Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Me?nikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian‐speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.     

Agamben,Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.     

Defending the West in All Its Amplitude: The Liberal Conservative Vision of Roger Scruton

This article explores the mixture of conservatism and liberalism that informs Roger Scruton's political and philosophical reflection. It highlights his response to the “culture of repudiation,” his resistance to totalitarianism, his defense of national loyalty (as opposed to ideological nationalism), his conservative-minded environmentalism, and his defense of order—and government—against libertarian and leftist assaults on legitimate authority. In particular, it explores a fruitful tension in Scruton's thought between a robust acknowledgment of the Christian features of Western civilization (a civilization that is unthinkable without a Christian emphasis on confession and forgiveness) and Scruton's forthright defense of the secular state against Islamist fanaticism. The article also explores affinities and differences between Scruton's understanding of the West's conjugation of Christianity and secularism and Pierre Manent's critique of radical secularism. The article concludes with reflections on Scruton's judicious melding of truth and liberty, and philosophy and Christianity.     

Review articles

Colette is not generally included in recent narratives of twentieth-century French neoclassicism. However, her contemporaries of various political and aesthetic persuasions considered Colette to be a classique of the first order. This article explores classification as classique by critics sympathetic to Charles Maurras and the aesthetics of the Action française as well as left-leaning critics associated with André Gide and the group surrounding the Nouvelle Revue française. The article shows that it is Colette's strong association with a particular type of femininity that allows her to be thought of as classique by critics of such different political and aesthetic commitments. The article also examines examples of resistance to Colette's categorisation as classique, and attempts to assert the modernity of her work, coining the term classique moderne as a way of bringing together diverse attempts to explain the harmony between classicism and modernity in Colette's work. The article suggests that Colette's incorporation in the canon of the classique is part of a larger solidifying of the role of femininity in French identity at that moment.     

Marxist Critiques of the Developmental State and the Fetishism of National Development

The developmental state has been heavily discussed in various disciplines and across diverse political spectrums. However, the statist notion formulated by institutionalists that the developmental state is autonomous from society and therefore effective in achieving “national development” has more often been taken for granted than problematised. The statist notion of the developmental state has also been accepted and reproduced or challenged merely inadequately by Marxist critics. By analysing how and why currently available Marxist assessments of the developmental state fail to challenge statism, this article offers an alternative theory of the developmental state by drawing on both social form critique and world system analysis. It then locates the origins of statism itself in the dynamics of global capitalism, in which the totality of capitalist social relations (understood as global from its inception) are hierarchically and unevenly constituted. From this it extends Marx's critique of commodity fetishism to the question of the international (the relationship between the nation state and world market) and criticises the statist notion of the developmental state from the perspective of a critique of the fetishism of national development.     

Geographies and utopias of Cameron's Big Society

This commentary engages with UK Prime Minister David Cameron's concept of the ‘Big Society’ as a cure for issues of multiple deprivation in UK cities. It considers the extent that it can be summarily dismissed as the latest manifestation of processes of neoliberalisation or as a cover for major cuts in public expenditure. In the spirit of the arguments of critics who wish to have an open mind about the benefits or otherwise of neoliberalisation, this paper argues that it is not just those on the political right who have a critique of state action from the top down as a method of solving social problems. A well-funded alliance between professionals and local communities can deliver locally appropriate solutions. Given the UK Coalition Government's commitment to reducing public spending, however, adequate funding is absent, as is a genuine willingness to accept local empowerment or to combat inequality.     

The Political Agent and Radical Democracy

Liberal democracy suffers from an internal contradiction stemming from its ideological roots and rending it from within. On the one hand its goal is to generate a system of laws and rules that maximize individual rights and liberties; on the other hand, some of its fundamental assumptions pertaining to the Subject restrict the political and social agent's existential experience to a limited threshold of speech and action. The central assumption of this article is that the main meeting point of the critics of modernity, Apel and Habermas primarily, and the post-structuralists, Foucault and Deleuze, in regard to the Subject, rehabilitates liberal discourse and creates an opening for a political theory that maximizes the freedom of the individual as a structured, anti-essentialist Subject. I will show that the expansion of the concept of the self in the two streams sheds new light on the concepts of political control and liberty, and in this way extends the normative discussion of all aspects of the political agent's status in a modern democracy.     

2. IN DEFENSE OF PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: A RESPONSE TO CAROLA DIETZE

This response to Carola Dietze's critique of Provincializing Europe takes up for examination three key expressions or ideas on which the original argument of the book was founded: hyperreal Europe, historicism, and political modernity. I appreciate the spirit of Dietze's engagement with the book, but I show that her critique is based on a degree of misapprehension of these three central ideas. While clarifying the details and the degree of my disagreement with Dietze, I provide my own critique of Dietze's proposal of “equal histories” by arguing that Dietze has not named or explained the unit with respect to which different histories could be considered equal. I also argue that Dietze's proposals about judging societies only by their “own” standards, and basing human dignity on the idea of a “human nature” that could be seen as a “constant,” do not solve the problems she sees with my book and are themselves open to some serious historical and logical criticism.     

The Legacy of Bernard Narokobi and the Melanesian Way

ABSTRACT

This special issue on the life and legacy of Bernard Narokobi documents and contextualizes Narokobi's life and thought. A central figure in Papua New Guinea's transition from Australian territory to independent nation, Narokobi was a jurist, philosopher, and poet who is best remembered for making ‘the Melanesian Way’ an important theme – if not the guiding ideological principle – in the discourse of independence in Papua New Guinea. In looking closely at Narokobi's biography, the collection also contributes to a growing body of work on political life writing in the Pacific. The collection speaks to Narokobi's role as a theorist of Oceanic modernity more broadly, one who deserves a place alongside two other important philosophers of Pacific independence, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Jean-Marie Tjibaou, as one of the main visionaries of Pacific decolonization and Oceanic modernity of the post-war period.     

What is settler colonialism? An anthropological meditation on frantz fanon's "concerning violence"

There has been a tendency in anthropology to read Frantz Fanon referentially, reflectively and phenomenologically. As a consequence, his analyses have been regarded as reductive and simplistic. Promoted here is a relational, reflexive and historical reading of his essay "Concerning Violence" that forms the basis for an alternative deconstructive and political critique to current anthropological studies of colonial discourses reliant on epistemologically based critiques. The intent is to consider some of the effects generated by the use of unexamined concepts and typologies. In particular, this deonstructive and political critique, in significant measure made possible by Fanon's oeuvre, is applied to the concept of "settler colonialism" as used in the discipline over the last three decades via texts as diverse as those of Leo Kuper, David Prochaska and Patrick Wolfe.     

From Dionysus to the Anti-Christ

Abstract

This essay is a reconstruction of Rene Girard's Christian apology in “I saw the Devil fall like Lightening.” It develops Nietzsche's antithesis between Christ and Dionysius which Girard identifies as the antithesis of modernity as such. Against Girard's own alliance with Carl Schmitt the essay adopts the Trinitarian point of view suggested by the author, in order to show that it is Erik Peterson's “Trinitarian” critique of Carl Schmitt's political theology of sovereignty which could fulfill the “true” aim of the author in fact much better.     

Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality*

We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning national security, illegal immigration, and the threats posed by various foreign countries. Although these arguments sit within a long colonial tradition, they also indicate a crisis of modernity, as witnessed in the growing challenges to colonial masculinity, nationalism, and rationality. We conclude that Trumpism articulates a reaction to these challenges, and that Trump's rise to power is a symptom of the crisis of post-territorial coloniality in contemporary global society.     

The Concept of Corruption in J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment

SUMMARY

In the scholarship on the concept of political corruption, one frequently encounters the lamentation that the manner in which the concept is deployed in liberal modernity is insufficiently attuned to the richer sense in which the term was employed in the ‘civic humanist’ tradition. In these lamentations, the usual point of reference is J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, a work that made corruption the central term of art in a political language stretching from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century and beyond. Certainly there is something quite attractive today about the ‘Machiavellian’ inflection of the term—our era is replete with the very things the protagonists of Pocock's story decried: debt, dependency, oligarchy, standing armies and the diminution of civic duties. But to what extent is Pocock's classic text a reliable guide for those studying the concept of corruption? This article suggests that Pocock uses the term in an excessively capacious manner, which both weakens his book's utility for understanding eighteenth-century political thought and undermines its power as a foundation for political critique by civic-minded anti-corruption reformers.     

Classy Kids and Down-at-Heel Intellectuals: Status Aspiration and Blind Spots in the Contemporary Ethnography of Iran

This article reviews the ways in which class, status, social mobility and their cultural ramifications have been considered (or failed to be considered) in recent ethnographic studies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It argues against the trend of privileging “resistance” to an oppressive state as a theoretical frame for documenting social phenomena in Iran: lifestyles and consumption patterns cannot be interpreted merely as signs of political rebellion because they are endowed with symbolic value as status attributes in a society whose class configurations are shifting. I present a number of sources and concepts that help to rethink these phenomena, and show how the experience of Afghan refugees living on the margins of Iranian cities illuminates both the opportunities and constraints created by the Islamic Republic's uneasy mix of political Islam, populism and neoliberalism. A focus on aspiration to upward mobility becomes a useful analytical lens that allows us to sidestep reductive dichotomies such as tradition/modernity or religion/secularism that are in practice blurred by its very pursuit.     

The Infrastructures of Internal Colonialism: State,Environment, and Race in Lerma,Mexico

This article explores the relations between infrastructures, labour, and internal colonialism in Lerma, Mexico. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research of two hydraulic projects there, the article argues that infrastructures are productive of the racial, environmental, and political relations that constitute internal colonialism both historically and contemporarily. I show how these infrastructural projects imagined and produced colonial relations between the environment, racialised workers, and the nation-state, and how these colonial logics endure today through infrastructures and the forms of racialised labour that maintain them. In doing so, this article contributes to literature that interrogates the relations between infrastructure and coloniality by focusing on how infrastructural labour makes internal colonialism enduring. The article concludes by reflecting on how the labour practices that make internal colonialism enduring also point to ways of producing infrastructures otherwise.     

Contested Self-determination: Indonesia and East Timor's Battle over Borders,International Law and Ethnic Identity

ABSTRACT

East Timor's twin experiences of colonialism established its collective identity and internally recognised rights of self-determination. Political boundaries were created through negotiated treaties between Portugal and the Netherlands, and Portuguese colonialism provided East Timor with its status as a non-self-governing territory under international law in 1960. Indonesian colonialism resulted in a discursive battle over identity as both the Indonesian government and East Timor's independence movement employed ethnocultural narratives and myths to persuade the international community of the legitimacy of their respective political claims. During debates over East Timor's political status that occurred between 1975 and 1999, Indonesia emphasised the ethnic ‘kinship’ between Indonesians and East Timorese. In contrast, East Timor's representatives emphasised cultural links with Portugal and Melanesia to prove its distinctiveness from Indonesia.     

Huaso Romance as Neoliberal Reform in Sebastián Silva's La nana

Building on the work of recent critics, this essay asserts that the narrative of illness and recovery at the center of Sebastián Silva's film La nana (2009) can be understood as allegorically working through the contradictions between economy and culture in contemporary Chile. Diverging from these critics, however, the essay argues that the film operates its critique by mobilizing the narrative structures that characterized Chilean criollista novels, and in particular the huaso romance narrative. Far from arguing that the film represents a nationalist or folkloric take on contemporary Chile, the essay asserts that Silva reconfigures the huaso romance to construct local solutions to the potential social conflicts generated by Chile's more complete integration into the world economic system. Following this line of argument, the essay asserts that Silva's film, like its criollista antecedents, produces a reformist political project that provides the grounds from which new social bonds can be developed to heal and stabilize the neoliberal economic system. In addition to a close reading of the film, the essay considers the basic characteristics of criollismo by examining Joaquín Edwards Bello's best-selling criollista novel La chica del Crillón (1935) as well as key details in Chilean history, politics, economy and culture.     

After Post‐Development: On Capitalism,Difference, and Representation

The post‐development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post‐development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it remains the most popular critical approach to development and is reemerging in decolonial and pluriversal guises. This paper contends that the post‐development critique of mainstream development has run its course and deserves a fresh round of criticism. We argue that those committed to struggles for social justice must critically reassess the premises of post‐development and especially wrestle with the problem of representation. We contend that Gayatri Spivak's work is particularly important to this project. We review some of Spivak's key texts on capitalism, difference, and development to clarify the virtues of her approach.     

The Myth of Counter-modern Ontologies: Indigenous People and the Modern Politics of Extractivism in Ecuador

Anti-extractivist critique still positions Indigenous people as protagonists of counter-modern political sentiment, whether as opponents of modernity's processes of productive rationalization and economic integration, or as embodying ontologies that reject modernity's conceptual separation of humanity from natural resources. Indigenous anti-extractivism is thus said to represent a rupture of modern politics in that it exceeds politics as we know it. Yet the calculus of modern politics remains central to Indigenous responses to resource extraction, even in social contexts where non-modern ontological suppositions are widely adhered to. This is illustrated through an ethnography of Indigenous mining in the southern Ecuadorean Amazon and national-level electoral data showing the sweeping support of Indigenous people for former leftist President Rafael Correa's ‘neo-extractivist’ programme. This persistent modernity of Indigenous resource politics exposes the fallacy of projecting counter-modern sentiments onto Indigenous peoples.     

The modernity of nations. A tribute to Walker Connor

To fully appreciate Walker Connor's contribution to the foundation of the contemporary study of nationalism, two main factors must be taken into account. First, the context of positivist behavioural political science within which in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, he articulated his critique of the concept of nation‐building. In this context, Connor emerged as a critic of the limitations and the naivité of positivist modernization theory. His dissenting voice called for critical rethinking and revision of the central concepts of the theory of political development, some of which enjoyed almost doctrinal status. Second, despite his criticism of modernization theory, Connor retained a strong conviction that nations and national sentiment were the products of modernity; indeed, in his judgement, they formed the primary content of modernity. This too was a critical stance within the rising tide of nationalism studies since 1989–1990, when ideology and wishful thinking influenced to a considerable extent the interpretation of nationalism. Walker Connor's intellectual legacy should thus be understood as a heritage of critical thought that is informed by a noteworthy awareness of the moral responsibilities of scholarly analysis.