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A review essay on a book by Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings (Budapest & New York: Central European U Press, 2003).

A wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence which returns to the early modern period in order to focus, question, and develop issues of postmodernity, linking writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Gide, Wilde, and Genet, and cultural critics as different as St. Augustine, Freud, Fanon, Foucault, and Monique Wittig.

This essay examines Mexican immigrant political and labor activism in Chicago through the life of Refugio Roman Martinez, an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) who was deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Martinez's history suggests that Mexican immigrant CIO members tended to be proud Mexican citizens motivated to join US unions by their understanding of the Mexican Revolution and rise of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas (1934–1940). These Mexican immigrants campaigned for labor and immigration improvements and encouraged Mexicans to enter unions to attain equity; however, they concurrently rebuffed US naturalization as a means to achieve these ends. Indeed, Mexican immigrants fought for labor rights while rejecting US citizenship and did so in part because they were conscious of US hegemony and found it too intellectually problematic to become US citizens and to appeal to the US state for justice. As the United States entered the Cold War, immigrants paid a price for joining the US labor movement while retaining their foreign citizenship. From the Southwest to the Midwest, the INS disciplined immigrant labor leaders through deportation.

[eng] Dissidence occurs when an individual opposes and resists in some way an established social order. The opposition can address any kind of social values: political, religious, artistic. Societies may tolerate or repress dissidence. In this work, I want to raise the question of whether dissidence makes any evolutionary sense. In many animal social groups, it happens that individuals can be ostracized, and this practice may turn out to be adaptive for the species as it can be seen as a mechanism of diversification, which may become functional as a way to respond to environmental changes. In what follows, I will consider several reasons why it might be evolutionary and adaptive for humans that some individuals fail to conform to the group standards, focusing particularly on the benefits of social innovation

André Zeller et Jacques de Bollardière : deux hommes qui ne se ressemblent pas, deux officiers généraux face à la complexité algérienne des années 1960, deux actes de rupture à des temps distincts. Chacune de ces deux destinées est singulière d'abord en raison de leur personnalité différente, ensuite des enjeux distincts dans lesquels les hommes furent pris. À bien observer cependant, l'entrée de ces deux militaires en dissidence peut indiquer quelque chose de commun dans leur trajectoire.