The predicament of pastoral sovereignty

This paper seeks to understand the conditions of possibility of “sanctuary” – the claiming of a “sacred” space of (humanitarian) exception - in the midst of civil war. Sanctuary codifies an exceptional space where sovereign and pastoral registers of power converge into a form of “pastoral sovereignty” that can temporarily “interrupt” the law of violence of sovereign power. In civil war this can enable civilians to be saved and protected from killings and suffering. However, this pastoral sovereignty is precarious as it depends on the belligerents' good will and tacit authorization: this is what we call the predicament of pastoral sovereignty. Using the case study of Church sanctuary in Sri Lanka's civil war, this paper explores how this predicament of pastoral sovereignty comes into effect in moments of acute crisis. Throughout Sri Lanka's brutal civil war, Catholic priests provided “sanctuary” to Tamil civilians in the form of territorial sanctuary (Church compounds), bodily sanctuary (the priests' bodies providing protection), and numerous other humanitarian activities. Our ethnographic material illustrates the force and fragility of the Church's claims to pastoral sovereignty and its sanctuary practices and provides detailed accounts of numerous constellations. The paper thereby raises fundamental questions about the ontology of sovereignty and its operability in moments of humanitarian crisis.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

The Levelling Process as a Function of the Masses in the View of Kierkegaard and Ortega Y Gasset

The present article is an analysis of the emergence of a new Uruguayan author, Armonía Somers (1914–94), as well as the publication in 1950 of her first novel, La mujer desnuda (The Naked Woman). It focuses on the Uruguayan social body of the 1950s, when society lived the paradox of recognizing women in its legal structure, but limiting them in the everyday social and cultural life. In this context, Somers's novel symbolically explores what I call the “crisis of feminine subjectivity,” through the creation of a woman who on her thirtieth birthday decided to throw away all the costumes and masks with which society and tradition imposed feminine roles and, naked, tried new ways of being, new subjectivities. Central to this study is an analysis of the different ways in which historical, social, and cultural demands produce certain kinds of human bodies, especially how they produce a woman's body. The specific argument that underlies this article is that the body inserts itself in conflictive and tense manners with the marks imposed on the genders. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of “feminine subjectivities” and “historical marked bodies” in a fiction that presents itself as a black box in which Somers finds herself as a woman who became a novelist in the 1950s and in which readers also find themselves questioning the persistence of gender marks on their own social bodies.     

The Economic Degeneration of Masculinity in Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla

Rafael Chirbes's En la orilla has been proclaimed as “la novela de la crisis,” and it has garnered an impressive amount of distinction in the short length of time since its publication in May 2013. It was voted the 2013 novel of the year by readers of El País, and in January 2014 it won the Premio Francisco Umbral, as well as reaching its fifth edition. Unsparingly critical, En la orilla forms an integral part of the cultural requestioning of social values in the wake of the Spanish crisis, “la literatura de la crisis,” which stresses the human and material consequences of the suspension of human values stemming from the social endorsement of market imperialism. En la orilla thematizes the corrosion of moral character during Spain's economic boom, in its multiple forms, such as selfishness, disregard for the elderly, and arrant mercenariness, while also fictionalizing neoliberal Spain's exclusion of immigrants and the poor. Integral to Chiribes's historically contextualized critique of the recession, and the object of my study, is a perceptive vision of the historical degeneration of masculinity from the Second Republic, 1931–1936, to the present day. This article will first provide a brief overview of “la literatura de la crisis,” while the second part illumines the economic and ideological distortion of the father–son relationship in this novel.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

Explaining "Auschwitz" after the End of History: The Case of Italy

Everywhere the 1990s have been characterized by an odd mixture of ideological triumphalism—Fukuyama's “end of history” being only the crassest example—and of ideological uncertainty—can there be, should there be, a “third way”? For all its pretensions to universality, the “New World Order” has never lost a fragility in appearance. Students of historiography can scarcely be surprised to learn that an uneasiness over the present and future has in turn frequently entailed uncertainty about the past and particularly about those parts of the past which had seemed most able to give clear and significant “lessons.” One evident example is the history of what in my Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima (1993) I called the “long” Second World War, that is, that crisis in confidence in the relationship between political and economic liberalism and the nation-state which, by the end of 1938, had left only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia as in any sense preserving those “liberal” freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789. In this article, I briefly review the most recent difficulties World War II combatant societies have had in locating a usable past in the history of those times. However, my major focus is on the specific case of Italy, very much a border state in the Cold War system, and today the political home of an “Olive Tree” and a “Liberty Pole” whose historical antecedents and whose philosophical base for the future are less than limpid. 1990s Italian historians thus give very mixed messages about the Fascist past; these are the messages I describe and decode.     

The Problem of Evil in Sand's La Mare au diable and Carl Jung,The Ideology of Sentiment

My thesis insists on the theme of evil implicit in Sand's title to her pastoral novel, La Mare au diable (1846). The question of evil as death (le mal métaphysique) stands out in her preface, opens her novel, and defines the challenge faced by the hero in social prejudice (le mal social) and in the heroic journey to overcome internalized obstacles such as fear (le mal psychologique) in order to transform his values. The interplay between good and evil culminating in “the devil's pond” intuits Jung's theory of the convergence of good and evil and the necessity of the latter in the maturation process. The victory of the hero, Germain, is also that of Sand who rises above the ideological partisanship of her opening chapters to bring to life inspirational values open to all.     

Sustainability as Empty Signifier: Its Rise,Fall, and Radical Potential

Until recently, the concept of “sustainability” appeared to occupy a central position in the politics of many Western democracies. Following the 2008 financial crisis, however, sustainability has been relegated to a position of secondary or tertiary significance. This article considers the rise and fall of sustainability through the theoretical lens of Ernesto Laclau, considering whether it may be seen as an example of an “empty signifier”. Through detailed engagement with Laclau's work, as well as both theoretical and empirical studies of the concept of sustainability, I argue that sustainability signifies the multiple failures of dominant discourses to recognise “the future” as a meaningful category. After examining the historical conditions under which sustainability was able to operate in this way, I go on to argue that the global financial crisis and neoliberalism more broadly have interrupted our capacity to think about the future, undermining the significance of sustainability, at least temporarily.     

Crisis,Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism,the Left and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world‐scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de‐legitimated. My answer is that a “post‐neoliberal” future is probably a long way off. I make my case in two stages and at two geographical scales. First, I examine the British social formation as currently constituted and explain why even a leading neoliberal state is failing to reform its ways. Second, I then scale‐up from the domestic level to international affairs. I examine cross‐border emissions trading—arguably the policy tool for mitigating the very real prospects of significant climate change this century. The overall conclusion is this: even though the “first” and “second” contradictions of capital have manifested themselves together and at a global level, there are currently few prospects for systemic reform (never mind revolution) led by a new, twenty‐first century “red‐green” Left.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.     

HISTORICAL AND LITERARY APPROACHES TO THE “FINAL SOLUTION”: SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER AND JONATHAN LITTELL

This article discusses together two recent prize‐winning works of epic proportions that have received much attention: Saul Friedländer's two‐volume historical study Nazi Germany and the Jews and Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), the former of which focuses on victims and the latter on perpetrators of the “Final Solution.” I provide a critical analysis of Littell's novel, especially with respect to its seemingly fatalistic mingling of erotic and genocidal motifs and its disavowal or underestimation of the difficulty and necessity of understanding victims of the Nazi genocide. My analysis raises the question of the extent to which the notoriety of the novel may be due to the way it instantiates influential approaches to both literature and the Holocaust in terms of an aesthetic of the sublime, excess, radical ambiguity (resolvable at best into irony and paradox), and fatalistic entry into an incomprehensible “heart of darkness.” Crucial here is the notion that an object (paradigmatically, the Holocaust) both demands representation or explanation and ultimately is beyond comprehension, narrative, or even words. I also reevaluate the bases for the justified praise accorded Friedländer's masterwork and question certain claims made on its behalf by commentators, especially with respect to literary and historiographical innovation. In so doing, I explore and defend the role of critical theory in relation to historical narrative.     

HEIDEGGER,LATOUR AND THE REIFICATION OF THINGS: THE INVERSION AND SPATIAL ENCLOSURE OF THE SUBSTANTIVE LANDSCAPE OF THINGS – THE LAKE DISTRICT CASE

“Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.     

Şeref Xan's Sharafnama: Kurdish Ethno-Politics in the Early Modern World,Its Meaning and Its Legacy

This paper critically analyzes the Sharafnama, a history of the Kurds, written by the late sixteenth century ruler of Bitlis, ?eref Xan. Given the politically sensitive nature of the Middle East's “Kurdish Question,” the Sharafnama has become an extremely important resource through which Kurdish nationalists have sought to construct a coherent “national narrative.” This is due to the fact that ?eref Xan's book constitutes one of the few systematic histories of the Kurds written before the twentieth century. This paper moves away from nationalist inspired interpretations of the Sharafnama, which see the work as a “national(ist)” history. Instead, it posits that, although the piece can be regarded as a manifestation of Kurdish “ethno-politics,” it is necessary to look at it within the context of the relationship between the Kurdish tribal princes who ruled large areas of “Kurdistan,” on one hand, and the Ottoman and Safavid empires who competed for control of this region, on the other. In particular, it brings to the fore an often forgotten and/or ignored aspect of ?eref Xan's history, namely its pro-Ottoman bias. In this way, the article makes broader points relating to the nature of the Kurdish identity in the early modern period, and the influence of such conceptions on the later construction of the modern Kurdish identity.     

“Voy a empeñar la Edad de Oro”: Historia,música y política en la crisis española (2011–2016)

ABSTRACT

Spain's current economic and social crisis has involved a profound reappraisal of the country's history, institutions, and official narratives, especially after the emergence of the 15M or indignados movement in 2011. A crucial example of this shift has been the widespread criticism of Spain's “Transition to Democracy” or Transición, widely considered Spain's “foundational” narrative. In this article, a series of examples from the musical field—including essays, songs, and public uses of music—are studied and contextualized in order to analyze different interpretations and critiques of the Transición developed by artists, intellectuals, and politicians who took part in the 15M or have been influenced by its “climate” (Fernández Savater). In these examples, two complementary trends are identified: on the one hand, an intention to reclaim part of the Transición's collective mood through its musical symbols; on the other, a rejection of its political legacy, as expressed in criticisms of its musical canon.     

Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract: It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis‐prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre‐inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.     

WHO SUFFERED FROM THE CRISIS OF HISTORICISM? A DUTCH EXAMPLE

Was the crisis of historicism an exclusively German affair? Or was it a “narrowly academic crisis,” as is sometimes assumed? Answering both questions in the negative, this paper argues that crises of historicism affected not merely intellectual elites, but even working‐class people, not only in Germany, but also in the Netherlands. With an elaborated case study, the article shows that Dutch “neo‐Calvinist” Protestants from the 1930s onward experienced their own crisis of historicism. For a variety of reasons, this religious subgroup came to experience a collapse of its “historicist” worldview. Following recent German scholarship, the paper argues that this historicism was not a matter of Rankean historical methods, but of “historical identifications,” or modes of identity formation in which historical narratives played crucial roles. Based on this Dutch case study, then, the article develops two arguments. In a quantitative mode, it argues that more and different people suffered from the crisis of historicism than is usually assumed. In addition, it offers a qualitative argument: that the crisis was located especially among groups that derived their identity from “historical identifications.” Those who suffered most from the crisis of historicism were those who understood themselves as embedded in narratives that connected past, present, and future in such a way as to offer identity in historical terms.     

The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield's Missionary Vision

At the age of thirteen, Mansfield wrote “I want to be a Maori missionary” in her Book of Common Prayer. “The Swinging Gate: Katherine Mansfield's Missionary Vision” by Richard Cappuccio argues that Mansfield's initial diary entry is a lens through which one can read her interests in, rebellion against, and modifications of her Anglican background. The article discusses close readings of her poems “The Sea Child,” “The Butterfly,” and “To L.H. B.” as well as two of her stories — “Prelude,” and “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.” In addition it draws on journals and letters to focus on a relationship between Maori systems of belief, her affinities with Frank Harris's “A Holy Man (After Tolstoi),” and her final observations about G. I. Gurdjieff.     

De-censoring an Iranian-American “Memoir”: Authorship and Synchronicity in Shahriar Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story

In the literature of the Iranian-American diaspora, the memoir genre has become a predominant lens through which Western audiences “read” contemporary Iran. While many bestselling life narratives have relied on hostage crisis-era tropes of gendered repression and subsequent liberation in exile, new amalgams of style and theme, distortions of perspective, and complicated renderings of the “subject” are now beginning to cross borders. One of these is Shahriar Mandanipour's 2009 novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, which this paper examines as an auto-fictional commentary on the memoir genre that both arises from and responds directly to censorship using a self-referential and layered text. Through three central dialectics—ambiguous violence, encoded desire and resistance to diachronic historicization alongside the nation—this paper demonstrates how Mandanipour's auto-fictional and often magical realist attempts elude what Gillian Whitlock terms the transnational “economy of affect” that publicizes, protects and ultimately drives the reception of memoir across borders.