Materialism and history: Diderot and the Histoire des deux Indes

In the last years of his life, Diderot made a large number of anonymous contributions to Raynal's widely read Histoire des deux Indes. The identification of these passages over the last thirty years has led to a view of Diderot's later political thought as being far more radical than had previously been supposed. But his contributions in general are notable for their pessimism about the situation in France and in Europe generally. In part this was due to his belief in a cyclical view of history, but it was also due to his bringing to his understanding of history the materialist, and resolutely non‐providential, view of nature which he had developed earlier.     

Contested Representations: Black women and the St Paul's Carnival

This research focuses on black women's experiences of the annual African-Caribbean carnival in St Paul's, Bristol, as a potential site of resistance. I have chosen to look at how black women challenge conceptions of space on three levels: nationally, locally and within the street. These three spatial levels are permeated by notions of resistance: resistance to dominant notions of Englishness, to representations of place, and to gender roles. I aim to focus on carnival's potential to contest hegemonic discourses, to denaturalise them and to expose them as partial. It is my overall contention that black women challenge the use of space as it is designated on a number of these levels, but that carnival does not enable them to contest their regular gender roles. Through this I hope to develop a 'cultural politics of place', but one which takes account of the intersecting dynamics of 'race' and gender, moving away from a binary model of difference.     

Translating relics: Victricius of Rouen and fourth‐century debate

This article uses a little‐known sermon by Victricius, bishop of Rouen, as an approach to the fourth‐century debate on the translation of relics. In the last third of the fourth century, the cult of martyrs and their relics was promoted by Damasus of Rome, Paulinus of Nola and Ambrose of Milan, but remained controversial in the western churches. Roman law forbade the disturbance of dead bodies, especially where magic was suspected. Christians as well as non‐Christians were repelled by the veneration of bone, bloodstains and dust, and by the extreme asceticism that was often associated with relic‐cult. The sermon Victricius preached, welcoming to Rouen a gift of relics from Ambrose, is here interpreted as an attempt at cultural translation. Victricius deploys a late‐antique education in rhetoric and philosophy to make relic‐cult and asceticism acceptable. Like many others, he uses the adventus, the ceremonial reception of a visiting emperor or his deputy by local aristocracy and officials, as an analogy for the reception of relics by ascetics and clergy. Exceptionally, he equates corporeal relics with the presence of God; but his unique theology of relics was lost to view.     

Notice of an Example of Decorative Coloured Brickwork in the Neighbourhood of Rouen

The Mycenaean world of the late Bronze Age was one of domination and expansion. Such expansion can be seen in the distribution of Mycenaean ceramics in the eastern and western Mediterranean basin. In contrast to the west, Mycenaean culture in the east came into contact and perhaps conflict with well established cultural traditions and civilizations which had achieved a marked degree of sophistication. These native cultural traditions effectively limited the external growth of the Mycenaean world to the coastal fringes of the Near East. However, the impact of Mycenaean culture is evident, especially in the adaptation and imitation of ceramic styles and motifs typically classified as Mycenaean. Such influence is readily seen in south-western Turkey as Mycenaean cultural traditions penetrated inland to distant inland sites in the lower Maeander river valley.     

Pure and impure gestes: the generation of history in Jean d’Outremeuse's Myreur des histors

ABSTRACT

Scholars have long debated the place in medieval historiography of Jean d’Outremeuse's Myreur des histors, a universal history in celebration of Liège written in French around 1399. The abundance of Old French epic material in a chronicle that, according to its author, contained translations of only Latin sources, was once a source of outrage. The Myreur now holds significant interest, however, for its evidence of late medieval narrative strategies. This study demonstrates the Myreur's deliberate adaptation of epic material to glorify Liège. The author reimagines the Carolingian past as a source for future historical narratives by knowingly altering the genealogical framework of the chanson de geste universe. Carrying tales of sexual impurity, he describes the demise of the Carolingian line and transforms figures from epic to function within his linear history. This inventive approach allowed him to create a new hero- and history-generating lineage for his universal history.     

Woman,Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance

The practices and aesthetics of carnival are hotly debated in Brazilian society, as it is taken to be the expression of 'the essence of Brazilianness'. In this paper, an attempt is made to understand the Rio de Janeiro carnival in ways which are not only sensitive to its maps of power and meaning, but also able to explore the subtle ways in which value hierarchies are displaced. To this end, we suggest that cultural categories 'constitute' what they appear to 'describe'. In this way, the mobilisation of categories of 'woman' make women's bodies seemingly both material and intelligible, while foreclosing on the instability of that category. This paper shows that Rio Carnival is a site not only where categories of high and low value are presented and sometimes inverted, but also where the sight of the female body is both made to bear the full weight of contradictory and unstable cultural values, and to disguise and deny those tensions and instabilities. Yet, the performance of 'woman' in Rio Carnival constantly unfolds through power, knowledge and social equivocation about what 'woman' is- or might be. From here, we argue that the performers are not merely dupes to this system of meaning and power, nor do they merely convey cultural norms through their bodies, but are actively performing and masquerading femininity, and this actually renders femininity indeterminate and unknowable, opening up the possibility that the performance can act as a site of resistance .     

Working at the ambivalence of race: ethnomimesis and the cancellation of St Paul's Carnival

The ambivalence of race is taken as a starting point in exploring the cancellation of the 2012 St Paul's Carnival, an African-Caribbean arts event in Bristol, England. That race is unstable, that it can be done and undone, has long been a focus of scholarship in social and cultural geography and beyond. This article asks instead how such a fragile state is maintained and with what implications. This necessitates regarding racial ambivalence as an activity; a condition that has to be worked at to be sustained. Ethnomimesis is used to frame these operations of racial ambivalence. Ethnomimesis is the way in which we encounter, stereotype and recognise cultural practices for ourselves and manifest them to others. It demonstrates how different configurations of race are precariously held between the creative possibilities and contingencies of situated cultural practices. Three moments of cancellation are narrated to show how ethnomimetic processes work through multiple formulations of race. This racial ambivalence is central to Carnival's failure. The organisers attempted to produce a performance of African-Caribbean culture that simultaneously denied the histories of racism that motivated the event. Ethnomimesis exposes how the racial ambivalence emergent in these cultural practices both opens and closes the possibilities to belong.     

Confabulations: a conceptual history

Confabulations are inaccurate or false narratives purporting to convey information about world or self. It is the received view that they are uttered by subjects intent on "covering up" for a putative memory deficit. The epidemiology of confabulations is unknown. Speculated causes include amnesia, embarrassment, "frontal lobe" damage, a subtype of "personality", a dream-like event, and a disturbance of the self. Historical analysis shows that "confabulation" was constructed at the turn of the century as part of a network of concepts (e.g. delusion, fixed idea, etc.) meant to capture narratives with dubious content. This paper deals with the history of the construction of the word and concept of confabulation and with earlier recognitions of the behaviours that serve as their referent and puts forward a model based on historical data. Two phenomena are included under "confabulation": "untrue" utterances by subjects with memory impairment and "fantastic" utterances marshalled with conviction by subjects suffering from psychoses and no memory deficit. Under different disguises, the "covering up" or "gap filling" hypothesis is still going strong. Although superficially plausible, it poses problems in regards to the issue of "awareness of purpose": if full awareness is presumed then the semantics of the concept of "purpose" is severely stretched and confabulations cannot be differentiated from delusions.