Political Horizon Research Articles

Notes on Atmosphere

AbstractThis essay argues that we do not yet fully recognize and attend to the importance of atmospheres as social and political phenomena of everyday life, and draws on a range of approaches to examine these ordinary and ubiquitous sites of affective charge. First charting how creating and manipulating atmospheres in retail and commercial settings has become a feature of contemporary capitalism, the essay discusses the political potential of “organizing a climate” via the case of the recent indignados movement in Spain. The essay suggests that atmospheres can play an important role in opening up political horizons.

Illegalized Sexual Dissent: Sexualities and Nationalisms

In this essay, Katherine Franke explores how dissent becomes a different, and in some ways more interesting, phenomenon when the dissenter emerges not from outside the political horizon drawn by the state, but rather from within it, and as an integral part of the state's project of governance. In these cases, the state calls up a set of subjects who are in some fundamental sense positioned to gain state, if not public, disfavor. These subjects are then isolated, excised or otherwise managed in ways that further state interests. Three cases are discussed in which the production of sexual outlaws proves to be a convenient method of managing periods of public, if not state, stress. She examines how sex and sexuality can be used by the state during significant moments of transition, as well as periods of state formation and reformation, both in identifying danger and as a tactic of governance. First, she looks at the sexual politics of rule of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Mugabe has found the deployment of sex as a particularly useful wedge issue in his mission of national freedom - that is, freedom from colonial rule by the British. Next she turns to Egypt and recent government-led campaigns of highly public and publicized criminal prosecutions of men alleged to be gay. Finally, she turns to the United States in the period immediately following the civil war, when the federal government undertook two enormously challenging tasks: reunifying the nation after a devastating civil war, and managing the transition of African Americans from enslavement to citizenship. In these three instances sex and sexuality have been particularly useful to the project of managing political instability or transition. These examples illustrate how under some circumstances, in response to transitional stress, the state gains an official sexuality, sources of threat are sexualized, and the management of sex becomes a tool of governance that produces individual unfreedom in the name of expanding national freedom or independence.

‘대백제’ 스토리텔링을 통한 충남의 정치?문화적 지평 확대

‘대백제’ 스토리텔링을 통한 충남의 정치?문화적 지평 확대

Ifeoma Okoye: socialist-feminist political horizons in Nigerian literature

SUMMARYNigerian author Ifeoma Okoye’s novel The Fourth World, published in 2013, presents us with a truly 21st century African unified socialist-feminist theory, while it places individual growth firmly in the community of an eponymous shanty in Enugu, Igboland. Through this novel, we observe how dictates of survival are transformed into acts of moral choice through the agency of work by a young girl of extraordinary character, helped by the congeniality of the community and by radical organisers.

A DEMOCRACIA EM DEBATE: JURISTAS BAIANOS E A RESISTÊNCIA AO REGIME VARGUISTA (1930-1945)

Resumo Entre 1930 e 1945, e especialmente durante o Estado Novo, o pensamento político autoritário pareceu dominar completamente o horizonte da política brasileira. Apesar disso, outras compreensões da política, de caráter mais democrático, não estiveram de todo ausentes na época. O presente trabalho procura investigar e conhecer mais a fundo as noções de democracia elaboradas por um grupo de juristas baianos do período, por meio da extensa produção intelectual que eles deixaram registrada em duas revistas acadêmicas que circularam então: a Revista da Faculdade de Direito da Bahia, e a Revista Fórum, editada pelo Instituto dos Advogados da Bahia.

Political Horizons in America

Political Horizons in America

З приводу концепції Української революції: продовження дискусії

The content of the discussion about the concept of the Ukrainian Revolution, which the author leads with the well-known domestic historian V. Soldatenko, is revealed in the article. Views on the history of the Central Rada, its leaders – M. Hrushevsky, V. Vynnychenko, D. Doroshenko and others, which V. Soldatenko describes as the developers of this concept, are concidered. The questions of the political and socio-economic content of revolutionary events are discussed. The author contradicts the point of view of V. Soldatenko, according to which the political horizons of the Ukrainian Revolution were confined to the autonomy of Ukraine as part of the Russian state, reorganized on a federal basis, and its social perspectives coincided with the Bolshevik program of socialist transformations.

A Late Imperial Elite Jewish Politics: Baghdadi Jews in British India and the Political Horizons of Empire and Nation

A Late Imperial Elite Jewish Politics: Baghdadi Jews in British India and the Political Horizons of Empire and Nation

The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies by Fabio Lanza

Reviewed by: The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies by Fabio Lanza Maggie Clinton Fabio Lanza. The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 262 pp. $94.95 (cloth), $25.95 (paper). In what ways do the trenchant critiques generated by the 1968-founded Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) speak to our present historical moment? How did the activism of a "concerned" cohort of graduate students and junior faculty, galvanized by China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and US-wrought carnage in Vietnam, reshape the field of East Asian (especially China) studies in the United States? How did the efforts of these young activist-scholars to "take Maoism seriously" dovetail with those of their Maoist contemporaries in France, and what can the comparatively deeper French engagement with Marxism tell us about the limits of CCAS analyses? These are among the many questions raised by Fabio Lanza's provocative new book, The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies. Lanza's thoughtful examination of the formation, dissolution, and afterlives of the CCAS and its Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars sheds vital light on an important US New Left intervention and constitutes necessary reading for scholars of modern China and the global 1960s. The book's introduction and four chapters examine the decade-long existence of CCAS, from its 1968 founding through its 1970s demise amid the "Thermidor" of the Deng Xiaoping era and the waning of antiwar activism. To reconstruct the organization's history, Lanza carefully mined CCAS archives and publications; he also conducted interviews with former CCAS members, including John Berninghausen, Saundra Sturdevant, and Marilyn Young (Sturdevant and Young both passed away before the book was published). Each chapter illuminates a set of concerns articulated by these "concerned scholars" and relates them to the structuring conditions that rendered their articulation possible in the first place. Lanza makes clear from the start that "to both concerned scholars and French radicals, Maoism had configured itself as a theory that found expression and realization in localized practice, not as a set of rules to follow, nor as a model that could be exported and replicated" (27). He underscores that the era's Maoist sympathies should be attributed not merely to youthful naïveté or to an orientalism now dressed in revolutionary garb but to a newly shared political horizon. Maoism "traversed the sixties" as a means for reflecting on and transforming differing yet intertwined sets of historical circumstances (5). To understand the emergence and dissolution of CCAS (which was not a Maoist organization), Lanza insists that we must consider it in relation to the abrupt opening and then equally abrupt reconfiguration of this shared political horizon. Chapter 1, "America's Asia," examines how the graduate students who founded CCAS in 1968 linked the American war in Vietnam to the "ideological blinders" of reigning authorities in the field of Asian studies, that is, to professors including John King Fairbank under whose direction they were pursuing PhDs. McCarthyist purges of the 1950s not only had drained the field of critical thought but also had facilitated the rise to prominence of scholars seemingly unconcerned about the ways in which their scholarship lent itself to anti-Communist war making. CCASers came to insist that "new intellectual production based on a humane approach to Asian people (i.e., on the political foundation of equality) required . . . the dismantling of the assumption of objectivity and neutrality behind the existing structure of learning and the unveiling of the political character of that assumption, in the name of politics" (53). Lanza explores this "humane approach" from [End Page E-27] another angle in chapter 2, highlighting how this approach was enabled by "one of the perceived, declared, and probably unrealized possibilities of the 1960s: the capacity of the oppressed to speak for themselves, denounce their oppression, and subvert the mechanisms of domination" (70). Further emboldened by the ways in which China's Cultural Revolution was upending entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and power, CCASers confronted what they perceived to be gulfs between academia and activism in their contemporary US context. Here, Lanza also illuminates the sharp...

Reimagining Political Horizons

Anthropology NewsVolume 58, Issue 6 p. e68-e73 November/December Online Content Reimagining Political Horizons Eben Kirksey, Eben KirkseySearch for more papers by this author Eben Kirksey, Eben KirkseySearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 May 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.662AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume58, Issue6Special Issue: Anthropology Matters!November/December 2017Pages e68-e73 RelatedInformation

Minor Perambulations, Political Horizons: Comment on Kathy Ferguson’s “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking”

In “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking,” Kathy Ferguson identifies rich and unexpected connections between anarchist feminists, walking, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. In attuning readers to resonances between the physiological and sensory complexity of walking, and the latter’s role in the lives of anarchist feminists Alexandra David-Neel and Lily Gair Wilkinson (and Ferguson’s own), her essay sheds crucial light on the concept of process for political thinking and what the everyday process of walking might mean for political praxis. At the same time, I argue that the anarchist feminist walking praxes of David-Neel and Gair Wilkinson depend in some degree on disavowed white supremacist frames of reference. Moreover, Ferguson’s circumscription of the politics of walking to exclude situations of coercion and vulnerability correspondingly raises the question of what and for whom the politics of walking is for. I suggest that a radical politics of walking must not only open its horizons to nonvoluntary, threatened, and resistive perambulatory modes and the histories that they carry, but avow these feminist anarchist ancestors’ disavowals along with their achievements as part of a living radical lineage.

A battle over meanings: Jayaprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohia and the trajectories of socialism in early independent India

ABSTRACTThis article will argue that during the 1950s and 1960s a battle over the meanings of socialism took place in India. Exploring the ways in which the contending conceptions of socialism defended by Rammanohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan intersected and drifted apart during these decades, and the ways in which these were shaped in response to the gradual adoption of socialism by the Nehruvian state, it will be shown that during these years socialism emerged at the same time as a central part of the roadmap for socioeconomic development of the national state as well as a central category for doctrines and practices of protest and contestation. For this, it will focus on Narayan’s insistence on a politics of the people, or lok niti, and his equating of socialism and Sarvodaya, as well as on Lohia’s doctrine of equal equidistance and his critique of Third Worldism and the Nehruvian state. Moreover, it will be argued that this battle over meanings crated a space for the emergence of original conceptions of socialism wholly unrelated to anything known elsewhere by that name, and inaugurated a set of political trajectories central to the contemporary political horizon in India.

Ernst Jünger e o demônio da técnica: modernidade e reacionarismo

ABSTRACT The theme of this article is Ernst Jünger’s work in the interwar period, especially the essay The Worker (1932). Our focus is to point out, in the Jüngerian appropriation of technique, its character of anti-liberal political mythology. We dialogue with the political and intellectual horizon of the time (including authors such as Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin), seeking to establish a problematization framework about the technique in Germany, where also emerges the so-called “Conservative Revolutionary Movement.” We point out in Jünger’s work the relationship between the “type” or “figure of the worker” and the notion of the sacrifice of individuality in favor of the total mobilization of technique, in the terms of reactionary modernism. Finally, as there are no references to authors and works in The Worker, we raise the hypothesis of an underlying dialogue with the intellectual tradition of Romanticism by confronting Jünger’s work with the theme of “asymptotic completion” (Lacoue-Labarthe) -the impossibility, in modern times, of sustaining a pre-established harmony.

Lessons for a Rural Female Superintendent: Gender, Leadership, and Politics

Two years before my coauthor and I began this narrative inquiry, as the school superintendent of a rural community, I failed to fire a malicious football coach and resigned shortly thereafter. I floundered for a few months and then decided to pursue a doctorate in educational administration. Soon I met a professor, now my coauthor, who offered me the opportunity to explain what had happened in terms of socially constructed gender roles. We investigated 40 post-World War II urban, suburban, and rural female superintendents whom my coauthor and other scholars had interviewed. After theming their stories into five prototypes we wove these collective representations into my personal narrative and found that operationalizing any political agenda necessitated being aware of how a school community views acceptable womanhood, because it determined how the female superintendent was received. Had I adopted my stakeholders' notion of female demeanor, more school patrons may have heard me. Yet, for me and other superintendents the feasibility and ethics of what might be seen as outright manipulation will forever loom on the horizon of politics, gender and the superintendency

Stuart Hall and our current conjuncture

In the wake of the general election and the sense of expanding political horizons, Stuart Hall has never been more relevant. Revisiting his ideas and approaches as we enter a new and turbulent conjuncture.

A Genealogy of the Anthropocene: The End of Risk and Limits

This article aims to shed light on the emergence of the Anthropocene as a concept within the social sciences and philosophy. It frames this evolution in the wider context of a crisis of knowledge, confronted with the need to consider global climate change as both an empirical ground and an inescapable political horizon. The central hypothesis is that the organization of knowledge concerning the relationships between modernity and nature has undergone a profound shift over the last decade, necessitating a reconfiguration of the two main concepts on which this knowledge relied: risk and limits. To consider the present situation through the concept of the Anthropocene is to imply that the rationality of risk (i.e., the suspension of modern political autonomy) and the notion of a fundamental limit to material development can no longer be considered separately. In the final part of the article, this hypothesis makes it possible to discuss some aspects of our current epistemological configuration.

Single currency and fiscal performance: the early Euro Area in perspective

ABSTRACTWe examine how exchange rate regimes affect fiscal discipline by investigating European countries as they transitioned from flexible to fully fixed exchange rates under the Euro. We apply the synthetic control method to estimate, for each Eurozone country, its counterfactual budget stance under flexible rates. Our evidence strongly suggests that fixing exchange rates negatively impacted negatively fiscal discipline. However, effects were not homogeneous, as they were mediated by political factors. For example, countries where policymakers faced a longer political horizon and operated within a more cohesive political environment, managed to perform better in terms of fiscal discipline.

Extractivismo unearthed: a genealogy of a radical discourse

ABSTRACT This article provides a genealogy of extractivismo discourse. In South America, the critical discourse of extractivismo has shifted political horizons and fomented a protracted intraleft dispute. Decades of neoliberalism unified popular movements to resist austerity and recuperate national sovereignty, but the ascendency of leftist administrations across the continent fragmented the field of radical politics. Ecuador exemplifies this internecine conflict: environmental and indigenous activists and allied intellectuals crafted the discourse of extractivismo to resist President Rafael Correa’s ‘21st century socialism’. State actors assert that oil and mining revenues will trigger economic development. But anti-extractive activists contend that ‘the extractive model’ pollutes the environment, violates collective rights, reinforces dependency on foreign capital, and undermines democracy. Drawing on 14 months of archival and ethnographic research, I recover the source discourses of extractivismo and outline the conditions of their coalescence into a novel problematic. I trace extractivismo to the neoliberal period (1981–2006). In that period, I identify the co-existence of two distinct critiques of resource extraction, which I call resource radicalisms: resource nationalism and proto-anti-extractivism. But alongside it, in their struggle for territorial sovereignty and collective rights, Amazonian indigenous groups articulated the discursive elements that would later be unified by the term extractivismo. I argue that a particular conjuncture – the election of a leftist President, the rewriting of the Constitution, and the government’s avid promotion of extractive projects – enabled the crystallization of extractivismo discourse. Anti-extractive resistance in turn triggered a tectonic political realignment: activists that once fought for the nationalization of natural resources now oppose all resource extraction, a leftist President finds himself in conflict with the social movements who initially supported his election, and the left-in-power has become synonymous with the aggressive expansion of extraction. Finally, I consider the tension between extractivismo-as-critique and its capacity to generate collective action.

Recognition, power and coloniality

ABSTRACTRecognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Writing particularly in response to North American settler colonialism, they argue that the politics of recognition has functioned, not to ameliorate colonialism’s negative effects, but to reproduce them. We seek here to respond to the important provocation posed by Simpson and Coulthard’s scholarship, and to extend their critiques into new geographic and empirical terrains. Specifically, we draw on the notion of coloniality to establish a comparative frame that can bring both settler and non-settler postcolonial contexts into dialogue. Doing so highlights a multiplicity of forms of recognition relationships, as well as of sites and structures of power beyond the settler state. It also illuminates a complex, unstable middle ground that can exist between recognition and its absence, which provides a productive ground from which to engage with the possibilities of being against, or beyond, recognition.

Enjoy Poverty: humanitarianism and the testimonial function of images

The overlap between production of humanitarian images and interventions in contexts of natural and man-made catastrophes is growing on a global scale. An increasingly close relationship exists between image production, news production and humanitarian industry. In this article, we argue that this process is transforming the meaning of the social, political and ethical act of bearing witness. We analyse the epistemic and political implications of visual humanitarian testimony through the documentary film Enjoy Poverty (2008), shot in Congo by the Dutch artist Renzo Martens. Examining some of the key scenes of the film, we undertake an analysis of the visual culture of humanitarianism within which the contemporary production of sensational images of strong emotional impact is inscribed and justified. We maintain that rethinking testimonial debt in light of contemporary visual humanitarianism fundamentally means to acknowledge and explore the hierarchical relationship that visual humanitarianism creates between the witnesses, the victims and the spectators. We conclude by arguing that Enjoy Poverty constitutes an attempt to generate a new visual, discursive and political horizon within which one can prevent the transformation of the testimonial relationship into a relationship of power.