Review: Kiss of the Spider Woman by Hector Babenco, David Weisman

1986 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-46
Author(s):  
Mauricio Viano
Keyword(s):  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Hector Babenco

Babenco's film, about the points where orthodox revolutionary politics meets with sexual oppression, is a needed message to the left.

Kropotkin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Kinna
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Revolutionary Politics

This book is designed to remove Peter Kropotkin from the framework of classical anarchism. By focusing attention on his theory of mutual aid, it argues that the classical framing distorts Kropotkin's political theory by associating it with a narrowly positivistic conception of science, a naively optimistic idea of human nature and a millenarian idea of revolution. Kropotkin's abiding concern with Russian revolutionary politics is the lens for this analysis. The argument is that his engagement with nihilism shaped his conception of science and that his expeditions in Siberia underpinned an approach to social analysis that was rooted in geography. Looking at Kropotkin's relationship with Elisée Reclus and Erico Malatesta and examining his critical appreciation of P-J. Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Max Stirner, the study shows how he understood anarchist traditions and reveals the special character of his anarchist communism. His idea of the state as a colonising process and his contention that exploitation and oppression operate in global contexts is a key feature of this. Kropotkin's views about the role of theory in revolutionary practice show how he developed this critique of the state and capitalism to advance an idea of political change that combined the building of non-state alternatives through direct action and wilful disobedience. Against critics who argue that Kropotkin betrayed these principles in 1914, the book suggests that this controversial decision was consistent with his anarchism and that it reflected his judgment about the prospects of anarchistic revolution in Russia.

The Shop-Girl Revolutionary in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima

2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Mullin
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Literary Naturalism ◽  
Public House ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Marginal Characters

Abstract This essay argues that the complex political resonances of Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) can be further elucidated through closer critical attention to one of its more marginal characters, the shop-girl Millicent Henning. Ebullient, assertive, and, for many early reviewers, the novel's sole redeeming feature, Millicent supplies the novel with far more than local color. Instead, James seizes on a sexual persona already well established within literary naturalism and popular culture alike to explore a rival mode of insurrection to that more obviously offered elsewhere. While the modes of revolution contemplated by Hyacinth Robinson and his comrades in the Sun and Moon public house are revealed to be anachronistic and ineffectual, Millicent's canny manipulation of her sexuality supplies her with an alternative, effective, and unmistakably modern mode of transformation. The novel's portrait of ““revolutionary politics of a hole-and-corner sort”” is thus set against Millicent's brand of quotidian yet inexorable social change.

Iran’s Islamic Revolution

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Sadeghi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Iranian Politics

The Islamic revolution of 1979 in Iran was decisive in reshaping and reframing both Iranian politics and the Middle East, as we know it. This chapter investigates the historical framing of the Islamic revolution as a result of the politicization of the religious discourse in Iran from the early 1940s through the late 1970s and the steady emergence of the idea of an Islamic government as an alternative to the oppressive structure of Western modernity. The Islamic revolution marked the re-enchantment and remystification of politics in an allegedly disenchanted world. The chapter reveals two versions of revolutionary Islam, the clerical and the messianic, and their role in the framing of revolutionary politics. Whereas in clerical Islam the modern state was seen not as substantially corrupt but as an indispensable instrument for the establishment of the Islamic government, in messianic Islam the contemplation and reconstruction of history aimed at building a new past, hence a quite different future.

Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class.

1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Patrick V. Peppe ◽  
Maurice Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Revolutionary Politics
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