1,721,053 research outputs found
Powers of the Gun: On Violence, Frontier and Community
No full textSince the mid-1990s, the Free Burma Rangers (FBR)–a self-defined ‘multi-ethnic humanitarian movement’ operating in Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan–has supported and trained rebel movements and civil society organisations to create spaces of relief and rescue in war zones at the frontiers of their polities. Central to the FBR’s logic and praxis is the use and governing of weapons as military means in order to ‘immunise’ communities of the oppressed from violence. Aside from their politically disputed character, this article takes the activities of the FBR as an entry point to ask: how are the relations between weapons and humans governed in war frontiers? And how does the management of military means reproduce different forms of political community with their political space? Situating these questions in political geography’s literature on frontiers, the article brings in dialogue Roberto Esposito’s analysis on the relationship between violence and (political/impolitical) community with critical approaches on weapons in security studies to show how violence, frontier, and community stand in a co-constitutive relation. Rather than looking at violence and military means as an instrument for the territorialisation of an ideological-political project at the frontier, I analyse the frontier as a politico-military device consubstantial to a political community with its biological body and political space. Drawing from fieldwork methods, I argue that the governing of human-firearms relations constitutes the political community and the human subjectivities part of it by producing frontiers as zones of distinction and encounter between the civilised and the ‘not yet’. The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it empirically substantiates the co-constitutive rather than instrumental relation between violence and the frontier. Second, it shows how the immunitary apparatuses that govern the encounters between humans and weapons, in shaping the political community, shape also ‘the dehumanisation of Man’s human Others’. Third, zooming onto the life experiences of activists taking part to FBR and resistance forces, it differentiates between the political and impolitical forms of community produced by managing violence
The Paradox of the Virtual: Iñárritu's Carne y Arena between Innovative Spect-actor and Traditional Fruition
No full textThis article analyses the relationships between text and participant in the mixed-reality film/installation Carne y Arena by the Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu (2017), which I experienced in 2018 at Prada Foundation in Milan, Italy. The film is divided into three sections: the first theatrical, the second based on virtual reality (VR) and the third concerning TV. Theoretically, the article draws on Boal’s spect-actor and on theories analyzing the position of the audience between the opposite poles of passivity and activity; and on conceptualizations of how the digital media have increased participants’ activity. Starting from all of this, the article applies rhetorical narratology analysis to the three parts of Inarritu’s film to find out what kind of narrative experience the film/installation offers the participant. The results show that the second part of the installation mostly surprises and excite the participant. In contrast, the materiality of the theatrical part and the informational value of the TV part talk to the participant more completely and concretely. In the end, Boal’s spect-actor is more present when the participant deals with old and traditional forms of communication than when they are only apparently immersed in the VR experience. Thus, to bridge its gap, VR needs help from old languages such as theatre and TV. This is the paradox of the virtual mentioned in the title
The Aryan race of animals: The role played by colour in the visual semiotics of Nazi propaganda
No full textThis article analyses the role of colour in the representation of animals
in Nazi propaganda. It demonstrates that colour, as applied to animals, was a
communicational strategy of paramount relevance in setting boundaries and
creating differences between the Nazis and their enemies. Drawing on propaganda
studies, colour studies, and representational zoosemiotics, it semiotically
investigates visual items published from 1923 to 1945. The results show that Nazi
propaganda created an Aryan race of animals via colours. In fact, white animals
always supported the regime’s ideologies; dark animals, conversely, very often
symbolised the enemy (the Soviet Union, the Jews, and others). Semiotically, Nazi
propaganda represented these animals as symbols, even though the links between
signifier and signified were not shared within a community but only within the
racist ideology of the Nazis
No Country for Old Food? Food Network and the Making of Italian Food Culture
No full textThis chapter analyses the programmes of the Italian branch of the Food Networ
Pasta, Pizza and Propaganda: Political History of Italian Food TV
No full textThe book explores the central role of food in Italian culture through a political history of Italian food on national television. A highly original work of political history, the book tells the story of Italian food television from a political point of view: from the pioneering shows developed under strict Catholic control in the 1950s and 1960s to the left-wing political twists of the 1970s, the conservative riflusso or resurgence of the 1980s, through the disputed Berlusconian era, and into the contemporary rise of the celebrity chef. Through this lively and engaging work, we learn that cooking spaghetti in a TV studio is a political act, and by watching it, we become citizens
On the natural border: A bio‐geo‐political reading
Full text linkThis article engages in a critical analysis of the concept of the natural border. It highlights its inherently biopolitical nature by exploring how it intersects with biology, history and geography. In the last decades, critical border studies have deeply questioned the naturality of borders. As a consequence, the concept could sound today as nothing more than the relict of late nineteenth-century positivist and descriptive physical geography. However, discourses on natural borders are not as dusty as one may think: the idea of the natural border has been consistently exploited as part of new right-wing populist narratives, all the more so in a political scenario in which the reclaiming of territorial sovereignty has become a main pillar of populist discourse. While critical approaches have developed a biopolitical perspective on bordering processes, we argue that the ontology of the natural border needs to be further investigated. By tuning into the debate on Friedrich Ratzel and the biopolitical nature of his work, we investigate early twentieth-century border theories developed by Italian geographers. Ultimately, through the under-researched case of Italian geographical thought, the paper demonstrates how natural borders are conceived, and how they work, as a biopolitical dispositif
New Meat and the Media Conundrum with Nature and Culture
No full text“New meat” is meat obtained either from stem cells or totally synthetically, and promises to drastically reduce pollution and to abolish animal killing, despite
raising safety issues. This study analyses how the media have been constructing “new meat” since 2012, the year of the first test–tube hamburger. Peirce (1877) finds four different ways through which people accept new beliefs; they are based either on past models, or on power and economic interests, or on individual accommodation, or on science. Moreover, new meat is a human artefact that aims to replace a natural product, and therefore it raises foundational issues linked
to the relationships between Nature and Culture. While old theories see these two concepts as separate and conflicting, this work builds on newer, bio–semiotic
perspectives according to which the two concepts are linked to each other by mutual and ever changing relationships. Articles published in online versions
of British and American magazines, newspapers and broadcasters have been purposely sampled and semiotically analysed. The results show that the media
represent new meat either as a utopian product able to clean the world of evil (pollution, illness, animal suffering, etc.), or as a dystopian food, similar to GM
products and continuing the long list of dangerous techno–foods. The utopian representations adopt Peirce’s power–led fixation of belief; instead, the dystopians
rely on Peirce’s a priori method. Thus, Nature and Culture are still considered as two separate entities in conflict with each other. However, further semiotic
analysis of the forms and names that scientists and designers are giving to new meat demonstrate that the new perspectives on Nature and Culture as interacting
are slowly entering the field. In conclusion, the newer approach to Nature and Culture is more practiced by scientists and designers, while the media lag behind,
still anchored to old schemes
Television as a trattoria: Constructing the woman in the kitchen on Italian food shows.
Full text linkThis article analyses the gender issues raised by the representation of the woman in the kitchen on Italian food TV. In Italy, food and women have always been constructed as a whole, but today this model seems to be redundant. Controversial postfeminist readings of Nigella’s cooking shows and Williams’ categories of dominant, emergent and residual help investigate, in a constructivist sense, how Italian TV deals with this social change. Through qualitative, semiotic and gender analyses, the article focuses on three Italian food shows broadcast at noon. Results show that the three programmes mediate the role of the woman, drawing on the model of trattorie, traditional Italian restaurants in which the women cook and the men serve the tables. This negotiation helps balance gender relations without revolutionary outcomes. In fact, at the same time, it modernises the old model of the housewife and does not move the woman out of the kitchen
Mario Soldati and his Viaggio nella Valle del Po: A culinary journey between early television and Italian culinary identity.
No full textThis chapter analyses Mario Soldati's Viaggio lungo la Valle del Po (Journey along the Po Valley), the first Italian food show broadcast by the public service television Rai in 1957.
Drawing on studies on television and on the construction of food culture, and adopting multimodal analysis, the chapter investigates the relationships between the TV show and Italy's politics and culture in the 1950s.
The results show that the programme was an extraordinary means through which public service television mediated conservative social values and a nostalgic idea of the Italian past. More generally, the chapter highlights the enormous power of food television in negotiating ideologies
How ‘il caffé sospeso’ became ‘suspended coffee’: The neo-liberal re-‘invention of tradition’ from Bourdieu to Bourdieu.
Full text linkThis article analyses the way in which il caffè sospeso, an old Italian tradition of giving needy people a free coffee, has become ‘suspended coffee’, a current trend in the United States. This study explains the Italian phenomenon through Bourdieu’s ‘classic’ theory linked to food as provider of social distinction, distance from reality and culinary capital. To explain the new American model, this article builds on Bourdieu’s later work on neo-liberalism. This double theoretical approach enables a double methodological approach. The old Italian practice is investigated through Bourdieu’s historical field analysis. The American, neo-liberal model is studied through political economy analysis of websites owned by the companies supporting suspended coffee. The results show that in Italy il caffè sospeso was an opportunity for the donor to gain social distinction thanks to distance from reality, not providing the poor with something more necessary than a coffee. In the United States, private companies have taken hold of this tradition and altered the old relationship between donor and receiver. Giving is no longer spontaneous. Companies advise/force their clients to donate and confer culinary capital to ‘elected’ customers on their websites, with texts aiming to advertise rather than to inform. In conclusion, neo-liberalism exploits old traditions for commercial reasons
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