Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.     

The banality of displacement: Discourse and thoughtlessness in the internal refugee crisis in Colombia

Colombia has one of the largest internal refugee populations in the world. For years government agencies and NGOs presented vastly disparate statistics, with government figures showing much lower estimates of the amount of internally displaced persons, or IDPs. In this article I suggest that the discourse of displacement in Colombia was dominated by a “war over numbers” at the expense of a more complex characterization of the displaced population. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's suggestive ideas on the banality of evil, I propose the notion of the “banality of displacement” to examine two distinct but related processes. First, the normalization of violence over time has made forced displacement appear as a mundane social fact in Colombia. Second, this banality is actively produced through an “attitudinal thoughtlessness” in government and NGO circles. To illustrate this banality at play, I focus on two interrelated aspects. First, I examine the history of IDP management in Colombia, in particular the disputes over displacement statistics. Second, I explore the “colour-blindness” in the counting strategies and the lack of reliable data regarding displaced Afro-Colombians. In a final section I discuss ways in which the banality of displacement has been contested, both from civil society and by the Constitutional Court, which has challenged the Colombian government over its handling of the displacement crisis. I also suggest more broadly how a re-reading of Arendt brings a critical sensibility to other geopolitical contexts, exemplified by geographers' engagement with the “war on terror.”     

The Articulation of National Identity in Early Twentieth-century East Asia: The Intertwining of Discourses of Modernity and Civilisation

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which national identity was articulated by intellectuals in Japan, China and Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth century as a first step to reviewing the standard western-centric and diffusionist account of nationalism. Conventional accounts of nationalism regard nationalism as intrinsically European, rooted in developments such as the Enlightenment and the Westphalian system of states, and consider non-western cases as examples of diffusion from the “centre” to the “periphery”. Even though the discourse of the nation and national identity produced by East Asian intellectuals in the early twentieth century was shaped by social and political theories developed in the West, their frequent use of civilisational referents suggests that they were subjectively engaged with a project of self-definition that drew on their own sources, which undermines diffusionist assumptions. The article briefly examines the discourse of national identity articulated by the Kyoto School of philosophy, Sun Yat-sen and Tsai Pei-huo as the first step in exploring the possibility of multiple origins of nationalism.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.     

Reform and Resistance: A Consideration of Space,Scale and Strategy in Legal Challenges to Welfare Reform

This paper examines the law as a mechanism for resisting neoliberal policy change through a consideration of legal challenges to welfare reform in the United States. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 marked a sea change in both the content and scale of the American social welfare system. It has entailed a downward shift in policy creation and administration from the national to the state and local level, and conveys a heavy emphasis on the “responsibility” of single mothers to engage in waged labor. In addition to changing the scale at which the social welfare system operates, welfare reform has changed how the more oppressive aspects of this policy might be resisted. While some legal advocates are challenging welfare reform by working within the “policy scale”, others are invoking national level protections by appealing to Civil Rights legislation. By working against the scale imposed by neoliberal social policy, Civil Rights legislation presents the possibility for advocates to “re‐scale responsibility” from that of single mothers to submit to wage labor in order to survive, to the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens against identity‐based discrimination. Herein, I argue both that the law can serve as an important mechanism for re‐focusing the scale of resistance in efforts to challenge oppressive social policy; and that even in the face of policy that imposes a local scale, the national level holds potential as an important terrain of resistance.     

From the government to the university: Efforts to write national history in the early Republic

ABSTRACT

From the controversies surrounding the National History Bureau in the early Republic to the short-lived National Historiography Office at Peking University, the traditional undertaking of writing dynastic history experienced many crises during the transformative Republican era. The National History Bureau was merged with Peking University as part of Cai Yuanpei’s efforts to separate the field of national historiography from the government and shift it toward universities, as well as his efforts to further reform the university system. In comparing the staff members and aims of the National History Bureau and the National Historiography Office of Peking University, the latter clearly represented an update in terms of concepts and methods. The purpose of the History Bureau’s shift from “dynastic” to “popular” history, which apparently intentionally imitated the German academic system, was to render national historiography and other related research independent of the government, cast off the traditional moral burden of “condemning evildoers and praising the virtuous,” and gradually move forward on the path of specialization for national historiography within the university system. The National Historiography Office’s various editing plans amply demonstrate this tendency. The many winding detours that the “national history” efforts took between dynastic and popular history both expressed the entanglement of new and old ideas within academic circles, and revealed the contemporary struggle between the government and universities.     

“The Men of the North” Redux: Nanook and Canadian National Unity

This article explores the operation of nordicity as a discursive resource in Canadian national identity. Drawing on the late nineteenth-century idea of Canadians as “the men of the north” and therefore having a particular national character, this article examines the way that the Inuit have been drawn into this discursive frame since the 1950s. The key argument advanced in this article is that idealized images of the Inuit as exemplars of “northern people” operate in various ways to affirm a “northern” identity for all Canadians. This claim is explored with reference to the images of Nanook of the North and of the Inuit as “a quintessential Canadian Folk.” Continuities between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of the “northmen” thesis are examined in this article.     

The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class‐based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti‐poverty politics in southern Africa.     

The Crisis of the “Disadvantaged Child”: Poverty Research,IQ, and Muppet Diplomacy in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, the US federal government deemed poverty to be a national crisis, and actively intervened to solve this problem. My question for this article is how did preschool education become a key site to remedy this crisis? Government interventions were a combination of poverty research, racialized politics, and child development. I show how the discipline of early childhood education cohered around the term “disadvantaged child”, in turn influencing the War on Poverty policies, including the basis of Head Start preschool education. During this same decade proponents of Sesame Street—with private funding, along with extensive testing mechanisms by consultants—argued that the television could reach more children, therefore be more cost effective. This paper investigates how surplus populations became determined and demarcated, as early as three years old. I question how televised preschool taught “affective skills” and proper social relations during times of political crisis.     

Space,identity politics and resource control in Indonesia's transmigration programme

Indonesia's recent history has revealed the fragility of a national unity created under a political authoritarianism that was itself underpinned by the country's relative economic success. The government's transmigration resettlement scheme has been one particularly powerful mechanism through which the New Order government (under President Soeharto) has sought to achieve unity amidst the country's disparate ethnic groups. By resettling Javanese people, Indonesia's largest and most politically central cultural group, the state has attempted to achieve a presence of the “centre” in the country's “margins”, and in turn, extend a particular imagined geography across the archipelago. This paper examines the spatial politics of this process in one particular region, where transmigration has been coloured by environmental authoritarianism and concerns over the activity of “illegal forest squatters”. It draws on Henri Lefebvre's concept of socially produced space to demonstrate how local people have challenged the spatial authority of the state, and the ways subtle forms of resistance are expressed in agrarian landscapes and livelihood practices in Lampung. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities of linking such resistance to emerging social movements which are beginning to challenge the post-Soeharto government's authority outside Java.     

Ideological others and national identifications in contemporary Poland

Sexual minorities in Poland are excluded from the traditional understanding of “Polishness” premised on conservative, Catholic values. This article examines how ethnic Polish citizens who identify as non‐heteronormative navigate their relationship to “Polishness” at a moment of heightened nationalism. Through 31 interviews with Polish sexual minorities, I show that while national identification is a struggle for some sexual minorities, others work to reframe what “Polishness” means to them. I argue for further research examining the ways that stigmatised members of the ethnic majority—what I term ideological others—understand and navigate their relationship to national identity. The study contributes to the literature on everyday nationhood and national identity by attending to national identification among stigmatised members of the ethnic majority.     

MOVING CENTRAL KNOWLEDGE TO A NORTHERN PERIPHERY: EXPLORING LOGICS OF PUBLIC SECTOR JOB RELOCATION IN SWEDEN

Through the means of Swedish relocation politics, the capital of Stockholm has been constructed as a governing centre with the ability of giving something to a periphery thought of as unable to survive on its own. The relationship between centre and periphery, furthermore, produces images of what kind of knowledge can be located to “central” or “peripheral” regions. In this article I research the move of a knowledge‐intense government agency from Stockholm to Östersund, a smaller inland town in the north. The data were collected through an ethnographic case study of a government agency. I adopt a discourse theoretical approach that provides a clear ontology of identity and processes of identification. This enables research on how ideological images of places create geographical identity positions. The aim of this article is to explore how groups of professionals at the government agency identified with geographical identities dependent on whether they were seen as experts or generalists. In conclusion, identity positions became important for how the relocation was organized. The establishment of the two identity positions functioned to stabilize the social environment during the move, a time when many things at work seemed to be in turmoil. At the same time the positions worked to exclude other ways of identifying with (work)place, and in this way sustained asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination between centre and periphery.     

Observing,Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British “everyday” life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of “mass” and “morale”. These formed part of a broader scientific–administrative–bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and “things” in this and later periods.     

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.     

Racializing Cities,Naturalizing Space: The Seductive Appeal of Iconicities of Dispossession

In pursuit of a critical geography of globality, my essay examines how racial hegemonies are sustained and perpetuated by the ways in which urban spaces inhabited by peoples on the margins of the world economy are imagined, represented, and brought to public visibility. Central to my inquiry is how iconic representations of “slum life” are produced for a white consumer public. Propelled by fantasies of racial essence, primal bodies, and exotic naturalism, the iconicities of “shantytowns” and the “black ghetto” are circulated as popular commodity forms throughout Europe's metropolitan centers. In analyzing this process, I identify “africanism” (spaces of contested black civility, premodern savagery, urban jungle) and “tropicalism” (naturalized landscapes of color and houses, childlike creativity, and happy workers) as representational codes for how “slums” as sites of urban dispossession are racially mapped and consumed.     

Sociopolitics

Sociopolitics refer to ways in which politics and relations of power are constituted through an authoritative discourse on the social. This concept echoes Foucault's biopolitics. “Society” and the “social” are devices, as well as categorical foundations, for the political. As with “bio” in biopolitics, “socio” gives a particular form to power that it articulates and constitutes. This review essay uses this concept to discuss recent work of James Scott and David Graeber, and the English-language translation of a 1980 collection of essays by Pierre Clastres. I argue that this anarchist anthropology articulates a clear break within anarchist theory. This break is in the ways the social and the political are related as means and ends in ethnography and in conceptualization of anarchist practice.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

Locating the Cannibals: Conquest,North American Ethnohistory,and the Threat of Objectivity

This essay critiques the claims to political neutrality and academic authority in an approach to ethnohistory that is defined by historian James Axtell as “balanced” and “objective.” Seeking to shed light on the political genealogy of Axtell’s assertion of objectivity, particularly as it is articulated through an evocation of cannibalism, I trace the ways in which power is implicated in Axtell’s theorizing and argue that objective ethnohistory is linked to conquest as an ongoing ideological and material process. I conclude that objective ethnohistory works to both mask and affirm an imperial grounding, most egregiously through a deceptive rhetoric of democratization in the context of which a posited “we” becomes the supreme cannibalizing trope. Finally, I suggest possibilities for a decolonized, politically engaged ethnohistory.     

The Expansion of Emergency Powers: Social Conflict and the Military in Indonesia

The exercise of emergency powers is always controversial. This article identifies the expansion of the type and scope of emergency powers through legislative reform. It does so by examining the Indonesian Law on Social Conflict 2012, which allows a state of social conflict to be declared at the national, regional or local level in response to social conflict, such as conflict between religious or ethnic communities. The deliberate choice of the term “state of social conflict”, rather than “state of emergency”, is an attempt to obscure the nature of these powers. Analysis of these powers and the debate that has ensued suggests that the law expands the types of situation in which powers usually only reserved for an emergency are used, and by delegating this power to local authorities, the law in effect amounts to the expansion of emergency powers. I suggest that this should lead to renewed focus on meaningful limits and checks on the exercise of power during times of emergency.     

The greening of Oscar Wilde: situating Ireland in the Wilde wars

The importance of Ireland to an understanding of Oscar Wilde has been the subject of contentious discussion in recent years. For one group of critics Wilde has been considered “a militant Irish republican”, an Irish “terrorist by another name”, whose literary practices resembled those of “guerrilla warfare”, an ardent Home Ruler and Parnellite, and committed Irish nationalist whose work is suffused with references to Ireland and the Irish Question, very influenced by his Irish background and political views, possibly shaped by a genuine interest in and awareness of Irish folklore and the Irish oral tradition, and deeply engaged with issues of Irish identity and culture. For an opposing set of critics Wilde should at best be considered a “reluctant” Irish patriot, who referenced his Irish “identity” only when it suited him commercially, was more interested in exploiting intellectual fashions and fads than making genuine political points, was a shallow thinker in most areas of life and certainly didn’t use his writing to pursue Irish nationalist issues, was probably more of a British imperialist than an Irish nationalist, knew precious little about Irish folklore or Irish oral traditions, and his works contain few if any references to Irish issues or themes. The differences between these two interpretive communities certainly seem quite large, and these differences have been emphasised in a disputatious manner which has shed more heat than light on the messy matter of Wilde’s national identity. In this article I want to begin to clear up some of the misunderstandings I think have crept into this critical dispute and suggest fruitful ways in which opposing critics can come together in if not harmony then perhaps a less acrimonious, more productive way.