Hegemonic System Research Articles

The Narrative Power of the Black Maternal Body: Resisting and Exceeding Visual Economies of Discipline in Margaret Walker'sJubilee

AbstractAs theorist Robyn Wiegman has established, specular, and panoptic disciplinary measures together served to maintain hegemonic systems of power in American slavery, the Reconstruction period, and the era of segregation. Specular discipline is characterized by public scenes of torture, which discourage acts of opposition to the dominant power structure, while panoptic discipline uses constant surveillance, both real and imagined, to cause subjects to internalize the order of the discipline. In this article, I argue that Jubilee investigates and resists the visual control of the black maternal body in US slavery and Reconstruction, as these periods are depicted in the novel, as well as in the Civil Rights era contemporary to its publication. I focus on the changing narrative significance of the black maternal body in Jubilee as the protagonist carves out space within a disciplinary system of ocular control to claim ownership of her black maternal body and tell her story. I claim that the novel positions the black mother as uniquely able to subvert the narrative power enforced by the gaze throughout the past several centuries and counters stereotypical discourses about black women with an account of the strength and survival of the black female body.

Imaginando Otros Mundos: Apuntes Para Una Historia Ambiental En Tiempos Neoliberales

Desde sus orígenes, la historia ambiental se ha convertido en una de las disciplinas que más se ha preocupado por las consecuencias de la degradación socioambiental. El contexto en el que surge se caracterizó por la competencia entre el socialismo real y el capitalista, resultando este último vencedor, abriéndose así el periodo conocido como “el final de la historia”, donde en neoliberalismo se consolidó como sistema hegemónico. Esta situación permeó el desarrollo de la disciplina, lo cual se puede apreciar en que buena parte de sus investigaciones se centran en el estudio de procesos destructivos, dejando en segundo nivel a los organizativos. En este sentido, este artículo busca reflexionar sobre estas cuestiones y presentar algunas propuestas metodológicas y epistemológicas, -productos del diálogo con otros esfuerzos académicos y sociales- que tienen como fin responder a los retos que el neoliberalismo del siglo XXI plantea.

Honourable spoils? The Iraq War and the American hegemonic system’s eternal and perpetual interest in oil

Oil is the most important extractive industry and the United States has dominated its global development, creating the modern petrochemical-based era. This article explains how oil shaped US hegemony and US controlling influence in the Middle East as conventional reserves on US territory dwindled after World War Two. Critical review of hegemonic theory accounts for the US role in the Middle East and the Iraq War in new depth, while defining how the US operates its hegemonic system with allied yet subordinate British and Dutch actors. US pursuit of relative autonomy and power maximization has yielded twin US policy objectives of pursuing North American energy autonomy and dominance over the Middle East so as to influence others’ energy consumption. These simultaneous US policy objects are specified amidst an assessment of how the reserves and exports of Iraqi oil and global gas are advancing US control of the world’s future energy system as it moves toward natural gas and unconventional oils in similar path dependent ways as did the conventional oil era.

Agroecología y cambio climático: ¿adaptación o transformación?

Despite the fact that there is general alarm about the planetary emergency represented by climate change, and no effective solutions seem to be on sight, part of the problem is that it requires revolutionary changes that run against economic growth and the hegemony that benefits from the capitalist system. Industrial agriculture, which is part of this hegemonic system, pretends to reproduce itself by making minor changes through strategies of Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA), without challenging the structure of monoculture or the relations of power that maintain it. On the contrary, agroecology is a science and movement that confronts the root causes of hunger and environmental degradation led by social rural movements that value the legacy of traditional agriculture, which through the skills of thousands of peasants and indigenous people has developed systems that stood the test of time constituying a patrimony for humankind on how to design a new resiliente agriculture able to confront climate change.

A culture of informality

This article offers an ethnographic account of informality, showing the complicity between the formal sector and the informal economy. Taking the reader on a car journey of urban disorganisation and traffic jams in Mexico City, the analysis shows how informality has become part of an everyday social contract. It is argued that the diverse world of informal practices, working as a popular survival strategy, is also entrenched in the workings of formal institutions, which draw on under-the-counter agreements and exchanges with the illegal economy, be that in the construction of public works in the city, in film and clothes piracy or in the public provision of water, transport, light or Internet services. The global hegemonic system could not function without these agreements: the transition from informality to illegality is slippery. If Mexico City is a global city it is not just for participating in the networks of transnational corporations, consulting firms and international tourism; it is also because of its networks with super brands in legal and illegal production. The article concludes by suggesting that an informal system of production, transactions and distribution of goods and services linking entrepreneurs from all continents can position the city on a global scale through non-hegemonic globalisation.

If You’re a Critical Theorist, How Come You Work for a University?

ABSTRACTHow can we deal with the apparent contradiction between the normative ideals of critical theory and the practice of the current university system? To answer this question, I consult three classical criticisms of the university system: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the French educator Joseph Jacotot formulated a pedagogical critique of the disciplinary effects of the educational system; at the beginning of the twentieth century, German historian Franz Rosenzweig articulated an ethical critique of the hegemonic educational system’s distance from life; and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, British feminist Sara Ahmed proposed a political critique of the oppressing functions of academic institutions. Taken together, these critiques can serve as an orientation for critical intellectual practice even within the academic system. Finally, I try to describe the relation between critical theory and the university thus evolving by utilising Stefano Harney’s and Fred Moten’s concept of the “undercommons”.

"Eppur continua a muoversi". La dinámica colonial del conocimiento científico a través de las revistas y los índices de impacto

Cuando se trata la geopolítica del conocimiento suele hacerse referencia a la ciencia, las universidades y sus modelos de conocimiento, pero en la actualidad las carreras académicas giran en torno a las publicaciones científicas y su impacto. Por ello el objetivo principal de este trabajo es analizar la dinámica y evolución de estos agentes. Para ello se utilizan como marcos de referencia las epistemologías del sur, y dentro de este marco se interrogan y ponen en cuestión las diferentes afirmaciones que la ciencia ha hecho sobre sí misma, y sobre el método de difusión hegemónico en la actualidad: el artículo científico. Inicialmente se describe la evolución de la ciencia y cómo las revistas y los índices han cobrado su protagonismo actual. Posteriormente, se analizan una serie de alternativas actuales, interrogándoles si amplían el horizonte de posibilidades o, por el contrario, ahondan en las dinámicas colonialistas y elitistas. Finalmente se muestra por qué en la actualidad las alternativas se construyen como posibles en tanto que pueden ser integradas por el sistema hegemónico de gestión del conocimiento; mientras que las resistencias ofrecen estrategias y marcos prácticos de acción con capacidad para plantear y ampliar nuevos horizontes de posibilidades.

Movimientos de mujeres para luchar contra la impunidad y el olvido: paralelismos y diferencias entre Ciudad Juárez (México) y Medellín (Colombia)

El presente trabajo analiza desde una óptica comparativa el trabajo desarrollado por los movimientos sociales de mujeres en dos ciudad como Ciudad Juárez y Medellín, que, pese a su separación geográfica, presentan paralalismos significantes. Ambos municipios han estado históricamenete marcados por una violencia estructural contra las mujeres, perpetuada dentro de un sistema patriarcal hegemónico que, como analizamos, de forma constante ha solapado la violencia feminicida y misógina en el marco de inseguridda generalizada imperante en ambos lugares. La sororidad impulsada por mujeres juarenses y medellinenses han conseguido importantísimos avances en el trabajo de visibilización de esta realidad y en la exigencia de justicia a través de estrategias comunicativas y discursivas.

“You don't want to peer over people's shoulders, it feels too rude!” The moral geographies of using participants’ personal smartphones in research

This paper examines the moralities of using participants’ personal mobile technologies in research. While smartphones bring novel benefits to research in terms of their labour‐saving, innovative, intuitive and low‐cost virtues, they also raise unique spatial, ethical and moral issues that can have implications for how research is conducted. Using morality as a conceptual tool, this paper explores the smartphone as a geographical space that is simultaneously private/public, personal/shared and material/imagined. By examining the observations made during a study which tested a mobile walking tour app, this paper questions the moral implications for, and the consequences of, researching using participants’ personal technologies and how researchers might access and interpret behaviours within these private digital “spaces.” This paper advocates the importance of recognising the complexities of moving into participants’ private digital spaces and how a diverse range of behaviours may become part of the research encounter through the ways in which participants form interactions with technologies, the environment and with each other. Finally, this paper contributes to discussions of moral geographies by examining the asymmetric power relations that are evident when examining moral behaviours that are performed simultaneously in digital and geographical spaces, and questions whether these may be functions of hegemonic systems of “acceptable” behaviour.

Dinâmicas socioeconômicas dos feirantes agricultores familiares de Chapecó (SC)

No presente artigo, o objetivo central é compreender a feira-livre como um espaço estratégico para a permanência da agricultura familiar, indo além da temática da inserção de mercado. A pesquisa de campo foi desenvolvida nas duas feiras-livres centrais da cidade de Chapecó/SC, dividida em duas etapas: levantamento das características dos feirantes, por meio da entrevista com base em um formulário com questões abertas e fechadas com 63 feirantes responsáveis pelas bancas; e entrevistas com base em questões semiestruturadas com as 28 famílias que se enquadraram como feirantes agricultores familiares residentes no Município de Chapecó. Os dados coletados foram apresentados em quadros sínteses e a análise realizada seguiu os parâmetros da análise de conteúdo. Os resultados demostram a importância desse mercado de proximidade para os agricultores familiares feirantes, não apenas como espaço de comercialização de produtos, mas como espaço de construção social em que estão presentes as relações de interconhecimento, de reciprocidade e de relativa autonomia frente ao sistema agroalimentar hegemônico.

Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise

This paper encourages clinicians to consider how patients’ conflicts and symptoms reveal not only familial etiology but the internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology. It explores how the subject evolves within the cultural matrix of neoliberalism, the contemporary hegemonic system that shapes unconscious fantasy, conflicts and defenses. Several clinical case vignettes illustrate the benefits to both analyst and patient of exploring within the transference and countertransference how neoliberal hierarchical arrangements of class, race and gender affect subjective and intersubjective experience.

The banality of evil

The aim of this article is to unveil how cisnormativity is institutionalised in a Brazilian gender clinic, creating an emotionally charged local regime of doctor/ patient interactions. Our interest is not only in illustrating how the clinic’s institutionalised normatitivies about transbodies are the result of the crystallisation of particular transnational medical discourses, but also in showing how such a normative framework creates specific conditions for trans people’s acts of resistance. In order to capture this dual perspective on norms and resistance to them, we draw upon three important but somewhat neglected perspectives in sociolinguistic and discourse analytical research, which may bring some fresh insights to the study of language and discrimination more broadly: Hannah Arendt’s (1994) reflections on the ‘banality of evil’; Michel de Certeau’s (1984) ideas about the no less banal ways in which social actors speak back to power via a plethora of ‘tactics of resistance’; and transfeminism’s critique of language and the banalisation of hegemonic systems of oppression.

Inquietações e mudanças na Educação Artística: mais de que nunca uma urgência

O artigo escreve-se na primeira pessoa, como um exercício de reflexão, a partir da amplitude de responsabilidade política de um professor de educação artística, envolvido nas encruzilhadas de um tempo controverso onde se confronta a dignidade e imprescindibilidade da presença do artístico nas escolas com uma ofensiva ultra liberal que a pretende anular em favor de uma escola utilitarista que alimente as necessidade do sistema hegemónico e forneça sujeitos dóceis e adormecidos. As controvérsias que afrontam a dignidade humana no mundo contemporâneo exigem-nos entender que, no terreno educativo, não se procura um modelo que se lhes contraponha mas se criem possibilidades de confrontação com o novo.

The Hegemony of Representation: Democracy and Indigenous Self-government in Bolivia

In the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the 2009 Constitution articulates a multidimensional conception of democracy, reflecting a legacy of social movement mobilizations that demanded political inclusion and propelled to power a president who self-identifies as Indigenous. Many anticipated that Bolivia could present a propitious environment for an invigorated and post-liberal democracy. This article evaluates the three dimensions of democracy enshrined in the Constitution – representative, participatory, and communitarian – with the aim of understanding the relationship among them. I focus on two important sites of democratic practice: the process of drafting and approving the Constitution, and the construction of “Indigenous autonomies”; that is, institutions of Indigenous self-government based on communitarian democracy. While Bolivian democracy is more stable and inclusive under the current government than under previous ones, this study finds that the expansion of sanctioned participatory and communitarian democratic processes has been limited vis-à-vis the hegemonic system of representation.

If God Got Us: Kendrick Lamar, Paul Tillich, and the Advent of Existentialist Hip Hop

The African-American experience within the history of the United States of America has been one in which their existence has been constantly threatened. From the conclusion of the Civil War to the present moment, the hegemonic system of white supremacy has represented a ubiquitous challenge for survival for members of the black community. The difficulties endemic to this system have been foundational to the advent and growth of the hip-hop culture and the art form of rap, which has emerged as being of central importance to the dissemination of hip hop's language and symbolism. The rap artist Kendrick Lamar, in his masterful record To Pimp a Butterfly, seeks to elucidate the black experience in the United States by describing the manner in which the threat of death always affects the way African Americans view their lives. In addition, on the album, Lamar celebrates the ability of members of the African-American community to courageously face this danger while still declaring power and strength within their race. This experience of the omnipresence of death and the determination to live life from within that shadow mirrors the theological system employed by the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich. In this article, Lamar's album will be interpreted employing Tillich's categories of finitude, anxiety, and new being.

Justice institutions in autocracies: a framework for analysis

ABSTRACT What role do justice institutions play in autocracies? We bring together the literatures on authoritarian political institutions and on judicial politics to create a framework to answer this question. We start from the premise that autocrats use justice institutions to deal with the fundamental problems of control and power-sharing. Unpacking “justice institutions” we argue that prosecutors and ordinary courts can serve, respectively, as “top-down” and “bottom-up” monitoring and information-gathering mechanisms helping the dictator in the choice between repression and cooptation. We also argue that representation in the Supreme Court and special jurisdictions enables the dictator and his ruling coalition to solve intra-elite conflicts facilitating coordination. We provide several examples from Mexico under the hegemonic system of the PRI and of Spain under Francisco Franco, as well as punctual illustrations from other countries around the world. We conclude by reflecting on some of the potential consequences of this usage of justice institutions under autocracy for democratization.

Ways of Machine Seeing

Algorithms do not act alone or with magical (totalising) power but exist as part of larger infrastructures and ideologies. Some well-publicised recent cases have come to public attention that exemplify a contemporary politics (and crisis) of representation in this way. The problem is one of learning in its widest sense, and “machine learning” techniques are employed on data to produce forms of knowledge that are inextricably bound to hegemonic systems of power and prejudice.

LEGAL PLURALISM AND COMMUNITY CHANGES: A REVIEW OF LEGAL PLURALISM INTEGRATION SYSTEM

The system of Eastern nations’ people lives is characteristic of Eastern cultures. Indonesia is a nation that also reflects these characteristics, in social and legal systems. Pre-colonization, the Indonesian people has been living in a pluralistic legal system, both in religious or customcharacterized systems. Until now, the both characteristic being a living law system inherited in history. The presence of colonization changed the model and the basic characteristics of the nation into a modern society with the west-styled colonial legal system. These western-modern systems continued post-independence and became the main pillar of development to change people lives. Therein the basic problem of the national legal system, that is legal pluralistic of society to be helpless in front of the hegemonic system of state law. Community changes in legal pluralism can occur if the contribution of living law systems (religion and customs) extends, without being sub-system or supporting or complementary of state law system. Hegemonic dominance of state law must continue to loosened, so that a free space of contribution for nation culturebased people legal system increasingly wider. Therefore, the legal pluralism integration system is important to establish in the national life. The paradigm of this system is a legal pluralism and its operation is integration of living law system with state law within the spirit and scope of legal pluralism. Thus, the purpose of this article are to analyze and determine the extent of relevance the concept of legal pluralism in the national development process concerned with a diversity of Indonesian culture.

Kraj hegemonije i dominacije u Jugoistočnoj Europi

At the end of the 20th century the SE European region was surviving one of the most difficult periods of changing hegemony and dominance circumstances. The disintegration of the communist world and the collapse of former Yugoslavia, as part of the process, could be considered as the result of the new relations among big powers’ hegemonic systems. The NATO spreads to the European east (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland etc.), which has direct influence on SE Europe. After new countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia) had been internationally recognised in 1992, and the loyal Slovenian and Croatian partnership with NATO in the Kosovo action in 1999 was proved, it is obvious that regional hegemony of the Serbia core region does not exist any more. Also Russian (former Soviet) attempts to play the role of the dominant leader in this region have been suppressed to a minimum. The author discusses European Union interests in this zone, and the way European countries include themselves in the process of pacifying and developing the region. After Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia are expected to satisfy the conditions for entering EU in next 3 to five years. In the same time Serbia and Montenegro enters a new, more democratic phase of its development.

Latin American “Neo-Developmentalism,” State Action and Supranational Realignment: What Consequences to Multipolarity?

Within the context of a new capitalistic phase of development, some South American countries undertook until recently a search process of an alternative path of development to neoliberalism, or “neo-developmentalism” experiences. In neo-developmentalist countries, the states' inner action was complemented with the use, at the supranational scale, of the states' external power to further a geoeconomic and political realignment with China, Russia, the BRICS and the Global South, and, thus, a distancing from US and its hegemonic system of states. Centered on state action, to which we provide a set of theoretical foundations related to capitalistic phases of development from a Gramscian perspective, we explore neo-developmentalism experiences (particularly Brazil's and Argentina's), their supranational realignment and the possible consequences to multi-polarity, including the recent setbacks suffered by the progressive governments. We conclude that those trends won't avoid China, the BRICS and the Global South to continue reconfiguring South America, but another push like the one recently seen might have to wait until the next expansive phase of the commodity price cycle.