Carnival, that image of sensuous frivolity, is shown by Abner Cohen to be a masquerade for the dynamic relations between culture and politics. His masterful study details the transformation of a local, polyethnic London fair to a massive, exclusively West Indian carnival, known as "Europe's biggest street festival," which in 1976 occasioned a bloody confrontation between black youth and the police and which has since become a fiercely contested cultural event. Cohen contrasts the development of the London carnival with the development of other carnivalesque movements, including the Renaissance Pleasure Faire of California. His valuable analysis of these relatively little-explored urban cultural movements advances further the theoretical formulations developed in his previous studies.
Hannah Arendt was famously resistant to both psychoanalysis and feminism. Nonetheless, psychoanalytic feminist theory can offer a new interpretive strategy for deconstructing her equally famous opposition between the social and the political. Supplementing critical readings of Arendt's most significant texts (including The Human Condition, On Revolution, Rahel Varnhagen, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and The Life of the Mind) with the insights of contemporary psychoanalytic, feminist, and social theorists, Norma Claire Moruzzi reconstitutes the relationship in Arendt's texts between constructed social identity and political agency. Moruzzi uses Julia Kristeva's writings on abjection to clarify the textual dynamic in Arendt's work that constructs the social as a natural threat; Joan Riviere's and Mary Ann Doane's work on feminine masquerade amplify the theoretical possibilities implicit in Arendt's own discussion of the public, political mask. In a bold interdisciplinary synthesis, Moruzzi develops the social applications of a concept (the mask) Arendt had described as limited to the strictly political realm: a new conception of (political) agency as (social) masquerade, traced through the marginal but emblematic textual figures who themselves enact the politics of social identity.
This volume addresses these key issues through an analysis of important theoretical debates on issues such as digital democracy, cultural politics and transnational communities. Featuring contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, the book contains a series of case studies on new social movements including campaigns on the environment, gender, animal rights and human rights. It combines cutting edge research with theoretical material and makes an important contribution to this highly topical and rapidly growing area. This book will be invaluable reading for students in areas including Politics, Communications and IT, Sociology and Cultural Studies.
The New Politics of Olympos explores the dynamics of praise, power, and persuasion in Kallimachos' hymns, detailing how they simultaneously substantiate and interrogate the radically new phenomenon of Hellenistic kingship taking shape during Kallimachos' lifetime. Long before the Ptolemies invested vast treasure in establishing Alexandria as the center of Hellenic culture and learning, tyrants such as Peisistratos and Hieron recognized the value of poetry in advancing their political agendas. Plato, too, saw the vast power inherent in poetry, and famously advocated either censoring it (Republic) or harnessing it (Laws) for the good of the political community. As Xenophon notes in his Hieron and Pindar demonstrates in his politically charged epinikian hymns, wielding poetry's power entails a complex negotiation between the poet, the audience, and political leaders. Kallimachos' poetic medium for engaging in this dynamic, the hymn, had for centuries served as an unparalleled vehicle for negotiating with the super-powerful. The New Politics of Olympos offers the first in-depth analysis of Kallimachos' only fully extant poetry book, the Hymns, by examining its contemporary political setting, engagement with a tradition of political thought stretching back to Homer, and portrayal of the poet as an image-maker for the king. In addition to investigating the political dynamics in the individual hymns, this book details how the poet's six hymns, once juxtaposed within a single bookroll, constitute a macro-narrative on the prerogatives of Ptolemaic kingship. Throughout the collection Kallimachos refigures the infamously factious divine family as a paradigm of stability and good governance in concert with the self-fashioning of the Ptolemaic dynasty. At the same time, the poet defines the characteristics and behaviors worthy of praise, effectively shaping contemporary political ethics. Thus, for a Ptolemaic reader, this poetry book may have served as an education in and inducement to good kingship.
In the wake of the decolonization movement in South Africa and around the world, this edited work presents fresh evidence and advances new arguments on the politics and economics of colonial biomedical knowledge in South Africa and other parts of the African continent. Covering a richly diverse set of fields---including human genetics, obstetrics, occupational therapy, medical photography and the vaccine sciences---the book demonstrates the troubled histories and the enduring effects of imperial knowledge decades since the end of colonial rule and apartheid. This is a valuable text on the politics of the biomedical sciences written from the perspective of the African continent, and at the same time it revisits knowledge/power relationships between the majority (“global South”) and minority (“global north”) words in a historical perspective and in their contemporary expression in the disciplines. The immediate benefit is a reference resource for medical science researchers, and a teaching text for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students. The book is further composed as an accessible, readable and interesting text on politics and medicine in Africa for the discerning lay reader.
'Political Messaging in Music and Entertainment Spaces across the Globe' uniquely expands the frontiers of political communication by simultaneously focusing on content (political messaging) and platform (music and entertainment). As a compendium of valuable research work, it provides rich insights into the construction of political messages and their dissemination outside of the traditional and mainstream structural, process and behavioral research focus in the discipline. Researchers, teachers, students and other interested parties in political communication, political science, journalism and mass communication, sociology, music, languages, linguistics and the performing arts, communication studies, law and history, will find this book refreshingly handy in their inquiry. Furthermore, this book was conceptualized from a globalist purview and offers readers practical insights into how political messaging through music and entertainment spaces actually work across nation-states, regions and continents. Its authenticity is also further enhanced by the fact that most chapter contributors are scholars who are natives of their areas of study, and who painstakingly situate their work in appropriate historical contexts.
How outlaw "spatial products"—resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, and ports—act as cunning pawns in global politics. In Enduring Innocence, Keller Easterling tells the stories of outlaw "spatial products"—resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports, and other hybrid spaces that exist outside normal constituencies and jurisdictions—in difficult political situations around the world. These spaces—familiar commercial formulas of retail, business, and trade—aspire to be worlds unto themselves, self-reflexive and innocent of politics. But as Easterling shows, in reality these enclaves can become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally ambiguous, they are imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic capital. Their hilarious and dangerous masquerades often mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms. Easterling argues that the study of such "real estate cocktails" provides vivid evidence of the market's weakness, resilience, or violence. Enduring Innocence collects six stories of spatial products and their political predicaments: cruise ship tourism in North Korea; high-tech agricultural formations in Spain (which have reignited labor wars and piracy in the Mediterranean); hyperbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities; automated global ports; microwave urbanism in South Asian IT enclaves; and a global industry of building demolition that suggests urban warfare. These regimes of nonnational sovereignty, writes Easterling, "move around the world like weather fronts"; she focuses not on their blending—their global connectivity—but on their segregation and the cultural collisions that ensue.Enduring Innocence resists the dream of one globally legible world found in many architectural discourses on globalization. Instead, Easterling's consideration of these segregated worlds provides new tools for practitioners sensitive to the political composition of urban landscapes.
From Egypt to India, and from Botswana to London, worker, youth and middle class rebellions have taken on the political and bureaucratic status quo. When most people can no longer earn a decent wage, they pit themselves against the privilege of small, wealthy and often corrupt elites. A remarkable feature of the protests from the Arab Spring onwards has been the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances. This collection explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the massive mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes and the apolitical silent majority. Discover how it fuelled solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties.
"In this unusual juxtaposition of Indians in Minneapolis and Caribbean immigrants in Brooklyn, Buff has given us a unique and powerful lens on the nation-form and its discontents. This is a highly inventive, insightful study--as keen in its analysis of U.S. politics and policy as it is alive to the political force of various ‘minority’ cultural forms."—Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University, author of Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917
