Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World

Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World
Author: G. Arunima
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2021-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 3030795802

This book addresses emancipatory narratives from two main sites in the colonial world, the Indian and southern African subcontinents. Exploring how love and revolution interrelate, this volume is unique in drawing on theories of affect to interrogate histories of the political, thus linking love and revolution together. The chapters engage with the affinities of those who live with their colonial pasts: crises of expectations, colonial national convulsions, memories of anti-colonial solidarity, even shared radical libraries. It calls attention to the specific and singular way in which notions of ‘love of the world’ were born in a precise moment of anti-colonial struggle: a love of the world for which one would offer one’s life, and for which there had been little precedent in the history of earlier revolutions. It thus offers new ways of understanding the shifts in global traditions of emancipation over two centuries.

Revolutionary Emotions in Cold War Egypt

Revolutionary Emotions in Cold War Egypt
Author: Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2024-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350383775

In autumn 1951, a diverse array of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish students from clubs like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Worker's Vanguard launched a guerrilla struggle against British occupation of the Suez Canal Zone. Revolutionary Emotions in Cold War Egypt recovers this overshadowed revolution of 1951, and the part played by the “Canal struggle” in the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy. In a study spanning a half-dozen international archives, the book delves into the divisive court cases and rousing club newspapers, intimate memoirs and personal poetry of Egyptian activists. These documents reveal that in the early years of the Cold War, morality tales and moral emotions were at the heart of the methods and the successes of Egyptian activists. What stories did activists tell, and how did the emotional appeals and “moral talk” of Islamist and communist clubs compare? How did Arabic-speaking populations negotiate moral norms, and what role did emotions like love, anger, and disgust play in political campaigns? Taking a journey through Islamic parables about perilous beaches, communist adaptations of Greek myths, and popular stories about Juha's Nail and Paul Revere's Ride through the Suez Canal, this book uncovers a rich history of activist storytelling. These practices uncover the mechanics of morality tales, and reveal how activists used narratives to convert emotion to motion and drive social change. Still vitally important for readers today, such findings shed light on how paramilitary groups and protest movements use moral appeals to attract support-and why activist campaigns become the controversial epicentre of polarizing emotional battles.

Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India

Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India
Author: Mallarika Sinha Roy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2024-04-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009264095

Among the most significant playwrights and theatre-makers of postcolonial India, Utpal Dutt (1929–1993), was an early exponent of rethinking colonial history through political theatre. Dutt envisaged political theatre as part of the larger Marxist project, and his incorporation of new developments in Marxist thinking, including the contributions of Antonio Gramsci, makes it possible to conceptualise his protagonists as insurgent subalterns. A decolonial approach to staging history remained a significant element in Dutt's artistic project. This Element examines Dutt's passionate engagement with Marxism and explores how this sense of urgency was actioned through the writing and producing of plays about the peasant revolts and armed anti-colonial movements which took place during the period of British rule. Drawing on contemporary debates in political theatre regarding the autonomy of the spectator and the performance of history, the author locates Dutt's political theatre in a historical frame.

Of Captivity and Resistance

Of Captivity and Resistance
Author: Sharmila Purkayastha
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009392751

An intervention in the field of dissenting writings by women political detainees in India in the 1970s, and it straddles three interlinked areas: politics, prison and writing. It focuses on writings arising out of Bengal's Naxalite movement (1967–1975) and from the pan-Indian period of Emergency (1975–1977).

Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance

Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance
Author: Feras Hammami
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-04-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030777081

This book is about the entanglement of heritage and resistance in different situations of conflicts, and the opportunities this entanglement may provide for social justice. This entanglement is investigated in the different contributions through theoretical and empirical analyses of heritage-led resistance to neoliberal economic development, violation of the subaltern, authorised narratives and state-invented traditions, colonialism and settler colonialism, and even dominating discourses of social movement, to name just a few. Crossing the disciplinary boundaries of heritage and resistance studies, these analyses bring new insights into several timely debates, especially those concerned with the interrelated critical questions of displacement, gentrification, exclusion, marginalization, urbicide, spatial cleansing, dehumanization, alienation, ethnic cleansing and social injustice. Following our purposeful and future-driven approach, we wish to bring new energy to the field of heritage studies through the focus on the potential of heritage and resistance for hopeful change rather than adding to the field yet another overwhelming engagement with conflict and war.

The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media

The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media
Author: Antawan I. Byrd
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2023-03-14
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 030026688X

A roster of prominent artists, curators, and scholars offers a new, entirely contemporary approach to our understanding of photography and media Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago's deep and varied collection of photographs, books and other printed matter, installation art, photobooks, albums, and time-based media, this ambitious, wide-ranging volume features short essays by prominent artists, curators, university professors, and independent scholars that explore topics essential to understanding photography and media today. The essays, organized around themes ranging from the expected to the esoteric, are paired with key objects from the collection in order to address issues of aesthetics, history, philosophy, power relations, production, and reception. More than 400 high-quality reproductions amplify the authors' arguments and suggest additional dialogues across conventional divisions of chronology, genre, geography, and technology. An introductory essay by Matthew S. Witkovsky traces the museum's history of acquisitions and how the evolution of the museum's collection reflects broader changes in the critical reception of the field of photography and media. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

The Radicality of Love

The Radicality of Love
Author: Srećko Horvat
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2016-01-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 074569117X

What would happen if we could stroll through the revolutionary history of the 20th century and, without any fear of the possible responses, ask the main protagonists - from Lenin to Che Guevara, from Alexandra Kollontai to Ulrike Meinhof - seemingly naïve questions about love? Although all important political and social changes of the 20th century included heated debates on the role of love, it seems that in the 21st century of new technologies of the self (Grindr, Tinder, online dating, etc.) we are faced with a hyperinflation of sex, not love. By going back to the sexual revolution of the October Revolution and its subsequent repression, to Che's dilemma between love and revolutionary commitment and to the period of '68 (from communes to terrorism) and its commodification in late capitalism, the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat gives a possible answer to the question of why it is that the most radical revolutionaries like Lenin or Che were scared of the radicality of love. What is so radical about a seemingly conservative notion of love and why is it anything but conservative? This short book is a modest contribution to the current upheavals around the world - from Tahrir to Taksim, from Occupy Wall Street to Hong Kong, from Athens to Sarajevo - in which the question of love is curiously, surprisingly, absent.

Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures - Continental Europe and its Empires

Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures - Continental Europe and its Empires
Author: Prem Poddar
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 847
Release: 2011-09-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748650970

The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G

The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects

The Postcolonial City and Its Subjects
Author: Rashmi Varma
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2011-08-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113680403X

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth
Author: J. Daniel Elam
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823289826

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.