The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike.Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses—the crowd scenes—in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions.
Discusses the proliferation of futuristic and post-apocalyptic works - something that has been going on for generations - and the wholesale rehabilitation of such 'genre' material for serious or serious seeming novels and movies. Adapted from the source document.
AbstractThis paper explores the responses of women living in a small town in the Chitral region of northern Pakistan to the Islamizing policies of the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal, a coalition of Islamist parties elected to provincial government in the North West Frontier Province in October 2002. Its focus is on women in the region who vocally and publicly criticize Chitral's politically activemadrasa-educated 'men of piety'. Documenting the ways in which these women and the region's 'men of piety' debate with one another on matters concerning personal morality, comportment and self-presentation illuminates dimensions of small-town Muslim life that are rarely considered important in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. In particular, by exploring these complex and multi-dimensional debates, I seek to emphasize the inherently unfinished nature of Chitralis' responses to ongoing Islamizing processes, a growing and pervasive sense of disenchantment amongst many of the region's Muslims with the authenticity of public expressions of personal piety, and, in this context, the continuing emergence of new ways of being Muslim, modes of self-presentation and categories of Islamic public opinion forming figures.
AbstractChallenging perspectives on the urban question have arisen in recent years from beyond academic realms through the work of artists and cultural practitioners. Often in dialogue with urban theory and political activism, and employing a range of tactical practices, they have engaged critically with cities and with the spatialities of everyday urban life. They are typically concerned less with representing political issues than with intervening in urban spaces so as to question, refunction and contest prevailing norms and ideologies, and to create new meanings, experiences, understandings, relationships and situations. Such interventionist practices may rarely be seen as part of the traditional purview of urban studies. Yet in asserting their significance here, this essay argues that growing dialogues across and between urban and spatial theory, and artistic and cultural practice, have considerable potential for inspiring and developing critical approaches to cities. The essay highlights a number of specific challenges thrown up by such interconnections that are of political and pedagogical significance and in need of further debate.RésuméRécemment, d'intéressantes perspectives sur la question urbaine se sont dégagées au‐delà des sphères de recherches, à travers le travail d'artistes et de professionnels de la culture. Dans un échange fréquent avec la théorie urbaine et le militantisme politique, et à l'aide de toute une panoplie de pratiques tactiques, ils se sont impliqués dans les villes et les spatialités de la vie urbaine au quotidien. En général, ils se soucient moins de représenter des thèmes politiques que d'intervenir dans les espaces urbains pour remettre en question, rediriger ou contester les normes et idéologies en vigueur, et pour créer de nouvelles significations, expériences, compréhensions, relations et situations. Il est rare de pouvoir inscrire ces modes interventionnistes dans le champ traditionnel des études urbaines. Toutefois, cet essai défend leur importance en soulignant le potentiel considérable d'une accentuation du dialogue à travers et entre les théories urbaine et spatiale, et les pratiques artistique et culturelle, pour inspirer et élaborer des approches critiques des villes. Ce travail met en avant plusieurs enjeux spécifiques nés de ces interconnexions, significatifs sur le plan politique et pédagogique, et appelant à un débat approfondi.
State subsidies to attract investment have proliferated since the 1980s, yet we know little about the factors that influence governments' subsidy policies. In this paper, I propose that in making subsidy policies, governments are influenced by capital mobility and domestic political institutions. Capital mobility influences subsidy levels in two ways. First, mobility increases the bargaining power of capital vis-à-vis governments in negotiations over subsidies, and, second, the ability of companies to move across borders triggers competition among neighboring countries, thus driving subsidy levels upwards. I argue, however, that the likelihood of governments to respond to the pressures from mobile capital will be higher in countries with electoral institutions that encourage personal vote-seeking, such as small district magnitudes and low political party discipline. The empirical analysis of subsidy levels in the EU member states during the period 1992-2006 lends support for these arguments.
