Polite Refusal Research Articles

Corridors of countersovereignty: Insurgency, smuggling, and post-nation-state politics in Turkey's Kurdish highlands

In Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, smugglers occasionally entered insurgent corridors, the guerrilla-controlled mountainous passages, to bypass state control. This article takes insurgent corridors to frame sovereignty as monopolization of space-making and proposes space-making as a key analytic to examine the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices. As a spatial form, corridors are central to the claiming and exercising sovereignty and extraction without having complete territorial control across a bounded space or the whole population in that space, the territoriality identified with nation-states. By controlling corridor space and monopolizing the traffic in them, colonial empires, nation-states, corporations, and rebel movements exercised sovereignty and extracted value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The insurgent corridors further complicate corridor sovereignty as the Kurdish guerillas monopolized corridor-making without monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic under a post-nation-state political vision that favors grassroots democratized organization of mobilities and livelihoods rather than centralized exclusive authority and biopolitical governance on them. The insurgent corridors constituted what I call countersovereignty, a practice contesting not only the existing state sovereignty but also political models of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality. While anthropologists understand refusal as disengagement from actors claiming sovereign superiority, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal that rejects mimicking state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance.

The Queer Art of Feeling: Futurity, Fin de siglo , and New Queer Realism

ABSTRACT: This article takes Lucio Castro’s Fin de siglo ( End of the Century , 2019) as a paradigmatic example of broader formal and aesthetic shifts in recent queer world film, most notably towards narrative slowness, a lack of dramatic tension, and an intimate focus on the quotidian realities of queer lives. Through the frameworks of new queer realism and queer futurity, the article contends that the screening of queer lives in a more realistic, observational manner is not a refusal of politics but rather a recalibration of the politics of queer representation for the contemporary period.

SELÇUKLULAR DÖNEMİNDE İKTANIN GULAMLAR ÜZERİNDEKİ SOSYAL VE EKONOMİK ETKİSİ

Yaklaşık bir buçuk yüzyıl boyunca, büyük Selçuklu İmparatorluğu, şimdiki yirmi ülkeyi kapsayan toprakları, merkezi olarak ve bazen de dolaylı olarak yönetti. Bu hükümetin yapısal ve kurumsal kapasitesi ve etkinlikleri, büyük devlet arazilerinin optimal yönetimi alanında ikta sisteminin kurulması ve farklı alanlarda santrifüj yönetiminin dengelenmesi dahil olmak üzere çeşitli alanlarda yeniliklere sahipti. İkta iki kurumu, askeri ve ekonomik sektörü birbirine bağladı. Bu sistem ayrıca idari alanda da birçok sorunu çözdü. Ancak; ikta sisteminde oluşan bazı işlev bozuklukları yüzünden bu dönemde siyasi gerilemeye yol açmıştır. Bu vakalar arasında, önemli olan ve sınır illerinin (özellikle doğu sınırlarının) giderek bağımsız bölgesel yönetimlerin oluşumuna zemin oluşturan, Gulam-Sepahsalar'a devredilmesi de vardır.
 Selçuklular döneminde Nizamülmülk önderliğinde tamamen yeni bir sistem oluştu ve Selçuklular bu sistemle diğer Müslüman devletlere model oldu. Yukarıdaki tartışmaya ek olarak, bu çalışma, Selçuklular döneminde iktanın gulamlar üzerindeki etkisini inceler.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline et le cinéma: voyage au bout de l’écran by Émile Brami

Reviewed by: Louis-Ferdinand Céline et le cinéma: voyage au bout de l’écran by Émile Brami James P. Gilroy Brami, Émile. Louis-Ferdinand Céline et le cinéma: voyage au bout de l’écran. Écriture, 2020 ISBN 978-2-35905-316-6. Pp. 158. This book will appeal to admirers of Céline and film historians. Brami presents a chronological description of the several attempts over the decades to adapt Voyage au bout de la nuit and other novels by Céline to the screen. All these efforts never led successfully to the making of a film. There were various reasons for this, such as the impossibility of obtaining financial backing or the involvement of the interested cinéastes in other projects. Some directors feared that they could not do justice to Céline’s text, especially the stark and disturbing quality of his style of writing. It was thought that Céline had achieved a deconstruction of the French language comparable to what Joyce had done to English. Somehow changing the author’s way of expressing himself to make it more accessible to movie spectators would constitute a desecration. Interestingly, Céline himself was very eager throughout the years between the publication of his novel in 1932 and his death in 1961 to have a film version made of it—and to reap the financial benefits of the film rights. As early as 1933, he tried to persuade Abel Gance, the renowned creator of the silent film Napoléon, to bring Voyage to the screen. According to Brami, this was both the first and the best opportunity to make a film of the novel. There was a young writer named Francis Norman who heard of the project and submitted a lengthy script to Gance based on the New York segment of the novel. Combining dialogue with extensive description of shots, Norman traced the sordid adventures of the hero Bardamu after he lands in America. The hopeful scénariste met with a polite refusal when the project was abandoned. Céline himself went to Hollywood in 1934 to get one of the big studios to make a movie of Voyage. His failure to arouse interest inspired him to pen an anti-Semitic diatribe against what he considered the domination of the American media by Jewish financial interests. In the year before he died, Céline even wrote a script for opening and closing scenes not found in his novel to be incorporated in a possible film. Although such cinematic giants of the 1960s as Godard, Fellini, and Visconti thought of making a film version of Voyage, as previously, nothing came of it. More recently, there was a proposal to make a television feuilleton of the novel. It was thought that a series with multiple episodes would be better able than a single film to capture the complexities of all the differing parts of the original work, but this project also failed to come to fruition. Brami devotes the last pages of his book to the illustrations made by the graphic artist Jacques Tardi for deluxe editions of Voyage, Mort à crédit, and Casse-pipe published in the late 1980s by Gallimard/Futuropolis. Céline’s widow Lucette and the administrator of his copyright insisted that Tardi’s drawings accompany the original text and not be used for a bande dessinée. [End Page 215] James P. Gilroy University of Denver (CO) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary

Cinema against Communication

This essay reassesses the concept of spectacle and argues for aesthetic refusal as a key strategy for contesting spectacle’s expanding hold on everyday existence. Against the view that spectacle renders the individual passive, the essay asserts instead that spectacle develops as a central postwar mechanism for intensifying the subject’s productivity and managing the growing anxiety that pervades post-Fordist social life. Highlighting the “refusal of work” that grounds 1960s Italian workerist movements, the essay proposes a corresponding refusal of communication, a form of aesthetic refusal that, as with political refusal, operates not through simple negation, but through creating openings or ruptures that allow new possibilities to emerge. Such aesthetic refusal, which finds its most radical postwar expression in the antispectacular films of Guy Debord, thus arises as a means to reorient perception, to break with existing modes of seeing so that different forms of existence might be envisioned and initiated.

Racial Impossibility and Critical Failure in W.E.B. Du Bois's <em>Darkwater</em>

This essay examines the relatively overlooked speculative short fiction included in W.E.B. Du Bois's Darkwater (1920): “The Princess of the Hither Isles,” “Jesus Christ in Texas,” and “The Comet.” I read these pieces in Darkwater through the lens of “racial impossibility” to discern the interconnectedness between Du Bois's fiction and his political theory in order to explore the role that his creative writing played in his imaginations of social change. I argue that Du Bois's fictional writings are not merely illustrations of his utopian thought but rather where it emerges. Specifically, it is precisely the failures of these fictions in imagining utopia that can be read as moments of political refusal that helped him cultivate his political theories.

Understanding Saudi Arabia's Influence on Pakistan: The Case of the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism

AbstractThe launch of the Saudi‐led so‐called Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism (IMAFT) in 2015 tested the strong strategic alliance between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. In light of concerns about the positioning of the coalition of 41 states against Iranian interests in the Middle East, Pakistan's initial response to the Saudi demand to join the war in Yemen was a polite refusal by means of a unanimous decision of the parliament. However, under tremendous pressure from Riyadh and other Gulf States, Islamabad later capitulated and backtracked from its initial decision. This paper analyses the unique nature of the relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia through a dissection of the various dimensions of the Kingdom's cultural and political influence on Pakistan. It also illuminates Saudi hegemonic strategies and the manner in which Islamabad adjusts and is influenced as well as coerced to revise its foreign policy choices. This paper argues that Saudi's diplomatic strategies, political pressure and pledges of generous financial assistance ensured Pakistan's participation in IMAFT.

Loneliness: Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill

Loneliness:Black Gay Longing in the Work of Essex Hemphill Darius Bost (bio) Do you think I could walk pleasantlyand well suited toward annihilation?with a scrotal sack full of primordial lonelinessswinging between my legslike solid bells? —Essex Hemphill Black gay poet, essayist, and performer Essex Hemphill was, arguably, the most prominent of the black gay intellectuals of the 1980s and early 1990s. His work addresses the psychological, social, and political struggles of urban black communities, and often maps the psychological, social, and political location of black gay men onto the black urban landscape. In "Heavy Breathing," Hemphill takes the reader on a city bus ride through 1980s black Washington, DC. The speaker of the poem rides the "X2, the bus I call a slave ship," with the "majority of its riders Black" (lines 65–66). The speaker defines the "X2" as a "risky ride," with its "cargo of block boys, urban pirates" (71–72). The imagery of the city bus as "a slave ship" and the riders as "cargo" conjures the historical trauma of the Middle Passage, suggesting a continuity between the social death of antebellum slavery and the urban poverty and decay produced by neoliberal capitalism. The speaker goes on to describe the spectacular forms of violence that emerged in Washington, DC, in the late '80s and '90s, as the line "the funerals of my brothers" alludes in part to how the nationwide crack epidemic greatly impacted crime in cities like Washington, DC, with a homicide rate so high in the late 1980s and early 1990s that it eventually earned DC the label of "murder capital."1 But the speaker attends these funerals only "at the end of heavy breathing" (63), signaling the climax of public sexual encounters with other men. It is in this same black urban [End Page 353] environment that the speaker negotiates the dangers and pleasures of same-sex desire. If read within this context, the speaker's "brothers" are also his same-sex-desiring brothers, and the "funerals" are also for those who have succumbed to homophobic violence and AIDS. A range of black cultural studies scholars, most notably Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton, have also theorized a continuity between antebellum slavery and contemporary blackness.2 Drawing on Orlando Patterson's conceptualization of antebellum slavery as "social death" and Saidiya Hartman's conception of "slavery's afterlife," these theorists point out the specificity and ubiquity of antiblackness obscured by hegemonic discourses of multiculturalism and colorblindness in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3 Furthermore, Sexton defines the lived experience of blackness as a "social life of social death" and expresses a political refusal to distance himself from blackness "in a valorization of minor differences that bring one closer to health, life, or sociality."4 But these theories have yet to fully account for gender and sexual difference for the queer "brothers" of Hemphill's poem, who also negotiate their lives under the sign of blackness. In Wilderson's formulation, queerness, as a "human" ontological category, depends on the non-ontology of blackness for its coherence, and, thus, the gratuitous violence done to black queer and transgender bodies is subsumed under the structures of anti-blackness. But afro-pessimist theories fail to address how non-normative black genders and sexualities signify differently, and how these so-called "minor differences" oftentimes bring black gender and sexual minorities closer to illness, death, and social exclusion under regimes of antiblackness. The line "funerals of my brothers" in Hemphill's poem conjures the ghostly presence of 1980s and 90s black gay intellectuals within contemporary theorizations of blackness fixed as pathology and as embodied subjectivity marked by (social) death. In addition to the racial retrenchment affecting urban black communities in the Reagan era, black gay artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1980s and 90s also experienced amplified cultural stigma attached to homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic. Many of them carried in their bodies the literal pathology of AIDS and a consciousness shaped as much by everyday black life as it was by black (social) death. Though the literary communities that they formed could not prevent their deaths, nor could they alleviate the debilitating psychic and...

Конструктивные и деструктивные аспекты отказа от общения

Marianna A. Gulyaeva (Volgograd State Social-Pedagogical University, Volgograd, Russian Federation) The article investigates the phenomenon of refusal from communication in terms of its positive and negative impact, both on the communicative process, and interpersonal relationships in general. It has been analyzed several aspects of the failure to communicate with positive communication position. The identification of constructive or destructive potential was carried out on the basis of three parameters such as productivity/ unproductive conflict resolution with the help of avoiding communication, the choice of an optimum way of non-communication and its role in the communication process on the basis of the functions performed by them. Failure to communicate is often perceived negatively and is considered an inefficient form of communication, so it does not allow to solve interpersonal conflicts. This article discusses the circumstances where refusal from communication advocates an effective way to avoid conflict. In situations where the termination of communication is inevitable, a fundamental factor for the positive, harmonious form of communication acts interrupting the communication process. Functioning in the communicative space, failure to communicate can either destroy an interaction and relationship between the partners, and regulate the communication process by guiding in the right direction, coordinating the behavior of communication. Key words: refusal from communication, communication termination, positive communication, interpersonal communication, polite refusal, impolite refusal . DOI: 10.18522/1995-0640-2016-4-59-68

Crossing the Border: Rethinking Failure and Exile in Lebanese Musalsalat

This research examines examines three Lebanese musalsalat, Min Kol Albi (Al-Jadeed), Ajyal (MTV), and Ichk Al Nisaa (LBCI), and their portrayal of characters with nonnormative sexualities living in Lebanon. Through the failure and subsequent exile of each character, a commentary on nation and its “constitutive outsiders” (Mikdashi, 2014) can be found. In each character’s crossing of the Lebanese border, the negative affects of shame, loss, and failure offer an escape from the “here and now.” Through exile, these characters are able to offer alternative ways of thinking about the dominant social structures we inhabit. If we think of failure and loss not as a “refusal of politics” but a “politics of refusal,” (Love, 2009) these portrayals offer potential in their capacity to cause a rupture in dominant systems of logic (Halberstam, 2011).

A Speculative History of No Future: Feminist Negativity and the Queer Dystopian Impulses of Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night

The theme of this and the previous special issue has been a flashpoint in the interdisciplinary field of queer studies since Lee Edelman's influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). Edelman argues that to be queer is to oppose futurity, coining the term “reproductive futurism” to describe the tendency to define political value in terms of a future “for the children” and insisting that the power of queer critique inheres in its opposition to this narrative and therefore to politics as we know it. This assertion inspired extensive debate on relationships between queer artistic and political movements and discourses of futurity. This article argues that the conversation changes when feminist writings on the politics of reproduction and the genre of speculative fiction are taken into account, as they have not been so far. Drawing on Katharine Burdekin's dystopia Swastika Night (1937), the article suggests that the history of feminist speculative fiction offers a counter to twenty-first-century queer scholarship's sometimes reductive approaches to gender and reproduction. Burdekin's book is best known for its prescience in imagining the horrifying prospect of a Nazi victory before Britain's entry into World War II. It prefigures many concerns of queer studies in its disturbing depictions of homoerotic love among Nazi soldiers and women reduced to mindlessly reproductive bodies. Focusing on the significance of the women in her narrative, the article argues that Burdekin's speculative critique of fascist futurity turns saying no to the future into an effective form of feminist resistance — one that does not require a refusal of politics itself.

The Effect of Implicit and Explicit Types of Feedback on Learners’ Pragmatic Development

Having adopted a pretest- posttest design with a control group, this study investigated the effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on pragmatic development of Iranian EFL learners. Having received explicit instruction, forty intermediate participants in this study received explicit type of feedback (matalinguistic explanation) and implicit type of feedback (recast) in response to any utterance containing an error in doing the role plays of refusals. One week after a treatment lasting 10 days, pragmatic acquisition was measured by a Discourse Completion Test. Results of Chi-square indicated that both treatment groups outperformed the control group and the proportion of using all subcomponents of polite refusal strategy except for one of the subcomponents outweighed in explicit group compared with implicit group.

The Critic as Quietist

Though a radical critic of capitalist society, Thorstein Veblen was a political quietist. His ideas of social evolution, cultural lag, and predatory power help to explain why. Veblen saw the need for deep-seated social change but despaired of its chances. He was in crucial ways a tragic writer, a radical realist who refused to yield to the temptations of political life. Veblen's quietism also helps to explain the hesitant, often unwelcome reception more ideologically minded scholars have given to his work. Attributing Veblen's quietism to timidity or confusion, they have frequently avoided coming to grips with his distinctions between theory and pragmatism, science and politics, which lie at the heart of his political refusal. Theory and science push toward reasonable explanations and accounts of things; pragmatic and predatory political actors apply “worldly wisdom” to the exploit of others. Scientists cannot change institutions; political actors cannot dispense with the operations of power. Veblen asks much of us: for he struggled to undrape the veils of power while puncturing false hopes in the prospects of democracy. His quietism situates itself within this awful contradiction. Above all, Veblen's work serves the purpose of reminding us that neither science nor democracy constitutes a self-evident ground for belief in the inherent reasonableness or justice of action per se. For these reasons alone, an acquaintance with his work should be part of any solidly grounded education in the possibilities and limits of democratic political life in a scientific age.

Be Still, Be Good, Be Cool: The Ambivalent Powers of Stillness in an Overactive World

Be Still, Be Good, Be Cool: The Ambivalent Powers of Stillness in an Overactive World

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Politics, Mortal and Natal: An Arendtian Rejoinder

Is there a that 'politics' makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which 'politics' appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the 'body politic' must survive (Post-Partum 181)? What is that space? What would it mean to embrace or assume or embody the prevailing figuration of that space in order to disturb or refuse the political realm as such? Having reflected on Lee Edelman's carefully argued response to my criticism of Future Is Kid Stuff, I think that the salient issues of contention between us lie in our respective responses to these questions. There are indeed spaces outside the political realm. The form they take varies according to the nature of the political order. In Eastern Europe under communist rule, for example, there emerged a signifi cant refusal of politics. The Hungarian writer George Konrad called it anti-politics. Communist states, particularly after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, denied all avenues for citizens to organize or express themselves within the political sphere. Moreover, the mechanisms of one-party rule made every facet of life political by ex erting control over intellectual and artistic life, public opinion, even individuals' choice of occupation and housing and their freedom of movement. The repression of conflict within the political realm went hand-in-hand with the omnipresent reach of politics into the nonpolitical realm. Citizens could counteract the omnipresence of the state, Konrad argued, only by refusing politics and devoting their minds and ac tivities to whatever remaining spaces eluded the reach of the state (see Konrad's Anti-Politics). This withdrawal from politics was painful, precarious, and risky, but had unexpected political effects; the anti-political citizens contributed to the eventual

The New Monthly Magazine and the Liberalism of the 1820s

In the 1820s, the New Monthly Magazine under Henry Colburn, Thomas Campbell, and Cyrus Redding participated in a new domain of public opinion, exploited by Tory apostate George Canning for its leverage against partisan gridlock. Current criticism takes the New Monthly's refusal of partisanship as a refusal of politics, calling it an authorless institution. Yet partisanship caused the death of the London Magazine's editor, and the New Monthly went on to dominate the London market by embracing constitutionalism abroad and middle-class reformism at home. Through its contributors, republican émigrés, offshore commentators, and women writers sharing a republican idiom, the New Monthly promoted institutional as well as political reform: a better term than authorless for the magazine's identity, then, is coverture.

In the Rustic Kitchen: Real Talk and Reciprocity

The evaluation of social communication in the town of Orgosolo is implicitly engaged with definitively Sardinian and traditional practices of hospitality. Sensually rooted in meaningful material culture, these practices enwrap participants in a moral world within which positive reciprocity and co-operation can be presumed as normative. Both language and everyday sociality in Orgosolo operate symbolically to transform verbal exchange so that the processes involved in making words fit social consumption largely mimic the rigorous local standards of authenticity applied to baking bread or roasting meat. Townspeople highlight their own regional and national marginality by affirming their ideas of real in contrast to the untrustworthy discourses of bureaucrats and party politicians. By cultivating hospitality as a sphere of political expression, they attempt to subvert cultural constructions of their backwardness and legitimize the authority of their own informal discourses. (Italy, Sardinia, politics of hospitality, authenticity, the senses) ********** Over the course of fieldwork in the town of Orgosolo, in central Sardinia, I often asked people to explain how the political climate had changed over the past twenty or 30 years. The seeming apathy of residents toward la politica appeared to be a recent trend. In postwar rural Sardinia, as in Italy generally during that period, party politics was an important part of social life. One woman described how even through the 1970s, political parties held public demonstrations and assemblies for everything ... you were always hearing an announcement on the loudspeakers or a car going around advertising a meeting one party or another, and if the Christian Democrats had a meeting, the Communist Party had to have one too, they vied with one another to see who had more meetings. At the end of the 1960s, there were vibrant sections of several political parties, and two circles led active lobbies on several issues. Yet two decades later, people in their teens, twenties, and thirties often insisted they knew nothing about politics, that they were uninterested in political parties and did not see any differences between them. Most would talk earnestly and thoughtfully about issues and events, but not about political parties. Few people had party memberships, and many skipped official town assemblies as a general rule, saying that they already knew what would be said and who would speak. Quite apparently the political climate had changed much in the course of one generation. Older people agreed that the role of organized political parties had declined. Many people who had once participated in various political projects spoke nostalgically about the period prior to the 1980s, and no longer thought it was useful to work within the party framework. Some expressed disillusionment with the left-wing activists who got their permanent job posts and ran out of steam lobbying and organizing, Si sono tutti sistemati (they all got settled). An artist, teacher, and former youth activist at Orgosolo suggested that the problem lay not in the degeneration of political organizers, but in the people, who had become more diffident toward the politicians. A former mayor also explained the changing mode of politics in Orgosolo as a decline in popular participation: [T]he indifference [today] towards the problem of employment, or the lack of [political] participation to change our life, waiting others to change it, is something unpleasant. Political life today is less intense than that of yesterday: probably one believes less than before, one has less faith, one is tired of the behavior of the political world or of the government. This phenomenon of political refusal is often attributed to the changing national context within which party politics in Sardinia takes shape. Following World War II and the creation of the Republic of Italy, extensive patronage networks evolved in association with key political parties. …

HoraceCarm.2.12, Maecenas, and Prose History

Carm.2.12 has often received attention because scholiasts observe that Licymnia is a pseudonym for Maecenas' wife Terentia. The poem is also interesting for the originality of therecusatioit contains, and for the comments it elicits from scholars on Maecenas. Horace begins with a polite refusal to incorporate epic themes into his poetry, and in lines 9-12 he announces that Maecenas will better tell of Caesar's deeds in prose (‘pedestribus historiis’). Rejections of grand themes are found in Greek poetry, but for Roman poets therecusatioacquired the added function of dismissing apparent requests for weighty poetry, and poets on occasion address Maecenas inrecusationesthat supposedly decline his requests. Typically the poet recommends another poet to undertake the rejected task in a more elevated style, usually because the other person's talent (ingenium) is better suited to the job. In the case ofCarm.2.12.9-12, however, Maecenas himself is the suggested alternate, and he is not asked to compose a poem, but to write about Caesar's deeds in prose. Interpretations of these lines tend to focus on Horace's motives for suggesting that Maecenas, whose literary style was notoriously bad, should compose anything, much less prose history, for Caesar. In fact there are no motives or hidden meanings concerning Maecenas as a writer. Horace merely turned to a genre that better represented both his patron's status and the weightiness of Caesar's deeds.