Radicalism, Respectability, and the Colour Line of Critical Thought: An Interdisciplinary History of Critical International Relations

The epithet ‘critical’ has become both coveted and contested. A long-established lodestone of personal, political, and professional commitment within academia, its meanings are multiple, and its histories are poorly understood. This article reconstructs an interdisciplinary history of debates concerning what it is to ‘be critical’, beginning in the 1930s but focusing on the late 1960s to the late 1990s. It argues the significance of the category ‘critical’ to be that it can connote political radicalism while allowing for a degree of professional respectability. Furthermore, the article shows that claims and counterclaims upon the parameters of criticality have privileged certain thought traditions. In particular, while contemporary discourses of ‘anti-wokeness’ caricature critical academics as being prepossessed with issues of coloniality and race, traditions of thought dealing with these issues have, until recently, been rather marginalised. The enduring ‘colour line’ of critical thought is not only unjust but also deleterious to political imagination.

Tokens of Love

The third and final installment of this book-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation” treats two further writers in seventeenth-century England whose work is not representative of any stance or discourse that contextualist historians have recognized as available in that era. In Aemelia Lanyer's poetry, we find a resistance to established perspectives that is related to her sense that divine signification is always incomplete and that, therefore, the diffidence of female cognition is superior, when approaching religious texts, to the assertive mentality that she associates with men. Despite his sex, however, and his reputation for theological and political radicalism, Milton too explicitly contends that the interpretation of scripture should always be “non-committal” because its signification is always incomplete. The “very magnitude” of the “great mystery” of the Incarnation, Milton argues in De Doctrina Christiana, should encourage the reader's mind to stand on “guard from the outset” against the tendency to make “rash or hasty assertions.” The urge to tamper with, pry into, add to, or hasten to understand the signifiers of divine meaning is shown, in Paradise Lost, to be the original sin of the first human couple. As much as for Lanyer, then, sex is for Milton bound up with hermeneutics—and, for both poets, the individual's relationship with God is a consuming passion, about which one may report a phenomenology of affects but can offer no contentions or arguments.

Sailors

European overseas expansion and the processes of early modern globalization depended on the labor of sailors. It is therefore not surprising that they are among the most thoroughly studied occupational groups of the early modern world, especially as their historical importance is reflected in a relative abundance of archival source material. Legal records of various kinds have proven an especially rich source that has allowed historians to recover in remarkable detail the lives of early modern sailors as they crisscrossed oceans and imperial jurisdictions, moving back and forth between ship and shore, switching from the fisheries to the merchant marine, and on to naval service and back again. As one of the first predominantly wage-dependent groups of workers in the emerging capitalist world-economy, sailors were subject to an unusually complex constellation of forces that together provided the structure of the international maritime labor market, including the interaction of the push and pull of demand and supply with the multiple and overlapping coercive recruitment systems that in wartime funneled mariners by the tens of thousands onto the gundecks of Europe’s burgeoning war-fleets. But scholarly interest has not only been stimulated by the fact that sailors sailed the ships that projected European imperial aggression overseas, and then carried people, commodities, and ideas back and forth across the oceans. Historians have also been fascinated by the peculiar culture that emerged below deck and in port cities around the world, including its characteristic cosmopolitanism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism. The titles listed in this bibliography highlight some of the most prominent studies on these and other subjects, but interested researchers will want to consult other Oxford Bibliographies articles as well, including Oceanic History, Ships and Shipping, Piracy, Smuggling, and The Maritime Atlantic in the Age of Revolutions.

„Chcecie totalnej wolności słowa?” Kultura w Niemczech u progu lat dwudziestych (XXI wieku) wobec radykalizmu, wielokulturowości i konfliktów etnicznych. Próba rozpoznania problemów

This article attempts to present selected phenomena of contemporary German culture in the context of political radicalism, multiculturalism and ethnic conflicts. Starting with the criticism of the student protests of 1968 (using the example of the novel Örtlich betäubt by Günter Grass) and discourses on Europe in the early 1990s (Grass, Enzensberger), and ending with debates on freedom of expression, political correctness or “cancel culture” (Wallraff, Pirinçci, Nuhr, Eckhart), this article analyses the consequences of left- and right-wing radicalism, anti-Semitism and Islamism for literature and cabaret in Germany on selected examples.

Continuities of Racial Fascism: Louis Till and Black Marxism in the Pisan Cantos

In Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Pound mourns the unjust execution of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. This essay argues that the unusually sympathetic representation of Till in the poem was made possible by Pound’s engagement with the ideas of activists for black liberation like Nancy Cunard and Langston Hughes; hence Pound, an avowed fascist, ultimately voices a critique of the “racial fascism” of the United States typical of discourses of black anti-imperialism. The essay concludes with exploring the antinomical racial logic of the Pisan Cantos, for which black political radicalism—the “Black Leninism” of Langston Hughes in particular—is revealed to be a constitutive, but repressed, ideological interlocutor.

Belief in conspiracy theories and attitudes toward political violence

In the last decade, political protest events have been rising in Western democracies. At the same time, there has been a steady increase in the diffusion of conspiracy theories in political communication, a phenomenon that has captured the interest of scholars for its growing political relevance. However, while most research focuses on the reasons why citizens believe in conspiracies, studies looking at the political-behavioral implications of such beliefs, in particular their connection to political radicalism, have been more limited. In this paper, we investigate the association between people's belief in conspiracies and their propensity to endorse political violence or to legitimate radical political action. Building on pathway theories of radicalization, we argue that conspiracy theories provide narratives that might help people channel their feelings of resentment toward political targets, fueling radical attitudes. We provide some correlational evidence using survey data of US respondents collected on MTurk. We observe attitudes toward political violence using two multi-item batteries, one developed by us. Our results show that people who score higher on a scale of generic conspiracy belief are also more likely to endorse violent political actions.

Transatlantic Radicalism

The Atlantic Ocean not only connected North and South America with Europe through trade but also provided the means for an exchange of knowledge and ideas, including political radicalism. Socialists and anarchists would use this “radical ocean” to escape state prosecution in their home countries and establish radical milieus abroad. However, this was often a rather unorganized development and therefore the connections that existed were quite diverse. The movement of individuals led to the establishment of organizational ties and the import and exchange of political publications between Europe and the Americas. The main aim of this book is to show how the transatlantic networks of political radicalism evolved with regard to socialist and anarchist milieus and in particular to look at the actors within the relevant processes—topics that have so far been neglected in the major histories of transnational political radicalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Individual case studies are examined within a wider context to show how networks were actually created, how they functioned and their impact on the broader history of the radical Atlantic.

CZECH POLITICS AND DECAY OF THE AUSTRO-HUNGARY (1917-1918)

The article analyzes the development and manifestations of the Czech national movement at the final stage of the First World War in the crisis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The reasons for the decline of the policy of Czech «activism» at the level of the Czech parliamentary representation and leading political parties have been clarified. At the same time, the growth of anti-war and anti-Austrian sentiments among the population of the Czech Republic is highlighted. The changes in Czech-German relations caused by the attempts of German nationalists to establish German rule in the Czech Republic on the one hand and the resistance of Czech politics on the other are described. At the same time, emphasis was placed on the fluctuations of the domestic political course of the monarchy, which gradually lost its traditional role of arbiter in interethnic relations and a safeguard against political radicalism during the war. The main projects of reforming the empire, which directly concerned the Czech lands, are highlighted. The influence of foreign policy factors that accelerated the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in this period is highlighted: changes in the attitude to the preservation of Austria-Hungary, the Entente, USA entry into the war, the Russian Revolution, the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace. The aspirations of Czech and German national radicalism based on the right of nations to self-determination are analyzed. The circumstances of the approval of the concept of an independent sovereign Czechoslovak Republic as the main project of Czech state-building among emigrant circles and its popularization in the Czech lands are clarified.

Italianness in the United States between migrants’ informal gardening practices and agricultural diplomacy (1880–1912)

During the Age of Mass Migration more than four million Italians reached the United States. The experience of Italians in US cities has been widely explored: however, the study of how migrants adjusted in relation to nature and food production is a relatively recent concern. Due to a mixture of racism and fear of political radicalism, Italians were deemed to be undesirable immigrants in East Coast cities and American authorities had long perceived Italian immigrants as unclean, unhealthy and carriers of diseases. As a flipside to this narrative, Italians were also believed to possess a ‘natural’ talent for agriculture, which encouraged Italian diplomats and politicians to propose the establishment of agricultural colonies in the southern United States. In rural areas Italians could profit from their agricultural skills and finally turn into ‘desirable immigrants’. The aim of this paper is to explore this ‘emigrant colonialism’ through the lens of environmental history, comparing the Italian and US diplomatic and public discourses on the potential and limits of Italians’ agricultural skills.

The Battle for Post-Habsburg Trieste/Trst: State Transition, Social Unrest, and Political Radicalism (1918–23)

In spite of the recent transnational turn, there continues to be a considerable gap between Fascist studies and the new approaches to the transitions, imperial collapses, and legacies of post–World War I Europe. This article posits itself at the crossroads between fascist studies, Habsburg studies, and scholarship on post-1918 violence. In this regard, the difficulties of the state transition, the subsequent social unrest, and the ascent of new forms of political radicalism in post-Habsburg Trieste are a case in point. Rather than focusing on the “national strife” between “Italians” and “Slavs,” this article will concentrate on the unstable local relations between state and civil society, which led to multiple cycles of conflict and crisis. One of the arguments it makes is that in post-1918 Trieste, where the different nationalist groups contended for a space characterized by multiple loyalties and allegiances, Fascists claimed to be the movement of the “true Italians,” identified with the Fascists and their sympathizers. Accordingly, while targeting the alleged enemies of the “Italian nation” (defined as “Bolsheviks,” “Austrophiles,” and “Slavs”), they aimed to polarize the Italian-speaking community along different political fault lines to reconfigure relations between the state and civil society.