Revolutionary Ambitions Research Articles

Marxist Realism: Kobayashi Takiji and the Politics of Representation

This paper explores the cross-cultural dynamics and contradictions that surface when attempting to apply the universal claims of Marxist literary aesthetics to the particular case of a non-Western national tradition. More specifically, the key work of 1930s proletarian writer, Kobayashi Takiji (“The Factory Ship”) and his mentoring relationship to Marxist critic, Kurahara Korehito, will be analyzed by examining the tensions in trying to remain faithful to the universal, international claims of global Marxism, while also respecting Japanese historical and cultural particulars and conditions. Broadly speaking, the issues that surface in the Kobayashi/Kurahara relationship reflect inherent difficulties in maintaining metanarrative dimension of orthodox Marxism that belies its Western framework regarding world historical movements. The tension between the universal and particular poles of Marxism’s global vs Japanese context also frames parallel tension between the literary/aesthetic realm of art and its political content; remaining true to the former may bracket the assumed-to-be applicable state of the latter. In short, the question of the viability of a particular work of fiction’s realism (namely, its literariness) vs its fidelity to political orthodoxy, often articulated in terms of its form versus content. Finally, this tension between the universal global and particular national culture setting of Marxist literature and Marxist politics also may indicate a tension inherent within the revolutionary ambitions of idealist philosophy, namely Hegelianism. Stated differently, is Marxist philosophy itself a work of art/fiction – the utopic impulse of the classless society and worldwide revolution – at odds with the realities of specific historical and cultural conditions ‘on the ground’?

Displaying Socialist Cosmopolitanism: China’s Architectural Aid in the Global South, 1960s–70s

After World War Two, modern architecture was disseminated worldwide by western architects. However, the role of Chinese architects in Asian and African countries during the Cold War has been largely overlooked. Chinese-aided projects were initiated by communist leaders and executed through state-owned design institutes and construction companies. This article explores these projects as a cultural expression of socialist cosmopolitanism, as China sought to reshape the world order of the 1960s through political, cultural, and material interventions. It argues that architects from state-owned design institutes helped newly independent Guinea and Sri Lanka form national identities through architectural intervention by adopting cosmopolitan ideas that maintained sensitivities to differences and appreciation for others. By embracing situated cosmopolitanism and socialist ideologies, Chinese political leaders and building professionals saw themselves as partners with revolutionary ambitions who respected others with geographical and cultural differences on the global stage.

« Working Thru These Bullshit White People » : l’histoire éditoriale de l’anthologie Black Fire , entre conformité et subversion

This article traces the editorial circumstances in which the anthology Black Fire, milestone of the Black Arts Movement, was published. The anthologists insisted on the existence of racial tensions when the book was released, tensions which were real but which were also part of broader editorial negotiations, all the more so since the very form of the anthology seemed to thwart a revolutionary ambition.

NAVIGATING THE POSTWAR LIBERAL ORDER: AUTONOMY, CREATIVITY AND MODERNISM IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA, 1949–1953

Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state–society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. “Self-management socialism,” as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.

Swain, Geoffrey A Short History of the Russian Revolution (review)

REVIEWS 373 Swain, Geoffrey. A Short History of the Russian Revolution. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2017. xxiii + 232 pp. Illustrations. Timeline. Further reading. Notes. Index. £10.99 (paperback). The intention of the I. B. Tauris Short Histories series is to provide ‘introductions with an edge’, combining ‘informed interpretation’ with ‘factual reportage’. Geoffrey Swain’s contribution to the series certainly fulfils that remit. It is packed with factual detail, particularly about the political history of 1917 in Petrograd, and it presents a distinctive interpretation of the Russian Revolution. The main emphasis is placed upon accounting for the Bolshevik victory and subsequent consolidation of power, since, as the author states, ‘Most of the history of the twentieth century can be traced back to the events of the night of 24–25 October 1917’ (p. 1). Swain makes two salient arguments. The first is that ‘the October Revolution represented the culmination of those revolutionary ambitions first articulated by Russia’s masses during the failed 1905 Revolution’ (p. 1). He challenges the view found amongst ‘optimistic’ historians of the pre-Revolutionary years that the labour movement was reformist after 1905, arguing instead, with the ‘pessimists’, that it remained revolutionary, not least because the liberal movement consistently failed to represent its interests (for example, when it accepted ‘sham constitutionalism’ in 1905–06 at the expense of wider-ranging social reform). In this view, the February Revolution, with its seemingly fleeting prospects for a liberal outcome to the disintegration of tsarism, was an aberration in a longer-term ineluctable process. This, as Swain acknowledges, was the standard interpretation of Soviet historians, but it also echoes the work of social historians in the West who, in the 1970s and 1980s, portrayed the revolution as ‘an explosion of popular fury’ to which the Bolsheviks gave ‘political form’ (p. 3). The second main argument of the book relates to the aftermath of October. Swain argues that the roots of the one-party state are to be found in Bolshevik ideology, particularly suspicion of the peasantry. Lenin feared that Russia’s peasant majority would jeopardize the socialist revolution — which could be spearheaded only by the proletariat — by, for example, supporting a counterrevolution , as occurred after the 1848 revolution in France. This fear lay behind Lenin’s determination not to work in coalition with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, whose support was based in the countryside, and whose position as the most popular political movement in revolutionary Russia was confirmed in the Constituent Assembly elections. The Bolshevik leader countenanced a temporary coalition with the Left SRs only because, as he saw it, they represented the ‘poorest peasants’ who might stoke class war against peasant landowners. But that coalition soon began to unravel over the Brest-Litovsk SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 374 peace negotiations and the introduction of grain requisitioning in spring 1918, and the abortive Left SR uprising in July 1918 accelerated the drift towards civil war. Throughout all these developments, Lenin persistently invoked the concept of party discipline to assert his position. Ultimately, the author argues, it was this combination of discipline and ideology that led the masses ‘along an unnecessary path’ to ‘dictatorship and terror’ (p. 2). Swain makes the case for this interpretation of the revolution in a robust manner that clearly reflects his deep and detailed knowledge of the topic, and although not everyone will agree fully with his main arguments, this is a stimulating and concise introduction to some key themes. The focus is very much on the period from the February Revolution to the summer of 1918, and in this respect the book provides a more condensed chronological treatment of the revolution than has been typical in recent historiography. It can be contrasted with, for example, the growing body of scholarship that discusses 1917 as part of a broader context of uninterrupted crisis that stretched from 1914 to 1922. University of Dundee Murray Frame Chernev, Borislav. Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2017. xx + 301 pp. Map. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. The latest general study on this topic before...

Borders and sovereignty in Islamist and jihadist thought: past and present

This article explores how Islamists and jihadists have framed issues pertaining to sovereignty, borders, as well as political and religious identity, over the last century. At a time when the territorial delimitations of several Arab countries seem more fickle than ever, it is necessary to address how Islamists and jihadists view the historical and contemporary aspects of borders and sovereignty. The Islamists, on the one hand—whose aim is creating a caliphate—have had to deal with unexpected realities, turning inevitably to some extent of reform of their original revolutionary ambition. The jihadists, on the other hand, while remaining committed to an armed struggle to unify Muslims worldwide, do not advocate for any action other than global insurrection. By focusing on the writings and discourses of major Islamist and jihadist leaders, it thus appears that the study of borders and sovereignty is indispensable to understanding the similarities and differences between the two ideologies. In addition, the study of borders and sovereignty allows for predicting developments in the region that largely pertain to the desire to achieve (jihadists) or amend (modern Islamists) the original revisionist design. It appears that borders, territory and sovereignty prove to be significant constraints for both Islamists and jihadists. Evidently, both Islamists and jihadists have reacted in diverging ways to the political and cultural realities that stand against their founding ideology—with certain Islamist movements having thus nationalized their doctrine, while jihadists still remain eager to achieve their original ambition.

When China goes to the Moon… By Marco Aliberti

When looking back at China half a century ago, the year 1966 is usually remembered for the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. But, as we learn from Marco Aliberti's stimulating When China goes to the Moon…, it was also the year when China sent its first dog into space (p. 80), one year after the first proposal to put Chinese astronauts in space. This was part of a period of huge strategic and revolutionary ambition during which Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's then putative successor, played a key role until his suspicious death in a plane crash in 1971. It was not until 1986 that the revival of China's space programme began. Aliberti's book, part of a series of studies in space policy, gives a detailed and thoroughly researched account of this programme, with a particular focus on plans for a human lunar mission. This is a balanced assessment of the programme's feasibility, covering its technical as well as strategic elements. Chapter two traces the institutions and structures through which policy is made, demonstrating the complexity and nuance required to understand Chinese policy-making processes in general. Chapter three sets out the motivation for China's lunar ambitions, showing that they are not just driven by their role in ‘regain[ing] the status of great power’ (p. 56) and the message of regime legitimacy that the achievement of successful milestones brings, but also by deeper Chinese cultural imaginings about the moon. Chapters four and five assess these plans as being broadly feasible, as long as China's development trajectory remains solid, while showing the gradual and cautious nature of their implementation (targets originally set in the 1990s had proved too ambitious).

Agyeya's Unfinished Revolution: Sexual and Social Freedom in Shekhar: Ek Jivani

ABSTRACTSachchidananda Hiranand Vatsyayan, also known as ‘Agyeya’, famously penned his three-volume modernist Hindi novel, Shekhar: Ek Jivani (Shekhar: A Life) while he was imprisoned by the British during 1930–33 for his participation in revolutionary terrorist activities. The novel, however, was incompletely published: only the first two volumes were released (in 1941 and 1944, respectively). The incompleteness of Agyeya's Shekhar manifests both writerly dissatisfaction and the transformation of the political landscape in newly independent India. Shekhar, a story of the life of a revolutionary, becomes impossible once revolution is undesired and impossible. The form of the novel, its revolutionary ambition and the construction of a writerly sensibility are all exhausted in the same moment. While revolutionary ambition is normally associated in Hindi with the realism of the All India Progressive Writers Movement (AIPWA), Agyeya's modernism was born out of aesthetic debates that he had with the poets affiliated to the AIPWA and from his Trotskyist politics.

Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico

The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.

Back to the Future

Among the many ‘founding myths’ of Italian Fascism such as those regarding its relationship to the First World War, one element stood out as key to both its quest for absolute dominion over the Italian peninsula and its historically based self-concept and representation: the idea of present-day Italy as incarnating the spirit and virtuousness of Roman (late Republican and early Imperial) antiquity, creating the image of a Terza Roma, of a ‘third’, Fascist Rome. This concept was omnipresent throughout the entire period within which Mussolini dominated Italian politics. This very specific use of the historical past is discussed in this article, tracing its presence in various parts of the cultural and intellectual field, identifying the manifold ways in which history can meet contemporary, and ‘futural’, prerequisites. In so doing, it is inspired by recent scholarship underlining the futural, temporal thrust of Fascism and romanità, rather than its traditionally reactionary, backward-looking dynamic. As seems, at least to a certain extent, to have been the case in Nazi Germany, for the Fascists, antiquity indeed was no faraway, dusty past, but a lively source of inspiration and energy revealing the regime’s modernist, revolutionary ambition to build a ‘Third Rome’ which, literally and figuratively, made visible the earlier layers of Roman heritage.

Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s–1940s

Made in Mexico is a very important book that fills a number of gaps in the literature on postrevolutionary Mexico by tracing the national and regional development of the country’s industrial sector. The book, which explores the conflicts among industrialists and labor leaders as well as state and federal policy makers over statist industrialism, is well written, thoroughly researched, and rests firmly on materials from Mexico City’s national depositories as well as the state archives of Jalisco, Nuevo León, and Puebla. According to author Susan Gauss, the postrevolutionary Mexican state sought to reconcile class interests in order to advance industrial capitalism. Federal policies were “shaped not only by dependent development and radical revolutionary ambitions, such as working-class mobilization, but also by regional resilience generated by shifting local alliances of industrialists, labor, and politicians” (p. 17). In spite of the many problems faced by federal officials, Gauss concludes that statist industrialism was a “flexible nationalist political project” that was able to “appropriate, tolerate, or marginalize alternative regional industrial paths and the rival visions of political rule and modern social relations attached to them” (p. 21).Gauss smartly debunks some lingering revisionist arguments regarding the rise of a leviathan state and the hegemonic collusion that existed between Mexico’s ruling party and its national bourgeoisie. She rightly shows that Mexico’s political and economic elite were often divided over questions regarding industrialization, with the state sometimes siding with workers against employers for political ends. Miguel Alemán’s administration, for instance, refused to grant machinery import permits to Puebla’s textile industrialists because, although said imports would have modernized an antiquated industry, the new machinery would have reasserted management’s authority over local labor, weakened the latter’s collective contracts, and undermined the corporatist relationship between workers and the official party, which was critical to the power of both the central state and the ruling party.On the other hand, because of the federal government’s limited power, Mexico City could not always impose its agenda on the country, and occasionally it yielded to the demands of regional manufacturers. In Gauss’s opinion, Mexico’s path to protected industrial development “was contested and erratic.” Even groups that supported statist industrialism — and many in the larger agricultural sector did not — were divided over federal policy. Technocrats across a broad range of state agencies, including the Offices of Industrial and Economic Research, along with the Secretariats of the Treasury, Industry, Labor, Presidency, and National Economy, frequently disagreed and “struggled to coordinate their efforts, especially when facing economic crisis, dependency, and the regular sexennial transitions in federal administrations that often subordinated economic planning to politics and precluded designing or implementing comprehensive economic policies” (p. 244). Consequently, Mexico’s federal officials were unable to build a viable bureaucracy that was “capable of defining, coordinating, or implementing planned industrial development” (p. 16).Besides the state sector, divisions over public policy also existed between factory owners and among private sector commercial associations, including the National Chamber of Manufacturing Industry (CANACINTRA), the Confederation of Industrial Chambers (CONCAMIN), and the Mexican Employers Association (COPARMEX). As for the former group, regional identities, personal rivalries, and diverse political proclivities and attitudes toward local rule and modern social relations divided industrialists and affected how they responded to state policies over import licenses, quotas, tariffs, foreign loans, aid and investment, domestic price controls, federal financing, tax breaks, subsidies, and labor rights, among other issues, many of which were connected to import substitution industrialization.The primary strength of Gauss’s work is that she paints a very messy picture of industry, labor, and the state that varies between economic sectors, regions, political administrations, and historical eras. As is often the case, heterogeneity characterized the day. Like many postrevolutionary scholars, Gauss illustrates the complexity and contradictions of her topic and smartly avoids lumping actors together. Although the book’s breadth is worthy of praise, it remains an elite history that sometimes exists in a historical vacuum. For example, while labor leaders are well studied, little attention is given to the everyday lives of industrial workers, either inside the factories or in their communities. Had Gauss documented the impact of the political, industrial, and labor elites’ policies on workers, and had she given rank-and-file workers a voice in her narrative, readers would have gained a fuller understanding of Mexico’s midcentury industrial development and read a more interesting story. Additionally, the historical evolution of mexicanidad as a postrevolutionary cultural product that Gauss claims justified federal industrial policy, especially during Alemán’s presidency, warrants more thorough analysis than is presented here. These criticisms aside, those interested in modern Mexico and Latin American industrialization will benefit greatly from this fine study.

Surrealism, Dada, and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism, and Social Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde

Discussions of the relatively recent notion of ‘activist-art’ have two common art-historical frames. The first is formal: the post-modern move towards collective or participatory art practices.1 The second is critical and historical: that of the revolutionary ambitions of the historical avant-garde, and their ‘failure’ or ‘success'. This frame, made central by Peter Bürger in 1974, has produced a wealth of criticism.2 Perhaps due to this weight of criticism, these two frames are often considered in isolation from one another. Meanwhile, the narrative of the failure of the radical avant-garde3 project has become a common one. However, this tragic historical narrative is far less clear cut than it is often presumed to be. Against these melancholy readings of history, it is possible to trace another, joyful, trajectory: a history not of the failure of the radical avant-garde, but of its success. But rather than defending the ‘success’ of later ‘neo-avant-garde’ art, this article will attempt to offer a historical rethinking of the frame of radical avant-gardism in the art and writing of Dada and Surrealism by drawing on the ideas of autonomist Marxist theorists such as Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, and others.4 This is a tradition that, while still Marxist, is opposed to the philosophical Western Marxist tradition5 to which Bürger belongs in its emphasis on the primacy of revolutionary agency over ideological critique. This reappraisal of the radical avant-garde begins by examining the theme of the refusal of work in Surrealism and Dadaism.6 But to do so first necessitates a critical return to accounts of the avant-garde's use or negation of the autonomy of art, alongside an examination of their engagement with cultural practices beyond this autonomy.

Tear down the walls: Jefferson Airplane, race, and revolutionary rhetoric in 1960s rock

AbstractWhile the notion of the ‘rock revolution’ of the 1960s has by now become commonplace, scholars have rarely addressed the racial implications of this purported revolution. This article examines a notorious 1968 blackface performance by Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, to shed light on a significant tendency in 1960s rock: white musicians casting themselves as political revolutionaries by enacting an idealised vision of African American identity. Rock, a form dominated by white musicians and audiences but pervasively influenced by black music and style, conveyed deeply felt but inconsistent notions of black identity in which African Americans were simultaneously subjected to insensitive stereotypes and upheld as examples of moral authority and revolutionary authenticity. Jefferson Airplane's references to black culture and politics were multifaceted and involved both condescending or naïve radical posturing and sincere respect for African American music. The Airplane appear to have been engaged in a complex if imperfect attempt to create a contemporary musical form that reflected African American influences without asserting dominance over those influences. Their example suggests that closer attention to racial issues allows us to address the revolutionary ambitions of 1960s rock without romanticising or trivialising them.

The Good Book and the Good Life: Bestselling Biographies in China's Economic Reform

AbstractThis article looks at currently bestselling biographies in urban China as popular histories of the national self from 1949 to the present. In their retrospective narrations of the Cultural Revolution and economic reform, they identify a reorientation of life away from ideological community and towards market rationality. I locate this shift also in the history of the publishing industry that produces them and analyse how publishing practices and values have changed from Mao to Jiang, to argue that a reconstitution of the “good” has been effected by the deployment of old rhetorical goals under structurally new conditions. Extended into the broader political arena, this suggests that institutional continuity in contemporary China masks a reconstitution of governance itself, from direct intervention and political control to administrative regulation and commercial competitiveness. Communist revolutionary ambitions are now redefined and fulfilled through economic success in commercial enterprise. Contrary to the prevalent notion that such couplings are contradictory and unsustainable, I argue that a mutually generative relationship currently exists between the two.

Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics (review)

Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics, by Michael Heller. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2005. 247 pp. $21.95. When poet and critic Michael Heller wrote his first book of prose, Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), Objectivists were neglected stepchildren of American modernism, overshadowed by far more famous poets who influenced them (Pound, Williams) and by bravura public careers of poets that followed (Robert Lowell, W H. Auden, and New American Poets of 1950s and 60s). Twenty years later, core group of Objectivists are routinely anthologized, with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Neidecker-all but last of them Jewish-seen as major figures in their own right and in history of American verse. Heller, too, has finally begun to receive attention he deserves, not least as leadoff figure in Objectivist Continuities chapter of Norman Finkelstein's Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. Uncertain Poetries, selection of Heller's essays, talks, and reviews twenty years, shows how far range of this poet's interests have carried him beyond tradition-and how thinking deeply within this tradition, as well as outside it, has carried him into distinctive, appealing account of relationship between poetry and more generally. Heller strikes keynote for collection in opening sentence of Uncertainty of Poet, meditation on painting of that name by Italian modernist Georgio de Chirico. I am he declares, investigating floating filigree of doubt and fear, that feeling of being on edge, which often accompanies poetic composition (p. 3). Heller's essays pursue edgy encounters incumbent upon writing poetry: encounters with oneself, one's culture, one's imagined future readers, and most profoundly with what Gershom Scholem described, in passage Heller cites, as the abyss in which freedom of living things is born (p. 230). By opening his collection with an essay on de Chirico's enigmatically allegorical cityscape, Heller joins fine tradition of poets who have explored their own poetics by writing about visual art. Heller writes with sympathy and sensuous intelligence on Pound's relationship with sculptor GaudierBrzeska and Rilke's interest in Rodin and Cezanne, painter who gave German poet a way to use past (p. 57), and uses contrasts between their disparate Romantic and Vorticist versions of modernism to triangulate his own about nature of form and uses of artistic tradition. The Rilke who set himself to study at Cezanne's easel, Heller writes, did so to learn to write a poetry in which precision and uncertainty were inextricably joined (p. 59). To Heller, lyric poetry ought to articulate both affirmation and doubt-ideally, in fact, it should do so simultaneously, although as several essays make clear, poem will be just as well off if it tracks poet's trajectory the museums of received ideas (p. 178) into open space of new, or from known into unknown, as George Oppen put it in passage Heller cites (p. 200). Heller's emphasis on this double-sidedness of literary act (p. 3) serves to distinguish his poetics those promulgated by Language poets, that radically skeptical, radically theoretical cadre of poets who announced their presence in early 1980s. That Language poets saw themselves as heirs to Objectivists seems to have sparked need, on Heller's part, to distinguish his vision of that inheritance theirs; several essays here, notably Avant-Garde Propellants of Machine Made of Words, take up how his own ideal of poetry that frees us intellectual dogma and orthodoxy differs their revolutionary ambitions. …

Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic

In his article "Metamorphosing Worlds in the Cinema of the Fantastic" Juan González Etxeberria reads fantastic films as appealing products of both unconscious psychological and institutionalized sociological anxieties. A result of the binary opposition of rhetorical strategies that shaped modern culture, the genre is an open door to other worlds where to dream of uncertainties and to indulge in our traumas. Its transgressive indeterminacy against the Cartesian system is traced from the origin of creative filmic language to postmodern disturbing fantasies about the unknown, having social control and individual free will as the only limits of its imaginary trips across time and space. Technical and financial restraints, on the one hand, and mystical and revolutionary ambitions, on the other, have configured a genre that has lately become an even more polysemic and polymorphic universe, where computer-generated simulations fulfil human desires and seek pleasure through a new vision of the body, a site where natural and cultural orders fade away. Resemblance to actual places or to persons living or dead, especially the latter, is never coincidental.

Post-Political Theatre versus the Theatre of Political Struggle

In this article Bérénice Hamidi-Kim tests the hypothesis that two conflicting interpretations of the notion of ‘political theatre’ exist on the French stage today. She suggests that each is based on a specific ideology stemming from a specific conception of history and policy, which results in a legitimation of the theatre and of artists both in the theatrical field and in society at large. One, which she calls ‘post-political theatre’, seems to proceed from a radical anthropological and political pessimism, and has deliberately severed all links with all previous forms of political theatre and given up any revolutionary ambitions. The other, which she calls ‘political-struggle theatre’, proudly embraces the legacy of the earlier forms of revolutionary political theatre – the epic form of documentary theatre in particular – and is attempting to revive the political ambition of contributing to a comprehensive, coherent critical project, based on the assumption that theatre is a preparatory school for reality and for political action. Bérénice Hamidi-Kim's doctoral thesis was entitled ‘The Cities of Political Theatre in France from 1989 to 2007’. She is also author of ‘Quelle place politique et culturelle pour le cadre de l'Etat-Nation dans le théâtre de gauche français?’ in the e-review Sens Public (2006), and of ‘Théâtre populaire, immigration, intégration, et identité nationale’, forthcoming in the February 2008 issue of Etudes Théâtrales.

Happy Anniversary! Time and critique in International Relations theory

ABSTRACTAll critical theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in the present and future in international politics. This article argues that if critical international theory is to have a future that lives up to its revolutionary ambition, then it needs to listen more carefully to the voices of postcolonial and feminist critics and take on board the heterotemporality of international politics.

Commissioning the Truth

This Article was originally written as an invited contribution to a workshop on Gender and Transitional Justice organized by the International Centre for Transitional Justice. My particular assignment for that workshop was to write a discussion paper which addressed the key category of The idea of truth has a particularly potent role to play in the world of transitional justice. For many scholars and practitioners in this field, uncovering the truth is understood as a vital task, both at an individual and at a collective level. At the individual level, is presented in therapeutic terms, as a means of healing those who have been wounded by the violence of civil war, revolution, or despotism. At the collective level, establishing the truth of a contested history is understood as a necessary basis for moving forward as a nation and creating the conditions for a viable, shared life. The title of this Article indicates a certain distance from this vision of the ends of truth. In particular, the word is there as a reminder. Throughout, this Article makes visible the institutional conditions and productive effects of the commissioning of truth. Testimony or speech becomes part of commissioned truth through institutional mediation--through the institutions of language, of the state, and of liberal internationalism. How should we try to understand what takes place when an international body, a state, or a private organization seeks to write the truth of history? How should we understand the situation of the subject who is called upon to speak her truth in such a context? What does the act of writing a commissioned truth bring into being? What does the commissioning of an official truth mean for the addressees of such performances? Much critical literature on the current international enthusiasm for the establishment of international criminal courts, war crimes tribunals, and truth commissions in fact does focus on the conditions of production of truth in an institutional context. This literature argues that the juridification of the post-conflict, post-revolutionary, or transitional situation must be understood as part of a broader attempt to create a new world order of liberal democracies in which politics is forever deferred and history comes to an end. Indeed, my initial posture towards the appeal to truth-telling in situations of charged international intervention was one of skepticism. My earlier work had explored the arrival of human rights as a justification or alibi for military intervention during the 1990s. (1) In writing on post-conflict reconstruction, I had sought to explore the way in which economic restructuring, exploitation, and management was enabled by humanitarian intervention, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Timor L'Este. I had wanted to understand how it was that the presence of agents of global market integration alongside the militaries of powerful nations and their corporate investors could be interpreted, so straightforwardly, as benevolent and charitable. This research shaped my response to the post-Cold War project of globalizing transitional justice. My first reaction was to read appeals to truth with an assumption that their address to an audience of liberal internationalists might work to mask ways in which states undergoing transition were also being produced as reliable subjects of the capitalist democratic order. At the same time, the operation of transitional justice mechanisms would ask the inhabitants of these countries to articulate their needs, desires, losses, hopes, revolutionary ambitions, and so on in the name of a universal humanitarianism. Yet is the arrival of human rights, here in the form of transitional justice institutions, always accompanied by a particular form of restructuring of the subject? Can the process of internationalization be understood as a simple unity with all its operations coordinated to achieve one set of interests? …

Como salvar a educação (e o sujeito) pela literatura: sobre Philippe Meirieu e Jorge Larrosa

A tentativa de aproximação entre literatura e educação está encontrando um número cada vez maior de adeptos. Isso parece indicar a emergência de um novo logos pedagógico que tenta, talvez, ultrapassar as fronteiras de reflexão impostas pelas "ciências da educação". Algumas dessas tentativas, no entanto, apresentam certas (e compreensíveis) limitações, como a ausência de uma "teoria da recepção" dos textos ficcionais, mas, em outros casos, demonstra a ambição de revolucionar o discurso pedagógico por intermédio da literatura, na qual a própria pedagogia se transforma em projeto de "estetização da existência". Tomando Philippe Meirieu e Jorge Larrosa como ilustrações das "limitações" e da "ambição revolucionária", respectivamente, o artigo procura mostrar como o romantismo e o nietzscheanismo tentam constituir um novo discurso que pretende, uma vez mais, nos salvar da "sociedade administrada".