The latest most-important-election-of-our-lifetimes is upon us. Almost every election seems to get spun this way, although in 2000 […]
Category Archive: politics
“Is their such a thing as Philadelphia exceptionalism?” asked one observer at this year’s UHA. Undoubtedly, over the […]
How in God’s name did we end up here? Who decided to hold a presidential debate in the […]
“This is a bunch of stuff!” I couldn’t have said it better myself…. Wait, of course I could […]
Well, thank God football is back. Tony Romo took a dump on my beloved Giants but I’ve been […]
Continuing my series of posts on the novels of Victor Serge at my personal blog site For the Desk Drawer, I focus now on what Richard Greeman has recognized as the “cycle of resistance” in the second informal trilogy comprising Midnight in the Century [1939], The Case of Comrade Tulayev [1942], and The Long Dusk [1946]. If earlier novels in the “cycle of revolution” capture the conquest of space, notably Conquered City, then the later novels in the “cycle of resistance” convey the statification of space. This refers to the production of political space through meaningful architectural forms; symbolic representations of state power; the organisation of territory and geography; and state strategies to shape, reproduce, and control production through industrial development, land use, transportation, and communication. The novel Midnight in the Century reflects the defeat of revolution and how the Soviet state bound itself to space: how state control is extended, shaped and reshaped by the production of space. The spatial dimension is therefore intrinsic to understanding the contradictions of state action and struggles for survival within this rendering of life at the hands of the Soviet machine.
Appropriated by rockers, this voice of rebellion, alienation and entitlement has become the national paradigm. It is the […]
Our Alex Sayf Cummings has a new piece up at Salon looking at the epic 1972 electoral battle between […]
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