Violence,Past and Present: “Mati” and “Non‐mati” People

The article explores violence as an entanglement of race, politics and belonging in Guyana. The author argues that where race as an object of violence has to be actively orchestrated against people who wish to live in peace, other factors can intersect to dangerously alter the balance of “co‐existence”. By co‐existence, the author refers to people’s management of complementary settings: a politically orchestrated race problem is seen as separate by people who have their own agendas to do with amicable relations and their living conditions. The race problem is located in the notion of a city‐space as divided from what people do. However, the article considers the shifting of this city‐space in ethnic composition and its extension into everyday relations. The shift in a post‐repression era further demonstrates violent citizenship through transformations in relation to an outside imaginary.     

Observing,Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British “everyday” life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of “mass” and “morale”. These formed part of a broader scientific–administrative–bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and “things” in this and later periods.     

Patronage,gentility, and “base degree”: Edmund Spenser and Lord Burghley

This essay examines the social asymmetry of Early Modern patronage by focussing on Edmund Spenser’s complex relationship with Lord Burghley. Both were anxious to validate their social credentials, the one as novus homo, and other as novus poeta. Burghley sought to offset criticism of his rise by consolidating a reputation for public service with claims of illustrious ancestry, and scores of dedicators obliged. Spenser was anxious to claim the status of gentleman through talent despite his obscure origins. In appending a dedicatory sonnet to Burghley in the 1590 Faerie Queene he endorses his public image in the hope of reciprocal acknowledgement. Apparently disappointed, he responds in Complaints (1591) by presenting Burghley as a mercenary parvenu, while for the first time claiming kinship to the “ancient” house of the Spencers of Althorp, thereby reversing the social hierarchy but problematizing his own criteria for gentility.     

“Words fail us”: Beckett,Leacock, and Johnson

ABSTRACT

This article will look at political treatments of language in Samuel Beckett’s early novel Watt and place the novel’s linguistic scepticism in conversation with three authors, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the language theorist Felix Mauthner, and the English-born, Canadian parodist Stephen Leacock. The paper will argue that Beckett, like Leacock, engages in Mauthnerian critiques of language, destabilising Johnsonian formulae for language standardisation. But while Leacock fails to develop the political implications of his critique of language, Beckett’s understanding of language standardisation is implicitly political, informed by Johnson’s conception of speech as the predicate of national identity, a standard for inclusion which Watt gleefully antagonises. Challenging nationalist calls for controls on language, Watt interrogates the ways that campaigns for linguistic unity will engender exclusionary attitudes towards the nonconforming and bar access to that speech and identity which falls outside of normative frameworks.     

Extraction and the Ocean “Frontier”: Dispossession,Exclusion, and Resistance in Namibia

The perceived neglect of the ocean to state and industry actors has seen frontier rhetoric emerge as it is rendered visible under the Blue Economy agenda. By framing the marine scape as underutilised, capitalist expansion is being legitimised. Drawing on the case of Namibia, I argue that the afterlives of colonialism and apartheid are being repurposed to present the ocean as a Blue Economy opportunity. The physical disconnection of citizens from the marine scape, and the dominance of fishing and mining industries, has been used by state and development actors to present it as empty of socio-cultural relations. However, to declare Namibia’s coasts and ocean as forgotten unless articulated through capital is to conceal that they have been labelled “no-go” zones. I argue that, by considering exclusions and looking beyond proximity in discussions of equity and representation, the marine scape is articulated by civil society, to elucidate forms of resistance.     

BIFFOs,jackeens and Dagenham Yanks: county identity, “authenticity” and the Irish diaspora

Despite being an everyday point of reference in Irish discourse, the extent to which the county serves as a locus of identification has been oddly overlooked in the Irish studies literature. In particular, the persistence of identification with the county of origin post-migration offers new insights on the construction and maintenance of identity within the Irish diaspora. Drawing on my PhD research on discourses of authenticity and identity among the Irish in England, this article investigates the ways in which county identity is invoked both by Irish migrants and those of Irish descent. It illustrates how the county is used as a rhetorical tool to situate the speaker within discourses of belonging and authenticity, but how this may also act as a constraint on the articulation of a collective, diasporic identity. It argues for a greater research focus on translocalism within the context of changing Ireland–diaspora relations.     

Ethos,economics and “civilization” in rural Italy

Sydel Silverman. Three Bells of Civilization: The Life of an Italian Hill Town. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. xvi + 263 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography and index. $15.00.     

In the name of God: translation and transformation of Chinese culture,foreign religion,and the reproduction of “Tianzhu” and “Shangdi”

Translation between one language and culture into another assumes that a fundamental set of commonalities exist between the two cultural and linguistic contexts. In the case of the Christian Bible, Chinese translations not only involved translating words into Chinese, but also adapting and transforming an exotic Western religion for local sensibilities in such a way that Christianity might be recognized as a legitimate system of thought within a Chinese cultural milieu. Focusing on the perspective of different Chinese translations of the name of the Christian God, this article examines the history of the debate regarding the issue of translation, and the approaches adopted by the Catholic and Protestant faiths. It examines the reclamation and evolution of traditional Chinese vocabulary into new terminology through the application of Western religious concepts, and the ways in which indigenous Chinese society accepted these concepts, with an eye towards examining the course of historical progress through the history of social adoption of these ideas.     

“Half Bacchanalian,Half Devout”: White Intellectuals,Black Folk Culture,and the “Negro Problem”

In the wake of the Civil War, white Americans generated an unprecedented amount of writing about the songs, stories, and “superstitions” of black southerners. This interest was not purely esthetic. In the late nineteenth century, folk culture was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence, discourse on black folklore was entangled with the debate on the social and political place of African Americans. A number of scholars have noted the ways in which white supremacy was bulwarked by the work of folklorists, ethnologists, local color writers, and other intellectuals. The variety and contingency of this discourse on race, however, has sometimes been obscured, giving the impression of a static and monolithic racial ideology. Ideas about black folk culture shifted over time, shaped by a range of racial attitudes encompassing a liberal emphasis on uplift, a conservative commitment to stasis, and a radical insistence on regression. Moreover, the racial politics of intellectuals determined not only the ways in which they represented black folk culture, but also the particular cultural forms about which they wrote. Thus, while the Christian content of the “spirituals” suited the agenda of liberal reformers, the supposedly sinister figure of the conjure doctor complemented radical discourse on dangerous racial degeneration.     

Theocracy,Eschatology, and the Ephemeral Church: Graham Ward and the “Crisis of Democracy”

This article offers a critical assessment of Graham Ward’s political theology and critique of modern democracy. Ward argues that modern democracy expresses a nihilistic metaphysics and lacks an adequate account of the embodiment of sovereignty within the social, with the result that it tacitly harbors totalitarianism. As an alternative, Ward advances a theocratic model of the social, with the aim of providing an account of the social embodiment of sovereignty lacking in democracy. The article argues that Ward is ultimately unsuccessful in this attempt. His eschatological focus separates the church from the world, undermining his account of the embodiment of sovereignty and reinforcing the very emptiness at the heart of the social his theology is intended to counter.     

On “the Concrete”: Labour,Difference and Method

This paper develops a genealogy of concrete labour, paying particular attention to debates within marxist, feminist-marxist and Black feminist writings. Our argument pivots around the dual character of (re)productive activities and an argument that the concrete is both an “aspect” of labour and the concentration of many different relations. We begin with a critique of the false universalisms in certain invocations of the concrete, noting how the far right has mobilised this “false concrete” in the figure of the people. Teasing out long-standing debates over the dual character of labour enables us instead to better understand the social differentiation within concrete lived activity. Through discussing the internal relations that constitute the concrete as labour and method we propose a critical strategy that challenges false universalisms, provides a way to understand relationally defined positionalities, and that is also a place from which to struggle and organise.     

Guanhua,Guoyu, and Putonghua: Politics and “proper names” for standard language in modern China

ABSTRACT

Guanhua (official language), Guoyu (national language), and Putonghua (common language) are generally regarded as different names for the same thing in different eras, but from the perspective of cultural history, there are many subtle semantic differences between these three concepts, symbolizing how different social classes and political groups defined their particular experiences, expectations, and efforts to take action. Guoyu, which replaced Guanhua in the late Qing Dynasty, is closely bound up with the construction of modern nationalism. In the 1930s, leftist intellectuals imbued Putonghua with strong proletariat attributes and overtones of indigenous and ethnic equality, wielding it as a tool for critiques against Guoyu. Although Putonghua returned to certain key positions of Guoyu after the mid-1950s, it putatively emphasized the legacy of the leftist language movement, and represented a new political identity. Through these “proper names” for the standard language, it was possible not only to launch a political and social “revolution,” but also to smooth over the historical rifts that this engendered, by repeatedly revising the concepts of “written” and “standard” to form a linear national narrative.     

Self-reflection,Egyptian Beliefs,Scythians and “Greek Ideas”: Reconsidering Greeks and Barbarians in Herodotus1

This article addresses the debate between Afrocentrists like Martin Bernal and classical scholars such as Mary Lefkowitz and Robert Palter concerning the origins of ancient Greek civilization. Focusing on the first half of Herodotus’ Histories, I argue that, although Greek cultural developments can be attributed to the Greeks themselves, Herodotus indicates that the conditions that made these developments possible were due to the prior Greek absorption of important aspects of Egyptian religion. Herodotus shows that the Greeks learned from the Egyptians to individualize their gods and to appreciate the humanity of women. This Egyptian influence, Herodotus suggests, is what allowed the Greeks, in contrast to the Scythians, to become an object to themselves within the context of stable city life. I conclude that this habit of self-reflection is the source of the uniquely Greek contribution to the art, philosophy, science and politics of the West.