Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

L’idée d’un « spirituel républicain » est, en France, plus intuitivement sentie que rationnellement conçue. Si le syntagme dénote quelque densité conceptuelle, historiens et philosophes s’accordent d’ordinaire à la chercher dans les doctrines politiques et sociales de la IIIème République – celles du solidarisme, de la laïcité ou des lois sur l’éducation. Ce travail voudrait montrer que le spirituel républicain est irréductible à un supplément d’âme, comme à toute forme de caution morale destinée à pallier les derniers scrupules d’une politique désenchantée. En ce sens, sa généalogie demande à être singulièrement élargie à l’aval. Elle trouve son origine dans le sillage de la Révolution Française, où 1789 commande tout autant une interprétation politique qu’une reconfiguration anthropologique de la croyance. Le point commun des auteurs mobilisés ici (Joseph de Maistre, Auguste Comte, Jules Michelet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Émile Durkheim) est en effet d’assumer une position symétriquement opposée à la nôtre. Partant du principe que la question spirituelle est la seule qui n’ait pas été réglée, ils s’efforcent d’interroger le statut, problématique dans les démocraties modernes, d’un gouvernement des esprits. C’est donc en partant de ce qui, au sein de ce corpus, est réputé le plus anachronique – soit la rémanence du religieux au cœur d’un siècle censément scientifique – que la notion de spirituel républicain trouve à se constituer. Guettée par le risque d’un syncrétisme philanthropique inchoatif, comme par la confrontation à trois des idéologies majeures du XIXème siècle (traditionalisme, libéralisme, socialisme), cette tradition intellectuelle ne conserve son identité qu’en justifiant son qualificatif de républicain. / The idea of the spiritual as it relates to republicanism – the “republican spiritual” – is, in France, more intuitively felt than it is rationally conceived. While the phrase carries a certain conceptual density, historians and philosophers normally agree that this idea is to be sought in the political and social doctrines of the Third Republic – for example, in the doctrines of solidarity and secularism and in the laws on education. This work shows that the “republican spiritual” cannot be reduced to a touch of soul, or to any form of moral guarantee intended to overcome the last scrupules of a disenchanted politics. In this way, its genealogy needs to be particularly enlarged. It has its origin in the wake of the French Revolution, as the events of 1789 required both a political interpretation of belief as well as its anthropological reconfiguration. The common point among the authors studied here (Joseph de Maistre, Auguste Comte, Jules Michelet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Émile Durkheim) is that the position they took on this issue is diametrically opposed to ours today. These authors, starting from the standpoint that the spiritual question is the only one that has not been resolved, struggle to understand the status – problematic in modern democracy – of a spiritual regime. It is thus within the most anachronistic elements of the body of work studied here – that is, the endurance of the religious in a supposedly scientific century – that the notion of the “republican spiritual” finds its origin. At risk of a formless philanthropic syncretism, menaced by its confrontation with three of the main ideologies of the 19th century (traditionalism, liberalism, and socialism), this intellectual tradition only preserves its identity by justifying its qualification as republican.

abstract: Michel Tremblay, one of the most renowned and beloved Quebecois writers, began his literary career in the 1960s. He is well known for writing many of his works exclusively in the Quebec dialect of joual. The history of Quebec, from its beginnings as a permanent settlement of New France, to its subsequent takeover by the British after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, all were events that set the stage for the Quiet Revolution. The Quiet Revolution was a cultural, social and linguistic uprising set in motion by the French-speakers of Quebec who were tired of being dominated. Up until the 1960s, the majority of literary works produced in Quebec followed the classical French tradition. The desire in the 1960s to break free from the domination of the English language and culture as well as to be differentiated from the French from France brought with it a newfound nationalistic pride. From this point forward there was a push to create a distinct Quebecois literature. One way to differentiate the works of Quebec from those from France was to include characters and settings from within the Quebec society as well as to have those characters speak in their native dialect. Joual, a dialect version of the pronunciation of the French word cheval, meaning horse, was originally a rural dialect that eventually found its way to the inner city. For this reason, joual was most closely identified with the urban working-class of Montreal. This dialect was also perceived as the language of an uneducated, socially and economically inferior segment of the French-speaking Quebec society. By using joual in his literature, Tremblay was able to depict the social, cultural and economic effect that joual had on this element of Quebec's population. This thesis focuses on the impact of joual on this society through the study of two of Tremblay's plays: Les Belles-soeurs (1965), to show a women's perspective about a socially and economically inferior group, and Hosanna (1973), to show the perspective of homosexuals and transvestites, a socially prejudiced group. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. French 2012

Annotation Through the analysis of the alternation of the elites in the municipality of Studená and the after - February fates of two businessmen, I tried to describe the transformations of the small town in the course of the period of three republics and mainly during the high Stalinism. I substantiated, inter alia, the replacement of the small town elites by two examples of Jan Satrapa and Karel Bartušek whose fates appeared to be very applicable for this way approached case study. I also attempted to record the changes of the common cultural and ideological period trends within this municipality. Directed through the specific fates, I described the shape of the small town after February 25, 1948 and compared it with the specialised literature thereby I tried to place the case of Studená in the contemporary context. To acheive the needed results, I used the sources of personal data and the memory data (family and municipal chronicles), conversations with survivors, and likewise the books of Vlasta Javořická. They proved to be extremely valuable sources.

The Revolutionary Breath is praxis of conscious breathing and values awareness. I explore the transformative potential of this praxis through a method I call axio-somatic ethnography, which is an expansion of traditional autoethnography that de-centers identity and valorizes body-sensing as the foundation for authentic storytelling. The Revolutionary Breath is juxtaposed to the State Sponsored Breath, a constellation of physical and cultural habits and values. The Revolutionary Breath, itself, is composed of three Allowings, or conscious sensing practices, all framed within a commitment to the depth and ease of one’s breath. Throughout the dissertation, I use axio-somatic ethnography to present my own experiences of putting this praxis into use.

This project adopts the framework of World Systems Analysis [WSA], formulated by global sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, to take the entire world system as the unit of analysis. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, the seminal theorist of critical pedagogy, this project couples WSA with the analytic lens of public pedagogy to overcome the conceptual limitations of ideology and of various postmodern critiques. Primary media sources are used for purposes of critical political economy, to outline the contours of economic changes and class formations from the first world revolution. A detailed descriptive history of the revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848 recovers narratives from that critical juncture. I discuss prominent public pedagogies via analysis of primary print media sources like the London Times. Focusing on hegemonic shifts in the world system around 1848, I throw light on movement-media cracks in the British Empire, while also uncovering oft-ignored resistance, insurrections and utopian experiments in the Americas. Pedagogies of conspiracy theory and Manifest Destiny legitimated US aggression against Mexico as the former took initial steps toward becoming a world system superpower. Problems and pedagogies from 1848 are also updated and examined in light of the contemporary society-media context to consider cracks in the existing system and learn from the past new possible paths out of the world system’s terminal structural crisis.

While most scholars agree that revolution is linked to international confrontation and violence, we do not understand why some revolutions lead to long, drawn out conflicts while others are largely ignored. Part of the problem is due to improper methodology, which uses models that make independent and identically distributed assumptions and do not take the complex network of relations that states share into account. Using social network analysis, we devise a network theory of revolution and international conflict that incorporates the revolutionary state's status and relational ties within other states into the relationship between revolution and international conflict. We find that larger and more well-connected revolutionary states, particularly those integral to global alliance networks and possessing a larger share of global military capacity, are more likely to become involved in international conflict. We also find evidence of non-normality in conventional logit and poisson probability models, showing current methods of measurement of revolution and international conflict to be flawed.

249 pages / We are witnessing today the beginning of a return to and renewal of the theory and practice of political revolution. This return to revolution, however, takes none of the traditional forms: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat, or the leadership of the vanguard. Rather, given the failure of such tactics over the last century, coupled with the socio-economic changes brought by neoliberalism in the 1980s, revolutionary strategy has developed in a more heterogenous and non-representational direction. The aim of this dissertation is to map an outline of this new direction by drawing on the theory and practice of two of its main inspirations: French political philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and, what the New York Times has called “the first post-modern revolution,” the 1994 Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. The aim of this dissertation is thus threefold. First, I provide a philosophical clarification and outline of a revolutionary strategy that both describes and advances the process of constructing real alternatives to state-capitalism. Second, I focus on three influential and emblematic figures of revolutionary history, mutually disclosive of one another, as well as this larger revolutionary return: Deleuze, Guattari, and the Zapatistas. Third, and more specifically, I propose four novel theoretical practices that characterize this return to revolution: (1) a multi-centered diagnostic of political power; (2) a prefigurative theory of political transformation; (3) a participatory theory of the body politic; and (4) a theory of political belonging based on mutual global solidarity.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta dissertação em História Política da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), inserida na linha de pesquisa Política e Cultura é um estudo sobre a historiografia brasileira tendo como elemento central a contribuição teórica do militar do Exército Brasileiro e historiador Nelson Werneck Sodré, no tocante a modernidade (ou melhor, o desenvolvimento) no Brasil. A sua obra notabiliza-se pela necessidade de modificar as estruturas políticas, sociais e econômicas do país, construídas ao longo de sua formação histórica, marcado pelo alinhamento das classes dominantes com o centro hegemônico, a sua intensa relação com o mercado externo e o seu mutualismo com o capital internacional. Escreveu extensa obra teoricamente fundamentada no marxismo-leninista, no afã de superar as forças tradicionais, que em sua visão impediam o avanço do país na constituição de uma nação, dificultando uma política de industrialização independente, em contraposição a setores progressistas da sociedade brasileira. Através da concepção dialética, do choque entre os opostos, no caso, o novo e o velho, no qual o primeiro era a Revolução Brasileira e a sua antítese, o segundo, as forças da tradição: o latifúndio e o imperialismo. Em nossa pesquisa também focamos a crise da Revolução Brasileira, com a instauração da ditadura, após o golpe de 1964, que culminou com a derrota de um projeto de nação de toda uma geração. Por fim observamos o intenso debate político-historiográfico que a obra de Werneck Sodré foi submetida, além do seu posicionamento. / This dissertation in Political History of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), inserted in the line of research Politics and Culture is a study on the Brazilian history taking as a central theoretical contribution to the Brazilian Army and military historian Nelson Werneck Sodré, regarding modernity (or rather, development) in Brazil. His work is noted for the need to change the political, social and economic conditions of the country, built along its historical formation, marked by the alignment of the ruling classes with the hegemonic center, his intense relationship with foreign markets and their mutualistic with international capital. Wrote extensive works theoretically grounded in Marxism-Leninism, the desire to overcome the traditional forces, which in their view impeded the advancement of the country in the constitution of a nation, making a policy of industrialization independent, as opposed to progressive sectors of Brazilian society. Through the dialectic, the clash between opposites, in this case, the "new" and "old", in which the first was the "Brazilian Revolution" and its antithesis, the second, the forces of tradition: landlordism and imperialism. In our research we also focus the Brazilian crisis of the Revolution, with the establishment of the dictatorship after the 1964 coup, which culminated in the defeat of a national project of an entire generation. Finally observe the intense political debate that the historiographical work of Werneck Sodré was submitted, in addition to its positioning.

One of the most fashionable impressions about the legacies of French May ’68 lurking in our capitalist society nowadays is perhaps the view that this historic episode has greatly inspired a chain of sexual liberations and anti-authoritarian lifestyle revolts within the realm of modern Western cultures. However, without actually questioning the ideological implications behind this liberal-libertarian ethos, the above convenient historical verdict may still help perpetuate the predominant logic of late capitalism and the concurrent status quo. Historically speaking, during the heyday of the worldwide leftist insurrections of the 1960s, the events of ’68 were never simply an isolated First-World phenomenon. Deeply entangled with the empirical lessons of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, May 68 in France has radically invoked and manifested many profound social queries and contestations against both the capitalist universality and the emerging Soviet revisionist thinking for two decades. In this dissertation, my primary research focus is precisely to call into question, through the optics of their inherent “Chinese connections,” the dominant narratives about the movements of May ’68 as merely a smoothening agent of massive “cultural reforms” in the capitalist West, instead of a continuous response toward the Maoist egalitarian principles that keeps incessantly catalyzing genuine political transformations in the sphere of global communitarian and quotidian practices. By analyzing and rehistoricizing a variety of cultural texts that include travel writings, memoirs, novels and films in relation to the subversive spirits of ’68, this study aims to reopen their heavily forsaken sociopolitical significances in order to recast some of the truly alternative historical imaginations of this epoch. Unlike the predominant methodologies of historiography and intellectual histories which usually marginalize cinematic texts as largely “illegitimate” data for the serious investigations of the sixties, this thesis particularly emphasizes the extensive study and critical reexamination of many insufficiently discussed or widely misinterpreted filmic representations of “China” that were produced by a large group of Western filmmakers such as Bertolucci, Godard, Antonioni, Casabianca, Viénet, and Yanne, under the adoptions of different art forms and genres between the 1960s and the 2000s. While the overreliance on European cinematic representations of China may potentially risk becoming a blind repetition of many contemporary capitalist stereotypes about the Maoist influences in May ’68 at the expense of those greatly innovative and dialectical Sino-Western encounters during the same period, this thesis also seeks to cautiously retain and reinscribe the latent heterogeneous, antagonistic, and historical Chinese characters long pertaining to the ensemble of the so-called “French Theory” advanced by Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan, and others since 1968, so as to retrieve certain unrealized revolutionary potentialities of the latter beyond the reigning ideological confines of neoliberalism today. I argue that this seemingly “redundant” or “generic” gesture of constantly delinking the multiple creative novelties adhering to the aforementioned Western cultural representations of “China” from the unique intellectual innovations of ’68 is highly crucial here, insofar as such excessiveness of negativity and refusal may nonetheless offer us a chance to persistently (re)search for some even better forms of emancipatory possibilities to come.