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99 books match the query 'Politics and culture' and 21 start with t

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The Appearing Demos

Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement

Pang Laikwan

University of Michigan Press, 2020

As the waves of Occupy movements gradually recede, we soon forget the political hope and passions these events have offered. Instead, we are increasingly entrenched in the simplified dichotomies of Left and Right, us and them, hating others and victimizing oneself. Studying Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which might be the largest Occupy movement in recent years, The Appearing Demos urges us to re-commit to democracy at a time when democracy is failing on many fronts and in different parts of the world.

The 79-day-long Hong Kong Umbrella Movement occupied major streets in the busiest parts of the city, creating tremendous inconvenience to this city famous for capitalist order and efficiency. It was also a peaceful collective effort of appearance, and it was as much a political event as a cultural one. The urge for expressing an independent cultural identity underlined both the Occupy movement and the remarkably rich cultural expressions it generated. While understanding the specificity of Hong Kong’s situations, The Appearing Demos also comments on some global predicaments we are facing in the midst of neoliberalism and populism. It directs our attention from state-based sovereignty to city-based democracy, and emphasizes the importance of participation and cohabitation. The book also examines how the ideas of Hannah Arendt are useful to those happenings much beyond the political circumstances that gave rise to her theorization. The book pays particular attention to the actual intersubjective experiences during the protest. These experiences are local, fragile, and sometimes inarticulable, therefore resisting rationality and debates, but they define the fullness of any individual, and they also make politics possible. Using the Umbrella Movement as an example, this book examines the “freed” political agents who constantly take others into consideration in order to guarantee the political realm as a place without coercion and discrimination. In doing so, Pang Laikwan demonstrates how politics means neither to rule nor to be ruled, and these movements should be defined by hope, not by goals.

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The Clash of Moral Nations

Cultural Politics in Pilsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935

Eva Plach

Ohio University Press, 2006

The May 1926 coup d’état in Poland inaugurated what has become known as the period of sanacja or “cleansing.” The event has been explored in terms of the impact that it had on state structures and political styles. But for both supporters and opponents of the post-May regime, the sanacja was a catalyst for debate about Polish national identity, about citizenship and responsibility to the nation, and about postwar sexual morality and modern gender identities. The Clash of Moral Nations is a study of the political culture of interwar Poland, as reflected in and by the coup. Eva Plach shifts the focus from strictly political contexts and examines instead the sanacja’s open-ended and malleable language of purification, rebirth, and moral regeneration. In tracking the diverse appropriations and manipulations of the sanacja concept, Plach relies on a wide variety of texts, including the press of the period, the personal and professional papers of notable interwar women activists, and the official records of pro-sanacja organizations, such as the Women’s Union for Citizenship Work. The Clash of Moral Nations introduces an important cultural and gendered dimension to understandings of national and political identity in interwar Poland.

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The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution

Roger Chartier

Duke University Press, 1991

Reknowned historian Roger Chartier, one of the most brilliant and productive of the younger generation of French writers and scholars now at work refashioning the Annales tradition, attempts in this book to analyze the causes of the French revolution not simply by investigating its “cultural origins” but by pinpointing the conditions that “made is possible because conceivable.”
Chartier has set himself two important tasks. First, while acknowledging the seminal contribution of Daniel Mornet’s Les origens intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1935), he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier goes beyond Mornet’s work, not be revising that classic text but by raising questions that would not have occurred to its author.
Chartier’s second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution is a major work by one of the leading scholars in the field and is likely to set the intellectual agenda for future work on the subject.

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The Cynical Society

The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

University of Chicago Press, 1991

The Cynical Society is a study of the political despair and abdication of (individual) responsibility Goldfarb calls cynicism—a central but unexamined aspect of contemporary American political and social life. Goldfarb reveals with vivid strokes how cynicism undermines our capacity to think about society's strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on thinkers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Allan Bloom and on such recent works as Beloved, Bonfire of the Vanities, and Mississippi Burning, The Cynical Society celebrates cultural pluralism's role in democracy.

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The Difference Aesthetics Makes

On the Humanities “After Man”

Kandice Chuh

Duke University Press, 2019

In The Difference Aesthetics Makes cultural critic Kandice Chuh asks what the humanities might be and do if organized around what she calls “illiberal humanism” instead of around the Western European tradition of liberal humanism that undergirds the humanities in their received form. Recognizing that the liberal humanities contribute to the reproduction of the subjugation that accompanies liberalism's definition of the human, Chuh argues that instead of defending the humanities, as has been widely called for in recent years, we should radically remake them. Chuh proposes that the work of artists and writers like Lan Samantha Chang, Carrie Mae Weems, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allan deSouza, Monique Truong, and others brings to bear ways of being and knowing that delegitimize liberal humanism in favor of more robust, capacious, and worldly senses of the human and the humanities. Chuh presents the aesthetics of illiberal humanism as vital to the creation of sensibilities and worlds capable of making life and lives flourish.

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The Fierce Urgency of Now

Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation

Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz

Duke University Press, 2013

The Fierce Urgency of Now links musical improvisation to struggles for social change, focusing on the connections between the improvisation associated with jazz and the dynamics of human rights struggles and discourses. The authors acknowledge that at first glance improvisation and rights seem to belong to incommensurable areas of human endeavor. Improvisation connotes practices that are spontaneous, personal, local, immediate, expressive, ephemeral, and even accidental, while rights refer to formal standards of acceptable human conduct, rules that are permanent, impersonal, universal, abstract, and inflexible. Yet the authors not only suggest that improvisation and rights can be connected; they insist that they must be connected.

Improvisation is the creation and development of new, unexpected, and productive cocreative relations among people. It cultivates the capacity to discern elements of possibility, potential, hope, and promise where none are readily apparent. Improvisers work with the tools they have in the arenas that are open to them. Proceeding without a written score or script, they collaborate to envision and enact something new, to enrich their experience in the world by acting on it and changing it. By analyzing the dynamics of particular artistic improvisations, mostly by contemporary American jazz musicians, the authors reveal improvisation as a viable and urgently needed model for social change. In the process, they rethink politics, music, and the connections between them.

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The Insubordination of Signs

Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis

Nelly Richard

Duke University Press, 2004

Nelly Richard is one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today. As a participant in Chile’s neo-avantgarde, Richard worked to expand the possibilities for cultural debate within the constraints imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), and she has continued to offer incisive commentary about the country’s transition to democracy. Well known as the founder and director of the influential journal Revista de crítica cultural, based in Santiago, Richard has been central to the dissemination throughout Latin America of work by key contemporary thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, and Diamela Eltit. Her own writing provides rigorous considerations of Latin American identity, postmodernism, gender, neoliberalism, and strategies of political and cultural resistance.

In The Insubordination of Signs Richard theorizes the cultural reactions—particularly within the realms of visual arts, literature, and the social sciences—to the oppression of the Chilean dictatorship. She reflects on the role of memory in the historical shadow of the military regime and on the strategies offered by marginal discourses for critiquing institutional systems of power. She considers the importance of Walter Benjamin for the theoretical self-understanding of the Latin American intellectual left, and she offers revisionary interpretations of the Chilean neo-avantgarde in terms of its relationships with the traditional left and postmodernism. Exploring the gap between Chile’s new left social sciences and its “new scene” aesthetic and critical practices, Richard discusses how, with the return of democracy, the energies that had set in motion the democratizing process seemed to exhaust themselves as cultural debate was attenuated in order to reduce any risk of a return to authoritarianism.

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The Legacy of Edward W. Said

William V. Spanos

University of Illinois Press, 2008

With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the “anti-humanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory.

In this provocative assessment of Edward Said’s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said’s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism,Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism--that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.

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The Necromantic State

Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution

Irina R. Troconis

Duke University Press, 2025

In the spring of 2013, televisions across Venezuela announced the death of then-president Hugo Chávez, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution and key political actor in Latin America’s “turn to the left.” Chávez’s death, however, was not the end of Chávez’s life. In The Necromantic State, Irina R. Troconis examines how Chávez, as a “specter,” has lingered in Venezuela’s public, private, and digital spaces. Focusing on contemporary Venezuela and drawing from a diverse corpus that includes tattoos, toys, memes, graffiti, and a hologram haunting the streets of downtown Caracas, Troconis contends that, in moments of failed transitions, political tensions, and crises of legitimacy, the state brings the dead back to life to negotiate the terms of its survival. By showing how this necromantic performance enables the state’s material and visual manifestations in public and private spaces, Troconis untangles a sociopolitical moment in which the ghostly acts as the affective, social, and political force that grounds state authority and ensures the preservation of the status quo, as it circumscribes acts of political imagination and limits popular resistance.

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The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences

István Rév

Central European University Press, 2000

This volume of essays is dedicated to George Soros in honor of his seventieth birthday. The authors come from the different but intersecting worlds of academia, politics and business. The editors have chosen the title The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences to encourage the contributors to adopt a dialogue-oriented approach and in reference to the example of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake 400 years ago for holding heretic views which were probably far more backward than the views of those condemning him. The idea behind this approach was that any complex social process or political attempt to change the lives of people will have unintended consequences, usually paradoxical ones. These consequences should force us to reconsider our original theory. The volume also contains a short biography of George Soros and a list of his published works and philanthropic initiatives

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The Pinocchio Effect

On Making Italians, 1860-1920

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2007

Soon after the disparate states of the Italian peninsula unified in the 1860s to create a single nation, the nationalist Massimo D’Azeglio is said to have remarked, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” The Pinocchio Effect draws on a remarkably broad array of sources to trace this making of a modern national identity in Italy, a subject that remains strikingly understudied in the English-speaking world of Italian studies.

Taking as her guiding metaphor the character of Pinocchio—a national icon made famous in 1881 by the eponymous children’s book—Susan Stewart-Steinberg argues that just like the renowned puppet, modern Italians were caught in a complex interplay between freely chosen submission and submission demanded by an outside force. In doing so, she explores all the ways that identity was constructed through newly formed attachments, voluntary and otherwise, to the young nation. Featuring deft readings of the period’s most important Italian cultural and social thinkers—including the theorist of mass psychology Scipio Sighele, the authors Matilde Serao and Edmondo De Amicis, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, and the pedagogue Maria Montessori—Stewart-Steinberg’s richly multidisciplinary book will set a new standard in Italian studies.

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The Play in the System

The Art of Parasitical Resistance

Anna Watkins Fisher

Duke University Press, 2020

What does artistic resistance look like in the twenty-first century, when disruption and dissent have been co-opted and commodified in ways that reinforce dominant systems? In The Play in the System Anna Watkins Fisher locates the possibility for resistance in artists who embrace parasitism—tactics of complicity that effect subversion from within hegemonic structures. Fisher tracks the ways in which artists on the margins—from hacker collectives like Ubermorgen to feminist writers and performers like Chris Kraus—have willfully abandoned the radical scripts of opposition and refusal long identified with anticapitalism and feminism. Space for resistance is found instead in the mutually, if unevenly, exploitative relations between dominant hosts giving only as much as required to appear generous and parasitical actors taking only as much as they can get away with. The irreverent and often troubling works that result raise necessary and difficult questions about the conditions for resistance and critique under neoliberalism today.

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The Politics of Research

Edited by E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine

Rutgers University Press, 1997

"Eloquent, provocative, and timely, these essays provide a thoughtful, undoctrinaire defense of the centrality of the humanities to higher education--and society--at the millennium."--Cora Kaplan, University of Southampton The crisis in the humanities and higher education intensifies daily. The partisan din drowns out the voices of those thinkers who have resisted the seductions of strong ideology. Against the tendencies of the extreme attacks on higher education from the right and the counterattacks from the left, many academics would prefer to get beyond critical fashions and easy slogans. In this collection, leading scholars demonstrate how the current furor threatens the critical analysis of culture, so vital to a healthy society. They explore the historical sources of the crisis, the relations between politics and research, the responsibilities and possibilities of the academic intellectual, the structure of the institution of the university, the functions and achievements of the humanities, and the development of interdisciplinarity as a catalyst for change. This volume is a necessary resource for understanding the current crisis and for transforming the academy as we approach the twenty-first century. The contributors are Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Roman de la Campa, Myra Jehlen, Stanley Katz, Richard Kramer, Dominick LaCapra, George Levine, Ellen Messer-Davidow, Helene Moglen, Bill Readings, and Bruce Robbins. E. Ann Kaplan is the director of The Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Stony Brook

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The Politics of Small Things

The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Political change doesn’t always begin with a bang; it often starts with just a whisper. From the discussions around kitchen tables that led to the dismantling of the Soviet bloc to the more recent emergence of Internet initiatives like MoveOn.org and Redeem the Vote that are revolutionizing the American political landscape, consequential political life develops in small spaces where dialogue generates political power.

In The Politics of Small Things, Jeffrey Goldfarb provides an innovative way for understanding politics, a way of appreciating the significance of politics at the micro level by comparatively analyzing key turning points and institutions in recent history. He presents a sociology of human interactions that lead from small to large: dissent around the old Soviet bloc; life on the streets in Warsaw, Prague, and Bucharest in 1989; the network of terror that spawned 9/11; and the religious and Internet mobilizations that transformed the 2004 presidential election, to name a few. In such pivotal moments, he masterfully shows, political autonomy can be generated, presenting alternatives to the big politics of the global stage and the dominant narratives of terrorism, antiterrorism, and globalization.

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The Production of Modernization

Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and The Passing of Traditional Society

Authored by Hemant Shah

Temple University Press, 2011

Daniel Lerner's 1958 book The Passing of Traditional Society was central in shaping Cold War–era ideas about the use of mass media and culture to promote social and economic progress in postcolonial nations. Based on a study of the effectiveness of propaganda in the Middle East, Lerner’s book claimed that exposure to American media messages could motivate “traditional” people in the postcolonial nations to become “modern” by cultivating empathy for American ideas, goods, and ways of life.

The Production of Modernization examines Lerner’s writings to construct the intellectual trajectory of his thinking about mass media and modernization up to and beyond the publication of his famous book. Shah has written not just an intellectual biography of Lerner but also a history of the discipline he shaped.

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The Revolution Will Be Improvised

The Intimacy of Cultural Activism

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

University of Michigan Press, 2024

The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism traces intimate encounters between activists and local people of the civil rights movement through an archive of Black and Brown avant-gardism. In the 1960s, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists engaged with people of color working in poor communities to experiment with creative approaches to liberation through theater, media, storytelling, and craft making. With a dearth of resources and an abundance of urgency, SNCC activists improvised new methods of engaging with communities that created possibilities for unexpected encounters through programs such as The Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, and the Poor People’s Corporation.

Reading the output of these programs, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder argues that intimacy-making became an extension of participatory democracy. In doing so, Rodriguez Fielder supplants the success-failure binary for understanding social movements, focusing instead on how care work aligns with creative production. The Revolution Will Be Improvised returns to improvisation’s roots in economic and social necessity and locates it as a core tenet of the aesthetics of obligation, where a commitment to others drives the production and result of creative work. Thus, this book puts forward a methodology to explore the improvised, often ephemeral, works of art activism.

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The Senses of Democracy

Perception, Politics, and Culture in Latin America

By Francine R. Masiello

University of Texas Press, 2018

In The Senses of Democracy, Francine R. Masiello traces a history of perceptions expressed in literature, the visual arts, politics, and history from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. A wide transnational landscape frames the book along with an original and provocative thesis: when the discourse on democracy is altered—when nations fall into crisis or the increased weight of modernity tests minds and nerves—the representation of our sensing bodies plays a crucial role in explaining order and rebellion, cultural innovation, and social change.

Taking a wide arc of materials—periodicals, memoirs, political proclamations, and travel logs, along with art installations and fiction—and focusing on the technologies that supplement and enhance human perception, Masiello looks at the evolution of what she calls “sense work” in cultural texts, mainly from Latin America, that wend from the heights of romantic thought to the startling innovations of modernism in the early twentieth century and then to times of posthuman experience when cyber bodies hurtle through globalized space and human senses are reproduced by machines. Tracing the shifting debates on perceptions, The Senses of Democracy offers a new paradigm with which to speak of Latin American cultural history and launches a field for the comparative study of bodies, experience, pleasure, and pain over the continental divide. In the end, sense work helps us to understand how culture finds its location.

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