Interrogating LeftTube: ContraPoints and the Possibilities of Critical Media Praxis on YouTube

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642095354
Author(s):  
Jessica Maddox ◽  
Brian Creech
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dialogic Relationships ◽  
Critical Media ◽  
Political Left

For the past several years, media commentary and cultural analysis has grown increasingly fixated on YouTube as a radicalization hub, particularly around extremist, alt-right content. However, a growing community of leftist YouTube content creators, loosely coalescing into the platform’s “LeftTube,” have developed dialogic relationships with some of YouTube’s most extreme content. This work focuses on one specific LeftTube creator, ContraPoints, to explore how those on the political left engage with YouTube’s cultural and technical affordances to challenge alt-right ideology. Through a textual analysis of ContraPoints’ top thirty videos, we identified three main discursive strategies: practicing deradicalization strategies on YouTube; establishing alt-right individuals as an intentional audience; and developing a language for escaping alt-right logics. ContraPoints, and her rightful critics, demonstrate how political subjectivities are created and contested within YouTube as both a technical and cultural space.

scholarly journals The Value of Work and the Future of the Left

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 137
Author(s):  
Campbell Jones
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Future Of Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
The Right

This paper arises from a request to report to the Future of Work Commission on the question of the value of work in the past, present, and future politics of the Left. This task is complicated, however, by the complexity of the meaning of the terms Left and Right. It is only when we are clear about the meanings of Left and Right that we can be clear about the very different kinds of politics that will result from taking a Left position on work. This paper seeks to clarify what a Left politics of work might look like today. This requires in the first place an analysis of the respective value of work to the political Left and Right, to which end I argue that what distinguishes the Left and the Right regarding the value of work is not simply the quantity of value or dignity that is attributed to work. Rather, Left and Right depart in a fundamental ontological confrontation regarding the nature of what work is and the existence of the bodies from which work issues. This analysis therefore raises deeper questions regarding the very distinction between the Left and the Right.  

scholarly journals Remaking The Making: E.P. Thompson’s Reception in Argentina and the Shaping of Labor Historiography

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Lucas Poy
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article traces the reception of E.P. Thompson’s work in Argentina over the past three decades. It explores the context in which Thompson was read by labor historians as a means to analyse the way in which the country’s labor historiography was shaped over this period. It argues that, in the 1980s and the 1990s, against a context characterized by a crisis of the political left and a downturn in the labor movement, Thompson’s appropriation was focused on his critique of Marxist “determinism”. While this corresponded to similar developments in other countries, Argentinian labor historiography started to show a different path in the early 2000s, when a tremendous social, political, and economic crisis shook the country. The article concludes that recent developments in labor historiography in Argentina show a different pattern to those seen in the “Global North”.

scholarly journals Modos de representación literaria de la zona gris. Una lectura de dos novelas chilenas

2018 ◽  
pp. 150-166
Author(s):  
Hans Lauge Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modal Approach ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Past ◽  
Augusto Pinochet ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Do So

Este artículo realiza una lectura de dos novelas chilenas, El desierto de Carlos Franz (2005) y La vida doble de Arturo Fontaine (2010). Ambas novelas aplican la perspectiva del victimario en la represión violenta de la izquierda política después del golpe de estado de Augusto Pinochet en 1973, pero de forma muy diferente. El artículo contextualiza las dos novelas en relación a un ‘giro victimario’ internacional y la subsiguiente desconstrucción de los patrones narrativos utilizados para representar un pasado violento, y propone un enfoque modal en el análisis comparativo de las dos novelas. El concepto de la "banalidad del mal" de Hannah Arendt y las dos diferentes versiones descritas por Maria Torgovnick, "Eichmann está en todos nosotros" y "todos podríamos ser Eichmann", se aplicarán para describir las diferentes formas con que las novelas conceptualizan y contextualizan las categorías morales.  This article engages with a comparative reading of two contemporary Chilean novels, El desierto by Carlos Franz (The desert, 2005) and La vida doble by Arturo Fontaine (The double life, 2010). Both novels include the perspective of a perpetrator in the violent suppression of the political Left following Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat in 1973, but they do so in very different ways. The article contextualizes the novels in relation to a broader, international ‘perpetrator turn’ and the subsequent deconstruction of hegemonic narrative templates used in the representation of the conflicts of the past, and proposes to apply a modal approach to the analysis of the differences between the novels. Hannah Arendt’s concept of the "banality of evil" and Maria Torgovnick’s interpretation of its different possible applications, "Eichmann is in all of us" and "Anyone could be Eichmann", are used to describe the different ways in which the two novels engage with moral categories and social contextualization of ‘evil’.

Discursive strategies of instrumentalizing history in mainstream Turkish political discourse

2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Can Küçükali
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
State Party ◽  
Content Type ◽  
People's Party ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
The Government

This article explores how specific narratives of the past can be functionalized/instrumentalized as discursive strategies in order to gain political power. To investigate this issue, four relevant governmental and non-governmental texts about the main opposition party in Turkey are analysed. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), which played a historic role by becoming a state party between 1923 and 1946, and which later adopted a social democratic position in the political system, has frequently been criticized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for its historical identity. The article illuminates how discursive strategies of argumentation, nomination and predication are used to portray the CHP as an enduring bureaucratic-militarist state party and the ways in which these strategies are functionalized by AKP politicians as well as by public intellectuals in favour of the government.

scholarly journals The ‘changing’ face of media discourses on poverty in the age of populism and anti-globalisation: The political appeal of anti-modernity and certainty in Brazil

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Jairo Lugo-Ocando
Keyword(s):  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
News Media ◽  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Global South ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
Political Right

This article analyses how the political right in parts of the Global South has appropriate agendas and issues that in the past were often associated to the political left and presented them instead as their own. It does so by articulating narratives around poverty and social exclusion in the context of anti-globalisation and nationalistic discursive regimes that appeal to popular ‘common sense’. The piece explores this argument by examining the case of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Reviewing a sample of Brazilian news media outlets and the type of messages in relation to poverty during the most recent presidential elections, it is suggested that by linking themes of social exclusion with nationalism in the news media, the political right has been able to explain poverty by means of increasing globalisation and liberalism and co-opt this agenda.

Born in Translation

boundary 2 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-152
Author(s):  
Arif Dirlik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Idea

Around the turn of the twentieth century, late Qing (1644–1911) thinkers settled on an ancient term, Zhongguo, as an appropriate name for the nation-form to supplant the empire that had run its course. The renaming was directly inspired by the “Western” idea of “China,” which had no equivalent in native geopolitical conceptions of the area so designated and “mis-recognized” its historical political configurations. The renaming called for radical re-signification of the idea of Zhongguo, the political and cultural space it presupposed, and the identification it demanded of its constituencies. Crucial to its realization was the reimagination of the past and the present’s relationship to it. This essay explores the reasons late Qing intellectuals felt it necessary to rename the country, the inspiration they drew upon, and the spatial and temporal presuppositions of the new idea of China/Zhongguo. Their reasoning reveals the modern origins of historical claims that nationalist and Orientalist historiography has endowed with timeless longevity.

scholarly journals Controlling Celtic Pasts: the production of nationalism in popular British archaeology of Celtic peoples

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-34
Author(s):  
Nicholas Christopher Cole Healey
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Audience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Archaeological Knowledge

A textual analysis of four widely distributed books addressing Celtic peoples and intended for a general audience by prominent British archaeologists was conducted to examine how these materials enable the imagination of nations into the past. The analysed texts are argued to variously enable and inhibit differing forms of British Unionist, Celtic and European integrationist nationalisms by alternately projecting Celtic identities into the primordial past or erasing Celtic histories. This research calls attention to the need for archaeologists to engage with the political ramifications of their work and provides a basis for future research examining the contexts of archaeological knowledge production and consumption in their relationship to nationalism.

Nation, Locality and Radical Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Political Left ◽  
National Model ◽  
Selection Of

Concentrating upon the years between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, which separated the first and second minority Labour governments, this chapter traces the rise of a modernised, national vision of Labour politics in Scotland. It considers first the reworking of understandings of sovereignty within the Labour movement, as the autonomy enjoyed by provincial trades councils was circumscribed, and notions of Labour as a confederation of working-class bodies, which could in places include the Communist Party, were replaced by a more hierarchical, national model. The electoral consequences of this shift are then considered, as greater central control was exercised over the selection of parliamentary candidates and the conduct of election campaigns. This chapter presents a study of the changing horizons of the political left in inter-war Scotland, analysing the declining importance of locality in the construction of radical political identities.

The Political Economy of Local Governance in Yemen

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Benoit Challand ◽  
Joshua Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Local Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Strong State ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Local Initiatives ◽  
Self Rule

This paper provides an historical exploration of local governance in Yemen across the past sixty years. It highlights the presence of a strong tradition of local self-rule, self-help, and participation “from below” as well as the presence of a rival, official, political culture upheld by central elites that celebrates centralization and the strong state. Shifts in the predominance of one or the other tendency have coincided with shifts in the political economy of the Yemeni state(s). When it favored the local, central rulers were compelled to give space to local initiatives and Yemen experienced moments of political participation and local development.

PRACTICAL BASE OF FORMULATING RETRAINING PROGRAMS ON ETHNIC MINORITY AFFAIRS KNOWLEDGE FOR CADRES, CIVIL SERVANTS UP TO 2030

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nguyen Van Dung ◽  
Giang Khac Binh
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Training Program ◽  
Political System ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Training Programs ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
The Political ◽  
Target Groups ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past

As developing programs is the core in fostering knowledge on ethnic work for cadres and civil servants under Decision No. 402/QD-TTg dated 14/3/2016 of the Prime Minister, it is urgent to build training program on ethnic minority affairs for 04 target groups in the political system from central to local by 2020 with a vision to 2030. The article highlighted basic issues of practical basis to design training program of ethnic minority affairs in the past years; suggested solutions to build the training programs in integration and globalization period.

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