From Trance to Vertigo

2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-492
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Nunes

This article looks at Brazilian films from two periods—the late 1960s and the last three years—in order to compare the ways in which they elaborate two moments of defeat for the Left: the 1964 military coup against João Goulart and the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Its focus is not only the stories the films tell about these historical junctures but also the way they implicate or fail to implicate themselves and their audience in those stories; in other words, the depth of the self-scrutiny they propose and the incisiveness of their diagnosis of the Left. Paying special attention to Glauber Rocha’s 1967 Land Entranced and Petra Costa’s 2018 The Edge of Democracy, the author argues that the recent crop of documentaries tend to be much less critical than the films produced around 1968 and suggests some explanations for that. Among those is the way the memory of the struggle against the dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s is mobilized today with inverted signs, establishing dubious parallels between the two moments. Due to these critical deficits, these films risk hindering a collective working through of defeat by reinforcing an understanding of what counts as political “realism” that prevents a clear-eyed assessment of the recent past and limits the imagination of future possibilities.

Author(s):  
ILHAN NIAZ

AbstractThe present paper examines the growth of corruption in Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s with particular emphasis on the factors that influenced changes in the behavioural norms of the officer cadres or higher bureaucracy of Pakistan. The main argument is that during the 1960s increases in development spending and the manipulation of local governments by civil servants to help the Ayub Khan military regime secure legitimacy led to a substantial increase in the level of corruption. However, while the increase was alarming, the higher bureaucracy was still fairly clean and, given leadership, training and resources, in a position to contain the spread of corruption. In the 1970s the first Pakistan People's Party government enacted a number of reforms aimed at asserting political control over the civilian bureaucracy while pursuing a socialistic development model that justified nationalisation of industrial and commercial assets. These substantially undermined the ability of the higher bureaucracy to fight back against corruption while dramatically increasing state penetration of society and the economy, thus making opportunities for corruption more abundant. After General Zia-ul Haq's military coup in July 1977, the new regime, though it received plenty of good advice, was not interested in enhancing the autonomy and prestige of the services as that would diminish Zia's personal power over the state apparatus.


2015 ◽  
Vol 156 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-141
Author(s):  
Catharine Lumby

This article uses Frank Moorhouse as a study of the formation of a public intellectual in the 1960s and 1970s. Moorhouse was a key figure in the Sydney Push, a loose Libertarian-anarchist network of artists, writers, intellectuals and party people who rejected the dominant moral values of the 1950s and 1960s. A journalist, Moorhouse later became a well-known fiction writer who was part of a similarly bohemian and activist milieu centred in Sydney's Balmain. Taking Frank Moorhouse as a case study, I will argue that there is something particular about the way public intellectuals have historically been formed and given voice in Australian life, which is characterised by a permeability between art and writing practices and between academic and activist milieux.


Author(s):  
Andy Birtwistle

The chapter critically reappraises the work of the British experimental filmmaker John Smith, drawing on analyses of key films and interview material to explore his use of sound, music and voice. Smith’s films often engage self-reflexively with how sound creates or accepts meaning within an audiovisual context. Influenced by structural film practice of the 1960s and 1970s, and underpinned by a Brechtian concern with the politics of representation, Smith’s often humorous work both foregrounds and deconstructs the sound-image relations at work in dominant modes of cinematic representation. This analysis of Smith’s work identifies the political dynamic of the filmmaker’s use of sound, and addresses what is at stake—for both Smith and his audience—in the self-reflexive concern with audiovisual modes of representation. Examined within this context are Smith’s creative focus on the production of meaning and how this relates to aspects of musicality and abstraction in his work.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Feldman ◽  
Mark Gould

In a recent issue of this journal (Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 1990), Susan Sterett examined the role of the Law Commission in the development of English administrative law. She suggested that the Commission mimicked a “peak association” and adopted an “idiom of legalism” in order to justify its reform proposals. This comment disagrees with Sterett on three grounds. First, the role and constitutional position of the Commission is far more complex than Sterett suggests, and this affects the way in which the Commission works. Second, judges and academic lawyers were central to the reform of substantive principles of judicial review in the 1960s and 1970s, making it unnecessary for the Law Commission to act in this field. Finally, it is wrong to ignore the fact that much administrative law occurs outside the judicial review procedure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (25) ◽  
pp. 108-135
Author(s):  
Andrzej Kostołowski

The proposals of art by the internationally known: Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–1999) and Ewa Partum (b. 1945) have been emerging since the 1960s and 1970s as the successive steps driving through the shell of masculine domination in art. Owing to the power and coherence of the liberation endeavours, both artists have worked out their own forms of creativity. Through the individuality of feminine approaches they manifested in their statements some sort of model message, and at the same time a uniqueness in the way of using artistic means of expression. For the sculpturess and “performeress” Pinińska-Bereś entangled in the multi- level dualism of the patriarchal domination and neo-avant-guarde freedom, the method depended on showing psychoanalytically filtered depths through the veiled object allusions. For the relatively early emancipated and direct in her strong performances conceptual artist, Ewa Partum, the fusion of corporal presence with critical ideas was, and still is, important.


Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ermanno Malaspina ◽  
Jula Wildberger ◽  
Veronica Revello

The Stoic Seneca (b. c. 4 bce–d. 65 ce), mentor to Emperor Nero and one of the wealthiest men of his time, has been studied as the brilliant and enigmatic father of Silver Latin prose and, together with his nephew Lucan, as an outstanding representative of the rhetorical, gory baroque of 1st-century ce Latin poetry. The latter subject is covered in the parallel bibliography on Seneca’s tragedies; the present article is dedicated to Seneca as a philosopher. This very fact, that we now regard his philosophy as a research subject by itself, reflects a fundamental change in his reception. For a long time, the majority of scholars saw in Seneca a wielder of edifying words rather than a serious thinker, a moralizer and eclectic, who would not hesitate to mix disparate ingredients from competing schools into a hotchpotch of sparkling, sententious diatribe. At the beginning of the 20th century, those interested in philosophy mined his works for traces of his Greek models, the “real” philosophers whom they deemed worthy of study, in particular the Stoic Posidonius (b. c. 135–d. 51 bce). In the 1960s and 1970s, attention to Seneca himself increased significantly in anglophone scholarship. While Italian scholars have always insisted on an holistic approach, refusing to detach stylistic considerations from an analysis of conceptual content and never separating his political thought from his life as an active politician, scholars in Germany and France followed the lead of Paul Rabbow’s famous research on Seelenheilung (“psychotherapy”) and Seelenführung (“psychagogy”) and read Seneca as a spiritual guide. All these approaches continue to play an important role in international Seneca scholarship, but two recent tendencies deserve special attention. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s readings of Seneca as a representative of “the care of the self” in ancient philosophy, study of Senecan therapy and psychagogy has resulted in increasingly sophisticated explorations of what one might call his philosophy of authorship. What is more, considerable improvements in our understanding of Stoicism, Seneca’s professed school, have revealed his well-informed commitment to his predecessors. Against the more clearly defined backdrop of Hellenistic and Imperial Stoicism, it has also become easier to recognize and illustrate facets of Seneca’s originality, a work that is still ongoing or rather, one may dare say, has only just begun.


Author(s):  
Virginie Baudais

Since the independence of Niger in 1960, Nigerien armed forces have played a prominent role in the country’s history, either because of their recurrent “nonpolitical” interventions in the political arena or based on their involvement in the stabilization process of the Sahel and the fight against terrorism. Nigeriens have lived under civil, military, and authoritarian regimes, experienced four coups d’état (1974, 1996, 1999, and 2010), four political transitions, nine presidents, and have voted on seven constitutions. The Nigerien population lived under military rule for 23 out of 60 years following independence. Thus, Nigerien contemporary politics cannot be analyzed without a sound understanding of the Nigerien Army, how the institution became an “entrepreneur politique,” and how institutional, economic, and social factors may encourage the intervention of a nonpolitical institution in the political arena. Politics and the military are definitely connected in Niger. Each coup has had a different motive. The 1974 military coup is one of the many successful military seizures of power that occurred in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. This first “praetorian” intervention resulted from intramilitary and domestic factors and lasted 17 years under the rule of Seyni Kountché and his successor Ali Saibou. The second intervention in politics occurred in 1996 and also resulted from institutional factors and the inability of the newly elected authorities to overcome their divisions. The 1996 coup d’état was a classic case: a time-limited military intervention using violence to convert itself into a civilian regime. In 1999 the army overthrew a military regime, whereas in 2010 militaries put an end to the democratically elected president’s shift toward authoritarianism. In 2010, the shift in the security situation in the Sahel marked the armed forces’ return to strictly military functions, such as national defense and security and providing support for external operations. Consequently, the security situation in the Sahel strip deteriorated and the major economic and social challenges of the poorest country in the world were neglected. This has led to recurrent political and social tensions that reinforce the fact that addressing the basic needs of the people is as, important as Niger’s security policy.


Author(s):  
William Wootten

This chapter considers the attacks against Alvarez's extremism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles Tomlinson's ‘Against Extremity’, from his 1969 collection The Way of the World, was particularly outspoken and unpleasant, referring to how ‘That girl’ who nearly took her own life before writing a book. Roy Fisher, a late modernist poet also declared: ‘The poets are dying because they have been told to die’. The fiercest and most comprehensive sally came from a bright young Scottish academic named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who inveighed against: the suicide merchants who say in effect, ‘no one can become a great poet unless he has at least tried killing himself’. The chapter goes on to discuss the similarities between Sylvia Plath and Forrest-Thomson, as well as the latter's poetry.


Author(s):  
Elena Shtromberg

The history of exhibitions in Brazil during the 1960s and 1970s provides a key reference point for understanding how artistic vanguards and contemporary art unfolded in direct relationship to social and political contexts. The seminal exhibitions during these pivotal decades elucidate how the contemporary in Brazilian art stages and reframes conceptions of the “new” vis-à-vis the art object. The exhibitions in question trace the development of Ferreira Gullar’s não-objeto (non-object, 1959) and its path toward the idea-based artwork, an impulse that was prevalent throughout the 1960s in the United States and Europe as well. Inaugurated by the emergence of Brasília, Brazil’s new capital city in the formerly barren hinterlands of the state of Goiás, the 1960s witnessed a new model of artistic practice that pushed the boundaries between art and life, actively seeking out the participation of the viewer. This is most evidenced in the canonical work of artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. By the 1970s, challenges to the utopian undertakings from the previous decades had become imbricated with political activism, as artists and intellectuals alike pronounced a commitment to the quest for democracy after the military coup of 1964. The 1970s also witnessed heightened artistic engagement with new information and communication technologies, including the use of video equipment and computers. Constructing the history of Brazil’s contemporary art via the most important moments of its display will not only historically and politically contextualize some of the groundbreaking artists and artworks of these two decades, but also introduce readers to the challenges that these artworks posed to the more traditional methods of institutional display and the criteria used to interpret them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-221
Author(s):  
Malika Sh. Tovsultanova ◽  
Rustam A. Tovsultanov ◽  
Lilia N. Galimova

This is the first paper in Russian historiography dedicated to the struggle of left and right groups in the Turkish army on the eve of a military coup on March 12, 1971. By 1970, an alliance of leftist intellectuals and officers was formed, led by the editor of the Devrim newspaper, Dogan Avjioglu and one of the organizers of the 1960 coup, a retired lieutenant general Jemal Madanoglu, received the conditional name of the organization of national revolutionaries. The members of the organization sought to approve the socialist system of the bassist type in the country and outlined the number of military coups March 9, 1971. However, the death of one and the opportunist position of two other leaders of the military wing led to the failure of the attempt of a leftist coup. On the contrary, on March 12, 1971, a right-wing military coup took place in Turkey. In the course of subsequent repressions, a powerful blow was dealt to the left groups in the army and in Turkish society as a whole. In an effort to end the repression and achieve consensus in society, moderately leftist forces led by B. Ejevit entered into a coalition with their opponents religious conservatives led by N. Erbakan.


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