San Juan,the Fragile City: Finance Capital,Class, and the Making of Puerto Rico's Economic Crisis

This paper narrates Puerto Rico's fiscal and financial crisis through a reading of San Juan's urban landscape. We underscore the role of capital in the city, primarily embodied by the local capitalist class (the Criollo bloc) and foreign capitalists. Historically excluded from the manufacturing sector (dominated by US capitalists), the Criollo bloc accumulates its wealth by concentrating financial assets in the city. In times of crisis, the Criollo bloc resorts to the acquisition of new assets and asset exchange with foreign capitalists to remain solvent and provide short‐term solutions to the state's fiscal and financial limits. The survival of the local capitalist class, we demonstrate, is dependent on asset stripping. Drawing on Clyde Woods, we document how asset stripping unevenly redistributes wealth and risks along class and racial lines within a colonial economy. The finance capital/asset stripping basis of San Juan's economy renders it an extremely fragile city, we contend.     

Becoming Inca: Juan Bustamente Carlos Inca and the Roots of the Great Rebellion

Inca nobles were prominent colonial petitioners for royal mercedes. Their high visibility and persistent claims to a special place in the colonial order, based on their descent from sovereign Inca emperors and past service to the Crown, ensured that the question of political alternatives to normative colonial arrangements would remain alive in the public domain. This article explores the career of one Inca pretendiente, Juan de Bustamante Carlos Inca, the Crown's response to his petitioning, and the significance of his own quest for a better understanding of the ambitions and motives of José Gabriel Túpac Amaru on the eve of the 1780 rebellion. Politically, Bustamante's attempt to win succession to the Marquesado de Oropesa and its entail brought into public view a 1555 cédula of Charles V empowering the then leading Inca noble, Alonso Tito Atauchi—and all his successors—to raise an army on the king's behalf during any crisis within the Viceroyalty of Peru. Bustamante's quest thereby compelled the Crown to confront the potential for political destabilization of Inca succession at the precise moment that the Bourbon dynasty embarked upon an unpopular root-and-branch reform of its empire. The 1555 cédula was the prime source of Túpac Amaru's claim to be rightful heir to the Marquesado—in effect, the version of an Inkarrí that he adopted stemmed in the first instance from the Crown.     

Australia's national climate: learning to adapt?

Pride in Australia's extreme climate has long been a part of Australia's national identity. Today, climate continues to be enrolled in a range of nationalistic projects, including the (re)development of climate science and other responses to climate change. In this paper, we outline some of the contours of the ‘Australian national climate’, claims to know it, and four idealised responses to it: bounce back, dismissal, endurance, and migration. We argue that the deeply cultural framing of climate in Australia—in particular, Australians' emphasis on the climate's inherent variability and unknowability, and their own historical adaptability—is being exploited by the federal government and hampering climate change mitigation nationally.     

Planning for Climate Change Adaptation in a Multi-level Context: The Gothenburg Metropolitan Area

Individual local governments are key players in Sweden's strategy for climate adaptation but their authority does not match the scale of climate change and its impacts. Competences are divided among local, regional and national authorities. Climate adaptation thus requires cooperation, particularly in metropolitan regions. This raises issues of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of adaptation measures recommended in local Master Plans. The focus here is on how the 13 municipalities in the Gothenburg Metropolitan Area—expected to be the part of Sweden most affected by impacts of climate change—address and act upon issues of climate change adaptation within the framework of Sweden's Planning and Building Act, which places responsibility for the “common interest” of climate adaptation with local governments. Analysing municipal Master Plans, as well as the comments on these plans from the regional County Administrative Board and from Göteborg Region Association of Local Authorities, the inter-municipal association charged with infrastructural planning, I identify patterns in terms of coordination, legitimacy and effectiveness of planning for climate change adaptation. Results are discussed in relation to propositions from recent research on planning for climate adaptation in multi-level contexts.     

Emissions Trading,New Enclosures and Eco‐Social Contestation

Abstract: The central operating strategy within the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and most of the advanced capitalist world's environmental policy is to address climate change through the market mechanism known as emissions trading. Based upon government issuance and private trading of emissions reductions credits and offsets, this approach quickly rose to $135 billion in annual trading. But in the wake of the collapse of climate negotiations in Copenhagen and a world financial crisis which undermined market faith in derivative investments, carbon trading has an uncertain future. Linkages between deep‐rooted financial market and emissions market problems are revealing in spatio‐temporal terms, especially in the context of a deeper overaccumulation crisis and investors’ desperate need for new speculative outlets. It is in the nexus of the spatial and temporal aspects of carbon financing amidst resistance to “new enclosures” by adversely affected peoples, that broader‐based lessons for global/local environmental politics and climate policy can be learned.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

Index to Volume VIII 1961

In recent decades in Spanish literature, a series of stories have emerged that attempt, with varying degrees of zeal, revisionist reinterpretations of recent historical events, especially those related to the Civil War, the postwar crisis, and exile. This is demonstrated by novels like La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón (2002), La desbandá by Luis Melero (2005), Los años del miedo by Juan Eslava Galán (2008), and El corazón helado by Almudena Grandes (2007, awarded the Premio al Libro del año by the Guild of Booksellers in Madrid and the Premio Fundación José Manuel Lara). With her novel, Almudena Grandes initiates a dangerous and conflicted way of retrieving this historical memory. This essay aims to analyze the identity conflict of the children of the Spanish Republican exile in Grandes's novel.     

According to What: Art and the Philosophy of the "End of Art"

In 1964, when Danto first encountered Warhol's Brillo Box, Jasper Johns made a painting titled According to What. Danto's new book After the End of Art also provokes this question because in his restatement of Hegel's verdict on art's historical role he drops an essential part of the implied definition of art: the issue of adequacy between content and presentation. Why dispense with this crucial point of quality judgment? My critique falls into three parts. The first part shows how the whole historical argument rests upon a shift of criteria. According to Hegel art reached its highest point of achievement in classical antiquity when adequate embodiment seemed indispensable to the presence of the spirit. It subsequently lost this exclusive rank—first through Christianity, then through modern philosophy—when a new spiritual self-awareness emerged which no longer seemed to need external manifestation. Although Danto disputes the concept of absolute self-possession as the metaphysical vanishing point of Hegel's construction, he nevertheless subscribes to its apparent evidence in late twentieth-century art and culture. In the second part I discuss the characteristic distortions of Hegelian-type historicism and confront them with both the obvious misrepresentation of the works of art themselves and the different code of conduct in practical art history. This leads to a rather disenchanting conclusion: according to an old, deeply ingrained philosophical prejudice there is no problem about quality in art, because the true yardstick and fulfillment of art is philosophy itself. The final part tries to unpick this tangle by showing that there was in fact, contemporaneous with Hegel, a remarkably different interpretation of the self-same auspices of modern art which comes much closer to its actual achievements, and this without denying the basic philosophical predicament of which Danto has reminded us.     

El laberinto espacio-temporal en dos relatos de El llano en llamas de Juan Rulfo

The pattern of Latin American Boom criticism developed by Donald L. Shaw established that Juan Rulfo's protagonists are universal, not regional. In this interpretative mode, espoused by Graciela B. Coulson and others, Rulfo's characters are viewed as powerless to alter their own destinies. Humans are dominated and doomed by the hostile natural world that surrounds them. However, through a detailed analysis of Rulfo's technique and the internal and external structure of two of Rulfo's short stories in El llano en llamas—“No oyes ladrar a los perros” and “Es que somos muy pobres”—a new theoretical framework emerges for the study of Rulfo's work. In these two stories, Rulfo imagines the llano as a space that individuals control through their personal choices and actions. This article proposes, therefore, that Rulfo's protagonists are not victims of their environment, but rather the perpetrators of its violence.     

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.     

“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.     

Agricultural Modernization and Climate Change in Vietnam's Post‐Socialist Transition

This article presents a critique of Vietnam's agricultural modernization in the context of its post‐socialist transition and the emerging climate crisis. Agricultural modernization has led to impressive rates of wealth creation that have pulled many Vietnamese out of poverty and food insecurity over the past two decades. However, the model's own logic of accumulation has also made the country increasingly reliant on complex processes and has locked in various technological path dependencies. These include energy‐ and input‐intensive production, engineered landscapes, reduced agro‐biodiversity, and weakened social networks, knowledge and skills. As a result, Vietnam is becoming more sensitive and less able to adapt to structural shocks, notably that of climate change. Furthermore, and crucially, the post‐socialist transition since the launch of ??i m?i (market reform) has given rise to a political economy with dominant interests increasingly vested in the continuity of this modernization model. The article argues that it is this new dynamics of class and state–society relations that now represents the main obstacle to the development of credible solutions to the climate crisis.     

The geopolitics of Antarctic governance: sovereignty and strategic denial in Australia's Antarctic policy

The governance of Antarctica has re-emerged as a geopolitical issue in the past decade due to the increased presence of China, India and Russia; the continent's importance in understanding global climate change; and its economic potential as a source of marine, genetic and mineral resources. This article examines the challenges for the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in this context and the consequences for Australia's foreign policy in its dual role as both a territorial claimant and supporter of ATS norms of cooperative science and environmental protection. The central argument is that Antarctic ‘bifocalism’ is under pressure as increased commercial activity and problematic jurisdictional interfaces with other regimes create difficult regulatory challenges for the ATS and encourage assertions of sovereignty that cannot be resolved within the existing regime. Consequently, the author argues that it is vitally important for Australia to preserve the legitimacy of the ATS through a policy framework of ‘strategic denial’ that aims to prevent all states from acquiring sovereignty over Antarctic territory. Australia should therefore reject recent proposals to securitise Antarctic policy or pursue World Heritage listing because they involve assertions of sovereignty that risk fracturing the ATS and thus compromise Australia's enduring interest in keeping Antarctica as ‘a continent of international cooperation and peace’.     

Vico: Past and present

In 1935, the British scholar Eliza M. Butler published The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany, in which she explored the appeal of Greek art and poetry to modern German writers. She argued that Hellenism had exerted a baleful influence on German literature and culture, and that Germans were especially—even dangerously—susceptible to the power of ideas. In her view, the most dangerous Hellenic concept to German culture and society was the daimon, which had reached Germany via the work of Winckelmann. Butler's thesis and methods may be problematic, as some reviewers of Tyranny pointed out, but her work is noteworthy as the product of a scholar who had lived in Germany and was a witness to history, familiar with German language, literature, and culture, writing on Germany during difficult times. As a British scholar who began studying German just before World War I and ended her career after World War II, Butler had an ambivalent relationship with Germany and Germans. But in addition to political factors, she was also influenced by her family, her educational and research experiences in Germany, and her preference for 18th- and 19th-century over 20th-century Germans. Moreover, her perception of Germans and Germanness was consistently posed against her perception of England and Englishness, and she defined the two cultural identities in terms of their relation to each other. Writing Tyranny as the National Socialists came to power in Germany, Butler judged Germans and their relationship to the daimon harshly. In 1956, Butler reconsidered the daimonic in a study of Byron and Goethe, and in this work it received a more sympathetic and nuanced analysis. A comparison of these two works is useful for understanding the evolution of Butler's thought in the 20-year interval between their publication.     

Collapse,Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed

Collapse is a perennial topic among historical scholars, and a favorite source of lessons for our future. Collapse literature often reflects contemporary fears and aspirations. The four books discussed here mirror today's concern with anthropogenic environmental degradation and climate change, and for better or worse, influence a reading public far beyond the academy. Two books focus on an individual collapse—the Classic Maya—and two aspire to a broader treatment. They are unequally successful in their outcomes.     

What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?

The crisis of the 1960s is now central to debates about religious change and secularisation in the twentieth century. However, the nature of the crisis is contested. Using Hugh McLeod's The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007) as a starting point, this article explores the issues that divide scholars — the origin and length of the crisis (was it revolution or evolution?); was it generated more by developments within the Christian churches or by developments without them; and what was the relative importance of liberal Christianity versus conservative Christianity in the development and legacy of the crisis? It argues that secularisation of the period should be regarded as mostly a sudden and shocking event, based on external threats, and reflected in the churches dividing between liberals and conservatives in ways that were to become ever more militant as the century wore on.     

Global Change and Southern Africa

The developing nations of southern Africa have previously been identified as vulnerable to the vagaries of global change, particularly in terms of future climate change. This paper explores recent climate change scenarios for the region in terms of some representative sectors of the environment‐society interface, namely biodiversity, agriculture and related land uses, water resources and health issues. It is concluded that the impacts of predicted climate changes over the next century are likely to be very marked indeed. Biome distribution, agriculture, rangelands and water resources are highlighted as being negatively impacted in ways that will increase the vulnerability of the great majority of the region's population to natural hazards. The potential impact of these changes on the prolific biodiversity of southern Africa is clear. Holistic policy responses, incorporating both environmental and human development concerns, are required in the near future if a crisis is to be averted.     

Nature in the Old Portuguese Lyric

The present article focuses on the role of paratextual elements—epigram, marginal notes, and musical partitures—in Juan Benet's Un viaje de invierno (1976), with special emphasis on their role in the reading process. Gérard Genette's work on paratexts will serve as a helpful entry to my analysis of the Spaniard's novel. When conceived as the components of a liminal space that mediates text and off-text, Benet's paratexts serve to explore and enrich the zona de sombras inherent to his narrative vision. This slippage situates readers on the thresholds of interpretation and underscores the indeterminate quality of aesthetic (re-)creation. The interconnected, and often contentious, “zones” of the work engender multiple readings, vitiate chronology, and reinforce several recurring themes such as alienation, death, and rebirth. The novel brings to the fore the reader's role in negotiating the highly indeterminant components of the text and the paratext. Through this process, Benet eschews the tenets of casticismo and highlights the role of enigma central to his literary theory and praxis.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

Art,Transformation, Liberation: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet

Balzac's works about actual artists like Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu have long been studied to derive the author's ideas about the artistic creative process. Eugénie Grandet also deals with art, however, even though there is not a real artist in it. In telling the story of Eugénie and her cousin Charles, Balzac suggests his views on the effects of beauty created by artful arrangement as opposed to the beauty in nature uncrafted by human art.