Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan investigates the relationship between religious and political radicalism in the poetry and poetics of San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988). I argue that Duncan draws on a nexus of religious and political "heresies" (e.g., Gnosticism, anarchism) to create a complex ethical vision of individual freedom and communal interdependence, what the poet called a "symposium of the whole." As my argument demonstrates, Robert Duncan's mytho-anarchism serves as a critique of twentieth-century political ideology, as well as the cultural politics of such precursors and contemporaries as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov.

This thesis presents a thorough investigation of the 2500th Anniversary Celebrations of the Founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great, held in Persepolis by the Shah of Iran in 1971. Since the time of the Celebrations they have been routinely demonised by historians and critics of the Pahlavi regime, who present them as evidence of the delusion and megalomania of an Oriental despot. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a more sober, balanced account of the events of 1971 and the preparations leading up to them, in order to understand more fully the aims and motivations of the Shah and his entourage in organising such a nationalist spectacle. It will argue that Iran benefitted greatly from the international exposure the event generated, politically, economically and culturally. Most accounts of the Celebrations have focussed primarily on the sumptuous Pahlavi hospitality, enjoyed by the world’s elite over the course of a few days in purpose-built accommodation at Persepolis, the former ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid dynasty. In contrast, the premise of this thesis is that the ceremonies at Persepolis and Pasargadae were just a small, albeit highly visible, part of the programme for the Celebrations. From the time the Celebrations were conceived in the late 1950s, exhibitions were organised, publications commissioned and buildings constructed. All were intended to contribute to the development and modernisation of Iran, and all were conceived with the Anniversary Celebrations in mind. Internationally too, the Celebrations aroused great interest. Hundreds of books and articles were published in conjunction with the event, and museum exhibitions, academic conferences and other special cultural events were organised around the world, giving an important boost to the field of Persian studies worldwide. Meanwhile, the Shah’s Iran was presented as a significant regional and global power. This thesis will contribute, therefore, to our understanding of the Celebrations, and more broadly the material effects of the politicisation of culture in the late Pahlavi period.

This study examines the photographic production of the 1970s in Cuba through print media and aims to situate its role and function within the cultural politics that dominated this decade. The photographic image played a distinctly prominent role in the construct of a euphoric narrative that defined the early Revolutionary period. However, at the onset of the 1970s, the social, political and cultural life of the country was marked by a centralization and institutionalization of power that challenged the autonomy of artists and intellectuals. The medium of photography functioned almost exclusively as an instrument for journalism, removed from its artistic potential. The research focused on the work of a generation of photographers that emerged during two distinct moments in two major publications ? Cuba Internacional in the early 1970s and Revolución y Cultura in the second half of the decade. The study shows that the photographic production of this group of photographers was imbued with a personal aesthetic vision that belied the contemporaneous political status quo and as such reflected shifting ideological attitudes. The research also examines the socio-political factors that led these publications to represent sites of relative creative freedom and artistic innovation. It demonstrates how the function of photography shifted from strictly documentary to an artistic manifestation. The research predicted and found that photography played an influential role in the art making processes that generated aesthetic ruptures in the 1980s.

On 1 July 1997, sovereignty of Hong Kong was transferred to the People's Republic of China , ending over a one and half century of British rule. The cultural identities of people in Hong Kong have been an important research topic in the study, past research has generally focused on the dichotomy of a "Hongkongese" vs. a "Chinese" identity. But in this paper, I try to introduce Danny Yung¡¦s Chinese concept to explain a "Hongkongese" identity. Danny Yung is one of the most dynamic cultural figures in Hong Kong. As a director, producer, artist and curator he sets the cultural agenda not only in Hong Kong, but in many Asian countries, US and Europe. His works are experimenting and based on critic comments to daily media and culture politics in Asia. In 1982, he founded the art association ¡¬Zuni Icosahedron¡¬, which works with performing art, press events, art education and youth festivals nationally and internationally. This research discussed Danny Yung how to help "Hongkongese" get rid of the shadow of Britain and China ,and promote "Hongkongese" have a new identity.

In the beginning of 2016 the politicians in the city of Stockholm made a decision to renovate the city's civic hall. The building accommodated, among a variety of businesses, a public arts school and a library. The building also accommodated Debaser, which was a one of Stockholm's most popular live music scenes that had hosted a lot of different bands and artist over the years. Due to the decision of renovating the civic hall Debaser had to shut down its business, and as a result of that a debate took off in newspapers and on social media. The debate brought up topics about the importance of Stockholm's live music scene and the process of decision-making in cultural politics. This study aims to describe how the decision was made by the politicians regarding the renovation of the civic hall and how the following debate discusses the topic of live music scenes. I have listed the arguments found in the debate and in the political documents regarding the decision-making process and analyzed them with Dorte Skot-Hansens three cultural rationales and Per Mangsets ten dilemmas of conflicts. Furthermore my result shows, not surprisingly, that the decision was based mainly upon the fact that the civic hall is owned by the municipality of Stockholm and the politicians wanted to promote the municipal enterprises by renovating the building. The discussion about the importance of the live music scene was held in the debate but it was not discussed as thoroughly as it may have seemed.

Why, in the aftermath of 9/11, did a segment of U.S. security experts, political elite, media and other institutions classify not just al-Qaeda but the entire religion of Islam as a security threat, thereby countering the prevailing professional consensus and White House policy that maintained a distinction between terrorism and Islam? Why did this oppositional threat narrative on Islam expand and even degenerate into warning about the “Islamization” of America by its tiny population of Muslim-Americans—a perceived threat sufficiently convincing that legislators in two dozen states introduced bills to prevent the spread of Islamic law, or sharia, and a Republican Presidential front-runner exclaimed, “I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it”? This dissertation takes these puzzles as its object of inquiry. Using a framework that conceptualizes discourses and their agents as fundamentally political, this study deepens the literature’s characterizations of this discourse as “Islamophobia,” the “new Orientalism,” the “new McCarthyism,” and so on by examining how it functioned politically as a form of cultural politics, and how such political factors played a role in its expansion in the decade after 9/11. The approach is syncretic, blending Foucauldian genealogy with its emphasis on power, a more interpretive Bourdieuan relational sociology, and synthetic social movement theory. First, it examines the discourse at its macro-level, in the historical and structural factors that formed its conditions of emergence; specifically: 1) the culturally-resident political framing structure that rendered this discourse meaningful and credible; 2) the politically-relevant social-structural resources that rendered it influential; and 3) the more historically contingent or eventful political openings or opportunity “structure” that otherwise enabled, supported, or incentivized it. Then, it examines this threat discourse at its micro-level, biographically profiling three of its more influential polemicists, analyzing their strategies of cultural politics. The study concludes that this threat discourse functioned as a distinctive strategy by the more entrepreneurial segments of the U.S. conservative movement, who—in the emotion-laden wake of 9/11—seized Islam as another opportune site to advance their ongoing project of cultural politics. / Ph. D.

This thesis investigates the cultural politics of a small group of women through their writing and other activities in 1880s London. Focussed on Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx and Amy Levy and the connections they had to one another and to other women, such as Henrietta Frances Lord, Clementina Black and Henrietta Müller, it explores key events in their everyday lives, the writings and texts they produced. It analyses a wide selection of textual sources, re-reading these for small details, intertextual connections and points of disjuncture, to allow for different ways of understanding the mechanics of feminist cultural politics as produced and performed by these interconnected women. Small things in texts can be revealing about such women’s everyday lives and connectedly the cultural politics which underpinned their actions, thus contributing to knowledge about how writing was used strategically and imaginatively to challenge, side-step and overcome oppression and inequality, in these years in London and after. Using the term ‘writing’ in a broad sense to include letters and diaries and other archival sources such as newspaper articles, reviews and manuscript drafts, as well as some selected published work and biographies, the thesis is anchored around four event-driven investigations: Olive Schreiner being accosted by a policeman; the first public performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; the writing of a letter mentioning Eleanor Marx; and, the death of Amy Levy. Relatedly, there are discussions concerning working with historical documents, documenting and archiving the past, researching and representing the past in the present. These investigations allow for the operationalization of a research approach framed by ideas concerning micro, small-scale, everyday life and its qualitative aspects, which together contribute to a re-conceptualisation of a ‘sociology of small things.’ Specifically, it is argued that close and small-scale studies of women’s writing, whether undertaken alone or connected to others, sheds light on the importance of relationship dynamics in connection with writing output, on what writing was produced and what role each text played in larger scale political agendas. Concepts such as palimpsest, liminality and bricolage are interrogated with respect to researching and representing the spatial and temporal interconnectedness of the selected authors and textual sources. And contributions are made to contemporary thinking about epistolarity and social networks, focussing on reciprocity, gift-giving and receiving and notions of ‘letterness,’ along with the defining of boundaries, and the value of determining the nature of ties between women. The thesis also argues that the relationships between intimacy and distance, interiority and exteriority, public and private, are frayed with complicated overlaps.

The carbon footprint metaphor has achieved a ubiquitous presence in Anglo-North American public contexts since the turn of the millennium, yet this metaphor remains under-examined as a crucial mediator of political responses to climate change. While the assumption is that this metaphor orients people toward mitigation efforts that address this urgent crisis, close attention to its many figurations suggests a complex range of possible orientations. Using a discursive analysis of instances of this metaphor in popular and public texts, and mobilizing an interdisciplinary array of literatures including theories of metaphor, political theories of affect, and cultural politics of climate change, this dissertation asks: “what are the promises and risks of the carbon footprint metaphor?” Given the histories that have shaped the appearance of climate change as a public matter of concern to be governed, the carbon footprint metaphor in many instances risks marketized approaches, such as offsets which allow business-as-usual trajectories of worsening carbon emissions. Yet, certain other instances of this metaphor promise to disturb such approaches. The promising disturbances to marketized and instrumental approaches through this metaphor emerge as a result of larger-than-human actors who come to challenge given accounts of the footprint. In these instances, the carbon footprint metaphor suggests that dominant anthropocentric responses to climate change are inherently flawed because they miss out on wider political ecologies. Here, the metaphor itself as a suspension to the representational logic of (human) language offers a key political opening to actors not yet accounted for. For those seriously interested in tackling the climate change issue, critical attention to the risky and promising attachments of carbon footprint metaphors marks a key intervention. / Graduate / agirvan@uvic.ca

Balettutbildning har varit auktoritär och elitistisk i århundraden. Med utgångspunkt i Agrippina Vaganova och hennes metodiska systematisering av balettundervisning diskuteras frågor om elit, lärande och tradition inom balettundervisning. Vaganova var en länk mellan tsartidens Ryssland och det nya Sovjet och bidrog aktivt till att balett som konstform, trots sin aristokratiska bakgrund, fördes vidare och blev en viktig kulturpolitiskt aktivitet i Sovjet. Med underlag i texter av Bourdieu och Said diskuteras elit, kulturellt kapital och elitutbildning för att förklara några av de politiska och samhällsmässiga mekanismer som bidragit till balettens unika position i Sovjet. För att placera Vaganova som pedagog i förhållande till balettundervisning och balett genom tiden, presenteras korta informativa kapitel om baletthistoria, och utveckling och spridning av Vaganovas metod, både i Sovjet/Ryssland och i andra länder.

Esta investigação tem como objetivo analisar os instrumentos textuais e imagéticos da coleção Cuadernos de Educación Popular, publicada entre os anos de 1971 e 1973 pela Editora Nacional Quimantú, de modo a discutir a relação dessa obra com o projeto de construção de um novo tipo de cultura política durante o governo da Unidade Popular (1970-1973). Escrita por Marta Harnecker e Gabriela Uribe, essa coleção, composta por 12 volumes, foi produto de um projeto político-cultural ambicioso e de um contexto marcado por grande efervescência e polarização político-ideológica, o que faz com que suas páginas carreguem as marcas das tensões existentes no período. Por meio da verificação atenta do conteúdo dessa publicação, objetivamos examinar o papel atribuído à coleção dentro do projeto político-cultural idealizado pelo governo de Salvador Allende e verificar seu potencial propagandístico por meio da análise das representações e estratégias didáticas nela presentes. Também intentamos discutir a posição veiculada pelas autoras a respeito dos debates e divergências que se colocavam à esquerda no tocante à via para se chegar ao socialismo e à política de alianças. Ao assumirmos as relações entre política e cultura no período da Unidade Popular como eixo fundamental de nossa investigação, apoiamo-nos nas reflexões e aportes teórico-metodológicos fornecidos pela História Política Renovada, vertente que advogou a ampliação conceitual do político e permitiu, assim, a incorporação de novas fontes e problemáticas (como as representações e propaganda políticas), além de um fértil diálogo do âmbito político com outras esferas da realidade social, como a cultura. / This research is dedicated to analyze the imagetical and textual tools developed by Marta Harnecker and Gabriela Uribe in the collection named Cuadernos de Educación Popular, published by Editora Nacional Quimantú between 1971 and 1973, under the government of Salvador Allende. The intention is to discuss the relation between this collection and the project that fought for the creation of a new kind of political culture in Chile during the Unidade Popular. This collection, constituted of 12 books, was produced by an ambitious political and cultural project and was created in a period marked by a huge political polarization and cultural effervescence, what makes its pages carry traces of the political conflicts that occurred on that period. By analyzing the content of this publication, we intend to understand the role of this collection in the political and cultural project idealized by Allendes government. Moreover, we fetch to show the propagandistic potential of the Cuadernos de Educación Popular through the verification of its representations and didactic strategies. We also debate the position defended by Harnecker and Uribe in this collection about the divergences that occurred between the left groups regarding the way of developing a socialist society in Chile and the ideal alliances to do it. To achieve these objectives, we used as reference the reflections and contributions produced by the New Political History, a methodological and theoretical perspective that allowed the incorporation of new sources and problematics and also defends the dialogues between political aspects and other social fields, like culture.