“Communist Miscellany” is a history of file-keeping and bureaucratic paperwork in Maoist China, examined through the institution of individual dossiers on Chinese subjects known as dang’an. Drawing upon an original sourcebase of deaccessioned archival dossiers, the project explores how the party-state bureaucracy fashioned an archive of Maoist society through scrupulous routines of investigative, clerical, and material labor. In Maoist China, one of the primary responsibilities of local bureaucratic units was to compile detailed individualized dossiers on party members, cadres, workers and students under their jurisdiction. The dossier constituted a master record of a subject's social identity, probing issues of class status, personal background, family relationships, political activities and attitudes. Broadly instituted in the 1950s on the basis of the Soviet model, the stated purpose of the dossier system was to inform staffing decisions for personnel management in the planned economy. However, in the Mao era, the dossier was widely deployed as a surveillance instrument, producing a living archive of “political and historical problems” among the people. For ordinary citizens, materials gathered through the dossier were the basis of crucial class labels and the grounds for political advancement. The paper-bound practices of the dossier informed the generic presentation of identity and evidence while supplying material for everyday political acts. This study of the dossier system engages current debates on bureaucratic culture, social surveillance, and archive in the PRC. A project of immense ambition, the dossier system straddled the imperatives of permanent revolution and socialist state-building to transcribe a record of Chinese society in the Maoist image. The continuous expansion of the dossier system over the Mao era gave rise to elaborate routines of file-keeping and paperwork as well as unexpected consequences of the bureaucratic will to knowledge. The bureaucratic tendency toward overaccumulation and excess in the production of dossier materials exposes the political and epistemic insecurities that drove social surveillance. The practical demands of the dossier system strained the ability of local bureaucrats to keep pace with requests for intelligence, shaping an approach to file-keeping that conceived its own distinctive forms of knowledge and incapacity.

Since the cultural turn and the publication of André Lefevere's Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), the field of translation studies has increasingly focused on the question of ideological influences in the translation process and the subsequent textual or paratextual censorship. While a broad range of studies identify a number of alterations, omissions or disappearances in the translation process under totalitarian or otherwise restrictive regimes (Fabre, 2007; Merino & Rabadán, 2002; Thomson-Wohlgemuth, 2007 among others), only a handful of them researches censorship of non-normative sexualities and identities (Baer, 2011b; Gorjanc, 2012; Linder, 2004). This thesis complements this still largely under-explored subject through an insight into the censorship of male same-sex affection in former Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia. Focusing on two key periods of the two countries' history, the communist era of 1948-1989 and the current democratic period that started with the Velvet Revolution, the project compares a series of consecutive translations in order to uncover possible patterns of censorship. The corpus of this work consists of Czech and Slovak translations of Shakespeare's sonnets, a poetry collection known for its potential for a homoerotic reading which became subject of controversy almost from the moment of its first known publication in 1609. This project utilises a theoretical background borrowed from poststructuralism and queer theory, chiefly represented by the works of Foucault (1978), Sedgwick (1985, 1990) and Halperin (2002). One of the key questions that these scholars attempted to answer is how to successfully conduct research into the history of human sexuality, given the fact that its conceptualisation changes across temporal and spatial axes. It is based on the assumption that it is not possible to research the history of translation of non-normative sexualities without an awareness of these changing perceptions of the very basic terms like homosexuality. The key aim of this thesis is to introduce the theoretical frameworks from queer studies into a historical enquiry within the field of translation studies in order to test this hypothesis. The methodological framework for this work was designed to suit the large corpus used for this project, encompassing fifteen translations of a collection of 154 sonnets. It consists firstly of a quantitative methodology devised in order to uncover the potential shifts in the gender of the recipient of the sonnets, which is one of the crucial elements in the reading of the corpus as a collection of amorous poetry written by a man for another man or men. The second stage consists of a qualitative analysis of the translations which focuses on textual, contextual and paratextual features that will complement the macro-level insight of the quantitative part with micro-level observations. The aim of this study is to uncover patterns of censorship related to same-sex affection and desire in the sonnet collection, place them into their respective historical context and finally to answer the question of whether there is a correlation between the socio-political changes in Czechoslovakia, the shifting conceptualisation of homosexuality throughout the various periods, and the strategies applied in Czech and Slovak sonnet translations.

More than six decades after its occurrence, China's ‘peasant revolution' of 1949 remains an enigma. According to classical Marxism, peasants are passive ‘objects of history' who must be transformed into industrial workers before they can become agents of revolutionary change. This line of argument is reinforced by much extant Sinology and historical sociology, both of which have treated Maoism either as a disguised continuation of peasant exploitation, or as a failed emulation of Stalinism. Contra these interpretations, this thesis argues that China's peasant revolution was a real historical phenomenon which involved a previously unthinkable form of peasant political agency. To substantiate this argument, the thesis deploys Leon Trotsky's theory of Uneven and Combined Development (U&CD) which posits social development as a non-linear process constituted via multi-societal interaction. This reveals that the origins and specificities of the Chinese Revolution can best be understood with reference to a 'combined development' emerging from China's long-run and short-run interactions with variegated social forms. The first chapter of the thesis shows how China's ‘peasant revolution' remains an insurmountable paradox for the relevant literature, expressed in a shared problem of anachronism. Chapter 2 introduces Uneven and Combined Development as a theory of inter-societal causation that might overcome the problem by virtue of its non-linear conception of social development. Chapter 3 demonstrates how this inter-societal perspective is central to understanding the longue dureé ‘peculiarities' of China's development: the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies made the Chinese peasants directly subject to a centralizing empire, configuring their political agency quite differently (and with quite different potentials) from that of their European feudal counterparts. Chapter 4 analyzes the specific intersection of the Chinese social formation with the universalizing dynamics of Western capitalism, an intersection which generated the context of China's modern combined development. Chapter 5 then provides a conjunctural analysis of how the revolutionary agency of the peasant came to the fore in China's revolution in terms of a pattern of combined development that substituted the peasantry for the weak bourgeoisie and nascent proletariat as the leading agency of a socialist modernization that fused anti-imperialist struggle and campaigns for rural restoration and national liberation into a single process aimed at overcoming China's backwardness. Finally, Chapter 6 shows how this argument resolves the Sinological debate on whether modern Chinese history is ‘China-made' or ‘West-made'; for it reveals how the interaction of China's premodern social forms with Western modernity co-determined the peculiarites of China's modern transformation. It also provides a critique of extant Marxist historical sociology, arguing that it is built upon a mode-of-production analysis that tends towards falsely unilinear, ‘internalist' explanations.

December 1989, Romania – a culture steeped in secrecy-fuelled paranoia is reflected in the family of six-year-old Adam Stan, whose father is missing and no one concedes to even talk about it. In the first of two sections of 2, a novel, through the eyes of Adam the child, the narrative explores the fall of Ceaușescu's regime and the incandescent bouts of hope brought on by the first Romanian democratic summer, but overshadowed by the presence of an absent father. Adam keenly experiences the joys and injustices of private and public life in both urban and rural Romanian landscapes, before he is forced to emigrate with his mother to the United States. The latter half of the novel sees the adult Adam return to his native Romania after an absence of over two decades, having been reunited with his father and fully assimilated into American life. Adam’s first impressions are of a country still in social and political turmoil, but his Romanian senses are dulled, his outlook cynical, his father’s prohibitive voice never far from his mind. However, the seemingly new scenery and the people he meets end up exposing forbidden memories which prompt Adam’s curiosity for coming to terms with his family’s past. Dualities construct the framework of Adam’s journey: innocence and experience, child- and adulthood, nationhood and otherness, (post)communism and capitalism, personal and national trauma, culture and identity. 2, a novel is a story about family, displacement, language, but most of all about finding a sense of self despite the ambivalent responsibility that comes with inheriting one’s history.

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The creative project Communism: a love story is a piece of literary non-fiction: a biography of the communist intellectual Guido Carlo Luigi Baracchi (1887-1975). It investigates Baracchi's privileged childhood as the son of the government astronomer and a wealthy heiress, his career as a university activist, his immersion in Melbourne's radical and artistic milieu during the First World War, his role in the formation of the Communist Party of Australia, his changing attitudes to communism during the 1920s and 1930s while in Australia and overseas and his eventual identification with the Trotskyist movement. The project explores the different strands of thought within Australian communism, the impact of Stalinisation on the movement both in Australia and overseas, and the personal and political difficulties confronting facing anti-Stalinist radicals. It examines the tensions between Baracchi's political commitments and his upbringing, and situates Baracchi's tumu ltuous romantic relationships (with Katharine Susannah Prichard, Lesbia Harford, Betty Roland and others) in the context of his times and political beliefs. The exegesis Engineering your own soul: theory and practice in communist biography and autobiography examines the political and artistic tensions within the biographical and autobiographical writings of Betty Roland and Katharine Susannah Prichard in the context of the development of the world communist movement.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 1983. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 728-748).

The purpose of the study was to examine institutional autonomy within three selected Chinese universities. Research questions were designed based upon the elements of university autonomy (James, 1965), the essential ingredients of institutional autonomy (Ashby, 1966), and a unique feature of Chinese higher education, the Communist Party of China's leadership over universities. The five groups of research questions covered the CPC's leadership over universities, and personnel, academic, student and financial affairs. Findings were examined and interpreted through a framework of substantive autonomy and procedural autonomy, which was modified from Berdahl's (1990) work. Twenty-eight administrators and the CPC leaders at different levels were interviewed. Data were also drawn from university documents, published CPC documents, newspapers, periodicals and books, and the researcher's personal observations. The study found that at the university level the CPC controlled the decision-making power regarding all major issues, and the President took charge of university affairs only under the leadership of the CPC University Committee. At the college or department level, the dean or the head was given full authority to make decisions, while the Party branch played supervisory and safeguarding role to ensure the proper operation of the college or department under the Party's guidelines. The control of these universities by the upper authority was inverse to the ranking of the universities, the higher the status the university, the more freedom it gained. The CPC and the government rigidly controlled all the substantive matters. In terms of procedural matters, governmental authorities controlled the appointment of president and vice presidents, diploma granting, enrollment quotas, and tuition and fee levels. The degrees of autonomy in other procedural matters in personnel, academic, student and financial affairs varied with universities. Generally, the higher the ranking of the university, the more procedural freedom it was granted. Findings indicated that compared with the practice before the market-oriented economic reform, the amount of autonomy the universities had gained was notable, and the national higher education system had moved somewhat from the state-control model to more of a state-supervising model.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Jonathan Grant, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of History. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.