Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2004"

The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction

Abstract: It is widely accepted todaythat, whenever we receive or produce culture, we do so from a certain position and that such location influences how we theorize about and read the world. Because I am an Italian trained in the United States (specializing in American modernism) in the 1980s, my reading of science fiction has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is a hybrid approach, combining these circumstances primarily with an interest in feminist theory and in writing by women. From the very beginning I have foregrounded issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize this turn of the century.

Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema

Abstract: This book offers an intriguing and ambitious prospect: an attempt to unearth the emergence of an ecologically-based worldview pervading at least western consciousness. The author adopts a Raymond Williams-style approach to this project, engaging in deep textual analysis of the Hollywood blockbuster with a view to identifying whether those projects are implicitly informed by some kind of subliminal eco-consciousness. (Dr. Roddy Flynn, DCU) Utopianism, alongside its more prevalent dystopian opposite together with ecological study has become a magnet for interdisciplinary research and is used extensively to examine the most influential global medium of all time. The book applies a range of interdisciplinary strategies to trace the evolution of ecological representations in Hollywood film from 1950s to the present, which has not been done on this scale before. Many popular science fiction, westerns, nature and road movies, as listed in the filmography are extensively analysed while particularly privileging ecological moments of sublime expression often dramatized in the closing moments of these films. The five chapters all use detailed film readings to exemplify various aspects of this 'feel good' utopian phenomenon which begins with an exploration of the various meanings of ecology with detailed examples like Titanic helping to frame its implications for film study. Chapter two concentrates on nature film and its impact on ecology and utopianism using films like Emerald Forest and Jurassic Park, while the third chapter looks at road movies and also foreground nature and landscape as read through cult films like Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise and Grand Canyon. The final two science fiction chapters begin with 1950s B movie classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Incredible Shrinking Man and compare these with more recent conspiracy films like Soylent Green and Logan's Run alongside the Star Trek phenomenon. The last chapter provides a postmodernist appreciation of ecology and its central importance within contemporary cultural studies as well as applying post-human, feminist and cyborg theory to more recent debates around ecology and 'hope for the future', using readings of among others the Terminator series, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element and Alien Resurrection.

Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract: Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror -- formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace.From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.

Carnivalizing the Future: A New Approach to Theorizing Childhood and Adulthood in Science Fiction for Young Readers

Abstract: The comic narrative strategies that Reeve uses in Mortal Engines set it apart from the bulk of deeply serious, starkly pessimistic science fiction for young readers Sambell illustrates how Reeve eschews the oppressive admonitory tone of the dystopian genre, by playfully and humorously carnivalising the future instead She argues that this innovative approach allows him to critique and subvert the polluted adult world in a manner that is not at odds with the desire to offer young readers optimistic possibilities within the post-catastrophe novel A new style of didacticism is achieved, based upon an emancipatory model of child-adult relations

Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion

Abstract: This book offers readers a concise introduction to Atwood's published novels and the central themes motivating her writing. The volume starts with an overview of the author's biography and the relationship of her writing to relevant literary traditions. Because Atwood is internationally renowned, many commentaries ignore the Canadian roots of her work. Cooke corrects this oversight by sketching the ways in which her work is shaped by, and has shaped, the Canadian literary scene. As the author of a full-length Atwood biography, Cooke is able to summarize feminist, Canadian nationalist, and postmodern influences on Atwood's work and on her development as a writer. The book offers close scrutiny of three illustrative works: Cat's Eye as the artist novel, The Handmaid's Tale as a dystopian novel, and The Blind Assassin as a villainess novel. This book extends the dialogue surrounding Atwood's work in several important ways. As a book written by a Canadian about a Canadian writer, it illustrates how readings of Atwood's work can be significantly enriched through attention to the Canadian literary and cultural context. Noting that Atwood's work not only entertains but also challenges and disturbs, it argues that all of Atwood's novels can be read as satires that expose society's double standards. By locating the beginnings of satire as far back as Atwood's first published novel, and tracing it in Atwood's later novels as the impulse behind challenges to character (in the artist novels), setting (in the dystopic fiction), and plot (in the villainess novels), this study provides a startlingly original interpretation of The Blind Assassin and new insights into the earlier novels.

Darker Cities: Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema

Abstract: This article makes use of Darko Suvin’s theory of the novum and Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism to analyse three urban-dystopian science fiction films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998). It argues for the central significance of utopia, dystopia and cinema to SF. It explores the themes of class and gender, the uses of intertextuality, and the representations of the human and the posthuman in these three films. Drawing on Jameson, Baudrillard and others, it argues that the first film exhibits a characteristically modern, the latter two different versions of a characteristically postmodern, ‘structure of feeling’.

From Solid Modern Utopia to Liquid Modern Anti-Utopia: Tracing the Utopian Strand in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman

Abstract: Utopia literally means 'nowhere'. Most often, however, Utopian thought and practice have pointed to a 'somewhere', a tangible and definable expression of the 'nowhere' and have often been presented as a positive minor image (a eutopia) or a deliberately distorted and negative picture of contemporary reality (a dystopia or anti-utopid), the 'here and now', but today these previously flourishing 'somewheres' everywhere appear to be gradually dismantled, dissolving, or disillusioned. Thus, as Bruce Mazlish recently and poignantly pointed out, "Utopian thinking, except in the form of messianic or fundamentalist aspirations, appears either to take other shapes or be in the tepid condition or non-existent" (43). His description of the van ishing or transformation of Utopias is correct in as far as it pertains to the recent development in and destiny of social or political Utopias because within literary or filmic genres such as science fiction or virtual reality, Uto pian ideas are indeed still very much made available by different agencies and individuals. Therefore, the demise of Utopia is primarily associated with the spheres of either politics or science, and particularly social science, which have become disenchanted in the process of 'de-utopianisation' and have lost the visions and Utopias which for centuries guided the founders, pioneers and practitioners of these domains and pointed in the direction of 'the common good', the 'just society', etc. At the same time especially the social sciences may very well have lost their own raison d'etre and the jus tification of its own practice in the process The postulated demise of Utopia is, however, perhaps premature. Not everybody accepts this tragic disappearance of Utopias and the limitations of mind, fantasy, ingenuity and creativity that underpins and is promoted by it.

Biotechnology: Between Commerce and Civil Society

Abstract: New scientific knowledge is no longer merely the key to unlocking the secrets of nature and society. It now represents the "becoming" of a new world. Scientific developments affect the ways in which we conduct our affairs, as well as how we comprehend the changes underway as the result of novel technical artefacts and scientific knowledge. The practical fruits of biotechnology are a case in point; they have grasped our imaginations, and generated worldwide debate and concern. Debates on biotechnology shift between images of utopia and dystopia. The social sciences deserve a voice in the debate, and can do so through sober examination of the economic, social, and cultural implications of biotechnology. Some economists even predict that the importance of biotechnology as the technology of the future will far exceed that of the information technologies, in particular the Internet. The contributors to this volume are drawn from a broad spectrum of the social sciences, and include Nico Stehr, Gene Rosa, Steve Fuller, Steve Best and Douglas Kellner, Nikolas Rose, Fred Buttel, Javier Lezaun, Anne Kerr, Susanna Hornig Priest and Toby Ten Eyck, Martin Schulte, Alexander Somek, Steven P. Vallas, Daniel Lee Kleinman, Abby Kinchy and Raul Necochea, Herbert Gottweis, J. Rogers Hollingsworth, Gisli Palsson, Elizabeth Ettore, Richard Hindmarch and Reiner Grundmann. The impact of science on society is destined to be a fundamental concern in the new century. This volume illustrates the contributions anthropology, law, political science, and sociology can make to the ongoing discussions about the role of biotechnology in modern societies.

"The Land of Rape and Honey": The Use of World War II Propaganda in the Music Videos of Ministry and Laibach

Abstract: "Industrial" is a loud, powerful and often shocking style of avantgarde popular music. It is constructed from mechanical rhythms, harsh and distorted timbres, and dark minor key or modal harmonies, all of which contribute to the creation of a dystopian soundscape. This brutal postapocalyptic attitude is not produced, however, by the music alone. The visual images that accompany these Industrial bands during their live performances, and in their music videos, work with the music to design environments resembling a futuristic urban wasteland. These visual images frequently contain distorted scenes of riots or warfare, pictures of cogs, hammers, robots, or soldiers. These images, and others like them, evoke the imagery of World War II propaganda in their visual style and composition, which make use of bold colors, sharp lines, scenes of mass spectacles, and military themes. It is also quite common to find images that are directly related to World War II propaganda that promoted fascist ideologies or, more specifically, the German National Socialist, or Nazi, political party. Many Industrial bands claim that these images are used solely for shock value, to send a political message to their audiences about the social systems in their respective countries and the evils of disguised fascism and totalitarianism in general. There is often, however, a dis-

Ethics and Perplexity: Toward a Critique of Dialogical Reason

Abstract: Editorial Foreword Author's Acknowledgments Editorial Acknowledgments Part One Introduction (Letter to Alicia Axelrod) ONE Project for a New (Illustrated) Guide to the Perplexed Part Two Toward a Critique of Dialogical Reason TWO On the Intranscendental Nature of Reason THREE Beyond the Social Contract (Fortunes and Misfortunes of Communicative Ethics) FOUR Reason, Utopia, and Dystopia Part Three Coda (Conversation with Ignatius M. Zalantzamendi) FIVE Perplexities and Obstinacies Works Cited About the Author Index

Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics

Abstract: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technology and spirituality formed uncanny alliances in countless manifestations of automatism. From Victorian mediums to the psychiatrists who studied them, from the Fordist assembly line to the Hollywood studios that adopted its practices, from Surrealism on the left to Futurism and Vorticism on the right, the unpredictable paths of automatic practice and ideology present a means by which to explore both the utopian and dystopian possibilities of technological and cultural innovation. Focusing on the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, Alan Ramon Clinton argues that, given the wide-reaching influence of automatism, as much can be learned from these writers' means of production as from their finished products. At a time when criticism has grown polarized between political and aesthetic approaches to high modernism, this book provocatively develops its own automatic procedures to explore the works of these writers as fields rich in potential choices, some more spectral than others.

The production of the city as a white space : representing & restructuring identity and architecture, Cape Town, 1892-1936

Abstract: English values, architects and architectural ideas played a major role in shaping identities, architecture and power relations in Cape Town between 1892-1936. Driven by an uncompromising belief in the universal desirability of Englishness and Western architecture and culture, they manifested a tension between a romanticised, historical, rural ideal, and an urban dystopia, the compromised resolution of which lay in suburban housing schemes. The discourse, images, public events and built space produced through this tension resulted in the deliberate - and occasionally unintentional - restructuring of class and racial identities (and thence power relations) at the Cape in the following ways: 1. The Cape Dutch revival and preservation movement, initially generated out of Arts & Crafts ideals, became the rallying point around which (i) a common English/Afrikaner national identity was formed, (ii) Empire and land possession was legitimised as a continuation of the project of "civilisation" and "History," and (Iii) an English landed gentry was re-realised at the Cape. 2. Poorer buildings and materials, and the old dense parts of Cape Town such as Wells Square in District Six, were socially, culturally, racially and materially heterogeneous, and the anti-aesthetic to English architectural ideals. Discourse around these spaces defined the inhabitants and the very fabric of these "slums" as "Other" and laid the groundwork for the eventual removal of these "Others" and conditions of "hybrid- Otherness" from the city. 3. The suburban housing schemes were initially generated out of the ideas of the Garden City Movement and "model cottages." Attempts to restructure "the Other, as "Same" through these projects were abandoned as the English Ideal gave way to economic compromises and the tendency to view "Natives" as non-permanent residents of the city. The resulting housing was effectively neutered, bordered and controlled, thereby removing the visible presence of "Others" and temporarily obscuring the effects of colonialism.

An Ambiguous Utopia

Abstract: The article begins with a discussion of some Christian and secular ideas about utopia. It shows that after the Enlightenment it has become difficult to conceptualize true utopias while postmodernism has been preoccupied with dystopian visions of the future. The ambiguous nature of utopianism is reflected particularly in science fiction, which powerfully reflects contemporary aspirations and anxieties, and this ambiguity is here explored with special reference to the work of the novelist Ursula Le Guin.

Putting Stones in Place: Anne Duden and German Acts of Memory1

Abstract: "If ever there were a Sisyphean image of hopelessly heaving weight upward, it is the German with his burden of history. Damned if you do; damned if you don't." -Tom L. Freudenheim (146) Germany's current memory boom, most notably the construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, attests to the continued labor of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Often enough, however, stones put in place to recall the past provoke familiar grousing about "German difficulties in 'getting it right'" (Fulbrook 41). History presumably recedes beneath inanimate abstractions in stone or, as Andreas Huyssen argues, takes the form of "radiating" waste in need of Entsorgung (193).2 Either way, the verdict is equally damning. The metaphysics of stone and waste also figures prominently in the literary work of Anne Duden, particularly her short story "Ubergang" (1982), one of several short stories in a collection with the same title and perhaps Duden's best known work. Significantly, Duden's text recasts Sisyphus' work of "hopelessly heaving weight upward" (Freudenheim 146) as an act of abjection. When a nameless female protagonist's face is shattered in an accident, she vomits the effects of German history buried in her body. After her physical boundaries have been brutally resurrected by physicians, she imagines herself drowning in a Steinmeer (89). Despite its dystopian nature, this process nonetheless provides a powerful language for the purposes of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. The act of abjection in which the protagonist's voice emerges reveals a complicated positionality. While vomiting re-establishes besieged boundaries and the semblance of a differentiated self, the protagonist also recognizes an inexplicable commingling of self and other in what she voids. Expelling the abject and having her face reconstructed, in turn, hide damning evidence of German history and metaphorically turn her to stone. This process of abjection and turning into stone has particularly interesting ramifications if one considers Berlin's present frenzied construction, during which buried history has a way of periodically disgorging itself, like the Goebbels bunker unearthed beneath the site of the Holocaust Memorial. Another example is the "Topography of Terror" at the Prinz-Albrecht-Gelande, which, with its excavated, subterranean rooms where the Gestapo tortured and murdered, also gains suggestiveness given Duden's metaphorics. A dilapidated structure which a bulldozer could easily topple, these rooms stand as an open hole in the face of Berlin - a past neither buried nor carted away. Duden's text reminds us to position German identity alongside of German history in precisely those ambiguous, discomforting spaces which challenge easy distinctions and symbolic designations. It remains for each generation to keep the traces of German history exposed and to work towards its own symbolic renditions of perpetually troubled historical, geographic, and psychic boundaries. The short story "Ubergang" equates the alternatives - burying or removing history - with a symbolic form of disease and death respectively. In the following I will offer a close reading of "Ubergang" which first examines the mechanics of a "vacuum mouth" - the means by which an abject history enters the protagonist's body. I will pay close attention to the positionality of the voice which ultimately rides out of the body on the back of abject emissions, if only to disappear in a ruinous landscape of rubble. Despite an all-out assault on the protagonist's boundaries and a response akin to a mechanical act of self-preservation, she nonetheless conjures up differentiated, mournful relations between Germans and Holocaust victims. Based on the film Berlin Babylon (Hubertus Siegert, 1996-2000), I will conclude with remarks on Berlin's present-day landscape, particularly the new Reichstag dome, Potsdamer Platz, the "Topography of Terror," and Peter Eisenman's Holocaust monument. Duden's text not only offers rich metaphorical implications for abject history and stone, bulldozers and glass, it also helps us to understand how German identity is currently positioning itself along architectural nodal points, at times transparent, messy or ossified, in relation to history. …

Transmodernism or the resurgence of modernism in contemporary cinema and popular culture

Abstract: In recent years (from the mid-1990s onwards, roughly), the alleged idiosyncratic dominion and hegemony of postmodernism in the fields of the higher arts, but also - and perhaps even more importantly - in popular culture, has slowly begun to make way for a new resurgence of modernism. This new "modernism," or, as I call it, "transmodernism," has somehow assimilated some of the features of its predecessor -postmodernism, while returning to some of the classic values of modernism: the reinforcement of a strong, structured and original "Narrative," a greater appeal for the avant-garde and abstract art, daring inventions as opposed to redundant postmodern recycling, a more worried and dystopian gaze thrown on the world, as opposed to postmodern relative carelessness and nostalgia, etc... This applies strikingly in several forms of art, from architecture and automobile design, up to music (both contemporary classical music and pop music, as in the case of an artist like David Bowie), but most importantly in cinema. Indeed, recent directors of importance like Lars Von Trier, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Not, Michael Haneke, but also Gus Van Sant and David Cronenberg (to name but a few), have in common their simultaneous (though not connected in any systemic way) vow to renew cinema. The medium, it is commonly believed, has been undergoing a cultural crisis that was witnessed by almost everyone so far (leading even to such aberrations as a book called Death of Cinema). The truth is less alarming and simpler. We are just witnessing another shift of aesthetic equilibrium in the fields of popular culture. This is simply the expression of a need for a more demanding, more ambitious form of art, after the kitsch and often careless excesses of postmodernism - a movement, needless to say, which has also brought its share of remarkable achievements over the past thirty years.

Auguries of Power: Prophecy and Violence in the Satanic Verses

Abstract: "All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end," predicts the narrator of Kim, Rudyard Kipling's classic orientalist adventure (45). The incendiary energy of Kipling's 1901 portrait of the religious zeal of prophecy persists in the imagination of the West. But a century later, it seems, holy zeal has lost its innocence: the frenzy of the visionary--now called the fanatic or the fundamentalist--is charged with violence. The change from the exotic to the terrifying in the Western view of Eastern prophets calls for analysis. Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, with its infamous inversions of the prophecies that shaped Islamic culture and Indian society, boldly confronts the aura of violence that now surrounds prophecy. Rushdie invites the reader to listen attentively to a multitude of babbling voices as they clamor against one another. Rushdie challenges the reader to adjudicate this novel's founding competition between prophecy and its falsifications, between inspired verses and satanic verses. Indeed, the narrator asks "who has the best tunes?" (10). Because some of the prophets' "tunes" are deadly, the task of adjudicating among mantic voices is all the more urgent. Which babblers and visionaries are dangerous? Does their violence stem from prophecy itself, from falsifications of prophecy, or from both? In listening to the voices, it is not enough to distinguish the degree of their religious fervor (moderate, zealous or extreme) or even the content of their predictions. Rather, to determine why many prophets are violent in The Satanic Verses, one must ask what kind of prophesying they engage in. Instead of simply condemning or acquitting one kind of prophecy or another, Rushdie presents prophets that defy categorization. (1) The theological and literary tropology of prophecy suggests that terrorism in this novel is a hybridized prophetic activity that exaggerates some elements of prophecy and falsifies others. Many characters in the novel distort the prophetic tradition in three ways that generate violence. First, the violent prophet figures exaggerate mantic sympathy for divine wrath against injustice. Second, they collapse prediction and fulfillment into a single action. Third, they manipulate the fusion of truth and justice that characterizes the prophetic imagination. A fourth distortion of the prophetic tradition emerges in the novel. The novel's critique of inscription and sacred text would seem to account for the violence of certain prophets by pitting textuality, the letter of the law, and tyranny against orality, spirit, and freedom. Ultimately, however, these oppositions break down in the face of the violence of the clerical tyrant. The tyrant's fantasy of timelessness requires one to look beyond the three distortions of the prophetic tradition to the fourth: the reversal of prophecy's mandate of newness. A brief look at the dystopian genre demonstrates the convention of using prophecy as a trope to address power and violence. The literary tropology of prophecy often hearkens back to a longstanding purpose of prophecy: to rebel against tyranny. In writing about prophecy, Rushdie does more than address religion: like the dystopian novelists, he uses prophetic speech as a trope to address problems of oppressive power, violence and terror. (2) This trope is common in the classic dystopian novels, which project a future tyranny that is the logical outgrowth of present policy. In the novels, the juxtaposition of present and future invites readers to examine their own societies. For instance Ayn Rand's Anthem projects a dystopian future in order to warn against certain social trends that she considers incipiently tyrannical. (3) Dystopian novels like Rand's do not so much attempt accurate predictions of a real future as examine the present. …

An Everyday Nostalgia: Memory and the Fictions of Belonging

Abstract: In 1984, George Orwell presented the future as a dystopian vision, where everyday existence was governed and redefined by an oppressive regime. Winston Smith's daily duties at the Ministry of Truth involved the invention, rewriting and erasing of fragments of history as a means of perpetuating contentment, uniformity and control. History, as Orwell described it in the novel 'was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.' More that a quarter of a century after the publication of 1984, Michel Foucault discussed the cinematic representation and misrepresentation of French history and identity in terms of what he called the manipulation of 'popular memory'. In what was tantamount to a diluted version of Orwell's palimpsestic histories, Foucault stated that 'people are not shown what they were, but what they must remember having been.' This paper will investigate notions of memory, identity and the everyday through a discussion of the community of Celebration in Florida. Conceived in the 1990s, Celebration was designed around a fictionalised representation of pre 1940s small town America, using nostalgia for a mythologised past to create a sense of comfort, community and conformity among its residents. Adapting issues raised by Orwell, Foucault and Baudrillard, this paper will discuss the way in which architecture, like film and literature, can participate in what Foucault discussed as the manipulation of popular memory, inducing and exploiting a nostalgia for an everyday past that that never really existed.

Acting, Singing, Dancing, and So Forth: Theatre (Research) in the University

Abstract: About midway through Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, the protagonist Jimmy (later known as Snowman, survivor of a genetically engineered global epidemic induced by his childhood friend, Crake) leaves home for the university, or in this case for the Martha Graham Academy. In a culture driven by the collusion of technology and capital it's not surprising that the best students are sent to lavish technical universities (Crake attends the Watson–Crick Institute), while arts and humanities students listlessly rusticate at Martha Graham, learning the pointless yet “vital arts” of “acting, singing, dancing, and so forth” and how to deploy them in the service of commodity culture (Jimmy's skill with language leads him to major in Applied Rhetoric, eventually writing advertising copy for Crake's new life forms). Like much else in Oryx and Crake, Atwood's vision jibes chillingly enough with the rhetoric of today's corporate university: compared to jet propulsion, cancer research, or even the battle of Appomattox (on my campus, history is a social science), the arts and humanities can be made to seem “like studying Latin, or book binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything” (187).

Western Dystopia: Radical Islamism and Anti-Westernism

Abstract: When Frantz Fanon’s L’An Cinq de la Revolution Algerienne appeared in 1959 it seemed to be part of an unstoppable tide of anti-colonial socialist liberation. Translated as Studies in a Dying Colonialism, the publisher’s blurb on the first English edition (1965) proclaims that this is a work that ‘has much to say to a world dominated by revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped countries’. Introducing the book, Adolfo Gilly reminds us that ‘Revolution is mankind’s way of life today. This is the age of revoution; the “age of indifference” is gone forever’ (p. 1).

George Orwell’s 1984 and Political Ideology

Abstract: From its release in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 has been considered a stinging indictment of totalitarian ideology. Unlike many other texts, Orwell’s novel seems overtly to suggest its ideological underpinnings and place aesthetic considerations squarely in the background.1 For critics such as Richard Lowenthal (1983, 209) and Tosco R. Fyvel (1984, 73), Orwell provides a transparent — but nevertheless powerful — condemnation of Stalinism and a prescient warning against the proliferation of totalitarian methods. In this light, Orwell, working from a ‘common sense’ socialist position that eschews dogmatic rhetoric, exposes the dehumanizing qualities of systemic terror. Both sympathetic and hostile critics usually ground their discussions of 1984 in the assumption that Orwell offers ‘substantially little more than an extension into the near future of the present structure and policy of Stalinism’ (Rahv 1987, 14). For the inhabitants of Oceania, ideology — irrational and sadistic — crushes not only the feeble resistance of ‘rebels’ like Winston Smith and Julia, but also disintegrates the human spirit and transmogrifies it into a repository of platitudes. Aided by what Rob Kroes deems a ‘dislocation of human understanding by linguistic sabotage,’ the Inner Party employs ideology to eliminate the very possibility of thought (Kroes 1985, 85). According to such interpretations, Orwell sets his dystopia in England as a check against factions within British socialism that he feels are open to influence from Stalinism.

COUNTER-NARRATIVES, CLASS POLITICS AND METROPOLITAN DYSTOPIAS: Representations of Globalization in Maelstrom, Waydowntown and la Moitie Gauche Du Frigo

Abstract: Resume: En portant une attention particuliere a Maelstrom, l'auteure considere trois films canadiens qui abordent la problematique de l'experience metropolitaine de la mondialisation pour re-imaginer la ville en termes de traditions architecturales et du libre mouvement des capitaux. Dans ces uvres, la ville devient une dystopie de fonctionnalisme redondant et anonyme. Ses habitants appartiennent a une ethnie uniforme, homogene, blanche, tous des col-blancs proletarises dans la vingtaine ou debut de la trentaine. Sa texture emotive est une melancolie generalisee explicitement issue de l'impacte du capital sur la vie de tous les jours. The metropolis is, above all, a myth, a tale...an allegory; in particular it represents the allegory of the crisis of modernity.... To go beyond these bleak stories of exile and that grey, rainy country of the anguished soul, is to establish a sense of being at home in the city, and to make of tradition a space of transformation rather than the scene of a cheerless destiny.1 While an enormously disputed and internally differentiated body of literature, theories of globalization provide a resonant framework for reading contemporary Canadian cinema as a field shaped by international flows of money, textual influence and ideologies as much as by national determinations. There is, perhaps, no better place to begin than with Arjun Appadurai who has devised an expansive model that encompasses the cross-border flow and social integration of transnational "ethnoscapes," "mediascapes," "technoscapes," "financescapes," and "ideoscapes."2 For Appadurai, this broad-dimensional approach to globalization necessitates a deep rethinking of issues of mediation and causation beyond economist approaches that privilege transnational corporate capital as the single most crucial vector in considering globalization. According to Appadurai, flows of capital, technology, immigrants, and ideas are not, "coeval, convergent, isomorphic or spatially consistent. They are...in relations of disjuncture...[and] have different speeds, axes, points of origin and termination."3 Appadurai's enormously influential model allows us to theorize the incomplete, uneven, mutually contradictory histories of globalization in Canada. Separating the economic from the socio-political in relation to their discrepant histories of development might go someways toward explaining the continuous vivacity of regional and sub-national cultural identities in Canada (Quebec and first nation communal formations being the paramount examples) against the backdrop of accelerated continental economic integration and American domination of mass media consumption. In addition to Appadurai, Saskia Sassen provides a clear alternative to thinking globalization as a single integrated or unified conceptual scheme. Sassen suggests shifting analysis from the conventional global/national axis to a consideration of how globalization is actualized in concrete, localized assumptions about globalization, which stress the hyper-mobility of capital or the immateriality of the information economy, Sassen places a renewed emphasis on concrete location and place by arguing that even information economies require substantial, site-specific infrastructures and agglomerations of population. Introducing sub-national groupings like cities into an analysis of globalization not only adds concrete specificity but allows for a consideration of the way in which economic globalization impacts on everyday life, in particular, on the lives of marginal subjects: "women, immigrants, people of colour, whose political sense of self and identities are not necessarily embedded in the nation or the national community."4 Sassen's approach goes well beyond the consistent and often consistently banal evocation of the local as a situated or essentially resistant counter-ballast to the homogenizing and imperializing flows of global corporate influence. Reorienting the analysis of globalization from the macro to the micro involves a focused consideration of the specific places where the everyday reality of globalization is performed, felt, and resisted by embodied subjects. …

Mudslides Make Good History

Abstract: Historians don't generally have much to do with the Big History Business of this country. Perhaps we should. Americans soak up documentaries, love to watch "historical" films, and have an authentic desire to understand more of our country's history. Sales of nobly elevating national histories are astonishing, or so it seems to those of us who write for the academic market. I am frustrated by what passes for history in much of our popular culture. My mother got so fed up with the History Channel's fascination with the Third Reich that she declared "No Nazis at Night" a household rule. Yet at the same time, I am inspired by the desire to learn more and see more and understand more about the past that I witness in bookstores, at megaplexes, and in my friends' living rooms. Those of us who think about liistory for a living, who teach and write about it for students and scholars, can do a better job connecting with this deeply-rooted historical passion. (Please, let us not leave it to Martin Scorsese, who would have us believe that the United States Navy responded to the draft riots of the Civil War by shelling lower Manhattan.) Furthermore, we can make these connections without sacrificing our hard-won insights into plural perspectives, multiple causality, and general complication in the worlds of the past.1Luckily, environmental history offers excellent ways to write good history that engages public interest. The landscape, terrain, and human ecology of the American western states provide abundant material for work that will challenge, inform, and involve our neighbors as well as each other.The American West has some colossally Big Stuff: big deserts, big mountains, big dams, big plains, big waves, big dust storms, big mansions. There's an epic quality to much of the weather and topography west of the Mississippi. Subtle detail can be crucial for historical insight, but largeness of scale can also be tremendously exciting. Big Stuff has innate drama, and much of it has inherently narrative qualities. Big Stuff also yields great visuals. Dramatic narrative and images capture people's imaginations and fire their curiosity. I think if we-that is, people who would use their hard-earned time to read an article like this-include more drama, narrative, and imagery in our work, we will end up writing stronger histories that advance our fields and also engage our fellow citizens.I see four main themes through which western environmental history can help us do this. For the sake of alliteration (the kind of popular technique that works even if professional historians think it's kind of cheesy), I'm calling these Disease, Disaster, Desiccation, and Dystopia. In the coming years, I'd like to read more about each of these. Here's what I mean.Start with disease. Bad bugs make good copy. Everyone likes reading about disease-the more loathsome, the better. This is why Richard Preston in his "Trilogy of Dark Biology" can move back and forth between historical journalism and fiction without losing any of his audience: his prose terrifies us, it fascinates us, and it makes us feel informed about our present-day world. Moreover, Elizabeth Fenn's recent Pox Americana demonstrates that excellent (and much-better-documented) history can get immense air-time in our popular culture when it is about something that we all fear, like smallpox. Disease and sickness have massive gross-out appeal. This paradox makes horror movies sell, and 1 think it can also expand the sales and readership of histories that embrace the sometimes unpleasant realities of the human form.2The search for health in various places reveals the complicated history of regional identity in this country. Emigrants to the West struggled to avoid "sickly" places and claim "healthy" ones. Yet as successive regions became denned as healthy with respect to illnesses like malaria or tuberculosis, the "healthful West" moved along at quite a good clip. In turn, health concerns influenced how generations of Americans shaped and engineered* their Wests. …

Architecture i theory i criticism i history

Abstract: George Orwell presented the future as a dystopian vision, where everyday existence was governed and redefined by an oppressive regime. Winston Smith’s daily duties at the Ministry of Truth, where he was employed, involved the invention, rewriting and erasing of fragments of history as a means of perpetuating contentment, uniformity and control. History, as Orwell described it in the novel ‘was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary’ (Orwell, 1989, p. 42). More that a quarter of a century after the publication of

Satirising the bourgeois worldview: Patrick Hamilton’s Impromptu in Moribundia

Abstract: As well as being a cultural product itself, literature provides a means for the critical interrogation of the processes of cultural production and consumption in class-structured capitalist society. Realist narrative, Utopian speculation and dystopian conjecture have all been used to good effect. So, too, have satire and fable, and these come together in a neglected and largely forgotten novel from 1939, Impromptu in Moribundia, written by the bourgeois Marxist Patrick Hamilton. Though dated in many ways, and clearly rooted in a particular social and political context, this fabulous tale, nevertheless, retains interest for those wishing to critique the production of the bourgeois cultural worldview.