Sample Abstracts
Sample Abstracts
Arpita Joyce
Class of 2020
Bryn Mawr College
asjoyce@brynmawr.edu
Maíz Culture, “lo mexicano”, and Indigenous Womxn: the Artist Imaginary
This article will explore Mexican identity in visual culture through a close examination of the relationship between indigeneity, maíz, and labor as seen in selected works of María Izquierdo and Diego Rivera. Despite the gap of twenty years time between the creation of these works, this paper marks parallels and patterns that emerge in Rivera and Izquierdo’s work as they strategically depict the relationship between the land and indigenous womxnhood in order to gesture towards ideals of the Mexican nation state. I argue that indigenous womxn’s bodies exist as the palimpsest upon which culture, nation-state formation, and language is created or inscribed. What is done to the land is indicative of what is being done to the bodies; destruction of the land and revocation of indigenous autonomy makes invisible indigenous womxn. While these two artists make different socio-political critiques through the mode of painting, how do they both utilize the imagined indigenous womxn as a visual cue? Maíz and the figure of the indigenous womxn become synonymous with each other and these works of art map the intimacy between the land and Mexican claims to indigeneity through the body of indigenous womxn.
Taylor McClain 2020
Bryn Mawr College
tmcclain@brynmawr.edu
Aristotle had this idea that owning property leads to virtue because the property owners would be able to participate in politics. This rests on the idea that the work of maintaining the property was done by slaves. It can be said that the leisure time afforded to the ancient Greeks was the result of their reliance on slavery. Similarly, in the United States, there was this ideal with Jeffersonian democracy, that farmers were the most virtuous of society. Yet, slavery was legal and this ideal relied on westward expansion and displacement of Native Americans. The questions then arises: how has the development of democracy shaped the way that with think of our relationship to the land? In what ways does landownership contribute to our modern conceptions of democracy and exclusion? Thinking about democracy, land (place), and property offers a useful way to think about who has historically been excluded from democracy. This is important because Tocqueville said that the goal of government and society is justice. It seems to be that justice is only for some people. As a result, it would be valuable to analyze the ways that landownership and labor contribute to who does and does not receive justice. To answer this question, I will be examining the Reconstruction period and the shift from a slave society to an egalitarian, democratic one and the role that land redistribution played in that shift.
Torture’s Object: Molding the Modern Body Politic
This project tackles a haunting question in modern politics: why, despite the rise of the democracy, liberalism, and the human rights regime, has torture remained a significant force in modern statecraft? Proponents of these ideologies regularly claim that formal equality before the law, recognition of universal rights, and the rationalization of political authority will minimize or eliminate state violence. And yet, torture persists. I argue that this puzzle can be resolved by thinking closely about the relationship between the sovereign and the tortured body. Modern torture is predominantly extrajudicial, but not quite illegal – it occurs in spaces under the law’s jurisdiction yet is figured as exceptional or extraordinary. Although it may seem new, modern torture connects to the long historical legacy of torture as a method for marking boundaries: it simultaneously signifies who is outside the political community, and materially enacts the divide. I situate the tortured body at the intersection of the abject, the constitutive Other, and the homo sacer, arguing that is the inversion of the sovereign body. It plays a foundational role in the creation of the political community, and serves as a signpost for apolitical (i.e. non-rights bearing) Other. Reading this body, I argue, illuminates the form of modern sovereignty, the construction of political communities, and the relationship between pain and the body politic.
“Home Economics: Wendell Berry, Republicanism, and the Agrarian Alternative” (Gregory Koutnik, University of Pennsylvania)
Wendell Berry has long been of interest to both environmentalists on the left and cultural conservatives on the right. However, less scholarly attention has been given to the economic implications of his thought. In this paper, I draw out Berry’s economic critique while establishing its relevance to recent efforts by political theorists such as Alex Gourevitch and William Clare Roberts to radicalize republicanism. I devote special attention to the importance of democratic and local control of land in Berry’s ecological agrarianism. While it might be tempting to dismiss Berry’s republicanism as little more than Jeffersonianism in contemporary garb, I argue that his thought ought to be understood in light of perennial efforts by local communities across the globe to wrest some measure of economic control and self-determination from the forces of development and capital that threaten their ecological and social viability.
“A Critique of the Critical Juncture Concept: A Call to Recognize the Socially Constructed Nature of Time” (Catherine Scott, Cornell University)
I critically analyze theories that political scientists use to relate time to political change in their scholarship, foremost the concept of critical juncture. The fundamental problem with the critical juncture concept is that political scientists externally impose the label onto particular time periods. I argue instead that characterizations of time (whether a time period represents a critical juncture or not) should be internal. The action, beliefs, and rhetoric of political actors about their time period should be used to characterize it. Recognizing the multiplicity of conflicting ways that political actors characterize their own time would force political scientists to acknowledge the socially constructed nature of time and the contentious nature of claims about time. This implies that there are no objectively definable critical junctures. I argue that whether a time period is a critical juncture or not is actually a political question. Political scientists should recognize that claims about time are political. When a political actor invokes a particular temporality, it may be the result of ideological thinking or be calculated to serve his political ends. Since different beliefs and political interests exist simultaneously, judgments by political actors about time are likely to be contradictory.