This volume offers an unusual, interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars working on the major regions of the global South. The authors probe important episodes of resistance in the colony and postcolony for the light they shed on the vexed notion of counterhegemony, enriching our notion of resistance and pointing to new directions for research.
This book analyses contemporary French films by focussing closely on cinematic representations of immigrants and residents of suburban housing estates known as banlieues. It begins by examining how these groups are conceived of within France’s Republican political model before analysing films that focus on four key issues. Firstly, it will assess representations of undocumented migrants known as sans-papiers before then analysing depictions of deportations made possible by the controversial double peine law. Next, it will examine films about relations between young people and the police in suburban France before exploring films that challenge clichés about these areas. The conclusion assesses what these films show about contemporary French political cinema.
Economic aid is one of the cornerstones of the Egyptian-American relationship, and plays a significant role in promoting US policy objectives in the Middle East. Focusing on the latter half of Hosni Mubarak's rule, Dina Jadallah argues that, through its aid policy, the US has attempted to use a reforming and democratising narrative to transform Egypt into a stable "market democracy" that would be aligned with US interests in the region. This aim has been pursued in conjunction with one that promoted a comprehensive "warm peace" with Israel. By highlighting the opposition within Egypt to US aid, Jadallah analyses the key issues that came to the fore during the 2010/11 protests in the country and led to the downfall of Mubarak. Extending her analysis into the post-revolutionary period, the author provides interviews with regime insiders and prominent critics, inside state institutions and outside, who actively challenged the regime. This enables her to assess the different perceptions of US aid both under Mubarak and in the current political situation, contributing to an incisive analysis of modern Egypt and its relations with its superpower ally in the region.
The importance of Antonio Gramsci’s work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national—a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.
Using historical and anthropological analysis, this book examines the changing characteristics of nations globally; nation-building in Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia; and the history of multi-culturalism in the Global South as an advantage to development in post-colonial conceptions of the nation.
The waves of protest ignited by the self-immolation of Muhammad Bouazizi in Tunisia in late 2010 highlighted for an international audience the importance of contentious politics in the Middle East and North Africa. John Chalcraft's ground-breaking account of popular protest emphasizes the revolutionary modern history of the entire region. Challenging top-down views of Middle Eastern politics, he looks at how commoners, subjects and citizens have long mobilised in defiance of authorities. Chalcraft takes examples from a wide variety of protest movements from Morocco to Iran. He forges a new narrative of change over time, creating a truly comparative framework rooted in the dynamics of hegemonic contestation. Beginning with movements under the Ottomans, which challenged corruption and oppression under the banners of religion, justice, rights and custom, this book goes on to discuss the impact of constitutional movements, armed struggles, nationalism and independence, revolution and Islamism. A work of unprecedented range and depth, this volume will be welcomed by undergraduates and graduates studying protest in the region and beyond.
The work of environmental educators and activists in India and South Africa offers new models for schooling and environmental activism. Education has never played as critical a role in determining humanity’s future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind’s unprecedented control over the natural environment. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Peter Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable practices. He exposes the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examines cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. Finally, he calls for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis. The onset of the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of education and its fundamental goals, says Sutoris. Researchers must look outside conventional models and practices of education for inspiration if education is to live up to its responsibilities at this critical time. For decades, environmental activist movements in some countries have wrestled with questions of responsibility and action in the face of environmental destruction; they inhabited the mental world of the Anthropocene before much of the rest of the world. Sutoris highlights an innovative research methodology of participatory observational filmmaking, describing how films made by children in the Indian and South African communities provide a window into the ways that young people make sense of the future of the Anthropocene. It is through their capacity to imagine the world differently, Sutoris argues, that education can reinvent itself.
Through Gramsci and Fanon, Salem centers anticolonial politics by exploring the connections between Egypt's moment of decolonization and the 2011 revolution.
The November 1970 coup that brought Hafiz al-Asad to power fundamentally transformed cultural production in Syria. A comprehensive intellectual, ideological, and political project—a Ba'thist cultural revolution—sought to align artistic endeavors with the ideological interests of the regime. The ensuing agonistic struggle pitted official aesthetics of power against alternative modes of creative expression that could evade or ignore the effects of the state. With this book, Max Weiss offers the first cultural and intellectual history of Ba'thist Syria, from the coming to power of Hafiz al-Asad, through the transitional period under Bashar al-Asad, and continuing up through the Syria War. Revolutions Aesthetic reconceptualizes contemporary Syrian politics, authoritarianism, and cultural life. Engaging rich original sources—novels, films, and cultural periodicals—Weiss highlights themes crucial to the making of contemporary Syria: heroism and leadership, gender and power, comedy and ideology, surveillance and the senses, witnessing and temporality, and death and the imagination. Revolutions Aesthetic places front and center the struggle around aesthetic ideology that has been key to the constitution of state, society, and culture in Syria over the course of the past fifty years.
While the Arab people took center stage in the Arab Spring protests, academic studies have focused more on structural factors to understand the limitations of these popular uprisings. This book analyzes the role and complexities of popular agency in the Arab Spring through the framework of contentious politics and social movement theory.
