Archives,anthologies and other source books†

Documents on Australian International Affairs 1901–1918. Edited by Gordon Greenwood and Charles Grimshaw. (Nelson. In association with the Australian Institute of International Affairs and the Royal Institute of International Affairs).     

Thomas Mann’s depiction of neurosyphilis and other diseases

Thomas Mann (1875–1955), a Nobel Prize recipient rightly considered one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, was one of the most medically perceptive writers of recent times. His novels take place against the background of the different plagues (tuberculosis, cholera) that characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of Mann’s later novels, Doctor Faustus, is set against a background of syphilis. In the 500-page book, which is subtitled The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend, we see the theologian turned composer make a pact with the devil. He “voluntarily” contracts syphilis and, as a result of the pact and despite (or because of) the disease, Leverkühn starts a brilliant 24-year career, becoming the greatest German composer of his time. While it is widely thought that Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is the model for Leverkühn, we will show that other composers of the time also inspired the fictitious musician’s life and works. We will also illustrate the parallel between Leverkühn’s disease progression and political events in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and their similarity with current political events.     

Beach ridges and other shore deposits in south‐west Jura

EUROPE

Planning Research. Edited by W. Pearson. 9¾ × 7¼. Pp XVI + 158. London: The Town planning Institute, 1961. 18s. 6d.

Highland Folk Ways. By I. F. Grant. 8½ × 5½. Pp. XIII + 377. 77 figures. 3 maps. London: Routledge &; Kegan Paul, 1960. 40s.

British Landscapes Through Maps. Edited by K. C. Edwards. No. 1. The English Lake District. By F. J. Monkhouse. 9¾ × 7½. Pp. 19. 18 plates. 3 figures. 1960. No. 2. The Yorkshire Dales. By C. A. M. King. 9¾ × 7½. Pp. 24. 18 plates. 3 figures. 1960. No. 3. Guernsey. By H. J. Fleure. 9¾ × 7½. Pp. 20. 16 plates. 4 figures. 1961. Sheffield: The Geographical Association. 4s. 6d. each.

ASIA AND AFRICA

Nepal. By P. P. Karan. 10¾ × 13¾. Pp. 101. 60 illustrations. 35 maps. Folded map in two colours. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1960. $10.00.

Physical Geography of Asiatic Russia. By S. P. Suslov. Translated by N. D. Gershevsky. Edited by J. E. Williams. 10¼ × 7½. Pp. XIV + 594. 50 maps. 11 diagrams. 16 drawings. 1 end‐paper map. London: W. H. Freeman, 1961. 105s.

Transportation in Ghana. Northwestern University Studies in Geography No. 5. By P. R. Gould. 9 × 6. Pp. X + 163. 13 tables. 4 plates. 113 figures. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Department of Geography, 1960.

CLIMATOLOGY

Précis de Climatologie. By C. P. Peguy. 9¾ × 7¼. Pp. 347.097 diagrams and maps. 3 folding maps. Paris: Masson, 1961. N.F. 42.

PHOTOGRAMMETRY

Photogrammetry. By F. H. Moffitt. 9¼ × 6¼. Pp. XI + 455. Numerous figures and tables. Scranton, Pennsylvania: International Textbook Co, 1959. $ 12.00.

Photogrammetry, Basic Principles and General Survey. By B. Hallert. 9¼ × 6¼. Pp. IX + 340. Numerous figures and tables. New York: McGraw‐Hill Book Co, 1960. $ 12.00.

GENERAL

Britain and Beyond: People of the World. Book one. By R. W. Morris. 7¾ × 5½. Pp. 209. 129 photographs. 18 maps. 24 diagrams. Glasgow: Blackie &; Son Ltd., 1960. 8s. 6d.     

Have tropical Africa's nationalisms continued imperialism's world revolution by other means?

Many scholars argue that European imperialism shaped today's tropical Africa, for better or worse. Some imperial historians see the British empire as a fertile capitalist pioneer, kindling class‐conscious, national, politics overseas. Economists of differing persuasions can see it, to the contrary, as the engineer of an underdevelopment that strangles popular sovereignty. Together with most Africanist historians, this article doubts that Europe had such creative or destructive power; British rule, among others, had to respond as much to African history as to metropolitan will. Anti‐colonial nationalisms, in turn, were neither class not ideological vanguards but regional coalitions. Nation‐building thereafter was an elusive aim, steered by minority visions imperfectly seen and widely disputed, from capitalism to socialism. All these complexities rest, it is widely argued, on the historic difficulty of exercising power in what was until recently an underpopulated continent with openly available resources.     

Le Sacre de la citoyenne? Pierre Rosanvallon and the significant other

Rosanvallon, P., Le sacre du citoyen: histoire du suffrage universel en France (Gallimard, 1992), 490pp., 195F., ISBN 2 07 072745 9     

Thinking the other,thinking otherwise: Levinas’ conception of responsibility

ABSTRACT

Probably no other philosopher described the encounter with the other (human being) in a more radical way than Emmanuel Levinas. This led him to a new interpretation of responsibility as origin of all our ethical obligations towards others. He put into question a philosophical tradition of thought he accused of taking the ego as sole origin of all foundation of meaning. In this paper, I begin by outlining Levinas’ criticism of the occidental tradition of thought to explain the place of the other in his writings. I go on to explicate Levinas’ peculiar understanding of ‘responsibility for the other’. I will show how important it is in Levinas’ work not to isolate the question of responsibility from the question of justice. Finally, I examine what other capabilities would be required in order to act in a responsible and just way.     

Europe’s other? The Turks and shifting borders of memory

Abstract

Since the fifteenth century, the ‘Turks’ have represented the paradigmatic other of Europe. Even in times without violent conflict, the ‘Turks’ delimited the mental border of Europe towards the ‘Orient’ and served for identity-building in East Central Europe. In that region, the commemoration of the Turkish menace substantiated claims of being part of Europe over the last 200 years. Societies in peripheral regions could thereby redraw Europe’s frontiers in their favour. A comparison across Eastern European countries demonstrates how attempts at an inner homogenization through instrumentalization of an imagined external enemy contradict the plurality of interpretations of the past.     

Politics by other means? The virtual trials of the Khmer Rouge tribunal

This article argues that more emphasis should be placed on the political aspects of international tribunals, which are often in the business of reshaping politics as well as simply administering justice. By examining the hybrid Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), popularly known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, the article develops arguments previously advanced by Victor Peskin in respect of Rwanda and the former Yuogoslavia. Peskin has suggested that courtroom war crimes trials are paralleled by ‘virtual trials’, in which international and domestic political actors struggle for power and control over the form and outcome of proceedings. He terms these virtual trials ‘trials of cooperation’, in which governments of states where war crimes have been committed seek variously to help or hinder legal proceedings to address those crimes. Such virtual trials now loom extremely large in the Cambodian case; the Hun Sen government, while exploiting the ECCC to deflect domestic and international attention from the endemic corruption and growing authoritarianism over which it presides, has sought tightly to limit the Tribunal's room for manoeuvre. One trial has been completed, another is about to start, and the international investigators and prosecutors are planning a couple more—but Prime Minister Hun Sen has personally declared his opposition to any further cases going ahead. If the ECCC succeeds in trying only five defendants from the murderous 1975–79 Khmer Rouge regime, justice will not have been done; and wider questions will emerge about the future viability of hybrid tribunals. The Cambodian case demonstrates that where war crimes tribunals are concerned, backroom ‘virtual trials’ need as much academic, policy and media attention as the actual courtroom trials of key defendants.     

Baroque Science,Experimental Art? Jusepe de Ribera and other Neapolitan Sceptics

Current attempts by historians of science to revise the narrative of the Scientific Revolution by using the concept of the Baroque have important implications for art history. Correspondences between baroque art and baroque science gain new complexity when the rational, epistemologically optimistic image of the New Science is put in doubt. Rather than a method of objective observation, early seventeenth‐century science and art share an acceptance of the constructed nature of reality, of human epistemological limitations and of the role of passions in the observation of the world. While Caravaggio has revolutionised art precisely through his interest in questions of knowledge and sensorial perception and by his subversive transformation of Renaissance epistemological values and ideals, this article concentrates on the work of Jusepe de Ribera, who made the senses and their shortcomings a major theme of his pictorial research. Ribera's epistemology is examined in the context of contemporary Neapolitan philosophy and science. Through the confrontation of some of the Spagnoletto's paintings with the work of figures such as Giovanni Battista della Porta, Federico Cesi and particularly Colantonio Stigliola, it becomes clear that early modern Neapolitan faith in rational knowledge was more ambiguous than is sometimes assumed.     

Feminism and its ‘other’: representing the ‘new woman’ of Bangladesh

This essay examines women's oppression and organizing against gender violence in contemporary Bangladesh through the lens of television. I argue that the telefilm Ayna (The Mirror, 2006), written and directed by popular film actor and women's rights activist Kabari Sarwar, offers a window into the changing social and economic landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and the complex negotiations of power and inequality across gender, class and community. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to unpack the social messages underlying development and modernization initiatives, the new kinds of alliances as well as dependencies engendered by them, and their multiple and uneven consequences. An investigation of the representations of competing and contradictory notions of women's subjectivity and agency in this telefilm allows us to understand how these intersect with shifting notions of local/global patriarchies, feminist solidarity and women's empowerment in Bangladesh today. Further, this essay illuminates the disjunctures between representations of the ‘new woman’ circulated through development and certain feminist advocacy narratives with women's lived realities of oppression, and survival.     

Art That Makes Itself and other generative beginnings: Paul Brown interviewed by Bronaċ Ferran

ABSTRACT

In an interview with Brona? Ferran, Paul Brown recalls his involvement with people and places formative in shaping important countercultures of the 1960s and his long-term interest in generative art processes. He describes his interests since childhood in art and technological thinking which was further inspired by the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968. Shortly before seeing this, he had left art school, discouraged by a tutor who, on seeing a system-based drawing he had made, told him he would never become an artist. This exit proved liberating as Brown swiftly went on to forge an autonomous route working on light-shows and other multimedia events particularly at The Blackie in Liverpool, which had links to Drury Lane Arts Lab and other centres of radical experimentation. He returned to college in the early 1970s to study art and computing which became the basis of his successful art career.