The 1908 Pankhurst Medal: Remembering the Campaign for Votes for Women in Parliament

The house of commons has recently acquired the medal awarded to Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). This acquisition provides a timely reminder in 2008 that it is only 90 and 80 years respectively since women in Britain were granted the vote as well as marking the centenary of the ‘rush’ on the house of commons for which the medal was awarded. The ‘rush’ was just one of many occasions when members of the WSPU brought their campaign and protests to the Palace of Westminster. The palace was a site, both physically and ideologically, of suffragette protest, evidence of which remains on the building itself and, increasingly, as the acquisition of the medal suggests, in gestures of marking and remembrance of women's fight for the vote by parliament.     

Dealing with the past and planning the future: the urban renewal of Rome and Barcelona through the Olympic Games

Is there a link between Rome and Barcelona's past and their Olympic legacies? This article sheds further light on the two cities' urban renewals through the Olympics on the basis of a historical and comparative analysis, as well as through the lenses of regime theory. It argues that Rome's modest outcome and Barcelona's success can be linked to their capacity to deal with their controversial past. The article shows that this capacity played a major role in shaping the composition and equilibrium of the two cities' informal networks of local elected officials, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who planned and implemented the Games (‘growth regimes’). The difficulties of Rome in coping with the Fascist experience resulted in a growth regime in which weak and divided public actors – split along the Fascist/anti-Fascist and Communist/anti-Communist lines – were unable to counterbalance private agents' interests. In contrast, Barcelona's ability to reconcile itself with the past – facilitated by the Spanish entry in the European Economic Community and by the end of the Cold War – eased the Francoist/anti-Francoist and the centralist/Catalan divides, hence allowing the public actors to promote a coalition around a project of ‘democratic restoration’ of the city which involved planners, local businessmen and citizens.     

Re-tribalization in the 21st century,part 1

This exploratory study presents ‘re-tribalization’ as a framework for comprehending contemporary global patterns and phenomena. It posits a link between the erosion of modernity's traits and a resurgence of tribal behaviour – the more elements that we associate with modernity diminish, the more we see the emergence of group formations akin to anthropological notions of tribes. This trend manifests not only in societies where tribal and lineage affiliations remain central to identity but also – perhaps more notably, considering modernity's promises – in developed nations, including global powerhouses like the USA, India and China. ‘Re-tribalization’ signifies a modern-day recourse to a so-called tribal past, fortifying intra-group cohesion and creating a distinction from other groups, thus delineating ‘us’ and ‘them’. This process highlights the drawing of boundaries between communities, positing that such delineations were more apparent in the past and need to be re-established to navigate today's challenges and crises. The study traces the historical lineage of re-tribalization appeals and their ties to nationalism, citing instances from Johann Gottfried Herder's works. This argument leverages the authors’ nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, a collection of four studies and initial insights from their soon-to-be-published book.     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

Personal lives: narrative accounts of Irish women in the diaspora

The burst of writing about Irish women in the diaspora after the 1980s, led by Mary Lennon, Marie McAdam and Joanne O'Brien's Across the Water: Irish Women's Lives in Britain, coincided with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and literary representation. This paper uses Carol Smart's concepts of Personal Life (2007) – memory, biography, embeddedness, relationality and the imaginary – to examine a range of ways in which personal narratives have become central to our understandings of Irish women and their descendants in both written and visual representations. It interweaves disciplines, bringing together a wide range of sources including academic and public accounts in which Irish women appear both as main characters and in walk-on parts. It explores constructions of these ‘fictions’ and their connections with the biographies of authors.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

The Dog and Cat Massacre of September 1939 and the People's War

During the first week of the Second World War around 400,000 companion animals in London alone were killed at their owner's behest. This was not a state directive. Little is known of this event although details of what was called at the time the pet ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Cat and Dog Massacre’ were not suppressed. Far from the Home Front of the Second World War in Britain being a ‘People's War’, as popularly described, in different ways the animal–human relationship was prominent. The massacre – and subsequent animal–human relationships – tends to undermine the notion of both a positive and exclusively human ‘People's War’.     

The Greek Communist Party (KKE) and the Greek-Italian War, 1940–1: an Analysis of Zahariadis' Three Letters

Abstract

An analysis of the position of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) during the Greek-Italian war is interesting not only because it involves a hitherto unsolved puzzle – how and why the KKE's General Secretary, Nikos Zahariadis, wrote his ‘three letters’ – but also because, it involves background factors that help explain how the KKE emerged, during the occupation period, in possession of an invaluably useful ‘patriotic’ image. Such an image, obtained from Zahariadis' ‘first’ letter, undeniably facilitated the party's successful efforts to build up the country's largest liberation movement (EAM) and, through this movement, to come close to capturing power during the years 1943–4.     

Making gender–work practicable: situating men's reconstruction of ‘women's job’ in a Swedish supermarket's micro-politics

Based on empirical data from one Swedish supermarket, this article argues that men's reconstructing of ‘women's work’ in accordance with a masculinised sense of self what Simpson (2004, ‘Masculinity at Work: The Experience of Men in Female Dominated Occupations’, Work, Employment & Society 18, no 2: 349–368) calls ‘gender–work’ is not limited to individual men's perceptions and creations of self. Rather, by investigating the gendered boundary work in which the manager and other workers engage, this study shows how these reconstructions are legitimised and made practicable by organisational micro-politics. By emphasising the specific skills required by ‘their’ department – produce – the male workers distanced themselves from the routine and standardised stocking that dominated the work performed at the supermarket. This notion that working in the produce department required specialised knowledge was legitimised by the manager and the organisation of work at the supermarket. While at times, other workers (most of them women) challenged the boundaries of the produce department, they simultaneously re-established those boundaries by glossing over potential conflicts and maintaining equal treatment existed within the organisation.     

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.     

Plotting Jane Austen: heritage sites as fictional worlds in the literary tourist’s imagination

Fans seeking engagement with Jane Austen and her fictional creations seek out heritage locations linked both temporally and geographically to her life and works. This article adopts a multidisciplinary framework that triangulates fan studies, literary criticism, and heritage studies to analyse three Austen-linked fan spaces: Chawton Cottage (Austen’s former home and now a museum), Lyme Park (‘Pemberley’ in B.B.C.’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and two Austen-themed literary walks. I argue that the fan’s desire for connection is by no means an organic or natural quality of the heritage site itself. Rather, creating connections between the revered object (Austen) and the physical spaces that purport to contain her necessitates imaginative work on the part of the literary tourist. That such performative work is necessary in both the ‘real’ (Chawton) and ‘fictional’ (Lyme Park) locations demonstrates the problematic nature of previous critical emphases on the authenticity – or lack thereof – of such spaces. The significance of the fan’s pilgrimage to Austen-linked heritage sites lies not in the author to be ‘found’ there but in how the tourist actively constructs ‘their’ Jane by inscribing her presence – and those of her characters – onto these spaces.     

The ‘Dividual Androgyne’ and Me: a Personal Affair

In the 25 years since Marilyn Strathern published The Gender of the Gift (1988) its signature concepts of the ‘dividual androgyne’ and ‘sociality’ have received almost no criticism in the anthropological literature and are now widely accepted as true. The ‘dividual’ is considered to be ‘a new, non‐unitary model of embodiment and … one of the most important theoretical accomplishments to emerge from Melanesian ethnography in the latter part of the 20^th Century’ despite the fact that it erases affect, agency, identity and other essential features of human beings (Lipset 2008). The present critique of Strathern's concept of the androgynous ‘dividual’ challenges its legitimacy as a Melanesian or any other ‘premodern’ form of personhood and suggests that it expresses the wish of academic feminists in the 1970s and 1980s to locate an indigenous model for androgyny and to characterise patriarchy, misogyny and sexual segregation as peculiarly Western. The article explores aspects of Gimi myth, ritual and exchange which Strathern claims helped her to formulate the concept of the ‘dividual’ (especially those surrounding men's sacred bamboo flutes) and concludes that she mistook a virulently anti‐female ideology – including a fantasy in which men may subsume or incorporate certain aspects of female anatomy – for benign accommodation between the sexes. The ‘dividual’ does not correspond to social reality among the Gimi and paradoxically affirms Lévi‐Strauss' classic demonstration in the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that ‘the gender of the gift’ is invariably female.     

De-personifying Collaert's Four Continents: European descriptions of continental diversity, 1585–1625

Adriaen Collaert's personifications of the four continents are typical examples of how continents and their respective cultures were represented in the art and literature of Europe in the early-modern period. For example, Asia is the exotic double to Europe, possessing an ‘otherness’ upon which European identity has been juxtaposed. Such personifications of continents and broader tropes of ‘the other’ and ‘the exotic’ have greatly influenced the historiography of the idea of Europe. However, the creation of art and literature characterised by these tropes reflects only part of the European understanding of the wider world. This article will explore how travellers – such as missionaries, merchants and ambassadors – in Europe's encounters with non-European societies presented a complex picture of the world sought to offer practical guidance and knowledge. How travellers’ accounts and personifications interacted is important for understanding the European experience of other continents. In considering how travellers presented their knowledge of continents, it is possible to analyse both how early-modern Europeans viewed other continents and question how useful artistic representation of ‘other’ continents are for understanding how they viewed their own.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

‘There Is Graite Odds between A Mans being At Home And A Broad’: Deborah Read Franklin and the Eighteenth‐Century Home

From 1764 to her death in 1774, Deborah Franklin lived in ‘their’ new house without husband Benjamin. The correspondence between them reveals several ambiguously gendered constructions of that house – ideologically, materially, and architecturally. Deborah was ‘homeless’ legally and conceptually. Her household variously consisted of her mother, her adopted son, her daughter, relatives, guests, boarders and servants – she permanently assumed the role of head of the household. His household consisted of his landlady, Widow Margaret Stevenson, and her daughter Polly – he could not assume his role as head of household. Moreover, as Deborah wrote to her husband about turning the house into a fortress during a raid on it during Stamp Act crisis, he wrote to her about the household goods; as she talked about politics, he discussed familial matters. Their permeable, even ambiguous, masculine and feminine roles reconstructed the meaning – and thereby symbolised the gendered complexity – of the early American white middling and elite eighteenth‐century home.     

Gendered viewing,childbirth and female authority in the residence of Alice Chaucer,duchess of Suffolk,at Ewelme,Oxfordshire

ABSTRACT

This article examines the visual culture of the late medieval great residence from the perspective of the female gaze. In 1466, the widowed Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk (c.1404–75), moved several items from her London and East Anglian houses to her principal residence at Ewelme, Oxfordshire. A unique set of inventories reveals that the move anticipated the birth and baptism of one of Alice’s grandchildren at that manor house. Focusing on the tapestries displayed in the main rooms of Alice’s residence, this article argues that the rituals surrounding the birth of Alice’s grandchild – and their occurrence within a female-headed household – provided a gendered viewing context, which both informed, and was informed by, their iconography. It considers how the mutually constitutive relationship between space, iconography and ritual would have authorised an event centred on female bodies, whilst also articulating Alice’s authority as household and family matriarch.     

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope

This article juxtaposes two prominent discourses accompanying the neoliberalisation of EUrope's borders. The first is the emerging notion of humanitarian ‘migrant-centredness’ found in the policies of elites and security professionals in the field of EUropean border security and migration management. The second is the use of animalised metaphors and imagery that pervade narratives of ‘irregular’ migrants' embodied experiences of detention across and beyond EUrope. It argues that what is at stake in this juxtaposition is more than simply a discrepancy between the ‘rhetoric’ of neoliberal bordering and the ‘reality’ of ‘irregular’ migrants' experiences. Such a view, which is commonly held among diverse critics of border violence, ultimately makes a problematic appeal back to the very humanitarian frame that has already been coopted by authorities associated with or even complicit in that violence. Seeking an alternative diagnosis and ground for critique beyond the ‘rhetoric/reality’ bind, the analysis draws on conceptual resources found in (post)biopolitical theory – particularly Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘zoopolitics’ – in order to identify and explore animalisation as a specific spatial technology of power. Understanding the work that the zoopolitical threshold does in shaping contemporary spaces of incarceration and producing animalised subjects offers new insights into both governmental logics of border security and the limits of humanitarian-based critiques.     

Universalized categories,dissonant realities: gendering postconflict reconstruction in Nepal

International agencies, nongovernmental organizations, governmental agencies, and development policy-makers have sought to incorporate ‘gender mainstreaming’ into postconflict policies and programs in an effort to ameliorate the unequal gender impacts of war. This article uses narratives of widow heads of household collected through field research in Nepal in 2008 and 2011 to illustrate how postconflict development discourses purporting to engage with gender not only take a narrow view of gender (i.e., by equating it to women-focused activities), but also neglect the complex and dynamic realities of women's lives. Postconflict interventions employ simplistic assumptions that neglect gender-specific postconflict insecurities and oppressions (such as systematic violence against women). By neglecting the crucial significance of social networks for widows' survival, postconflict reconstruction assumes women to be individualized receptacles for development/empowerment. The crucial role of social networks in constraining women's agency is obscured. At the same time, assumptions of homogeneity ingrained in universalized categories such as ‘widow’ and ‘conflict-affected’ obfuscate women's multiple identities, roles, and agency in their struggles for survival. The insights emerging from field research suggest a greater attunement of postconflict development interventions to women's lived experiences and social settings.     

The Metrical Structure of the Oral Decapentasyllable

Abstract

What Milman Parry saw as his ‘historical method’ in Homeric criticism has paradoxically relieved students of the Greek folk song from the obligation to approach their subject of study from an exclusively genetic or ‘etymological,’ – in a word, historical – viewpoint. Instead of having to search for – or rather to speculate about – the origins of Greek oral poetry in the mists of antiquity or to assess the extent to which a song can provide reliable historical evidence concerning past events, we are free to turn our attention, as scholars such as Roderick Beaton (1980) and Grigoris Sifakis (1988) have done, to a synchronic study of the folk-song tradition, concentrating as much on the rules that generate the songs as on the significance of actual samples collected in the field (or in the scholar's study or the recording studio).