economy

Occupy Wall Street: Carnival Against Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility at Liberty Plazza

While some commentators and journalists have dismissed Occupy Wall Street as carnival, lawmakers and policemen did not miss the point. Carnival per se, the Shrovetide festival, hardly exists in the United States anymore, save for Mardi Gras in New Orleans and the West-Indian American or Labor Day Parade in Brooklyn, a pan-Caribbean celebration.The carnivalesque, however, as medium of emancipation and instrument of political protest, is alive and well. (...) Carnivalesque protests are a staple of the anti-corporate globalization movement.

City

18.10.2011 | by Claire Tancons

The moral economy of witchcraft: an essay in comparative history - I

Witchcraft, as used here, is also an abstraction, but one intended to represent directly the terms used by African and other societies to describe their own beliefs and practices. The introductory section of the essay will attempt to identify an African witchcraft idiom which gives broader meaning to texts such as the Beninois oral account of slave-cowry transactions. The concluding section will examine the early-modern European "witch craze" in order to consider how the elaboration of common elements in European and African culture both reflects and mediates differing trajectories into the modern world

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19.06.2011 | by Ralph A. Austen

Preview: poems from the book “Fragments d’un Crépuscule Blessé”

The air erodes Its shadow quivers My land is lost sand My skin a black target A rough weave of laments How could anyone believe that a mother is anything but love?