| 1. |
- Blomqvist, Håkan
(författare)
-
Nation, ras och civilisation i svensk arbetarrörelse före nazismen
- 2006
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ideas of nationalism, race and anti-Semitism are usually connected to right wing ideology and politics. This thesis, however, is studying them in the context of the socialist labour movement. That a radical left wing patriotism, inspired by the French revolution, developed intertwined with workers’ internationalism is well known. But this left wing nationalism has, in the Swedish case, been characterised as an “internal” tool for obtaining democratic rights and social reforms and not directed against other peoples and nations. Inspired by postcolonial studies of whiteness the thesis examines the views of development of mankind and of national difference expressed in Swedish socialist publicity since the 1850’s up to the late 1920’s. Empirical studies of magazines, brochures and books show that it is possible to distinguish a trace of socialist whiteness in the production of ideas from the labour movement, influenced by liberal radicalism. Here, by socialist whiteness is not primarily meant identities of skin colour but ideas that the working class was the true and purest part of the nation and that socialism primarily was of concern to the white races on top of the chain of development. How this whiteness could be counter-posed to peoples and races considered different or “lower placed”, such as Slavs and Jews, has been of particular interest. In opposition to import of foreign labour, “usury Jews” and Tsarist Russia, arguments of socialist whiteness could be developed. With the Russian October revolution in 1917 bolshevism could be described as an Asian threat under Jewish leadership, alien to Swedish labour. Eugenic concerns for the Swedish race also found spokespersons in the socialist milieu of the 1910’s and 20’s. When fascism in the 1920’s captured the most radical themes of socialist whiteness ideas of Jewish threat and race purity could no longer be combined with defence of democratic ideals and find a public space in social democracy.
|
|
| 2. |
- Petrusenko, Nadezda, 1977-
(författare)
-
Creating the Revolutionary Heroines : The Case of Female Terrorists of the PSR (Russia, Beginning of the 20th Century)
- 2017
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Representing revolutionary terrorists as heroes and martyrs was a typical feature of the mythology of the Russian revolutionary underground at the beginning of the 20th century. This mythology described Underground Russia, the world of the revolutionaries, as an ideal country inhabited by ideal people. The purpose of that epos was to represent the revolutionary struggle, and individual revolutionaries in such a way that they would gain sympathy from the wider public and become role models for other revolutionary fighters. Sympathetic representations of women who committed political violence seem to be especially shocking in the context of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, since female violent behavior contradicted the existing gender order.Employing theoretical perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis, gender history and intersectionality, the dissertation analyzes the way narratives about the individual life paths of female terrorists of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (the PSR), the biggest socialist party in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, were constructed in their revolutionary auto/biographies. It analyzes how the lives of women from different social and ethnic origins, of different ages, with different life paths, who happened to be united only by their participation in the political terrorism of the PSR, were recounted with the help of narratives used in the Russian revolutionary underground.The research findings demonstrate that the accounts of the lives of female PSR terrorists were constructed with the help of the dominant narrative that was formed as a conversion story. Within the framework of that narrative, the lives of individual women were adapted to the dominant discourse of heroism and martyrdom, and at the same time were contextualized within the dominant discourse on “good” femininity that existed in the Russian society, and even within the discourse on Jews as perpetual “Others” in the Russian empire in case of Jewish women. Social and ethnic backgrounds as well as individual circumstances of the terrorist women, however, transformed the dominant narrative, and thus created diversity of representations. The discursive practice of writing a revolutionary life accepted by Bolsheviks influenced the discursive practice employed in revolutionary auto/biographies of female terrorists written during the early Soviet period.
|
|
