Speaking the Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandita Bajpai
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Market Liberalization ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The Face ◽  
External Actors ◽  
Political Oratory

Untangling the logical, lexical, and semantic patterns of the multiple official speeches of Indian prime ministers, Speaking the Nation gauges how the Indian state has been projected by different governments in different times, in the face of challenges from internal and external actors that put pressure on its leaders to safeguard their status as legitimate elites in power. It analyses how Indian nationhood is consistently reshaped and reaffirmed by invoking its secular ethos and practice, as well as the experience of market liberalization. The book calls for serious engagement with political oratory in India. A close reading of speeches since 1991—from Narasimha Rao to Narendra Modi—it captures how, through these crosscutting topics, the prominent ‘authors of the nation’ and the ‘vanguards of the state’, speak India into being.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 269-302
Author(s):  
Anandita Bajpai
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
The State ◽  
Market Liberalization ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
Indian State ◽  
Open Markets ◽  
The Voice

The Conclusion presents a review of the key findings. It draws the consistencies and the inconsistencies in the rhetoric of Prime Ministers Rao, Vajpayee, Singh and Modi. It engages in a transversal discussion of how the vocabularies of Nehru’s ‘New India’ differ from the texture of the ‘New India’ after 1991. The next section elaborates on the category of what I have called ‘Airport Literature’ (mainly because of its overwhelming presence at Indian airports). This literature celebrates India’s market liberalization and is part of the changes it seeks to glorify. The conclusion discusses how the genre of speeches speaks to this genre of literature. The last section returns to the debate of New World Orders to establish how the Indian state has attempted to recalibrate its position in the wider changing architecture of geopolitics and open markets and how the PMs as the voice of the state have attempted to legitimize their own authority as the voice of the nation.

Un/re/production of Old Age inThe Taking of Deborah Logan

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-194
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kotwasińska
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Horror Film ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Found Footage ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Face ◽  
Female Embodiment ◽  
Main Protagonist

The article offers a re-examination of abjected femininity and old age through a close reading of The Taking of Deborah Logan (2015), a found footage horror movie centered on spectral possession. While to a large extent the movie replicates an infamous monstrous old woman trope, it also effectively questions typical Alzheimer's disease (AD) narratives, which tend to portray life with AD as a story of unmitigated loss and debility. In The Taking of Deborah Logan, potentially destabilizing moments occur when in the face of progressive loss of control, memory, and bodily functions, the main protagonist is momentarily experienced as resisting the dehumanisation and loss of agency conventionally associated with AD and possession alike. The aim of this article is thus three-fold. The first part sketches the processes through which possession narratives generate a highly ambivalent space for aging femininity in horror film, and how aging, disability, and AD intersect both in popular understanding and in film. In the second part, the author examines how The Taking of Deborah Logan, as a found footage horror, shapes a discussion about selfhood, agency, and monstrous embodiment. Finally, the author argues that it is through the concept of transaging that one can find ways to destabilise traditional understandings of old age, female embodiment, and AD, and offer new narratives that highlight monstrous, if ambivalent, agency.

Yu.F. Samarin’s Model of the National State: Between Archaic and Modern

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 149-155
Author(s):  
Alexey B. Panchenko
Keyword(s):  
Rural Community ◽  
Fundamental Difference ◽  
The State ◽  
Basic Unit ◽  
National State ◽  
Basic Model ◽  
The Face ◽  
Identical Position ◽  
Ethnocultural Community ◽  
Communicative Space

Yu. F. Samarin’s works are traditionally viewed through the prism of his affiliation with Slavophilism. His view of the state is opposed to the idea of the complex empire based on unequal interaction of the central power with the elite of national districts. At the same time it was important for Samarin to see the nation not as an ethnocultural community, but as classless community of equal citizens, who were in identical position in the face of the emperor. Samarin’s attitude to religion and nationality had pragmatic character and were understood as means for the creation of the uniform communicative space inside the state. This position for the most part conformed with the framework of the national state basic model, however there still existed one fundamental difference. Samarin considered not an individual, but the rural community that owned the land, to be the basic unit of the national state. As the result the model of national state was viewed as the synthesis of modernistic (classlessness, pragmatism, equality) and archaic (communality) features.

The Prophetic Voice of the Church in a Democratic South Africa – A Theological Reflection

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lufuluvhi Maria Mudimeli
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The State ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Black Liberation Theology ◽  
Prophetic Voice ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This article is a reflection on the role and contribution of the church in a democratic South Africa. The involvement of the church in the struggle against apartheid is revisited briefly. The church has played a pivotal and prominent role in bringing about democracy by being a prophetic voice that could not be silenced even in the face of death. It is in this time of democracy when real transformation is needed to take its course in a realistic way, where the presence of the church has probably been latent and where it has assumed an observer status. A look is taken at the dilemmas facing the church. The church should not be bound and taken captive by any form of loyalty to any political organisation at the expense of the poor and the voiceless. A need for cooperation and partnership between the church and the state is crucial at this time. This paper strives to address the role of the church as a prophetic voice in a democratic South Africa. Radical economic transformation, inequality, corruption, and moral decadence—all these challenges hold the potential to thwart our young democracy and its ideals. Black liberation theology concepts are employed to explore how the church can become prophetically relevant in democracy. Suggestions are made about how the church and the state can best form partnerships. In avoiding taking only a critical stance, the church could fulfil its mandate “in season and out of season” and continue to be a prophetic voice on behalf of ordinary South Africans.

Party Standstill in an Era of Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
External Environment ◽  
The State ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
Significant Modification ◽  
Interest Management ◽  
The Face ◽  
Short Run

Chapter 5 discusses the premises of the emergence of the cartel party with the parties’ resilience to any significant modification in the face of the cultural, societal, and political changes of the 1970s–1980s. Parties kept and even increased their hold on institutions and society. They adopted an entropic strategy to counteract challenges coming from a changing external environment. A new gulf with public opinion opened up, since parties demonstrated greater ease with state-centred activities for interest-management through collusive practices in the para-governmental sector, rather than with new social and political options. The emergence of two sets of alternatives, the greens and the populist extreme right, did not produce, in the short run, any impact on intra-party life. The chapter argues that the roots of cartelization reside mainly in the necessitated interpenetration with the state, rather than on inter-party collusion. This move has caught parties in a legitimacy trap.

From the Law of Ransom to the Law of Release

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Law ◽  
New System

This chapter charts the “Law of Release,” a new system of rules that replaced the Law of Ransom. These rules were based on treaties signed from 1739 onward, but also on a variety of lesser agreements and unwritten understandings and the Islamic legal tradition. They were renewed frequently, and structured captivity as late as the 1850s. This chapter will explore the basic structures of the Law of Release—how captives were found, released, and sent home, and how slaveowners were convinced, coerced, or compensated to cooperate. I argue that while release was initially limited to Istanbul, and to the most visible captives, it extended both into elite households, and outward along the Ottoman corridors of power. This process tested the limits of the Ottoman state, forcing the state to cooperate with Russian officials for the benefit of both. They did so in the face of resistance from captors.

Political and Economic History of Land-Grabs in India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
The State ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

This chapter begins with tracing the roots of colonialism in India, followed by understanding its various structures and processes of resource-grabbing. It argues, that India has largely followed the colonial approach towards land appropriation. After independence, although the Indian state followed a nationalistic path of development, the developmental approach of the state was far from being pro-peasant and/or pro-ecology. In a similar fashion, hydroelectricity projects in Kashmir, developed by NHPC from 1970s, have been displacing thousands of peasants from their lands and houses. Despite this, they are yet to become a major debate in the media, in the policy circles, or in academia in India.

Plebiscitary Politics and the Threats to Legality

2019 ◽  
pp. 275-289
Author(s):  
Claudius Härpfer
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Face ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Relationship

In recent times we find many plebiscitary acts that seek to democratically legitimize political processes in any direction. They have in common that they interrupt the normal routine of representative democracies to a certain degree and create an extra-daily state of affairs, which entails not only direct but also indirect consequences. The text attempts to systematize some of these mechanisms from a Weberian perspective using Brexit as an example. After a brief overview of Weber’s short-term politically inspired statements on plebiscitary democracy, the text systematizes Weber’s understanding of the state as a bureaucratic apparatus that requires any kind of leader to be controlled. Subsequently, the text discusses the relationship between domination, legality, and rationality in order to finally point out the danger of erosion of truth and legality through the emergence of competing consensus communities in the face of competing conceptions of order.

Islamists between revolution and the state: an epilogue

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Ghani Imad
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
Heavy Burden ◽  
New Type ◽  
Political Realities

The problematic addressed in this article is the challenge initiated by the Arab revolutions to reform the Arab political system in such a way as to facilitate the incorporation of ‘democracy’ at the core of its structure. Given the profound repercussions, this issue has become the most serious matter facing the forces of change in the Arab world today; meanwhile, it forms the most prominent challenge and the most difficult test confronting Islamists. The Islamist phenomenon is not an alien implant that descended upon us from another planet beyond the social context or manifestations of history. Thus it cannot but be an expression of political, cultural, and social needs and crises. Over the years this phenomenon has presented, through its discourse, an ideological logic that falls within the context of ‘advocacy’; however, today Islamists find themselves in office, and in a new context that requires them to produce a new type of discourse that pertains to the context of a ‘state’. Political participation ‘tames’ ideology and pushes political actors to rationalize their discourse in the face of daily political realities and the necessity of achievement. The logic of advocacy differs from that of the state: in the case of advocacy, ideology represents an enriching asset, whereas in the case of the state, it constitutes a heavy burden. This is one reason why so much discourse exists within religious jurisprudence related to interest or necessity or balancing outcomes. This article forms an epilogue to the series of articles on religion and the state published in previous issues of this journal. It adopts the methodologies of ‘discourse analysis’ and ‘case studies’ in an attempt to examine the arguments presented by Islamists under pressure from the opposition. It analyses the experiences, and the constraints, that inhibit the production of a ‘model’, and monitors the development of the discourse, its structure, and transformations between advocacy, revolution and the state.

scholarly journals Neoliberalism is not dead – On political implications of Covid-19

2020 ◽  
pp. 030981682098238
Author(s):  
Miloš Šumonja
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
The State ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Strong State ◽  
Hand Grip ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face

The news is old – neoliberalism is dead for good, but this time, even Financial Times knows it. Obituaries claim that it had died from the coronavirus, as the state, not the markets, have had to save both the people and the economy. The argument of the article is that these academic and media interpretations of ‘emergency Keynesianism’ misidentify neoliberalism with its anti-statist rhetoric. For neoliberalism is, and has always been, about ‘the free market and the strong state’. In fact, rather than waning in the face of the coronavirus crisis, neoliberal states around the world are using the ongoing ‘war against the virus’ to strengthen their right-hand grip on the conditions of the working classes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document