scholarly journals An archive of whose own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction’s digital infrastructure

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mel Stanfill ◽  
Alexis Lothian
Keyword(s):  
Structural Changes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
Potential Models ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Commitments

In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of fannish racism, we turn to the specifics of AO3, the political commitments embedded in its systems, and how attention to racial justice could transform them. Drawing on fan fiction genres, we offer three potential models for thinking through these possibilities: a fix-it that would extend AO3's existing metadata structures; a canon divergence that would alter the makeup of the content on AO3; and an alternative universe that draws from abolitionist organizing to imagine the broadest structural changes of all.

scholarly journals “No one may starve in the British Empire”: Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Nott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Underdevelopment ◽  
Natural Result ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
Political Value

Summary Throughout the twentieth century it was widely assumed that African diets were grossly deficient in protein, that childhood protein deficiency was a natural result of this generalised diet and that a relative lack of meat and milk went some way to explaining African economic underdevelopment. This article explores why these conclusions took hold; the European deification of animal protein in previous centuries; structural changes to African diets and food economies under colonial government; and the political value of such a consensus. Unlike elsewhere in the world, where deficiency was removed from the exceptionalism of tropical medicine, protein malnutrition was constructed as a particularly African concern. Focusing this discussion on the history of the severe childhood deficiency, kwashiorkor, this article explores how the politically informed othering of African nutrition came to direct, or misdirect, the medicine of malnutrition in twentieth-century Africa.

scholarly journals “Whatever Community Is, This Is Not It”: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of “Race” in Britain after 1958

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Schofield ◽  
Ben Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Workers ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe impact of the 1958 Notting Hill riots tends to figure in histories of the political right, as a galvanizing force for anti-immigrant sentiment—or as radical catalyst in the transnational history of the Black Atlantic. Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left. This article treats Notting Hill after 1958 as an important locale of new progressive thinking and action. It seeks to consider the political work that the idea of “community” did in Notting Hill, allowing us consider how the politics of antiracism relates in complex ways to the reformulation of progressive politics in postwar Britain. It reveals how black activists came to reappropriate the language of “community” to critique the ameliorative, welfarist approach to antiracism. It also unearths the forgotten eclectic beginnings of Britain's New Left. By excavating the history of community work and New Left activism “from below,” this article traces the ways in which a motley group of Methodist ministers, Christian Workers, students, social workers, and community leaders tested the limits of the liberal paternalism and “universalism” of the postwar social democratic state.

Subject to Reality

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shilyh Warren
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Talking Head ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
Ethnographic History

This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”

scholarly journals El feminismo de la segunda ola en México y su relación con otros movimientos de mujeres

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (131) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Yearim A. Ortiz San Juan
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Wave

The neo-feminist women, when articulating the private and public spheres, evidenced the sexual violence that was exercised on women. In order to study this movement, it is convenient to make a brief history of the second wave of feminism in Mexico, particularly that of Mexico City, and to explain how its postulates became part of the political agenda.

The Social Origins and Provenance of the English Bishops during the Reign of Edward II

1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Edward Ii ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complete Study ◽  
History Of

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

Essays of a “comparatively progressive” economist (On the 150th birth anniversary of Vladimir Geleznoff)

2019 ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Viktor A. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Working Ability ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
History Of

Deep comprehension of the advanced economic theory, the talent of lecturer enforced by the outstanding working ability forwarded Vladimir Geleznoff scarcely at the end of his thirties to prepare the publication of “The essays of the political economy” (1898). The subsequent publishing success (8 editions in Russia, the 1918­-year edition in Germany) sufficiently demonstrates that Geleznoff well succeded in meeting the intellectual inquiry of the cross­road epoch of the Russian history and by that taking the worthful place in the history of economic thought in Russia. Being an acknowledged historian of science V. Geleznoff was the first and up to now one of the few to demonstrate the worldwide community of economists the theoretically saturated view of Russian economic thought in its most fruitful period (end of XIX — first quarter of XX century).

A Confrontation between Two Doctrines: The Birth of Struggle for Hegemony in Hebrew Children's Literature during the 1930s and 1940s

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
YAEL DARR
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Single Channel ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Creation ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Level ◽  
First Time ◽  
Literary Quality

This article describes a crucial and fundamental stage in the transformation of Hebrew children's literature, during the late 1930s and 1940s, from a single channel of expression to a multi-layered polyphony of models and voices. It claims that for the first time in the history of Hebrew children's literature there took place a doctrinal confrontation between two groups of taste-makers. The article outlines the pedagogical and ideological designs of traditionalist Zionist educators, and suggests how these were challenged by a group of prominent writers of adult poetry, members of the Modernist movement. These writers, it is argued, advocated autonomous literary creation, and insisted on a high level of literary quality. Their intervention not only dramatically changed the repertoire of Hebrew children's literature, but also the rules of literary discourse. The article suggests that, through the Modernists’ polemical efforts, Hebrew children's literature was able to free itself from its position as an apparatus controlled by the political-educational system and to become a dynamic and multi-layered field.

The Use and Misuse of Religious Language: Zionism and the Palestinians

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wetherell
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Title Deed ◽  
History Of ◽  
Land Question

Every discipline which deals with the land question in Canaan-Palestine-Israel is afflicted by the problem of specialisation. The political scientist and historian usually discuss the issue of land in Israel purely in terms of interethnic and international relations, biblical scholars concentrate on the historical and archaeological question with virtually no reference to ethics, and scholars of human rights usually evade the question of God. What follows is an attempt, through theology and political history, to understand the history of the Israel-Palestine land question in a way which respects the complexity of the question. From a scrutiny of the language used in the Bible to the development of political Zionism from the late 19th century it is possible to see the way in which a secular movement mobilised the figurative language of religion into a literal ‘title deed’ to the land of Palestine signed by God.

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.

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

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