Hegemony

This article discusses the influence exerted on English Language Teaching (ELT) by discordant informing paradigms. It is argued that ELT is undergoing a theoretical restructuring, as its established linguistic, pedagogical and political underpinnings are giving way to an emerging critical worldview. These two positions, referred to as the Dominant and Emergent Paradigms, are in constant flux, which generates methodological tension. For instance, on the issue of the target language, methodological tension is manifest as friction between the Standard Language Ideology, i.e. the belief that native speaker norms constitute authoritative criteria of linguistic correctness, and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), a more inclusive position that acknowledges linguistic variation. Using a language school in Greece (the host institute) as an illustrative example, this study explored the existence of methodological tension between the Standard Language Ideology and ELF. Qualitative data elicited from the teachers and learners in the host institute were analysed using grounded theory, and information about the host institute’s courseware was subjected to content analysis. A complex picture emerged from the data: Traces of the Standard Language Ideology were evident in the beliefs espoused by the teachers and some learners, as well as in the courseware and in certain highly visible pedagogical practices. By contrast, practices which were less subject to outside scrutiny seemed closer to the ELF model, as were certain anonymously expressed student attitudes. These findings underscore the inherent complexity of educational settings, the hegemonic presence of the Dominant Paradigm, as well as the potential for bottom-up change.

https://classiques-garnier.com/l-histoire-et-la-question-de-la-modernite-chez-antonio-gramsci.html

Le marxisme ouvert d’Antonio Gramsci permet de redéfinir la philosophie de l’histoire en échappant à tout dogmatisme. Gramsci cherche en effet à penser le processus historique dans sa consistance tout en accordant un rôle central à l’activité et aux luttes humaines, en particulier grâce aux notions de praxis, d’hégémonie et de rapports de forces. L’auteur des Cahiers de prison s’attache ainsi à comprendre la complexité de la modernité européenne, depuis ses origines jusqu’à la crise organique qui marque son temps, et s’arrête notamment sur la Renaissance, la Réforme, la Révolution française, le Risorgimento, l’américanisme, le fascisme et le socialisme soviétique.

While the very possibility of a philosophy of history has been widely questioned, this book shows that Antonio Gramsci’s open Marxism gives it new life, away from all dogmatism. Gramsci seeks to conceive the historical process in its consistency while giving a central role to human agency and struggles, thanks to notions such as praxis, hegemony and relations of force. His determination to understand both the coherence and the complexity of European modernity leads him to trace its development from its origins to the organic crisis it was undergoing in his time, from the Renaissance and the Reformation to Americanism, Fascism and Soviet socialism, via the French Revolution and the Risorgimento.

Following attempts to make sense of a congeries of global dynamics, and to render legible events that have concomitantly made the world a space of order and disorder, globalization has emerged as a concept that encompasses countless contradictions. Viewed from a historical perspective, globalization has only increased in its complexity and territorialisation, infiltrating webs of spaces that are continually changing. In light of this complexity, this essay aims to examine how globalizing institutions of culture, economy and knowledge have shaped more local forms of society, and how local subjects and communities have reshaped, resisted, or reformulated global influences. The discussion in this paper is primarily centred on the works of Comaroff and Comaroff (1991, 2009), Appadurai (1996), and Bayart (2005), who together offer insightful and varied ways of conceptualizing globalization and its impacts over time.

The United States pursuing the realist prescription during the cold war helped maintain the balance of power and thus 'peace' among the competing great powers. In the post-cold war era it divorced some of realist assumptions-most importantly the prudential consideration-and pursued hegemonic policies which not only alienated its allies but also created apprehensions among other great powers about US ambitious grand designs. By pursuing such policies it has challenged not only the legitimacy of certain institutions established since Second World War (like United Nations), but also the institutions being established since Treaty of Westphalia (like state sovereignty). The study postulates that struggle for power and great power politics that had gone to the back-benches for some time during 1990s is very much alive and back in the post 9/11 era generally, and in the past decade specifically, establishing the prominence of enduring legacy of Realism.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

The Sino-US relations will be perhaps, the most important set of relationships in the near future. They tend to shape international relations in the coming decades and almost all other sets of relations can be considered from the perspective of Sino-American framework. The East Asia under the impact of China's rise, is a stage for disputes in relations between the two countries in the new century. Currently, China is seen as a regional power, it has exerted increasing influence in the international arena and it has been the subject of speculation about possible attempts to become the great hegemonic world power replacing the United States, a fact that the Chinese leadership refutes. In order to create a stable environment for your development project, China launched the strategy of “Peaceful Development”. In contrast, the United States has repositioned itself in the international order prioritizing the region which has the greatest potential for growth in the world, particularly in the context in which China takes a greater prominence: the Asia-Pacific. Hence the disclosure of the “Pivot” to Asia strategy, a way to try to extend its hegemonic position through the containment of China. The clash between the two strategies is the center of our thesis.

Resumen: Hegemonía y orden internacional hegemónico son ontologías clave para la disciplina y la teoría de las Relaciones Internacionales, y por ello, se trata de conceptos en permanente disputa académica. En un escenario mundial caracterizado por la crisis de la globalización, que puede interpretarse como crisis de hegemonía, vuelve a ser oportuna la revisión de estos conceptos. Este capítulo reexamina el concepto de hegemonía a partir tanto de las aproximaciones clásicas, como de una teorización crítica que se basa en la sociología histórica. Desde el concepto de hegemonía de Antonio Gramsci, se examina la aportación de la escuela neogramsciana de Relaciones Internacionales, que, frente a conceptos como primacía o polaridad, propone una visión estructural y socio-histórica de la hegemonía y de la globalización como un orden internacional hegemónico específico de esta etapa histórica. 

Abstract: Hegemony and international hegemonic order are key ontologies for both the discipline and the theory of International Relations, and therefore, these are concepts in permanent academic dispute. In a global scenario characterized by the crisis of globalization, which can be interpreted as a crisis of hegemony, the revision of these concepts is timely again. This chapter re-examines the concept of hegemony from both the classical approaches and critical theorizations based on historical sociology. Grounded on Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the contribution of the Neogramscian school of International Relations is examined, which, in the face of concepts such as primacy or polarity, proposes a structural and socio-historical vision of hegemony, and of globalization as a specific hegemonic international order in this historical stage.

One of Halliday's original purposes in developing Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was to address and redress equity questions such as how and why certain groups of people are discriminated against because of their language use. This chapter provides an overview of SFL theory and why and how it has been used in recent years in the United States and elsewhere to support the academic, linguistic and cultural repertoires of multilingual and multicultural students and teachers. It further outlines key concepts drawn on by the mostly U.S. contributors throughout this volume, highlighting the similarities and differences of contributors' approaches to critical take(s) on SFL. The purpose of focusing primarily on North American contexts is to show how educators contextualize their use of SFL theory and practice to respond to increasingly rigid immigration policies and to a very high level of children living in poverty. Finally, it provides an overview of each of the three sections in the volume: 1) Reflection Literacy and Critical Language Awareness; 2) Register Variation and Equity; and 3) Multimodal Designing as they relate to SFL.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

Επιβλέπουσα Καθηγήτρια: ΝΑΣΚΟΥ-ΠΕΡΡΑΚΗ Παρασκευή Τηλ.: 2310 891499 Email: perraki@uom.gr Β΄ Μέλος Εξεταστικής Επιτροπής: ΜΠΕΛΛΟΥ ΦωτεινήΤηλ.: 2310 891479 Email: fbellou@uom.gr
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Λέξεις Κλειδιά:

ασφάλεια, ειρήνη, τάξη, σταθερότητα, ισχύς, συνεργασία, συγκρούσεις, περιπτωσιολογικές μελέτες, φάσμα, εκκρεμές, πλαίσιο, πρίσμα, νομιμότητα, νομιμοποίηση, δόγμα, στρατηγική αντίληψη, σύστημα, ηγεμονία, αρχή, επέμβαση, ευθύνη, προστασία"

Συμπέρανα ότι, το ΝΑΤΟ μετεξελίσσεται σε οργανισμό που έχει τα χαρακτηριστικά ενός διεθνούς περιφερειακού οργανισμού, σε παγκόσμια όμως διάσταση, όπου με βάση το δόγμα "Ευθύνη Προστασίας" (Responsibility to Protect), αναλαμβάνει ρόλο χωροφύλακα, που επιδιώκει τη διασφάλιση της διεθνούς ασφάλειας και του εσωτερικού τομέα ασφαλείας, σε οριακές συγκρούσεις ανά την υφήλιο, πχ Βοσνία, Κόσσοβο, Λιβύη και προσεχώς Συρία."

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach combining research methods in history and political science to propose that the fundamental cause of Rome’s entry into and later domination of the Greek world was its reaction to a series of geopolitical developments in the Mediterranean region around the years 219 – 188 BCE. The thesis contends that the dominant paradigm in current scholarship on Roman imperialism assigns too much value to the internal structures of Roman society and consequently overlooks the importance of developments in the interstate system, in which the Roman state was a participant.

Following Alexander’s unexpected death in 323, his subordinates waged constant warfare for the next four decades to divide the spoils of his vast empire. By the 280s, these wars subsided, and an unstable balance of power emerged in the east Mediterranean, between the Antigonid, Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties.

This balance of power shattered seventy years later due to a sudden decline in Ptolemaic power, caused by a massive native uprising in Egypt, chronic domestic maladministration and a series of unfortunate coincidences. Ptolemaic collapse triggered what political scientists term a power-transition crisis, as it motivated the Antigonid and Seleucid rulers to launch aggressive wars with the aim of capturing Ptolemaic territory. Their aggression threatened the independence of minor Greek states, which attempted to recreate a tripolar balance of power in the region by appealing to Rome for intervention in the crisis.

With the Roman defeat of the two great dynasties and the collapse of the third, a new interstate system emerged in the Mediterranean: hegemony under the government of the Romans.

The concept of üst akıl, an all-powerful and sinister agency, has recently been socially and politically influential in the public sphere in Turkey. From the time it was first used in 2014 to today, the concept has served as an enabling device to legitimize a political motive, to delegitimize dissident views, to make an assertion of difference, to safeguard political status and to gain mainstream recognition. In this article, I examine specific conspiracy narratives in Turkey, which are by-products of the üst akıl discourse, and attempt to understand how they, in their own ways, contribute to the formation of a conspiratorial climate and a hegemonic consensus in Turkish mainstream media. Journalists and popular authors creatively allude to üst akıl in a wide range of styles. Analysing the discourse of üst akıl, I demonstrate how the concept has been strategically used by many circles, pro-government and sometimes critical, to endorse a new nationalistic agenda intensified by the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey.

This study focuses on hegemonic contests in Zimbabwe between Authoritarian Nationalism and Democratic nationalism as competing national visions. It focuses on understanding the tri-factor of: the crisis in Zimbabwe post-2000 in its proper historical context; regime survival and attempts at hegemony during it and how the dominance and attempts of the state at hegemony were contested. The study adopts and adopts and adapts Gramscian analytics to answer these questions, and find that while the authoritarian regime was matched in terms of its tactics, the counter-hegemonic bloc could not match it at the level of scale. It ends by urging ​consideration of steeping democratic discourse in social justice as a way of ensuring that it covers critical elements of economic redistribution alongside its focus on political representation and recognition. A case study of the ‘Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition’ is used to highlight how authoritarianism was resisted through the sponsorship of an alternative national vision that centred on democracy.

Brazilian projection towards South America has been an important issue since its re democratization process in the 1980s. Still, Brazil’s regional behavior could not be considered as a hegemony, under the realist point of view, that is, exerted by its hard power. Nor liberal, considering the option for multiplicities initiatives and a low level of institutionalization. Therefore, we propose to apply the Gramscian concept of hegemony to analyze if Brazil could exert hegemony towards South America throughout its participation in regional integration processes. To do so, we have chosen to use a qualitative method of analysis along with a typical case-study to develop a prelaminar theory illustration, based upon a literature review of the Brazilian foreign policy (primary and secondary sources). This inquiry leads us to argue that there is a dubiety regarding Brazil’s regional action. Firstly, due to the lack of institutionalization of South American regional organizations and; secondly...

Article on the comparison of Gramscian and Foucauldian understandings of civil society.

Published in the book "A Panacea For all Seasons?" (Freise, Pyykkönen, Vaidelyte, eds., 2010, Nomos): http://www.amazon.de/Panacea-all-Seasons-Governance-European/dp/3832947876

June 6, 2021 The genocide in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region has been going on for seven months now. The UN is doing nothing and the slaughter continues. To understand events there one must examine the context in which they were created.
The past 500 years of colonialism and even world politics today are very easy to understand. Euro-American colonialists are inherently white supremacist to give them a unifying bond, uniformly amoral and totally capitalist. Over time they realized its easier to get the “colored savages” to fight each other rather than waste good white boys on the effort so they became masters at dividing indigenous groups within the Americas, Asia and Africa, setting them upon each other, then rolling in later on to “clean up the mess” and totally take over while congratulating themselves on their kindness.
The First Italo-Ethiopian War 1895 – 1896 in which the Italians claimed the entire country of Ethiopia as their own was bad enough, but then the Second Italo-Ethiopian War from 1935 – 1937 saw 200,000 Italian soldiers invade proving what a totally ineffectual entity the League of Nations (1920 - 1946) truly was, precisely the same as the modern so-called United Nations.
What the foreign invaders were really after was a solid base in East Afrika, and specifically the Ethiopian Highlands, the largest continuous elevated area on the continent, sometimes called the “Roof of Africa.” The highlands mountain areas extend from central and northern Ethiopia north into Eritrea. Those are deliciously cool and beautiful lands far better suited to the more delicate European constitutions than the deserts, Savannah and tropics found elsewhere in Afrika along with all manner of fearsome wildlife including those horrid malaria carrying mosquitos.
Jumping forward in time a bit we find the USA with an urgent “existential need” of some kind to rule the entire world forever that looks upon the ancient land of Ethiopia with distain. Myopically addicted to fragmenting and dominating all nations of the earth in perpetuity, the clever but not wise directors of American foreign policies have decreed Ethiopia needs a good war to break it down some more, as if the droughts and endemic poverty brought about by predatory Euro-American aggression in Afrika weren’t enough.
So, the ever-so-clever but avaricious American foreign policy makers locked the former dominant political party called the TPLN located in the northern ancient holy Tigray region into power for an overly long time while feeding their corruption, and at the same time fed anger and resentment towards them from all directions, Eritrea to the north, and the other Ethiopian political parties to the south.
- This short brutally honest satire is an alternative introduction to the much more detailed and analytic article I posted on Academia.edu yesterday titled: Made in Amerika - Genocide in Ethiopia - A four-part article series. That the UN does nothing is not surprising, however it's astonishing to me that so few people seem to even care about another genocide. Is only 20,000 innocents slaughtered too insignificant to call your Congressional representatives and demand the UN send in peacekeepers?

The Social and Economical Bases of Evolution in the Hegemonic Political Discourses of the Islamic Republic of Iran


مبانی اجتماعی و اقتصادی تحول در گفتمان های سیاسی مسلط در جمهوری اسلامی ایران

Abstract:
Iran's revolution was a prelude to the rise of a modern system in the world's contemporary political history. This new system emerged without having any sample or version. This article in addition to identifying the sub-discourses of this system, is trying to find the roots of their rise and fall. In fact this research has focused on this question that what is the main reason of the hegemonic discourses' becoming and evolution in the political system of Iran's Islamic Republic area? The research's hypothesis, to answer this question, searches the root of these becoming and evolutions in the social and economical fields and shows that the society's social and economical evolutions, cause the evolutions in its political discourses. From the other hand, it shows that in the shade of the international interactions, these processes have been affected and reinforced. The research's hypothesis has been investigated in the framework of Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory with some roots of Fairclough's discursive reading.



Key words:
Hegemonic political discourse, Islamic Revolution, Islamic Republic, social bases, economical bases

IntroductionThey bear upon them the traces of the particular cultures, traditions, languages and histories by which they were shaped. The difference is that they are not and will never be unified in the old sense, because they are irrevocably the product of several interlocking histories and cultures, belong at one and the same time to several &quot;homes&quot; (Hall &quot;Cultural Identity&quot; 222)Caribbean identity is important because it expresses the ethos of the people. To establish such identity, it is a difficult subject because there are multiple historical contributing elements. The Caribbean has many cultural roots. After the European had exterminated the indigenous population, they settled the Caribbean with people around the world and forced them to labor. Thus, people of the Caribbean have extensive backgrounds, making &quot;identity&quot; a problematic topic. Indeed, oppression and slavery marked the Caribbean history, which caused a long-lasting trauma in the mind o...

The special issue New Swedish environmental and sustainability education
research, published in Education & Democracy 20(1), introduced
a novel generation of Swedish ESD research. With the intention to spur
academic debate this rejoinder offers alternative interpretations of some
of the findings in the special issue. The article contests the special issue’s
proclaimed distinction between empirical studies and ideological debate
in the field of ESD research, and points to the contradiction between
the special issue’s promotion of ‘pluralism’ and the absence of critical
interrogations of sustainable development. Theoretically informed by
post-Marxist thought the concept post-politics is employed to shed new
light on sustainable development and its companion ESD. It is argued
that the contributions in the special issue are partly embedded in a post-political logic and that several findings are open for far more radical interpretations. This suggests, ultimately, that there is a need for alternative
pathways that can challenge and complement mainstream ESD research.

IR scholars have recently paid increasing attention to unequal institutional orders in world politics, arguing that global governance institutions are deeply shaped by power inequalities among states. Yet, the literature still suffers from conceptual limitations and from a shortage of empirical work. The article addresses these shortcomings through a study of the historical evolution of global arms control institutions since 1945. It shows that in this important policy area, the global institutional order has not been marked by a recent trend toward deeper inequality, as many writings on unequal institutions suggest. Instead, the analysis reveals a pattern of institutional mutation whereby specific forms of institutional inequality are recurrently replaced and supplemented by new forms. This process, the article argues, is driven by states' efforts to adapt the regime to a changing material and normative environment within the constraints of past institutional legacies.

The challenge of Marxism to the establishment caused him to be excluded from the academic field. Gramsci says, altogether, that Marxism will be the common sense of our age, because it is a formation that has influenced a wide area in many different ways in social sciences.

How should we understand such discursive patterns? From where do the involved mental maps come from, which we understand as key ideational mechanisms about how knowledge on demographic and migratory processes are structured? How are various demographic developments and actors of the world represented? How should we interpret anti-immigration demographic nationalism, which can be understood as a combination of selective anti-immigration discourses and regulations with straightforward, state-sponsored pronatalism and the use of “own resources” for the sake of improving our standing within Europe? How can we link these discursive and political events and the underlying mental maps to demographic structures and changes? What challenges do the structural processes of fertility, migration, and mortality show, and how can we interpret the political reaction given to them during the Orbán regime? First, I shall provide a historical-structural analysis of demographic processes and then review policies and institutionalized norms that shape mental maps and that are shaped by mental maps. Finally, I will look at the interrelationship between material structures, processes, and political discourses in order to complete a complex and dynamic analysis of Hungarian demographic nationalism in the 2010s.

I wrote this poem when I accepted who I had become over time: a Poster Boy.

Playing the game of the colonizers, I had learned to climb up the ladder of “success”, as defined by the colonials and internalized by us.

This ladder being one that many of us learn to climb from childhood. “Success” is: to learn English (at the cost of mother tongue and other local languages), study in English medium schools, go abroad (preferably to the US or another western country), get a job abroad (preferably in a western country), and make money by working for our colonizers.

This review critically engages with Radhika Desai’s concept of geopolitical economy as a framework for understanding the evolution of the capitalist state system. While presenting a useful challenge to many of the most deeply-held beliefs in International Relations theory, Desai’s over-reliance on a geopolitical lens produces a relatively one-sided account of the ways in which capitalism forges distinct international regimes and ideological formations under a given set of historical conditions of possibility. Thus, Desai’s somewhat opaque reading of the international relations of capitalism clouds our understanding of what the current conjuncture might entail for any possible future beyond the social discipline of capital.

Türkiye'de neoliberal hegemonyanın inşası, diğer unsurların yanı sıra, tabandaki grupların desteğini seferber etmek için birbiriyle yarışan siyasi aktörler arasındaki mücadelelerin yönü ve kapsamına bağlı olmuştur. 1980'lerde başlayan neoliberal dönem boyunca, İslamcı siyasi hareket ve Kürt siyasi hareketi, neoliberal projeye karşı tabandan gelen muhalefeti harekete geçirmeyi başaran ana siyasi aktörler oldular. 1990'lardan bu yana, tabandan gelen siyasetin merkezindeki formel proletaryanın yerini bir enformel proletarya almış ve neoliberal politikaları gayrimeşrulaştırma mücadelesinde bu enformel proletaryanın desteğini almak temel hegemonik mücadele haline gelmiştir. Birbiriyle yarışan siyasi partilerin rekabetinin ana hedefi hem rekabet halindeki siyasi partilere verilebilecek çok geniş bir halk desteğini barındıran hem de İslamcı ve Kürt radikal grupların etkisi nedeniyle devlete yönelik temel siyasi tehdidi oluşturan Türkiye'nin varoşlarındaki enformel proletaryanın desteğini almak olmuştur. Bu bölümde, formel ve enformel proletaryanın toplumsal iktidarını hem genişleten hem de zayıflatan yapısal süreçlerden bahsedeceğim; buna ilâveten, tabandan gelen bu gücü harekete geçiren ve kontrol altında tutan gerek ana akım gerekse radikal siyasi aktörler üzerine tartışacağım. Bilhassa, neoliberal ihracata dönük politikalar, Kürtlerin tabi tutulduğu zorunlu göç ve İslamcı hareket ile Kürt hareketinin enformel proletaryayı hangi yollarla seferber ettiği (mobilize) konuları üzerinde duracağım. Bu analizden yola çıkarak, 1990'lı yıllarda neoliberalizm karşıtı rahatsızlıkları harekete dönüştürenlerin İslamcılar olduğunu; diğer taraftan, İslamcı hareket radikallikten çıkıp ana akım hale geldiği ve bu nedenle Türkiye'ye neoliberal hegemonyanın empoze edilmesi mümkün kılındığı için, 2000'li yıllarda hegemonik düzene direnen temel gücün Kürt hareketinin radikalleşmesi olduğunu öne süreceğim. Başka bir deyişle, sol Kürt hareketi, enformel proletaryayı hedef alarak İslamcı hareketi neoliberalizm karşıtı seferberliğin merkezinden çıkarmış ve onun yerine geçmiştir. Söz konusu siyasi seferberliklerin neoliberal hegemonyanın inşa edilmesinde esas olduğunu; bu yüzden Türkiye'deki iktidar partilerinin, özellikle Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi'nin (AKP), enformel proletarya tarafından hükümet politikalarına rıza gösterildiği sürece hegemonyasını

This article suggests that the Gezi Park protests in general, and particularly the presence there of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims is a valuable example for studying the ambiguity and complexity of the secular/Islamic paradigm in Turkey. Conducting field research on the formation of the Anti-Capitalist Muslim identity, I argue that the secular/Islamic divide is politically produced, and potentially vulnerable to contestations and transformations, for it opens the socio-political landscape to the production of multiple secularisation projects beyond this divide.

This is the idea of the paper. It incorporates a slightly Marxist feminist perspective that basically works on the premise that we are all agents in the production cycle like cogs in a wheel and we have different roles to play to keep the production cycle going and all institutions and arrangements in society that we see are determined by economics. Men and women through their different roles in the cycle of production create a society which in turn shapes them. Marriage is a contract which has economic reasons and the family acquires the status of a hegemonic institution because it is instrumental in facilitating production and in furthering the interest and the material wellbeing of the state. The man works for the state, the woman works for the man and she also reproduces so in other words she brings in more workers or caretakers which will contribute to this cycle of production.
I have taken up Mahashweta Devi’s MO1084 and I am looking at how she is trying to disrupt the family as a hegemonic institution and critiquing its functioning just as a mere tool of the state which undermines individual growth and well-being of a person. So we have grieving mother Sujata who has lost her son to the Naxalite movement and she is the only one who is mourning his death. But not publicly. Because they belong to a particular social class, the Bengali bhadralok or the bourgeoisie their actions and reactions and even the dynamics within the family are determined and governed by their class consciousness. So the Brati the dead Naxalite son who has brought bad name to the family is reduced to a number 1084 and disowned in many ways by the family. They don’t discuss him, they obliterate him from their thoughts and they go on as if nothing has happened. Because that’s whats best for the family and the family name and the family business.
Except Sujata. She is torn between conforming to middle class standards and mourning over her dead son. And if she is seen to be grieving she allows herself to be labelled as strange, not dutiful enough to her husband and his reputation. So devi gives us a glimpse of this family where no true bonds exist either between the couples, all the married couples share a very perfunctory arbitrary relationship. They are just married to each other because it is socially correct to remain married. There is no bond between the children and the mother because they are in different camps playing the game of capitalist patriarchy.
SO through this model of a dysfunctional family devi exposes the decay and the damage which submission to the state machinery can cause to a family and how the family in turn because of its puppetlike existence can be detrimental to the well-being of the individual, how it can lead to estrangement and frigidity and ostracism and marginalisation and finally death.
And the paper of course attempts a very close reading of the text to substantiate and consolidate this argument.