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While there are refined creations, vulgarised Zimdancehall has been a subject of academic, political and cultural concern. It is widely disparaged as abominable and culturally subversive music. How...

In Chinese political discourse, “positive energy” (zheng nengliang) is a popular expression that has embodied mainstream political ideology in China since 2012. This term has also become prominent on Douyin, a prominent Chinese short-video platform. By June 2018, over 500 Chinese governmental accounts on Douyin had promoted positive energy in videos, and the content was viewed over 1.6 billion times. Douyin even created a separate trending section, Positive Energy, for videos that promoted the dominant state ideology. This study argues that the Positive Energy feature on Douyin is significant. The Chinese government has accused and even permanently shut down several digital platforms for spreading “vulgarity” as the antithesis of positive energy. Using the app walkthrough method and a content analysis of over 800 videos collected from the Positive Energy section of Douyin, this study explores how Douyin promotes the Chinese state’s political agenda by promoting a new form of playful patriotism online.

Laughter can provoke both cultural catharsis and sociopolitical critique. However, in an era of Trumpism, laughter has become troubled by vulgar rhetoric of shrugging off comic possibilities insofa...

Beckett’s work provides a visceral and clear-sighted critique of language as a territorialising force by which the self is irrevocably an object of nationalist pedagogy, that which “marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control” (Bhabha). Exploring his fiction and drama in relation to the ethno-linguistic nationalism which emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century, a central focus of this chapter is the manner in which ‘the language crisis’ in Beckett is fraught with the language politics of his native country. It argues that Beckett’s fabled ‘abandoning’ of English recapitulates a history of cultural anxiety, especially acute among Protestant writers, concerning the viability of the English language as a vessel for an Irish national imaginary. The formulation of a “literature of the unword” in Beckett’s early career is similarly read in the shadow of the complex debate concerning ‘official’ language in the Irish Free State and a virulent nationalist language ideology which proselytised the ‘vulgarity’ of English. The chapter finally considers the disturbing ventriloquized speech suffered by Beckett’s characters, arguing that a key achievement of the Beckett canon is its exposure of language as the inscription on consciousness of political forms of community and continuity.

This paper seeks to interpret Chenjerai Hove’s depiction in Palaver Finish of the Zimbabwean postcolony in the period leading into the new millennium. It seeks to argue that the portrayal of political developments in Zimbabwe in that period presents the nation as plunging into a state of vulgarity where human life and dignity are sacrificed at the expense of political power. Vulgarisation in this sense refers to gross distortions by the ruling party and state authority and the machinery of discursive processes, morality, culture and social life – all in an attempt to retain power. It also refers to the manner of doing things, to the use of the obscene, whether this is through the ab/use of language in its literal or metaphorical sense, dehumanizing sex or violence or disregard of civic etiquette.

The Vulgarity of Democracy explores key aesthetics and affective aspects of democracy via a visual ethnographic exploration of political pornography and the public uses of machismo to construct agendas for popular redemption in Guayaquil, Ecuador, during the 1980s. This period was the beginning of a highly conflictive social process as a result of the imposition of neoliberal policies. Its focus is on the life and work of Pancho Jaime (1946-1989), the most controversial and widely known rock promoter and independent journalist. Between 1984 and his assassination in 1989, Jaime’s underground publications used in-depth investigation as well as gossip, pornographic cartoons, and obscene language to comment on democracy and the corruption of political elites. Jaime’s strategy was to denounce the conduct of powerful figures in public office, and caricaturize their deformed bodies as indexes of their supposedly “deviant” sexuality. Following contemporary and comparative discussions on the political economy of images, and the materiality of image-objects, X. Andrade analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption of Pancho Jaime’s political magazines, audience responses to grotesque visual and aggressive textual discourses, and the effects of revealing public secrets about popular understandings of politics.

Faced with repression and reform, humor has become tactical for public school teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, engaged in a decades-old movement that after 2006 involved intensified street- and school-based pedagogies. This piece explores how humor adds to a political project via mocking names, images, and dictates of elite leaders to bring a here and now to what is taken as inaccessible in the teachers’ political lives. Humor forms part of an (e)sc(h)atology in which critical practices are part eschatological, a call for definite transformation, and part scatological, embodied vulgarity. La parte chusca (the funny part), its (e)sc(h)atological contribution, angles toward critical literacies in Oaxaca and beyond.

This paper examines post-independent Zimbabwean literary narratives which engage with how the ruling ZANU-PF government frames dissenting voices as constituting dirt, filth and undesirability. Making use of Achille Mbembe’s postulations on the “vulgarity of power” and Kenneth W. Harrow’s readings of the politics of dirt, the central thesis of this paper is that the troping of dirt and state sponsored violence are closely related to the themes of memory and belonging. Literary works by writers such as Chistopher Mlalazi, NoViolet Bulawayo and John Eppel become self-effacing speech acts that are involved in reimagining and revisioning our understanding of power dynamics and how this affects human and social experiences.Keywords: discursive construction, dissenting voices, filth and disease, Gukurahundi massacres, state violence, Operation Murambatsvina, politics of dirt, power, memory and belonging, nationalism, Zimbabwean literature

Although Tocqueville would be personally appalled at Trump’s vulgarity, he would support much of Trump’s political program, based on Democracy in America’s distinction between “great parties” (which defend high principles) and “small parties” (which engage in interest group politics). First, Tocqueville believed that a nation should cultivate its own particular identity, and thus so should the United States, while still welcoming those who can and will become part of the American project. Second, Tocqueville admired American townships’ capacity for self-government, which contrasts with the unaccountability of the federal bureaucracy. Trump is attempting to undercut the pernicious growth of the administrative state. The Progressives and the New Deal embraced ideas from Hegel, and thus transformed American government so that it now resembles the European welfare state. This development has undercut American freedom. Finally, Tocqueville would also support Trump’s call for restoring American power and prestige, for greatness is a national project.

This article shows how rhyme came to be devalued critically. It argues that formalist methodologies alone cannot explain why rhyme once dominated and then fell in importance. Nor can formalism save rhyme by pointing to the reasons why humans enjoy it or by showing how it adds to poetry’s value. Instead, in historicist fashion, I focus on how political factors have determined the meaning of rhyme in the last three hundred years. I link rhyme’s fall to a series of ideological disavowals that tied the technique to subject positions deemed unfree. From political conservatism and aristocracy to femininity, childishness, and popular vulgarity, rhyme was positioned in aesthetic discourse as a device not fit for liberal professors of poetry. The case of rhyme illustrates that literary form can never be abstracted from the political contests by which culture is riven.

This essay makes a case for ridicule as a vehicle for humoring rhetorical judgments. With an eye to the “ugly,” the “laughable,” and the “distorted” as longstanding topoi for defying conventional appeals and wrongheaded standards, I build on contemporary interest in the politics of comedy by providing a provisional map of some of the tensions that emerge out of ridiculous appeals in public discourse. The general orientation is toward comic forms that seem to evidence the civic virtue in vulgarity. Specifically, this essay considers how ridicule bends the rules of rhetorical judgment in the formation (or reaffirmation) of cultural values. Stephen Colbert's stunt in establishing a political action committee is put forth as an example of how particularly comic judgments test the grounds of what tends to pass for acceptable political speech. In addition, broader economies of ridicule are engaged in order to consider some of our current politics of offense, the importance of occasionally disidentifying with so...

An experimental study investigated the effect of politicians’ profanity and gender on their perceived and actual persuasiveness. Results showed that a candidate’s use of swear words increased the perception of language informality and improved the general impression about the source. The latter effect was particularly strong for male candidate, as female candidate was already evaluated positively, irrespective of her cursing. In addition, though the manipulation of the politician’s vulgarity did not directly affect participants’ self-reported likelihood of voting for him or her, an indirect effect through language informality and impression about the candidate emerged. On the contrary, profanity use reduced perceived persuasiveness of the message, suggesting that the influence of swearing could be automatic and unaware. Theoretical implications are discussed.

In 1958, Roque Dalton, a young poet affiliated with the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), won the first prize in a poetry contest at the University of El Salvador. A few days later, members of Salvadoran Catholic University Action, a student organization known as ACUS or simply Catholic Action, published a demolishing but carelessly written critique of Dalton. The anonymous writer of an article titled “Under the Empire of Vulgarity” turned his disgust with the poem written by Dalton into a diatribe against Dalton's political persona. Dalton's raw allusions to double standards in the sexual morality of priests and his remarks about the Catholic practice of fasting seem to have especially upset the leaders of ACUS. A month later, ACUS published a rejoinder written by Dalton, along with excerpts of the controversial poem. In his retort, Dalton stated that ACUS dodged debates on substantial political and aesthetic issues by engaging in “insults, quick and facile judgments, and rude pigeon-holing that closes all means of intellectual comprehension. ”

Entertaining Television: The BBC and Popular Television Culture in the 1950s. Su Holmes. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013. 224 pp. $24.95 pbk.The values instituted by the British Broadcasting Company's (BBC) first director, Lord John Reith, were to "inform, educate, and entertain," but those three verbs have enjoyed nary a moment of peaceful coexistence in the nearly ninety years that they have comprised the organization's public service mission. Conventional thinking holds that nonmercenary, beneficial-to-the-citizenry programming, and crowd-pleasing fare are mutually exclusive and that which is desirable to viewers, garners a big audience, and earns revenue is deemed antithetical to the charge of public service.Although the public service versus entertainment dichotomy is as old as broadcast technology, Holmes trains her lens on a decade when it was in full glory. The "entertaining" in the title of her book purposefully conveys a double meaning, referring to the type of programming that aims to divert audiences as well as the consideration of the entire endeavor of television. The latter connotation gives her ample room to dissect a wide range of issues, but at the heart of her argument is the "popular" in the subtitle. Although she explores British television programs, the matter is equally relevant to U.S. television history. In fact, public service and popular sometimes take on the faces of the BBC and the American system, respectively, given their dissimilar economic and political structures, but Holmes proves that the conflict was alive within U.K. television culture itself, as evidenced by the contentious relationship with the commercial, independent ITV.The BBC was a monopoly until the 1955 launch of ITV. Early television broadcasting was a matter of politics in the United Kingdom, far more aggressively than it was in its infancy and adolescence in the United States. British TV was essentially a pawn of the state, quite often divorced from any regard to its content. Much of it was characterized by its resistance to American TV, as if the BBC were a fortress against Americanization. Holmes makes frequent mentions of the 1962 Pilkington Report, a text that seems loosely analogous to U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Newton Minow's 1961 "vast wasteland" speech or an ersatz set of public service commandments. Among its conclusions the eponymous committee that published the report depicted ITV programs, in contrast to the self-described fair and balanced BBC, as populist and "trivial," indicting the United States as a bad influence. Paradoxically, the battle has been reduced to public versus popular despite the fact that in other contexts those terms might be on the same team. Popular can be quantitative, indicating that which is liked and watched by many, or it can connote vulgarity and low rent taste, depending on whom you ask.Holmes traces the BBC's interpretation of popularity and how judgments were challenged by the advent of ITV. She divides her study into categories of the soap opera, quiz show, "problem" show, and celebrity. The Grove Family, British TV's first soap opera or family serial, premiering in 1954, presented a lower middle class family. Reactions to the show revealed perspectives on patterns of consumption and taste and reflected, for better or worse, the cultural values of the millions who watched. Quiz, or "give-away," shows allowed escape and fantasy whereas a problem show revealed real-life tribulations and ostensibly an opportunity for education. Holmes explores the lineage of the modern talk show with the British problem show (e.g., Is This Your Problem?) and the U.S. advice show. Both early progenitors were criticized for invasion of privacy, peeping Tom-ism, and, ultimately, the tabloidization of TV. With their airing of laundry, problem shows also punctured the postwar bubble of purported happiness. Whereas The Grove Family intentionally presented a comforting image of suburban family life (analogous to Father Knows Best or Leave It to Beaver in the United States), the problem shows presented just what their name advertised. …

In Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), a massive, four-volume survey of urban workers living on the economic margins of Victorian society, city streets offer up plenty of appalling working-class vulgarity – strident voices, coarse language, gaudy clothing, and brazen behavior undisciplined by bourgeois standards of decency and reticence.1 But even as these crimes against propriety sharpen the contrast between the privileged observer and “the poor,” they also disturb the power relations between Mayhew and the subjects of his investigations. While vulgarity is generally understood as a lack of good taste and propriety, it can also result from an unwillingness to make an appropriate show of deference to one’s superiors. As James C. Scott argues, subordinate classes can subtly withhold deference in everyday practices such as speech, clothing, gestures, tone of voice, and word choice. These “hidden transcripts,” as he calls them, represent local, relatively safe assertions of power in a stratified society. Seen in this way, vulgarity – bad manners, slang, obscenity, sexual indecency – arises not from a lack of sophistication but from a deliberate intention to offend, resting on an awareness of the power dynamics of class relations. Scott quotes Pierre Bourdieu’s observation, “[t]he concession of politeness always contains political concessions ... the symbolic taxes due from the individual” (Bourdieu, Outline 4; qtd. in Scott 47-8). For some of Mayhew’s subjects, vulgarity is a form of tax evasion, amounting to an oblique protest against the would-be hegemony of bourgeois standards and a defense of their own territories, customs, and traditions.In London Labour and the London Poor, currents of power, speech, and judgment do not run in only one direction, and vulgarity often supplies the energy that turns these currents back on the observer.

While the “bad girls” of Pakistan's contemporary Punjabi theatre are accused of “obscenity” and “vulgarity” and punished by harsh censorship, girls from “good families” are actively promoted in Anglophone dramas. Punjabi performers reverse the gaze onto this split discourse, exposing the body politic's gender and class biases.

INTRODUCTION This paper addresses a paradox: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which means resisting the present. This is one of the issues Deleuze and Guattari discuss at length, notably in What is Philosophy?: (1) the relationship between creativity and critique. It is however a problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists, namely how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the necessary dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness. Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the present, more specifically the nastiness, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with the present in a productively oppositional and affirmative manner. I shall return to this in the final section of my essay. There is a conceptual and a contextual side to this problem and I want to start by discussing each one, before addressing my central concern. I. THE CONTEXT The public debate today shows a decline of interest in politics, whereas discourses about ethics, religious norms and values triumph. Some master-narratives circulate, which reiterate familiar themes: one is the inevitability of capitalist market economies as the historically dominant form of human progress. (2) Another is a contemporary brand of biological essentialism, under the cover of 'the selfish gene' (3) and new evolutionary psychology. Another resonant refrain is that God is not dead. Nietzsche's claim rings hollow across the spectrum of contemporary global politics, dominated by the clash of civilizations and widespread Islam phobia. The bio-political concerns that fuel our necro-politics and the perennial warfare of our times also introduce a political economy of negative passions in our social context. Thus the affective economy expresses our actual condition: we now live in a militarised social space, under the pressure of increased enforcement of security and escalating states of emergency. The binary oppositions of the Cold War era have been replaced by the all-pervasive paranoia: the constant threat of the imminent disaster. From the environmental catastrophe to the terrorist attack, accidents are imminent and certain to materialise: it is only a question of time. In this context, mass political activism has been replaced by rituals of public collective mourning. Melancholia has become a dominant mood and a mode of relation. There is, of course, much to be mournful about, given the pathos of our global politics: our social horizon is war-ridden and death-bound. We live in a culture where religious-minded people kill in the name of 'the Right to Life' and wage war for 'Humanitarian' reasons. Depression and burn-out are major features of our societies. Psych-pharmaceutical management of the population results in widespread use of legal and illegal drugs. The narcotic sub-text of our societies is under-studied and mostly denied. Bodily vulnerability is increased by the great epidemics: some new ones, like HIV, Ebola, SARS or the bird flu; others more traditional, like TB and malaria. Health has become more than a public policy issue: it is a human rights and a national defence concern. While new age remedies and life-long coaching of all sorts proliferate, our political sensibility has taken a forensic shift: 'bare life', as Agamben argues, (4) marks the liminal grounds of probable destitution--infinite degrees of dying. At the same time European culture is obsessed with youth and longevity, as testified by the popularity of anti-ageing treatments and plastic surgery. Hal Foster (5) describes our schizoid cultural politics as 'traumatic realism'--an obsession with wounds, pain and suffering. Proliferating medical panopticons produce a global patho-graphy: (6) we go on television talk-shows to scream our pain. …

Sexualized portrayals of women are staples of two television situational comedies because these reflect the patriarchal society’s gender hierarchy and dichotomy as experienced by the target audience in real life. The researcher found out the audiences’ contrasting perceptions on the vulgarity of jokes. Sexualized portrayals are unwelcome in reality but are considered pleasurable within what the researcher calls as the audiences’ ‘virtual structure’. GMA 7, one of the largest television networks in the Philippines, peddles this vulgarity as a common phenomenon in sitcoms: It commodifies actresses as sex objects, which limits their character roles and creates a consciousness that using women as bait of the target audience is okay as long as it is for entertainment purposes only.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When I entered the grounds of Louisiana State Penitentiary, I saw a maze of rawhide belts and purses, paintings reminiscent of a back aisle thrift store, and elaborate wooden objects that evoked the country crafts of my southern childhood. I passed a robust woman sniffing a perfumed wooden rose with "Mother" etched in lavish script on its heart-shaped stand. Above her hung a copied print of John Wayne next to Tupac Shakur. Brightly airbrushed bible covers praised the Lord in oversized letters. Larger-than-life cartoon characters decorated heavily-shellacked furniture. Men with leather faces and white coats hovered near the crafts and sat amidst the crowds visiting Angola. Some talked with abandon; others hung back and smoked cigarettes, stealing glances at the women who passed. This was my first trip to Louisiana State Penitentiary in West Feliciana Parish, fifty-five miles northwest of Baton Rouge. The prison, better known as Angola, sits on former plantation land named for the country from which its slaves came. In 1880, former Confederate major Samuel James bought the Angola plantation with three others and ran it with convicts leased to him from the state of Louisiana. Under James and, later, the state--to whom he sold the plantation in 1901--Angola became infamous as a site of brutality and death. (1) After a long and troubled history, the prison is today considered a model prison, not least because of its popular Angola Prison Rodeo and Inmate Arts Festival, held every Sunday in October and one weekend in the spring. As a cultural anthropologist interested in folk art and popular culture, I pursued research at the Angola Prison Rodeo and Inmate Arts Festival, visiting six times in total. During my third and fourth visits, I secured permission from the warden to bring a tape recorder and camera to interview inmates, despite the usual prohibition against recording equipment at the festival. A child of the South, I was familiar with the phenomenon of rural festivals deemed offbeat by outsiders. During the summers of my youth, I spent at least one sweltering day wandering around downtown during Hillsborough (North Carolina) Hog Day. Like other teenage girls, I followed the standard courtship rituals of flirting, sweating, and eating barbecue, laughed at the vulgarity of the old farmers' hog-calling contests, and danced with their sons to the tunes of amateur musicians. From hillbilly days in Kentucky to rattlesnake roundups in Georgia, festivals are the very fabric of public life in the South. Indeed, the ubiquity and pageantry of public events often intrigue cultural anthropologists and folklorists. For them public festivals serve as a ritual display that communicates deeper cultural meanings through which a collective group asserts its history and identity. (2) The Angola Prison Rodeo and Inmate Arts Festival is a compelling model of this kind of public display, communicating complex and disturbing messages about crime and incarceration to a curious public. One inmate cowboy's experiences reveal how the rodeo poses as a progressive recreational reform at the same time that it exploits and ridicules inmate participants, while the perspective of an inmate artisan demonstrates how the Inmate Arts Festival offers a more salient, though still questionable, avenue to prison reform at Angola. Although the Inmate Arts Festival provides creative and economic benefits to inmates, the festival also presents a sanitized version of prison life, and the festival atmosphere eludes any serious critique about the growing prison industrial complex in the United States. Furthermore, the cultural messages available to spectators at Angola resonate more profoundly in the American South, where a legacy of conservatism on issues of crime and punishment has shaped the public imagination, and, perhaps more significantly, where the prison industrial complex has had the most profound impact. …

This chapter considers how Denise Riley’s writing on irony can form the basis for a developing feminist flippancy. Riley suggests that irony, despite its capacity for humour, is a serious political commitment, and a means to express solidarity with a larger political group. However, irony has a problematic relationship with contemporary feminism, if as Riley suggests ‘vulgarity can be worn down by erosion, but can’t flash into irony’. Looking to the ‘Slut Walk’ in particular, this chapter will explore the ways in which flippancy can work as a linguistic strategy to reflect contemporary ‘vulgar’ identification.

During the period when General Francisco Franco ruled Spain (1936-1975), official censorship kept a watch on all books that were published in the country. The main objective of this censorship was to conceal from the Spanish people political manifestations that might be ultimately threatening for the dictatorial government politically. However, under heavy influence of the Catholic Church, the censors also veiled for the moral health of the Spanish people by intervening in all matters of sexual morality, decency, obscenity and vulgarity. Research has shown that during this period censors were as vigilant for sexual content as they were vigilant for political content. In this study I will examine censorship and sex by studying Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939) and the three Spanish-language translations published during this period (1949, 1958, 1972). Chandler’s novel contains no potential political offenses to Franco’s Regime and its allies, but it does contain references to male homosexuals, scenes of female nudity, and sexually suggestive dialogues involving the detective and a female character. All of the Spanish versions were censored, whether by government censors or the translators/editors prior to presenting the manuscript to the censors. I will discuss the government-censored and self-censored passages in the Spanish versions of the novel, and show that all of the references to the homosexual characters, much of the nudity, and many of the sexually-suggestive dialogues have been manipulated and/or suppressed, producing undesirable and often unexpected effects., Pendant la période durant laquelle le général Francisco Franco gouvernait l’Espagne (1936-1975), la censure officielle maintenait un contrôle sur tous les livres publiés dans le pays. Le principal objectif de cette censure était de taire aux Espagnols toute manifestation d’ordre politique qui pouvait représenter une menace directe pour le gouvernement dictatorial. Toujours est-il que, sous la forte emprise de l’Eglise Catholique, les censeurs ont exercé leur vigilance sur la santé morale du peuple espagnol en intervenant sur les questions de moralité sexuelle, de décence, d’obscénité et de vulgarité. Des recherches ont démontré que durant cette période, les censeurs étaient les gardiens du contenu sexuel aussi bien que du contenu politique. Dans cette étude, je vais analyser la censure sexuelle par le biais du premier roman de Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939), et ses trois traductions espagnoles publiées durant cette période (1949, 1958, 1972). Le roman de Chandler ne contient pas d’offenses potentielles envers le régime de Franco et ses alliés, mais il contient en revanche des références à des homosexuels, des scènes de nudité féminine, et des dialogues à connotation sexuelle entre le détective et un personnage féminin. Toutes les versions espagnoles ont été censurées, soit par les censeurs officiels, soit par les traducteurs ou éditeurs avant la soumission du manuscrit à la censure. Je traiterai des passages censurés officiellement et des passages autocensurés des versions espagnoles du roman et démontrerai que toutes les références concernant les personnages homosexuels, la plupart des scènes de nudité et une grande partie des dialogues à connotation sexuelle ont été manipulés et/ou supprimés, produisant ainsi des effets indésirables et souvent inattendus.

This article uncovers the complex and tangled intertextual relationship between the 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses and the many competing narratives about barmaids at the turn of the century. For some, barmaids were ambiguous sexual personae who characterized a modern and freer age. For others, barmaids were in acute moral peril, in need of rescue and salvation. While 'Sirens' has often been read as a chapter more preoccupied with style than with politics, it seems that Joyce was intimately engaged with intensely political debates over the role of women in the public sphere. Through satirizing contemporary moral unease surrounding the figure of the barmaid, Joyce covertly attacks those moral reformers who would also successfully censor his own work.

The demise of left and right wing authoritarian regimes during the last two decades and subsequent rise of free market and pluralist-oriented philosophies have enveloped the globe in a sea change of political, social and economic reform. The most remarkable of these is the appearance of a nearly feral form of entreprenuership in which black marketers, drug barons, arms merchants, rackets bosses, Mafiosi, and other profiteers are emerging as the economic and political leaders of the social transformations underway in their respective societies. Their achievements have been praised, however inadvertently, by some1, and damned by others (most from the left2, but including neo-conservative moralists like William Bennett and George Will in the United States, to say nothing of television evangelists the world over). Regardless of perspective, this has become a time in which Lumpenproletarians have become legitimate social leaders, warts and all. Think about the common denominator among Ivan Bosky, Tupac Shakur, George Soros, Notorious B.I.G., Rupert Murdoch, Snoop Doggy Dawg, Donald Trump, Don King, John McEnroe, Anna Kornikova, Dennis Rodman, Howard Stern, Coolio, Silvio Berlusconi, Dodi Al-Fayed, Rio favela gang leaders, Chilean arms merchants, Russian disco magnates, Hong Kong real estate barons, the children, grand-- and great-grandchildren of European nobility and self-- made Internet entrepreneurs alike, second and third generation Arab royalty, a cross-national section of narcotics kings, and all the other noveau riche prancing around the globe in their Lear Jets, Ultra Yachts and limousines (to say nothing of the wannabes). Their affinity is vulgarity, greed and ostentatious lifestyles. They are neither high cultured, traditional old rich or new innovators, but instead are backbiters and syndicators, currency and stock speculators, arms merchants, hustlers, money launderers, tycoons, spoiled children, carneys for prurient material and intellectual pabulum to the masses.3 Defined by consumption rather than productivity (remember the advertising slogan "image is everything"), and layered in cynicism ("image is nothing") these are the champions of the New World order. There are always exceptions. Perhaps Bill Gates, Richard Branson, the Nike founders, and a host of new Internet entrepreneurs contribute material gains to human existence (even if they exploit labor and resources in equal measure). Technological innovation and productivity in the hands of many business elites certainly contributes to rises in consumption, material standards and income-for at least the privileged classes worldwide. But even here they are the exception that proves the rule. And the question begs: whither the privilege? For their part, the rapidly expanding ranks of subordinate groups (in many countries including former members of the middle classes displaced by the structural dislocations of the last decade) remain divided, materially debased, and individually consumed to varying degrees by immediate "survivalist" interests. This has given rise to a range of informal economic activities, from street merchants, sidewalk entertainers, buskers and "facilitators" to criminal gangs, all operating in an environment of declining civility and cultural degeneration. New forms of ideological extremism and nihilism have entered public discourse. These are in equal part a product of historical amnesia and post-materialist angst, in which the return to primary group identification takes on immediatist, self-absorbed, atomizing, and social Darwinian characteristics in a context of increasing globalization of production. This is a vulgar form of capitalist social organization, one that is highly efficient, highly stratified, utterly competitive and often brutish in its cultural and political dimensions. What is offered here is not the heroic vision of subaltern groups offered by some cultural theorists. Neither is it a nostalgic paean to classical Marxism or the possibilities of socialism, whose failures are too obvious to recount. …

Recent years have seen efforts to critique the dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in Western thought, and to demonstrate their coconstruction under specific material conditions. As yet, however, little work has uncovered the discourses of animality that lie buried within a social field whose ontological status until recently has been securely ‘human’. In this paper, I show how Western concepts of animality have circulated across the nature border and into a politics of social relations. Concepts of savagery and vulgarity can, in particular, be found within racialised representational systems with whose historicity, I will be suggesting, we can make fresh critical engagements. In much recent work on colonial power formations, ‘othering’ practices have been implicitly conceived within a psychoanalytic frame—one in which the white self's ‘interior beasts’ are anxiously displaced onto an externalised other. Whilst not refuting the efficacy of repression I wish to historicise the workings of a peculiar western model of the Human self, ‘split’ into physical ‘animal’ and cultural ‘human’. This is done both through an extended theoretical account, followed by a microstudy of geographies of savagery and civility in Sydney, Australia.

Despite the growing conflict between Britain and her colonies, a metropolitan education remained a popular choice for the sons of elite colonial Americans in the late colonial period. This article explores the attitudes of the youths themselves, and of their parents, towards their London education during a period when political conflict was engendering a growing sense of separateness. American youths typically underwent a status crisis upon reaching the metropolis. Their insecurities related to the usual pitfalls of genteel London life: the prospect of social isolation and vulgarity, and the opportunities for debauchery. The parents of these colonial youths, however, shared the view of elite British parents of the period that a public education was a necessary social apprenticeship for their children. They regarded personal experience of the metropolis, and familiarity with its social and political systems, as important attributes for elite colonists. Parental views on the advantages of a metropolitan education for their sons were unaffected by the imminent breach with Britain. The status crisis experienced by colonial youths in London was age-related; their visiting parents were acculturated to the metropolitan environment. The article concludes by suggesting that the polarized provincial mentality so long attributed by historians to the colonial presence in London should be replaced by a more integrationist model which reflects the real complexity of the relationship between colonial American elites and their mother country.

Henry James's Autobiography recalls a first vision of “vast portentous London” in 1855, and contrasts brother William's boredom to his own imaginative response to the city (Small Boy157, 170–71). Having moved there, he feels that amid the “London scene” he can fully exercise his “intellectual curiosity,” feeding “on the great supporting and enclosing scene itself” (Middle Years553, 564). A later announcement to William Dean Howells that “henceforth I must do, or half do, England in fiction” comes as no surprise (Letters284). James would follow up his intention in half-a-dozen novels, gradually refining the treatment of broad aesthetic, moral, and political issues inThe Tragic MuseandThe Princess Casamassimato a more specific “form of social-scientific inquiry” into characters and their interactions (Mizruchi 119). The novels written during the last years of Victoria's reign —The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, andThe Sacred Fount— convey perceptions of crumbling social values, “the lost sense, the brutalized manner” (James,Notebooks196), through close analysis of individuals' speech, actions, motives, and relationships. Indeed, James held that wider trends were summed up by the differences between the personal traits of Victoria and her heir. After the old queen's death, he voiced misgivings in various letters: whereas she had been “a kind of nursing mother of the land and of the empire,” Edward was “an arch-vulgarian,” whose accession seemed bound to bring “vulgarity and frivolity” (qtd. in Edel 2: 426). The tone is first gloomy, “It's a new era — and we don't know what it is,” and later resigned: “We live notoriously, as I suppose every age lives, in an ‘epoch of transition’ ” (Preface,Awkward Age12). A strong conviction that personal and social behavior influence and signify each other informs such comments.

For two different sorts of tourists there are two dramatically different nightmares about Europe. The first is ages old and teeming with surly French waiters, incomprehensible languages, uncomfortable and cold hotels, bizarre plumbing, crowded trains, and unrecognizable food. To others there is the frightening vision of a Europe lying supine before an American invasion of vulgarity: marauding legions of hamburger patties and tidal waves of CocaCola. For those Americans and Europeans who want Europe to be different, the seductions of American mass culture, from action films to "Baywatch," fast food to rock 'n roll, are a grand and bitter disappointment. Richard Pells understands these reactions well, although it is the latter that he finds most interesting and important. In assessing what "Americanization" means and how it has affected various European societies, he has written a superbly sensible and intelligent essay. And his conclusion is a surprise: despite the amazing changes in European society since 1945, it has not become just like us-the Golden Arches and Euro Disney to the contrary notwithstanding. Who has a stake in this debate about difference; where does the concern come from; and why is it so powerful and persistent? There are, first of all, tourists who voyage to Europe in search of difference and quaintness-for the experience of being not-American. This is a complicated gesture based as much on American fantasies, popular culture, and nostalgia as anything else. As with tourists everywhere the "differences" are often planned, stereotyped, and controlled. Too much difference would be incomprehensible and frightening; too little would make Europe appear too American. For very different reasons, there are other groups that wish to make Europe more American. On occasion, as after World War II in Germany, American policy was designed to transform German values and political institutions into practice derived from the American experience. This democratic instruction was sometimes even projected into relations with other European countries during the Cold War years. Still other groups, particularly in the business community, hoped to

The cinepanettoni are a series of farcical comedies, one or two of which are released annually in Italy for the Christmas period, and attendance at which has come to be an integral part of the festive celebrations for many Italians so that the films are often among the most successful of the year. Though the cinepanettoni date back to 1983, the term itself seems to have been coined in the early 2000s and was certainly intended pejoratively, meant to suggest that these films are a matter of mere consumption (the preferred industry term is ‘film di Natale’ (Christmas film)). My aim is to introduce the history and variety of the cinepanettoni, and analyse a sample of the criticism or parody of the films in scholarship and in popular culture. Through a discussion of history in S.P.Q.R. 2000 and a Half Years Ago/S.P.Q.R. 2000 e ½ anni fa (1994), a satire of contemporary Italian politics and justice set in the classical Roman period, I argue that the film’s satire is directed as much at the pomposity of historical discourse as it is at its explicit targets of political corruption and judicial incompetence. Secondly, I discuss a literal version of ‘toilet humour’ in Natale sul Nilo (2002), directed by Neri Parenti. Parenti’s cinepanettoni from the new century have been the subject of particular derision, and I deliberately focus on what is seen as the irredeemable vulgarity of the Parenti films, in an attempt to better understand their humour of the lower body. My modest aim in this chapter is to argue the complexity and interest of the cinepanettone against its discursive construction in scholarship, criticism and in the wider Italian culture as crude, simplistic and beneath consideration.

FOR THOSE LOOKING FOR WAYS TO RESIST AND OVERCOME the many manifestations of vulgarity in contemporary American life, it may seem apposite to turn for inspiration to the vision and ideas of Ronald Reagan. He has been described by a number of scholars, politicians, and ordinary Americans as a man and president who embodied the American spirit. Many people consider him a model conservative in American politics. Reagan had long-standing and deep attachments to individual liberty, free markets, limited government, decentralized power, and traditional moral values. As president, he shared with Americans his understanding of these and other ideas in numerous speeches. More so than most presidents, Reagan appealed to the imagination of Americans; that is, he used concrete images and illustrative stories to convey his vision of America and its people in a captivating and memorable way. Reagan was also a very likeable political leader, quick with a smile and a handshake, and he was rather humble in his personal conduct. His affability and personal modesty have no doubt contributed to the enduring appeal of his intuitive sense of politics. Yet a careful analysis suggests that Reagan’s imagination may not be the model of modest republicanism that some might suspect.

If many Capahosic participants had ties to an older, traditional GOP and retained a quid pro quo approach to politics, more internationally minded Republicans began to rival Democrats in looking outward at a global environment in transition. They looked for counsel to such figures as Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, for whom Urban League director Lester Granger wrote a policy paper during the Eisenhower years. Kissinger had directed a seminar focused on the status of the United States in the world. Granger’s contribution, “The Racial Factor in International Relations,” advocated decolonization and racial reform. Granger used conventional cold war arguments to suggest approaches for improving the United States’ image. He called for a coherent State Department program for foreign visitors of color and recommended removing materials in United States Information Agency (USIA) libraries that denigrated African Americans. Granger placed considerable emphasis on propaganda work, including “good will missions,” foreign aid, and the integration of the Foreign Service. In line with the Urban League’s focus on placing minority candidates in jobs, his recommendations leaned heavily on the appointment of “American Negroes of high qualification” for overseas posts. He expressed skepticism, however, about sending popular black entertainers on foreign tours. Granger “seriously questioned,” for instance, whether having jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong play before a “shouting, swaying, rocking and rolling Gold Coast audience,” advanced the best interests of the United States. Instead of Satchmo’s sweaty vulgarity, the punctilious Granger believed, “skillful, well-trained and highly intelligent” blacks would be far more appropriate representatives. The Urban League director’s disdain for such authentic expressions of African-American culture as jazz was not rare at the time.

Since their creation over a decade ago, blogs have become an important means of communication. Blogs focusing on politics have risen to prominence in the United States, especially during elections. Prior research into political blogs has focused on content and link analysis, but few studies have analyzed the comments left on political blogs by readers. The interactions between bloggers and readers in the comments of political blogs have created political communities. This study attempts to explore the blog communities created on Election Day 2008 through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the comments left by blog readers on five elite American political blogs. Quantitative results showed that a few commenters account for the majority of the comments posted. Qualitative analysis of one blog post and its associated comments revealed more vulgarity than deliberative debate between commenters. These conclusions are preliminary, but they demonstrate the necessity of further research into blog comments and blog communities.

G. T. W. B. Boyes, to his contemporaries ‘Alphabet’ Boyes, was a Commissariat officer during the Peninsular War who later served in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. He was both a well-educated man and an intellectual snob. His closest friend was a fellow Commissariat officer, whom he described to his wife as a great acquisition ‘in the midst of the Goths’.1 With finely developed sensibilities in art and literature, unlike many others during those years, Boyes considered himself culturally superior to his fellow colonists: the ‘Goths’ as he called them in letters home to his wife. Bernard Smith has argued that Boyes cultivated the arts ‘not as a means towards a better understanding of an unfamiliar part of the world but as a manifestation of taste, culture and sensibility’.2 His wife would remain in England for nine years before eventually joining him. During that time, he had only a few cultured friends, mostly fellow colonial officials, with whom he socialised. Forced to live in what he considered a vulgar world obsessed with commercialism and political intrigue, Boyes found an outlet in his diary and in long letters to his wife. In one letter, he wrote ‘Bye, the bye, do you wear a bustle? This article of female attire excited considerable surprise and speculation among the Goths and Vandals of Van Diemen’s Land.’3 Yet, despite the vulgarity of colonial society, Boyes found his prospects improving in the Australian colonies and diminishing further in England.

We used to hate nostalgia. The sentimentalism, the conservatism, the sheer vulgarity of it were beneath contempt. In 1962 Eric Hobsbawm brusquely observed that ideologies that offer ‘resistance to progress hardly deserve the name of systems of thought’ (Hobsbawm, 1962: 290). But something has changed. Nostalgia is getting noisy. Today’s socialist movement is shot through with fond yearning for a time when Left-wing varieties of radicalism were a real force in Western politics. The taboo on a sense of loss, on wistful recollection, remains powerful but is crumbling. To call someone nostalgic remains a wounding insult. Yet the radical Left is, in so many ways, the politics of the past. To be on the Left is to inhabit a political landscape where all the familiar faces and all the significant events are of yesteryear.

As the last chapter described, a group of exiles founded the Library of the Burned Books in Paris in time for the first anniversary of the Nazi book burnings. Their early efforts would later have a decisive impact on the wartime memorialization of the fires, when the indelible connection between fascism and book burning was drawn. But while their efforts were relevant to the political history of book burning, many contemporary writers, even those vehemently opposed to fascism, continued to express a distinct longing for a conflagration. Most agreed on the vulgarity of the National Socialist pageants, but for every international report which dwelt on their childish barbarity, there were several others that understood how such an act could signify a refreshed commitment to art or politics. This diversity has been elided in more recent history, replaced with a sanitized version which imagines that book burning was instantly recognized as the emblem of fascism, when in fact, the hackneyed eloquence and official dogma of the Nazi critics and writers had faint international echoes. By exploring the fiction and political rhetoric of the 1930s, this chapter shows that the distaste for book burning did not banish the nostalgia for a good bonfire.

The CRC Committee has pointed out the lack of legal guarantees for the freedom of expression for children below 18 years of age within the States Parties to the CRC. Cultural obstacles pose a real threat whether they stem from religious dogma, oppressive political culture or corrupt business tactics in exploiting children with vulgarity and violence or simply apathy resulting from ignorance, lack of information and/or mindless consumerism. The UN Human Development Report 2004 encourages allowing people full expression, including the poor and the marginalized and not least youth, to prevent outbursts of violence. The CRC Committee is particularly concerned about de facto discrimination, including multiform-discrimination against vulnerable groups of children, perhaps without sufficiently linking the horrendous situation of hundreds of millions of children to their actual lack of exercising their civil and political rights.Keywords: CRC Committee; de facto discrimination; freedom of expression; political rights; States Parties

In October 1837 The Quarterly Review stooped to recognize the arrival of a new author. The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist were appearing in monthly numbers and already it was clear that a seismic shift had taken place in the world of letters: The popularity of this writer is one of the most remarkable literary phenomena of recent times, for it has been fairly earned without resorting to any of the means by which most other writers have succeeded in attracting the attention of their contemporaries. He has flattered no popular prejudice and profited by no passing folly: he has attempted no caricature sketches of the manners or conversation of the aristocracy; and there are very few political or personal allusions in his works. Moreover, his class of subjects are such as to expose him at the outset to the fatal objection of vulgarity; and with the exception of occasional extracts in the newspapers, he received little or no assistance from the press. Yet, in less than six months from the appearance of the first number of the Pickwick Papers, the whole reading public were talking about them.1 Any author may have readers; all readers may in some sense be termed a public. However the phrase “reading public,” first used by Coleridge four years after Dickens’s birth.’ meant much more than the agglomeration of purchasers and borrowers of the text.

Following the terror attacks of September 11, political comedian Bill Maher indicted American foreign policy as a contributory cause of the attacks on his late night forum for pop commentary, Politically Incorrect.1 The next day, White House Press Secretary An Fleischer sounded a warning to Maher and others poised to join in his satirical vulgarity: “[t]here are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say and watch what they do, and that this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.”2 ABC, the network on which Maher’s show appeared, cancelled Politically Incorrect effective May 2002. The National Coalition Against Censorship indexed several censorship moments post-9/11 on its Internet web site, as categorized by their relationship to art, entertainment, news and commentary, and even the workplace.3 The purpose of this chapter is not to catalogue such incidents, but to expound upon their origins and effect.

BRAVE NEW WORLDS WALKER ART CENTER MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA OCTOBER 4, 2007-FEBRUARY 17, 2008 Viewing "Brave New Worlds" is an arduous experience, but worthwhile, for it is the most intellectually and emotionally courageous show I have seen in years and all the more bold for its emotive aspects). Although Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond rightfully laud the creative bravery of these twenty-four artists from seventeen countries who are "responsible to the 'world,'" these two Walker curators are no less daring visionaries. Not only for proffering an "antidote" to Aldous Huxley's terrifyingly efficient future, but for eschewing the museum world's decades-long dependency on semi-shocking or incomprehensible spectacle as a means of attracting an audience. These seventy political, and poetical, artworks justly implicate the viewer. Rather than shame us, however, their subtle potency convinces us that we must be responsible to the world too. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The exhibition is monopolized by the moving image, but this is no cheap attempt to mesmerize viewers. Instead, the incessant use of film, video, and televisual footage functions as a crystalline mirror of our world's most preferred mode of obtaining information. Erik Van Lieshout's Guantanamo Baywatch, Parts 2 and 3 (2007) is an anarchic video road show that follows the artist and his editor through New Mexico and Israel, and one cannot help but view these two holy fools as the artworld version of Beavis and Butthead. Accordingly, their ostensibly infantile banter is revealing in its vulgarity, and such inane refrains as "Hothead Arabs, Jews, all is line!" may very well scream what the mannered world cannot. Sex and violence also collide within their expanded cinema's entranceway, where Van Lieshout's mixed media drawings of scantily clad women, the words Israel and Iraq scrawled across their breasts, resemble a twenty-first century DeKooning weaned on cable, crystal meth, and American Apparel Ads. Inside, the "boys in the basement" sensation is heightened by a random arrangement of thrift-store chairs. Stuck kamikaze style on the slanted floor, they force one along for a wild ride. In Schema (Television) (2006-2007), Sean Snyder more cynically proves Marshall McLuhan's belief that the medium becomes the message, but questions whether a universal penchant for cheesy game shows is really proof that we are all one global village. Snyder edits together seconds-long segments from hundreds of television networks around the world, accrued via satellite, then intersperses them with such seemingly cliched platitudes as "Television always speaks the truth not the whole truth because there is no way to say it all." As they rapidly interrupt one another, a clip of a cow under a shower becomes no more significant than Vladimir Putin on a fighter plane: all is equalized. More frightening, however, is the recognition that this is precisely the same way and speed at which so many of us amass our own knowledge about the world's diverse cultures: we are all flicking through a thousand channels, considering each for no more than a millisecond. This superficial homogeneity brought on by globalization is perhaps the saddest aspect of the "world" illustrated within these heterogeneous works. As most capital cities now seem a standardized amalgamation of concrete and commerce, it is only the predominance of Arabic calligraphy or Chinese characters that indicate a place other than where you already are. Perversely, then, the images that lack such specificity become all the more powerful for their universality. One such series, "The Sleepers, Tangier 2006," by Yto Barrada, initially appears to be comprised of photos of homeless men, all of whom lie prone upon grassy, trash-strewn public spaces. Their holey socks and ill-fitting shoes are the first universal iconographic element suggesting all is not right. And it is not. …

Bicentennials and the like characteristically become times of com placency, of celebrations of the national achievement, of a mass stroking of the national ego and the national psyche, reaching occasionally the pits of vulgarity and the heights of hyperbole. Undeniably 1988 is a proper time for confirmation of the national identity, although there are great disputes about what exactly that is. There are national achievements to be celebrated, there are good and true stories to be told, of bravery and generosity, of social experimen tation and advance, of serious attempts to break away from external patterns and bondages. But 1988 also gives us the chance, indeed requires us, to scrutinise critically where we are and where we have come from, though that enterprise, which mixes love and self- criticism, even impiety, should be continuous. It is not that we should walk short rather than walk tall (along with Bob, Alan, Kerry and Co.), that we should become ‘moaning minnies’, to use a fashionable British term for those who want to thoughtfully examine rather than unthink ingly endorse their society. We cannot look back and say simply: ‘Well done mates!’ Proper pride and critical reflectiveness can co exist happily. And acceptance of the responsibility of our forbears for bad as well as good things need in no way leave us crippled with guilt: it could and should underlie positive action towards a better society.

E VERY time I teach Othello, whether to graduate students or to undergraduates, I must always start with the question of racial bias and where that bias enters the play and our readings of it. "Must" because, in my experience, the majority of students assume that Othello's problems start in Venice, where, as a Moor, he can only be an outsider. There is, of course, evidence in the play for this assumption. By the end of scene one, Roderigo and lago have called "the Moor" (whom they never name) "the thick-lips" (I.i.66), "an old black ram" (88), "the devil" (9i), "a Barbary horse" (III-12), "a lascivious Moor" (I26), and "an extravagant and wheeling stranger" (I36), and have accused him of "making the beast with two backs" (ii6-I7) with Brabantio's "fair" (I22) daughter, Desdemona.1 By the end of scene two, Brabantio has joined vehemently in the fray, to accuse the "foul thief' (I.ii.62) of "practi~cing] on" Desdemona "with foul charms" (73) and drawing her to his "sooty bosom" (70), of being "an abuser of the world, a practiser / Of arts inhibited and out of warrant" (78-79). And in scene three, the duke orders Othello to Cyprus to fight against the Turks, as if happier to expend Moorish than Venetian blood. Yet although these expressions may suggest an undercurrent of racial bias that makes them especially effective for underhanded personal and political maneuvers, that bias does not determine Othello's position in the court or on the stage. To the contrary, the racial epithets of the opening scenes-the stereotypes that classify and condemn Othello as a black manhelp place Roderigo, Brabantio, and lago outside polite society, the vulgarity of their sexual imagery calling their otherwise respectable social and political standing into question.2 And, although Othello's commission may invoke the European practice of hiring Moors as mercenary soldiers, that practice does not necessarily prove bias against the Moor.3 In fact, the duke also con

L2 VERY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER is subject to misunderstanding, but perhaps none more so than those who insist on distinctions to which their age is not accustomed or which it is determined to ignore. Thus it is not surprising to discover that Hannah Arendt, whose philosophy is based on just such distinctions which we find either alien or meaningless, should be particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Two recent issues of Political Theory have included articles which have contained critical but thoughtful appreciations of Arendt's celebration of the political.' However, the authors of these articles, George Kateb and Margaret Canovan, have found quite troubling the counterpart of Arendt's glorification of the political: her denigration of all nonpolitical activities, and in particular laboring as personified in Arendt's animal laborans.2 Indeed, Kateb finds Arendt's indictment of labor so relentless and so complete that he feels compelled to defend her against the possible charge of austocratic "fastidiousness."3 Canovan believes no defense is possible and finds Arendt guilty of "demonstrating a haughty and distant contempt for the vulgarity of the modern world."4 I believe both Kateb and Canovan are wrong in discerning elitist tendencies in Arendt, at least to the extent they base their conviction on Arendt's alleged harsh strictures against the laboring class. They make that mistake because both of them too easily assume that Arendt's devaluation of labor and her indictment of animal laborans refer to a social category of humanity that was formerly described as the lower orders and today is

“There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth.”So concludes the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Such a statement appearing in 1945 would, except perhaps for the view that the two countries “tend towards the same end,” be truistic. Even the journalists would understand and accept it. It appeared in 1835. To most Europeans of that day, the United States was a crude and bumptious little nation on the western fringes of the world, just as Russia was the half-Oriental, half-feudal state which was not so much a power as a vast expanse of inhospitable steppes. At a time when English travelers were frequently aware only of the vulgarity of American manners, and when some European visitors to this country were most impressed with its picturesque qualities, Tocqueville was much more concerned with the basic nature and with the future of the complex combination of laws, customs, and mores which were embraced within his inclusive conception of democracy. He came here, not to give slightly condescending lectures and to bolster his own feeling of superiority, but rather to observe and report on the operation of a principle of political and social organization. Partly because he had an inquiring mind and was willing to work hard at his self-imposed task, but largely because he was gifted with rare insight and was not prevented from seeing the trend of events by the surface happenings of his own time, his book on the nature of American institutions remains, after more than a century, one of the few invaluable books on that subject.

ROM THE VERY BEGINNING, American higher education has been faced with a choice between two general ideals: those of developing and educating our leaders, experts and more or less professional people at the expense of raising the general educational level of the people; or, on the other hand, extending the privileges of a general education to everyone capable of receiving them at the possible expense of the few most qualified to receive such training and benefit by it. That our choice of the second of these ideals, a choice based upon the principle that the success of a democratic government depends upon the development of the general understanding of its people, is fraught with danger has been recognized by many educators. Three quarters of a century ago the French historian, Ernest Renan, writing of expansion of higher education in the United States, made the pertinent observation that "countries which, like the United States, have set up considerable popular instruction without any serious higher education, will have to expiate their error by their intellectual mediocrity, the vulgarity of their manners, their superficial spirit, their failure in general intelligence." And many an English observer of our American scene has expressed, in even less polite, if more specific terms, his doubts about the wisdom of our policy of extending the benefits of higher education to an ever-increasing proportion of our population. Nevertheless, whatever our personal opinions may be regarding the wisdom of such a choice, we are, as a nation, more than ever committed to the extension of popular education as is evidenced by the recent report of the President's Committee on Higher Education. The majority of Americans, educators and laymen alike, in the words of a well-known educator, Earl McGrath, Dean of the College of Arts, Iowa State University, have "fewer misgivings about the danger of trying to make race horses out of burros by extending educational opportunities than they have about the danger of making burros out of potential race horses by denying such opportunities to a large percentage of American youth." Our people are beginning to realize that our system of higher education, patterned originally after European (especially German) methods, and based upon a social philosophy that is alien to our political convictions, has failed to cater to the peculiar needs and fill the particular gaps that exist in their educational background. Again, to use the words of the educator just quoted, we are suddenly aware that in the United States, higher A Serious Critique of Cultural Opportunities in Our Present Educational System

LAST THURSDAY EVENING, in the midst of the season's most vivid thunderstorm in southern England, the British launched a bold, new enterprise which nearly everyone feels is going to have a revolutionary effect on the life, habits, taste, and manners of the people of this island. Commercial television made its long-awaited bow in Britain with a fanfare of trumpets, a burst of orchestral music, a solemn round of inaugural speeches, and an advertisement for toothpaste. In spite of the thunderstorm, the reception on opening night was sharp, clear, and uninterrupted within a 70-mile radius of London; and, in spite of the vivid storm of controversy that has raged on the subject, it is already obvious that commercial television is not only here, but here to stay, an accepted and permanent feature of the life of this nation. Commercial television has been a hotly controversial issue here for the past three years. No other public question has created a greater outward fuss on the upper levels of British politics. During the three-year debate, the British have heard a thousand dreadful warnings about the damage that commercial TV would do to the British way of life. The TV monster, as it is commonly referred to by its legion of unfriendly critics here, would bring in its wake a host of undesirable things-the debasement of taste, the corruption of youth, the breakdown of law, and a huckster's riot of vulgarity. Eminent public men, like Lord Halifax on the Conservative side and Herbert Morrison on the Labor side, have

It is becoming more and more obvious that colonialism--as we have come to know it during the last two hundred years--cannot be identified with only economic gain and political power. In Manchuria, Japan consistently lost money, and for many years colonial Indochina, Algeria and Angola, instead of increasing the political power of France and Portugal, sapped it. This did not make Manchuria, Indochina, Algeria or Angola less important as colonies. Nor did it disprove the point that economic gain and political power are important motives in a colonial situation. It only showed that colonialism could be characterized by the search for economic and political advantage without concomitant real economic or political gains, and sometimes even with economic or political losses. This essay argues that the first differentia of colonialism is a state of mind in the colonizers and the colonized, a colonial consciousness which includes the sometimes unrealizable wish to make economic and political profits from the colonies, but other elements, too. The political economy of colonization is of course important, but the vulgarity and insanity of colonialism are principally expressed in the sphere of psychology. The following pages will explore some of these psychological contours of colonialism in the rulers and the ruled and try to define colonialism as a shared culture which may not always begin with the establishment of alien rule in a society and end with the departure of the alien rulers from the colony. The example I shall use will be that of India, where a colonial political economy began to operate seventy-five years before the full-blown ideology of British imperialism became dominant, and where thirty years after the formal ending of the raj, the ideology of colonialism is still triumphant in many sectors of life.