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Biographical-poetic journeys: A conversation with Yeison F. García López Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Silvia M Serrano, Yeison F García López
Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, Yeison F. García López assumes multiple identities: Afro-Colombian and Afro-Spanish. This multiplicity allows García López to assert a politically active citizenship, articulated through his migrant journey, his Afro-descendant and Colombian heritage, and his connection with Madrid society. This conversation delves into how García López’s
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Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire: A retrospective Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2024-02-21 María DeGuzmán
Located at the intersection of American Studies, LatinX Studies, and Romance Studies, the scholarly book Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire turns a “critical ethnic studies” lens on Anglo-American culture. It argues that constructions of Anglo-American identity as “American” have depended on figures of Spain. These figurations have been crucial to the dominant
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Tsigane voices in the 1960s: The first decade of Romani activism in France (1960–1971) Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Begoña Barrera
This article investigates the emergence and development of Romani activism in France during the 1960s. Its purpose is to analyse the way in which its leaders set themselves up as representatives of an ethnic community and helped to define its profiles and aspirations. Although the Romani movement clearly aimed at becoming international, this article argues that its growth during its first decade of
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Latinxs in the house? Latinx migration and culture in Madrid Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Dagmary Olívar Graterol
This commentary explores some of the cultural practices among people of Latin American origin living in Madrid. By establishing a link between Latinx migration and the process of racialization, the author describes how contemporary archives are being created and the ways that “migrant culture” is expressed and perceived in modern-day Spain, using the term “Latinx” as a critical category that refers
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Europe: Passages or reflections Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Nilo Palenzuela
This text reflects on identities from an African archipelago in the Atlantic that is part of the Spanish state. The Canary Islands were the first place colonized by Europeans in their expansion toward America. The text focuses on identity formation throughout the twentieth century. Reference is made to Canarian artists and poets such as Tomás Morales and Alonso Quesada, and more recent artists of international
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LatinX genesis: On the origins of a mongrel species Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Claudia Milian
This essay focuses its attention on Madrid, the Royal Botanical Garden (RBG), and the LatinX presence just as they were all coming into existence in the Spanish and European world. Pursuing a LatinX origin that exceeds humanness, this thought exploration tracks the Mesoamerican dahlia, transplanted to Spain in 1789. Acocoxochitl—what we now know as the dahlia, named after Swedish naturalist Andreas
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Plazas of sovereignty: Curatorial imagination in times of expanded borders Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Leire Vergara
This article explores the dispersed geography of the so-called plazas of sovereignty, the Spanish strongholds formed by a group of rocks, islets and archipelagos, that stretch along the northern co...
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We are here: An archive of portraits to look at myself Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Abdiel Segarra
This is an introduction to a selection of portraits that are part of a personal archive of photographs collected over the last 6 years. The portraits are of artists, cultural agents, activists and ...
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Practices of disobedience and clandestine citizenships: A proposal towards an anarchist theory of art Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Pablo Angel Lugo
This article will analyse the relations between anarchism and artistic practices. The relationship between anarchy and art has been well documented ever since political anarchism was first defined ...
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Introduction: Against citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Inés Plasencia Camps, Olga Fernández López
This special issue “Against Citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects” gathers contributions that address the affective and transnational networks that position themselves against or...
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Gender(ed) violence in neo-authoritarian times Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Leticia Sabsay
As conservative and neo-authoritarian tendencies in Europe move across political and geo-cultural borders, we bear witness to a renewed attack on gender and sexual rights. This is a challenge to de...
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Visual negotiation of identity and settlement of Poles in the so-called Recovered Territories: East Side Story by Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Marta Smolińska
This text is an analysis of a series of pinhole photographs, by Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky (Urban Art), entitled East Side Story I (Myślibórz). Photo research on migration and arrival stories...
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Divergent democracy: Notes on a mediatised affective activism renewal of feminist and anti-fascist struggle in contemporary Greece Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Anastasia Christou
While the shackles of austerity continue to shatter the remnants of once dignified, and now, mostly dehumanising lives, for most Greeks who have suffered decades long of economic and social crises,...
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“We will make the revolution as homosexuals!” transnational solidarity among social movements in the 1970s Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Víctor Mora Gaspar
In the 1970s, in different European countries, collectives for homosexual emancipation began to organize. Either as homophile groups of reformist character or as revolutionary fronts of liberation,...
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From cultural citizenship to suspect citizenship: Notes on rethinking full societal inclusion Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Jean Beaman
Based on past and current ethnographic research and interviews with ethnic minorities in the Parisian metropolitan region, I argue that despite France’s colorblind and Republican ethos, France’s “v...
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Visuality, rhetoric, and reality in the Second Slavery Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Dan Rood
This piece engages with the new book Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. It places the text within the longer publ...
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The visual records and visual legacies of slavery Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Radhika Mongia
How did visual techniques serve to facilitate slave regimes? How can an attention to the visual record enhance our understanding of slavery? In what ways does this record survive in our contemporar...
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Care-work for colonial and contemporary white families in India: A historical-anthropology of the racialized romanticization of the ayah Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Satya Shikha Chakraborty, Shalini Grover
This article examines interracial gendered care-work through the figure of the ayah (maid) serving white families in India from the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Historical and anthr...
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Space, place, and the landscapes of slavery Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-11-18 Christopher R DeCorse
Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Dale Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Ve...
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A New History of Crime and Law in 20th century Nigeria Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-08-11 Titilola Halimat Somotan
Historians have focused on the origin of the Nigeria-Biafran War (1967–70) and the conflict's impact on Nigeria's local and international policies. But no study has adequately interrogated the Biaf...
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The microcredit mousetrap: A long way from fighting poverty in Mexico Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Antonio Orozco Ramos
In Mexico microcredit has deviated from its original purpose of fighting poverty to oppress those whom it was supposed to help through high interest rates and over-indebtedness. There 42% of the po...
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The white-clad people: The white hanbok and Korean nationalism Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Yeseung Lee
The paper diachronically examines the white hanbok as the material and symbolic site of interaction between the hegemonising and the hegemonised in Korea. It traces the changing status of the white...
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Ordering life and law in a besieged African secessionist state Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Vivian Chenxue Lu
Samuel Fury Childs Daly’s A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War focuses on the remarkable legal inner workings of the postcolonial African secessionist state o...
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Homomercracia. The commodification of sexual and gender diversity in Chilean democracy Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-06-24 Abelardo León-Donoso
The approval of the anti-discrimination law in 2012 and the Civil Union Agreement in 2015 in Chile offer a sharp contrast to a society that has historically repressed LGBTQ people. However, it is n...
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The holy family: Neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the current far-right: Interview with Melinda Cooper Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-05-26 Bruna Della Torre, Melinda Cooper
Interview with Melinda Cooper about her 2017 book Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism. The interview addresses neoliberal gender politics, Cooper’s critique of the ...
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Introduction: Neoliberalism in the Americas. Brutal experiments, distressful realities, and conspicuous contestations Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Eduardo Altheman, Mónica González García, Ximena Martínez
This special issue was originally conceived as a conference organized at Duke University in January 2019, entitled “Neoliberalism in the Americas: Brutal Experiments, Distressful Realities, and Con...
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Neoliberalism and neocolonialism in Nadia Prado’s @Copyright (2003): Towards a decolonial reading Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-05-17 Bárbara Fernández-Melleda
This paper reads Nadia Prado’s poetry collection ©Copyright (2003) from a decolonial perspective, based on Walter Mignolo’s conceptualization of history as heterogeneous and decentred, aspects that I argue also permeate subjectivity and poetic expression. The poem delves into criticism of both Chilean neoliberal reality and a wider Latin American context in which the US has become a new economic and
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The return of neoliberalism in Argentina: Towards a critical theory from (and for) the global south Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-05-17 Santiago M. Roggerone
The victory of Mauricio Macri in the 2015 Argentine presidential election led to a kind of return of neoliberalism, soon resisted by the people and the political opposition. In this paper I will address the question of how recent regressive neoliberal policies and austerity agenda have been defied and counteracted by progressive forces and the Argentine left-wing movements. To do so, I will periodize
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Economics is the continuation of psychology by other means: Psychic suffering and neoliberalism as a moral economy Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-05-16 Vladimir Safatle
The article aims to discuss some psychic consequences of the emergence of neoliberalism. I seek to understand the major changes presupposed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder III upon the rise of a neoliberal subjectivity. If we want to have a real idea of the disciplinary process immanent to neoliberalism, we need to understand how it changed our way of describing categories
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Call for papers: Against citizenship: Visual belongings and transnational affects Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-04-05 Inés Plasencia,Olga Fernández López
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Of vigils and vigilantes: Notes on the white witness Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-02-22 Kathryn Bedecarré
This ethnographic study examines what happens when white allies bear witness to Black suffering. Through participant observation of Black Lives Matter Austin vigils for African Americans killed by police (2016–2018), I found that, while bearing witness, white and non-Black allies at times centered our own pain; criminalized insurgent forms of Black dissent; and engaged in a metaphorical slipping-on
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Worldmaking and the ethnographic possibilities for an abolitionist anthropology Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Aimee Meredith Cox
This essay is a commentary on Dorinne Kondo’s Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity. I consider how Kondo’s definition of worldmaking and reparative creativity can be useful concepts for anthropologists contending with the ongoing debate on anthropology’s colonial roots, postcolonial anxieties, and the abolition of the discipline. D. Soyini Madison and Erin Manning in dialog with
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Uncoupling specters of coloniality in postcolonial Cameroon: literary explorations Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-02-08 Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom
This essay discusses colonialities of power, knowledge, being, gender, language, nature, Anglophones, and victimhood as constitutive elements of a national/global Cameroonian coloniality in Nyamnjoh’s Married but Available. I contend that the sustainability of Cameroon’s future depends on struggles against colonialities as constitutive elements of a national/global coloniality that hangs over Cameroon’s
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Integration and reparation are never complete—nor is the work of creativity Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-02-03 Joshua Chambers-Letson
A meditation on Dorinne Kondo’s Worldmaking, this essay attends to the work of reparative creativity in Kondo’s text. Revisiting Melanie Klein’s theory of reparation alongside Kondo’s rich discourse on racialization, repair, and creativity, the essay follows Kondo to insist upon a framing of reparation that attends to both its creative and destructive psychic, political, and social effects.
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Dancing in the rain Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2022-01-25 Dorinne Kondo
Worldmaking is a genre-bending ethnographic/theoretical analysis of labor and race-making in the US theater industry, grounded in Kondo’s full participation in theater as anthropologist, performance studies scholar, dramaturg and playwright. The narrative trajectory toward what Kondo calls “reparative creativity,” inspired by Kleinian theory and its appropriations in queer of color critique, grounds
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“We Ain’t Nothing but White Trash”. The Ethnography of Poor Whites and the Politics of Stigma in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee. Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-11-03 Djemila Zeneidi
This article aims to demonstrate the documentary value of Zora Neale, Hurston’s descriptions, in her novel Seraph on the Suwanee, of the condition of the poor white US Southerners known as “crackers.” By, depicting a “cracker” woman’s upward social trajectory through, marriage, Hurston reveals the social and existential reality of this, segment of the white population. Her novel presents an objective
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Postface: Brokerage as social practice Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-08-14 Thomas Bierschenk
This postface argues for a narrow and analytically strong concept of brokerage, which is oriented towards the classical definition by Boissevain. His ideal type emphasises the agency of brokers who actively pursue their own interests and act at an equal distance to the groups between which they mediate. Furthermore, the text argues for thinking of brokerage as a bundle of social practices instead of
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Cultural brokers in mental health care in Sri Lanka’s North Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-08-04 Nadeeka Arambewela-Colley
This article engages in an anthropological analysis of brokerage to investigate the role of community support officers (CSOs) and mental health clinicians working on implementing post conflict reconstruction and reconciliation projects in Jaffna, in the North of Sri Lanka. I propose that CSOs and mental health clinicians become cultural brokers in health care by operating beyond the universal clinical
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Introduction: Moral and Market disordering in the time of Covid-19 Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-28 Michaeline A Crichlow, Dirk Philipsen
This special issue composed of essays that brainstorm the triadic relationship between Covid-19, Race and the Markets, addresses the fundamentals of a world economic system that embeds market values within social and cultural lifeways. It penetrates deep into the insecurities and inequalities that have endured for several centuries, through liberalism for sure, and compounded ineluctably into these
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COVID-19 and the modern plantation: Debunking the neoliberal moral economy Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-28 Marisa Wilson
Plantations have long been justified by moral and racial hierarchies that value specialised, export-oriented producers over domestic or subsistence-oriented producers. In this paper, I associate this value hierarchy with the neoliberal moral economy, explain its roots in classical political economy, provide examples of its workings and argue that the Covid-19 crisis provides a crucial opportunity to
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Another economy calls for another perspective Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-28 Arjo Klamer
Economics makes sense of the economy. Another economy that may or may not come about in response to the Corona crisis will require another sense making. This article provides a possible alternative perspective, a value-based approach. It includes a model with five spheres that encourages a visualization and conceptualization of the economy beyond the market and governmental spheres that dominate the
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Birth of a nation: Race, regulation, and the rise of the modern state Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-28 Jennifer M. Chacón
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Indian Migration and the Shift in How States Limit Free Mobility Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-28 Nandita Sharma
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When ‘street-level bureaucrats’ act as cultural brokers: The normative dilemmas and personal commitment of government officials in southern Ethiopia Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-20 Susanne Epple
Following the implementation of ethnic federalism in 1995, for the first time, government officials have been appointed from among the various ethnic groups rather than being only drawn from the central Ethiopian highlands. As such, they carry the responsibility of mediating and translating between two rather different worlds and value systems: those of the state and state law and those of the local
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NGO brokers between local needs and global norms: Trajectories of development actors in Burkina Faso Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Kathrin Knodel
Local NGO brokers in Africa and beyond negotiate and mediate between (inter)national donors and potential beneficiaries within their communities. They translate local needs into development projects to make them suitable for international donors. This article looks at two main conditions that influence their work: First, windows of opportunity, which open and close according to structures and institutions
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Johny Baleng (c. 1890–1964): A colonial broker from the Cameroon Grassfields Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Ricardo Márquez García
This article presents insights into the life story of Johny Baleng, a subchief from the Cameroon Grassfields. I argue that understanding him as a broker in a colonial context helps to identify local agency beyond the paradigm of coloniser-colonised. He needed to prove to his paramount chief that he was able to manage people and facilitate a high agricultural production rate, in order to achieve a more
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On Learning Lessons from the Past: Slavery, Freedom, and Migration Regulation Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-06-26 Radhika Mongia
My very sincere thanks to Cultural Dynamics, particularly the editor Michaeline Crichlow, for convening a forum on my book, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (2018), and to Jennifer Chaćon and Nandita Sharma for taking the time to serve as interlocutors. Their astute and generous commentaries traverse several issues explored in my book and raise numerous potential
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Liminality, third-culture and hope in a quarantine camp Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-06-10 Minh-Hoang Nguyen
Through the experience of a quarantine camp in Vietnam, the essay discusses how the experience was a third-culture phenomenon in overdrive because of spatial and social isolation. Through such resemblance, the author points toward a path to understanding and embracing third-culture in the larger context of globalization.
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“It’s enough to survive through this hell to make ourselves immortal in the eyes of our descendants:” Myal, death and mourning in Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-06-06 Janelle Rodriques
Die the Long Day narrates the 24 hours following the flight, capture, and brutal murder of Quasheba, a fugitive slave, on an 18th-century Jamaican plantation. Quasheba is remembered, retroactively, for her defiance of, despite ultimate defeat by, both the extreme gendered violence of the plantation and the paternalism of the narrative. The climax of this novel is Quasheba’s funeral, on which her community
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Blacks weather, Whites climate Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-24 Mark Driscoll
This essay explores the intersections of race, weather and climate. Earth science construes weather as the temperature and precipitation that impacts environments. Thinking about how this applies to bodies has come into vogue in trying to understand the disproportionate number of COVID-19 infections and deaths for Blacks and Latinx people. Arline Geronimus pioneered this in 1992 when she transposed
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Play it again, this time with meaning Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-24 Patrick McHugh
The potential exists to rebuild a more just economy in the wake of COVID-19. By illuminating the gap between what economic institutions promised and the reality billions of people face, this crisis is focusing attention and activism in new ways, particularly at the juncture of race and class. Advocates for racial and economic justice are effectively using this moment to forge new shared understandings
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Brokerage from within: A conceptual framework Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-12 Birgit Bräuchler, Kathrin Knodel, Ute Röschenthaler
Situated between various social worlds, brokers are highly mobile figures, in a physical and an ideational sense; they channel scarce information and resources, translate different languages and jargons, and mediate and facilitate between individuals and/or organisations, the local and the global, in a wide range of settings. Taking an in-depth ethnographic look at the actual work of brokers and their
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A discussion: Capitalist crisis and economic estrangement Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-12 Kathi Weeks
I am grateful to the editors, Michaeline Crichlow and Dirk Philipsen, for inviting me to think alongside and reflect upon this archive of essays. It is a rare treat to read such a diversity of analyses that nonetheless cohere around a clear theme: the problems and possibilities of the moral economy of (neo)liberal capitalist markets in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. Marisa Wilson offers what I
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Friendly moods Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-09 Claudia Milian
This exploration is a journeying toward ethical encounters with others in unfamiliar locales. It attends to friendship, close association with non-relatives, and a nexus of themes that arise amidst the COVID-19 global health crisis: quarantine life, networks of belonging and human connections, and new forms of research and productivity. The piece’s ruminative thinking draws on what the author discovers
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The tragedy of the private: Theft, property, and the loss of a commons Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-07 Dirk Philipsen
In a world of escalating climate crisis, metastasizing market logic, structural racism, growing inequality, and a global pandemic, this essay argues, the tragedy is not one of the commons, but one of the private. The relentless capitalist focus on self-interest rather than common good, on efficiency rather than resilience, on more rather than better, on the private over the public, has brought societies
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COVID 19, communal capital and the moral economy: Pacific Islands responses Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-07 Steven Ratuva
One of the impacts of COVID-19 is that communities have looked for alternative means of survival as the market economy went into a major crisis and people lost their jobs. For many communities in the Pacific Islands, who have relied largely on the market economy over the years, this means falling back on their communal way of life which has provided resilience for centuries. The revival of various
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Jamaica, Covid-19 and Black freedom Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-07 Maziki Thame
This essay is concerned with the conditions of Black life in the 21st century and the continued need to imagine Black freedom as projects of self-sovereignty, in the current moment of global protests centered on the socio-economic inequities that people especially those of color face, deepened by the devastating effects of Covid-19. The essay’s focus is on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. I highlight
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Ayni and Neltilitztli: The reconstitutions of the destituted Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-05 Walter D. Mignolo
“Market” in the past 500 years became synonymous with “capitalist market” (mercantile economy, industrial economy, technological and financial economy, market democracy). Before 1500 all organization of people living together (civilizations or cultures) had their own places to exchange within the communal and between nearby communities, all over the planet, not only in Europe. They did not go away
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Life versus Capital: The COVID-19 pandemic and the politics of life Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-05-04 Nicholas De Genova
Like all ostensibly “natural” disasters, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic unceasingly reveals the depths of social inequality and political myopia or governmental recklessness that predictably exacerbate the effects of a more strictly natural calamity. The pandemic thereby exposes the grotesque disparities in how illness, death, and suffering are unevenly distributed. As the COVID-19 public health
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Facilitating resonance: Brokerage in indigenous activism Cultural Dynamics Pub Date : 2021-04-22 Birgit Bräuchler
Putting forward a synergetic combination of three concepts – brokerage, indigeneity and resonance – this article investigates how brokers in Indonesia support indigenous communities in their struggle for citizen and human rights. It investigates the emergence of broker chains and multi-scalar activism that are needed to translate from the local – in this case the Aru Islands in Eastern Indonesia –