From ‘motherland’ to ‘daddy state’: A genealogical analysis of the gender undertone in China's nationalist discourses

This article examines the gender undertone of China's nationalist discourses, especially in familial metaphors of nationalism, and how such an undertone shapes people's understandings of state authority and state-citizen relations. Conventional nationalist discourse of the ‘motherland’ evokes the image of an insulted and raped mother as the symbol of national humiliation and calls for actions from patriots (masculinised in the discourse). In recent years, however, we have seen the emergence of a new discourse that depicts the nation-state as a rich, powerful and masculine ‘daddy’. Using discourse analysis and Foucauldian genealogical methods, this article argues that the discursive development has to be analysed against China's historical backgrounds, especially considering new standards of masculinity and femininity in the era of economic reform. Capital is equated to masculinity and righteousness, whereas femininity is shaped by the middle-class values of consumerism and political disengagement. The ‘daddy state’ discourse conjures strong paternalistic power from China's economic capacity that can be projected onto challengers of state authority, while also constructing the nationalist public as feminised consumers whose consumerist enjoyment relies on patriarchal state protection.     

‘Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the US Army’s role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the speci?c context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

So many Glasgows: From ‘personality of place’ to ‘positionality in space and time’

This paper investigates place and positionality in the regional novel against a background of evolving trends in geographical scholarship of place and placelessness. In re‐examining the representation of Glasgow in the urban regional novel, it proposes that a qualitative difference exists between rural and urban epistemologies which relates to the profoundly temporal essence of ‘cityness’. Aspects of both multi‐dimensionality in urban time‐space and of the city as the locus for working‐class oppression are reviewed in the context of a selection of urban imaginings.     

The Contribution of Reinhold Niebuhr's ‘Moral Ambiguity’ to Contemporary Discussions on the Morality of Intervention and the Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World

Abstract

The post-Cold War world poses challenges to traditional principles guiding the ethics of the use of force. Military intervention and the current war on terror are two phenomena that challenge just war criteria such as just cause, right authority, and reasonable hope for success. The just war tradition is helpful but needs to be expanded and re-thought to address the pressing issues of our time. This paper suggests Reinhold Niebuhr's category of ‘moral ambiguity’ as a contribution to the discussion. His application of moral ambiguity to his situation during World War II and the Cold War witnesses to the depth that such a category can add to current international circumstances fraught with moral complexity. Though it too requires critique, contemporary discussions on military intervention reflect many of Niebuhr's evaluations of the ambiguity in the use of force as different global actors seek humane alternatives to provide relief to intense human suffering.     

From resistance to revolution: the limits of nonviolence in Arendt’s ‘Civil Disobedience’

ABSTRACT

Arendt’s work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energising the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth century. Civil disobedience should not simply be tolerated, she argued, but incorporated into the legal structure of the American political system. Her work is usually seen to promote an idea of civil disobedience that is thus bound to existing constitutional principles and essentially nonviolent. However, by looking at Arendt’s discussion and critique of various practices of civil disobedience in 1960s and 1970s America, specifically in relation to the nonviolence movement influenced by Martin Luther King, and on the other side, the more militant Black Power movement, a different idea of civil disobedience emerges. This paper argues that whilst, for Arendt, civil disobedience within America certainly possesses the constitutionally restorative potential she assigns to it, in a broader sense – theoretically, globally, and even in terms of alternative ideologies within America – her conception of civil disobedience is in itself neither necessarily constitutional, nor nonviolent. It is, instead, a form of revolutionary action, whose limits are set only by politics itself, and specifically, Arendt’s criterion of publicity.     

At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism,neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part One: From ‘knowing’ fetus to ‘confused’ child

The inability of the child to represent his or her own interests as a legal subject (by definition), and the continued interest of the state in the child as a futurity or resource locks the child in an eternal pas de deux: the child continually approaches the possibility of ‘personhood’ but never achieves it. In the past 40 years, in western nations the child's legal personhood has been simultaneously invoked and constrained: through a growing array of persons and organizations that, as an exteriority, purport to ‘best represent the child’; and through an ever more finely gradated mapping of the child's interiority—which filters the child's voice through a range of interpretive theories, and mechanisms. In this myopic and hyperopic reading of the child, the child's voice disappears. This paper is the first of two examining the relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. In the case law explored around fetal rights and custody issues in the United States and elsewhere we find a paradoxical situation where the ‘fetus’ is granted a more authoritative voice in terms of what it ‘wants’ than is the child, whose wishes are perpetually called into question. Together these papers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual. They highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child whereby neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport to speak for the child mobilize their own political interests.     

From ‘Landsman’ to ‘Seaman’? Colonial discipline,organisation and resistance in the Royal Indian Navy, 1946

In February 1946, 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) mutinied over a number of grievances, from the poor quality of their food to demands for an independent India. Drawing on archival research in the UK and India, this paper uses this event, together with an examination of life in the RIN more generally, to explore how colonial discipline was organised and resisted in specifically maritime ways. By examining the practices and organisational structures of the RIN which attempted to discipline sailors, and in turn how these were resisted and negotiated, it is argued that the spatial politics of life in the Navy created distinctly maritime social and cultural relations. These maritime, naval understandings of space and place add to our understandings of the ways in which colonialism worked in practice. The paper therefore not only adds to work about colonialism's attempts to discipline and order its subjects but also contributes to debates on the geographies of the sea.     

From the Inside Looking out and the Outside Looking in: Whatever Happened to ‘Behavioural Geography’?

As part of the Institute of Australian Geographers' Millennium Project, this article examines the shift of behavioural geography from a cutting edge sub-discipline to a branch of enquiry that is now much less prominent in mainstream human geography, especially in Australia. Through an exploration of the rationale for behavioural geography, a brief outline of the nature of the work that was done, and a consideration of the critiques of behavioural geography, the paper argues that behavioural geography enriched the discipline in several ways: it was instrumental in encouraging geographers to consider the epistemological foundations of the discipline; it fostered consideration of a variety of philosophical and methodological positions; and it highlighted the need to consider interrelationships between individuals, groups, society and environment thereby bringing into prominence the ways in which shared environmental meanings are contested and negotiated. Behavioural geography might be a term that is used much less than it once was and behaviourally-orientated research might increasingly find expression in interdisciplinary outlets rather than in mainstream geography journals but contemporary geography is heir to the endeavours of behavioural geography.     

A forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East: US democracy promotion and the ‘war on terror’

Following the 11 September terrorist attacks, a belief has emerged that one of the root causes of Islamic extremism lies in the repressive nature of the regimes that populate the Middle East. Thus the spread of democracy has become a major component of the Bush administration's ‘war on terror’ Previously dismissed as Wilsonian idealism, the promotion of democracy is now considered a strategic necessity to address the threat posed by terrorism. Despite the significant role democracy promotion has played in the present foreign policy of the United States, the focus has tended to be on the more controversial policies of preventive warfare and coalitions of the willing. The purpose of this article is to help rectify this imbalance by examining the role the promotion of democracy plays within the current administration's foreign policy in the Middle East. It considers the logic behind America's ‘forward strategy of freedom’ in the Middle East as well as the likelihood of this strategy succeeding.     

From spaces of exception to ‘campscapes’: Palestinian refugee camps and informal settlements in Beirut

The recent literature on the refugee condition and spaces has heavily drawn on Agamben's reflection on ‘bare life’ and the ‘camp’. As refugees are cast out the normal juridical order, their lives are confined to refugee camps, biopolitical spaces that allow for the separation of the alien from the nation. But is the camp the only spatial device that separates qualified and expendable lives? What happens when the space of the camp overlaps with the space of the city? Taking the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut as a case, this study problematises the utilisation of legal prisms and clear-cut distinctions for the understanding of the production of bare life and spaces of exception. Isolated at the time of its establishment, Shatila is today part of the so-called ‘misery belt’. Physical continuities are also reflected by the distribution of the population as both Palestinians and non-Palestinians, including Lebanese, live in Shatila and the surrounding informal settlements. As physical and symbolic boundaries separating the refugee and the citizen blur, I argue that the exception is not only produced through law and its suspension. While legal exceptions place the Palestinians outside the juridical order, other exclusions run along sectarian and socio-economic lines cutting through the Lebanese body. As Shatila and the informal settlements are entangled, a new spatial model of analysis defined as the ‘campscape’ is proposed. Once the exception leaks out of the space of the camp, the campscape becomes the threshold where the refugee, the citizen and other outcasts meet.     

From ‘neo-vernacular’ to ‘semi-vernacular’: a case study of vernacular architecture representation and adaptation in rural Chinese village revitalization

ABSTRACT

Vernacular architecture can be regarded as heritage places. Recently, the need to protect vernacular heritage in China has been reflected through government policy changes, for example the ‘beautiful countryside’ program which aims to develop rural villages since 2005. However, a conflict between conserving the tangible fabric and the intangible heritage of the vernacular place can become pronounced, as villagers have desires for a modern lifestyle, and maintaining the physical building fabric. Vernacular villages require sustainable development alongside conservation of both tangible and intangible heritage significance. A key factor in keeping a village alive is continuing its utilization by a local community. This paper introduces the terms ‘neo-vernacular’ (buildings with a vernacular appearance with contemporary methods and materials) and ‘semi-vernacular’ (reusing or renovating vernacular buildings in combination with modern and traditional building techniques) to distinguish two approaches to vernacular villages conservation. We analyse the distinctions between the works of Amateur Architecture Studio (AAS) and Atelier Zhang Lei (AZL) to demonstrate the neo-vernacular and semi-vernacular approaches respectively through photo-comparison diagrams, and reviewing comments from local villagers, architectural students, and scholars. In the discussion, we propose that the semi-vernacular adaptation offers a new approach worth pursuing in China’s rapidly changing rural landscapes.     

From the Arctic and Antarctic to ‘the back parts of Mull’: The life and career of William Gordon Burn Murdoch (1862–1939)

Published and archival sources are examined to elucidate the career of William Gordon Burn Murdoch, artist, bag‐piper, explorer, geographer, hunter, Scottish nationalist, traveller, whaler and writer. Burn Murdoch's diverse contributions to geography are discussed, as are the roles he played in the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and other Scottish scientific and literary societies. A preliminary list of his extant original works of art is included.