Articulation in Ruins

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.1093/oso/9780192894069.003.0002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 31-55

Author(s):

Benedict Morrison

Keyword(s):

Sound Design ◽

Critical Tradition ◽

Post War ◽

Historical Moment

This chapter challenges the critical tradition that has interpreted the formal disjunctures of Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1948) as representative of its young protagonist Edmund. The film’s complicated formal experiments—including in cinematography, editing, and sound design—have been read as expressions of the child’s distress as he struggles to survive in post-war Berlin. This criticism, however, cannot account fully for the film’s disjunctive transitions between documentary realism and expressionism. This chapter argues that year zero is a space in which all stabilizing definitions are thrown into disorientating contingency, and the clash between styles marks this unsettledness. In such a historical moment, Edmund is unable to articulate himself, and the film’s formal ruptures do not speak clearly for him. The form cannot be explained through reference to a character who is outside explanation. The film records an eccentric moment in Germany’s history, in which meaning is out of reach.

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‘Everybody's Lonesome for Somebody’: age, the body and experience in the music of Hank Williams

Popular Music ◽

10.1017/s0261143000004086 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 9 (3) ◽

pp. 259-274 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Richard Leppert ◽

George Lipsitz

Keyword(s):

Turning Point ◽

Second World War ◽

The Body ◽

Political Struggle ◽

World War ◽

Race And Gender ◽

And Gender ◽

Post War ◽

Historical Moment ◽

Second World

Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984, pp. 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams's voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment – post Second World War America – a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams's songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.

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Accident as Critique

Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198857280.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 89-112

Author(s):

Julia Jordan

Keyword(s):

The 1950S ◽

Post War ◽

Historical Moment

This chapter turns from reading the accidental and uncertain nature of British post-war avant-gardism as constitutive of its status as late, to asking the question, late to whom? Lateness clearly implies a particular relation to history, and assumes an emergence from a particular tradition, in this instance Western and modernist. What does it mean to conceive of this form of writing—the accidental, the experimental, the uncertain—in the period as new, that is, in terms of the anglophone modernist tradition? The particular historical trajectories of Britain’s colonial past, and the dissolution of its empire, combined to mean that in the 1950s and 1960s some of the most innovative writers were migrants. This chapter accordingly asks how this argument thus far might be extended by thinking about how the specifically postcolonial historical moment is illuminated by their (partial, or perceived) refusal of realism, taking as its examples the experimentalists Zulfikar Ghose and Denis Williams.

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Ideas and Leaders in Contentious Politics: One Parish Priest in El Salvador's Popular Movement

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x13009862 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 38 (01) ◽

pp. 76-101

Author(s):

PETER M. SANCHEZ

Keyword(s):

Collective Action ◽

El Salvador ◽

Liberation Theology ◽

Contentious Politics ◽

Religious Leaders ◽

Political Movement ◽

Parish Priest ◽

Historical Moment ◽

Resource Mobilisation ◽

The Church

AbstractThis paper examines the actions of one Salvadorean priest – Padre David Rodríguez – in one parish – Tecoluca – to underscore the importance of religious leadership in the rise of El Salvador's contentious political movement that began in the early 1970s, when the guerrilla organisations were only just beginning to develop. Catholic leaders became engaged in promoting contentious politics, however, only after the Church had experienced an ideological conversion, commonly referred to as liberation theology. A focus on one priest, in one parish, allows for generalisation, since scores of priests, nuns and lay workers in El Salvador followed the same injustice frame and tactics that generated extensive political mobilisation throughout the country. While structural conditions, collective action and resource mobilisation are undoubtedly necessary, the case of religious leaders in El Salvador suggests that ideas and leadership are of vital importance for the rise of contentious politics at a particular historical moment.

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