Death inevitable as it is, bears the mark of finality. When someone leaves us unexpectedly or prematurely, it leaves an even more indelible mark. Zainul Abedin’s transition is our great loss,.
The farmers' movement, of the people, by the people, and for the people, may also have a few lessons in political wisdom for floundering opposition parties.
Featured in Wu Tsang’s Renewal of the Collective
Two new films by the artist and her cohorts, on view at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, speak to joint struggles and why collaboration is key
In the second volume of his
Prison Notebooks (1926), Italian communist Antonio Gramsci suggests that critical consciousness stems from the understanding that one’s identity is shaped by historical processes ‘which [have] deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The notion of an infinitely mutable mosaic of identities that we carry with ourselves (class, gender and race) is at the heart of ‘Visionary Company’, the exhibition by filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang and her multidisciplinary collective Moved by Motion, currently at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
Abstract
The article sheds light on Walter Benjamin’s and Antonio Gramsci’s treatments of elitist traditions. It provides a historical contextualization and brief comparison of the theoretical and political developments of the two contemporaries under this aspect. In the Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1924/25), Benjamin’s historical-philosophical aesthetics are enriched by a history of concepts which increasingly takes up socio-historical aspects. This approach goes beyond Benjamin’s programmatic formulations at the beginning of the 1920s, in which he regarded the work of art as a privileged medium of historical insight that, in theory and method, had to be isolated from history. As for Gramsci, the article elaborates an increasing mediation between social and literary history. This is done, on the one hand, by comparing Gramsci’s statements on Italian Futurism between 1913 and 1922 and, on the other hand, by tracing and examining Gramsci’s criticism of Benedetto Croc