Introduction: Literature and the State in Nancy Morejón

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Antonio López
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Nicolas Guillen

This essay introduces a special section on the Afro-Cuban poet and intellectual Nancy Morejón’s 1982 book Nación y mestizaje en Nicolás Guillén (Nation and Mestizaje in Nicolás Guillén). It sets up the contributors by surveying the literary and political trajectory of Morejón’s career in the years leading up to the publication of the book, focusing in part on her silencing by the Cuban state because of earlier activities centered on Afro-Cuban rights. The essay considers the themes and arguments of Nación y mestizaje, recognizing the surfaces, depths, and fissures of its actual and apparent doctrinaire lauding of Guillén as exemplar of Cuba’s cultural politics.

The resistible rise of Islamophobia

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Poynting ◽  
Victoria Mason
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Racial Hatred ◽  
Immigration And Settlement

This article compares the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Britain and Australia, from 1989 to 2001, as a foundation for assessing the extent to which the upsurge of Islamophobia after 11 September was a development of existing patterns of racism in these two countries. The respective histories of immigration and settlement by Muslim populations are outlined, along with the relevant immigration and ‘ethnic affairs’ policies and the resulting demographics. The article traces the ideologies of xenophobia that developed in Britain and Australia over this period. It records a transition from anti-Asian and anti-Arab racism to anti-Muslim racism, reflected in and responding to changes in the identities and cultural politics of the minority communities. It outlines instances of the racial and ethnic targeting by the state of the ethnic and religious minorities concerned, and postulates a causal relationship between this and the shifting patterns of acts of racial hatred, vilification and discrimination.

Introduction: Peace Movements in Southern Europe during the 1970s and 1980s

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942110149
Author(s):  
Martin Baumeister ◽  
Benjamin Ziemann
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Peace Movements

The introduction to this special section discusses the state of the art in recent historiography on peace movements during the 1970s and 1980s, and recent attempts to conceptualise Southern Europe as a geographical or political space.

scholarly journals The “Children of Crisis”: Making Sense of (Post)socialism and the End of Yugoslavia

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 500-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ljubica Spaskovska
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Special Section ◽  
The State ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Media ◽  
Conservative Values ◽  
Socialist Politics

This article is part of the special section titled The Genealogies of Memory, guest edited by Ferenc Laczó and Joanna Wawrzyniak The article traces certain mnemonic patterns in the ways individuals who belonged to the late-socialist Yugoslav youth elite articulated their values in the wake of Yugoslavia’s demise and the ways they make sense of the Yugoslav socialist past and their generational role a quarter of a century later. It detects narratives of loss, betrayed hopes, and a general disillusionment with politics and the state of post-socialist democracy that appear to be particularly frequent in the testimonies of the media and cultural elites. They convey a sense of discontent with the state of post-Yugoslav democracy and with the politicians—some belonging to the same generation—who embraced conservative values and a semi-authoritarian political culture. The article argues that an emerging new authoritarianism and the very process of progressive disillusionment with post-socialist politics allowed for the emergence and articulation of such alternative, noninstitutionalized individual memories that, whilst not uncritical of the Yugoslav past, tend to highlight its positive aspects.

scholarly journals The Cultural Politics of Ethnic Identity in Xishuangbanna, China: Tea and Rubber as “Cash Crops” and “Commodities”

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet C. Sturgeon
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Poverty Alleviation ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
The State ◽  
Income Levels ◽  
Cash Crops ◽  
Symbolic Value

In 2003, the poverty alleviation bureau in Xishuangbanna, China, introduced tea and rubber as cash crops to raise the incomes of ethnic-minority farmers who were thought to be backward and unfamiliar with markets. Using Marx's commodity fetish and Polly Hill's critique of “cash crops”, this paper analyses the cultural politics of ethnicity for Akha and Dai farmers in relation to tea and rubber. When the prefecture government introduces “cash crops”, the state retains its authority as the dispenser of knowledge, crops and modernity. When tea and rubber become commodities, however, some of the symbolic value of the commodity seems to stick to farmers, making rubber farmers “modern” and tea farmers “ethnic” in new ways. Through rising incomes and enhanced identities, Akha and Dai farmers unsettle stereotypes of themselves as “backward”. As a result of income levels matching those of urban middle-class residents, rubber farmers even challenge the prevalent social hierarchy.

scholarly journals The Sydney riots

Focaal ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2006 (47) ◽  
pp. 141-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Current Process

This article describes the recent Sydney riots and the commentary surrounding them. The author demonstrates how, through processes of ‘analytical et nic cleansing’, ‘ethnic homogenization and specification’, and ‘blame displacement’, the Lebanese Muslim community, a target of the initial rioters, came to be victimized in commentary on the riots. While the riots may not have been particularly significant in themselves, the commentary surrounding them provides an important window onto the state of cultural politics in Australia at a specific juncture in time when multi-culturalism is simultaneously hegemonic but subject to attack from Australia’s ruling federal political regime. The author claims, moreover, that the victimization of Lebanese Muslims is indicative of a particular current process in which a discourse of multi-culturalism, engendered largely by its liberal advocates and drawing on the scholarly works of anthropologists and other social scientists, is utilized to undermine multi-culturalism as a form of social policy and organization.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-229
Author(s):  
Sarah Ghabrial
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Race Difference ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Main Intervention

Abstract The main intervention of this special section is to identify and reposition race and colonial law as (conspicuously) absent referents in widely accepted genealogies of the state of exception—most notably, that of Giorgio Agamben—and to offer methodological pathways, based on historical and contemporary examples, of how colonial legal histories might be “written back” into this history. Collectively, these essays attempt to show how race thinking and exception each operate as the other's alibi: exception instantiating and substantiating race difference, and race difference justifying exception and ushering its expansion and normalization in steadily more realms of law and life. In so doing, this special section proposes at least three possible avenues of further inquiry, each of which builds on and into the other: First, by virtue of their geographic and temporal scope, these essays signal a way of approaching sovereignty and exception not as totalizing and synthetic, but rather as multivalent, recursive, and regenerative. Second, the designation of “partial personhood” or “disabled citizenship” is offered as a way of conceptually traversing trans-Mediterranean and trans-Atlantic historical experiences and legal traditions. Third, these essays signal the need for more sustained exploration at the nexus of law, labor, and violence.

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