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The Need for an Augustinian Left
Punished for Being Right? Writing about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can be a frustrating experience. On the one hand, the boundaries of “reasonable debate” are so narrowly construed within the popular media as to make the discussion of any genuine alternative points of view virtually impossible; on the other, the polarized and polarizing [...]
Can the Left Govern?
I am unclear as to whether I’ve been a spy or a voyeur as I’ve read Michael Berube’s The Left at War. One thing was clear from the start—the author wanted to write this book to persuade, but not to persuade me. If each of us draws a circle containing tolerable or respectable beliefs at [...]
Cultural Studies & the “Cold War” on the Left
Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War makes an eloquent and powerful case for a reinvigorated democratic left. With rich and detailed descriptions of political and cultural debates over several decades, he explores left intellectuals’ responses to a wide range of challenges but especially 9/11 and, in its wake, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His [...]
Toward A More Rational Left?
It would be difficult to discuss Michael Berube’s latest volume without registering a degree of ambivalence. On the one hand I am impressed by the author’s honesty, seriousness and efforts to carve out a position that allows him to retain many of his core convictions while criticizing and dissociating himself from what he calls “the [...]
GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION: Toward a Post-Manichean Left
For Christopher Hitchens—the Left at War with Himself What follows are nine essays inspired by Michael Berube’s book of 2009, The Left at War (NYU Press), prefaced by Nick Cohen’s shot at dealing in brief with some of the same issues, which he takes on at greater length in his book of 2007, What’s Left? [...]
The Political Allure of the Local: Food and Cosmopolitanism in Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park and Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
emilyjohansen[at]hotmail.com Abstract:This article considers the potential political stasis produced through the ossification of a binary opposition between the local and the global. I consider, what I term, “territorialized cosmopolitanism”(a cosmopolitanism that emerges out of simultaneous multiple global and local affiliations) in two recent novels: Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park and Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of [...]
Backyard Survivalism: The Global Politics of the Kitchen Garden
michaelmikulak[at]yahoo.ca Abstract: This article looks at the backyard garden as a political space. Michael Mikulak draws on his own experiences with gardening and small scale organic agriculture to consider the different ways in which the politics of the everyday are being complicated by various food-centred movements such as Slow Food. The growth in popularity of [...]
Terroirs as spaces of intergenerational justice: Building Communities for the “Food Citizen”
karine.vigneault.1[at]umontreal.ca Abstract: This article examines the “food citizens” naturalized in and through practices which identify themselves as “local food” through an exploration of the ways in which they conceive of food and of their subjects. More specifically, I argue that these practices contribute to a redefinition of food and eating as an issue of intergenerational [...]
For Liberalism & Thinking Politically Again: Reflections Inspired by Michael Bérubé’s "The Left at War"