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6 Creative survival as subversion I Solidarities and creative tactics against ‘conditions of death’1 n the DRC, the exercise and consolidation of state authority does not necessarily imply social transformation or a real commitment of the state to impose itself but, rather, the management of state absences and state presences through a plurality of authorities. Still, the patterns of coercion and extraction that have followed from the 20 years of conflict, with the different state-making and peacebuilding processes, determine the conditions for the
1 Creative Democracy Optimism about democracy is today under a cloud. (LW2: 304) Unfashionable democracy When Dewey published The Public and Its Problems in 1927, democracy had become somewhat of an unfashionable aspiration, with populations in Europe beginning to turn to the extreme Left and Right for their political settlements. In Russia the October Revolution was nearly ten years old, in Italy Mussolini had been in power for three years and in Germany both volumes of Mein Kampf had been published. At home in the United States of America, even the pretence
3 The Obstacles to Creative Democracy at Home and Abroad Only sheer cynicism and defeatism will deny that it is possible to create a workable world government. There have been times when the moral ancestors of present day defeatists would have scornfully declared that a rule of law over a territory anything like as large as our present United States was impossible. They would have said that outside of family groups and small neighbourhoods, the custom of every man’s hand against other men could not be uprooted … If peoples, especially their rulers, devoted
2 Fin-de-siècle investigations of the ‘creative genius’ in psychiatry and psychoanalysis Birgit Lang In Victorian society, admiration for the ‘creative genius’ abounded. It was based on stereotypical notions of the Romantic artist, who, ‘by the neat and necessarily contradictory logic of aesthetic elevation and social exclusion, [was] both a great genius and greatly misunderstood’.1 In Germany the propensity to idealise the artist as a creative genius was further propelled by intellectuals’ and writers’ contribution to imagining the German nation throughout the
James Baldwin Review (JBR) is an annual journal that brings together a wide array of peer‐reviewed critical and creative non-fiction on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. In addition to these cutting-edge contributions, each issue contains a review of recent Baldwin scholarship and an award-winning graduate student essay. James Baldwin Review publishes essays that invigorate scholarship on James Baldwin; catalyze explorations of the literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin’s writing and political activism; and deepen our understanding and appreciation of this complex and luminary figure.
Introduction Artist–academic collaborations are becoming increasingly popular in socially engaged research. Often, this comes from a drive to ‘have impact’ outside of academia, as creative pieces are often seen as more engaging and accessible for non-specialised audiences. The impact on collaborators (both on the collaborating ‘researchers’ and ‘creatives’) also comes into play here, as interdisciplinary work could be a form of re-thinking how we
This essay draws on James Baldwin’s ideas on race, immigration, and American identity to examine the experience of contemporary African immigrants in the United States. More Africans have come to the U.S. since 1965 than through the Middle Passage, and only now is their experience gaining the full creative and critical attention it merits. Since becoming American entails adopting the racial norms and sentiments of the U.S., I explore how African immigrants contend with the process of racialization that is part and parcel of the American experience. Drawing on Baldwin’s idea of blackness as an ethical category, I also consider the limits of the concept of Afropolitanism to characterize the new wave of African immigrants in the U.S.
field report submitted by Sara Wong on the artist-academic collaborative project PostiveNegatives and the Drugs & (dis)order project foregrounds the questions of authorship, knowledge production and power relations suggested in the research articles. The report reflects critically on one of the group’s creative collaborations – part of the Drugs and (dis)order project in Colombia – and particularly on the interpersonal relations and questions of capacity building and learning which form part of
life and live out the fascistic dream. That doesn’t mean to say the threat of violence ever truly dissipates from the relationship. Once the power over life is normalised, the spectre of violence is in fact omnipresent. It has to be that way or else the still existent capacity to resist might result in a reversal of fortunes. In the absence of violence there is an absence of fear. And in the absence of fear life can live affirmatively, creatively, resistively in the primary and ontological sense of these terms, with all the public and joyful expressions of difference
and a tight timeframe, yet they managed to respond creatively to the peculiar situation in Vienna, where huge empty office buildings had been allocated to shelter new asylum seekers during the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. The architects had focused on adding simple furnishings that created a more homely environment, articulating a careful, human-centred approach that had interpreted shelter not as four walls and a roof but as a calming and secure internal space. The aim