Drucilla Cornell’s Revolutionary Thinking

Every student of the French Left is familiar with the career of Auguste Blanqui, the uncompromising hero of the revolutionary movement in France in the nineteenth century. Far less is known of the party which he inspired, the small circle of militants for whom he remained a living legend. The Blanquists are today remembered as a conspiratorial elite of professional revolutionaries, whose role of leadership in the Paris Commune of 1871 was momentarily inspiring, but whose subsequent activities were without practical consequence. From this perspective, Blanquism was a style of political protest with little relevance for the political realities of the Third Republic. But in the decade which separates the amnesty of the Communards (1880) from the Boulangist crisis (1889), the Blanquists enjoyed a stature, exerted a moral influence, and played a role in left-wing politics which far surpassed their numerical importance. Their prestige was dependent, not only upon their identification with the values and experience of the Commune, but also upon their experimentation -with political tactics designed to adapt the revolutionary movement to changing political conditions. For the political process itself was becoming democratized, a phenomenon with which the revolutionary parties were obliged to come to terms. The significance' of the Blanquists in left-wing politics in this era of transition is derived from their decision to abandon plans for a coup d'etat by a revolutionary elite in favor of efforts to catalyze a popular upheaval through broad-based agitation. By exploring new possibilities of revolutionary action in the dawning age of mass politics, they hoped to revitalize the Jacobin values of popular vigilance and direct political action identified with the revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century. Some historians minimize the role of the Blanquists in left-wing politics in the 1880s because they did not appear to contribute to the

Is a liberated nation an inherently male concept? What happens if women insurgents do not map out a site for gendered demands within the revolutionary movement? If women had been fully encouraged revolutionary actors, could there have been a military triumph for the guerrillas in El Salvador? In other words, are women a strategic sector with the potential to alter revolutionary outcomes? The answers to these questions may expand the current boundaries of sociological theories of revolution and the literature on gender and revolution. By focusing on the case of women revolutionaries in El Salvador, we can move toward unpacking the significance of these issues. I argue that women revolutionaries served the unconscious yet highly strategic role of gendered revolutionary bridges. In short, armed and unarmed women revolutionaries were able to bridge gaps between the guerrillas and unincorporated Salvadoran civilians, thus expanding the revolutionary base and movement. Salvadoran women demonstrated a revolutionary capacity that proved eminently effective but was consistently belittled, and this has had both practical and theoretical consequences. This article aims at addressing the latter.

This study examines the formation of new regions or autonomous regions to improve public services. Regional autonomy is the authority of autonomous regions to regulate and manage the interests of local communities according to their own initiative based on community aspirations, in accordance with laws and regulations. Meanwhile, autonomous regions are legal community units that have certain regional boundaries authorized to regulate and manage the interests of local communities according to their own initiative based on community aspirations within the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia. This study uses qualitative research, focusing on the formation of new regions. With data analysis using this spiral data analysis model as a conceptualization to explore and follow procedures in conducting data analysis. The process of analyzing the spiral model data uses qualitative analysis procedures by following contours or patterns. Research Results That the formation of regions is the granting of status to certain areas as provincial areas, district areas, and city areas. Meanwhile, what is meant by regional expansion is the division of provincial areas, district areas, and city areas into more than one region. The practical consequences of regional expansion will be changes in the organizational structure of regional government, changes in area followed by changes in regional boundaries and changes in population. These changes will have implications for other, more essential changes, especially in efforts to provide services to the community.

Mourning under Siege:The Uses of Apocalypse in French Caribbean Letters Regine Joseph (bio) « Heureux ceux qui écrivent sous la domination de l'âge dernier : leurs poèmes peuvent faire balles, et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts. » —Patrick Chamoiseau, Ecrire en pays dominé, 19971 «When I wrote Bonjour et adieu à la négritude, one could perhaps read that as "Hello and Goodbye to Politics." If the notion of revolution itself has failed, it would be illusory for me to continue to sleep with a phantom: the great zombie of modernity, it is revolution, alas. The great zombie. » —René Depestre, Interview with Joan Dayan, 19902 Ruins of Dreams3 Patrick Chamoiseau might have articulated the most fundamental dilemma of French Caribbean writing when he claimed early in Ecrire en pays dominé that it was far better for a writer to write under colonialism—the political domination of "l'âge dernier"—than within the "domination silencieuse" of cultural assimilation. In Chamoiseau's view, colonial oppression provided a much more fertile ground to the writer's literary imagination because it offered a visible target against which his craft could "faire balles et conforter l'espoir du nombre de leurs impacts." In removing the colonial enemy, cultural assimilation disarmed the "guerrier" within the writer, turning him into a mere observer of local reality, "un pauvre scribe, marqueur de paroles."4 This privileging of the writer-guerrier over the writer-scribe expresses Chamoiseau's nostalgia for the ideal of the committed writer—a nostalgia that can be likened to the modern belief in the visionary artist. In the French Caribbean, this (modern) ideal is embodied by figures such as Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and René Depestre whose writings often called for the end of colonial oppression through explosive solutions, radical political change and revolutionary action. Writing fifty years after the 1946 departmentalization of the French Antilles, Chamoiseau is drawn to the hope (l'espoir) that he imagines had been the explosive impact (faire balles) of that earlier writing. As he examines the livres endormis from the high days [End Page 13] of anti-colonial struggle, Chamoiseau asks a question to which we will return throughout this article: What is left for a writer to write once the glory days are gone? What seems to fascinate, yet trouble, Chamoiseau as a writer is the apocalyptic element (seemingly) inherent to the poetics and politics of this earlier literature. Aimé Césaire's call for decolonization, for instance, is indeed explosive. His Cahier d'un retour au pays natal employs metaphors of explosion in the poet's pathological analysis of the native land ('Les Antilles dynamités d'alcool')5 as well as in his vision of its future salvation ('les volcans éclateront, l'eau emportera les taches mûres du soleil et il ne restera plus qu'un bouillonnement tiède picoré d'oiseaux marins').6 In the poet's view, cataclysmic change conceived as 'l'apocalypse des monstres… chaude élection de cendres, de ruines et d'affaissements,' seems to hold the highest potential for stimulating 'l'affreuse inanité de notre raison d'être.' The Cahier's poetic thrust seems to arise as much out of an apocalypse—a movement toward an impending cataclysmic end ('La Fin du monde, parbleu')7—as an affirmation of the poet's Negritude.8 Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre provides another example from this l'âge dernier of an apocalyptic conception of revolutionary change. Fanon's ardent attraction to revolution partly stems from the transformative and purifying power of apocalyptic action. In his vision of the decolonizing process, "Tout est permis; en réalité, l'on ne se réunit que pour laisser la libido accumulée, l'aggressivité empêchée, sourdre volcaniquement. Mises à mort symboliques, chevauchées figuratives, meurtres multiples imaginaires, il faut que tout cela sorte. Les mauvaises humeurs s'écoulent, bruyantes telles des coulées de lave...''9 In Fanon's vision, violence (erupted volcanoes) is necessary ingredient that allows revolution to fulfill its destructive and reconstructive purpose; it brings about the end of decolonization by destroying all of its constitutive elements (colonial system, colonizer...

Multiagent reinforcement learning algorithms have not been widely adopted in large scale environments with many agents as they often scale poorly with the number of agents. Using mean field theory to aggregate agents has been proposed as a solution to this problem. However, almost all previous methods in this area make a strong assumption of a centralized system where all the agents in the environment learn the same policy and are effectively indistinguishable from each other. In this paper, we relax this assumption about indistinguishable agents and propose a new mean field system known as Decentralized Mean Field Games, where each agent can be quite different from others. All agents learn independent policies in a decentralized fashion, based on their local observations. We define a theoretical solution concept for this system and provide a fixed point guarantee for a Q-learning based algorithm in this system. A practical consequence of our approach is that we can address a `chicken-and-egg' problem in empirical mean field reinforcement learning algorithms. Further, we provide Q-learning and actor-critic algorithms that use the decentralized mean field learning approach and give stronger performances compared to common baselines in this area. In our setting, agents do not need to be clones of each other and learn in a fully decentralized fashion. Hence, for the first time, we show the application of mean field learning methods in fully competitive environments, large-scale continuous action space environments, and other environments with heterogeneous agents. Importantly, we also apply the mean field method in a ride-sharing problem using a real-world dataset. We propose a decentralized solution to this problem, which is more practical than existing centralized training methods.

This article looks closely at an argument that took place in the 1940s between the Romanian Surrealists Gherasim Luca and Gellu Naum. This argument centered on the question of whether love can ever act as a transformative social force, or whether it is too fatally embedded within the existing social situation ever to work in this way. In the 40s Luca had just published a series of texts laying out his “anti-oedipal” theory of love and revolutionary action, and Naum responded to this with his sharply critical “Inventatorii banderolei” (The Inventors of the Banderole), which to my knowledge has never been translated into English or French. I argue that what was really at stake in their argument is despair: Naum’s claim that Luca has misunderstood crucial elements of Surrealist and Marxist thought ultimately resolves into an accusation that Luca has yielded to despair and resignation. Luca, for his part, accuses Naum of the same thing. I show how, despite the fact that they were actually in agreement on many points, each believes that the other has prematurely given up the revolutionary struggle as well as his faith in the transformative power of love as a result of mistaken and pessimistic views about the relationship between the individual and society. In the first part of the article I outline Luca’s anti-Oedipal <em>ars vivendi</em> and trace corresponding attitudes in Naum’s work. In the second part of the article I examine in detail one of Naum’s allegations in “Inventatorii banderolei”: that Luca’s despair is due to his misuse of the Hegelian and Marxist concept of the “negation of negation.” I show how Luca has not misused but has deeply engaged with this concept, partly through his ideas about “dialectical despair.” Finally, I show how these ideas illuminate the question of love outlined at the beginning.

Introduction:On Black Performance Soyica Colbert, Guest Editor (bio) Historically aligned with hypervisibility, blackness places the individual on display. Cultural workers have used the transformative power of performance—repeated actions presented before an audience that carry with them the history of their recurrence—to shape viewers’ and listeners’ perceptions of blackness. Working against the notion that categories of identity, including racial ones, are fixed, performance strategically uses improvisation to instate and destabilize subjectivity. While performance studies is a relatively new field of inquiry, performance has been fundamental to the revolutionary character of black culture from its beginnings. As Cedric Robinson theorizes in Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, “The evidence of the tradition’s persistence and ideological vitality among the Black slave masses was to be found not only in the rebellions and the underground but as well in the shouts, the spirituals, the sermons, and the very textual body of Black Christianity” (311). Along a similar line, Saidiya Hartman’s groundbreaking analysis in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America demonstrates the ubiquitous intersection of subjection, subject formation, and display in black people’s earliest experiences in the United States. While Hartman and Robinson may not consider themselves black performance theorists, I include them here to demarcate a line of inquiry pervasive in black studies. Calling attention to performance as a theory that is multisensory, Fred Moten locates an acoustic materiality that emanates from the scenes of subjection Hartman describes. The sounds that echo throughout In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition necessarily belong to a history of revolutionary action that emerges in relation to degrading and dehumanizing images of black people. As scripted forms of race continue to rear their ugly heads in Will.i.am’s blackface performance at the MTV 2010 video music awards alongside a Venus Hottentot-esque Nicki Minaj, the time is ripe to investigate the past, present, and future of black performance and its relationship to the constitution of identity, aesthetic forms, and freedom movements. The articles in this special issue of African American Review demonstrate the centrality of performance to black cultural production from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. They show how artists have attenuated the hold on blackness on display atop the auction block, as animated in the soft-shoeing of the blackface minstrel stage, or personified in a grin plastered on a bottle of maple syrup. Instead, the authors reaffirm blackness as a process, following E. Patrick Johnson’s Appropriating Blackness: Performance Politics and Authenticity (2003) and Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (2006). Redefining, reshaping, and re-signifying blackness, the cultural workers examined in this special issue make use of the fluidity of identity categories in order to liberate subjectivities and collectivities. As a field formation, black studies has been persistently interested in the way aesthetic movements enable and imagine political movements. The latest milestone in this development has been the emergence of the field of performance studies, which has enabled a new generation of scholars to ask questions and refine methodologies about theatricality—the forces and apparatuses that script production and reception—of blackness. On April 9-10, 2010, the Black Theatricality Conference, which I helped to organize, was held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. The conference brought together theorists of sound, theater, literature, popular culture, [End Page 275] and visual culture, to name but a few of the disciplines engaged, under the rubric of performance. This special issue continues the conversation the Black Theatricality Conference began, demonstrating the wide range and varied nature of performance studies and its particular implications for black culture. Working at the intersection of diverse fields of inquiry (from opera to science) within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of blackness, the first three essays consider how questions of embodiment may shed new light on familiar archives and demonstrate the importance of less familiar bodies of work. The essays draw attention to the historical specificity of blackness in the antebellum period to consider its peculiarities and particularities. As Britt Rusert persuasively argues, “black performers took advantage of the...