Political Subject Matter Research Articles

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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) utilizes strict censorship to enhance its legitimacy and justify its actions. In the digital age, the internet is a vital platform for disseminating propaganda to domestic and global audiences. Political cartoons transpire as a potent tool, employing parody to transmit political messages. Their effectiveness lies in their faculty to simplify complex ideas, provide humor, and reinforce biases. China’s diplomatic approach has shifted to wolf warrior diplomacy, a use of authoritative language to safeguard its interests. Chinese diplomats increasingly use X (formerly Twitter) to convey political messages, and growingly, anti-US sentiments through negative portrayals. This paper reviews the thematic relationship between tweets by the Chinese government and anti-US propaganda political cartoons, exploring how tweets from government officials influence the creation of negative portrayals of the US. Employing a content analysis methodology, the study explores tweets and political cartoons, revealing insights into China’s soft power and propaganda efforts. It was found that there is a significant correlation between anti-US sentiment expressed through tweets and political cartoons, with variations depending on specific categories of political subject matter and presidential administrations.

Censoring Kuli Pratha in British India

In 1917, the United Provinces government in British India proscribed Lakshman Singh’s play titled Kuli Pratha arthat Biswin Shatbdi ki Gulami (The System of Recruiting Coolies, in other words, Slavery in the Twentieth Century), under the Indian Press Act of 1910. This essay analyzes Kuli Pratha’s proscription when indenture was an important issue on the nationalist agenda and shows that legal control of literature was shaped not only by issues within the subcontinent but also by British imperial policies and practices in the Empire’s colonial outposts beyond India. Analyzing the play in tandem with its proscription, its extra-legal contexts, and its official English translation that served to direct authorities about its political subject matter, thus, provides a layered understanding of the complicated entanglements of colonialism, nationalism, and literature.

Diplomatic personae: Torquato Tasso on the ambassador

ABSTRACT This article examines Torquato Tasso’s Il Messaggiero [The Messenger] (1582), by focusing on the political subject matter, as discussed in the final part of the text through an imaginary dialogue, that is, the figure of the ambassador, the framework of his office and its relationship with power. Tasso’s dialogue features the nature of the ambassador as a figure incarnating his own ‘self’, while simultaneously representing his prince and acting on his own behalf within a specific political context, an external dimension, namely, the ‘international’. Such a condition of alienation is one of the origins of the office’s ‘conflicting obligations’ toward the prince and toward its conciliatory function. We should indeed discuss the diplomatic personae or a divided persona. Tasso rejects the concept of the ambassador as a mere executor of policy, which is a striking departure from the previous general conception of the ambassador. The paradoxical conclusion that emerges is that the messenger, or the ambassador, is not a simple messenger. Tasso’s text and its context is the article’s epicentre. However, this article concerns the possible links between certain ideas and discourses regarding the ambassador’s persona and the growth of diplomacy as a part of the rise of the ‘international’.

Context and text in scientific disciplines of English

Abstract As major world languages – Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, for instance – become the medium of university networks, it may be the right time to take stock of the influence that English has had over the way the disciplines of humanities and sciences have been shaped, directed and evaluated, in particular in the second half of the 20th century. This paper is an attempt to understand some of the textual, linguistic and historical determinants of Disciplinary English (DE) specifically in the spectrum of technical subjects. DE is now a way of meaning which has become associated with objective authority. From this association, DE has shaped our disciplinary knowledge and spread across to registers of bureaucratic and political subject matter. The discussion also considers innovative potential in disciplinary discourses, in particular what Halliday regarded as the “knight’s move” in text: this is the related, analogical effect of Hasan’s “symbolic articulation” in verbal art and grammatical metaphor in the language of technical disciplines.

The visual rhetoric of the aerial view: From surveillance to resistance

ABSTRACTWe live in a world increasingly photographed from satellites, planes, and drones. Many scholars have viewed aerial imagery through a dystopian lens, largely due to its use by the state and its legacy of military applications. While problematic uses of aerial images persist, this paper theorizes rhetorical potentialities of aerial imagery. We posit how aerial imagery creates these potentialities through strategies related to questions of visibility, scale, and aesthetics. Using case studies that illuminate these strategies, we demonstrate how they can be used to resist state and corporate interests, constitute new social movements, and invite contemplation of otherwise repellent political subject matter. Ultimately, we argue that with increased technological access and the ability to reconfigure norms of expertise, the aerial view presents both opportunities for civic engagement and counter-hegemonic potential.

Kwestie prawno-ustrojowe w pracach nad konstytucją kwietniową z 1935 roku

The April Constitution ended the process of evolution of the political system of prewar Poland. She broke with the principles of liberal democracy and sanctioned the position of the office of the president of Poland as the authoritarian sovereign legally. The sanation Constitution was a Polish reply to the intellectual climate of the thirties. Drawing mainly upon archive materials, the author acquaints the reader with the legal and political subject matter of the April Constitution and with legal argumentation for the reconstruction of the political system of the Second Republic of Poland.

Governing the Fear of Islam: Thinking Islamophobia through the Politics of Secular Affect in Historical Debate

This article reflects on the historio-political quest for continuity and discontinuity between Orientalism and Islamophobia by looking at theories of emotions and the politics of secular affect in historical debate. It is argued that both contemporary Islamophobia and early twentieth-century colonial discourse converge in the transformation of Islam into a political subject matter of “affective governance” (Nitzan Shoshan), the rationale of which is to define and establish political and religious subjectivities that ensure and justify governability of Muslims within the respective settings of the colonial and the postcolonial state. The material under consideration is taken from debates on Islam in the German context both from the imperial era and from contemporary attempts to politicize Islam in terms of remaking German nationalism.

The Aboriginal Flag as activist art

Abstract Since the 1960s, art with overt social and political subject-matter has been widely practised, if not widely accepted in the western world. Activist art, I propose, is a distinct category of art-making within a larger grouping of socially engaged contemporary art practices that have emerged in recent decades: its primary intent is to achieve social change. The alliance of activism and art is rare, in part because the practice of activism and the discipline of art have different values and agendas: activism seeks to bring about social change; art-making seeks to create art. Art activism combines the values and agendas of both art and activism. In Australia, a handful of mainly Indigenous artworks have been successful activist artworks. This type of art, however, falls short of being an established and recognized genre of art-making with committed long-term practitioners. This article explores the parameters, and asserts the rationale for understanding the Aboriginal Flag as activist art, and more broadly the role of culture in Indigenous activism postcolonization. Surprisingly, the flag is neither understood as art, nor has it, in an academic framework, ever been studied as art or art activism.

Power Struggles: The Politics of Composing with Sounds of Protest

The author challenges perceptions of authorship within the practice of field recording, discussing sonic arts responses to political subject matter and examining the power dynamic among recordist/composer, subject and listener. He considers compositions drawing on recordings of protests as a medium to represent political content without recourse to language.

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation

Engaged Composition, Dehierarchisation and My Politics of Practice

All music, by its nature, is political, whether explicitly concerned with political subject matter or not. A composer's stylistic decisions, choice and treatment of material, along with who plays the music and who listens to it, are all aspects determined to a large degree by political factors. In this paper I shall explore two distinct modes of compositional practice to illustrate my position. The first mode involves the use of techniques that explore the ‘dehierarchisation’ of material. The second mode utilises a notational practice that requires a method of working in which the process of rehearsal acts as a model of political practice. I examine the creation of non-hierarchical relationships between composer and players, and look at how my choice of subject matter functions as a celebration and reminder of an alternative history of protest and social struggles. I also suggest how music can become a site for the practice of new social relations.

The Ethics of Audience Positioning in the Paintings of Leon Golub and the Prints of Sue Coe

There is no question that the works of artists Leon Golub and Sue Coe share an overwhelming political subject matter. Golub's series of paintings Mercenaries, White Squad, and Vietnam feature over-sized soldiers, singly or in small groups, taunting each other or torturing victims who are helpless and in suppliant positions. The resemblance between one of Golub's best known paintings, Mercenaries V (Fig. 1), completed in 1984, and one of the most widely circulated photos of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 makes Golub's much earlier work prescient and deeply disturbing. Sue Coe's much smaller prints, particularly those in the book Dead Meat, depict the inner workings and horrendous cruelty of slaughterhouses (Figs. 3, 4, 6). The images are accompanied by text which recounts the ways Coe gained access to various slaughterhouses normally barred from public view. The question is: What are those giant mercenaries, those hunched workers and twisted animals asking of us? It is impossible not to be taken in, not to be engaged by Golub and Coe, but what happens to us as a result? What is the ethical import of their work and of the violence their work confronts?

Betraying the NHS: health abandonedBetraying the NHS: health abandoned Mandelstam Michael Jessica Kingsley 320 £14.99 1843104822 1843104822

The book’s pithy title hints at the sharp writing style that continues throughout this chunky tome. The gardening and harvesting metaphors for section headings and the intensely political subject matter indicated a treat of a read ahead.

Negotiating The Nation: “Expanding” the Work of Joyce Wieland

La façon dont l’œuvre de Joyce Wieland a été conceptualisée par le discours dominant sur l’art et le cinéma canadien empêche un questionnement plus large de son rôle historique, politique et culturel. Cet article démontre, d'une part, que la notion de « cinéma élargi » de Gene Youngblood permet de situer le travail de Wieland à l’intérieur du mouvement de synesthésie artistique des années 1960. D’autre part, nous situons Wieland à l’intersection de la seconde vague féministe et des idéologies nationalistes qui émergent à la même époque pour élucider son articulation symbolique de la nation canadienne, des notions de citoyenneté et des différences sexuelles.

Commentary: Opera in the Age of Revolution

Despite the apparent political subject matter of nineteenth-century opera, the aesthetic elements remained in the forefront. Practitioners, no less than audiences, placed more of a premium on factors relating to the operatic medium (style, vocal character, dramaturgical effect, and spectacle) than on political or social messages. Alternatively, such messages may have been embedded in issues of national style, apart from the implications of the drama enacted.

Enlightenment, Agency, and Romance: The Case of Scott's Guy Mannering

The position of Walter Scott in the history of the novel is an ambiguous one. On the one hand he is credited, most influentially by Georg Lukaics, with the introduction of historical and political subject matter into prose fiction in a way that inaugurates the nineteenth-century practice of socialrealist fiction. Specifically, he is understood to have used the model of historical development posited by the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment as the grand narrative underlying the action of his stories: things happen in a Scott novel, people behave in certain ways, because of their place in a social totality that is itself historically determined.1 The tradition of commentary that emphasises Scott's invention of the historical novel thus tends to ignore or play down (or, even, regret) the fact that the action of a Scott novel is often, on the contrary, generically determined: that his detailed attention to the particularities of historical societies is placed within plots that deploy the conventional tropes and narrative structures of romance. In this essay I wish to explore the role of romance plot-structure in its relation to Scott's realist project, in the case of one particular novel, Guy Mannering of 1815. In doing so, I am drawing on the arguments of Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson, who take romance to be not simply an extra-realistic principle at work in these texts, but historical realism's

« A Dove Involving a Whole Nation » : Politics in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

In this article I intend to revise the prevailing critical opinion that the poetry of Medbh McGuckian is apolitical. I want to argue that she uses the words of other writers - Osip Mandelstam, Carlo Ferdinando Russo, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Feuerbach - to set up personally enabling analogies for the Troubles. I also want to signal an increasing openness with regard to political subject matter in her work subsequent to Marconi's Cottage.

“Talking amongst ourselves”: Language, politics, and sophocles on the field day stage

The Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland, has made the politics of translation central to its theatrical mission since its inception in 1980. In The Riot Act by Tom Paulin, and The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney, the company has staged two contemporary adaptations of Sophoclean tragedy. Both of these are truly original works, not merely literal translations; both are explicitly anachronistic in places. Despite the political nature of the Field Day enterprise, however, neither Paulin nor Heaney overtly addresses political subject matter through their content. In both plays, however, language serves both to delineate and to demarcate characters by class, power, and at least explicit connection with nationality. Paulin's Creon undergoes a personal transformation expressed in his language, and the play is as much about Creon's finding an appropriate voice as it is about Antigone's tragedy. Heaney, too, uses language as subject as well as means of discourse: switches from verse to prose, and especially relative degrees of dialect, serve to map the psychic and philosophical landscape of his characters.

Rawlsians, Pluralists, and Cosmopolitans

Some of us were introduced to political philosophy as an activity of identifying, criticising, and revising the moral basis of existing social institutions. We asked questions about the nature of the good or the just society, and some few of us thought that once we knew and advocated the truth, it would win out. We, or some appropriate revolutionary or reforming group or class, would with reason, truth, and history on our side, bring about the society of our ideals. When we first read John Rawls's A Theory of Justice we read it as continuing the traditional tasks of political philosophy. Justice as Fairness was a moral theory which addressed a political subject matter. From the moral point of view it told us what any just society aiming to realise the values of liberty and equality would be like. This comported nicely with liberal cosmopolitanism, and also with more widely shared philosophical views that the task of political philosophy is to construct a vision of an ideal society, perhaps more sensitive to justice in implementation than would be required in pre-modern, pre-democratic societies, but nevertheless an ideal which in the long run we would hope to see all societies converge on. That kind of liberalism gave those of us who think that Rawlsian justice is the right or true justice a license to go on the offensive in promoting liberal ideals and practices in our own society, and, at the very least, a critical vantage point from which to judge other societies.

The Logic of Modernism

There are four interrelated properties of Euroethnic art that are central to understanding the development of modernism, and in particular the development of contemporary art in the United States within the last few decades: 1) its appropriative character; 2) its formalism; 3) its self-awareness; and 4) its commitment to social content. These four properties furnish strong conceptual and strategic continuities between the history of European art-modernism in particular-and recent developments in American art with explicitly political subject matter. Relative to these lines of continuity, the peculiarly American variety of modernism known as Greenbergian formalism is an aberration. Characterized by its repudiation of content in general and explicitly political subject matter in particular, Greenbergian formalism gained currency as an opportunistic ideological evasion of the threat of cold war McCarthyite censorship and red-baiting in the fifties. To the extent that this ideological repudiation of political subject matter has prevailed in the international art context, American imperialism has succeeded in supplanting the longstanding European tradition of art as a medium of social engagement with a peculiarly pharmaceutical conception of art as soporific and analgesic. By the appropriative character of Euroethnic art, I mean its tendency to draw on the art of non-Euroethnic cultures for inspiration. This may originate in the early Italian Renaissance experience of drawing on the art of an alien, temporarily remote culture-that of Hellenic Greece-for revitalization. The real lesson of the Renaissance, on this account, is not the rediscovery of perspective but rather the discovery of difference as a source of inspiration. Other early examples of the Euroethnic appetite for appropriation include the influence of Byzantine religious art in the paintings of Duccio or Cimabue; the Islamic and Hindu influences on the art of Giotto or Fra Angelico; more recently, the influences of Japanese art on Van Gogh, of Tahitian art on Gauguin, and of African art on Picasso; and more recently still, the influences of African-American jazz on Mondrian and Stuart Davis, and of African-American graffiti art on Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz. It is natural that a society dependent on colonized non-Euroethnic cultures for its land, labor, and natural resources should be so for its aesthetic and cultural resources as well. But the impetus in the latter case is not necessarily imperialistic or exploitive. It may instead be a drive to self-transcendence of the limits of the socially prescribed Euroethnic self, by striving to incorporate the idiolects of the enigmatic Other within them. Here the aim of appropriation would not be to exploit deliberately the Other's aesthetic language, but to confound oneself by incorporating into works of art an aesthetic language one recognizes as largely opaque; as having a significance one recognizes as beyond one's comprehen-