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Chap 1 28/8/03 1:06 pm Page 1 The context of political life in Britain and the United States* 1 Political systems are shaped by the societies in which they function. For this reason, it is helpful to know something about the historical, geographical, social and economic settings against which they operate, and to understand something of the values and ideas which have mattered and continue to matter to those who inhabit any individual country. In this introduction, we examine the background factors that help to shape the way in which political life and
4 Political life in an antisemitic world: Hannah Arendt's Jewish writings All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together. (Franz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness ) 1 We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English or representatives of any country for that matter. We will always remain
Reading works on Baldwin from 2017 to 2019, the author tracks the significance of Baldwin within the Black Lives Matter movement and our growing need for police reform in conjunction with a revaluation of the lives of racial and ethnic minorities within the oppressive systemic biases of American social and political life.
In Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown attempted to negotiate varying forces confronting contemporary American religious and political life. Through the transformation of the temple into a Gothic zone Brown injects questions of epistemological uncertainty, clashing forces of rational Enlightenment and supernatural faith. Brown outlines the religiously motivated founding of the nation reacting to European oppression as allegorical to the Wieland patriarchs journey from the Old to New World, and his construction of the temple demonstrates the establishment of new institutions in the American landscape. Religious liberty turns into extremism, producing Gothic violence that transforms the temple into a site of horror and destruction. His children attempt to re-transform the temple along rational Enlightenment lines much the same as Brown perceived the need for America to distance itself from its revolutionary and religious extremist origins. Yet the failure of rationalism to expunge the supernatural aura from the temple allows for the tragic events to transpire that comprise the bulk of the novel. Ultimately, Brown‘s Gothic novel evinces the critical nature of the epistemological clash he sees taking place for the direction America will take, and his concerns that Gothic violence will reverberate throughout future generations find their expression in Wieland‘s temple.
Using political and critical theory, this article identifies in James Baldwin a model for citizenship unique to the Black artist who assumed the dual responsibilities of art practice and political activism. I engage with Baldwin’s fiction and his writing about other Black artists working in theater, film, dance, and music during the period of the civil rights movement. Across his career, Baldwin’s prevailing view was that, because of their history, Black artists have the singular, and indeed superlative, capacity to make art as praxis. Baldwin explains that the craft of the Black artist depends upon representing truths, rather than fantasies, about their experience, so that they are at once artists pursuing freedom and citizens pursuing justice. This article pays particular attention to the tension between living a public, political life and the need for privacy to create art, and ultimately the toll this takes on the citizen artist. Baldwin demonstrates how the community of mutual support he finds among Black artists aids in their survival. In his writings on Sidney Poitier and Lorraine Hansberry, his friendships with Beauford Delaney and Josephine Baker, as well as his reviews of music and literature, Baldwin assembles a collective he refers to as “I and my tribe.”
This book engages in a critical encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell on cinema, focusing skeptical attention on the claims made for the contribution of cinema to the ethical character of democratic life. In much of Cavell's writing on film he seeks to show us that the protagonists of the films he terms "remarriage comedies" live a form of perfectionism that he upholds as desirable for contemporary democratic society: moral perfectionism. Films are often viewed on television, and television shows can have "filmlike" qualities. The book addresses the nature of viewing cinematic film as a mode of experience, arguing against Cavell that it is akin to dreaming rather than lived consciousness and, crucially, cannot be shared. It mirrors the celebrated dialogue between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean D'Alembert on theatre. The book articulates the implications of philosophical pessimism for addressing contemporary culture in its relationship to political life. It clarifies how The Americans resembles the remarriage films and can illuminate the issues they raise. The tragedy of remarriage, would be a better instructor of a democratic community, if such a community were prepared to listen. The book suggests that dreaming, both with and without films, is not merely a pleasurable distraction but a valuable pastime for democratic citizens. Finally, it concludes with a robust response from Dienstag to his critics.
9780719075636_4_005.qxd 16/2/09 9:24 AM Page 79 5 The stuff of tragedy? Representations of Irish political leaders in the ‘Haughey’ plays of Carr, Barry and Breen Anthony Roche Plays which deal directly with political life are rare in the Irish canon. Mostly, the emphasis is on family relations, with the direct political context placed in the background, if not almost entirely effaced. But there are those exceptional occasions when contemporary playwrights have felt the need to address the state of the nation more directly by placing politicians squarely on
the uprisings. The emergence of uprisings across the region demonstrates the widespread rejection of political, social and economic conditions that people had faced. The conditions prior to the uprisings should not be viewed solely as a by-product of political life, an accident or the unavoidable consequence of the interaction between nationalist and globalising forces. Instead, as previous chapters have argued, political, social and economic situations were carefully designed as mechanisms of control, resulting in the cultivation of a form of bare life. Although
powerful who now control governments and the futures of entire populations across the developed and developing worlds. The forms and methods of resistance need to be constantly in transition, in performance as in all other aspects of cultural and political life, to maintain their potential to counteract the influence of the spectacle of global capital. To get stuck in previously radical conclusions is to risk unwitting collusion through adherence to a would-be oppositional narrative that has long since been absorbed and manipulated by those in power for their own benefit
. But the intense polarisation and stigmatisation accompanying the terrorist framing still remained an issue for the ongoing transition of the listed armed group into political life and for longer-term reconciliation efforts in Colombia. This raises questions regarding the concept of the ‘linguistic ceasefire’. Is it just an elite-level pact to get negotiations off the ground? How far and by whom does