‘Blindness which we mistake for sight’: British officials and the economic world of the cultivator in colonial Burma

Prompted by the recent completion of a study of the economic – and, to a degree, social and political – strategies used by Burma's rice cultivator to mitigate the potentially devastating impact of the economic crisis of the early 1930s on his material circumstances, this article explores some of the major methodological issues faced by the historian seeking an understanding of the economic behaviour of the cultivator in Burma under colonial rule. One set of issues concerns the need to locate that economic behaviour in a distinctive cultural context. A second rises from the fact that since almost the sole source for the Burma research is the surviving records of the colonial administration, the historian is forced to peer into the economic world of the Burmese rice cultivator through the eyes of British officials, whose sight of that world was far from complete and commonly distorted by cultural preconceptions. Here the article pays attention to the historian's use of colonial statistical data and impressionistic reports.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.     

Voices from the Margins: Gendered images of ‘Otherness’ in colonial Morocco

The main goal of this essay is to study a book- El Marroc sensual i fanatic - of travel writings written by a Catalan woman traveller, and to put it within the context of the recent scholarship that relates, on the one hand, travel narrative with Orientalism and gender and, on the other, geography and colonialism. The contradictory nature of the contents of the book leads us to challenge the notion of simple 'Othering' as presented in Said's works where the heterogeneity of colonial power is neglected in a totalising dichotomy between the colonising Self and the colonising Other. The contemporary Spanish official discourse was indeed pro-colonial and paternalistic and often drew on notions of shared history and geographical proximity in order to legitimise an 'altruistic' colonial presence. The author's position is very different from this official discourse, but is deeply ambivalent. Her ambivalence arises from her gender which allows her to live the last Spanish colonial adventure as an outsider, and also from her positioning in Spanish politics. The confrontation between different cultures and traditions is sharply delineated in her accounts on Moroccan women, the primary aim of her travel. The (cultural) impermeability of the Others, with whom she would like to identify deeply, yet with whom she cannot really communicate, forces her to construct her own vision of the identity of these Others, projecting her own view of (Western) feminism. The essay demonstrates the importance of focusing on narratives that come from the margins (and particularly from female authors). These provide new perspectives which can destabilise established conceptions of the colonial relationship and, at the same time they can broaden the conceptual and factual history of our disciplines.     

Providing fun in the ‘world of tourism’: servicing backpackers in Indonesia

Service sector work is a special arena for the formation of gendered subjects because its workers are both service providers and part of the consumed product in the sense that they have to deliver a ‘quality’ product and have the ‘right attitude’ toward customers. Based on repeated qualitative fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with tourism workers in a backpacker tourism enclave in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this article explores the ways in which tourism work and tourism workers are constructed as gendered subjects. Although women and men might have the same work tasks within tourism, they are positioned differently, and it is not unusual for women to be seen as having a hidden agenda that is assumed to involve sex work. Men are constructed as the norm to which women are compared and consequently perceived as deviating from. Between men and women working in tourism and the western backpackers on which tourism workers depend in order to sustain their livelihoods, relations of class, gender and colonial stereotypes come into play. Tourism workers consider themselves to be seen as providers of fun, which means that they are able to meet the needs of the tourists, whatever those needs might be.     

‘Playing Cold War politics’: the cold war in Anglo-Kenyan relations in the 1960s

Kenya has rarely been considered a major Cold War battleground, becoming linked with Britain and the Western side, even whilst being publicly committed to non-alignment and African Socialism. Nonetheless, the Cold War offered opportunities for Kenya’s newly independent leaders. It was utilised in factional political debates between Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga. In the late 1960s, leading Kenyans around President Jomo Kenyatta used Cold War rhetoric and rivalries to bargain to their advantage with the British over arms sales. British policy-makers offered concessions as they worked to build and then maintain their position as Kenya’s closest foreign partner.     

New regionalism in Turkey: questioning the ‘new’ and the ‘regional’

Turkey’s regional policies are inspired by the new regionalism theory. During past two decades, key concepts of new regionalism, including knowledge economies, specialization, networked cities and innovation, have been incorporated in policy documents. At the same time, Turkey comes from a strong central state tradition that controls local and regional development. At first insight, new regionalism and strong central state control do not fit in the same frame. This research analyses the trajectory of regional policies in Turkey with the aim of explaining how these seemingly incompatible policies can coexist. It argues that regional policies developed at the central state level utilized new regionalism as a part of the strategy to maintain power in the course of transformation of the nation state.     

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.     

‘Chilling’ and ‘hopping’ in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of Mechelen

Within the field of children's geographies several calls have been made to develop ‘teenagers’ geographies’ as a complementary field of research and practice. It has been stated that teenagers remain ‘invisible’ or ‘marginalised’ in public debates as well as in research and practice, even within childhood studies and children's geographies. Further explorations in teenagers’ geographies could contribute to the research on ‘diverse childhoods’. This article explores the spatial worlds of teenagers (approximately 12–16 years) in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterised by a dense network of smaller cities and ‘urban sprawl’. Based on street interviews and observations in a small city several mental maps and patterns of teenagers’ use of public space were identified. Starting from a case study in the city of Mechelen, this article suggests how these perspectives can be integrated into urban planning by identifying and tying together relevant planning layers, thus creating a more closely knit ‘teenage space network’. Wouter Vanderstede is an urban planner, anthropologist and historian. He is a researcher and staff member at Childhood & Society Research Centre–Onderzoekscentrum Kind & Samenleving vzw. Child friendly and teenager friendly planning and design of public space is one of the main research themes of the institute. View all notes     

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.     

Organizing the ‘people’s community’: the NSDAP and the ‘ethnic Germans’ in Nazi-occupied territories

ABSTRACT

This article refers to recent scholarly debates on the term ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), which throughout the Third Reich remained rather vague and encompassed often contradictory purposes. It deals with the relations between the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and some of the ‘ethnic German’ (volksdeutsche) organizations to exemplify how German society should be transformed into a ‘people’s community’ after 1933. Thus, it is necessary to analyse the ‘people’s community’ not by asking whether or not its different purposes were realized, but by examining its functions in the Nazi regime. This functional analysis of the ‘people’s community’ focuses on the NSDAP and its relations with ‘ethnic German’ organizations after 1933, primarily in Nazi-occupied territories during the Second World War. First, the article describes the NSDAP’s efforts to align the ‘Germans abroad’ (Auslandsdeutsche) after the seizure of power and to organize the German Front (Deutsche Front) in the Saar territories in 1934/35—an experience serving as a blueprint for the relations between the NSDAP and ‘ethnic German’ organizations during the Second World War. Second, it evaluates the creation of the Ethnic German Community (Volksdeutsche Gemeinschaft) in the General Government and its efforts to organize ‘ethnic Germans’. Third, it interprets the foundation of the German People’s Community (Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft) in Lorraine and its ongoing attempts to establish a racial hierarchy of ‘ethnic Germans’ over the autochthonous French population. Fourth, it looks at the connection between the Germanization of Lower Styria and the launch of the Styrian Homeland Union (Steirischer Heimatbund) as an ‘ethnic German’ movement. The article argues that the NSDAP’s operational routines regarding both the German population and the ‘ethnic Germans’ living in the occupied territories shaped the ‘people’s community’.     

Malthus,gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare reform

This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial rhetorical architecture for welfare reform debates in the USA during the 1990s. Populationism, which Joni Seager defines as ‘the dogma and the rhetoric of population alarmism and population control,’ subtly legitimized efforts to control and marginalize poor women's bodies in the context of welfare reform. The populationism underlying welfare reform hinges on a deep fear of engulfing social chaos if ‘we’ do not check the fertility of poor women, and particularly women of color. This article historically situates contemporary welfare politics by tracing in some detail how Malthus' original writings on population were constitutively linked to debates about ‘poor relief’ in early nineteenth century England. Exploring the gendered linkages between Malthus and social welfare policy in the 1800s allows us to understand how Malthus continues to haunt discourses about social welfare in the 1990s and beyond, with direct consequences for poor women and particularly poor women of color.