Can civil disobedience be transnationalized? This question presumes civil disobedience to be a fundamentally domestic concept—one constitutively tied to both the nation-state and the normative underpinnings of liberal, constitutional democracies. This article shows how this assumption mistakes one version of civil disobedience’s twentieth-century intellectual history for the whole of it, and risks reproducing binaries (domestic vs. international, democracies vs. non-democracies) that trouble attempts to theorize the transnational. Turning to an alternative intellectual history—a network of civil rights and anticolonial activists—reveals a novel theory of civil disobedience as decolonizing praxis, as well the stakes of these binaries: the disavowal of white supremacy as pervasive and durable global structure of governance, linking the domestic to the international, and democratic rule to domination.
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Beyond (and Before) the Transnational Turn
Recovering Civil Disobedience as Decolonizing Praxis
Erin Pineda
In Democratic Theory
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 11–36 (25 total)
Book Review
Mabogo Percy More, Sartre on Contingency: Antiblack Racism and Embodiment
Thomas Meagher
Mabogo Percy More, Sartre on Contingency: Antiblack Racism and Embodiment (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 303 pp., $44 (paperback), ISBN: 9781538157046
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Book Review
- Pages:
- 98–101 (3 total)
Karuna Mantena, Adom Getachew, Sofia Näsström, and Jason Frank
Theorizing the Democratic Crowd: From the Who to the How of Popular Assembly
From the Boundaries of the People to their Enactment: A New Terrain for Democratic Theory
Popular Sovereignty, Aesthetics, and Emancipation
Beyond the Age of Democratic Revolution
Contested Greenspace Solidarities?
Asymmetric Valuation Compromises and Civic-Material Tensions in Copenhagen Allotment Gardens
Nicola C. Thomas and Anders Blok
Urban allotment gardens constitute urban natures with a rich history as well as potential public redevelopment land. While many cities in Europe struggle to protect allotment gardens from competing land-use forces, in Copenhagen, allotments are classified as valuable urban nature and enjoy special protection. We analyze the social and political conditions and consequences of this unique situation. Taking a closer look at the governance arrangements and what we refer to as asymmetric civic-public compromises enabling the protection, we show how this is resulting in new material conflicts between civic and municipal actors. We argue that the conflicts are related to the unresolved issue of competing visions of civic, green, and market sustainability shaping contemporary urban development in Copenhagen and beyond and which are starkly revealed within allotment gardens.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 262–287 (25 total)
Daoist Political Ecology as Green Party Ideology
The Case of the Swedish Greens
Devin K. Joshi
Green parties were once hailed as offering a “new politics” vis-à-vis the political establishment by proposing radical political, economic, and environmental reforms, but they have since transformed in many countries to become more moderate and pragmatic. While some doubt whether their ideology still contains any essential core, I contend that a unifying link can be found in the philosophy of the Daoist sage Laozi. I illustrate this by analyzing the party program of Miljöpartiet de Gröna (Sweden’s Environmental Green Party), one of the world’s most electorally successful green parties. As demonstrated here, this green party’s current ideology strongly reflects key imperatives of Daoist political ecology revealing the philosophy’s durability and attractiveness over time and its perceived relevance to pressing issues of sustainability and climate change.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 288–313 (25 total)
The Duties to Protest and to Listen to Protest
Communicative Resistance, Enabler’s Responsibility, and Echoing
José Medina
This article argues that the duties to protest and to listen to protest are central democratic obligations required for active citizenship. Section 1 sketches protest as communicative resistance. Section 2 argues that we always have a duty to listen to felicitous protests against injustice and that, under conditions of social uprising, we also have a duty to protest. Section 3 defends a view of protest participation that takes into account subjects’ positionality with respect to the injustice being protested, arguing for the special prerogatives of victims and the duties to defer and yield of non-victims within protest movements. Finally, Section 4 elucidates the notion of giving proper uptake to protest and what I call echoing a protest, that is, expressing communicative solidarity with that protest.
In Democratic Theory
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 101–119 (18 total)
Graham Holderness
Shakespeare’s interest in ancient Rome spans the whole of his dramatic career, from Titus Andronicus to Cymbeline, while Roman history and Latin culture permeate the whole of his work, well beyond the explicitly ‘Roman’ plays and poems. Critical interest has to some extent shifted from the historicist Roman plays based on Plutarch, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and the pseudo-historical Coriolanus, to the outlying Roman plays that evidence greater generic diversity and stylistic innovation, the early Senecan tragedy Titus Andronicus and the late ‘British’ romance Cymbeline. In these latter plays, the complex interactions between past and present, that are the main subject of the formal histories, are presented with even more aesthetic flexibility and creative improvisation than the ‘Roman plays’ proper.
Constance L. Mui and T Storm Heter
Readers will recall that we devoted a special issue to anti-Black racism in 2021, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement which gained momentum following the 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police officers in Louisville and Minneapolis. The present issue continues to address the problem of racism from a Sartrean perspective, with an interview of the pioneering Black Existentialist thinker Lewis R. Gordon, followed by articles that take up related themes in freedom and oppression.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- v–vii (1 total)
Existential Philosophy and Antiracism
An Interview with Lewis R. Gordon
T Storm Heter
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy (and Head of the Department of Philosophy) at the University of Connecticut. His two most recent books are Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2020) and Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). Since his first monograph, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Gordon’s many writings have challenged Sartre scholars to move beyond narrowly Euro-centric ideas of reason, humanity, and existence. The existential philosophy pioneered in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (a revision of Gordon’s 1993 Ph. D. dissertation), placed the issue of antiracism at the heart of the study of existence. A prolific and highly visible philosopher, Gordon’s writings have inspired an explosion of interest in Africana Existentialism, an open-ended, creolizing philosophy. In the interview below, Gordon outlines the existential situations that face us today. How is human liberation possible given the soul-killing forces of white supremacy, capitalism, and ongoing colonization? Gordon insists on the importance of antiracist institution building, including the transformation of white spaces, especially in academic journals, at conferences, and in university philosophy departments. Importantly, Gordon reminds us that Sartre was one of the few European writers to offer “a genuine engagement with Black intellectuals.” Like Sartre’s famous assertion that “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Gordon’s message is that Black Existentialism is a Humanism. Challenging the Euro-centric notion that human existence is an abstract, color-less category, Gordon teaches us a new way of thinking and listening. Misguided by parochial notions of human reason, many white (and/or non-Black) philosophers have closed their minds and ears to the calls of Black liberation, thinking they have nothing at stake, or that they must remain mere “allies.” Gordon’s work shows us a different path: Black liberation is a universal ethical injunction. Existential philosophy dissolves the supposed contradiction between action and theory, between universal and concrete, between ally and freedom fighter. Done properly, existential philosophy is, in Gordon’s words, “a form of epistemological decolonial practice.”
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Other
- Pages:
- 1–16 (15 total)
Glaciers in the Anthropocene
A Biocultural View
Daniel Gaudio and Mauro Gobbi
Disappearing glaciers are one of the most evident signals of climate change of the current period in Earth’s history, the Anthropocene. In this article, we discuss the side effects of the glacier melt from a biocultural standpoint, moving from the Southern European Alps to a global context. Specifically, we highlight what we are losing from a cultural and naturalistic perspective but also, paradoxically, what we could “gain” if we were able to understand more deeply, and with an interdisciplinary approach, glacial dynamics and their role for human society. Glaciers can teach us several stories, but we are quickly approaching the last chance to listen to them.
In Nature and Culture
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 243–261 (18 total)