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 Nostalgic Utopianism: The New Zealand Values Party’s 1972 Blueprint

Te Kaharoa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Moon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Material Progress

Although the manifestos or policies of most New Zealand political parties aspire to improve some aspect of the country, few have matched the Values Party’s 1972 Blueprint for the utopian form and extent of the changes it promised to being into effect. And unlike the policies of most other New Zealand political parties in the twentieth century, the Values Party proposed that material progress ought to be stopped at some point, echoing the notion of the stationary state which John Stuart Mill devised in 1848.   However, the Blueprint’s distinctly utopian orientation was not only necessarily subversive of the political status quo in the country, but simultaneously rejected the past and present in favour of a radically transformed future, while (seemingly paradoxically) drawing on a nostalgic interpretation of aspects of New Zealand’s colonial era as a thematic source of its utopian construct for the country. This article examines these dimensions of the Blueprint, and how the inherent flaws in practically all utopian movements similarly undermined the Values Party’s programme for a utopian New Zealand.

scholarly journals Theology of Revolution: In Ali Shari’ati and Walter Benjamin’s Political Thought

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 504
Author(s):  
Mina Khanlarzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Jewish

In this paper, I offer a comparative analysis of the political thoughts of twentieth century Iranian revolutionary thinker and sociologist Ali Shari’ati (1933–1977) and German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Despite their conspicuously independent historical-theoretical trajectories, both Shari’ati and Benjamin engaged with theology and Marxism to create theological–political conceptions of the revolution of the oppressed. Shari’ati re-interpreted and re-animated Shia history from the angle of contemporary concerns to theorize a revolution against all forms of domination. In comparison, Benjamin fused Marxism with Jewish theology in his call to seize the possibilities of past failed revolutions in the present. Both Shari’ati and Benjamin conceptualized an active messianism led by each generation, eliminating the wait for the return of a messiah. As a result, each present moment takes on a messianic potential; the present plays an essential role to both thinkers. Past was also essential to both, because theology (through remembrance) had made the past sufferings incomplete to them. Both thinkers viewed past sufferings as an integral part of present struggles for justice in the form of remembrance (or yād or zekr for Shari’ati, and Zekher for Benjamin). I explore the ways Shari’ati and Benjamin theorized the role of the past in the present, remembrance, and messianism to create a dialectical relation between theology and Marxism to reciprocally transform and compliment both of them.

scholarly journals Inheriting Marx Daniel Bensaïd, Ernst Bloch and the Discordance of Time

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-182
Author(s):  
Filippo Menozzi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
The Past

Abstract This essay traces a Marxist notion of cultural heritage drawing on the work of twentieth-century thinkers Daniel Bensaïd and Ernst Bloch. Both authors, indeed, address the act of inheriting as a way of rethinking Marxism beyond determinist and teleological concepts of history. In particular, Bensaïd’s 1995 Marx for Our Times and a 1972 essay on cultural heritage by Ernst Bloch reimagine the handing-on of cultural inheritance as the political reactivation of untimely and non-synchronous survivals of past social formations. For this reason, the heritage of Marx conveyed by these authors does not result in a nostalgic preservation of the past but in reviving unrealised possibilities of social transformation. In a comparative reading of Bensaïd and Bloch, the act of ‘inheriting Marx’ analysed in this essay hence formulates a de-commodifying conception of cultural heritage set against the violence of capital.

scholarly journals Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet's Geopolitical Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 227-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dibyesh Anand
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
The West ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
British Imperialist

The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibet's status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-à-vis China. Tibet's modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibet's status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative.

Imaginary Travels in Post- Socialist Mongolia

Inner Asia ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-164
Author(s):  
David Bade
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Orientation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Bernardo Carvalho

Until recently, when the Mongols have appeared in the world’s literature, they have usually appeared in the persons of chinggis Khaan or Khubilai, or as ‘Mongolian hordes’. Some recent writings are unlike earlier works of the twentieth century, regardless of the political orientation and situation of the writers. In this paper I examine three works published between 1992 and 2003 that exemplify radically different instances of that difference: Mongolski bedeker by Serbian novelist Svetislav Basara; Paměť mojí babičce by czech author Petra Hůlová; and Mongólia by the Brazilian writer Bernardo carvalho. With the certainties and stereotypes of the past discarded in these novels, contemporary Mongolia provides the setting for the authors’ encounters with the strangeness of the world at the turn of the millennium.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

scholarly journals Introduction

2003 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-359
Author(s):  
Touraj Atabaki ◽  
Marcel van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Central State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
Military Elite ◽  
Political Relationships

In its long history Iran has experienced many eventful moments. The past century was far from exceptional in this respect: the country was ravaged by three major wars (1914–1918, 1941–1945, 1980–1988) in which hundreds of thousands of people died; two coups (1921, 1953) transformed power relations within the political and military elite; and two revolutions (1905–1911, 1978–1979) led to radical changes in social, cultural, and political relationships. The country's appearance has changed completely since the end of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the population lived in tribal communities; by the end of the century the central state was omnipresent. The capital, Tehran, expanded from a city of around 100,000 inhabitants in 1890 to a metropolis of over ten million.

scholarly journals Crazy about Catherine: Representations of Catherine the Great in Contemporary Russian Cinema (Temptations of Power and Legitimation of the Present)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Prikazchikova
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emotional Culture ◽  
Russian Cinema ◽  
Female Audience

This article discusses the reasons for the increased interest in the figure of Catherine II in Russian cinema of the 2010s. These films recreate the principles of gynecocracy in the period of Catherine’s reign. The analysis of TV series Catherine (2014–2016) and The Great (2015) aims to answer the question about the ideological and psychological meaning of such ‘retrohistory’ and its connection with the political concerns of the present. This study also considers these series within the cinematographic tradition of the twentieth century and the context provided by the memoirs of the eighteenth century. The conclusion is made that contemporary Russian historical cinema has lost its escapist function as well as its interest in depicting the emotional culture of the Catherinian era. Cinematic representations of the past are thus characterized by the following features: use of the past to legitimize the present; aesthetic empathy; ‘Russification’ of the German princess as a source of Russian national pride; gender self- presentation and projection of certain psychological complexes on the representation of Catherine in order to enhance the film’s appeal to the female audience. Keywords: Catherine the Great, Russian cinema, gynecocracy, retrohistory, legitimation of the present, aesthetic empathy, gender self-presentation

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.

SCULPTING THE PAST IN PRECLASSIC MESOAMERICA: OLMEC STONE MONUMENTS AND THE PRODUCTION OF SOCIAL MEMORY

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-27
Author(s):  
Jillian Mollenhauer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Stone Monuments ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time

AbstractScholars encountering the monolithic sculptures of the Gulf lowland Olmec since the early twentieth century have frequently employed the term “monument” to describe these works. Often the word has been applied in reference to the formal qualities of the sculptures as well as to their antiquity. The function of monuments as sites of public remembering, however, has never been fully explored in relation to these works. This article discusses the evidence for, and implications of, viewing certain Olmec sculptures as public monuments intended to generate, transform, and erase the social memory of Olmec populations. Case studies of sculptural contexts suggest that such monuments were subject to diachronic transpositions and transformations in order to affect shifts in the collective memory over time. They remain as physical testaments to the maneuverings of Olmec elites within complex and ever-changing power relations that relied on the process of memory-making as part of the political stratagem.

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