Nationalism,party political discourse and Scottish independence: comparing discursive visions of Scotland's constitutional status

This article critically examines the predominant narratives which emanated from party political discourse in relation to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Utilising a methodological approach centring on political discourse analysis (Fairclough and Fairclough 2012), this paper analyses party manifestos and constitutional policy documents produced by the three largest political parties represented in the Scottish Parliament, namely, the pro‐independence Scottish National Party, and two pro‐union parties, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party. The emergent discourse of each party is interrogated by drawing upon pertinent theoretical concepts from previous academic analyses of Scottish nationalism, with particular attention given to those which have deployed modernist and ethnosymbolist theoretical approaches when analysing the Scottish context. This facilitates a critical reflection on the contrasting and nuanced narratives of the Scottish nation's past and future espoused by each political party vis‐à‐vis modernist and ethnosymbolist theory, illustrating the ways in which contrasting theorisations of nationalism are empirically tangible within political discourse and are thus not simply theoretical abstractions.     

Mothers and children in post-war Europe: martyrdom and national reconstruction in Italy and Poland

References to family and nation abounded in post-war rhetoric and informed the painstaking process of (re)creating a normal life in the aftermath of devastation. Taking Italy and Poland as its main case studies, this article explores the connections that linked familial and national discourses in post-war Europe. It is argued that families did not simply provide a useful metaphor to talk about national communities, but represented a constitutive element of post-war reconstruction. References to the family as a place of civic and national resistance were modelled on earlier narratives of national and familial devotions, which found in the sacrifice of children (in the double meaning of young person and offspring) a central theme. Both in Poland and in Italy, the celebration of the sacrifice of young people and their mothers became a means of celebrating the nation, its suffering and its recovery.     

An Iranian Woman's Memoir on the Iran–Iraq War: The Production and Reception of Da

Da (Mother): Memoirs of Seyyedeh Zahra Hoseini, as Recorded by Seyyedeh A‘zam Hoseini was published by Sureh-ye Mehr, the official publisher of the Artistic Center of the Islamic Development Organization, in 2008. According to the publishers, it became the biggest seller in the shortest period in Iranian publishing history. This article analyzes the conditions of production, distribution and reception of that work, and compares it to the canon of other contemporary Iranian war narratives. It argues that the unusually wide and varied reception of a traditional discourse of sacrifice, nationalism and revolutionary fervor was facilitated by the fashionable format of the woman's memoir, in addition to a formidable propaganda machine.     

秦雍城马家庄宗庙遗址祭祀遗存的再探讨

本文通过对陕西省凤翔县秦雍城马家庄宗庙遗址祭祀坑的分析 ,认为当时每一次祭祀活动以使用一种牺牲为主 ;使用牺牲种类不同 ,其埋入方式亦有差别 ;该遗址中打破宗庙主体建筑的人坑 ,其埋放时间、性质及目的当与分布于中庭的它类祭祀坑有别。     

‘Exodus’: The Serb flight from Sarajevo,its legacy,and its role in the political memory of Republika Srpska

This study provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how and why the leadership of Republika Srpska (RS), which is one of the entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formed a specific discourse concerning the flight of Sarajevan Serbs after the 1992–1995 war. Undertaking an analysis of local media, it explores the ‘defensive’ and ‘cohesive’ strategies promulgated by the RS elite that have been pivotal in shaping the idea of Serbhood. The former accentuates victimhood through discursive dimensions of external enforcement, suffering and rupture. The latter channels a sense of collective identity and the notion of ‘statehood’ in RS through narratives of sacrifice and patriotism. These strategies help to advance the concept of Serbhood to counter the war's external near-hegemonic understanding, fuelling denialism and promoting in-group characteristics in the RS society. The legacy of the flight has contributed to moulding the political memory of RS.     

The secret of my succession: dynasty and crisis in Vandal North Africa

The system of royal succession in the Vandal kingdom of North Africa has long been regarded as idiosyncratic within the early medieval west, but its fullest implications have rarely been investigated closely. The present article examines the origins of succession by agnatic seniority under the strong rule of King Geiseric, and argues that it was one of several innovations intended to establish the emergent Hasding royal house against other aristocratic challenges. The article goes on to explore the consequences of this law in the two major dynastic crises of the Vandal kingdom: under Huneric in c.481 and under Hilderic in 530. In both cases, the standard narratives of events are challenged, and with them assumptions about the ‘constitutional’ status of Geiseric's law of succession.     

The President and the Public: Inaugural Addresses in American History

This article examines presidential inaugural addresses to gain a perspective on the changing relationship between the people and the presidency throughout American political history. The analysis suggests three distinct models of inaugural address—constitutional, party, and plebiscitary—each articulating a different understanding of presidential leadership and the relationship between the presidency and the people. The constitutional presidents see themselves largely as restrained, constitutional officers with a minimal relationship to the people. The party model yields a role for the president which is more tied to the people's will, especially as expressed through party. Even though tied more strongly to the public, party presidents recognize constitutional limits on their roles and powers. Plebiscitary presidents often eschew party affiliation and the guise of constrained constitutional officer, and cast themselves as engines of the American political system fully tied to public opinion. Plebiscitary presidents often make few references to other political actors or to the Constitution. Beyond helping us to better understand the contours of American political development, this analysis challenges the prevalent assumption in studies of the presidency that nineteenth-century presidents were not popular or “public” leaders.     

The Impact of the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War on the ‘Culture of Suffering’ in Post-1914 Polish Fiction

ABSTRACT

Using Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, this article focuses on the three major types of narratives of suffering which appeared in Polish fiction, after Poland regained political independence in 1918, outside the strong myth-creating narrative of the Polish Legions’ role in the war for independence. It argues that Polish post-1918 fiction developed these three major paths in the face of suffering inflicted on Polish lands, during WWI and Polish-Soviet War. These paths were to: 1) continue the narrative of Polish suffering within the framework of heroic, and selfless, sacrifice for Poland that has been well established since Romanticism; 2) present suffering as the universal fate of humanity outside the notion of national identity, due to the monstrosity of modern bureaucratic systems wherein human beings are treated as objects; and 3) present suffering as the result of modern warfare, but told outside of “patriotic phraseology” – thus suggesting a growing need as to finding a solution to national conflicts outside narrowly defined identities.     

Ghostly Remains and Converging Memories: Yūshūkan and the Australian War Memorial Exhibit the Pacific War

Focusing on the Yūshūkan museum in Tokyo, and the Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra, this article engages how pain and sacrifice in the Pacific War are represented through the characters of kamikaze and prisoners of war respectively. Despite the inimical historical, political and moral orientations, these institutions’ presentations of memory of war display some interesting overlaps. After establishing that historical, cultural and political contexts are significant in assessing how and why pain and sacrifice in the war are engaged by each institution, I examine the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney in 1942, which effectively bridges both institutions. By assessing the emotive nature of the exhibitions it becomes apparent that while the framing of this single act of violence is culturally esoteric, themes of bravery, heroism, loyalty and sacrifice cross cultures.     

Skin,personhood and redemption: the double self in West New Britain cargo cults

This paper is about the sorts of spaces and identities created by cargo cult narratives. It explores those placements of identity which emerge in the colonial context, out of the interface of self and Other, where each self can only be a self through determining its relationship to the space occupied by the Other. This is a concern with the topography of colonialism, with that multiplicity of regions and sites which black and white are made to occupy in narratives. Here gender, trickery and masalai sites are employed to create alternative terrains of power and identities to those offered by black male colonised bodies.     

Nation,narrative and commemoration: political ritual in divided Cyprus

This article examines the issue of political commemoration, focusing on the commemorations organized by different political parties in the two sides of divided Cyprus. It suggests a new analytical framework for the study of ritual in contemporary nation‐states that moves beyond the usual examination of any single ritual on its own terms. The use of comparison, both within each side and between the two sides, reveals how political actors stage commemorations of different historical events in order to propose contesting historical narratives. Hence, the meaning of any commemorative ritual can be understood only as part of the broader story that each narrative proposes. The historical narratives proposed by different political actors share certain common characteristics by virtue of all employing the narrative form: a beginning, a plot, certain categories of actors, the spatial location where history unfolds, the moral centre through which events are to be evaluated and the end. However, each narrative suggests a different story through which issues of identity and “otherness”, self‐justification and blame are negotiated in order to define the “imagined community” of the nation, its enemies and its pertinent history.     

Women and Family Property: A Review of U.S. Inheritance Studies

Historians can use the concept of causation in a variety of ways, each of which is associated with different historiographical claims and different kinds of argumentation. The author shows that, contrary to the usual view, historical narratives are causal (in a specific way), and microhistory can be seen as a response to a very specific causal problem of Braudelian macrohistory.     

HISTORY'S DEMARCATION PROBLEM

In his 1998 book Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Lubomír Dole?el put forth a theory of narrative fiction based on the interdisciplinary framework of possible worlds. In Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage, Dole?el takes his earlier theory further and applies it to historiography as well, with the specific aim of showing how the study of history might be defended against the postmodern challenge via the use of possible worlds (PW) semantics. Dole?el's book is essentially an argument against the postmodern views expressed by Roland Barthes and Hayden White, who have claimed that fundamentally, there is no difference between fictional and historical narratives. According to Dole?el, this difference can be saved if the focus of attention is shifted from the textual features of these narratives to the fictional or historical worlds that the narratives project. Dole?el's comparison of fictional and historical worlds to each other is quite illuminating and thorough. However, the question remains whether the application of PW semantics does anything besides offering a detailed analysis of the structure of the different types of narrative worlds. After all, one should not overlook the perhaps more practical way of differentiating between historical and fictional narratives through their institutional status. Furthermore, we argue that by focusing on the properties of the end products, that is, the resulting narratives, Dole?el concedes too much to postmodernists. A stronger way to give postmodernists a taste of their own medicine would be to argue that the rules that historians follow in the process of generating, constructing, and evaluating weighed causal explanations (or historical models of the past) are fundamentally different from whatever rules govern the generation and construction of fiction.     

The Narrative Uses of Evidence

When scientific evidence is used in policy controversies, it is always embedded in narrative stories. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is an empirical framework used to study the role of narratives in public policy. While the NPF has considered the relationship between evidence and narratives from different angles, it has not used a consistent approach in examining how evidence is embedded in narratives. This article develops a categorization of narrative uses of evidence. A narrative use of evidence is defined by the different roles that evidence plays in the plot of a narrative depending on which narrative element is addressed by a given piece of evidence. To distinguish different narrative uses of evidence, the article examines how competing coalitions use the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) study in Swiss direct‐democratic campaigns on school policy. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of newspaper articles and governmental documents show how evidence may relate to all main narrative elements and may play different roles in the plot of a narrative. The findings demonstrate significant differences in the narrative uses of PISA between coalitions related to the story types and narrative strategies that each coalition uses. Finally, the implications for future NPF research are discussed.     

黄遵宪的地方自治思想

地方自治是近代宪政的重要内容之一,地方自治思潮在中国的出现是在甲午战争之后。本文主要介绍黄遵宪的地方自治思想的内容、地方自治思想的理论来源和他的地方自治实践活动。黄遵宪的地方自治思想体现了中西文化相互碰撞和相互交融的时代特征,也反映了先进的中国人追求民主、探索宪政之路的不懈努力。     

EXPERIENTIALITY AND “NARRATIVE REFERENCE,” WITH THANKS TO THUCYDIDES1

Lately, the concept of experience, which postmodernist theoreticians declared dead, has seen a renaissance. The immediacy of experience seems to offer the possibility of reaching beyond linguistic discourses. In their attempt to overcome the “linguistic turn,” scholars such as Ankersmit, Gumbrecht, and Runia pit experience against narrative. This paper takes up the recent interest in experience, but argues against the opposition to narrative into which experience tends to be cast. The relation between experience and narrative is more complex than is widely assumed. Besides representing and giving shape to experience, narratives are received in the form of a (reception) experience. Through their temporal structure, narratives are crucial to letting us re‐experience the past as well as to representing the experiences of historical agents. This potential of narrative is nicely illustrated by Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in which “side‐shadowing” devices restore history's experientiality. Through “side‐shadowing,” narrative can challenge the tendency toward teleologies inherent in merely retrospective histories and can re‐create the openness intrinsic to the past when it still was a present. However, the “side‐shadowing” devices used by Thucydides are fictional. To conceptualize the price and gain of “side‐shadowing” in historiography, the paper advances the concept of a “narrative reference” (a concept analogous to Ricoeur's “metaphorical reference”). Introspection, speeches, and other “side‐shadowing” devices sacrifice truth in a positivist sense, but permit a second‐level reference, namely to history's experientiality. In a final step, the paper turns toward modern historians—most of whom are reluctant to use the means of fiction—to briefly survey their attempts at restoring the openness of the past.     

Humans as Ritual Victims in the Later Prehistory of Western Europe

The paper presented here addresses the issue of how far current evidence permits the admittance of ritual murder or human sacrifice in the European Iron Age. It argues from two basic premises: firstly that the notion of human sacrifice is the more acceptable within the context of strictly hierarchical, slave-owning societies for whom human life was not, of itself, sacrosanct; secondly that, since there is a solid body of both literary and archaeological evidence for human sacrifice in antiquity, there is no intrinsic reason to deny its presence in later European prehistory. However, scrutiny of the data reveals that, if human sacrifice did take place in Iron Age Europe, it appears to have been both rare and special. More importantly, virtually all the evidence has a measure of ambiguity and is capable of alternative interpretation.     

略论商周时期射牲礼

由花东甲骨文和作册般鼋铭文的记载可知,射牲礼起源不晚于商代中晚期,最初其举行的地点通常在自然形成的河流沼泽等水边,射牲结束后多伴随有祭祀活动。之后射牲礼逐渐发展完善,由麦尊和伯唐父鼎等青铜器铭文记载可以推定,至晚到西周早期,天子在辟雍乘舟射牲的仪式已明显区别于习射及以"择士"为目的的大射,其不仅与祭祀相关,且已具有象征天子亲自射猎以"示亲杀"的特点。     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.