“Hegemony Protected by the Armour of Coercion”: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and the State

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW PEPPER
Keyword(s):  
State Formation ◽  
State Power ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
The Us ◽  
A Site ◽  
Corporate State

This article argues that Dashiell Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest is best understood in the context of the consolidation and expansion of the US state following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It also argues that Hammett's novel constitutes a highly significant articulation of theoretical debates about the nature of political authority and state power in the modern era and speaks about the transition of one state formation to another. Insofar as Red Harvest explores the way in which the state's coercive and ethical character are bound up together, this article argues that Hammett's novel draws upon an understanding of political authority and state power primarily derived from Gramsci, via Marx. Gramsci insists that control cannot be maintained through force alone (and his conception of hegemony, in turn, suggests a power bloc that can become fragmented and disunited in a war of position). In the same way, Red Harvest traces the transformation of the “economic-corporate” state into the expanded or “ethical” State but crucially any ethical dimension, as Gramsci notes, is always beholden to the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the apparently arbitrary bloodshed in the novel is conceived as a relatively minor realignment in the ranks of the capitalist classes – certainly less serious than the miners' strike that prefigures the novel. What makes this realignment significant is that it calls attention to the state both as repressive and as a site of conflict and compromise. Here, the work performed by the Continental Op and by the crime novel in general – simultaneously buttressing and, to some extent, contesting the power of the state – needs to be understood as part of the process by which the state is consistently enacting hegemony (albeit protected by the armour of coercion). The article concludes by pointing out that while Gramsci is perhaps too willing to dwell upon the state's expanded reach, Red Harvest is more interested in examining possible “cracks and fissures” in the state formation, even if the critique it ultimately offers goes nowhere and yields nothing.

Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hawraa Al-Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The State ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Resistance ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Material Form

The book examines the trajectory of the state sponsored novel in Iraq and considers the ways in which explicitly political and/or ideological texts functioned as resistive counter narratives. It argues that both the novel and ‘progressive’ discourses on women were used as markers of Iraq’s cultural revival under the Ba‘th and were a key element in the state’s propaganda campaign within Iraq and abroad. In an effort to expand its readership and increase support for its pan-Arab project, the Iraqi Ba‘th almost completely eradicated illiteracy among women. As Iraq was metaphorically transformed into a ‘female’, through its nationalist trope, women writers simultaneously found opportunities and faced obstacles from the state, as the ‘Woman Question’ became a site of contention between those who would advocate the progressiveness of the Ba‘th and those who would stress its repressiveness and immorality. By exploring discourses on gender in both propaganda and high art fictional writings by Iraqis, this book offers an alternative narrative of the literary and cultural history of Iraq. It ultimately expands the idea of cultural resistance beyond the modern/traditional, progressive/backward paradigms that characterise discourses on Arab women and the state, and argues that resistance is embedded in the material form of texts as much as their content or ideological message.

The Archive as a “Collective Project”

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-533
Author(s):  
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
State Government ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Governmental Body ◽  
National Memory ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

The history of the archive is the history of the state. Or so say conventional approaches to the archives. Until recently, the archive has been seen solely as a site, or rather a repository, of modern state power and governmentality, and a crucial medium for the making and preservation of national memory in the late 19th century. There is a truth to this state-centric perspective: the archive was conceived as a place where governments keep their records; they usually contain a term such as “state,” “government,” or “national” in their names; and they are often funded by and connected to a governmental body.

scholarly journals The Volatile State in Southeast Asia: Evidence from Sumatra, 1600–1800

2003 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 497-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freek Colombijn
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
State Power ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
The State ◽  
Central State ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
State Capital

The communis opinio of historians is that early modern, or precolonial, states in Southeast Asia tended to lead precarious existences. The states were volatile in the sense that the size of individual states changed quickly, a ruler forced by circumstances moved his state capital, the death of a ruler was followed by a dynastic struggle, or a local subordinate head either ignored or took over the central state power; in short, states went through short cycles of rise and decline. Perhaps nobody has helped establish this opinion more than Clifford Geertz (1980) with his powerful metaphor of the “theatre state.” Many scholars have preceded and followed him in their assessment of the shakiness of the state (see, for example, Andaya 1992, 419; Bentley 1986, 292; Bronson 1977, 51; Hagesteijn 1986, 106; Milner 1982, 7; Nagtegaal 1996, 35, 51; Reid 1993, 202; Ricklefs 1991, 17; Schulte Nordholt 1996, 143–48). The instability itself was an enduring phenomenon. Most polities existed in a state of flux, oscillating between integration and disintegration, a phenomenon which was first analyzed for mainland Southeast Asia by Edmund Leach (1954) in his seminal work on the Kachin chiefdoms. This alternation of state formation and the breaking up of kingdoms has been called the “ebb and flow of power” and the “rhythm” of Malay history (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 35). In this article, I will probe into the causes of the volatility of the Southeast Asian states, using material from Sumatra to make my case.

“Standing before You, World”

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-353
Author(s):  
Daniel Behar
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
State Power ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The State ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
Individual Enterprise ◽  
Original Works ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article examines translation activity in modern Syria and its intersections with original works as a middle ground between world literature and postcolonial studies. It argues for a return to the multiplicity residing within a postcolonial national setting as a way of understanding poetic production in interaction with foreign poetries. Syrian translating as practiced in the state-endorsed literary periodical Al-Adab Al-Ajanbiyya (Foreign Literatures) is studied as a site of tension between a political rhetoric maintained by a growingly invasive state and the narrowing field of individual enterprise. How would world literature figure from the perspective of a state-backed, professedly Arab-socialist culture? How would this construction then be contested by agents struggling to carve out spaces for individual expression? What role does translation play in this struggle? The parameters of postcolonial experience and representation are themselves fought over in an unequal playing field between state power and beleaguered authors on the literary margins. Translations originating in politicized agendas then become constitutive of non-ideological engagements with world literature sanctioning deviations from state hegemony and promoting civilian agendas.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Prison Writing from Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 430-435
Author(s):  
Daniel Roux
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Functional Architecture ◽  
Prison Writing ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Penal Institution ◽  
A Site

If the unvarnished power of the state has a face, then it is the prison. When the mask of cultural hegemony slips, we encounter the walls of the penal institution, its barbed wire, and its blankly functional architecture, mute and unseeing. A prison is one of the most concentrated modalities of state power. By definition, a prison is a zone of exclusion; it defines the normal, everyday civic sphere by defining a site of exception. A prison has its own distinctive logic and temporality, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s words, “dull, mundane, monotonous, tortuous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping, eating, defecating, sleeping” (1981:116). It is a world of boredom, isolation, and fear. Nonetheless, because of its close proximity to state power, the prison also offers a sharp-edged reflection of the operation of power in a society. As Michael Hardt observes, “Those who are free, outside of prison looking in, might imagine their own freedom defined and reinforced in opposition to prison time. When you get close to prison, however, you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the world” (1997:66). Or as Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake remarked in his 1987 autobiography, “Prison is the heart of oppression in any oppressive society” (1987:228).

The racial environmental state and abolition geography in California’s Central Valley

2021 ◽  
pp. 026377582110259
Author(s):  
Keith Miyake
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The State ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
A Site ◽  
Systems Of Domination ◽  
California's Central Valley ◽  
California’S Central Valley

This article introduces the “racial environmental state” as an analytical framework for examining race and environment as mutually constituting modes of state power. Under racial capitalism, the state relies on the constant articulation of racial and environmental difference and domination to sustain the uneven geographies necessary for capitalism. The racial environmental state offers a way to examine hegemonic state power operating through the convergences of race and environment, as a site for resistance, and the proliferation of abolition geographies. Using this framework, the author analyzes the abolitionist struggle to transform the carceral geographies of California’s Central Valley through a campaign to stop the construction of a prison in Delano, California. This case study shows the importance of recognizing race and environment as interconnected systems of domination and resistance. It also highlights the possibilities and limitations of engaging the state in the abolitionist fight for freedom.

scholarly journals Transgender People’s Deterritorialization in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Trace Peterson’s “After Before and After”

MANUSYA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-126
Author(s):  
Tanrada Lertlaksanaporn
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Transgender People ◽  
The Us ◽  
Before And After

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Trace Peterson’s “After Before and After” have been studied in several aspects related to transgender issues. The presentation of transgender people, especially the transgender protagonist in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, has been criticized as a formulaic depiction with little portrayal of their struggles and triumphs. At the same time, the transgender protagonist is viewed positively as an integral force in the novel. The poem “After Before and After” has been praised for its creative portrayal of transgender people. A study of transgender issues in relation to desire and connection helps to show that both texts offer more possibilities of liberation towards the state of “becoming.” This study applies Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of schizoanalysis to explore transgender people’s lines of flight, rhizomatic movements and transversal connections towards the state of deterritorialization in India and the US.

Multidirectional vulnerabilities: Trauma, bare life, and resistance in June Hutton’s Underground

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096996
Author(s):  
Anna Branach-Kallas
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
A Site ◽  
First World

The article offers an analysis of Underground, published by Canadian writer June Hutton in 2009. The main protagonist of the novel is a young Canadian, Albert Fraser, who suffers severe shock and disillusionment in the trenches of the First World War. He faces unemployment and destitution during the Great Depression and eventually joins the 1,700 Canadian volunteers who fought in the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. My purpose is to analyse Hutton’s representation of the Canadian veterans’ difficult reintegration in the post-war years and the protagonist’s prise de conscience which ultimately leads him to Spain, despite his hatred of war. While discussing the veterans’ discontent and the Canadian government’s attempts to control this unruly population, I refer to Judith Butler’s conceptualization of precariousness and precarity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical reflection on biopolitics and bare life. Central in my reading is the terrain of the camp — the hobo camp, the relief camp, and the POW camp — as a site of biopolitical exclusion, yet also a space of encounter that triggers ethical reflection. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the novel stages unexpected alliances between the protagonist and Chinese characters, which cause Fraser to revise his racist opinions. I propose the concept of multidirectional vulnerabilities to explore the parallels between these apparently disjointed geographies and temporalities. The article shows how Hutton represents the vulnerability of Canadian bodies in a historical period of socio-political upheavals, yet at the same time locates in their vulnerability the possibility of resistance and an alternative ethics.

scholarly journals Conexus: Crime Fiction and the State of the Nation.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Duncan Dicks
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
State Control ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
The Past ◽  
Crime Novel

Conexus: Crime Fiction and the State of the Nation consists of two parts. The first section is the novel, Conexus, which is a practice-based exploration and illustration of crime fiction as state-of-the-nation social commentary. The second is a critical discussion of the requirements of a state-of-the-nation novel that reflects the contemporary, globalised word, and how crime fiction contends with these needs. Conexus follows a range of characters in parallel threads that converge onto a single physical location in Gloucestershire. Ainsley Griffin, a technology journalist, his partner, Chelsey, his grandson, Sundance, and a range of other characters gradually become aware of each other through their use of IT as they investigate a series of undiscovered murders that began with a sophisticated network of paedophiles in the 1990s. The murderer chooses each new victim through the random last act of communication of the last victim, and controls their lives through surveillance hacking before murdering them. The critical underpinning of the thesis discusses the concepts, theories and controversies surrounding the concept of a nation (for example, following the legacy of Gellner’s work, Hroch, and the explorations of Bhabha), emphasising the importance of state control through jurisprudence, of communication technology, and of physical locations and boundaries over the past two hundred years. The relative importance and impact of these concepts is seen to have changed dramatically with the rapid explosion of information technology in the twenty-first-century, requiring a very different approach to literary explorations of a nation. A number of crime novels from the past 25 years are analysed in conjunction with Conexus. The locations and boundaries are discussed with reference to the uncanny implications of the physical as discussed by Freud. Approaches to the incorporation of information technology into crime fiction are explored, and the success of this integration is compared to other literary works. In summary, the suitability of the crime novel as portrayal and summary of the culturally and socially significant trends of the time is assessed.

Experimenting in Somalia: The new security empire

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 404-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Besteman
Keyword(s):  
State Government ◽  
The State ◽  
Territorial State ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
A Site ◽  
Us Intervention ◽  
Security Regimes

The past several decades of US intervention in Somalia produced violent destabilization, dysfunction, and uncertainty, creating refugee outflows and terrorist networks against which the US is currently tightening its security cordons. This paper argues that Somalia’s recent history as a stateless region offers a cautionary and tragic case study of the long-term damages that ensue when wealthy states that intervene in poorer states in the name of their own security instead cause insecurity and inequities that enable violence, and then in response to that violence enact further securitization to protect themselves against the consequences of that damage. But rather than focusing on the state as a site of securitization, I focus on those whose lives are made insecure by the retreat of their state government and the imposition in its place of security regimes that are not created by their own state government. Such security regimes overlap and compete, are instituted by different state and nonstate actors for different purposes, and by their incoherence and multiplicity raise questions about the definition, location, and relevance of the state in such regions. The paper explores the emergence of new, interlinked security regimes that are partially or wholly constituted through the logics of a new security empire designed to respond to US security concerns. By turning attention to the situations faced by those who live within the insecurities of stateless regions, the paper asks, what happens to the concept of securitization when the national-territorial state is not the entity that operates as a ‘state’ in the lives of people, even though their lives are overlain with multiple and overlapping regimes of securitization?

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