Political Ambivalence Research Articles

“The War at Home”: Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Black Community; Race and Policing in New York City, 1970 to 1973

This article argues that in 1971 a war between the radical Black Liberation Army and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) erupted, and within this war, the NYPD tried to influence Black politics in the city’s Black community. However, the Black community in New York City was not monolithic politically. This community was diverse in its political makeup, and there was a political ambivalence by Black people about policing in their communities. It further demonstrates that the law-and-order turn was not fully embedded in white liberals’ virtuous attempts to pacify Black radicals or that the rise of law and order was not solely a product of federal projects such as the War on Poverty. Instead, this article argues that political debates within New York City’s Black community and efforts by the NYPD to influence Black politics largely drove the city toward greater law and order policing.

A German DJ, Postmodern Dreams, and the Ambivalent Politics of East–West Exchange at the First Exhibition of Approximate Art in Riga, April 1987

Organized as part of the annual Art Days festival in the capital of the Latvian SSR, the First Exhibition of Approximate Art comprised a cacophonous and provocative mashup of music, dance, performance art, and design. At the center of the event was a demonstration of mixing and scratching records by Maximilian Lenz, also known as Westbam, one of the leading DJs in West Berlin. Mining archival sources in Berlin and Riga, this article reconstructs the complicated path by which the DJ came to perform at the event. It reveals a surprising network of relations and alliances operating in tandem behind the scenes, featuring a Riga artist dedicated to enacting a vision of postmodern performance in his city, an ambitiously networking émigré Latvian living in exile in West Germany, and a pair of Soviet offices under direct control of the KGB, charged with managing cultural exchanges with the West in hopes of currying sympathies for Soviet culture and policy. Complementing and extending research on the “gaps” and “holes” in the Soviet system that sometimes allowed for the staging of otherwise unacceptable works of art, the story of the First Exhibition of Approximate Art reveals how personal connections and interpersonal networks within even the most highly monitored parts of the system itself—the state security apparatus—could open doors for artistic projects unanticipated and even undesired by the bureaucratic state.

Behn’s White Innocence: Language Politics in the Dutch-Surinamese Translations of Oroonoko (1688)

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) has elicited myriad contradictory readings based on its central ideologies about race and slavery. The ambivalence within the novel has made it a popular text to adapt or translate to produce a certain politics. This essay examines two twentieth-century Dutch-Surinamese translations of the novel: H.D. Benjamins’s of 1919 and Albert Helman’s of 1983. I contextualize both translations within each author’s language politics and imperial projects, reading their work through the lens of Gloria Wekker’s notion of “white innocence.” I argue that Benjamins and Helman rely on Behn’s ethnographic authority and her white sentimentalized womanhood to produce an imperialist politics that perpetuates the long-standing myth of the Netherlands as a gentle and benevolent nation. By moving beyond the notorious politicization of Oroonoko during the nineteenth-century abolition movement, this essay sheds new light on how the novel’s ambivalent politics has been manipulated to political ends throughout history.

A story of hope and frustration: a wastewater-based agricultural frontier in the Algerian Sahara

ABSTRACT This study explores how wastewater reshapes the dynamics of agricultural settlement in the Algerian Sahara. It also discusses farmers’ hopes and frustrations around these dynamics. The study was carried out around the Berriane wastewater treatment facility. It is based on interviews with officials and farmers, a review of technical studies and direct field observations. We show how wastewater reuse regenerates traditional practices, such as the use of human waste as fertilizer and raw sewage to irrigate palm groves. We also discuss the problems that arise when the treatment plant is not managed properly, and the political ambivalence of State authorities regarding wastewater reuse.

Governing through partnership: Strategic migration partnerships and the politics of enrolment and ambivalence

This paper examines the role of partnerships in the governance of UK migration policy, considering how partnerships have been mobilised to navigate tensions between multiple state and non-state actors. The paper focuses on the work of regional strategic migration partnerships (SMPs) across the UK, bodies that bring together national and local government, statutory agencies, third sector organisations, and private contractors, all concerned with the management of migration and asylum. Considering SMPs as sites of collaboration and contention within local ‘battlegrounds’ of policy, the paper examines how enrolment and socialisation shape relations between actors, serving to sustain governmental authority but also offer openings for the formation of advocacy coalitions. Through examining how SMPs addressed the outsourcing of asylum support services, I argue that for many non-state actors enrolment into an SMP produces an ambivalent politics centred on forms of tactical closeness and critical discomfort. In concluding, I suggest the forms of intimacy created through enrolment serve to extend ambivalence as actors become torn between relationships and commitments, highlighting the fraught and often unstable nature of SMPs as bodies of policy coordination and advocacy potential.

Relocating Oneself Beyond Barriers

South-Asian diasporic authors write out of their specific cultural, individual and collective needs that relate to their experiences of racism, ethnic discrimination and sexism in the new space. The task at hand is to re-structure and re-constitute alien paradigms to suit the spaces inhabited by the immigrant. Immigrant writing involves a powerful “presencing” of source and host cultures. There are indeed variations within the immigrant groups in terms of the degree of retention of ethnic cultural values, the behavioural patterns and the degree of accommodation arrived at with the demands of the host culture. These various facets of immigrant experience, that are thrown into focus as a result of cross-cultural encounter, point to the shared experiences of the immigrant communities, which constitute the ethos of the diaspora. Diaspora is an important conceptual tool because it highlights the multiple standpoints borne of migration and displacement. It illuminates an ambivalent politics of positioning and being positioned, of identification and being identified.In her debut collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies, also called, “stories of Bengal, Boston and Beyond”, Jhumpa Lahiri probes deeply into the maladies of cultural dislocation and the consequential emotional trauma. This paper analyses four short stories titled “A Temporary Matter”, “The Third and Final Continent”, “Mrs. Sen’s” and “Interpreter of Maladies” in the anthology and attempts to trace how the immigrants who vacillate between two cultures overcome the identity crisis they face.

Literarisches Schreiben post Hanau

Abstract The following contribution begins with an overview of a history and critique of the contemporary usage of the term postmigrant art and literature. I then examine the writing by authors of colour in Germany after the racist killings in the city of Hanau in 2020. Taking Shida Bazyar’s novel Sisters in Arms (Drei Kameradinnen) as a point of departure, I investigate what I refer to as the art and politics of confusion and ambivalence. As I discuss within the context of the novel, the narrative strategies and aesthetics reflect racist practices of victim blaming, evidence tampering and the scandalous failure of state institutions to restore justice or fight the rising threat from the far-right.

Passionate humility for global constitutionalism in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Passionate humility for global constitutionalism in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Drugs, techno and the ecstasy of queer bodies

In Cruising Utopia, José Muñoz writes that ‘drugs are a surplus that pushes one off course, no longer able to contribute labor power at the proper tempo’. Their pharmacology of unproductive time also interacts in a synergistic/synaesthetic manner with the hypnotic upbeat tempos of electronic dance genres like disco, house or techno. In the club, drugs enhance sensations and draw bodies close together, all while sound penetrates the ear, turning it into an erotic orifice. Central to countercultural histories of sexual liberation, the club is a temple of queer world-making, a laboratory carrying out experiments with a queerness-yet-to-come. In this speculative autotheoretical essay, I explore the ethics and political value – as well as political ambivalence – of drug-fuelled techniques of self-invention encountered in the queer club. At once pharmacological, sexual and biopolitical, these modes of becoming-queer of bodies flooded by sound, drugs and sexual pleasure allude to the possibility of kinds of subjectivity and social relations that resonate with a narcofeminist ethics and veer away from neoliberal regimes of identity and belonging.

The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World

The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World

Austerity's afterlives? The case of community asset transfer in the UK

AbstractIn the UK, community infrastructure and the care that it provides has been at the sharp end of swingeing government cuts brought about through austere economics and politics. One local manifestation, and legacy, of austerity is the rise in Community Asset Transfer (CAT), a practice whereby local authorities transfer the ownership of public assets to community groups. CAT may predominantly be understood through the lexicon of austerity localism where the state—driven by fiscal pressures—offloads publicly owned buildings onto community groups. However, narrowly applied this interpretation leaves little room for the possibility and/or recognition of other politics which may exist on the ground. In response, this paper sets out a non‐foundational approach to CAT practice that involves in‐depth ethnographic analysis of three CAT community centres in a Welsh local authority. Following Gibson‐Graham's (2006, A postcapitalist politics) call to read for difference rather than dominance, and conscious of the ambivalent politics of CAT, I trace ways in which care is practiced in these new spaces through momentary acts and even explicit political engagement. CATs are experiments in care that allow us a glimpse into the life of community infrastructure after the passing of direct state support. Exploring the afterlives of these assets—and their relational and emotional geographies—reveals an affective politics and orientation not necessarily aligned with neoliberal rationales. Indeed, despite their fragile configuration, CAT practices must be acknowledged, questioned, and considered as part of the wider debate on the future(s) of post‐welfare care.

Barrymore's Gun: Gender and Genre Potential in The Blood Red Knight (1810)

This article closely examines William Barrymore's equestrian melodrama The Blood Red Knight; or, The Fatal Bridge (1810). While the play uses a vague medievalist setting, such associative conventions to the medieval romance are upended when the play's heroine shoots and kills the villain during the knight's mounted battle. While contemporary reviewers and theatre historians today have been largely fascinated by the use of live horses on stage, the gunshot makes The Blood Red Knight an outlier worthy of further study. I argue that the firing of Barrymore's gun creates a moment of disruptive potentiality where melodrama's complex and ambivalent politics are negotiated before the audience witnessing the play's concluding spectacle. In this largely overlooked moment, histories of gender and violence as well as romantic convention are disrupted, demonstrating the radical potential available to melodrama during its early stages of development.

Politics of ambivalence: how Zhou Shen’s androgyny survives under Xi Jinping

ABSTRACT Since the recent state crackdown on effeminate stars labeled as niangpao (sissy pants), “insufficient” masculinity has once again become a focus of political controversy in China. Among these stars, Zhou Shen, a male pop singer known for his feminized voice and image, continues to enjoy immense popularity and perform in official programs. His growing fame and tolerance by the state call into question his cultural-political strategy. Conceptualizing Zhou’s androgynous performance as a political effect of a series of co-optation, compromises and negotiations, this essay offers a contextualized reading of the complex ways in which competing and contradictory influences shape his expression. In tracing the practices that configure his stardom, we investigate how Zhou’s androgyny paradoxically reaffirms and unsettles hegemonic norms in non-antagonistic ways. We describe how his engagement with Xi Jinping’s China Dream creates an ambivalent space for negotiating established norms. We argue that Zhou’s phenomenal success rests with the fusion of contradictory elements into his performances and his ability to cut across binary classifications. This process has nurtured a politics of ambivalence marked by ambiguity, confusion and contingency. It also sheds light on the limit and possibility of doing gender politics in an increasingly illiberal setting.

Black Liberals, the Cold War Straight State, and the Politics of Ambivalence

This essay recounts how two civil rights organizations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League—encountered and responded to antiqueer state practices and policies during the Cold War era. It draws upon my forthcoming monograph Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality after World War II (University of North Carolina Press), which contends that the modern civil rights movement and the white supremacist backlash to it were crucial arenas in which ideas about Blackness and homosexuality (often defined as same-sex intimacy and gender dissidence) were discursively linked. In this essay, I argue that Black liberals not only encountered politicized concepts of homosexuality, but that their responses, at times, were ambivalent and responsive to a heteronormative state that increasingly criminalized and penalized queer subjects. A work of Black feminist and queer history, this article contributes to a rich interdisciplinary literature that interrogates how anti-Black violence (interpersonal and structural) occurred in gendered and sexual realms with legacies that reverberate into the twenty-first century.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Abstract Does political ambivalence increase vote switching? While the effects of ambivalence on vote switching have been investigated in the American political system, its application to multi-party systems has not been explored. To address this gap, this article investigates the effects of ambivalence on vote intention switching and vote switching in Germany's multi-party system, which has recently experienced electoral instability. Using the German Longitudinal Election Study (gles), the article teases out the mechanics of party ambivalence, leader ambivalence, and party-leader ambivalence. The results suggest that ambivalence increases the probability of voters switching parties during the pre-election campaigning period and between two consecutive elections. Ambivalence therefore has important implications for vote switching and for understanding the underlying determinants of electoral volatility in twenty-first-century politics.

My Own Creation as a Dynamic Subcultural Objectified Authenticity of Adult Fans of LEGO

My Own Creation as a Dynamic Subcultural Objectified Authenticity of Adult Fans of LEGO

Sino-Cal realism: TikTok as a medium between new market dynamics

The meteoric rise of TikTok, the video-sharing app owned by Chinese technology giant ByteDance, is already being hailed as a potent platform for political expression, but this is complicated by its economic and geopolitical entanglements, namely the ongoing power rivalry between China and the US, as well as TikTok’s adherence to a business bottom line. This short commentary aims to unpack some of the structural issues which contextualise TikTok’s particular brand of political ambivalence ahead of designations of the platform as a meaningful site for political participation.

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Less Punk, More Splatter: Heavy Metal, Horror Video, and the Literary Nasties of Shaun Hutson

Overview of Higher Education in the 21st Century

No nation gets world-class topper status in higher education overnight. Investment made in the field of education proves its significance or futility after one and a half to two decades. In the contemporary Indian scenario, higher education is shifting away from quality to being market-oriented. The imprecision which is seen in it results in a shift from the traditional pass to the state-of-the-art. It doesn't seem to fit our needs. The level of human resources that are expected to be created from higher education is completely lacking in practical life in our country. Following the policies of Lord Macaulay Mahaprabhu, our education system is sowing the seeds of inequality instead of social harmony. Ignoring the national needs and requirements, our higher education society cannot be relative without the air planners getting acquainted with the ground reality. Where is the adoption of higher education policies of developed nations in societies without basic infrastructure, leading us blindly, social governments can be established in higher education by connecting modern global ideas with traditional knowledge. In this country full of diversities, it is possible to implement a perspective higher education policy. The need is strong willpower. By keeping higher education away from appeasement and political ambivalence, it can be saved from being frivolous.
 Education is the backbone of human civilization. Education is the foundation of civilization and culture. Education is the most effective means of all-round development and transformation of human beings. From ancient times, education in Indian society was broad, knowledge-oriented, well-planned, and well-organized. Through education, our lives are not only refined, refined and refined, pure, intelligent and advanced, but by following the sattvik and moral values-directives of the entire society, human welfare is achieved. Perhaps that is why education is declared as an important parameter of development. Higher education works to strengthen any society and nation within the world. Higher Education Objectives To acquire knowledge or to earn money, in the Indian context, whether higher education is deviating from its original objectives, the seeds of the present form of the Indian education system can be traced in the mirror of the British rule that ruled for almost two hundred years. If it is to be said that the present entire education system is a gift of the British Raj, then there will be no exaggeration. Charles Grant, who is called the father of this education system.01 what they must have imagined in this present distorted form is well known that the British used education in their own interest. They planned to create a new educated class in India who could conduct their colonial rule according to their vision plan. The goal of English education in the early stages was to nurture the roots of the British government while spreading Christianity in India.

Seabirds in the city: Urban futures and fraught coexistence

AbstractAt a time when seabird populations have experienced steep declines and the movement of diverse species into cities has become a globally important issue, the paper examines the contested presence of an urban seabird colony in North East England. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper details how avian claims to space have prompted fraught debates on coexistence, urban planning, and socio‐environmental futures that reveal an inherently ambivalent politics. While normally a coastal breeding bird, the paper argues that the Tyne kittiwakes – and their use of window ledges, drain‐pipes, streetlights, rooftops and road infrastructure – have become a familiar part of the region's urban life. However, while their presence has reworked understandings of public space, urban belonging, and oceanic boundaries, urban regimes of control and normative notions of the city continue to inhibit a more expansive urban politics capable of accommodating difference and responding to environmental change. Through attention to practices of deterrence, shifting forms of urban decision‐making, and the emergence of the kittiwake as a regional icon, the paper documents the conditions that limit coexistence despite a change in attitudes towards the colony and environmental futures more broadly. In this context, the paper raises fundamental questions about how to support coexistence amid ambivalence without resorting to normative forms of species valorisation. Attending to ambivalence and the difficulty of creating and sustaining ethical modes of coexistence, the paper reflects on the implications of the research for urban futures, local geographies of the sea, and the multispecies city.