Masks

Since the beginning, Carnaval has been a relatively safe means to express dissatisfactions, for political protests and even rebellion. Among the current political themes is the symbol of four percent, alluding to the constitutional requirement that four percent of the national budget be allocated to education (and showing dissatisfaction with lower percentages). [...]the Carnaval is a stew of cultures, a mix of the old and new, the costumes and dances a freewheeling admixture of images and textures in motion.

The security bill that was proposed by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government in 2014 has sparked controversy both within and outside the Parliament of Turkey. Yet, with AKP's majority, the bill -- which includes an anti-masking regulation for protests -- was passed in spring 2015. In this article, first I demonstrate a partial mapping of the rhetoric employed by mainstream politics in Turkey, to underline that any oppositional political activity on the streets has the potential to be labeled a 'terrorist' one -- and most have been. Then, by taking one of the most prominent examples of these events, the Gezi uprising, I discuss the affirmative biopolitical potentialities of the uses of masks that the law criminalizes. Lastly, I situate the law globally in relation to the protest movements, on the one hand, and anti-masking laws on the other.

The Second Circuit has ruled that the state of New York can prevent demonstrators from wearing masks during public protests. The decision overturned a district judge's finding that the state's antimask statute was unconstitutional.

This essay offers a new way of understanding a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. environmentalism: the time surrounding the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970. By exploring a wide array of visual images produced during this period and paying particular attention to pictures of people wearing gas masks, the comic strip character Pogo, and the figure of the Ecological Indian, the article examines the complex relationship between the mass media and multiple forms of environmentalism. These images personalized the sense of risk and responsibility by presenting all Americans as equally vulnerable to pollution and equally to blame for environmental degradation. When placed in dialogue with both mainstream and subaltern environmental movements as well as with public policy, the images reveal a paradox embedded in the environmental politics of the era: the state expanded its environmental regulatory agenda, even as the visual media repeatedly emphasized individual responsibility for the environmental crisis.

This article introduces the symposium on Glen Coulthard's Red Skin, White Masks. It begins by situating the book's publication in the wake of the extensive mobilisations of the Idle No More movement in Canada in 2012-13. Coulthard's strategic hypotheses on the horizons of Indigenous liberation in the book are intimately linked to his participation in these recent struggles. The article then locates Red Skin, White Masks within a wider renaissance of Indigenous Studies in the North American context in recent years, highlighting Coulthard's unique and sympathetic extension of Marx's critique of capitalism, particularly through his use of the concept of 'primitive accumulation'. Next, the article outlines the long arc of the argument in Red Skin, White Masks and the organisation of the book's constituent parts, providing a backdrop to the critical engagements that follow from Peter Kulchyski, Geoff Mann, George Ciccariello-Maher, and Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz. The article closes with reflections on Coulthard's engagement with Fanon, who, besides Marx, is the most important polestar in Red Skin, White Masks.

Infiltrators linked to protests: Core activists say they are not to blame for the increasing violence being seen at demonstrations, pointing the finger at people in masks adopting a high profile

The essay analyzes concepts of social justice, which were influential during the US-American Occupy protests of 2011. It discusses the recent genealogy of notions of social justice in the alter-globalization movements of the 1990s and argues that constitutive elements of Occupy’s tactics, like carnivalesque frivolity, recurred to protest forms of that decade. The essay investigates how the usage of the Guy Fawkes-mask, later associated with the comic superhero V, complicates binary logics of good and evil, arguing that such binary narratives helped in the organizational phase of the protests, but turned out to be inimical to further discussions of what constitutes social justice in the 21st century.

Spiegel explains how the mask ban sought to divide, order, and control would-be allies in the fight against austerity measures, undercutting attempts to build a collective front and maligning those who sought to adopt the face of the collective.

Melville and Protest Collective Action, Corporate Fiction, and The Confidence-Man Peter Jaros Franklin & Marshall College Although Occupy Wall Street has claimed Bartleby as a precursor, many of its hallmarks-the people's mic, chains of linked arms, Guy Fawkes masks-rely on a collectivity that trades Bartleby's singular dissent for the submersion of individual will in a group. Questions recurrently asked by critics-is the Confidence Man one or many, an allegory of capitalism or of charity, an unlikely hero or the antagonist of all humanity-echo antebellum legal writers' descriptions of the corporate form as paradoxically joining opposites: singular and plural, natural and supernatural, fact and fiction.

The analysis of interviews with & documents produced by Zapatista leaders, particularly Subcomandante Marcos, revealed that the ski masks worn by Zapatista leaders have a dual function -- to protect members' identities & to discourage the emergence of leaders. The implications of the Zapatista movement's continued use of testimonios for achieving change in Third World nations are also pondered.

Mask-wearing political protests have been global front page news for several years now; yet, almost no literature exists which attempts to engage the symbolic density and ritual role played by such mask-wearing acts. We argue that mask-wearing has political potentiality which relates to deeper-lying anthropological features of mask-wearing. The powers of the mask reside in the transformative ability of masks to unify and transcend key oppositional categories such as absence/presence and death/life, creating possibilities where conventional boundaries of the possible/impossible no longer restrict. By questioning the communicative rationality of the modern 'public' and the 'sphere' in which it operates, we approach mask-wearing as a 'communicative opening'. Building on earlier critiques of liberal democratic normativity, we further argue that the 'utopia of transparency' is itself a regulatory power and that mask-wearing exposes the very notions that were supposed to form the background of modern, emancipatory politics: transparency, free speech and representative democracy.

This article examines the practical and theoretical implications raised by protesters' use of masks to conceal themselves from the eyes of the state. It argues that the refusal to be seen and categorized by the state is empowering in that it exposes, and then unsettles, the power dynamics that have traditionally structured public space. It analyzes the different ways in which masks create transformative in-between spaces that signify the presence of a deliberately unspecified absence and therefore facilitate the possibility of thinking differently. It concludes that this strategic form of presence reveals the usually invisible boundaries of the public sphere and, in doing so, renegotiates the dynamics of power that have structured articulations of dissent. These issues are explored through an analysis of the masks worn by the Zapatistas, the Black Bloc, carnivalesque protesters, antiwar protesters, and the Occupy movement.

French court rules in favour of auction house despite Native American tribe's objection that items represent dead ancestors' spirits In a chaotic auction repeatedly interrupted by protests, dozens of native American tribal masks were sold Friday after a French court ignored the objections of the Hopi tribe and the U.S. government. About a dozen protesters from a French group that sides with the Native Americans gathered outside - one waving the flag of the American Indian Movement.

The action started with a street performance, in which the actors were wearing masks of political figures [namely of Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the leader of the Ukrainian Choice pro-Russian public organization, Viktor Medvedchuk].

During the summer of 1935, approximately 20,000 Swedish women mobilized in a peaceful action - the Women's Unarmed Uprising Against War. The manifestation was a protest against rearmament and, in particular, against a militarization of everyday life that might result from a civil defense buildup. Thus, in a spirit of solidarity, women were encouraged to refuse to use gas masks or evacuate into cellars and air-raid shelters in the event of an air raid. Only then would men realize their responsibility, lay down their weapons, and solve the conflict at the negotiating table. The action was connected to a radical pacifistic tradition in which male conscientious objectors, among others, and the example of Gandhi were prominent. Liberal and Social Democrat women and members of the Swedish section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) carried out the action.