Transformative Studies Institute Research Articles

The Uncivil Sphere and Anarchist Movements: Problems of Status Quo Violence, Internationalist Militancy, and Anti-state Civil Society

Jeffrey C. Alexander’s civil sphere theory makes a significant contribution to understanding how people, especially social movements, relate to society’s various institutions. Radicalism challenges the long-term stability of the civil sphere and pushes it to be more open. While capitalism and the state are considered to be uncivil institutions, the civil sphere typically tolerates their existence and negotiates with them. But, what of radical, non-state and antiauthoritarian movements that seek the abolition of all hierarchies— can they join the existing civil sphere or replace it with their own vision? This paper uses three cases studies—the Haymarket Affair, the Spanish Revolution, and Seattle’s anti-World Trade Organization protests—to interrogate non-state, anti-authoritarian, and anarchist interpretations of civil society. These cases suggest compatibilities and divergences with civil sphere theory, complicating its interpretation of violence and militancy, civil order breaching, nonstate or extra-state scope, and internationalism. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

“Cinderella seems so easy”: Archetypal Characterisation in Bob Dylan and T.S. Eliot’s Wastelands

This article presents an intertextual study of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Bob Dylan’s ‘Desolation Row’ (1965) – the original version in the album Highway 61 Revisited. Only a few scholars dedicated to the works of Bob Dylan have ‘Desolation Row’ being a vague rather than an explicit allusion to The Waste Land. This study will demonstrate how the themes and topics in both texts are not only similar, but how the piece by Dylan contains direct references to Eliot’s poem as well as to other literary and cultural phenomena which Eliot references in his Wasteland – “alluding to allusions”, therefore. All this will be illustrated through the nearly identical processes of archetypal characterisation led by the two authors and the rhetorical use of multiplicity of voice. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Solitude and Exile in Roberto Bolaño

Profoundly original and deliberately shocking, innovative and puzzling at the same time, Roberto Bolaño (1953 – 2003) is now considered one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. Born in Chile, he grew up in Mexico and then traveled across the South American continent, finally settling in Europe, in his steady attempt to establish his reputation of a poet and a novelist. His entire work represents a constant challenge to the literary critics, given the fact that he distinctively addressed some important universal issues (like human loneliness or the impossibility to establish an authentic connection and dialogue in the midst of an alienated society); but he is also famous for his particular way of meditating upon the often hidden meanings of exile in the contemporary world. His characters travel around the world as well as within themselves, in order to find their identity and to assert the truth of their own existence at the same time. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Producing the Present through the Past: Adam Smith and the Inevitability of the Economy

This article makes two claims: first, “the economy” in its contemporary sense is distinct from the object of classical political economy; and second, despite this distinction, social scientists have generated a narrative history of the economy that contributes to its appearance as natural and inevitable by presenting it as a continuous object. This article briefly examines some of the ways in which we read the language of “the economy” back onto Smith, contributing to this appearance of continuity. This article then demonstrates that while Smith may have originated or elaborated many of the concepts used by contemporary economists, he did not understand his own object to be “the economy,” and concludes with a brief discussion of the political possibilities opened up by such an assertion. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

The Impact COVID had on Carceral Institutions in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic is something that affected, and continues to affect, the entire world. In the United States specifically, it impacted the nation majorly- so many people became infected and died, and there were numerous policies implemented to slow the spread. These policies mostly took place in the general population, but in the prison population, many inmates were not protected. Inmates have five times greater risk of COVID than citizens in the general population do. Carceral institutions in the United States are already known to treat many of their inmates inhumanely, but the COVID pandemic amplified the poor living conditions of the inmates. This paper gives an overview of how prisons functioned pre-pandemic, and then it goes into how federal, state, and local carceral institutions initially responded to the start of COVID. How inmates were treated and whether or not they were prioritized in vaccine distributions is discussed, and the impact the COVID virus had on correctional staff is discussed as well. The rise of lawsuits is also briefly explored. Ultimately, there is much variation in how different jurisdictions responded to the pandemic and how they continue to respond. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

A Comparison of the Patient Wife in Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, and Lope

Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer all told versions of the Patient Wife narrative that could be read both literally and metaphorically. Literally, the narrative served as both a lesson in wifely obedience and as a commentary on the patriarchal social order of the Middle Ages. As an allegory, the tale had biblical implications about the necessity of obedience to one’s heavenly ruler. The popularity of this tale lasted well beyond the Middle Ages, making its way into Renaissance dramatic comedies. Some of these Renaissance versions eliminate the metaphorical possibilities of the narrative and mitigate Griselda’s situation by pairing the patient wife motif with a tamed shrew motif. However, in El ejemplo de casadas (The Wives’ Example), Lope de Vega prevents a dramatic version of the tale that does not abandon the metaphorical possibilities of the medieval versions. This essay examines the political and religious implications of Lope’s dramatic version of Patient Griselda. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Impressions of a Brazilian in New Delhi

This text is a collection of 18 fragments written during a trip to New Delhi during February and March 2014. They can be seen as a discontinuous short travel diary which develops comparative cultural criticism between Brazil and India from ordinary experiences. As they try to develop concepts from everyday occurrences they also end up fusing academia and tourism in a way that both are eventually improved. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Quests for a Change of Territories: Forms of Dystopia and Transfiction in La autopista: the movie, by Jorge Enrique Lage

The Cuban literary tradition is closely linked to the idea of a “national literature,” reducing narrative to a specific axis of space and time. The authors of the so-called Generación Zero (Generation Zero) experiment with the elements of this “national literature,” or, Literature-Nation (Aguilera 2002), and de-territorialize narrative while working with its tropes. Departing from the idea of ‘transfiction’ (Aguilera 2015) and the idea that utopia is not only referring to a time and space, but also to a genre, I will analyse the novel La autopista: the movie (2015), by Jorge Enrique Lage from that perspective. The novel stretches the binary between utopic and dystopic fiction articulating an ambiguous future that the present article explores through the narrative possibilities of the (trans)generic, (trans)spatial, and (trans)temporal. While easy to conceive of this novel as dystopic, futuristic, and apocalyptic text, it rejects the limits of space, time, and the dystopic genre. The article thus invites a re-thinking of the role of literature in the Cuban tradition as merely representative of territory or nation. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Peripheral Orientalism and the Creation of Arab Literary Precursors in Quinteto de Mogador by Alberto Ruy Sánchez

This essay explores the intentio operis in the use of transatlantic bridges that are sometimes real, other times rhetorical, and others imaginary that Alberto Ruy Sánchez draws between his country and Morocco. It also looks at the representation of Moroccan space and women, arguing that Ruy Sánchez falls into exoticizing Orientalism with tints of colonial nostalgia, particularly when portraying Moroccan women. Finally, it explores how the author creates his own precursors through the quotes and literary references in his five novels. Presenting himself as a reader of Arab erotic literature and Sufi sacred texts, Ruy Sánchez suggests that he is rewriting classic literary texts, thus creating his own literary lineage and diachronically situating his work within a literary tradition that remains on the margins of Mexican national coordinates to approach, instead, the canon of Arabic literature. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Los viajes del Barón von Humboldt a Cuba: vistas/visitas de su narrativa personal

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) traveled a lot and wrote a lot. Belonging to a noble Prussian family, he studied botany, geology, and mineralogy at the School of Mines in Freiberg and at the University of Göttingen. In 1799, at the age of 30, Humboldt undertook a journey of approximately ten thousand kilometers through Spain and America. His two brief visits to Cuba (1800-1801, 1804) resulted in the Ensayo Político sobre la isla de Cuba (Political Essay on the Island of Cuba). Considered a minor book compared to his vast oeuvre, von Humboldt reinvents and takes stock of both the Cuban flora and fauna in what he called “views”. His “personal narrative” or views, which constitute the poetics of his book, do not contradict his politics; on the contrary, they shape it. My purpose in this essay is to examine the aesthetic elaboration of the German naturalist's “views” of the Cuban landscape. Not only is the aesthetic conception of his book romantic, but also its exoticism prefigures, in a certain way, Latin Americanism, as an exotic and magical discourse. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.

A Journey to the Self: The Quest for Identity in Clarice Lispector’s Fiction

One of the best representatives of Latin American literature, Clarice Lispector has always fascinated her readers. Her novels bring into question some major aesthetic and ideological issues, sometimes under the mask of elaborated textual games implying innovative narrative strategies and a new way of understanding fiction. The Hour of the Star (A hora da estrela, 1977) addresses the problem of identity and storytelling, as well as the complex relationships established among author, narrator, character and reader. The violence which the novel’s protagonist has to face and endure is also an expression of the force of literature. Therefore, the heroine’s death stands for the symbolic birth of fiction, her personal life being permanently mirrored by the metaphorical level of this extraordinary text. The novel progressively turns into an intricate and symbolic journey to the self, Lispector analysing the quest for personal (and artistic) identity and its hidden meanings. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Death as a Hidden Gem in Mircea Eliade’s “The Trenches”

Mircea Eliade’s “The Trenches” (Şanţurile) is a World War Two story in which death is a reintegration into the divine. This Romanian language story is a variant of the legend in which Alexander found a gem that enabled him to see in darkness. In this venture into the fantastic, Romanian mountain villagers search for a hidden treasure at a juncture where legend momentarily demonstrates “the function of the unreal.” Affirming his belief in a Romanian nationalism that coalesces around a mythical Dacian past, Eliade belongs to a literary tradition that includes the poet Mihai Eminexcu and the playwright Vasile Alecsandri. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Know Justice, Know Peace: Reflections from a community-based, action research collective

This article provides an overview of the community-based, action research project called Know Justice, Know Peace: A Transformation & Justice Community Collective, which took place with six local grassroots justice-oriented organizations in Southern California’s Inland Empire region. Together we explored if, how, and where, wellness, healing and trauma-informed practices and transformative organizing exist in the daily operations and strategic vision of these organizations. Through interviews, focus groups, and healing circles, as well as an 8-month, bi-weekly training program, we identified individual and organizational needs, barriers, and facilitators of actualizing healing, wellbeing, and justice values in daily operation and organizational culture. Overall, the findings of this collective echoed what our review of literature in the field found from a diverse range of interdisciplinary scholars and activists; that to thrive individually and organizationally we must transform the relationships and structures we operate in to actualize values to stay grounded and connected while advancing effective strategies that resist toxic and violent structures and replace them with transformative and sustaining ones. This article summarizes community participants’ internal and organizational struggles as well as the assets they build upon. It explores theoretical frameworks deriving from healing justice, transformative movement organizing, trauma-informed and healing-centered methodologies, and emergent strategy that propose critical analysis and applied tools to advance individual and community wellness and healing as well as restorative organizing models and alternative organizational structures for values alignment in the daily operations of social justice-oriented community organizations. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Chandervati

Qudratullah Shahab was a civil servant during the British Raj. After the partition of India, he served as the chief of staff of three heads of state of Pakistan. He also served as the ambassador of Pakistan to the Netherlands and as information secretary and education secretary of Pakistan. He authored many short stories and, in his later years, he opened up about his spiritual journey. "Chandervati," which was included in his memoirs, recounts his coming of age during the thirties, at a time when interreligious marriages were taboo. The author expresses his deep connection to a Brahmin girl named Chandervati. Despite their love for one other, they understood their societal and religious divide. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Violent Crime and Destiny Control: Theorizing a Missing Variable in Criminology

U.S. citizens believe they can control their destinies at rates higher than any other nation. The U.S. is also a world leader in violent crimes. This article argues for correlations between these two trends. A theory is proposed based on three distinct trajectories related to destiny control. One trajectory involves persons modifying their destiny-control beliefs through turning points in the life course. On another trajectory, persons with low destiny-control beliefs are prone to anxiety/depression. The third track is that of high-rate offenders. Due to such things as attachment traumas, feelings of entitlement, internal/external barriers, and substance abuse they do not often modify their adolescent views that they are in complete control of their destinies. For some this translates into violent crimes. Implications for society and research are raised. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Dive In: Transformative Education, Direct Action, and Innovative Media Strategies in an (Inter)Collegiate Partnership to Save a Community Pool

This article aims to broaden critical discussions of service-learning and sport for development and community partnerships through attention to transformative education, holistic learning, and collaborative agency. Building on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and praxis, this study problematizes traditional service-learning incorporating a dialogical framework that focuses on interdepartmental collaboration and anarchist principles such as self-organization, direct action, and mutual aid. I investigate critical pedagogy in the classroom and action and reflection outside of it through a case study of a partnership between a college swim team, media studies students, and local residents to save a community pool. This paper highlights an innovative media campaign, new media platforms, design choices, and digital media used for capacity building, critical reflection, and social justice. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Journeys and Exile in Roberto Bolaño’s Novel The Savage Detectives

The Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) is one of the most important representatives of Latin American literature of the last century. His novel The Savage Detectives (1998) represents a profound meditation on the meanings of journey, exile, initiation and quest, the author following some great writers of the past (from Homer and Virgil to James Joyce) and finding new and original ways to express his ideas. His characters, mainly intellectuals, are restless travelers or wanderers; they lose and subsequently find themselves in order to discover a deeper meaning of the world around. In this context, literature saves them from failure and offers them all the possibility of spiritual salvation. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Mahmud Darwish’s Prose and Poetry as Means of Peaceful Resistance for the Palestinians: The Importance of Re-Writing the History of Palestine

Mahmud Darwish was undoubtedly one of the major Palestinian poets of the peaceful resistance against Israeli aggression, expulsions of Palestinians from their own lands, their houses and their other properties. Darwish also wrote prose, like for example Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab (In the Presence of Absence) work in which he emphasized the need to re-write the history of Palestine, since Israel has constantly destroyed Palestinian villages, and has expelled the Palestinians from their own towns. Israel has systematically substituted these villages and their names by Hebrew ones. This way Israel conveys the notion that they are Hebrew villages. On the other hand, it is possible to notice that Israel denies the pre-existence of the Palestinian settlements, towns and villages in those places. For Darwish, therefore, there is a clear need to re-write the history of Palestine, in order to show that where there are nowadays many Jewish towns, there were Palestinian villages in the past. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2023 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Place-Based and Experiential Pedagogies: Teaching radical concepts in social movements and political sociology

Drawing from manifestos, online communications, interviews, and other written reports, we examine the words and thoughts of five mass shooters from 2007-2019. These documents provide important insights into the structural conditions and ideological factors that have contributed to increases in the frequency and lethality of mass public shootings in the U.S. since the mid-2000s. Unlike studies that focus on gun laws and/or the mental health or personality traits of mass shooters, we emphasize the connection between mass public shootings in the U.S. and the prevailing neoliberal ideology that has, particularly in recent decades, shaped not only material conditions but value systems, social relations, and conceptions of the self in accordance to the logic of the market. We suggest the increasing digitization of social life under neoliberalism has led to a form of hyper-neoliberalism that amplifies conditions such as social isolation, low self-esteem, and egoistical forms of agency, all of which discourage empathy, erode social bonds, and foster a fertile environment for various forms of social degradation and violence. Under these conditions, mass public shootings can be regarded as an attempt to seek respect or recognition—what classical Greeks described as thymos—among individuals, particularly men, who feel alienated and irrelevant. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2022 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

Place-Based and Experiential Pedagogies: Teaching radical concepts in social movements and political sociology

This piece argues that radical ideas in political sociology and social movement studies can sometimes be difficult to teach because of the ideological training that we all undergo in the process of our socialization. However, using a place-based and experiential form of pedagogy can be useful in explaining three particular concepts within the discipline: prefigurative politics, direct action, and self-management. First, I outline this approach as developed in my travel course to Spain, “Global Political Economy and Sustainability.” I begin with a brief explanation of this method and some relevant literature in sociology. Next, I identify those three concepts within the sociological study of social movements and political sociology that this type of pedagogy can help students see clearly and understand. Finally, I add some concluding remarks, self-criticism, and suggest some further research to investigate learning outcomes. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2022 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]