Search

Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps—white male politicians and military heroes—was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this iconographic diversification: workers, people who labor. Stamps that seem to be about labor (those devoted to such topics as labor leaders, collective bargaining, and employment for the disabled) are, we claim, about something other than "labor as such." Drawing on Marx's Grundrisse , we argue that in capitalist societies, waged labor and pauperism are indissolubly linked because laborers have no control over the reliability of their employment. Laborers are "humanity ground zero," people deemed (in capitalist common sense) to have accomplished nothing beyond working for a wage and who therefore cannot be represented in postal iconography as builders of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Photoarticle, we survey what we will call the post-historical U.S. postage stamps of the last third of the twentieth century. We focus on stamps depicting the space race and space travel, as well as the linkage of some of those stamps to the 1992 Olympic games, to analyze the iconographic and narrative consequences of an increasing turn toward the commercialization of postal services. The stamps we consider coincide with a series of new commercial strategies on the part of the United States Postal Service (USPS) and a broad resurgence in public interest in space travel. While many critics during the 1960s considered the space race to be a distraction from more pressing political concerns—such as urban poverty or the war in Vietnam—by the 1980s and 1990s, space travel had become a less controversial endeavor (perhaps due to its large-scale defunding), and astronauts, especially the Apollo 11 astronauts, were widely lauded as heroes. We have chosen this "topical" focus (as stamp collectors say) for two reasons. First, the iconography of space exploration is dominated by one specific moment, when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969. Despite an ongoing history of space exploration before and after 1969, the moon landing, we will argue, was treated in postal iconography as a timeless event —a climactic technological triumph that seemed to announce what Francis Fukuyama, in an influential essay, called "the end of history." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the relationship between universities' roles in gentrification of urban areas and the place of campus security. He mentions the actions of the University of Virginia in developing Charlottesville, Virginia and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the role of gentrification in providing more security for the universities' campuses, and the sense of safety established by geography alone.

The article discusses the organization of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Subconference by graduate students at different universities to determine if their peers will accept a shadow conference. The organization was designed as a site to forge relationships between academic and nonacademic activists and propose the use of direct action in home campuses and communities and understanding militant research as a way to transform the financial and power structures of universities.