scholarly journals Bataille in the South: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Erskine Caldwell’s Depression Fiction

2019 ◽  
pp. 295-307
Author(s):  
Joseph Kuhn
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Erskine Caldwell ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Right

This article tries to show how James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and Erskine Caldwell in his fiction from the Depression years–especially the little-known novella, The Sacrilege of Alan Kent (1930)–used a discourse of the sacred to represent the strange otherness of the Depression South. They particularly drew on the “left hand sacred” (of taboo, repulsiveness and sacrifice) as distinct from the “right hand sacred” found in institutional religion. The article argues that a theoretical understanding of Agee and Caldwell’s use of the sacred may be provided by Georges Bataille. It seems particularly appropriate to invoke Bataille since he was concerned with the political elements of the sacred and sought to mobilize these elements during the 1930s when liberal democracy was thought by many leftist writers on both sides of the Atlantic to have failed. Bataille provides a productive analogue to the two southerners, who shared this perception of liberal democracy, because he tried to articulate a radical path in this decade that was not Marxist. Agee and Caldwell, although notionally Communist, were dissatisfied with Marxism because they saw it as another version of a utilitarian or restricted economy. They looked instead to the sacred as a discourse of transgression–a discourse that was rooted in what Bataille called a general economy or the deeper organization of collective life around ecology and the gift.

§ XI.—Hellenistic Mycenae

1923 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 408-428
Author(s):  
C. A. Boethius
Keyword(s):  
Common Type ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
The Right

Among the ruins of the Hellenistic buildings at the south end of the Great Ramp, in the fourth or southern chamber (Pl. I. 34), three fragments of a stele (now in the Nauplia Museum) were found. The stele is of a simple and common type, and is made of the same white limestone as the other Mycenaean stele found by Tsountas, which it closely resembles even in its weathering. Except for the top left-hand corner and a gap on the right side the whole stele is preserved. It is ·969 m. in height, ·41–·436 m. in breadth (·41 m. at the ninth line of the inscription) and ·11–·125 m. thick. At the top there is a plain frieze, ·065 m. high : ·02 m. below the frieze begins an inscription which fills twenty lines and ends ·50 m. above the bottom of the stele. The letters are ·008–·01 m. high. The space between the lines is ·009–·011 m. The surface of the stone is very much worn, and it was consequently difficult to make out the letters and their accurate forms. The sketch (Fig. 93) shows the arrangement of the text.

No Man’s Land: Feminised Landscapes in the Utopian Fiction of Ursula Le Guin

1998 ◽  
pp. 199-208
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The South ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
And Gender ◽  
No Man's Land ◽  
Feminist Utopias

In this chapter, Jones reviews various texts by Ursula Le Guin, including Always Coming Home, The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Sur. Jones draws attention to the depiction of the ‘South’ in literature as a whole, but more specifically in terms of the feminist utopias that Le Guin creates in her narratives. She also foregrounds the significance of navigating the political, social and gender codes of society and explores the ways in which masculinity and femininity often correspond to an imbalance of power.

Indian Political Democracy: A Study

Ensemble ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-248
Author(s):  
SIDDHARTHA SANKAR MANNA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Democracy ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Right

Democracy means the prearrangement of governance in which people can enjoy the greatest means of life. It depends on the larger participation of people regardless of caste, gender, creed, men, and women. So far, the constitution of India shaped a democratic state and ensured the right to liberty, equal rights, the notion of justice, and fraternity for all its citizens in society. The political enterprisers who uphold the various ethnoreligious characteristics, mainly the Hindu nationalist beliefs and opinions, have shaped a lot of confusion and bewilderment about the conceptual ideas of secularism. The Liberal democracy still continues as an arrangement of human governance and structure of values that keep on unwavering for millions of people. At the lower stages, the judicial organization took a large-scale initiative in some debatable and controversial occurrences.

scholarly journals Lawyering protest - critique and creativity: Where to from here in the public interest legal sector?

2017 ◽  
pp. 7-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Chamberlain ◽  
Gina Snyman
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Space ◽  
The South ◽  
The Public ◽  
Emerging Themes ◽  
The Right ◽  
State Responses

Frequent protests, arising from a diversity of motivations, are a feature of the South African landscape. Despite the right to protest being entrenched in section 17 of the Constitution, it is under threat, and communities seeking to protest increasingly risk criminalisation. This article identifies some of the emerging themes in the protest landscape and the way the right to protest is being suppressed. Four dominant themes are highlighted through the lens of the experiences of the public interest legal sector: the conflation of notification and permission; heavy-handed state responses to protests; the abuse of bail procedures; and the use of interdicts. Law has become at least one of the sites of contestation in the protest arena. The political space held open by the existence of the right to protest is thus closing as a result of violations of this right. It is therefore both useful and necessary to interrogate the role of lawyers in such contestation. This article also examines the context and nature of the public interest legal sector’s response to these emerging themes.

French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-59
Author(s):  
Adrian May
Keyword(s):  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Program ◽  
The Right

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political engagements of both these figures in the 1930s were coming under increasingly scrutiny as they were suspected of fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic views. This chapter returns to the pre-war period to firstly delineate the review’s trenchant defence of Bataille’s political record, and the influence of Bataille on Lignes’ dual political program of anti-fascism and a critique of economic and political liberalism is subsequently delineated. Secondly, the significance of the review’s historic defence and recent exposé of the right-wing past of Blanchot is discussed in depth. The reception of these two thinkers is thus historicised, especially in the 1980s context of the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ and the growing anxieties of intellectual complicity with fascism following the Heidegger affair.

Echoes from Bassae

1965 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 156-158
Author(s):  
Peter Corbett
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
South Side ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Temple

A marble slab, built into a private chapel in a cemetery in Catania, has on it a centauromachy, carved in relief. In a recent publication the author observes that at the start of the century the chapel belonged to a Catanian antiquary, who decorated it with sculpture from various places and periods; apart from this, nothing is known about the provenience of the slab. He also comments that the whole face has been re-cut at an unknown date, but certainly in modern times, so that an exact judgement of the style is impossible, and adds that the theme was a common one in ancient art, citing in particular the metopes from the south side of the Parthenon and the frieze from the temple of Apollo at Bassae. It is possible to go somewhat further; the nine figures on the relief are all copied from the frieze from Bassae; reading from left to right, the first four figures correspond to Slab 526; the fifth one to the left-hand centaur on Slab 521; the next two to the left-hand pair on Slab 525, and the last couple to the group of a Greek and a centaur on Slab 521. It might seem impossible to decide beyond all doubt if the Catania relief is an ancient copy of the frieze, re-cut in modern times, or if it is entirely modern; the copyist has indeed taken certain liberties with his original, varying some of the details—for instance, the position of the right forearm of the right-hand centaur—and replacing the woman on Slab 521 by two figures from another slab, but these changes are perhaps not inconceivable in an ancient copy. Two other details, however, are decisive.

Some Fragments of a Vase presumably by Euphronios

1888 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 143-146
Author(s):  
Jane E. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Interior Design ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
The South ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Complete Restoration ◽  
South Wall ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right

The fragments collected on Plate VI. were found in 1888 in the excavations on the Acropolis—near to the south wall beyond the stratum of poros débris. (). I am not able to offer a complete restoration of the design, nor to explain with certainty all details, but the extant fragments are of such great artistic and archaeological importance that it seems desirable to publish them at once, without waiting either for such explanation or for a detailed examination of the mythography involved.I owe to the courtesy of M. Kabbadias permission to make the publication. The drawing is by M. Gilliéron, kindly supervised by Dr. Wolters, after I left Athens. To him is therefore due the present restored position of the fragments.The vase was obviously a cylix, the designs of both interior and exterior being painted on a white ground. The necklet and bracelet of the female figure, the head-bands of both, and other portions in slight relief and now coloured red, once bore gilding. The subject and main outline of the—most important—interior design are happily clear. Orpheus (ΟΡΦΕϒ) to the right sinks on one knee to the ground; his left hand no doubt supported him.

Coercive gifts: Ritual and electoral transactions and political value in village Tamil Nadu1

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-391
Author(s):  
Indira Arumugam
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Election Campaign ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Value ◽  
To Receive

This article considers the gift as a medium of politics in two parallel domains, namely the electoral and the ritual. Juxtaposing the material transactions during a rural election campaign and the distribution of meat after a sacrifice in a vernacular polity, it traces the continuing interpenetrations between philanthropy and politics in lubricating political associations. The properties of the political gift and the proprieties of its giving are what create political value. The right to govern is premised upon the prerogative to give. The right to give, however, is premised on the obligation to receive. The coercive gift—which one is not allowed to reciprocate but more importantly does not want and is forced to receive—is the animus of a politics that is premised upon caste and class hierarchies that also reverberate through democratic governance. What compels the political gift’s receiving, and deliberately negates its reciprocity—its spirit or force—is the implicit threat of violence that it harbours.

Capturing the South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
James Agee ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

This expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologists Howard Odum and Arthur Raper, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. It also explores the contentious history of documentary work in Hale County, Alabama, a place immortalized by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in their collaborative book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well by other documentary artists such as William Christenberry, Martha Young, and J.W. Otts. The work of these documentarians salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. Hale County, Alabama and other places in the region became not only an iconic sites of representation but also battlegrounds where black and white residents challenged the right of documentarians to represent them. The accumulation of influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images of the South created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the region that persists into the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Democracia y derecho a decidir = Democracy and the right to decide

2020 ◽  
pp. 375
Author(s):  
Josep M. Vilajosana
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Principal Reason ◽  
Spanish Constitution ◽  
Democratic Rights ◽  
The Right

Resumen: En este artículo, el autor defiende el derecho a decidir, concretado así: un referéndum sobre el futuro de Cataluña no está prohibido en la Constitución española. Esta tesis se sustenta en que tanto el principio de indisolubilidad (art. 2.1. CE) como el de la soberanía nacional (art. 1.2. CE) deben ponderarse adecuadamente con los principios definitorios de una democracia liberal (arts. 1.1., 23.1, 9 y 10 CE). Desde esta perspectiva, el trabajo ofrece razones para justificar dos cuestiones importantes: 1) la posibilidad de realizar un referéndum sobre la independencia de Cataluña, teniendo en cuenta una interpretación evolutiva de los derechos democráticos vinculados a una concepción densa de la democracia; 2) la posibilidad de que esa consulta tenga como sujetos a los catalanes, con el fin de evitar pasar del principio de la mayoría al dominio de la mayoría.Palabras clave: Legalidad, legitimidad, principios, democracia, derecho a decidir, Constitución.Abstract: In this article, the author defends the right to decide, meaning that holding a referendum on the political future of Catalonia is not banned by the Spanish Constitution (SC). The principal reason cited is that the principle of indissolubility (section 2.1 of the SC) and the principle of national sovereignty (section 1.2 SC) should be adequately balanced with the principles of liberal democracy (as defined in sections 1.1., 23.1., 9 and 10 of the SC). In light of this perspective, the article provides justification for two main aspects: 1) holding a referendum on Catalonia's independence on the grounds of an evolutive interpretation of democratic rights linked to a dense conception of democracy; and 2) holding a referendum exclusively in Catalonia, in order to avoid shifting from the principle of the majority to the dominion of the majorities. Keywords: Legality, legitimacy, principles, democracy, right to decide, Constitution.

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