2015/06/27

Reflections and inquiries

This may be my last post in Literature & Society. My newly designed website, with the same URL as before (geoffreyfox.com) but much better organized, will incorporate a new blog, Reflections & Inquiries. Literature & Society will remain as an archive.

"Reflections" will try to make sense of things read or experienced, as in my previous blogs. (Before Literature & Society, 2002-2015, I had a blog-like section of my website that I called "Unsolicited comments," 1993-2002. That archive will also be available from my newly designed geoffreyfox.com website.)

By "Inquiries," I mean more serious attempts to grapple with difficult questions, questions to which I don't have satisfying answers. Some that I have in mind include:
,
  • the many diverse forms of violence we label as "terrorism," how they come about and how they may evolve — often (generally?) into very stable political systems. Might this happen with the so-called Islamic State?
  • Transformation and continuity in socialist Cuba
  • The path and likely future of "Bolivarianism" in Latin America

For recent examples of my reflections and hypothesis-testing inquiries, I invite you to look at my article on Spain's insurgent political formation "Podemos" in CounterPunch, or my article on the evolution of the Polish labor movement and Andrzej Wajda's films, about to appear in Film International.

What I can formulate are testable hypotheses, and examine them, trying to get closer to an explanation that will help us understand and respond to these phenomena.