Subversive Ideology Research Articles

LGBTQ and Politics: China and Japan Compared

This article explores the impact of state politics on LGBTQ individuals through a comparative study of LGBTQ groups in China and Japan. Despite both countries sharing similar cultural and demographic backgrounds, there is a great divergence in the political status of LGBTQ individuals in these two countries. Previous studies have highlighted cultural reasons for this divergence, but political factors are seldom examined. This article aims to analyze the political logic of China and Japan to explain the great divergence and examine the political mechanisms of their respective political systems. It argues that in China, the suppression of LGBTQ individuals is a complementary action towards the Second-Child/Third-Child Policy, due to the potential exacerbation of demographic challenges. Ideologically, this suppression is a form of Chinese anti-Westernism. On the other hand, in Japan, promoting LGBTQ activism is beneficial since it aligns the country with the global trend. Domestically, the LGBTQ population is considered a crucial political tool for elections, as public sentiment is influenced by a teleological social progressiveness that sees the U.S. as a model. In general, this article elucidates that authoritarian regimes tend to eradicate potential political threats by directly suppressing LGBTQ activism, which holds progressive or subversive ideologies and spreads them through various movements to avoid political instability. In contrast, democratic governments are more “short-sighted”, and tend to align with LGBTQ activism by following current influential ideologies to secure voting blocs.

A Peasant’s Satire of the Politics of Debt (Luke 16:1–8a)

This article reads the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1–8a) using a social-scientific method, particularly the anthropology of agrarian patron-client relations. Here I delineate a model of the erosion of patron-client bonds, based on the work of James C. Scott and others, and the emergence of horizontal solidarity and mutual aid (“balanced reciprocity”). I relate this model to the peasant’s burden of debt, particularly in Jesus’ world. As commercialization develops in an agrarian society patron-client bonds begin to erode, and peasants begin to understand these bonds as relations of exploitation. Consequently, subversive ideology develops, evident in peasant folktales directed against the wealthy and powerful. Accordingly, I argue that the parable of the unjust steward is a satire aimed at landlord-patrons who perpetuate the burden of debt.

Transnational Kemalism—Power, Hegemony, and Dissidence

Abstract This review essay examines the historical and present configurations of transnational Kemalism, with a focus on Kemalism's transformation into a counterhegemonic transnational dissidence movement during the rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey. Accordingly, Kemalism, as the founding ideology of the Turkish state, has historically been the anchor for Turkish transnational politics. Ethnic Turkish kinship networks, for instance in the Balkans and the emigrant communities worldwide, were connected via Kemalism to the Anatolian mainland, and vice versa. With the AKP's rise to the power in the 2000s, Kemalism lost its primacy and came to be viewed as a subversive ideology which was utilized in resisting, both nationally and transnationally, the officially promoted neo-Ottoman and Islamic representations of belonging and identity in Turkey and its diaspora communities. Here, the author's research among the Kosovar Turkish population adds to a discussion of two works on this subject.

Caveat emptor: boycott through digital humour on the wave of the 2019 Hong Kong protests

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the topic of social media users’ polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ongoing boycott movement of multiple companies consequent upon their actions in response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Apart from presenting the multimodal characteristics of the creative digital data through the lens of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the central aim is to discuss the functions of users’ political humour online, offering various socio-pragmatic conclusions about the polyvocal participatory practice at hand. It is argued that this digital humour resides solely in the attention-grabbing form, with the otherwise serious posts performing informative and persuasive functions as they convey community members’ socio-political critique. While disparaging the ‘butts’, online users do bonding through collectively expressing their political dissent (which also gives them psychological relief) and sharing subversive ideologies. The humorous items inform and warn potential punters and tacitly call for a boycott of the companies that bow to the regime, all in an act of solidarity with Hong Kong protesters.

Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and the Dream of Revolution: October 1917 in the Trajectory of a Brazilian Metalworker of African Descent

Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and the Dream of Revolution: October 1917 in the Trajectory of a Brazilian Metalworker of African Descent

Conservation, innovation and healing of the well-preserved medieval Ystad

This article investigates the discursive powers that authorise and legitimise heritage practices in Ystad, which has a reputation as one of the best preserved medieval towns in Scandinavia. To maintain this reputation, the discursive and material heritage of certain groups and periods of history are projected at the expense of others, albeit in a legitimised manner. Methods of discursive analysis, supported by Smith’s ‘authorised heritage discourse’ and Harvey’s ‘heritageisation’, show that a static approach to heritage, assimilative and exclusionary in nature, has protected Ystad’s material heritage. This approach has never been challenged but is perpetually adjusted within frameworks of dominant and subversive ideologies, producing adverse and overlooked social and spatial consequences. Heritage practices need new perspectives on entrenched habits of thought and new trajectories within the political dynamics of planning strategies, both of which are often unrecognised by the means commonly used to measure the legitimation of intervention in heritage.

Storming of Lal Masjid in Pakistan: An Analysis

Religious places are being increasingly used by fundamentalists and terrorists as their hideouts and strongholds to propagate their subversive ideology and launch attacks. This has often compelled states to use the military to flush them out. This use of the army has far-reaching consequences and can even alienate the population. To check and prevent such adverse fallout, a state needs to take decisive action at an early stage. Without focusing on the causative factors and tactical aspects of any military operation, this article attempts to identify lessons at the macro level to deal with such situations by using the storming of the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July 2007 as a case study.

Meo's Fists – Fighting For or Against Fascism? The Subversive Nature of Text and Image in Giovanni Bertinetti's I pugni di Meo

During the 1920s and 1930s Italian children's literature was heavily influenced by fascist propaganda. Stories which celebrated patriotism, militarism and obedience appeared in great numbers as did biographies of Mussolini. Children's book illustrations also underwent stylistic changes becoming more statuary and geometric in accordance with the principles behind fascist architecture and propagandist art. Not all of the Italian writers and artists who ostensibly endorsed fascist ideologies, however, were entirely compliant with fascist dictates. Careful reading of some of the key works by writers and artists outwardly supportive of the regime reveals underlying subversive political ideologies, the majority of which have yet to be acknowledged. One of the ways in which writers and artists of the fascist period inscribed subversive ideologies in their works was by manipulating contemporary visual and verbal codes. This paper focuses on the dialectic of text and image in Giovanni Bertinetti's I pugni di Meo [Meo's fists], a children's fantasy, illustrated by the well-known artist, Attilio Mussino. Situating text and illustrations in their socio-political context, it discusses how these artists manipulated words and images to convey an ideology of moderation in the midst of excessive use and abuse of power in Italy in the 1930s.

American Toussaints: Symbol, Subversion, and the Black Atlantic Tradition in the American Civil War

During the American Civil War, Toussaint Louverture was for African Americans the touchstone of a transatlantic identity, which joined their violent struggle for freedom and equality to a black revolutionary tradition that was deeply rooted in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. White abolitionists reinforced the construction of this identification, for when they saw armed and uniformed black men, they likewise imagined American Toussaints, committed, disciplined, and talented slave soldiers who were eager to both die and kill for freedom. The men and women who seized upon the revolutionary symbols of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution at this critical moment in the history of the American republic advanced a subversive ideology that undermined the white supremacist ideas that buttressed both the institution of slavery as well as the republic itself.

"Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands (review)

??? COHPAnATIST general will profit from this important body of scholarship. Most important, the many critics of"theory" in our discipline, those who lament the second-rate scholarship and fatuous generalizations ofcareless ideologues and ignorant culture critics and thereby dismiss the entire theoretical enterprise, will meet here with worthy opponents, formidable thinkers who articulate sophisticated philosophical positions, avoid reductive historical generalizations, and challenge realist epistemological assumptions in their domain ofgreatest strength—that ofscience and technology. Ronald BogueUniversity ofGeorgia REVIEWS THEO D'HAEN AND HANS BERTENS, eds. "Closing the Gap": American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997 (Postmodern Studies 20). 267 pp. Judging from a number ofrecent reappraisals ofpostmodern fiction, the antifoundational approaches developed by postmodernism in response to Cold War ideologies have appeared outmoded to some ofus after the collapse ofthose normative metanarratives in the events of 1989. In volume 5 of 7Ae Encyclopedia ofWorld Literature in the 20th Century (ed. Steven R. Serafín. New York: Continuum, 1993), Robert F. Kiernan notes that postmodem metafictionists have "ceased in the 1 980s to enjoy the critical deference they received in the late 1960s and 1970s [...]. [Their works] found only limited audiences, not just because they are inherently difficult books, but because their self-reflexive conceits and multidimensional, nonlinear combinations of fantasies, joke, and horror seem to many readers a throwback to the intellectual temper ofthe 1970s" (26). As this description suggests, the swerving away from experimentalism has ideological motivation. The prevailing tendency after 1989 has been to push postmodern innovation to the margin as part ofa counteroffensive against those alternative paradigms deemed responsible for the current crisis of authority, identity, and values. Critics ofvarious stripes want to "rescue" fiction from its engagement with language and the subversive ideologies ofthe sixties, returning it to conventional forms ofrealism. The recent Modern Library list ofthe 100 best twentieth-century novels in English is a case in point. Few postmodernists made the list (Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, E. L. Doctorow, John Fowles, and Salmon Rushdie). Conspicuously absent were Coover, Pynchon, and Reed, but also Atwood, Morrison, and Walker. In an amnesic revision mat took literature back one or two generations, the list reinstated the primarily white male canon from Joyce and Fitzgerald to Saul Bellow, William Golding, and James Dickey. By contrast, the writers featured in Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens' collection ofessays on the reception ofpostwar American fiction in four Western European countries are exactly those left out by the Modern Library list: Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Gilbert Sorrentino, Thomas Pynchon, and Ronald Sulenick (Paul Neubauer, "The General Reception of Postmodern American Literature in Germany " 9); also postmodern feminist and ethnic authors like Sandra Cisneros, Rita Dove, Marilyn French, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker. The primary Italian bibliography ofBarthelme, William S. Burroughs, Coover, James Purdy, and VcH. 24 (2000): 171 REVIEWS Pynchon "is almost as rich as the American one" (Daniela Daniele, "The Fate of Postmodern American Fiction in Italy" 149). In Spain, certain translations of Barthelme, Cisneros, Don DeLillo, Gaddis, Jerzy Kosinski, Morrison, Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Kurt Vonnegut have run through several reprints (Francesco Collado-Rodríguez, "The Columbus Connection: American Postmodern Fiction in Spain" 177, 178-81); so have Vonnegut's works in the Netherlands (Frans Ruiter, "The Reception ofPostmodem American Fiction in the Netherlands" 223) or those ofAbish, Barth, Coover, Federman, and Pynchon in Germany (Neubauer 12, 24). Federman's German bibliography may soon overtake his American one, including for example radio plays not performed in the US. Academic criticism in Western Europe has devoted monographs not only to Pynchon and Vonnegut, but also to William Gass, Federman, feminist metropolitan fiction, or postmodern short story writers, treating their works as "acts ofdefiance and critique," attempts to break open official history and develop "ironic and parodistic counter-histories oftheir own" (Neubauer 82, 88). Substantial literary anthologies and collections of essays, such as Gerhard Hoffmann's three-volume Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von derModerne zur Postmoderne (1988), have supplemented the picture, refining or problematizing its contours. The convergence oftranslation, magazine criticism, and academic research has ensured a multidimensional "reception of...

NPD-NDP: Europe's New Nationalism in Germany and Austria

Part of the Heritage bequeathed by the Habsburg Empire to the First and Second Austrian Republics was German ethnic nationalism. The movement was a response to what its adherents considered the difficulty of preserving German cultural practices and institutional patterns within a state composed of diverse nationalities. Challenged by the growth of nationalism among the other linguistic and ethnic groups of the Habsburg lands during the latter half of the nineteenth century and stimulated by the appearance of a German national state after 1871, Austro-Germanism grew in size and diversity until 1914. In its more moderate form, the persuasion went no further than stubborn resistance of German Austrians to any cultural or political concessions to non-Germans in the Empire. In the hands of the rabid Pan-Germanist Georg von Schonerer, it was a frankly subversive ideology dedicated to the detachment of the German sections of Austria from the Danubian monarchy and their fusion with imperial Germany.