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eleanoragrayalien · 2 months

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This Playlist Kills Fascists

This is a playlist I made of music written for historical anti-fascist movements, music that is symbolic of anti-fascist movements, and music that showcases anti-fascist values and ideas. I made this and am posting it here as part of the final project for one of my classes this quarter. The playlist is 21 minutes long and contains folk, punk, and rap in several languages.

Under the cut is an annotated track list, and some additional context for the playlist. If you decide to read it please let me know what you thought!

Fascism is a complex right-wing ideology that can’t be explained without a lot of nuance. Roger Griffin‘s “palingenetic ultranationalism“ and Umberto Eco‘s Ur-Fascismare are two frequently cited explanations. Regardless, fascistic societies are always highly oppressive, unstable, and bigoted.

Anti-fascism is the belief that the formation of a fascist society should be opposed at all costs. Most anti-fascists are leftists, and may be involved in a wide variety of other social movements.

-1 Modena City Ramblers “Fischia Il Vento” (2015)

Starting off the playlist is “Fischia Il Vento” (The Wind Blows), an Italian anti-fascist resistance song originally written in 1944 (I chose to use the Modena City Ramblers version, it’s a bop). I chose to play this song first because Italian resistance to Mussolini was the first organized anti-fascist movement (1920s). These partisans were largely communists and anarchists.

to conquer the red spring where rises the sun of the future

The lyrics use “the conquering of the red spring” as a metaphor for establishing a communist society, which directly opposes the aims of fascists. This is why leftists are the most opposed to fascists taking power.

-2 Frente Popular “A las Barricadas” (1936)

“A las Barricadas” (To the Barricades), was a song popular among National Confederation of Labor (CNT) members during the Spanish civil war.

Though pain and death may await us, Against the enemy by duty we are called.

“A las Barricadas” shows the way anti-fascists oppose fascism at all costs, even if it means percinal harm. “Fischia Il Vento“ also mirors this sentiment.

-3 Los Pinochet Boys “La Música del General” (1984)

Los Pinochet Boy’s story is exhilarating. They were a clandestine punk rock band that formed during Pinochet’s fascist dictatorship of Chile. Every show they played was a revolutionary act that would end in a police raid. “La Música del General” is one of the two surviving recordings of the band’s music and shows the need for expression under oppression. (Naomi Larsson Piñeda. “A fascist tried to electrocute us on stage” 2023)

Musical Dictatorship Nobody can stop dancing The music of the general The music of the general

-4 National Wake “International News” (2013) [The original release is from 1979]

National Wake was the only multi racial punk band in apartheid South Africa. Like Los Pinochet Boys, their music was illegal to make. Under apartheid white and black South Africans were not allowed to live and work together. “International News” showcases the way international (American, and British) media failed to adequately cover the violent response to the Soweto uprising, where student’s protesting the forced use of Afrikaans in schools were met with extreme violence from the police. (Alexis Petridis “National Wake: the South African punk band who defied apartheid” 2013)

'put a blanket over Soweto They put a blanket, nowhere to go, no They put a blanket over the news They put a blanket, nothing to choose

-5 Killah P “I won’t cry, I won’t fear” (2012)

Pavlos Fyssas, who went by the stage name Killah P (killer of the past) was a Greek anti-fascist rapper. In 2013 he was murdered by a group of Golden Dawn members (the Golden Dawn is a fascist Greek political party). His death sparked a weeks long protest in Athens that garnered 10,000 people and put pressure on the Greek parliament to investigate the Golden Dawn as a criminal organization. Pavlos is remembered as a martyr, and his music remains a symbol of anti-fascism in Greece. (Patrick Strickland. “Greece mourns slain anti-fascist...” 2017)

-6 Dead Kennedys “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!” (1981)

I would be remiss not to include this song. The early punk scene had a Nazi problem. Some punks wore fascist symbols for the sake of offending people, fascists came to shows not realizing the music was mocking them, and Neo-Nazi gangs would violently disrupt shows. (Steve Knopper. “Nazi Punks F**k Off... “ 2018) Making it clear to fascists that they are unwelcome, and that there are consequences if they don’t stop being a fascist is a tactic effectively used by groups like Anti Racist Action. (Mark Bray. Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook 2017)

-7 Rainbow Coalition Death Cult “Blue MAGA” (2022)

“Blue MAGA” begins with a sample from Leroi Jones’s “Young Spirit House Movers and Players”.

WHAT HAS AMERICA DONE FOR ME? NOTHING BUT MADE ME A ZOMBIE!

The use of the word zombie (think Haitian Vodou, not The Living Dead) aligns perfectly with how Iris Young describes powerlessness in “Five Faces of Oppression” as an “inhibition to develop one’s capacities, lack of decision making power, and exposure to disrespectful treatment because of the lowered status”. RCDC then compares this social powerlessness to political powerlessness.

"Pipe down and tow the line, you got no room to whine Censor those who don't comply, we're the best that you got." Some say they'll put up a fight, they really don't have the spine Just an image they hide behind, to make you feel like we won

They then end the song

The truth is they're all full of shit

Suggesting that the status quo isn’t the best that we can get, and that action can be taken to make our lives better.

-8 G.L.O.S.S. “Give Violence A Chance” (2016)

Despite the majority of antifa activism being nonviolent, anti-fascists take a systemic view of violent self defense and act on it accordingly.

KILLER COPS AREN'T CROOKED SOLDIERS FOR BASTARDS, THEY DO AS THEY'RE TOLD THE COURTS AREN'T CORRUPT MALICIOUS, VIOLENT, THEY MAINTAIN CONTROL

Even when the cops kill and the courts falsely convict it’s not seen as violence because they have the approval of the state to do that violence. The same would apply to borders, and immigration bans which can only be enforced with a threat of violence that an anti-fascist would say justifies self defense, violent or otherwise. (Philosophy Tube "The Philosophy of Antifa" 2017)

-9 Noname “Song 33″ (2020)

I struggled to find a single song that could symbolize my thoughts on the protests following George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police. For many people in my generation 2020 was an awakening. Even if you were aware of the racism inherent to policing and America broadly (if you were white) it might not have seemed as totalising, and urgent as it is. Song 33 embodies this feeling. Noname asks

He really 'bout to write about me when the world is in smokes? When it's people in trees? When George was beggin' for his mother, saying he couldn't breathe You thought to write about me?

and

Distracting from the convo with organizers They talkin' abolishin' the police And this the new world order We democratizin' Amazon, we burn down borders

Textually, She’s asking rapper J. Cole why he wrote a rap about her tone when he could be rapping about what matters. Subtextually, she is asking the listener the same question.

She also highlights the intersectional solidarity of the anti-fascist movement, drawing parallels between BLM’s goal of abolishing the police, labor rights, and abolishing borders.

-10 Woody Guthrie “All You Fascists Bound To Lose“ (1942)

Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger were both well known anti-fascist musicians in America during their lives. Both of them made anti-nazi music durring the war and continued to make music that espoused anti-fascist values afterward. Guthrie’s iconic “This Machine Kills Fascists” sticker is still a common anti-fascist slogan.

I wanted to end on this song because of how hopeful it is.

The people in this world Are getting organized You’re bound to lose You fascists bound to lose

Fascism is bound to loose in the end. But only because people are fighting back against it, organizing, and standing in solidarity with one another.

Thank you for reading this, I hope you got something out of it.

#it's 9am #i hope this is coherent #good night #punk #dead kennedys #folk music #g.l.o.s.s.#gloss #woody guthrie #pete seeger #anti facist #antifascism

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archiveavk · 4 years

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“Pavlo, you won”/ “Pavlo, tu as gagné” (Description in English) Golden Dawn (gr: “Χρυσή Αυγή”) is a neo-Nazi party -a former member of the Greek and Europe Parliament- which was founded on the first years of the Greek 3rd Democracy from the neo-fascist branch of the reminiscing collaborators of the Greek Military Dictatorship, 1967-1974. Although throughout the 80s and the 90s Golden Dawn was at the fringe of the Greek political spectrum, it was underground supported by the Greek state, operating under the protection of the security services, acting, at times, as a subserving force to its counter-insurgency operations and conducted attacks against anarchists, leftists, and immigrant workers from the Balkan peninsula. In the late ’00s, Golden Dawn gains leverage from the Greek Debt Crisis and the austerity programs imposed by the EU, ECB, and IMF, appealing to the sentiments of frustration and insecurity of the more «retrogressive» strata’s and exploiting to the maximum the, rather, positive stance of the Greek mainstream media towards them, who depicted them as a “cult” group who were “escorting the grandmother to the ATM’s to withdraw safely their pensions”. As a result, Golden Dawn, (preceded by a “surprising” success in the Athens municipal, during the 2010’s Greek local election’s), entered in the Greek Parliament in 2012 and made the use of publicity, state’s subventions, and parliamentary immunity, strengthen the ties with the Greek state’s security apparatus, opened offices all over Greece and formed “raid battalions” which conducted numerous violent assault’s against democrats, antifascists, leftists, immigrants, and refugees, during 2010-2013, which lead to the assassination of the Pakistani 27-year-old migrant worker, Sahzat Luqman, in January 2013, in Petralona, Athens and the 34-year-old rap musician and anti-fascist activist, Pavlos Fyssas, in September 2013 at Keratsini, Peiraeus. The public outcry that followed the murder of Pavlos Fyssas and the mass protests that took place, forced the Greek Government to launch a crackdown on Golden Dawn’s leadership, charging them with managing a criminal organization. The trial of the Golden Dawn lasted 7 years. All of that time, the greek antifascist movement mobilize for the conviction of the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn, with Magda Fyssa, the mother of Pavlos, playing a major role in the process of social de-legitimation of the fascists, due to her dignity, commitment, and combativeness for delivering justice for Pavlos and all the other’s victims of the Golden Dawn’s action. However, in 2019 the prosecutor’s proposal on the trial of the Nazi-criminal organization to acquit the leadership and its cadres of the serious crimes they are accused of reinforced the movements and spurred in dozens of rallies and teach-ins all over Greece, under the campaign “They are not innocent”, which conclude in a mass gathering outside of the court, in 7. 10. 2020 where the verdict for the Golden Dawn was delivered, ruled that the neo-Nazi party is a criminal organization in disguise and the actual and former leadership and the cadre of the party are guilty of managing and belonging to a criminal organization. Celebrating this historical verdict and commemorating Pavlos Fyssas and the major contribution of the Greek antifascist movement for the condemnation, not only in the courts but also at a society level, of the neo-Nazis of the Golden Dawn, we made this street-bomb in a central highway of Athens, declaring “Pavlo, you won”! ————————————————————————————— (Description en Francais) Aube Dorée (gr: “Χρυσή Αυγή”) est un parti néonaziste - ancien membre du Parlement grec et européen - qui a été fondé sur les premières années de la 3ème Démocratie grecque à partir de la branche néofasciste des collaborateurs de la Dictature militaire grecque 1967-1974. Même si, tout au long des années 80 et 90, Aube Dorée était à la frange du spectre politique grec, elle était soutenue dans la clandestinité par l'État grec, opérant sous la protection des services de sécurité, agissant parfois comme une force de réserve pour ses opérations anti-insurrectionnelles et menant des attaques contre les anarchistes, les gauchistes et les travailleurs immigrés de la péninsule des Balkans.

À la fin des années 2000, Aube Dorée tire profit de la crise de la dette grecque et des programmes d'austérité imposés par l'UE, la BCE et le FMI, en faisant appel aux sentiments de frustration et d'insécurité des couches les plus “rétrogrades” et en exploitant au maximum l'attitude plutôt positive des médias grecs à leur égard, qui les dépeignaient comme un groupe “culte” qui “escortait la grand-mère aux distributeurs automatiques de billets pour retirer en toute sécurité leurs pensions”. En conséquence, Aube Dorée, (précédé par un succès “surprenant” dans la municipalité d'Athènes, lors des élections locales grecques de 2010), est entré au Parlement grec en 2012 et a fait usage de la publicité, des subventions de l'État et de l'immunité parlementaire pour renforcer les liens avec l'appareil de sécurité de l'État grec, a ouvert des bureaux dans toute la Grèce et a formé des “bataillons de raid” qui ont mené de nombreuses attaques violentes contre les démocrates, les antifascistes, les gauchistes, les immigrants et les réfugiés, entre 2010 et 2013, qui ont conduit à l'assassinat du travailleur migrant pakistanais de 27 ans, Sahzat Luqman, en janvier 2013, à Petralona, Athènes, et du musicien de rap et militant antifasciste de 34 ans, Pavlos Fyssas, en septembre 2013 à Keratsini, Peiraeus. Le tollé public qui a suivi le meurtre de Pavlos Fyssas et les protestations de masse qui ont eu lieu, ont forcé le gouvernement grec à lancer une campagne de répression contre les dirigeants de Golden Dawn, en les accusant de gérer une organisation criminelle. Le procès de la Golden Dawn a duré 7 ans. Pendant tout ce temps, le mouvement antifasciste grec s'est mobilisé pour la condamnation des néo-nazistes de la Golden Dawn, avec Magda Fyssa, la mère de Pavlos, qui a joué un rôle majeur dans le processus de délégitimation sociale des fascistes, en raison de sa dignité, de son engagement et de sa combativité pour rendre justice à Pavlos et à toutes les autres victimes de l'action de la Golden Dawn. Cependant, en 2019, la proposition du procureur relative au procès de l'organisation criminelle nazie d'acquitter la direction et ses cadres des crimes graves dont ils sont accusés a renforcé les mouvements et a donné lieu à des dizaines de rassemblements et de séminaires dans toute la Grèce, dans le cadre de la campagne “Ils ne sont pas innocents”, qui se sont terminés par un rassemblement de masse devant le tribunal, en 7. 10. 2020, où le verdict de la Golden Dawn a été rendu, a statué que le parti néonaziste est une organisation criminelle déguisée et que les dirigeants et cadres actuels et anciens du parti sont coupables de gérer une organisation criminelle et d'en faire partie. En célébrant ce verdict historique et en commémorant Pavlos Fyssas et le rôle majeur du mouvement antifasciste grec dans la condamnation, non seulement devant les tribunaux mais aussi au niveau de la société, des néonazis de la Aube Dorée, nous avons fabriqué cette bombe de rue dans une autoroute centrale d'Athènes, en déclarant “Pavlo, tu as gagné” !

#killah p #pavlos fyssas #golden dawn trial #antifascism #smashfascism #antifa_greece #athensgreece #streetbombing #greecegraffiti #graffiti #goldendawn

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katiewattsart · 4 years

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25/03/20 : A RECAP

- Who Watches the Watchmen? - Power, Discourse, The Other

- Ever Tried. Ever Failed - Failure, Resilience, Sustainability

- Teddy Boys and Haul Girls - Subcultures, Resistance, Commodification

- Utopia and Dystopia - world-building, social justice

- Nothing is original and that’s ok - The Copy, Remix Cultures, Bricolage

- Hauntology and Nostalgia - Political Nostalgia, Subversion,

- Telling Stories - Narrative Theory, Narratives in practice, storytelling

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Power

Theorists Include:

Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey,

John Berger

Moral Panic

The Panopticon

Surveillance

Feminism

Sex/Gender

The Gaze

The Power of Looking

“Looking involves learning to interpret and, like other practices, looking involves relationships of power....

To be made to look, to try to get someone to look at you or at something you want to be noticed, or to engage in an exchange of looks, involves a play of power.”

Sturken, M. Cartwright, L. (2004) Practices of Looking

The Panopticon

Designed by British Jurist and social reformer Jeremy Bentham in 1791, as an architectural system of control and surveillance.

Used by Foucault to analyse systems of power, and the self-regulating society.

Section and plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary, drawn by Willey Reveley, 1791

- Power is reinforced through language

- Bodies act under strict constraints of power exercised by institutions

- The Power of Subversion

- Gender is a social construct and is performative

- The structure of power is Patriarchal

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Drawing Power: How depictions of superheros have changed in the Marvel Universe from the 1960s to the present day

A post-structural analysis of Power and Illustration in the graphic novels of Frank Miller

Power Play: A history of Alan Moore mocking authority

Imbalance of power: Becoming Unbecoming and readdressing female histories

Chintz and power: Jim Shaw’s anti-fascist wallpapers

Political cartoons and the British Establishment, from William Hogarth to Steve Bell

Ever Tried. Ever Failed.

Trying and failing as art

Experimentation

Sustainability

Social Justice

Capitalism

The Process

Resilience

Artists Include: Beckett, Smithson, Ono, Signer, Banksy, Wei wei

failure:

1. Lack of success.

2. The neglect or omission of expected or required action.

3. The action or state of not functioning.

Oxford living dictionaries

Guerilla Design

Chapitre Zero (2013)

Furniture designers Duccio Maria Gambi/Mattia Paco

Salvages wooden pallets, unwanted furniture, and assorted pieces of wood

Create urban public furniture to create ‘social spaces’ in Paris.

Sustaining Culture?

Justin Gignac, New York City Garbage (2001)

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Tru Try and Try again: why those who keep going get the most done

From one to many: how Greta Thunberg’s perseverance made a difference in a world of indifference

Resilience and Sustainability are the tools we need for surviving the future

We Make Our Luck: the aggregation of Marginal Gains

Say Nothing, Do Nothing, Be Nothing: the purpose of the Crit in Art and Design

Teddy Boys and Haul Girls: Subcultures

Subcultures

Subversion

Bricolage

Youth Culture

Dominant/Deviant culture

Conspicuous Consumption

Punk

Culture Jamming

Utopia/Dystopia

Theorists/ Artists Include: Hebdige, Williams, Leckey, Banksy, Warhol, Adbusters

Dominant culture: a dominant culture is one that is able, through economic or political power, to impose its values, language, and ways of behaving on a subordinate culture or cultures. This may be achieved through legal or political suppression of other sets of values and patterns of behaviour, or by monopolizing the media of communication.

Dominant culture. A Dictionary of Sociology. . Encyclopedia.com.

ubculture: Subcultures are smaller groups within the larger culture that have slightly different—or additional—traditions and ideas. They tend to share much in common with the larger culture and typically interact with members of the majority on a regular basis. Most people belong to at least one group that can be classified as a subculture.

Feminist Critique:

The role of women/girls is largely ignored.

The experience of youth is gendered.

Wider gender politics can be investigated through the study of youth subcultures.

This is England (2007) Shane meadows:

youtube

Haul Girls

“In fact, the closest thing to the old model of a subculture I've come across is Helina and the haul girls. Their videos are about conspicuous consumption: a public display of their good taste, carefully assembled with precise attention to detail. When you put it like that – and at the risk of incurring a fatwah from middle-aged Paul Weller fans – they sound remarkably like mods.”

-Alexis Petridis

Conspicuous Consumption:

..is a term introduced by the Norwegian-American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his book "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899). The term refers to consumers who buy expensive items to display wealth and income rather than to cover the real needs of the consumer.

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Cosplay and the Carnival: Counter culture as the World Turned Upside Down

Representations of Subculture in Film, Theatre and Costume/Illustration

England’s Dreaming: Punk as a critique of Thatcherism and the rise the Me Generation

Dressing/Drawing Working Class Subcultures from 1950 to 2000: An Artifact

This Is England: From Skins to The Inbetweeners, a cultural reading of England’s youth culture

Art & Artifice: a discussion of representations of young people and material culture from Annie Swynnerton to Andy Warhol

Utopia and Dystopia

World-Building

Social Justice

Critiques of culture

Art and Crisis

Transformative design

Theorists include: Thomas Moore, Philip K. Dick, Ernst Bloch..

Sir Thomas More 1477-1535

- First person to write about Utopia - a perfect imaginary world

- Greek - Ou-topos - No place, or Nowhere

- Eu-topos- A good place

Can a perfect place ever be realised?

Utopia means nowhere or no place. It has often been taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy. As a result of this mix up, another word, dystopia, has been invented, to mean bad place. But, strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres.

- John Carey

The Garden of Earthly Pleasures -Hieronymus Bosch circa 1490-1510

UTOPIAS IN FILM

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

I Am The Architect: The Role of the Designer in Dystopia

Fashioning Utopia: How costume design in Science Fiction helps us reimagine the world

Interior Identities: How the inner spaces of our lives tell the narrative of our times

Digital Dystopia: How the Ghost In The Machine Became A Trope of the Internet Age

The Perfect Palette: The search for Utopia on the canvases of the Stanley Spencer

NOTHING IS ORIGINAL - and that’s ok!

The Remix

Hauntology

Appropriation

Nostalgia

The Copy

Sampling

Theorists/Artists Include: David Lynch, Kenneth Goldsmith, Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher.

WHAT IS ORIGINALITY?

How would you define originality?

Should we try and pursue originality?

Does originality exist?

If so, what does it look like?

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Steal Like an Artist: How Our Influences Make Us Who We Become

Copy Paste Culture: How Rap Reflects the Wider Art World of the 1980’s and Beyond

Youtube Made Me Hardcore: How Access to Everyday Editing Software Made Everyone an Artist

Hauntology and Nostalgia

Nostalgia

Hauntology

Politicisation

Style and Aesthetic

Commodification

Reflexive/restorative

Theorists include: Svetlana Boym, Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida

NOSTALGIA AS DOMINANT MODE

How do explain the large number of works based on pre-existing work?

Why do you think that adaptations are the dominant product in today’s media market?

Two Types of Nostalgia

estorative:

“puts emphasis on nostos (returning home) and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” (Boym)

Reflective:

“Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, “dwells in algia (aching), in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.”

“Personal nostalgia can be used therapeutically to help individuals move beyond trauma” (Batcho, 2017)

Historically being nostalgic or using nostalgia as a form of expression in art or literature has not been seen as a good thing, rather it’s been viewed as the antithesis of progression and innovation. Miuccia Prada once said ‘nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me. I'm attracted by nostalgia but I refuse it intellectually.’

Definition of Hauntology

Hauntology is a philosophical concept referring to the return or persistence of elements from the past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx.

Broadly speaking, the notion that the present is haunted by lost futures

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The Machine in The Ghost: Digital and Analogue Traces in the Art and Films of David Lynch

Breaking the Future: How Nostalgia and Hauntology has Led to an Influx of Genre Movies and Remakes, and What Can be Done to Change It

The Effects of Nostalgia: Instagram and the Filter

Telling Stories

The Mainstream

Narrative

Provocation/Disruption

Street Art

The Spectacle

Theorists/Artists include: Kruger, Banksy, Warner, Anderson, de Certeau, Georges Perec,

Texts’ that could hold a narrative?

…novels, comics, films, tv series, plays, films, children’s books, animation, games, photographs, news stories, magazine covers, folktales and myths, book covers, paintings, editorial illustrations, window displays, packaging, logos…

The Culture Industry

How might film be seen as an ideological tool, then and now?

CRAFTING NARRATIVE

Exploring how makers and designers are using objects and making ,to tell stories.

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Costume as Character in Game Of Thrones

Grayson Perry as Storyteller: Culture Captured in Ceramics and tapestry

Dressing the Window: Narratives on Display

Suffragette Jewellery and the Story of Adornement as Dissent in Early 20th Century Britain

ALL UR VIRAL PHENOMENA R BELONG 2 US

Networks

Collective Understanding

Viral Phenomena

Populism

Digital Culture

User Content

Memes

Satire

Viral phenomena are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. They get their name from the way that viruses propagate

“Breaking the Internet”: The narratives of Viral media

Why do things go viral?

- Relatability

- Empathy

- Irony / irreverence

- Political meaning

- Humour

- ‘Smarts’

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads; such as beliefs, fashions, stories, and phrases

POTENTIAL RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The Viral Marketing campaigns of JJ Abrams

The Meme is Dead, Long Live the Meme! How Do We Keep up with the means of communication when the means of communication change on a Daily Basis?

HASHTAGS: Friends or Enemies?

The Rise of Cancel Culture and Implications for Critical Thinking

ESSAY PREPERATION

What do you want to explore?

theme/idea

artist/designer

object/image

These Questions should now:

- guide your research and keep you focused.

- What information are you lacking, and where do you need to go to get it?

- Brainstorm a list of Questions, considering whether you need to:

Analyse

Appraise

Assess

Compare

Contrast

Criticise

Define

Discuss

Describe

Examine

Explain

Indicate

Illustrate

Interpret

Judge

Justify

Outline

Refute

State

Summarise

Trace

Title/Question

Be concise and explicit. This is a working title/question.

EG. Who Decides Who Decides?

Critiquing power in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Keywords

Include here any words you think will help you identify the research you want to undertake.

EG. Power, Foucault, Surveillance, war on terror, citizen activism, superheroes

introduction/Questions

Use this section to introduce the questions and any issues that are central to your research.

EG. This paper explores the ways in which power is exercised in the MCU, and compares the films to the source comics to see how the two mediums differ

Background

What are the key texts and approaches in the field? How does your proposal extend our understanding of particular questions or topics? You need to set out your research questions as clearly as possible, explain problems that you want to explore and say why it is important to do so. In other words, think about how to situate your project in the context of your discipline.

EG. Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons; V for Vendatta etc, Crisis on Infinite Earths

DEVELOPING YOUR RESEARCH QUESTION

5Ws: answer the following questions:

Who does your topic impact?

Who cares about your topic?

What is influenced by or influences your topic?

Where is your topic relevant?

Why is your topic important?

You could try free writing!

Write continuously for a set amount of time without stopping. Ignore grammar and spelling. Write what you know and identify gaps and questions to pursue.

Or mind mapping!

A visual form of brainstorming. Include related subtopics, concepts and words and connect to them to your topic.

TASK

Before next session:

Brainstorm and mind map your ideas

Gather images, quotes

fill in your research proposal for GCOP200

(as much as you can)

Bring it all with you to your seminar

#gcop200

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spamzineglasgow · 4 years

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(ESSAY) Thinking With Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Odyssey Calling’, by Azad Ashim Sharma

In this essay, Azad Ashim Sharma voyages the fraught expanse of colonial legacy, migration and racism explored in Vahni Capildeo’s stunning new pamphlet from Sad Press, Odyssey Calling (2020). Addressing the poems through close reading and reference to critical histories and cultural expression, from Windrush to Greek myth to Stormzy, Sharma shows how Capildeo’s work, while plugged into the reverberations of historical traumas and harms, also feels into the base/bassline of a possible future, building a living intensity through and against post-Brexit Britain.

> I recently attended a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London called ‘Thinking Art’ which closed with a performance-lecture by Ayesha Hameed. Hameed took the audience through videos and lyrical thoughts to Barbados and her research into the Plantationocene – a theory that looks at Climate Change from the perspective of the slave-plantation. In the questions after, Hameed discussed how electronic music had added another dimension to this long project, and described how the baseline pulled at her organs and connected her with the ground, with the roots, with history. The last words of Vahni Capildeo’s recent Chapbook Odyssey Calling (Sad Press, 2020) are: indigo blue baseline (p.34). Since its publication Odyssey Calling has pulled at my organs. In what follows I want to think with the energy and spirit of this new collection, to feel the pull of its baseline, and understand what rhythms of contemporary life Capildeo attends do.

> Capildeo’s collection of poems and musings on some of their recent creative experiments captures a moment in our fraught times that warrants witnessing, demands listening, attends to the contemporary expressions of racism whilst conjuring a ‘humming brain-cave [that] you can step into’ (OC, p.2). This pamphlet offers itself to its reader as ‘a magic gift’ which ‘create[s] active silence[s]’ from which one can contemplate a true experience of our moment (Ibid). This humming or active silence is exactly what the baseline is, a low rumble, the sound of the sub, the undercommons, a play on ‘white noise’ as ‘Azure Noise’ (p.3). It’s a sound that laps at the body bringing it into grounding and into a liquiform murmur. Azure noise is the sound that Lewis Gordon has in mind when he reflects on ‘our willingness to become ancestors’ and ‘join a stream of accountability through descendants’ (Melancholia Africana Foreword, p. xi). It is the sound of gratitude as much as it is our riotous cry against the erasure of our history. That azure-noise is the sound of this ‘brain-cave’ implies an echo, a reverberation, an openness and willingness to hear and to summon the spirits, of those who have passed on, those who have been killed before their time, and those to whom we are responsible.

> What I mean precisely by this moment is what has been described by Maya Goodfellow as a ‘hostile environment’ in which the lives of those of migrant descent and newly arrived migrants are made unbearable, untenable, unliveable. As a direct consequence of the 2014 and 2019 Immigration Acts, what we are now witnessing in the UK from the deportation of Windrush citizens and the still on-going search for justice for Grenfell, the absurdities of Prevent, is a space in which people of colour are being left to destitution. We are those people called funny tinge, cockroach, burden, the swarm of supposed illegality that is threatening the economy. What is missed from all of this right-wing brouhaha is, of course, history. A history that is being obfuscated by the charlatans in Westminster who – aside from a minority of MPs – are in cahoots with these violent Acts and the legalisation of state enforced racist policy. It is an environment in which performances by Black British artists such as Stormzy and Dave are described as ‘racist’ for pointing out the very real concerns, experiences, and frustrations of communities who are essentially criminalised by the Tory Regime.

> What is so ‘scandalous’ about what has happened to the Windrush generation (if scandal is the right word for the deportation and death of citizens), is their misrecognition as other than citizens in the first place. This confusion between the various labels of immigrant, migrant, citizen, refugee, etc, appear in the poem ‘Odyssey Response’:

Sometimes, words, you launch in many lovely languages: yet, before you begin to fly, you are misrecognized, like an owl entering a superstitious person’s open-plan room being beaten to death, Athena’s wise bird struck down, bloody feathers everywhere, a soft body a futile piñata releasing clouds. (p.7)

The link between migration and birds is a common theme to this pamphlet’s thrust into the heart of the contemporary moment. But before the bird (migrant) is able to fly, misrecognition as a pest or an unwarranted guest leads to its demise: beaten to death, in someone else’s room. Capildeo’s use of the word ‘superstitious’ to describe the person doing this beating is marvellous. It precisely calls to the fore the grandiose whimsy of English nationalism, the sheer fiction it relies upon, the myth of its superiority and uniqueness. Furthermore the image of the piñata made me think of the right-wingers in this country like blindfolded children, striking at an imagined enemy, in the hope of sugary reward. Of course the bloody reality in this scene releases the opposite, the stark death of the ‘wise bird’. If the owl here represents the citizen-as-migrant, the wisdom this person contains is only released by their death, as if something as final as death was required to attend to the life and history of the journey that was over before it began. Bifo’s work on Breathing defines poetry as a metaphor for the ways in which we can escape the suffocation (of language and of our own capacity to breathe) by a landscape that has been invaded by nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism (p.9-10 Breathing Bifo). The accented slippery assonance of ‘superstititious’ is, to my mind, exactly what Bifo has in mind when he refers to poetry’s ‘excess of semiotic exchange’ that ‘can reactivate breathing’. It is the ‘breathiest’ moment in this saga of the wise bird’s demise, a hissing-lampooning of the fundamentalisms of post-Brexit Britain and its racist policy.

> And this brings me to something I think is curious in Capildeo’s poems, their evocation of a specific history. In the poem ‘Windrush Reflections’ we encounter history as a narrative, a narrative that contains the kernels of truth that are not taught in schools in the UK, namely the history of why the Windrush generation should never have been ‘sent back’. Capildeo delves into the heart of the matter:

…post-war Britain already was home by birthright: documentation was not a prize or a promise for this generation born under the far-fetched Union Jack (p.16-17)

This argument is familiar to those of us who have read and know our history. The experience of migration for many formerly colonised peoples was one of welcome in a Britain that was rebuilding after the devastation of WW2, a time when there was no need for ‘documentation’ because it was guaranteed by our status as ‘members of the Commonwealth’. The argument here, presented with increasing force through line breaks speaks truth to power; it is ‘birthright’ in the sense of the right to be born and to live, the right to thrive and have one’s rights respected, that are absolutely called into question by the hostile environment in today’s UK. To recall this history is to assert the right for Rights, of recognition, of representation, and of equality. It is against the hostility of the Union Jack that Capildeo writes, with a willingness to educate as well as to critique. It’s a stylistic mark of a lot of cultural production in the UK today from the music of Lowkey and Akala to Capildeo’s work which seeks to encourage a transformation of consciousness through the reactivation of anti-racist politics. Such work always bears the marks of history, and more often than not, is positioned on the right side of history.

> I also want to turn back to the poem ‘Odyssey Response’ as I think one of the great achievements of this collection of poems is its reimagining of the relationship between the histories of colonialism and migration that define a contemporary creolised UK and the old ‘classical’ relationship between poetry, myth, and epic. What Capildeo achieves by addressing the Odyssey as well as Windrush simultaneously is a Spivakian sense of the ‘ab-use’ or ‘use from below’ of the Enlightenment. Capildeo recasts the images of the Odyssey as that of Windrush, caught between the Scylla of Priti Patel and the Charybdis of social erasure. By recasting the migrant -both living and (socially) dead- as an Odyssean figure, a Spirit and Time traveller, Capildeo makes the request of them ‘if you see Columbus, shoot on sight’. This bullet that travels through spirit and time abuses the relationship with the epic, the odyssey is now the story of migration and not a classical text held above the historical experiences of Windrush as a kind of cultural prison. This conceptualisation of Odysseus in the plural moves against ‘the song of yourself simplified on the news’ (p.12) and delineates a space (or sound-space) where ‘words, take wing’ and ‘fly commonly among all people / who share vulnerability on a trembling earth’ (p.7). This abuse of the Odyssey raises our attention to ‘the uneven diachrony of global contemporaneity’ and is a supply, empowering gesture marking another fine addition to Capildeo’s important oeuvre.

> Where politics is revealing its true fascist face, poetry and by extension contemporary Grime and UK Rap are leading the way as a force for change, for consciousness, and for a deeper connection with histories both of colonisation and of the present. The most overt display of this has been Roger Robinson winning the T. S. Eliot prize for a collection of verse that engages in this precise moment we find ourselves in. Around the time of that announcement, the global poetry community collectively grieved for Kamau Brathwaite who, we learned, had joined the ancestors. In Brathwaite’s Middle Passages, which I re-read as soon as I heard of his passing, I encountered the lines ‘There was a land not long/ago where it was other-/wise” (p.88). That land may be the future we are working collectively towards, poetically and educationally through poetry, which I think captures something of the essence of what I am thinking with when I think with Odyssey Calling. In revealing and accessing that land, we return to the future.

Odyssey Calling is out now and available to order via Sad Press.

Text: Azad Ashim Sharma

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