The Transformations of Biddy Early: From Local Reports of Magical Healing to Globalised New Age Fantasies

The literatures dealing with legends and vernacular narratives, on the one hand, and collective memory, on the other, are rarely brought to bear on each other. Following a discussion of the classificatory focus of the legend literature, and the lack of agreement about classification in that literature, this paper draws on the collective memory literature to suggest a focus on process. In particular, it suggests that we should pay attention to a historical process during which local reports of “known” people and happenings may be transformed, in the course of their incorporation into wider spheres of discourse, into legends, which may, through further chronological and spatial distancing from their original context, become fantasies. This tentative framework is used to analyse how the local reputation of Biddy Early, a well-known nineteenth-century “wise woman” of County Clare, Ireland, spread—originally through the work of Lady Gregory, in particular—to become first national, then international and, finally, in the age of the Internet, global. In the course of this long process, first-hand reports of her skills and powers eventually became transformed into free-floating marketing devices and New Age fantasies.     

Hayden White's Appeal to the Historians

Historians rarely agree with Hayden White's account of theirdiscipline. To a certain extent their dissatisfaction can be explained by the fact that historianscustomarily distrust historical theory and always tend to look at the historical theorist with thegreatest suspicion. But historians find an extra argument for their dislike of White's ideasin his alleged cavalier disregard of how historical facts limit what the historian might wish to sayabout the past. And, admittedly, this criticism is not wholly unfounded.
Nevertheless, this essay attempts to show how misguided this traditional criticism ofWhite actually is. For it is historians who too easily take the truth of their accounts of the past forgranted, whereas White's theoretical writings can be shown to express a full awareness ofthe kind of problem encountered in the effort to tell the truth about historical reality. Hence,White's writing—rather than those by historians criticizing White—testify to therespect that we owe to historical reality itself.
That this is how we should read White becomes clear if we consider his intellectualevolution as a whole rather than the individual books or essays that he wrote.     

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.     

The Unevenness of Political Theology

ABSTRACT

Those who agree that Carl Schmitt was correct to prefer to political theology to liberalism nonetheless need to develop an account of how an authority structure can sustain itself without imposing an ideology on those over whom it rules. This article suggests that one possibility forward is found in the mystical political theology of Jacob Taubes's 1955 essay “On The Symbolic Order of Modern Democracy,” since that essay posits a political body in which sovereignty is distributed, without forcing that distribution in an arbitrary manner.     

断裂的世界——庄子政治思想研究

政治思想是庄子思想的有机组成部分.庄子在个体生存领域与政治、社会领域之间划开界限,从根本上否定政治领域的存在价值,而追寻生命的自在与生长,这在先秦思想中独具特色.对庄子政治思想加以引申,可以得到一些有益的思想启迪.     

The Political Economy of Israeli-Palestinian Interdependence

The Israeli and Palestinian economies are asymmetrically interdependent. Some scholars argue that the Palestinian economy cannot be viable alone. Others believe that economic links with Israel will promote peace. Supporters of separation argue that these links distort Palestinian development. I show that the current interdependence is associated with a cyclical Israeli-Palestinian violence and Palestinian economic decline. Assuming that an independent Palestinian state forms in most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, I argue that Israeli-Palestinian relations require economic separation to be stable. Economic separation will deteriorate Palestinian welfare in the short run. Policies to make it viable are considered.