ABSTRACT
The decline of revolutionary utopian hopes over recent decades has led to a remapping of political and cultural possibilities. Since the 1980s one finds, even on the left, a self-reflexive and ironic distance from revolutionary and Third Worldist rhetoric. A language of "revolution" has been largely eclipsed by an idiom of "resistance," indicative of a crisis of totalizing narratives and a shifting vision of the emancipatory project. The idea of a vanguardist takeover of the state and the economy, associated with the politics of Lenin, has long since given way to the resistance to hegemony associated with Gramsci. Substantive nouns like "revolution" and "liberation" transmute into a largely adjectival opposition: "counter-hegemonic," "subversive," "adversarial." Instead of a macro-narrative of revolution, the focus is now on a decentered multiplicity of localized struggles. Though class and nation do not completely disappear from view, they lose their privileged position, being both supplemented and challenged by categories such as race, gender, and sexuality.
