Movement and the Paradox of Resistance (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revolution and Resistance in World Politics
Millennium, 2019
Are we living in an age of revolution and resistance? Fifty-one years after the global tumult of 1968, and a century since the Russian Revolution, the world-political scene is marked by discussion of resistance movements, revolutionary politics, and new forms of opposition to the status quo. Yet the meanings of revolution and resistance remain ambiguous and undecided -terms that are both everywhere and nowhere in the contemporary world. While a variety of actors, movements and popular cultural phenomena are labelled revolutionary, there is also a sense that 'big-R' revolution is dead, the social, political and economic problems it was meant to solve essentially settled. Resistance, , aimed to interrogate the multiple meanings of revolution and resistance in the 21st century and to foster cross-disciplinary conversations and dialogue about the concepts' theoretical, empirical and international dimensions. In selecting the theme, we reflected on the concepts, theories and spaces that have been central to the making and remaking, imagining and reimagining of world politics. Revolution and resistance have been and continue to be pivotal to our understanding and analysis of international relations. From the eponymous revolutions in, inter alia, Haiti, Russia and Cuba to the critical feminist, de/anti-colonial and civil rights movements, they have been central to the formation of international order as we know it. Contemporary movements and moments, from uprisings in Algeria, Sudan and Venezuela to Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the Women's March Global, emphasise the continued relevance of revolution and resistance in the contestation of world politics.
Revolutionary Scholarship by Any Speed Necessary: Slow or Fast but for the End of This World
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017
Advocates of 'slow scholarship' have called for building relations of care and solidarity across the university. But, when academia is romanticized, the possibilities for these relations are limited. To de-romanticize academia, we frame universities as terrains of struggle between competing political projects with colonial and decolonial histories. Nostalgia for the university is often tied to an ideal of liberal democracy. Feelings of anxiety about 'speed-up' originate in the liberal ideal of the slowly deliberative citizen in the public sphere. We show that this over-politicizing of temporality has the converse effect of depoliticizing other important political struggles. While jettisoning these problematic assumptions of 'slow scholarship' advocates, we maintain their desires for building relations of care and solidarity. This requires revealing the university's 'temporal architectures' and 'spatial clockworks'—how some people's temporally and spatially privileged situations are interdependent with others' oppressed spatio-temporal situations. For example, the (slow) scholarship of tenured faculty is dependent on the (sped-up) time and labor of graduate students, contingent faculty, and service workers—as well as the constrained spatio-temporal conditions of off-campus domestic workers and incarcerated persons. These intertemporal and interspatial relations intersect with other dynamics, including racism, sexism, labor exploitation, and bureaucracy. We demonstrate an approach of intertemporally and interspatially reflective scholarship through analyses of the movements of #theRealUW and #DismantleDukePlantation at our own campuses, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Duke University. This allows us to envision possibilities for solidarity across different struggles, for expanding alternative modes of study and temporal sub-architectures, and for amplifying already existing forms of resistance in the university’s undercommons.
Syllabus, Resistance and Revolution
This course examines arguments about whether it can ever be justifiable or advisable to resist or even overthrow one’s government—and if so, then when, why, and how to do so. We read classic treatments of these questions in thinkers from Xenophon to Martin Luther King, Jr., examine some more recent arguments about civil disobedience and nonviolent revolution, and conclude with a look at what “went wrong” after the Arab Uprisings of 2011.
This paper revolves around the politics of time and temporality within Michel Foucault's theorisation of resistance. In focus is Foucault's outline of resistance as discursive resistance, reversed discourses, techniques of the self and counter-conducts, and other anti-authority struggles. These forms of resistance are played out across a range of temporal scales. When is resistance, in Foucault's view, spectacular and instantaneous rather than incremental and 'slow'? Overall, this paper reveals how the resistance practices, that are described within Foucault's texts, appear as repetitions of signs across time, major ruptures, breaks or as rhizomatic movements between now, then and the future.
On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance' by Howard Caygill
Dandelion: Postgraduate Arts Journal and Research Network, 2014
Resistance is a sticky, complex term that defies easy definition but one that is emblematic of contemporary politics. In his recent book On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, Howard Caygill maps out and draws together how the term has been understood from a variety of perspectives, in different histories and debates. From various definitions of resistance, he constructs an 'archive of resistance' exploring themes such as domination, consciousness, violence and subjectivity. 1 He draws on a wealth of references from progressive and revolutionary politics including thinkers such as Mao, Lenin, Luxembourg, Gandhi and Fanon; artists such as Pasolini, Genet and Kafka; and practices such as Greenham Common and the Zapatista movement. Caygill's study is easily accessible and highly engaging. He successfully teases apart a term that-although it is very pertinent to the contemporary moment and has had many texts dedicated to inciting, sustaining or repressing it-has remained under-analysed. Generally speaking this is a powerful and thoughtprovoking book, providing a strong basis for further analysis. However, it does raise questions about what the consequences of the theoretical framework within which it operates are, how this inflects our understanding of resistance, and whether it is undone by its own contradictions.
Humanities at the crossroads Reflections on theory culture and resistance
European Journal of Social Work, 2021
'clearly demarcated development path to civilisation and adulthood' (p.119) during the nineteenth century, though I think she might also have depicted it as a rocky road. It ebbs and flows in the level of detail it embraces, plunging into finely tuned description and analysis at times, skipping lightly over complex issues at others. Ultimately, however, a careful perusal of her perspectives will yield considerable intellectual rewards, as we ponder on whether or not the current technological revolution will 'secure the future of capitalism' (p.206) or signal its end, and the role that young people will play in either eventuality.