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The twentieth century is witness to a revival of interest in the bildungsroman as writers, especially from postcolonies in the Global South, turn to it to reflect on concerns of history, culture, and social life in a postcolonial setting. Scholars, however, disagree regarding the nature of these reworkings. Some see them as a continuation of the original European models established by Goethe, Dickens, and other European writers. Others find such associations Eurocentric and call for more local standards of evaluation. This article examines this debate by looking closely at a version of the postcolonial bildungsroman proposed by the Kannada writer U. R. Ananthamurthy in his 1965 novel Samskara. The novel follows an orthodox Brahmin priest from Karnataka who, disillusioned by the corruption and moral decay in his community, embarks on a pilgrimage to rediscover his identity in the rapidly modernizing world of twentieth‐century India. Ananthamurthy's bildungsroman, while retaining some structural similarities, departs from European models in fundamental ways. The motif of the hero's journey, for instance, is flipped. The novel tracks the hero's growing discontentment with his community leading to a sense of communal alienation, thus inverting the European journey‐trajectory that typically follows the hero's movement toward social integration. It also deviates from the generic Western rags‐to‐riches storyline that complements that hero's road to social integration. Instead, it adopts the narrative structure of the Niti‐shastra, a set of precolonial Hindu texts that teach about the wise conduct of life. Such readings not only facilitate fresh ways of understanding the relationship between the Western and the postcolonial models, but they also allow new insights into understanding how South Asian authors utilize the bildungsroman to rediscover precolonial and classical works through modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, by looking to the generalization of a certain kind of artistic or creative character in paradigms of work, there is a view onto a different kind of relationship between culture and militant action and fugitivity. Here, the term destituent art is proposed to sketch out a form of cultural production that does or might lay waste not only to institutional targets of critique but also to the structurally immanent belief in institutional reform that underlies the aesthetics of that critique. It is an invitation to reconsider some key myths that structure art discourse (even if they appear as objects of critique) and an appeal to read that discursivity as not just productive but potentially destituent. To do so, the author reads operaismo's rereading of Marx against Marxism alongside theorizations of destituent insurrection through the subject of the artist. Some recent social movements in New York City targeting art institutions are analyzed to consider this connection. Like Colectivo Situaciones' discussion of destituent insurrection as a grammar that unifies surplus populations through their expressions of refusal (the riot, the strike, the commune) that are simultaneously modes of reorganizing forms of life, a destituent art would not signal a turn to a productive pessimism—that all creative work is already subsumed—but that the cultivation of destituent power actualizes and is actualized by the aesthetic production of places of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general body of literature on the theology of liberation tends to focus either on ecclesiastical debate, theological intricacies, or discussion within the church. Not much attention is paid to the empirical investigation of how civil society members might be influencing the rhetoric of the local church. This article takes a different approach and explores how liberation movements in Ukraine and Hong Kong inform and inspire elements of the theology of social justice within local Catholic communities through bringing to life their social dreams and engaging the churches in action. Looking at how churches and activists interact in the aftermath of the Euromaidan and the Umbrella Movement, we explore how grassroots activists approach religious hierarchies and how, in these circumstances, the clergy of the churches might be pressured into maneuvering between the social dreams of civil society and the Vatican. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay outlines how religious ideas and practices shaped the activism of Chin Wan, known as the "godfather of localism" in Hong Kong. While Chin's role in the rise of the localist wave of the 2010s is well known, his role as a religious figure has been completely ignored. As the earliest exponent of "valiant warrior" (yung mou 勇武) and "be water" militant tactics based on Confucian and Daoist narratives, he had a deep influence on Hong Kong protest culture during and after the Umbrella movement of 2014. This case undermines conventional secularist narratives of Hong Kong social movements and offers new insights into the politics of identity in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how and why protestors from the 2019 anti-ELAB (Extradition Law Amendment Bill) movement turned to popular Chinese religious practice for political dissent, and simultaneously tracks the negotiation of emerging sociocultural identities of Hong Kongers in the face of political upheaval. Attempting to pressure the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government into meeting their demands, protestors adopted a wide range of tactics that brought protest activities to previously unaffected residential districts. Although no less hectic than other months during the movement, August 2019 also produced indelible moments of nonviolent innovation that attracted international media coverage. One of the protest events from this fertile period, the Hong Kong–wide Night Assemblies for Freeing Spirits, Almsgiving, Prayers for Merit, and Removal of Evil 全港超幽佈施祈褔除惡晚會, was held on August 9, 2019, in the districts of Wong Tai Sin and Shatin and specifically centered religious practice as a creative and potent source of political expression. To better understand this intersection of religion, politics, and identity in Hong Kong, this article analyzes protestors' ritual utterances and interview responses from the protest event's proceedings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum explicates Hong Kong's complex religious and ritual landscape and the ways in which it influences social movements and identity making, in response to large forces of religion and protest around the world today, including in Ukraine and places in Asia such as Iran and Myanmar. Scholars have noted how various forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and popular Chinese religions have been diffused into the secular spaces of Hong Kong's governing state structures, formal and informal economies, and ad hoc protest organizations in civil society. Recent work has also emphasized the ways that race, ethnicity, and gender have been shaped not only by institutions with religious ties but also by theological and cosmological narratives that circulate through the public sphere. Religiosity in the Hong Kong protests might also be conceived as polyphonic, layering over familial practices with structures that have colonial baggage and postcolonial aspirations. Religion, in such senses, tends to be unbound by secular attempts to fence it into private spheres; it might be seen as forging a new civil society and civil identity through recent protests and shaping new theoretical frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the concept of being "on-site" in the context of South Korean democracy movements. It discusses how being present in public spaces and witnessing marginalized places became a quality used to evaluate political strategies and literary works. The article includes examples of on-site struggles in the era of infrastructural capitalism, such as aesthetic movements, experimental music, and cinematic techniques. It also emphasizes the importance of paying attention to absences and silences in historical narratives and explores the destabilization of national identities through global cultural exchanges. The text further discusses topics related to cultural movements, capitalism, and ecological issues, including the rise of infrastructural capitalism in China, challenges faced by communities after disasters, and the importance of place making in rebuilding. It also analyzes a film that addresses ecological visibility and offers alternative perspectives on life and death. Overall, the text highlights the significance of on-sitedness and local experiences in understanding and addressing these complex issues. [Extracted from the article]

The article offers information on the overlooked contributions of Iranian students in the United States to US-based social movements against imperialism. Topics include the predominance of US racial formations in shaping ethnic studies, the impact of the geopolitical relationship between Iran and the United States on the perception of Iranian students, and the complex political consciousness and internationalism of Iranian students as explored in Manijeh Moradian's book, This Flame Within.

The article reconsiders contemporary internationalist experiences in relation to the multiple temporalities that characterized key cycles of struggles in the 2010s. Although these cycles are heterogeneous in social and political composition, they have resulted in significant synchronizations. The article's specificity lies in linking a reinterpretation of internationalism to an examination of the role that multitemporalities play both in longue durée capital development and in the various phases that characterized the post-2008 world. The series of crises that have marked the past decade have in fact led to contradictory outcomes, on the one hand opening the door to the rise of post-fascist forces, while on the other hand triggering unusual and powerful struggles. These outcomes have contradictory political orientations but are united by the fact they all have temporalities that are discordant with those initially imposed by capitalist processes. With regard to social movements, the article shows how the diversity of the geographies, practices, and claims animating them can be understood as unfolding "within and against" the post-2008 global scenario. It illustrates how contemporary social movements exhibit complex and contradictory rhythms and temporalities, arguing that the tuning between these multitemporalities is vital for rethinking the renewal of internationalism today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words" as an opening for thinking about the impact of Hortense Spillers's thought on Black feminist, queer, and transgender studies. In a reflection on the interstitial, the essay engages Spillers's approaches to the discursive, historiographic, and iconographic dimensions of racialized gender and sexuality in a reading of the failed philological proposal of thon and the life and public memory of the military figure Private William Cathay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over sixty years Kipp Dawson has built coalitions on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Vietnam antiwar movement, women's movement, gay liberation movement, labor movement, and education justice movement, confronting state-sponsored violence and challenging systems of active harm and death. Her astonishing career—and marginalized identities as a lesbian, Jewish, working-class woman from a multiracial family—demonstrates the radical power of ordinary people engaged in collective, transformative action. In this visual essay, the authors share material from two new archival collections spanning the remarkable breadth and depth of Dawson's intersectional feminist activism. They suggest rethinking movement leadership as women's radical collaboration and demonstrate its role in organizing both resistance to state violence and alternative visions for the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the 2022–23 feminist uprising in Iran through a transnational feminist lens, as part of a global revolt against patriarchal, homophobic, and transphobic state violence. After first placing the Women, Life, Freedom movement in the context of modern Iranian history, the essay analyzes the dramatic changes in revolutionary politics and consciousness that have resulted in the shift of gender and sexual liberation from the periphery to the center of the freedom struggle in Iran. These novel developments have also opened up new possibilities for diasporic and transnational feminist solidarities that can cut against Iran's relative isolation from other social movements in the global South. The essay focuses on Iranian iterations of the Chilean feminist song "A Rapist in Your Path" as examples of how affective desires for revolution are transmitted across borders and embodied at the same time, rendering these performances situated acts of resistance as well as sites of South-South solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, is a significant piece of legislation that continues to impact US society and immigration politics today. The act has led to the persistence of nativist beliefs and movements, sparking intense debates on immigration over the past century. Interestingly, the act restricted most overseas immigration while still allowing for the availability of cheap migrant labor for US employers. This contradiction between restrictive policies and economic demands has shaped US immigration politics and policies. The text also discusses the enduring power of xenophobia and the ongoing polarization of American politics surrounding immigration. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the complexities of local Hong Kong religion after the imposition of the National Security Law in 2020. The author highlights the challenges faced in preserving the local flavor and recognizing the agency of those who resisted oppressive regimes. The article explores the intersections between religion, social movements, and identity in Hong Kong, including Sinophone religiosity, the role of the Catholic Diocese, and the engagement of Islamic and Sikh communities. It also examines the implications of religious institutions in the uprising of urban life and their involvement in the colonization of Hong Kong. The article concludes by emphasizing the geopolitical complexities and the ongoing negotiation between religious institutions and civil society in Hong Kong. [Extracted from the article]

This document is an editorial foreword from the Journal of Asian Studies. The first article discusses the postwar reconsideration of Japan's place in the world and the reconceptualization of history by intellectuals associated with the Kyoto School. The second article explores the inconsistencies in property rights in colonial-era Korea and the conflicts that arose from changes in cultural practice. The third article analyzes the incorporation of Taylorism in modern China as a theory of administration and a technique of governmentality. The fourth article examines how states use student labor camps to produce productive modern citizens, focusing on India's program in the first two decades after independence. The issue concludes with a forum on religion and social movements in Hong Kong, highlighting the relationship between religious beliefs and political activism in the context of the city's political struggles. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the container shipping industry's response to the European Commission's decision to end the Consortia Block Exemption Regulation (CBER), which had exempted ocean carriers from certain competition laws. It mentions that while some believe this change won't significantly impact the industry due to the limited number of shipping agreements benefiting from CBER.

Recognizing the current conjuncture, this article explores the changing role of media and communications in the cohering of social struggles by antisystemic social movements. Transforming structural relations of media and their tactical uses, the authors argue, are key components to shifting the terrain upon which such movements build. In response to a deepening organic crisis, the authors argue for the importance of organizing against and beyond the existing political economy of platform media by building new narrative blocs as bases of power that can serve as one of several determining factors for the direction of popular movements and the generalization of new notions and political programs around which a counterhegemonic consensus may emerge for society. Transformative resistance and collective power will depend on the ability to develop movement‐based media infrastructures to deepen international communication processes with and relationships to an ongoing global mass movement against the rise of antidemocratic politics, popular authoritarianism, and other morbid symptoms of a declining order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of social media in the context of contemporary social movements. It highlights the impact of social media on these movements and the challenges they face in navigating the digital landscape. It also mentions the rise of far-right movements and their use of metapolitics in the realm of culture and ideas.

Yoonkyung Lee's book, "Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea," explores the gap between strong social movements and weak political parties in South Korean politics. Lee argues that the capacity for collective action among political actors in different organizations has shaped the outcomes of social movements and political parties. The book examines the post-1987 political developments in South Korea, particularly the roles played by former student activists and revolutionaries. It also challenges the assumption that weak party politics indicates underdeveloped democracy and provides a balanced perspective on the challenges and achievements of the 586 generation. The book suggests that multiple pathways exist for democratic politics and that South Korea's case should not be evaluated from a Western-centric view. However, the analysis could be extended to include the role of conservative conversions in undermining progressive political reforms. The book emphasizes the importance of expanding the capacity for collective action and building solidarity infrastructures to strengthen democracy. Overall, "Between the Streets and the Assembly" provides valuable insights into the legacies of the democracy movement, the interactions between political parties and social movement organizations, and postauthoritarian developments in South Korea. [Extracted from the article]

The article reflects on essays about how contemporary social movements such as Black Lives Matter take advantage of the media, online social networks and other communication technologies to advance their work in the U.S. Topics include an account of the success of these movements by their adaptation of platforms such as Twitter and Instagram and new styles of communication such as hashtags and memes, and arguments on the political imagination of Black Lives Matter.

The article reflects on archiving works about Black Lives Matter and police violence in the U.S. Topics include the Sandra Bland Digital Archive project about African American woman Sandra Bland's death in police custody in 2015, a sampling of language and literacy practices of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and insights on the mass protests and uprisings in summer 2020 following the murder of African American George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Contemporary politics seems to be saturated with irony. In the context of social movements, this creates a perplexing mix of sincerity and insincerity, in which ambivalence and irreverence are coupled with deep conviction and (sometimes deadly) serious action. Writing as a multidisciplinary collective, the authors have witnessed irony playing a crucial role in diverse social movements — from BlackLivesMatter activists in Ghana, to post‐crash political imaginaries in Greece, to the Boogaloo Bois in the United States. Across these cases, the authors argue that irony becomes an important means of gathering, orienting, and animating political collectives, in two ways. First, within contexts of deep uncertainty or instability, where it can be extremely hard to trace political cause and effect and to know how to act effectively, irony provides a useful interpretative tool. Irony allows actors to position themselves between competing values, and attend to contradictions, enabling them to imagine common cause and possible futures within a radically unsteady world. Second, irony generates intensities in excess of understanding. Irony can generate surpluses of meaning, cultivate spaces of play and freedom from responsibility, and amplify the felt potentiality of ideas through memetic repetition. Such intensities have the capacity to spill over into decisive action. The authors conclude by unpacking the implications of these ironic forces for engaging in politics today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I first encountered Herbert Gutman's work as a PhD student at the University of Oxford in 1988 when I was working on my thesis comparing the experiences of the German Social Democrats and the British Labour Party during the first three decades of the twentieth century.[1] A friend of mine introduced Gutman to me with these words: "This is the American E. P. Thompson." If today's labor historians are making their field of study speak to other fields of study, rather than isolating labor history in a little niche of their own, they can also look back to Gutman as inspiration. Linking labor history to urban history and to specific localities is an ongoing challenge for labor historians today and one where they can still find inspiration in Gutman's articles. [Extracted from the article]

Lorraine Hansberry's essay "Stanley Gleason" expresses her theory of Black existence. The essay depicts everyday acts that transform the body and, in so doing, expand what is possible. Her ideas about Black existence emerge as part of a long history of Black thought and in relationship to the artistic and political communities she organized. While working in Greenwich Village, Hansberry crossed paths with and learned from an international cadre of intellectuals and performing artists, including South African singer Miriam Makeba, how to shift the body to shape reality. The essay offers possibilities for locating live options within historical periods marked by despair and, therefore, for remapping the Black world from one of negation to one within what Hansberry called an affirmative movement in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study asks why and how a segment of young people have led the emergence of veganism in contemporary South Korea since the mid-2010s, and what this appearance means—especially against the backdrop of the wide interpretation of Korean youth as disillusioned and depoliticized individuals who distrust the possibility of any positive social change. The article argues that the youth-driven Korean veganism has played a role in filling the void of the postdevelopmental, postindustrial, and postliberation era of climate crisis and planetary challenges by working as a broad vision for a good life and meaningful social change. Based on qualitative interviews, textual analysis, and participant observation, the article shows why veganism has worked as a way of alternative survival for vegan youth, how veganism as the source of voice and personal growth has been validated and cultivated by the transnational youth culture, and what has enabled veganism's solidarity from and coalition with other social movements. The article contributes to diversifying the representation of Korean youth and their agencies beyond the ruins and pessimism of the neoliberalized Korean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through digital ethnography of the mass uprising against Myanmar's early-2021 military coup, this article considers appeals to "the international community," in which activists maneuver the simultaneous potential and peril of global entreaties, deploying a double-move of contradictory thrusts. To continue stoking the possibility of international intervention, activists reiterate demands while intensifying their affective content; conversely, they use anticipated failure of those appeals to "boomerang" them back to local publics—making the international a present-but-effaced addressee. They engage in the jouissance of abandonment, coordinate (potentially violent) tactics, shame their enemies, and engage in political debate on the objectives of their ongoing struggle. By retaining the key mediatory role vis-à-vis Myanmar publics, activists enact an alternative relationship with the international, one that invites intervention but is not dependent on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the Anthropocene has spread far beyond its origins in geology, becoming common in contemporary activist and intellectual circles. But who is responsible for the mounting disasters associated with the age of anthropos, and who should be made to pay reparations? What if the onset of the Anthropocene was tenaciously resisted in various different historical moments and parts of the planet? This issue recuperates the alternative worlds, orientations, and subaltern environmental movements that constitute radical historical alternatives to the Anthropocene. We conceptualize these alternatives as seeds of ecological insurrection, sometimes lying long dormant but always ready to rise up again when the time is right. At a moment when elites have intransigently refused to decarbonize society, we must look back to histories of revolt to broaden the repertoire of militant tactics available to face the environmental emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often describe the heteropatriarchal relationships that prop up fascist political ideologies and practices. This emphasis is rooted in counter-reading other historical texts, which often conflate homosexuality and fascism as (1) one and the same or (2) linearly related along a spectrum, between the "moral degeneracy" of homosexuality and the atrocities produced by fascist regimes. These traditional models fail to describe the National Socialist League (NSL), a US neo-Nazi organization operating from 1974 until the late 1980s, which was explicitly structured to incorporate and include gay men into the white supremacist and fascist far right. By exploring how the NSL situated itself within the broader US fascist movement, this article examines how public-private distinction, whiteness, and hegemonic scripts of masculinity shaped NSL recruitment. These mechanisms provide discursive space for white gay men to position themselves as responsible citizens and important actors within the cultural, social, and military mechanisms of an imagined fascist state. Confronting this political and historical reality is critical to understanding the neo-fascist political configurations that incorporate white gay men that we see today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines literary evocations of Afropolitanism in French, with particular attention to millennial works by Black women writers. Narratives and portraits by Lauren Ekué, Léonora Miano, and Rokhaya Diallo reject the Afro-pessimism of twentieth-century visions of urban migration by foregrounding the consumerism and cultural capital of their female protagonists. Rethinking Paris as a stage rather than a site, these works present new models of Afropolitan iconography, featuring women who are eminently alert to the contradictions and contingencies of contemporary Black experience. In teasing out the links among presentism, hip-hop culture, and the European beauty industry, these explorations generate a unique brand of performed consumerism that forges a dialogue between Black female cosmopolitanism and historicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, South Korean literature underwent a crisis of relevance due to the changing materiality of cultural production as shaped by globalization, neoliberalism, and technological saturation. Nevertheless, the postmillennial decades have witnessed an efflorescence of new styles and voices in the literary field. Abroad, South Korean literature in translation has achieved unprecedented success in Anglophone publishing. At home, #MeToo has converged with structural critiques against the literary institution, animated by online social movements and new paradigms for understanding relationships between politics, affect, and everyday life. This article begins by exploring these phenomena through the framework of "literary materiality," understood as a set of contradictions about tangible and intangible properties distributed across intransitivity of signs, book-as-thing, codes and networks, material conditions of writerly life, and entities that confer and mediate literary value. The article goes on to examine the case of Yun Ihyŏng, whose oeuvre and activism have mobilized against the culture of literary commodification operating immanently in and across these forms. This article argues that her attempt to claim moral autonomy from the South Korean literary system is a promising vector in the ongoing struggle to dis-alienate literary culture in the age of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of Hindu nationalist statecraft under the Modi regime, India finds itself at a perilous conjuncture that compels a critical rethinking of the political economy of the world's largest democracy. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for doing so, centered on a Gramscian rethinking of the relationship among law, social movements, and state formation in the longue durée of Indian democracy. Working across three hegemonic transitions in Indian democracy, we argue that social movements and the state have constituted each other across this longue durée, and that this co-constitution has been both mediated by and inscribed in law. Crucially, we focus on the making and unmaking of compromise equilibriums between dominant and subaltern social forces in state-society relations in and through law and legal formations from the transition to independence, via the unravelling of the Nehruvian state, to the present moment of neoliberalization and authoritarian populism. The article is organized around three analytical concerns—law and hegemony, state formation as a hegemonic process, and the dialectic of power and resistance in passive revolution. In the conclusion, we bring our reflections to bear on the current conjuncture in Indian democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reflect on the politics of contemporary carceral LGBT movements and to delineate the (im)possibilities of an anti-colonial queer abolitionism. From the southern Americas, the authors elaborate a brief genealogy of the punishment of queer bodies in Brazil, marking the impossible promises of safety made by the penal "cystem." By elaborating a critique of carcerality in LGBT contemporary politics, the authors argue for a refusal of the colonial world's solutions to violence. Amid (im)possibilities, this article formulates some elements for anti-colonial, queer abolitionist practices that envision the end of prisons and police, as well as the abolition of gender, sexuality, class, and race as structures of this world. It presents the refusal, the imagination, an ethics of incommensurability, and an active daily building of other possibilities as imbricated elements of anti-colonial, queer abolitionist struggles. Those practices may well be a path to set on fire this world, this present prison house, in the name of queer abolitionist futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the "energy state," or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that references any discrete value of total energy that remains fixed, but that is potentially mutable because of its transitive properties, the modern energy state is addressed as an entity that has the capacity to undergo massive reconfiguration and transition. The energy state is not discrete, however, and is embedded within a global infrastructure of capitalist dominance, power inequalities, and commodity contingencies. Despite its current imbrication with the colonial/modern infrastructures of petrol extraction, the energy state, it is argued here, has the capacity to be reimagined and remade. By focusing on popular movements within the western hemisphere, and by learning from the lessons of energy pasts, presents, and futures, the article proposes the move to radical interdependency, which could be legislated by a substantially altered state apparatus during the implementation of a new energy paradigm. Unsurprisingly, land rights, social and multispecies justice, and antiracist social movements are central to enlivening the new energy state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers' protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers' protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary provides a critical discussion of the three essays in this forum and reflects on the similarities and differences between the crises of democracy under globalized neoliberal capitalism in South Korea and South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines a theoretical framework for researching popular politics in the Middle East and North Africa. It sketches a Gramscian alternative to existing approaches in materialist Marxism, cultural studies, and social movement studies. It also aims to think a Gramsci useful to historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists, beyond the common loci of Gramsci scholarship in political theory, comparative literature, and international relations. With a start point in Gramsci's philosophy of praxis, it puts forward a concept of popular politics as a mostly slow-moving, complex, and many-layered transformative activity, a form of historical protagonism comprising a variety of moments, capable of working changes on existing forms of hegemony and founding new social relations. The point is to enable researchers in Middle East studies to see and research popular politics, carry on a critique of transformative activity, and inform transformation in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his first inauguration as president of Brazil, speaking before the National Congress in Brasilia, on January 1, 2003, Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva famously declared, "If by the end of my term all Brazilians have the chance to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I will have achieved my life's mission." Lula and His Politics of Cunning thoroughly delivers on its promise of telling an important history through "Lula's relationships with others" (4). Although he sometimes appears impatient with the amateurish mistakes and class biases of the young researchers at the University of São Paulo studying ABC during the 1970s, perhaps echoing the mistrust that Lula and his union peers often expressed about doutores and overzealous students, French makes exemplary use of these rich materials. [Extracted from the article]

Ideas about historical memory and the uses of the past deeply inform Matthew E. Stanley's layered I Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War i . Each of the central chapters focuses on a different group through which Stanley presents an inclusive view of labor that incorporates urban and rural workers, white and Black workers, and male and female workers. Deftly using varied and often competing Civil War memories, Stanley elucidates both the emancipatory possibilities of an inclusive and multiracial abolitionism for labor and the limitations of that promise in the years that followed. [Extracted from the article]

Reconciliation is a central goal of transitional justice. Yet, its importance for democratization can give reconciliation a coercive edge, pressuring victims to abandon legitimate grievances for the good of the nation to come. This article considers struggles over popular sovereignty in Tunisia's democratic transition, by examining the anticorruption campaign Manish Msamah ("I do not forgive"). Manish Msamah was formed in 2015 to defeat the Project Law on Economic and Financial Reconciliation, legislation that proposed amnesty for crony capitalists who profited from the Ben Ali dictatorship. Drawing on participant observation, media analysis, and activist interviews, the author shows how Manish Msamah debunks the ruse of consent at the heart of reconciliation, and in doing so maintains fidelity to the ideals of the 2011 Revolution. The campaign is revealed as an early participant in the "second wave" of the Arab Spring, which has refused the lure of procedural democracy in favor of deeper structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although white feminists are increasingly likely to recognize women-of-color feminism, Levenstein argues, "many still resist prioritizing these views", posing challenges for future coalition building (192). They Didn't See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties Lisa Levenstein New York: Basic Books, 2020 vii + 295 pp. [Extracted from the article]