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E-book Warping Time : How Contending Political Forces Manipulate the Past, Present, and Future

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Penilaian

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In a 2017 speech, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe declared that the Confederate monuments should be removed because they helped to keep racism alive in present-day institutions and attitudes. President Donald Trump, for his part, argued that those attempting to remove the monu-ments were seeking to rewrite history in order to remove all traces of ideas with which they disagreed. Though they differed on the proper course of action, the two politicians seemed to agree that the power to describe the past is also a power that can alter present-day political realities. The monuments themselves functioned as what Pierre Nora has called lieux de memoire, or sites of memory, that help to symbolically fix or institutional-ize a particular memory.1This was certainly not an isolated incident. Throughout 2020, pro-testors across the United States sought the removal of Confederate monuments and the renaming of streets and buildings that memorial-ized slavery and slave owners. Since the list of American slave owners includes such giants of the American founding as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, these demands called for a significant recasting of the history of America.In this vein, the New York Times launched the 1619 Project. This proj-ect is an ambitious effort to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.”2 In other words, it casts aside the narrative most often taught in American K-12 schools that emphasizes the virtues of American civilization and nobility of American democracy.Revision of the past in order to change the present and future is, of course, a standard science fiction theme. In one of the more memorable moments in recent popular film history, Arnold Schwarzenegger, portray-ing a murderous cyborg, or “Terminator,” materializes in present-day Los Angeles surrounded by bolts of energy. The Terminator, we learn, was sent from the future, to win a war between humans and machines by killing the future human leader while he is still a child. While enthralled by the imag-ery, most viewers understand, of course, that the film is pure fantasy. Travel through time to win wars or change the outcomes of political struggles is impossible. Or, is it?This is a study of the ways in which contending political forces actually manipulate time, rewriting the past to influence the present and future, reimagining the future to change the present, and reinventing the past to comport with and legitimate a desired future. These efforts, which we shall examine via narrative examples and original experiments using a special survey we designed for this book, summate to a kind of political time travel that can have important, and even surprising, consequences.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

320 GIN w

Penerbit

USA : University of Michigan Press., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

159 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780472903344

Klasifikasi

320

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Political dan Government Science

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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