Cultural Dissent Research Articles

Hauntologies of Fiction: Reading Roth at the End of History

Hauntologies of FictionReading Roth at the End of History Andy Connolly (bio) It has been over thirty years since francis fukuyama proclaimed that the Cold War victory of western democratic capitalism over communism culminated in an end to class-based ideological conflict as the motor of "History." Drawing upon an interpretation of Hegel's belief "that the evolution of human societies […] would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings" (xii), Fukuyama looked to the imminent spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism into heretofore closed-off reaches of the globe as a sign that the long Enlightenment project toward human progress had begun to adopt its peak, finalized form. As a major governing assumption of our neoliberal age, the Fukuyamist belief that we have reached the "end of history" looks to free market capitalism's limitless capacity to enhance individual potential and promote human freedom, while at the same time short-circuiting any serious discussions about the limiting structural conditions of class and poverty, not to mention the influences that other powerful factors such as gender and race have in the uneven shaping of capitalist social relations. Over the past number of decades, what has given particular impetus to this myth of a post-historical, classless society has been the capitulation of effective forms of social, political, and cultural dissent to the neoliberal assertion that "there is no alternative" (assigned the acronym TINA by political commentators) to market-based definitions of democracy and the social good. As such, the radical liberalization of the post-Cold War period has been shaped by a monocular stridency, which forecloses not only on the major social struggles of the past but also on the lessons that such history may present for understanding the present and potentially altering the future. In terms of our historical horizons, then, the end of history has locked us into a kind of endless, monotonous present, from which there appears no relief or interruption. It has taken some time to understand the lasting impact of my early life experience as one of Fukuyama's children. Then again, coming of age at the end of history proves deceptive in such ways, diminishing one's sense of historicity since there's apparently no more epic battles of "History" to live by or suffer from. The significance of history [End Page 50] in such an age is subject to all kinds of denial and delay. Like the repressed, history at the end of history often comes in the shape of uncanny and monstrous returns. No longer the meaty source of experience and identity that it once was, or at least appeared to be, it can take a spectral quality, like a haunting trauma whose presence is yet to be made properly known, but which lurks in wait for us, eager to disrupt our naïve sense of having broken from the past. Over the years, Philip Roth's fiction has helped shape my understanding of the peculiar "hauntological" functioning of history at the end of history. This sense of how the seemingly dead past haunts both the present and the future is not only revelatory in terms of events that have shaped my own "dwarf drama" (Anatomy 106), but also in relation to my understanding of what Roth has to tell us about history and memory. Roth's historical imagination, with its various presentiments of the "unforeseen" (Plot 113), proves highly informative when it comes to thinking about the complex issues of memory and futurity that shape our present times. Such considerations of how history functions as a spectral presence in Roth's work continues to shape my scholarship. I My early adulthood in the mid-90s was colored by a number of local phenomena that reflected the larger post-Cold War experience of a liberalized and rapidly integrating world, disencumbered of the previous two centuries of modernity, made replete with class antagonism, revolution, nationalism, colonialism, and international conflicts. During this period, many young Irish people like myself, particularly within the southern Republic of Ireland, began to experience, in ways that seemed quite sudden, a welcome breach from the drab...

Dissidents, Rebels, and Everyday Heroes: New Perspectives on the Digital Archiving of Cultural Resistance Under State Socialism

The aim of this article is to present and study how a digital archive can shape and create new ways of producing, publishing, and studying historical sources. Based on our analysis of the COURAGE (Cultural Opposition—Understanding the CultuRal HeritAGE of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries) Registry about cultural dissent under state socialism in Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century (and focusing on collections about environmental issues in this registry), we seek to understand how different private, amateur, and professional archivists have shaped the scientific and public legacy of cultural dissent under state socialism. The COURAGE Registry conveys a unique view of the history of the Soviet Bloc, providing an assemblage of documents concerning people, groups, institutions, events, and pieces from the time. Together, they tell an alternative story of cultural opposition under socialism, shedding light on important—but until now marginalized—problems, topics, and actors. Our results have shown that cultural opposition in the Registry is understood and constructed as a wide range of forms of engagement and activities, and it is not limited to specific high-cultural or direct political products. The structure of the COURAGE Registry creates a balance among collections that are very diverse in form, and its linked data structure helps connect the information and stories compiled in it. The COURAGE Registry enables researchers to use it as a tool with which to build their own scientific narratives about dissent under socialism.

Futurismus a fašismus

The article maps the relationship between the Italian Futurist movement and fascism from a general perspective. It deals with the relationship between the leader of Futurism F. T. Marinetti and Benito Mussolini from the beginning of their cooperation in 1915 to the end of the Second World War. Throughout its era, Futurism identified itself with Italy’s social and political climate. Futurism was one of the ideological sources for fascism and it was one of the movements that formed Fasci di Combattimento in 1919. But after Mussolini came to power, fascist cultural politics aesthetically preferred traditionalism, order, and a return to the achievements of history, a contemporary rappel à l’ordre, and Futurism found itself in cultural dissent. Marinetti thus spent the rest of his life trying to improve the position of modernist artists in fascist Italy, which would earn Futurism recognition of the official state art of the fascist regime.

Bandits, Brigands and Militants: The Historical Sociology of Outlaws

AbstractOutlaws have been prominent actors in a social context which is characterized by collective dissent, conflict, and violence. Bandits, brigands, and militants emerged in societies with the decline of social justice, political stability, and economic prosperity. Their emergence and social networks with different actors and agencies provide us principal motives to deconstruct the social identity of outlaws and determine the factors that fostered collective dissent, conflict, and violence in different societies. This special issue covers a vast geography and different time periods to theoretically and methodologically advance our knowledge in the historical sociology of outlaws. In doing so, we address complex social, political, and cultural issues that rendered outlaws inextricable part of social problems. Exploring the power and activities of outlaws in different social geographies offers us new perspectives to tackle the origins and outcomes of social, political, and cultural dissent across the world.

Dissent on the Belarusian Literary Front

Dissent on the Belarusian Literary Front Barbara Martin Tatsiana Astrouskaya, Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988): Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses. 232 pp., illus. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2019. ISBN-13 978-3447111881. €48.00. In recent years, the historiography of Soviet dissent has undergone a clear renewal and deideologization. Emancipation from Manichean Cold War era tropes of moral opposition to communism has allowed historians to enlarge their focus to manifestations of cultural dissent, study dissident cultures, but also explore the gray areas between the official and unofficial fields. Geographically, however, the focus is only beginning to shift from Moscow and Leningrad to the Russian peripheries and other Soviet republics. Belarus, with its image of political loyalty to Moscow, seems an unlikely place to look for manifestations of dissent or nonconformism. Yet, as Tatsiana Astrouskaya demonstrates in her study, the Belarusian intelligentsia found ways to voice its concerns over the status of its national language and history in both censored and uncensored publications. Far from delivering heroic narratives about Soviet dissidents, Astrouskaya brings to the reader's attention a case study characterized both by its liminality and peripherality. As the author underlines, "it is probably more challenging for the case of Belarus than in any other to merely divide intellectuals into two rival camps of nonconformists and collaborators, fighters and trimmers, Communist Party functionaries and opponents of the Party's monopoly, advocates of Russification and those who were 'nationally conscious'" (2). Using Homi Bhabha's concept of "third space," she writes that Belarusian intelligentsia "meandered between dissent and conformity, between self-printing and the state publishing houses" (11). While Belarusian writers were well-integrated into the Soviet system, mastered its codes, and knew how to navigate its hierarchies, they could also use this knowledge to circumvent accepted norms and introduce nonconformist ideas into censored print. Moreover, [End Page 650] authors who benefited from the privileges attached to the status of Soviet writer could also circulate their uncensored writings in samizdat. While such scholars as Ann Komaromi or Sergei Oushakine have explored the blurred boundary between official and unofficial fields, Astrouskaya shows that nationalist cultural discourse could also occupy this "third space."1 The notion of peripherality is no less important for Astrouskaya. It conditions the type of cultural dissent that is central to her study: discourses produced by the nationally conscious intelligentsia, set in opposition to the more universal democratic and moral opposition of Soviet human-rights activists in Moscow. Although she does not elaborate on this thesis, the author suggests that Russification was a product of "cultural colonization by Russian and Soviet imperialism" (116). Hence at the periphery, the task of national liberation superseded the more universal struggle for freedom that characterized dissent in the Russian capitals. Moreover, she emphasizes, the Belarusian intelligentsia was also marginal in so far as its national language and culture were always located at the crossroads of the Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Jewish, and Ukrainian worlds. Historically, Belarusian nationalists often took part in other national projects, only to realize that they did not fit, and incorporated these different perspectives into their own national project. Peripherality also imposed additional hurdles on Belarusian dissenters, such as the lack of access to channels of dissemination of their uncensored writings across the Iron Curtain and more limited access to samizdat from the capital. In addition, the lack of a significant Belarusian diaspora in the West, coupled with a lesser interest from Western radio stations, explain the relative paucity of Belarusian tamizdat. Being a borderland area, Belarus was also under stricter political control than more central areas of the Soviet Union. Astrouskaya states from the outset that she concentrates on "the intelligentsia that understood itself as national, wrote and published predominantly in the Belarusian language and perceived itself as deeply rooted in Belarusian tradition" (4), with a closer focus on "the writers' community and nonconformism" (8). The authors she considers, however, were variously integrated into the system, ranging from the acclaimed writer Vasyl´ Bykaŭ, who received the status of People's Writer of Belarus in 1980, to the poet Larysa Heniush, incarcerated in the Stalin era and with very few works that made their way into censored print. Astrouskaya convincingly shows...

Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey

Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey

Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988): Intelligentsia, Samizdat and Nonconformist Discourses, written by Tatsiana Astrouskaya

Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988): Intelligentsia, Samizdat and Nonconformist Discourses, written by Tatsiana Astrouskaya

How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images

How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images

Forme culturali del dissenso alle due sponde della cortina di ferro (1956-1991). Problemi, temi e metodi di una difficile comparazione

Starting with the 1950s, the European context saw the emergence of various movements of cultural dissent, which involved both western and eastern countries and led to forms of literary and artistic protest against the cultural and political establishment. In particular, underground movement - connected with the American scenario - and Neo-vanguard groups developed in Italy, France, and Germany, while the Soviet area was pervaded by the culture clandestinely disseminated by the Samizdat circuit. This contribution offers a comprehensive view of the multifaceted forms of literary, cultural, and artistic dissent considered by the essays collected here, with special attention to the differences between Western and Eastern areas. These two contexts, in fact, are addressed separately in the following sections: Neo-vanguard and contestation: the two forms of dissent in the western area and The kaleidoscopic planet of Soviet non-conformism: into, beyond and around the Samizdat.

Politica editoriale e cultura del dissenso. Due esempi in casa Einaudi e Feltrinelli tra il 1964 e il 1968

The beginning of the sixties represents for Italian editors the attempt to understand the long wave of cultural dissent that express many European writers almost since the Hungarian revolution. Einaudi and Feltrinelli, following the example of Seuil with the “Tel Quel” collection, creates tho new experimental series: “La ricerca letteraria” and “Materiali”. In my contribution I will try to underline the cultural role of Einaudi and Feltrinelli and their series between ’64 and ’68: Einaudi proposes the translations of nouveau roman authors among others while Feltrinelli leads the discussion about experimentalism and neo-avantgarde. Few years that add to change Italian cultural panorama and prepared the ’68 protests.

Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988): Intelligentsia, Samizdat and Nonconformist Discourses by Tatsiana Astrouskaya

Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988): Intelligentsia, Samizdat and Nonconformist Discourses by Tatsiana Astrouskaya

Student Activism at the University of New England in Australia’s “Long 1960s”

ABSTRACTIn November 1973, a group of students at the University of New England (UNE) in rural Armidale, New South Wales, staged a “peasants’ revolt” to protest the examination system. The protest, which involved up to 400 students and culminated in the successful occupation of UNE’s main administration building, was organised by the Socialist Action Movement (SAM), the most prominent student group at UNE, and arguably the most successful far-left group on any Australian campus at that time. This article considers student activism at UNE in the early 1970s as a case study illustrating that intramural issues such as assessment methods, university government and student housing, far from being a sideline to more “political” external issues such as the Vietnam War, were in fact critical drivers—and shapers—of cultural and political dissent among students. Building on the work of Hannah Forsyth, the article argues that focusing on the intramural concerns of students reveals much about the aims, meanings and long-term significance of New Left student activism during Australia’s “Long 1960s”.

Comradeship of cock? Gay porn and the entrepreneurial voyeur

ABSTRACTThirty years of scholarship on gay porn have produced one striking consensus, which is that gay cultures are especially ‘pornified’: porn has arguably offered gay men not only homoerotic visibility, but a heritage culture and a radical aesthetic. However, neoliberal cultures have transformed the operation and meaning of sexuality, installing new standards of performativity and display, and new responsibilities attached to a ‘democratization’ that offers women and men apparently expanded terms for articulating both their gender and their sexuality. Does gay porn still have the same urgency in this context? At the level of politics and cultural dissent, what is ‘gay’ about gay porn now? This article questions the extent to which processes of legal and social liberalization, and the emergence of networked and digital cultures, have foreclosed or expanded the apparently liberationary opportunities of gay porn. The article attempts to map some of the political implications of the ‘pornification’ of gay culture to ongoing debates about materiality, labour and the entrepreneurial subject by analyzing gay porn blogs.

Taming dissent: the United States and the Italian centre-left, 1948–1978

Italy was the first country in which the United States tested its ‘political warfare’, the integrated application of overt and covert strategies to stabilise internal politics. This article illustrates that while America’s most intrusive and aggressive methods against Communist power in Italy often backfired, its diplomatic use of Italy’s interplay of domestic politics and foreign policies was relatively successful. It was an indirect method that hinged on America’s flexibility towards the moderate centre-left forces. American counterintuitive toleration and sometimes encouragement of mild political and cultural dissent in Italy helped refute and isolate the determined opposition of the strong Italian Communist Party.

Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory’s Affective Histories

Through case studies of key texts across history of inquiry, this article analyzes temporality, affectivity, and politicization of term in its academic usages. My goal is to lay bare inarticulate and opaque method that orients what objects, processes, and relations count as within studies. For if is singularly mobile and mutable term, capable of adjectivally modifying range of phenomena-from sex practices, to social formations, temporalities, affects, diasporas, and inhumanisms-it is, nevertheless, not equally capable of being applied to anything nonnormative or boundary crossing. The method that orients what may be felicitously named is, I propose, fundamentally affective: it is matter of sensing some resonance between ones object of study and inchoate cluster of feelings that inhabit and animate term queer. These feelings, I propose, must be understood as in origin. Specifically, I argue that despite frequency with which inquiry has described itself as uncommitted to its pasts and by definition attuned to questions of immediate political urgency, it remains affectively haunted by histori- cal and political moment of U.S. 1990s in which it emerged. Ultimately, I propose that future of field of studies-and its relevance for scholarship on prior periods, racialized populations, and areas outside of United States-requires reckoning with field's affective haunting hy inaugural moment of U.S. 1990s. This reckoning may take form of re- rather than dehistoricization. That is, whereas scholars have tended to gesture toward unbounded future as domain in which can have renewed life hy becoming other to what it has been so far, it may he more efficacious to engage queer's multiple pasts-including those prior to its explicit deployment as political and theoretical term in 1990s-in order to differently animate queer's dense affective histories. I close hy offering attachment genealogy as method of exposing, fragmenting, and reworking queer's inheritances to enable to do different work in new contexts.Queer and NowBefore elaborating on significance of 1990s, I want to begin with text that marks an important moment in studies scholarship: introduction to 2005 special issue of Social Text edited hy David Eng, J. Jack Halherstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz titled What's Queer about Queer Studies Now? Published as field intervention that markedly highlighted work of a younger generation of scholars, this special issue, as described in its introduction, sought to foreground question of the political utility of queer in its assessment of what's queer about contemporary studies scholarship (Eng, Halherstam, and Munoz 2005, l). The antennae of political utility, in turn, orients editors to identify target of critical intervention as series of late-twentieth-century global crises which they describe, quoting Walter Benjamin, as historical (l). Their list of emergencies to which this special issue responds includes:[T]he triumph of neoliberalism and collapse of welfare state; Bush administration's infinite war on terrorism and acute militarization of state violence; escalation of U.S. empire building and clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; devolution of civil society and erosion of civil rights; pathologizing of immigrant communities as terrorist and racialized popula- tions as criminal; shifting forms of citizenship and migration in putatively postidentity and postracial age; politics of intimacy and liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and return to moral values and family values as prophylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. …

Afro cyber resistance: South African Internet art

Abstract Looking at the digital–cultural–political means of resistance and media activism on the Internet, this article explores Internet art practices in South Africa as a manifestation of cultural dissent towards western hegemony online. Confronting the unilateral flow of online information, Afro Cyber Resistance is a socially engaged gesture aiming to challenge the representation of the African body and culture through online project. Talking as examples the WikiAfrica project, Cuss Group’s intervention Video Party 4 (VP4) and VIRUS SS 16 by artiste Bogosi Sekhukhuni, this article attempts to demonstrate that the use of the Internet as a medium for digital cultural production and as a platform of dissemination is crucial to raise social awareness and defy African stereotypes and misrepresentation. Creating a unique visual language using the ‘global’ aesthetics of the Internet, yet rooted in African culture, these works deeply reflect on the social environment they spawn from and therefore act as cultural and visual resistance.

World Literatures and Romanian Literary Criticism

In his article "World Literatures and Romanian Literary Criticism" Caius Dobrescu argues that the notion Weltliteratur of Goethe posits the concept of world literature as the conveyor of universal (i.e., cosmopolitan) skills of socio-cultural adaptation. The influence of this form of Weltliteratur on Romanian literary criticism is traceable from Westernization in the nineteenth century to the cultural dissent of the post-Stalinist era. Based on Norbert Elias's diffusionist theory of the civilizing process, Dobrescu contends that one of the role models of the Romanian literary scholar and critic in his/her capacity of intercultural mediator was the eighteenth-century philosophe in the tradition of cosmopolitan politess.

The ‘Underground’ Reception of the Beats in Turkey

This article examines how Beat texts are received in Turkey as underground literature and what that reception reveals not only about the possibilities for cultural dissent in Turkey, but the extent to which the Beats are still capable of promoting social change in general. While translations of Beat Generation texts are a fairly recent phenomenon in Turkey, the internet has provided them with additional exposure, with the result that Beat texts play a role in discussions of the growing genre of underground literature in Turkey. This study analyses that role in order to discuss questions of commodification, transgression, censorship, and cultural difference that impact Beat texts in Turkey. Beat writers offer a form of resistance that allows Turkish readers to challenge mainstream values and mount legal challenges through the classic figure of the Beat rebel. This unique situation provides insight not only into the possibilities in culturally translating an imported counterculture, but also provides a refracted view of the assumptions operating in that countercultural model as it is redeployed in a different nation at a different moment of history.

Tales of Plagues and Carnivals: Samuel R. Delany, AIDS, and the Grammar of Dissent

While even today lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people might have cause to distrust the healthcare establishment, how much more fragile was the relationship between sexual minorities and health professionals in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. Dissent from consensus healthcare and health research then was a question of survival in the face of political and medical intransigence. This article focuses on one version of AIDS dissent: The narrative representations of AIDS in fiction by the gay African-American fantasy writer Samuel R. Delany, which rejected the rigid binarism of "safe" and "unsafe" sex practices, Delany's evidence-based dissent. He also engaged in a related form of cultural dissent: speaking the unspeakably obscene, at a time when Silence = Death. Delany called into question both the inferential leaps based on limited epidemiological research that were represented in safer sex guidelines and the widespread public reticence about sexual behavior.

Cultural Persuasion in Lexicographical Space: Dictionaries as Site of Nineteenth-Century Epideictic Rhetoric

This article discusses two nineteenth-century rhetors who engaged in cultural persuasion through their respective lexicons. It argues that lexicography served an epideictic function in nineteenth-century culture, entering educational values and pervading print culture. Nineteenth-century lexicography functioned epideictically as a storehouse of cultural values and influenced the discourse of nineteenth-century rhetorics, evidenced in their concern with clarity, usage, and the disambiguation of language. But there is an acceptance and awareness of the inherent ambiguity of language in nineteenth-century rhetoric, which is also reflected in other satirical lexicons. The two poles of lexicography in theory and practice illustrate how dictionaries became a site of cultural dialogue and dissent.