The "Arab Spring" was heralded and publicly embraced by foreign leaders of many countries that define themselves by their own historic revolutions. The contributors to this volume examine the legitimacy of these comparisons by exploring whether or not all modern revolutions follow a pattern or script. Traditionally, historians have studied revolutions as distinct and separate events. Drawing on close familiarity with many different cultures, languages, and historical transitions, this anthology presents the first cohesive historical approach to the comparative study of revolutions.
This volume, edited by Keith Baker and TEC faculty affiliate Dan Edelstein argues that the American and French Revolutions provided the genesis of the revolutionary "script" that was rewritten by Marx, which was revised by Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution, which was revised again by Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Later revolutions in Cuba and Iran improvised further. This script is once again on display in the capitals of the Middle East and North Africa, and it will serve as the model for future revolutionary movements.
This publication was sponsored by The Europe Center.
The fate of a soldier serving in the Russian army in the First World War largely depended on luck and circumstances. But even though his own means of influencing his fate were limited, there were available certain active choices – such as shirking and desertion – that could turn his life around in both positive and negative ways. For Russian civil and military authorities, of course, desertion was a nuisance that was fought against by all available means. Sometimes, such as with physical punishment, these means only succeeded in lowering the already low morale and increasing the number of deserters.
Dr. Mart Kuldkepp's presentation will focus on a small and somewhat exceptional group of deserters from the Russian army: the soldiers who served in the border guard regiments in Northern Finland and deserted alone or in small groups over the border to neutral Sweden. He will consider their motivation in doing so, and their subsequent fate, as much as it is known. At the same time, he will also look at how Sweden administratively handled this very unforeseen phenomenon and how the deserters were treated by Swedish authorities.
Mart Kuldkepp completed his PhD dissertation at University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2014 and joined University College London in 2015. Dr. Kuldkepp has been active as an academic in the field of Scandinavian Studies since 2007. Dr. Kuldkepp’s primary research focus is on 20th century Scandinavian political history, with a particular interest in contacts between the Scandinavian and the Baltic states, but also has interest in the history of secret services and espionage and Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture. His teaching has mostly concerned the history of Scandinavian culture, society, and politics from the earliest times up to today. He has taught subjects related to Old Norse studies and overview courses in humanities.
Organized by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and Stanford University Libraries
Mart Kuldkepp
Lecturer
Speaker
Scandinavian Studies, University College London
This is the second meeting of the workshop series on Civility, Cruelty, Truth. A one-day event hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center, the workshop will explore the genealogies, promises, and limits of civic virtue—at the heart of which is the city, the classical polis, itself— as a universal ideal. European in its moral contours, constituted by a deep fascination with the rule of law, borders, and security, at once coercive and oblique in whom it excludes and includes, how it punishes and protects, the city held out the promise of a humane center for ethical and sovereign life, one upon which anticolonial struggles against European empires too were first conceived and mounted. This workshop will examine the ambiguous foundations and resolutions of that vision in Asia, Europe, and the fatal waters in between; a vision that has come to be marked today by extreme violence and tragic displacements, and which now presses new questions against the very limit of modern political imagination.
Student Assistant: Ahoo Najafian (Department of Religious Studies)
Schedule (coming soon)
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Department of Religious Studies, The Europe Center, The France- Stanford Center for interdisciplinary Studies, Program in Global Justice, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford Global Studies, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Humanities Center, Center for South Asia
Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Martina Kaller is a philosopher and historian with a clear professional background in global history and a main focus on the Global South. She studied in Vienna, Berlin and at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM). She earned her Ph.D in epistemology of history from University of Vienna and did her postdoctoral thesis in modern history there as well. Her main research focus is on global food history and global studies of food.
At University of Vienna she co-directs the EU funded Master Erasmus Mundus-program, called “Global Studies—A European Perspective.” A consortium conformed by global studies specialists from the London School of Economics (UK), the University of Leipzig (Germany), Roskilde University (Denmark), the Willy Brand Center at University of Wroclaw (Poland), and at University of Vienna, proved that a joint studies program with incoming students from whole over the world works and equally turned greatly attractive for European students.
Her teaching philosophy is guided by a firm belief in the freedom of inquiry, encouraging students to discover and rigorously research the questions that emerge from their own interests, while applying stringent methodological standards. She welcomes difference, dialogue and respect among diverse and divergent points of view. Her courses are characterized by mutual respect, a sense of responsibility and reliability.
"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a 2002 film based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It concerns the author's mother, and two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, in order to return to their Aboriginal families, after being placed there in 1931. The film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong while being tracked by a white authority figure and a black tracker.
The film will be moderated by The Europe Center faculty affiliate Krish Seetah, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the ‘Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage’ (MACH) project, which studies European Imperialism and colonial activity.
"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is the last film in the annual SGS Summer Film Festival running from June 17th to August 26th. This year's festival features films from around the world that focus on the topic of “Imagining Empire: A Global Retrospective” and offers a flexible lens with which to look at both historical and contemporary geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts. For more information on the film festival, please visit: https://sgs.stanford.edu/sgs.stanford.edu/2015-film-festival.
The Geology Corner (Bldg. 320), Room 105 450 Serra Mall
Main Quad, Building 50
450 Serra Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2034
(650) 723-3421
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Associate Professor of Anthropology
Sykes Family Director of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER)
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Krish Seetah's research covers a range of issues relating to colonialism and colonization. Prof. Seetah is the director of Stanford's ‘Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage’ (MACH) project, which studies European Imperialism and colonial activity. Much of his work uses bioarchaeological materials, with a strong emphasis on human-environmental interactions. He is keen to use the long duree perspective to help contextualize the most recent phase of globalization witnessed in the IOW, and study both the impacts of imperialism on ecology, identity and the development of nationhood following mass diaspora.
His teaching focuses on osteoarchaeology, human-animal relationships, the the Indian Ocean World. Recent publications include a monograph titled ‘Humans, Animals and the Craft of Slaughter in Archaeo-Historic Society (Cambridge University Press), and an edited volume ‘Connecting Continents: Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean’ (Ohio University Press), which won the 2019 Society for American Archaeology Book Prize in the Scholarly category. Seetah gained his Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, holds two MSc degrees, the first in Ecology and a second in Osteoarchaeology, with a BA in Biology. He has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge University, UK, the Scientific Research Center, Slovenia, and was an ERC Research Fellow at Reading University, UK.
The first cultural analysis of the secret literature of sixteenth-century Spain’s Muslim communities.
Covert Gestures reveals how the traditional Islamic narratives of the moriscos both shaped and encoded a wide range of covert social activity characterized by a profound and persistent concern with time and temporality. Using a unique blend of literary analysis, linguistic anthropology, and phenomenological philosophy, Vincent Barletta explores the narratives as testimonials of past human experiences and discovers in them evidence of community resistance.
Conquered in 1492 and colonized by invading Castilians, the city and kingdom of Granada faced radical changes imposed by its occupiers throughout the first half of the sixteenth century—including the forced conversion of its native Muslim population. Written by Francisco Núñez Muley, one of many coerced Christian converts, this extraordinary letter lodges a clear-sighted, impassioned protest against the unreasonable and strongly assimilationist laws that required all converted Muslims in Granada to dress, speak, eat, marry, celebrate festivals, and be buried exactly as the Castilian settler population did.
Now available in its first English translation, Núñez Muley’s account is an invaluable example of how Spain’s former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant—given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation—this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.
Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, Vincent Barletta shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come.
Death in Babylon depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death. But Barletta also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, Death in Babylon develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas. A novel contribution to the literature of empire building, Death in Babylon provides a frame for the deep mortal anxiety that has infused and given shape to the spread of imperial Europe from its very beginning.
As part of a major speaking tour across the United States, author and award-winning filmmaker Bernhard Rammerstorfer will present his latest book and DVD project called “Taking the Stand: We have More to Say”. Accompanying him will be two survivors of the Holocaust, Mrs. Reneé Firestone and Mrs. Hermine Liska, providing one of the last opportunities learn about the Holocaust from those who lived through it.
“Taking the Stand: We Have More to Say” condenses insights and experiences of nine victims of the Nazi movement and their messages to the younger generation. They are from five different countries and were persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, political ideology, or religion. For five years, Rammerstorfer collected questions directed to Holocaust survivors that were posed by schoolchildren and students all over the world. The catalog of questions, unique in the world, consists of 100 questions from 61 schools and universities in 30 countries on 6 continents.
At the event, Mr. Rammerstofer will talk about his latest documentary and present some sequences from the film followed by a Q&A session with Mrs. Firestone and Mrs. Liska, who both appear in it. Please note that there will be a translator during the Q&A session.
Everyone is welcome to stay after the event for a book signing by the author and the two survivors.
Bernhard Rammerstorfer is an Austrian author and filmmaker who is best known for his numerous books and films about the Nazi regime, including the book “Unbroken Will” and the award-winning documentary “Ladder in the Lions Den”. Besides his work as a writer and producer, he also frequently gives lectures at schools, universities and memorial sites all over Europe and the US.
Reneé Firestone was born in 1924 in Užhorod (today’s Ukraine) into a Jewish family. In spring of 1944, she was deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, and later that year she was sent to the female forced labor camp in Silesia where she stayed until the liberation by the Russian Army in May 1945. After the war, Firestone lived in Prague before emigrating to the United States with her family in 1948. She worked as a fashion designer and ran a successful boutique. In 1998, she told her story in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning documentary “The Last Days”. She regularly speaks about the Holocaust to young people in schools, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Reneé Firestone lives in Los Angeles.
Hermine Liska was born in 1930 in Austria. As a child of Bible Students (today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses), her parents refused to raise her according to the Nazi ideology. For that reason, she was taken away from her parents in 1941 and put into a “reeducation center”. After the war, she was able to return to her home, got married and had three children. Since almost two decades she has been visiting schools all over Austria and told her story to thousands of students. In 2009, she was invited to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC to tell her story. Hermine Liska lives near Graz in Austria.
This event is co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Stanford Austria Club
Cubberley Auditorium 485 Lausen Mall Stanford University
Bernhard Rammerstorfer
Austrian author and documentary film producer
A pioneering textual analysis of French political speeches led by Stanford Professor of French Cécile Alduy reveals how Marine Le Pen, leader of France's surging far-right National Front, has made extremism palatable in a land of republican values.
French politician Marine Le Pen carried her father's right-wing fringe political party to first place in the country's latest elections for European Parliament.
Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy says Le Pen's success at the helm of France's right-wing National Front can be attributed to a combination of sophisticated rebranding and skillfully crafted moderate rhetoric that sells a conservative agenda that borders on extreme.
An associate professor of French at Stanford and a faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, Alduy conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than 500 speeches by Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to find out what has made their party surge in the polls.
Alduy's word-for-word analysis of National Front political speeches, published in the bookMarine Le Pen prise aux mots: Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) has become a flashpoint of political discourse in France.
The resulting research is the first study of Marine Le Pen's discourse, the first to compile a corpus of this magnitude of political speeches by a French political organization.
After sifting through the data and performing extensive close readings of the corpus, Alduy found that the stylistic polish of Marine Le Pen's language conceals ideological and mythological structures that have traditionally disturbed French voters. Her research reveals how radical views can be cloaked in soothing speech.
"Marine Le Pen's language is full of ambiguities, double meanings, silences and allusions," Alduy said.
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.
Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together. Image Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
But in terms of political agenda and ideological content, Alduy said the continuity between the younger and elder Le Pen is striking. "What is different is the words and phrases she uses to express the same agenda," Alduy said.
Alduy, whose research centers on the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the European Renaissance, conducted the research with the help of Stanford graduate and undergraduate students and with communication consultant Stéphane Wahnich. Academic technology specialist Michael Widner of Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, provided technical expertise throughout and trained students in the art of indexing the database.
With a grant from Stanford's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Alduy and her team transcribed and analyzed more than 500 speeches by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen dating from 1987 to 2013.
Alduy's team used text analysis software such as Hyperbase or Voyant Tools to measure precisely how Marine's language differs from that of Jean-Marie.
They found, for example, that Marine Le Pen used the word "immigrants" 40 times in speeches, compared to 330 times for Jean-Marie, or 0.6 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively. Instead, she used the more impersonal "immigration" or "migration policy" to discuss the issue and present this hot-topic issue as a matter of abstract economic policy rather than an ideological anti-immigration stance.
While Jean-Marie paired "immigrants" or "immigration" with words like "danger," "threat" or "loss," yielding phrases that scapegoat or even demonize France's large immigrant population, Marine used more technocratic pairings such as "protection," "cost," "euro" or "pay."
The effect, Alduy contended, is a repositioning of immigration from the racial and cultural problem Jean-Marie claimed it was to an economic one. Yet the actual policy agenda changed little from father to daughter, Alduy observed.
New language, same story
Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 to unite under the same political banner several extremist groups, from royalists to conservative Catholics nostalgic of the Vichy régime and the colonial Empire.
Since 1987 and his polemical statement about the Holocaust being a "detail" in the history of World War II, Jean-Marie has employed shock value to get media coverage. When asked about his daughter's new "normalization" strategy, which smoothes out the old xenophobic rhetoric in favor of a mainstream lingua, he routinely declares: "Nobody cares about a nice National Front."
But the party polled in the low double digits until Marine Le Pen took the helm in 2011. As she rose in the polls, Alduy began studying her speeches to understand what powered the politician's steady ascent.
In May 2014, Le Pen's National Front stunned the French political establishment by pulling 25 percent of the vote in European parliamentary elections, becoming the top French vote-getter in a multiparty system. President François Hollande's Socialists came in third. Last month, the party equaled that percentage in elections for local councilors. Such results make Marine Le Pen a credible contender for France's presidency as the country looks ahead to its 2017 presidential cycle.
To demonstrate how Marine Le Pen's language presents formerly unpopular ideas in a new light, Alduy pointed to the party's policy of préférence nationale (national preference,) the cornerstone of its platform since the late 1970s. This policy would give priority for jobs, social services and benefits to French citizens, and would strip from children of legally resident noncitizens the family benefits now available to all children in France.
As touted by Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, Alduy noted, "The phrase préférence nationale has negative connotations in the French mind."
"'Preference' sounds arbitrary, potentially unfair, and goes against the republican principle of equality in the eye of the law," Alduy noted. "So Marine Le Pen has renamed this measure priorité nationale (national priority) or even sometimes patriotisme social (social patriotism). Both new phrases sound positive and don't evoke discrimination as the former did.
"'Priority' evokes action, responsibility, leadership – all the qualities one would like an effective chief executive to embody," Alduy said. "Patriotism is a noncontroversial word that can rally across the political spectrum. Who wants to be called anti-patriotic by opposing 'social patriotism'? Yet both phrases refer to exactly the same measures."
In the same vein, Alduy observed, Marine Le Pen eschews the word "race" while her father stated unequivocally "races are unequal."
"Instead," Alduy said, "Marine Le Pen explains that 'cultures,' 'civilizations' and 'nations' have a right to remain separate and different, or else risk disappearing, overwhelmed by hordes of outsiders with a different, incompatible culture.
"The word 'race' has disappeared, but the same peoples are the target of this fear of the other."
Listening between the lines
Alduy's findings hint at ways voters everywhere can critically evaluate political thought and make sound political decisions in times of stress.
She observed that other far-right European movements, such as Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, have similarly rebranded themselves to expand their base.
"Like the National Front, the Party for Freedom now adopts the posture of a champion of Western liberal values and the defense of 'minorities' – gays and women – against the alleged homophobia and misogyny of Islam," Alduy said. "Yet the Party for Freedom is a typical xenophobic, far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe party in every other respect.
"I hope that people will start to pay attention to the meaning of words in political speeches and in the media."
In 2015-16, Alduy said, she hopes to convey to students the nuances of political code words such as laïcité (secularism), "the Republic" or "immigration" in a Stanford course titled How to Think About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Political, Social and Literary Contexts.
"We all have to be careful and listen to what is left between the lines," Alduy said.
"When we hear someone speak about equality or democracy, we have to pay attention not just to what we want to hear, or to what we assume these words mean, but to decipher what they mean in the context of this speaker's worldview.
"The positive or negative connotations of certain words can mislead us to think that we share the same definition of them with the politicians that use them to gain our vote."
Marine Le Pen prise aux mots is currently available only in French. Analyses and graphs taken from the book are available in English on the website www.decodingmarinelepen.stanford.edu.
Media Contact
Corrie Goldman, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, corrieg@stanford.edu
France's far-right National Front politician Marine Le Pen hugs her father, Jean Marie le Pen, after her May Day 2012 speech in Paris. The younger Le Pen's meteoric rise in French politics has captured the attention of Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy, who has analyzed the differences between her speeches and those of her more polarizing father.
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.