The Populist PrinceReturning to Charles's Vision of BritainSharr, Adam; Thornton, Stephen
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321239pmid: N/A
Following the coronation of British king Charles III, this article returns to a book that he produced in 1989 while Prince of Wales. Titled A Vision of Britain, Charles's text promoted classical and traditional architecture. First, this article examines the reception of A Vision of Britain, arguing that the prince acted as a “policy entrepreneur” and reviewing key consequences of his activism. While Charles's interventions are now typically interpreted along party political lines in Britain, the article finds that they were understood as more complex at the time. Second, it revisits the book in the context of an executive order signed in 2020 by US president Donald Trump that mandated traditional architectural styles for new federal buildings. This parallel serves to highlight dimensions of populism at work in Charles's former activism. It illustrates how Charles deployed his unusual power and influence in architecture, while denying the operations of his power to claim popular appeal.
Do You Hear the People's Nonsense?Performing Resistance in Pandemic-Era ChinaCheng, Zhen
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321252pmid: N/A
This study examines the performance of artistic activism and mass protests in COVID-era China, with a particular focus on Yang Xiao's Farewell, Language and the White Paper protests. The objective of this article is to illuminate the interplay between politics and performance, as well as between resistance and resilience. It seeks to understand how artistic expressions and acts of protest can transgress with nonsensical expressions. Situating itself in the context of postmodernism, authoritarian regimes, and multimedia landscape, this article sees nonsense as an artistic and performative device that transcends mere rational understanding to evoke a collective emotive response. This article hypothesizes that political activism and social movements gain traction and become feasible through adopting nonsense/non-sense. Moreover, this work further interrogates the concept of nonsense by dialoguing with affect studies, suggesting that the subversive potential of nonsense/non-sense may offer a glimmer of hope for political engagement and the expansion of social imaginaries.
The Decline of Innovation and the Rise of ContributionBerger-Soraruff, Amélie
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321265pmid: N/A
This article explores the concept of innovation through the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. Traditionally understood as the successful commercialization of a technical invention, innovation is considered to be the driving force behind capitalist growth. In recent years, it has been accused of being unsustainable and has been resented by many for causing more harms than benefits for life on the planet. As a result, a new generation of thinkers encourages the exit from innovation as part of a politics of “degrowth.” Although legitimate, these concerns are unfounded, as these thinkers misunderstand innovation in leaving aside the capacity for a technical phenomenon to bring effective change in society. This article turns to Stiegler's work in order to broaden the meaning of innovation. His philosophy allows us to approach innovation as a broader historical and biological drive that concerns the inherent technical character of the human. It shows that the human ability to introduce novelty and change in general can only be pursued through an interaction with technics. In a context where most of the technical resources essential to the introduction of significant change in society are owned by giant industries that only propose products destined for immediate consumption, Stiegler claims that it is politically crucial for individuals to intervene. This must be in developing a working knowledge of their technical environment in order to become again the active producers of their future, instead of being the passive consumers of a lifestyle that is essentially destructive. For these reasons, the article concludes that innovation, understood as a collective practice and a mode of social empowerment, must be revived rather than repressed.
The New MilitancyMemory Culture and the Politics of Implication from Ukraine, through Kassel, to GazaRoy, Tania
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321278pmid: N/A
This special section, entitled “Memory Wars,” marks the twentieth anniversary of Cultural Politics and was initiated a few months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Taking as a cue the question of a belligerent revision of history, the journal convened a symposium on “memory wars” in collaboration with the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, in June 2023. Geopolitical alignments of Europe and the United States around Ukraine have been catalyzed since by the incursion of Hamas fighters into Israel on October 7, 2023, and the campaign of extermination that has been subsequently waged by Israel on the Gaza Strip. The contributions to this special section engage the current, militarized politics of memory through the premise of increasingly authoritarian forms of liberalism—such militant liberalism is consolidated around an essentially epigonal understanding of the world, which combines reified languages of Holocaust memory culture with refurbished binaries of the Cold War. Entries range from the Russia-NATO war in Ukraine (Tarik Cyril Amar in conversation with Tania Roy), through the cultural domain of Germany and the limits of liberal freedoms of speech and artistic expression before and after October 7 (ruangrupa in conversation with Sophie Goltz), to the crisis of Israel-Palestine now (Ayelet Ben-Yishai).
Memory Capture from “De-communization” to “Decolonization”Tarik Cyril Amar on the Russia-Ukraine War, in Conversation with Tania RoyAmar, Tarik Cyril; Roy, Tania
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321291pmid: N/A
German historian of modern Ukraine Tarik Cyril Amar positions the third year of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (February 2022) between an analysis of escalated culture wars within Ukraine and its resonance for Anglo-American/European liberalism, whose most influential representatives suppress consideration of class-based, ethnicized contradictions that underlie the appeal to national self-determination, following the Maidan revolution of 2014. The discussion considers how notable “bellicists” of contemporary Anglo-Atlantic liberalism mobilize the Maidan's aspiration for EU and NATO membership (envisioned as the accomplishment of higher standards of living and a middle-class European Ukraine) while instrumentalizing the brutalities of the Russian invasion for a conjuncture marked by the eclipse of the “war on terror,” and the attendant exigencies of US-led realignment. Also a historian of the Holocaust, Amar reflects on his established study on the anomalous origins of “Soviet Ukraine” in the city of Lviv during the course of alternating occupation by Soviets and Nazis, in order to draw a sobering link between the twentieth century; the current, state-led “normalization” of memories of collaborationist violence during the interlude of Nazi rule (1941 – 44); and the prospect for a meaningful political future for Ukraine, in the wake of this war. Amar also indicates the unpopularity of such a position in the aftermath of February 2022 by pointing to the emergence of a new-left politics of identity, which, under the sign of “decolonization,” accelerates previous state-led efforts to erase traces of communist or Russian history from the built environment, cultural production, literature, and textbooks, even while consigning to illiberality the generally poorer, less educated Russian-speaking opposition to Maidan (from eastern and southern Ukraine). While Amar emphasizes unevenness within his discussion of the sovereigntist position and, more specifically, its uses by an Atlanticist geopolitical agenda, he also indicates its own appropriation of “third-world” vocabularies of emancipation (circulated through the rubric of “decoloniality” out of academic and cultural institutions of the West). The discussion draws links to the ongoing obliteration of Gaza and its alibi—insufficiently challenged by the Maidan generation of activists—in the West's memory culture of the Holocaust.
New Currencies or the Persistence of RepresentationWhat's Left after documenta fifteen?Goltz, Sophie; Afisina, Reza; Darmawan, Ade; Hartono, Iswanto
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321304pmid: N/A
In an extended follow-up to their first interview with Sophie Goltz, “Collective Crafting in Post-Suharto Indonesia” (Cultural Politics 18, no. 3), key members of ruangrupa, the Indonesian art collaborative, reflect on their tenure as directors of the fifteenth edition of the international art exhibition documenta (2022), held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Afisina, Dramawan, and Hartono discuss ruangrupa's long-standing attempt to forge a mode of artistic cohabitation through which a perpetually emergent, networked space constitutes, in itself an articulation of autonomy. Emphasizing economic democracy, or pragmatically generated pools of shared resources—emblematically and practically associated with the Indonesian rice house, the lumbung—Darmawan, Afisina, and Hartono respond obliquely to charges of anti-Semitism and racism that overshadowed documenta fifteen, which stands as the most international and racially diverse edition of the exhibition in its history. Darmawan articulates the necessity of an “alternative currency,” based on ruangrupa's adherence to the fundamental value of friendship, as a counter to the recursive claims of identity and representation in large-scale international exhibitions. Hartono and Afisina comment on documenta's partial narration of its own history of postwar internationalism, which fails to account for the historic Asian-African Conference at Bandung from the same year of its founding (1955) and, more broadly, the cultural memory of decolonization.
Against InevitabilityGenre and Crisis in Palestine/IsraelBen-Yishai, Ayelet
doi: 10.1215/17432197-11321317pmid: N/A
Emergency situations around the world have always presented a complicated and ostensibly paradoxical mix of crisis and continuity. This essay builds on the author's research into the cultural and literary history of the Emergency in India (1975 – 77) and on a reading of Paul Lynch's 2023 novel Prophet Song to address the ongoing and horrific crisis of 2023–24 in Palestine and Israel. Turning to genre as a way to look at emergencies and the ways in which we comprehend them, the article argues that once identified and declared, an emergency brings about an array of generically determined actions and reactions that seem inevitable and necessary. The crisis becomes disconnected from its historical origins, attendant only to the immanent logic of its genre. The logic of inevitability does not then allow a recognition of those strands of reality that are not embedded in the genres through which the world is already understood. Paying attention to the genres in which the current emergency is narrated, the article argues that the deadly violence in the Middle East is not, in fact, just a singular moment of crisis, nor is it just “more of the same,” or an inevitable result of a two-sided “conflict.” Shifting genres, one can recognize that the deadly violence today, and the occupation of which it is part, has a history and a politics that are human-made and can thus be unmade.