No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Im/possibility of Politics: Subalternity, Modernity, Hegemony
... Postcolonial studies, on the other hand, questioned the West-centric depiction of subalterns as primitive, irrational or inferior (Harding, 1998). The postcolonial lens essentially challenged the emergence of the "others" as a subject of study and inquired how the "others" were measured and evaluated in the dominant practices of knowledge production (Beverley, 2001). Postcolonial approaches communicatively engaged with the marginalized, whose voices were historically erased, to interrogate the dominant moves and agendas that reified social inequalities (Shome & Hedge, 2002). ...
Historically, indigenous people have been struggling with the issues of material and communicative absences and their voices systematically erased from discursive spaces. Critical-cultural frameworks such as the culture-centered approach (CCA) argue that reflexive engagements with subaltern communities by listening to their narratives are instrumental in interrogating structural absences. By mindfully attending to the emerging contextual narratives, this CCA study examines how indigenous villagers of eastern-India negotiate and exert agency with situated structural absences in their day-to-day existence. This research seeks to explore as well as extend our understanding of structural marginalization and its negotiations in the realm of subaltern agency.
Basing on an understanding of digital games as cultural objectivations, this article suggests interpreting them as sites of memory, or in other words as ‘carrier’ of cultural memory. By merging game studies, literary studies, and memory studies, we aim at providing a theoretical framework useful to frame different kinds of representation within (and beyond) digital games towards cultural memory. The framework is inspired by Paul Ricoeur and his threefold model of textual mimesis and favours an approach to digital games that takes into account how they represent and re-configure pre-existent cultural forms, and therefore get refigured into novel ones during, after, and beyond the game experience.
This agenda-setting theory essay offers a collaborative response to Sprague, J. (1992). Expanding the research agenda for instructional communication: Raising some unasked questions. Communication Education, 41(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529209378867 early theorizing on critical approaches to communication pedagogy, developing it to account not only for critical developments since but also to the political precarity increasingly organizing everyday life, especially of the dispossessed and particularly of the Global South (Shome, 2020). Indeed, we argue that the only viable pedagogical route that responds to the precariousness of life in the twenty-first century must be emancipatory rather than reformist. To make our point, we offer a metareview of over a century of literature published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (1915–1952) and Communication Education (formerly The Speech Teacher; 1952–2021) to reveal the same Western liberal philosophies of education undergirding communication pedagogies generally. In this regard, our agenda-setting essay calls for a paradigmatic shift against the grain and toward emancipatory futurities. Content warning: This essay cites anti-Indigenous, anti-Black, and xenophobic discourse; take good care of yourself as you move through these pages interrogating our disciplinary complicities.
In this article I argue that the structural conditions of global capitalism and postcolonialism encourage game developers to rearticulate hegemonic memory politics and suppress subaltern identities. This claim is corroborated via an application of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model to the Japanese-developed video game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. This case study highlights that the hegemonic articulations of colonial histories are not exclusive to Western entertainment products where instead modes of production matter in the ‘manufacturing of mnemonic hegemony’. I also propose that the propaganda model, while instructive, can be improved further by acknowledging a technological filter and the role of the subaltern. Thus, the article furthers the understanding of the relation between production and form in contemporary technological phenomena like video games and how this relation motivates hegemonic articulations of the past in contemporary mass culture.
This article uses Guatemala City’s Centro Cívico as a point of departure to consider the wider implications of shared Western epistemological assumptions during the Cold War. It argues that an “esthetic of progress”, based on notions of economic development as well as teleological beliefs about historical change, became a dominant artistic motif in mid-twentieth-century Guatemalan modernism, emblematic of the artists belonging to the Generation of 1940. Owing to the homogenizing tendencies of the idea of progress and its universality within Guatemalan politics, however, the article suggests that the esthetic of progress also possessed anesthetic qualities that muted its political importance. In so doing, the work of the Generation of 1940 appealed to a wide variety of political actors and the “anesthetic of progress” helps to explain why the Centro Cívico project was conceived and constructed by governments of opposing ideological convictions.
Sklodowska analyzes postmodern parody in Margarita Mateo Palmer’s 1995 experimental book Ella escribía poscrítica [She Wrote Post-Criticism]. Uniquely steeped in the most radical (self-)parody, Ella escribía poscrítica both merits and resists critical scrutiny. Sklodowska situates the text within a broader context of post-Soviet Cuba and, more specifically, against the backdrop of the profound socio-economic and ideological crisis of the 1990s known as the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” She demonstrates how Mateo Palmer’s book, produced amid the everyday drudgery of the struggle for survival, uses gendered performance to challenge the fundamental tenets of “western” postmodernism by means of irreverent (re)production of its metadiscourse and a dizzying amalgamation of fiction and academic criticism, testimony and (pseudo)autobiography, letters and interviews, footnotes and lecture notes.
In this chapter, I discuss the third mode of autonomous organising (i.e., contradiction) by looking at the struggles of indigenous-popular movements in present Bolivia. Autonomy (self-determination and self-government) is an ancestral practice among indigenous people in Latin America, but it became a new ‘paradigm of resistance’ (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010) relatively recently. As a ‘discourse, a practice and a legality’, autonomy became a ‘new political paradigm’ (Patzi Paco, 2004: 187) that positioned them vis-à-vis other paradigms (Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2010: 66).
An explosion of rage and hope irrupted and expanded throughout the Latin American region at the end of the twentieth century. A general sense of injustice felt by millions asserted itself as a series of demonstrations, mobilisations, struggles, strikes, uprisings and upheavals against neoliberal politics and policy. These collective actions undertaken by citizen, popular, labour and indigenous movements embraced ‘autonomy’ as the tool to resist structural adjustments, and their social, economic and political consequences. These protests and mobilizations soon developed into organizing tools for both to critique capitalism, patriarchal society, coloniality and to explore alternative relations and sociabilities beyond them.
All of them out! Much has been written about the Argentine financial crisis and the popular insurrection of December 2001, and their legacies. But today the slogan of the popular insurrection of December 2001, i.e. ‘¡Que se vayan tod@s!’ (referred to as ‘QSVT now onwards) sounds like a beautiful melody that brings nostalgia. Just before the new default of the external debt in 2014 as a result of the pressure from the so called ‘vulture funds’ the country’s economy was stable and the GDP growing. Back to normal the political debate refocused on institutional politics after a period when society had been at the centre of politics. Like in the old times, with the arrival of a new Peronist government to power, society became divided into pro (Kirchneristas) and against (anti-Kirchneristas). Yet, the negation voiced in the event that reverted hopelessness in Argentina remains lurking, indescribable, still unanswered: ‘the desiderium, the only honest attribute of all men, is unexplored’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 5).
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci undertakes a critical analysis of subaltern groups, examining their conditions, factors contributing to their subordination, their modes of thought, culture and levels of political organization. He attempts to identify the factors that empower as well as impede subaltern groups in the transformation of their conditions. In Notebook 3, §48, entitled ‘Past and present. Spontaneity and conscious leadership,’ he argues that subaltern political struggles are often characterized by spontaneity, a factor that contributes to the ineffective and, at times, regressive aspects of subaltern political activity. 1 By ‘spontaneity,’ he suggests that subaltern groups act according to a restless impulse or ‘instinct’ to revolt, due to crises or unacceptable conditions. Subaltern groups’ spontaneous rebellions and uprisings indicate social discontent and the desire for socio-political change, but such movements rarely succeed in transforming the conditions themselves. Thus, to be effective, he argues that subaltern struggles must be founded on ‘conscious leadership,’ which he describes as political activity informed by revolutionary theory and rooted in a systematic understanding of the historical conditions that define subalternity.
Chamorus (Chamorros) evince peaceful contestation through testimonies to the United Nations. These rhetorical practices highlight language as a form of political powermaking for the Chamoru within that local struggle. Chamoru testimonies demonstrate the importance of non-violent opposition to militarization and colonialism, which have a profound impact on the inherent collective rights of indigenous peoples. This essay offers a unique approach that informs broader inquiries of U.S. military policy toward the Pacific and provides a significant contribution to interdisciplinary work aimed at understanding how to abolish militarization and war to maintain peace throughout the region.
This dissertation addresses the question of marginalization in cross-cultural communication from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and postcolonial theory. Specifically, it focuses on European colonialism‘s effect on language and communicative practices in Latin America. I argue colonialism creates a deeply sedimented but unacknowledged background of inherited cultural prejudices against which social and political problems of oppression, violence and marginalization, especially towards women, emerge—but whose roots in colonial and imperial frameworks have lost transparency. This makes it especially difficult for postcolonial subjects to meaningfully express their own experiences of psychic dislocation and fragmentation because the discursive background used to communicate these experiences is made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions. To address this problem, I turn to a strategic use of Nietzsche‘s conceptions of subjectivity and language as metaphor to engage the unique difficulties that arise in giving voice to the subaltern experience. Thus, I argue that while colonialism introduces an added layer of complexity to philosophical discussions of language, the concrete particularities and political emergencies of Latin American history necessitate an account of language that can speak to these concrete particularities. To this end, I develop a conception of, what I call, ―hydric life,‖ a postcolonial feminist hermeneutics that better accommodates these cultural specificities.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.