Watching the city: the politics of space in Pizza,birra, faso

In this article, I discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis has as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts.     

The Devil is in the (Bio)diversity: Private Sector “Engagement” and the Restructuring of Biodiversity Conservation

Abstract: Intensified relations between biodiversity conservation organizations and private‐sector actors are analyzed through a historical perspective that positions biodiversity conservation as an organized political project. Within this view the organizational dimensions of conservation exist as coordinated agreement and action among a variety of actors that take shape within radically asymmetrical power relations. This paper traces the privileged position of “business” in aligning concepts of sustainable development and ecological modernization within the emerging institutional context of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Environment Facility in ways that help to secure continued access to “nature as capital”, and create the institutional conditions to shape the work of conservation organizations. The contemporary emergence of business as a major actor in shaping contemporary biodiversity conservation is explained in part by the organizational characteristics of modernist conservation that subordinates it to larger societal and political projects such as neoliberal capitalism.     

Christianity and Secularisation in the West and the Middle East: A Theological Stance

In this article I argue that Christianity is essentially secular. Hence, secularisation not only has a theological connotation concerning Christian faith but also it is the highest and most perfect realisation of Christian religion, since it signifies the cross that is in the centre of Christian faith. As Christians take upon themselves secularisation as an existential choice, namely the powerlessness of God and of the human being, they simultaneously take the worldly‐human existence as “here” and “now” upon themselves. I will argue that this is the culmination of Reformation. Further, I want to demonstrate that secular Christianity, in the sense given in this article, remains a challenge for both Western and Eastern worlds. In order to accomplish this I will reflect in the first part of this article — from a theological point of view — upon some sociological interpretations or theories concerning mainly secularisation in Western Europe and also the contemporary socio‐political scene in the Middle East. In the second part of the article I will present several Western and Eastern theological positions that defend secularisation, and through their contributions I will construct my own theological stance for secular Christianity.     

Unfree Again: Social Reproduction,Flexible Labour Markets and the Resurgence of Gang Labour in the UK

Abstract: The reproduction of human insecurity in contemporary capitalist societies is linked to the need to “produce” labour at a price that permits the realisation of surplus value, and crises of social reproduction (both generalised and specific). In this paper I use a social reproduction lens to focus on the example of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK. I look first at the gang labour system, its evolution, and processes and institutions of regulation. The paper then examines the ways in which the gang labour system sheds light on interrelationship of relations of production and reproduction, processes of class formation, and how the power of supermarkets and the political imperative to keep food costs down, which are related to patterns of migration and racialisation, privilege the reproduction of some workers over others. This in turn signals the need to engage with the role and significance of unfree labour in contemporary economies.     

Der griechische qualitätsgenetiv der nachklassischen zeit

The paper has three parts. The first examines texts that sketch the model Roman life, i.e. that of a member of the senatorial aristocracy. With its concentration on political and military achievement this life is by general consensus a (objectively) “good” life, the idea of (subjective) “happiness” remaining outside consideration. The second part of the paper looks at texts that favour alternative life choices, ones that give weight to the idea of “happiness”: the Epicurean life (Lucretius), the individualistic life (Lucilius and Horace), and the amatory life (Tibullus and Propertius). The analysis shows that these texts contrast the lives advocated with the model elite life and engage at the same time in a discourse with each other. The third part of the paper reflects on the philosophical significance and the social setting of the texts examined.     

Civilized Colonizers and Barbaric Colonized: Reclaiming Naga Identity by Demythologizing Colonial Portraits

In this paper, I address a prominent colonial representation known as “headhunting”, because this term has been in use almost synonymously with Nagas and continues to exert negative psychological ramifications on contemporary Nagas. Due to a lack of work revising the exaggerated representation, the colonial portrayal is being sustained by the frequent and continued use of terms such as “former headhunters” and “once headhunters”. Therefore, this work is in part to represent the Nagas not as “barbaric headhunters” but as “normal” human beings both in the past as well as in the present. To do so, first, I will outline traditional Naga warfare, the context in which decapitation occurred. Second, I will examine the subject as it is being presented in the literature of Euro-Americans. Finally, the paper will end with the argument that the term “headhunting” was simply an invention of the colonizers and briefly note the ramifications of colonial stereotypes on contemporary Nagas.     

New Models of Religious Diversity: Modern Judaism beyond the Scylla of “Political” and the Charybdis of “Religious”

ABSTRACT

This essay is a response to Julie Cooper’s piece in this volume. In her essay, Cooper insightfully analyzes ways in which the rise of the modern state has imposed “religious” forms of identification on Jews, and she engages a series of early twentieth-century Zionist thinkers who resisted and challenged that problematic imposition. I build on Cooper’s analysis, highlighting ways in which even these thinkers may still be caught up in the very paradigm that they sought to challenge. Yet despite their limitations, I suggest that it is precisely by engaging more deeply with such thinkers that theorists today can extend and continue the critique that they initiated. By gaining greater awareness of the ways in which useful critiques of “religionization” can still succumb to problematic “politicization,” and vice versa, theorists can better position themselves to draw on past texts and thought in order to challenge the hegemony of dominant “political” and “religious” options.     

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.     

Canaan Banana,Churches and the Land Issue: Revisiting Theology of Zimbabwe’s Vilified Prophet

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to revisit and evaluate the “combat theology” developed by Canaan Banana, a contemporary theologian, Methodist minister and the first president of Zimbabwe, notably with regard to the issue of land dispossession. It does so primarily against the backdrop of the historical analysis of the ways in which power operated at the intersection of religion and politics during the first three decades after Zimbabwe’s attainment of political independence (1980). The article interrogates several facets of Banana’s liberationist view of justice with regard to the land issue, including (a) speaking truth to political power, regardless of consequences; (b) bearing a prophetic witness vis-à-vis the church’s own complicity in wrongdoing; as well as (c) making a distinction between the selective acts of “liberating violence” and the systemic violence inherent in unjust socio-political structures.     

Sociopolitics

Sociopolitics refer to ways in which politics and relations of power are constituted through an authoritative discourse on the social. This concept echoes Foucault's biopolitics. “Society” and the “social” are devices, as well as categorical foundations, for the political. As with “bio” in biopolitics, “socio” gives a particular form to power that it articulates and constitutes. This review essay uses this concept to discuss recent work of James Scott and David Graeber, and the English-language translation of a 1980 collection of essays by Pierre Clastres. I argue that this anarchist anthropology articulates a clear break within anarchist theory. This break is in the ways the social and the political are related as means and ends in ethnography and in conceptualization of anarchist practice.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

Visualizing New Deal Debates: FDR's Big Stick

This article examines the use of the image of the “big stick” in the context of the New Deal. I argue that the conservative press in the 1930s used the image to mobilize historical memories of over-reaching executive power and a growing federal government under Teddy Roosevelt to “explain” Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Further, the “big stick” was used to accuse FDR of a drive for dictatorial power during his attempt to reorganize the Supreme Court in 1937. The article argues that the visual image and symbol of the “big stick” shaped contemporary political debates and mobilized the public in the 1930s, and continues to shape American political discourse, as seen in the use of the symbol in the 2012 election.     

6. ACTES DE PRÉSENCE: PRESENCE IN FASCIST POLITICAL CULTURE1

In order to discuss the notion of presence, I explore Fascist Italy as an example of a presence‐based culture. In the first part of this paper, I focus on the doctrines of “the philosopher of fascism,” Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), in order to show that his programme of cultural awakening revolves around the notion of the “presentification of the past.” This notion formed the basis of Gentile's dialectic of the act of thought, which is the kernel of his actual idealism, or actualism. I argue that actualism should primarily be interpreted as an ontology of a historical reality; it expresses the view that reality is history. In his 1914 inaugural “L'esperienza pura e la realtà storica” (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), Gentile drew this view to its ultimate consequence by developing a view of experience that has some striking parallels with the contemporary views of presence as expounded by Gumbrecht, Runia, and Ankermit. In the second part of my paper, I discuss how Gentile and his collaborators put presence into practice in school reforms, the Enciclopedia Italiana, and in hundreds of monuments, memorials, and exhibitions. Finally, I discuss the 1932 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, which was not only the apex of fascist culture politics, but also of the practice of presence. In this context, I argue that this practice should not be seen as a politics of historical interpretation, as Hayden White once held, but as a politics of sublime historical experience, or presence. The presence of presence in fascist political culture raises some difficult questions for all who embrace the new paradigm, questions that can only be answered if the notion of presence is somehow balanced by the critical historical method, which is the basis for a true dialogue with the past.     

Asylum and the Post‐Political: Domopolitics,Depoliticisation and Acts of Citizenship

This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the “post‐political” nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper questions the tendency within “post‐political” thought to strip the potential of modes of informal citizenship through arguing that minor acts of resistance are ineffectual and illusory. In response, the paper explores irregular migrant's “acts of citizenship”, and suggests that such prosaic acts can be powerful forms of political interruption through which new ways of seeing asylum are constructed. The paper concludes by suggesting that an incremental politics orientated around such acts of interruption is essential to challenge the material, affective and discursive closures of asylum domopolitics.     

Pre‐Black Futures

Abstract: In this essay I look at the contemporary production of surplus life in liberal democracies, and how it manifests a new type of sovereign spatial power. This power operates through the capacity to exile individuals and populations who are defined—in advance—as risk failures. I investigate further the ways that these pre‐known risk failures are determined through historical and geographical processes of racial formation, arguing that certain kinds of bodies have become vessels for concepts of risk formed in anticipation of an inevitable future. This “inevitable future” involves the formation of populations, which I term Pre‐Black, who are projected as outside of the enabling web of pastoral power. Moreover, as a consequence of this pre‐failure, individuals and populations can be forcefully and, more importantly, “justifiably” removed from commonly held spaces and resources in a contemporary liberal form of sovereign dispossession.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

Locating the Cannibals: Conquest,North American Ethnohistory,and the Threat of Objectivity

This essay critiques the claims to political neutrality and academic authority in an approach to ethnohistory that is defined by historian James Axtell as “balanced” and “objective.” Seeking to shed light on the political genealogy of Axtell’s assertion of objectivity, particularly as it is articulated through an evocation of cannibalism, I trace the ways in which power is implicated in Axtell’s theorizing and argue that objective ethnohistory is linked to conquest as an ongoing ideological and material process. I conclude that objective ethnohistory works to both mask and affirm an imperial grounding, most egregiously through a deceptive rhetoric of democratization in the context of which a posited “we” becomes the supreme cannibalizing trope. Finally, I suggest possibilities for a decolonized, politically engaged ethnohistory.     

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

Political chess and vernacular discursive strategies: A study of the late Qing Sichuan Railway Protection Movement

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary literary and historical studies of late Qing vernacular are rare, and the vernacular texts of the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement have been overlooked by academics. This paper focuses on this topic, arguing that the discursive strategies in such texts revolved around the movement's aim of “breaking the agreement and protecting the railway,” and primarily included discourses on constitutionalism, financial interests, patriotism, cultural order, and the late emperor, as well the ideas of “ridding the emperor of evil ministers,” borrowed from traditional Chinese political discourses, and “national subjugation,” within the context of the national crisis. None of these discourses were “anti-Manchu” or “revolutionary,” yet they were able to mobilize the people of Sichuan to devote themselves to the Railway Protection Movement, as well as attracting the “sympathetic understanding” of high-ranking Sichuan officials, such as Wang Renwen 王人文 and Zhao Erfeng 赵尔丰, thus lending discursive power to the railway protection camp in its game of political chess with the Qing court. Meanwhile, the government's weak discursive power was an important factor in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty by the revolutionary tide triggered by the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement. The discursive strategies in vernacular texts on railway protection (including the particularly strategic discourse on the late emperor) spread, transformed, and were reborn to varying degrees over the course of history.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.