rendering insecure the condition of free and freed people of African descent.

Sharif Gemie and Louise Rees. Representing and Reconstructing Identities in the Post-War World: Refugees, UNRRA and Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948).
This article analyses Fred Zinnemann’s 1948 film, The Search, setting in the context of Displaced Persons in post-1945 Europe. We concentrate on Zinnemann’s treatment of UNRRA, arguing that this is central to the film. We also consider the film’s references to Americanism, Zionism, gender equality and children’s wartime experiences.

Ad Knotter. "Little Moscows in Western Europe: The Ecology of Small-Place Communism.
Small communist strongholds were commonly nicknamed "Little Moscow", both in Britain and in Europe. Small-place communism has been widespread since the interwar period, often in distinctly hostile surroundings. In this article, based on research into a number of cases in Western Europe, I try to identify common characteristics which might explain their receptiveness to communist policies and ideas. My aim is to present a taxonomy for further research. Most of the places I researched were isolated, recently developed, and mono-industrial. They were populated by a wave of migrants who had formed mono-occupational, pioneer societies. Second-generation migrants turned to communism and built “occupational communities” based on trade unions and other associational activities. Often they continued militant traditions of earlier socialism, anarchism, or syndicalism; others had a tradition of irreligiousness or religious indifference.

Pablo Sánchez León. Conceiving the Multitude: Eighteenth-Century Popular Riots and the Modern Language of Social Disorder.
The image of the crowd as an irrational, spontaneous multitude is commonly related to the works of a first generation of social psychologists writing in the early twentieth century, yet its basic features can be found in conceptual innovations developed as early as the Enlightenment. This article focuses on a particular protest in eighteenth-century Spain in order to reflect on the transformation in the meaning of essential terms which occurred in the semantic field of disorder. The so-called motín de Esquilache of 1766 forced the authorities to renew their discourse in order to deprive the movement of legitimacy, fostering semantic innovation. The redefinition of riot implied a process of conceptualization that not only stressed the protagonism of the disenfranchised but also altered a long-established tradition that linked riots to conspiracies and devised a new anthropology depicting the populace as a subject unable to produce ideas on its own.