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Selections from the prison notebooks
... The civilizing mission is not a new aim in education. As scholars from Said (Rizvi and Lingard 2006) to Gramsci (1971) to Bourdieu (1986) have acknowledged, schools have long been sites of inculcation. The school is a natural site for the replication of the traditional colonial dynamic, since the formation of the colonial subject relied on a model of the colonizer as adult, and the native as child (Kumar 1989). ...
... Wallerstein (2004) describes hegemony as the economic and political superiority that permits one state to exercise control over another. Gramsci (1971) works with the concept of hegemony more broadly, and in ways that are more helpful to understanding the role education plays in the reproduction of the power relationship between core and periphery. Moving away from the economic and militaristic delineations of hegemony, Gramsci casts light on how "capitalist-class ideas"-adapted from the Marxian concept of "ruling ideas"-are pervasive across social and political structures (Clayton 1998), and reinforced in institutions such as schools. ...
Here, we question the ways in which the preponderance of international students as tuition-paying consumers of public (and private) schools in the core is shifting the model of education, and the vision of citizenship, in the world system. Although significant work has been done to illuminate these dynamics in higher education, we argue that the nascent market at the secondary level is particularly instructive of global trends in late capitalism. A thoughtful consideration of the presence of tuition-paying high school students in U.S., British, Australian, and Canadian public-school systems demands an engagement with the cultural colonization of periphery knowledge systems that accompanies the extraction of all surplus commodified value in service of the idea of development. In the high stakes globalized free market—in which the gap between core and periphery grows ever-larger—core secondary schools become places to attain core credentials, core values, and core belonging. The students’ tuition dollars represent an increasing proportion of underfunded school districts’ revenues in austerity regimes, blurring the line between education as a public good and education as a salable commodity. We empirically demonstrate the dynamics of the market in international secondary education using existing public data, and we explore its contingencies, beneficiaries, and victims. We posit a world system in which commodified children are coerced consumers of core value systems and are credentialed as honorary members of the “haves.” We argue that, in the increasingly zero-sum competitions for artificially scarce resources, inequality drives demand for international secondary school education, which in turn drives inequality.
... Segundo Hall (2005), o uso de análises que partem da premissa de que as relações sociais são determinadas apenas pelas relações econômicas provoca a existência de explicações unilaterais, ou seja, explicações que levam em conta apenas uma parte do todo, havendo, assim, uma distorção. A partir da incorporação de contribuições da teoria de Gramsci (1971), Hall (2005) passou a fazer uso do conceito de hegemonia, demonstrando que esse conceito traz contribuições para que a análise dos fenômenos sociais seja realizada de uma forma mais complexa. Hall (2005) destaca que a hegemonia é um processo, que precisa ser ativamente construído e mantido, de luta por liderança e poder social, em que diferentes grupos fazem alianças a partir de objetivos comuns. ...
... A noção de aliança proposta por Apple (2003) está intimamente ancorada no conceito de hegemonia de Gramsci (1971) e seu uso por Hall, uma vez que essa coalizão surge e se sustenta justamente na busca pela manutenção de grupos da sociedade em posições privilegiadas. A manutenção da hegemonia requer investimentos e esforços sistemáticos para manter uma determinada posição social. ...
Neste artigo, apresentamos uma rede de atores que defendem a educação domiciliar no Brasil. Nosso objetivo é contribuir para a identificação dos atores e para a compreensão da educação domiciliar em si bem como para o entendimento do movimento conservador brasileiro, que se manifesta em uma aliança conservadora. Para tanto, trazemos o contexto do avanço do conservadorismo no Brasil, por meio de um complexo referencial teórico. Na sequência, trazemos um panorama sobre a educação domiciliar no Brasil e no mundo. Na seção seguinte, tratamos da metodologia da pesquisa que gerou este artigo, apresentando a forma como foram coletados os dados utilizados na elaboração do mapeamento da rede estudada. Por fim, apresentamos a rede da educação domiciliar no Brasil, situando atores e oferecemos considerações finais. Concluímos que a defesa da educação domiciliar conta com argumentos característicos de distintos grupos, mostrando a potencialidade do conceito de aliança conservadora e de articulação para análise e compreensão do conservadorismo brasileiro.
... The progression of capitalism comes with the evolution of the reaction to it. Works such as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu, 1996), The Forms of Capital (Bourdieu, 1986), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Bauman, 2005), come as valuable insight in a world where concepts of surplus-value, as developed by Marx and Engels, change its place of importance in capitalist economy, giving space to consumer capitalism, that takes the hegemony as explained decades before by Gramsci (1971) to an almost absolute dogmatic capacity as individuality becomes itself a product, something to be bought and custom built by the consumers as they purchase the brands that represent who they are. Consumer capitalism develops further with globalization capacity, as seen in When Corporations Rule the World (Korten, 2015) and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (Robinson, 2014), as corporative will imposes itself upon the power of the state, filling the halls of power with those who have a stake in the development of corporative profit rather than public welfare, turning legislative power into a warfare that so often has corporations growing in power and scope. ...
... A healthy society "only asks that we be thoughtful of our fellows and that we be just, that we fulfil our duty, that we work at the function we can best execute, and receive the just reward for our services" (Durkheim, 2019, p. 357), but western capitalist society does not operate by those rules. Hegemonic mechanisms inculcate the creation of a capitalist-driven individuality whose goal is the continuous accumulation of wealth (Bauman, 2008;Curtis, 2002;Gramsci, 1971;Todd, 2011), leading to choices in consumption and labour that often speak of analysis of financial risk first and aspirations later. One is only as free to choose employment as the financial risk allows (Ong & Theseira, 2016), if one lives in an environment that prioritizes capital over a healthy division of labour, and refuses to abide by its rules, one risks becoming ostracised, bound to constant struggles against the system, such as Chaplin's Tramp and Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden; therefore, it is expected that some will abide by capitalisms social expectations even if internally disagreeing with it. ...
Cinema, like all forms of art, carry within itself the hopes, dreams, anxieties, and horrors of a society. Movies are social constructs meant to entertain their audiences by bringing them romantic stories, heartfelt dramas, fast paced adventures, and even dreadful horror. The production of films is something quite complex and entails the influence of many different individuals. From director and actors to producers and sponsors, every human element will bring its own social influence in the final product.
In that, a movie is, in a postmodernist approach, a parallel reality conceived of different visions. Given that this entails different possible interpretations for films and that, ever since the age of industrialization, class struggle seems like a constant characteristic of capitalism, it’s certain that many movies will often carry Marxist subtexts to them.
From Metropolis (1927) to Joker (2019), this research intends to use discourse analysis to interpret a selection of movies through Marxist lenses, thus adding to the already existing literature on sociological interpretation of cinema.
... Gramsci in 1971 refers to the subaltern class as low-rank people in a society suffering from the hegemonic dominance of the ruling elite, denying their primary rights in culture, politics and the forth as active individuals in the same society (Gramsci, 1971;Louai, 2012). Guha in 1982 customizes the same issue for India as an entity which increases the demographic disparity between the populace and elite classes (Guha, 1982). ...
... Subaltern is, first, derived from Gramsci's book "the-Prison Notebooks." His example for subalterns is the peasant and workers, discriminated and oppressed by the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini as the leader, as well as his agents (Gramsci, 1971). After Gramsci, the concept of the subaltern is developed by Ranajit Guha in "Subaltern Studies I" and "Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India" (Guha, 1982;Louai, 2012). ...
Purpose-This study aims to assess and decompose the sustainable development using the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) in Iran in 2018, for proposing agenda-setting of public policy. Design/methodology/approach-It ranks the SDGs not only in Iran but also in the region and the world to reveal the synergetic effects. Findings-Based on the results, subaltern-populace generally suffers from the hegemonic domination of ruling elite-bourgeois, lack of strong institutions, heterogeneous policy networks and lack of advocacy role of non-governmental organizations, due to no transparency, issues in law or no rule of law, no stringent regulation, rent, suppression and Mafia, all leading to corruption and injustice. Practical implications-To stop the loop of corruption-injustice, Iran should homogenize the structure of the policy network. Furthermore, the failed SDGs of the three-geographic analysis are the same in a character; all of them propose SDG 3, good health and well-being as a serious failed goal.
... Sua relação com o conceito anteriormente apresentado se dá quando, ao buscar a construção ou contestação de uma hegemonia, forças sociais com interesses distintos necessitam ser aglutinadas para trazer uma integração em termos de objetivos e crenças para a ação política (MORTON, 2007). Para Gramsci (1971), o bloco histórico representa justamente essa integração de uma variedade de ideias e interesses de classe distintos, no âmbito de uma formação bem-sucedida da hegemonia por certas forças sociais, ou por meio de alternativas e desafios contra-hegemônicos por classes sociais subalternas (MORTON, 2007). ...
... Neogramscianos, como Robert Cox (1981;1983) e Stephen Gill (2008), ressaltam no pensamento gramsciano que a construção de um bloco histórico não pode existir sem uma classe social hegemônica, já que a própria natureza do conceito é ligada à forma como várias forças sociais constroem ou contestam uma hegemonia por meio de estruturas políticas 'nacionais'. No entanto, mais relevante ainda para os propósitos deste trabalho é o aprofundamento realizado por tais autores na visão de Gramsci (1971) sobre os reflexos internacionais da hegemonia. A partir de sua consolidação no âmbito doméstico, ela pode se expandir para além de uma ordem social particular e se mover em direção ao âmbito global, moldando a ordem mundial (COX, 1983). ...
O fenômeno da globalização produziu classes favorecidas e integradas às cadeias globais de produção, bem como classes marginalizadas alheias a esses processos. Ademais, gerou a desintegração de vínculos sociais e coletividades, estimulando a ascensão de uma gama de mobilizações anti-establishment, sobretudo de extrema-direita. O caso brasileiro é particularmente sintomático desta conjuntura, onde, desde o início dos anos 2010, foi possível verificar um conjunto de forças reacionárias que ascenderam no âmbito da sociedade civil e política, contribuindo para consolidação do atual governo de Jair Bolsonaro. Com base neste contexto, se coloca a seguinte pergunta: a ascensão do movimento reacionário de extrema-direita no contexto político brasileiro estabeleceu as bases para resistência aos efeitos da globalização e da formação de uma estrutura social alternativa? A partir de um estudo de caso à luz da Teoria Crítica Neogramsciana, são investigados os processos que ocasionaram a ascensão da atual extrema-direita brasileira e como eles se inserem em um contexto de crise da ordem mundial liberal e da globalização. O trabalho conclui que houve uma convergência de interesses entre setores da sociedade brasileira e grupos capitalistas transnacionais, recompondo um bloco histórico alinhado com as dinâmicas da ordem (neo)liberal posta e ascendida desde os anos 1990.
... La innovación de una política pública tiene muchas más posibilidades de éxito cuando incorpora una o más normas decisivas adecuadas al contexto cultural específico en el que debe aplicarse. En su reflexión teórica sobre la hegemonía, Antonio Gramsci (1971) recuerda que un paradigma es hegemónico sólo cuando tiene eco (al menos en parte) entre la mayor parte de la población -incluyendo a quienes en última instancia quedan en situación de desventaja a causa de ese mismo paradigma-. Así pues, la vía para reemplazar un paradigma dominante no consiste tanto en negarlo cuanto en reformular sus elementos críticos a fin de volver a priorizar valores que se han perdido y reubicar o eliminar sus rasgos problemáticos más prominentes. ...
Carefair: el cuidado equitativo. Entre la capacidad de elegir, el deber y la distribución de las responsabilidades
... Prior examples of prison writing in the form of letters includeKing 1968;Gramsci 1971;Michnik 1986. ...
This publication is the first major transnational examination of prison hunger strikes. While focusing on Palestine, the research is enriched by extensive interviews and conversations with South African, Kurdish, Irish, and British ex-prisoners and hunger strikers. This study reveals in unprecedented detail how prison hunger strikes achieve monumental feats of resistance through the weaponization of lives.
How do prison hunger strikers achieve demands? How do they stay connected with the outside world in a space that is designed to cut them off from that world? And why would a prisoner put their lives at risk by refusing to eat or, at times, drink? This research shows that sometimes prisoners’ need for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriya) trump their hunger pangs and thirst.
Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine evaluates the process of hunger striking, including the repressive actions prisoners encounter, and the negotiation process. It analyzes differences and similarities between individual and collective strikes, and evaluates the role and impact of solidarity actions from outside the prison walls.
The work’s critical and grassroots understanding of prison hunger strikes fully centers the voices of hunger strikers. The analysis results in actionable takeaways that will be as useful to prison activists as they will be to their allies around the world.
... The whole unpredictable practical and hypothetical activities with which the decision class legitimizes and keeps up its strength, however, figures out how to keep up the dynamic assent of those over whom it rules (Gramsci, 1971). There intends to be an imposition of 'profit-seeking logic' on other systems where there isn't the direct involvement of buying of goods by consumers. ...
Nepal has a perennial history with the culture of alcohol and it is mostly seen as a form of social capital. Alcohol usage has been inextricable with local cultures, i.e., festivals. The current study aims to investigate aspects of alcohol advertising in newspapers using content analysis. The study focuses on unraveling the ideologies of liquor advertisers in boosting alcohol promotion mostly among the youth. Ostensibly, the boosterism of alcohol advertisements has been concomitant in an attempt to establish it as a mass culture. Consumerism remains the central theme of global contemporary societies and the fundamentals of capitalism are characterized by oligopolistic standards. Facets of such attempt to create a culture revolving around alcohol by injecting messages through advertisements to specific age groups. Forty random private newspapers and twenty state newspapers are taken into consideration and simplified into a coding form to test the two hypotheses. Variables such as themes of advertisement, age, published days, messages espoused, alcohol types, and types of advertisements have been independently tested for correlation. The research has highlighted that advertisers tend to promote alcohol as a form of reinforcing different cultures with the sales of alcohol. Also, there have been frequent reported attempts to magnify use of alcohol during weekends for tranquility from rigid bureaucratic norms. Waves of global cultures have also been associated with alcohol promotion as means of celebration Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 8, Issue-3: 408-415.
... One reason for conducting research among the residents of Norway is that their lifestyle has a greater impact on the environment than the lifestyle of people in less a uent societies. It is also, to a large extent, the voice of the wealthy that shapes the prevailing narrative (Gramsci, 2007). However, we want to expand this perspective, and acknowledge the complexities of power dynamics within a privileged society. ...
Climate anxiety discourse focuses predominantly on individualised and potentially mentally disturbing aspects of emotional responses to the awareness of climate change which can silence the mobilising charge of climate change emotions. We critically examine this perspective and explore the range, context, and perceived effects of emotions experienced in relation to climate change based on 33 in-depth interviews with people self-identified as highly concerned about this issue in the context of oil-wealthy Norway. Thematic analysis revealed that lived emotional experience of concern about climate change was characterised by a complex palette of co-occurring and dynamically linked emotions reported in relation to 16 evocative themes. We analyse the perceived effects of these emotions focusing on five areas: participants' mood and wellbeing, concerns about existing and hypothetical children, feelings of alienation, the responsibility for the climate situation, and positive experience in the context of climate change. We discuss the psychological, social and political implications of participants' emotional experience, considering the Norwegian context, and we conclude that it goes beyond potentially debilitating and paralysing feelings, and includes politically charged moral anger, and collective guilt, as well as love for nature, and a sense of community around collective climate action.
... Por lo tanto, para delinear el componente antropológico de la ideología neoliberal hegemónica en Occidente a partir de los años ochenta no es suficiente buscarla en las obras de Friedman, von Hayek o de los ordoliberales alemanes; cabe dirigir la mirada a otro lugar. Regresando a Gramsci (1971), cuando no son "arbitrary, rationalistic, or "willed"", las ideologías poseen una ""psychological" validity", porque estas ""organize" human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc. " (p. 377). ...
Este artículo aborda el proceso el proceso de transición política y social en los países occidentales desde principios de los años 70. El análisis se basa en la teoría de la transición de la lucha de clases desde arriba, según lo propuesto por el sociólogo italiano Luciano Gallino. Después de una breve biografía intelectual, así como una introducción a su teoría, el artículo analiza el consenso social y político que el neoliberalismo, la ideología detrás del concepto de lucha de clases desde arriba, logró tanto engendrar como gobernar en las últimas tres décadas. Las razones detrás de este éxito, se argumenta, se encuentran en la capacidad neoliberal de dar forma a las demandas y necesidades planteadas por las sociedades occidentales durante los Gloriosos Treinta de manera individual y competitiva.
... Gramsci Antonio (1891-1937) coined the term "subaltern" in Selections from Prison Notebooks (1975) [5] to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. In Geographies of Post colonialism (2008) [6], Sharp, J. P. pointed out that the Western intellectuals transferred the non-Western form of "knowing" to the margin of intellectual discourse by reconstructing and thus intellectually diminishing, such forms of acquiring knowledge as myth and folklore. ...
The Plague written by Camus tells the story of fighting against the plague. The anti-epidemic organizations gathered around the hero, Dr. Rieux struggle against the plague during the closure of Oran. Throughout the story, whether it’s the process from the occurrence of plague to the real confirmation, or the process of the anti-epidemic teams being organized, the indigenous inhabitants of Oran City—the Arabs are all marginalized objects and silent “others”. In addition, the Arab lands are full of French-style life and management methods, and Spanish-style building. These are the revelation of Camus's deep-rooted imperial consciousness.
... See AntonioGramsci's (2007) writings on cultural hegemony in which he argues that dominant groups can maintain and spread ideologies through powerful social institutions, including churches and schools. ...
Existing research largely ignores Black support for punitive policies that target group members, even as this support challenges expectations of in-group favoritism and group solidarity. The current research fills this gap by leveraging a familiar concept: “the politics of respectability.” Building on historical and qualitative accounts of this worldview, which focuses on the behavior of group members, I develop a social psychological framework to understand how identity-based concerns motivate Black support for punishment that targets members of their racial group. I also develop a novel measure of respectability–the Respectability Politics Scale. Findings demonstrate that adherents of respectability feel more ashamed about the public view of their racial group, endorse more negative racial stereotypes, and feel relatively less close to other Black people. They are also more likely to support a range of punitive policies that target group members, including restrictive dress code policies, tough-on-crime policies, and paternalistic welfare policies.
... Instead, what follows is that a social order can persist even as there are widening rifts between it and agents' horizons of normative expectations. 25 My hypothesis is that the general crisis facing racial justice is not a crisis of moral ignorance or a lack of knowledge concerning the situation of Blacks, migrants, or other minorities, but to borrow a famous phrase from Antonio Gramsci (1992): "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear" (276). The increased reliance on what I have called the "awareness model on consciousness" in discourses of racial justice expresses the real lack of political and organizational capacity to resolve the systemic dysfunction of our social order. ...
The question of how to theorize the relationship between consciousness and the social transformation of racism remains vexed. Most critical theories agree that some form of critical consciousness is necessary for the transformation of social life, but disagree about whether this change is sufficient. Furthermore, they disagree about whether the content of this change is at the level of cognitive beliefs, active ignorance, or ideology. In this article, I describe most accounts of social transformation of racism as relying upon what I call awareness consciousness. I argue that the model of awareness consciousness in critical theory risks giving too much explanatory power to the role of self-knowledge in developing accounts of successful social transformation. In contrast, I defend an account of critical consciousness that emphasizes the primacy of social structures in constraining and enabling our practices. When social structures can no longer support our horizons of expectation there is the possibility for the development of what I call crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness. The materialist account I deploy locates the social transformation of racism in the experience of dysfunctional institutions and the consequent insight of how to collectively develop functional institutions that can enable new forms of social practice.
... Notably, in the US examples of worker centres and 'alt-labor' (Eidelson, 2013) that have been highlighted elsewhere, the substitution effect of worker centres mobilising within spaces that have been vacated by unions themselves has led to a degree of counter-mobilisation by political actors of the right, creating further challenges and constraints on CSOs acting in a more radical and assertive fashion. The integrated and overlapping nature of the state and civil society (e.g., Gramsci, 1971;Jessop, 2020) creates institutional forms which partly mitigate the problems faced by those on the margins of the labour market, but such a role is beset by contradictions as many of these problems are essentially caused or driven by other state agencies and state preferences in terms of flexible, weakly regulated labour markets. This resonates with longer standing tensions identified by critical actors within the public sector on their position 'in and against the state' (LEWRG, 1979). ...
This article contributes to our understanding of the complex role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in tackling precariousness through advice, advocacy and activism. It draws on qualitative data gathered primarily from two local CSOs in the north of England that help clients navigate a highly flexible labour market and an increasingly punitive welfare system. The findings reveal that in marginalised communities, CSOs compensate for retreating state services by providing clients with individual advice and advocacy, but there is little evidence of the grassroots activism observed in labour CSOs in North America. We argue that the uneven tradition of community organising across cities in the UK combined with the complex dependencies of service-oriented CSOs on state resources has restricted their role to that of labour market intermediaries that serve primarily to integrate clients into low-wage jobs.
... It must be interpreted qualitatively by reading between the lines of the data, so the studies themselves cannot be faulted on this account. But it must also be pointed out that it may be challenging for Chinese studies to create constructs to capture the positive aspects of online education because the hegemonic existence of Confucian thought compels the subject to articulate the pre-pandemic in-person Chinese classroom as transparently "normal" (Gramsci 1971). It is a taken-for-granted ideological abstraction that conceals what actually took place in the pre-pandemic classroom. ...
As instructors who experienced first-hand the abrupt transition from face-to-face to online teaching in March 2020 in the US due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and who continue to adapt to various online platforms and technologies for the T&I classroom in Taiwan, we argue that the online classroom has specific cultural advantages summed up as the 4Cs: immediacy, privacy, intimacy, and democracy. We discuss how these advantages ring especially true for the Chinese classroom, because it is one not known for intimate interaction or lively discussion, but rather a mirror of Confucian class divide shaped by the legacy of the Chinese civil service exams. Findings from regular course evaluations and targeted feedback from students in the US and Taiwan support our argument. The goal is a more inclusive adoption of multimodal learning foregrounding “social presence” that transcends the black-and-white argument of “in-person” versus “online”.
... It must be interpreted qualitatively by reading between the lines of the data, so the studies themselves cannot be faulted on this account. But it must also be pointed out that it may be challenging for Chinese studies to create constructs to capture the positive aspects of online education because the hegemonic existence of Confucian thought compels the subject to articulate the pre-pandemic in-person Chinese classroom as transparently "normal" (Gramsci 1971). It is a taken-for-granted ideological abstraction that conceals what actually took place in the pre-pandemic classroom. ...
This study investigates the stance mediation of a Chinese and a British newspaper in (re)framing the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with a focus on metaphor transfer in news headlines. The database includes 97 pairs of Chinese/English news headlines from The Global Times Editorial (GTE) and 77 pairs from The Economist Global Business Review (EGBR). Drawing on an analytical model that combines framing, corpus and Appraisal Theory, the study found that the conceptual metaphors, framing strategies and attitudinal graduation in GTE and EGBR differ significantly. Whereas GTE generally takes a pro-China and anti-US/West stance, EGBR adopts an anti-China and pro-West perspective. The study highlights stance mediation in non-political reports within news agencies that resort to self-translation and metaphor as a frame in stance mediation, a finding that may foster interdisciplinary collaborations between framing studies and journalistic and metaphor translation studies.
... Gramsci frequently uses the word hegemony to refer the aspects in which a dominating power attains consent to its rule from those it subordinates-although it is real that he periodically uses the term to cover both consent and coercion together (Gramsci, 1971). Gramsci (1971, p. 182) regarded hegemony as the dominance established by a dominant group as domination and intellectual and moral leadership in concrete relations between those who ruled and ruling. ...
Over the past few decades, the international political economy has attained itself particular independence within the wider discipline of international relations step by step. The endeavors to figure out the determiners of the radical changes taking place in the world economy since the early 1970s have placed several special theoretical concepts in the focus of interest which directly associates with the international political economy. The concept of hegemony is one of them. Today, hegemony is one of the most discussed subject matters. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist intellectual, theoretician and politician who developed the concept of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. Gramsci's writings made incontrovertible contributions to the understanding of hegemony within the context of Marxist thought and philosophy. However, in the historical process, lots of views and theories have been put forward regarding the concept of hegemony. Thus, the application of the concept in international political economy is widely contested and necessitates disambiguation. From this point of view, we have tried to analyze how the concept was handled by theorists belonging to different schools of thought in the international political economy literature. In all these respects, this article takes its point of departure in the multiplicity of characterizations of the concept of hegemony and fastens on elucidating a certain strand of conceptualising hegemony more closely.
... Second, identifying the potential sources of their impressions of the Middle East can help students to grasp the social and contingent nature of ideas that we generally think about as unmediated reflections of reality. An awareness of the social and contingent nature of ideas is critical to self-understanding and can also help us to understand the social and cultural worlds that we inhabit (Gramsci, 1971;Roth, 2005;Said, 1978). The third purpose of these assignments was to facilitate students' ability to assess information "with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview," as the ...
Geography instructors have a role to play in helping their students to become more information literate. This is especially important today, given the complex and dynamic nature of our informational landscape, and given the evidence that young people lack much of the knowledge that is needed to engage with information critically. This paper reports on the effectiveness of an information literacy module that was included as part of a course on the Geography of the Middle East. It describes the design and rollout of the module, and the results of a study designed to assess the effectiveness of the module and the class on students’ information literacy, and to better understand students’ existing relationship to information about the Middle East. The findings of the study suggest several ways that future iterations of the module might be improved.
Current academic debate witnessed the salience of looking at the epistemic dimension of environmental governance. In such setting, this study learns from how knowledge co-production works in the emergence of permaculture movements in Indonesia. The method of this study departs from the concept of knowledge co-production and situates it within the broader literatures on social movement and counter-hegemonic politics. The data is based on the experiences of four permaculture communities in Indonesia, namely Bumi Langit Institute, Sendalu Permaculture, IDEP Foundation, and Jiwa Damai. This study argues that the formation of permaculture movements in Indonesia involves negotiated boundaries among different ways of knowing in the epistemic relations surrounding permaculture practices. The critical distancing that develops between the movements and the hegemonic knowledge structure seeks to transform agro-industrial knowledge practices toward an alternative knowledge system. The quest of epistemic leadership is constructed through the porous boundaries of knowledge co-production toward defining what permaculture means as a collective project.
This essay draws together the disciplines of race theory, artificial intelligence, and phenomenology to engage the issue of racism as a learned phenomenon. More specifically, it centres on a comparison between robots and humans with respect to becoming racist. The purpose of this comparison is to illustrate the complex interconnections between racism, ontology, and learning. The essay begins with a discussion of race and racism that identifies both fundamentally as social realities. With this account, the essay draws on Hubert Dreyfus’ critical phenomenological work on artificial intelligence to outline several limitations for robots becoming racist. Next, the essay turns to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as an ontological alternative for describing human beings and how racism is learned through habit and skill acquisition. In the end, it is suggested that this investigation not only provides an insightful glimpse into racism as a learned phenomenon, but also invites further discussion on how such racism may be confronted when it is viewed not simply as a cognitive issue, but rather as an issue of embodiment.
Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation. Considering the parallel histories of citizenship in Yemen and Tunisia, Challand develops innovative theories of violence and representation that view cultural representations as calls for a decentralized political order and democratic accountability over the security forces. He argues that a new collective imaginary emerged in 2011 when the people represented itself as the only legitimate power able to decide when violence ought to be used to protect all citizens from corrupt power. Shedding light upon uprisings in Yemen and Tunisia, but also elsewhere in the Middle East, this book offers deeper insights into conceptions of violence, representation, and democracy.
This paper establishes a theoretical linkage between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon. Gramsci’s critical-historicist method and its relationship to humanism, his integral understanding of Marxism, and emphasis on the moment of political practice resonate with Fanon’s articulation of the subjective and political-economic aspects of the colonial question, his activistic materialism, and his dialectically humanist universalism forged through anti-colonial struggle. Establishing this linkage presupposes engaging distinct currents of postcolonial Gramscianism in relation to each other and to the philological turn in Gramsci scholarship. In turn, a Gramsci–Fanon convergence helps elucidate the specificities of (post-)colonial contexts without elevating these into a civilisational-ontological difference. Emphasising their geographical sensitivity as a meeting point, pushing Gramsci towards Fanon helps us treat the global South and imperial heartlands relationally, in historico-geographical and specifically political terms. A Fanonian Gramsci (or Gramscian Fanon) thus allows us to tackle Eurocentrism without closing doors to a counter- or postcolonial Marxism.
In the shari‘a seminaries (hawza) of South Beirut, young Shi‘i Muslims articulate a notion of ethics that is realized in and through collective life. Classes on ethics (akhlaq) help them reweave the moral fabric of their neighborhoods by addressing volatile public situations, correcting improper conduct, and emulating virtuous figures. The concerns that animate these classes, and the practices of caretaking shaped therein, illuminate the political work that ethical action can achieve. Understanding how future clerics learn to fashion their community (and themselves) requires a theorization of subject formation that moves beyond conventional views of the self and that enables us to approach the public atmosphere as an ethical force. For this, a powerful starting point is offered by the tradition of political ethics as elaborated in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Simone Weil, and others.
Philip L. Kohl (Chicago 1946 – Antrim, New Hampshire 2022) fue profesor emérito de la cátedra Kathryn Wasserman Davis de Estudios Eslavos y especialista en la arqueología de la Edad del Bronce de Eurasia en el Departamento de Antropología del Wellesley College (Massachusetts). Cursó la primaria y secundaria (Chicago) y el primer año universitario (Massachusetts) en instituciones de la Compañía de Jesús que abandonó para ponerse a trabajar. Desde 1966 combinó el trabajo con los estudios, primero en la Universidad de Chicago y después en la School of General Studies de la Universidad de Columbia (Nueva York) donde se graduó en Clásicas en 1969 con las mejores calificaciones. En 1968 inició su experiencia de campo en las excavaciones en Tepe Yahya (Irán). El curso 1969-1970 se trasladó al Departamento de Clásicas de la Universidad de Harvard, pero el siguiente pasó al Departamento de Antropología. Allí fue auxiliar docente (1970-1973) y cursó el máster (1972) y el doctorado (1974). Ese año se incorporó al Departamento de Antropología del Wellesley College donde desarrolló toda su carrera. En 1999 accedió a la titularidad de la citada cátedra que ocupó hasta 2016 cuando, concedida la jubilación, pasó a catedrático emérito. El profesor Kohl centró su actividad arqueológica en la Edad del Bronce del Cáucaso, Asia Central y Próximo Oriente, entendido este en sentido amplio. Concebía la arqueología como una ciencia social capaz de instrumentar un humanismo superador de las fracturas impuestas por el colonialismo y la Guerra Fría. Ello le llevó a interactuar con las comunidades científicas locales en condiciones de reciprocidad. Gracias a su visión global y crítica de los problemas participó en los grandes debates de la Arqueología Contemporánea. Unos correspondieron al campo de la metodología y la teoría arqueológica. Otros se centraron en la Arqueología Sustantiva de Eurasia y las Américas en relación con el origen del Estado, las relaciones intersociales, la importancia del intercambio y la interacción cultural en los procesos de cambio, entre otros. Valorar estos aspectos de la obra de Kohl es de especial relevancia en el contexto actual donde al neoempirismo y fragmentación de la Arqueología, efecto colateral de la llamada “tercera revolución”, se une el retorno de visiones neo-kossinnianas de los grandes procesos de cambio global, efecto colateral del impacto de la paleogenética.
Το άρθρο βασίζεται σε εθνογραφική έρευνα που πραγματοποιήθηκε στην Ελλάδα και την Κύπρο την περίοδο 2020-2021 και αφορά τις σχέσεις μεταξύ των δύο χωρών και μεταξύ των πολιτών τους. Με αφορμή πρόσφατες αλλαγές στο εσωτερικό των δύο χωρών και, συγκεκριμένα, τη νέα ελληνική μετανάστευση της κρίσης, διερευνώνται σύγχρονες διαπραγματεύσεις και μετασχηματισμοί που πραγματοποιούνται τόσο στο επίσημο επίπεδο των σχέσεων μεταξύ των δύο χωρών, όσο και στη βιωμένη καθημερινότητα των πολιτών τους. Ειδικότερα, στο άρθρο διερευνώνται ζητήματα οικειότητας, πολιτισμικής απόστασης και πολιτισμικής ηγεμονίας, όπως αυτά εμφανίζονται ανάμεσα στο κρυπτο-αποικιακό ελληνικό και το μετα-αποικιακό κυπριακό, πλαίσιο και μετασχηματίζονται στην περιφέρεια του ελληνόφωνου κόσμου.
Los ciudadanos se enfrentan, hoy en día, a diferentes retos en el escenario digital. Uno de los principales desafíos reside, precisamente, en la dudosa calidad de la información que circula y se comparte en Internet. Por ello, resulta necesario educar a los ciudadanos para que puedan encontrar fuentes de información fiables en la Red. Para que esto sea posible, los periodistas y futuros profesionales de la información deben adquirir una serie de competencias y habilidades que les permitan luchar contra la desinformación y la misinformación. La supervivencia del periodismo depende de cómo los medios de comunicación orienten su lucha contra los bulos y los contenidos inexactos o engañosos. En esta batalla, los profesionales de la información necesitarán conocer cómo utilizar correctamente su principal herramienta de trabajo: el desmentido. Por este motivo, el presente capítulo ofrece una serie de pautas e indicaciones para ayudar a los periodistas y futuros profesionales de la comunicación a identificar la información falsa, buscar la verdad y crear una nueva noticia –el desmentido– que explique los datos verídicos, ofrezca un contexto adecuado y rectifique la información errónea. El periodista, como profesional de la verificación, debe dominar el arte de redactar correctamente el desmentido para alfabetizar a la opinión pública y orientar a los ciudadanos hacia la verdad. En definitiva, la labor de los periodistas verificadores no solo es evitar que los ciudadanos consuman bulos, sino también prevenir las consecuencias más perniciosas de la desinformación: los discursos del odio y la polarización ideológica que alimentan los radicalismos o extremismos. Palabras clave: bulos, desinformación, desmentido, periodismo, periodistas, verificación.
Dr. Michael Apple is one of the most influential and important thinkers in critical educational studies around the world. This chapter begins by tracing his biography and educational history, outlining how his commitment to a politics of social and educational justice has been a core part of his identity for his life and the entirety of his academic career. It then moves on to describe Apple’s role as one of the founding voices of critical education theory and practice, including some descriptions of his more influential work in curriculum studies, democratic education, and critical analyses of Rightist educational movements. This chapter concludes by discussing Apple’s legacy as a critical educational scholar, which includes his important and powerful “tasks of the critical scholar/activist in education.”
I explored the challenges facing work-affected states, especially their security system.
Abstract: The commodity-form played an important, if often overlooked, role in the studies of capitalism. Processes of transforming literally anything into a privatized form of (fictitious) commodity produced for market exchange are of fundamental importance for the rise and reproduction of capitalism. At the same time, the commodity, as the “cell-form of capitalism”, has played a crucial role throughout Marx’s oeuvre. This chapter aims to contribute to a large body of academic work dealing with commodification and commodity-form by directing focus on the field of communication in the widest sense of this word. Commodity-form and commodification are analysed from a theoretical, conceptual and historical point of view. Main consequences for society and social relations that emanate from the global universalisation of the commodity-form are emphasized. In the conceptual and theoretic part this chapter analyses how the commodity-form was analysed by Marx throughout his oeuvre, how this corresponds to the wider constitution of capitalist society, and how critical authors analysed these processes. It is claimed there is now an enduring global commodification of everything, including culture, creativity, information, and diverging types of communication; these social categories are becoming fundamental in what could also be called capitalist informational societies. Historical dialectical approach is used in the historical part of the chapter to make sense of this on-going contradictory social transformation, which manifests itself simultaneously as continuity of capitalist social relations and discontinuity of the means of production (because of the strengthened influence of information in the present historical epoch). Commodification of communication and information is analysed in deeply historical manner by looking at how these resources have been subjugated to capitalist market relations since the capitalist economic system first emerged several centuries ago. It is claimed, however, that especially political incentives and interventions led to the increasing social, economic and political significance of the information and communication systems and resources we have been witnessing in the last few decades. A seeping commodification as a historically novel type of commodification, which trickles throughout society, is conceptualized in the final part of the chapter. This is done by referring to the long historical transformations and to two strands of thought that offer several converging points between them: a) to critical communication studies, more specifically to political economy of communication (through a reappraisal of the “blind spot debate” initiated by Dallas W. Smythe and his audience commodity thesis); and b) to some neo-Marxist approaches, especially to the findings of the authors basing their research in the autonomist (post-operaist) movement (that defined the present transformations through concepts such as communicative, bio-linguistic capitalism, and social factory). The concept of a seeping commodification indicates we are witnessing a qualitative transformation in the commodification processes that is, in part, owed to an overwhelming capitalist enclosure of the wider communicative field, which accompanied its increased economic importance.
Keywords: Commodity-form, Commodification, Abstraction, Political economy of communication, Critique of political economy, Social factory, Audience commodity, The Internet, Communication capitalism, Capitalism, Critical communication studies, Information Society, Enclosures, Intellectual Property Rights, Critical Media and Communications History.
This is a book chapter published in the volume entitled "Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism", edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco.
Engineering ethics represent a key point of interaction between the humanities, social sciences, and engineering. The dominant approach to engineering ethics tends to be quite narrow and relies on the use of case studies involving ethical dilemmas and professional codes of ethics. It is individualistic in its approach assuming a capacity for moral agency. Given the problems with the dominant approach, a number of alternatives have been proposed. This has contributed to confusion around the purpose of ethics education. Given this divergence in approaches, it is necessary to develop tools to understand these different approaches and how they might relate to each other. This may allow us to explore the possibilities for developing an integrated approach and set out more clearly what is required to address the inadequacies in the dominant approach. There are similarities between the growing divergence in ethics education and debates in sociology/social theory about the nature of the discipline. Drawing on work focused on meta theorizing in sociology and using a number of dualisms used in this debate, the chapter will examine the assumptions underlying different approaches to engineering ethics. It will address the question as to whether alternative approaches actually escape the focus on individual agency prevalent in the discipline. It will seek to elaborate an approach that retains a focus on the responsibilities of engineers but also includes a focus on the wider social context in which they work.KeywordsEngineering educationEngineering ethicsDualismsSocial theoryCritical realism
Η ανακοίνωση εστιάζει στις παραμέτρους που συνέβαλαν στην πρόσληψη του Ευριπίδη στην Ελλάδα κατά τον 19ο αιώνα, με σκοπό να χαρτογραφηθεί η διαδικασία πρόσληψης του τραγικού ποιητή ως μέρους της γενικότερης προσληπτικής διαδικασίας του αρχαίου δράματος κατά το χρονικό διάστημα αναφοράς, και πώς αυτή η διαδικασία λειτούργησε για την επικράτηση των απόψεων για την ποιητική αξία του Ευριπίδη. Η δεξίωση του Ευριπίδη μέσα από τις μεταφράσεις, τις εκδόσεις, τις θεατρικές παραστάσεις, τα κείμενα και τα δημοσιεύματα σε περιοδικά και στον Τύπο, αλλά και ως αντικειμένου διδασκαλίας στην εκπαίδευση, πραγματοποιήθηκε βαθμηδόν από τις πρώτες δεκαετίες του δέκατου ένατου αιώνα. Μέσα από την περιδιάβαση στην προσληπτική διαδικασία του ηγέτη της ρομαντικής σχολής Ευριπίδη, παρακολουθούμε τη σκιαγράφηση του πορτρέτου του ποιητή με χαρακτηριστικά που τον ακολουθούν ως σήμερα. Ανιχνεύεται η διαχρονικότητα της προσληπτικής υπερ-αξίας μέσω της διακειμενικότητας, καθώς οι απόψεις για τον Ευριπίδη που εμφανίστηκαν στην ελληνική βιβλιογραφία του 19ου αιώνα φαίνεται πως έχουν φθάσει έως τον 21ο, κάποιες παραμένοντας ακλόνητα ισχυρές ενώ άλλες έχοντας διασκεδαστεί μέσα από κείμενα του 20ού, διατηρώντας ωστόσο την αρχική τους επίδραση ως προς τη φήμη του αρχαίου τραγικού.
Background
‘Resilience’, ‘self-reliance’ and ‘increasing country voice’ are widely used terms in global health. However, the terms are understood in diverse ways by various global health actors. We analyse how these terms are understood and why differences in understanding exist.
Methods
Drawing on scholarship concerning ideology, framing and power, we employ a case study of a USAID-sponsored suite of awards called MOMENTUM. Applying a meta-ethnographic approach, we triangulate data from peer-reviewed and grey literature, as well as 27 key informant interviews with actors at the forefront of shaping these discourses and those associated with MOMENTUM, working in development agencies, implementing organisations, low-income and middle-income country governments, and academia.
Results
The lack of common understanding of these three terms is in part a result of differences in two perspectives in global health—reformist and transformational—which are animated by fundamentally different ideologies. Reformists, reflecting neoliberal and liberal democratic ideologies, largely take a technocratic approach to understanding health problems and advance incremental solutions, working within existing global and local health systems to effect change. Transformationalists, reflecting threads of neo-Marxist ideology, see the problems as inherently political and seek to overhaul national and global systems and power relations. These ideologies shape differences in how actors define the problem, its solutions and attribute responsibility, resulting in nuanced differences among global health actors in their understanding of resilience, self-reliance and increasing country voice.
Conclusions
Differences in how these terms are employed and framed are not just linguistic; the language that is used is reflective of underlying ideological differences among global health actors, with implications for the way programmes are designed and implemented, the knowledge that is produced and engagement with stakeholders. Laying these distinct ideologies bare may be crucial for managing actor differences and advancing more productive discussions and actions towards achieving global health equity.
It is true that any long-term analysis poses significant challenges, namely the need to accommodate divergent explanations. Recent decades witnessed a remarkable growth in the Chinese economy. The centre of gravity of economic activities, namely industrial production, shifted in its dynamism from the Atlantic axis to the Pacific. One might ask whether these events are likely to lead to the end of unipolarity, and if so, what might be the contours of a new system. If so, the global impact might certainly involve a transformation of the entire system. We discuss the empirical evidence of the trends and patterns of recent Chinese economy evolution, in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. It is considered a simple duopoly model with network externalities. New consumers can enter the market each period, depending on the value of the products on players’ reputation and the size of the network.KeywordsHegemony and game changersBelt and Road InitiativeTFP growthConvergenceNetwork externalities
In Türkiye, communication science falls under the category of social sciences and is regarded as an interdisciplinary scientific field focused on empirical research. The field is influenced by communication science developments of the West in terms of developing theories and methodology, and it faces challenges when it comes to the systematisation of theories and research methods created by different research traditions; their critical evaluation, development, and the failure to put theories to practical use. In order to ascertain the present condition of the field, this article explores the institutionalisation of communication science at universities and its potential tendencies as an academic field of study, its research trends, and the characteristics of communication science studies.
Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, this book explores the analysis of crime-related language. Drawing on ideas from stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and intertextuality, it compares and contrasts the linguistic representation of crime across a range of genres, both fictitious (crime novels, and crime in TV, film and music), and in real life (crime reporting, prison discourse, and statements used in courts). It touches on current political topics like #BlackLivesMatter, human (child) trafficking, and the genocide of the Kurds among others, making it essential reading for linguists, criminologists and those with a general interest in crime-related topics alike. Covering a variety of text genres and methodological approaches, and united by the aim of deciphering how crime is portrayed ideologically, this book is the next step in developing research at the intersection of linguistics, criminology, literature and media studies.
Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, this book explores the analysis of crime-related language. Drawing on ideas from stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and intertextuality, it compares and contrasts the linguistic representation of crime across a range of genres, both fictitious (crime novels, and crime in TV, film and music), and in real life (crime reporting, prison discourse, and statements used in courts). It touches on current political topics like #BlackLivesMatter, human (child) trafficking, and the genocide of the Kurds among others, making it essential reading for linguists, criminologists and those with a general interest in crime-related topics alike. Covering a variety of text genres and methodological approaches, and united by the aim of deciphering how crime is portrayed ideologically, this book is the next step in developing research at the intersection of linguistics, criminology, literature and media studies.
The relational dynamics between the various global and regional discourses of feminism demand a theoretical framework that would allow further analysis of the established power relations. Critical Theory can be considered foundational for this objective as the school of thought that had engendered different strands pertinent to the discussion: feminist theory, Foucauldian theories of knowledge and biopower, and postcolonial and decolonial theories, which were influenced by both the Foucauldian analysis and development theories in explaining the discursive formation of colonialism through political, epistemological, and economic hegemony. These theories are predicated on the Critical Theory’s dissection and analysis of Enlightenment as that singly identifiable point in the history of European thought that binds together the colonization of non-European lands, production of truths for the sake of disciplinary power, as well as cultural imperialism of Euro-American feminism in the non-Western contexts. As such this chapter provides an overview of Enlightenment from a Critical Theory point of view, before moving into coloniality and its analysis by postcolonial and decolonial schools, which is complemented by an overview of Soviet postcolonial studies and writings. This is followed by an overview of feminist concepts that are presented as universally applicable to the position of women around the globe. The chapter concludes with an overview of the main concepts from the previously discussed theories that are used in the analysis of the narratives of respondents.
This chapter establishes the political negotiation of the public good or common benefit as an indispensable practice of statecraft. We argue that the field of Political Economy must support the advance of political knowledge essential to the public negotiation of collective ends and aspirations. We leverage the work of John Kenneth Galbraith to argue that reviving statecraft requires both a theory of power and a facility with ideas often absent in contemporary analyses of national and global economies. Contemporary statecraft must attend to predicaments of power as they impact ordinary people, and political economists must therefore be attuned to politically destabilizing and socially disruptive forms of power that threaten to fragment and disintegrate what remains of the public purpose.
The United Nations also features in this chapter about space law. Since the 1960s, UN space law has prevented the private ownership of outer space and the use of the cosmos for military purposes. It remains successful, not least because the pressure to extract rare resources of the Moon, Mars and the asteroids is not—for the time being at least—a priority for capital accumulation.
The goal of our research is to question the Global North’s narratives of the Future through alternative vernacular semiotic constructions. We will analyze the impact that American vernacular semioverses have on the possibility of generating decolonial figurations of alternative futures, based on the theoretical framework of what we call Xenofuturism . Having its roots in Latin America, Xenofuturism has two complementary aspects: the recovery of an active memory of decolonial deconstruction and the understanding of radical alterity. Within these semioverses, we will explore the Aymara cultural figurations for which the future is not ahead but behind, disorienting us from the present, the only temporal dimension in which we exist. In the ancestral cosmogony of the Bolivian-Peruvian Andean, where the Aymara culture stems from the idea of future-past, or that the past can be seen as future, is central. Temporal hybridity tears apart the linearity of Western time and outlines the emergence of figurations of the future that contain a density of temporal tensions in the present.
This e-book aims at contributing to an in depth study concerning the reception of the Ancient
Greek Drama Values across Space and Time, in the light of a fertile debate between Science
and Art.
There are seven units in this Volume, containing the following: 1. Values in/and Ancient 2.
Theory/Adaptation 3. Ancient Texts 4. Comparative Readings 5. Ancient Theatre's & Drama's
Educational Value 6. Directors' & Stage Re-readings 7.The Festivals, Moderator.
With their well-grounded works, all the distinguished writers that participate in this volume,
confirm the active and functional presence of the ancient drama as a vehicle of values
internationally, timelessly and contemporaneously in the best possible way. They approach it
as a field of vision, inspiration and experimentation, exploration, diversion, freedom and
transformation. They highlight the importance included in its values and concepts, which not
only survive and eliminate the limits of time and space, but also support, reinforce and serve
the global culture in various ways. It appears through the articles of this volume, that the ancient
drama may be re-created because of its timeless, updated handling, thus setting new rules for
its interpretation and reception, re-defining the idea of “tragic”, shaping the concept of
“classic”, constituting its complex dynamics and eventually influencing all the fields of life and
creation. In our contemporary times of the multilevel deep global crisis that has affected all
aspects of social and private life, the present material proves that the ancient drama, with all its
many different aspects and anthropocentric core, is a challenging, inexhaustible field of
research. The scientific, educational and artistic community, realizes and justifies its
contribution to the formation of a “cosmopolis” of the Present and the Future, orientated
towards values that have ceased to be taken for granted, able to place modern humans in the
center of its planning and perspective.
This chapter opens the canvas of the book with an observation of how Robert Mugabe spectacularly became that leader whose anti-colonialism did not become decoloniality that could lead to liberation. He fought the struggle against Rhodesian settler colonialism only to tragically inaugurate toxic native colonialism in Zimbabwe. Instead of ushering in liberatory politics that was alternative to the previous colonial era, Mugabe became a living symptom of enduring colonialism. The post-political mistake by both black and white Zimbabweans was to ever be taken in by Mugabe’s dramatic performances of gallant freedom fighting, the rhetoric of reconciliation at Zimbabwe’s independence and the promises of a paradisal Zimbabwean future. In their post-political excitement, Zimbabweans did not set up strong institutions and systems that would check Mugabe’s growing power and unfolding tyranny. Mugabe became a true confidence trickster that made both black and white Zimbabweans believe that he was the right man to address their fears and fulfil their desires after the long history of colonialism. It turned out that Mugabe’s principal objective was absolute power. Behind Mugabe’s dramatisations of reconciliation and peaceful political intentions was always concealed the “thing itself,” a tyrant that was driven by a spirited will to power that was made out of fears of powerlessness and desires of domination. By speaking reconciliation and liberation while actually pursuing absolute power in the Zimbabwean postcolony Mugabe rendered decolonisation and liberation lost causes that now need to be recovered in a new decolonial liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the will to power is used to capture how such anti-colonial African leaders as Mugabe fought the monstrosity of the settler colonial system only to learn from and assimilate it, and become a monster that turned his country into what Achille Mbembe has called a “postcolony,” which is a site of terror, suffering and misery of disillusioned masses whose dreams of liberation turned into haunting nightmares.KeywordsPostcolonyAnti-colonialismNative colonialismDecolonialityWill to powerPost-PoliticalLiberation
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