What I found interesting about this week’s material was Dawson’s notion of revolution being a claim of ownership on history.\u00a0 In most situations, people discuss revolution in relation to specific themes such as discontent of a governmental regime or economic inequality, the concept of revolution being an attempt to generate societal change with the intent of creating a ‘better’ society (though what is defined as better is highly subjective).\u00a0 However, while all of these ideas definitely have connections to many particular revolutions, I think there are also abstract and subtle nuances that help fuel and sustain revolutions beyond the archetypal circumstances.\u00a0 Structural causes and triggering events like oppression and governmental violence (respectively) obviously are what starts revolutions, but what sustains them are the changes in the ways in which people think.\u00a0 People fight for ideas and values, how they believe society should be organized.\u00a0 Dawson’s exploration of revolution as a claim of ownership on history discusses how in order to change the conditions of the present, the ideas that construct the past (or what’s known as history) need to be reshaped.\u00a0 I agree with Dawson’s proposal as throughout this course we’ve looked at Latin America as an abstraction rather than as something that is tangible.\u00a0 I think that this idea continues to perpetuate as we gain a deeper understanding of Latin America – that practically nothing in it is ever completely concrete.<\/p>\n
Another thing I found interesting about this week are how figures of revolution are often celebrated to the point in which they pretty much become legend.\u00a0 Though these people obviously have held large roles as leaders within the revolution, the pedestal they are put on after they become martyrs appear to far exceed the merit their actions.\u00a0 A quote that really struck me in Dawson’s attempt to explain this phenomenon is that these individuals “make good symbols because they did not live long enough to disappoint”.\u00a0 Dawson argues that in many cases of revolution, individuals that are glorified for the part they played in the revolution but survive the revolution often fall from grace later on in their lives whereas those who are praised but killed become icons simply because they died before peoples favour for them ran out\/they did something to invoke the wrath of the public.<\/p>\n
A question I would like to pose for this week’s discussion is how competing factions within the revolution used and manipulated the media (public documents, internet, postcards, art, etc.) in their favour; if at all?<\/p>\n
Thank you for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What I found interesting about this week’s material was Dawson’s notion of revolution being a claim of ownership on history.\u00a0 In most situations, people discuss revolution in relation to specific themes such as discontent of a governmental regime or economic inequality, the concept of revolution being an attempt to generate societal change with the intent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44761,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2079],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-week-8"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44761"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/learnsome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}