"In the now famous words of Benedict Anderson (1991), nations are imagined communities; that is, a nation connotes a group of people who believe and imagine that they belong together even though an individual will never meet more than a tiny fraction of the other members of his/her 'community'. Understanding the politics of nations, therefore, involves much more than studying their geopolitical boundaries; it involves analyzing cultural discourses. People believe and imagine that they belong together because they participate in, read, and hear a common set of cultural practices. This national imagination is constantly being made and remade through words, images, music, performance—that is, through pageants, patriotic songs, political speeches, holiday rituals, iconic figures, memorialized landscapes. The political geography of nations then is intricately bound up with cultural practices and products.
Understanding how and why certain of these practices and products participate in the making of national identity is no simple matter, yet it is extremely important to do. As Jan Pettman argues, ‘nationalism constitutes the nation as above politics, and so disguises the politics of its making. This is the extraordinary power of the nation as that thing which people will kill and die for’ [Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics. NY: Routledge, 1996: 48]. In other words, feelings of national identity are what prompt people to act in powerful ways, yet the politics of nationalism - how and for what reasons it has been formed in particular ways - are disguised from common view. The most basic research questions stem from the quest to disclose and make visible the workings of nationalism. Cultural geographers and others investigate the constitution of national identity - how notions of race, class, sexuality and gender are used to set up distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ hierarchically, so that ‘others’ outside the nation are placed lower in the ranking; they examine the deployment of nationalism - how national identity is reiterated daily, often in the most banal ways; and they study the relationship of nationalism to landscape - how nationalism both shapes and is reinforced by particular symbolic landscapes and human-environmental practices.
Imperialism – the imposition of one country on another – is often predicated on a form of nationalism based on ‘natural’ superiority. The Roman world, for example, distinguished between those ‘civilized’ people of the Roman nation who spoke Latin, and those living outside of Roman boundaries who spoke other languages – the ‘barbarians’. Assumptions of national superiority provided both the reasons for and legitimation of the conquest of ‘barbarians’ by the ‘civilized’ Romans. National identity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century England was based partly around notions developed from evolutionary theory that posited the English people as ‘naturally’ more evolved and civilized than others living outside its borders; again providing cause for and legitimation of imperial conquest. Understanding the cultural practices and products of national identity formation, therefore, is critical to analyzing imperialism – the actual military or political or economic imposition of one country over another is made possible by and legitimized with a set of cultural ideologies and practices that we call nationalism. (141-142)" -- Domosh, Mona. “Selling America: Advertising, National Identity and Economic Empire in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Ed. Alison Blunt, et al. NY: Oxford UP, 2003: 141-153.
"We are so submerged in the pictures created by mass media that we no longer really see them. ... And their effects run deep: popular culture is not tagged as ‘propaganda’ but as entertainment; people are often exposed to it when most relaxed of mind and tired of body; and its characters offer easy targets of identification, easy answers to stereotyped problems. (333, 336)." - Mills, C. Wright. White Collar. NY: Oxford UP, 1951.
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Carey, Alex. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Studies in Corporate Propaganda. (Posted on Youtube: June 4, 2012) [""The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." - Alex Carey This compelling book examines the twentieth-century history of corporate propaganda as practiced by U.S. businesses and its export to and adoption by other western democracies, chiefly the United Kingdom and Australia. A volume in the series The History of Communication, edited by Robert W. McChesney and John C. Nerone."]
Gaffney, Adam. "Medicare For All Is Still The Solution!" Current Affairs (February 22, 2025) ["Dr. Adam Gaffney, the former head of Physicians For a National Health Program, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and the author of the book To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History. Adam is one of the most articulate and effective champions of Medicare For All, having once fought five Fox Business Channel commentators at once. Today he joins to discuss why Medicare For All is still the #1 best way we can improve people's healthcare. He responds to common objections, and Nathan challenges him with quotes from the author of the book The False Promise of Single-Payer Healthcare. Adam shows why the objections are silly and we need to build a consensus around the necessity of a single-payer plan."]
Gorfinkel, Elena. "The Prop and the Performer: Actors Need to Touch Things." Notebook (March 4, 2025) ["The relationship of props to the embodied performer, the integral role they play in the gestural labor of the actor, is threaded through our entire discussion, but it is worthwhile here to tease out the investments and entrenched relations between performance and prop value. Cinema’s foundational fascination with bodily movement entails a frequent lingering on the prop and the role of objects; this preoccupation is noticeable across the history of cinema, from pre-cinematic motion studies and early cinema’s development as a narrational medium, all the way through actor training exercises in various schools of performance, including The Method and its multiple tributaries and variants. In numerous attempts to account for the essence of cinema, theorists suggest that the capture of corporeal movement entails a grappling with things that is central to the prop’s circulation through the diegesis, and thus to the unfolding of the diegesis itself. As plot vector, currency, relational mediator, agent of memory, appendage or illuminator of character, and dramatic catalyst, the prop buttresses and expands the very energies of cinematic narration and the articulation of character. The hands that hold and grab props set fields of activity in motion and generate horizons of narrativity. The prop’s status as an expressive resource is bound up with the performer’s bodily activity. In his account of film acting, James Naremore suggests that “actors need to touch things” by necessity, and this necessity of handling the prop world is a vital means of producing screen presence, key to the construction of a coherent fictional self. He further notes that “part of the actor’s job is to keep objects under expressive control, letting them become signifiers of feeling.” Concerned with how the border between prop and performer breaks down or becomes porous, Naremore points to elements of screen performances, from Charlie Chaplin’s cane to Barbara Stanwyck’s subtly wielded handkerchief in the tearful ending of Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), as examples of how acting techniques extend from an intensified relation between prop and character. In their different generic registers Chaplin’s comedic hyperbole and Stanwyck’s melodramatic realism demonstrate how prop work generates the gestural flow between action and expression."]
Hardt, Michael. "The Subversive Seventies." New Books in Critical Theory (October 29, 2024) ["A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism. The 1970s was a decade of "subversives". Faced with various progressive and revolutionary social movements, the forces of order--politicians, law enforcement, journalists, and conservative intellectuals--saw subversives everywhere. From indigenous peasant armies and gay liberation organizations, to anti-nuclear activists and Black liberation militants, subversives challenged authority, laid siege to the established order, and undermined time-honored ways of life. Every corner of the left was fertile ground for subversive elements, which the forces of order had to root out and destroy--a project they pursued with zeal and brutality. In The Subversive Seventies (Oxford UP, 2023), Michael Hardt sets out to show that popular understandings of the political movements of the seventies--often seen as fractious, violent, and largely unsuccessful--are not just inaccurate, but foreclose valuable lessons for the political struggles of today. While many accounts of the 1970s have been written about the regimes of domination that emerged throughout the decade, Hardt approaches the subversive from the perspectives of those who sought to undermine the base of established authority and transform the fundamental structures of society. In so doing, he provides a novel account of the theoretical and practical projects of liberation that still speak to us today, too many of which have been all but forgotten. Departing from popular and scholarly accounts that focus on the social movements of the 1960s, Hardt argues that the 1970s offers an inspiring and useful guide for contemporary radical political thought and action. Although we can still learn much from the movements of the sixties, that decade's struggles for peace, justice, and freedom fundamentally marked the end of an era. The movements of the seventies, in contrast, responded directly to emerging neoliberal frameworks and other structures of power that continue to rule over us today. They identified and confronted political problems that remain central for us. The 1970s, in this sense, marks the beginning of our time. Looking at a wide range of movements around the globe, from the United States, to Guinea Bissau, South Korea, Chile, Turkey, and Italy, The Subversive Seventies provides a reassessment of the political action of the 1970s that sheds new light not only on our revolutionary past but also on what liberation can be and do today."]
Jenkins, Henry. "I’m Still Here: A Harrowing Retelling and Warning." Pop Junctions (February 24, 2025) ["After government operatives enter and occupy the Paiva home in the film I’m Still Here, their daughter innocently runs into the home to retrieve a ball. She is unaware of what is happening and insists on being allowed back outside to play with her friends. At this moment, unbeknownst to the daughter but acutely sensed by the mother, their mundane life has been stolen. The family’s patriarch, Rubens (Selton Mello), a former Brazilian left-wing politician, has been detained without explanation. The Paiva family can never experience their blissful mundanity again, or rather their mundanity will always be framed by “eternal psychological torture,” as Paiva matriarch Eunice (Fernanda Torres) describes it. In many ways, I’m Still Here is about the limitations on the insistence of mundanity in times of turmoil and what we lose as a society when gradual escalations are unaddressed."]
Kaiser, Jocelyn and Max Kozlov. "The War on Science." Science vs (February 19, 2025) ["U.S. science is in turmoil. Amid agency firings and confusion over federal funding, researchers are freaking out. Many can’t do their work, and they have no idea what the future holds. Plus, we’re hearing that all of this could jeopardize medical treatments for people in the U.S. and all over the world. So, what exactly is going on? And how bad is it? We speak with Nature reporter Max Kozlov and Science magazine reporter Jocelyn Kaiser."]
Noble, Judith. "On Magic and Artistic Practice." The Secret History of Western Esotericism (October 30, 2023) ["In this interview we speak with Judith Noble – visual artist, film-maker, Professor of Film and the Occult at Plymouth Arts University, and all-around woman of parts – about artistic practice and its many intersections with magic. We discuss: An ‘enchanted turn’ currently underway on many levels in the world of fine art, Judith’s own artistic practice, wherein a number of landscape-based and other spirits are collaborators in creating curious multimedia productions (some of which can be perused in the gallery below), The fringes of Surrealism, and how that’s historically where the surreal action really was, The role gender-bias has played in the ‘art world’, and how that relates to magic-bias, The importance of form, but also the importance (for magic) of the artists’ formal intentions being subverted (taking Kenneth Anger’s films as a case-study) Judith Noble is Professor of Film and the Occult at Arts University Plymouth (UK), and an artist for whom the practice of magic is central to the work. ]
Pelly, Liz. "How Spotify Remade the Music Industry." Tech Won't Save Us #262 (February 6, 2025) ["Paris Marx is joined by Liz Pelly to discuss how Spotify changes how we listen to music and the broader impacts it has on the wider music industry. Liz Pelly is a music journalist and the author of Mood Machine."]
Ratner, Adam. "Why Measles Is Resurging—And The Rise Of Vaccine Hesitancy." Current Affairs (February 20, 2025) ["In 2000, the United States declared that measles had been eliminated. But just 15 years later, the disease made a comeback—and it hasn’t gone away since. In this episode, Dr. Adam Ratner, director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at NYU and author of Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health, explains why measles outbreaks are occurring again—as vaccine hesitancy and the antivax movement is on the rise—and what this means for the future of children’s health. Ratner describes why measles is the most contagious disease we know of, and why it can be particularly harmful to children. As vaccination rates for children and adults continue to decrease in the U.S., are we at risk of undoing decades of medical progress? And what can we do to stop it?"]
Rushkoff, Douglas. "Program or Be Programmed." Team Human (October 4, 2024) ["Is the internet good or bad? How can technology be directed? In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognise programming as the new literacy of the digital age and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message."]
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