Transnational ways of seeing: sexual and national belonging in Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality.     

Two dramatic treatments of the ‘Déirdre’ legend: a case study in Irish betrayal

During the heightened cultural activity of the Celtic Revival, the moral ownership and utilisation of Ireland's literary remains became an important cultural issue. At the same time, many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish writers were concerned to ‘retell’ ancient stories in ways which explored their relevance to the modern world. One of the most retold tales from the period was the story of Déirdre and the Sons of Usnach. The story of Déirdre broaches one of the most ubiquitous of human experiences – betrayal – and it does so in relation to both political and interpersonal behaviour. This essay examines two dramatic treatments from the early years of the century: W.B. Yeats's one-act Deirdre (1907) and J.M. Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, unfinished at the time of his death and finally published in 1910. This essay looks to account for the particular ways in which each author inflects the legend in terms of their own concerns, and in particular how both Yeats and Synge engaged with a discourse of betrayal that – although always significant in Irish cultural history – was moving to a position of centrality in Irish national life in the years leading up to the revolutionary period.     

The “tribal spirit” in modern Britain: evolution,nationality, and race in the anthropology of Sir Arthur Keith

ABSTRACT

This article re-examines the anthropological scholarship of Sir Arthur Keith (1866–1955), who served as the president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1914–1917), the Royal Anatomical Society (1918), and the British Association of the Advancement of Science (1927), who wrote prolifically on anatomy, evolution, and the idea of race. While most commonly associated with the Piltdown man hoax, Keith's contributions to the discipline were far greater and more complex. This essay specifically considers how Keith sought to problematize the concept of the nation, considering the nation-state as an evolutionary unit. The first half of this essay examines Keith's theories on the mechanism of evolution (hormonal instincts) and how this informed his ideas of races and nations as evolutionary units. The second half of the essay considers how Keith deployed his ideas about evolutionary instincts, with the goal of advising Britons about how an evolutionary perspective would help understand, if not resolve, modern political challenges, both international and domestic, that faced the British Empire around the time of the First World War.     

History of European ideas

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment.     

American Girls and French Jeunes Filles: Negotiating National Identities in Interwar France

This essay is a transnational and comparative study of how gendered national stereotypes structured the experience of American women who studied in France in the 1920s and 1930s and how this cross‐cultural exchange contributed to cultural internationalism. In both the French and American popular imaginations, American girls and French jeunes filles connoted opposite modern and traditional notions of femininity. In the process of negotiating these two competing identities in popular consciousness and in daily life, some American women students came to appreciate the limitations of the stereotypes, as well as more complex underlying cultural differences, notably in their encounters with French youth's heterosocial practices and with French women students. I argue that the outcome of this process included women's construction of alternative identities for themselves and a new tolerance and appreciation for cultural difference that represents a distinctive development toward cultural internationalism. This study challenges the cultural asymmetry of United States and European relations between the wars and locates gender and women at their centre.     

National stereotypes and music

Music became a marker of national identity in nineteenth‐century Europe. Western art music consists of tonal systems that are universally intelligible, but certain rhythms and musical idioms have been associated with national styles. How, when, and why does a musical phrase or piece become national? What political and cultural circumstances contributed to the development of national styles and facilitated the emergence of resonant topographies? What was the relationship between music as cultural practice and nineteenth‐century national thought as discursive space? These questions are addressed with a particular focus on verbunkos, which came to be characteristic of Hungarian national style, and on the Rákóczy March which became famous thanks to Berlioz's Faust. This essay traces the complex process of cultural transfer through which these martial tunes of mixed ethnic origins have become emblematic of Hungarian music.     

The strange case of ‘John Black’ and ‘Mr Hyde’: constructing migrating Jamaicans as (un)worthy nationals

This paper examines how migrating Jamaicans were constructed as ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’ of Jamaican diasporic membership in the early years of statehood, to demonstrate the role of nationalist cultural repertoires in constructing particular diasporic imaginaries. I conduct a discourse analysis of Jamaica's national newspaper, The Daily Gleaner, between 1962 and 1966, a period encompassing crucial transitions in Jamaican migration movements and from colony to statehood. I argue that tropes of respectability present in Afro‐creole nationalist ideology form the cultural repertoires used to distinguish migrants' actions as worthy or unworthy of national membership. These distinctions specify who ‘counts’ as part of the diaspora and how migrants of different social positions may claim and articulate their membership.     

Cultural icons and urban development in Asia: Economic imperative,national identity,and global city status

Global cities are characterized by the multiplicity of flows that they are implicated in – flows of people, goods, services, ideas, and images. Yet, global cities do not derive their status only on the basis that they are networked nodes. They also require particular forms of cultural capital. Cities with global aspirations have thus increasingly recognized the need to accumulate cultural capital, for which one means is to create new urban spaces, in particular, new cultural urban spaces (e.g. grand theatres, museums, libraries). These often monumental structures are intended to support a vibrant cultural life, in order to attract and sustain global human and economic flows. In this paper, I examine the efforts by Shanghai's, Singapore's and Hong Kong's governments to develop cultural icons as part of the strategy to help their cities gain global city status, and in the process, constructing shared national and city identities. I illustrate how such efforts are not universally interpreted in the manner intended, with city populations sometimes protesting, sometimes simply oblivious. At the same time, I argue that such strategies to achieve global city status are sometimes at odds with projects of nationhood.     

ACTS OF THOUGHT AND RE-ENACTMENT IN COLLINGWOOD'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

This article explores one of Collingwood's most puzzling claims—that, in re-enacting a past act of thought, I can revive not just the propositional content of that act but also the very act of thought itself. This aspect of Collingwood's ideas has been largely ignored, and, when not ignored, it has been almost universally rejected. After all, we might ask, how can it be that two acts of thought—one, say, had by Carol in the library on Wednesday and another act of thought had by Harold in his study on Thursday—are literally identical? I explore this baffling claim and, in particular, Collingwood's argument that acts of thought can have the identity of a continuant. I try to show how the idea of the identity of the continuant might be used to remove some of the puzzlement in Collingwood's claim about literal identity between acts of thought; I thus show how Harold, on Thursday, might be able to experience the exact same act of thought that Carol had on Wednesday.     

European Transfigurations—Eurafrica and Eurasia: Coudenhove and Trubetzkoy Revisited

The Eurasianist movement launched a theory according to which Russia does not belong to Europe but forms, together with its Asian colonies, a separate continent named “Eurasia” whose Eastern border is the Pacific Ocean. Similarily, in the early 1920s, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-European movement, developed, the idea of “Eurafrica.” I compare the writings of Coudenhove and those of Nicolas S. Trubetzkoy and show how the idea of Europe was used as an anti-essentialist model of a cultural community. Though both “Eurasia” and “Eurafrica” may be understood to express cultural and economic imperialism, the sophistication with which both concepts are brought forward makes their interpretation as simple derivatives of chauvinism impossible. Both Trubetzkoy and Coudenhove refuse national “egocentricity” which “destroys every form of cultural communication between human beings.” Above that, Trubetzkoy and Coudenhove agree that cultural apogees have often come about through fusion. I discuss the idea of “convergence” in the context of Bergson's and Deleuze's biophilosophies.     

Against epistemology

Rick Tilman's new study, Veblen and his European Contemporaries, explores Veblen's conceptual relationship with a host of seminal European thinkers. Among the continuities and differences that Tilman develops, none stands out more than his strikingly original claim that in important ways Veblen's work parallels that of Ferdinand Tonnies. This essay reviews Tilman's study, with a particular emphasis on Veblen's idea of community, particularly its political and utopian aspects. Most notable in these regards is Veblen's idea that a free and insurgent “spirit of insubordination” is the chief animating principle of self-regulating anarchistic communities. The essay examines tensions between Veblen's embrace of the free spirit of anarchism and his belief in the centralizing thrust of modern technology. It suggests, however, that by dramatically curtailing needs for human labor, Veblen's industrial republic might, as most systems do, fumble its way toward a rough working balance between predominant values in conflict, in this case, industry and insubordination.     

‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’: Anthropology and Matriarchy in H. Rider Haggard's She

This essay examines the nineteenth-century debate about an imagined matriarchal past, arguing that it raised significant questions about gender and history. It scrutinizes the interdisciplinary nature of the debate, demonstrating that anthropology and literature intersected in a fraught investigation of ‘mother-rule’. The essay contends that H. Rider Haggard's novel She (1887) engages in complex ways with anthropological visions of a matriarchal past. The work of the major matriarchal theorists, J. J. Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, John Lubbock, and L. H. Morgan, often seen as triumphalist accounts of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, was beset by tensions about gender, power, and temporality, caught between evolutionary meliorism and nostalgia, between a defence of patriarchy and recognition of cultural variability. Haggard's She, the essay argues, exposes and deepens the tensions at the heart of the anthropological narrative. Critics have conventionally read She as a matriarchal dystopia, yet the novel offers an ambivalent dramatization of matriarchy, and is attracted as well as repelled by the matriarchal past embodied in the white African queen Ayesha and her people, the Amahagger. More than a femme fatale, Ayesha is sorceress and scientist, harbinger of life and of death; even her violence unsettles assumptions about gender and power. Haggard's evocation of the Amahaggers’ marriage practices works to question the anthropologists’ hierarchical cultural evolutionism, moving towards an appreciation of plural cultures. The narrative's insistence on cyclical temporalities also disrupts a linear narrative of progress from matriarchy to patriarchy, conveying the potent attractions of a resurgent female past.     

Why be witty? Fichte and Kant on the nature of wit with a view to wit's political ramifications

In a brief section of The Characteristics of the Present Age, Fichte presents one of the strangest ideas to have arisen in transcendental thought: that wit is related to what Fichte calls the highest idea and to truth. The concept of wit does not arise anywhere else in Fichte's philosophy, and he does not analyze it completely in either The Characteristics of the Present Age or his philosophical texts. I contend that Fichte does not expand upon his idea because his understanding of wit arises out of the Kantian analysis of wit, even though Fichte gives his own spin to Kant's view. What I show in this paper is how Fichte both appropriates and alters Kant's understanding of wit, and how wit serves a social/political function in Fichte's thought.     

2. CAN THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM BE ANTIHUMANIST?

This essay argues that to understand Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, we must understand the elective theoretical affinities that he perceived between this current in economic thought and one of the central elements of his own philosophical project: the critique of humanism or “anthropologism” (that is, the tendency in modern thought to sift all knowledge through human knowledge). Specifically, the essay examines moments in Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures when Foucault clearly refers to the arguments of his earlier work, The Order of Things, the locus classicus of his philosophical antihumanism. In particular, Foucault claimed that economists of the Chicago School developed a theory of labor that escaped the limitations of the “anthropological” theory of labor associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. He also interpreted the notion of homo oeconomicus and Smith's idea of the market's “invisible hand” as critiques of the characteristically modern attempt to make transcendental claims on the basis of human nature. The essay concludes by asking if Foucault's philosophical antihumanism provides an adequate vantage point from which to critique contemporary capitalism.     

Reconfiguring the French nation: Public debates on the Left and national identity

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalisation has shaped the fate of local and national cultural productions, from movies to music, from entertainment to food. How did French intellectual and political elites respond to this unprecedented challenge? What were the implications for the politics of nationalism and national identity? Two books respond to these questions, although in very different ways – the first directly and the second indirectly. Vincent Martigny's Dire la France explains how a new way of narrating French national identity emerged in the 1980s within an internationally oriented French Left, attentive of the coming challenges of cultural pluralism. Patrick Boucheron's (ed.) Histoire mondiale de la France advances into a more challenging direction by skilfully unsettling the ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ clichéd narrative. French history is thus redefined by moving away from the Frankish/Gallic myth of descent, thereby reconfiguring national identity along new lines. This article identifies how crucial debates on the cultural nation and cultural identity emerged in the wake of the May 1968 uprising, asking how much they contributed to the current shape and meaning of French national identity. It thus reviews what can be described as a new historiographical turn in French history.     

Dilemmas of autonomy and liberal pluralism: examples involving Hungarians in Central Europe*

Abstract. Liberal pluralists have argued that minority cultural communities are necessary for the liberty of minorities. On the premise that individual rights are insufficient to protect these cultural communities, they argue that ethnic and national groups should be allocated some type of collective autonomy. In this article, we critically examine this claim through a discussion of policies regarding Hungarian minorities. We show that liberal pluralist approaches (1) privilege ethnic and national identities over other types of communal identities, (2) require that ethnic and national communities be clearly bounded, but do not address how lines should be drawn, and (3) increase the power of cultural communities over their members. Policies based on liberal pluralist ideas therefore violate principles of equality and are likely to harm the autonomy of individuals. Rather than looking to liberal pluralist theories as a panacea for minority concerns, we demonstrate why we should be sceptical about this effort to move beyond minority protections based on individual rights.     

D. W. Meinig and The Shaping of America

Published over eighteen years, between 1986 and 2004, in four volumes and well over 2000 pages, Donald Meinig's The Shaping of America quartet is one of modern geography's most substantial achievements. It warrants and repays careful attention. This essay seeks first to situate or contextualize The Shaping project by attending to the development of Meinig's ideas and scholarship before 1986. It argues that the approaches and emphases of Meinig's magnum opus were substantially but not entirely adumbrated by his earlier work and that the four volumes reflect something of the intellectual contexts in which Meinig developed his ideas about historical geography and the discipline more generally, as well as of Meinig's own particular interests and circumstances. The second section of this essay turns attention to the four volumes and offers some assessment of their contribution to, and significance for, geography, historical geography, and the study of American and Atlantic history.