The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

Freedom of speech and racial vilification in Australia: ‘The Bolt case’ in public discourse

This article examines the public discourse that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 decision of the Federal Court of Australia in Eatock v Bolt. We characterise the narrative of ‘the Bolt case’ as a ‘mobilising discourse’ that countered rather than echoed the decision itself. This discourse had three main messages: encouraging scepticism about the authenticity of fair-skinned Aboriginal persons and judgment by non-Aboriginal persons about the legitimacy of Aboriginal identity according to skin colour; questioning the legitimacy of racial vilification laws and strengthening a libertarian conception of freedom of speech. We explain how such a contrary discourse became dominant in the wake of a successful racial vilification action and consider the implications of these events.

本文研究了2011年澳大利亚联邦法庭就伊脱克诉博尔特案做出判决后的公众议论。博尔特案的叙事属于“动员话语”,是对判决的反弹而非反响。该话语主要包括三个信息：鼓励对浅肤色原住人士的真实性的质疑,鼓励由非原住人士根据肤色判定原住民身份的合法性;质疑种族诽谤法的合理性;支持言论自由的观念。笔者解释了何以这种矛盾的话语盛行于一次成功的种族诽谤行动之后,并讨论了这些事件的影响。     

Geography,political economy and the ‘personality of Britain’

SUMMARY: This paper engages with the historical archaeology of the British Isles (With one or two exceptions, I follow the usage of Kearney 2006 in preferring the term ‘British Isles’ to ‘Atlantic archipelago’, preferring the more ideologically loaded, but familiar, term over the arguably more neutral but obscure term.) as a whole. It advocates an approach that foregrounds geography and political economy, via quite simple and traditional ways of mapping variation, for example the work of Cyril Fox. It seeks to play to archaeology’s strengths: rather than seeking abstract origins, it examines how practices later labelled as ‘colonial’ emerged from an intersection of concrete material practices.     

The husbandry,perception and ‘improvement’ of turkeys in Britain, 1500–1900

The introduction of the turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) to Britain is documented during the first half of the 16th century. These birds initially featured on the tables of the powerful and served as living garden ornaments or pets. Shifting human perceptions, driven in part by the ‘ethic of improvement’, affected turkey husbandry methods and animal-human relationships as well as the bird’s symbolic role. This transition was complicated; the turkey remained a palimpsest of attributes throughout 1500–1900, with different associations assuming prominence over time.     

‘Nuclear Sword of the Moslem World’?: the United States,Britain, Pakistan,and the ‘Islamic Bomb’, 1977–80

There exists today considerable fear of nuclear proliferation across the ‘Islamic world.’ Despite this, an issue that - in part - set the tone for contemporary debates has largely gone under-examined in the scholarly literature. The emergence of the ‘Islamic bomb’ idea in the late 1970s created a meme that remains with us today. Analysing the roots of this meme allows us to examine its creation and the attitudes of governments towards this alleged emergent nuclear-proliferation threat. This analysis demonstrates that while the media portrayed the ‘Islamic world’ as violent, undifferentiated, and determined to gain nuclear capability, the US and British governments assessed matters evidentially and came to the conclusion that the ‘Islamic bomb’ represented a propaganda problem rather than an imminent nuclear-proliferation concern. Attitudes towards the ‘Islamic bomb’ highlight media and governmental attitudes towards the changing power balances in the Middle East and South Asia during a turbulent and troubled period.     

EMU,political discourse and the fifth French republic: Historical institutionalism,path dependency and ‘craftsmen’ of discourse

This article examines continuity and change in the way in which French élites have deliberated on and legitimated their policy actions at the European level in relation to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) during the Fifth Republic. Six themes are highlighted: the way in which institutional arrangements have conferred power on some actors while reducing the power of others; the complex role of ideas as independent variables ('cognitive filters') and intervening variables (building blocks) through which strategic conduct is conceptualised and assessed; the way in which EMU came to be defined and how it connected with other issues; how its historical development took the form of a distinctive national ‘path’ or ‘trajectory’ ; how that development was punctuated by ‘critical moments’ or ‘junctures’, defined in turn by crisis and the uncertainty generated, when discourse was restructured and took a new path; and the role of ‘craftsmen’ of discourse in negotiating meanings.     

‘The races and conditions of men’: women in nineteenth-century geography school texts in the United States

Geography schoolbooks published in the United States were important opinion makers in the nineteenth century, often joining the Bible as the main source of information about the world outside North America. The texts examined here are noteworthy for their static and pejorative treatment of non-American cultures and may be seen as playing a key role in forming isolationist and chauvinist American public opinion. They also played a role in reinforcing ideas about the proper niche for women in American society, even though it may seem at first that these books could not have had much influence on ideas about American women because they barely mentioned women, almost always relegating them to illustrations and captions. The few women depicted were usually characterized as ‘poor souls’ in distant lands worthy of pity. We discuss the national political context in which these writers (many of whom were women) were producing geography school texts, the social roles they were fulfilling by reinforcing such limited images of ‘foreign’ women, and the sources they may have used in their research. Furthermore, we demonstrate that much more could have been drawn ethnographically from the illustrations of women. The images of women in these geography schoolbooks reinforced the marginalization of women, particularly non-white and non-western women.     

Politics of the ‘creative industries’ discourse and its variants

The existing academic debate on creative industries can be summarised as ‘Trojan horse or Rorschach blot’: creative industries working as a neoliberal discourse or producing different effects depending on local context. Arguing that these are two sides of the same coin, this article looks closely at the discourse’s depoliticising and encompassing forces and their interplay on the discourse’s intersection to the broader new economy narrative. The article’s focus is South Korean variants of creative industries discourse. First, the country’s ‘content industries’ discourse served as a Trojan horse for the depoliticising narrative of knowledge economy while boosting the cultural sector discursively and financially. Second, ‘creative economy’ has very recently emerged as the current conservative government’s master economic narrative. This discourse allows the government’s neoliberal economic policies to be further justified while making cultural policy unable to persuasively claim that creativity belongs in the culture’s domain.     

De Excidio Patriae: civic discourse in Gildas’ Britain

This article explores the use of civic discourse in Gildas’ De Excidio Britonum. It argues that such language and imagery functioned within a larger dialectical argument that exhorted readers to choose virtue over vice. Gildas assigned the Britons collective moral agency by styling them citizens (cives) of a shared homeland (patria) defined by cities (civitates). Due to the citizens’ moral failings, however, this urban landscape had been compromised: enemies had destroyed the patria’s cities, rendering it a place of desolation. Only a return to virtue could save the Britons from ruin and grant them access to heavenly Jerusalem.     

Masculinity,place and a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography of Aotearoa/New Zealand

This paper discusses a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography practised in Aotearoa (New Zealand)[1]. I attempt to illustrate the way in which such dichotomous thinking articulates with the social construction of a hegemonic masculinity to effect a specific geographic understanding of the world. I suggest that this theory/empirical investigation binary gives rise to at least three significant problems in geographic research: a gendered and hierarchical structuring of geographic thought, a devaluation of the feminised term in the binary, and unworkable ‘mobile positioning’ of the researcher.     

Camp evolution and Israel's creation: Between ‘state of emergency’ and ‘emergence of state’

This paper examines the central role of the camp in the early Israeli state period and its spatial and geopolitical evolution. Unlike official Israeli history, which presents the immigrant camps as an inevitable improvised response to the unexpected problem of mass immigration, I examine the camp as a strategic modern biopolitical instrument that allowed for the state's profound geopolitical changes and was itself altered according to them. The paper analyses the ways in which the camp facilitated the creation of Israel as a state formed by two seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conditions: on one hand, a product of a chaotic ‘state of emergency’ and a form of ‘ordered disorder’ created by mass immigration, and on the other hand, a product of a comprehensive, tightly controlled modernist project combining physical planning and social engineering. This duality reveals the role of these immigrant camps, which were created both in Israel and abroad, as spatial ‘black holes’ which swallowed the contradiction between the radical geopolitical transformation and the rational self-image of the Israeli state-building project. The evolving and hybrid typologies of the camp in Israel's pre-state and early-state periods expose it as a versatile instrument, highlighting the need for informed spatial and geographical genealogies of the camp in order to illuminate its various transformations.     

‘L’île des bannis’: Jersey,Britain and the French Emigration 1789–1815

ABSTRACT

The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789–1815. During its high point in 1792–3, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military authorities in London, the British government and the émigré community. It shows how a brewing humanitarian crisis in the island prompted the British government to sanction subsistence payments in Jersey and enlist Royalist émigrés months before these policies were adopted in Britain. But British support was intimately bound up with the émigrés’ anti-Revolutionary military activities, as much as humanitarian concerns. The forced expulsion of most émigrés to Britain in summer 1796 resulted not from concerns about the wellbeing of the émigré community in face of imminent French invasion, but concerns about the Royalists’ military loyalties. During the Napoleonic Wars, British policy towards the émigrés lacked coherence and was not categorized by overriding humanitarian goals, though such concerns did compete with strategic ones.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

‘A “Special Relationship” sometimes in spite of ourselves’: Britain and Jordan, 1957–73

In view of Britain's role in the creation and development of Jordan, bilateral relations in the wake of the Suez crisis are an important test case of its continuing engagement, not only in the Levant, but in the Middle East as a whole. This article shows that despite the far-reaching changes which took place in British foreign policy between 1957 and 1973, Britain retained a significant bilateral relationship with the Hashemite Kingdom. Through a comparison of the role of the Western powers in the 1958 and 1970 crises, and through an analysis of the key events of the intervening years, including the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, this article explores the dynamics of this persisting relationship. It shows that the initiative often came from the Jordanian side, with King Hussein particularly keen to involve both Britain and the United States in the September 1970 crisis as witnesses to his dealings with Israel.     

‘Schools for the moral training of the people’: Public Baths,Liberalism and the Promotion of Cleanliness in Victorian Britain1

This article examines Victorian public baths as institutions of active, embodied liberalism: as political spaces where subjects went to practise and enhance their powers of self-government, and in so doing embody and perform a clean and respectable lifestyle. To some extent, public baths can be understood as disciplinary institutions. According to its promoters, personal cleanliness went hand in hand with sober, industrious habits and a conscientious sense of domestic and social responsibility. At the same time, they also formed significant ethical sites, for bathing was a privilege that had to be paid for and as such actively adopted as a lifestyle choice; and, to this extent, they were about facilitating, rather than coercing, a certain civilised freedom. Public baths also allow for an exploration of the material facets of Victorian liberalism, of its spatial and corporeal dimensions. Washing was a practice that not only took place within a privatising architecture but one that also entailed an intensified awareness of the materiality of the self, and especially its covering, the skin. As an art of the self, as a form of subjective individualisation, washing was at once an ethical and a sensory, a moral and a physical, enactment of power.

résumé ?Cet article se penche sur les bains publics comme un exemple pratique et physique du libéralisme, comme un espace ou les possibilités de la connaissance de soi et de la gouvernementalité pouvaient s'exprimer. Dans un certain sens les bains publics avaient une fonction disciplinaire dans le sens d'un parallèle entre la propreté et la sobriété, la responsabilité et la domesticité. En un autre sens les bains représentaient un site éthique dans la mesure où ils restaient un privilège payant et un choix de vie qui facilitait plutôt qu'il ne forçait une entrée dans le domaine de la liberté et de la civilité. Les bains publics permettent aussi une exploration de l'espace physique et matériel du libéralisme et des rapports entre une entreprise de type privé et les soins du corps et plus particulièrement de la peau. Dans ce sens les soins corporels et les bains représentaient un ensemble d'exercices du pouvoir de soi sur soi: éthique, sensorial, moral et physique.