Tag Archives: politics

Parody possesses a kind of power that realist critique sometimes lacks. I explore why humor is sometimes used as a medium for addressing tragic circumstances and why parody in particular may be especially suited to communicating about dictatorship. The research presented here draws on a long-term project on Eritrean politics and on websites devoted to Eritrean politics created by Eritreans in diaspora. The core of the analysis dissects an online political parody of conditions under the regime of President Isaias Afewerki. So much of what is known and written about Eritrean history and current realities, whether by scholars, journalists, international organizations, or Eritreans online, is earnest, serious, and even heartbreaking. The uses of humor in this context seem to call for an explanation, and the analysis presented here sheds light on the mechanisms through which humor accomplishes important political work and fosters the development of new subjectivities.

In Sweden, a long-standing and pervasive discourse delineates the significance of design—especially “Swedish design”—within a distinctly political framework. Just as the social democratic welfare state is in large part organized to “care” for its citizens, design in Sweden is supposed to “care” for the users of everyday goods. I explore this claim in several sociocultural domains in which different aspects of Swedish design are reproduced. I also present an argument for working with design and designing as ethnographic objects of inquiry.

President Obama’s 2008 electoral triumph garnered enormous journalistic and scholarly attention, but analysts have shown very little interest in African American media coverage of the campaign. In this piece, I focus on one major, nearly ignored, black media outlet: a syndicated radio show with a huge audience, commercial success, and progressive politics. I analyze the show’s construction of a powerful mediatized black counterpublic, consider its rise parallel to the neoliberal deregulation of U.S. media, and narrate its coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. I also consider the political effects of a new cross-media platform synergy among black and progressive outlets.

Competing visions of Egypt’s future have long been divided along secular versus religious lines, a split that both the Sadat and Mubarak regimes exploited to weaken political opposition. In this context, one striking feature of the Egyptian uprising that took place last spring is the extent to which it defied characterization in terms of the religious–secular binary. In this commentary, I explore how this movement drew sustenance from a unique political sensibility, one disencumbered of the secular versus religious oppositional logic and its concomitant forms of political rationality. This sensibility has a distinct intellectual genealogy within Egyptian political experience. I focus here on the careers of three Egyptian public intellectuals whose pioneering engagement with the question of the place of Islam within Egyptian political life provided an important part of the scaffolding, in my view, for the practices of solidarity and association that brought down the Mubarak regime.

In this article, I examine the ways in which a politics of caste empowerment that became central to democratic politics in much of north India in the early 1990s altered the ways in which the state was popularly imagined. Many people began to perceive state institutions as inherently corrupt sources of political patronage that, having long served to perpetuate upper-caste dominance, could now be used in the same way by a new class of political leaders to empower lower-caste groups. Within this context, corruption was tolerated, sometimes even celebrated, as a means to lower-caste empowerment.