scholarly journals Mourning with Masks: Political Death and Virtual Life

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Inna Zlatimirova Yaneva-Toraman
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Personal Connection ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Activist Movements

In this essay I explore how the V mask (Guy Fawkes mask) not only became a ‘re- sistance’ mask for the Turkish protesters during the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations, but also how it visually transformed into a new image. I argue that this new face became a virtual ‘death mask’ for one of the killed protesters and that the image exemplifies a shift in commemorative practices. Furthermore, I examine the relationship between this mask and the process of mourning to dis- cover why the Turkish protesters decided to adopt this particular mask for the dead. This essay argues that the mask and the need to wear it can be explained as an attempt to keep the lost one alive by virtually becoming him. In this sense, the V mask transformed from being just a ‘politi- cal’ symbol in real life activist movements, into a new mask which signifies something beyond the political, that is, a more ‘personal’ connection with the deceased that in turn ‘resurrects’ him.

A warm and sympathetic thing: Voice and dysfluency in Robert Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Daniel Martin
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Dramatic Monologue ◽  
The Real ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

This article takes a dysfluency studies approach to representations and expressions of voice and dysfluent speech in Robert Browning’s minor dramatic monologue ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’ (1864). Browning’s speaker, an American spiritualist medium named Sludge, is vile and repugnant in his casuistry and sophistry as he defends his deceptions after being caught as a cheat during one of his séances. While Browning’s contemporaries recognized ‘Mr Sludge’ as a mockery of the real-life American medium Daniel Dunglass Home, the monologue relies on one central metaphor of the medium’s stuttering and stammering body that challenges broader Victorian assumptions about the relationship between speech, voice and elocutionary practices. Throughout this article, G.K. Chesterton’s claim that Browning’s critique of spiritualist practices is paradoxically a ‘warm and sympathetic thing’ becomes the keystone for understanding the monologue’s contributions to modern thought about the pleasures and vitality of dysfluent speech. Fundamentally, Browning’s exploration of the spiritualist’s deceptions and conjuring of the voices of the dead reflects broader medical analogies beginning in the 1840s that linked the causes of dysfluent speech to invasive and contagious voicings.

scholarly journals Un suelo que no deja de moverse. Temporalidades no-humanas de Nuno Ramos

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (45) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Giorgi
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

Perhaps some of the most significant investigations in contemporary literature and art from Brazil revolve around  the question of temporality , the  threshold between the living and the dead and the ways in which conflicting temporalities and  anachronism articulate a critique of the present.  In this context,  Nuno Ramos’ installations and writings, working on the unstable terrain between the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic, the fossilized and the spectral, represent a decisive intervention. In Ramos’ works memory is never entirely human; it is irreducible to the domain of subjectivity nor to the shared narratives of the collective. From books such as Cujo or Junco   to the the fossilized matter present in many of his works, the relationship between life and death is both political, technological and non-anthropomorphic —it is, in other words, biopolitical. This paper analyzes the ways in which  the configuration of such critical perspective in Nuno Ramos’ work interrogates and reformulates the ways in which temporality and the political interface there where the very notion of life — the bios that articulates the biopolitical— is at stake.

Kämpfe um Bergbau und die Möglichkeiten demokratischer Transformation

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (189) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz
Keyword(s):  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Mining Project ◽  
National Governments ◽  
The Relationship

The article explores the political effects of popular consultations as a means of direct democracy in struggles over mining. Building on concepts from participatory and materialist democracy theory, it shows the transformative potentials of processes of direct democracy towards democratization and emancipation under, and beyond, capitalist and liberal democratic conditions. Empirically the analysis is based on a case study on the protests against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia. The analysis reveals that although processes of direct democracy in conflicts over mining cannot transform existing class inequalities and social power relations fundamentally, they can nevertheless alter elements thereof. These are for example the relationship between local and national governments, changes of the political agenda of mining and the opening of new spaces for political participation, where previously there were none. It is here where it’s emancipatory potential can be found.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

Imagining the Sudan in British Film, 1925–53

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354
Author(s):  
Zach Bates
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Relationship

Due to its status as a territory under the joint rule of Egypt and Britain, the Sudan occupied an awkward place in the British Empire. Because of this, it has not received much attention from scholars. In theory, it was not a colony, but, in practice, the Sudan was ruled primarily by British administrators and was the site of several developmental schemes, most of which concerned cotton-growing and harnessing the waters of the Nile. It was also the site of popular literature, travelogues and the most well-known of Alexander Korda's empire films. This article focuses on five British films –  Cotton Growing in the Sudan (c.1925), Stark Nature (1930), Stampede (1930), The Four Feathers (1939) and They Planted a Stone (1953) – that take the Sudan as their subject. It argues that each of these films shows an evolving and related discourse of the region that embraced several motifs: cooperation as the foundation of the relationship between the Sudanese and the British; Sudanese peoples in conflict with a sometimes hostile landscape and environment that the British could ‘tame’; and the British being in the Sudan in order to improve it and its people before leaving them to self-government. However, some of the films, especially The Four Feathers, subtly questioned and subverted the British presence in the Sudan and engaged with a number of the political questions not overtly mentioned in documentaries. The article, therefore, argues for a nuanced and complex picture of representations of the Sudan in British film from 1925 to 1953.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.

The Fragmentation of the Palestinian Political Field

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
National Representation ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Palestinian National Movement ◽  
The Relationship

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.

“Our Dead are the Ultimate Teachers of Life”. The Corpse as an Inter-mediator of Transcendence

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-240
Author(s):  
Antje Kahl
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Funeral Directors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Funeral Director ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

Today in Germany, religion and the churches forfeit their sovereignty of interpretation and ritual concerning death and dying. The funeral director is the first point of contact when death occurs. Therefore he or she is able to influence the relationship between the living and the dead. In the course of this development, the dead body, often referred to as dirty and dangerous, is being sanitized by funeral directors. Funeral directors credit the dead body with a certain quality; they claim that facing the dead may lead to religious or spiritual experiences, and therefore they encourage the public viewing of the dead – a practice which was, and still is not very common in Germany. The new connotation of the dead body is an example for the dislimitation of religion in modern society. The religious framing of death-related practises no longer exclusively belongs to traditional religious institutions and actors, but can take place in commercial business companies as well.

Kajian Sosiologis Terhadap Tema Lakon ‘Domba-domba Revolusi’ Karya Bambang Soelarto

Panggung ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nur Sahid
Keyword(s):  
Sociological Theory ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Political ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
Sociology Of Art ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTRevolutionary struggle in order to compete for the independence of Indonesia has been a source of inspiration Indonesian artists, including Bambang Soelarto who wrote drama Domba-domba Re- volusi (DDR). DDR studied drama is quite interesting because it tries to criticize the freedom fight- ers. This study aims to: first to know the theme and the problem plays DDR; second to determine the relationship of the socio - historical struggle in 1948 with the sociological elements of drama DDR themes and issues. This study uses sociological theory of art. The basic principles of the sociology of art is the fact that the creation of works of art influenced by the historical social conditions where the work was created. Research using content analysis of Krippendorf, the methods used to examine the symbolic phenomena with the aim to explore and express the observed phenomenon which is the content, meaning, and an essential element of the literary work. Based results of this research is that Bambang Soelarto as the author tries to capture di?erence between fighters during the struggle for the political aspirations for 1948 are expressed in a work of drama. Historical events inspired the creation of drama DDR. Soelarto want to respond to the political aspirations of the di?erence between historical figures and wanted to provide an assessment and outlook through DDR.Keywords: themes, drama, sociology of art, social historical ABSTRAKRevolusi perjuangan dalam rangka memperebutkan kemerdekaan Indonesia telah men- jadi sumber inspirasi para seniman Indonesia, termasuk Bambang Soelarto yang menulis drama Domba-domba Revolusi (DDR). Drama DDR cukup menarik diteliti karena mencoba mengkritisi para pejuang kemerdekaan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk: pertama, mengeta- hui tema dan permasalah drama DDR; kedua, mengetahui hubungan kondisi sosio-histo- ris perjuangan pada tahun 1948 dengan unsur-unsur sosiologis terimplisir pada unsur tema dan masalah drama DDR. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori sosiologi seni. Prinsip dasar dari sosiologi seni adalah adanya fakta bahwa penciptaan karya seni dipengaruhi oleh kon- disi sosial historis tempat karya itu diciptakan. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode con- tent analysis dari Krippendorf, yakni metode yang dipergunakan untuk meneliti fenome- na-fenomena simbolik dengan tujuan untuk menggali dan mengungkapkan fenomena yang teramati yang merupakan isi, makna, dan unsur esensial karya sastra. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian dapat diketahui bahwa Bambang Soelarto sebagai penulis mencoba un- tuk menangkap perbedaan antara pejuang aspirasi politik selama perjuangan tahun 1948 untuk diekspresikan dalam sebuah karya drama. Peristiwa sejarah mengilhami penciptaan drama DDR. Soelarto ingin menanggapi aspirasi politik perbedaan antara tokoh-tokoh se- jarah dan ingin memberikan penilaian dan pandangan pandangannnya melalui DDR.Kata kunci: tema, drama, sosiologi seni, sosial historis

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