By Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu · Wednesday, December 15, 2021 Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural divide; cities and gendered, racial, and class divides; urban planning and urban space; film as a particular medium, with specific parameters, in the broader age of media; film as mass entertainment and as revolutionary propaganda. Even with this wide range of topics and their themes, there are many more to be explored, herein and elsewhere, so complex and rich are the relations of the urban to the cinematic.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, December 8, 2021 The stunning end to the twenty-year war in Afghanistan with an unambiguous defeat has had little consequences in American domestic politics. To be sure, the final rout may have contributed to President Biden’s decline in public opinion polls, but there are plenty of other reasons for that. The end of the Afghanistan War, surely a matter of historical import, just disappeared into the news cycle. After the lives lost, the resources wasted, and the ideals betrayed, one might expect the political class to pay attention and to demand accountability. Yet no one seems to notice.
Such an accounting could take the form, for example, of congressional hearings—but instead Congress prefers to rehash the sad political circus of the January 6 riot. It has no time for the two decades in Afghanistan, telling evidence of our legislators’ priorities. Instead of congressional hearings, a special commission might be convened, serious and bipartisan, such as the one that followed on 9/11. No one is taking this road either. Enormous expenditure of resources and a defeat clearer even than the exit from Vietnam, and Washington doesn’t care.
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By Christophe Guilluy · Wednesday, December 8, 2021 Christophe Guilluy is a geographer and observer of French society. Christopher Caldwell comments on his work here. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on November 21, 2021 and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
Q: Several months before the presidential election, how do you see the political situation in France?
Christophe Guilluy: Fundamentally nothing much has changed since 2017. I did an interview about the duel between Macron and Le Pen, which I described as a chemically pure cleavage: the popular classes against the professional upper classes, the metropolis against the periphery. None of that has changed at all. The core of Macron’s electoral support is still made up of the bourgeoisies of the right and the left, the boomers, the retirees, people fully integrated into society. And for a good reason: he is the only candidate who defends the economic and cultural model of the past twenty years. Therefore, the electorate willing to follow him is the one that is integrated into this model, that benefits from it or is protected by it, such as the retirees for example. Starting from that, he can count on a hypersolid foundation of those 25%. This has not changed since his election.
On the other hand, there are the disaffected, those no longer integrated economically, those we used to call the middle class.
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By Fabrice Balanche · Wednesday, December 8, 2021 Fabrice Balanche is a geographer at the University of Lyon who focuses on the Middle East. This interview appeared in Le Figaro on August 19, 2021, and is translated with permission by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
Q: What are the geographic specificities of Afghanistan?
Fabrice Balanche: Afghanistan is a country of mountains and deep valleys, with passes connecting one region to another. It is a compartmentalized country. This obviously poses problems to all powers that want to penetrate it. It is a territory very difficult to control.
This physical fragmentation has human and social corollaries. The country includes different ethnicities living in the valleys: Pashtoons, Uzbeks, Tajiks. These ethnicities are further divided into clans and tribes that compete with each other. Even the central authority in Kabul, during the time of the monarchy, never succeeded in achieving direct control of the population.
This physical reality and the ethnic diversity are essential elements for any understanding of the country. They are furthermore linked to each other: the tribes maintain their specific identities thanks to the physical geography of the territory. One can be the master of one’s valley. Let us be precise that the field of geography has two topics: the physical question and the human and cultural specificity of a country. Western leaders did not want to see or understand these points, and this is what has led to the fiasco.
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