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ʿAli Salem was an independent intellectual, unbound to the regime or political parties. He believed that the intellectual must also be independent from the public. It does not mean he must be detac...

The article addresses the way in which characteristics of the education crisis in the postmodern era are manifested in parental deliberations when choosing to homeschool their children in Israel. B...

There are elective affinities between poetic expression and legal thought. Well-turned verse can do something more than delight the ear or express emotions. It can also depict social reality in a p...

This article contributes to methodological debates in contemporary critical theory regarding the scope and features of immanent critique. I spell out the philosophical commitments presupposed by th...

I argue that Haslanger’s account of ideology in ‘Cognition as a Social Skill’ does not seem to possess the normative resources it needs to diagnose non-distributive forms of social injustice withou...

Would not the recovery of a lost manuscript by a major twentieth-century literary theorist be an occasion for celebration? If that manuscript modeled an approach to social criticism that avoided th...

The aim of this paper is to investigate Brandom’s conception of the objectivity of norms. In Making It Explicit Brandom supports a weak notion of objectivity based on his understanding of the persp...

We locate the comedian Sarah Silverman's career trajectory within the rich tradition of Jewish public intellectuals in America, particularly those who have used comedy as their vehicle. We show that Silverman is in many ways the most current inheritor of the mantle of Lenny Bruce, not only in the sharpness of her observations and the unerring pitch of her comedy but also because of her perfect timing in the political zeitgeist. We argue that Silverman's stand-up comedy is not simply a form of social criticism, which is the purpose of all satire – but that like Lenny Bruce's – it takes on the function of political activism. Silverman, however, unlike Bruce, manages to use the comedic voice of a liberal outsider to speak to a wider, more mainstream audience, mobilizing constituencies to the cause of making a more progressive polity.

Running like a leitmotif through Peter Roberts’ recently published philosophico-educational writings there is a humanistic thread, which this article picks out. In order to ascertain the quality of this humanism, Roberts is positioned in relation to a pair of extant humanisms: radical and integral. Points of comparability and contrast are identified in several of the writer’s genre-crossing essays. These texts, it is argued, rectify deficiencies in how the two humanisms envision alternatives to capitalism. Roberts skilfully teases out the non-obvious futurological implications of the work of a diverse array of authors, spanning the boundaries of philosophy, social criticism, and literature. In so doing, he underscores the intimate connection between personal self-transformation and ideal-driven social transformation. Further, Roberts challenges humanists of both radical and integral stripes to reconsider the moral grounds of their critique of capitalism.

Published in 2012, Pat Grant’s debut graphic novel, Blue, depicts life in Bolton, a fictional Australian town that receives migrants who look noticeably different from the local community. Risk shapes Blue with regard to its aesthetic and formal concerns: the racism in Bolton places the foreigners at risk; Christian’s uneasy nostalgia depicts a community vulnerable to the ravages of time; and the work itself was self-published by Grant as a graphic novel. The genesis of the work arose from Grant’s accidental presence at the 2005 Cronulla riots in Sydney, a clash between Anglo and Middle Eastern Australians that brought to the fore questions about racism and community in Australian society. I argue that comics are highly suited to exploring ‘risky’ narratives because of the medium’s history as well as its formal properties. Comics have thus become popular vehicles for social criticism, frequently in the form of autobiography and memoir. As a highly mediated form, comics map time as space and in thi...

E.M. Forster’s Maurice, which was written in 1913 and 1914, was published only after Forster’s death in 1970 – almost sixty years later. Its long absence from the public domain renders it permanently anachronistic, since it was was never able to address directly its early twentieth century context. This paper considers how Maurice, in lamenting the oppression of homosexual men, offers a trenchant criticism of aspects of the ‘social fabric’ itself, including contemporary constructions of masculinity. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, published in 1988, is imbued with Forsterian echoes. Unlike Maurice, it was able to engage more openly with its social and political context; unlike the repressed Maurice Hall, its protagonist, Will Beckwith, enjoys what seems to be a sexually liberated lifestyle. However, Hollinghurst’s social criticism is if anything more stringent than Forster’s, for he shows that, despite the apparent sexual freedom enjoyed by gay men, there has been very little progress where...

In the past decade, a global wave of protests has spread to both liberal democratic and authoritarian countries in which the representative claims of nation-states have been profoundly challenged. This article explores the extent to which these protest movements reflect cosmopolitan practices and possibilities. The central argument is that the protests created forms of ‘cosmopolitan publicity’ in which people engaged in transnationally connected social criticism and political contestation directed at rupturing the representative authority of their state. The article first provides an account of cosmopolitan publicity, arguing that it is produced by interaction across territorial and cultural borders in which open and egalitarian publics are formed to deal with shared problems. It then argues that varying degrees of cosmopolitan publicity were generated in the recent global protests by examining the transnational communication, tactics, and claims of the Arab Spring and Occupy social movements. Fin...

Thomas Piketty’s volume Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Piketty 2014) is one of those rare academic books that become a public phenomenon. Partly a case of sponsored mobility and partly a genu...

The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera has been hailed for the modernist influences in his works. Marechera's literary outputs have also continued to fascinate contemporary readers because of the writer's overtly autobiographical writing style that was based on his outrageous lifestyle.While this article acknowledges the frequent observation that Marechera‘s work displays consistency of style, focus and purpose across his chosen literary genres (namely the novel, the poem, the short story and drama), I focus on the least studied genre in Marechera's literary output, his drama. I will argue that as an embodied art form that is meant for performance rather than private reading as literature, drama allows Marechera to perform the body as a significant site for elements of grotesque realism in his works. Using selected plays by Dambudzo Marechera as illustrations, the article will analyse the extent to which Marechera's plays present the body in performance as a site of post-independence social criticism wh...

This study examines the particular (but not exclusive) relationship between violent intimacy and Nazi and Hutu genocidal propaganda in relation to national desires. It focuses on the fears of the ‘double’ (the close stranger) as projected in language in order to point to the ‘anxiety of intimacy’ as a dangerous social space that under specific historical and political conditions can turn into genocide. As paradoxical as it may seem, intimacy is not only a concept of love but also a concept of hate and violence. This article aims to show how genocidal language can simultaneously reflect the desire of the other and its disavowal in violent language. Nazi and Hutu propaganda are analysed as case studies using psychoanalytic interpretations and social criticism theory to discuss how violent intimacy works in language and how mimetic desire of the other (of its freedom, power, intellect, pleasures, etc.), constitutes negative identification and a fear of the ‘double other’, giving rise to a ‘rapture of...

Whereas Thomas Bernhard's pessimistic and nihilistic Weltanschauung and his strident social criticism have received much attention, little work has been done on the narrative structures and strategies guiding his prose, yet these are crucial for an understanding of the thrust of Bernhard's message. In particular, the importance of role playing, and the monologic and dialogic nature of Bernhard's texts suggest a parallel with the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis as outlined by Leo Stone in The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961). A series of analyses of Bernhard's major novels will serve to argue this parallel. By incorporating addressees within the text, and by placing his stories in the hands of multiple narrators, Bernhard creates distance from the fictional biographical and authentically autobiographical elements they contain, while nevertheless soliciting a reaction from both the interposed conversation partners and the implied readers — which appears crucial to the author.

It's a commonplace that modern textual production is inevitably informed by cultural legacy; this paper shows that Kenny [Jacobson, Clayton, dir. 2006. Melbourne: Thunderbox Films], an Australian mockumentary, fits within a longstanding genre of humorously packaged social criticism. We show that Kenny's unusual hero has a Celtic predecessor Niall (circa 1390), a leader willing to subject himself to abjection for the greater good. Amidst their humour, both tales offer direction about ideal masculine behaviour in respect of national identity formation. Both texts use land and water as motifs for leadership and in both tales debasement is the test that sets a benchmark for approaches to the construction of national and cultural identities. In Kenny, we suggest, willingness to take dedicated care with human shit models an ecological ideal for a future wherein one of the monsters threatening humanity is its own pollution. The ugly legacy from a history of cultural abuse troubles white Australians’ rela...

There is a substantial body of academic literature analysing David Dabydeen's fiction and poetry as postcolonial writing, but much less critical attention has been paid to his treatment of gender. In some ways, his approach to this issue makes for uncomfortable reading, giving rise to a desire to gloss over its substance as well as its implications. However, if Dabydeen is courageous enough to write so explicitly and honestly about misogyny in colonial and postcolonial contexts, an unflinching examination of this aspect of his work is long overdue, and it is in this spirit that this article approaches his three novels which deal most directly with the West Indies (specifically his native Guyana): The Intended (1991), The Counting House (1996) and Our Lady of Demerara (2004). There is a sense in which these three novels, taken together, can be seen as a relentless catalogue of men's historical and contemporary brutality to women in Guyana, Britain and India. Dabydeen's fiction exposes in ruthless d...

This article examines the different types of deaths in La Celestina from the point of view of their legal and sociological significance. The analysis builds on contemporary historical data on suicide, homicide, executions, and accidents. It is shown that, beside its literary value, La Celestina is also an important historical document that provides an accurate portrait of the legal system relative to deaths that were socially unacceptable at that time. This study also highlights the presence of social criticism in the text when it describes how the authorities did not comply with some legal regulations.

ICED, which stands for “I Can End Deportation,” is a videogame released in 2008 by the human rights organization Breakthrough. The game places the player in the social and legal environments faced by undocumented immigrants in contemporary New York. This article presents ICED as a type of popular solution to the challenge of using videogames for meaningful social criticism and analyzes its mode of production as the key source for this popular potential. The creators use design techniques and gaming tactics common in virtual worlds to create a humanitarian game that problematizes the idea of free will. Instead of making free will a tool for progressing in the game, ICED uses roaming to create a frustrating game experience. This frustration is an affective lesson about undocumented immigration and the social and legal environment that casts individuals in a world void of freedom and some basic human rights.

This article examines the ways in which Elfriede Jelinek's 1995 horror novel, Die Kinder der Toten, confronts Austria's complicity in the Holocaust and challenges contemporary efforts to memorialize its victims. It concentrates on one figure in particular: an animated, monstrous web of hair [Haargespinst]. The Haargespinst serves as a metonym for the victims and becomes the vehicle by means of which the dead avenge themselves on the living. The Haargespinst furthermore enacts a critique of memorial spaces, particularly the museum at Auschwitz. In addition to discussing its function within the text, the article argues that the Haargespinst illuminates the poetics of the novel as a whole, helping make sense of its complicated narratorial positions, its use of generic tropes and cliches, and its critique of memory discourses around the Holocaust. Taking the Haargespinst as a point of departure, the article argues that Jelinek's social criticism and self-conscious narration make Die Kinder der Toten a work of...

Discrimination often involves social criticism and rejection, which may exacerbate or even cause anxiety in social situations, though few have investigated these associations. The current study investigates whether perceived discrimination on the basis of ethnic group membership and/or sexual orientation predicts social anxiety and whether use of an avoidant coping method (e.g., experiential avoidance) exacerbates social anxiety in response to discrimination. Approximately 500 participants were recruited from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds and various sexual orientations. Results indicate that the amount of discrimination reported varies by group, and that for sexual minorities the report of discrimination is positively correlated with social anxiety. Individuals who tend toward avoidant coping were found to experience more social anxiety than their low-avoidant counterparts.

In Engaging the Everyday, John Meyer seeks to engage with what he believes to be a fundamental problem in contemporary environmental politics: the resonance dilemma. He argues that though concerns ...

The work of women artists such as Safia Farhat, the only woman in the artists’ group l'Ecole de Tunis, testifies to the rupture with colonial art that began during the 1940s and that became the central orientation of art training in the Arab world since independence. This paper will show how the Arab Spring has seen an explosion of radically new artistic expression where women artists in Tunisia during the period 2011–13 and using forms such as documentary film, installations, cartoons, posters, and photographs, produce a new socio-critical discourse in the context of a ‘democratic transition’. While extending the work undertaken by pioneering women artists, contemporary creators like Nadia Jelassi, Aicha Filali, Nadia El Fani, Sonia Chamekh, and others in Tunisia, denounce both Salafi discourse and state feminism. This paper will focus on the work of several women artists to show the evolution from expressing marginal or oppositional views to political positions central to debates over the transition, as...

The article argues that the social criticism expressed in Salomon Gessner’s preface to his Idyllen (1756), and specifically the criticism of the state of the modern peasantry, is not germane to his writing. It demonstrates that Gessner’s writing takes its cues very substantially from Gottsched’s theoretical writing. By no means does Gessner maintain the distinction he expresses in his preface between the world of his idylls and the reality of Swiss peasant life. Rather, the distinction between idyll and reality is repeatedly blurred in the service of crafting an alternative bourgeois community based on an imagined nation of writers and patriots.

This paper aims to investigate the philosophical thought and moral practice of a Korean neo-Confucian female scholar named Kang Chŏngildang 姜靜一堂 (1772–1832), who not only believed in moral equality between men and women and the possibility of female sagehood but actually empowered herself to become a moral paragon. Furthermore, Chŏngildang’s strong faith in moral equality between men and women enabled her to engage in social criticism of the existing educational system and social norms which discriminated against women, not by overcoming neo-Confucianism, commonly understood as essentially androcentric and patriarchal, but by wholeheartedly embracing and further re-appropriating it in the service of women’s moral self-empowerment and moral perfectibility. After explicating why Chŏngildang nonetheless subscribed to gendered roles and female virtue with reference to her neo-Confucian worldview, I suggest that she can be called a harbinger of Confucian feminism.

This paper explores the danger that the practices of fundamental questioning (radical philosophy) can become completely detached from problems of practical social transformation. When this danger occurs, radical philosophy devolves towards academic self-referentiality. Once the practice of radical philosophy has become self-referential in this problematic way, the critique of philosophy is confused with the critique of the world. The form of radical philosophy—fundamental questioning—is retained, but without the substance. The substance of radical philosophy is committed to creating forms of understanding and social relationship that permit the widest possible expression and enjoyment of life-value.

Wang Yanhong 王彥泓 (zi Cihui 次回, 1593–1642) was active in the last decades of the Ming. Because of his particular interest in representing erotic and amorous experiences with women in rich and sensual detail, his poetry was controversial and condemned by those who upheld a Confucian poetics in which poetry was meant to express the poet’s moral intentions and social criticism. This paper is the first attempt to translate Wang’s poems into English and to closely examine them in the contexts of Chinese poetic tradition and late Ming literati culture. I argue that his “decadent” aestheticization of his amorous and emotional experiences with women was related to his identity as a “loser” who failed in the civil service examinations but sought in writing poetry an alternative path of self-realization. His poetics served to fulfill his ambition to become a poet of extraordinary creativity and aestheticism, even as it reveals his sense of self as an “invalid” member of his society.

Yvan Goll briefly joined the Expressionist circles in Berlin in 1914 before moving to Switzerland during the war. Early Expressionist poetry (beginning with ‘Films’ in 1914 and including contributions to ‘Menschheitsdammerung’) reflects the fragmented state of modern life and nostalgia for a more certain and harmonious past. ‘Der Torso’ (1918) conveys his ambivalent attitude to Expressionism, showing some Nietzschean influence and an almost Romantic attachment to nature. Other poems express Goll’s pacifism and a social conscience, especially the ‘underclass’ in ‘Die Unterwelt’ (1919). Associated programmatic essays, ending with the proclamation of its death in 1921, highlight a strong underlying scepticism about the Expressionist project.

Extending Albert Murray's presupposition that “performing artists are rhetoricians,” this study applies a rhetorical approach to Miles: the Autobiography. Davis's rhetoric of moral reconstitution utilizes the classical means of persuasion—ethos, pathos, and logos—within the epideictic, or ceremonial, genre. As such, Davis focuses his logos of invection on the Uncle Tom insult, where he displays his own, and incites in others, a pathos of insolence. Davis used these discourses to first, explain norms and introduce instability in the jazz community; second, create moral distance from particular figures and elevate himself; and finally, reconstitute the true jazz community around his own ethos of detachment. Based on Christopher Small's notion of musicking and Phillip Bohlman's ontological argument of “music as process,” this rhetorical approach extends Murray's “all performers are rhetoricians” presupposition suggesting, first, that jazz performers can use their musical performances as social criticism and ...

Feminist philosophers and philosophers drawing on the German tradition of social philosophy have recently converged in stressing the importance of the concept of reification—first explicitly discussed by Gyorgy Lukacs—for the diagnosis of contemporary social and ethical problems. However, importing a theoretical framework alien to Lukacs’ original discussion has often led to the conflation of reification with other social and ethical problems. Here it is argued that a coherent conception of reification, free of implausible Marxist and idealist trappings, can be recovered from Lukacs’ original discussion of it: the socially induced distortion of experience such that what is in fact human action appears as mere natural happening. This phenomenon is to be distinguished from, firstly, instrumentalising objectification of persons and, secondly, person-identification failure, with which Martha Nussbaum and Axel Honneth respectively have equated reification in recent work. Reification, on the understand...

In this article I present an original interpretation of Roy Bhaskar’s project in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. His major move is to separate an ontological dialectic from a critical dialectic, which in Hegel are laminated together. The ontological dialectic, which in Hegel is the self-unfolding of spirit, becomes a realist and relational philosophical anthropology. The critical dialectic, which in Hegel is confined to retracing the steps of spirit, now becomes an active force, dialectical critique, which interposes into the ontological dialectic at the ‘fourth dimension’ of a naturalistically reconfigured account of relational human nature, agency. This account allows Bhaskar to explain and vindicate the crucial role social criticism must play in any realistic project of self-emancipation, and to create a space that didn’t exist in Hegel for an open-ended concrete utopianism. Freedom is thus the actualization of human nature, but is not automatic: the relation of human nature to freedom is medi...

This article will analyze three fundamental elements of critical social theory: critique, explanation and normativity. It will show that only an articulation of all three elements in their mutual constitutive relations will enable them to take a crucial place in critical social theory. Firstly, it will clarify the need for critical social and political theory to have an internal character. Secondly, it will concentrate on the relations between individual elements of the above-mentioned trichotomy. Thirdly, it will deal with external social criticism. To conclude, it will explain why critical social theory is able to confront the pitfalls of authoritarian theoretical approaches which are widespread in social and political theory in the West and elsewhere.

The article argues that Shammi Kapoor (1931–2011) revolutionized and forever altered the corporeal stylistic of popular Hindi cinema by breaking away from the soft masculinity of the golden era films. Whereas the golden era films, which were predominantly films of social criticism, put stress on the body as the repository of socio-political values and ethico-economic concerns, Kapoor's dancehall dramas ushered in a new aesthetics of the masculine body in which blood life – i.e. life as an expressive and a-causal principle of vitality – exceeds all socio-political frames and references. By virtue of this innovation, Kapoor altered the manner of performing the masculine in popular Hindi cinema and influenced a whole cadre of male heroes who followed in his wake.

There is a remarkable and surprising connection to be found between an argument of Soren Kierkegaard's and one of Zhuangzi's—what I call the ‘social misfit’ critique. I will argue that this connection highlights a hitherto unacknowledged parallel between the moral thought of their respective targets: Hegel in the case of Kierkegaard and Confucius in the case of Zhuangzi. Specifically, it reveals a significant parallel between Hegel's movement from Moralitat to Sittlichkeit and Confucius’ position on the central and irreducible role of li (ritual or propriety) in morality. I will begin by briefly tracing the ‘social misfit’ critique as it is found in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and in the Zhuangzi. In Section 2, I will sketch Hegel's argument for the indispensability and irreducibility of social norms (Sittlichkeit) for morality, and reflect on the implications of this move for the possibility of social criticism. Finally, I will argue that Confucius can be understood as articulating a vision of moral...

This essay explores changing perceptions of the value of Chinese contemporary art within China since the mid-1990s. It argues that since the mid-1990s, Chinese contemporary art has lost the status it held as a relatively independent focus for cultural and social criticism during the 1980s and early 1990s. It also argues for a reinstatement of traditional Chinese scholarly values that allow for service to the nation alongside independent resistance to authority.

This article develops a methodology of social criticism with both a national and international focus. The basis for this methodology begins with the precepts of locally oriented, domestic social criticism or what is referred to in this article as ‘internal’ or ‘connected’ social criticism. After outlining the general framework of this model, the author extrapolates from Michael Walzer's idea of “reiterative” universalism to develop what might be understood as a framework for international social criticism. It is argued that an intellectual division of labour should be central to the self-understanding of critics dedicated to the latter form of intellectual engagement. While engaging in international politics may be appropriate for the promotion of democracy and greater equality, the protection of basic human rights may be better sought through interpretive work leading towards a worldwide consensus among cultures and civilisations. Resume Cet article developpe une methodologie de critique sociale...

As Liberia moved toward greater freedom of expression in 1971 after several decades of authoritarian rule, The New York Times credited a longtime critic of officialdom, Albert Porte, and a three-month-old magazine, the Revelation, with being pacesetters of the emerging trend (Johnson, 20 October 1973). Porte shared with several editors of the Revelation one commonality not noted in The New York Times article, and that was their West Indian origin. This article retraces the participation in Liberian journalism by persons of Caribbean descent, arguing that their specific contribution was a tradition of social criticism. The time frame extends from 1830, the year the nation's first newspaper was founded, to 1971, when Pres. William V.S. Tubman died, after serving as head of state for 27 years while dismantling protections for civil liberties (Wreh 1976). By examining behaviours and artifacts over such a long span, it is hoped that this study will better distinguish idiosyncratic patterns from those ...

Often exploring the very margins of society and thus frequently dealing with issues of poverty, oppression, as well as structures of gender and ethnic discrimination, Kirino Natsuo's literature has been labeled ‘neo-proletarian’. This analogy to the leftwing literature of the 1920s and 1930s is, however, clearly misleading. Through a close analysis of exploitation in Metabola, this article shows that contemporary representations of the casualization of the workplace can instead be read as testifying to the emergence of ‘precarity’ as a literary mode. The irregularity and permanent insecurity that characterize precarity are reflected in the struggles of the main protagonist, a former factory temp worker who, after a total loss of memory, is forced to (re-)construct an identity from scratch and ends up with a multiply fissured, ambiguous self. The analysis reveals that Kirino, by skilfully combining entertainment and sharp social criticism, addresses precarity on two levels: while on the one hand d...

In this article's Vaultage section, Peter Malone reflects on the themes and characters of John Duigan's Far East (1982). Malone offers a synthesis of responses to the film, whilst highlighting the film's cinematic and cultural points of reference—namely., Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) and developing Australasian relations.

This article considers the nature of communitarian thought in late twentieth century Anglo-American political philosophy. It argues that communitarianism arose out of a critique of modernist theories of justice such as that of John Rawls shared by a group of writers committed to idealist principles that emphasised narrative approaches to the study of political thought, the importance of historical context, and popular participation in political life. It then focuses on one particular American strand of communitarian thought, exemplified by the work of Michael Walzer and Michael Sandel, which draws on a tradition of radical democracy and, in so doing, helps both to create and to transform a new American republicanism. An important connection between Walzer and Sandel is that they share the view that egalitarian politics must draw on shared traditions of social criticism rather than on the abstract individualism that they associate with Rawls. A key difference is that Walzer's vision of American life is plu...

Stressing the interdependence of linguistic, physical, and moral dignity, Confucian decorum warns against jests with either words or body. Therefore, truncating the body parts for comic effects is a significant breakage of the social and cultural taboos of a Confucian society. This paper selects twenty-five jokes on the human body from Feng Menglong’s (1574-1646) Xiaofu (Treasury of Laughs) to showcase the great array of Ming humorous materials that, through an inverse of the established rules of the “solemn” human body, deconstruct and reconstruct the social body. I divide them into twelve categories: Literary parody, Political satire, Social criticism, Philosophical parable, Gallows humor, Physical disabilities, Stature shortcomings, Male sexual bodies, Female sexual bodies, Inappropriate uses of the sense organs, Homosexuality, and Children’s sexual jokes. Although the jokes push the limit of civility a bit, and some are indeed quite off-color, most of them are not terribly politically ...

Marx talks of alienation in connection with a number of areas of life — religion, politics, social and economic relations — but particularly labour. I shall focus on the area of labour in this Chapter.1 In this area, at least, he clearly uses the concept of alienation in a critical manner. But what sort of criticism does it involve?

The shifting relationship between environmental political theorists and liberalism is examined, moving from a total critique to an increasingly nuanced engagement. The argument here is neither for nor against the possibility of ‘greening' liberalism per se. Instead, it is argued that the preoccupation with ‘liberalism' in this context is a category mistake based upon the reification of liberalism as not just a political philosophy, but a characterisation of citizen values and practices in contemporary liberal democratic societies. A different way of thinking about the role and task of environmental political theory and social criticism is proposed. The key is to ask whether a theoretical argument resonates with citizens, not whether it can be reconciled with liberalism.

This paper explores the role that Muslim standup comedians are playing in breaking down cultural barriers, promoting inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue, as well as tackling the misperceptions about Muslim and Arab Americans in the United States. I argue that Muslim comedians are increasingly taking on the role of Gramscian “organic intellectuals” capable of successfully participating in a quintessentially American activity—standup comedy—on behalf of their respective communities. Some scholars of Islam may argue that Muslim comedians, if they have any significance at all, are confined to the periphery of any meaningful discussions regarding Islam and Muslims after September 11. I will show that this is not only false, but fails to fully grasp the multifaceted responses that have arisen to combat Islamophobia and Arabophobia in the United States since the events of September 11, 2001.

Within the context of its strategy for the reform of public companies in Africa, the World Bank became involved in redundancies of questionable legality. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the Bank arranged and financed a voluntary severance programme in 2003, whereby 10,000 employees of the mining company Gecamines, some 45% of its workforce, left in return for an arbitrarily fixed lump-sum payment. Based on ethnographic research, this paper discusses the history of the protest movement which emerged from this mass redundancy programme, the arguments deployed by the movement and the resources available to it. On the basis of this case study, the paper goes on to offer some thoughts on the conditions for social criticism in a transitional regime, heir to an authoritarian tradition of long standing, and operating under the tutelage of foreign donors.

This paper examines the use of "pleasure" as the distinguishing mark of aesthetic experience in post-Kantian philosophy. It shows how the distinctive features of aesthetic experience, such as pleasure, qualify this experience as a platform for social criticism. The key argument is that the autonomy of the aesthetic experience is not "false", rather it is paradoxical in the strong sense that the fact of its communicative efficacy, which follows from distinctive, "autonomous" aesthetic features, necessarily loads it with functions and expectations that are external to the aesthetic moment. Kant takes a complicated path to qualify aesthetic judgement as disinterested in order that it may eloquently testify for morality. He thereby sets up the cogency of the modern pattern of looking to aesthetic experience as a locus of meaningful communication for ideas that are experientially poor or remote.

Two middle-school teachers incorporated student creation of historical accounts into their history instruction. During these projects, the teachers instructed their students to (1) summarize information presented during classroom instruction on a topic (e.g., the Great Migration) and (2) explain the significance of that topic to the present day. This second component of the task addressed a curricular standard regarding historical thinking, but students' responses referenced themes from citizenship education (e.g., cultural pluralism, social criticism, and national identification). More than eighty student projects were analyzed and coded for themes. This study presents a portrait of ambitious history teaching and suggests a tactic for a civics-infused history education course.

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power pre suppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons avail able to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.

Exploring the links between beauty and boredom in the Legend of Good Women, this essay argues for a reconsideration of the apparent opposition between the affective and the social, embodiment and symbolization, aestheticism and historicism.