Social Forces
Tilting at Windmills in the Digital Age: Literature as a Warrior of Cultural Sustainability
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leyla Dündar
“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” enounced Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their groundbreaking work Dialectic of Enlightenment. The critical theorists of The Frankfurt School have coined the term “culture industry”, referring to the commercial marketing of culture, and thus consumption of it by mass society. Today, in times of neoliberal capitalism, “the fraying of art” and the “de-artification of art” has reached devastating dimensions. This paper offers insight into Turkish literary production and consumption in the last few decades since the transformation of economic and social structure has been phenomenal. As the publishing industry has grown significantly, the correlation between authors, distributors, booksellers, readers, and critics has changed through and through. After Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “literary field” discussed in The Rules of Art, the work of literature has continued to evolve into a commercial object with numerous formats in accordance with the logic of the digital market. In this pessimistic outlook, literature seems to be a mighty medium of resistance regarding sustainability of culture. Within this framework, my paper focuses on Latife Tekin (b.1957), one of the most brilliant authors of contemporary Turkish literature, who is widely acclaimed for her novels on migration, poverty, and urban slums. Often labelled as a “magical realist”, she is actually in search of a specific style relevant to the indomitable spirit of Anatolia. Consequently, Tekin’s works offer a literary perspective to tough issues of sustainability in a cultural, social, political and environmental context.
Prefigurative Politics in Social Movements and Sustainability
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Olgu Karan
The nature of capitalism requires an outside, that is, non-capitalized strata to extract surplus value, which means that capitalism essentially needs to expand. In other words, in order to survive, capital must aim for constant expansion (Castles & Kosack, 1981, p.28; Luxemburg [1913] 2003, p.348-9). The profit maximising strategies of capital have devastating consequences communities, resulting in dispossessed surplus populations, environmental degradation, scrape off indigenous cultures and local economies. Moreover, parliamentary democracies of the world based on representative majority rule are unable to respond to the needs of the peoples of the world and capitalism generates destructive tensions and unsustainable injustices. Within this configuration of power relations, the paper asks: How can we ensure justice? It argues that movements of the squares of 2011, encompassing the indignados in Spain and Greece and Occupy Wall Street in the U.S. have manifested how so many issues of social, ecological, political and economic justice are interconnected. Further, these movements manifested themselves as prefigurative politics that has the potential for humanity to relate to one another differently based on consensus decision making.
The Magic of Music: How Hip Hop Has Re-created Cultural Capital in the Absence of Structural Resources
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Frederick Gooding, Jr.
This paper explores how many Hip Hop artists have intentionally and strategically invoked sustainability principles of people, planet, and profits as a means to create community, compensate for and cope with structural inequalities in society. Specifically with respect to people and culture, Hip Hop artists frequently recycle comic book superhero techniques by creating alter egos (or stage names), by constantly painting themselves in positive angles (like a comic book cover), or by talking about their “triumphs” or “escapes” from difficult life situations (i.e., defeating nemesis) to inspire their audiences to regard them with value, when previously they may have had none. With respect to society and the planet, Hip Hop artists often purposely infuse samples from older songs to not only foster a historical contextualization for exploration of particular genres, artists, styles, sounds, images, rhetorical techniques, and verbiage from prior musical eras, but also to create new sustainable connections within the emergent world of Hip Hop (e.g., the recent hit “Old Town Road”). Lastly, with respect to economy and profits, many practitioners have leveraged Hip Hop not only as a means to cope with daunting challenges they face in life, but their successful song hits create private economies of exchange relatively free from mainstream corporate forces. Hip Hop therefore can be an ingenious tool to create self-worth, recycle positive imagery, and serve as a defense mechanism from institutional and structural forces that conspire to make an upward economic and social trajectory difficult, if not impossible for many people of color.
