[…] I was asked to speak on ‘forced migration and trafficking’ terms, which have now become major international law concerns. Recent debates in international agencies have sensationalized migration by linking it to trafficking in arms and drug smuggling and terrorism, to AIDS/HIV. The migrant, whose labour has served to build the wealth of other countries, has been reduced to a carrier of crimes and disease.

The use of the word ‘forced’ is, of course, susceptible to many complex nuances of interpretation that serve different interests or reflect different perspectives. It is indeed a contentious issue between countries of origin and destination, and government responses have been both contradictory and hypocritical. While countries of origin welcome foreign remittances from workers, they do little to facilitate their terms and conditions of employment. […] The more powerful countries such as the US have gone to the extent of using trade sanctions against the country of origin. At the same time the US has tempted migration through the sale of lotteries.

On the other hand, for ordinary citizens, freedom of movement is a choice for survival. Migration can be forced by political and economic circumstances in the country of origin, but administrative controls in the country of destination also force migrants into exploitative relations. […] While migration may be seen as a strategy for survival by families or an escape route for individuals, or even as presenting new opportunities, the human rights of migrants and their security are at risk from state controls, exploitation of the market and social exclusion. […]

This section contains five articles. The first two reflect on the problems and prospects of refugee representation in creative literature as well as in the media. The business of representation is drawing keen theoretical attention in recent years. Modes of representation are being seen as arenas for textualizing and performing subjectivity. Essentially, ‘representation’ is a work of substitution. The process of representation substitutes somebody/something for the other, in order to re-present somebody/something with an ‘original’ point of reference. Thus, in the process, it becomes a kind of un/intentional distortion/deformation of ‘the original’, whatever might be the amount (lesser/greater) such distortion/ deformation.

The risk of such distortion/deformation runs through all attempts of representation. This can be done by an ‘outsider-powerful’ or an insider/self-representative. This point occupies the centre of a debate, which began since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). In this seminal work, Said famously quotes a line from Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to describe the desire of the ‘outsiderpowerful’ (in this case, the Western ‘Orientalist’ scholars) to represent the (mute and weak) Orient: ‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’. This desire to represent the mute Orient led the Orientalists to rebuild/refashion the Orient according their (imperialist) imagination.

Although the postcolonial self-representation (of the formerly colonized) seeks to invert the colonial/imperialist (distorted) representation of the native, the same theoretical objections can be raised against an indigenous self-representation, since it reintroduces the problem of the theoretical impossibility of simply producing a ‘true’ representation.

Psychologists are usually very skilled at separating out what happens inside other people and what they themselves think and feel. This is not easy. When they carry out laboratory experiments they get tangled up in many rhetorical tricks, turns of phrase that refer to the others as the ‘subjects’ when those others are being treated as if they were objects. And in this kind of situation the experimenter, who is really the subject of the narrative – ‘I asked such and such people to perform this task in these different conditions’ – disappears altogether. Although the experimenters did it and write about what they did, they are not allowed to write in the first person. Psychology students learn quickly that there is no place for the ‘I’, for personal experience or reflection on their position in experimental reports, and they are often penalised for making themselves present in essays or any other kind of writing in psychology journals.

Psychologists are usually skilled at avoiding themselves then, but what happens when we try to train them up, to help them to become skilled in acknowledging their position? When the psychology degree was being rewritten at Manchester Polytechnic in the late 1980s, and interpersonal skills workshops were being introduced in the first and second years of the course, it seemed to be an ideal opportunity to change the way psychologists were taught to operate in relation to others.

Salford Masonic Hall has a notice board – it is in the entrance hallway, facing the men's toilets, at the back of the building, through the car park – on which visitors can learn how many freemasons there are in East Lancashire. Gone are the old days of secret networks and conspiratorial fraternities that guaranteed the success of many small businesses as capitalism developed; now the message to the public is one of transparency and goodwill in post-industrial cities like Manchester. And more secrets will be revealed on Tuesday evenings, for this is where the Manchester Circle of Magicians gets together to perform tricks and then show how they are done.

This circle was formed after splitting from the Order of the Magi and, unlike most other groups of magicians in the UK – the most prestigious being the Magic Circle – it does not require people to audition to join; instead, prospective members, it says on the website, ‘will simply be asked if they are seriously interested in magic’. The Manchester circle fights for its status – to be recognised as having members who are ‘real magicians’ – and has carved out a respectable space in the myriad of organisations that practice and protect magic. There are sometimes references to ‘jealous idiots’ who claim that there are no ‘real’ magicians who are members, and the key dividing line is between ‘the lay man’ outside and members who can recognise that there is a magic effect, and then ‘he is no lay person and entitled to find out how things work’.

Douglas Sirk's (1900–1987) career breaks down neatly into three parts. First is his German period (1934–42), which, starting with Zwei Genies (1934), comprises two dozen sophisticated melodramas and comedies of manners. His second phase began in 1943, after he emigrated to America, with the topical anti-Nazi drama Hitler's Madman (1943). During this time Sirk brought a high-art sensibility to programmers and European-style films like A Scandal in Paris (1946), for various companies. In 1950, with Mystery Submarine, he moved for good to Universal Studios where he made the films that secured his reputation as the premier 1950s melodramatist: All I Desire (1953), There's Always Tomorrow (1956), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1958), and Imitation of Life (1959).

In Michael Stern's interview, which explores the latter two periods but also considerably more, two seemingly contradictory statements appear within a few sentences of each other: “We were deeply steeped in Art” and “For God's sake, no more Art.” These words represent, in some ways, the unique appeal of Sirk's work and the fascinating paradoxes it contains. On the one hand, he's the consummate studio craftsman, embracing the most conventional elements in cinema. His major films were all made for one of the biggest Hollywood studios, using best-selling source novels by the likes of Fannie Hurst and Lloyd C. Douglas, and featuring movie stars like Rock Hudson, Lana Turner, and Jane Wyman and “trashy” collaborators like producers Ross Hunter and Albert Zugsmith.

Hollywood pioneer Allan Dwan, who lived to be 96 and whose first films date back to 1911, famously told Peter Bogdanovich, “If you get your head up above the mob, they try to knock it off. If you stay down, you last forever.” Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran is our attempt to get 19 directors, working in a wide range of eras, genres, production styles, and budgets, to, “get their heads above the mob”–without, we trust, getting them “knocked off.”

It's fitting that this first collection of writings from Bright Lights is comprised of interviews with directors. I started the magazine in 1974 as an “auteurist, truth-and-light sheet,” in the words of early contributor Jeff Wise. Bright Lights' profile evolved over time according to the peculiar alchemy of my and the writers' interests. It continued to feature director studies and interviews while expanding into many other areas including genre studies, production histories, political screeds, explorations of marginalized realms like exploitation and queer cinema, and whatever other topics the writers found engaging. This diversity is represented in Action!

When compiling this collection, we asked ourselves, how do serious film fans experience cinema? What do they look for? Do they focus exclusively on specific directors, genres, high budgets or low budgets, European or Asian or American films? We believe that many viewers like to experience all that cinema has to offer–docs and features, indies and blockbusters, art films and exploitation.

Roger Corman (born 1926), who turned 81 in April 2007, has assured his place in the history books several times over. A fast and furious director, he established the new land-speed record for no-budget feature filmmaking across the 1950s, outdoing even himself with 1960's Little Shop of Horrors (shooting schedule: two days). Meanwhile, as producer of almost 400 exploitation movies since 1955, he remains the most successful independent filmmaker Hollywood has ever known.

If he'd done nothing but direct the startling X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) or his 1960s cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, films that found the perfect balance between doomy, haunted elegance and bright, trippy Pop hallucination, he would be remembered. But as that turbulent decade wore on, Corman uniquely divined and responded to currents in the air–and to the money burning holes in the pockets of a restless new youth audience–and started making films that reflected the times in ways major studios couldn't comprehend. Nihilistic biker flicks such as The Wild Angels (1966) and head movies like The Trip (1967) led directly to Easy Rider (1969) (which, of course, he was instrumental in getting made) and the subsequent revolution in '70s Hollywood.

His greatest legacy, however, might just be the incredible roster of directing and acting talent he has nurtured. From Jack Nicholson to Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper to Martin Scorsese, almost all of the “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” generation started out working for him in the 1960s.

The club is a place that condenses everyday life and opens up its contradictions. Here we find distortions of reality in this enclosed space and the production of a different reality. There is concealment and display, but what is concealed is produced as effectively as what is deliberately played out. This is the scene. We are dancing in ‘Sankeys Soap’ in Manchester. We are drinking water. These places are friendlier and safer than the alcohol clubs in north Manchester where people stagger into each other before being sick in the toilets, where meeting someone's eye could mean getting beaten up, where people are uncoordinated and angry. We are coordinated but not regimented. We aren't marching, but we move together fast.

The club is a place of simultaneous anonymity and individualisation. At one and the same moment, it functions as a city site where masses of people are brought together who do not know one another. We go to clubs with friends and we move apart through the course of the evening and encounter each other again from time to time. We may dance in a group, but we cannot speak, and communication is broken and then we become bodies among other bodies. Like much life in the city, there are clusters of distinguishable, recognisable faces amidst a crowd of people who are strangers. Here there is also contact. Some guy pushes past another and their bodies glance against each other. One is rebounding and shouting, and the other shouts back.

I would like to thank the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (CRG) for inviting me to give a series of lectures touching on issues related to Forced Displacement, the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and International Law. […] As I worked very closely with Francis Deng and Walter Kalin in developing the normative framework applicable to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), I hope that these lectures will provide some useful insights into the origins, substantive content and normative character, as well as the impact to date, of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

ORIGIN OF THE UN MANDATE ON IDPs

It was not until the early 1990s that international concern began to increasingly focus on the plight of IDPs, i.e., people forced from their homes as a result of armed conflict, communal violence, serious human rights and humanitarian law abuses and/or natural or man-made disasters and who remain uprooted and at risk within their own countries. Unlike persons who flee across international borders and thereby may be entitled to the status and protective international legal regime applicable to refugees, IDPs remain within their country and, as such, are subject to the jurisdiction of their own government, whose very actions or policies may have caused their displacement and which all too frequently may be unwilling or unable to protect or assist them.

Introduction

The ageing of population is an outcome of successful demographic transition. One of the unprecedented achievements in the medical history of the twentieth century is the prolongation of the lifespan of human beings. Globally, the life expectancy at birth had been around 47 years in the 1950s. This increased tremendously to 67 years in 2008 – 20 added years in a lifespan of about 50 years. Between the more developed regions and the less developed regions, the gain was impressive among the less developed regions with 24 years against a mere 10 years among the more developed regions (United Nations (UN), 2007). However, the problems associated with an ageing population could be located in a developmental context through institutions that have been shaped by this experience. Institutional factors included on the one hand, the norm of a restricted definition of work as market-related productive activity and the association of ageing with ‘non-work’ and dependency, and on the other hand, state and market failures to internalize the interests of heterogeneous groups of the aged population. An important aspect here is the feminization of ageing, including the vulnerability of widows, alongside the greater emphasis on women as caregivers.

The recent emphasis in ageing research in the developing world is attributed to the growing number of elderly persons and the institutional failures to render adequate care for them. Population ageing is generally attributed to continuous decrease in fertility levels and constant increase in life expectancy.

As I reflect on a lifetime of canonical film-watching, I realize that what I've learned is, though not entirely worthless, probably useless. A certain director swerves the camera around emphatically, one employs moody colors, another bores us to death with selfimportantly minimalist narratives, and so forth. Though cinephiles and pedants insist that I should care about matters of style, I am tempted to half-jokingly agree with the Maoists and assent that the enterprise of the cinema–which can now only be repaired with the most radical consciousness-raising–is morally bankrupt and deserving of total abandonment.

I therefore shun the cineaste's narrow parameters and seek a new art, not a projected frame supervised by commerce and critics but an art that strives for a new, autonomous way of being. Nothing better represents such a praxis than the 1960s Austrian actionist movement, whose principal members–Otto Muehl, Rudolph Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch–scandalized the public with materialistic body art, staged saturnalia, and polymorphous perversity under the banners of the “Vienna Action Group” and the “Institute for Direct Art.” Sometimes the actionists would be jailed on public obscenity charges, and in the 1960s actionist art became the subject of momentous German and Austrian censorship trials. In the early 1990s, Muehl became the subject of a highly politicized trial once again: accused of raping and molesting underage members of his actionist commune, he was imprisoned for seven years.

Introduction

The European population is ageing faster than populations of the other continents. The ageing of the population is a very distinctive demographic event in the European context, considering its unique pace in demographic transition. The available estimates indicate that the elderly population (65+) is expected to increase by 40 million over the next 50 years and those who are in the working age population (15–64) are expected to decline by about 100 million. This process will lead to a decline in the worker–elderly ratio from the current 4:1 to 2:1 by the year 2050 (Economic Policy Committee, 2001). These results highlight the far-reaching transformations in the European population in general and elderly population in particular in the coming years.

This increasing elderly population has already received the attention of planners and policymakers all over the world. The European Commission has played a noteworthy attempt to highlight the issues associated with elderly population in Europe. The tremendous growth of elderly population basically on account of the then post-war baby boom and the resultant child population, has now reached the retirement age. Moreover, fertility has fallen sharply and there has been a considerable increase in the life expectancy of the European population.

Demography of the Elderly

The Netherlands, one of the leading nations in the European Union (EU) is no more an exception to the greying of its population.

The existing rich historiography on cholera in India can be divided into three distinct, albeit occasionally overlapping, strands. David Arnold has looked at how cholera was seen as a disease connected to disorderly crowds. His work has analysed the role of cholera in the imperial British–Indian state's efforts to ‘control’ spaces where large numbers of Indians gathered. Harrison's account of cholera, though also interested in issues of ‘control’, gives greater weight to the numerous internal tensions within the Anglo-Indian medical ureaucracy in speaking and writing about cholera. He gives particularly detailed descriptions of the varied positions maintained by different authorities on the question of the transmission of cholera. Harrison also points out how, being closely implicated in imperial politics, the eventual triumph of any one of these many views depended largely upon political considerations. Dhrub Kumar Singh uses a very similar approach to accent the difference in the medical response to cholera in Britain and India. Apart from these two major strands accenting, respectively, the politics of control and the politics of translating heterogeneous medical opinion to medical policy, a third strand investigates the demographic impact of cholera. Ira Klein's work is particularly significant in this regard. The scope of each of these studies reflects the massive administrative importance that a deadly endemic such as cholera had. Each of these studies draws upon administrative archives of the colonial government and therefore critically reflects the major concerns of those who compiled that archive.

Introduction

Where social or state protection for the aged is weak or inadequate in contexts of steadily eroding age-based hierarchies, secure property right over resources could turn into a crucial dimension of social security. Where age-based hierarchies were strong, dramatic, if highly uneven, social transformations since the colonial period have meant important shifts in family ideology and practices. In the Indian context, immovable property such as land and house have been owned largely by men and devolved among men, the only exceptions being matrilineal societies on the southwest coast and in the north-east (Agarwal, 1994). Despite differences in ‘law’ on a religious basis, which gained coherence through the use of religion to codify and evolve law during the colonial period, customs varied according to region and contiguity of communities. Thus, women's right to property under Islamic law, which provided daughters a lesser share than it did sons but protected that share against testation, was subject to the operation of custom which privileged the dominant practice in the region. Transformation of family relations among ‘Hindus’ through colonial legal interpretation and reform of personal law in the mid 1950s shifted the basis of women's property rights from the category of age to marital status i.e., unmarried daughters, wives and widows (Agnes, 1999). However, the process of transformation since the colonial period also weakened the position of aged men by allowing greater recognition of individual rights very generally over that of the corporate family, which gave aged men greater customary authority.

New York native Barbara Kopple has been a vital and socially progressive voice in documentary filmmaking for the past three decades, bringing a compassionate and unblinking scrutiny to the lives of miners, meatpackers, professional musicians, journalists and even disgraced boxing champ Mike Tyson. In her career-making, hard-hat couplet Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) and American Dream (1990), Kopple illuminated two of the more shameful episodes in recent U.S. labor history, demonstrating an abiding sympathy for the struggles of ordinary people and training her gimlet eye on the ironies and ignominies of economic oppression.

One of the founding members of the collaborative group that produced Winter Soldier (1972), a soldier's-eye view of atrocities in Vietnam with disturbing parallels to Bush Inc.'s military misadventures, Kopple began making films while attending college in West Virginia. In 1973, she spent a year living in a small Kentucky town filming the ugly, embittered, ultimately violent conflict between workers seeking a union contract from their overlords at Eastover Mining Company, and the gun-wielding scabs sent into their midst by greedy coal operators and their lapdogs in local law enforcement. Kopple, who was targeted by one goon for hoisting a camera during an early-morning picket-line melee (a chilling incident plainly visible in the Criterion DVD of the film), won an Academy Award for Harlan County, U.S.A in 1976.

Introduction

The goal of this chapter is to provide guidelines for public policy for social security and health care of the aged. The varied needs and experiences of the aged were obtained from clusters of populations that were probed as distinct groups in which key aspects of ageing were likely to differ from one another. This study envisaged an interest in understanding the significance of shifts in intergenerational contracts, in emerging institutional failures to cope with the process of ageing and it's implications for social security and health of a highly heterogeneous ageing population in Sri Lanka.

Research Design and Methods

Both time and budget constraints were considered in designing techniques and selecting the sample. Responding to the underlying concerns to capture the dimensions, characteristics and trends related to ageing among different social and economic groups of the aged, the sample was stratified into population clusters from selected locations that used to advantage intracluster homogeneity. Four clusters captured the ethnic variations. The sample of majority ethnic group of Sinhalese was drawn from two locations, one in and around the hill country with its main town, Kandy, which is home to a community that is upholding its own set of traditions, the other from the southern area in and around Galle, from a rural population that has entrenched traditions of its own. Rural agricultural society is represented by a sample from an interior rural location, which continues with traditional peasant agriculture while adopting non-traditional methods as well.

Two pieces of prose fiction selected here represent each year from 1872–1900, in order for the reader to situate the following poems in a broader fin–de–siècle context. The first piece is an extract from a novel or a short story. The second is, usually, ‘non-fictive prose’—an essay, article, autobiography, or other literary tract of the period not always easily accessible to readers, which illuminates some of the wider concerns of the age as whole. Important sensations of the period are also mentioned, such as the Ruskin-Whistler case. Twenty novelists have been selected. Half of these are established Victorian literary figures: Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Stevenson, Trollope, Meredith, Wilde, Pater, Gissing, and Wells. Hardy and Conrad appear three times, as writers of short stories as well as novels. Robert Louis Stevenson is represented as a poet, as well as in his more familiar capacity as the author of Treasure Island (1883) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The other ten novelists are less well known, but are selected on the basis of writing fiction that exemplifies late–nineteenth century imaginative concerns, especially the apocalyptic vision of a utopia or ideal society. This is epitomised in W. H. Mallock's novel, The New Republic.

All the writers are British, with the notable exception of Henry James, whose short story, ‘Daisy Miller’ (1878) was published in England before it appeared in America.