Radical History Research Articles

Radical History and the Politics of Art by Gabriel Rockhill

Reviewed by: Radical History and the Politics of Art by Gabriel Rockhill Ioana Vartolomei Pribiag Rockhill, Gabriel. Radical History and the Politics of Art. Columbia University Press, 2014. 288pp. Gabriel Rockhill’s ambitious book responds to an acute need to re-think the relationships between aesthetics and politics. Radical History and the Politics of Art is an innovative, interdisciplinary attempt at stepping out of discontinuist models of the history of art and ontological approaches to understanding art’s ties with the sociopolitical. It challenges theorists and critics alike to abandon the “classic, common sense trinity—what is art? what is politics? what is their relation?” and accept fully the idea that these concepts have no determinable, transhistorical essence (3). They are always in flux, always a matter of renegotiation, and their relations defy the binary logic that still dominates aesthetic debates (complicity vs. resistance; authentic vs. inauthentic; form vs. context; causality vs. indeterminacy; consubstantiality vs. opposition, etc.). Rockhill relies on a threefold conceptual framework. The first fundamental principle motivating the book is an attack on what he terms the ontological illusion, that is, the widespread belief that art and politics are discrete entities with a fixed essence and a definable relationship.1 The ontological illusion implies that there are some determinable criteria for what counts as authentic art and politics. Secondly, Rockhill calls for a broader understanding of the political efficacy of art works. The relation between art and politics has frequently been framed in terms of causality and success or failure. Art is either expected to create direct sociopolitical change or forced into isolation for its inability to do so. However, both of these positions rely on what Rockhill calls the talisman complex, the assumption that, in order to be political, works of art in themselves must have quasi-magical effects in the world. The talisman complex thus supports fusional and oppositional aesthetic theories, which both hold a reductive view of the political context and possibilities of art. Finally, Rockhill advocates for thinking the relationships between art and politics in the context of radical history by paying attention to the intricate temporal, geographic and social variations in historical practices. Radical history eschews discontinuous periods or epochs, inviting us instead to examine fluid, overlapping phases that are subject to reactivation and projection.2 Three minor conceptual threads also subtend the book’s discussions. Rockhill observes that thinkers often focus on a particular artistic tradition, assume it to be homogeneous, and treat it as grounds for making universal claims. He argues that this historical hegemony must be countered through careful attention to both geographic diversity and social [End Page 178] variation within a given culture at any time. Considering the diversity of aesthetic practices necessarily relativizes the dominant view of the artist as idiosyncratic creator, placing individual inspiration in relation with a multiplicity of sources of aesthetic and political agency. Similarly, the ideology of autonomy gives way to a complex web of forces involved in the production, circulation and reception of works. These significant theoretical stakes are laid out in the introduction and first chapter. The second chapter focuses on Lukács, Marcuse and Sartre, as representatives of realism, formalism and commitment. Rockhill provides a solid, straightforward summary of their theses on art, showing how, despite their substantial differences, each of these thinkers remains locked into some form of aesthetic ontology. For Lukács, true realism highlights the essential sociopolitical forces that shape the world, independently of authors’ intentions; for Marcuse, authentic art, identified with form, holds an ahistorical, emancipatory potential; and for Sartre, literature (prose) is an inherently instrumental address to the reader’s freedom and an appeal to change the world. Rockhill does not explain his choice of these particular thinkers, nor does he dwell on nuances or contradictions in their thought that occasionally lead away from these schematic positions. However, this does not detract from his central point, which is that all three perspectives rely heavily on selective historicism or transhistoricism, binary normativity in the form of a criterion that separates true and false art, ethnocentric history passed off as a universal account, and the belief that art works could or should directly effect political change. Rockhill’s...

Radical History Then and Now

Radical History Then and Now

What is Radical History Now?

What is Radical History Now?

Radical Histories

In 2016 it was twenty years since the death of Raphael Samuel, historian and inspiration for History Workshop. To mark his memory the Centre for History named after him, together with History Workshop Journal, devised a conference in which the project of radical history in our own times could be debated. In the same spirit, Felix Driver has brought together a special virtual issue of History Workshop Journal comprised of Samuel’s contributions to the journal for the first twenty years of its life (http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/history-workshop-journal-virtual-special-issue-raphael-samuel/). How is the radicalness of ‘radical’ history to be determined? Where, today, are radical histories located? Several hundred people gathered at Queen Mary University of London in July 2016 to discuss these questions. In the event, not for the first time, history moved faster than we did. The Brexit vote had just occurred. Indeed, as it turned out, the bulk of the editorial work for this issue of HWJ was undertaken in the period between the EU referendum, in June, and the election of Trump, in November. Each in its way can be perceived as a resurgence of a certain radical sensibility. But not in the way that we’d imagined. History looks significantly different at the end of the year than it did at the start. The crisis in the old political order, in Europe and in North America, is deepening; illiberalism in India, the world’s largest democracy, points toward right-wing, nationalist, populist sentiment. New dangers press in close. Reflection on where we are historically calls for sustained work.

Empire, Nature, and the Labor of Coal: Colombia in the Twenty-First Century

A twenty-first-century coal mine in Colombia reveals much about labor and empire in Latin America. To the extent that modern empire has been a project of extraction of mineral and agricultural commodities, it has also been a project of exerting imperial control over labor and nature. This essay puts nature at the center of the study of labor and empire, to examine how humans’ relationships with the natural world shaped, and were shaped by, imperial projects of extraction. Extractive industry workers have a long, radical history of resistance to foreign control of natural resources, positioning their unions as defenders of the nation as embodied by its natural environment, its natural resources, and its people, both workers and local residents, that are being exploited by a foreign oppressor. At the Cerrejón coal mine, labor environmentalism and the association of natural resources with the nation are embedded in militant anti-imperialism.

‘Pure Feelings, Noble Aspirations and Generous Ideas’:

This article considers the friendship between the Cuban leader José Martí and the US journalist Charles Anderson Dana in relation to questions of transnationalism, print culture, modernist aesthetics, and the politics of dissent during the era of the Cuban War of Independence (1895–8). It investigates the radical potential and aesthetic difficulties of rendering genuine affection in print at a time in which American friendliness towards Cuba often served to mask imperialist intentions. I offer a reading of Charles Dana’s obituary for José Martí as a text that destabilizes assumptions about Cuban–American relations in the late nineteenth century by presenting an alternative political vision that incorporated the possibility of an autonomous Cuban subjectivity. In doing this, I resurrect the work of Charles Dana as a proto-modernist alternative vision of US culture that deployed the history of American Transcendentalism within the forms of late-nineteenth-century print media to register his opposition to the rise of modern press magnates such as W.R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. This article challenges dominant narratives on two fronts: first, by suggesting an alternative to normative accounts of the development of the late-nineteenth-century commercial press; second, by exploring the mutual interpenetration of Latin American and US American radical history.

Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics

The Nonpartisan League (npl) was one of the most significant and certainly distinctive movements in America's long history of agrarian radicalism. Launched in North Dakota in 1915, it effectively took over the dominant Republican party and then the state government, established state-owned banks, terminal elevators, and flour mills, and soon spread rapidly across the American West and the prairie provinces of Canada. Mobilizing small farmers against the power of the caricatured “big business,” it generated controversy and, by the early 1920s, suppression by conservatives in state and federal governments, local and national businesses, both major parties, and in organized agriculture. Despite its importance, however, and despite the considerable popular and scholarly attention it has received, the last monograph to study the Nonpartisan League war Robert L. Morlan's Political Prairie Fire, published in 1955. Morlan's book has justly achieved the status of a classic, but it reflects the interests of the 1950s and Morlan's focus as a political scientist.

American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth CenturyLeilahDanielson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 39, Issue 3 p. 349-351 Book Review American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century , Leilah Danielson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Ron Briley, Ron Briley Sandia Prep School, Albuquerque, New MexicoSearch for more papers by this author Ron Briley, Ron Briley Sandia Prep School, Albuquerque, New MexicoSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 September 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12575Read the full textAboutPDF 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 No abstract is available for this article. Volume39, Issue3September 2016Pages 349-351 RelatedInformation

The Alaska Cannery Workers Association and the Ebbs and Flows of Struggle

The recent scholarship of civil rights historians and ethnic studies scholars have troubled the notion that appeals to a “common oppression” as “people of color” can unify multiracial coalitions. Rather, they have built their analysis around the concept of “differential racialization.” While distinct racial experiences should not be conflated, we also know that that communities of color do not live in isolation. With this later point in mind, this article examines an understudied history of black and Filipino labor solidarity in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically, my analysis centers the Alaska Cannery Worker Association (ACWA), a group of Filipino and other non-white white cannery workers in Alaska that formed in the summer of 1973. While they were a product of a long history of Filipino labor radicalism on the West Coast, they drew upon the resources and strategies of militant black workers in Seattle's building trades. To illustrate the fluid exchange of resources, people, and ideas between these labo...

From Archives to Action: Zines, Participatory Culture, and Community Engagement in Asian America

As a pedagogical tool, zines exist at the intersection of radical history, analog creativity, participatory culture, and community engagement. This article highlights the importance of contextualizing zines within a history of social activism to shift the focus of zines from individualism and self motivation to their role in community empowerment and social justice. This is particularly relevant when teaching about the topic of Asian American zines and community engagement. The first half of this article discusses the use of Densho’s online archive of the complete print run of the Asian American movement periodical Gidra as a way to teach students about histories of Asian American independent publishing, racial formation, and community activism. The second part of this article moves from archives to practice, concerning how students can use the skills and knowledge that they learn from these archival materials and apply them to current events and community engagement projects surrounding gentrification and tenants’ rights in Los Angeles Chinatown.

Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon?

ABSTRACTIf historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in the role of violence, subterfuge and conspiracy in South Asian anti-colonial struggles. But what happens when new methodologies and narratives begin to destabilise or even invert longstanding historical readings that have been the basis for generations of academic knowledge of the past? When, and under what political and institutional conditions, are fresh interpretations of history sayable? Can historical trajectories or interpretations be quickly turned or must they evolve slowly? This paper is a self-reflexive critique of the ways in which radical histories can—or cannot—be written in the post-colonial moment, with reference to the compulsions brought to bear in the writing of revolutionary history. This article considers these historiographical issues alongside compelling evidence of the involvement of Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru in key aspects of the revolutionary actions of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.

Marxism, Mediation, Historiography: Writing About 1857

What are the methods and goals of radical history? How can Marxist historiography, charged with producing radical histories, contend with the postmodernist challenge that knowledge is always mediated, that only fragments are recoverable, not totalities? Working through concepts and methods associated with postcolonial literary studies and subaltern studies, the article analyzes a document in the British colonial archives from the time of the 1857 Revolt in India that challenges both nationalist and imperialist histories of its most famous rebel: Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi. Understanding mediation and the limits of knowledge – the fissures and conflicts among colonial officials, the ambiguity of the queen’s intentions – are crucial to understanding this file, and the 1857 Revolt itself. But Marxist historiography must also link that text – mediated and complex as it is – to the world outside of the archive, and seek explanatory frameworks and adequate truths in the effort to produce radical histories.

American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century

Book Review| May 01 2016 American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Danielson, Leilah. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014472 pp., $55.00 (cloth) Paul Buhle Paul Buhle Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2016) 13 (2): 83–86. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3460870 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Paul Buhle; American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Labor 1 May 2016; 13 (2): 83–86. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3460870 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Editor’s Note: On the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Mission

WITHOUT FANFARE AND PERHAPS UNNOTICED by any reader of the journal, with the Summer 2015 issue (vol. 34, no. 4), the Immigration and Ethnic History Society instituted a revised Mission Statement (labeled in the JAEH as the Society’s Purpose), as endorsed by a vote of the Society’s members. Whereas the Society was founded in order, among a list of purposes, “to promote the study of the history of immigration to the United States and Canada from all parts of the world,” the Society’s new mission statement now identifies this focus of interest as “the study of the history of immigration to North America” (emphasis added). As most of the readers of the journal may be historians, some historical background of this change is in order. The impetus for the change in the mission statement’s wording arose from a perception that the original language was both outofdate and Eurocentric—or worse. The wording certainly was outofdate, considering the dramatic changes in migration flows since 1965 and the attendant changes in the migration and ethnic history subfield and how we now practice it. But the suspicions about the illiberal motivations for the original wording can be shown to have been unfounded. In 1965, when the Immigration History Group was first organized, American historical scholarship had yet to be roiled by the upending historiographical trends of the new social history, radical history, women’s history, and kindred subfields; and, similar to the deracinated maps that still appear on television weather forecasts like floating bubbles or disembodied heads, American history focused rather myopically on the history of the continental United States, disconnected from an international context and, at that,

South African History and Subaltern Historiography: Ideas for a Radical History of White Folk

AbstractIn considering how “radical” histories of ordinary whites under apartheid might be written, this essay engages with several traditions of historical scholarship “from” and “of” below. For three decades, Marxist-inspired social history dominated radical historiography in South Africa. It has, however, proved little able to nurture historiography of whites that is politically engaged and acknowledges post-Marxist currents in the discipline. I advocate a return to theory and suggest that new sources may be drawn from the academy and beyond. Historiographies “of” below need not necessarily be historiographies “from” below and this article proposes the idea of a “racial state” as an alternative starting point for a history of apartheid-era whites. It goes on to argue that Subaltern Studies, as a dissident, theoretically eclectic and interdisciplinary current in historiography offers useful perspectives for exploring the everyday lives of whites in South Africa. After suggesting a research agenda stemming from these theoretical and comparative insights, I conclude by reflecting on the ethics of writing histories of apartheid-era whites.

Crimes of the sign: Politics and performatives in the Treason Trials of 1794

AbstractThis paper explores some key topics in the semiotics of law − and the paradoxes related to legality, legitimacy, and interpretation − through a chapter in the history of British radicalism that unfolds around the Treason Trials of 1794. These trials, I argue, staged a wholesale battle around the very nature of the sign. The peculiarities of British treason law and the prosecution’s “constructive” readings made treason wholly into a crime of the sign, framing all of radical culture as criminal and conspiratorial. I argue this by showing how legal meaning, along with guilt and innocence, was negotiated in relation to (1) context, and particularly the French Revolution; (2) the performativity of signs, and most crucially, their capacity for disrupting the status quo; and (3) the dynamic nature of semiosis, whereby historical process and political change cannot be halted or controlled. In the Treason Trials, these concepts are alternately invoked and denied as frames for viewing “factual” evidence and establishing its meanings along partisan lines. Finally, this paper would like to suggest that the legal narratives produced in 1794 can generate insights into discursive strategies still used today to create “facts” and “truths,” shape popular opinion, and justify government interventions.

ChemInform Abstract: Taming Azide Radicals for Catalytic C—H Azidation

AbstractReview: 110 refs.

American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century by Leilah Danielson

American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century by Leilah Danielson

American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century

American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century

Critical Pedagogy for Black Youth Resistance

14 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 79, NO. 1 79 No.1 York: NYU Press, 2014), 59. 9. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Southern Negro Youth Congress, #100-HQ-6548, Part I, “Undeveloped Leads,” 28– 30. 10. Johnetta Richards, “The Southern Negro Youth Congress: A History” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1987), 48. 11. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 12. Ella Baker, Interview by John Britton, June 19, 1968, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, DC. 13. Robert P. Moses and Charlie Cobb, Jr., “Organizing Algebra: The Need to Voice a Demand,” Social Policy 31, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 8. 14. Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 15. See Clarence Lang, “Political/Economic Restructuring and the Tasks of Radical Black Youth,” The Black Scholar 28, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998): 32–33; also see Luke Tripp, “The Political Views of Black Students During the Reagan Era,” The Black Scholar 22, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 45–51. 16. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 24 (2009): 156–65. 17. Sarah A. Soule, “The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest,” Social Forces 75, no. 3 (March 1997): 857–58. 18. Sean Ginwright, Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). 19. Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28. 20. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and C. McClurg Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 137. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR BLACK YOUTH RESISTANCE By Tyson E. J. Marsh The rich history and tradition of Black intellectual radicalism, protest, and critical praxis draws upon and informs multiple epistemological spaces while also occupying a variety of physical places and contexts, both historically and in the present. The politics of place and space are woven throughout the Black radical tradition and struggle for social justice, as white supremacist statesanctioned violence (i.e., the maintenance and reproduction of white racial and economic supremacy through violent and racist state-sanctioned laws, policies, and practices enforced through Ideological and Repressive StateApparatuses), both overt and covert, has required that Black folk take a creative and critical approach in locating and creating spaces and places to organize, strategize, and mobilize.As Lefebvre has written, “Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally¿OOHGZLWKLGHRORJLHV´2 While Black radicals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright carved out intellectual spaces for the political work of challenging white supremacy, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer engaged in critical public pedagogical work in the struggle for civil rights in more formal, physical spaces and institutions. Combining the former and latter, scholaractivists Angela Y. Davis, Kathleen Clever, and others have situated their political work within the tradition of critical public intellectualism. Marc Lamont Hill3 KDVLGHQWL¿HGFXOWXUDOFULWLFLVP policy shaping, and applied work as three critical spaces in which educational researchers engage in public intellectual work. However, in acknowledging the marriage between racism and capitalism, we must also begin to position Black youth as public intellectuals in the struggle against white supremacist state-sanctioned violence. Undertaking this work requires that we acknowledge the way in which dominant culture serves to silence Black youth while simultaneously co-creating spaces with them to critique and respond to the culture of systemic violence as it manifests itself in schooling and formal/informal sites of education. Within a top-down education reform and policy context in which Black youth are the last ones consulted, if at all, we must work with them in carving out spaces to inform...