Translation, Ideology, and Social Practice

Author(s):  
Susan Petrilli

Translation is never completely neutral. On the contrary, it can be used in a double ideological-social sense: to orient people toward unaware, passive acceptance of a given situation or, instead, to evidence the possibility of change. On this account, most interesting are observations made by Marcuse. He analyzes a study conducted on work conditions in a firm in the United States, evidencing how complaints originally formulated by workers as general statements about a common condition lose their “generality” when “translated”: The actual meaning of their statements changes in the “translation.” The tones of protest in accusations denouncing bad work conditions for all are reduced to the status of isolated complaints concerning the life of single individuals. Similar situations abound in social practice and translation today, in the global “communication-production” order where language usage anaesthetizes critical awareness and the common sense of responsibility. This chapter investigates the relationship between words and values, the ideological dimension of sense, and translation, whether intralingual, interlingual, or intersemiotic, either to favor passive compliance to the order of discourse, the condition of “linguistic alienation,” or to develop the capacity for interrogation and conscious awareness in a world, today’s, that, like Orwell’s, resorts to a sort of Newspeak to obtain consensus and assent to the order of discourse, the official order.

2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (03) ◽  
pp. 491-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin L. Einhorn

The history of slavery cannot be separated from the history of business in the United States, especially in the context of the relationship between public power and individual property rights. This essay suggests that the American devotion to “sacred” property rights stemsmore from the vulnerability of slaveholding elites than to a political heritage of protection for the “common man.”


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 208-232
Author(s):  
Caterina Gardiner

The common law that applies to Internet contract formation could be said to exist in a penumbra—a grey area of partial illumination between darkness and light—where it may be possible to lose sight of established contract law principles. Internet contracts raise difficult issues relating to their formation that challenge traditional contract doctrine. Analysis of case law from the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland illustrates that the courts have not applied contract formation doctrine in a principled or consistent way. There is a tendency for decisions to be reached for policy reasons, for example, to facilitate the development of e-commerce, or to achieve a result that is considered fair, rather than on sound principles of contract law. There may also be some uncertainty arising from the relationship between statutory consumer protection rules and common law contract formation doctrine. The enforceability of Internet contracts in the common law courts remains unpredictable. This article argues that although Internet contracting may raise distinctive contract formation issues, it is possible for the judiciary to invoke the inherent flexibility of the common law, to take into account the specific characteristics of Internet contracts, while still adhering to established contract law doctrine and maintaining a principled approach.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2109-2136
Author(s):  
RUPING XIAO ◽  
HSIAO-TING LIN

AbstractThis article revisits the issue of the offshore islands in the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War. Benefitting from archival materials only recently made available, specifically Chiang Kai-shek's personal diaries, CIA declassified materials, Taiwanese Foreign Ministry files, and rare publications from the Contemporary Taiwan Collection at the Library of the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, this research examines the cloud of suspicion surrounding the secret contacts between Taipei and Beijing leading up to and during the 1958 offshore islands crisis, elucidating how such a political tête-à-tête, and the resultant tacit consensus over the status of the islands, gradually brought about an end to the conflict between Taiwan and Communist China. In hindsight, the crises over the offshore islands along China's southeast coast momentarily brought the United States closer to war with Communist China, while putting the relationship between Taipei and Washington to a serious test. The end result, however, was that, while these isles were technically embedded in the unfinished civil war between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, they provided, ironically, an opportunity for secret communications and, ultimately, a kind of détente between the two supposedly deadly enemies across the Taiwan Strait. A close examination of the details of these crises, along with their attendant military, political, and diplomatic complexities, reveals an amazing amount of political intrigue at both the local and international levels that has not been fully realized until now.


1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-87
Author(s):  
Lorraine A. Brown

As many historians of American theater and culture know, the Fenwick Library of George Mason University (GMU) became the home in 1974 to a major collection of Federal Theatre Project (FTP) materials. As many researchers also know, some FTP material was removed from GMU to the Library of Congress in the fall of 1994. In this essay, I will bring Theatre Survey's readers up to date on the status of the FTP collection, which, because of its continuing development over two decades, houses not only a considerable body of FTP material but also early records of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). ANTA in its earliest days was a worthy successor to the FTP in the drive to have a national theater in the United States. Since 1980, all of these holdings have been an integral part of the Center for Government, Society and the Arts (CGSA) at GMU. CGSA has been the site of many activities exploring the relationship between our government and the arts, ranging from conferences on theater and cultural studies to our own theatrical productions of FTP materials, some of which I will outline here.


Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Daniel J. O'Neil

Internal colonialism has beeome a popular term in academic parlance. Although suggested in the writings of Lenin, it was probably first developed by the Mexican intellectual Pablo Gonzales Casanova, who employed the term in his Democracy in Mexico to describe the relationship between the Mexican Government and the Indian population. In the United States it has since been used to characterize the status of virtually every minority. The charge is made that blacks, Mexican- Americans, Indians, and even women have been colonized. Virtually all culturally pluralistic societies— outside the socialist bloc—are now stigmatized as instances of internal colonialism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. eaay3761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shai Davidai ◽  
Martino Ongis

The tendency to see life as zero-sum exacerbates political conflicts. Six studies (N = 3223) examine the relationship between political ideology and zero-sum thinking: the belief that one party’s gains can only be obtained at the expense of another party’s losses. We find that both liberals and conservatives view life as zero-sum when it benefits them to do so. Whereas conservatives exhibit zero-sum thinking when the status quo is challenged, liberals do so when the status quo is being upheld. Consequently, conservatives view social inequalities—where the status quo is frequently challenged—as zero-sum, but liberals view economic inequalities—where the status quo has remained relatively unchallenged in past decades—as such. Overall, these findings suggest potentially important ideological differences in perceptions of conflict—differences that are likely to have implications for understanding political divides in the United States and the difficulty of reaching bipartisan legislation.


1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (S3) ◽  
pp. 91-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Cohen ◽  
Michael Hanagan

With the “forward march of labor halted”, and labor movements everywhere in retreat, T.H. Marshall's state-based emphasis on social welfare as “social right” has reminded those interested in reform that appeals to membership in a national community, the essence of citizenship, have served to rally groups to successful struggles for reform. Those aspects of Marshall's ideas, best summarized in his classic 1949 address, “Citizenship and Social Class”, with the greatest resonance for modern social theorists revolve around the relationship between citizenship, rights and markets. For Marshall, “the universal status of citizenship” was a plane of equality such that “all who possess the status (of citizenship) are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed”. Rights were embodied in a common culture and enforced by state power. Marshall believed that, gradually, one particular kind of rights, “social rights”, would come to limit the power of the market. While markets would continue to exist and to generate social inequality, government redistribution would increasingly expand the plane of equality to include the most important aspects of material and cultural life. The distinctive feature of these social rights according to Marshall is that they were not exemptions, privileges or paternalistic solicitude for those excluded from what he labels the “national community”, but social rights were benefits given to members of the community to encourage and facilitate their continued participation.


Author(s):  
O.D. Masloboeva

The article is devoted to the methodological aspect of the philosophy of the «Common cause» of the founder of Russian cosmism. First of all, the author reveals the historical prerequisites for the reflexivity of the projective nature of human activity, achieved through the synergy of the philosophical and scientific worldview, which is expressed in the paradigmatic functioning of culture. It is shown that as social practice became more complex, there was a deepening of awareness of human nature and its activities in the context of philosophical anthropology. The key moments in the development of human thought in the indicated direction are analyzed: Socratic and Kantian revolutions in culture. It is proved that N. F. Fedorov makes another revolution, removing the Kantian dualism of the subjective and objective and thus satisfying the urgent need to realize the attribution of the projective nature of human activity, which organically combines the theoretical and practical sides of social development. It is proved that at the same time Fedorov reproduces the Socratic revolution on a qualitatively new level, rooting after Socrates the moral regulation of «the sons of men « in the Foundation of being. The influence of Russian thought on the birth of the philosophy of «Common cause» is noted. The content of the Fedorov project is investigated: its subject and object, its goal in itself and the conditions for implementation. At the same time, the core of the theoretical justification of the project is revealed. It consists in the recognition of the transformation of the contemplative type of worldview into an active one, which leads to the formulation of the problem of freedom in the context of the relationship between subjective and objective factors in order to understand what depends and what does not depend on the subject of the project in realizing the goal. It is concluded that the theoretical depth and methodological validity of the Fedorov project consists in revealing the dialectics of the essence and phenomenon, i.e. in justifying the need to replace «the question of universal enrichment with the question of universal return of life». The goal of the comparative analysis of global projects is to reflexive the criterion of a truly philosophical project, which consists in the synergy of methodological optimality and worldview sense.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-249
Author(s):  
Rose Mary Hayden Lemmons ◽  

The crisis of democracy unfolding in the United States was identified by John Paul II as due to misunderstanding the relationship of truth and freedom. This crisis has grown worse due to a libertinism that sees objective moral truths as impositions on both free choice and fulfilling relationships, that identifies self-fulfillment with a self-creation in which one creates one’s own values, that seeks to build democracies apart from moral objectivity, and that dismisses the relevance of God for living well. I argue that democracy cannot survive these libertine errors and that they cannot be successfully countered by utilitarianism, Rawls’s political liberalism, or democratic proceduralism. Survival requires adopting the Thomistic personalism formulated by Aquinas and developed by Karol Wojtyła as indispensable for understanding those lived experiences through which one encounters the ethical moment of self-determination, achieves moral objectivity, avoids loneliness by loving truly, and seeks—via collaboration with women exercising their feminine genius for discerning the welfare of others—the common good, without which democracies collapse into atheistic tyranny.


Author(s):  
Bradley Curtis A

This chapter considers the status of treaties within the U.S. legal system. The focus is on international agreements concluded through the senatorial advice and consent process specified in Article II of the Constitution. The chapter describes that process, including the Senate’s ability to condition its consent through reservations and other qualifications. It also discusses the role of treaties as supreme law of the land, including the situations in which treaties will be considered “self-executing” and “non–self-executing,” as well as the later-in-time relationship of treaties to federal statutes. The chapter also discusses the relationship of treaties to constitutional limitations concerning the separation of powers and federalism, including the implications of the Supreme Court’s 1920 decision in Missouri v. Holland. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how the United States terminates treaties.


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