Stanford University Press Blog

Grappling with Dystopia

Orwell's heirs in Hong Kong fiction and film yield insight into western surveillance society.

by KAREN FANG

A still from "Ten Years", a dystopian film from Hong Kong released in December 2015.

George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four recently shot to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list, crowning a sudden rebirth of interest in the cautionary tale that has been brewing over the past few months. As many commentators noted, sales were particularly high in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia—western nations currently riven by divisive social politics—suggesting that this renewed interest in a novel about a charismatic demagogue spouting misleading evidence and trafficking in xenophobia arises because Orwell’s fiction may help us to understand the contemporary world.

Perhaps one reason in particular that the novel is gaining renewed influence now is that Nineteen Eighty-Four explicitly portrays Asia as a bogeyman and a pawn in the militarized rhetoric of fear in which Big Brother traffics. Throughout Orwell’s novel the declining white empire of “Oceania” is always at war with East Asia or Eurasia—in fact, a particularly macabre moment in the novel occurs when a professional orator charged with inciting crowds abruptly changes mid-harangue from vilifying one enemy to the other. As Orwell describes it, “it was almost impossible to listen … without being first convinced and then maddened.” As a description of political rhetoric and its use in manufacturing consent, Nineteen Eighty-Four thus presages the ever shifting, fill-in-the-blank scapegoating of ethnic, racial, and religious others that fuels so much of our post-9/11, anti-immigration and anti-China hysteria. As the novel furthermore notes, “Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had changed.”

Perhaps one reason in particular that the novel is gaining renewed influence now is that Nineteen Eighty-Four explicitly portrays Asia as a bogeyman and a pawn in the militarized rhetoric of fear in which Big Brother traffics.

Politicizing Debt

In the wake of the Ghost Ship and other tragedies, feminist economics may offer a way forward.

a Q&A with ANNIE McCLANAHAN and CASSIE THORNTON

An image from the Mystery Hands project.

This post is Part II of a two-part blog series exploring the culture of debt. View Part I here.

Cassie Thornton’s art suggests that any political revolution around meeting our basic needs without recourse to debt will necessarily be a feminist one. All her art projects—both individual and collective—are presented as products of “the FED”: not the Federal Reserve, but the “Feminist Economics Department.” Her view aligns with that of feminist, anti-globalization activist, and writer Sylvia Federici who identifies the politics of housing, care, and education as part of the politics of reproduction, an explicitly feminist politics. In a 2010 interview Federici called for a “radical movement that programmatically places at the center of its struggle the eradication of social inequalities and the eradication of the divisions between production and reproduction, school and home, school and community.”

Visualizing Debt

A conceptual artist critiques capitalism by foregrounding children’s perspectives on debt.

by ANNIE McCLANAHAN

An image from Debt: Bad Spelling, an Adult Problem.

This post is Part I of a two-part blog series exploring the culture of debt. View Part II here.

The link between unpaid debt and the uncertain future of “our children” is everywhere. We especially see it in discussions of the national debt, which Democrats and Republicans both insist that we pay off in the name of the nation’s children and grandchildren. And in discussions of consumer debt, we also find a link between debt, children, and shame, as when financial planning guru Suze Orman describes debt as a failure of personal will akin to addiction or obesity and insists that it is “irresponsible” for those in debt to have children. Both of these very contemporary ways of talking about debt recall debt’s much older association of debt with sin, guilt, and shame (as in the Aramaic, from which we get a line like the Christian Lord’s Prayer’s “Forgive us our debts,” or as in the German schuld, the word for both debt and guilt).

Typically, the attempt to connect the innocent child to shameful debt is creditor-ideology of the purest kind.

Typically, the attempt to connect the innocent child to shameful debt is creditor-ideology of the purest kind: a way to encourage state austerity in the case of the national debt; a way to ensure that people commit to unending attempts to pay off their personal debt on the consumer side. But artist Cassie Thornton’s brilliant installations on kids and debt offer something radically different from this creditor-ideology. Her ongoing project, Mystery Hands, includes both a children’s book and an immersive installation that, according to Thornton, “invites kids to learn about the ‘financialization’ of their world so they can imagine alternatives.” Thornton describes her book and the installation as a way to ask how a child experiences debt and to explore the consequences of “being raised and instructed by the scared silence of overleveraged adults with no time for play, with diminished access to basic material needs.”

Diversity: America vs. France

Two authors discuss how notions of race, culture, and gender differ when we toggle between American Exceptionalism and the French Exception.

a Q&A with LAURE MURAT and BRUNO PERREAU

 

While both France and the U.S. boast a racially and culturally diverse population whose sexual orientations and identities run a broad gamut, each country conceives of this diversity and of notions of citizenship in unique ways. Laure Murat and Bruno Perreau, two scholars who have made the transatlantic journey form French academia to the ivory towers of the U.S., offer their insights on these in the dialogue below.

 

Q:

How has migrating from France to the US transformed your scholarly work on France?

 

A:

LAURE MURAT: It’s transformed it in many ways. First, I should specify that I migrated from Paris to Los Angeles, and not from some provincial town in France to New York City or to the Midwest, for instance, which would have been different in each case. The greater distance (in miles, time difference and culture) from California makes a real difference, as well as the fact that Los Angeles is a very big and fascinating city but also the opposite extreme of Paris. It allows me reassess my vision of France and consider more accurately its limitations, its alienation from the past, but also its great qualities.

Second, I had the luck to be hired at UCLA, a great institution where intellectual life is extremely vibrant. Every week, lectures, conferences, and screenings give us the opportunity to discover new ways of thinking and work from people all over the world. My experience is of a “decolonization” of the mind and of a new openness. In particular, everything related to diversity, gender and queer theory, black feminism, racism, and the like is at the core of a complex reflection that France largely ignores. I also deeply appreciate the liberty we experience in the US when it comes to moving boundaries between disciplines.

Exit with Care

A pilgrimage through London reveals the beauty of the banal.

by J. M. TYREE

Photo by J. M. Tyree

What to do with your last day in London? After twenty years of visiting, my answer hasn’t changed. Walk along the river somewhere. You can never get lost if you steer by the water. I set off from the Charing Cross—London lore defines the city as any point within fifteen miles of the spot—and I begin my journey by replicating the viewpoint of Monet’s Houses of Parliament. I had just seen the famous painting in the National Gallery, where a woman’s voice had decried the tourists for taking pictures of the pictures.

“They won’t stop them from doing it,” she declaimed for all of us silly foreigners to hear, “Heaven knows why.”

In the galleries, I snapped a picture of someone else’s phone held aloft in front of Caravaggio’s Judith, the severed head on the platter miniaturized on the tiny screen. I wanted to preserve my own subjective experience of the museum, which was about jostling for glimpses while tour guides held forth and tourists snapped away.

Why Study Literature?

Reading expands our social imaginations and literary criticism can tell us why.

by PAULA M. L. MOYA

Public domain via Pixabay.

Since the beginning of my career I have worked extensively on issues concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, in the context of modern thought and literature. As such, I have been challenged (by students, colleagues, institutional mandates, and other pressures) to demonstrate how literary criticism might contribute to an understanding of these world-making social fictions. This question has been made all the more poignant, on the one hand, by the strides in the natural and social science literature on these issues, and on the other, by the perceived crisis in humanities writ large and the role of literary studies in particular in contemporary education.

What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world?

When I began graduate school, there was a shared belief among a sizeable portion of the profession regarding the political efficacy of cultural critique. Throughout the late 1980s and into the ’90s, this excitement was manifested in the rock star status within literary criticism of a few academics, of whom Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Fredric Jameson were the most prominent. But by the late 1990s the shine of these academic luminaries had faded, and the time of theory and its attendant methods seemed to be in retreat. In response we’ve seen a variety of new approaches that constitute nothing less than a field-wide search for method—from broadening the purview of the discipline (to include video games, graphic novels, and electronic media) to pioneering new methodologies (including the emergent field of quantitative literary analysis).

Yet not all literary critics have responded to the sense of crisis by looking beyond the traditional objects or boundaries of our discipline. Some have retrenched, turning their gaze inward, in order to advocate a kind of a “doing what we do, but doing it better.” The questions they raise are theoretical and methodological: What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world? How might a nuanced and insightful interpretation of a given text affect our perception of that text—and by extension, of the worlds it represents?

Decolonizing Culture

What a leftist Moroccan journal from the 60s can teach us about today’s cultural crises.

by OLIVIA C. HARRISON and TERESA VILLA-IGNACIO

Front cover of "Africa, a Single Struggle," special issue of Souffles (no. 19; Rabat, 1970).

Next March will mark the fifty-year anniversary of Souffles, a short-lived but incendiary publication founded in the wake of the brutally repressed March 1965 student protests that inaugurated the decades-long period known as “the years of lead” in Morocco. Initially a poetry and culture review, Souffles and later its Arabic-language twin Anfas became the unapologetic platforms for the disgruntled Moroccan youth that took to the streets in 1965. In 1971 the journal’s editor-in-chief, Abdellatif Laâbi, and dozens of fellow Souffles-Anfas activists were arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, effectively putting an end to this remarkable journal, if not to political dissidence, which continued unabated in the jails of Hassan II.

Moroccan writers and artists broke with stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms.

A repository of seminal 1960s texts from across the colonized and postcolonial world, Souffles-Anfas provides a window onto the transnational cultural and political movements that mark the heyday of Third Worldism and anticolonial theory. The sentiments and political grievances expressed in Souffles-Anfas are precursors to contemporary progressive movements—from the pro-democracy revolts collectively termed the Arab Spring to struggles for racial justice in the West. The journal proved instrumental in establishing dialogues between writers, artists, and activists from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It published seminal works by tricontinental writers and political activists the likes of Haitian writer René Depestre, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the struggle for independence from Portugal in Guinea-Bissau, as well as key revolutionary and postcolonial texts, such as the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program or the Argentine manifesto for a Third Cinema.

Politicizing the Ultrasound

On ultrasounds, “good mothers”, and women’s reproductive rights.

by RENÉE ANN CRAMER

Public domain image via Pixabay.

Supporters of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy have cried foul at Carly Fiorina’s cynical use of ultrasound as a backdrop to her fact-challenged takedown of Planned Parenthood. In a recent video filmed in a private clinic in South Carolina, Fiorina stands at the side of Lacey Thomas, seventeen weeks pregnant with her second child. With more than a dozen reporters in the room, Ms Fiorina gripped Ms. Thomas’ elbow, laughed with her about baby names and the joys of pregnancy, and marveled at the visible spinal cord—then left to address reporters, using the moment as an opportunity to denounce public funding for Planned Parenthood clinics.

While much media attention has focused on the expansive range of reproductive health care offered to women at Planned Parenthood clinics across the nation, and the inaccuracies of Fiorina’s statements regarding the videos alleged to have been made at a Planned Parenthood clinic, it serves us well to focus more closely on the ultrasound itself. My work on our cultural obsession with celebrity pregnancy brings to light the important ways that ultrasound technology is put to work for cultural and political purposes.

Our Images, Our Selves

"Public image laws" in the U.S. belie an image-obsessed cultural sensibility.

by SAMANTHA BARBAS

"Land of the Tabloids." Photo by Daniel Novta. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

After receiving calls from her neighbors, a woman found that her daughter’s picture had been used in an ad for a local ice cream store, without the daughter’s or the mother’s consent. Her daughter had simply “liked” the ice cream store on Facebook. The woman was outraged and embarrassed. People across the country whose photographs had been similarly exploited under Facebook’s Sponsored Stories advertising program sued Facebook.

In the past hundred years, in increasing numbers, Americans have turned to the law to help them defend and control their public images.

In 1948, the Saturday Evening Post ran a critique of cabdrivers in Washington, D.C., that accused them of cheating their customers. A photograph appeared with the article that depicted a woman cabdriver, Muriel Peay, talking to the article’s author on the street. The caption did not name her, and the article did not refer to her. Although the woman had consented to be photographed, she did not know that the picture would be used in an article on cheating cabbies. She was humiliated, and she sued the magazine.

In the early 1940s, Zelma Cason, who was the inspiration for a character in a book by a famous writer, sued the author. The portrayal of Cason was highly complimentary, although in one part of the book the author described her as an “ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary” and noted that she used profanity. Cason was upset, and she sought damages of one hundred thousand dollars.

Angry and insulted, these people could have done any number of things. On seeing her picture in the Saturday Evening Post, Muriel Peay could have gone home and cried. Perhaps she did. The unwilling subjects of the Sponsored Stories program could have boycotted Facebook—perhaps they did, too. But these individuals also chose to sue. In the past hundred years, in increasing numbers, Americans have turned to the law to help them defend and control their public images. The twentieth century saw the creation of a law of public image, and the phenomenon of personal image litigation.

The Political Consciousness of the Selfie, Pt. II

They’re about more than narcissism; they’re also tools for political self-identification.

a Q&A with REBECCA L. STEIN, ADI KUNTSMAN,
and NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

What follows is the second installment of a Q&A with authors Rebecca L. Stein, Adi Kunstman, and Negar Mottahedeh on the politicized use of selfies in contemporary political and social solidarity-building campaigns. All three have studied the use of social media in the context of Middle Eastern politics; Stein and Kuntsman, co-authors of Digital Militarism, have studied the use of social media in the Israeli occupation, while Mottahedeh, writing in #iranelection, chronicles how Iran’s post election crisis of 2009 achieved international notoriety as a result of its momentum on social media. You can see Part I of this Q&A here.

...

3.

What are some of the most interesting cases of selfie activism that you’ve encountered?

ADI KUNSTMAN & REBECCA STEIN: Over the course of the last five years, we’ve watched the militarized selfie gradually grow and spread—a genre used both by soldiers in the Israeli military and by Israeli civilians as well. When we first encountered the phenomenon in 2010, before the massive global proliferation of the selfie, mobile self-portraits of soldiers in contexts of military violence were considered exceptional and scandalous. Early instances of selfie militarism included Facebook photographs of soldiers posing in Palestinian homes during routine raids, or in front of blindfolded and cuffed detainees at checkpoints. These early cases shocked the Israeli public and were deemed social aberrations, exceptions to Israel’s “moral army” and the national ethos of “purity of arms.” 

The Political Consciousness of the Selfie

They’re about more than narcissism; they’re also tools for political self-identification.

a Q&A with REBECCA L. STEIN, ADI KUNTSMAN,
and NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

 

In 2013 that silver fox of the lexicographical world, the Oxford English Dictionary, proclaimed that “selfie” was the word of the year and recorded that its use in the English language had increased 17,000% from the year previous. That precipitous rise mirrors its transition from a niche colloquialism to a now international cultural phenomenon—one that has precipitated Kim Kardashian’s entry into publishing as well as a public awareness campaign in Russia regarding the hazards—sometimes fatal—of incautious self-photography.

Trivial though it may seem, the preponderance of the selfie is taking on increasingly inventive, political registers as well. A New York Times front-page story from earlier this month documented (or perhaps, lamented) the pervasiveness of campaign trail selfies in the wind-up to the 2016 presidential bid (which the article’s author christened the “Selfie Election”).

Rebecca Stein, Adi Kunstman, and Negar Mottahedeh, who have all studied politicized social media practices in the Middle East, have documented the use of selfies as a tool for building solidarity—from the Israeli military to Iranian protesters. All three have documented the ways in which selfies can operate in myriad contexts; from validating political violence, to challenging an election result; at times seeking to trivialize something, in other instances seeking to glorify it.

We asked them all a few questions that consider the political function of the selfie, inarguably one of the most ubiquitous forms of self-expression today.

Hashtag Solidarity in Iran

How the Green Movement mobilized social media in the interest of social change.

by NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

Mousavi supporters, gathered in Tehran on June 18th, protesting against the election results. Photo by Hamed Saber, CC-BY-2.0 via Wikipedia.

A sense of euphoria and unprecedented freedom dominated national politics during the presidential campaigns in Iran in the spring of 2009. In the course of the thirty-year history of the theocratic state, no one could remember another time when Iranian state television had broadcast such lively debates among the presidential candidates.

Six years ago today Iranians went to the polls to elect a new president. Millions believe that their votes were never counted.

After leaving a rally for the then-sitting president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein described a crowd of tens of thousands: “They began to filter in to downtown,” he recalled. The Ahmadinejad rally was ending around the same time that the reformist leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s rally was also finishing up. Mousavi’s supporters made their way downtown, flooding the streets and squares. The scene, as Klein recalled it with obvious awe, was one of camaraderie, of playfulness. Describing the intermingling of the two camps, Klein observed, “they were just kind of joking with each other. It seemed as if someone had opened a magic door and an entire country had spilled out.”

This wasn’t just a feeling. Things looked lively too. Color was everywhere. Campaign paraphernalia, campaign headquarters, and campaigners themselves were clearly differentiated using predesigned graphic coding based on the colors of their chosen candidate’s campaign.

Hollywood’s Billion-Dollar Club

In defense of the imaginative potential of the franchise.

by J.D. Connor

21 films have grossed over 1 billion dollars at the box office.

In the history of the world, there have been twenty-one movies that have earned more than a billion dollars at the box office. Two-thirds of them have debuted since 2010, two of which—Furious 7 and Avengers 2—came out just this year. Jurassic World and Minions might join the billion-dollar movie club this summer, the newest James Bond and the final Hunger Games might join in the fall, and the Star Wars installment to be released at Christmas certainly will.

What makes me so confident in these predictions? It’s easy to extrapolate from recent film history what the winning recipe of a blockbuster film looks like today. All twenty-one of the billion-dollar movies hail from Hollywood, most are episodes within larger franchises, and all can boast an international fan base. The trends behind these mega-hits are pronounced and consistent—what can they tell us about movies today?