Possibility Of Freedom Research Articles

“To Do Nothing Would be to Dig Our Own Graves: Student Activism in the Republic of Vietnam”

During the Vietnam War, South Vietnamese students were some of the most vocal activists asserting multiple visions for Vietnam’s future. Students’ attitudes spanned the political spectrum from staunchly anti-Communist to supportive of the National Liberation Front. Like young people throughout the world in the 1960s, students in South Vietnam embodied the spirit of the global Sixties as a hopeful moment in which the possibility of freedom energized those demanding political change. South Vietnam’s university students staged protests, wrote letters, and drew up plans of action that tried to unite the disparate political interests among the nation’s young people as politicians and generals in Saigon attempted to establish a viable national government. South Vietnamese government officials and U.S. advisors paid close attention to student activism hoping to identify and cultivate sources of support for the Saigon regime. While some students were willing to work with Americans, others argued that foreign intervention of any kind was bad for Vietnam. The Saigon government’s repressive tactics for dealing with political protest drove away students who otherwise might have supported it.

Freedom as ethical practices: on the possibility of freedom through freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong

Although the idea of freedom has been well studied as an ideal in political philosophy, relatively little scholarship has focused on the human experience of freedom. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2012 and 2013, I examine how freedom was achieved by people who practice freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. I show that the freedom that these people pursue, either individually or collectively, is not a freedom without constraints but a freedom that must be attained through the exercise of deliberation, restraint, and self-discipline. While freegans seek liberation by withdrawing from the world and practicing self-cultivation (chushi asceticism), freecyclers do so by engaging with worldly affairs in order to create social changes (rushi asceticism). In both cases, by reimagining freedom as ethical practices rather than a right that comes naturally with birth, freegans and freecyclers in Hong Kong are able to experience moments of freedom despite inevitable structural constraints.

Karl Polanyi’s Search for Freedom in a Complex Society

This article reads Polanyi’s work as a lifelong search that focuses on the possibilities of freedom in a complex society. The implications for Polanyi’s thinking are examined in more detail in two thematic areas: The question of the socialist transformation of society, which was at the heart of Polanyi’s contributions to the debates in Red Vienna with Ludwig Mises and the Austro-Marxists; the idea of the double movement, which is crucial to Polanyi’s analysis of the end of European nineteenth-century civilization. In contrast to most of the existing interpretations, the article is not limited to an examination of Polanyi’s best-known work, The Great Transformation, but also includes the writings that have become accessible in recent years in the discussion.

O RIO DA PRATA, A INDEPENDÊNCIA E A ABOLIÇÃO: PERSPECTIVAS DE LIBERDADE DOS ESCRAVOS NO ALÉM-FRONTEIRA

Resumo o presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar as possibilidades de liberdade de escravos oriundos de terras do Brasil para as colônias espanholas no contexto das lutas pela independência política ocorridas a partir de 1810. Procuramos dar um panorama da política nesse período e apresentar algumas trajetórias negras no decorrer destas lutas, sobretudo após a publicação da lei de 1813 e do decreto que permitia aos escravos vindos de terras estrangeiras a aquisição da liberdade.

Scripts people live in the marketplace: An application of script analysis to confessions of a shopaholic

This article shows how Script Analysis can produce new marketing theory by applying it to contemporary shopping behaviour via British novelist Madeleine Wickham’s novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. We show how Becky Bloomwood, the central character, is a Scripted Shopaholic for whom shopping is the activity around which everything else in her life falls in and out of place. In presenting a Scripted Shopaholic Racket System, we theorize: how shopping is used to structure time and relationships with others; the role of injunctions and attributions and related discounting in fulfilling shopping scripts and the possibility of freedom from excessive shopping scripts. We therefore bring together psychoanalysis, literary texts and shopping theories to generate new insights about why people shop (and often shop too much) and how such behaviours might be transformed.

The Historical Creation of Kendo’s Self-Image from 1895 to 1942: A Critical Analysis of an Invented Tradition

The self-image of kendo (Japanese swordsmanship) in modern times is a complicated historical fabrication and an ‘invented tradition’ [Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983] involving ‘ethno-symbolism’ [Smith 2009] relating to images and ideas of history, heritage and cultural identity in modern Japan. This means that, despite the high current value and status of Japanese swordsmanship, its cultural identity is shot through with paradoxes and contradictions. This article aims to examine the formation of this self-image through the invention of traditions, and how swordsmanship came to be bound by these inventions. There are numerous components to the invented traditions of Japanese swordsmanship, but this article will focus on three key dimensions: (1) how the tradition was reconstructed, accompanied by the name change from kenjutsu or gekiken/gekken to kendo; (2) the fabrication of historical facts around methods for swordsmanship competition; and (3) the recasting of ‘levels of mastery’ in supposedly traditional styles of teaching and learning swordsmanship. In conclusion, the article reflects on the possibility of freedom from such constraints in the future and explores the question of possible further changes in the future of kendo.

De Beauvoir, Existentialism and Marx

In this article, I focus on de Beauvoir’s view and argue that, alongside an original account of existential freedom, she utilises a Marxist-inspired historical materialism as a methodological tool with which to analyse the social position of women. First, I discuss existential freedom and highlight de Beauvoir’s introduction of gender, whereby the concepts of material, social and situational conditions cohere to restrict the possibility of freedom and agency for women. Next, I explore Marx’s view on freedom and de Beauvoir’s endorsement that in order to promote human flourishing, structural and material change is required. Although some tensions prevail, I conclude that by weaving together existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism in her unique way, Simone de Beauvoir offers a complex and nuanced approach to human freedom.

Sjeta religije i zov demokracije

The author is of the opinion that his problematics focuses on the fact that many people have deprived themselves of emphatising with authentic border situations. As though the the category of people who, regardless of their thought formation, rejects any backing from god who is not beforehand an ally of humanity as they perceive it, is growing. The person is a growing perfection (S. G. Jung) so dial one gains and does not loose in colliding with the fire of God. Freedom appears as the possibility of freedom and is not reducible to choice. Monotheistic religions will loose their stride if they do noi ready themselves for an authentic dialogue amongst themselves. The coping with interconfessional relationships is a precise measure of cultural differences in contemporary society: if they are not reflected in a negative manner on these relationships than these differences are minimal. Democracy manifests itself through the prism of two concepts of politics: (a) the nihilistic-misanthropic and authoritarian and (b) the andiropological-humanistic and democratic concept. Three myths of the communist ideological and political formation give way before three myths of societies of transition.

Contributions of a materialist ontology to the critical knowledge of labour processes and workers struggles

This essay argues that a materialist ontology can contribute to a renewal of the analysis of contemporary labour processes and indicate new possibilities for addressing workers struggles. An ontological/explanatory critique is indispensable to a transformative praxis that confronts the capitalist organization of labour and creates alternatives for the emancipation of labour and humankind. Part of this critique would have to be directed to theory itself, including Labour Process Theory. The main contributions of a materialist ontology in this respect are related to: commodity production inserted in a wider historical context; the overcoming of the subjectivist/objectivist dilemma; labour processes and struggles as open-ended dynamics in which the possibility of freedom always plays a central role; the focus on the qualitative aspects of value (social form), its manifestations and expressions in concrete labour processes and the ways it conditions or determines social relations of production, actions and struggles; the consideration of everyday life and its ontological deep determinants; the analysis of workers organisations and struggles as social exercises of freedom (conscious choices) under structural historically constructed constrains.

Playing off the beat: Applying the jazz paradigm to psychotherapy.

A jazz paradigm is applied to traditional psychotherapy practice, illuminating the links between psychotherapy and the Romantic aesthetic tradition, primarily in the centrality of concepts such as attunement. Modernist disruptions of realism during the early 20th century, such as jazz, elaborated dissonant and improvisational artistic impulses that brought new vitality to their art forms. The psychotherapeutic relationship also has potential avenues for multilevel and discrepant communication that open possibilities of freedom. However, the limitations imposed by the single channel nature of comprehended language, compared with the capacity of artistic media to express multiple sensory information simultaneously, remain the most significant obstacle to dimensionalizing the psychotherapeutic dialogue. Psychotherapy may have much to gain from embracing some of the concepts underlying the jazz aesthetic.

Moon Brow

World Literature in Review FICTION Shahriar Mandanipour Moon Brow Trans. Sara Khalili. Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2018. 452 pages. It would be an understatement to call Moon Brow, the latest novel by Shahriar Mandanipour (translated from Persian by Sara Khalili), anything but “world literature .” Moon Brow is both an Iranian novel and an example of the present global context that enables and, in Mandanipour’s case, forces literature to cross boundaries in language, theme, form, and style and offer a message beyond a singular national context or moment. Mandanipour, living in literary exile in the United States since 2006, seems to thrive on the idea of doubleness. Perhaps it is fueled by the predicament of a writer who has lived through one set of national contexts and stories and finds his oxygen for writing about those events outside his country in the strangeness of exile. Mandanipour’s previous novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 2009, is built on two interlinked stories. In Moon Brow, the double effect is conveyed through a literary device that echoes both an older folkloric and Quranic reference and a newer, more fractured sensibility that conveys the effects of the narrator ’s PTSD—two angels (one, the angel of virtue, and the other, the angel of sin) sit on the shoulders of the protagonist, Amir Yamini, a wounded veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, and narrate his story in the twinning of his past and present. The angels give the reader Amir’s evolving psychological development first as a reckless, philandering, violent, and confused young man who defies his privileged, religious family, and then in the aftermath of enlisting as a soldier to fight in the war as a traumatized veteran who has lost his arm on the battlefield. By the time he is found by his mother and sister in a mental hospital, Amir has lost most of his memory. But he is haunted by the memory of having fallen in love with a mysterious woman whom 66 WLT JULY–AUGUST 2018 he calls “Moon Brow” while he was away at war. All Amir can recall is that Moon Brow was his true love and that they had exchanged rings. Because he cannot remember his past, he must rely on his sister , Reyhaneh, to tell him what she remembers about his life before he ran away and joined the army. The two angels slowly reveal details about the mysterious young woman, but Amir is plagued by the need to find her since it is the most potent and immediate memory he has of his broken life. Once he has exhausted his sister’s memory, Amir pulls in every favor he can think of to find the ring that was lost with his left arm and hand on the battlefield so that he can learn the true identity of Moon Brow. Although it is easy to lack empathy for Amir when we discover what his life before the war was like, his quest to uncover the story of his love for Moon Brow imbues him with a human fallibility that evokes a need to see Amir made whole again. Like his previous novel, Mandanipour is concerned with the idea that readers glimpse both the specifics of Iran and Iranian history (his novel is replete with references to the events of Iran’s revolution and aftermath) but, more importantly, engage with the ideas of freedom and restriction and of the power of love to transport us beyond social, spiritual, and political confinement . He draws our attention to both the possibilities for freedom and redemption as well as the soul-crushing realities of war and power to imprison the human soul and psyche. Mandanipour’s ambitious and highly complex novel demands from his readers an attention to the much bigger questions of human life—both the idiosyncratic and the predictable as well as the comic and tragic. His highly inventive and playful writing as well as Moon Brow’s structure cast the reader into a psychological minefield that captivates and leaves us in awe of the writer’s ability to move from the historical and political reality of his own...

The Two Rival Concepts of Devotional Leisure: Towards an Understanding of Twenty-First Century Human Creativity and the Possibility of Freedom

The starting point of this article is that the ultimate objective of sociology so far as the study of leisure is concerned should be with understanding the ways in which twenty-first century modern men and women attempt to reconcile the demands of individuality and community (aka freedom and security) by focusing on what they choose to do when they can do anything at all. The first introductory part sets up the rest of the article by offering a brief critique of the sociology of leisure which operates with the somewhat startling assertion that in modern societies leisure is largely consumerist in orientation and that as a result freedom is a fiction. Counteracting this assertion with a startling one of its own it is subsequently argued that the twentieth century interregnum saw modernity radically revise its modernity which led to a transformation in the power of human agency and emergence of the insistent voice ‘I too am in individual’. Taking as its starting point Peter Sloterdijk’s reading of Nietzsche’s imperative to ‘Become who you are’ articulated passionately in his book You must change your life (Sloterdijk 2013), the second part of the article argues that in the twenty-first century terms like authentic leisure and consumerist leisure, work and leisure are not antithetical to one another, and there is a radical need to rethink how people give meaning and order to their lives though their leisure pursuits. Here the article explores the relationship between Sloterdijk’s concept of anthropotechnics, the art of living and leisure. The next part of the article fleshes out the theory of devotional leisure which is one part of a more embracing project set out in the book Re-imagining leisure studies (Blackshaw 2017). Here the article explores two contrasting ways of understanding devotional leisure practice, namely ‘devotional leisure’ and ‘performative leisure’ by drawing respectively on the examples of surfing and car cruising. The article concludes with an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory forms of devotional leisure practice with a discussion of urban exploration, speculating that their uniqueness to one another is never absolute, and the more you perceive their particularity, the more you understand their double nature, as simultaneously aspects of a third endeavour.

The Multifarious Nature of Care

A limited rumination on the practice of swaddling in relation to my general infatuation with death—as release, the only actual possibility of freedom for the spirit, allure of the unknown, comfort of inevitability, caring for others, catharsis of mourning, the possibilities in endings, generative destruction… keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.

Book Review: The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men by Robert Jensen

This book is a story of one man’s journey through patriarchy, and his reflections on the issues of masculinity, sexuality, rape, pornography, prostitution, and transgenderism. Robert Jensen’s latest book The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men (2017) is written from his own gender location as a man who became persuaded by the intellectual and political coherence of radical feminism. In focusing on contemporary issues of sexuality/gender, he tackles topics that are controversial not only in the dominant culture but within feminism itself. In exploring these from a radical feminist perspective, he pin-points the crucial differences between radical feminism and liberal/postmodern feminisms. He compellingly argues that a radical feminist ethics, rooted in a shared moral commitment to human dignity, solidarity, and equality, offers an escape from the pathology of patriarchy. Jensen writes with ease, never letting go of a mode of analysis anchored in his embodied subjectivity. The book is paradoxically uplifting, given the weightiness of its topics, because it is fundamentally concerned with the broader themes of humanity and the possibilities for freedom.

‘It be hard just existing’: Institutional surveillance and precarious objects in the northeast rustbelt

Northeastern, post-industrial cities have some of the highest rates of incarceration, parole and foster care management in the United States. In this essay, I focus on one woman, who I call Kira, to explore ethnographically the lived experience of institutional surveillance in the post-industrial, northeastern city. Written as an analysis of fieldwork completed in a major post-industrial center, this essay traces the emergence of an anxious affect that tethers Kira’s intimate and structural relationships. I show how this affective subjectivity has serious structural implications for the duration and intensity of state surveillance, as well as the possibilities for freedom and continuity in Kira’s world. Through engagement with affect and object relations theory, this paper works through the subjective experience of political-economic marginalization and surveillance in the inner-city. I conclude with reflections on the ethical implications of ethnography and the broader stakes for an anthropology embedded in these types of affective relationships.

Moralizing Nietzsche's Moral Psychology: The Case of Katsafanas

This review essay discusses Paul Katsafanas’s The Nietzschean Self (Oxford, 2016), which purports to offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s moral psychology, including questions such as “reflection’s role in action, the genuine action/mere behavior distinction, the nature of evaluative judgment, the structure of human motivation, the possibility of freedom, and the nature of responsibility.” Katsafanas also claims that Nietzsche “wants to understand how ethical claims are justified” (hereafter, the problem of “normative authority”), although no textual evidence is ever adduced anywhere in the book showing Nietzsche to be concerned with this question.I argue that (1) Katsafanas’s claim that Nietzsche thinks that only conscious mental states are conceptually articulated is not supported by the texts and trades on Katsafanas’s own confusion between linguistic and conceptual articulation, one that vitiates many of the arguments in the book; (2) Katsafanas has a more successful account of the role of drives in Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology and their influence on conscious reflection; (3) Katsafanas’s attempt to resist the import of the latter account for Nietzsche’s ideas about free will and the role of conscious deliberation depends on misrepresentations of the texts and philosophical confusions about the thesis that consciousness is epiphenomenal; (4) Katsafanas misrepresents Schiller’s views about the “unity” of a self, and thus fails to refute the popular view in the literature that unity, for Nietzsche, is a matter of unity among a person’s drives; and (5) many of Katsafanas’s mistakes, and especially his frequent carelessness with Nietzsche’s texts, are best-explained by his desire to construe Nietzsche’s moral psychology as responding to the problem of normative authority. In the end, the “Nietzschean moral psychology” of this book is largely Katsafansas’s invention, occasionally inspired by snippets from Nietzsche.

From pregnancy out of place to pregnancy in place: Across, within and between landscapes of meaning

Through his metaphor of landscapes of meaning, Reed provides a way of looking at meaning in terms of how it explains action, with the assumption that action occurs within landscapes of meaning. However, my ethnographic evidence suggests that Reed’s metaphor needs to enlarge its scope. In doing this I use my research on immigrant girls in Sweden. The aim is to demonstrate that people can and do live across, within and between landscapes of meaning. This interstitiality can both produce extreme hardship and possibilities of freedom and agency. I share the story of one person, Nazira, who is negotiating with different social and cultural worlds. This allows her to criticize different cultural contexts and to work towards emergent cultural forms. I conclude by arguing that my ethnographical accounts could be used in support and as a critique of the theoretical understanding of landscapes of meaning within Reed’s interpretivist sociology.

The Anxiety as the Possibility of Freedom in Kierkegaard and the Cosmic Anxiety of Psychodrama - On the Paradox of Anxiety Viewed from Philosophical and Psychodramatic Re - illuminations -

The Anxiety as the Possibility of Freedom in Kierkegaard and the Cosmic Anxiety of Psychodrama - On the Paradox of Anxiety Viewed from Philosophical and Psychodramatic Re - illuminations -

Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon Kennedy-Nolle Gretchen Long Sharon Kennedy-Nolle. Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2015. 428 pp. $45.00. The political, social, and cultural upheaval of the Civil War and Reconstruction introduced a host of new characters into the American dramatis personae— the wounded veteran, the unrepentant Confederate, the carpetbagger, the widowed [End Page 69] plantation mistress, the emancipated slave and his/her family who define their freedom and citizenship. The postwar Southern literary landscape, drawing on these characters and the postwar context, gave new meaning to themes of regional divide and reconciliation. How, then, is a work of literary history, particularly one whose aim is to explore that period, to organize itself? In Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the Postwar South, Sharon Kennedy-Nolle hits on a novel methodology. She draws scholarly inspiration from the most bureaucratic of sources—the map drawn up by the Union Army and U. S. government bureaucrats after the surrender at Appomattox. This map, which she kindly reproduces in the book’s early pages, divided the former Confederacy (most of it, anyway) into five districts and laid the geographic basis for the Freedmen’s Bureau rubric of assistant commissioners all reporting to a central commissioner in Washington. This structure provides Kennedy-Nolle with her chapter outline. In each of her five chapters save one (more on that later), she focuses on a single author. For this reviewer, the male authors were familiar. District Two, North and South Carolina gave us Albion Tourgée (novelist and legal scholar), and District Five, Louisiana/Texas contributed George Washington Cable. The women authors, and the locales from which they wrote were lesser known. The book opens with a strong chapter on Constance Fenimore Woolson, a Northern woman who set her travel sketches and short stories in Florida, which along with Georgia and Alabama comprised District Three; it ends with Octave Thanet, another Yankee and part-owner of a postwar cotton plantation in Arkansas. These four writers were all white, with varying degrees of experience with actual enslaved people and divergent styles of fiction ranging from magazine pieces to staged readings, from travel guides to novels. Thanet even dabbled in photography, and one her photographs—a haunting portrait of an African American child laborer—graces the cover of the paperback edition of Writing Reconstruction. All of these white authors took up ideas concerning freed people and their future. While Albion Tourgée wrote a brief supporting Homer Plessy in 1896, Octave Thanet happily reproduced and reinforced racial and labor hierarchies on her plantation, which in true antebellum style she (re)named Thanford, in her own honor and that of her woman companion JaneCrawford. Kennedy-Nolle argues that all of these white authors, who published their work from in the last third of the nineteenth century, imagined roles for African Americans as citizens and laborers. Furthermore, each author explicitly saw the potential for African American freed women to manifest uniquely some of the new contours of freedom. Some of Kennedy-Nolle’s insights on this front are more convincing than others. Most effective are her explorations into Cable’s deployment of enslaved and free women characters in The Grandissimes that allows him to explore interracial love, sex, revenge, and the possibilities of freedom. Woolson’s comparisons between Balearic women laborers originating from a region in Spain and freed black women serves as a concrete reminder of the vagaries of the color line in the late nineteenth century. Kennedy-Nolle’s most innovative chapter comes as she pushes the boundaries of her own formula. In her foray into District Four, composed by Virginia, Kennedy-Nolle chooses to focus on a geographic grey area, West Virginia. And, more innovatively, she explores a few African American writers associated with Storer College (an African American institution that closed in 1955) rather than choose a single, canonical author. This focus is a deft move on a few fronts. Firstly, it frees her to include African American writers without resorting to the “go to” list of late-nineteenth century African...

The end of the ocean

ABSTRACTIn “The end of the ocean,” I argue that nineteenth-century literary imaginings of oceanic space that celebrated openness, wildness, and instability were, paradoxically, enabled by American efforts to ensure worldwide military control. I focus especially on two important nineteenth-century publications: Edward Everett Hale's “The Man Without a Country” (1863) and Frederick Douglass's Life and Times (1881), both of which highlight the significant differences between land and sea and between landed Americans and their seafaring counterparts. Though both texts seem to assume the existence of what James Fenimore Cooper called “the trackless and fathomless abyss of the ocean,” and the possibilities for freedom that lie therein, both texts also highlight the emergence of a global empire to limn and control the supposedly “trackless … abyss.” Indeed, as Hale and Douglass show us, as the United States' power and imperialistic ambitions grew, the country came to dominate and regulate the ocean to such an extent that the fluid national and racial identities enabled by that space disappeared. In a brief coda, I suggest how this significant change in literary imaginings might have been reflected in military doctrine and, eventually, military policy.