Political Reading Research Articles

Mantegazza pop. Dall'Heracleum Mantegazzianum di Sommier & Levier a The return of the Giant Hogweed dei Genesis e oltre

Tuscan botanists and explorers Stéphen Sommier and Emile Levier during their trip to the Caucasus (1890) discovered a new plant species. In 1895 they named the species Heracleum mantegazzianum in dedication to their friend and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. This botanical species is a large, highly invasive, and poisonous herbaceous plant. The seeds brought by the naturalists quickly spread throughout Europe. It became common in Great Britain as an ornament of communal and botanical gardens. Thedense free trade between enthusiasts and sale in horticultural catalogs, all helped it spread throughout the natural environment of Europe. Due to its strong vitality it became an invasive species. Even the English musical group The Genesis dedicated in 1971 a songto the plant, The return of the Giant Hogweed, using the vulgar name and quoting Mantegazza. The study presented here delves into the sources of inspiration of Genesis, which are broad and linked to both the popular and scientific spheres. We then consider the references to the economic, social, and cultural aspects that an invasive and toxic species entails, considering the eradication programs developed in most of the world’s countries. Finally even a political reading is provided in light of the «myths» that remains under the name of Mantegazza.

Imperial Satire Redux: A Political Reading of Dryden's ‘Discourse’ on Satire

Dryden's 'Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire' has long been seen as one of the most important and influential accounts of satire and its history in English literature. Historians, editors, and critics have admired and contested Dryden's account of satire's pre-history, etymology, and ‘progress’, finding in this intricate text a whole tissue of challenging ideas about satire as a literary form. However, the political purposes of the Discourse (in its immediate context) remain exceptionally difficult to bring into focus. For all the clarity with which we can see what Dryden was saying about satire, it has always been quite unclear as to why he was saying it in the first place. Assuming Dryden's rationality and command of the intellectual resources, this article offers a very different reading of the Discourse as a politically motivated intervention post-1688 discussions about literary satire, and as an attempt to reset the form along ancient lines for Tory satirists excluded from the centre of public life by the Glorious Revolution.

Media, Communication, and Democratic Decline: Thoughts on The Paradox of Democracy

Abstract The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion, by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing, argues that the study of democratic decline is mistakenly focused on reversal. Drawing on media ecology theory and an interpretive reading of media and politics in the Western world, the authors argue that the conditions that allowed liberal democracy to become temporarily dominant have now been disrupted and eroded by the rise of new forms of media and communication. This review article assesses that argument in terms of (1) the central role of media and communication in studying of trajectory of democracy; (2) the empirical contributions of political communication scholarship; and (3) the authors’ call for revitalizing a core liberal institution: the press.

Contentious press freedom: Media law and the Supreme Court in the Philippines

The legal environment particularly the body of laws that regulate media operations are telling, yet underexplored, indicators of press freedom. Using the analytical concept of episodes of contention based on a reading of contentious politics, the article examines the ambivalent state of press freedom in the Philippines. The argument is that the protracted issues of media access and libel serve as two episodes of contention that identify extant and emerging sets of actors, mechanisms, and claims that collectively characterize the role of media law in the body politic. Drawing from interviews with journalists and review of the Supreme Court rulings about media access and libel, the hope is to underscore the potential and limits of the Court as an ally of the media in advancing press freedom. The decision of the Court does not at all times favor a liberal interpretation of press freedom but it deploys ways including dissenting opinions that can balance, if not outrightly oppose, the occasional negative view of the Court toward media-related cases.

“Three-Quarters of an Hour to Consume Everything”: Dorian Gray and Commodified Aesthetics

This paper examines the commodification of aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel is most extensively investigated within the artistic context employed, where Wilde’s approach to art, aesthetics and beauty is regarded as surviving on a transcendental ground. Indeed, despite his identity as a decadent of fin de siècle Britain, and his depreciating critique of the middle and working class for their material pursuits, Wilde gets conceptually closer to the capitalist stream of consumption. The novel ostensibly highlights aestheticism, and hence, art living for its sake on the lines of the manner Wilde launches himself to the world of artistry and literature, particularly through the characters of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward, and Lord Henry. However, the deep desire to experience artistic pleasure and beauty, as illustrated mainly by Dorian, gets along very well with, and ends up as, the British materialist pursuit. Dorian’s initial position as the embodiment of beauty degenerates due to the same dynamic of beauty commodifying itself, and so, the others implementing it. The very commodities where aesthetic pleasure is sought commodify the aesthete. Wilde's use of ornamental and decorative elements, Dorian’s search for eternal youth, and the whole structuration of aestheticism in the novel necessitate a political reading of the text, calling for the recognition of colonial, material and modernist platform the narrative deeply bases itself on.

The Popular Culture and General Elections in Republic of Indonesia

Political marketing for power often uses popular culture to achieve it. Popular culture, which prioritises packaging over substance, is becoming increasingly thinner and thinner, especially when other passengers are infiltrated into its fragile body. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the practice of popular culture in politics whose ultimate goal is the attainment of power. The fragility opens up wide opportunities for the accommodation of other interests, which are always present in public life. Popular culture itself is already poor in substance, will become even more banal with relations with other fields. So the relationship between popular culture and politics falls into the "ideology" of inevitability. A multifaceted reading of politics and popular culture allows for other findings, but in this study we see that humans instinctively have the desire for power, he is anxious if it is not achieved. Sublimation is done so that anxiety can still be done, so that the desire for power is released. Popular culture provides space for that.

“‘I have to want you to act this way’”: a political reading of sexual violence, men’s Rights Activism, and the Pick-up Artist

ABSTRACT Since the emergence of allegations of sexual violence against media producers, directors, writers, and actors in 2017, viewers have questioned how their alleged abuse impacts viewership of their creative works. These questions hold even more significance in cases where the creative work represents behaviors and power dynamics that are reported to have supported these creators’ abuse. I analyze James Toback’s film, The Pick-Up Artist, next to allegations of his sexual misconduct and common Men’s Rights Activist strategies to contend that Toback’s film and other media texts implicated in similar distasteful resemblances ought to be read for their political force and subsequent implications, due to the work that these texts do to normalize violence and maintain the status quo. Through my analysis, I argue that, due to the resemblances between Toback’s film, his alleged abusive behavior, and PUA teachings, the film ought to be read as political. Ultimately, I conclude that a reading of Toback’s film as political demonstrates how mediated romantic storylines can reflect, inform, and, upon examination, disrupt manifestations of violence in daily life, as well as the potential for examining resemblances that emerge in media texts to reveal new analytical possibilities.

Defending Dworkin’s One-System Anti-Positivism

Abstract In this article, I argue that Dworkin’s one-system view of law and morality is not as easy to refute or dismiss as some would suggest. In a recent article, Dindjer criticizes a new kind of opposition to legal positivism characterized by both its opposition to a two-system view of law and morality and its promotion of a one-system alternative picture. By re-examining Dworkin’s criticisms of the two-system view and by providing additional reasoning of my own, I show that Dworkin’s one-system interpretative approach is not just sensible but also promising in refocusing contemporary debates in general jurisprudence on a moral and political reading of the structural features of law.

Mary Astell's Female Retirement: Feminist Pedagogy and Politics in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

AbstractMary Astell's female retreat is a political project, dedicated to the full self-realization of students in a world that diminishes them and thwarts the development of their potential. Newly analyzing the pedagogical tools and distinctive setting of her seminary, I reveal its most progressive promise. In this political reading of A Serious Proposal, Astell emerges as an early figure in the broad political tradition of female resistance to patriarchal domination. She enables a subordinated group of women to arrive at new and oppositional ways of understanding themselves, each other, and even the world, and to act for change. The methods and tactics she employs in her retreat bring to light some surprisingly democratic and feminist dimensions of Mary Astell.

Dramaturgy of "Hamlet"(s) in Czech Theatre between 2000 and 2023

The paper focuses on five Czech productions of Hamlet that attracted the most critical and public attention between 2000 and 2023. Namely, the productions directed by Miroslav Krobot (2006), Jan Mikulášek (2009), Daniela Špinar (2013), Michal Dočekal (2021) and finally the most recent version by Jakub Čermák (2022). All five performances could be seen as contemporary reinterpretations of a classical text using a (post-)modern stylistic approach, as examples of post-millennium Hamlets. The paper discusses dramaturgical choices (such as the conceptualisation of the ghost, the mousetrap scene, or the character of Fortinbras) in order to identify and analyse possibilities for interpreting Hamlet as a political drama in the context of Czech performance tradition and the current political situation. The results show that performances generally present variations of Hamlet as a family drama, foregrounding different issues of memory and body, while the political reading is obsolete.

An Al-Farabian Analysis of Social Disorder in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Like many political philosophers, Al-Farabi was influenced by Greek philosophy and tried to define the best regime and ruler. However, much has changed in Al-Farabian scholarship since the 1970s, and 80s through deeper analyses of his philosophy, and translations of his works. The early Islamic philosopher Al-Farabi (870-950) played a key role in the revival of Plato and Aristotle’s works within Islamic philosophy, guiding others by studying and providing commentary on these texts. Al-Farabi and his political philosophy deal with the existence of human, ruling, and ruled organs in the body, the city and state which exemplify hierarchy, the features of a ruler, and the differences between excellent and ignorant cities in his on the Perfect State. In this sense, focusing on an Al-Farabian political reading of Julius Caesar, the aim of this study is twofold. Firstly, it examines the abovementioned socio-political issues to present the idea that such political qualities are also represented and questioned in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Secondly, the paper argues that the two works exhibit socio-political similarities inasmuch as Caesar’s portrayal of power relations within the play can be related to Al-Farabian understanding of the society, state, and rulership.

Representation and Subversion in Croatian Alexander Romance

Reading the novel Hrvatska Aleksandrida (Croatian Alexander Romance) as a chivalric narrative structured around a historical figure, this paper aims at reinterpretation of it in the key of popular culture and looks into the politics of the representation of the protagonists-bearers of specific ideological values, acting both affirmatively and subversively within the imposed value system. Beside that, the paper will focus on the novel’s strategy of undermining dominant codes, arguing that the chivalric romance provides an ideal frame for the observation of the clash of ideological centers and margins. The codification of the genre increases the transparency of the text, facilitating political readings capable of bringing about the new interpretative potential of the narrative in question. From that theoretical point, the Middle Age chivalric novel Croatian Alexander Romance reveals itself as a textual terrain for clashing specific social forces and their mainfestations, stressing the fact that they can be noticed only by using described methodological optics. The dominant chivalrous and Biblical codes represent exactly two dominant social classes (nobels and religious structures) as owners of social power in the historical period in which the text is inscribed. Therefore, this chivalric narrative, at the same time, respects their imperatives, but also offers disparate motives as fantasy, superstition, satire, social critics, individualistic morality and so on. That kind of contradiction inscribed in the (cultural) text himself confirms the very common thesis of cultural studies theorists about culture as a battlefield. On the text level, it is manifested as the series of incompatible motives that a reader could miss out if they read or overview just the surface level of the text. Because, on that level, the text sets an ideological (imposed) ‘consensus’ which is just specious. They still have its antipode, that they can not completely suppress, and that binary opposition articulates itself in certain segments of the text differently. Its rotations make this text interesting in further readings.

The Heḇelness of African Power: Hope or Despair: A Political Reading of Reading Qoh 3:16-17; 4:1-3.13-16

The mother continent Africa is known for its various, multiple, and repeated instabilities, the rationale being the great hope and desire for the permanence, fixity, stability, lasting or enduring things that characterize human beings. Irrespective of how great and noble this hope and desire might be, one should admit that permanence or stability in life under the sun is against human nature, which for Qoheleth is הבל, that is, fleeting, transitory, brief, “not stable”. The use of הבל applied to different areas of life draws attention to the fleetingness of human experience in the world compared to God’s eternity. In Qoheleth’s view, there is nothing eternal on Earth: everything is fleeting (הכל הבל). So is political power, which for Qoheleth is short-lived and unstable, whether oppressive or not. It is, therefore, the aim of this paper to explore the hermeneutical possibility of Qoheleth’s use of הבל, which could be used to understand the political instability in African leadership. As such, this study calls attention to Qoheleth’s use of הבל with a political focus. It reads the text against the context of the oppressive manipulative political control of the powerless, voiceless, and the downtrodden by the powerful in Qoheleth’s society, which is no less in today’s African society. Consequently, it proposes that a political reading of Qoheleth adds to its hermeneutical understanding, which then can become more meaningful to Africans in an oppressive and depriving social and political environment.

The Future: Missing Children, Time Travel, and Post-Nuclear Apocalypse in the Dark Series (Netflix)

The concept of the post-apocalypse, a cultural imagination of nuclear energy, the temporality of trauma, and time travel are linked herein in order to arrive at a political reading of the Dark series. This show is a commentary on the phasing out of nuclear power in Germany in response to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Two readings of this series are proposed: a meditation on the possible futures of the world (the possibility of reparative action and the post-apocalypse) and a traumatic narrative (the concepts of trauma and loss are crucial to understanding the plot, while both the visuals and the plot borrow from posttraumatic cinema). Nevertheless, the series plays by the rules of popular trauma culture, rules whereby a tragedy suffered by others serves the economic interests of the media.

David Lurie and the ‘Disease of Romanticism’: The Transnational and Transcultural Afterlives of Goethe and Kleist in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

My paper studies J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to understand the transnational, transcultural mutations of two key figures of German Romanticism: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich von Kleist. Coetzee’s novels are reflections and reproductions of his extensive reading of politics and literature; these texts grant the lives and works of old masters a renewal, a re-introspection, and most importantly, a resurrection into contemporaneity. Set in post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace operates as a site of racial and sexual contentions. Through the character of David Lurie, Coetzee initiates a dialogue between the 'visions' of the former colonizer and the ‘revisions’ of the newly emancipated colonized. While the scholarship on the Romantic element in Disgrace (Beard 2007; Easton 2007; Hawkins 2009; and Cass 2013) is predominantly centred on the afterlife of British Romanticism, more particularly, on the roles Byron and Wordsworth play in shaping plot and action, I attempt to read the novel in the light of Coetzee’s critical prose to understand how he draws upon the German Romantic tradition. If Wordsworth and Byron are evoked to characterize the outer, more conspicuous texture of the novel, then the inner, hidden threads that stitch the form and content together are borrowed from Goethe and Kleist. I argue that Coetzee’s romantic sensibility is as much German as British. These two traditions are brought together in Disgrace to re-enact four major leitmotifs of Romantic literature—desire, transgression, punishment, and finally, salvation—in a transformed political dispensation.

Gnosticism, political theory and apocalypse: Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders, Tracy Strong and Carl Schmitt

Beginning with Jacob Taubes and Günther Anders on eschatology, apocalypse and political theology, including Saint Paul and Frankfurt School critical theory along with bombs and power plants (energy/climate), this essay parallels a re-reading of Tracy B. Strong’s political reading of Nietzsche on Jesus (and love) with Taubes, Anders and Carl Schmitt on politics (and technology). Highlighted throughout is the politically charged (and inherently esoteric) context of Gnosticism for philosophy and theory for Taubes but also for Anders.

CREATING THE IMAGINATION OF CULTURAL HYBRIDITY: GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA

In Turkey, new trends, which are alternatives to traditional art production in terms of method, material and subject, started to become visible as of the end of the 1970s. In the activities carried out under the leadership of the State Academy of Fine Arts and accompanied by the intellectual efforts of the Academy teachers based on philosophical discussions in the West, graduate students they had the opportunity to exhibit new and different productions and to be visible. In this generation, many artists who adopted new and different trends, beyond the classical painting and art education in the Academy curriculum; One of them was Gülsün Karamustafa. In addition to bringing local political and cultural elements to her artworks over the years, the artist has exhibited a diversity of materials and attitudes; It has continued her production process uninterruptedly by carrying it to the international level and has become one of the important names of Turkish Contemporary Art. Karamustafa's studies, which have developed around the issue of migration-based cultural hybridity, which emerged in the socio-political field of Turkey after 1980, have a quality that makes sociological readings possible in the context of the political and cultural structure of the country. Listening to the migration stories of her family since childhood; The political background of her family members and her contact with Istanbul, which had a very active sociological atmosphere during her youth, enables the artist to create the main themes in her artworks. The imagery shaped by the period and environment in which she lived, in the context of a cultural transformation-based objectivity, leads to the emergence of products in Karamustafa's artworks, in which subjects such as migration, cultural hybridity, identity, arabesque and kitsch are mostly discussed. The artist has produced a sincere and original art production by simultaneously transferring social issues that she blended with her personal history in line with multiple materials and artistic expression. This study aims to evaluate Karamustafa's work, her life and the social memory of the period she lived in, that period’s cultural structure, political readings and her testimony in the context of cultural hybridity.

Beyond the Education of Desire

Abstract While critical utopias sought to rescue the political import of utopia, recently scholars have questioned their overemphasis on literary forms and a disempowering pluralism. Challenging the applicability of these claims to one of the instigators of critical utopias, I provide a political reading of Miguel Abensour's understanding of utopia and connect this to councils as a concrete institutional infrastructure. This begins with a re-reading of his influential conception of the ‘education of desire’ in relation to the simulacrum as a utopian ‘model’ that, in rejecting identity-thinking, refuses to reduce utopias to a blueprint. I then turn to conceptualising the utopia of councils through the simulacrum on two fronts: first, as a form subject to innovation in the context of the dialectic of emancipation; second, as a content that aims to both ‘democratise utopia’ by embracing plurality and ‘utopianize democracy’ by expanding the realm of democratic space.

Integrity in Science and Technology Production

This communication discusses the meanings and applications of the concept of integrity in scientific production. Integrity is a polysemic concept whose etymology refers to wholeness, completeness or purity. When applied to ethics, the concept presents itself as a virtue of those who are coherent – ​​whole, complete – in their moral life. In the field of care sciences, integrity is also related to respect for the whole body and individuality of patients. In discussions about ethics in scientific production, integrity includes both aspects: on the one hand, it points to bad practices related to the researcher's ethical conduct in matters such as fraud, plagiarism, falsification of data, conflicts of interest, that is, to what violates the integrity of scientific data; on the other hand, it points to practices that put the integrity of people and the environment at risk, such as in abusive and exploratory research with human beings or studies with negative impacts on the environment. The communication concludes that the issue of integrity goes beyond individual relationships involving researchers and their objects of study, but concerns a network of collective practices whose approach requires a critical, collective and politicized reading of bioethics.

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Unbecoming Language by Annabel L. Kim is a detailed study of three French writers: Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta. Through extensive and careful analysis of each of these writers’ works and personal backgrounds, Kim traces a direct chain of influence between them. Furthermore, she proposes to consider their works as a common corpus—a coherent theoretical project of anti-difference writing: an innovative project that presents us with ways in which language can become a means of societal and political potential to undo identity. In the first of four chapters, Kim examines Sarraute’s work and proposes a new, surprising rereading of her corpus. Even though Sarraute is most often situated within the categories of New Novel and “woman writer,” Kim argues that both categories rob us of some important aspects of her works and instead offers a political reading of Sarraute’s writing. In her study of Sarraute, Kim pays special attention to Tropismes, in which language becomes a powerful force with the ability to shape reality. For Kim, Sarraute’s tropisms place the reader in an indeterminate space where they can experience language as Sarraute’s anonymous subjectivities, and, through an encounter with unbecoming language, have their own identity erased. In this sense, Kim concludes that Sarraute’s writing is revolutionary.