Suchergebnisse

This project aims to explore the connection between history, memory, political power, and visual art. It aims to contribute insight to how contemporary visual artists, like the filmmaker Jean Luc Godard, and the installation artist Christian Boltanski, confront politics through the reformation of collective memory. In their case the memory and history that they evoke are connected to Second War World and the Holocaust. In a very schematic way I will try to describe their role as a provider of a sight; a sight of the political struggle. I structured our investigation of Boltanski and Godard's works around three general questions on art, history and power. These questions provided a point of departure for my exploration, and helped with the formation of my arguments. At first, I tried to understand the presence of history in both Boltanski's and Godard's works. As I explained in this project, their motivations come from different reasons and events. Above all, as I have presented in this project, these artists use history in order to understand the conditions of the present moment. Therefore, I will argue that both Boltanski and Godard are historians of the present. Secondly, it was important for me to understand their specific use of the Holocaust and Auschwitz in their works. Here we notice how this event is perceived, as a reflection of social structures, and our understanding of the way power operates has grown accordingly. In this respect, Boltanski and Godard's works fall, both directly and indirectly, under the theoretical framework formulated by Michel Foucault, Adi Ophir, and Giorgio Agamben. The third question relates specifically to the art world and art practice, focusing on the attempt to expose how artistic methods and technique function as apparatuses of power. In other words, I wanted to understand and expose how power suffuses art through artistic practices. Here, I followed Godard's own investigation of cinematic montage, and Boltanski's challenges of archival practice. Therefore, it was through their paradigms that I was able to consider alternatives

In negotiations of what a standard language is or should be, language criticism – with its evaluation of language and its speakers – has a central role. The article gives an overview of how the attitudes towards standard written as well as spoken British English have developed and changed over time and in the various socio-historical contexts. From a diachronic perspective, a tendency can be observed which begins with an orientation towards the linguistic variety used by the sophisticated elite in the middle of the 18th century and gradually moves towards acceptance and appreciation of local dialects and new standard varieties other than British English in the 20th century. For a long time, however, the ability to use 'correct', i. e. standard language, has been associated with education, appropriate social behaviour and decorum. This view is still subliminally present in British English and other national varieties, such as American English, today. Standardisation also plays a role in the public debates about the politically correct use of certain forms of language as well as in academic discussions about the influence that linguistic discourse exerts upon the attitudes formed about certain social groups.

How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don't have a "big bang" theory for the "second wave" of the women's movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when women who were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s took a good, long look at their radical male comrades and began to question their own subservience. "We do everything they do," they thought, "organizing, writing leaflets, marching, demonstrating—and then they think we should do the laundry? What's that about?" They wondered why they weren't running the show. But the roots of the movement go back even earlier. Again, popular opinion tells us that there was a buildup for some time, at least since the time of the Second World War, when women had to pitch in and were needed for essential work in the "outside" world.

Recent years have witnessed important new initiatives in the study of popular fictional modes of writing. At one time the field could have been described with reasonable accuracy by two traditions: one that analyzed the production and distribution of popular fiction as commodities; and one whose proponents regarded popular fiction as the negative which offered definition to the exposure of the positive - the 'great' canonic literary tradition. Generally, then, popular fictions were to be 'evaluated' according to the institutionalized norms which had been established as common sense practice ar

Abstract The article discusses to what extent sociological theories produced in the Brazilian academic field dialogue with a global intellectual movement criticizing coloniality and the Eurocentric foundations of the social sciences. Initially, we analyze the challenges regarding the attempts to define two theoretical approaches, Brazilian sociology, and Postcolonial Thought, without overlooking their internal heterogeneities. Then, we address the tensions between these approaches as conditions for research agendas that bring both contributions into proximity. Finally, we explore the epistemological potential of one of these agendas, which corresponds to a rereading of Brazilian sociological theory in light of postcolonial criticism. This exercise in rereading the canon is based on the methodological program of sociological reduction of Guerreiro Ramos, which indicates a reciprocal interrogation between Brazilian sociology and postcolonial thought, i.e., a decentered look at our sociological tradition that also reveals contributions from this tradition for the future of postcolonial epistemologies.