Mapping the nation: street names and Arab‐Palestinian identity: three case studies

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab‐Palestinian street names – pre‐1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post‐1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation aims at charting the ideological orientations represented and the political messages entailed in these three different textual manifestations of Arab‐Palestinian national identity. The analysis focuses on notions of historical and cultural heritage as expressed in the choice of street names. Finally, it offers an interpretative evaluation of this process, placing it within broader ideological and historical contexts.     

Styling the revolution: masculinities, youth, and street politics in Jakarta, Indonesia

This article explores the changes to urban political culture in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1998 to the present. By tracing the contributions of youth activists, and middle-class university students in particular, to the production of the street as a political and public space, the author demonstrates to what extent the democratized post-Suharto era naturalizes the place of youth in nationalist politics. Central to this inquiry of youth identity formation is the elision of class and gender as analytical categories. Student movements in 1998 and after have relied on a specific masculine style that draws on both the authenticity of nationalist historical narratives and the street as the domain of the People, and in the process masks potentially contentious class and gender differences among progressive activists.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.     

Heritage Interpretation and Politics in Kfar Etzion,Israel

Kfar Etzion is a Kibbutz first established in Palestine in the 1930s. At the end of the British Mandate, in 1948, it became a de facto Israeli military outpost that controlled access to Jerusalem from the south. Kfar Etzion fell to Arab forces in 1948 and the area became Jordanian territory until 1967 when Israeli forces occupied the West Bank. Kfar Etzion was re-established in the same year. Kfar Etzion now interprets its history through a sophisticated multilingual audio-visual presentation offered in a museum built over a former bunker where Jewish defenders were killed. This presentation is analysed to illustrate the ways in which an historical narrative is constructed for interpretive purposes and to show that Bloc and Israeli perspectives are conflated for political purposes. The battle for the Bloc continues through the interpretation of heritage.     

Fragments from many pasts: layering the toponymic tapestry of Milan

In the recent literature on the cultural politics of naming, toponyms and street names are increasingly read within the wider social–historical context upon which naming is contingent. In this perspective, naming is often seen as an act of power and a way to inscribe an ideological discourse into the landscape. In this article, we analyze the street names currently inscribed in the historical center of the Italian city of Milan, Italy as a reflection of its long and contested social and political history. Fragments of all the different toponymic regimes and hegemonic discourses that took over one after the other over time have remained inscribed in Milan’s street network, originating a complex tapestry in which different pasts revive and conflicting ideologies co-exist. In this context, we examine the role Geographical Information Science (GIScience) methods and technologies play in quantifying, revealing, and visualizing the spatial patterns of downtown Milan’s toponymic texture at the urban scale and at the scale of the six historical neighborhoods.     

International migration and the politics of admission and exclusion in postwar Europe

"Although nation-states assume territorial, political and cultural boundedness, their boundaries are not uniform barriers, but rather are characterized by varying degrees of openness and closure to international migrants. The manipulation of the permeability of these boundaries constitutes the politics of admission and exclusion....This paper provides a discussion of the complex economic, political and social forces impinging on the politics of admission and exclusion and an analysis of how these forces have been operating in a particular historical and geographical context to determine the admission of international migrants into national territory and community....There are signs that the integration of nation-states into regional blocs such as the EC is shifting the politics of admission and exclusion practised by the dominant member countries to the supra-national scale."     

A Model of Social Security?

This essay provides historical perspective to Senator Bernie Sanders’ appropriation of elements of the Nordic model in the 2016 campaign by studying how Scandinavia was used as a political image in 1930s United States. Departing from previous scholarship, this essay argues that accounts of Scandinavian achievements were variable in their ideological outlook and sometimes deliberately challenged the existence and goals of New Deal policies. Moreover, this essay explores the usage of Scandinavia in New Deal social legislation by examining the policymaking rhetoric of the Social Security Act and its 1939 amendments. The surprising plasticity of the Scandinavian image amongst policymakers ultimately reveals the fluid nature of both New Deal-era politics and the Scandinavian images it appropriated.     

THE LIMITS OF OTTOMAN PRAGMATISM

In this paper I reflect critically on the concept of pragmatism as it is used in Ottoman historiography. Pragmatism has gained increasing currency over the last ten to fifteen years as one of the defining features of the Ottoman polity. I argue that unless it is properly defined from a theoretical‐philosophical perspective, and carefully contextualized from a historical perspective, pragmatism cannot be used as an explanatory or comparative category. When used as a framework of explanation for historical change, pragmatism blurs more than it clarifies an essential aspect of the Ottoman polity that it seeks to define, namely, the political. It is essential to reflect on the difference between the political and politics because whereas the political refers to the configuration of the power relations that organize a society as a legitimate entity, politics refers to the strategies, practices, institutions, or discourses whose purpose is to construct and retain hegemony within a polity. Through an analysis of the concept of pragmatism in Ottoman historiography, I show that for most proponents of Ottoman pragmatism, pragmatism pertains to politics rather than to the political. From a perspective rigorously confined to political theory, I argue that much like the discourse of modern tolerance, pragmatism in Ottoman historiography posits a problematic periodization, relegates the political to the background, and depoliticizes essential power relations.     

Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War

This paper examines how acrobatics was imbued with multiple meanings through the practices of nation-state building and international diplomacy. More specifically, the author discusses why the Chinese government chose acrobatics to facilitate the Sino-US rapprochement and the implications of this cultural diplomacy for the governments as well as the acrobats. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival data, this study demonstrates how the relationship between acrobatics and the ideas of ‘Chinese revolution’ was established, strengthened, disrupted, and finally re-modified to facilitate China’s relations with the West. This historical investigation advances the literature on performing arts and politics by exposing the political logics in the North-South exchange. As important, the analysis of acrobats’ engagement with Cold War politics evades state-centric narratives and contributes to an understanding of international diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective.     

The Use of Gasoline: Value, Oil, and the "American way of life"

Abstract:  While the critical literature has focused on the geography of oil production, the politics of "outrageous" gasoline prices in the United States provide a fertile path toward understanding the wider geography of petro-capitalism. Despite the deepening contradictions of US oil consumption, "pain at the pump" discourse projects a political sense of entitlement to low priced gasoline. I use a value-theoretical perspective to examine this politics as not only about the quantitative spectrum of price, but also the historical sedimentation of qualitative use-values inscribed in the commodity gasoline. Gasoline is analyzed both as a use-value among many within the postwar value of labor power and as a singular use-value fueling broader imaginaries of a national "American way of life." While use-value still represents an open site of cultural and political struggle infused within value itself, the case of gasoline illustrates how use-values are not automatically mobilized toward politically savory ends.     

Subject Disobedience: The Colonial Narrative and Native Counterworks in Northwestern Namibia,c.1920–1975

This article concentrates on the ambiguities and contradictions in the colonial archive on North West Namibia (a region also known as Kaokoland), and on the way these were exploited by the “stubborn traditionalists” inhabiting it. Its aim is to place the emergence of postcolonial identities and subjectivities in the region in an historical perspective. To do so, it takes a look at the depoliticized discourse on livestock and development in which South West African rule framed its politics of identity. This case study investigates how precisely this discourse fuelled political resistance in the region. However, the efforts by elders and so‐called commoners to counter indirect rule and apartheid hardly ever took the form of overt rebellion or explicit political protest. It concerned instead a more subtle and defiant form of counterworks, a very specific local modernity rooted in local subjectivity and experience that happened to be quite efficient.     

‘For the Honor and Glory of the Jewish People‘: Arendt’s Ambivalent Jewish Nationhood

Observers of German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt often disagree on her politics, yet many view her as a staunch early critic of Zionism. Whereas her criticism of Israel rendered her unpopular in the American-Jewish and Israeli communities for many decades after 1948, commentators more recently have come to see her perspective as a prescient assessment of the ills of Jewish nationalism. This interpretation, however, fails to grasp the complexity of Arendt‘s political views of Zionism in particular and of Jewish nationhood in general, which evolved over time and remained ambivalent from her early to her late works.     

Drugs, Sex, Rock, and Roll: A Theory of Morality Politics

I assume that (a) the demand for sin is characterized by heterogeneous preferences and (b) private behavior diverges from public statements. From these assumptions, in the first section of this article I derive a series of propositions about morality policy. Rational politicians will perceive that demand for restrictive policies will be greater than it actually is and thus compete to produce more extreme policies. Bureaucracies will lack expertise and thus will not provide a check on political excesses. This "politics of sin" can be translated into a contemporary form of redistributive morality policy politics if the issue can be refrained by political actors to legitimate an opposition position. In the second portion of the article, I argue formally that sin policies in general will fail because they operate on subsets of the population that are more and more resistant to the policy instruments available to government. I conclude with potential expansions of this theory, including how it might be generalized to other types of public policy.     

The anti-politics of smart energy regimes

In this paper, we explicate how smart energy infrastructures embed and enact politics. By advancing the framework of technopolitics, and building on two in-depth case studies of the US and Australia, this paper analyzes the emergence and effects of the smart energy sector. With the aim of economizing electricity, the “modernization” of the energy sector has followed from historical dynamics of deregulation and marketization. Based on interviews and document analysis, we argue that a specific logic, which we call anti-politics, is now being enacted through the creation of policies and technologies that aim to reduce and remove human agency from energy systems. Analyses based on post-politics do not fully capture the extent to which politics—the continual process of disagreement and deliberation—has been purged from the ideologies and institutions that govern energy and society. In addition to the technocratic evolution beyond politics, we are witnessing the neoliberal elimination of politics.     

Tracing children’s politics

This article sets out to conceptualize children’s political agency and the spaces of children’s politics by addressing children’s politics in official settings and everyday contexts. The study is based on research concerning child and youth policies and the politics played out in children’s everyday life practices. To demonstrate how childhood policies typically seek to involve children in politics, we discuss recent legislative developments related to building a parliamentary apparatus for children’s participation in Finland. We propose that not all children are able to, or willing to, participate actively in this kind of political action, and that all issues important to children can not be processed through (semi)official arenas such as school councils, children’s parliaments and civic organizations. Thus, we agree with scholarship portraying children as political agents also in their everyday environments and on their own terms. To further conceptualize these mundane politics, we propose a model for identifying different modes and spaces of children’s agency in terms of political involvement and political presence. We conclude by discussing the challenges of studying everyday political geographies in childhood.     

Ritual and Politics: An Examination of the 1072 Primal Ancestor Debate in the Northern Song

In considering the vital role played by imperial rites in claiming political legitimacy and maintaining social stability, Chinese emperors endeavored to present themselves as the perfect model for their subjects in terms of ritual performance. Focusing on a Northern Song (960–1127) ritual debate over the placement of imperial ancestors’ spirit tablets and ancestral chambers, especially that of the Primal Ancestor, this study aims to contribute to a better understanding of discussions on ancestral rituals and how they were intensified during the implementation of Wang Anshi’s New Policies. More importantly, this study reveals the differences between Song scholar-officials’ political positions and intellectual interests, thus providing a new interpretation of Song factionalism from the perspective of ritual politics.     

Geographies of Urban Politics: Pathways,Intersections, Interventions

This paper deals with urban political geographies and, most particularly, with political economy perspectives on urban politics. It offers an account that narrates what I see as influential pathways and intersections, theoretical debates, and methodological developments that have shaped contemporary urban political geographies in this vein since the 1970s, including: the ‘new urban politics’, intersections with postmodernism, and postcolonialism; urban neoliberalism and the contingency of urban politics; and, most recently, poststructural political economy and the notion of assemblage. This leads me to trace the implications of the shift in understanding from urban political geography to geographies of urban politics, and the growing emphasis on practice, contingency, relationality, and assemblage that accompany this shift. I conclude with reflections on new directions, new productive questions and tensions, and on the knowledge politics of how we do and might do contemporary urban political geographies.     

Netflix: Canadian (Dis)Content. Competing Sovereignties and the Cultural Politics of Cultural Policy

Netflix has gained significant attention in Canada because it exemplifies the challenge posed by digital technology to Canada’s long-standing cultural policies. It is increasingly evident that such policies are limited in their ability to encourage foreign investment while safeguarding Canadian cultural expression. Indeed, the policies proposed thus far have generated “Canadian discontent” across the political spectrum, notwithstanding their promised benefits. This article uses Netflix to explore the cultural politics of cultural policy: the historical and political underpinnings that drive ongoing discussions about state intervention in culture. These politics include the debates about the effect of foreign investment on Canadian cultural sovereignty, and the ideological tensions within the notion of sovereignty itself, namely those between state and consumer and between center and periphery. Using a historiographical approach, this article investigates the controversy surrounding recent government responses to the disruptive force of foreign digital multinationals, such as Netflix.     

The Sunland Park/Camino Real Partnership

The location and management of landfills is among the many controversial issues confronting many American communities. Greatly increasing the controversy is the issue of interest group politics in the local landfill siting and international waste trading policies. Exploring the historical and political controversies, this study examines landfill politics in a public-private partnership. The analysis reveals the vulnerability of local public authority and citizen participation in this kind of partnership.