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By 1989, at least one in five Soviet citizens lived outside of "their" titular territories or did not have one, yet their lived experiences—especially poignant when the USSR dissolved—are not well understood. Using archival evidence and oral interviews, this paper focuses on two events pivotal to these communities: fatal unrest over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory from 1988–1990, the first perestroika conflict that produced the phenomenon of Soviet "refugees" in the country; and the Fergana Valley Massacre of June 1989, the first mass casualty event in Central Asia that displaced tens of thousands more. It argues that these conflicts became major regional and Soviet-wide issues that exposed the growing impotency of the center and contributed widely to the impetus to flight. This paper underscores how Soviet internationalism created the foundation for intercommunal "groupness," or the various cross-ethnic nexuses that became especially apparent vis-à-vis these episodes of titular violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the library of Winchester College is a multi-lingual psalter formerly owned by the diplomat and scholar, Richard Pace (c.1483–1536). Pace left extensive notes in this volume, the product of his study of the Hebrew Scriptures in comparison with the Vulgate and Greek Septuagint. They demonstrate his engagement with a variety of Jewish, patristic and humanist learning. A broader set of theological and devotional themes also emerge. For Pace, the Psalms were primarily a prophetic text, foretelling the coming of Christ and the Gospels, but they likewise reflected an interest in devotion, rhetoric and prayer typical of humanists of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of other collaborators rehearsed together on a daily basis. Held since then in the archive at Young and Zazeela's Church Street apartment in New York City, the tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music have become obscure objects of fascination and mystery for experimental music fans. They have also been at the centre of disputes over the authorial propriety of the drones that they record. This paper offers a material history of those tapes as they circulate online. By tracking and organizing the available bootlegs, I trace the ensemble's changing sonic self-conception as it moved from a composer-led ensemble supporting Young's saxophone improvisations to an egalitarian collective constituted in its dedication to the daily practice of listening from 'inside the sound'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A close reading of Yvonne Rainer's archival papers reveals new insights into the postmodern iconoclast. Revivifying Rainer's early choreographic practice and verbalembodied explorations, Rainer's own notes and journals illuminate and challenge reductive interpretations of a writing dance artist's work over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with archives of memoryscapes as remembered landscapes of a past society by Hungarian women authors from Yugoslavia. Divided into two separate cycles, it explores how an inhabited geography transgressed from the present into a past, and how it evolved via belletristic practices from the 1990s onward. The archive is therefore assessed as a cumulative development of text-worlds in prose, poetry, and drama by Hungarian women, who either remained in disintegrating Yugoslavia or emigrated to Hungary, both of which led mostly to uprootedness and a misinterpretation of their work. Accordingly, displaced as authors, who remember landscapes that are beyond official memory politics, their archive remained largely unnoticed and marginalised throughout the decades. Emerging in autobiographic writing and literary fiction equally, these memoryscapes are not idiosyncratic but are regulated and systemic representations of a time, a space, and a society. To display such a mnemonic agency, the article integrates the foucauldian notions of the archive with the thirdspace perspective of geocriticism within literary representation, as used in post-colonial thought. Eventually, this enables the exposition of the archive of these female memoryscapes of an ethnic minority not in relation to other "national" archives, or as auxiliary archives of a male perspective, but as a system of thirdspaces and representation in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, much scholarship has revealed how archives and archival artefacts mediate processes of knowledge extraction, production, and representation. Yet, there remains a certain assumption of the archive's transparent availability as a given location for disciplinary work. This essay asks how less visible forms of mediation organize the critical conceptualization and experience of archival inquiry. It examines these conceptual questions through a focus on the 1971 JVP (Janata Vimukti Peramuna—People's Liberation Front) insurgency, a pivotal but now neglected event in Sri Lanka's political history. I explore how an authoritative monograph on the insurrection and its archive have mediated its problematization and enabled its nationalist recuperation. I ascertain the political stakes of returning to the event by locating the supervening context for my own interest in the insurgency, a discursive archive of the disciplinary conceptualization of Sri Lankan political modernity, its characteristic preoccupations, and their effects. I suggest that the event of 1971 offers a locus from which to examine a normative narrative that this archive yields. Recounting how these stakes animated my experience of the liberal archive, the paper's final section asks how different forms of archive implicate distinctive ethical practices and subjects of reading. I pursue this question through the representation and reading of 1971 within what I term the JVP's own pedagogical "archive." I conclude by reviving a postcolonial concern with the critical stakes of disciplinary investigation and suggest a different approach to the problem of "ethnicized" postcolonial modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls into question a story that has become part of the folklore and indeed the official history of Cambridge University. Supposedly, the passage of the Chantries Act posed a threat to university colleges which was averted by the lobbying of Cambridge academics early in 1546, and this adroit intervention inspired Henry VIII to found new colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Close reading of the sources, however, indicates that the universities were singled out for special treatment from the start and that Henry's new foundations were in his mind before the Chantries Act was passed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from the proposition that, in the sociological debate about whether there has been a shift towards a de-standardised lifecourse in advanced economies, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructural arrangements that would support such a transition, this paper explores the changing role of standards in the governance of ageing societies. In it, I outline a sociological theory of age standard substitution which suggests that contradictory rationalities used in the implementation of chronological age fuelled the emergence of a critique of chronological age within the diverse strands of gerontological knowledge during the 20th century. The paper analyses how these critiques were linked to a proliferation of substitute, ‘personalised’ age standards that aimed to conjoin individuals’ unique capacities or needs to roles or services. The paper suggests that this configuration of age standards’ production, characterised by uncertainty and an opening of moral and epistemic possibilities, has been shrouded by another, more recent formation where institutional responses to decentred processes of standardisation moved research and political investment towards an emphasis on biological age measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In most contexts, personal names function as identifiers and as a locus for identity. Therefore, names can be used to trace patterns of kinship, ancestry, and belonging. The social power of naming, however, and its capacity to shape the life course of the person named, becomes most evident when it has the opposite intent: to sever connections and injure. Naming in slave society was primarily practical, an essential first step in commodifying human beings so they could be removed from their roots and social networks, bought, sold, mortgaged, and adjudicated. Such practices have long been integral to processes of colonization and enslavement. This paper discusses the implications of naming practices in the context of slavery, focusing on the names given to enslaved Africans and their descendants through baptism in the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Danish West Indies. Drawing on historiographical accounts and a detailed analysis of plantation and parish records from the island of St. Croix, we outline and contextualize these patterns and practices of naming. We examine the extent to which the adoption of European and Christian names can be read as an effort toward resistance and self-determination on the part of the enslaved. Our account is illuminated by details from the lives of three former slaves from the Danish West Indies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]