Dan Chatterton 'Atheistic Communistic Scorcher' - Andrew Whitehead

Communist atheist pamphleteer, bill poster, slum dweller, early birth control advocate, fierce public ranter; Dan Chatterton is one of the most fascinating and undeservably obscure characters of the London radical scene in the second half of the 19th century.

From History Workshop Journal no. 25, Spring 1988, this article is a fine piece of historical research and the most detailed known writing about Chatterton. A collection of 'Old Chat's' selected works by some enterprising publisher is long overdue.

[Andrew Whitehead's website contains a page with further information on Dan Chatterton; http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/dan-chatterton.html ]

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Dan Chatterton and his
'Atheistic Communistic Scorcher'

by Andrew Whitehead

The history of the left has conventionally been written as the story of movements and organisations. Those who left no institutional legacy, who were not pioneers of party or union, whose pamphlets have not been collected by libraries, have been more-or-less neglected. There's an injustice in this - not so much a personal injustice, as an injustice to the generations that follow who are deprived of a proper sense of the complexity of the past. Those mavericks who kept aloof from organised politics and struggled alone to preach and to persuade according to their own idiosyncratic values could have quite as much importance in transmitting ideas, in however vulgarised a form, to a popular audience as the closely-printed political journals and the in-house political rallies.

Most of these independent spirits cannot be redeemed from the condescension of history simply because little or no record survives of their lives and labours. It's only possible for Dan Chatterton to be the subject of an article because he attracted, by the exuberance and outlandishness of his propaganda, the attention of journalists and novelists, and more particularly because he took the trouble to deposit a of all (or perhaps nearly all) of his pamphlets and of every issue of his entirely self-produced paper, Chatterton's Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher, with the British Museum. His 'pamphlets elaborations' were preserved among the millions of books in `this one really social institute of the world', the individualist anarchist J. H. Mackay recalled, `bound, numbered, and catalogued just as carefully as the rarest manuscript of past centuries.'[1] And there still the curious can leaf through the fragile yellow tissue pages of the Scorcher, marvelling that such a precarious venture survived for almost eleven years, and can turn the pages of Chatterton's tracts with their irregular syntax and large, ill-matched type.

"We Have Never Allowed Such A Thing Here": Social Responses to Saskatchewan's Early Sex Trade, 1880 to 1920

Sarah York-Bertram

Despite what the title suggests, Saskatchewan had a booming sex trade in its early years. (THE SAME IS TRUE OF ALBERTA)

The area attracted hundreds of women sex workers before Saskatchewan had even become a province in 1905. They were drawn to the area by the demands of bachelors who dominated Canada's prairie west.

According to Saskatchewan's moral reformers, however, the sex trade was a hindrance to the province's Christian potential. They called for its abolishment and headed white slavery campaigns that characterized prostitution as a form of slavery. Their approach stood in contrast with law enforcement's stance on the trade. The police took a tolerant approach, allowing its operation as long as sex workers and their clients remained circumspect. Law enforcement's approach reflected their own propensity to use the services of sex workers as well as community attitudes toward the trade. Some communities were more welcoming of sex workers, while others demanded that police suppress the trade. Saskatchewan's newspapers also reflected differing attitudes toward the trade. While Regina's Leader purveyed a no tolerance view of the sex trade, Saskatoon's Phoenix and Star held more tolerant views. Saskatchewan's newspapers reveal that as the province's population increased and notions of moral reform gained popularity, police were challenged to take a less tolerant approach. However, reformers' efforts to end the sex trade dwindled with the onset of the First World War and attitudes toward sex workers shifted drastically as responsibility for venereal disease was placed largely on women who sold sex.

Using government and police records, moral reform and public health documents, and media sources such as newspapers, as well as intersectional analysis of gender, race, class, and ethnicity, this examination of Saskatchewan’s sex trade investigates the histories and social responses to the buying and selling of sex, revealing the complex and, at times, contradictory place of sex workers and the sex trade in Saskatchewan’s early history.

Sex Work and Protest in WWI Egypt

Middle East Studies Association annual conference, 2017

Christopher S Rose

On April 10, 1917, Dr. Alex Granville, director of the Alexandria Sanitary Service, filed sent a letter to the Ministry of the Interior regarding the fact that prostitutes were being treated in a government Lock Hospital in the Moharrem Bey district of Alexandria. Neighborhood residents, he reported, took exception to the treatment of prostitutes in their district and Dr. Granville demanded that the treatment facility be moved to somewhere less objectionable.

During the period of the British occupation, prostitution was legalized and well regulated by the Department of Public Health. Due to the influx of British troops during the war, the number of licensed prostitutes soared and special measures were taken to discover and treat both licensed and unlicensed prostitutes and, by late 1915, specific areas had been set off where licensed prostitutes could operate.

With almost no exceptions, these red light districts were all located in Egyptian quarters of major cities—Alexandria, Cairo, Port Said, Ismailia, etc--away from neighborhoods where European administrators of the government and military were likely to live and to encounter them on a regular basis. A secondary factor of this relocation was that it (theoretically) made it more difficult for foreign troops to solicit the services of prostitutes and, when venereal disease infection rates became high among troops, to cordon off the red light districts entirely for a period of time.

What makes the complaint registered by Dr. Granville somewhat unique is that Moharrem Bey was a native quarter, and that the residents requesting the relocation of the hospital were native Egyptians, not Europeans.

This paper aims to discuss the implications of relegating legalized brothels and licensed sex workers (and their medical treatment) into native Egyptian quarters during the war. While European attitudes toward these quarters—routinely described as filthy, miasmic, smelly, etc.—are well documented and help explain why they were seen as appropriate sites for sex work, what is less documented is how the inhabitants of these quarters felt about hosting said brothels and sex workers in the neighborhoods where they lived and worked. As we have seen above, they did object, and they used legal means to do so when and where possible. What were the complaints and methods of protest? And what were the tensions with colonial and military administrators, as well as the troops, that resulted from this imposition?

More Info: Middle East Studies Association conference 2017

History of Anarchism in Egypt until 1945

Caught between Internationalism, Transnationalism and Immigration: A Brief Account of the History of Anarchism in Egypt until 1945

Constantine Paonessa
Laura Galián

Laura Hernández

Anarchism first appeared in the Southern Mediterranean countries at the end of the nineteenth century with the immigration of European workers and political exiles. Despite the important role anarchists played in introducing radical and revolutionary political thought in Egypt, only historians Anthony Gorman and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi have paid attention to these narratives. The main goal of this article is twofold: on one hand, to analyse the reasons for the paucity of studies related to anarchism in Egypt, and, on the other hand, to delve into the history of anarchism in Egypt before and after the First World War to contribute to the writing of the history of postcolonial Egypt. This article explores two different anarchist experiences in Egypt. The first one is related to the Italian political exiles in Egypt who developed a strong anarchist movement in the country through the construction of trade unions, educational institutions and study groups. The second experience emerged in the interwar period due to the rise of Fascism and the disillusionment with parliamentary politics through the artistic and revolutionary project of al-Fann wa al-Hurriyya (Art and Liberty Group). Our goal is to demonstrate that before the arrival of Gammal Abdel Nasser, anarchism was a potent political culture and philosophy and an existing way of doing politics in the country. Tracing this hidden history is crucial to understanding the developments of non-party politics in the history of modern Egypt.

Anarchism in Egypt - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Anarchism_in_Egypt

Anarchism in Egypt refers both to the historical Egyptian anarchist movement which emerged in the 1860s and lasted until ... Laura Galián; Paonessa, Costantino (2018). "Caught between Internationalism, Transnationalism and Immigration: A Brief Account of the History of Anarchism in Egypt until 1945". Anarchist Studies.

Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Nineteenth ...

by L Carminati - ‎2017 - ‎Cited by 4 - ‎Related articles

Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of ... Fifteen were arrested right away, one in November 1898, and two more the ... “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” International History ... “Anarchism in Egypt: A Brief Account of Its History until 1945,” Anarchist ...

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2006/01/need-for-arab-anarchism.html

'WHITE SLAVE TRADE'
Between Port Cities: Women Travelling Alone around the Mediterranean

Women’s Migration for Prostitution in the interwar Middle East and North Africa
Liat Kozma

This article examines the migration of women for prostitution around the Mediterranean Sea, particularly to and within the Middle East and North Africa, in the interwar period. Reading League of Nations’ reports on traffic in women and children along with other published and archival sources, it situates women’s mobility within three significant waves of
migration at the time: of south European men and women to Europe’s colonies in North Africa; of east European Jews westwards and south- wards; and of Syrians outside of Mt. Lebanon. It shows how women's migration can be explained and traced by following such temporary travelers as tourists, sailors, and soldiers and such more permanent migrants as settlers, refugees, and labor migrants. By using the category of migration, this article argues that “traffic in women” is insufficient as an analytical category in accounting for the geography of prostitution and prostitutes’ international mobility in the interwar Mediterranean.
In his 1930s play Awlad al-Fuqara (and 1942 film), Egyptian playwright Yusuf Wahbi presents Serena, an Italian prostitute. Her life story, narrated in broken Arabic, echoes traffic narratives of the time:Treacherous Carlo, after seven years he is laughing at me; he took me away from my mother. I was a young Mademoiselle . . . he married me, and I went with him to Alexandria. Then there was no work, and he told me I should be the one to bring money. I had no money, he told me to look for male strangers on the street.Then I came to Cairo, four years ago, and every day Carlo took 50 piaster from me, and I gave him because I love him, but today. . . another foreigner paid 50 pounds and told me that in seven days I must go with the other man to Marseille.
Serena is a fictional character, who tells a story of what came to be known in the interwar years as “traffic in women and children.” This phrase denoted the forced migration of unsuspecting women and girls for prostitution across national borders and elicited a moral panic about the exploitation of innocent young girls by unscrupulous traffickers. Serena’s narrative resembles others that appeared repeatedly in the press, rescue organizations’ writings, and League of Nations’ reports from the 1920s and1930s.

A PHALLUS HARD TO SWALLOW: 

THE MEANING OF ΑIΔΟIΟΣ IN THE DERVENI PAPYRUS

THE CONTROVERSY OF THE ΑIΔΟIΟΝ:URANUS’ PHALLUS OR  PROTOGONOS?

MARCO ANTONIO SANTAMARÍA ÁLVAREZ

.....the author of the Derveni Papyrus comments upon narrates the events that led Zeus to his seizure of power and alludes very summarily to his ancestors. The most important action that Zeus executes after receiving power from his father is described in the verse: αἰδοῖον κατ̣έπινεν, ὃς αἰθέρα ἔκθορ̣̣ε πρῶτος ( 8). The most controversial issue of the Derveni Papyrus has arguably been the meaning of the αἰδοῖον that Zeus swallows. Two opposing stances have been held: some scholars have understood it as a substantive meaning “phallus” and referring to Uranus’ member, cut off by Cronus (hereafter, hypothesis A); others have considered it an adjective meaning “venerable” and alluding to Protogonos, the firstborn god (hereafter, hypothesis B).Walter Burkert was the first to claim that αἰδοῖον means “phallus.” Geoffrey S. Kirk (independently, it seems) translates Orphic fragment 8 as “[Zeus] swallowed down the phallus [of him] who first leapt up to the upper air,” and states that the phallus is “the one severed from Ouranos by Kronos”; he translates Orphic fragment 12.1 (πρωτογόνου βασιλέως αἰδοίου) as “of the phallus of the first-born king.” According to Burkert, in Orphic fragment 8 “Zeus is made to ‘swallow the genitals’ of the god ‘who first had ejaculated the brilliance of the sky’; this must be Uranos, the ‘first king.’ Many other scholars have adhered to this theory and added further arguments in its favor.

Nobody Expects the Maoist Inquisition! 

How Mao Tested Khrushchev and

 Caused the Sino-Soviet Split, 1958-1959

Cameron Nielsen

Introduction
In 1949, shortly after founding the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow to beg for an alliance with his stronger neighbor, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Mao had proclaimed that “China has stood up,” and then proved it by uniting China under one government for the
first time since the abdication of the Emperor in 1912. However, his country
 was still desperately poor with no geopolitical standing. China needed a staunch ally, and the USSR, which had mentored the Communists’ revolution, was the
natural choice. When the alliance was announced in 1950, it bore the fingerprints
of Stalin’s unfair treatment of his allies, but it was still what China needed—a legitimizing emblem, backed up with Soviet aid to develop the economy. Yet 1961, just eleven years later, saw the Chinese denouncing the Russians as
traitors to Communism, and 1969 saw the two countries fighting a brief border
 war. What happened? While there were many factors leading to the Sino-Soviet Split, one of the most important proximate causes was a pattern of almost bizarrely bad diplomacy, mostly on the Chinese side. If it were not for jarring provocations such as the infamous “swimming pool meeting” in 1958, the split may have not occurred until much later, and certainly would not have been as precipitous. When the behavior of Mao and other Chinese leaders is analyzed, it becomes clear that this was their intent. The evidence is strong that the 1958 Khrushchev-Mao meetings were crucial moments when this decision was made
READ ON 

Monographs on the Universe: Americans Respond to Ernst Haeckel’s Evolutionary Science and Theology, 1866–1883

Daniel Halverson

Ernst Haeckel was one of the nineteenth century’s most famous and influential scientists and science popularizers. According to one historian of biology, he was “the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism” in his time. At the same time, he endeavored to set up his own pantheistic-evolutionary theology in the place of Christianity. This study makes use of new information technologies to gather documents which have been largely unavailable to historians until recently. Halverson finds that Haeckel’s ideas met with a poor reception in the United States because American journalists, ministers, and scientists insisted on maintaining a sharp separation between science and theology, while Haeckel was intent on merging the two under an evolutionary-pantheistic framework. Although often regarded as an advocate of the “conflict thesis,” on his own terms he was a deeply religious man who wanted to reform, rather than abolish, theology.

The Struggle of Others:  Pierre Vallières, Québécois Settler Nationalism, and the N-Word Today.

VALLIERES FOUNDED THE FLQ, FRONT du LIBERATION QUEBEC

HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MANIFESTO WAS ENTITLED 

WHITE NIGGERS OF AMERICA  

Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2017

Bruno Cornellier

This essay re-examines the paradigm of the Quebecer as a “nègre blanc” (“white n****r”) that circulated in left-nationalist literature in 1960s Québec, most influentially in Pierre Vallières’ 1968 book-length manifesto/autobiography, Nègres blancs d’Amérique. In conversation with Mark Rifkin’s recent analyses of what he calls “settler common sense,” I explain that Vallières’ racially appropriative theorization of a global village of all exploited underclasses under the rubric “nègres” provided new orientations for an emergent structure of feeling in Québec, and one that would easily be incorporated within the hegemonic because it already spoke (and still speaks) its language: it effectively assumed forms of dwelling and personhood predicated on the geopolitical self-evidence of settler sovereignty and settler occupancy, while exculpating Québécois whiteness and disengaging it from the history of Western coloniality. Secondly, I draw parallels between Vallières’ radical prose and our contemporary moment, in the aftermath of a series of alleged “crises” and expressions of public outcry about governmental failures to properly manage diversity and secure state secularism in Québec. Even though Vallières’ later work allows us to speculate that he would have been very critical of the orientalist and islamophobic undertone of recent policy proposals about secularism, I argue that the fame and polemical visibility of his book in Québec’s intellectual history nonetheless continue to orient and sustain, with other texts, corresponding affective mappings about the futurity of the dominant group’s historical sufferings, thus allowing “us”/“nous” to constantly assume “our” legitimacy in rearticulating such self-authorized delineation of zones of exception.

Issue: 1

Volume: 39

Page Numbers: 31-66

Publication Date: 2017

Publication Name: Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture

The Half Measure Terrorists: An Analysis of the FLQ through the Lens of the “Propaganda of the Deed”, Sergei Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary, and Other Decolonial Movements

Brenden Woldman

A Sorry State of Affairs: Chinese Arrivants, 

Indigenous Hosts, and Settler Colonial Apologies (2019)

Angie Wong, 

Lakehead University

Abstract: 

We make and give gestures of apology every day, Canadians doubly so. Yet, grand actsof apology for more serious and sustained matters, such as historical and contemporary injusticeagainst those with the least amount of social power, require far more ethical consideration and transformation than simply saying, “I am sorry.” Since the early 2000s, several political parties of the Canadian government have taken up the trend of making a spectacle out of nationalapologies to historically oppressed groups. Engaging with the concept of the settler colonial triad to theorize the histories of early Chinese arrivants’ experience, this work departs from the 2006 House of Commons apology made to Chinese Canadians on behalf of former PM StephenHarper and explores the paradoxical operations behind state-sanctioned apologies, including the use of benevolence and hospitality as crisis management tactics resultant of Canada’s settler colonial configuration. Within this contradictory relation, those who identify as ChineseCanadian may find themselves questioning their belonging, given the historically- fraught socialstrategies used for the making of Canadian subjecthood. State-sanctioned apologies function toconsolidate settler colonial reality and constitute a return to normalcy, which is why critical racescholars and scholars of settler colonial studies must look beyond unilateral relationships withthe state.

Angie Wong is a critical race scholar and second-generation Chinese born in Canada. Wong iscurrently a professor of Women’s Studies at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.Reliant upon critical race theory, philosophy, settler colonial studies, and transnationalfeminisms, Wong continues to research the experiences of Asian women and histories of Chineseracialization in Canada in a forthcoming book project on the Chinatown community of Calgary, Alberta. Wong obtained a BCC from the University of Calgary (2012). Her MA (2014) and PhD(2018) in Humanities are from York University where she conducted the first extensivephilosophical and critical race analysis of the small and powerful grassroots magazinepublication,The Asianadian, under the supervision of Chinese Canadian and postcolonial scholar, Lily M. Cho. Wong’s approach to pedagogy and research is interdisciplinary, political,and cross-cultural.