“UNABLE TO RESIST”: ON THE “POSSIBILITY” OF “IMPOSSIBILITY” AND CHRISTOPHE BOUTON'S TIME AND FREEDOM

This essay reflects critically on Martin Heidegger's remarks about authenticity and death with the aid of Christophe Bouton's Temps et liberté (2002), translated by Christopher Macann as Time and Freedom (2014). It first raises general questions concerning the possible thematic relationship between human endeavoring (action) and the experiences of finitude and freedom. Heidegger's Being and Time is particularly useful for exploring this relationship, but certain problems emerge when using this text for accessing the essay's themes. To wit: there are good reasons for mistrusting readings of Being and Time as a “practical” guide for grounding action. Against the practical reading, the essay wishes to reclaim the ontological‐existential significance of Heidegger's text. Although Bouton's treatment of Being and Time excludes its ontological dimensions and is entirely practical, even to the point of disregarding certain theoretical risks inherent in this approach, Bouton's study is indispensable for situating Being and Time in a historical‐intellectual context, whereby the experiences of freedom and time are understood within certain metaphysical presuppositions rendering them difficult to establish together on reliable grounds. Following Bouton's lead, the essay shows that the hermeneutic differences between practical and ontological readings of Being and Time can be explored through reflections on what Heidegger might have meant by the term “Möglichkeit” (“possibility”), from which Bouton infers “freedom.” It is alleged that Bouton does not fully consider all of Heidegger's assertions regarding Möglichkeit, most problematically the claim that the human being's most essential “possibility” is its “impossibility,” that is to say, its death.     

U.S. Latina/o Muslims Since 1920: From “Moors” to “Latino Muslims”

This article provides a historical overview of the development of the U.S. Latina/o Muslim community. U.S. Latina/os have been converting to Islam since the 1920s. Early converts were primarily found in African‐American‐majority Islamic communities, though there were some others who entered Islam through ties to Muslim immigrants. In both cases, the U.S.'s racist social system had brought the two communities together. In New York City during the 1970s, however, a group of around a dozen Latina/o Muslims felt that neither the African‐American‐majority nor the immigrant‐majority communities sufficiently addressed Latina/os' particular culture, languages, social situations, and contributions to Islamic history. To correct this, they created the first known U.S. Latina/o Muslim organisation, the Alianza Islamica, a group which fostered a “Latino Muslim” identity. Since that time, due to the growing numbers of U.S. Latina/o Muslims, as well as a tendency to foster ties with Latina/o Muslims in countries outside of the U.S., U.S. Latina/o Muslims are more and more adopting the “Latino Muslim” identity, which is now being promoted by several organisations and prominent leaders.     

2. CONSTRUCTIONS OF “HOME,”“FRONT,” AND WOMEN'S MILITARY EMPLOYMENT IN FIRST‐WORLD‐WAR BRITAIN: A SPATIAL INTERPRETATION

In First‐World‐War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters.     

3. “PRESENCE” AND MYTH

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of “presence” that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate “presence” to representation. Then I focus on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of “stowaway” (Runia), so that the past is literally “present” in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so‐called “parallel processes” for an analysis of this variant of historical representation.     

THE “INS” AND “OUTS” OF HISTORY: REVISION AS NON‐PLACE

Revision in history is conventionally characterized as a linear sequence of changes over time. Drawing together the contributions of those engaged in historiographical debates that are often associated with the term “revision,” however, we find our attention directed to the spaces rather than the sequences of history. Contributions to historical debates are characterized by the marked use of spatial imagery and spatialized language. These used to suggest both the demarcation of the “space of history” and the erasure of existing historiographies from that space. Bearing these features in mind, the essay argues that traditional, temporally oriented explanations for revision in history, such as Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, miss the mark, and that a more promising line of explanation arises from the combined use of Michel Foucault's idea of “heterotopias” and Marc Augé's idea of “non‐places.” Revision in history is to be found where writers use imagery to move readers away from rival historiographies and to control their movement in the space of history toward their desired vision. Revision is thus associated more with control than with liberation.     

Organic Public Geographies: “Making the Connection”

Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape ( Fuller 2008 ) in geography's mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non‐ academic outlets ( Castree 2006 ; Mitchell 2008 ; Oslender 2007 ), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area‐based or single‐interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome” ( Ward 2006 :499; see Fuller and Askins 2010 ). A number of well‐known projects exist where research has been “done not merely for the people we write about but with them” ( Gregory 2005 :188; see also Cahill 2004 ; Johnston and Pratt 2010 ). However, collaborative writing of academic publications which gives research participants authorial credit is unusual ( mrs kinpainsby 2008 ; although see Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006 ). This paper is about an organic public geographies project called “Making the connection”. It is written by a diverse collection of (non‐)academic participants who contributed to the project before it had started, as it was undertaken, and/or after it had finished. This is a “messy”, process‐oriented text ( Cook et al. 2007 ) working through the threads (partially) connecting the activities of its main collaborators, including a referee who helped get the paper to publication.