Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Profits Of (The Critique Of) Patriarchy: On Toxic Masculinity, Feminism, & Corporate Capitalism In The Barbie Movie, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This article explicates the political, social, economic, and cultural contribution of Barbie (2023). Through a critical and normative analysis of four different prominent reviews of the film, this essay explores the quality of discourse surrounding Barbie, with particular emphasis on its feminist critique of toxic masculinity and lack of a coherent criticism of capitalism.

The Threat To Academic & Intellectual Freedom, Christopher M. Jimenez, Melissa Del Castillo, Stephen Thomson Moore, Lowell Bryan Cooper, Jacqueline Radebaugh, George Pearson

Works of the FIU Libraries

The Academic and Intellectual Freedom Ad Hoc Committee presented a First Thursday discussion on May 4 about academic and intellectual freedom. Starting with a brief definition of these terms, they traced the history of Academic Freedom and how current events affect us at FIU. The committee posed several real-life scenarios threatening Academic/Intellectual Freedom in libraries. All library staff were invited to attend this lively discussion.

Banshees Of Late Capitalism: War, Ecology, & Alienation, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This review essay explores the concepts of war, ecology/human-nonhuman relations, and alienation through a critical analysis of McDonagh's The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).

The Comedy Of Cancel Culture In A Post-Carlin United States: On The Politics Of Cultural Interpretation, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Taking the form of a critical review of the HBO documentary George Carlin's American Dream, this essay explores the character of George Carlin's political and cultural criticism, its implications for contemporary debates about so-called "cancel culture," and the broader political significance of cultural interpretation.

The Politics Of The Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, And Subjectivity In The Anthropocene, Joshua Falcon

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how psychedelic substances become drawn into particular sociohistorical and political arrangements, and how psychedelic experiences with psilocybin ‘magic mushrooms’ are used as tools of subjectivation. Guided by literatures in philosophy, critical theory, and the social sciences that focus on subjectivity, assemblage theory, and critical posthumanism, I argue that psychedelics are drawn into variegated assemblages, each of which conceptualizes the nature of psychedelics in highly specific ways that reflect implicit conceptions of the world and the self. In developing the concept of psychedelic assemblages, this research provides a window onto the politics of the self in the Anthropocene. …

Semi-Presidential Executive Branch Institutionalization And Personalization Under Cuba's 1940 Constitution, Daniel Pedreira

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ratification of Cuba’s Constitution of 1940 ushered hopes for democratic stability, most notably through the implementation of a semi-presidential system. Innovative for its time, semi-presidentialism sought to reduce the “perils of presidentialism” that plagued the early decades of the Cuban Republic. Yet, over the next two decades, the Cuban Republic declined and fell as it devolved into authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

This study analyzes the extent to which Cuba’s executive branch was institutionalized or personalized under the 1940 Constitution. Taking a close look at the presidential administrations of Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar (1940-1944, 1952-1954, and 1954-1959), Ramón Grau San Martín (1944-1948), …

Stoicism And Just War Theory, Leonidas D. Konstantakos

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ancient philosophy of Stoicism, itself one of the foundations for international law, can improve contemporary just war thinking by forming a coherent set of philosophical principles to serve as a foundation for a just war theory. A Stoic approach considers justifications for moral actions to come not from an appeal to human rights, conformity to deontological rules, or from the utility of the actions themselves, but from virtuous character traits and corresponding virtuous actions. As such, a Stoic approach to just war theory is a virtue ethics perspective in which metaethical incentive for moral action is the agent’s own …

Absolute Impunity: On The Legacies Of 9/11 & The Policies Of The War On/Of Terror, Bryant William Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

It has been a little over twenty years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and thus we are also going to be coming up on twentieth anniversaries of some of the most heinous restrictions on civil liberties in US history (though there is a lot of competition) and the twentieth anniversaries of instance after instance of unjustifiable atrocities committed in the name of the Stars and Stripes. Through autoethnographic reflection in conversation with Netflix’s Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror (2021) and Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump (2021), …

Canadian Financial Imperialism And Structural Adjustment In The Caribbean, Tamanisha J. John

Class, Race and Corporate Power

From the start of the early 1980s, structural adjustment was already normalized in the Caribbean given the power of a variety of self-interested actors, including the U.S., IFIs, and Canadian investors who continued to advance and support— by any means necessary— structural adjustment policies in the Caribbean. Debt traps, coupled with incursions on Caribbean state’s sovereignty would see the neoliberal and capitalist doctrine accepted by all of the independent states in the English-speaking Caribbean region by the mid-1980s. Structural adjustment drastically intensified the existing inequalities in states and removed the ability for governments to alleviate these situations. Alongside Caribbean structural …

Canadian Banks And Imperialism In The English-Speaking Caribbean, Tamanisha J. John

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Canadian banks have been important components of an imperialist system since at least the 19^th century. However, their long and rich history of operating as purely exploitative entities in the English-speaking Caribbean region is often overlooked— leading to many incomplete and conflicting narratives about Canada’s role within the global system. I argue that Canada is an imperial actor that exerts agency in supporting a Canadian banking oligopoly both within Canada and in the English-speaking Caribbean. Insufficient attention is given to these Canadian banks, especially considering the power they have wielded in the Caribbean over the centuries. By analyzing the …

Criticizing Past And Modern Ideology Through Twisted Comedy Series: A Case Of "Comrade Detective", Damian Winczewski, Slawomir Czapnik

Class, Race and Corporate Power

The objective of the paper is to solve the interpretative controversies around Comrade Detective, one of the most original TV entertainment productions of the recent years. This production is a pastiche of American buddy police films. The plot refers to the reality of the socialist Romania in the 1980s and presents in a satirical way the local militia’s fight against the American threat. We have attempted to prove that its not only deriding the reality of the political system, but the series constitutes also a satire on American propaganda films. Although the humour in the series seems vulgar and …

Historical Geopolitics Of Kashmir: A Discourse Analysis Of Civilizational Framings, Thomas J. Liguori

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to locate the intractable issue of Kashmir within a global context. The global setting utilized here is constituted and shaped by multiple levels, none of which is purely discrete, and which act upon each other with differing degrees of salience. Taking a discourse analytic approach, political positions can be seen as activating (acting upon, mobilizing, or challenging) existing discursive material in a given political context and then deploying it. This dissertation aims to show how the Kashmir problem has: 1) come about; that is, how it has been constituted and the (discursive) contexts which shaped the available …

It's Capitalism, Stupid!: The Theoretical And Political Limitations Of The Concept Of Neoliberalism, Bryant William Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This polemical essay explores the meaning and function of the concept of neoliberalism, focusing on the serious theoretical and political limitations of the concept. The crux of the argument is that, for those interested in overcoming the exploitative and oppressively destructive elements of global capitalism, opposing "neoliberalism" (even if best understood as a process or a spectrum of "neoliberalization" or simply privatization) is both insufficient and potentially self-undermining. This article also goes into some detail on the issues of health care and climate change in relation to "neoliberalism" (both conceptually and the material processes and policies that this term refers …

Sorry To Bother You With Twelve Theses On Boots Riley’S "Sorry To Bother You": Lessons For The Left, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

As one of the most overtly anticapitalist major motion pictures to be released in recent times (perhaps ever), Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) offers many crucial lessons for today’s Left. This essay provides short, open-ended discussions on twelve of those lessons.

We’Ve Come A Long Way (Baby)! Or Have We? Evolving Intellectual Freedom Issues In The Us And Florida, L. Bryan Cooper, A.D. Beman-Cavallaro

Works of the FIU Libraries

This paper analyzes a shifting landscape of intellectual freedom (IF) in and outside Florida for children, adolescents, teens and adults. National ideals stand in tension with local and state developments, as new threats are visible in historical, legal, and technological context. Examples include doctrinal shifts, legislative bills, electronic surveillance and recent attempts to censor books, classroom texts, and reading lists.

Privacy rights for minors in Florida are increasingly unstable. New assertions of parental rights are part of a larger conservative animus. Proponents of IF can identify a lessening of ideals and standards that began after doctrinal fruition in the 1960s …

Iran And The Constitutionalism: History And Evolution And The Impact On International Relations, Farshad Ghodoosi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The sweeping changes in the Middle East, so-called the “Arab Spring”, necessitate revisiting constitutionalism in the region. This task entails a fresh look at the idea of rule of law and constitutionalism amongst the people of the Middle East. One of the widely misconceived and yet understudied constitutional movements in the Middle East belongs to Iran. A new perspective on the trajectory of constitutionalism in Iran would better equip us to comprehend rule of law in the Middle East. From the 1905 Constitutional movement to the 1979 Revolution, Iran has undergone major changes. Each transformation created a rupture with the …

Popular Radicalism In The 1930s: The History Of The Workers' Unemployment Insurance Bill, Chris Wright

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Historiography on the Great Depression in the U.S. evinces a lacuna. Despite all the scholarship on political radicalism in this period, one of the most remarkable manifestations of such radicalism has tended to be ignored: namely, the mass popular movement behind the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill. This bill, which the Communist Party wrote in 1930, was introduced in Congress three times, in 1934, ’35, and ’36, as an alternative to the far more conservative Social Security Act. Its socialistic nature ensured that it never had any chance of becoming law, but it also enabled it to become enormously popular among …

Exploring The Shadows Of America’S Security State (Or How I Learned Not To Love Big Brother) Reprinted From Tomdispatch.Com Courtesy Of Haymarket Books, Alfred W. Mccoy

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This piece has been reprinted from TomDispatch.com and is an adapted and expanded version of the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy's new book: In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Haymarket Books, 2017). Thanks to TomDispatch.com, Dr. McCoy and Haymarket Books for allowing us to reprint this here.

The Syrian Refugee Crisis And The European Union: A Case Study Of Germany And Hungary, Simone-Ariane Schelb

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on the Common European Asylum System. It evaluates the extent to which the European Union was able to implement a common asylum system, identifies discrepancies between different European countries, primarily Germany and Hungary, and briefly examines the roots of these differences. To this end, the structure of the international refugee protection regime and the German and Hungarian asylum systems are analyzed. Furthermore, the thesis explores how the governments of the two countries perceive the rights of refugees and how their views have affected their handling of the crisis. The case …

Screen Savior: How Black Mirror Reflects The Present More Than The Future, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Despite the media treatment of Black Mirror as a dystopian series dealing with the (near) future, this essay explores season three of Charlie Brooker's immensely successful Channel 4-turned-Netflix series in order to show how the central themes of the series are actually more concerned with the present than they are with the future. The present that is reflected is, to put it mildly, not very pretty, but it offers the necessarily dark vision of the current conjuncture that we need if we are to fully appreciate where our present tendencies are leading us.

Foreign Policy Evaluation And The Utility Of Intervention, Graham Slater

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation identifies and explains the factors contributing to the presence and severity of U.S. foreign-policy blunders, or gross errors in strategic judgment resulting in significant harm to the national interest, since the Second World War. It hypothesizes that the grand strategy of preponderance and the overestimation of military power to transform the politics of other states have precipitated U.S. foreign-policy blunders since 1945. Examining the Vietnam War and Iraq War as case studies, it focuses on underlying conditions in the American national identity and the problematic foreign policy decision-making (FPDM) that corresponds to this bifurcated hypothesis, termed the overestimation/preponderance …

Reimagining Movements: Towards A Queer Ecology And Trans/Black Feminism, Gabriel Benavente

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples.

In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but …

Kim Was Korea And Korea Was Kim: The Formation Of Juche Ideology And Personality Cult In North Korea, Bianca Trifoi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Juche ideology, created by founder Kim Il-Sung, governs all aspects of North Korean society. This thesis attempts to answer the questions of why and how Juche ideology and the cult of personality surrounding Kim Il-Sung were successfully implemented in North Korea. It is a historical analysis of the formation of the North Korean state that considers developments from the late 19th century to the late 20th century, with particular attention paid to the 1950s-1970s and to Kim’s own writings and speeches. The thesis argues that Juche was successfully implemented and institutionalized in North Korea due to several factors, including the …

Worlds Ahead?: On The Dialectics Of Cosmopolitanism And Postcapitalism, Bryant William Sculos

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the major theories of global justice (specifically within the cosmopolitan tradition) have missed an important aspect of capitalism in their attempts to deal with the most pernicious effects of the global economic system. This is not merely a left critique of cosmopolitanism (though it is certainly that as well), but its fundamental contribution is that it applies the insights of Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics to offer an internal critique of cosmopolitanism. As it stands, much of the global justice and cosmopolitanism literature takes global capitalism as an unsurpassable and a foundationally unproblematic …

Achieving And Maintaining Food Security In The Prc: The Impact On Foreign Policy, Paul D. Rittenhouse

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the People’s Republic of China has used domestic and foreign policy to achieve and maintain food security. This is a formidable task for the PRC given that it has 20% of the world’s population and only 7% of its arable land. It has been made more formidable by domestic policy errors and its changing position within the international system.

The PRC has evolved from a Marxist revisionist state to one that mixes state capitalism and free enterprise and has become a combination of revisionist and status quo. Such changes lend …

Parenting For Progress: Reflections On Matt Ross’S Captain Fantastic, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Matt Ross's film Captain Fantastic explores the difficulties of raising one's kids to be critical of modern capitalistic society. This essay explores the parenting lessons that can be taken from the film in connection with contemporary politics and protest movements. As people who are concerned with social justice, this essay attempts to think through the question: how should we be raising our children in these tormented, unjust times?

Explaining China's Contradictory Grand Strategy: Why Legitimacy Matters, Lukas K. Danner

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzed the internal incoherence of China’s grand strategy. To do so, it used the cultural driver of honor to explain the contradictory behavior of China, which ranges from peaceful, responsible international actor to assertive, revisionist rising power with hegemonic ambitions. The central research question asked why China often diverges from Peaceful Development, thus leading to major contradictions as well as possible misperceptions on the part of other nations. Honor was the standard of reference that was utilized and examined in order to establish congruence and coherence between deed and praxis. Accordingly, the first hypothesis of this study posited …

Anarchy And Anti-Intellectualism: Reason, Foundationalism, And The Anarchist Tradition, Joaquin A. Pedroso

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Some contemporary anarchist scholarship has rejected the Enlightenment-inspired reliance on reason that was supposedly central to classical anarchist thought and expanded the anarchist critique to address issues ignored by their classical predecessors. In making reason the object of critique, some contemporary anarchists expanded the anarchist framework to include critiques of domination residing outside the traditional power centers of the state, the capitalist firm, and the church thereby shedding light on the authoritarian tendencies inherent in the intellect itself.

Though contemporary anarchist scholarship has sought to apply this anti-authoritarian ethos to the realms of epistemology and ontology (by employing Michel Foucault’s …

Capital Revenge: Ideologiekritik And The Revenant, Bryant W. Sculos

Class, Race and Corporate Power

Though superficially The Revenant is an expertly written, acted, and directed new age Western about one man's wild quest for revenge. It is all of those things to be sure, but this critical review essay goes deeper and explores the ideological dimensions of the film, arguing that the film's main antagonist is actually a capitalistic hero representing the mindless application of the endless drive for profit and wealth. Furthermore, this essay concludes with the dialectical assertion that it is precisely because of the audience's situatedness within the ideological confines of capitalism that they are able to view the antagonist as …

Marx At The Gold Coast: Reflections On Teaching And The Confrontation With Ideology, Allan Ardill

Class, Race and Corporate Power

This article engages with Marx in Miami and the strategies and pedagogical experiences of teaching Marx and Marxism. It relates the experience of teaching Marxism in a compulsory law course at the Gold Coast, Australia. Marx rarely makes an appearance in law schools and this poses particular challenges when it is taught to politically conservative students. Therefore the article supplies a case for teaching Marx arguing why it is not just appropriate for lawyers but irresponsible to exclude it.