FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts

Counter Cultures

Ashanti Alston — 2018-06-26

This article examines the development of countercultures from the Black Panther movement in the 1960s to the present day.

Between Hashtagging and Hashtrending: Counterculture, Dissent and Aesthetic Politics

Chantelle Gray Van Heerden — 2018-06-18

The year 2016 was marked by a number of major events, some fleeting, others still ongoing, but almost all underscoring the need for thinking about a very different way of being in the world; in other words, producing radically different kinds of subjectivity. These events – which included Brexit and the election of real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity, Donald Trump, as the president of the U.S. – can be seen as part of the ongoing rise of right-wing populism that has marked world politics for at least the past decade. The continuing European migrant and refugee crises, too, have been harnessed by politicians to create voter fear around personal security in terms of jobs and safety, and national security in terms of terrorism. Accordingly, these kinds of political strategies create a victim-perpetrator binary.

Spregelburd’s Stubbornness

Benjamin Bollig — 2018-06-17

In recent years I have almost religiously gone to see something by or featuring Rafael Spregelburd whenever I visit Argentina, on stage or screen. On my last trip, this March, alongside two films(Florencia Percia’s debut Cetáceos and Lucrecia Martel’s historical drama Zama) and a talk, in conversation with the academic Gabriel Guz, it was his ambitious play La terquedad (Stubbornness). Spregelburd is widely acknowledged as one of Argentina’s most significant contemporary dramatists. His work appears regularly on European festival stages, and has won prizes worldwide. He has translated Harold Pinter, Sarah Kane, and other British playwrights for performance in Spanish. Yet it is a number of years now since The Argentine Moment appeared at London’s Royal Court, and his namewill hardly be familiar to British readers. Some may recognise him as a screen actor, playing the proverbially tortured political artist, gruff husband to the eponymous heroine, and love rival to SamHuntington’s lead in Nico Casavecchia’s Finding Sofia (2016).

The dissident is dead. Long live the dissident – Boris Akunin and popular literature as counterculture under Putinism

Anne Liebig — 2018-06-17

This paper explores the reappearance of the dissident in Russian contemporary literature followingPutin’s rise to power, focussing in particular on how the country’s formerly highbrow dissident counterculture is now moving closer to the realm of popular culture. Tracing the link between the intelligentsia, literature, and dissent all the way up to the supposed death of all three phenomena in the post-collapse years, this article argues that a dissident revival is not only ongoing but directly linked to Putin’s manipulation of historical consciousness and the nostalgia discourse in Russia. Using Boris Akunin, one of Russia’s most popular contemporary writers, as an example, this paper demonstrates how his activity as an author and a public figure has changed in reaction to Putin’s totalitarian turn in politics, resulting in an increasingly pointed counter-narrative to theKremlin’s hegemonic discourse on history. Through sketching Akunin’s artistic principles as a writer and addressing the importance of the nostalgia discourse for post-Soviet Russia’s identity struggles, this article discusses how Akunin’s exploration of the intersection between popular culture and highbrow literature may be indicative of a modernisation of the entire Russian intelligentsia tradition, pointing towards the future of literary dissent in Russia.

Toys and Radical Politics: The Marxist Import of Toy Story That Time Forgot

Jonathan Hay — 2018-06-17

Through the analysis of a capitalist text, and by reflecting on the discourse of Marx and Althusser, this paper attempts to demonstrate why Marxism remains a potent politics of dissent. It suggests that Marxist philosophies can come to function in an ultimately reparative manner through their promotion of countercultural ideologies.

Becoming-Black Bloc, Becoming-Anartist: the art of prolonging and remodulating counter-cultural lines of flight

Gian Luigi Biagini — 2018-06-17

The text describes the practice of the Anartist, which consists of interventions that subvert the urban space with an antagonist and countercultural spin inspired by the Black Bloc. The evil aura and the symbolic violence of the Black Blocks, a sort of magical Black Mana, are folded into a subversive aesthetic expressiveness that opens a line of escape in the urban space and provokes a viral infection in the Integrated Spectacle of Capitalism. The Anartist, a masked transpersona that can be embodied by anybody, extends the counter-spectacle of the Black Bloc destructive actions in disruptive line of flights that actualize their telluric subversion in site-specific situations of the urban space. The Anartist is a sort of simulacrum that decentralizes, remodulates and intensifies the counter-cultural mythology of Black Blocks. The practice of the Anartist, which can be defined as Disturbanism, unworks the money-form of the space, unleashing an event that is out of capitalist design but which arises from within itself as a virus that causes a negative diarrhea of dissensus. In fact, the Anarchist Disturbanist intervention can be considered as the unappropriated other that cannot be expelled outside by a totalitarian system that has no outside and returns as a viral scatological hauntology. The Anartist produces chaos, symbols and experiences through Black shit, ghosts and antagonist viruses to operate witchcraft rituals, which not only cannot be subsumed by the Capitalist Spectacle but continue to infect it in an eternal return producing a counter-culture and a counter-spell.

The Real Deal: Hip-hop Mixtape Artwork and Black Masculinity

Emmett Robinson Smith — 2018-06-17

Despite hip-hop’s status as a means of resistance to myriad systems of institutionalized racism, oppression, and poverty, its rise in mainstream popularity has caused a dramatic increase in its corporate monetization. This causes a transfer of control from the artist to the record label, at times jeopardizing hip-hop’s fundamental principles of rebellion, resistance, and risk. An alternative mode of expression, however – the mixtape – puts power back into the hands of hip-hop artists, becoming a crucial vessel for unmitigated artistic expression and meaning. One of the most significant and immediately striking aspects of the mixtape is the cover art. By honing in on the visual aspects of five select mixtapes, it becomes evident that the images presented on their covers advance male hip-hop artists’ freedom of expression of black masculinity. These images, though at times problematic in their own way, become a crucial source of meaning not only in the realm of hip-hop, but in the genre’s relationship with broader societal perceptions of the black male.

Grace, Laura Jane. Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. New York: Hachette, 2016. 320 pp. ISBN: 9780316387958. £13.99. Print.

Gina Maya — 2018-06-17

In her autobiography Tranny (2016), punk singer/songwriter Laura Jane Grace explores the excesses of two forms of subversion, against the music industry, and heteronormativity as a transgender woman. In the following review, Gina Maya analyses the implications of her experiences as a counter-cultural icon.

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo.’ Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso, 2015. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781781685785. £10.99.

Tomás Vergara — 2018-06-17

Berardi’s Heroes (2015) analyses the intricate relationship between capitalism and mental health by exploring the proliferation of mass murder and suicide in the twentieth-first century. This book is not essential to achieve a better understanding of Berardi’s theoretical edifice as a philosopher. Instead, Heroes offers a great application of his theoretical concepts on contemporary events, exhibiting how philosophy can be applied to contingent historical issues such as the ones dealt with in the book.