Browsing by Subject "peasant"

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    Politics beyond Dominance: Subaltern Power and World Making
    (2018-08) Pham, Quynh
    This dissertation examines the counter-intuitive relation between the systemic marginalization of subaltern groups and their world-making capacities. Challenging the widespread view of subalterns as only objects of domination and intervention, I argue that they have the capacity to enact alternatives to the dominant order and recompose collective existence from the margins. This capacity, what I call subaltern power, is grounded in enduring ways of being and worlding that continue to be sustained and cultivated despite forces of elimination and assimilation. The dissertation focuses on peasant politics as a significant site of subaltern power in contemporary global politics. I look closely at articulations of peasant power in three interconnected realms. First, I examine how peasant agroecology rejects the capitalist agro-industrial order and enacts social and ecological regeneration in response to the inheritance of ruins. Second, drawing attention to the ontological violence of rural displacement, I argue that peasant power is manifest in the staging of agrarian dissensus wherein peasant villagers make visible and audible a subaltern order of political community and just relations. Third, I suggest that the transformative power of transnational peasant movements exceeds normative and legal changes insofar as they work to construct a different world order through international agrarian restructuring, rural renewal, and epistemic decolonization. By attending to subaltern dwelling, dissensus, and translocal mobilization, I provide an analysis of how subaltern power is expressed in diverse locations, forms, and moments. The dissertation offers a framework to account for what is otherwise obscured in International Relations: the worlds at stake in subaltern struggles against the dominant order.
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    Real and Ideal: The Realism of Jules Breton
    (2018-07) Acosta, Taylor
    Real and Ideal: The Realism of Jules Breton examines the artistic production of Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton (1827-1906) in relation to theories of realism, the historiography of Realism, and the discursive formation of the “peasant” in the visual culture and history of the nineteenth century. In his cultivation of the persona of the preeminent peintre paysan, and through his works which represented his vision of country life, Breton, perhaps more than any other French artist of the nineteenth century, was involved in an explicit negotiation of two fundamental concepts, which effectively constituted the terms of the “realist debate”: the “real” and the “ideal.” In negotiating past and present, rural and urban, the particular and the universal, notions of the real and the ideal, which perhaps began as nothing more than what Umberto Eco termed a “semiotic enclave,” became an entire discourse on truth, aesthetics, and social welfare in the artistic and critical output of the period dominated by Realism (1830-1885) and its subsequent historiography. Rather than reinforce this binary as it has appeared in much of the scholarship on Realism, this dissertation aims to restore a productive ambivalence to these terms and conceives of this perceived opposition as operatively valuable within the discourse of realism itself and as emblematic of its inherent tensions. By analyzing Breton’s paintings, poetry, and prose through an exploration of some primary concerns of Realism: truth, type, and the artist’s self, this dissertation proposes that the antagonism between the “real” and the “ideal” that has underscored so much of the historiography of Realism is rather more apparent than actual. It concludes that within this more capacious understanding of Realism, as at once antinomical and dialectic, Jules Breton emerges as its most typical practitioner.