NEW VICTORIANISM – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Progress, Progressivism, and Progressives

Where does “progress” come from? What does “progressivism” mean? Which cultural tradition and ideological discourse makes “progressive” movements or parties thinkable? Why is it always important to be “moving forward,” as in the now clichéd phrase used by some many US politicians, journalists, and public commentators? When does thinking about “going forward” start to look […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Privilege: White, American, or Imperial?

To the extent that “white privilege” continues to exist in the US, is it the highest form of privilege? How might a focus on domestic race relations misdirect us from an examination of US society in its proper geopolitical context? Related to the last question: is this introverted, America-centric focus itself a sign of “American privilege”? In practice today the tendency […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Democratization vs. Liberalism in Canada

Many North Americans (leaving aside Mexico), would likely not know that the official acronym for “North Korea” is “DPRK,” and if they did then fewer still might realize what it stands for: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. An even smaller minority, we can assume, would take North Korea’ self-designation as “democratic” seriously. If anything, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Exploitation, Cultural Genocide: Problems of Neoliberal Diversity Management

In Canada, “a yoga instructor…says her free class at the University of Ottawa was cancelled because of concerns over cultural appropriation….‘There were some cultural sensitivity issues and people were offended’,” this despite the fact that yoga was deliberately spread to the West by Indian gurus and was meant to be shared. In Lethbridge, Alberta, high […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The Working Class, Identity Politics and New Victorian History

Against the Labouring Classes: Identity Politics in the New Victorian Age The New Victorianism serves to not only divert politics into issues of morality and identity, it works to obfuscate the bases of increasing inequality. Focusing on the Democratic Party, and its abandonment of the working class over the past forty years, Adolph Reed Jr. […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

Social Imperialism and New Victorian Identity Politics

Social Imperialism? New Victorianism’s Domestic Moral Code and the Political Economy of Identity Politics “The nation-state in its imperialist guise was the inescapable context within which all political action necessarily took place: it determined the range of possibilities against which the left as much as the right were compelled to define their positions”. (Eley, 1976, […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The New Victorianism, Imperialism, and Identity Politics

Victorian Parallels in the New Imperialism “The New Imperialism” is not a very efficient conceptual phrase since it requires a lot of labour to clarify what one means each time one invokes it. For me, one of the noteworthy features of this particular phrase is that it came into currency at two notable points in […]

by Maximilian C. Forte

The New Victorianism

“A man…lives not only in the spot which he personally occupies, but in every spot to which he may extend his action, or to which he may conceive it possible that his action should be extended. And so, wherever over the world British influence penetrates, or can conceive itself penetrating, there, and not in the […]