World makers of the Black Atlantic

Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (75) ◽  
pp. 180-198
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew Talks to Ashish Ghadiali

In Worldmaking After Empire, Adom Getachew challenges standard histories of decolonisation, which chart the story of a simple shift from empire to independent nationhood. She shows that supporters of decolonisation have always sought to create something much more than nationalisms: they have engaged in a dynamic and rival system of revolutionary worldmaking, seeking an alternative international system that could replace the old inequitable dispensation. She charts this decolonial project from its roots in the works of Black Atlantic thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James in the 1920s and 1930s. The key events she tracks are the challenges the project faced in the United Nations in the 1940s and 1950s; attempts at regional federation in late 1950s and 1960s; and the emergence of the New International Economic Order in the 1960s and 1970s. This a twentieth century tradition now ripe to be reclaimed and revived.

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan McCargo

Thailand's ‘southern border provinces’ of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat – along with four districts of neighbouring Songkhla – are the site of fiery political violence characterised by daily killings. The area was historically a Malay sultanate, and was only loosely under Thai suzerainty until the early twentieth century. During the twentieth century there was periodic resistance to Bangkok's attempts to suppress local identity and to incorporate this largely Malay-speaking, Muslim-majority area into a predominantly Buddhist nation-state. This resistance proved most intense during the 1960s and 1970s, when various armed groups (notably PULO [Patani United Liberation Organization] and BRN [Barisan Revolusi Nasional]) waged war on the Thai state, primarily targeting government officials and the security forces. In the early 1980s, the Prem Tinsulanond government brokered a deal with these armed groups and proceeded to co-opt the Malay-Muslim elite. By crafting mutually beneficial governance, security and financial arrangements, the Thai state was able largely to placate local political demands.


Author(s):  
Georgina Colby

Chapter 2 addresses Acker’s practice of collage, and the anxiety of self-description. Blood and Guts in High School is positioned in relation to both the Dadaist collage and montage practices of artists such as Hannah Höch at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the subversive publications of the 1960s and 1970s: mimeographed magazines, and the punk and post-punk medium of Xeroxed publications. The original manuscript of Blood and Guts in High School housed in the archive possesses a different materiality to the published version of the novel. The materiality of the text in its collage and typographic experimentation is situated in a counter position to the language and hegemonic discourses within which Janey, the voice of the text, is imprisoned. Drawing on Acker’s practices of illegibility, and Denise Riley’s work on language and affect, the chapter argues that Blood and Guts in High School, through its experimental form, reveals the anxiety of self-description that Janey experiences within conventional language structures. Illustration, experimental typography, non-referential language, and the use of the poetic, function in Blood and Guts in High School as sites of an alternate language that emerges through compositional form and experimental forms of iteration.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.


2017 ◽  
pp. 204-234
Author(s):  
Enzo Traverso

The seventh chapter retraces the encounter of the French philosopher Daniel Bensaid and the work of Walter Benjamin, that reveals a resonance between two crucial turns of the twentieth century—1940 and 1990—through a vision of history based on the idea of remembrance. After the fall of Berlin Wall, the survivors of the 1960s and 1970s met a vision of history engendered by the defeats of the 1930s. This encounter reveals the potentialities of a political reinterpretation of the tradition of melancholy Marxism.


Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem

The strain of Black Nationalism that existed within the United Nations also worried conservatives as they monitored the evolution of events in Southern Africa. In their intense desire to rid the world of communism, other issues, such as race, were either marginalized or ignored. The chapter analyzes the three publications’ view of race as it relates to the issue of Rhodesia during the height of the Cold War. In ignoring the suppression of an entire race of people, Human Events and National Review contrasted what they perceived to be a stable, anticommunist, biracial society with the militarism and lawlessness that they argued defined the 1960s and 1970s. While the two conservative publications viewed Rhodesia as a model of biracial success, Commentary focused on the Carter administration’s dismissive attitude about the dangers of Soviet encroachment within the African hemisphere. The Right argued that the Carter White House, in its refusal to endorse Rhodesia’s 1979 parliamentary elections due to a lack of representation of militant nationalist groups, and its belief in the policy of détente, continued to send a message of American weakness and indifference to totalitarianism around the world.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 432-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeppe Nevers ◽  
Jesper Lundsby Skov

Drawing on examples from Danish and Norwegian history, this article traces the ideological origins of Nordic democracy. It takes as its starting point the observation that constitutional theories of democracy were rather weak in the Nordic countries until the mid-twentieth century; instead, a certain Nordic tradition of popular constitutionalism rooted in a romantic and organic idea of the people was central to the ideological foundations of Nordic democracy. This tradition developed alongside agrarian mobilization in the nineteenth century, and it remained a powerful ideological reference-point through most of the twentieth century, exercising, for instance, an influence on debates about European integration in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this tradition was gradually overlaid by more institutional understandings of democracy from the mid-twentieth century onwards, with the consequence that the direct importance of this folk’ish heritage declined towards the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, clear echoes of this heritage remain evident in some contemporary Nordic varieties of populism, as well as in references to the concept of folkestyre as the pan-Scandinavian synonym for democracy.


1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 190-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUAN B. GALLEGO-FERNÁNDEZ ◽  
M. ROSARIO GARCÍA-MORA ◽  
FRANCISCO GARCÍA-NOVO

In Spain, it is estimated that 60% of wetlands have disappeared in the last 50 years. The present study aimed to describe the relationships between loss of wetlands and land-use change in Azuaga County, Central-western Iberian Peninsula where during the period 1896-1996, 94% of the original wetlands disappeared. Forest, scrub, holm oak dehesas and olive groves have become fragmented or disappeared completely, having been substituted by eucalyptus plantations in areas of low productivity and by dry cultivation of herbaceous crops, mainly cereals, in more productive areas. These substitutions have resulted in a homogeneous, coarse-grained landscape with low diversity and high dominance. The type of land-use has depended on the evolution of demographic processes, with high human immigration rates toward the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, and high emigration rates during the 1960s and 1970s. The mechanization of agriculture and transition from closed to market economy in the second half of the twentieth century also played an essential role in the landscape changes described.


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