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The problem with Cargo 200, in a sentence: it wants to maintain the shocking locus of the film as both a thematically coherent linchpin of events, characters, narrative strands, etc. and as a decidedly “meaningless,” shocking violence that cannot be articulated, grasped, or accounted for “finally” by the film in which it appears.
Accordingly, the literature [...]
After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, [...]
The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
by Daniel Heller-Roazen
295 pp. | 6 x 9
Available November 2009
FORTHCOMING
from Zone Books:
The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As [...]
Three recent films/series use the plight of fantastical beings (vampires, mutants, aliens) trying to gain acceptance into society as metaphors for the real life struggles of embattled, minority groups. Is the metaphor successful, or does it also work against its apparent progressivism by indulging in the very stereotypes it claims to resist? But first, a [...]
Juan Cole debunks the Obama administration’s and the media’s Pakistani Taliban threat fantasy:
As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, [...]
It seems that the GOP considers even pandemic preparadness a form of welfarism:
When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year’s emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.
Obey and other advocates [...]
Jeremy Scahill is not pleased:
The U.S. State Department has announced it is sponsoring a “New Media Technology” delegation to Iraq to “explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.” Of all of the areas in Iraq in desperate need of attention, its “emerging new media industry” is [...]
Even Nicholas Kristof is acknowledging animal rights as a legitimate, opposed to ‘absurd’ or ‘radical’, cause. He even muses over the historical nature of what we happen to consider a self-evident, obvious ‘right’.
For most of history, all of this would have been unimaginable even to people of the most refined ethical sensibility (granted, for many [...]
It’s a common accusation of the left that politics, liberal and conservative alike, becomes “aestheticized” through persistent suspensions of law and declarations of emergencies. But what, exactly, Neil Levi asks, in a timely, subtle paper on Carl Schmitt, is so “aesthetic” about political decisionism, a doctrine still fresh on our lips in the Obama era. [...]
Der Spiegel reports of another “Veiled Woman Removed From Bus in Denmark“:
“For Amina Farah Suleiman, it was the fourth time in a few months that she has been kicked off a bus in the harbor city of Odense. Her Islamic niqab only had a small opening for the eyes, and the driver refused to accept [...]
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