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Understanding Popular Politics: Caste, Kinship and Factionalism among Yadavs in North India

LUCIA MICHELUTTI

in Diversity and Change in Modern India: Economic, Social and Political Approaches

This chapter discusses the rise of caste politics and the dynamics of Indian popular politics in the 1990s, specifically in the state of Uttar Pradesh. It shows how the interrelation between ... More

This chapter discusses the rise of caste politics and the dynamics of Indian popular politics in the 1990s, specifically in the state of Uttar Pradesh. It shows how the interrelation between vernacular socio-cultural idioms and structures have been vital to make ‘democracy’ a part of the Indian political imagination. These have also been used to give information about the political upsurge of the common people and the shaping of political cleavages based on caste or community.Less

Classical Education and the Early American Democratic Style

Joy Connolly

in Classics and National Cultures

This chapter examines classical rhetoric's central role in the formation of early American cultural identity. It surveys classical education in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America, ... More

This chapter examines classical rhetoric's central role in the formation of early American cultural identity. It surveys classical education in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century America, focusing on the way claims about the universalist appeal of eloquence and certain habits of elocution transformed the exemplary tradition of civic republican virtue into a lived stylistics of democracy. Inculcating a personal style of classical ‘simplicity’ and ‘naturalness’, classical rhetoric both reinforced notions of white male superiority and (through its own universalist claims) opened a way for women and people of colour to claim roles in civic life. In concluding, it argues that, like the imperfect or suicidal heroes dear to colonial and revolutionary Americans, rhetoric's status as an ethically and epistemologically suspect discourse reveals the dissonances and compromises resting at the heart of republican culture.Less

Lex Pacificatoria: Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Christine Bell

in On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria

This concluding chapter summarizes and brings together the book's central argument for a lex pacificatoria as a new law of the peacemakers. It proposes an ambivalent response to the new lex, and ... More

This concluding chapter summarizes and brings together the book's central argument for a lex pacificatoria as a new law of the peacemakers. It proposes an ambivalent response to the new lex, and concludes by suggesting a concept of law that is necessary to ‘doing good’ in peace negotiations and when working to implement peace agreements. This concept of law involves six key commitments: to legal pluralism, constitutional pluralism, to recognition of law's performative dimension, to negotiated justice, complex accountability, and to enabling moral and political imagination.Less

Thinking big: the political imagination

Matthew Flinders and Matt Wood

in Tracing the Political: Depoliticisation, governance and the state

The aim of this collection was to be provocative and open up debate, and the book appears to have succeeded. In doing so, it seems to have achieved the not insubstantial feat of provoking Colin Hay, ... More

The aim of this collection was to be provocative and open up debate, and the book appears to have succeeded. In doing so, it seems to have achieved the not insubstantial feat of provoking Colin Hay, who makes several abject criticisms of the collection. He is uninspired by Bob Jessop’s ‘neologistic’ approach to the topic, exhausted by the myriad attempts at conceptual re-formulation, and somewhat aghast at the potential implications of our own discussion of Carl Schmitt’s work. This very short concluding chapter responds to Hay’s critique of Flinders and Wood’s chapters, and of the broader purpose of this collection, in three senses. It argues that Carl Schmitt’s work is used to contextualise the collection, rather than set a theoretical agenda. Secondly, it argues that conceptual reflection and problem-based research need not be antagonistic, but can in fact be complimentary. Lastly, taking the lead from C Wright Mills’ work on ‘the sociological imagination’, it argues for a little more ‘big thinking’ in the social sciences, and the development of a ‘political imagination’.Less

Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case Of Punjab *

Alyssa Ayres

in Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture, and Practice

A movement to ‘revive’ the spirit of the Punjabi language, the Punjabiyat movement, has been catalyzed from within Pakistan — raising intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the ... More

A movement to ‘revive’ the spirit of the Punjabi language, the Punjabiyat movement, has been catalyzed from within Pakistan — raising intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the cultural basis of the nation-state. Although the Punjabiyat movement bears the surface features of a classical nationalist formation — insistence upon recovering an unfairly oppressed history and literature, one unique on earth and uniquely imbued with the spirit of the local people and the local land — its structural features differ markedly. Pakistan’s Punjab has long functioned as an ethnic hegemon, the centre against which other regions struggle in a search for power. Yet the Punjabiyat movement presents Punjab as an oppressed victim of Pakistan’s troubled search for national identity. This essay argues that a theory of symbolic capital best explains this otherwise peculiar inversion of perceived and actual power, and underscores culture’s critical role in the nation’s political imagination.Less

1. 1. Solomon's Temple, Augustus' Altar, and Edwin's Roads: Peace in the Political Imagination

Paul J. E. Kershaw

in Peaceful Kings: Peace, Power and the Early Medieval Political Imagination

What did early medieval authors think about when they thought about peace? Early medieval political culture is impossible to understand without a full awareness of the foundations upon which it was ... More

What did early medieval authors think about when they thought about peace? Early medieval political culture is impossible to understand without a full awareness of the foundations upon which it was constructed, and the inherited thought and imagery with which it was built. Briefly discussing the linguistic issues involved in the subject, this chapter uses Bede's famous image of the peace of King Edwin of Northumbria's reign as a means to explore the various currents that fed into the early medieval political imagination. Biblical material, and the forms of its re‐use in early medieval culture is addressed — with emphasis upon the treatment of Solomon — as is the legacy of antiquity through an examination of the late history of the ara pacis of Augustus and the reconfiguration of Rome's central precincts. Byzantine, Augustinian, early Irish, and ‘Germanic’ notions of peace also come under scrutiny.Less

Origins and Models

HAROLD LOVE

in English Clandestine Satire, 1660-1702

This chapter begins with a description of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham and how his life as it is told today is essentially one that has been compiled from satires. It argues that the ... More

This chapter begins with a description of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham and how his life as it is told today is essentially one that has been compiled from satires. It argues that the ‘Buckingham’created by the satirists is a fascinating figure in its own right, and one that reveals a great deal about the dreams and nightmares of the Restoration political imagination. The modes and origins of clandestine satire are discussed.Less

Antigone and the Polis

in Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins

This chapter relocates Antigone within the ancient sphere of democracy, calling upon some of the text's political conditions of production as well as upon the mysterious success of Antigone's ... More

This chapter relocates Antigone within the ancient sphere of democracy, calling upon some of the text's political conditions of production as well as upon the mysterious success of Antigone's performance in fifth-century Athens, to open up new dialogues between the tragedy's political imagination and our own. The (tragic) interpretation of context is aligned with that of the “new democratic school,” which sees continuities between ancient tragedy and ancient, as well as modern, political thought and practice. It is argued that the tragedy stages a political paradox, which modernity reformulated as it appropriated for itself the principle of equality. Antigone exposes a constitutive question for the ancient revolutionary invention of democracy, a question that invariably resurfaces regardless of how often it is suppressed: who constituted the body politic, and by which rituals was this determination made?Less

Introduction: Toward a New Political History of African American Literature

Gene Andrew Jarrett

in Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the political value of African American literature through an examination of Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama. Prior to their careers as elected ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the political value of African American literature through an examination of Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama. Prior to their careers as elected officials, both men wrote books that had been influential in shaping public opinion on the nation's democratic potential as well as on their own personal, political, and presidential qualifications. In 1776, Jefferson coauthored the Declaration of Independence, and in 1787, he published an authoritative ethnography of early America. Meanwhile, Obama released three bestselling books of autobiographical nonfiction and public policy. Evidently, African American literature fueled their political imaginations. Thus, this book looks at African American literature's role in political imagination and political action—to the extent that it can facilitate social change—and political action's role in the African American literary imagination.Less

An Unsettled Past as a Political Resource

Svjetlana Nedimović

in African, American and European Trajectories of Modernity: Past Oppression, Future Justice?

This chapter examines recent debates about transitional justice and argues against attempts at ‘overcoming the past’ or ‘settling the past’. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of the ... More

This chapter examines recent debates about transitional justice and argues against attempts at ‘overcoming the past’ or ‘settling the past’. Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of the social-historical, it shows that engaging with the past is an inescapable dimension of societal existence and its self-creative process. It contends that such past is not necessarily a burden but can become a political resource in the (re)construction of political community. The resourcefulness of the past, however, is contingent upon standing or permanent political institutions and normative frameworks. The unsettled past, the chapter suggests, becomes a valuable political resource only if it remains unsettled and, as such, a vital part and live matter of everyday political processes through the interconnected workings of collective political responsibility and political imagination.Less

The Imaginary and the Political

in Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters

This chapter suggests that the political purpose of refunctioned ethnography could be to provide some intellectual purchase on the imaginations that are only superficially expressed as rational ... More

This chapter suggests that the political purpose of refunctioned ethnography could be to provide some intellectual purchase on the imaginations that are only superficially expressed as rational arguments through which orphans of the Enlightenment persist in pretending politics proceeds. This purpose may be divided into three basic activities: (1) mapping the political imagination, (2) reflection, and (3) intervention. Ethnography for present situations takes a stance toward politics quite different from the stance taken by classical, or indeed much contemporary, cultural anthropology. If the navigator wishes to be political in a serious sense, then they must learn about the swirls and assemblages of this world, which cannot really be done from outside.Less

‘A calling for England’: Hill and the political imagination

Alex Wylie

in Geoffrey Hill's Later Work: Radiance of Apprehension

This chapter opens with an examination of Hill’s later conception of value and intrinsic value, with reference to John Ruskin, whose work is a crucial point of reference and departure for Hill’s ... More

This chapter opens with an examination of Hill’s later conception of value and intrinsic value, with reference to John Ruskin, whose work is a crucial point of reference and departure for Hill’s later work; this takes the form of a reading of Hill’s symbolic use of coins and precious metals, its relation to nationalism and nostalgia. Hill’s interest in the body politic as political symbol is discussed here, too, as an investment in the political discourse of British (and European) history. The chapter considers throughout the relationship, if any exists, between aesthetic and social order – a relationship of which the body politic is a symbol – and Hill’s vexed relationship to this vexed question, and indeed the relationship between poetry and politics in which Hill’s later work is deeply invested. The chapter places this element of Hill in the context of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Ruskin, as well as Shakespeare and Dante. The chapter concludes with a section on memory and civil power, comparing Hill with Ivor Gurney in certain crucial respects and building towards a conception of Hill’s later work as being an identification with Romantic conceptions of imaginative power.Less

Justice and Feasibility: A Dynamic Approach

Pablo Gilabert

in Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates

It is common in political theory and practice to challenge normatively ambitious proposals by saying that their fulfillment is not feasible. But there has been insufficient conceptual exploration of ... More

It is common in political theory and practice to challenge normatively ambitious proposals by saying that their fulfillment is not feasible. But there has been insufficient conceptual exploration of what feasibility is, and very little substantive inquiry into why and how it matters for thinking about social justice. This paper provides one of the first systematic treatments of these issues, and proposes a dynamic approach to the relation between justice and feasibility that illuminates the importance of political imagination and dynamic duties to expand agents’ power to fulfill ambitious principles of justice. Agents can use their political imagination to envisage alternative ways to fulfill principles in different contexts, and recognize dynamic duties to expand their ability to fulfill those principles over time.Less

“The Stuff Our Dreams Are Made Of”: Lincoln in The English Imagination

Adam I. P. Smith (ed.)

in The Global Lincoln

This chapter examines the perception of Abraham Lincoln in English political and cultural imagination. It explains that Lincoln had a varied career in the English imagination in the century or so ... More

This chapter examines the perception of Abraham Lincoln in English political and cultural imagination. It explains that Lincoln had a varied career in the English imagination in the century or so after his death and that the salience and political content of his image shifted according to the context. It discusses how Lincoln was invoked by supporters and the opponents of Irish Home Rule and suggests that the interwar years were the high-water mark for Lincoln in England. This chapter also describes the 1941 documentary film “Words for Battle,” directed by Humphrey Jennings which featured a statue of Lincoln in front of the Houses of Parliament and suggests that the film hints at the role of Lincoln in the evolving language of democratic English culture.Less

What Was Revolutionary about Armenian Revolutionary Parties in the Ottoman Empire?

Gerard J. Libaridian

in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire

Armenian political parties were founded at the end of the nineteenth century to give a new direction to their Armenian constituents. They spoke, negotiated, and made decisions on behalf of the ... More

Armenian political parties were founded at the end of the nineteenth century to give a new direction to their Armenian constituents. They spoke, negotiated, and made decisions on behalf of the Armenians; and they sought to dominate the Armenians' cultural and religious institutions while transforming their collective identity. These parties were also active players in Ottoman political life, so active, in fact, that by 1908 they were widely considered as having replaced the church as the main intermediary between the Ottoman authorities and their Armenian subjects. This chapter does not aim to present a history of the revolutionary parties; nor is it a history of their relations with the Ottoman state. Rather, it attempts to delineate boundaries of political imagination developed by Armenian revolutionary organizations at their inception, boundaries created and crossed by ideology and praxis.Less

Policy translation: how personalisation spreads

Catherine Needham

in Personalising public services: Understanding the personalisation narrative

This chapter focuses on the people and organisations that have promoted personalisation and established its strong hold on the political imagination. It traces the history of personalised approaches ... More

This chapter focuses on the people and organisations that have promoted personalisation and established its strong hold on the political imagination. It traces the history of personalised approaches within social care and the role of different actors, including disability activists and politicians, in bringing personalisation into the policy mainstream. The chapter also highlights the importance of the broader sociopolitical context, in which new configurations of individuals and communities, and new participative technologies, have reshaped the citizen's engagement with the state. It goes on to consider the mechanisms and dialogues through which the personalisation narrative has migrated from social care into other service areas. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and analysis of speeches and government documents, the chapter applies the theory of policy translation to the personalisation case.Less