“In Goodbye, My Havana, the Cuban revolution’s prescribed limits of freedom are most evident in the relegation of women and LGBTQ individuals to the periphery, where their rights quickly erode and their personhood is more easily dismissed. The benefit of hindsight shows Castro’s regime working inward from there. Once it had stripped the most vulnerable of their rights, it was easier to impose a system of authoritarianism on the remainder of the populace.”
Category Archives: Arts
Lorissa Rinehart: “A Graphic Novel Looks at the Limits of Freedom in Revolutionary Cuba”
Posted in fiction, gender, justice, Nota Bene, revolution, rights, tragic politics
Tagged Cuba
A.O. Scott: “Review: ‘Edge of Democracy’ Looks at Brazil with Outrage and Heartbreak”
‘One of the implications of “The Edge of Democracy” is that as Lula and the Workers’ Party lost touch with the mass movement that brought them to power and mastered the levers of the political system, they made themselves vulnerable to popular anger on the right. Corruption and back room dealing were longstanding norms of Brazilian governance that the party didn’t do much to challenge.’
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Posted in film, hubris, melancholy, Nota Bene, revolt, the Left, tragic politics
Tagged Brazil
“4 Musicians Chart 100 Years in the Life of a Runaway Slave”
‘Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘
Joseph Nechvatal: “How Artists of the French Revolution Embraced Neoclassical Revivalism”
“The exhibition Revolutionary Generation: French Drawings (1770-1815) from the Fabre Museum illustrates how, as the Rococo movement went out of fashion, France’s insurrectionist artists drew on ancient Greek and Roman art for inspiration.”
Posted in fine arts, revolution
Tagged Classicism, David, French Revolution
Gastón Gordillo: Syllabus of the course “The Anthropology of Insurrections and Revolution”
“how to teach about insurrections and revolution at a time when the world is headed toward an environmental-social catastrophe unless we manage to generate truly revolutionary changes.”
“The Photos that Captured the First Day of the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia”
“August 21, 1968 at the Czech Center New York features 20 images of dynamic photo-reportage capturing the first day of the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia.”
“How the Performance of a French Opera about a Neapolitan Revolt Sparked a Belgian Revolution”
The plot of the fiery libretto of the grand opera The Mute Girl of Portici by the French composer Daniel Auber revolves around the Neapolitan revolts of 1647.
Posted in Blog, music, revolution
“Love and revolution” (2018): A film by Yannis Youlountas
A documentary film-testimony of struggles for autonomy in Greece, letting those who are directly engaged in these struggles speak for themselves.
Posted in anarchism, Blog, crisis, film, fraternity, resistance, the common
Tagged Greece
“Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics” by Stephen Greenblatt (2018)
“We learn not simply what Trump tells us about Shakespeare but what Shakespeare tells us about Trump. Illuminating scene after scene, Greenblatt is especially fine on the mechanisms of tyranny.”
