scholarly journals Vivir y pensar la construcción de la sociedad anarquista desde la realidad mesoamericana, ayer y hoy

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado

The communal life of the Mesoamerican communities has been the historical basis of indigenous resistance against Spanish colonialism and then against Mexican colonialism. This way of life and mentality was considered by the magonistas in the 1910s as the powerful historical experience that would be the basis for the free reconstruction of society after the triumph of the anarchist sector in the Mexican revolution that they organized in exile from the United States. But they did not value communality as a form of resistance to achieve the liberation of capitalist colonialism, because they supposed dead a way of life that is still alive today in communities of places like Oaxaca.

Author(s):  
Omer Avci

This study focuses on the cultural characteristics of Ahiska Turks in Wheaton, Illinois in the United States. By trying to understand the culture of the participants, I sought to shed light on how the Ahiska Turks managed to cope with the hardship they experienced and yet preserved their ethnic identities. In this multicase study, I interviewed six male Ahiska Turks. As a result of my analyses, eight themes emerged: family, religion (i.e., Islam), language (i.e., Turkish), communal life, endogamy, authoritarianism, oppression against the preservation of culture and identity, and education for upward mobility. The Ahiska Turks’ agrarian way of life, the preservation of their language, and their preference of integration to the larger society for acculturation make them who they are today.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.


Author(s):  
Ramón J. Guerra

This chapter examines the development of Latino literature in the United States during the time when realism emerged as a dominant aesthetic representation. Beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and including the migrations resulting from the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Mexican Revolution (1910), Latinos in the United States began to realistically craft an identity served by a sense of displacement. Latinos living in the United States as a result of migration or exile were concerned with similar issues, including but not limited to their predominant status as working-class, loss of homeland and culture, social justice, and racial/ethnic profiling or discrimination. The literature produced during the latter part of the nineteenth century by some Latinos began to merge the influence of romantic style with a more socially conscious manner to reproduce the lives of ordinary men and women, draw out the specifics of their existence, characterize their dialects, and connect larger issues to the concerns of the common man, among other realist techniques.


2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-115
Author(s):  
Samer Abboud

Written at a critical historical juncture of Arab-western relations, Khalidi’stext provides a refreshing and informed account of western intervention inthe Middle East. It stresses the catastrophic human and political consequencesof western colonial adventures in the region and the neglect of thishistorical experience by current American foreign policy decision makers.Although written primarily for a non-academic, American audience, it is auseful and important text on contemporary Middle East history.Accessible and highly readable, it provides insights into a series ofmajor issues currently relevant to the study of the Middle East: democracy, oil, Palestine, and Iraq. The first chapter provides an account of westerncolonialism’s social, political, economic, and cultural legacy wrought on theMiddle East. Beginning with a brief introduction to the American march towar with Iraq, the author establishes an approach employed throughout thetext: juxtaposing the historical western colonial experience with theAmerican invasion and occupation of Iraq. Locating western involvement inthe Middle East within the context of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, Khalidihighlights the differential systems of colonial rule imposed on the region.Throughout, he emphasizes the indigenous resistance to colonialism, thusarguing against Orientalist discourses of indigenous acquiescence and subservienceto the supposed benevolence of colonialist rule. Two importantpoints emerge: first, that the political structures imposed by the colonialregimes have persisted, and second, that the region’s political cultureremains deeply rooted in the anti-colonial experience. This experience –entirely conditioned through European involvement in the region – meantthat for many, the United States never experienced the same political andcultural hostility as Europe. Throughout the cold war, however, the UnitedStates’ image as a disinterested outside power began to give way to an imageof the United States as a significant power broker in the region with manyinterests, and, most importantly, few objectives compatible with the politicaldesires of the region’s peoples ...


Author(s):  
Tony Smith

This chapter examines Woodrow Wilson's efforts, first as an academic, later as president of the United States, to promote democracy through “progressive imperialism.” A first step for Wilson was to embrace America's democratizing mission in the Philippines. Later, he would continue in this fashion after he became president and faced the challenge of providing stability in the Western Hemisphere during the Mexican Revolution and with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914—the same year that war broke out in Europe. Wilson's driving concern now became focused: how to provide for a stable peace based on freedom. His answer: through protecting, indeed if possible expanding, democratic government the world around as the best way to end violence among states and provide freedom to peoples.


2021 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Whitfield

Several major American Jewish scholars and intellectuals have addressed the vitality and the pertinence of Jewish humor, seeing in it an entrée not only into key characteristics of communal life but also into the texture of reality itself. These academicians and critics have exposed the encounter between stand-up comedy and the social and political peculiarities of Jewish life in the United States. No comedian attracted more sustained attention than Lenny Bruce, whose career enlarged the contours of what could explored in night clubs and on long-playing records. Perhaps no satirist took greater risks, or exposed himself to greater legal danger, in both subject matter and in language. No predecessor was more willing to flaunt his own Jewish sensibility, or to present with such cynicism the hypocrisies inherent in the codes of conduct by which respectable America professed to live—which is what made Bruce the object of serious interest.


2020 ◽  
pp. 103-128
Author(s):  
Bruno Maçães

This chapter details how television became the first modern technology to be entirely shaped by American culture and American ambition, and to take the American way of life to its fullest development. In the beginning, the new medium was literally the product of American power, a peacetime application of wartime technology used against German submarines and the Japanese navy. Later, the connection would seem less obvious, but only at first. As the mass medium of choice during the decades when the United States conquered the planet, television quickly became synonymous with an American future of material and spiritual progress. They were a window into America, but a window displaying the American dream in all its glory, a transplant of the American life energy. Arguably, the internet, mobile technology, Netflix, and binge-watching did not change this basic fact. By liberating content from the physical restraints of the old wartime vacuum tubes, they can only increase its powers and render it, as it were, more spiritual. Ultimately, the internet can be seen as an expansion of television culture.


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