Progressive Geographies

Shakespeare and the Reactionary Mind: Counterrevolution, Fascism, Militarism – Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare, 31 August 2024

Speakers – John Gillies, Amy Lidster, Björn Quiring, Jennifer Rust and Richard Ashby.

Booking via Eventbrite

Conservatives have always tended to claim Shakespeare as one of their own. In the 1950s, E. M. W. Tillyard developed the influential thesis that
Shakespeare’s plays uphold the traditional social hierarchies and suggest that these hierarchies are embedded in nature. Ulysses’ speech on “degree”
in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ serves as one of the key witnesses in this context. Since Tillyard’s time, scholars have persistently pointed out elements of Shakespeare’s plays that do not fit this assumption: the actions on stage persistently seem to contradict and subvert the noble proclamations of Ulysses and his peers. In the histories and tragedies, the persons on top of the hierarchy mostly seem to end up there by a combination of luck, political manipulation and, first and foremost, the effective use of violence, rather than by any apparent inborn excellence.

Accordingly, Shakespeare’s plays represent a volatile social order in which communal life unfolds as perpetual warfare between interest groups – sometimes open, sometimes covert. With Corey Robin and others, one might venture the hypothesis that this apparent discrepancy between words and deeds delineates a symptomatic ambivalence that characterizes the reactionary worldview: while reactionaries claim to be conservative, their enforcement of traditional hierarchies often takes on the form of a violent interruption of these very traditions. In the name of nature and of “real life”, they voice unprecedented demands that those who are destined to rule may finally be allowed to rule as they must and to keep their inferiors in the subjugated position they deserve. The most extreme form these demands can take is that of fascism, a militant movement of
revolutionary conservatism that, according to Hannah Arendt, has the inherent tendency to destroy everything it ostensibly holds sacred (such as the family, the state and the nation). Shakespeare’s plays (first and foremost, ‘Coriolanus’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Hamlet’) have been used to explore this ambivalence, by reactionaries and fascists as well as by their opponents. This one-day symposium aims to investigate this complex relationship.

If you read this blog on the web (rather than through an rss reader, for example), and don’t use an ad-blocker, how annoying are the adverts?

They are hopefully fairly minimal and have two benefits – they mean I don’t have to pay WordPress to not have them, and the tiny amount they bring in covers the running cost of the site (domain registration, file storage upgrade, etc.).

I’ve largely thought that if people find them that annoying they can use an ad-blocker – this site is hardly the only place where you experience them. But I’m tempted to remove them entirely, even if that costs me a bit. I’ve not wanted to go down the subscription model, or premium content, or donations…

Any thoughts appreciated.

Peter Adey, Evacuation: The Politics and Aesthetics of Movement in Emergency – Duke University Press, September 2024

Open access introduction

In Evacuation, Peter Adey examines the politics, aesthetics, and practice of moving people and animals from harm during emergencies. He outlines how the governance and design of evacuation is recursive, operating on myriad political, symbolic, and affective levels in ways that reflect and reinforce social hierarchies. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, from the retrieval of wounded soldiers from the battlefield during World War I and escaping the World Trade Center on 9/11 to the human and animal evacuations in response to the 2009 Australian bushfires and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Adey demonstrates that evacuation is not an equal process. Some people may choose not to move while others are forced, some may even be brought into harm through evacuation. Often the poorest, racialized, and most marginalized communities hold the least power in such moments. At the same time, these communities can generate compassionate, creative, and democratic forms of care that offer alterative responses to crises. Ultimately, Adey contends, understanding the practice of evacuation illuminates its importance to power relations and everyday governance.

Naomi Waltham-Smith, Free Listening – University of Nebraska Press, November 2024

Free Listening offers a radical reframing of seemingly intractable debates and polarized positions on free speech, academic freedom, systemic injustice, and political dissent by shifting attention from our voices to our ears. Instead of reclaiming the terrain of free speech that is increasingly ceded to conservatives, Naomi Waltham-Smith argues that progressives should assume a more radical task—to liberate listening from those frameworks that have determined what freedom looks like, who enjoys it, and at what cost. Refocusing on aural responsiveness forces a confrontation with the liberal tradition that has traditionally anchored claims for freedom of expression and inquiry. If listening is placed at the heart of public deliberation and disagreeing well, the relational, open-ended, and unpredictable character of free expression becomes a common good.

In a wide-ranging critical reflection on issues from civility to criticality, righteous anger to gentle listening, and silencing to streaming platforms, Free Listening makes an ambitious contribution to sound studies and political philosophy. Weaving together deconstruction, Black political thought, and decolonial theory, Waltham-Smith argues that the retort to accusations of “cancel culture” should be a revival of abolition democracy.

Martin Paul Eve, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History – Stanford University Press, July 2024 (print and open access)

Digital spaces are saturated with metaphor: we have pages, sites, mice, and windows. Yet, in the world of digital textuality, these metaphors no longer function as we might expect. 

Martin Paul Eve calls attention to the digital-textual metaphors that condition our experience of digital space, and traces their history as they interact with physical cultures. Eve posits that digital-textual metaphors move through three life phases. Initially they are descriptive. Then they encounter a moment of fracture or rupture. Finally, they go on to have a prescriptive life of their own that conditions future possibilities for our text environments—even when the metaphors have become untethered from their original intent. Why is “whitespace” white? Was the digital page always a foregone conclusion? Over a series of theses, Eve addresses these and other questions in order to understand the moments when digital-textual metaphors break and to show us how it is that our textual softwares become locked into paradigms that no longer make sense.

Contributing to book history, literary studies, new media studies, and material textual studies, Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History provides generative insights into the metaphors that define our digital worlds.