“Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is a tremendous historical thesis into the early years of post-coloniality and the crunching, brutal machinery of Western imperialism. America’s puppeteering of foreign governments in the Global South during the Cold War warrants little elaboration, and what makes Johan Gimonprez’s effort a revelation is that it argues that American arts and…
Category: Arts
Michael A. Allen & Julie VanDusky-Allen: “The ‘Barbie’ and ‘Star Wars’ universes”
Both “Barbie” and “Andor” are useful for those who want to understand why revolutions happen and what it takes for them to happen. Their fundamental point: Before the start of any revolution, the oppressed have to first recognize their oppression.
introduction to “Smash The System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance” (2022)
“Our subculture will be Dionysian—sensual, spontaneous, wild—an uncontrollable geyser of raw feeling. The Apollonian (the rational, the intentional, the orderly) will follow the chaotic energy that drives this movement, not precede it. Intellectual proposals can build on adrenaline, lust, violence, and pleasure, but they can’t substitute for them. So nothing sanctimonious, nothing triumphalist or moralistic.…
“Emory Douglas: The Art of the Black Panthers”
“From 1967 to the Party’s dissolution in the early 1980s, Douglas designed the art that came to define the Black Panthers and their iconography.”
Éric Morales-Franceschini: ‘Cuba Libre: On the Revolutionary Epic as “Redemptive Impatience”’
‘The revolutionary epic is never a “finished” narrative, let alone uniquely nefarious. The unruly and dense “archives” that revolutions (or an epic past) embody are liable to tell different stories, stories that bequeath different “lessons” and, thereby, possibilities.’
Jared Marcel Pollen: “For Percy Bysshe Shelley, Literature Was the Spark of the Revolution”
After the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the young radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley proclaimed he was deserting “the odorous gardens of literature” for “the great sandy desert of politics.” Instead, he infused literature with revolutionary political ideas.
The tragedy of post-colonial self-determination
In her challenging book Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019), political scientist Adom Getachew discusses self-determination in the Anglophone Black Atlantic, with special emphasis on post-colonial independence as well as Caribbean and African federations. It would be interesting to compare the political thought of intellectuals and statesmen such as George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley,…
The tragedy of Haiti in history, drama, and performance
Last week, as I read in The New York Times the four-day series “The Ransom – The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers” and I continued work on Aimé Césaire’s superb drama The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, 1970) for my book-length project The Tragedy of Revolution, I took the train to Chicago and…
Malin Bång: “splinters of ebullient rebellion”
“We are also seeing many influential institutions, organizations, even governments gradually facing collapse when their actions and manifestations are colliding with the core values of the individuals they are made up by. We see how this friction generates a new spine of idealism with the aim to shift back the focus from simplified, one-dimensional explanations…
Jason Farago: “The Dangerous Beauty of Jacques-Louis David”
“A landmark exhibition of drawings at the Met brings us into the studio of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist, and stages the ultimate showdown of culture and politics.”