Chapter 8 analyzes the marketing of inkiko gacaca; that is, the RPF’s effort to create demand for its invented tradition. By revealing a series of tactics related to this marketing strategy, the book here sheds light on the manufacturing of consent about the meaning of transitional justice in post-genocide Rwanda. The focus is on the presentation of law in everyday life, with particular reference to select localities.

This chapter offers a critical analysis of how scholars have interpreted the relationship between eighteenth-century cultural practice and revolutionary politics, circa 1760 to 1825. The chapter first surveys and classifies eighteenth century cultural practice, identifying three main types: the social arts, practices of everyday life, and fine arts. The bulk of the essay then reflects on three major paradigms for interpreting how these forms of culture interacted with revolutionary politics. The dominant approach, exemplified by literature on the “bourgeois public sphere,” argues that eighteenth-century culture prefigured or lay the groundwork for revolutionary politics. Other scholars, particularly those working on the fine arts in the revolutionary era, have emphasized how cultural practices were transformed by revolutionary politics. A third, newer approach emphasizes the autonomy of cultural practice. Scholars working within this paradigm argue that cultural change was itself a form of revolution and that culture acted as an independent container for new political practices during the revolutionary era. This paradigm points the way to a broader, more inclusive account of revolution in this period. The essay covers the historiographies of eighteenth-century culture and revolutionary politics in North America, Europe (especially France and the Netherlands), and Latin America (especially Peru).

In the space of a single generation, social media have transformed how billions of people make friends, build communities, and share knowledge. However, approaches that suggest harm occurs based solely on time spent using social media disguise this everyday reality. In response, this chapter points toward the importance of understanding who uses social media in daily life, why, and how. While we have more data than ever to help us explore the impacts of new technologies, including social media, everyday experiences require description alongside careful theorizing about the mechanisms that might cause benefits or harms. This collectively shifts research priorities towards applied applications that can mitigate problems, injustices, and inequalities that social media and other digital cultures can foster.

This chapter surveys consumer experience in an economy with a shrinking supply of consumer goods, explaining how consumers responded to the shortages, price controls and rationing. It explains social experience with queues and the motivations and rationale for food protests by ‘housewives’ to obtain more food, and the family strategies to exploit opportunities for getting food from relatives and connections in rural areas. It also examines how consumer hardship was represented in the daily press and the use of humour in cartoons about the black market, queues, and restaurants.

An examination of Maroon cultural, festive and political practices, their victorious militarized Black masculinity and their wider transimperial significance as figures of resistance or reconciliation, as images of the the red-coated Maroon circulated across imperial networks

This chapter reconstructs Haitian and Dominican life along the border in the years before the 1937 Genocide. It addresses the history of the old border by studying new laws and new forms of enforcement that changed border life during the 1920s and 1930s. It draws from records of migratory and non-migratory arrests of ethnic Haitians. Offenses included contraband, illegal border-crossing, sanitary laws, theft, and failure to produce national identity documents. It argues that ethnic Haitians were disproportionately targeted for the enforcement of these laws and the pattern of enforcement reflected a rising tide of official persecution. Far from being a harmonious, open, bicultural border, the chapter shows that border and migratory enforcement grew over the course of the 1920s and 1930s and the new patterns of enforcement were changing everyday life in places where people had once crossed freely. Struggles over claims to land, livestock, and crops are recorded in the remarkable testimonies from ethnic Haitians who spoke boldly against their persecution in Dominican courts. Through an analysis of excuse-making, the chapter also details the strategies ethnic Haitians employed as they struggled to maintain old ways of life amidst news legal forms of ethnic and racial discrimination.

World literary studies appears caught between several competing models, each privileging the determining force of a given spatial scale – the global versus the local, national, or regional, - or a specific patterning of space – vertical structure versus horizontal network. This article seeks to test a multiscalar and transregional method of analysis which might place these models in sharper dialogue. It does so by addressing the physiology, a popular quasi-journalistic nineteenth-century genre dedicated to the taxonomic description of mores, customs and social types found in the everyday life of the modern city. Arising in Paris and other metropolises of western Europe, the physiology was soon adapted to the very different circumstances of the Russian capital St. Petersburg, before shifting to the Russian colonial administrative centre of Tiflis (Tbilisi), today the capital of Georgia. This article explores the poetics and cultural politics of the physiology’s adaptation to three distinct urban contexts, in what might be seen as a movement from centre to colonial periphery via the Russian semi-periphery. In doing so it seeks to link genre theory to debates within critical geography on spatial scale, while also entering debates in urban studies and the sociology of culture on metropolitan and peripheral modernization, particularly as it relates to the correlation between the state, the market, and the literary public sphere. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Harry Harootunian on the uneven spatio-temporal rhythms of the urban everyday, the article also addresses the limits of such canonical interventions as Walter Benjamin’s critique of the Parisian flâneur and Jürgen Habermas’s account of the bourgeois public sphere.

This chapter considers the complex relationship between the amateur British ethnographic movement, Mass-Observation, officially inaugurated in 1937, and surrealist methods, ideas, and images. Surrealism influenced Mass-Observation protagonists such as Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, David Gascoyne, and Julian Trevelyan, although their formal connections with the surrealist movement in poetry and art and their associations with Mass-Observation overlap only partially. After considering these biographical connections, the chapter goes on to discuss the Mass-Observation–surrealism connection through two complementary but distinct lenses of scholarly discussion: cultural and social science scholars who discern surrealist inspiration in Mass- Observation’s methodological approach to everyday phenomena; and literary and art-historical scholars who trace the intertwining of Surrealism with other 1930s artistic and literary trends, such as British documentary film and I. A. Richards’s critical meditations on science and poetry, in the work of Jennings, Madge, and other Mass-Observation principal figures.

Japanese society embraces a rich variety of cultural forms that reflect its tradition, stratification, and regional expanse. To examine the internal diversity of Japanese culture as thoroughly as possible, this chapter first looks at two manifestations of its duality and then analyzes mass culture, folk culture, and alternative culture as three major spheres of popular culture. After confirming its plurality, we turn at the end to the Japanese cultural presence in the transnational context.