Search Results (3)

Radical left culture and heritage—understood as incarnations of leftist artefacts and praxis both past and present—have taken risks in challenging hegemonic machinations often when it is unpopular to do so. To the ire of hegemons, leftist projects across the globe have marshalled places, spaces, and technologies into sites of empowerment and struggle utilising ‘small’ and ‘big’ acts of resistance and critical interventions to champion social justice—sometimes successfully, and at other times, less so. However, the preservation of projects’ artefacts, praxis, and memory work has been anything but straightforward, owing primarily to institutional politics and infrastructural and resourcing issues. Taking The Freedom Archives (FA) as a case study, this article explores how FA is preserving the distinctive political education programme that underpinned the iconic liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau that kickstarted the seismic, global decolonisation project in the late 1950s. The article argues that FA could substantially enhance the preservation and memorialisation of that programme in the Metaverse—if this materialises as a fully open, interoperable, and highly immersive space (1) unfettered by hegemonic regulation, and (2) characterised by ‘strategic witnessing’, ‘radical recordkeeping’, and user agency. In doing so, FA would serve as an exemplar for leftist projects globally. Full article

This paper is the first to perform a systematic quantitative analysis of the arguments used to motivate selections in grammatical entries from normative works on Standard Dutch written between ca. 1550 and 1650. Thus, it aims to obtain insight into what language ideologies were characteristic of this early modern period, what these reveal about how Standard Dutch took shape in its initiating phase, and what the differences are between the codification of Dutch in the early modern period (16th/17th century) and the (post)modern period (20th/21st century; analysed in earlier studies). Although certain issues within the annotation method need to be addressed in future research, the results indicate that the following principles were particularly characteristic of the early modern period: for Dutch to be a good language in terms of its grammar, it ought to differentiate, display consistency, mirror Latin and Greek, and reflect the use of certain authorities. These linguistic principles form the roots of the part of the Dutch standard language ideology (SLI; which, as previous research has shown, came into existence in the decades around 1800) that connects ‘language’ with ‘norm’ and that bestows value on the language’s regularity. However, the additional connection to social identity, that forms a second and crucial part of the SLI, played no major part in the arguments used in this time period yet. Moreover, two important differences between the early modern period and the (post)modern period were found: (1) the latter period showed a higher degree of consensus and therefore of canonisation of the normative discourse than the former period; (2) the nature of the metalanguage used in normative publications was explicitly prescriptive in the later period but mostly ostensibly descriptive/implicitly prescriptive in the earlier period. This indicates that, in terms of the metalanguage used, the normative discourse in the formative period of Standard Dutch was in between description and prescription. Full article

On the 9th of October, 1170 Pope Alexander III resided in Anagni, which had been the ancient residence of the court of the Popes for at least two centuries. He wrote to two influential local archbishops for help in pacifying King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket, who had been in dispute for six years. Sensing Becket’s looming tragic fate, Alexander III began slowly to encircle the archbishop with rhetoric of the new martyr of Libertas Ecclesiae. When he had to flee from Rome besieged by factions led by Frederick I, the pope found refuge in Segni, where he canonised Thomas Becket on 21 February 1173. However, it was in faithful Anagni that he settled on and off from March 1173 through the following years (November 1176; December 1177–March 1178; September 1179). It was here that he decided to elaborate a powerful speech in images. In an oratory in the crypt of the grandiose cathedral, Alexander III had the last painful moments of the Archbishop’s death painted in a program imitating that of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Becket thus became the new imitator of Christ, the new Peter, the new martyr on the altar of the Church of Rome. Full article