Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.

YouTube as Alternative Television in Russia: Political Videos During the Presidential Election Campaign 2018

Previous studies on “youtubification” of political communication (May, 2010) have largely focused on democratic contexts. This study aims at exploring the role of the global video-sharing platform in non-democratic political communication, using the example of the Russian presidential election of 2018. It draws on the qualitative content analysis of 169 political videos collected from the “Popular” section of Russian YouTube during the last 2 months of the presidential campaign. The results show that oppositional discourse dominated the most popular political videos of Russian YouTube and that pro-state actors tried to co-opt the platform, publishing videos made in amateur and semi-professional styles that imitated user-generated content. Drawing on the findings, I discuss the risks and benefits of YouTube publics for the Russian authoritarian regime and the role of social media platforms in consultative authoritarianism.

Street Science: Community Knowledge for Global Health Equity

Street science is the processes used by community residents to understand, document, and take action to address the environmental health issues they are experiencing. Street science is an increasingly essential process in global urban health, as more and more people live in complex environments where physical and social inequalities create cumulative disease burdens. Street science builds on a long tradition of critical public health that values local knowledge, participatory action research, and community-driven science, sometimes referred to as “citizen science.” Street scientists often partner with professional scientists, but science from the street does not necessarily fit into professional models, variables or other standards of positivist data. Street science is not one method, but rather an approach where residents are equally expert as professional scientists, and together they co-produce evidence for action. In this way, street science challenges conventional notions in global health and urban planning, which tend to divorce technical issues from their social setting and discourage a plurality of participants from engaging in everything from problem setting to decision-making. Street science does not romanticize local or community knowledge as always more accurate or superior to other ways of knowing and doing, but it also recognizes that local knowledge acts as an oppositional discourse that gives voice to the often silent suffering of disadvantaged people. At its best, street science can offer a framework for a new urban health science that incorporates community knowledge and expertise to ensure our cities and communities promote what is already working, confront the inequities experienced by the poor and vulnerable, and use this evidence to transform the physical and social conditions where people live, learn, work, and play.

Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial discourse is the critical underside of imperialism, the latter a hegemonic form going back to the beginnings of empire building. In the languages of the colonized—those of the ruling class as well as its subjects—a critical discourse of displacement, enslavement, and exploitation co-existed with what Conrad called the redemptive power of an “idea.” Postcolonial theory took shape in response to this discourse as a way of explaining this complex colonial encounter. But the discourse itself required a consciousness of the colonial experience in its diverse articulations and a corresponding legitimation of the lives of those colonized. This shift in consciousness only began to take critical shape in the mid-20th century with the gradual dismantling of the non-settler European empires. In Africa anti-colonial agitation congealed, as a theoretical problematic, around the idea of négritude, a nativist “thinking” that was built around alternative and self-empowering readings of African civilizations. In the writings of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Amilcar Cabral, and Aimé Césaire, négritude affirmed difference as it foregrounded an oppositional discourse against a “sovereign” European teleological historiography. The African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o pushed this further by insisting that, where possible, postcolonial writing should be in the vernacular. But even as difference was affirmed, with the emergence of the psychoanalytic–Hegelian writings of Frantz Fanon , the discourse ceased to be defiantly oppositional and moved towards an engagement with the larger principles of Western humanism, including a critique of the instrumental uses of the project of the Enlightenment. Out of this grew a language of a postcolonial theory which could then trace the colonial experience in its entirety, in all its complex modes and manifestations, to uncover the genesis of a critical postcolonial discourse, a discourse shaped in the shadow of the imperialist encounter. However, for the theory to take shape as an analytic it needed something more than a binary exposition or a simple historical genealogy; it required an understanding of those power structures that governed the representation of colonized peoples. The text that gave a language and a methodology for the latter was Edward W. Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism. Although Said did not use the term “postcolonial theory” in the first edition of his work, his argument (after Foucault) of the links between discourse and power provided a framework within which a postcolonial theory could be given shape. Works by two key theorists followed in quick succession: Homi K. Bhabha on complicit postcolonialism and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the subaltern and postcolonial reason. The three—Said, Bhabha, and Spivak—regularly invoked as a triumvirate or a trinity provided solid plinths for the scaffolding of innumerable studies of postcolonialism. Of these studies, in the Anglophone context a few may be cited here. These are: Robert J. C. Young and Bart Moore-Gilbert on critical Western historiography and colonial desire, Aijaz Ahmad, Neil Lazarus, and Benita Parry on the globality of capitalism and the need to historicize scholarship, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam on Eurocentrism, Dipesh Chakrabarty on provincializing Europe, Gauri Viswanathan on the role of premodern thought in postcolonial activism, and Harish Trivedi on postcolonial vernaculars. In all these studies the specters of Marx emerge as ghostly flares, which is why postcolonial theory is not so much an established paradigm with identifiable limits but an idea, a debate which in existential parlance carries a sense of exhaustion, ennui, that has no closure but is always an opening delimited only by a given theorist’s disciplinary boundaries.

What is Hamasteghtsakan Art

The document presents two separate articles with the same title –“What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” – by artist Arman Grigoryan and art critic Nazareth Karoyan, published in Armenia in 1994 and 1996 respectively. Translated from Armenian and introduced by Angela Harutyunyan both articles have been formative for the development of contemporary art in Armenia. While presenting diverging views on the meaning of hamasteghtsakan (translated as collectively created), the concept was circulated as a definition for a broad range of post-medium artistic practices in late Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. These practices formed an oppositional discourse to both Socialist Realism and Armenian National modernism. Harutyunyan's introduction locates the texts in a broader context of artistic institutional transformations in the late 1980s and early 1994 in Armenia.

Introduction to Arman Grigoryan's “What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” (1993) and “What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” (1996)

The document presents two separate articles with the same title –“What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” – by artist Arman Grigoryan and art critic Nazareth Karoyan, published in Armenia in 1994 and 1996 respectively. Translated from Armenian and introduced by Angela Harutyunyan both articles have been formative for the development of contemporary art in Armenia. While presenting diverging views on the meaning of hamasteghtsakan (translated as collectively created), the concept was circulated as a definition for a broad range of post-medium artistic practices in late Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. These practices formed an oppositional discourse to both Socialist Realism and Armenian National modernism. Harutyunyan's introduction locates the texts in a broader context of artistic institutional transformations in the late 1980s and early 1994 in Armenia.

Is urban gardening a source of wellbeing and just freedom? A Capability Approach based analysis from the UK and Ireland

The production of urban space and associated neoliberalisation of urban governance limits opportunities for individual and collective freedoms. Such a socio-spatial approach to uneven urban development has influenced a number of authors in their examination of urban community gardens. The research has shown both positive agency and wellbeing benefits of these spaces and also more critical accounts of how the spaces are limited in their ability to truly enhance political freedoms, overcoming asymmetric power relations. In addition to ongoing issues of insecurity of tenure, such well-intentioned community garden initiatives may be seen as light green, weak approaches to urban sustainability rather than a true oppositional discourse of practice, therefore seen to continue neoliberal forms of both unsustainable and uneven development. Using qualitative, visual methods, the chapter focuses on the potential of community gardens to enhance both human agency and ecological sustainability of passive adult users, and active youth and child users in urban areas. The sites chosen are specifically designed with ecological principles and associated features. In order to examine the freedoms valued within these sites, Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) is operationalized in five such sites in the UK and Ireland. Various critiques of the CA are addressed, and a particular approach to evaluating human wellbeing, linking the sustainable and just use of urban resources is developed. Such a re-conceptualisation of the CA is significant in realizing the potential role of the sites in enhancing a more expressive mode of being for individuals, along with the enhancement of participative and critical capacity in urban areas.

The Discourse on Economics

Based on the previous chapter’s demonstration of the links between Marxism and German bourgeois thought, Robinson argues in this chapter that Marxism represents neither the interests of the oppressed nor a radical break with contemporary philosophy. Chapter 4 provides an alternative history of oppositional discourse on poverty in European history that Robinson uses to emancipate socialism from the rigid ideological regime of bourgeois intellectuals imposed by Marxism. Robinson demonstrates the importance of Aristotle and Athenian philosophy for the empirical, conceptual, and moral precepts of modern economics. Robinson then traces the persistence of socialist impulses in Europe’s Middle Ages, particularly in the work of Marsilius and the Jesuits and its eventual transformation into the secular socialist utopianism of eighteenth century bourgeois Europeans. In both cases, he shows how radical gender relations are effaced by modern economics and by Marxism. Robinson thus shows how Marx and Engel’s scientific historical economics privileged a select group of bourgeois ideologists, insisting upon individualism and historical materialism and ignoring alternative oppositional discourses built in previous rebellions against oppression, inequality, racism, gender discrimination, and poverty.

Neoliberalism and the Equivocations of Empire

The British Empire has been through several phases of ideological grace and disgrace. When it folded during the post–Second World War period there was widespread public awareness of terrible atrocities and great harm caused by the British in their former colonial territories. Pride in the past achievements of Empire, however, has re-emerged today alongside continuing recognition of its evils, perhaps serving to inoculate against really searching criticism and the virus of oppositional discourse to the typical operations of geopolitical power under neoliberal conditions. These matters raise serious issues to do with memorialization in public heritage.