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The rich history of Czech anarchism is not well-known internationally. The movement was comprised of thousands of proletarians (especially Northern Bohemian miners) and some important poets. It ended in a surprising and original way with the formation of an anarchist political party in 1914. This led to participation in national governments between 1918 and 1922. To explain the dynamics, the article narrates five separate stories of the Czech anarchism. After a summary recounting the development of the Czech anarchist movement from a temporal and spatial point of view, it examines ideas about the individual and society, organisational forms and organisations, and, finally, the national question, gender, and direct action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central Europe is often considered to be a source of nationalist pathologies and plagues that could infect "proper" (Western) Europe. This image is at best outdated, as Western Europe and the United States have (and always have had) their own nationalist and conservative authoritarian resources. Moreover, Central Europe has also been a space of original political thought, albeit often obscure or forgotten, which can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary world beyond the borders of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the discourse of Czech historians and authors publicly recognized as historians (historians Martin Kovář, Ivan Šedivý, and Marie Koldinská, egyptologist Miroslav Bárta, anthropologist Ivo Budil, and fiction writer Vlastimil Vondruška) who have consistently promoted ideas of the decline of the Western civilisation in the media and in their books during the past decade. After presenting the context of conservative declinism in the West and in the Czech Republic, the article presents the most important topics in the discourse of the Czech declinist historians and authors: democracy, the welfare state, the EU, the army, and masculinity. The article goes on to analyse declinist historians' critical views of scholarship and especially of new trends in historiography; according to Ivan Šedivý, "concepts like gender... minorities and marginal groups, post-colonialism and environmentalism are the Molotov cocktails of the 21st century". In their opinion, historiography allegedly lost its capacity to deliver an integrative narrative to society. Following this, the article analyses the epistemological assumptions of declinist historians: the idea of eternal human nature or "laws of development" of civilisations. In conclusion, the article argues that these assumptions are contradictory in terms of history as the analysis of the past in its specificity and difference (and towards conservative values of respect to this specificity), and that we can identify analogical contradiction in future-oriented focus of declinist historians as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is based on an analysis of Czech anti‑communism. It starts with a brief definition of anti‑communism. Then it presents six possible typologies of anti‑communism based on various questions: type of political mission, political background, actual political function, proposed cure, and spatial scope. There then follows a presentation of various phenomena that are framed in an anti‑communist way: the Communist Party, Social Democrats, liberals, the young generation, but also the contemporary West with its “progressivist” tendencies. In the two final sections the paper focuses on comparison in the Central European context. It shows that in the Czech context the transfer of German experience was (in)adequate for different reasons than in the Polish and Hungarian cases, namely because of the dynamics connected with the different trajectories of post‑communist political subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the position of Roma youth in Czech rap music. We focus on the role of cultural translation of hip hop culture in general and rap music in particular and the accompanying notions of authenticity. The findings challenge the romantic notion of hip hop as a platform for oppressed marginal communities to express their lived experiences and opinions; rather, we analyze the invisibility and misrepresentation of the Roma in Czech rap music. Using qualitative research methods (in-depth interviews, discourse analysis of rap lyrics and participant observation at hip hop events) we first look at the attitudes of 'white' (majority) Czech rappers towards the Roma community. In the second part of the article, we focus on the Roma presence in Czech rap music, in particular on two case studies of Roma youth groups, as well as on the roles of youth workers and educators and their appropriation of hip hop as a form of Roma integration. Finally we discuss the threat of the burden of a 'triple inauthenticity' of Roma youth in Czech rap music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has a twofold aim: 1) to introduce four theoreticians who transfer concepts of postcolonial theory to the analysis of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe; 2) to apply these concepts to the interpretative dialogue of Milan Kundera's essay *e Tragedy of Central Europe (1983). The article thus presents the main concepts of the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (Balkanism and its similarities with and differences to Orientalism), American-Polish literary historian and Slavicist Ewa Thompson (surrogate hegemon, Sarmatism), Russian cultural theorist Madina Tlostanova (speaking from colonial wounds), and Hungarian sociologist Agnes Gagyi. In particular, the presentation of Todorova and Thompson is complemented by the presentation of the debates caused by their work (Diana Mishkova and Rastko Močnik in Todorova's case, Stanley Bill, Jan Sowa, Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez in Thompson's case) and conceptual alternatives (Maria Janion). The concepts of these authors are used to demonstrate how Kundera's essay is based on his ignorance of both non-European world and European internal peripheries, how it homogenizes Central European experiences, how it replaces politics by culture, and how it contributes to conservative identitarian positions which are not shared by Kundera in his other writings. In conclusion, the article discusses the mutual ignorance of Central European discourse and postcolonial discourse, and the possibilities of dialogue. On the meta-level the article also poses the question of how dialogue between theories of literature and political theory can enrich both participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slačálek and Svobodová's paper focuses on the ideology of the Czech Islamophobic movement as seen during the 2015-16 migration crisis. In their analysis of interviews with demonstrators and speeches by leaders of the movement, they discuss first how the movement imagined its enemies, and then describe its vision of positive core values. They conclude that the movement's key ideological features are: an emphasis on social and civilizational decline (declinism); a return to an assumed naturalness in economic and gender relationships (naturalization); and the open evocation of violence and severity (brutalization). In terms of Rogers Brubacker's distinction between xenophobic ethno-nationalism in Eastern Europe, and the xenophobic defence of liberal values in the West, Slačálek and Svobodová find that the Czech case fits the allegedly western pattern better than the eastern one, which may cast doubt on the whole essentialization of distinctions between 'western' and 'eastern' populisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents research concerning the image of the annual rave party Czechtek (1994-2006) and its media coverage by Czech media. It shows how the framework was established for the description of these rave parties, which were characterised by schematic images during annual moral panics -- key images depicted the contamination of the surrounding area, drugs, the strange and erratic nature of participants and the dishonouring of the state. This study shows that this media coverage played a repressive role in relation to the subculture by attracting the attention of the public, mobilising large numbers of visitors, and demanding repressive solutions. The article enters into a debate with previous analyses of Czechtek media coverage, and the comparisons they draw with the media coverage of alternative culture during the state socialist dictatorship of the 1970s. The article argues that the one-sided use of the analogy with repressive socialist-era discourse regarding alternative culture is not fruitful, and that it is more interesting to compare and analyse the differences between the two. Post-socialist media discourse is also ideological and repressive, but it is, nevertheless, different to the media discourse of the socialist dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the application of postcolonial theory to the post-communist situation, something that a number of authors are attempting to do - most notably Ewa Thompson, who connects this analysis with a cultural and political project for contemporary Poland. The article looks at the possible ways in which postcolonial perspectives can be used to analyse national identity in "Europe between Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism", and specifically in the Czech context. It then devotes itself to a genealogical reading of Milan Kundera's essay on Central Europe, and ends with a discussion on the usefulness of the postcolonial perspective for the analysis of post-communism. It concludes that this perspective is a fertile source of inspiration for comparative hypotheses and research questions, but that its full acceptance may be both methodologically and politically problematic. The "authenticity" of Central Europe has been constructed by the dominant Central European spokespeople in opposition to the "subaltern empires" of Germany and Russia as "more Western than the West". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]