Cultural power and resistance

We invite applications for our panel "Figuring It Out: Crises and Resistance in Graphic Novels, Comics, and Cartoons" at the XV Conference of the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (SeSaMO). The conference will be held in presence at L’Orientale University of Naples (Naples, Italy) on June 22-24, 2022.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

The themes of ‘freedom’ and ‘resistance’ have histories and philosophical arguments that can be mapped across human history. This thesis uses these thematic concerns to explore the work of Irish artist Samuel Beckett. In so doing, this piece challenges the reader to re-evaluate Beckett’s work away from being a modernist artwork detached from time and context.  Instead, what we need to see in Beckett is his relentless desire to reveal a brutally damaged 20th century that saw individuals exposed to extreme political ideas that led in many cases to physical and mental abuse.  To aid this highly contextualised view of his work, this thesis employs the works of Berlin, Hegel, Marx and Adorno to give a deeper understanding of the philosophical context or to provide prisms through which a modern-day reader might understand Beckett’s narrative form.
This piece illustrates how, by encapsulating philosophical concepts of freedom and resistance, Beckett’s literature not only offers a glimpse into how he saw the world, but also why Jean Paul Sartre argued that he needed to focus on how “a fictional technique always relates back to the novelist’s metaphysics.”

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

We argue that the continued growth of the Internet, both as a form of mainstream media and as a tool for organizing democratic social interactions, requires that Internet politics be retheorized from a standpoint that is both critical and reconstructive. While we undertake an approach that is critical of corporate forms and hegemonic uses of the Internet, we advocate for new software developments such as blogs and trace the oppositional deployments of the Internet made by a wide variety of groups in the cause of progressive cultural and political struggle. In this regard, we describe how the Internet has facilitated the worldwide VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PP 75-100

Of the challenges confronting the nation-building project in Timor-Leste, the " generation gap " is one of the most important. The history of Timor-Leste, characterized by foreign occupations by both Portugal and Indonesia, has produced an emerging national identity founded on the concept of suffering in the name of national self-determination. Official state narratives that outline a national identity based on the recent struggle for independence have privileged the generation of East Timorese whose members led the resistance movement against the Indonesian occupation. This emphasis has not only overlooked youth involvement in the liberation struggle, but it has also estranged the younger generation of East Timorese from the nation-state. The examination of street art, the medium most accessible to members of Timor-Leste's Geração Foun, or " new generation " , permits exploration of the ways that they identify with official notions of an emerging national identity.

This thesis examines the central driver of recent mobilizations to be the need felt by society to seek a reinterpretation of democracy. This need for change is seen to emerge due to the damages caused to the social fabric by the impact of economic globalization. It is argued that every social movement has its own particular reasons. However, in the current globalization era, everything is connected to each other and drivers of recent social movements are dependent on the ‘legitimation crisis’ of the political economy. This aspect is focused through a case study on the Gezi Park movement as part of the recent wave of social movements. While investigating these aspects, it appears necessary to go beyond the new social movement theory in order to observe accurately this even newer wave of mobilizations. These issues must be addressed, and if they would be, it is argued that recent social movements can be the pioneers of an honorable social and political system in the future.

To refuse is to say no. But, no, it is not just that. To refuse can be generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. Refusals illuminate limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions. And yet, refusal cannot be cast merely as a response to authority, or an updated version of resistance, or a concept to subsume under already existing scholarly categories. Instead, the contributors to this Openings collection find refusal to be about the social as much as the political, to be a concept in dialogue with exchange and equality. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss (1967) discusses refusal as the cutting of social relations, or in some instances as the raising anew of obligations and rituals. We seek to theorize refusal in this collection as concept to both think with and think about. We approach refusal as ethnographic subject and mode, recognizing each as making its own set of moral claims, including claims about how we receive, make sense of, and present (or not) ethnographic worlds. Yet why the concept of refusal now? Why not just use the term resistance (see Theodossopoulos 2014)? A quarter of a century ago, Lila Abu-Lughod (1990,

Artykuł przynosi reinterpretację Kopisty Bartleby. Historii z Wall Street-słynnej noweli Hermana Melville'a, której poświęcono niezliczoną ilość analiz. Autor przedstawia działanie "fabryki Bartleby'ego" i odnosi się polemicznie do tych wszystkich lektur, które przypisują wywrotowy i wspólnototwórczy poten cjał idiosynkratycznej formule oporu powtarzanej przez bohatera. Kluczowa dla argumentacji pozostaje figura muru, rozumiana jako projektowany przez protago nistę obraz zewnętrznych konieczności-niepodlegających zmianie reguł świata społecznego. Suplementowanie marksistowskich ujęć (zwłaszcza propozycji Leo Marxa) pojęciami zaczerpniętymi z pism Jacques'a Rancière'a umożliwia wypra cowanie perspektywy, w której osłabieniu ulega deterministyczna wizja jednostki ulegającej socjoekonomicznemu przeznaczeniu. Bartleby okazuje się ofiarą włas nego fatalizmu, z kolei adwokatnarrator, na ogół przedstawiany jako uosobie nie systemu władzy, jawi się jako podmiot polityczny bezskutecznie projektujący wspólną płaszczyznę rozumienia i działania.

Over the past several decades, the neoliberal paradigm has dominated global economics and has marked a period of privatization, the supremacy of finance capital and the centrality of unaccountable global financial organizations. Since 2011, the world witnessed an increase in protests across the globe, as citizens have expressed their discontent with the political structures and policies that led to inequalities and the erosion of democratic institutions. Together with millions of people from Ecuador, Colombia, Lebanon, Brazil, Hong Kong or France, different groups of civilians also participated to mass-gatherings in Chile since October 2019 to nowadays. In this paper, I will try to elaborate on how protesters are answering to global challenges through local cultural resistance in order to build counter-identity. By tracing the history of Cueca, a traditional Chilean dance, this article aims to understand how the performance of these cultural practices had been submitted to various levels of re-constructions and re-appropriations of meanings, becoming both an instrument of politicization and a form of activism. Transversally, this analysis will examine how new political actions are shaping the dynamics of protests by different actors and instruments of propagation, specific to post neo-liberal societies:  the dominant role of youth, the absence of political parties as main organizers and the widespread use of social media as means of political action.

Since 2009, 155 Tibetans inside Tibet have positioned themselves in public places and burned themselves alive, in what most understand to be a protest for Tibetan freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama. This article explores how Buddhism is used to disavow the self-immolators through descriptions of the protest as an act in violation of the Buddhist tenet to not destroy life. By examining Tibetan Buddhist conceptualizations of death and the theological precedents for acts of sacrifice, the analysis argues that the act of self-immolation resides in a gray area-neither implicitly sanctioned, nor prohibited. Like many actions in Buddhism, the ethical reading of it rests on the motivation with which the act is undertaken. This article also analyzes interviews undertaken by the author with exile teachers of Tibetan Buddhism to understand the act's violation of, or coherence with, Buddhism. The author demonstrates that conceptualizations of self-immolation are negotiated in the context of the political exigency in exile to make the act coherent with Buddhism. The article ends with a discussion of the global phenomena of martyrdom, and explores the discreet acts of resistance that the self-immolations have inspired inside Tibet.

Whilst the condition of a damaged ethical life has received due scholarly attention to date, only rarely is resistance to it conceived as an actual possibility with the potential of real effects on a macro-social scale. This is not just a curious lacuna in the literature. To ignore or miss concrete possibilities or even instances of resistance is to reinforce the apparent naturalness and inevitability of structures of injustice. The aim of this edited collection is to help address this epistemological neglect, exploring the multiplicity of motives, presuppositions, sites, ways, and consequences of acts of resistance. As shown in the ensuing contributions, resistance can be recalcitrant or transformative in its aims, discursive or physical in its means, and local or generalised in its loci. If there is a single argument that can be distilled, it is that the emergence of progressive resistance entails the incessant rational critique of so-styled ‘common sense’ and prevalent ethical claims–a process which could be called ‘the banality of good’. Contributors (in alphabetical order): Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Leonidas K. Cheliotis, Lilie Chouliaraki, Spiros Gangas, Richard Kearney, Alison Liebling, John O’Neill, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Justice Tankebe, Ezra Tessler, Sappho Xenakis.


Contents

List of Contributors
Acknowledgements

1. Roots, Rites, and Sites of Resistance: The Banality of Good: An Introduction
Leonidas K. Cheliotis

2. Values, Crisis, and Resistance: Prospects for Freedom Reconsidered
Spiros Gangas

3. Narcissism, Humanism, and the Revolutionary Character in Erich Fromm’s Work
Leonidas K. Cheliotis

4. Thinking after Terror: An Interreligious Challenge
Richard Kearney

5. Ecce Homo: The Political Theology of Good and Evil
John O’Neill

6. Resistance as Transformation
Andrea Mubi Brighenti

7. Acting on Vulnerable Others: Ethical Agency in Media Discourse
Lilie Chouliaraki

8. Sites of Resistance: Death Row Homepages and the Politics of Compassion
Ezra Tessler

9. Face to Face with Abidoral Queiroz: Death Squads and Democracy in Northeast Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

10. Resisting Submission? The Obstinacy of ‘Balkan’ Characteristics in Greece as Dissidence against ‘The West’
Sappho Xenakis

11. Legitimation and Resistance: Police Reform in the (Un)Making
Justice Tankebe

12. ‘Governmentality’ and Governing Corrections: Do Senior Managers Resist?
Alison Liebling

Por meio da compreensão do ativismo de fãs como uma forma de resistência cotidiana cultural, econômica e criativa, o objetivo deste capítulo busca problematizar as relações entre participação, resistência e consumo de fãs do jogo on-line League of Legends (LoL). Enquanto suporte empírico, apresenta-se um mapeamento sobre algumas práticas do ativismo de fãs-jogadores no antigo fórum oficial de LoL no Brasil, a partir de uma triangulação metodológica com destaque para o uso de inspirações etnográficas. Após as reflexões teóricas e as análises, propõe-se uma tipologia das práticas de resistência cotidiana na comunidade de LoL baseada em quatro modos. Os resultados desta abordagem indicam que a diversidade do universo das produções digitais e práticas de parte dos fãs de LoL ressignificam as compreensões sobre resistência e participação, questionando a dualidade existente entre a cidadania e o consumo da cultura pop, agindo como catalizadores que reinterpretam e excedem os limites do fandom.

et , cette recherche fournit une nouvelle approche théorique des difficultés de la fidélisation. Une étude qualitative conduite auprès de 40 consommateurs révèle qu'ils fondent leurs justifications sur une critique des logiques marchande et industrielle, à partir d'autres « mondes » qui soutiennent leurs référentiels de jugement.

Why do some members keep silent, although the group counseling is based on interaction? Is this a way of participation or is oral participation too difficult as a skill to actualize in a group? This study handles the issue of silence and its reasons, which group leaders frequently face and sometimes have difficulty coping with in nonvoluntary training groups. The data for the study were collected from the reports of 61 members in four distinct counseling groups. The groups were led simultaneously by two leaders who are specialized in individual and group counseling. The data were analyzed using content analysis. As a result, it was found that silence because of personal characteristics was the major cause of silence, and that it appears to be there are reasons for silence other than the ones specified in the relevant literature. Key Words Quietness, Group Counseling, Resistance, Training Groups, Group Leader. Counseling is one of the significant community and social services occupat...

The Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939, was the first battle against fascism in Europe. Five months after the victory of dictator Francisco Franco in Spain the conflict moved to Europe with the outbreak of the Second World War. Fascism and anti-fascism again faced each other on the battlefield. Amid the heat of the Nazi invasions in Europe, anti-fascist resistance groups formed by ordinary citizens emerged in virtually all European countries. Although the Franco dictatorship was not directly involved in the Second World War, in Spain an anti-Franco resistance movement was organised in 1939 and lasted until 1952. Although the Spanish resistance constituted the first and last antifascist resistance movement in Europe, the Spanish case has been consistently overlooked by international studies.
This book inserts the Spanish anti-Franco resistance into the European context, proposing a new narrative of anti-fascist resistances (plural and in lower case) in Europe. At the same time, the book offers a new interpretation of guerrilla phenomena with a strongly peasant character, as was the case of the resistance in Spain. The author underlines the Importance of primary groups (kinship, neighbourhood, friendship) and secondary groups (camaraderie and political loyalties) in the mobilization and organization of armed groups. For this study, the author established twelve variables that permitted him to distinguish between ‘neighbours in arms’ and ‘modern guerrilla’. Using all of these elements, the author shows the plurality of the identities and cultures of the antifascist resistance in Spain.

The instance postcolonialism becomes hinged on liberalism, the liberating promise which postcolonialism propels considerably shrinks. This essay explains that in predicating the liberal ideology as a tool for self-determination, a crippling standstill awaits a given cause. The Palestinian question as recently imagined by the American Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in Mornings in Jenin (2010) stands a glaring example for such a predicament. The predicament is characterized by a predilection towards ontology instead of epistemology, the personal rather than the collective, character over theme, irony and excess instead of explicit and balanced approaches and finally, discussions favoring culture and identity in lieu of class and resistance. Masking that same postcolonial predicament is the narrative obsession with the existential-ontological, turning the struggle into a textual one. All in all, the predicament expands on postcolonial experiences by raising awareness to the dialectics of emancipation discourses. Introduction:

In Truth and Bright Water, Thomas King makes various metaphorical connections between the buffalo and the natives to reconfigure the prevailing Canadian cultural discourse surrounding native people. In this novel, King focuses on a "critique of authenticity" as well as "the role of the artist" and reveals the "complexity and creativity of Native writers and their art" (Archibald-Barber 237). Marta Dvorak argues that King's novel does not strives to subvert the hegemony head on; alternatively, King uses a more complex and elliptical method. Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber suggests that, through his novel, King questions the existence of and ability to restore native cultural authenticity. Barbara S. Bruce sees Monroe as an avenue for King to express his literary art's inability to erase the effects of colonization. King negotiates dialogically with the hegemony when he parallels the buffalo and the natives in Elvin's counter-discursive version of the historical reasons behind the buffalo disappearance, Munro's play on the ideology of authenticity through his decoy buffalo, and Tecumseh's musing about a utopian past prior to violence towards the buffalo from the Europeans and the natives. Through this symbolism, King complicates prevailing notions of native cultural authenticity and demonstrates self-awareness about his novel's non-oppositional stance as resistance art.

The apparitions in Medjugorje are an extremely complex phenomenon that produces different interpretations and evaluations. In this paper I will focus solely on the perspective of those who recognize the apparitions of Mary as a symbol of resistance. This Mary's role I will analyse in the context of the Medjugorje apparitions in a time of socio-political crisis in communist Yugoslavia, primarily generated by the death of its president Josip Broz Tito and demonstrations in Kosovo.
In that period Medjugorje apparitions have disturbed the spirits, not only within the communist authorities of Yugoslavia, but also within the Church. National authorities characterize the apparitions of Medjugorje as fiction of local Franciscans – "clerical nationalists", in the words of one of communist officials – with the aim of bringing down the constitutional order of the communist Yugoslavia. At the same time, the alleged apparitions in Medjugorje have deeply shaken the Church of this area and intensified the centuries-old conflict between diocesan and Franciscan priests of the Mostar-Duvno Diocese, where Medjugorje belongs.

Noken is an essential tool/bag/clothing in the lives of Indigenous people of West Papua, which is made from knitting thin strips of wood primarily from the Gnetum Gnemon tree. Raw materials required to make noken have become scarce due to massive deforestation. An analysis of the noken lends itself to a useful understanding of the link between economic development initiatives in the Merauke Regency of West Papua and shifting cultural identity among Indigenous Papuans. Drawing on the Women, Culture and Development (WCD) approach, this qualitative study examines interviews from Papuan women in order to understand how the noken resonates with Indigenous Papuans, and how perceptions of noken and their accessibility have changed. The findings reveal that a combination of factors contribute to dwindling noken supplies, which adversely impact Papuans’ ability to produce and reproduce their culture. This paper argues that Papuan women possess an unwritten specialized knowledge that is of in...

One of the most prominent, and well-studied, relationships in nineteenth-century Ireland is that of landlord and tenant, and for most of the century it was the traditional authority of the rural landed elite that dominated positions of power at local and national level. This essay, drawing on theory from the social sciences, will examine the role of ritual in legitimizing the elite position of the landed class at local level in the 1850s and how, through the forces of historical change, its efficacy became greatly diminished as the century drew to a close. Howard Newby's aim in his 1975 paper 'The deferential dialectic' was to explain 'the relational and normative means by which [rurally based] elites maintain their traditional authority [and] the strategies they employ that attempt to ensure the stability of their power'. 1 Deference, he argues, is neither 'a type of behaviour' nor 'a set of attitudes', but rather a combination of both as 'a form of social interaction which occurs in situations involving the exercise of traditional authority'. 2 He uses the dialectic to explain the interaction between the superordinate and subordinate partners in a paternalistic relationship and argues that this dialectic requires attentive management, on the part of the superordinate partner, in order that the relationship's destabilizing 'tensions' can be addressed. The root of these tensions, he explains, is the inegalitarian nature of paternalistic social relations and that the successful management of these tensions necessitates the superordinate group entering into an inherently contradictory relationship with the subordinate one in order to strike a balance between the conflicting elements of differentiation and identification that constitute deferential interaction. 3 Because of the hierarchical nature of the relationship, differentiation from subordinates is a prerequisite in order to effectively wield power over them, but so too is it necessary to cultivate a level of identification to promote the relationship as mutually cooperative so that the subjection of the subordinate partner is less obvious. 4

This thesis aims to explore the making of Kurdish publishing in Turkey by asking how that field emerged and has been developed under the conditions inimical to the use and reproduction of Kurdish literary language. My exploratory journey into that terrain focuses on both the diachronic development of the conditions of possibilities underlying its emergence and the synchronic dynamics characterizing its conditions
of existence. Drawing on both the secondary data collected through archival research and the qualitative data collected through ethnographic one, I argue that Kurdish publishing is situated not simply at the intersection of culture and economy, but rather at the intersection of culture and politics as a form of cultural resistance. Rather than taking this form of resistance as a monolithic one, I use Bourdieu's conception of the field to frame the complexity of the dynamics constituting that form of resistance, and I define two moments characterizing the making of that field: struggle and competition. While the former moment denotes the relations of
antagonism between the Kurdish publishers and the state, the market imperative and the predominant public perceptions, the latter one stands for the relations of agonism among the publishers making that field.

This paper examines the affective dynamics surrounding street harassment encounters endured by women of colour in the transient spaces of London. The harassment will be framed as intersectional, combining racist and sexist oppressions in an emotionally violent encounter, producing feelings of unbelonging, fear, and anger. I will analyse forum postings on Hollaback! and conduct interviews on women of colour and their experiences of street harassment in the city of London. This paper seeks to answer these questions by breaking down the lived experience of a street harassment encounter, the feelings of anger and fear that are borne from each incident that shape one’s experience of living in London and the intersectional foundations of the
harassment.
This paper is written in the spirit that street harassment, while the racist and sexist encounters are persistent and at times painful and frightening, stories are exchanged between those who experience it. The more that encounters are shared, the more people realise that they are not alone or to blame for their harassment and find modes of resistance.

The German invasion of the Netherlands on the 10th of May 1940 was not only a tragedy for the Dutch people; it was also a tragedy for Dutch literature. In a few weeks time, the intellectual leaders of an entire generation would disappear. In the chaos of the battle of Rotterdam, Doeke Zijlstra, editor in chief of the publishing house Nijgh & Van Ditmar, was killed by a stray bullet. Publisher Robert Leopold, who feared German revenge for his publication of Hermann Rauschning’s critical work Hitler Speaks, shot himself. The promising Jewish writer Jacob Hiegentlich took poison and died. The young poet Tom de Bruin was accidentally shot by a nervous Dutch sentry. Hendrik Marsman, the most celebrated Dutch poet of his time, was among the few who found a place on a ship that would bring him to England. Within sight of the coast, however, they were hit by a German torpedo and he drowned. By then, two of the most prominent essayists, Edgar Du Perron and Menno ter Braak, had already died; Du Perron collapsed with a heart attack during the bombardment of an airport near his home in Bergen and ter Braak committed suicide upon the news of the Dutch surrender to the Germans. None of them ever knew about the death of the others.
What might seem as the last chapter of a Greek tragedy was only the beginning. During the occupation, at least 700 men and women of the underground press would lose their lives. The punishment for participation in the clandestine press was equivalent to that for acts of sabotage. Propaganda had been an essential element in the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and, as such, a strict control over the press in the occupied Netherlands was considered of paramount importance. Literature was given a totally new purpose in the occupied Netherlands; it became propaganda in support of the Nazification of Dutch society and the tightening of links between the “Germanic” Dutch and their German “brothers.”
Hence, Dutch authors were suddenly confronted with a tough challenge. For decades, most of them had preferred the loftiness of the ivory tower over the squabbling of daily politics. In 1937, the celebrated novelist Simon Vestdijk still wrote: “The creative artist faces war like a toddler: utterly helpless.”  Only a couple of years later, his publishing house was bombed and he himself was taken hostage. The same author, who didn’t want to have anything to do with war, had ended up in its clutches.
In fact, after the German invasion, participation in political debates was no longer an option. It had become a necessity. Even keeping quiet was now considered a political statement. In this context, a simple poem could have a huge impact.

During the past two decades, a new immigrants’ rights movement in the U.S. has emerged, constructing a counterpublic that challenges hegemonic immigration discourses, policies, and practices. We show how a counterpublic is constructed in practice, using as a case study the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), an event in 2003 that helped further the momentum of immigrant rights activism. We examine how immigrant activists and their allies came together and worked to construct, articulate, and enact a shared political identity that we refer to as an identity-in-alliance. Space-time and emotions were crucial in the development of this identity as ‘Freedom Riders,’ as well as a sense of solidarity. We reflect on the vulnerabilities within the counterpublic and challenges it faced when inserting its discourses on immigration, race, and citizenship into the hegemonic public sphere. Taking the insights gained from these practices, we extend Nancy Fraser’s concept of the counterpublic by demonstrating the centrality of space-time and emotions to its theorization.

The colonial project presupposes the existence of a binary between the colonizer and the colonized, master and slave. This binary is actually a form of hierarchy where the colonizer is pitted against the colonized which is similar to the traditional conflict between good and evil, rational and irrational and so on. The alliance between empirical knowledge and power creates a discourse where the colonized people are 'otherised' and represented by the colonizer. The fragmented empirical evidence and the existence of the native cultural and political system have problematized the issue of representation. This discursive colonial representation is challenged by the politico-cultural resistance on part of the colonized. This resistance takes multiple forms since it occurs on the political, cultural and linguistic plane. Language is an important medium for both representation and resistance, since it is manipulated by both the colonizer and the colonized to serve their own purpose. Postcolonial narrative adopts the strategy of 'abrogation' and 'appropriation' to trace the biased representation in the colonial discourse and attempts to rewrite the politico-cultural history of the colonized which is hitherto excluded. To bring out my point, I shall focus on Aeschylus's The Persians and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

In their search for explanations for the so-called Tunisian paradox under Ben Ali -a country with comparatively high levels of socio-economic development, yet plagued by the absence of a civil society that could push for political liberalization-analysts primarily investigated the gradual co-optation of political institutions and actors. As research and analytical agendas were consumed by the robustness of Ben Ali's authoritarian state, little attention was paid to the development of informal and extra-institutional political activities that existed even under deepening political repression. In hindsight, many of these informal activities clearly contributed to the

ABSTRACT
This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of
Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and
interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the
author’s own particular sexual politics. The novel is an experimental
text striving to be a Gesemtkunstswerk, an integrated work that
incorporates music, painting, poetry, regional folklore, and private
thoughts about personal and national power. I discuss the novel’s
themes of violent sexuality and the anxiety of powerlessness and
explore their implications for the fascist political aesthetics in which
D’Annunzio played a pioneering role.

Dans les imaginaires collectifs, la marionnette est tour à tour assimilée à un emblème des rapports de domination et de manipulation. à une créature essentiellement frondeuse et irrévérencieuse, ou bien à un divertissement parfaitement inoffensif et tout juste bon pour les enfants.
En mettant ces clichés à l'épreuve des faits, sur une période qui s'étend du début du XXe siècle à aujourd'hui. cet ouvrage examine la diversité des rapports de pouvoir dans lesquels marionnettes et marionnettistes se trouvent pris. auxquels ils prennent part, qu'ils influencent ou qu'ils génèrent.
D'une étude à l'autre, le lecteur sera amené à traverser des contextes et des espaces très divers (marionnettes en temps de guerre, dans les usines, dans la rue, sur le Web). Il retrouvera des repères de la grande Histoire qui lui sont familiers (Hitler, Franco, Suharto, la révolution culturelle chinoise, la Marche pour le climat, la Syrie de Bachar el-Assad), mais dont le prisme de la marionnette lui permettra de découvrir un aspect tantôt glaçant, tantôt dynamisant par sa créativité.
Au fil des quatre focus qui structurent l'ouvrage (« Appareils d'Etat»; « Profession»; « Dramaturgies»; « Espaces alternatifs»), c'est in fine une histoire culturelle des arts de la marionnette qui se dessine, à la faveur d'un travail approfondi et historicisé sur les répertoires, les techniques. les esthétiques et les pratiques.

More : http://www.marionnette.com/fr/Edition/Catalogue/64

Directed by Raphaèle Fleury and Julie Sermon.
With the participation of scholars and artists: Sarah Anais Andrieu, Sylvie Baillon, Hélène Beauchamp, John Bell, Jaroslav Blecha, Lucile Bodson, Patrick Boutigny, Élodie Chamauret, Karim Oakroub, Raphaèle Fleury, Kathy Foley, Rachel Fourmentin, Alexander Gref, Juraj Hamar, Gabriel Hermand-Priquet, Ida Hledikovô, Annie Katsura Rollins, Anthony Liébault, Salma Mohseni Ardehali, Olivier Neveux, Julie Sermon, Elena Slonimskaya, Cheryl Stephenson, Daniel Urrutiaguer.

This paper, about cinema and the scaffolding of the protest movement in Egypt, depicts how Egyptian recent movies foresee 2011 25th Januarry Revolution.

En Occidente, debido a la sesgada información que aportan los medios de comunicación generalistas y a ciertos posos de orientalismo académico, estamos malacostumbrados a una visión del mundo árabe y sus sociedades como monolíticas y retrógradas, inmóviles en lo que a luchas sociales y demandas de derechos y democracia se refiere. O, en todo caso, se piensa que son sociedades beligerantes habitadas por barbudos extremistas religiosos. Poco o nada sabemos de sus levantamientos populares, democráticos y revolucionarios, como el progreso cultural que supuso la Nahda a principios del siglo XX, o los nacionalismos que dirigieron la necesaria descolonización y trataron de extender la reforma agraria y numerosas mejoras sociales, o las revueltas del pan de finales de los años setenta, o la ola de solidaridad pan-árabe con la causa Palestina o las protestas anti-belicistas que siguieron a la invasión norteamericana de Irak o la Guerra del Líbano en 2006. Es lógico por tanto que apenas tuviéramos noticia de los movimientos en pro de la democracia y en contra de las violaciones de los derechos humanos que perpetraban regímenes árabes aliados de las potencias europeas y de los Estados Unidos de América que llevaban más de una década fraguándose en Egipto, Siria, Túnez... Sin embargo si hubiéramos seguido con atención lo que escribían numerosos pensadores, escritores, activistas o periodistas árabes e incluso a algunos de nuestros más reputados arabistas o analistas políticos, nunca diríamos que la llamada “primavera árabe” ha sido un movimiento espontáneo e impredecible, favorecido por la difusión de las redes sociales.

El cine, junto con los nuevos medios digitales, cómo fenómeno sociocultural, es clave en una sociedad donde la imagen (pese a lo que desde la tradición orientalista se viene informando) es de suma importancia por las altas tasas de analfabetismo. Además, en Egipto particularmente, por razones de prestigio de su centenaria industria cinematográfica. Y por tanto, también es una herramienta válida para entender y explicar desde un punto de vista académico las leyes que codifican dicha sociedad y los cambios que experimenta. No queremos decir que las películas muestran la realidad social de Egipto de manera fidedigna ni que hayan provocado directamente el estallido de las revuelta popular pero sí constatamos que es posible, mediante un estudio multidisciplinar desde las ciencias sociales de cada obra cinematográfica en toda su extensión y polisemia (técnica, contenido, contexto de su producción y exhibición, acogida del público), localizar elementos que ilustren una influencia bidireccional entre el cine egipcio de la última época y su sociedad.

A través de un análisis de las películas de este periodo, atendiendo tanto al cine popular y comercial como al cine de autor e independiente, se pretende identificar los ingredientes de la crisis, las causas de la indignación y el hartazgo de una sociedad oprimida, en definitiva, las claves de una revolución inevitable y también a sus actores: movimientos de oposición, trabajadores, jóvenes, mujeres...

Beogradski ravnogorci monografija je koja je posvećena jednoj nedovoljno istraženoj temi u domaćoj istoriografiji- delovanju pokreta otpora u urbanim uslovima jedne okupirane prestonice. Autor se ne zadržava samo na istoriografskoj rekonstrukciji pravaca delovanja već nastoji da pronikne u složeni mehanizam "urbane gerile". Analizirana je orgnizaciona struktura, metodologija rada, ukazano na kadrovski i materijalni potencijal Ravnogorskog pokreta u Beogradu tokom Drugog svetskog rata. Vršenje obaveštajne službe, širenje ilegalne propagande, sakupljanje materijalnih sredstava, izvođenje sabotaža i atentati istaknuti su kao  najvažniji oblici otpora koji su vršili beogradski ravnogorci. Posebnu vrednost čini nastojanje da se oslanjanjem na relevantnu literaturu anglosaksonskog govornog područja čitaocima obezbedi i komparativna dimenzija ove teme u okvirima delovanja drugih pokreta otpora u okupiranoj Evropi. Publikacija ima 427 stranica i obogaćena je grafikonima, tabelama i autentičnim fotografijama.

A conflict transformation model can be used to characterise deep-rooted socio- political conflicts in which non-violent, creative and/or alternative methods are used to deal with complex and critical situations, to attempt to achieve positive peace. The complexity, history and degradation of the 40 year conflict in Colombia, as well as the variety of actors involved in it suggests that no simplistic solution will have the answer for ending violence, injustice and poverty in the country. Tackling Colombia’s violent conflict requires a multidimensional long-term approach, which is able to include all the actors (relational factor) while addressing its root causes (structural factor). It is in this setting where community-based peacebuilding experiences have the potential to complement the top-level peacemaking efforts by engaging communities in conflict transformation, whilst deconstructing the unjust power structures that have fed conflict. At the moment, these experiences stand as symbols of resistance and hope in the path towards positive peace in Colombia. This dissertation explores community-based peacebuilding experiences in Colombia and analyses their role in Conflict Transformation.