Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Review of Wen Jin’s “Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms” by Fan Yang

By politics | Published: September 1, 2014

Pluralist Universalism is an original and daring book that prompts us to re-think the politics of difference within and across national boundaries. Literary scholar Wen Jin has developed an innovative approach to the study of multicultural narratives that emerge from two distinct and yet intertwined national contexts – namely, China and United States after the Cold War. Rigorously researched with meticulous attention to both national histories and transnational linkages, Jin’s work has offered a great model for critical, comparative scholarship that challenges nation- or state- based frameworks.

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Notes on Contributors

By politics | Published: December 30, 2010

Tore Rye Andersen (reviewing Stephen Burn’s Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Department of Contemporary Literature at Aarhus University (Denmark), and chief editor of the Danish literary journal Passage. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the work of Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, and he has just finished a book on the contemporary American novel. His current research deals with the materiality and mediality of literature.

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GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION: Toward a Post-Manichean Left

By politics | Published: December 30, 2010

For Christopher Hitchens—the Left at War with Himself

What follows are nine essays inspired by Michael Berube’s book of 2009, The Left at War (NYU Press), prefaced by Nick Cohen’s shot at dealing in brief with some of the same issues, which he takes on at greater length in his book of 2007, What’s Left? (Harper Perennial).  Our interview with Berube was conducted in light of his reading of these pieces, and his own piece—a “response to the responses,” titled “The Left at Bay”—which comes after.

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On Intellectual Biography

By politics | Published: October 6, 2010

On Intellectual Biography

Tim Kaposy

When we have to change an opinion about anyone, we charge heavily to their account the inconvenience they thereby cause us.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”

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The Politics of Mediated Gender: Women Politicians in the Bulgarian Press

By politics | Published: September 19, 2010

1. Introduction

Almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not too far-fetched to argue that Eastern European women have carried the burden of the post-communist transition. The transformative paradigm shift caused by the collapse of communism left the political and social positions of women in shambles. And while the Soviet system undoubtedly offered a number of state-protected privileges to women, unparalleled in the Western world, those privileges where often ideologically masked to represent a closely-controlled and fabricated sense of emancipation. This was meant to restrict the role of women in society to those directly benefiting the state-namely, the production of goods and the reproduction of population growth. As Azhgikhina (1995: 3) aptly pointed out, ‘in effect, the declaration of emancipation condemned women to a double burden – the new power demanded that she should take an active part in developing industry, and at the same time, the national mentality insisted that she fulfill all the traditional women’s duties in the home’.

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Productive censorship. Revisiting recent research on the cultural meanings of film censorship.

By politics | Published: September 19, 2010

Censorship used to be quite a predictable research subject. It was often associated with ideas about State oppression, intolerant governments or other powerful institutions controlling the minds of powerless citizens and society’s dominated classes. Censorship was related to dictators and their brutal strategies to limit freedom of speech, or to undermine artistic expression. It was seen as part of a carefully orchestrated strategy of controlling or even silencing public debate in society.

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Hybridities in political media discourse

By politics | Published: September 19, 2010

1. Political discourse in context

In the age of mediatized mass democracies, political discourse in the media is an important means for ordinary people to encounter politics (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007). This is particularly true of political debates and interviews, in which political information is transmitted in dialogue-anchored forms. Against this background, different discourse genres, such as political interviews, panel interviews or talk shows provide the opportunity, first, to translate politics, which has been frequently conceptualized as a macro structural phenomenon, into text and talk (Chilton & Schäffner, 2002); second, to transfer macro-domain oriented politics to the micro domain; and third, to personify party-political programs, agendas and ideologies. Furthermore, the dialogic nature of these genres allows for the presentation of symbolic politics (Sarcinelli, 1987) as a language game composed of questions and answers, in which the politician’s and journalist’s argumentation and their underlying reasoning and negotiation of meaning are made explicit. This sort of contextualization facilitates and supports the comprehension of macro politics, making it more accessible to the general public.

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What makes Poland a post-communist country?

By politics | Published: September 19, 2010

To a western ear there is presumably nothing ambiguous about the term post-communism. It seems to be merely descriptive, referring to the realities of countries which only 20 years ago lived under the political and socio-economical system known as ‘real socialism’. In the last decades, those countries are believed to have been undergoing the process of structural social, economic and political change, usually referred to as ‘transition’. At first glance, one can see that both terms suffer from being too vast in order to provide a good ground for further investigation. They embrace very heterogeneous realities, histories and perspectives. What cognitive use can we make of a term such as post-communism, applicable both to Slovenia and Mongolia? Analogically, in what way can transition explain the dynamics of social processes in those states? But one could also argue that this kind of vagueness is (to some extent) ineluctable in the description of social realities.

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Chameleon strategies of BBOT-BNA, a Brussels digital storytelling organization. Dealing with the urban community, institutional politics and participation.

By politics | Published: September 19, 2010

1. Introduction

In a city like Brussels, where different communities live together and interact, participatory media practices can play an important role in the construction of a democratic and communicative urban network. Analyzing one of these participatory urban media organizations – the digital storytelling organization BBOT-BNA (a combination of abbreviations of the Dutch[1] ‘Brussel Behoort Ons Toe’ and the French ‘Bruxelles Nous Appartient’, both meaning ‘Brussels Belongs To Us’) – allows for a closer look at the construction of a Brussels urban community. Since 2000, BBOT-BNA has been facilitating inhabitants of Brussels to record and upload their conversations in an online open-access database.

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Introduction: A European perspective on Politics and Culture

By politics | Published: September 19, 2010

In this fourth issue of Politics and Culture (2008) we have explicitly chosen for a European perspective. An editorial team of 6, consisting of 3 Belgians (Joke Bauwens, Nico Carpentier & Sofie Van Bauwel), 2 Germans (Tanja Thomas & Fabian Virchow) and one Hungarian (Peter Csigo) launched a call for essays and reviews, for instance using ECREA’s mailing list. The end result is an issue with 6 essays and 8 reviews. Given the media studies background of the 6 editors, it is not surprising that most of the essays and reviews also focus on the media as an inseparable component of the spheres of the cultural and the political.

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