Laughing at power: Humor, transgression, and the politics of refusal in Palestine

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Lisa Bhungalia
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Productive Work ◽  
The Face ◽  
New Space ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the political and productive work of humor under conditions of precarity, war, and occupation. Drawing on the case of Palestine but making links to other contexts of violence and war, it explores the transgressive power of humor to destabilize existing power relations and established hierarchies by calling into question the norms and “rationalities” that underpin our social world. Palestine’s laughter in particular, it contends, constitutes a mode and practice of refusal to normalize conditions of subjugation. Accordingly, this article explores how humor, as wielded on the part of subjugated populations, constitutes a different kind of political grammar that cannot be adequately captured by the language of resistance. To laugh in the face of power is not to say: “I oppose you”—rather it is to assert: “your power has no authority over me.” It is to refuse that power authorizing force. As such, this article maintains that closer inspection of the relationship between humor, laughter, and power carves out new space for a working theory of the political, one wherein power is not opposed but disavowed. This disavowal, I argue, is also productive: it is to assert that other political orders and possibilities exist.

scholarly journals Resituating the political in cultural intermediary work: Charity sector public relations and communication

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199423
Author(s):  
Anne M Cronin ◽  
Lee Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.

scholarly journals Exploring ambivalent oxygen machine–people–world relations through the lens of postphenomenology

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Oxygen Therapy ◽  
Heart Diseases ◽  
Health Technology ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
The Political ◽  
Philosophical Approach ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

Technologies for medicinal oxygen delivery at home are increasingly part of the global health technology landscape in the face of rising rates of chronic lung and heart diseases. From the mere notion of harvesting and privatizing oxygen from the atmosphere to its status as both dangerous and therapeutic, and finally to its capacity to both extend and limit life, oxygen as therapy materializes its status as an ambivalent object in global health. This analysis of ethnographic material from Uruguay and South Africa on the experience of home oxygen therapy is guided by philosopher Don Ihde’s postphenomenology – a pragmatic philosophical approach for analysing the relationships between humans and technologies. Participants related to their oxygen devices as limiting-enablers, as markers of illness and measures of recovery, and as precious and limited resources. Oxygen was materialized in many forms, each with their own characteristics shaping the ‘amplification/reduction’ character of the relationship as well as the degree to which the devices became ‘transparent’ to their users. Ihde’s four types of human–technology relations – embodiment, hermeneutic, alterity and background relations – are at play in the multistability of oxygen. Importantly, the lack of technological ‘transparency’, in Ihde’s sense of the term, reflects not only the materiality of oxygen but inequality too. While postphenomenology adds a productive material and technological flavour to phenomenology, the author argues that a critical postphenomenology is needed to engage with the political-economy of human–oxygen technology relations.

Strategy and the Surge

The Last Card ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 296-313
Author(s):  
Joshua Rovner
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Military Action ◽  
Strategic Effect ◽  
Practical Strategy ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Subsequent Rise

This chapter studies the relationship between strategy and the surge. Strategy is the bridge that links military operations and political objectives in war. A practical strategy describes those objectives and explains how military action will achieve them. The chapter disputes the idea that the surge constituted a new US strategy in Iraq. Instead, it can be considered as a “decision to put strategy on hold.” The surge, the chapter argues, encouraged a perverse strategic effect—by obscuring the political objectives of the war, it undercut efforts to forge competent and self-reliant governance in Iraq and contributed to the breakdown of the Iraqi state in the face of the subsequent rise of the Islamic State.

Readership and Readers

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Tom O’Malley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Newspaper Industry ◽  
Industry Research ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines aspects of the relationship between newspapers and their readers in the twentieth century. It explores the ways the newspaper industry understood its readers and how readers responded to newspapers. It discusses patterns of circulation; the effect of industry research on the content of newspapers; the demographics of readership; what readers read, and the nature of their engagement and the question of the effects of the content. It argues that if historians are to grasp the roles newspapers played in the political, cultural and social world of the twentieth century, we need to pay far more attention to their readers.  

“We are all republicans”: Political Articulation and the Production of Nationhood in France's Face Veil Debate

2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 938-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Laxer
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
The Face ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractIn July 2010, following a year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling, the French government passed a law prohibiting facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This article takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for articulating, rather than merely reflecting, social identities, I argue that the 2010 ban arose in significant part out of political parties’ struggles to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate politics in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, I show that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the consensus thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It conceals ongoing conflict, both between and within political parties, over the precise meaning(s) of French republican nationhood. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary-drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood in contexts of immigrant diversity.

The Prudent Dissident: Unheroic Resistance in Sophocles'Antigone

2011 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennet Kirkpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractMost contemporary political theorists who have interpreted Sophocles'Antigonehave focused on the fearsome clash between Antigone and Creon. The relationship between Antigone and her weaker, more cautious sister Ismene has not garnered similar attention. This essay addresses this gap by revisiting the tantalizing possibility that Ismene played a more significant role in resisting Creon than has often been assumed. The essay shifts the analysis ofAntigone, first, by illuminating the complex and fraught relationship between two women and emphasizing the political and legal challenges that they face together as women. Second, the essay shifts focus from vertical power relations—that is, between the individual and government—to horizontal power relations between disempowered outsiders. On this reading,Antigonereveals less about the downfall of a character than it does about the political power of the weak and disadvantaged.

scholarly journals ISLAMISTER OG KLUBLIV I GAZASTRIBEN

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Irving Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Gaza Strip ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modem World ◽  
Sport Activities ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Gaza Strip ◽  
The Relationship

Michael Irving Jensen: Islamists and Club Milieu in the Gaza Strip The article deals with Islamic social institutions in the Gaza Strip. The author considers these institutions as being part of Palestinian civil society. However, the bulk of the article is focused on one aspect of the work that the Islamic social institutions carry out; namely sport activities. The article is based on qualitative interviews, carried out by the author, with young men playing football in an Islamic club (ciosely related to the Hamas movement). Among the questions raised are: Why do young men choose to play football in an Islamic club? What are their perceptions of the political situation in the Gaza Strip? How do they view the relationship between Islam and politics in general? The interviews reveal - not unsurprisingly - that the young Islamists playing football do not equal the stereotype of an Islamist, i.e. a young fanatic with long beard and a wild look in the face. On the contrary, they are young men willing and able to cope with the modem world. From the interviews it is evident that high moral standards, more than anything else, attract these young men. Although further empirical work needs to be done, one could conclude tentatively that a good Islamist can play club football three times a week.

scholarly journals Semantics of Saudi Political Discourse: A Significations Study of Prince Saud Al-Faicel Speeches

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (14) ◽  
pp. 245-273
Author(s):  
د. عبد اللطيف السلمي د. عبد اللطيف السلمي
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Textual Approach ◽  
Language And Politics ◽  
Political Model ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Rhetorical Tools

the present study p urports to shed light on the problematics of the relationship between language and politics in general and on the semiotic formulation, in particular, of Prince Saud Al-Faicel political discourse. It attempts to explain how this discourse succeeded to formulate a political model capable, thanks to its argumentative and rhetorical tools, to decode or unlock regional crises and international transformations in order to make historical decisions. Such problematics reflect our particular perception of political discourse in its relationship with textual linguistics, along with the powerful semiotic discursive strategies and practices ever present in the analysis and interpretation of the political discourse of Prince Saud Al-Faicel. The Present study relied on an analytic frame following Norman Fairclough's model and other semiotic studies structured around lexicon and language construction. It also paid attention to analyzing the intricacies characterizing relations and strategies within power relations. The originality of the present study can be seen in its combination of the textual approach with the analytical one when dealing with political discourse.

The History of Muslims and Christians in Papua: Tracing Cultural and Religious Heritage

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-106
Author(s):  
Cahyo Pamungkas
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Sociology Department ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Agents ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The Relationship

This is article derived from a thesis study in the Sociology Department of the University of Indonesia in 2008 exploring socio-economic, socio-political and socio-cultural contexts playing their roles in the formation of the political and religious fields along with their respective ‘habitus’ of the social agents in the Papua land. This paper discusses the history of the term “papua” itself based on a historical study conducted by Solewijn Gelpke (1993). Based on historical approach, the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Papua can be traced as a religious and cultural heritage. Also, by using a sociological conception elaborated by Bourdieu (1992: 9), we may view the Papua land as a social space encompassing all conceptions of the social world. Bourdieu’s social space conception considers the social reality as a topology (Harker, 1990).

The Strength of Weak Review: National Courts, Interpretive Canons, and Human Rights Treaties

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yonatan Lupu ◽  
Pierre-Hugues Verdier ◽  
Mila Versteeg
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Direct Effect ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Courts ◽  
Human Rights Treaties ◽  
The Face ◽  
Legal Constraints ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

Abstract Enforcement of international law is often delegated to national courts, creating a space for them to play a part in international judicialization. Under what conditions can they do so? We argue that the answer depends on the relationship between the political and legal constraints national courts face. National courts must be careful to safeguard their independence in the face of potential backlash, but they face constraints in terms of the legal mechanisms available to them when enforcing international law. We focus on the availability of two legal mechanisms: direct effect, under which courts apply treaties directly, setting aside inconsistent domestic laws; and canons of interpretation, under which courts strive to interpret domestic laws in conformity with treaties. We find that the effects of human rights treaty ratification is greater when courts have the canon available to them than it is when courts have direct effect available to them.

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