<p>In this dissertation, I argue that musicians began to emerge as a professional class during the French Revolution (1789-1804) by mobilizing Enlightenment philosophies of music, pre-revolutionary social networks, and economic upheaval. I conceive of this phenomenon within a broad macro-historical context beginning in 1749 with Rousseau's first articulations of music and political culture, and ending with institutional changes at the Paris Conservatoire in 1802. My research applies an anthropological approach to the archives as set forth by scholars including William H. Sewell, Jr., Bernard S. Cohn, and Natalie Zemon Davis. Through archival discoveries from across Parisian archives, I elucidate how musicians capitalized upon revolutionary change to pursue personal and collective advancement as artists and professionals. This approach takes the concept of musicianship as a multivalent social category that traverses musical genres and institutions. This study contributes to the nascent movement to reincorporate economic life back into the historiography of the French Revolution and to a relational approach to the politics of expressivity and practice in musical production. The result of this study is a rethinking of previous historical accounts of revolutionary musicians as simply utilitarian. </p><p>In focusing on practicing musicians, their social networks, and their economy, I demonstrate the unique political circumstances of musical production and practice in late eighteenth-century Paris. I conclude that revolutionary politics among composers, performers, and pedagogues gave birth to a distinct form of French musical Romanticism rooted in the negotiation of rational approaches to music with the lived experiences of Revolution. This perspective locates one origin of musical Romanticism in Parisian musical institutions during the second half of the eighteenth century. In Paris, musical genius came to be regarded as a collective attribute applicable to not only composers, but also to performers. This shift toward inclusive professional musicianship constituted an evolution of musical production and aesthetics, which held profound implications for cosmopolitan nineteenth-century European music culture.</p> / Dissertation

Wang Xiaobo is a Post-Mao novelist whose works have prompted tremendous attention from the intellectuals and the public after his death. The straightforward representation of sex in his fiction is often considered as one of the sources that contribute to his “liberal spirit”. This is because many of Wang Xiaobo’s stories full of sexual depictions are set during the Cultural Revolution. But Wang Xiaobo’s ambiguous manipulation of the relationship between sex and the power makes his resistance to authoritarianism a tricky issue. On the one hand, his nonchalant attitude to both sex and politics can be interpreted as a mocking of the Maoist ideology. On the other hand, the author’s detachment from the political background and the protagonist’s sexual carnival in the rural areas can be considered as indifferent to the Cultural Revolution. The engagement with Maoist ideology in the theoretical framework of suppression/revolt cannot give a satisfactory answer to the role of sex in his fiction. This thesis amends this framework by taking other elements than Maoist discourse into consideration. / Graduate

This paper discusses the origin of the notion of two-stage revolution in Japan and its development by a member of Japan’s communist party, Nosaka Sanzo. The Communist International stipulated the task of Japan’s two-stage revolution in 1927. In the following years Nosaka Sanzo creatively developed the connotation and the nature of the two-stage revolution in Japan based on his comprehension of the economic and political features of imperial Japan. I begin my narrative on how Nosaka came to understand the labor problem in Japan’s imperial economy in the 1910s, and continue by outlining how he developed this idea as a criticism of the Japanese empire from 1927 to 1945. The research will contribute to the understanding of the communist movement in imperial Japan. / Graduate

The triple coordinates of youth, the Sixties and the Cuban Revolution interact to create a rich but relatively unexplored field of historical research. Previous studies of youth in Cuba have assumed a separation between young people and the Revolution, and either objectify young people as units that could be mobilized by the Revolution, or look at how young people deviated from the perceived dominant ideology of the Revolution. This study contends that, rather than being passive in the face of social and material change, young people in 1960s Cuba were active agents in that change, and played a role in defining what the Revolution was and could become. The model built here to understand young people in 1960s Cuba is based on identity theory, contending that youth identity was built at the point where young people experienced – and were responsible for forging – an emerging dominant culture of youth. The latter entered Cuban consciousness and became, over the course of the 1960s, a part of the dominant national-revolutionary identity. It was determined by three factors: firstly, leadership discourse, which laid out the view of what youth could, should or must be within the Revolution, and also helped to forge a direct relationship between the Revolution and young people; secondly, policy initiatives which linked all youth-related policy to education, therefore linking policy to the radical national tradition stemming from Martí; and thirdly, influence from outside Cuba and the ways in which external youth movements and youth cultures interplayed with Cuban culture. Through these three, youth was in the ascendancy, but, where young people challenged the positive picture of youth, moral panics ensued. Young people were neither inherent saints nor accidental sinners in Cuba in the 1960s, and sought multiple ways in which to express themselves. Firstly, they played their role as activists through the youth organisations, the AJR and the UJC. These young people were at the cutting edge of the canonised vision of youth, and consequently felt burdened by a failure to live up to such an ideal. Secondly, through massive voluntary participation in building the Revolution, through the Literacy Campaign, the militias and the aficionados groups, many young people in the 1960s internalised the Revolution and developed a revolutionary consciousness that defines their generation today. Finally, at the margin of the definition of what was considered revolutionary sat young cultural producers – those associated with El Puente, Caimán Barbudo and the Nueva Trova, and their audience – who attempted to define and redefine what it meant to be young and revolutionary. These groups all fed the culture of youth, and through them we can start to understand the uncertainties of being young, revolutionary and Cuban in this effervescent and convulsive decade.

This paper will explore the intersections of gender, sexuality and revolution in contemporary Chinese art through the lens of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As an integral part in the process of narrative reconstruction, the propaganda imagery from the Cultural Revolution provides important insights into societal expectations for the masses. This paper will also analyze how contemporary artists seek to appropriate and respond to the events of the Cultural Revolution through their artwork, and describe the processes by which the I interpreted this information in order to create my own artwork.

This thesis attempts to challenge the way military historiography deals with the state of the Ottoman army between 1683 and 1792 and the military reform attempts prior to the Nizam-i Cedid army. Western military historians have ascribed to the inferiority of the Ottoman military technology the waning of the Ottoman military power in the post-1683 period. Any attempt at reform was allegedly obstructed by religious reaction against borrowing European methods and technology. This thesis argues that technology was not the decisive factor in the Ottoman failure against the Austrians and Russians since those two were not too far ahead of the Ottomans with regards to the level of military technology to justify such a conclusion. The comparison with the Russian army, the archenemy of the Ottomans in the period under question, reveals that the Russian success in such departments as conscription, logistics, military leadership and continuous tactical adjustments made to accommodate the needs of steppe warfare, rather than outright application of Western methods of warfare, resulted in victories against the Ottomans. The Ottomans in the meantime were bothered by instability at the Porte, which could neither provide the necessary leadership on the battlefield nor carry out the military reforms. As a result, the vestiges of the Ottoman military organization in its classical form continued to take up economic resources and block any attempts at reform. Religion in this process served as nothing more than a rallying cry for a certain group who vied for power in Istanbul at a time of state formation.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of China (the Cultural Revolution)from 1966 to 1976 is considered an unprecedented political and social upheaval in Chinese modern history. Model Plays were produced as the core of the Cultural Revolutionary propaganda in an effort to promote a new discourse of political and cultural ideology of and for the worker-farmer-soldier class. As images of heroic proletarian revolutionary women were expansively represented onstage, conventional gender norms and boundaries were challenged. This paper assesses the "woman" messages carried by Model Plays and the vision of Chinese women's liberation they depicted on the Cultural Revolutionary theatric stage. By analyzing images of Model woman characters in Model Plays, the author argues that these model plays and operas offer an idealized vision of Chinese women's emancipation and to certain extent serve as an empowering influence on women's social practice in real life during the Cultural Revolution; on the other hand, however, they reveal a central tension in the Chinese revolutionary discourse with respect to gender: women could be re-conceived as heroes, public actors fighting fearlessly for collective goals, yet these women heroes seemly could only take form in the absence of private ties: family bonds, marriage, and motherhood. So while there is something "new" and, perhaps, even liberating in these newly imagined women characters, the form they take falls short of truly reconfiguring gender relations in Chinese society.

Univ., Diss.--Tübingen, 1996.

Zugl.: Hamburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2005.

Habilitationsschrift--Göttingen, 1977. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-320) and index.