The Multiple Functions of Criollo,Gaucho and Indigenous Symbols in La Historieta Patoruzú, 1936–50: The Conflicts of Peronism,Nationalism and Migration

This article considers the comic book Patoruzú in light of the cultural expressions of Argentine criollismo between the 1930s and 50s. It begins by examining the political and class conflicts that informed the meanings of criollo symbols, and how Dante Quinterno’s creation interacts with them. Perón’s political organisation, for example, constantly resorted to discourses and images of a gaucho and rural nature in order to propagate the ideals of nationalist corporatism. From one perspective, the drawings, storylines and characters of Patoruzú articulate the arguments set forth by Perón in his battles with neo-colonial and oligarchic forces. However, as Anthony Cohen and Stuart Hall argue, mass-media products and popular national symbols are dialogic; they enter into a dialogue with different competing discourses. Thus the comic book is also analysed in respect of the different and conflictive uses and potential interpretations of criollo symbols. One such conflict, it is proposed, resides in the understudied effect of modernisation and urbanisation on the rural criollo migrants, who moved to the provinces of Buenos Aires in large numbers in the 1930s. The comic book, therefore, is not understood simply as an expression of Peronist ideals, but as a footprint of the complex political and identity conflicts of the period.     

Industrial Enterprises and Economic Space: the Network Paradigm

This paper is an extended review essay stimulated by the book of Conti, Malecki and Oinas (1995) on The Industrial Enterprise and its Environment. Three different paradigms of industrial organization are outlined with what has earlier been referred to as the network paradigm best capturing contemporary realities. The spatial implications of this framework are then drawn out and the limits of the paradigm summarized.     

“This Remarkable Piece of Antiquity”: Epic Conventions in Shelley’s Oedipus Tyrannus; or,Swellfoot the Tyrant

ABSTRACT

Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s earnest goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu.     

Cronies,economic crime and capitalism in Putin's sistema

The books included in this review article are essential for the understanding of what I call Putin's sistema—the governance model that originated in the Soviet system but has transformed and adapted to global change. Each book tackles, from a different angle, the issues of Russia's transition and suggests ways to describe its political consequences. The books all attempt to identify some underlying logic or organizing force in a Russian society that has emerged through weak institutions. Although I join the authors in their criticisms of the ‘transition paradigm’ and its ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of democracy’ formula, transformations of the Soviet sistema seem to resonate with the ‘opening‐breakthrough‐consolidation of capitalism’. Perestroika can be seen as an ‘opening’ in shaking the foundations of sistema; Yeltsin's era as a ‘breakthrough’; and Putin's regime as the ‘consolidation’ of capitalism but with its distinct characteristics.     

Comparative policy agendas: a review essay

ABSTRACT

The two books that are investigated in this review essay consider new ways to explain policy processes by focusing on a spectrum of methodological approaches, theories, time periods and political systems. The first book examined investigates policy change in Australia and considers for the first time how relevant the Policy Agendas Project (PAP) is for the Australian political system. A recent contribution to the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), the second book reviewed is a collection of comparative studies applying different methodologies and theories to analyse CAP datasets with the view to exploring how policy changes in a variety of political systems. Together these books showcase the best of PAP/CAP’s qualities to provide a common platform for cross-comparative policy change studies and standalone country-specific studies. These books are also an indispensable resource for Australian political scientists interested in the unique policy change dynamics in Australia.     

Captain Canuck,audience response,and the project of Canadian nationalism

This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (1977 Althusser, L. 1977. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.  [Google Scholar]) and McGee (1975 McGee, M. 1975. In search of ‘the people’: a rhetorical alternative. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61: 235–249. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The authors engaged in a qualitative content analysis of the Captain Canuck comic books, searching for themes and markers of Canadian-ness and looking for audience identifications with those themes and markers in the ‘letter to the editor’ columns published within the comic books themselves. The study finds that through the many incarnations of Captain Canuck various versions of Canadian identity have been projected, with varying degrees of support by the readership. The role of the USA in Canadian identity formation looms large, especially in the positioning of Canadian quality and multiculturalism against the tacitly American lack thereof. Another finding of this research is that there has been a fundamental change in the way Canadian identity is structured as a new, commercially driven Canadiana culture industry has arisen since the 1970s.     

Livres, Pouvoir et Théorie

This article tries to understand what kind of theories is produced in books and only in books, without any institutional or scientific guarantee. Two cases are successively studied: a method for accountants and a treatise on nobility. Both contain theoretical proposals, although neither accounting nor knowledge of genealogies or aristocratic habits was considered more than mere practical competence at the time (the end of the xvii ^th century in France). The aim of this inquiry is to suggest that identifying material and social conditions of some evolution of thought (context of composition of an important book, circulation of printed materials or of information, literary market, relationships of the authors with powerful patrons) does not differ that much from a « Zeitgeist » analysis, as long as a book is viewed as a result or a product and its own action is not taken into account. This action consists here in an elevation of accounting and genealogical techniques to theory or even to quasi-political philosophy. Both case-studies then try to show that the adaptation of a book to political action is not an available explanation for historians; rather, it is nothing other than the fact of an interpretation of theoretical needs aroused by this action.     

Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven

The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands. Ridley Scott's three movies, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and most recently The Kingdom of Heaven explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable; political violence is presented as something that has both simple and very complicated geographies. The public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” in Western states is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott's work. Analyzing them in terms of the warrior, empire and the particular geographies of combat adds a specifically military dimension to the critical geopolitical literature on war and representation.     

A History of Chinese Immigration in the United States and Canada

The 2005 Québec novel by Nicolas Dickner (English publication, 2008) presents intertextual effects that become a reflection on writing. The novel is a voyage of self-discovery while offering connections to Melville, Joseph Conrad, the German “bildungsroman,” nineteenth century classic novels, twentieth century French existentialist essays, Anglo-Saxon seafaring sagas, Central and South American imaginative tales, “cric-crac” stories of Québécois “raconteurs,” subversive Canadian novels, adventure stories, detective narratives, comic books and computer-generated discourse. This complex mise en abyme of writing through interlacing genres stands as a metaphor for diversity and rootlessness in North American society.     

Women and children,war and peace: political agency in time of conflict

The four books under review focus on different aspects of war and conflict, but they all make it clear that women and children are more than their victims. They can be, and often are, active participants in all dimensions of conflict, from taking up arms to working for peace. While all four books paint an appropriately grim picture of war and its impact, there is also some optimism to be found in the resilience shown by women and children as they face the brutality of war and often actively seek to work for peace. Three of the books examine women's involvement in conflict, war, peace and peacemaking, and the aftermath of these events, albeit in very different ways—although all view women as active participants in the process rather than as victims. The fourth book included in this article, Children and global conflict, is not only relevant to the discussion, but also provides another important lens through which we can examine issues of conflict, war and peace. This review article provides insight into the contrition made to the field by these recent books individually, as well as when considered as parts of a whole.     

Entre Littérature Et Religion Les Pratiques D’Auteur De Jean Goulu

The activities of Jean Goulu in the 1620s, an author and superior of a religious order, the Catholic congregation of the « Feuillants », are a good example of the conflicts over the uses of print in France in the early xvii ^th century. An erudite translator of Greek philosophy and author of anti-protestant pamphlets, spiritual books, but also of a polemical book on eloquence, Goulu was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of the political, religious and literary debates of his time. On one level, his books obviously serve to advance his very successful career within his religious congregation, but they also represent a moral and political attempt to control the publications intended for the growing number of non scholarly readers. Goulu’s books aim to guide this relatively uneducated public. He hopes to satisfy these inexperienced readers’ request for novelty with attractive, but moral, writings. Last but not least, his books seek to fashion good reading and interpreting habits. This study thus makes it possible to understand how one can use books to build one’s social identity as well as to act concretely upon the society in which they are published.     

Capitalizing on Bare Life: Sovereignty,Exception, and Gender Politics

Abstract: This article examines the capital value of bare life as part of aid/development in (post)Taliban Afghanistan. I argue that the political production and spatial fixity of homo sacer “as the object of aid and protection” within specific geographic locations subsequently territorializes gendered bodies as a site for capital accumulation and exchange value through aid/development allocation. This occurs through a continual discursive reduction of “full or proper” human life to the remnants of bare life. This subjective reduction subsequently elicits capitalist‐modernity as a prime method for rescuing bare life and transferring it to an image (and imaginary) of western political and economic life. Gendered multiplicities of bare life emerge from variant forms of political and economic opportunity among aid/development workers and Afghan recipients. I argue that the discursive framing of bare life is situated as a site for (re)constructing rights through “western” frameworks infused with geopolitical and economic exchange value.     

Geopolitical television at the (b)order: liminality,global politics,and world-building in The Bridge

This article interrogates the geopolitical content of the internationally popular television series Bron/Broen (‘The Bridge’) and its two subsequent adaptations. In my analysis of The Bridge as a global phenomenon, I make a threefold contribution to the literature of popular geopolitics and cultural geography. First, in a normative contribution intended to challenge mainstream assumptions regarding the banality of the medium of television, I situate TV-viewing within the discursive battlefield of global politics as an affective act of world-building, a phenomenon enabled by the emergence of a third phase of television (Television 3.0). Second, via a theoretical contribution, I conceive of Bridge-gazing as a form of quotidian geopolitical interaction, wherein the spectator maps their own emplacement in the world’s various (b)order regimes, while also engaging with the distant politics of the series’ narratives. And, third, in an empirical contribution, I provide a exegetic analysis of the three iterations of The Bridge by interrogating the three series’ geopolitical interventions into pressing issues associated with unfettered globalisation, the purported victory of neoliberalism and the waning of the nation-state.     

A Conflicted Nation. Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978)

This roundtable assesses the arguments and importance of Guido Formigoni’s book Storia dell’Italia nella Guerra Fredda (1943–1978). This book is essentially composed of seven 70–80-page broadly chronological chapters, each of which might almost be expanded into a short book in its own right. The chapters perform the difficult feat of shifting constantly between the foreign policy of the Italian state (which was so often driven by domestic political considerations) and the political consequences of international events on the debates (or polemics) taking place in the Italian polity. There can be few works of international history in which the linkage between the domestic and foreign policy ‘levels’ is so clearly demonstrated. Indeed, one of the key objectives of the book plainly is to show that although there may be countries where foreign policy is carried on with blithe indifference to domestic politics, Italy is certainly not one of them, or was not during the Cold War years. Mark Gilbert introduces the book on which Federico Romero, Maud Bracke and Michele Marchi engage in a detailed commentary, to which the author replies.     

The Emergence of Ethno-Geopolitics in Post-Soviet Russia

A prominent UK-based political and historical geographer analyzes ethnogeopolitics, a new trend in Russian political discourse that is distinguished by the primary role it assigns to ethnicity (rather than the nation-state) as a geopolitical factor—i.e., recognizing formal (often poly-ethnic) ethno-national groupings on their respective ethnic spaces as important "geopolitical subjects" in their own right with a certain autonomy in world politics. After defining and otherwise setting out the differences between ethno-geopolitics and the more mainstream school of Russian geopolitics emerging after the disintegration of the USSR, the author proceeds to assess the extent to which ethno-geopolitics is shaping current Russian geopolitical thought in two critically important arenas: (1) Russia's relations with other great powers at the global level and (2) the dynamics of ethnicity (and inter-ethnic relations) within its own boundaries as well as in neighboring states. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: Y900, Z190. 71 references.     

The Lost Library of Anne Conway

ABSTRACT

The philosopher Anne Conway (1631-1679) owned a large library, and her reading and book ownership shaped her intellectual life in distinctive ways. Until now, however, almost nothing has been known about the details of her reading or her book collection. Current scholarship assumes that her library, like that of her husband, the third Viscount Conway (c. 1623–1683), was lost or dispersed after her death. This article presents previously unrecognised evidence of Conway’s book ownership, and identifies, for the first time, the only books currently known to survive from her personal library. It traces their path to their current location in the Old Library of Jesus College, Cambridge, through the library of the soldier, book collector, and Cambridge Fellow Francis Sterling (c. 1652-1692). The article demonstrates that the newly identified books reveal previously unknown patterns of intellectual exchange amongst Conway’s family, and argues that they have significant implications for our understanding of her early intellectual development.     

Politics,Time and Judgment

In 1842, the Parisian editor Louis-Antoine Pagnerre published the Dictionnaire politique. This large volume was the manifesto of the French Republicans in opposition to the conservative governments of King Louis-Philippe under the July Monarchy. One of the most original aspects of the Dictionnaire resides in the attempt to link the doctrine of republicanism to political economy. It is the purpose of this paper to analyse the republican political economy presented in Pagnerre's dictionary. First, we detail the historical context in which it appeared, stressing on Pagnerre's biography and on the composition of the group of young republicans who wrote the main economic entries of the book. Second, we focus on the economic ideas about the political regulation of industrial phenomena and the solutions these Republicans imagined to solve the social question. Third, we conclude by attempting to summarize the main characteristics of this republican political economy and to appreciate its originality.     

朝鲜吴庆元《小华外史》考论

《小华外史》一书,1 9世纪朝鲜吴庆元父子编撰。“小华”,即“小中华”,指朝鲜王朝。明朝灭亡以后,朝鲜君臣上下多有崇祀明朝之举,同时编修了大量追述和思念明朝的史书。本书就是在这种政治文化背景中产生,内容是记载朝鲜王朝与明朝的历来关系,而在明朝灭亡以后,则详述朝鲜举国怀思明朝、祭奠明朝皇帝和优礼明朝遗民及其后裔的史实。吴庆元父子用了几乎半个世纪的时间才把其编成。全书征引史料十分丰富,参考了明、清、朝鲜以及日本的史料1 80余种,几乎每条史料都标明出处,史学方法严谨扎实,学术视野广阔。在思想上大倡尊周思明理念,宣扬尊王攘夷、尊明贬清观念,将清朝视作夷狄。此书之编撰在清朝已经统治二百余年之后,是值得注意的史学现象,对于研究明清时期的中朝关系具有重要的参考价值。