A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about […]
Archive for the ‘Cultural politics’ Category
We are all tuteishi (or, on not being posthuman)
Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, tagged alternative humanism, bioregionalism, border identities, borderlands, Bruno Latour, cultural identity, earthbound, ethnicity, Gaia, Galician, global cultural studies, humanism, identity, mestizo, nationality, Origins of the Slavic Nations, place, placelessness, posthuman, posthumanism, posthumanities, postmodern, premodern, Russian, Rusyn, Serhii Plokhy, Slavic, tuteishi, tuteishyi, Ukrainian, Zomia on June 17, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
The “what does it have to do with me?” defense
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged colonialism, coloniality, Decolonization, genocide, George Floyd protests, Mignolo, modernity, racism, slavery, Ukraine, United States, US history, white privilege, whiteness, xenophilia, xenophobia on June 11, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.) The […]
Eco-ethico-aesthetics and George Floyd
Posted in Cultural politics, Process-relational thought, tagged A. N. Whitehead, aesthetics, C. S. Peirce, eco-ethico-aesthetics, ecology, ethics, firstness, George Floyd, George Floyd protests, logic, object-oriented ontology, revolutionary moments, secondness, Shadowing the Anthropocene, systemic racism, U.S. cultural politics, Whitehead on June 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third. This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response […]
Mapping identities in global cultural studies
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged anthropology of globalization, capitalism, cognitive capitalism, colonialism, cosmopolitics, critical realism, cultural identity, cultural studies, cultural theory, decoloniality, ecocultural identity, etic, global cultural studies, globalization, identity politics, modernism, modernity, modernization, multiple modernities, postmodernization, reflexive modernization, reflexivity, sociology of globalization, tradition, traditionalism, traditionalization on May 28, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, […]
The Epistemically Challenged States of America
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged Algoricene, algorithmic transparency, cultural policy, digital culture, epistemology, fake news, global media literacy, global media studies, information war, media ecology, media hygiene, media literacy, media policy, media theory, political polarization, Russia, Ukraine, Ukrainianization on December 2, 2019 | 7 Comments »
Or, Why Ukraine- and Russia- literacy should now be mandatory studies for every voting American One could start with another question: Why are both the politics of climate change and politics in general so polarized these days? Political polarization, after all, remains the main complaint of Americans, and it has made it impossible to make […]
On civility
Posted in Cultural politics, tagged body politic, civics, civillity, communicative discourse, illiberalism, incivility, left politics, Politics, post-truth, Trump on July 13, 2018 | 3 Comments »
Some say the problem in today’s political world is the lack of civility. Others say the problem is civility itself, or the pretense of it (and use of it as a bludgeon), when what is called for is outrage. It seems to me that there is no universal “civility.” Civility is a matter of fitting […]
On cultural civil conflict
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged affect, affective contagion, civil religion, civil war, cultural civil war, cultural values, cultural war, culture, mass murder, politics of affect, red states-blue states, Trumpland, United States on October 5, 2017 | 8 Comments »
I think it’s fair to say that the United States is in a state of cultural civil war. It is cultural war in the sense that it is a war fought with signs and symbols rather than with guns — signs and symbols intended to elicit affiliation, allegiance, and identification with one or another party to the […]
Hysteria, or hope?
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged Charlottesville, cultural left, democracy, fascism, hope, hysteria, left, left politics, political left, Trump era on August 29, 2017 | 20 Comments »
Based on its title and on the snippets I saw being quoted, I fully expected to dislike Lee Jones’ article “Charlottesville and the Politics of Left Hysteria,” posted a few days ago at The Current Moment. Instead, I’ve found it nuanced, cogent, and well worth reading. I myself have tried to broach this topic of the […]
The I=PAT of mass murder, and its antithesis — joy
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged anti-liberalism, Bill Chaloupka, ClimateJustice, Dugin, fundamentalism, global solidarity movement, green left, I=PAT, LGBTQ, liberalism, movement of movements, Naomi Klein, Omar Mateen, Orlando shootings, war and peace on June 15, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Just as I=PAT serves as a handy, if problematic, formula for thinking about the causes of environmental impact, so I think there is a similar formula underlying tragedies like the massacre at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. It goes something like this: Hate + Technology + Distress = Carnage/Chaos