Using Judith Butler's notion of the "ungrievable life," this project examines the politics of loss and its remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, an award-winning documentary featuring five diverse lives, represented by panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and their subsequent loss. The essay is divided into four sections. The first discusses the notion of loss and its remains. The second provides a brief overview of the film and situates it in the political and historical context in which it was produced and circulated. Using the concepts of bodily, spatial, and ideal remains, the third section analyzes the politics of loss in the film. The essay concludes by examining these politics two decades after the AIDS Memorial Quilt was originally displayed.

The Politics of Loss and Its Remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt

This paper discusses organizations of the oppressed, such as drug user and sex worker groups, and the images of themselves that they construct. We suggest that analysis of these organizationally-produced collective self-images –frequently overlooked in scholarly research –is crucial to understanding the complex internal dynamics of users' and sex workers' organizations and struggles they engage in when defining their collective (organizational) identities and course of action.

A gap in science's and the media images of people who use drugs and sex workers: research on organizations of the oppressed.

Primary commodities present a special problem in international political economy for two reasons. First, their production and export is generally ascribed to and identified with the former colonial areas of the world characterised by extreme poverty for the majority (not all) of their citizens. Second, the relationships of supply, demand and price for many of these commodities show several peculiarities which are not adequately accounted for either in classical ‘invisible hand’ theory or in the rationalised planning of large corporations. Several attempts have been made to link the two problems together in one theory, in an effort to show how the poverty of Third World peoples can be accounted for by either the violence of commodity price fluctuations or a long-range tendency for the terms of trade of commodity prices to decline in relation to the prices for manufactured goods.

Afterword: Commodity prices and third world poverty

Review of Lessons from the Damned: Class Struggle in the Black Community by The Damned.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Lessons from the Damned

In the October 1973 issue of Monthly Review , Ankie M.M. Hoogvelt and David Child argue that the economic blockade of Rhodesia has stimulated economic development in the country, thereby lending support to the theses of Andre Gunder Frank, Paul Baran, and others concerning the underdevelopment effect of metropolis-satellite relationships between developed and less developed countries. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/index.php/mr/article/download/MR-026-07-1974-11_8/2146

Conrad J. Lynn

Papers

Lessons from the Damned

The Rhodesian Blockade and Internal Structural Change; A Correction