Hegemonic Regimes Research Articles

The anglophone problem in Cameroon yesterday and today in search of a definition

Since September 2017, the English-speaking peoples of the Northwest and Southwest regions of Cameroon have been subjected to unprecedented repression of genocidal dimension by the Biya regime that needs to be unpacked. What precisely led to this ugly situation which has come to be known as “the Anglophone problem?” This article sets out to lucidly capture the Anglophone problem in such a way that it is seen as a legitimate, legal, authentic and concrete statehood problem deserving national and international attention. I therefore posit cogently that the Anglophone problem is a nationhood issue that emerged after unification with the Francophone Cameroun Republic in 1961. The problem is caused by the systematic and unilateral attempts by the hegemonic Francophone regime, within the Jacobin logic, to dismantle the statehood identity of Anglophone Cameroon since 1961. By steadily destroying the Anglophone state through multiple dubious mechanisms, Anglophone fell prey to Francophone colonization, militarization, marginalization and assimilation. The birth of the self-proclaimed Anglophone state of Ambazonia in 2017 is the apotheosis of the statehood crisis.

Cultural globalization and young Korean women’s acculturative labor: K-beauty as hegemonic hybridity

This article aims to understand how young Korean women respond to the changing ideals of K-beauty, a form of gender imagery embodied by Korean pop celebrities, when such ideals become exported as global cultural products. The findings reveal that K-beauty is characterized by three paradoxical themes: manufactured naturalness, hyper-sexualized cuteness, and the ‘harmonious kaleidoscope’. When we unravel these paradoxes further, we observe that they provoke unsettlement and ambivalence among young Korean women, who shed light on the acculturative labors of concealment, selective resistance, and compliance that permeate the field of K-beauty. We argue that through these new layers of women’s work, the paradoxes in beauty are re-domesticated, the globalizing Western dictates are brought into alignment with neo-Confucian cultural ideology, and a new hybridized hegemonic regime of feminine beauty becomes established.

English

This paper examines the relationship between visuality, knowledge and power in the postcolonial African novel. With examples from selected texts of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sony Labou Tansi, it argues that visual culture, usually employed in the analysis of cultural images and material iconographies in media studies, can aptly be employed in textual analysis given that postcolonial novels are primarily engaged with the undoing of dominant visual regimes. Against the background of hegemonic regimes based on instrumentalist and subjectifying surveillance of the subject, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Labou Tansi build their texts on visual tactics and practices that subvert the capacity of the state apparatus to see, hence to know the subject. Bordering on humour, parody, graffiti, bricolage and surrealist representation, the two authors “play” with the state Panopticon, creating avenues for countervailing meanings that elude the dominant regimes of vision, knowledge and power. The subversive visual practices are inscribed within a conception of literary textualities that is based on plurivocality, heteroglossia, dialogism and the non-transparent text. Through the deconstruction of dominant visual architecture, both authors open up spaces for democratic conception of power that takes account of inter-subjectivity and non-hegemonic participation in the postcolonial public sphere.   Key words: Postcolony, visual culture, visuality, subversion, dictatorship.

Reading the Universe with Heart and Practicing Science as Religious Ethics: Reconciling Islam and Science in Contemporary Turkey

ABSTRACT The article examines how the epistemologies of Islam and modern science are reconciled in the writings of the contemporary Turkish Sunni Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen (b. 1938), one of the once most influential yet vastly controversial religious leaders in contemporary Turkey. Through a close reading of his texts on science, the article analyzes how Gülen defines the scientific practice as an ethical act of reading the universe with heart and mind, and as a path in which one can fully grasp the magnificence of God. Framing with references to Sufism, Gülen also explains science as a domain where Islamic ethics can be practiced. The article shows that Gülen’s project of Islamization of science is not limited to the domain of knowledge, but rather comprises a comprehensive cultural transformation led by a new epistemic approach to contest the secular hegemony in the country. Therefore, Gülen’s politics of Islam at large should be understood as a project of transforming the episteme, or the hegemonic regime of knowledge, in society, from secular to Islamic. However, the article also notes, somehow paradoxically, in his harmonization of the Sufi notions with secular science, Gülen cannot escape from being captured by the very epistemology of the modern science.

Women, Art and Wartime Industries: A Feminist Inter/Modern Analysis

ABSTRACTThis article interrogates the gendered nature of modernism via analysis of the art work of two modern women painters, the American Edna Reindel and the Australian Sybil Craig. Each portrayed women working in shipbuilding, aircraft and munitions factories during the Second World War. While their paintings of women at work could be seen as complicit in the hegemonic masculinist political regimes which considered women a reserve army of labour, a feminist inter/modern reading runs counter to the conventional view that the masculinity of modern times was barely disturbed by women stepping into unusual roles under exceptional circumstances.

Límites de la percepción y limitaciones del placer

En esta reseña se analizan crítica y situadamente lospostulados de Lo estético. Percepción y placer tesis dedoctorado realizada por el investigador y docente EdgardoGutiérrez, señalando sus limitaciones ideológicas y portanto, teóricas. A su vez, se destaca la necesidad de unaaplicación crítica y situada de la filosofía para no caer ensujetos estéticos abstractos, apartados de su realidad yde las concepciones estéticas autóctonas y autónomas delrégimen hegemónico estético.

Simulating pluralism: the language of democracy in hegemonic authoritarianism

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the language authoritarian leaders use to legitimate their rule. It examines the official speeches of autocrats in hegemonic regimes and compares them to the rhetorical styles of leaders in closed or competitive regimes and democracies. While recent autocracy research has drawn most attention to the phenomenon of competitive authoritarianism, the survival strategies of hegemonic regimes are less explored. Thus, the study focuses on the simulation of pluralism as a key feature of hegemonic regimes. By installing non-competitive multiparty systems which merely pretend pluralism, these regimes maintain a strong grip on power. The study finds that the leaders of hegemonic regimes use a surprisingly democratic style of language to sustain this façade of pluralism. The dictionary-based quantitative text analysis of 2074 speeches of current leaders in 22 countries illustrates that compared to other autocracies, hegemonic regimes overemphasize the (non-existing) democratic procedures in their country to fake a participatory form of government and gain national and international legitimacy. The subsequent case studies of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia further reveal the differences in context and motives for autocrats in hegemonic, closed, and competitive regimes to use autocratic or democratic styles of language.

Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature by Jason Richards

Reviewed by: Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature by Jason Richards Jonathan Daigle (bio) Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature jason richards Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017 256 pp. For decades, scholars have been expanding the geographic and temporal lenses through which they study "American" identities, cultures, and texts. The logic of this reconsideration is simple and sound: the notion of an autochthonous, independent US literature and culture is inaccurate and, at bottom, in bad faith. What this project lacks in freshness, it makes up for in continued relevance. Decades after the transnational shift began, American exceptionalism and its tangle of assumptions persist. Indeed, the remapping of identities and relationships is a vast imaginative effort, one of several generations, in the very least. This long revaluation requires textured analysis and new conceptual frameworks. In Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum US Literature, Jason Richards offers both. Triangulating modes of inquiry, Richards studies hiding-in-plain-sight relationships among white Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and white Europeans. For example, Richards combines insights from scholarship on blackface minstrelsy with those gleaned from settler postcolonial theory to bring Natty Bumppo's native and African American mimesis into sharp focus. This approach to James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers (1823) reveals the dependence of American whiteness on Native American, African American, and British Anglo-Saxon identities. Exploring new relationships among established schools of thought, Richards provides a model for redressing the insularity that has long shaped conceptions of US history, literature, and culture. Richards borrows from nineteenth-century social theorist Gabriel Tarde, who viewed imitation, not essence, as the basis of identity. Tarde's [End Page 537] notion that identity is contingent on one's response to others is particularly suggestive in the early American and antebellum contexts. As Richards notes, the theater's rapid growth in the early Republic reflected a longing for national culture keyed to an implicit understanding that Americanness would be achieved through imitation, specifically, through embodying and absorbing Native American, African American, and European identities. Engaging the work of Philip J. Deloria, Eric Lott, and Robert S. Levine, Richards delineates mutually constitutive relationships among diverse acts of cross-racial, cross-Atlantic mimesis. Imitation Nation makes an important contribution to the scholarship of blackface minstrelsy. But because mimesis took place offstage, too, Richards conceptualizes redface and blackface broadly to cover a range of cross-racial imitations. While mimesis occurs wherever contact happens, it assumed particularly robust form in a new republic defined by remarkable diversity and dominated by descendants of white Europe who faced the unusual problem of defining themselves as, at once, white and not European. A unique postcolonial settler society, the early United States sought the temporal depth and legitimacy associated with aboriginal Indian identity, but it also imitated Britain's imperial dominance over nonwhite groups. Imitation Nation makes a compelling case that American identity emerged in the complex interplay of western and Atlantic frontiers. Literature helped shape national identity in this push-pull fashion: European models distinguished the white United States from its Native American and African American inhabitants, and these Others helped distinguish American literature and identity from European antecedents. This dynamic set at odds preoccupations with racial purity and American distinctiveness. That is, a distinctive white national identity required absorbing and excluding racial and cultural Others at the same time. Citing Homi K. Bhabha's idea of mimicry from The Location of Culture, Richards opens a space for nonwhite agency in the production of national identity. Through mimicry, the disenfranchised, colonized, and enslaved exploit the slippage between the identities hegemonic regimes enforce and those same identities as performed by the oppressed. Mimicry and cross-cultural imitation, more broadly, energize what Richards calls "hybridity, the inevitable offspring of mimesis" (31). Imitation Nation sets the reality of hybridity against the fiction of white purity, as Richards argues: "If the colonial apparatus stabilized itself through a fiction of racial [End Page 538] purity, the fact of hybridity cut through the homogenous myth, opening the door to a more democratic postcolonial future" (31). A robust conception of hybridity leads Richards to...

The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Exile and Counterpoint in Farah's Maps

Taking as its starting point Edward Said's appropriation of the concept of counterpoint, late style, and exile in Culture and Imperialism and On Late Style, this essay examines the thematic and literary implications of Nuruddin Farah's counterpoint and exile, as manifested in Maps. More concretely, building on Said's secular and humanist examination of counterpoint, late style, and exile as embodying a form of musical, aesthetic and sociopolitical criticism and resistance, this essay examines the way in which Nuruddin Farah addresses the aesthetic and home in Somalia as a counterpoint to the dictatorial masculine oppression of the regime from a contrapuntal and exilic perspective. The theme of postcolonial transnational feminism as a contrapuntal sign of resistance and late style is examined and interrogated in Farah's Maps in various ways. I investigate contrapuntally the way in which Somalian women, as portrayed in Farah's selected works, stand up to challenge the hegemonic patriarch and postcolonial regime in Somalia, as represented by the General Siad Barre and the oligarchy. Somalian female identity foregrounds itself in a pertinent and humanist way within a postcolonial feminist context.

Beyond deaths in school: education, knowledge production, and the Adivasi experience

PurposeSubmergence, dislocation, rehabilitation and reform are the terms that crowd out most discussions on Adivasi/indigenous communities. They also fit in aptly with the Adivasi experiences of education and their relationship with knowledge construction, for them but not necessarily with them. Over the course of the last century, the Adivasi story has been composed and reoriented by a confluence of hegemonic regimes, institutions and epistemic traditions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachTracing the shifts over last few decades and paying attention to the larger politics of indigeneity, schooling and knowledge production, this paper advances a critical reading of the relationship between the marginalised and formal systems of schooling.FindingsEmploying Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1989) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the paper identifies the discourses that have contributed to the construction of Adivasi communities and their relationship with the Indian state.Originality/valueAs schooling continues to occupy a significant place among the communities in India and it gets associated with a number of contradictory logics, the present paper highlights the historicity of the project by which marginalised communities have been defined and their schooling needs have been framed and justified.

Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power by Kathryn McNeilly

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power by Kathryn McNeilly Anna Grear (bio) Kathryn McNeilly, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power (Routledge, 2018), ISBN 9781138690219, 166 pages. Costas Douzinas once wrote that: Human rights are the negative principle at the heart of the social imaginary. The end of human rights, like that of natural law, is the promise of the "not yet," of the indeterminacy of existential self-creation against the fear of uncertainty and the in-authentic certainties of the present. When the apologists of pragmatism pronounce the end of ideology, of history or utopia, they do not mark the triumph of human rights; on the contrary, they bring human rights to an end. The end of human rights comes when they lose their utopian end.1 Kathryn McNeilly's book, Human Rights and Radical Social Transformation: Futurity, Alterity, Power,2 offers extended reflection upon the "not yet" of human rights and its promise for radical politics—a promise, which like the utopian end explored by Douzinas, is a restless, impossible principle of hope.3 McNeilly constructs an account of human rights emphasizing the persistence and significance of their not yet—a performative, agonistic leaning-forwardness—in which human rights are to be understood as a ceaseless grappling with the political, expressed through ineradicable tensions between power, vulnerability, and alterity. In making her argument, McNeilly draws upon established critical engagements with the multiple paradoxes of human rights. She is fully aware that human rights ascendancy is marked by their extensive violation, as well as by ambivalent dynamics between their emancipatory impulses and their dark complicities with hegemonic power. Mc-Neilly understands, therefore, the skepticism of activists and thinkers concerning human rights. Her central question is animated by a deep recognition of human rights failures in full cognizance of their uneasy role in relation to contemporary crises—including the contemporary crisis of human rights legitimacy. Can human rights, despite all this, "offer possibilities for contemporary radical politics?" This is a question that can only be answered adequately by examining the "relationship between human rights and radical social transformation" under present configurations of power.4 McNeilly's book reaches out to battle weary activists and thinkers to make the case that human rights can be a vehicle for radical politics in confrontation with the hegemony of contemporary power: I advance that an alternative conception of rights compatible with the promotion of different regimes of class, gendered, racial, ablest and heteronormative power and meaningful social equality is made possible through the concept of "human rights to come."5 [End Page 710] "Human rights to come," then, is in essence McNeilly's account of the not yet of human rights. She offers an extended engagement with the "futurity" that Douzinas sees human rights "inscribe [into] law"6 by focusing her attention on the inherent futurity of human rights themselves. There is a way, McNeilly insists, for human rights to offer hope of renewed critical engagement and to recover the vital energies of their inherently political nature. Indeed, it is the very "depoliticization" (following Jacques Ranciere)7 of rights as a result of their widespread codification and positivization, converging with radical politics having "[run] out of tools to meaningfully challenge hegemonic regimes of power,"8 that opens out the promise and urgency of human rights to come. The power of human rights as a language of claim, combined with reclamation of their political nature and the responsiveness of human rights to crisis, suggests that a futural conception of human rights can reinvigorate the power of the political for contemporary politics.9 McNeilly develops her thesis by beginning with the idea, well established in critical human rights thinking, that human rights always contain a movement of (re)articulation, that their meanings remain persistently open (Chapter 2). This dynamic of permanent excess means that human rights are always "inherently 'to come,' and … strive towards a futural conception of living and being that is free from alterity."10 McNeilly posits an interlocking set of four theoretical aspects of human rights to come: performativity (Chapter 3), universality as universalization (Chapter 4), agonistic pluralism (Chapter 5), and the paradoxical vulnerable subject (Chapter...

Gender-segregated spaces in Icelandic high schools: resistance, power and subjectification

ABSTRACTOrganization of spaces in schools often revolves around gender and sexuality. For example, it has been reported that restrooms and locker rooms are the most heteronormative and heterosexist spaces within schools. Particularly within these spaces, hegemonic heterosexual masculinity/femininity is institutionalized, not only in the practices and individual performances, but also in the organization of these spaces. In that sense, the space of the restroom and the locker room is regulated and constructed on the basis of gender binaries, and as such, inscribes disciplinary power on those gendered bodies that do not conform to the hegemonic gender regime. For trans/transgender students and other gender-nonconforming students, these spaces have been experienced as hostile and problematic. The paper draws on ethnographic data from two Icelandic high schools and has the aim of moving the discussion about gender divided spaces (restrooms and locker/changing rooms) outside the sole emphasis on gender binaries by incorporating into the analysis identity categories based on sexuality and trans/transgender/gender-queer embodiment.

An Analysis of Jack Mapanje’s Poetry with Particular Reference to his use of Obscuring Devices

Jack Mapanje’s poetry is a true reflection of his society through the use of obscuring devices. These obscuring devices are necessary to ensure that the literary work reaches its intended audience in a totalitarian society. Overall, Jack Mapanje’s poetry exploits creatures from the world of nature—mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and insects—for close association with life experiences in various contexts and situations and with people he viewed with contempt and disgust and those he regarded with tenderness and compassion. He utilises them to conceptualize and construct a wide range of ideas that respond to questions of justice, identity and belonging. It all thus becomes part of ecocriticism which is defined by various authors as ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’. This eco-critical reading, the use of animal imagery in his poetry makes it stand apart and ahead of other resistance poetry and makes new statements about the relationships between animals, poetry and political resistance in African literature. Mapanje’s poetry is a direct response and a stance of resistance to social injustice, especially the debasement of culture, abuse of power, despotism, oppression and exploitation of the masses by the hegemonic regime of Dr. Hastings in Malawi that leads to his incarceration and final forced flight from his motherland. This paper attempts to showcase the nature of poetic expressions produced in a repressive society.

In Search for Truth: Surveillance Rumors and Vernacular Panopticon in Belarus

Abstract In this article, I analyze rumors about surveillance—unverified expressions of belief and narratives, which, despite their global omnipresence, are contextualized by local peculiarities and modalities. I concentrate on the narratives recorded in Belarus, notoriously referred to as “the last dictatorship of Europe.” There, the rumors, largely inherited from the USSR, are reiterated due to the nontransparency of current legislation and other features of the Belarusian hegemonic regime, serving to create the sense of perpetual surveillance.

Dynamic political contexts and power asymmetries: the cases of the Blue Nile and the Yarmouk Rivers

This paper explores the evolving patterns of hydropolitical relations in the dynamic contexts of Yarmouk and Blue Nile Rivers in comparison. The analysis aims at shedding light over the complex implications that recent political and social changes have aroused for the water disputes between Jordan and Syria on the one hand, and Ethiopia and Egypt on the other. In both basins, cooperative efforts toward the integrated management of transboundary waters have been only partially effective and largely undermined by the perpetuation of unilateral actions by riparian states. In the case studies, the lack of a basin-wide vision over the control and use of shared waters has resulted in disputes among the basin states and ultimately in an unsustainable, unfair, and unwise utilization of the resources. This paper argues that a substantive and effective integration of national water policies is unlikely to occur, unless power asymmetries are properly addressed in order to overcome the likelihood of hegemonic regimes.

BDSM under security: Radical resistance via contingent subjectivities

In recent decades, BDSM communities have engaged in a political struggle for rights by separating their practices from the oppressive gaze of legal and medical praxis, seeking to legitimize BDSM discourse and actions under the slogan of ‘safe, sane and consensual’. The espousal of principles governed primarily by health and safety nonetheless carries a normalizing overtone, apparently trapping the community within the epistemic codes against which they struggle. This article suggests that the security mechanism Foucault identifies as forming part of biopower can serve as a critical analytic capable of arbitrating between BDSM as a form of political resistance to hegemonic sexual norms and the restraints imposed by the ‘safe, sane and consensual’ code itself. We argue that communities using health and safety codes shift the political struggle from direct resistance to sovereign power to the transgression of hegemonic regimes of truth through contingent sexual identification and practice.

Gender and Caste at Work: Evolution of a Factory Regime Under the Sumangali Scheme

The feminisation of labour practised by the spinning industry in Tamil Nadu in the name of the Sumangali Scheme is based on a highly exploitative labour arrangement of employing girls belonging to socio-economically deprived sections. Using a socially sensitive factory regime approach developed by Ching Kwan Lee, this article brings to light changes that are underway in a prominent mill that has been the target of NGO activism. The findings show that a highly despotic factory regime has slowly transformed into a hegemonic regime premised on the reconstruction of the employer as a benevolent patron. The study unravels the complex intersection of caste and gender in shaping the new factory regime.

Auteurship and Image‐Making: A (Gentle) Critique of the Photovoice Method

This article critiques digital photovoice, a method deployed by social activists, developmentalists, and anthropological researchers. I argue that the uncritical use of photovoice methods (1) has allowed a reinvigoration of a positivist orientation toward image authenticity and (2) inadvertently supports hegemonic regimes of value. To revitalize photovoice as a method, I argue that practitioners must view their project as an aesthetic one, in which image‐makers are considered auteurs producing realities. I provide an example from my fieldwork in Adavisandra village near Bangalore, using one of my students’ photographs to consider how representations of her life change when we take her aesthetic‐auterial sensibility seriously.

Hos in the garden: Staging and resisting neoliberal creativity

This article takes up the challenge of extending and enhancing the literature on arts interventions and creative city policies by considering the role of feminist and queer artistic praxis in contemporary urban politics. Here I reflect on the complicities and potentialities of two Toronto-based arts interventions: Dig In and the Dirty Plotz cabaret. I analyse an example of community based arts strategy that strived to ‘revitalise’ one disinvested Toronto neighbourhood. I also reflect on my experience performing drag king urban planner, Toby Sharp. Reflecting on these examples, I show how market-oriented arts policies entangle women artists in the cultivation of spaces of depoliticised feminism, homonormativity and white privilege. However, I also demonstrate how women artists are playfully and performatively pushing back at hegemonic regimes with the radical aesthetic praxis of cabaret. I maintain that bringing critical feminist arts spaces and cabaret practice into discussions about neoliberal urban policies uncovers sites of feminist resistance and solidarity, interventions that challenge violent processes of colonisation and privatisation on multiple fronts.

Bringing Ideology in: Differing Oppositional Challenges to Hegemony in Singapore and Malaysia

This article explores the nature of the main opposition parties to the incumbent hegemonic regimes in Malaysia and Singapore. I argue that the differing characters of these opposition parties should be considered. In Singapore, where there is no ideological challenge to the ruling party, I contend that even if the opposition takes over it will be the end of a hegemonic party but not hegemony. In Malaysia, the opposite is true. This article contributes to the literature on transition theory in two ways: (1) it recognizes the diversity of authoritarian regimes and enhances analyses of various authoritarian regimes by focusing on one type – hegemonic parties; and (2) it brings ideology into the reckoning by focusing on the nature of the opposition parties most likely to take over.