Showing papers by "Craig Calhoun published in 1990"

The ideology of intellectuals and the Chinese Student Protest Movement of 1989

Abstract: Protest and struggle for democracy in China has become an object of international appropriation. The 1989 movement is claimed by Wu'erkaixi and Yan Jiaqi, by Chinese students who were studying abroad when it happened, by overseas Chinese businessmen, by the Guomindang, by the American political establishment, and by a variety of scholars. It is interpreted for one purpose in Hong Kong, where a strident mix of fear and ambivalent insistence on Chinese identity are central. It is interpreted in much of the West as an object lesson on the evils of totalitarian government and more specifically, if insidiously, the virtues simply of being Western. Each scholar or journalist who writes on the movement participates in this struggle to appropriate it. This is not altogether avoidable, but it is crucial to recognize it. It is crucial also to realize that the movement of Spring 1989 was notmonological, did not speak with one voice, did not express one set of interests and did not point in one direction. It represented a confluence of forces as well as persons, and the complexity of that representation is the reason that it can and must still be struggled over. Seeing the easy collapsing of the movement into settled categories is disconcerting for one who observed it first hand and joined in discussions with its protagonists as they struggled to create and define it. The Western media and the Chinese diaspora alike have objectified the movement or created a simulacrum of it in international discourse. And if this reminds one of Baudrillard's account of the hyperreal world of modern media it should also caution one against joining in Baudrillard's happy acceptance of the dominance of Disneyland over consciousness. For the difficulty of understanding, and the absence of any single, monological "Truth" need not blind us to the reality and pernicious effects of lying, distortion and oversimplification. And they should not lead us to forget that this movement really happened, amid concrete struggle, joy and bloodshed; it was not a madefor-TV movie. This preamble signals, I hope, a theme of introducing some complexity and contestation into accounts of the protest movement that render it too easily the result of teleological necessity (as indeed many of its participants claimed at the time), or of some single set of structural circumstances, or of the interests of any particular group or groups. In particular, I want to argue that the protest movement must be seen as internally heterogenous and as the product of active creation and transformation. In this paper I cannot develop a narrative or an analysis of the whole movement. 1 I want to concentrate instead on the different ideological currents among intellectuals which formed a backdrop to and shaped the student

Putting the Sociologist in the Sociology of Culture: The Self-Reflexive Scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams@@@Homo Academicus.@@@Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism.@@@The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists.

Abstract: Reviewed work(s): Homo Academicus. by Pierre Bourdieu; Peter Collier Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. by Raymond Williams; Robin Gable; Robin Blackburn The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. by Raymond Williams; Tony Pinkney

Putting the sociologist in the sociology of culture: the self-reflexive scholarship of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams

Abstract: Reviewed work(s): Homo Academicus. by Pierre Bourdieu; Peter Collier Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. by Raymond Williams; Robin Gable; Robin Blackburn The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. by Raymond Williams; Tony Pinkney