modernism

Resisting Genetically Mutilated Food and the Eco-Modern Nightmare: Together, “Just You and Me”

This image is symbolic of everything that is wrong with modern society. A gas leak from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 resulted in around 560,000 injured (respiratory problems, eye irritation, etc.), 4,000 severely disabled and 20,000 dead. Not only that, but the pesticides produced at the factory and the model of farming […]

The Counter-Enlightenment: the origin of conservative politics?

Caricature of the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back. “You should hope that this game will be over soon.” The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes‘ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These […]

From Pagan Animism to Alienation

Orientation: the politics of the sacred The word “pagan” is one of those words that has been worked over by monotheists and secular rulers so that it has many meanings, mostly  negative. This has been the case except for the past fifty years when Neopaganism has made a comeback, thanks mostly to the women’s movement. […]
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Are We the Sum Total of Our Life, Theirs, Inside Our Darkest Thoughts?

There is no such thing as an ending. At the conclusion of any work of art, just like at the conclusion of any experience, what we arrive at is a site of interpretation. Every reader commits a creative act at that site. Every reader creates a version of their own artwork within their act of […]
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Not So Fast: Why the Enlightenment is Still a Foundation for Working-Class Liberation

Orientation Why should you care about a bunch of dead white guys? To pull some lyrics from Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World, the Yankee working class “don’t know much about history, don’t know much about geography”. So why would they care at all about an intellectual movement that began 300 years ago in a country notorious […]

Diversity in Dance Today: Enlightenment and Romanticist Perspectives

The drum is always there. In life and death. In between is dance. Always the drum is everywhere. — Peniel Guerrier, Interview with Yvonne Daniel,  BOMB, January 1, 2005 I don’t think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else. — H.G. Wells, In the Days of […]
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At the Edge of Postmodernity – Reflections on the Contemporary from the Global South

    I The term ‘contemporary’ is often used synonymously with ‘the present’. It is often used to connote ‘newness’. But there is another sense where it refers to the idea of inhabiting the same time (as for example in the statement: ‘Gandhi was a contemporary of Tagore’) or of the industrial revolution being contemporaneous … Continue reading At the Edge of Postmodernity – Reflections on the Contemporary from the Global South →