Revolts in Cultural Critique
Revolts in Cultural Critique

Author: Rosemarie Buikema

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1786614030

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Centered around the relationship between art and political transformation. From Charlottë Bronte and Virginia Woolf, to Marlene van Niekerk and William Kentridge, artists and intellectuals have tried to address the question: How to deal with the legacy of exclusion and oppression? Via substantive works of art, this book examines some of the answers that have emerged to this question, to show how art can put into motion something new and how it can transform social and cultural relations in a sustainable way. In this way, art can function as an effective form of cultural critique. In the course of this book, a range of artworks are examined, through a postcolonial and feminist lens, in which revolt—both as a theme and as a medium-specific technique or/as critique —is made visible. Time and time again, revolt takes the form of a slow and thorough working through of the position of the individual in relation to her history and her contemporary geopolitical circumstances. It thus becomes evident that renewal and transformation in art and society are most successful when they proceed according to the method of self-reflexive cultural critique; when they do not present themselves as revolution, radical breaks with the past, but rather as processes of revolt in which knowledge of the past is investigated, complemented, corrected, and bent to a new collective will.

The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Author: Martin Gurri

Publisher: Stripe Press

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1953953344

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How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Wake
Wake

Author: Rebecca Hall

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1982115203

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A Best Book of 2021 by NPR and The Washington Post Part graphic novel, part memoir, Wake is an imaginative tour de force that tells the “powerful” (The New York Times Book Review) story of women-led slave revolts and chronicles scholar Rebecca Hall’s efforts to uncover the truth about these women warriors who, until now, have been left out of the historical record. Women warriors planned and led revolts on slave ships during the Middle Passage. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. Wake tells the “riveting” (Angela Y. Davis) story of Dr. Rebecca Hall, a historian, granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery. The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. But Rebecca decides to look deeper, and her journey takes her through old court records, slave ship captain’s logs, crumbling correspondence, and even the forensic evidence from the bones of enslaved women from the “negro burying ground” uncovered in Manhattan. She finds women warriors everywhere. Using a “remarkable blend of passion and fact, action and reflection” (NPR), Rebecca constructs the likely pasts of Adono and Alele, women rebels who fought for freedom during the Middle Passage, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. We also follow Rebecca’s own story as the legacy of slavery shapes her life, both during her time as a successful attorney and later as a historian seeking the past that haunts her. Illustrated beautifully in black and white, Wake will take its place alongside classics of the graphic novel genre, like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. This story of a personal and national legacy is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake.

The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital
The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

Author: Lisa Lowe

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1997-11-17

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 0822382318

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Global in scope, but refusing a familiar totalizing theoretical framework, the essays in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital demonstrate how localized and resistant social practices—including anticolonial and feminist struggles, peasant revolts, labor organizing, and various cultural movements—challenge contemporary capitalism as a highly differentiated mode of production. Reworking Marxist critique, these essays on Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe advance a new understanding of "cultural politics" within the context of transnational neocolonial capitalism. This perspective contributes to an overall critique of traditional approaches to modernity, development, and linear liberal narratives of culture, history, and democratic institutions. It also frames a set of alternative social practices that allows for connections to be made between feminist politics among immigrant women in Britain, women of color in the United States, and Muslim women in Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and Canada; the work of subaltern studies in India, the Philippines, and Mexico; and antiracist social movements in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe. These connections displace modes of opposition traditionally defined in relation to the modern state and enable a rethinking of political practice in the era of global capitalism. Contributors. Tani E. Barlow, Nandi Bhatia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chungmoo Choi, Clara Connolly, Angela Davis, Arturo Escobar, Grant Farred, Homa Hoodfar, Reynaldo C. Ileto, George Lipsitz, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Aihwa Ong, Pragna Patel, José Rabasa, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Jaqueline Urla

Revolt, Revolution, Critique
Revolt, Revolution, Critique

Author: Bulent Diken

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1134005644

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In contemporary society the idea of ‘revolution’ seems to have become obsolete. What is more untimely than the idea of revolution today? At the same time, however, the idea of radical change no longer refers to exceptional circumstances but has become normalized as part of daily life. Ours is a ‘culture’ of permanent revolution in which constant systemic disembedding demands a meta-stable subjectivity in continuous transformation. In this sense, the idea of revolution is painfully timely. This paradoxical coincidence, the simultaneous absence and presence of the desire for radical change in contemporary society, is the point of departure for the symptomatic reading this book offers. The book addresses the social, political and cultural significance of revolt and revolution in three dimensions. First, it analyzes revolt and revolution as ‘events’ which are of history but not reducible to it. Second, it elaborates on theories that grant revolt and revolution a central place in their structure. Thirdly, it discusses revolutionary or emancipatory theories that seek to participate in radical change. Further, since both revolt and revolution involve the critique of what exists, of actual reality, the implications of the intimate relationship between revolt, revolution and critique are explicated.

The Amistad Revolt
The Amistad Revolt

Author: Iyunolu Folayan Osagie

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0820324655

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From journalism and lectures to drama, visual art, and the Spielberg film, this study ranges across the varied cultural reactions--in America and Sierra Leone--engendered by the 1839 Amistad slave ship revolt. Iyunolu Folayan Osagie is a native of Sierra Leone, from where the Amistad's cargo of slaves originated. She digs deeply into the Amistad story to show the historical and contemporary relevance of the incident and its subsequent trials. At the same time, she shows how the incident has contributed to the construction of national and cultural identity both in Africa and the African diasporo in America--though in intriguingly different ways. This pioneering work of comparative African and American cultural criticism shows how creative arts have both confirmed and fostered the significance of the Amistad revolt in contemporary racial discourse and in the collective memories of both countries.

Intimate Revolt
Intimate Revolt

Author: Julia Kristeva

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 023111415X

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Julia Kristeva, herself a product of the famous May '68 Paris student uprising, has long been fascinated by the concept of rebellion and revolution. Psychoanalysts believe that rebellion guarantees our independence and creative capacities, but is revolution still possible? Confronted with the culture of entertainment, can we build and nurture a culture of revolt, in the etymological and Proustian sense of the word: an unveiling, a return, a displacement, a reconstruction of the past, of memory, of meaning? In the first part of the book, Kristeva examines the manner in which three of the most unsettling modern writers--Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes--affirm their personal rebellion. In the second part of the book, Kristeva ponders the future of rebellion. She maintains that the "new world order" is not favorable to revolt. "What can we revolt against if power is vacant and values corrupt?" she asks. Not only is political revolt mired in compromise among parties whose differences are less and less obvious, but an essential component of European culture--a culture of doubt and criticism--is losing its moral and aesthetic impact.

The Spirit of '68
The Spirit of '68

Author: Gerd-Rainer Horn

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-10-02

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0191562084

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In virtually all corners of the Western world, 1968 witnessed a highly unusual sequence of popular rebellions. In Italy, France, Spain, Vietnam, the United States, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and elsewhere, millions of individuals took matters into their own hands to counter imperialism, capitalism, autocracy, bureaucracy, and all forms of hierarchical thinking. Recent reinterpretations have sought to play down any real challenge to the socio-political status quo in these events, but Gerd-Rainer Horn's book offers a spirited counterblast. 1968, he argues, opened up the possibility that economic and political elites on both sides of the Iron Curtain could be toppled from their position of unnatural superiority to make way for a new society where everyday people could, for the first time, become masters of their own destiny. Furthermore, Horn contends, the moment of crisis and opportunity culminating in 1968 must be seen as part of a larger period of experimentation and revolt. The ten years between 1956 and 1966, characterised above all by the flourishing of iconoclastic cultural rebellions, can be regarded as a preparatory period which set the stage for the non-conformist cum political revolts of the subsequent 'red' decade (1966-1976). Horn's geographic centres of attention are Western Europe, including the first full examination of Mediterranean revolts, and North America. He placed particular emphasis on cultural nonconformity, the student movement, working class rebellions, the changing contours of the Left, and the meaning of participatory democracy. His book will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in this turbulent period and the fundamental changes that were wrought upon societies either side of the Atlantic.

Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution
Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution

Author: Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780231176323

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Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab offers a groundbreaking analysis of Egyptian and Syrian debates over enlightenment and their import for the 2011 uprisings. Enlightenment on the Eve of Revolution is the first book to document these debates for the Anglophone audience and to analyze their importance for contemporary intellectual life and politics.

States and Social Revolutions
States and Social Revolutions

Author: Theda Skocpol

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-09-29

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1316453944

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State structures, international forces, and class relations: Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations. Social revolutions have been rare but undeniably of enormous importance in modern world history. States and Social Revolutions provides a new frame of reference for analyzing the causes, the conflicts, and the outcomes of such revolutions. It develops a rigorous, comparative historical analysis of three major cases: the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 1800s, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s. Believing that existing theories of revolution, both Marxist and non-Marxist, are inadequate to explain the actual historical patterns of revolutions, Skocpol urges us to adopt fresh perspectives. Above all, she maintains that states conceived as administrative and coercive organizations potentially autonomous from class controls and interests must be made central to explanations of revolutions.