Political Awakening Research Articles

Healing the Rift

In the introductory “Intellectual Autobiography” of the Georg Henrik von Wright volume of the Library of Living Philosophers series, von Wright mentions the discrepancy he always felt between his narrow logical-analytical professional work and a drive to make philosophy relevant to his life, calling it a rift in his philosophical personality. This article examines the nature of the rift and the various stages the problem went through during von Wright’s career. It is argued that the initial impression that his books The Varieties of Goodness and Explanation and Understanding had contributed to healing the rift, was subdued by a gradual shift in existential focus from individualistic ethics towards a critical concern for destructive ways of thinking inherent in the Western culture, connected with von Wright’s “political awakening” at the end of the 1960s. The most urgent questions of our times called for novel, non-analytical, ways of doing philosophy, employed in von Wright’s later works on science and reason, and the myth of progress. Eventually von Wright’s earlier methodological concerns were also alleviated by his belief that logical-analytical philosophy was inherently unsuitable for exposing the cultural structures it was very much a part of.

Introduction

Introduction

DAMN GREAT EMPIRES! WILLIAM JAMES AND THE POLITICS OF PRAGMATISM BY ALEXANDER LIVINGSTON

Reviewed by: Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism by Alexander Livingston Shannon Sullivan Alexander Livingston Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 264 pp. I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually [End Page 209] synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have never been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. (To be fair, I’d say the same thing about other classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce.) I’m not alone in thinking and feeling this way. Cornel West (1989: 60), for example, once claimed that “James was preoccupied with the state of his and others’ souls, not the social conditions of their lives…. In regard to politics, James has nothing profound or even provocative to say.” Even James himself claimed in 1899 that his “political philosophy evidently belongs to the future; certainly not to the past or present” (epigram in Livingston 2016). For all I knew before reading Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (2016), the “damn” in Alexander Livingston’s title might have been an adjective rather than a verb, conveying James’s enthusiasm for rather than his condemnation of large imperial nations. But a verb it is, and with an exclamation mark from James to boot. Livingston’s remarkably refreshing book has written a new chapter in the story of what pragmatism has to contribute to political philosophy, and it has changed my thinking about the value of James’s philosophy for political purposes. As important as the concept of democracy is, it is not the only or the final word on how pragmatists might approach political theory and action. James’s contribution is not merely to insert individuality into democracy (cf. Rondel 2017), a reading of James that has value but which still seems to assume that the topic of democracy exhausts his political insights. On Livingston’s account, James instead provides an anti-imperialist critique of modern nations that is shaped by its “anarchist edges” (George Cotkin, quoted in Livingston 2016: 9). Rather than a full-blown Anarchist (capital “A”) ideology, what we find in James is an anarchist (lowercase “a”) criticism of what he called “bigness,” which led him to oppose empire building. Eloquently elaborated by Livingston and read with an “anarchist squint” (Scott 2012), James’s political vision becomes both apparent and appealing. James’s political philosophy is found primarily in his Nachlass, the notes, letters, and editorials that James wrote especially in the last ten years of his life (from 1899–1900). These were the years after the 1898 Spanish-American War, which as Livingston argues (2016: 2), triggered a kind of political awakening for James. While James has been understood variously—and somewhat inconsistently—as “an apolitical scholar, a harbinger of fascism, or a proto-Deweyan democrat” (2016: 7), Livingston convincingly demonstrates that James instead should be considered an anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist thinker. In Livingston’s view, James’s most significant contribution to pragmatist political philosophy is to “reorient[t] political thought towards the problem of empire as a way of life” (2016: 7, emphasis in original). [End Page 210] Chapter 1 of Damn Great Empires! demonstrates how James’s former student, Ralph Barton Perry, significantly shaped the reception of James’s political thought. Perry was a liberal who advocated individualism, toleration, and democracy, and he used James’s philosophy to advance American liberalism in the twentieth-century era of the two World Wars. In doing so, Perry was combatting an emerging interpretation of James’s philosophy as proto-fascist. In the 1920s, James’s pragmatism became aligned with the anti-intellectualism in Europe that fed into Italian fascism. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini even infamously claimed...

The Fascist Who Fought for World Peace: Conversions and Core Concepts in the Ideology of the Swedish Nazi Leader Sven Olov Lindholm

This article deals with the political conversion and ideological thought of the Swedish National Socialist Sven Olov Lindholm (1903–1998). Lindholm began his career as a fascist in the twenties, and became a member of Sweden’s main National Socialist party led by Birger Furugård, in the early thirties. Ideological divisions and a failed attempt to oust Furugård saw Lindholm found his own party in January 1933, the nsap (later renamed the sss). Previous research has often described this party as a left-wing Nazi alternative, but its ideological basis has never been thoroughly dissected. The present article uses a variety of archival collections, speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper articles to suggest a cluster of six interdependent core concepts in Sven Olov Lindholm’s ideological thought: anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-materialism, the idealization of the worker, and the definition of Nazi Germany as a worker’s state. Lindholm underwent a second political awakening in the sixties, redefining himself as a communist, and thus the article also examines the ideological remains thereafter. It is found that anti-materialism, linked to a broad antipathy to modernity, was central throughout his career.

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s

Proverbs, Power and Politics: A Linguistic Analysis of Osofisan’s Yungba-Yungba and the Dance Contest

African writers represent and reflect their cultural and sociolinguistic realities in their writings in spite of the necessity of acceding to the globalising and hegemonic dictates of English. This linguistic hybridisation is asserted through the use of indigenous linguistic practices. This article studies the use of proverbs and its relationship with power and politics in Femi Osofisan's (2012) play Yungba-Yungba and the Dance Contest. While the proverbs, as is customary in Yoruba society, function as conversational lubricants, they reveal diverse pragmatic implications. I identify the nexus of power and politics in proverbs with the contextual functions of mediation, provocation and admonition/caution. Ideologically, the proverbs contribute to the thematic preoccupation of political awakening and document the Yoruba ethos and mores, particularly in the face of language endangerment. More importantly, they assist in indexing a global issue: the recurrent conflict between progressive forces and oppressive regimes.

Seminal Years and the Long Arc of the Moral Universe

Seminal Years and the Long Arc of the Moral Universe Eleonory Gilburd (bio) Kathleen E. Smith, Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring. 434 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-0674972001. $29.95. Behind the story of a single year lie different premises. One year can be seen as representing many others. It can encapsulate subterranean ideas, generations, styles, or sensibilities at the moment when they come to prominence.1 It can differ from all the other years and generate interest for its uniqueness, rather than its representativeness.2 A single year can constitute a seminal point, a break, a beginning: such are revolutionary years, founding moments, and zero hours.3 They abound in possibilities (salutary or calamitous); they are the future rendered in the present tense.4 In book titles, a year's very precision and singularity—as opposed to chronological boundaries—imply an eruption of changes. Or, most radically, a year can serve to resist diachronic assumptions, pointing up simultaneity and randomness. A year can be seen as an environment for [End Page 613] fragmented, everyday occurrences united by what appears to be an accident of time, without autonomous actors, events, or causes.5 Kathleen Smith's book about 1956 works with the first three premises, but the spirit of the fourth—experiencing daily life in a kaleidoscopic swirl—motivates many pages as well. Traditionally, this has been a threshold year, the Soviet Union's Stunde Null and year of protest folded into one. Recent scholarship has challenged the divide between the Stalin period and everything that came after, whether one uses 1953, 1956, or some other date as a turning point. In line with such arguments, Smith distances herself from treating 1956 as a "simple turning point" or "a sharply drawn line" in the opening pages (4). Instead, she sees 1956 as a particularly intense expression of long-term trends and the beginning of processes that continue to define Russian politics—such as "a long and unresolved tug of war over the boundaries of accepted criticism within the Soviet system" and beyond (5). Smith highlights the ideological and political structures that endured across seven decades. Yet even as Smith rejects the turning-point vision of singular years, she reinstates the significance of 1956, which has been downplayed in recent years. While she shows the government's inconsistencies, its desperate attempts to maintain a monopoly on discourse, and the return of repression by the end of the year, she reminds readers that "nothing would be the same" (54). It was a year of "political awakening" (80) and burning, unanswered questions for everyone, Smith says, but especially for educated young people. They took seriously Soviet civic ethics and the possibility of change from within. Indeed, one of Smith's key themes emphasizes the prospects and limits of such change. Another, and related, theme woven into every chapter is what Smith sees as a major impediment to change: the bureaucracy. The year 1956, Smith argues, constituted "a mental threshold" (5) that forever constrained party leadership and forever altered how Soviet audiences would receive its celebratory narratives. The year 1956 would not and could not be undone. The book's sequential structure, with chapters devoted to every month, insists on intentionality, causality, and narrative progression. Smith tells the story of the Thaw largely through the biographies of poets, writers, filmmakers, scientists, idealists and cynics, people exuberant and disenchanted, budding young dissidents and old communist believers. These lives personify and humanize—even amplify—political events and social policies. The biographical plot works against the chance simultaneity of a [End Page 614] year. But the book also embraces an episodic arrangement that encompasses student volunteers going east to till the land in inhospitable terrains, privileged travelers heading west on a luxury cruise, and Gulag returnees trying to come to Moscow illegally and finding themselves shut out. Smith's writing is animated by a desire to capture 1956 as it was experienced and by a concern for the sensual and emotional environment. The imaginative first chapter takes readers inside the Kremlin New Year's ball, dormitories, and barracks; telling details create the portraits of key protagonists. In chapter 2, Smith restages the...

"A Riot is the Language of the Unheard": The Grassroots Activism of Whose Streets? (2017)

"A Riot is the Language of the Unheard"The Grassroots Activism of Whose Streets? (2017) Julia Alekseyeva Whose Streets? (2017), codirected by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, describes the months following the killing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown and the ensuing Ferguson uprising in 2014. Full of rare footage shot on-the-ground, the documentary follows a group of activists and their political awakening in the aftermath of these events. Yet what sets the film apart from the plethora of observational documentaries in the age of Netflix is the directors' proximity to the cause they depict. Folayan and Davis are both black activists and media artists, and their direction suffuses the film with pathos and empathy. In the manner of the best documentaries of its genre, the film activates its viewers: it horrifies and enrages, but also excites and renders hope. The codirectors do not appear directly in the film itself—the film does not feature expository voiceover, only brief explanatory intertitles—but Folayan and Davis craft a deeply personal account of the Ferguson uprising. One could easily imagine a more even-handed approach to the material, perhaps reminiscent of Ken Burns or Frederick Wiseman. From the 1960s on, documentaries by filmmakers such as Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles Brothers were prized for their allegedly objective approach to documentary filmmaking. Whose Streets? refuses this veneer of impartiality and instead participates in the long history of activist filmmaking. As the first frame of the film informs, the film is "For Michael Brown, Jr." Folayan and Davis assert that police racism and brutality directly impact the lives of too many people to warrant an impartial response; as several activists profiled in the film claim, "you are either with us, or against us." While the film does highlight the large issues of American police brutality and the founding of Black Lives Matter, the midwestern city of Ferguson, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis, is central to the documentary. Despite being located in the American heartland, several subjects in the [End Page 222] film describe their sense of being ignored by mainstream and coastal media. Ferguson and neighboring St. Louis are depicted as lagging behind in history: as one subject describes, "St. Louis is … I don't know what year it is, but it's not 2014." The directors astutely link the events in Ferguson to Dred Scott vs. Sandford of 1857, a landmark case that also occurred in St. Louis. The case, infamous in the history of civil rights, deprived slaves of American citizenship, thus dealing a major blow to the abolitionist cause. The film and its many interviewees claim that this history extends through present-day Missouri: trapped in an earlier era, St. Louis/Ferguson is a locale where some of the most egregious acts of racism continue to be enacted. It is no accident that much of the film takes place in some of the poorest regions in the state of Missouri, all adjacent to one another. The film is composed of interviews with Ferguson citizens, especially people of color. It also heavily features footage shot on cell phones and camcorders, some of which had been uploaded to YouTube. While some of the footage was shot in high definition by codirector Davis, a St. Louis native who was present during the events in Ferguson, much of it was culled from social media. Thus the documentary has a collage-like sensibility, as every scene includes several different media platforms and image textures. This contributes to the grassroots nature of the film, and, indeed, the film takes pains to contrast the footage presented through YouTube and cell phones with the officially recognized media portrayals of Ferguson on MSNBC and CNN. As Folayan and Davis demonstrate, the images of riots and looting contrast severely with the experience of Ferguson activists, whose behavior was almost exclusively nonviolent in nature. What appear as riots are unveiled to be expressions of frustration and despair. The film cites a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: "A riot is the language of the unheard." By giving Ferguson residents and activists a voice, Whose Streets? transforms what had been framed as a riot on mainstream...

Urbanization and Education in Imphal during the Colonial Period

In the late nineteenth century, Manipur became one of the princely states under the indirect rule of British Crown. A Cantonment and British Reserve was built in Imphal, the capital city of Manipur to accommodate the military and British officials. The old ancient Kangla fort was turned into a Cantonment; civil residential areas, new markets were established as a part of colonial urban development. Various institutions and offices were set up in the state which directly affected the lives of the people in this erstwhile small kingdom in the north east frontiers of British India. Introduction of western education in the state created new groups of educated people who were then absorbed in these offices directly or indirectly under colonial officers. To the colonial state, introduction of western education was a signifier of the ‘colonial modernity’ and ‘progress’. This paper traces the development of western education, establishment of schools, and how education shaped the lives of the city dwellers. How education created a niche of new ideas, perspectives, and intellectual growth making Imphal an arena of social and political awakening in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sergei Tret’iakov’s Chzhungo: Reportage from China in the 1920s

Chzhungo means “China” in Chinese, and Tret’iakov’s book by this unusual title was the outcome of his living and teaching in Peking during 1924 and 1925. It was first published in 1927. A second revised and amplified edition came out in 1930, but after the author’s execution in 1937 his books disappeared from Soviet libraries. Very few copies of either edition of Chzhungo reached libraries outside Russia. As the editors of the partial re-editions of works by Tret’iakov after his posthumous “rehabilitation” decided not to bring Chzhungo back into circulation, it remains unavailable in print. This article offers an introduction to the book. Referring to the second edition, the author analyses the self-positioning of Tret’iakov as an involved observer of Chinese life and political awakening; the image of China that emerges from Chzhungo; and the status of Chzhungo within the larger context of Tret’iakov’s work.

The Politics of Religious Conversion among the Ethnic Chin in Burma

Through an analysis of some possible reasons for religious conversion among the ethnic Chin in the western frontier of modern-day Burma to Christianity from their old religion that historically shaped and impacted Chin society for centuries, this article argues that missionary agency, Chin religion, social change and political awakening after the Chin were finally exposed to the wider modern world appear to have played a critically crucial role in a long process of the choice of religious conversion among the Chin when Christian missionaries came to their country and evangelised them at the turn of the twentieth century. Moreover, their newly adopted religion has been not only a historical source of political awareness and social progress, but also a hallmark of their ethnic identity. Chin leaders now proudly maintain that Christianity has provided them with a cementing source for retaining their ethnic identity and that Chin identity and Christianity have become interwoven.

Young Feminist Activists in Present-Day China: A New Feminist Generation?

This article studies post-2000 Chinese feminist activism from a generational perspective. It operationalises three notions of generation— generation as an age cohort, generation as a historical cohort, and “political generation”—to shed light on the question of generation and generational change in post-socialist Chinese feminism. The study shows how the younger generation of women have come to the forefront of feminist protest in China and how the historical conditions they live in have shaped their feminist outlook. In parallel, it examines how a “political generation” emerges when feminists of different ages are drawn together by a shared political awakening and collaborate across age.

Ending the siege? David Ervine and the struggle for progressive Loyalism

ABSTRACTDrawn from newspapers and interviews with political colleagues, relatives, and conflict intermediaries, this article concerns the late Loyalist political leader David Ervine – an ideal vector through which to explore the recent history and struggle for progressive Loyalism within Protestant working-class East Belfast. It outlines the vital influence of his father, as well as Ervine’s ability to find mentorship in others. It covers his imprisonment in Long Kesh, early political awakening, and later success as a representative of the Progressive Unionist Party. It argues that Ervine’s chief political opposition eventually came from establishment and hard-line Unionism, and that his primary achievement was to articulate Ulster Loyalist positions and demands against this culture. Ervine’s duality as a political representative who was close to the militarism of his former career is shown as being central to his political persona. Ervine’s premature passing is shown to be connected to the pressures arising from pursuing progressive policies and stances from a Loyalist background, frequently under fire from other Unionists.

Political Awakening and National Revolt in Nawal El Saadawi's <em>God Dies by the Nile</em>

Political Awakening and National Revolt in Nawal El Saadawi's <em>God Dies by the Nile</em>

Awakening Lazarus: Forgotten Figures — Masses and Surplus?

The text aims to think through a figure largely forgotten in radical philosophy or communist theology discussions today: the Biblical figure(s) of Lazarus. The absence of this figure from current discussions might have to do with something that was pointed out by Balibar as the ongoing “fear of the masses,” and with their political awakening that is usually interpreted as violence, failure, riotous noise and absence of political program/ organization. I will perform a close reading of two stories of Lazarus from the Gospels in the first part of this article, tackling the question of the first Lazarus (from the Gospel of John) that can be seen not only as the prefiguration of the resurrection of Jesus, but also as the awakening of political “surplus” that shakes the old order and cannot be easily integrated into the new. The second Lazarus (from the Gospel of Luke) can often be seen as a somewhat stoic figure that remains outside the gates of political life and is only absolved in the afterlife. This oscillation between the figure of poor/excluded was taken up and transformed in the works of three radical thinkers: Foucault, Marx, and Fanon. A short panoramic view of the “legacy” of Lazarus shall be then explored in the second part of the article: from the early discussion of leprosy and the strategic spatial and sovereign separation of exterior and interior in Foucault and Marx’s oscillation between “surplus population” and “Lumpenproletariat,” and finally to Frantz Fanon, who predicted that political subject of Lumpenproletariat is supposed to become a spearhead of future revolutions.

"Reducing Free Men to Slavery": Black Kidnapping, the "Slave Power," and the Politics of Abolition in Antebellum Illinois, 1830–1860

This article looks at the history of kidnapping in Illinois to trace the development of an antislavery politics in the state and to complicate conventional histories about the rise of the Republican Party. Kidnapping cases brought out tepid allies for African Americans in unexpected places: the local press in southern Illinois publicized kidnapping cases, local groups acted as search and rescue parties, and politicians in minor posts, and occasionally in high elected office, acted to protect African Americans in the state. Many of these people never espoused an antislavery politics or embraced abolitionism. However, they worked to protect free men and women from captivity and enslavement. By joining the struggle against slaveholders' power, even tangentially, Illinois residents took part in a larger politics of slavery and antislavery between the 1830s and the U.S. Civil War. Contesting kidnappings contributed to a political awakening in the state, which helped to advance a wider politics of antislavery in Illinois. By examining the history of kidnapping largely before the 1850s, when the foundations of the Republican party had yet to take shape, but abolitionists and antislavery activists were organizing with increasing power, it is possible to identify a longer and more diverse origin to rise of antislavery politics in the state.

Catholic Relief and the Political Awakening of Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia, 1780–1830

ABSTRACTOver the course of the eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries the Irish, who moved throughout the British Empire, helped to build the social, political and economic structures that would enable the success of countless colonial settlements. They were merchants, traders, fishers and labourers, and a significant proportion of them were Catholic. While many would go on to play pivotal roles in the development of Catholicism in the colonies, the Irish were not alone and often joined or were joined by other Catholic groups such as the French, Spanish and Scottish Highlanders. That the Irish achieved greater political and economic success, though, had a knock-on effect for the other Catholic groups could then use the foundation that the Irish established for their own progress and development. This article considers the place of Catholics on Britain’s expanding colonial landscapes by examining the political awakening of Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, two of Britain’s north Atlantic colonies, between 1780 and 1830. These two colonies, like many others, witnessed the growth of an Irish Catholic laity that was ambitious, pragmatic and adept at using the political structures available to reframe their legal status. The election of Laurence Kavanagh, a second-generation Irish Catholic merchant from a tiny fishing outpost on Cape Breton Island, to Nova Scotia’s legislative assembly in 1820, is offered as an example of how this process actually worked on the ground and opens up a broader discussion about the importance of minority populations like Catholics to Britain’s imperial programme.

‘Prophets of Doom’: The Zimbabwean Christian Community and Contemporary Politics

Since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the Christian community was largely silent about Zimbabwe’s economic and political quagmire. However, the country’s growing political and economic turmoil drew the Zimbabwean Christian community into direct confrontation with Mugabe’s administration. The community experienced political awakening after decades of political indifference, passivity and silence. In 2016, several Christian leaders and their denominations publicly challenged the government on several occasions calling for Mugabe to step down and demanded economic reforms. In response, the Mugabe regime employed different tactics to silence and undermine the Christian community.

Narrating Dalit womanhood and the aesthetics of autobiography

This article will consider two Hindi-language autobiographies by Dalit women, to explain how we can emphasize the collective, relational, and specifically gendered character of Dalit women’s life writing without simplistically categorizing them as testimonio, “witnessing”. Nor should we over-privilege their gendered specificity, thereby effacing the very real narrative authority, purposefulness, and perspectival control of their authors. Instead, we must be especially attentive to the language of a text and understand how the relationality and collectivity of experience is not accidental or necessarily organic to a woman’s view on her world, but is actively, politically, and consciously constructed in the course of a narrative. Predicated on a reasonable concern over the appropriation of a revolutionary new literary voice, attention to narrative form has been slow in coming to the critical and scholarly analysis of Dalit literature, somewhat paradoxically resulting in the rendering of this literature too as “untouchable”. In exploring what is therefore only a nascent formal criticism of the Dalit autobiographical genre, I believe it is important to express a note of caution against replicating the same kinds of essentializing processes of differentiation (the kind we have seen before in the critical reception of life writing in other cultures and languages) between men’s and women’s Dalit life narratives as ego-driven and individualistic linear progressions to political awakening versus relational, community-based, politically and purposefully diffuse “witnessings”. In this exciting moment in which we have the opportunity to engage with a critically important and rapidly expanding rhetorical movement such as Dalit literature, it is, I believe, a diligent recourse to textual analysis that may yet save us from such facile stereotyping.