Radical Perspective Research Articles

Sport Stripped Bare

Modernization and decline were matters of intense debate and concern in the Britain of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among the many strands that made up the debate were the issues of gender and masculinity. This article examines them by means of a close reading of texts taken from the often-overlooked field of creative writing and film. In both the novel and film of This Sporting Life, attention is turned to questions of sporting heroism, social class and change, and, particularly, male-female relationships. The texts reveal a radical perspective on the problems of British society, seeing sport and the social and cultural conditions that sustain it as a conservative force to be confronted in the drive to modernize.

Spiritual and Pastoral Care in the Rapidly Changing Culture of Health Care: A Radical Perspective

(2005). Spiritual and Pastoral Care in the Rapidly Changing Culture of Health Care: A Radical Perspective. Contact: Vol. 145, No. 1, pp. 42-46.

BOOK REVIEW: Kenneth McConkey.MEMORY AND DESIRE: PAINTING IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002.

Reviewed by: Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Gordon Fyfe (bio) Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, by Kenneth McConkey; pp. xiv + 304. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002, £45.00, $89.95. For much of the twentieth century, late-Victorian and Edwardian British painting was judged by the lights of a cultural deprivation thesis. Measured against the achievements of French modernism, it was taken to be not only different but provincial and deficient. Whilst it was possible to glimpse British modernists in the glare of the supernova that was French modernism, it was the latter that provided the measure of British achievements. In recent times, however, this judgment has been challenged by scholars who have reassessed the relationship between English, British, and Irish art and modernism. Complex cultural and disciplinary issues are at stake in the debates that have ensued, and it is possible to identify several perspectives in the literature. First, there is an orthodox perspective that adheres to the conviction that the notion of English modern art constitutes an oxymoron, but that may nonetheless recognize the modernity of cultural markets and institutions. Second, there is a revisionist perspective that stretches out a canonical hand to neglected English artists with modernist credentials. Third, there is a radical perspective in which critical categories are transformed; this is sometimes linked to the claim that the modernist project is now exhausted. In this book, however, Kenneth McConkey adopts a retreatist position. That is, he opts out of the competition for a better British place in the modernist stakes: he is interested in "artists who did not consciously position themselves on the modernist map, who were in essence trying to be successful at the business of being a painter" (13). Thus, a particularly interesting aspect of his approach is that he spends some of his time with the Victorian successes (Alfred East, for example) whose reputations were eclipsed in the twentieth century and who had no knowledge that the story of art would be told as a modernist teleology or that J. M. Turner would, one day, have a coherent reputation. This approach has enabled the author to write an important study of visual culture in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods. He covers a large number of artists, collectors, and critics who came to maturity in the second half of the nineteenth century and who, in some cases, survived into the 1920s. George Clausen, Charles Conder, Benjamin Leader, John Lavery, William Orpen, and John Singer Sargent are amongst the artists; P. G. Hamerton, George Moore, D. S. MacColl, Charles Holmes, and Roger Fry are amongst the critics. The collectors include James Staats Forbes, Abraham Mitchell, and Henry Tate. Moore is a key figure. The title, which is borrowed from Eliot, signals McConkey's interest in how memory and desire were interwoven and cultivated through the medium of painting. The desire which accompanies appreciation, say of a pastoral landscape painting, is a complex business that cannot be reduced to generalizations about a [End Page 315] retreat from modernity and archetypal categories such as landscape painting. Whilst a landscape painting might distract the eye from the uncertainties of the metropolis and might evoke a collective memory of the past, it was also the locus of a reflexive modernity that nuanced and transformed the very meaning of the genre. Thus, McConkey puts forward a subtle argument about the structuration, or active making, of painterly categories such as landscape, seascape, and portrait. The book's subject is the historical character of visual intelligence. It demonstrates that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the cultivation of visual memory had acquired a central role in the production and consumption of art. The author brilliantly conveys the subtlety of memory's implicit role in informing contemporary practice: "the whole attitude to past and present is the backdrop to a collusion between critics, writers and collectors" (162). McConkey is interested in moments when the artist, informed by past art and past experience, transforms things, so that the viewer, remembering and gazing at a landscape, can only say to herself: Yes, that...

Utopian ideas and the planning of London

Utopianism provides a radical perspective of the future, designed to show how much better it can be than the present. The problem is that what is a dream of perfection for some may well be a nightmare for others. Thus, in the case of London, views of the city’s future can be represented in one of three contrasting models. There is first, the Utopia of metropolis, an idealization of the large modern city – a source of enthusiasm for some but anathema for others. A second model is the Utopia of anti‐urbanism, envisaging the disintegration of the metropolis in favour of small settlements in the countryside. Finally, there is a model of suburban idyll, enjoying the benefits of the city centre yet, importantly, cherishing the bucolic delights of leafy avenues. This paper presents the main features of each of these models, from the end of the nineteenth century until the present, showing how each, in turn, evokes its own opposition as well as advocacy. It sees merit in Utopian perspectives but also pitfalls.

Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics

Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics Richard Baxstrom (bio), Naveeda Khan (bio), Deborah Poole (bio), and Bhrigupati Singh (bio) The months leading up to the U.S. incursion into Iraq in 2003 witnessed one of the largest protest movements in world history, unprecedented in its international scope, with rallies being held simultaneously in over forty countries across four continents. Even as the protests were building momentum, a group of us from Johns Hopkins University, peripherally involved with the anti-war movement, began to feel a different kind of anxiety.1 What would be the future orientation of this movement once the invasion began and the initial momentum of the protests began to subside? Would it be simply to re-iterate that Bush is, and had been, unusually stupid? Beyond a point there seemed nothing particularly radical about that. And, despite our continued participation in the movement, we were equally worried by the intellectual and moral certainties of the anti-war rhetoric, which left very little room for future (anticipatory?) thought except to demand punitive or reparative action a posteriori and to await the next crisis. The present, it seems, had fallen out of our grasp. How did such a situation emerge? At the same time within the United States, as in several parts of the world, the problem of Homeland Security has come to be surrounded by a distinctive sense of panic, which we ourselves came to feel at various moments. News of the deteriorating situations in Afghanistan and in Iraq are accompanied by reports of the “largest Executive Branch transformation in half a century with the Department of Homeland Security” in the United States. 2 “The state of emergency has now become the rule rather than the exception.” We hear this claim across the entire political spectrum, in progressive journals of social theory and philosophy, conservative manuals of public policy, government legislations, activist reports, and op-ed pieces, although each may attribute the cause of this apparent shift to a different source. Such a claim is repeatedly, urgently mobilized with the body politic being trained to embody the currently endorsed level of anxiety in yellow, orange and red. Within such an atmosphere, of certainty conjoined with panic, what constitutes a radical perspective? What tasks might radical scholarship set for itself? Words such as Democracy, Justice, Freedom, and Revolution have been used so often, by so many people, first and foremost by the Bush administration, that it would be completely disabling if the only work left to do were to adjudicate their “correct” or “truthful” application. Finding ourselves at a loss, as a first step we felt it crucial to address that which lay closest to us, which, given our location within the academy, meant returning to the question of intellectuals and power, or the intellectual life of power, in all its specificity, within the American context. With such an inquiry in mind we began to investigate the set of networks and institutions known as think tanks, seemingly the most crucial intellectual node in what is commonly known as the military-industrial complex. Having set ourselves this task, the question arises: hasn’t such an inquiry been undertaken several times before? Indeed, all the empirical material for this argument, including think tank reports and self-descriptions, government documents and news archives, are publicly available, often less than a click away on the Internet. And there is no lack within existing social science literature or, more recently, on activist listservs of detailed descriptions of think tanks, of their politically implicated histories, and the neo-conservative takeover of American politics. Although motivated by many of these same concerns, our essay enters this terrain of inquiry at a slightly different angle of participation. We might present our mode of engagement as follows: In 1993, immediately after his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the administration of George Bush (Sr.), the current Vice-President Richard Cheney joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank closely linked to the Republican Party since the time of the Reagan administration. Cheney then left the AEI in 1995 to become the Chairman of the Halliburton Company. Recently, under...

God sends us nothing but angels

AbstractGod sends us nothing but angels represents the core vision of a radical psychospiritual perspective, wherein all symptoms are understood as symptomatic of the fundamental human wound of forgetfulness, arising in the form of mistaken identity. We are not who we think we are and the reality we perceive is no more than a perception based on this mistaken identity. We think we are awake but in reality we are only dreaming. To awaken we need something that breaks through the dream to remind us of who we really are when Awakened. That ‘something’ is something which to the dreamer appears unbidden and unwanted, but to the Awakened One, angelic. That something is the perceived experience of death in all its different forms. Death heralding life heralding death. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Nouvelles questions féministes: 22 años profundizando en una visión feminista, radical, materialista y anti-esencialist

Este artículo presenta las grandes orientaciones teóricas y políticas, así como la história, de la más antigua revista científica feminista francófona Nouvelles Questions Féministes, que fue fundada hace 22 años por Simone de Beauvoir, entre otras.Esta revista se caracteriza por su voluntad de unir calidad teórica y anclaje político y militante, en una perspectiva radical, materialista y anti-esencialista muy firme. A lo largo de su existencia, Nouvelles Questions Féministes ha publicado artículos de especial importancia para el movimiento feminista. A mediados de los difíciles años 90, empieza a tener serias dificultades para mantenerse, sin apoyo institucional, hasta casi cerrar. Sin embargo, ha empezado una nueva vida a partir de 2001, cuando es retomada - con la misma perspectiva política por un dinámico grupo alrededor de la Universidad de Lausanne.

‘For Better or Worse?’ Lesbian and Gay Marriage

This special feature takes forward the debate on lesbian and gay marriage by providing an explicitly feminist forum for the discussion and by grounding the contributions both in personal experience and in political reality. The contributions range from theoretical arguments to personal stories to accounts of front-line activism. The experience of getting ‘married’ is described by Kathleen and Becky Liddle, and Kevin Bourassa. Bourassa’s paper illustrates that for lesbians and gay men these deeply personal events at times occupy centre stage in a wider political battle for ‘equality’. Elizabeth Peel and Rosie Harding provide an edited transcript of a discussion from early in their relationship about whether they would register their relationship – if this were an option available to lesbians and gay men in the UK – and whether they would welcome some kind of ceremony or ritual to mark this. Feminist theory takes centre stage in Maria Bevacqua’s argument about why both liberals and radicals should support lesbians’ and gay men’s right to marry. Catherine Donovan also draws on radical and critical perspectives, but to argue against marriage. She maintains that marriage as an institution and as a model of love is not the ‘best’ that lesbians and gay men can do. The experience of emigrating as a gay couple is discussed by Martin Holt. He argues that immigration laws compel lesbians and gay men to demonstrate how their relationships conform to heterosexual norms. Finally, the debate is extended beyond the confines of the West in Martin Saavedra’s contribution, which outlines the current status of same-sex marriage in Latin America.

Unsustainable South Africa: Environment, Development and Social Protest (review)

Reviewed by: Unsustainable South Africa: environment, Development and Social Protest Catherine Oelofse (bio) and Victoria Lubke (bio) Patrick Bond (2002) Unsustainable South Africa: environment, development and social protest. Scottsville: University of Natal Press, London: Merlin Press. Introduction Patrick Bond's hard-hitting book on environment and development in post-apartheid South Africa is both personal and provocative. The author develops a strong and convincing argument based on his own radical perspective, presenting the factors that he believes underpin environmental decision making in South Africa. Second, he identifies and links particular individuals to projects and decisions made in planning and development post-1994, thereby making individuals responsible and accountable for the 'unsustainability' of South Africa. He is highly critical of the ruling party's approach to development, which acts in imperial not local interests. However, Bond also highlights that 'the core of the problem we must never forget is systemic: global capitalism, augmented by patriarchy, racism/ ethnicism, anthropocentrism, religious bigotry, and many other easy vices' (2002:xvi). Bond supports an alternative approach to the sustainable development debate since he criticises weak sustainability or ecological modernisation and calls for a new approach based on social, ecological and environmental justice. He states that a weak sustainability approach is maintained within a neoliberal strategy that has been adopted in the country during the first eight years of transition. The rhetoric of sustainable development is present in legislation, policies and programmes but the environmental destruction on the ground is intensifying. Bond critically explores why this is so. [End Page 81] Broad approaches and key arguments With the memory of the much-publicised World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), still fresh in our minds, Bond's new book comes at an opportune time. Hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg in August 2002, the WSSD disappointed those expecting stronger commitments to the original intentions of the United Nations Declaration on Environment and Development drawn up at the Rio summit in 1992. Within this context, Bond explores South Africa's progress towards achieving sustainability. The central argument of his book is that during the first period of democratic rule in South Africa, from 1994 until now, 'government's attempts to improve environment and development failed miserably' (2002:18). He argues that in the transition from apartheid to democracy, government has succumbed to a World Bank-inspired neoliberalism. In the process, much of the ANC's original intentions outlined in its Reconstruction and Development Programme have been sidelined or watered down. Socio-ecological progress has been set back partly by conditions inherited from the apartheid government but also from unaltered power relations, and the current government's economic priorities geared towards globalisation and trade liberalisation. Bond concludes that 'although on the surface, the ruling party's practices appear grounded in stakeholder ideology, in reality they cement apartheid-capitalism's social, economic, geographic and ecological legacy' (2002:20). Bond implicitly uses concepts and methods (discourse analysis) developed by Hajer (1995) and Dryzek (1997) among others, which criticise ecological modernisation and propose alternative approaches to sustainability. He identifies three distinctive environmental-developmental discourses that have emerged internationally and in the South African context - neoliberalism, sustainable development/ecological modernisation, and environmental/socio-ecological justice. He argues that the 'overarching rhetoric associated with the post-apartheid state's environmental policy' (2002:19) is sustainable development. This discourse works positively with the neoliberalisation discourse but excludes environmental justice's core issues, and hence remains as weak sustainability. By exploring five specific aspects of development in South Africa (water and sanitation, energy, waste, land use, and pollution), the book considers the role of these different discourses in determining government policy and action. Part One of the book explores the legacy of apartheid-capitalism, as well as the common discourses associated with the environment-development [End Page 82] debate in South Africa. This section also introduces the five aspects of development mentioned above. Part Two focuses on two unsustainable development projects - the planned Coega Port and Industrial Development Zone (IDZ), and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. The book then moves onto unsustainable policies in Part Three, focusing on the government's infrastructure policy, in particular water and electricity delivery. Lastly, Part Four is devoted to a...

Toward a Radical Understanding of Trauma and Trauma Work

The purpose of this article is to help pave the way for more radical counseling with traumatized individuals, communities, and nations. The author critiques the post-traumatic stress disorder conceptualization and psychiatry fundamentally, builds on and critiques feminist and other radical contributions to trauma theory, suggests directions for feminists, theorizes trauma from a radical perspective, and draws implications for practice. Conclusions include the following: A deficit trauma model is inappropriate; institutions of the state must be seen as critical in the creation of trauma; there must be a fundamental break with psychiatry; and trauma work should move in the direction of radical adult education.

Reflections on the Economic‐Noneconomic Debate: A Radical Geographical Perspective from the European South

This paper expands upon the economic/noneconomic (cultural turn) debate in economic geography and proposes an alternative radical perspective through the lens of the European South. Based on the experience of Greece, the paper argues that no matter how important the cultural issues might be, the great political economy problems of distorted growth and incomplete development, sociospatial inequalities, and weak, incoherent and contradictory territorial policies continue to have a primary importance. The paper reviews some basic points of the cultural turn debate and then examines the orientations of radical spatioeconomic thought in postdictatorial (post‐1974) Greece in arguing that this thought was mostly problem‐driven, policy‐oriented and focused upon the political economy of Greek socioeconomic and territorial restructuring. It is argued that a southern radical agenda has to be based more deliberately on holistic and inclusive interdisciplinary resyntheses in which cultural issues are given due attention, but not to the detriment of a radical understanding of the territorial workings of economy, society and power relations. The concluding suggestion of the paper is that it is a political turn, rather than a cultural turn, that is best suited to a radical interpretation of South European economic geographies.

The geographies and politics of fear

Background This special issue arose from a collective sense of disappointment and frustration with prominent academic and policy related debates around 'the fear of crime'. Since its 'discovery' in the 1970s and 80s, fear has remained an important and obvious theme for academic and government researchers, the media and politicians. There is no denying the substance of fear in terms of media coverage, political manipulation and public discourse. Fear, whether it is quelled or stimulated, provides the capacity to both control and manipulate a variety of social and political discourses. Like any word with such powerful connotations, fear is a term that is controlled via processes of legitimisation, exclusion and prescribed interpretation. It is a word which in wider political terms is licensed to those whose fears are 'legitimised' by dominant political and media structures. At the same time its use is denied to those in the ranks of the 'deviant' or 'transgressive'. As we will show, the fears of the marginalised and power less are often relegated behind those who are, in reality, less vulnerable to crime. This collection of papers examines recent evidence on the patterning of fear, documenting some of the ways in which fear reflects, reshapes and reinforces social structures and power relations, and emphasising explanations which focus on social, political, sexual, race and class inequalities. The papers also examine 'fearism'--the manufactured and contested nature and use of fear of crime. The contributors challenge the way 'fear of crime' is defined and used within hegemonic discourses for the purposes of political agendas. They also examine how, in connection, fear is constructed within a range of distinct spatial arenas. In addressing these points, we argue that there are some evident deficiencies in the quality of much research which has been undertaken. The continued spread of myths and stereotypes by the media and through research has led to the failure by national and local policymakers to recognise and address the root causes of fear. We have been surprised by the paucity of academic work which focuses explicitly on the socio-political power relations involved in the fear of crime. The small number of exceptions which have forwarded critical and radical perspectives on fear have tended to be ignored by the mainstream. As we go on to argue below, most accounts of fear of crime developed by academics have been positivist, behaviouralist or individualistic, often with the aim of servicing policy, but rarely presenting a fundamental challenge to it. Politicizing fear of crime debates is important, then, not just to improve understanding of a large and complex field, but so that they can actively inform political responses mo re appropriately. The collection also focuses on the geographical aspects of fear. The location and situation of fear of crime, and the ways it is patterned, reflected and reinforced by the particularities of place, has a central role in its close association with patterns of marginalisation and exclusion. Each of the papers explores different aspects of these geographies. Human geography is currently seeing a reinvigoration of longstanding calls for geographers to become involved in more critical action research, and engaging to a greater degree with tackling pressing social issues through research (Kitchen and Hubbard, 1999). This new impetus is an appropriate backdrop for the research on fear of many of the contributors, as the papers tackle a number of issues where inequality and oppression are at the forefront, such as women's experiences of domestic violence; the fears of marginalized groups of young people; ethnic, sectarian and homophobic violence. In this introduction we begin with a discussion of what fear of crime is and where it came from. We describe the deficiencies of much research to date, and then outline a more critical perspective which focuses on the geographies and politics of fear as a framework for the papers which follow. …

Evolutionary Economics from a Radical Perspective

David Hamilton's book, Evolutionary Economics: A Study of Change in Economic Thought, (1999) is a masterpiece of elegant writing and brilliant insights. I learned much when I read it several decades ago and perhaps even more from the present reading. Most of the book clarifies the main differences between institutionalism and classicism (Hamilton's term for both classical and neoclassical economics). In the first place, classicism is reductionist, concentrating on only one aspect of society, namely the psychology of consumerism-and even that psychology is so abstract in its assumptions that it cannot be empirically tested. Institutionalism sees the whole society as a unified set of relationships and processes, so it is called holistic rather than reductionist. Secondly, classicism focuses on equilibrium with and the adjustment to equilibrium, as if there were eternal laws of equilibrium. Institutionalism focuses on the process of change of history in an evolutionary approach in the tradition of Darwin. Third, classicism explains everything based on the psychology of individuals, as if they could be seen in isolation from society, while social laws derive from individuals. Institutionalism argues that individuals are always part of society, so one must begin with the actual institutions, which embody relationships between groups. Hamilton's theme is that both classicists and institutionalists do look at change, but they examine it quite differently. Classicism is Newtonian, so it examines the laws of change after an outside disturbance toward a situation of equilibrium. Institutionalists are Darwinian, so they examine the process of evolution. The process of evolution is explained by internal dynamics, as is biological evolution. That is very different from change solely due to external shocks, such as the physics of one billiard ball hitting another. Newton's was a machine universe run by natural law. Classical and neoclassical price theory is Newtonian. The switch from the labor theory to the utility theory

Du bois and the question of the color line: Race and class in the age of globalization

(2003). Du bois and the question of the color line: Race and class in the age of globalization. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 141-160.

An American holocaust? The structure of denial

(2003). An American holocaust? The structure of denial. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 25-75.

Black radical theory and practice: Gender, race, and class

(2003). Black radical theory and practice: Gender, race, and class. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 109-122.

Language as oppression: The English‐only movement in the united states

(2003). Language as oppression: The English‐only movement in the united states. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 187-208.

American identity and the mechanisms of everyday whiteness

(2003). American identity and the mechanisms of everyday whiteness. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 209-226.

Erupting thunder: Race and class in the 20th century plays of August Wilson

(2003). Erupting thunder: Race and class in the 20th century plays of August Wilson. Socialism and Democracy: Vol. 17, Radical Perspectives on Race and Racism, pp. 339-358.

The Invisible Hand of the Royal Family in the Political Dynamics of Swaziland

Abstract Why does Swaziland remain authoritarian despite the democratic political changes that have occurred in the other parts of the African continent since the 1990s? Does it mean that Swaziland is immune to political change? The answers to these questions are diverse and wide-ranging from the international relations view to the radical perspectives and to the functionalist view. But the tendency of these views is to analyse Swazi politics according to historically constructed and particularised contexts and dynamics without fusing the wide-ranging factors that play various roles in the politics of the country. One of the major assumptions by these views is that the state (royal family) and the nation (subjects) are the same as was the case in the pre-colonial period and that the state has a sole privilege to cultural instrumentalism. These views therefore have a tendency to explain political change in terms of class structure and capital relations without taking the multifunctional dimensions of culture into consideration. This paper brings together the various views to explain political resistance in the country in terms of a cleavage between the state and the nation. It provides a historical overview of the political transformation in the country within a framework of cultural nationalism. The thrust of the paper is to look at how the royal family has survived between a primordial and constructivist perspective to political change from the colonial to the post-colonial period. It subjects both the incumbent and the opposition onto a critical analysis and points out a possible direction for political resolve.