Ashley Dawson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3595057 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ashley Dawson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ashley |
| FAMILY NAME | Dawson |
| SIGNATURE | DAWSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4613-7825 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 71 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Public Power Observatory
We are entering a period of abrupt and irreversible environmental change. Currently dominant assumptions about what is politically appropriate and realistic will be obliterated as vast masses of people find the conditions for their collective survival annihilated in coming decades. This article argues that it is imperative we deepen the debate about strategies to provoke revolutionary ruptures within the fossil-capitalist world system. We need vi…
The work of art in the age of extractivism
How do we win the fight against fossil capitalism? What role do cultural institutions such as museums have in this struggle? Is it possible to liberate powerful cultural institutions from their colonial histories and reactionary boards of trustees? This essay analyzes the recent work of two collectives that have fought to transform cultural institutions. The Natural History Museum has sought to infiltrate and commandeer museums of natural history…
Germinations
The idea of the Anthropocene has spread far beyond its origins in geology, becoming common in contemporary activist and intellectual circles. But who is responsible for the mounting disasters associated with the age of anthropos, and who should be made to pay reparations? What if the onset of the Anthropocene was tenaciously resisted in various different historical moments and parts of the planet? This issue recuperates the alternative worlds, or…
Urban Climate Insurgency
Urban climate insurgency refers to the ensemble of grassroots initiatives aiming to tackle climate change from a radical point of view. Insurgency in this case does not imply violence but rather refers to the radical rejection of the current socioecological system. While explicitly challenging planetary ecocide and climate-change effects, these forms of insurgency target all policies that make the urban condition yet more precarious, demonstratin…
Energy States
This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that ref…
Cities in Flux
From Singapore to New York, via New Delhi, Johannesburg, London, Glasgow and Buenos Aires, “Cities in Flux” registers some of the most profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities around the world. Narrated in different styles, the individual pieces draw on theories of global cities in neoliberal times as well as on the phenomenological truths of inhabiting these disparate places bound together by a global crisis. The pieces make use of a …
The right to stay and the right to move
In 2019, 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced (United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) 2020). This was not an anomalous year: the UNHCR calls the years from 2010 to 2019 “the deca
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Extinction: A Radical History
Ashley Dawson. New York, NY: O/R Books, 2016. 126 pp., photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $10.84 paper (ISBN 978-1-944869-01-4).Conceptualizing extinction is a messy process. Whoeve
Introduction to Focus: Apocalypse Now
Introduction to Focus: Apocalypse Now Ashley Dawson, Focus Editor (bio) It has become banal to observe that the world as we know it is coming to an end. A recent national poll found that twenty-two percent of Americans believe that they'll live to see the end of days. This should be no surprise given the extent to which contemporary U.S. culture is permeated by narratives of catastrophe and collapse. The obsession with apocalypse is shared across…
Biohazard
Contemporary modes of biopolitical manipulation and commodification entail a radically new political economy of nature, a wholesale shift from the laws of biological evolution and development that have subtended much of the temporal imagination of modernity. In place of the notions of gradual but progressive growth that characterized the industrial age, extreme, fractal changes increasingly characterize our biopolitical age. We live in an era of …
The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature
In The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature Ashley Dawson identifies the key British writers and texts, shaped by era-defining cultural and historical events and movements from the period. He provides: Analysis of works by a diverse range of influential authors Examination of the cultural and literary impact of crucial historical, social, political and cultural events Discussion of Britain’s imperial status in the cen…
The Social Media Reader
The first collection to address the collective transformation happening in response to the rise of social media With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transform…
Calypso Circuits: Trans-Atlantic Popular Culture and the Gendering of Black Nationalism
This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singe…
New World Disorder: Black Hawk Down and the Eclipse of U.S. Military Humanitarianism in Africa
This article argues that Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down (2001) may be seen with the benefit of historical hindsight as a portrait of the fear of imperial overreach and failure as written through the psyche of elite U.S. soldiers. In Black Hawk Down , Mogadishu and its denizens are made to stand in for the worst fears of the American military and the civilian policymaking establishment: the city, and, by extension, urban Africa, is represente…
Extract from a Report on the Origins of the Present Crisis
Extract from a Report on the Origins of the Present Crisis Ashley Dawson (bio) Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Culver City, Calif: TriStar Pictures, 2009. James Cameron’s Avatar, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, Hollywood, Calif: Universal Pictures, 2006. Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, Hollywood, Calif: Paramount, 2006. Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., Los Angeles: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2008. J…
Introduction: New Enclosures
But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England. 'What is that?' said the Cardinal: The increase of pasture, said I, by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there …
Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement against Green Capitalism
As the severity of the unfolding global climate crisis has become increasingly apparent over the last decade, a movement for climate justice has emerged to challenge unsustainable environmental policies pursued in the United States and around the world. The U.S. wing of this movement builds on the environmental justice movement and its challenges to mainstream environmental organizations around a civil rights agenda of ecological equity for all. …
Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement
Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement Ashley Dawson (bio) The full implication of the identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were not safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of the nation-state. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Much of what is classifi…
Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice
Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice draws on the fields of geography, political theory, and cultural studies to analyze experiments with novel forms of democracy, highlighting the critical issue of the changing nature of the state and citizenship in the contemporary political landscape as they are buffeted by countervailing forces of corporate globalization and participatory politics. Using interesting case studies, the book ex…
The rise of the Black Internationale: Anti-imperialist activism and aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s
This article explores the radical ferment associated with the cadre of anti-imperialist activists through the lens of films made by Paul Robeson during his sojourn in Britain in the 1930s. The collective biography of the activist intellectuals with whom Robeson affiliated himself while in Britain may be said to track the rise of an exemplary Black Internationale, a loosely organized but nonetheless coherent revolutionary project linking anti-fasc…
Surplus City: Structural Adjustment, Self-Fashioning, and Urban Insurrection in Chris Abani'sGraceland
Postcolonial scholars have been slow to address issues relating to urban space and society. This essay argues for new forms of critical engagement with questions of urbanism and citizenship on a global scale. Postcolonial narratives of urbanization, I argue, represent important sites for exploring tensions between elite and popular visions of the city and of development. Moreover, narratives of formation or bildung in the city such as the one tha…
Environment
Social Text contributors have approached the environmental crises of the last several decades by exploring the constitution of a second nature. If, that is, the environment furnishes particular societies with a specific set of obstacles and possibilities, this original natural realm is reshaped and transformed through human agency. A hallmark of Social Text's theorization of the environment could be said to be critical inquiry into the modes thro…
Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism
Exceptional State analyzes the nexus of culture and contemporary manifestations of U.S. imperialism. The contributors, established and emerging cultural studies scholars, define culture broadly to include a range of media, literature, and political discourse. They do not posit September 11, 2001 as the beginning of U.S. belligerence and authoritarianism at home and abroad, but they do provide context for understanding U.S. responses to and uses o…
Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot: Whose gend'ring Offspring quickly learned to bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough: From whence a Mongrel Half-Bred Race there came, With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame.In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran, Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.While their Rank Daught…
Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot: Whose gend'ring Offspring quickly learned to bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough: From whence a Mongrel Half-Bred Race there came, With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame.In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran, Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.While their Rank Daught…
Extinction: A Radical History
Ashley Dawson. New York, NY: O/R Books, 2016. 126 pp., photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $10.84 paper (ISBN 978-1-944869-01-4).Conceptualizing extinction is a messy process. Whoeve
Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement against Green Capitalism
As the severity of the unfolding global climate crisis has become increasingly apparent over the last decade, a movement for climate justice has emerged to challenge unsustainable environmental policies pursued in the United States and around the world. The U.S. wing of this movement builds on the environmental justice movement and its challenges to mainstream environmental organizations around a civil rights agenda of ecological equity for all. …
This is the Digital Underclass: Asian Dub Foundation and Hip-Hop Cosmopolitanism
After being eclipsed for years by binary black-white definitions of racial difference, Asians have become an increasingly visible and self-assertive part of Britain's vibrant cultural scene over the past decade. From television comedy to movies like East is East , cultural production by second-generation Asians has become a central element in definitions of British identity. Nowhere is this more true than in music, where deejays like Talvin Singh…
Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City
Research Article| December 01 2004 Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2004) 22 (4 (81)): 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-4_81-17 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite…
Bollywood Flashback’: Hindi film music and the negotiation of identity among British‐Asian youths
The songs that punctuate Hindi films and give them much of their remarkable international appeal are particularly significant sites in the cinema's attempt to deal with challenges to traditional structures of authority. Focusing on spectacular moments of non‐narrative – and often explicitly erotic – pleasure, such songs proffer utopian scenarios within which the tensions raised by the narratives of kinship in crisis that dominate Hindi film are e…
Surplus City: Structural Adjustment, Self-Fashioning, and Urban Insurrection in Chris Abani'sGraceland
Postcolonial scholars have been slow to address issues relating to urban space and society. This essay argues for new forms of critical engagement with questions of urbanism and citizenship on a global scale. Postcolonial narratives of urbanization, I argue, represent important sites for exploring tensions between elite and popular visions of the city and of development. Moreover, narratives of formation or bildung in the city such as the one tha…
Biohazard
Contemporary modes of biopolitical manipulation and commodification entail a radically new political economy of nature, a wholesale shift from the laws of biological evolution and development that have subtended much of the temporal imagination of modernity. In place of the notions of gradual but progressive growth that characterized the industrial age, extreme, fractal changes increasingly characterize our biopolitical age. We live in an era of …
New World Disorder: Black Hawk Down and the Eclipse of U.S. Military Humanitarianism in Africa
This article argues that Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down (2001) may be seen with the benefit of historical hindsight as a portrait of the fear of imperial overreach and failure as written through the psyche of elite U.S. soldiers. In Black Hawk Down , Mogadishu and its denizens are made to stand in for the worst fears of the American military and the civilian policymaking establishment: the city, and, by extension, urban Africa, is represente…
Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement
Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement Ashley Dawson (bio) The full implication of the identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were not safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of the nation-state. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Much of what is classifi…
The rise of the Black Internationale: Anti-imperialist activism and aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s
This article explores the radical ferment associated with the cadre of anti-imperialist activists through the lens of films made by Paul Robeson during his sojourn in Britain in the 1930s. The collective biography of the activist intellectuals with whom Robeson affiliated himself while in Britain may be said to track the rise of an exemplary Black Internationale, a loosely organized but nonetheless coherent revolutionary project linking anti-fasc…
Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival in Britain
Research Article| October 01 2006 Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival in Britain Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2006) 10 (3): 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1215/-10-3-54 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Ashley Dawson; Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival …
Energy States
This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that ref…
Combat in Hell
Research Article| June 01 2007 Combat in Hell: CITIES AS THE ACHILLES' HEEL OF U.S. IMPERIAL HEGEMONY Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2007) 25 (2 (91)): 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ashley Dawson; Combat in Hell: CITIES AS THE ACHILLES' HEEL OF U.S. IMPERIAL HEGEMONY. Social Text 1 June…
To remember too much is indeed a form of madness: Caryl Phillips's the nature of blood and the modalities of European racism
At first thought it may seem strange that the anti‐Semite's outlook should be related to that of the Negro‐phobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to
Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and the Dual Society in Keith Piper's Relocating the Remains
Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and the Dual Society in Keith Piper’s Relocating the Remains Ashley Dawson This past July, the Tampa, Florida Police Department introduced a computerized surveillance system to augment its efforts to monitor the streets of a downtown business and entertainment district for potential miscreants.1 The system, built by Visionics Corporation of New Jersey and offered free to municipalities for a year, consists of a n…
Crossing “The Line”: A Case Study in South African Media Practice and Democratization
This is the Digital Underclass: Asian Dub Foundation and Hip-Hop Cosmopolitanism
After being eclipsed for years by binary black-white definitions of racial difference, Asians have become an increasingly visible and self-assertive part of Britain's vibrant cultural scene over the past decade. From television comedy to movies like East is East , cultural production by second-generation Asians has become a central element in definitions of British identity. Nowhere is this more true than in music, where deejays like Talvin Singh…
The Short Century: Postcolonial Africa and the Politics of Representation
To remember too much is indeed a form of madness: Caryl Phillips's the nature of blood and the modalities of European racism
At first thought it may seem strange that the anti‐Semite's outlook should be related to that of the Negro‐phobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to
Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City
Research Article| December 01 2004 Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2004) 22 (4 (81)): 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-4_81-17 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite…
"Love Music, Hate Racism": The Cultural Politics of the Rock Against Racism Campaigns
Love Music, Hate Racism": The Cultural Politics of the Rock Against Racism Campaigns, 1976–1981 Ashley Dawson (bio) Abstract During the mid- to late 1970s, Britain endured an upsurge of neo-fascist organizing and racial attacks. In response, a strong anti-racist movement grew up among Britain's ethnic minority communities, leading to radical new forms of organizing. Nascent British youth subcultures of the period such as punk were sucked into the…
Bollywood Flashback’: Hindi film music and the negotiation of identity among British‐Asian youths
The songs that punctuate Hindi films and give them much of their remarkable international appeal are particularly significant sites in the cinema's attempt to deal with challenges to traditional structures of authority. Focusing on spectacular moments of non‐narrative – and often explicitly erotic – pleasure, such songs proffer utopian scenarios within which the tensions raised by the narratives of kinship in crisis that dominate Hindi film are e…
Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival in Britain
Research Article| October 01 2006 Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival in Britain Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2006) 10 (3): 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1215/-10-3-54 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Ashley Dawson; Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dub Poetry and the Political Aesthetics of Carnival …
Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism
Exceptional State analyzes the nexus of culture and contemporary manifestations of U.S. imperialism. The contributors, established and emerging cultural studies scholars, define culture broadly to include a range of media, literature, and political discourse. They do not posit September 11, 2001 as the beginning of U.S. belligerence and authoritarianism at home and abroad, but they do provide context for understanding U.S. responses to and uses o…
Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot: Whose gend'ring Offspring quickly learned to bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough: From whence a Mongrel Half-Bred Race there came, With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame.In whose hot Veins new Mixtures quickly ran, Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.While their Rank Daught…
Combat in Hell
Research Article| June 01 2007 Combat in Hell: CITIES AS THE ACHILLES' HEEL OF U.S. IMPERIAL HEGEMONY Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2007) 25 (2 (91)): 169–180. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ashley Dawson; Combat in Hell: CITIES AS THE ACHILLES' HEEL OF U.S. IMPERIAL HEGEMONY. Social Text 1 June…
The Crisis at Columbia
Research Article| March 01 2007 The Crisis at Columbia: ACADEMIC FREEDOM, AREA STUDIES, AND CONTINGENT LABOR IN THE CONTEMPORARY ACADEMY Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2007) 25 (1 (90)): 63–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ashley Dawson; The Crisis at Columbia: ACADEMIC FREEDOM, AREA STUDIES, A…
Academic Labor at the Crossroads
Research Article| March 01 2007 Academic Labor at the Crossroads?: AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW ROSS Malini Johar Schueller; Malini Johar Schueller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ashley Dawson Ashley Dawson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2007) 25 (1 (90)): 117–132. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-2006-020 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mali…
Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice
Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice draws on the fields of geography, political theory, and cultural studies to analyze experiments with novel forms of democracy, highlighting the critical issue of the changing nature of the state and citizenship in the contemporary political landscape as they are buffeted by countervailing forces of corporate globalization and participatory politics. Using interesting case studies, the book ex…
The rise of the Black Internationale: Anti-imperialist activism and aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s
This article explores the radical ferment associated with the cadre of anti-imperialist activists through the lens of films made by Paul Robeson during his sojourn in Britain in the 1930s. The collective biography of the activist intellectuals with whom Robeson affiliated himself while in Britain may be said to track the rise of an exemplary Black Internationale, a loosely organized but nonetheless coherent revolutionary project linking anti-fasc…
Surplus City: Structural Adjustment, Self-Fashioning, and Urban Insurrection in Chris Abani'sGraceland
Postcolonial scholars have been slow to address issues relating to urban space and society. This essay argues for new forms of critical engagement with questions of urbanism and citizenship on a global scale. Postcolonial narratives of urbanization, I argue, represent important sites for exploring tensions between elite and popular visions of the city and of development. Moreover, narratives of formation or bildung in the city such as the one tha…
Environment
Social Text contributors have approached the environmental crises of the last several decades by exploring the constitution of a second nature. If, that is, the environment furnishes particular societies with a specific set of obstacles and possibilities, this original natural realm is reshaped and transformed through human agency. A hallmark of Social Text's theorization of the environment could be said to be critical inquiry into the modes thro…
Introduction: New Enclosures
But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England. 'What is that?' said the Cardinal: The increase of pasture, said I, by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there …
Climate Justice: The Emerging Movement against Green Capitalism
As the severity of the unfolding global climate crisis has become increasingly apparent over the last decade, a movement for climate justice has emerged to challenge unsustainable environmental policies pursued in the United States and around the world. The U.S. wing of this movement builds on the environmental justice movement and its challenges to mainstream environmental organizations around a civil rights agenda of ecological equity for all. …
Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement
Cargo Culture: Literature in an Age of Mass Displacement Ashley Dawson (bio) The full implication of the identification of the rights of man with the rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were not safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of the nation-state. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Much of what is classifi…
Calypso Circuits: Trans-Atlantic Popular Culture and the Gendering of Black Nationalism
This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singe…
New World Disorder: Black Hawk Down and the Eclipse of U.S. Military Humanitarianism in Africa
This article argues that Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down (2001) may be seen with the benefit of historical hindsight as a portrait of the fear of imperial overreach and failure as written through the psyche of elite U.S. soldiers. In Black Hawk Down , Mogadishu and its denizens are made to stand in for the worst fears of the American military and the civilian policymaking establishment: the city, and, by extension, urban Africa, is represente…
Extract from a Report on the Origins of the Present Crisis
Extract from a Report on the Origins of the Present Crisis Ashley Dawson (bio) Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Culver City, Calif: TriStar Pictures, 2009. James Cameron’s Avatar, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2009. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, Hollywood, Calif: Universal Pictures, 2006. Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, Hollywood, Calif: Paramount, 2006. Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., Los Angeles: Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2008. J…
The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature
In The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature Ashley Dawson identifies the key British writers and texts, shaped by era-defining cultural and historical events and movements from the period. He provides: Analysis of works by a diverse range of influential authors Examination of the cultural and literary impact of crucial historical, social, political and cultural events Discussion of Britain’s imperial status in the cen…
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Law (24 works) · History (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · History (10 works) · Aesthetics (8 works)