Oppositional Stance Research Articles

Genealogies of (anti-)Blackness in the Maghreb: Africanity, Arabness, and the French colonial legacy

This essay starts with the unstable valence of the term “African” in governmental discourses and their media treatment in Morocco and Tunisia, which vacillate between a political and cultural solidarity on the one hand, and an oppositional stance on the other hand, whereby the “Arabness” of the Maghreb is posited as oppositional to the Blackness of Africa. The essay grapples with the competing historical and epistemic frames that attempt to explain this conflicting relation. The “colonialist thesis,” whereby the origin of the “tale of two Africas” is traced back to colonial racial schemes, posits pan-Africanism as an anti-imperialist political alliance, one that sought to transcend colonial categories of belonging between so-called “Arab” and Black Africa. However, if taken in isolation, a pan-African approach can also selectively sanitize the historical relation that the Maghreb entertains with the rest of the continent. The essay discusses the urgency of re-centering the precolonial Maghrebi history of the trans-Saharan slave trade, in order to fully comprehend the history of Black and North Africa, while being cautious with importing western concepts, and reinforcing orientalist notions of Islamic “tyranny.” Ultimately, taking Eugène Delacroix’s Femme d’Alger dans leur Appartement as a case study, it argues for an entangled legacy of prejudice , whereby trans-Saharan practices of slavery become palimpsestically reconfigured through the racial schemes of French coloniality. It invites a third mode of relationality, a critically reparative stance, one that posits the necessity of more fully implicating a global audience – a Maghrebi as well as a Western one – as having historically co-constituted the sociocultural and political frameworks through which racial prejudice is reproduced.

War and liar: a semiotic account of metaphors in the reports on the discharge of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water in Chinese media

Abstract The release of nuclear wastewater by Japan has generated strong opposition from Japanese citizens, governments of neighboring countries, and global environmental advocates. China, representing the concerns of neighboring countries, has underscored the illicit and detrimental nature of this action. This study explores the metaphors employed in Chinese media regarding the discharge of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water. Based on the self-built corpus, we reveal the rhetorical motives underlying the metaphors, drawing on the framework of critical metaphor analysis. The study centers on two major metaphors – war and liar metaphors – in the discourse of two Chinese official media, China Daily and People’s Daily Online. It is found that according to Chinese media, initiating and protesting the discharge of Fukushima nuclear-contaminated water is a war; and that the Japanese government and TEPCO are liars. The metaphor choices reflect China’s stance of opposition and condemnation against the discharge and its intention of uncovering deceptive and misleading information.

‘Constitutions without constitutionalism’ and judicial leadership in Kenya

ABSTRACT Judicial leadership and ‘constitutions without constitutionalism’ are two opposing but useful concepts to demonstrate the oppositional stance taken by a minority of judges in safeguarding the rule of law in Kenya. Okoth-Ogendo accused African states of adopting constitutions not for the sake of rule of law, but to consolidate their hegemonic power through law – what has been termed as ‘rule by law’. I conducted an empirical study on the role of courts in constitution-making in 2018. At the time, the conversations were focused on persistent constitutional problems that garnered immense public-interest litigation: the two-thirds gender principle, and the right to housing. After the empirical study, I followed the trajectory of these judges, some of whom were involved in the subsequent Building Bridges Initiative Case on constitutional amendments by popular initiative. For this reason, I focus on adjudicatory leadership, not only in the two themes of the two-thirds gender principle, and the right to housing, raised in the 2018 study, but also on the BBI cases in constitutional amendments. A central theme is the retaliatory backlash against these few oppositional judges involving huge personal and professional sacrifices.

Recurrent gestures and embodied stance-taking in courtroom opening statements

Abstract Despite the inherently multimodal nature of the courtroom, studies of multimodality in forensic linguistics have been scarce. This study uses the stance triangle and ideological square concepts and the assumption that recurrent gestures serve as stance-taking resources to analyze conflicting embodied stances taken by the prosecutor and defense attorney in their opening remarks during the State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin 2021 trial. Statistical results reveal that the prosecutor predominantly uses modal gestures to display a strongly aggravated oppositional stance and attempts to be more persuasive, while the defense attorney favors performative gestures. The analysis of the interplay between the verbal and gestural resources suggests that recurrent gestures such as open hand prone or supine, open hand held with vertical palms, index finger extended, and precision grip have a threefold indexical realization: prototypical, argumentative, and stance-taking. The findings contribute to a more complete understanding of persuasion in the courtroom.

Ai and/as racialised political theology

Building on earlier work engaging with the entanglement of artificial intelligence (AI) and apocalypticism and both with whiteness (Ali 2019), in the present essay I explore AI through the lens of a political theology informed by critical race theory and decolonial thought. The essay begins by setting out the meaning of a few key concepts, viz. AI, political theology, ?The World?, and the apocalyptic, before going on to consider their relationship, and concludes by briefly sketching an oppositional stance that I suggest is appropriate to adopt in relation to AI where the latter is understood as a manifestation of racialised political theology.

The Janus Face of Polish Cultural Diplomacy in Paris during the Khrushchev Thaw

The Khrushchev Thaw allowed Poland a slightly larger margin of freedom in its cultural exchange with Western Europe than it had since the end of the Second World War. In this newly relaxed political climate, two models of Polish cultural diplomacy emerged in the West. The first constituted the official foreign policy of Poland’s communist authorities, while the other remained unofficial, relying on a network of contacts with Poland’s government-in-exile. An examination of contemporary Polish art exhibited in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s reveals this dichotomy. The first type of cultural patronage was coordinated in Paris by communist representatives of the Polish Embassy. The second emerged in Paris within Polish political émigré circles. Its key proponents were the Literary Institute (Instytut Literacki), including the intellectual and artistic milieu of the monthly journal Kultura (“Polish-based Culture”) and the Lambert Gallery (Galeria Lambert). State foreign policy, funded by the state budget and anchored in agreements between Poland and France on cultural cooperation determined the former, while the latter constituted an oppositional stance against the Eastern Bloc, deriving its strength from the resolve of Polish political émigré circles, their extensive network of sympathetic foreign contacts, and an understanding of the mechanics of the art market. The communist model sought to build a friendly image of Polish culture despite the apparent ideological rift between Eastern and Western Europe. The émigré approach stemmed from a refusal to accept the political division of Europe and involved searching the world of art for evidence of forces in Poland that opposed the political status quo. Finally, the patronage model adopted by communist authorities followed the state-imposed policy of favoring figurative art over Polish abstract art, whereas the model championed by émigré circles pursued the opposite strategy. It showcased unrestrained, spontaneous, and mostly abstract art. It evidenced an affinity for international trends in the art of the time, including abstract expressionism and, in particular, Parisian Art Informel. How can these two strands of cultural diplomacy co-exist? Which resonated more with international audiences?

Writing in solidarity: Gu Cangwu, Cultural Revolution, Cold War

ABSTRACT This article will shed light on the remarkable yet overlooked influence of the Cultural Revolution on renowned Hong Kong writer Gu Cangwu during the Cold War period. Through scrutinizing his untapped works in the 1970s, the article will argue that Gu Cangwu incorporated a Communist perspective in his observations of pivotal local, national, and global events in his poems and writings. Gu’s untapped works show his attempts to use Cultural Revolution ideology and Chinese nationalism as a source of resistance to British colonialism amid Hong Kong’s Defending Diaoyu Island Movement in 1971, a movement in which international recognition of Communist China at the United Nation sparked Gu’s nationalistic fervor and encouraged him to embrace critical realism. The article also puts Gu’s sympathetic portrayals of the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam War in juxtaposition with his decadent narratives of the 1972 Hong Kong landslides, showing that his effort to build local solidarity with Chinese nationals and the people suffering in the global conflict of the Cold War was based on a stance in opposition to capitalist-imperialist-colonial aggression. More significantly, transcending the simplistic Cold War binary between communist totalitarianism versus liberal capitalism and foregrounding the specific experience of the Cold War in the Hong Kong context, the case of Gu Cangwu demonstrates that the production of Hong Kong literature in the 1970s occurred at the intersection between local ideological contestation and global Cold War tensions.

“Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom

Although researchers of language and communication have become increasingly interested in both embodiment and conflict in recent years, little is known about how elementary students use embodied actions modeled by their teachers as they engage in peer conflicts. This paper addresses such questions, focusing on the “quiet coyote” gesture and the “open hand prone” gesture, two emblems commonly used as classroom management strategies in elementary grades. Building on work in language socialization, gesture studies, and other areas of discourse analysis, I propose what I call a gestural socialization perspective for analyzing the nuanced ways the US second-grade children in this study use and socialize one another to use these gestures, as well as other semiotic resources, to handle peer disputes. An ethnographically informed, multimodal discourse analysis centering on a multiracial group of girls reveals how students' gesture practices draw on their teacher's gestural socialization practices while also diverging from them, especially with regard to gestural form, stance object, intended recipient, and accompanying metapragmatic commentary. These aspects of the participants' appropriations of the “open hand prone” and “quiet coyote” emblems, together with their use of gestural innovations, metagestures, and other semiotic resources, allow them to take more oppositional stances than those made relevant by the teacher's practices. Through these multimodal stances, students take a hands-on approach to starting, continuing, and closing peer disputes on their own terms. Overall, the study highlights how participants' handling of disputes often subverted a local emphasis on conflict avoidance, efficiency, and appropriateness and the developmentalist, neoliberal, and standard language ideologies underpinning these norms. The paper closes with a discussion of implications for research and pedagogy, emphasizing the importance of closely attending to the multimodal, interactionally emergent, and culturally situated nature of conflicts among children and people of all ages.

An Ecocritical Perspective of Flora and Fauna under the 2003 Invasion of Iraq in American and Iraqi novels

Abstract This essay offers ecocritical discussions of Iraqi flora and fauna under the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the point of view of both American and Iraqi novelists. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the American Kevin Powers’s in The Yellow Birds (2012) and Iraqi Sinan Antoon's in The Book of Collateral Damage (2019) extend their moral mission of the 2003 invasion of Iraq which moves beyond the human species to include flora and fauna in light of ecocriticism. More specifically, the paper attempts to expose the outrageous things reflected by Antoon and Powers that the US invasion has done to flora and fauna which are officially ignored. It also examines the proper employment of different forms of symbolism and techniques to strengthen their ecological conservation values. The study concludes that despite the selected writers’ different experiences of colonialism, they similarly stand in creating eco-consciousness that comes from their understanding that the costs of war are not only measured by the loss of humans, but also by the devastation of flora and fauna to institutionalize a strong oppositional stance towards the war in Iraq. Key words : Ecocriticism , Biocentric Vsion , Eco-justice Perspective , Environmental Ethics , Human and Nonhuman Relationship , Los of Biodiversity , Sustainability .

Democratic Planning and its Pitfalls: E. H. Carr, Harold B. Butler, and the Interwar Crisis

The article investigates competing arguments in favour of democratic planning by comparing and contrasting the writings of E. H. Carr (1892–1982) and Harold B. Butler (1883–1951). As British civil servants and distinguished commentators on public affairs, Carr and Butler were deeply struck by the magnitude of the Great Depression and its political repercussions around the world. Despite having a similar background and being critical of laissez-faire economics, Carr and Butler came to express two conflicting visions of the implications of planning for democracy, informed by their respective fascination with the Soviet experience and the New Deal. Ultimately, they took opposite stances on Britain's post-1945 nationalizations, a development that highlights the extreme suppleness of the democratic planning discourse blossoming during the interwar years.

The Nanjing model: Comprehensive food system governance, localization and urban food security in China

Food supply localization has been extensively studied and advocated in North America and Europe, focusing on its oppositional stance to food system globalization, long food supply chains, the disconnect between producers and consumers, and a desire to reconnect urban consumers with small farmers in the hinterland of cities. The Northern model of city-region food localization has recently been taken up by governments, and promoted by international agencies such as the FAO and embedded in the New Urban Agenda (NUA) of Habitat III and the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact. This paper focuses on an alternative conceptualization and practice of food system governance developed in Chinese cities since the late 1980s. This case study of Nanjing focuses on the similarities and differences between the Chinese model of comprehensive food system planning and localization and the Northern model of localization now being exported to the Global South. The Nanjing case offers an alternative model of food system governance could be more appropriate for other countries undergoing rapid urbanization and dealing with growing urban food insecurity.

The Wiz Khalifa Controversy and Hip-Hop's Pablo Escobar Archives

Abstract This article analyzes the controversy caused in 2017 by US rapper Wiz Khalifa's narco-tour photos in Medellín, Colombia. Narco-tours are day-long excursions through the mobster Pablo Escobar's landmarks in the city: his properties, the neighborhoods he built, and the roof where the police killed him after years of waging war against the Colombian state. Unlike the polemic films and series on the Colombian drug lord, the Wiz Khalifa controversy was the first time an outcry about the depiction of Escobar was aimed at a US Black artist, particularly a rapper. The outraged reaction exhibited by politicians, audiences, and the national media reveal an unexplored archive of exchanges, miscommunications, and negotiations between, on one hand, a long list of hip-hop household names—including Jay-Z, Nas, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and many others—who have incorporated the image of Escobar in their music, lyrics, aesthetics, and rhetoric and, on the other hand, Colombian institutional memorialization of the war on drugs. The author argues that Wiz Khalifa's pictures exemplify how mainstream hip-hop brings together the images of the Black American “hustler” and the Latin American “narco.” The juxtaposition of these two images is a denunciation of the similar conditions in Colombia and the United States that force people into the trade as well as a complicated and gory representation of the neoliberal ethos Escobar represents. The article concludes by registering how hip-hop's artistic uses of “Pablo”—as Escobar is known in the genre—clash with Colombian elites’ iconoclastic and moralistic stance in opposition to any representation of Escobar in the media.

Letter Troubles: Rereading Futon in Conversation with Japan’s Epistolary Discourse

Scholarship on letters in modern Japanese literature typically describes their discursive transformation from objects of practical import to texts of literary significance in the late Meiji 30s and 40s, a transformation contemporaneous to and engendered by the sudden explosion of interest in autobiographical literary texts. Such an approach, however, unintentionally denigrates the complexity of late-Meiji era fiction’s negotiation with the epistolary discourse that flourished in this era. Seeking a broader engagement with this hitherto underexamined discourse, I take Tayama Katai’s (1872–1930) famous I-novel, The Quilt (1907), as a test case, arguing that the letters embedded there engage with the contemporary conversation on letters on four levels: content, linguistic style, subjectivity, and hermeneutics. I argue that, far from reaffirming the overlap between letters and literature, Katai’s text evinces a consistently oppositional stance toward contemporary epistolary dogma, problematizing, interrogating, and subverting it at every turn. I conclude by proposing that this defiant stance toward typical conceptualizations of the letter is common to other I-novels of the period, suggesting that the I-novel was only born through a conspicuous disavowal of the letter form.

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels Zhu Yuanyuan (bio) Charles Dickens’s allusive and thematic use of the Bible in his novels and other writings has caught critical attention over the past four decades, resulting in studies that either explore his personal belief and his attitude towards religious and theological issues,1 or interpret his texts’ themes, characters, or narratives by examining their connections with biblical counterparts.2 Most recently, Jennifer Gribble’s Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” (2021) has explored how Dickens engages the Judeo-Christian grand narrative in his novels in dialogue with other contemporary narratives. However, critical examination of biblical allusion in Dickens’s novels has overlooked the aspect of serial publication that shaped how his contemporary readers would have approached and read his works. Each of the three novels under consideration in this article was serialized either in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words (Hard Times) or in separate monthly instalments (Bleak House and Little Dorrit). This article aims to theorize both explicit and implicit use of biblical allusion and its workings in the opening numbers of these three novels as structural and thematic tools that help organize oppositional stances embodied in characters and institutions and that foster active reading by drawing upon the reader’s familiarity with the Bible.3 [End Page 155] My analysis of biblical allusion in the opening numbers of these serialized novels is based on the assumption that Dickens’s contemporary readers were indeed familiar with the Bible, in spite of the fact that the nineteenth century witnessed the process of secularization, with the status of the Bible being challenged by a number of factors, including the Higher Criticism and the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.4 In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, communal and individual readings of the Bible together with Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost had become common in many families. In the nineteenth century, in addition to the practice of family prayers, daily Bible study, and exegesis in family circles, Bible readings became part of the curriculum in grammar schools.5 Therefore, we may assume that Dickens and his readers shared a biblical literacy that was the prerequisite for the novelist to incorporate biblical allusions and stimulate the reader’s participation in the process of interpretation. An “imagined community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term (46),6 can be thought of as existing between the novelist and his readers, as well as among the readers themselves, because of the cultural resonance realized by reading and sharing common cultural discourses.7 Each instance of allusion to the Bible engages the reader’s judgment through their efforts in recognition and interpretation. The aesthetic appreciation of an allusion involves an effective “exchange” and forges “intimacy and community” between the novelist and his reader, to use William Irwin’s terms (530). The use of biblical allusions in the opening numbers of serial fiction intensifies such cultural experience. My analysis has also been informed by the concept of biblical typology, defined by George P. Landow as “a Christian form of scriptural interpretation [End Page 156] that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and His dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament” (3). As Landow shows how the Victorians transfer “habits of mind derived from interpreting the Bible” to “contemporary politics, literary characterization […] and other areas of thought apparently far distant from theological studies” (15), my article will show such typological habits of mind are also transferred to Dickens’s literary production. I shall argue that in the opening numbers of Hard Times, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, novels about contemporary social problems, Dickens draws on biblical allusions to construct “types” that foreshadow and prefigure certain aspects; or, put differently, “types” that the novels will fulfil. Dickens’s novels of the 1850s critique social problems and individual failings, and suggest their connection. The criticism of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House and of utilitarian educational theories in Hard Times set up these novels’ moral stance in opposition to idolatrous practices, similar to Little Dorrit’s...

Charles Sanders Peirce and Effective Altruism

Abstract: When confronted with moral dilemmas, Charles S. Peirce would recommend that we trust our sentiments, not our reasoning. A scientific exploration of ethics may affect our daily conduct but should only do so gradually. Some modern approaches take the opposite stance and deny the significance of moral sentiments. Considering both Peirce and his opponents, I aim to contribute to the discussion of a radical moral theory: effective altruism. Stating that we should strive to do the most objective good we can, effective altruism regularly conflicts with our moral sentiments. In response, effective altruists claim that our sentiments are misguided and should be overcome. Which side is right? Using Peirce's work to answer this question reveals that effective altruism cannot clearly define how it aims to affect our daily conduct. In addition, it seeks to change our sentiments, but may alter them for the worse. Taking Peirce's insights seriously leads us to conclude that we should be cautious of how we adopt effective altruism in our lives—and that while we deliberate this, we should instead trust our sentiments.

Whose Life Is It Anyway? Medical Aid in Dying and Its Legal, Medical, and Ethical Conundrums

Whose Life Is It Anyway? Medical Aid in Dying and Its Legal, Medical, and Ethical Conundrums

Voice of Dissent: Negation of Heterosexuality in Adrienne Rich's Poetry

This article explores the opposition of heterosexuality in Adrienne Rich’s poems. Rich has questioned the heterosexual institutions in her poetry and has consciously worked to re-create women’s identity taking an oppositional stance towards heterosexuality and trying to establish women's positional stance. Heterosexuality as a political institution is so pervasive that it has not only controlled women's bodies by various means but also has controlled their consciousness. It proved that women should seek their primary emotional and erotic ties in themselves to have women-identified experiences and freedom. Rich’s poems; “Rape”, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, “Twenty-one Love Poems I” and “Diving into the Wreck” are examined through radical feminism and lesbian perspectives.

Class voting for radical-left parties in Western Europe: The libertarian versus authoritarian class trade-off

Which classes vote for radical-left parties (RLPs) in Western Europe? Previous research indicates that RLPs are strong among production workers and socio-cultural professionals, though not necessarily among both at the same time. Starting from the observation that these two classes take opposite stances on cultural issues, we trace variation in class voting back to RLPs’ positions on the cultural dimension. Combining voter-level data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018) with information on the positions of 23 RLPs from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we report robust evidence of a libertarian versus authoritarian class trade-off: RLPs with less libertarian positions receive relatively less support from socio-cultural professionals and relatively more support from production workers. These findings add to evidence that class voting varies with party positions. Ours is the first study to demonstrate this for RLPs, showing how, in the early 21st century, cultural positions matter for class voting.

Centering Home Care in Bioethics Scholarship, Education, and Practice.

This commentary responds to "Home Care in America: The Urgent Challenge of Putting Ethical Care into Practice," by Coleman Solis and colleagues, in the May-June 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report. More specifically, we respond to the authors' call for "inquiry into the nature, value, and practice" of home care. We argue that the most urgently needed normative reset for thinking about care work is the replacement of dominant individualistic thinking with systemic thinking. Deepening a focus on the social, economic, and historical forces that shape the state of contemporary care work will help bioethicists to argue more effectively for improvements to working conditions. In turn, better working conditions will ease the oppositional stance between caregivers and receivers that has been set up by the current system, enabling all parties involved to better pursue the feminist ethical ideal of care.

Quantifying the spatiotemporal dynamics and impact factors of China's county-level carbon emissions using ESTDA and spatial econometric models

China currently has the largest total CO2 emissions and is one of the countries that has made the most efforts to cut these. Anthropogenic emissions from county-level districts play a pivotal role in meeting carbon neutral due to the favorable breakdown of reduction targets into sub-national units, whereas limited work has been done related to those features and determinants. Here, we attempted to quantify the spatiotemporal dynamics of county carbon emissions and their drivers in China between 2000 and 2020 using an exploratory space-time data analysis (ESTDA) and spatial econometric method based on a remote sensing image inversion dataset. The results showed that emissions per capita and per unit of GDP in Chinese counties took on drastically opposite stances amid a trend of increasing carbon emissions. Meanwhile, their carbon emissions exhibited a pronounced regional disparity and spatially positive autocorrelation, characterized by sharp spatial heterogeneity and clustering. Local indicators of spatial association implied that the patterns of county carbon emissions had certain spatial integration, and that locally correlated forms were represented by deep path dependence and spatial locking effects. Besides, a range of panel regression models provided evidence of endogenous interactions of county carbon emissions, notably where every 1% increase in the neighboring emissions induced a local emissions increase by at least 0.4%. Various factors employed not only exerted a direct impact on local carbon emissions, but had spatial spillover effects on neighboring districts. Of these, economic level and industrial structure presented a significantly positive relationship with carbon emissions, while population clustering, financial input and technological advance had clear inhibitory effects. Our findings cast fresh light on the importance of the socioeconomic diversity of a district and its neighbors for government policy decisions related to carbon abatement at the county level.