Suchergebnisse

Speaking of pseudonyms, what well-known person was tried and convicted under the pseudonym Jose Gomez in 1971? (Having criminal defendants be tried pseudonymously is extremely rare.)

Jose E. Chapa talks about land prices, history and genealogy of Chapa family, the Great depression, political affiliations, Mexican Americans from the Rio Grande Valley in politics, farming, and traveling the world. Mr. Chapa passed away on 7 August, 2011. ; https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/rgvoralhistories/1075/thumbnail.jpg

Luandino Vieira, a master of modem prose fiction in the Portuguese-speaking world, embodies the non-racial character of Angola's African culture. Born in Portugal in 1935, and named Jose Vieira Mateus da Graça, he was taken by his father, a shoemaker, and his mother to Angola as an infant; he adopted the name Luandino from Luanda, the capital, where he grew up with poor whites, mestiços (people of mixed race) and blacks. This early experience made him a passionate opponent of racialism and colonialism, and provided most of the material he has poured into his stories and novels. In his twenties he clashed with the Portuguese colonial authorities who tried to suppress his work, but in the prison cells and camp he continued to write. When his work could not be published openly it was circulated clandestinely, and after the overthrow of fascism in Portugal in 1974 the writings of years of imprisonment could be brought without hindrance to an eager audience.

No one should forget the quiet social democratic victories of the age. For the first time in history--to take just one example--Swedish physicians could not determine a child's social class on the basis of that child's state of health. But the nightmare images are bound to come first to mind. And many of the most frightening images of comprehensive order--the acme of which is totalitarianism--come not from political philosophers or from totalitarians themselves, but from a few novels: Franz Kafka's Trial, Eugeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984. Whether it was someone telling lies about Joseph K., or 'the mathematically perfect life of the United State' (Zamyatin), or a bio-engineered caste system of Alphas and Betas, or the ubiquity of Big Brother, all of these visions shared a family resemblance. In each, unaccountable power had come to penetrate virtually the whole of life. There was scarcely any ability to be alone: both Winston Smith in 1984 and D-503, the narrator, the I, of Zamyatin's We, become dissidents simply by virtue of keeping a diary. Whatever the dystopia's local color, it was a 'world of total integration,' as Irving Howe wrote in a small brilliant survey of the genre, that would seize and then incorporate you. ANEW AGE wants new imaginations, and in this light the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago's achievement becomes especially striking. Saramago, who joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1968, when it was still outlawed, has been a political novelist from the start, each of his first six novels skirmishing with Portuguese history. Saramago's politics can be playful or grave. In The Stone Raft, he whimsically detaches the Iberian peninsula from the rest of Europe, just as fascism had done, but this time, so he explained in his 1998 Nobel Lecture, in order for it to float 'South to help balance the world, as compensation for [Europe's] former and its present colonial abuses.' In The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the dead poet Fernando Pessoa returns from the cemetery to visit one of his own creations, the alter ego Ricardo Reis, and the two trace arabesques of melancholy speculation on the air, Reis perfecting his aloofness and passivity while all around him--the novel is set in 1936--fascism assembles its world. This century, that century--it hardly matters. Everything depends on whether a book like Blindness is looking backward or ahead. Many readers saw this novel as an abstract of twentieth-century atrocities, and, true, the incarceration of victims of a contagious 'white blindness' in a disused mental asylum cannot help but recall the uses to which elementary schools and sports stadiums and churches (not to speak of the specially constructed facilities of the Nazis) have been put by various regimes. But Blindness affirms the very thing that Saramago's precursors in political allegory dreaded and wished to deny: the wholeness of society. For Saramago, blindness is a type of illumination, and what the white blindness, 'like the sun shining through mist,' reveals is the dependence of people on one another and the necessity of society's deliberate organization. Before long a gang of thugs and extortionists has taken over the asylum, reviving the old question: socialism or barbarism?

Described as 'the most original and innovative Latin American Marxist' by Michael Lowy - a sentiment repeated by many others - the work of Jose Carlos Mariategui remains a largely untapped resource in the Western Marxist tradition outside of specialist circles. This review essay considers the recent publication of a translation and anthology of Mariategui's work into English by Harry Vanden and Mark Becker as a first step towards correcting this trend. It highlights Mariategui's understanding of race, power, and identity; the combined and uneven development of capital; and the role of myth and voluntarism in revolutionary struggle as key points in which the early-twentieth-century Peruvian contributes to contemporary debates in Marxist praxis in Latin America and beyond. Adapted from the source document.

Guinea-Bissau is a failed state by any definition: a state with a bloated, unaccountable, corrupt, wasteful civil service, and which does not even pay salaries to its civil servants; a state which cannot control its security forces; a state which is unable to bring to justice anyone high-up involved in audacious and scandalous robbery of the Treasury; a state which cannot or is not willing to bring to justice perpetrators of serious crimes. These are the qualities of a failed state. Adapted from the source document.