rwnorris writes:

Vietnam War Conscientious Objector Republishes Memoir

Robert W. Norris, a native Californian and Vietnam War conscientious objector (CO) now living in Japan, understands what many of the Iraq War generation are going through. Thirty-four years after being court-martialed as a CO, Norris has republished his first novel in order to give them an alternative viewpoint.

Looking for the Summer, published January 15, 2005 by Lulu Press, tells the story of a Vietnam War CO's adventures and search for identity on the road from Paris to Calcutta in 1977.

s0metim3s writes

Australia on the edge

Angela Mitropoulos, reviewing Allaine Cerwonka, Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia, Borderlines 21, University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Allaine Cerwonka’s Native to the Nation explores the everyday details of claims to ownership of — as well as and belonging in — Australia's postcolonial landscape. The attention to that detail is impressive.

So too are the analytical connections made between landscape, spatial control and geopolitics as Cerwonka puts some of Foucault’s concerns to work in examining how 'contemporary state power depends on the disciplining of territories and 'the production of docile bodies.' What makes Native to the Nation much more than another textbook Foucault is the attention to those details of contingency that Foucault insisted on, in this case: the specificity of the postcolonial territory of Australia, always located precariously on the edge of both ownership and beloning.

"Children of a Lesser Marxism?"*

Steve Wright, Historical Materialism

Reviewing:

Futuro anteriore. Dai "Quaderni Rossi" ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano
G. Borio, F. Pozzi & G. Roggero

Rome: Derive Approdi, 2002.

La nefasta utopia di Potere operaio. Lavoro tecnica movimento nel laboratorio politico del Sessantotto

F. Berardi

Rome: Castelvecchi. 1998.

1.

While it has inspired more than its share of critical essays and polemics over the past forty years, the political tendency of operaismo (workerism) has been the subject of few book-length analyses in Italy or elsewhere. Perhaps this is less surprising in the English-speaking world, where for whatever reason, Italian workerism has commonly been passed over in discussions of postwar marxism(s).(1)

In Italy’s case this is a little more perplexing, given operaismo’s influence for many years within the local left and labour movement. Back in the late seventies, it is true, there was a collection of papers from a conference organised by the Istituto Gramsci. There leading Communist party (PCI) intellectuals — many of them former workerists — grappled with the tendency’s historical significance, as well as its meaning for their own political commitments of that time.(2)

Interestingly enough, the conference in question also allowed a certain space for contributions from workerist intellectuals deemed ‘to reek of autonomia’,(3) at a time when that movement and the PCI were themselves daggers drawn. In any case, the arrests of 1979 onwards, led by Judge Calogero (himself close to the PCI), both put the final nail in Autonomia as a mass phenomenon, and marginalised operaismo as a current within Italy’s cultural and political life. To use a much-quoted phrase of Primo Moroni and Nanni Balestrini, the years that followed were ones of ‘cynicism, opportunism and fear’,(4) granting little time or space for dreams of a life beyond capital and the state.

"American Splendor"

Paul Buhle

Reviewing:

Americn Splendor: Our Movie Year

By Harvey Pekar

Ballantine Books, 174 pp., $16.95

Whoever does not already know the basic Pekar story not only isn't a comics afficianado, he or she hasn't been watching the movies closely enough to spot one of the most attractive and innovative indies of recent years. If "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" brought animation to an adult audience as nothing since the Golden Age of Hollywood, when Bugs Bunny was watched mainly by grown-ups, "American Splendor" (the film, that is) matched actor to human original to animated version. Nothing quite this remarkable may have happened in Cleveland — forget the Rock 'n' Roll Museum, crowning the famous — since Satchel signed with the Indians.