‘Enormous Opportunities’ and ‘Hot Frontiers’: Sub-Saharan Africa in U.S. Grand Strategy, 2001-Present

Abstract

This article argues that, in the 21st century, there has been a significant turnaround in the US approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. No longer is the region viewed solely as the site of human tragedy and internal wars where Washington has no tangible interests. Instead, US policymakers have increasingly viewed this part of Africa as a site of valuable commercial, geopolitical, and security interests—with particular emphasis on petroleum reserves, the market potential of its growing population, and its apparent locus as a site of transnational Islamist terrorism. Sub-Saharan Africa is now considered in grand strategic terms. Unintended consequences of US intervention are already visible, however; as it integrates the region into its global strategic calculus, the United States has begun to repeat mistakes made in other key regions of the world.     

‘Sane’ and ‘insane’ imperialism: British idealism,new liberalism and liberal imperialism

It is contended that British Idealists, New Liberals and Liberal Imperialists were all in favour of imperialism, especially when it took the form of white settler communities. The concession of relative autonomy was an acknowledgement of the potential of white settler communities to go the way of America by severing their relationship with the Empire completely. Where significant differences emerge in their thinking is in relation to non-white territories in the Empire where native peoples comprised the majority, and the British Government and its agents administered in trust ‘lower’ peoples on the scale of civilisation with the ostensible goal of guiding them towards self-determination in the Empire. The differences in degree of commitment to these ideals were largely expressed in terms of the pejorative categories of ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ imperialism, which were flexible and manipulated for political gain, rather than analytic precision. Liberal Imperialists and New Liberals were opposed to each other in terms of the degree to which they supported imperialism, whereas British Idealists aligned themselves on both sides of the divide.     

‘Les Soixante-Routards: travel,generation, and 1968’

Philippe Gloaguen and the ‘Routard Generation’ reveal a variety of themes in the cultural history of 1968 and its legacy in France regarding the intersection of travel mobility and generational identification. Mobility was and remains a central motif in the mythology of 1968. The way the cultural phenomenon of French backpacker travel has come to be understood there is bound up with ideas about 1968 and generation. The cultural association of 1968 with French travel and mobility helped create a broad generational cohort able to incorporate those who were not politically involved, or at best, were on the margins of protest activity. The self-proclaimed soixante-routards conflate travel mobility with a generational construct centred on 1968 as a means to render their personal travel with political meaning.     

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman,Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of the Orient, however, suggests the need to revise literature on Western approaches to the East which has assumed that antagonism towards Islam declined in the modern period, or was masked behind narratives that purported to be secular and objective but which continued to empower Europe and subjugate the Orient. Juxtaposing Freeman's narratives on Western and Eastern history, I argue that his association of Christianity with European progress and Islam with Eastern barbarism is key to understanding his deep fear of cultural contact with the Orient. Far from bolstering the strength and power of the West vis-à-vis the East, Freeman's account of the fearful barbarity of the Islamic Orient is underpinned by his belief in an anti-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, conspiracy that threatened the West with degeneration and recapitulation.     

‘Culture’, ‘sustainable development’ and cultural policy: a contrarian view

Abstract

This essay offers a critical analysis of the ‘culture and sustainable development’ discourse, notably among cultural activists and in actually existing cultural policy. It interrogates the utility of the narrative, seeks to uncover the semantic manoeuvres it employs and challenges the conventional wisdom it represents. The essay first explores the itinerary of the ductile notion of ‘sustainability’, the ways in which it has been stretched far beyond the original intent of those who coined the term, and identifies the conceptual discontents that this semantic multiplication has entailed. It hypothesizes that precisely because the term ‘sustainable’ and its derivatives are so acceptable and malleable at the same time, they have been easy to yoke to the bandwagon of the many-faceted and totalizing process that is ‘development’, allowing many different actors to project their interests, hopes, and aspirations under this composite banner. The essay then analyses the campaign to make culture ‘the fourth pillar of sustainability’ under the banner of the movement called ‘Agenda 21 for Culture’. It concludes with a plea for a return to the original ecological focus of the term ‘sustainability’ – notably as regards climate change – and outlines some cultural policy responses such a focus can and should generate.     

Still ‘breadwinners’ and ‘providers’: Singaporean husbands,money and masculinity in transnational marriages

As international marriages continue to be on the rise around the world, and in East and Southeast Asia in particular, there is an increasing need for more focused studies on the phenomenon. While the extant literature has paid attention to the complex dynamics of marital intimacies through a ‘gender-sensitive’ lens, the experiences of men are still largely under-examined. This article considers the gendered and classed subjectivities of Singaporean husbands who have married Vietnamese wives and focuses on ‘money’ as a key vehicle through which the men are able to construct masculinities in the spaces of transnational marriage and family. We argue that these non-migrant men engage with transnational processes and practices strategically in order to reclaim respectable and honourable masculine status. In doing so, they dislodge themselves from the idiom of ‘failed masculinity’ commonly ascribed to men who seek foreign spouses, but at the same time reproduce dominant models of masculinity predicated on ‘breadwinning’ and ‘providing’. This article draws on the narratives of 20 Singaporean Chinese men from a range of social backgrounds to demonstrate the endurance of money and economic potency in the performance of masculinities.     

‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats,J.G. Herder and the imperfection of tradition

In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Gottfried Herder's theories of the Volk and the origin of language. I show how, at a crucial point in European history, the folk tradition modelled a view of cognition and modernity, which stood apart from analytic rationalism and based itself upon a positive evaluation of the obscurity of sensation. Finally, I read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark’ cognition into Yeats's early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight; and I make the argument that this often-neglected text does not represent a degeneration of folkloric integrity into Celtic mysticism but a comedic trait of folk modernity.     

‘We are of the connections’: migration,methodological nationalism,and ‘militant research’

Abstract

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and actualized as the territorial expression of state power. Therefore, the questions of methodological nationalism and what might be called ‘militant research’ are deeply interconnected, indeed, mutually constitutive. As scholars of ‘migration’ – and above all, as practitioners of ‘militant research’ – we must attend to a self-reflexive critique of our own complicities with the ongoing nationalization of ‘society’. Hence, as researchers or scholars of migration, we are indeed ‘of the connections’ between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies. We are ‘of’ these connections because there is no ‘outside’ or analytical position beyond them. The larger juridical regimes of citizenship, denizenship, and alienage configure us to be always-already located within the nexus of inequalities that are at stake in these conflicts.     

From ‘Generation Auclert’ to ‘Generation Ockrent’: Convictions,Comparisons and Continuities

Nicolas Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential campaign culminated with an appeal to ‘liquidate’ the heritage of the revolt of May 1968. Through an examination of the trajectories of all candidates at the 2007 election, this article seeks to explain the controversy around Sarkozy's remarks in terms of the broader impact of the ‘’68 years’ on a generation of both right and left born in the postwar period.     

Political geographies, ‘unfaithful’ translations and anticolonialism: Ireland in Élisée Reclus's geography and biography

This paper addresses the role of Ireland and Irish republicanism in the geography, biography and political thinking of the French anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830–1905). This paper sheds new light on the construction of a scientific and political discourse, one which was radically opposed to external and internal colonialisms in the Age of Empire, analysing primary sources such as Reclus' texts and correspondence, along with his transnational networks. It draws on present-day debates on ‘geography and anarchism’, postcolonial Ireland and international circulation and localisation of knowledge. Finally, it is a contribution to evaluating the importance of the ‘British Isles’ as a place for production and reception of the geographical and political works by both Reclus and the other anarchist geographer Pëtr Kropotkin (1842–1921), scholars and militants who lived there in different periods of their respective careers.     

“‘Ruottiksi’, translated Paul Muotka patiently. ‘Kiitos.’” Mikael Niemi,Meänkieli and Readers Inside and Outside Tornedalen

The present study in the research field of literary multilingualism and literary codeswitching is based on Mikael Niemi's novel Mannen som dog som en lax (2006) [The man who died like a salmon]. The novel is set mainly in Tornedalen, a widely bilingual area in Sweden where many people speak both Swedish and Meänkieli, a national minority language in Sweden since 2000. All instances of codeswitching in the material studied were identified and an analysis, based on Eriksson and Haapamäki's model designed to analyse literary multilingualism and literary codeswitching, was performed. The model consists of three main components: (1) the communicative context of the analysed work; (2) the form of codeswitching in the analysed work; and (3) the possible literary functions of codeswitching in the analysed work. The sender, Mikael Niemi, does not consider himself bilingual and most intended receivers are not bilingual either, even though linguistic conditions are central to the theme of the novel. Swedish is the base language of the novel, while elements of Meänkieli/Finnish, varieties of Swedish, and other languages represent a small fraction of the entire text. Implicit literary codeswitching predominates in the material in the form of metalinguistic comments and contextualization cues. By far the most common type of explicit literary codeswitching is between Swedish and Meänkieli/Finnish. The novel contains examples of literary codeswitching used in attempts to reproduce authentic usage and depict an authentic linguistic setting. In other examples, Tornedalen, Tornedalians and Meänkieli/Finnish are depicted as exotic phenomena compared with the majority society. Likewise, there are examples of how certain passages in the novel may include or exclude readers, depending on their understanding of Meänkieli/Finnish. Certain elements of Meänkieli can be interpreted as expressions of linguistic emancipation and the liberation of identity that empowers speakers of Meänkieli and the community of these speakers.     

Beyond ‘logistics sprawl’ and ‘logistics anti-sprawl’. Case of the Katowice region,Poland

The growing role of logistics in the economic space of large metropolises is visible in an increasing number of objects of this kind as well as in their high spatial concentration. Taking into account these circumstances, a phenomenon known as ‘logistics sprawl’ is considered in the article. This is one of two problems concerning the development of logistics in metropolitan areas. Studying the Katowice conurbation in Poland, the authors note, however, that in this region the opposite phenomenon, which they define as a ‘logistics anti-sprawl’, is more noticable. Its characteristic feature is a location of logistics facilities not in the outer zone of the conurbation, but in its core. This phenomenon undoubtedly differs from the patterns of localization of logistics facilities in all major CEECs. It is caused by some chief factors which are disscused in the paper. Therefore, an attention is drawn on the period of socialist development of the region, its contemporary postindustrialism, urban shrinkage, as well as the polycentricity of the conurbation. The crucial question whether the expected reduction of the ‘sprawl logistics’ phenomenon may be based on the development model observed in the Katowice conurbation is also discussed in the article.     

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.     

‘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.     

Ieme van der Poel. Une Révolution de la pensée: maoïsme et féminisme á travers ‘Tel Quel,’ ‘Les Temps modemes,’ et ‘Esprit.’

Abstract

Claire Addison. Where Flaubert Lies: Chronology, mythology and history. Cambridge University Press, 1996. xv + 393 pp.

Dennis Porter. Rousseau's Legacy. Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 306 pp. $39.95.     

Introduction: Italy and the Euro–Mediterranean ‘migrant crisis’: national reception,lived experiences,E.U. pressures

The introduction discusses the origins of this themed section of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, based on a 2017 interdisciplinary conference about migration and the migrant experience in Italy. The co-editors recognized early on that the U.S. media was paying inadequate attention to migrant landings in Italy during the so-called refugee crisis around 2015–16, and engaged scholars active in Italy, the U.K. and the U.S. to provide further nuance to this particular migratory flow, and in particular to question how the term ‘crisis’ was used in describing it. In response to a public debate increasingly prone to alarmism, the articles produced after the conference investigate the contradictions of the Italian reception system of migrants and refugees; the often glossed-over labour, race, and gender aspects of the flows; and the critical conditions of the Mediterranean crossing as represented in film and theatre. The contributions specifically bring forward the migrants’ voices to challenge the exclusionary practices adopted in Italy and Europe in favour of structured legal channels, and to reveal the growing crisis of E.U. democratic principles.     

‘Martial Races’ and ‘Imperial Subjects’: Violence and Governance in Colonial India, 1857–1914

This essay explores the specificity of colonial violence in India. Although imperial and military historians are familiar with several instances of such violence—notably the rebellion in 1857 and the 1919 massacre at the Jallianwalla Bagh in Amritsar—there is a broader, and arguably more significant, history that has largely escaped attention. In contrast to metropolitan European states, where sovereignty derived, at least in principle, from a covenant between subjects and government, the sovereign power of the colonial state was always predicated on the violent subjugation of ‘the natives’. However, while violence was integral to colonialism, such violence was never a purely metropolitan agency: most of those recruited to serve in the colonial military were, themselves, Indian. Exploring the history of the imperial military in South Asia after 1857, the paper outlines the complex and rather ambiguous relationship between the colonial state and its ‘native armies’.

résumé ?Cet article se penche sur la spécificité de la violence coloniale. Malgré des exemples familiers—comme la grande révolte de 1857 en Inde ou le massacre de Jallianwalla Bagh à Amritsar en 1919—il y a une histoire plus large et plus importante qui a échappée à l'attention des historiens. Contrairement aux états européens ou la souveraineté dérivait en principe du moins d'un contrat social entre les acteurs sociaux, le pouvoir souverain de l'état colonial restait fondé sur la subjugation violente des indigènes.