A Brave New World?: Reproductive Politics from the Past to the Present

Author(s):  
Susan Markens
Author(s):  
Don D. Fowler

Nation states, or partisans thereof, control and allocate symbolic resources as one means of legitimizing power and authority, and in pursuit of their perceived nationalistic goals and ideologies. A major symbolic resource is the past. In this chapter I review three cases in which the past and, in particular, relevant archaeological resources were ‘used’ for such purposes, and I refer to several other well-known instances. The three cases discussed are Mexico from c.AD 900 to the present, Britain from c.AD 1500 to the present, and the People’s Republic of China since 1949. The implications of such uses in relation to archaeological theories and interpretations are discussed. In The Uses of the Past, Herbert Müller (1952) sought for ‘certainty of meaning’ in an analysis of the development of Western civilization. The only certainty he found was that the past has many uses. This chapter is concerned with some specific uses of the past: (1) how nation state rulers and bureaucrats have manipulated the past for nationalist purposes, both ideological and chauvinistic, and to legitimize their authority and power; (2) how nation states have used archaeological sites, artefacts, and theories for such purposes; (3) how these uses of the past relate to more general questions about the intellectual and socio-political contexts in which archaeology is conducted. The importance to the state of using or manipulating its past is neatly delineated in two great dystopian novels, George Orwell’s (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World. In the former, the Ministry of Truth totally revamps the past as needed to justify and lend ‘truth’ to the immediate requirements, actions, and policies of the state. In the latter, the past is blotted out. As the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, Mustafa Mond tells the Savage, ‘we haven’t any use for old things here’ (Huxley 1932: 200). In both cases, control and manipulation of the past or its complete denial is critical to state ideology and purposes.


1955 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-30
Author(s):  
Henry Grattan Doyle

A POPULAR RADIO SERIES a dozen years ago, dealing broadly with the important area that is the subject of my talk tonight, was called (borrowing its title from Shakespeare) “Brave New World.” Braver still, in the modern sense, is the commentator who tries in a brief talk like this to deal with even one phase of the vast area, of some eight million square miles, and constituting about one-fifth of the world’s inhabited continents, that lies South of the continental United States. But I am what is called in Spanish an “Old Christian” in these matters, which may be roughly interpreted as the opposite of a “Johnny-Come-Lately,” as our own phrase has it. I have been a student of this area for nearly fifty years, a teacher of one of its languages, Spanish, and of the literature and other written materials published in that language, for more than forty years. During the past four years I have spent my summer vacations on educational missions that took me to all of the American republics except two—Bolivia and Paraguay. In some instances I have made two or three visits to individual countries during that period, supplementing a number of earlier trips, the first of which was in 1916. So I must be as “brave” as the fascinating and to us tremendously important complex of nations that make up the New World outside of the United States and Canada, which for want of a really accurate term we call Latin America.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-217
Author(s):  
Andrew Urie

AbstractEmploying an interdisciplinary sociopolitical framework, I examine Philip Osment’s play This Island’s Mine (1988) and demonstrate how it interrogates and repudiates Margaret Thatcher’s neoconservative authoritarian populism. Specifically, I argue that Osment’s play constitutes not only a damning indictment of Thatcherism, but also an enduring work that speaks directly to our present sociopolitical conjuncture, which has witnessed varied forms of reactionary populism sweep nations throughout the international community.


IJOHMN ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-125
Author(s):  
Hadjer Khatir

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949)and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) stand as two powerful works of art that emanated from a mere disorder and fragmentation. To put it differently, this work of art emanated from a world that underwent an extremely rigorous political transformations and cultural seismology. This is a world that has witnessed an overwhelming dislocation. All those upheavals brought into being a new life, that is to say, a reshuffled life .A new life brings forwards a new art. This research, accordingly, attempts to put all its focus on two modernist visionary works of art that have enhanced a completely new system of thought and perceived the past, the present, and even the future with an entirely new consciousness. In the world of Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World, power seems to get beyond of what is supposedly politically legitimate. This power has paved the way for the emergence of a totalitarian system; I would rather call it a totalitarian virus. This system has emerged with the ultimate purpose of deadening the spirit of individualism, rendering the classes nothing but “docile masses”. I will be accordingly analysing how power becomes intoxicating. In other words, I will attempt to give a keen picture of how power becomes no longer over things, but rather over men according to Nietzsche’s philosophical perception of “The Will to Power”.


1999 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 564-593

Saturday 1 January 1949 I have started another diary – though I doubt very much whether I shall have the energy to go on with it for any length of time – one's life nowadays is no longer of much interest and one no longer has much joie de vivre – all that one has lived for appears to be passing away and the ‘brave new world’ is singularly unattractive to those of us lived fifty years ago. One's only hope is that this new generation will ‘grow up’ in course of time, and realize that the things we stood for in the past were the things which matter in life – the things for which it is worth living…


1999 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-30
Author(s):  
Jennifer Cooknell

For many years the archive profession in the United Kingdom has tended to view highly structured cataloguing rules as a constraint, redundant in the light of the unique material with which it deals. Times are changing however and, with the advent of three new standards over the past six years, archivists are beginning to recognise that, far from being the straitjacket they had previously imagined, such standards do in fact provide the key to freedom in the brave new world of information technology opportunities.


Author(s):  
Christopher A. Miller

The concept of Levels of Automation (LOAs) as a categorization of distinct combinations of human-automation relationships arrayed along, usually, a spectrum of possibilities has a long and fruitful tradition in Human Factors. Nevertheless, if a proliferation of novel LOA schemes and uses is any evidence, there is some reason to perceive unrest and dissatisfaction with comparatively simple LOA schemes that have been proposed in the past. This panel will review concepts and uses of Levels of Automation schemas and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses. A central theme will be whether novel automation capabilities (and, therefore, novel human-machine interaction opportunities) demand revisions to LOA concepts or whether we can (or have) defined a scheme that defines the full space of possible interaction types.


PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (35) ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Richard Ferraro

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Hile
Keyword(s):  

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