Walter the Chancellor on Ilghazi and Tughtakin: a prisoner’s perspective

This article concerns two leading Turkish rulers, active in the Near East during the crusading era: Tughtakin of Damascus and Ilghazi of Mardin. They were important commanders, but the surviving sources create difficulties when outlining the contours of characters and cultural perspectives. Muslim authors typically present them as idealised Islamic rulers and yet it is difficult to accept such stereotyped portraits. This article sheds new light on these men, seeking to understand how far they had transitioned from the steppe culture of their forefathers into a more distinctively Islamic mould. It focuses in particular on the Antiochene chronicle written by Walter the Chancellor. He witnessed both rulers at first hand when he was their prisoner in Aleppo in 1119, an experience which left him deeply scarred. This is tainted evidence, yet it will be shown that many of Walter’s observations also provide invaluable insights that deserve to be taken seriously.     

‘It’s the best place on Earth’: Newfoundland women’s outmigration,diaspora and the myth of return*

This article explores Newfoundland women’s experiences of outmigration as a gendered process of displacement. Experiences of displacement can provide significant insight into Newfoundland and Labrador’s fractured political relationship with the nation of Canada. This article argues that Newfoundland outmigration must be viewed through the lenses of diaspora and intersectionality, as nationalist sentiment and the province’s peripheral place within Canada affect women’s experiences of outmigration. Tensions shaped by gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status affect their ability to integrate into Canadian society and influence their decisions about returning home.     

China’s Information and Communication Technology in Geographic Perspective

Two economic geographers analyze the unprecedented growth of China’s information and communication technology (ICT) industry over the past decade (2000–2010)—an industry increasingly important as a new engine powering exports and providing infrastructure and services critical to sustaining economic growth. Using agglomeration and inequality indices including the Herfindahl and the Gini, the authors show that the geographic concentration of ICT activities has decreased over time, in tandem with a decline in their regional inequality; however, a new ICT development index (IDI) designed for this study reveals a significant and persistent gap in ICT development between the country’s advancing and lagging provinces. The paper also explores a range of factors contributing to “leapfrog” ICT growth in some provinces, as well as the challenges likely to be faced by the industry in the future. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: L630, L960, O180, O330. 2 figures, 4 tables, 85 references, 1 appendix.     

‘Queen’s Day – TV’s Day’: the British monarchy and the media industries

In contemporary British history, Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 is typically imagined and narrated as the moment where television was anchored as a national cultural form. In addition, it is well documented by commentators and scholars that during preparation for the coronation, politicians and the palace had reservations that live television might fracture the carefully constructed mystique of monarchy. This article revisits the coronation to consider why and how television was perceived as a watershed moment for both monarchy and television, and what difference this has made to royal representations since. Using the work of Michael Warner, it argues that the mediated intimacies facilitated by television as a new cultural form encouraged viewers to enact participatory and active processes of spectatorship as royal ‘publics’, who are brought into being through being addressed. That is, it was the act of emphasising the centrality of television’s role in the coronation, and in reinforcing the apparent distance between monarchy and (popular) media, that these ‘meanings’ of the coronation were constructed in the public and historical imaginary.     

Risk and security on the Mexico-to-US migrant journey: women’s testimonios of violence

In this article, I argue that immigrants’ meanings, perceptions, and feelings of risk and (in)security are relational, multi-scalar, and contextual to lived experiences before, during, and after the migration journey. Paying attention to and analyzing Mexican women’s testimonios of intimate experiences uncovers why they migrate, how migration is experienced, and how migrant women frame their lives in the US. In this article, I compare how national and transnational policies of the War on Drugs in Mexico, which increased militarization of the US-Mexico border and created tougher immigration policies in the US (all in the name of US national security), form and transform intimate experiences of risk and (in)security across the migration journey for the same population. This comparative approach challenges and expands US-Mexico literature that does not read across experiences in the three sites of the migration journey.     

Between friendship and justice: on Lincoln’s political thought

Reading Aristotle and applying his notion of philia, or political friendship, across 26 centuries sheds significant light into Abraham Lincoln’s career. It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address. The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends who shared a commitment to nature and nature’s law as expressed in the Declaration.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

Mill’s closet: J.S. Mill on solitude and the imperfect democracy

This paper focuses on the role solitude played in John Stuart Mill’s political thought. By doing so, it challenges contemporary appropriations of Mill’s thought by participatory, deliberative and epistemic theories of democracy. Mill considered solitude to be contrary to political participation and public debate, but nonetheless regarded it as essential for democracy and for intellectual progress. Since the early 1830s Mill began developing an idea of solitude while simultaneously forming a particular kind of a democratic model which I refer to as ‘imperfect democracy’. According to this model, democracy is restrained by non-democratic elements which offer a contrary spirit and are not incorporated by democracy. At first Mill believed the ‘leisured class’ would fulfil this task, but later considered solitude as a possible solution. This paper follows the way in which these ideas were crystallised in Mill’s thought, and by doing so offers a novel interpretation of Mill’s political thought and his nuanced understanding of solitude, political participation and democracy.     

Manent and Perreau-Saussine on MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism

This essay examines Pierre Manent’s and Émile Perreau-Saussine’s critique of Alasdair MacIntyre. Both criticize MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelianism as an apolitical Aristotelianism, arguing that it is a deficient because it neglects Aristotle’s question of the best regime. In examining MacIntyre’s narrative biography of Justice O’Connor in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, I show the merit of this critique, in that it obscures what the applications of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism are in the modern polity. While MacIntyre is not without a strong reply to their objections, I conclude that the deeper, unresolved disagreement MacIntyre has with Manent and Perreau-Saussine is over how to characterize modernity.