Poetic Utterances and Socio-Political Commitment in Ọbasa’s Poems

Yorùbá literary critics such as Olabimtan (1974a), Fo ̣ lọ runs ̣ ọ (1998), among ̣ others, have classified D. A. Obasá as a unique colonial poet whose poems ̣ were committed to the promotion of Yorùbá cultural heritage. Tus, a lot of critical works that exist on Obasa’s poems largely concentrate on the cultural ̣ and the philosophical dimensions with little or no focus on the socio-political commitment of the poet. The objective of this study therefore, was to examine the socio-political commitment of Obasa and his poetic utterances. The research methodology is descriptive. It is a corpus study or content analysis of the poetry books. Poems that are relevant to socio-political issues in the three books (Ìwé Kinni Awon Akéwì, ̣ Ìwé Kejì Awon Akéwì and ̣ Ìwé Kéta ̣ Àwoṇ Akéwì) were analyzed within the theory of Nativism. The major findings of the study were that: the selected poems have diverse socio-political themes as related to traditional politics, colonial politics, Yorùbá civil wars, first world war, migration and the need to remember one’s home or country; some of the poems were used as viable tool for political education; while others were essentially to ignite political consciousness in the readers. The paper concluded that Obasá was a committed poet who used his poetic utterances to disseminate, analyze, and educate the readers on the socio-political climate of colonial days. His non-violence ideological position in resolving socio-political issues is in consonance with the theory of Nativism and it is recommended for modern Yorùbá society and other African societies.

Bartók, Biography, and the Violin

Biography takes the scant facts of a life that are available to scrutiny, like the waypoints on a journey to be mapped, and attempts to form a coherent narrative from them. That coherence is, to at least some degree, contingent upon the ideological position of the author and as Michael Benton has noted, “the biographical subject is a textual creation as much as a historical recreation.” While fully acknowledging that one cannot “read back” from the works of an author to their life, Benton has described the substance of literary outputs as “quasi-facts” to be set beside “historical facts” and argued that these “can be seen as reflecting some contemporary events or as sublimating some experiences in the writer’s past or mirroring some authorial state of mind.” This article draws on the First Violin Sonata as such a quasi-fact of Bartók’s life to question whether biographical information can or should impact the ways that we understand and perform his music. The article additionally considers whether the content of individual works as mental products may have something tangible to impart about their composer’s personality. Given the broad consensus around the so-called “Five-Factor Model” of personality measurement within the field of psychology, it speculates whether this might offer a tool to refine our portrait of Bartók through analysis of his music.

Tending Immanence, Transcending Sectarianism: Plane of Mixed Castes and Religions

The attempt in this article is to extrapolate the notion of hybridity latent in B. R. Ambedkar’s reflections on mixed castes, and outcastes, which subsequently leads to the causal link that he then derives gesticulating to social evils, namely, the origin of untouchability. Whether this embryonic notion of hybridity present in Ambedkar’s work is amenable to the extrapolation of Dalit identity thought along the lines of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “immanent mixtures” is a thread that this study pursues. This certainly has broad implications for the prevalent notions of Dalit identity. This study ventures to read Ambedkar’s work, Riddles in Hinduism (1987) alongside Deleuze, probing into the intuitive link between notions of hybridity and the plane of immanence. Ideological distancing from predetermined categories of identity considered to be reductive in nature by the intellectuals of Indian philosophical thinking view such predetermined notions as facile conceptions that run short of representative qualities of complex and varied particularities of reasoned engagement with one’s resources. Amartya Sen heralded this ideological position in his work titled, The Argumentative Indian (2006), in favor of heterodoxy and reasoned choice determining priorities between different identities. Lacunae regarding identification of resources prominent in Sen’s work is pointed out by Jonardon Ganeri, who hails from the cluster of contemporary Sanskritists competent in philological and theoretical exegesis of “sastric” philosophical literature from the classical period of India. This study is a close reading of Jonardon Ganeri’s concept of ‘resources within’ which he develops in his work, Identity as Reasoned Choice (2012) to examine the potentiality of this concept to advance a theoretical framework that could counter a sectarian view of Indian tradition, as it is professed at the outset of his work. Sectarianism, which Ganeri opposes, identifies mysticism to be its chief trait which he shows to be selectively usurping only those resources grounded in Vedantic wisdom from India’s past.

Loose Credit and Low Wages: A Re-examination of US Postwar Economic History in Light of the Recent Recession

<p>The protracted nature of the current global economic downturn, beginning in late 2007 with the crash of the US credit markets and continuing on into today, suggests that a wider range of policy responses are now required by the international community to get the global economy back on an upwards trajectory of growth. Orthodox economics, with its disproportionate bias towards the supply-side of the economic equation, has proved extremely ineffectual in addressing the multitude of problems associated with the current global recession. In particular, the apathetic approach encapsulated by the neo-classical position, which asserts that the "free market" should be left alone to generate a solution to any economic downturn, has proved a highly costly ideological position for the global economy to follow. Fortunately however, in policy-making circles, a slight move away from the debilitating neo-classical supply-side position is now under way, giving rise to proactive policies that do not wait for the market to "inevitably" fix itself.</p>

Loose Credit and Low Wages: A Re-examination of US Postwar Economic History in Light of the Recent Recession

<p>The protracted nature of the current global economic downturn, beginning in late 2007 with the crash of the US credit markets and continuing on into today, suggests that a wider range of policy responses are now required by the international community to get the global economy back on an upwards trajectory of growth. Orthodox economics, with its disproportionate bias towards the supply-side of the economic equation, has proved extremely ineffectual in addressing the multitude of problems associated with the current global recession. In particular, the apathetic approach encapsulated by the neo-classical position, which asserts that the "free market" should be left alone to generate a solution to any economic downturn, has proved a highly costly ideological position for the global economy to follow. Fortunately however, in policy-making circles, a slight move away from the debilitating neo-classical supply-side position is now under way, giving rise to proactive policies that do not wait for the market to "inevitably" fix itself.</p>

On Secular and Religious Politics of Belonging

This chapter focuses on the search for meaning and belonging of the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel by discussing how belonging is framed in Arab politics in Israel. More specifically, the chapter maps and analyzes three narratives in the Arab politics of belonging: the romantic, the practical, and the visionary. The first advocates belonging to what the authors term a “lost paradise” of Palestine and Islam. This nostalgic type of belonging yearns for idealized places, times, and characters in the history of Palestine and Islam. The second narrative, the practical, defines belonging first and foremost as a developmental act, practiced at the community level through voluntary and charity programs. The third, the visionary, promotes belonging as an ideological position to be articulated and educated for at the national level. These three concepts are circulated and mobilized by both secular Arab political and Muslim religious actors but in different versions and to different extents.

Mock News: On the discourse of mocking in U.S. televised political discussions

American televised political shows are under tremendous pressure to succeed within an economic model that requires maximizing viewership. In response to this growing financial pressure, political shows invite contentious guests to discuss current events and issues. Such discussions are often confrontational, making a mockery of the responsibility the news industry has in disseminating information in an impartial and insightful way. Although outrage is a common discourse feature of televised political shows, little is known about what this language looks like and how it is used to argue ideological positions. To this end, drawing from critical discourse analysis, this study investigates the multidimensional and multifunctional aspects of mocking, which is a type of outrage discourse. The findings show that mocking is an important argumentative tool for panel members, which occurs in the turn following an opposing viewpoint and is used to carry out a range of actions, including expressing disagreement, establishing a competing ideological position, and refuting an idea based on an opponent’s political identity, to name a few. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how mocking and mock news feed into partisan ideologies, creating both tribalism and skepticism within society.

The odd one out: The influence of ideological positioning on individual electoral success

Within many countries, voters not only have to cast a vote for a political party, but also have the option to select (a) candidate(s) within that party, a so-called preferential vote. Recent studies indicate that several factors influence the success of candidates within this intra-party competition, such as ballot list position, political experience, and socio-demographic characteristics. However, it has not yet been investigated whether ideology also matters for intra-party success. This study investigates the role of the ideological position of candidates within their party on the share of preferential votes they obtain. Can candidates win preferential votes by taking ideological niche positions within the party? To investigate this question, the study uses data from a candidate survey conducted during the 2014 Belgian elections in which candidates were asked to position themselves ideologically. The results of this study indicate that ideology does not play a strong role within the intra-party competition.

Beyond aesthetics: The long take as the nation-form in the cinema of Lav Diaz

This article argues that the extreme long take of Lav Diaz is not only his aesthetic method but also his ideological position as a filmmaker of Third Cinema, reinstating the theory’s critical arsenal in opposing the violent structure of the postcolonial nation state. It maintains that the Diaz shot is isomorphic to the nation-form and has two political dimensions: first, the extreme duration of the shot is Diaz’s resistance to the imperialism of mainstream cinema and its debilitating effects by employing ‘dead time’ which creates restlessness and reflexivity that disrupt absorption to enable a mode of critical spectatorship; second, the Diaz shot is a critique on Philippine postcolonial society which can be understood by examining the triadic structure of space, time and body. Using the film Mula sa Kung Ano Ang Noon (From What Is Before) (2014), this article proposes an anatomy of the shot as a unitary system of environment, duration and progression of actions, labouring bodies of subalterns in the state of bare life. It expands the possibility of the long take from the narrowly held study of time and space to include a study of bodies.

Psychological and pedagogical support of the social success of adolescents in school

At present, the issue of development, formation and support of the social success of the younger generation is relevant on a global scale and in Russia. In adolescence, new basic needs and leading activities are formed, so it is very important to effectively interact with other people and positively self-actualize. The purpose of the article is to analyze the social success of adolescents and develop recommendations for the psychological and pedagogical development of success. Methodology and methods of research. An activity-based approach that sets the benchmark for the inclusion of a teenager in a variety of directions of emotionally saturated socially recognized and socially approved activities. Adolescence was studied in the works of L. I. Bozhovich, T. V. Dragunov, N. I. Krylov, A.V. Petrovsky, N. N. Tolstykh, D. I. Feldstein, D. B. Elkonin, E. Erikson and others. Studies of the theory of success were conducted on a multi-scale in various branches of social and humanitarian knowledge by domestic scientists (V. I. Bakshtanovsky, N. A. Baturin, O. I. Efremova, E. T. Konyukhova, E. M. Korzh, G. Yu. Ksenzova, V. A. Labunskaya, A. K. Markova, N. I. Nefedova, A. M. Rikel, G. L. Tulchinsky) and foreign scientists (A. Bandura, U. James, D. A. Dilman, K. Mannheim, R. Strenberg, P. Tillich, E. Fromm). Research methods: test of life orientations (D. Krambo, L. Makholik, adaptation of D. A. Leontiev), questionnaire “Determination of success” (D. A. Bukhalenkova), questionnaire “Style of self-regulation of behavior”, expert assessment of social success (N. V. Kalinina). Conclusion. Pedagogical observation allowed us to judge the lack of a deep understanding of social success among adolescents, the veiled value views on social attitudes, principles, norms and requirements. The respondents are influenced by authorities who directly invest certain ideals of the present and future in the ideological position of a teenager.