Political Reading Research Articles

Communication, media and genetically modified food: A politicized reading

Abstract The recent horsemeat scandal raises many important questions about technological developments in food production. First discussed is why food production and consumption practices should be recognized as late modern risks and which analytical perspective in the domain of media and science is called for to study related food communication and media practices. However, since many democratic challenges arise, a perspective is put forward that draws on several studies of genetically modified food and enables an evaluation of public and media discourses and the extent to which they contribute to democratic debate. More specifically, discussed is how a politicized reading illustrates the extent to which there is a struggle between politicization and de-politicization processes in these discourses, illustrating the ideological nature of communication practices on food. Particular attention will be devoted to the role of arguments about science in discursive practices and the strategies that characterize these discourses.

Imágenes de una identidad portuguesa y la recepción en Portugal del teatro de Lope de Vega

This article aims at discussing the topic of “Portuguese themes” in Lope de Vega’s plays, and it will consider the role of the images of a Portuguese national identity in both the political context of the Iberian Peninsula in the beginning of the 17th century and in the contemporary Portuguese reception of Lope de Vega’s theatre. The analysis of the play El guante de Doña Blanca [Doña Blanca’s glove] and its 1972 Portuguese translation will show the complex dialogue between historical reference and poetic conventions, and it will lead to a reflection on the possible political reading of cultural referents in Lope’s plays. Even if in a less obvious way, Lope de Vega was also, somehow, a writer between cultures.

Learning to read politically: narratives of hope and narratives of despair in Push by Sapphire

The ability to shift reading position has long been recognised as a means for politically minded readers – particularly those motivated by Marxist, feminist and/or race-related agendas – to read against the grain and uncover the implicit ideologies in the text. Little research has been conducted on how inexperienced and thus less sophisticated readers learn to make strategic decisions about how they will respond to the reading position offered by the text. Reading against the grain is a highly sophisticated reading practice which cannot be mastered successfully before the reader is able to simultaneously recognise the communicative practices of the author and reject the proffered viewpoint. This paper begins by examining how the novel Push by Sapphire (1996) encourages readers to try out more than one reading position, and in doing so enables her readers to gain the prerequisite skills for future political readings.

Print Capitalism, War, and the Remaking of the Mass Media in 1930s China

This article explores the intricate relationship among print capitalism, war, and the popularization of newspapers in 1930s China by analyzing the motivations for publishing the Libao 立报 and the reasons behind its success. Most of the print capitalists publishing major broadsheet newspapers in Shanghai in the early 1930s did not have a strong financial motivation to popularize such broadsheets especially because of the relatively small circulation of printed materials, the underdevelopment of communications infrastructures, the low level of literacy, and the small size of the middle class. However, this study of the Libao published in the mid-1930s demonstrates that the simultaneity of the commercialization of print media and the outbreak of the national crisis in the 1930s gave rise to the expansion of a politicized reading public and to popular nationalism, and provided print capitalists with financial motives to popularize and politicize newspapers.

Guy Debord's Time-Image: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)

In his Rhapsody for the Theatre (1990), Alain Badiou compliments Guy Debord’s final film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)—the film’s title is a Latin palindrome that can be translated as “we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire”—for revealing a “pure temporal moment [that] speaks to the glory of cinema, [and] which may very well survive us humans.” 1 One can easily imagine that Debord would have been dismissive of Badiou’s claim. In a letter to Jacques Le Glou sent on November 15, 1982, Debord expresses particular ire at Badiou’s judg ments on In girum , describing Badiou as “Maoist carrion.” 2 Badiou’s invo cation of a “pure temporality” at the service of cinema would seem to ignore and minimize Debord’s political project, placing Debord as merely another cinematic auteur. This may have been Badiou’s purpose. In his Theory of the Subject (1982), Badiou suggests that Debord and the situa tionists could only offer a Promethean politics of “active nihilism.” This politics was limited to a transitional stage and could not reach true polit ical virtue. 3 Therefore, Badiou’s reclamation of Debord for the “glory of cinema” might be an attempt to further marginalize this politics by limit ing the virtues of Debord’s project to the aesthetic. This marginalization of Debord as “aesthetic” figure, as exemplar of the “last avant-garde,” is remarkably common. To insist on the necessity of a political reading of Debord’s cinema, and especially In girum , in order to counter this kind of claim might seem like a relatively simple matter. And yet, in a text cowritten with Gianfranco Sanguinetti at the time of the dissolution of the Situationist International (SI) in 1972, Debord states that “the SI had been, from the beginning, a much vaster and more profound project than a simply polit ical revolutionary movement.” 4 The reason for this was the SI’s conception of time as “made of qualitative leaps, of irreversible choices, of occasions that will never return.” 5 So, although Debord constructs his “time-image” as a political act, he also hints that it serves a more profound project. In this case, the various politicizing readings of the situationists, which aim simply to revise and continue their political project, often fail to attend

La «voce indiana» in Campidoglio: una lettura politica del National Museum of the American Indian

The Indian voice at Capitol: a political reading of the National Museum of the American Indian. This article analyses the different stages of the foundation of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum dedicated to Native American cultures since 2004. The creation of an identity-based museum is investigated through a political perspective, with a special focus on the relationship between indigenous and American identities. The museum adopts an innovative paradigm in terms of cultural policy, based on three original elements - the concept of the «Indian voice», the «living museum» model, and the politics of stewardship - which, taken together, form an attempt to recognize a minority within the frame of nation-building.

Schiavitù e lumi. Attorno a una lettera di Jefferson a Grégoire sulle qualità naturali dei neri

The Indian voice at Capitol: a political reading of the National Museum of the American Indian. This article analyses the different stages of the foundation of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum dedicated to Native American cultures since 2004. The creation of an identity-based museum is investigated through a political perspective, with a special focus on the relationship between indigenous and American identities. The museum adopts an innovative paradigm in terms of cultural policy, based on three original elements - the concept of the «Indian voice», the «living museum» model, and the politics of stewardship - which, taken together, form an attempt to recognize a minority within the frame of nation-building.

Sentir el cuerpo: performance, tortura y masoquismo en el entorno de los nuevos comportamientos

This paper analyzes the relationship between the violence exercised by the Franco governement over the dissident bodies —on anyone who would present a threat to the maintenance of the dictatorship—, and some performative strategies close to the practices included under the label “nuevos comportamientos”. These conceptual works were related with a kind of masochism, with a desire to promote tactile aspects —through self-inflicted pain— and with a phenomenological exploration of reality. Following the studies of Kathy O’Dell and Sophie Delpeux, this text aims to provide new political readings of several performances by highlighting the role of the photographic medium in their reception and contextualizing these works in the very complex political Spanish transition.

The “Blueprints” of Revolution?: A Comparative Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought and Franz Kafka’s Fiction(s)

The “Blueprints” of Revolution?:A Comparative Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought and Franz Kafka’s Fiction(s) Pavan Kumar Malreddy (bio) 1 K.’s stubborn singleness of purpose, however, opens the eyes of some of the villagers; his behavior teaches them that human rights may be worth fighting for, that the rule of the Castle is not divine law and, consequently, can be attacked. (Arendt, Essays 76-77) For decades, negative theology, alienation, defeatism, shame and hopelessness have been some of the most commonly attributed literary themes to Franz Kafka’s writings (Ackerman 105-13; Block 322-26; Cohn 182-88). Although this has changed considerably since the 1990s, most political readings of Kafka’s fiction emphasize the symbolic, metonymic, spiritual, intertextual, and even the deconstructive qualities of its resistance than an overt political-will Kafka’s characters might otherwise inculcate (Nemoianu 357-71; Liska 329-34).1 For instance, in a conversation with Scholem, despite Kafka’s “prophetic vision” of the “communal estrangement” of the modern individual, Benjamin calls Kafka “a failure” largely because his experiments with literary form (parables growing into novels) prevent him from elaborating his prophesies into fulfilling (political) visions (Benjamin 245-47). Instead, as Kafka’s close friend and biographer Max Brod has observed, both the literary form and the aesthetic predicament of Kafka’s novels could be prolonged to an “infinity” which, in its rhetorical panoply, guides the reader all the “way to God” (Brod 97). This view is also echoed by Kundera (39-45) and Borges (199-201) who conclude that Kafka’s politics are neither definite nor transparent given the “infinite sense of procrastination” exerted by their characters, and a “boundless labyrinth” (143-45) of bureaucratic structures they are destined to pass through. For Blanchot (11-20), Kafka is first and foremost a performance artist, one who combines text and action together in an almost spiritual intonation, thereby turning his texts all the more radical but politically “intangible.” While a number of recent commentaries have drawn upon Kafka’s politics as “voicing” the resistance of the nameless, the underdogs, and the victims of political tyrannies (Bennett; Deleuze and Guattari; Hell), none comes close to Hannah Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s fables, characters, and literary devices as the “blueprints” of resistance and emancipation. Though Arendt’s interest in Kafka has been reasonably well-documented (Bernstein 46-60; Young-Ah Gottlieb 94-109; Scott 42-54; Boym 231-38), most commentaries on the subject simply reiterate what Arendt [End Page 53] has already said about Kafka in an essay which appeared in Partisan Review in 1944. By and large, the existing comparisons give an excessive credit to Kafka’s parable “He” (Feldman 67-95; Scheppele 1377-1407; Nowak 42-47; Terada 839-866; Bethânia 294-320) which Arendt discusses at length in her introduction Between Past and Future.2 Perhaps the only exceptions to this are Danoff (211-29) and Hansen (215-17), who make a strong case for political comparisons between Arendt and Kafka on the subject of totalitarian terror and violence. This essay aims to advance the scope of these comparisons by suggesting that Arendt’s interest in Kafka cannot be understood in terms of a single parable or an isolated thematic. Instead, Arendt’s entire body of political thought—from the anatomy of totalitarianism to her own hopes for revolution, freedom, and emancipation (“public life”)—bears the traces of Kafka’s fabulist imagination. In Arendt’s own words: Kafka’s technique could best be described as the construction of models. If a man wants to build a house or if he wants to know a house well enough to be able to foretell its stability, he will get a blueprint of the building or draw one upon himself […]. Kafka’s stories are such blueprints […] expose the naked structure of events. (Arendt, Essays 71) Following this guiding statement, Arendt’s further commentaries gesture towards Kafka’s “uncanny” ability in uncovering the nature and function of totalitarianism at large (Arendt, Essays 71-7). And it is entirely possible that Arendt’s reading of Kafka’s narrators as the fabricator mundi of resistance and revolution is inspired by her own...

Mentoring in Contexts of Cultural and Political Friction: Moral Dilemmas of Mentors and Their Management in Practice

This paper examines the nature of moral dilemmas mentors from three different national groups (Jewish, Druze, and Arab) encounter in their work in Israeli Arab schools, how they manage these dilemmas in practice, and how the nature of particular dilemmas might connect to their management strategies. Given the multicultural and politically conflictive context of the Israeli society, a cultural and political reading of in-service mentors’ moral dilemmas reveals that mentors’ encounter and management of recurrent moral dilemmas is embedded in cultural and political issues in a way that seem to hinder their mentoring practice. Preparation programs for mentors need to highlight awareness of mentors’ own culture and that of their mentees in order to implement a culturally and politically responsive practice.

The self as onwardness: reading Emerson’s self-reliance and experience

Recent scholarship has started to open up for social and political readings of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who John Dewey once called «the Philosopher of Democracy». The present paper attempts to promote the force and potential of this new Emersonianism for philosophy of education showing that Emerson´s notions of self-reliance and aversion to conformity are not inherently anti-social, a-moral or a-political. The paper first argues that Emerson proposes an understanding of self and society which undermines any bipolar opposition of the two concepts already in «Self-Reliance». Secondly, a closer reading of the later essay «Experience» examines his critique of a particular Western conception of thinking in terms of its political consequences. If there is to be hope for the individual self, then, for Emerson, there always has to be hope for a democratic society as well. He tries to remind us that the criterion for a democratic society consists in taking seriously the subjectivity of vision of every single one of its members. Received: 18/01/2013 / Accepted: 26/03/2013 How to reference this article Schumann, C. (2013). The self as onwardness: reading Emerson’s self-reliance and experience. Foro de Educación , 11(15), pp. 29-48. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.2013.011.015.001

The Philosopher Doth Protest Too Much: Rousseauian Enlightenment and the Rhetoric of Despair

AbstractThe most striking feature of Rousseau's self-presentation in the Confessions is his pathos-filled anticipation of future adversity. Never quite arriving at the depths of despair he foresees, however, Rousseau instead offers the reader glimpses of a surprisingly robust happiness. In this article I present a new political reading of the Confessions that is attentive both to the rhetorical surface of the work and to its charming subplot. Guided by Rousseau's humorous understanding of truth telling, I argue that the Confessions is shaped by a complex literary ruse that colors much of what Rousseau has to say about frankness, happiness, and his own idiosyncrasy. Far from being undone by his shadow-dappled imaginings, Rousseau's conscious dissimulations reflect his concerns about the public value of enlightenment and his commitment to authorial responsibility.

We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell (review)

Reviewed by: We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States by Richard Bell Russ Castronovo (bio) We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States. Richard Bell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. 332 pp. Even though suicide seems an intensely personal action that emerges from the depths of despair, it resounds with more public meanings about the proper balance between individual will and collective social feelings in US democracy. Richard Bell makes this argument in We Shall Be No More by refusing to psychologize—and hence privatize—the forlorn souls who took drastic steps toward self-murder. Instead, Bell reads the suicide’s final act as an elusive political expression, one that combines and confuses protest with resignation, ultimate defiance with submission, and severe autonomy with oversensitivity to cultural influence. Tracking these themes from the days of Puritan settlement to the crisis over slavery and secession, Bell covers a large swath of national history by exploring how suicide became a heated flash point in debates over novel reading, philanthropy, capital punishment, religious salvation, and resistance to slavery. This survey depends on a careful scouring of newspapers, pamphlets, and other print culture artifacts that Bell sets amid a rich backdrop of historical crisis. Many of these crises, such as the worries surrounding excessive sentimentalism or the distrust of Universalism, Bell argues, erupt from the unprecedented and ever-increasing availability of printed material in America. If suicide was an epidemic, as alarmed social observers frequently claimed, then newspaper columns often seemed to be foremost in spreading the contagion. The earliest instance of what Bell calls “suicide politics” involves a 1690 item in Boston’s Public Occurrences about a recent widower, who, deranged [End Page 771] by grief, listened to the devil and took his own life (249). Within a hundred years, such events would accrue heightened cultural significance, as American revolutionaries often found it completely understandable why cowardly Loyalists would commit suicide. The partisan view of such tragedies suggests to Bell “the connection between suicide and the disintegration of social authority” (12). Political readings of suicide are not an American invention, however. Lucretia’s act of self-murder, after being raped by Tarquin, is said to have provided the impetus for the founding of the Roman Republic. Joseph Addison’s Cato (1712), a favorite among eighteenth-century American republicans, exemplified for George Washington and other Whigs of his class just how far men of virtue were willing to go to withstand tyranny. Bell does not examine what attracted Americans to these classical topoi of suicide and the meanings they might have wrested from these myths of self-sacrifice, which befits a study that is more thematic than theoretical or critical. And precisely because he does not dwell on a few texts, he is able to range across the diverse geographies of popular print culture, from the pietistic heights of religious sermons to the sensational accounts of murder-suicides. As he sagely observes, the proliferation of newspapers in the early Republic, which increased more than tenfold between 1760 and 1814, occasioned a dramatic increase in the reporting of suicides in ways that both interested and anguished readers during this era. The danger that print could unhinge readers, especially young men and women attracted to suffering and self-consumed heroes, often centered on one particular novel in America, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Bell begins his first case study by tracking how ministers, medical doctors, and elders fretted over the influence that Goethe’s lachrymose tale of thwarted love exercised over impressionable minds. While these complaints against novels will be familiar to literary critics and book historians, Bell’s contribution lies in connecting this perceived danger to transatlantic publishing. The simile he employs to suggest the dimensions of this epidemic of novel reading—“suicide spread through the pages of fashionable fiction like yellow fever”—fits with the late eighteenth-century landscape, where cities such as Philadelphia and New York were decimated by hemorrhagic disease (60). Bell might also have spoken of a flood of teary fiction that inundated the reading public with sentimental excess, since the next chapter examines the many lifesaving and...

A Toothy Tale: Themes of Abjection in John Marsden and Shaun Tan's Picture Story Book, The Rabbits

A Toothy Tale:Themes of Abjection in John Marsden and Shaun Tan's Picture Story Book, The Rabbits Dianne McGlasson (bio) In this article I consider the multi-award winning, intriguing, contemporary Australian picture story book, The Rabbits,1 written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan. Published in 1998, the book has been given the Aurealis Convener's Award for Excellence, the Spectrum Gold Award for Book Illustration, and the Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year award. While the audience for this book is notionally children and young adults (acknowledged by its inclusion in the curriculum of Australian secondary schools), the book declares itself as "a rich and haunting allegory of colonization suitable for all ages and cultures" told from the viewpoint of native animals (The Rabbits back cover). The Rabbits depicts the dispossession of small lizard and marsupial-like animals in a recognizably Australian landscape; the indigenous inhabitants are robbed of their way of life, their cultural heritage, country, and children stolen by the invading army of rabbits who arrive with all the hallmarks of European culture and, with devastating effect, ruthlessly exploit the land, displacing the indigenes. The seemingly simple narrative contains complex references that most obviously relate to the contemporary, contested notion of colonization, and warrants a serious reading. This book's engagement with contemporary concerns relating to national identity, and the notion of colonization as a form of invasion and dispossession, demonstrates awareness of Australia's contested historical past and clearly invites a political reading; it has been the focus of such critics as Brooke Collins-Gearing and Dianne Osland whose essay, "Who Will Save Us from the Rabbits?: ReWriting the Past Allegorically" (2010), focuses on the ways in which The Rabbits reveals what they determine as "Australia's psychological terra nullius" and its perceived effect in the [End Page 20] invocation and creation of a collective post-Mabo Australian identity.2 While a reading of The Rabbits from the perspective of Homi Bhabha's "unhomely moment" (9)—the moment in which personal and psychic histories violently intersect with the dislocating effect of colonialism—would also elaborate on the theme of colonization and disaffection depicted in The Rabbits, this essay is inspired by the title, which has immediate negative connotations (for an Australian) of bodily functions such as voracious chewing and endless coupling and birthing of progeny.3 This notion is supported by Tan's surrealistic, fantastical depictions of increasing numbers of rabbitlike invaders that devour the indigene's motherland, invoking, to my mind, a reading in which the body is privileged. Thus, in my reading of this text, I propose to explore a metaphor hitherto untested by critics, that of teeth (such as the biting, chewing teeth of the colonists). My reading turns to Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to illuminate The Rabbits' toothy embodiment of the devouring nature of colonialism. Nöelle McAfee (2004) proclaims Kristeva as "one of the very few philosophers for whom the speaking being becomes a crucial constellation for understanding oral and written literature, politics and national identity, sexuality, culture and nature" (1), while Kelly Oliver (1998) suggests Kristeva's theory of abjection as "an explanation for oppression and discrimination" (81). (Abjection is an ambiguous term in English, referring equally to actively "abjection" and passively "being abjected": in the remainder of this paper I avoid confusion by using these verbs in preference to the distinct noun form.) Kristeva's emphasis on the maternal body and her psychological insights into manifestations of abjection suggest her theory as an appropriate, if contested lens, through which to view this text. Kristeva's work on "body politics" has attracted criticism and sparked vigorous debate among feminist critics such as Judith Butler (79-93), who argues that by associating the maternal body with the Semiotic (preoedipal) stage, Kristeva reifies it, removing it from a cultural framework, that is, from the masculine (Symbolic) order in which culture exists. Kristeva contends that the experience of abjection aligns with the maternal because it returns the subject to a time that precedes the processes of identification with the father and heralds separation from the mother; the maternal abject endures as a...

From the biomoral to the biopolitical: Ayurveda's political histories

This article presents a political reading of the history of Ayurveda in modernity, focusing on its deployment as a political force, while concurrently exploring its role in subject formation around issues of colonization, citizenship, nationalism and the politics of belonging. In it, the politics of Ayurveda are hinged upon two conceptual poles: firstly, the construction of the biomoral in discussions of Ayurveda and, secondly, the absorption of Ayurveda into the inherently modern project of late colonial biopolitics. While scholars have employed the biomoral as a way to think about Ayurveda's dismissal from the formal realm of the state, I argue instead that it was the process of determining Ayurveda's biomorality that created a counterpart to the allopathic intervention. I then map out the formal absorption of Ayurveda into the context of state medicine in the interwar United Provinces, a process that reveals the pragmatics of the diarchic and post-diarchic transformation of regional politics. Finally, I explore the appropriation of Ayurveda by the Congress party in the United Provinces after 1938, and its incorporation into the larger project of population management envisioned as an essential component of its biopolitical projects in the region. Ayurveda's institutional infrastructure was co-opted into practices of surveillance and strategies for ‘development’ – loosely conducted as the distribution of resources – and justified the excesses and neglects of the new political order. At the same time, the strong association of Ayurveda with the Hindu majoritarian community in the United Provinces resulted in the further marginalization of Unani medicine – and Muslims – from the systems of health care and the benefits of citizenship.

Musical as a Political Metaphor : Political Reading on Cats the Musical

정치와 예술은 어떤 연관성을 갖고 있을까? 지난 30년간 최고의 뮤지컬로 평가받고 있는 「캣츠」에 대한 분석을 통해 정치와 예술의 상관관계를 탐색하는 것이 본 논문의 목표이다. 「캣츠」의 예술적 특징으로 경쟁과 구원의 서사구조, 감동적이고 중독성 강한 멜로디, 시각 이미지와 청각효과가 결합된 거대한 스펙터클 등이 지목되어 왔다. 이러한 요소들은 「캣츠」가 공연되었던 시기의 중요한 정치사회적 특성인 신자유주의 사회질서, 선악이분법에 기반한 정치의 종교화, 서구적 보편성에 기반한 세계화, 그리고 스펙터클이 압도하는 정치분위기와 상당한 유사성을 보이고 있다는데 주목할 필요가 있다. 결론적으로 볼 때, 「캣츠」는 일종의 정치적 메타포로서 뮤지컬 고유의 서사구조와 표현방식을 통해 1980년대와 1990년대 서구사회를 지배했던 신자유주의 세계관을 고스란히 보여주고 있다는 것을 알 수 있다.

Reconquering England for the English in Havelok the Dane

The Middle English Havelok the Dane (ca. 1295–1310), set in pre-Conquest England and rooted in Lincolnshire history, features an Anglo-Danish alliance through marriage between the heir to the throne of Denmark, Havelok, and the heir to the throne of England, Goldeboru.1 The alliance comes amidst circumstances, paralleled in the two countries, of political usurpation and conquest. Both Havelok and Goldeboru lose their fathers (and kings) in early childhood, find themselves robbed of their royal positions, and are thrust into hardship despite the best efforts of their ailing fathers to provide for their future safety and well-being. Though Havelok is often considered a romance, in which such romantic unions typically play a central role, the marriage between the royal heirs departs from convention in that the union serves strictly political aims as it goes against both of their wishes, eliciting his feelings of awkwardness and her disgust. Their joint political destiny becomes manifest to both of them only after marriage when they realize that this union empowers them to reclaim their royal authority and take back their countries, which they do. Political readings of Havelok the Dane tend to situate the poem in the present, within the contemporary political affairs of the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), emphasizing the abuse of royal power in general.2 While these readings rightly identify political corruption as a primary

Le sphinx dénaturé : une écologie du discours ?

Résumé The narrator in E.A. Poe’s “The Sphinx” tells a story in which the huge proportions of an insect call the reader’s attention to the “monstrous” character of democracy. As the narrative develops, however, the sphinx appears as a creature which might be accounted for in a variety of ways. But the telling of the text repeatedly generates whatever line or lines of interpretation are likely to reinstate the enigma in which the sphinx is caught. As it directs the reader’s attention almost exclusively towards a political reading of a natural object, this narrative strategy makes it virtually impossible for readers to relinquish anthropocentric concerns, and for environment to emerge in and as fictive discourse.

Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike

AbstractThe protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 [1906], London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg's book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco.Re‐reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists in Morocco to recognize the workers' movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.

Genealogía de un origen: Túbal, el falsario y la Atlántida en la <i>Historia de los Incas</i> de Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa

The present article proposes a political reading of two texts that are connected to each other: the History of the Incas by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and the Antiquitatum Variarum by Annio de Viterbo, a collection of spurious texts from the end of the 15 th century. Doing a synthesis between the Antiquitatum and the platonic myth of Atlantis, Sarmiento argued that the Indians were descendants of Tubal lineage, the grandson of Noah and founder of the Hispanic monarchy which had come to the Indies after the Universal Flood. It is proposed that the History of the Incas as well as the Antiquitatum were part of an official current of imperial representation of the past promoted by the Catholic Kings, that was projected to Spanish and Indies chronicles during the 16 th century.