Hannah Arendt, antiracist rebellion, and the counterinsurgent logic of the social

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110092
Author(s):  
Will Kujala

Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern studies and the thought of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them.

Author(s):  
Suci Ramadhan

<p class="abstrak">The United States Constitution affirms that religious freedom is a fundamental human right regardless of religion. It is upheld by every citizen and the country. However, the political policies in a particular country are often considered to paralyze fundamental rights in religion, causing various problems in Muslim life at the social and political levels. This research aims to analyze the intersectional dynamic of religion, constitution, and Muslim human rights towards life and religious freedom in the United States. This qualitative research uses the lens of political approach. Primary data are taken from the United States Constitution and policies, and supported by secondary data from various books, scientific articles, and news. The results suggest that religious sentiment (Islam) is found in the political policies of the United States. Currently, unconstitutional and discriminative policies are gradually removed because it triggers the social and political chaos. The United States constitution strives towards a pluralist and multi-religious country rebuilding that is safe and peaceful for religion as guaranteed by the constitution. In fact, the public and political spaces have been occupied by many Muslims in an effort to resolve the problems of state and human rights, including the religious sentiment issues.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 117-129
Author(s):  
Diego Ernesto Parra Sánchez

Unlike countries like United Kingdom, France or The United States, Spain never had a remarkable tradition in the field of Crime Fiction. This lack of solid tradition was the consequence of different causes like censorship, a bad consideration at editorial level and the lack of a deep industrial revolution which brings the urban conflicts which make this type of literature emerge. With the arrival of the democratic Transition, these transformations took place and, as a consequence of this, Spanish Crime Fiction experiments and amazing development born, precisely, with the aim of building up a critical portrait over this political phenomenon and its most relevant milestones taking the hard boiled literary trend from the North American authors as model. Being this one the context reflected by the Juan Madrid´s noir trilogy on Transition, this article intends to display an approach to it and its role as an unbeatable platform to rise up a critical review of this period from three perspectives: the political, the social and economical and that in relation to the media.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro

This article analyzes critically the most recent scientific bibliography on the causes of the growth of mortality and morbidity in the white working class of the United States. The methodology used in these studies, and also the insufficient conceptualization of the variables used (such as social class), limits the understanding of the increment of the “diseases of despair” in that sector of the population. This article emphasizes the need to analyze the evolution of the social classes in the United States, and the political determinants that have changed not only the character and composition of that class, but also the power differentials between this class and other classes in the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-763
Author(s):  
Alexander Latham-Gambi

Abstract This article argues that the opposition between political and legal constitutionalism can be traced to a cleavage in what philosophers have called the ‘social imaginary’: the shared understandings that underpin social life. Since social imaginary understandings are by their nature nebulous and ill-defined, political and legal constitutionalism should not be thought of as competing theories or heuristic models, but—more abstractly—contrasting ways of imagining the political world. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, I argue that my claim is supported by the way in which legal constitutionalism embedded itself as the governing idea in the United States and in France, and also by the failure of the ‘new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism’ to yield a genuinely distinctive alternative to political and legal constitutionalism.


1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas N. Ingersoll

Slave law in early Louisiana is of great interest because it was shaped by three major European legal traditions under the rule of France (1699 to 1769), Spain (1769 to 1803), and the United States (after 1803). In this article, the types and origins of slave laws in early Louisiana and their application in the slave society of New Orleans is examined. Several different imperial, local, and mixed codes were ordained in the colony to govern relations between masters and slaves, and these laws reveal either the political strategies of imperial policymakers or the social tactics of slaveowners, but very little about actual slave treatment. The administration of justice in New Orleans was mostly determined by the planters: local needs and ideals prevailed when they conflicted with those represented by the crown's laws, and the courts rarely interfered with the authority of indivdual slaveowners over their chattels.


1906 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Rose

The Constitution of the United States as amended provides that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” These words are plain. Everybody understands them. They mean, and every one knows that they mean, that, from the constitutional point of view, one question relative to the suffrage is no longer open. That question is the very one about which I am asked to write. From the political point of view, from the historical point of view, from the social point of view, from the economic point of view, and from the ethical point of view, there is much to be said about negro suffrage. For centuries yet to come there may be much to be said. From the constitutional point of view, accurately defined, there has been nothing to say since March 30, 1870. On that day the Secretary of State of the United States proclaimed that the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified by the legislatures of twenty-nine out of the then thirty-seven States. The apparent assent of a number of these legislatures, perhaps, had not been a real assent. It might have been given under duress. Still, it had been given. The men who assumed to be the legislatures of other of these States may have had little moral and a very doubtful legal right to speak for them.


1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro

This presentation provides an alternative explanation of the present composition, nature, and functions of the health sector in the United States to those frequently given in sociological, economic, and medical care literature. These explanations usually maintain that the American health sector is a result of the value system of the assumedly middle class American society. In this presentation it is postulated that the present economic structure of the United States determines and maintains a social class structure, both outside and within the health sector, and that the different degrees of ownership, control, and influence that these classes have on the means of production, reproduction, and legitimization in the United States explain the composition, nature, and functions of the health sector. It is further postulated that the value system is not the cause, but a symptom, of these class controls and influences. The paper is divided into three sections. The first part provides a description of the class structure, which includes the corporate class, upper middle class, lower middle class, and working class, and it describes the mechanisms whereby this structure is maintained and replicated, both outside and within the health sector. The second section analyzes: (1) the production characteristics and social make-up of the three main sectors of the U. S. economy-the monopolistic, state, and competitive sectors-and it focuses especially on the monopolistic sector, which is assumed to be the dominant sector in the U. S. economy, with its needs determining to a large degree the functions of the social sectors, including those of the health sector; (2) the increasing dominance of the monopolistic sector in the health sector, by means of the financial institutions, which conflicts primarily with the providers' relative control of the financing of health services; and (3) the main conflict in the control of the reproductive (academic) and distributive (delivery) institutions which, it is postulated, is not, as is generally believed, between the providers and the so-called consumers, but rather between the corporate and upper middle classes (including the providers), who control those institutions, and the majority of the U.S. population, the lower middle and working classes, who do not control them. The third section analyzes the increasing importance of state intervention in determining the nature and outcome of the conflicts analyzed in the previous section. It is postulated in this section that, to understand both the nature and effects of state intervention, it is necessary to analyze the different degrees of control and/or influence that the social groups and classes defined in the first section have on the organs of the state, and primarily on the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. These different degrees of control and influence determine the main functions of state intervention, both outside and within the health sector, and these are postulated to be (1) the legitimization of the political system, and (2) the strengthening of mainly the system of private enterprise, in which the monopolistic sector is dominant.


1990 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-25 ◽  

The Society for Applied Anthropology invites nominations for the 1991 Malinowski Award. It is presented to an outstanding social scientist who has actively pursued the goal of solving human problems using the concepts and tools of social science in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies through social science. Each nomination should follow the criteria for selection as set forth by the SfAA. They are: 1. The nominees should be of senior status, widely recognized for their efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world through the use of social science. 2. The nominees should be strongly identified with the social sciences. They may be within the academy or outside of it, but their contributions should have implications beyond the immediate, the narrowly administrative, or the political. 3. The Awardee shall be willing and able to deliver an address at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. 4. The nominees should include individuals who reside or work outside of the United States.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-155
Author(s):  
Christine Zuni Cruz

This Article considers the decade, 2010 to 2019, in respect to indigenous peoples in the United States. The degree of invisibility of indigenous peoples, in spite of the existence of 574 federally recognized tribes with political status, is a central issue in major cases and events of the decade. Land and environment, social concerns, and collective identity are the three areas through which this Article considers the decade. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, endorsed in 2010, sets a measure for the nation-state’s engagement with indigenous peoples possessed of self-determination. The criticality of a new place in the American consciousness for the political status of indigenous peoples in the United States going forward is a feature of the decade.


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