The Americanisation of C. L. R. James

Race & Class ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Global Impact ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive

The writings of the Black Marxist-Leninist thinker and activist C. L. R. James are now widely known and studied, although most of his long career was passed in obscurity. His two most influential books, The Black Jacobins (1938) and Beyond a Boundary (1963) now have a global impact. But his work did not begin to receive wide recognition until the 1980s and 1990s. And it is the nature of that recognition, and the ends to which his work has been put in the US academy, that this article explores. In critiquing a wide range of influential theoretical approaches to James’ work, the author relates current interpretations of it to the wider political and cultural climate engendered by neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the individual not as a historical agent, but as primarily concerned with self-fashioning and cultural identity. In the process, the article demonstrates how the political activist thrust of James’ analyses and work, and its concerns with imperialism and resistance, has been set aside as part of the corporate world’s continuing appropriation of the ‘alternative and adversarial culture of the 1960s’.

Punk as Folk: Continuities and Tensions in the UK and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Dale
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Collective Creativity ◽  
Living Tradition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

Numerous claims have been made by a wide range of commentators that punk is somehow “a folk music” of some kind. Doubtless there are several continuities. Indeed, both tend to encourage amateur music-making, both often have affiliations with the Left, and both emerge at least partly from a collective/anti-competitive approach to music-making. However, there are also significant tensions between punk and folk as ideas/ideals and as applied in practice. Most obviously, punk makes claims to a “year zero” creativity (despite inevitably offering re-presentation of at least some existing elements in every instance), whereas folk music is supposed to carry forward a tradition (which, thankfully, is more recognized in recent decades as a subject-to-change “living tradition” than was the case in folk’s more purist periods). Politically, meanwhile, postwar folk has tended more toward a socialist and/or Marxist orientation, both in the US and UK, whereas punk has at least rhetorically claimed to be in favor of “anarchy” (in the UK, in particular). Collective creativity and competitive tendencies also differ between the two (perceived) genre areas. Although the folk scene’s “floor singer” tradition offers a dispersal of expressive opportunity comparable in some ways to the “anyone can do it” idea that gets associated with punk, the creative expectation of the individual within the group differs between the two. Punk has some similarities to folk, then, but there are tensions, too, and these are well worth examining if one is serious about testing out the common claim, in both folk and punk, that “anyone can do it.”

Governing the noisy sphere: Geographies of noise regulation in the US

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-556
Author(s):  
Key MacFarlane
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
The Body ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Legal Perspective ◽  
The Us ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
To Receive

Over the last 10 years there has been considerable growth in the range of geographical work on sound, particularly on how sound shapes everyday life. One area that is beginning to receive attention is how noise is formalized in law and policy. This paper contributes to that literature by developing a geographic theory of modern noise regulation. Two policies are examined: the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Noise Control Act of 1972 and Seattle’s Noise Ordinance of 1977. Combining Foucauldian and Marxian frameworks, I argue that these documents trace a biopolitics of “sensible citizenship” that emerges within, as a means of managing, a changing regime of capitalist accumulation, as global attention began to shift from production to the “noisy sphere” of exchange in the 1960s and 1970s. Noise, I claim here, has come to physically embody capitalism’s inner contradictions—between needing to promote commercial activities and needing to control the noisy externalities those activities create. Such an analysis addresses recent calls for a more historically and materially grounded approach to the study of sound in human geography, while also adding a critical legal perspective to recent debates on the relations between citizenship, the body, and governance.

United States Relations with Southern Rhodesia during the UDI Era

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddie Michel
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
White House ◽  
Unilateral Declaration ◽  
The Us ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) era, a 14-year period from 1965 to 1979, posed an exceptional and challenging policy dilemma for four separate US presidential administrations. Presidents’ Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter were all confronted by the presence of the internationally unrecognized pariah state in southern Africa. The shifting patterns in the US approach toward Salisbury ranging from empathy to open hostility were reflective not only of the individual viewpoints of the occupants of the Oval Office but represented the larger diverse pressures, global and domestic, shaping foreign policy during the 1960s and 1970s. The Cold War, economic interest, the need for strategic minerals, race relations, and human rights all guided White House decision making regarding Salisbury. Across the presidential administrations, the case of Rhodesia, further exposes the tension and interaction between pragmatism and morality in US foreign relations during the 1960s and 1970s. The US approach toward the UDI state not only reveals broad patterns of conflict between realpolitik and moral justice but also depicts times when pragmatism and ethical considerations aligned together to achieve mutually compatible goals. The differing polices adopted by the occupants of the Oval Office demonstrated the competing visions within Washington itself of what constituted pragmatism or morality during the decolonization era.

Latino Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elda María Román
Keyword(s):  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Central Americans ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Latino Literature ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Cuban Americans ◽  
South Americans ◽  
Activist Movements

Latina/o literature can be understood both in terms of its historical emergence and development as well as its engagement with and representation of history. The formation of a canon called Latina/o literature is a contemporary phenomenon. Institutions that have published, disseminated, and shaped this literature into a discernible entity emerged in the 1970s as extensions of political activist movements. In the 1990s, the establishment of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project also made possible the recuperation and publication of literature written before the 1960s. Studies of Latina/o literature now explore texts dating back to the 16th century, include 19th-century exile and dissident writing, and trace the evolution of Latina/o literature through the 20th and 21st centuries. While most writing and scholarship has been produced about Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans, literature by Dominican Americans, U.S. Central Americans, and U.S. South Americans is increasingly gaining visibility. Since the mid-20th century, most Latina/o literature has been written in English, though many writers incorporate Spanish or Spanglish. This tradition now spans a wide range of themes, experiences, and genres.

scholarly journals Airborne observations of total RONO<sub>2</sub>: new constraints on the yield and lifetime of isoprene nitrates

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 1451-1463 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. E. Perring ◽  
T. H. Bertram ◽  
P. J. Wooldridge ◽  
A. Fried ◽  
B. G. Heikes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Organic Nitrate ◽  
Radical Chain ◽  
Major Pathway ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Peroxy Nitrates ◽  
The Us ◽  
Isoprene Nitrates ◽  
Isoprene Oxidation ◽  
The Individual

Abstract. Formation of isoprene nitrates (INs) is an important free radical chain termination step ending production of ozone and possibly affecting formation of secondary organic aerosol. Isoprene nitrates also represent a potentially large, unmeasured contribution to OH reactivity and are a major pathway for the removal of nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere. Current assessments indicate that formation rates of isoprene nitrates are uncertain to a factor of 2–3 and the subsequent fate of isoprene nitrates remains largely unconstrained by laboratory, field or modeling studies. Measurements of total alkyl and multifunctional nitrates (ΣANs), NO2, total peroxy nitrates (ΣPNs), HNO3, CH2O, isoprene and other VOC were obtained from the NASA DC-8 aircraft during summer 2004 over the continental US during the INTEX-NA campaign. These observations represent the first characterization of ΣANs over a wide range of land surface types and in the lower free troposphere. ΣANs were a significant, 12–20%, fraction of NOy throughout the experimental domain and ΣANs were more abundant when isoprene was high. We use the observed hydrocarbon species to calculate the relative contributions of ΣAN precursors to their production. These calculations indicate that isoprene represents at least three quarters of the ΣAN source in the summertime continental boundary layer of the US. An observed correlation between ΣANs and CH2O is used to place constraints on nitrate yields from isoprene oxidation, atmospheric lifetimes of the resulting nitrates and recycling efficiencies of nitrates during subsequent oxidation. We find reasonable fits to the data using sets of production rates, lifetimes and recycling efficiencies of INs as follows (4.4%, 16 h, 97%), (8%, 2.5 h, 79%) and (12%, 95 min, 67%). The analysis indicates that the lifetime of ΣANs as a pool of compounds is considerably longer than the lifetime of the individual isoprene nitrates to reaction with OH, implying that the organic nitrate functionality is at least partially maintained through a second oxidation cycle.

scholarly journals Personal Experiences in Post-Shoah Greece: The Case of Isaak Menahem Rousso

HISTOREIN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Droumpouki
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Process ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Jewish Survivors

In December 1971, twelve years after his first letter to the West German government, 73-year-old Isaak Menahem Rousso exclaimed: “I ask you, what did I do to you for you to destroy my wealth, my shops? You killed my parents, and now you want to pay me a pittance”? The article focuses on the individual struggle of a Jewish survivor to receive compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany, as can be traced in the personal archive of Isaak Menahem Rousso. It examines the numerous letters he sent to German officials during the 1960s and 1970s, documents and contextualises his feelings of despair, fear and anger, and elucidates upon them. These feelings are typical for the Greek Jewish survivors that sought compensation. Survivors complained that the claims evaluation process constituted an unpleasant and inhumane experience. Many found it very difficult to return to the past and remember their suffering, as some of them already felt guilt or shame for having survived, not to mention the pain that reliving these traumatic experiences incurred. Many victims suffered from post-traumatic disorders and it was not easy to revive these experiences. Through Isaak Menahems’ story, I want to explore the survivors’ feelings in their search for recognition and compensation.

“A Home for Poets”: The Liberal Curriculum in Victorian Britain's Teachers' Training Colleges

2014 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Robert Bischof
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Original Thinking ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Teachers Training ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Pedagogical Learning

In the 1850s, at St. Mark's training college in Chelsea, London, ten students regularly violated the “lights out” rule in the evening at the end of long, exhausting days. Desirous of increasing their culture and general knowledge, they gave over half an hour every evening before sleep to what they styled, after the working-class clubs of the same name, “a mutual improvement society” in which they took turns giving lectures on a wide range of topics. They were not alone: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, teachers-in-training across Britain supplemented their already daunting workload by writing poetry, reading novels, discussing Shakespeare, and holding debates about pressing social and political questions. From the perspective of many Victorian observers and historians today, this anecdote is an anomaly, an aberration that carries little weight in telling the story of the training colleges in which the majority of teachers in Victorian Britain eventually came to receive an education. For them, training colleges were the sites of rote memorization and pedagogical learning. Though some educationalists called for a more liberal curriculum for teachers, according to this view, teachers' education only began to emphasize expansive reading, original thinking, the cultivation of the individual, and general curiosity beginning in the 1890s with the rise of day training colleges affiliated with universities.

scholarly journals Airborne observations of total RONO<sub>2</sub>: new constraints on the yield and lifetime of isoprene nitrates

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 12313-12341 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. E. Perring ◽  
T. H. Bertram ◽  
P. J. Wooldridge ◽  
A. Fried ◽  
B. G. Heikes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Surface ◽  
Organic Nitrate ◽  
Radical Chain ◽  
Major Pathway ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Peroxy Nitrates ◽  
The Us ◽  
Isoprene Nitrates ◽  
Isoprene Oxidation ◽  
The Individual

Abstract. Formation of isoprene nitrates (INs) is an important free radical chain termination step ending production of ozone and possibly affecting formation of secondary organic aerosol. Isoprene nitrates also represent a large, unmeasured contribution to OH reactivity and are a major pathway for the removal of nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere. Current assessments indicate that formation rates of isoprene nitrates are uncertain to a factor of 2–3 and the subsequent fate of isoprene nitrates remains largely unconstrained by laboratory, field or modeling studies. Measurements of total alkyl and multifunction nitrates (ΣANs), NO2, total peroxy nitrates (ΣPNs), HNO3, H2CO, isoprene and other VOC were obtained from the NASA DC-8 aircraft during summer 2004 over the continental US during the INTEX-NA campaign. These observations represent the first characterization of ΣANs over a wide range of land surface types and in the free troposphere. ΣANs were a significant, 12–20%, fraction of NOy throughout the experimental domain and ΣANs were more abundant when isoprene was high. We use the observed VOC to calculate the relative contributions of ΣAN precursors to their production. These calculations indicate that isoprene represents at least 76% of the ΣAN source in the summertime continental boundary layer of the US. An observed correlation between ΣANs and CH2O is used to place constraints on nitrate yields from isoprene oxidation, atmospheric lifetimes of the resulting nitrates and recycling efficiencies of nitrates during subsequent oxidation. We recommend sets of production rates, lifetimes and recycling efficiencies of INs as follows [4.4%, 5 h, 92%], [8%, 2.5 h, 84%] and [12%, 90 min, 74%]. The analysis indicates that the lifetime of ΣANs as a pool of compounds is considerably longer than the lifetime of the individual isoprene nitrates to reaction with OH, implying that the organic nitrate functionality is at least partially maintained through a second oxidation cycle.

Short Films from a Small Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Public Information ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art And Architecture

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.

Small talk as work talk: Enacting the patient-centered approach in nurse-practitioner-patient visits

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staci Defibaugh
Keyword(s):  
Nurse Practitioners ◽  
Nurse Practitioner ◽  
Medical Visit ◽  
Patient Centered ◽  
Small Talk ◽  
Medical Visits ◽  
Relational Work ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Patient Relationships

Small talk in medical visits has received ample attention; however, small talk that occurs at the close of a medical visit has not been explored. Small talk, with its focus on relational work, is an important aspect of medical care, particularly so considering the current focus in the US on the patient-centered approach and the desire to construct positive provider– patient relationships, which have been shown to contribute to higher patient satisfaction and better health outcomes. Therefore, even small talk that is unrelated to the transactional aspect of the medical visit in fact serves an important function. In this article, I analyze small talk exchanges between nurse practitioners (NPs) and their patients which occur after the transactional work of the visit is completed. I focus on two exchanges which highlight different interactional goals. I argue that these examples illustrate a willingness on the part of all participants to extend the visit solely for the purpose of constructing positive provider–patient relationships. Furthermore, because exchanges occur after the ‘work’ of the visit has been completed, they have the potential to construct positive relationships that extend beyond the individual visit.

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