Vallejo and the End of History

This article studies the intersections of racial, gender, and national subjectivities in Marta Rojas's novel, Santa Lujuria o Papeles de blanco (1998). I examine the entanglement of fiction and historical memory as well as the (re)appropriation and (re)construction of the slave experience as a vindication of anti-imperialist discourses. By focusing on the depictions of conflicts of race and class set in the colonial period, I also analyze the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento (racial and cultural whitening) and the myth of the eroticized mulatta. Furthermore, I maintain that this novel contributes to the intellectual articulation of new forms of racialization in the Cuban context, while confronting the traditional rhetoric of White supremacy.     

From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology—the Work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context**

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.     

Discrimination and silence: minority foundations in Turkey during the Cyprus conflict of 1974

In 1974, the dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus resulted in Turkish military intervention in the island. The same year, the Turkish Court of Cassation issued a legal decision that rendered possible the confiscation of properties belonging to minority foundations in the years to come. I argue that the case of minority foundations in 1974 was not a coincidence but a conscious reciprocal discrimination applied in both official and unofficial spheres. I support my argument with the following indicators: (1) the wider historical Greek–Turkish conflict and its ‘reciprocal’ nature of discrimination against non‐Muslim minorities; (2) the laden interpretation of the non‐Muslim minorities as the internal enemies in the Turkish mind‐set and its direct reflections on the 1974 case of foundations; and (3) the nature of the press coverage, which I assess using detailed reading and content analysis of three Turkish newspapers (H ürriyet, T ercüman, C umhuriyet) and one Rum minority newspaper (A poyevmatini).     

Mongrel nation: animality and Empire in the novels of J.G. Farrell

The novels of J.G. Farrell (1935–79), reveal a writer preoccupied with the cultural representation of Britain in an era of post-imperial decline. Farrell's ‘Empire trilogy’ illustrates a national consciousness examining its chequered past through focus on Ireland in Troubles (1970), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and the fall of Singapore in The Singapore Grip (1978). In doing so, Farrell's novels feature a notable proliferation of flora and fauna, particularly his use of dogs as representative of national character and the changeable state of British society under attack. This article argues that Farrell's novels explore the state of post-imperial Britain through a sustained focus on dogs and animality. In situations marked by degradation and decline, Farrell gradually collapses the boundaries of order and disorder, obedience and disobedience and man and beast, inviting comparisons between the animal instincts of the dogs that populate his novels and those of Britons fighting for survival.     

Radical (Evangelical) Democracy: The Dreams and Nightmares of Martin Luther King,Jr. and Antonio Negri

Abstract

This essay critically examines the theories of radical democracy offered by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of the beloved community and Antonio Negri's vision of the multitude. The radical democratic visions of King and Negri continue to critically inform progressive reflections on democratic theory and propel new dreams of democracy. Despite their similarities, the differences between Negri and King are substantial. I argue that Negri's dream of the multitude and King's dream of beloved community have been shaped by different conceptions of radical democracy. While Negri works out of a tradition of Italian Marxism, King works within a critical tradition of prophetic evangelicalism. Thus, the political task, according to King, is to translate Jesus' teaching of the Kingdom of God into a beloved community on earth. King's creative negotiation of transcendence and history provides the requisite theological and political resources to develop a truly transcendent and immanent vision of a radical democratic society that is attentive to the demands and dignity of "all God's children."     

Silas Marner,Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot's Ethics of Care

‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine’ reads Eliot's novel Silas Marner through the history of medicine, and particularly in the context of Marner's strange cataleptic trances which embody his alienation and suffering. Eliot, I argue, employs catalepsy in order to investigate ideas of illness and care, especially as that relates to professional medicine and to ideas of community. Focusing on cataleptic case histories and on Eliot's personal health concerns I show how issues of care become philosophical questions about ethical responsibility. It is through Silas Marner and his catalepsy, I conclude, that Victorian scholars can come to understand more about what that means within Eliot's canon and, more widely, in the mid-Victorian period. Overall, the article provides a unique reading of Silas Marner, drawing on significant new archival research on catalepsy and in Eliot's writing of illness narratives.     

Three reflections on Revolution at Point Zero for (re)producing an alternative academy

Abstract

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle is a collection of Federici’s essays, her theorizations and research on feminist struggles to reconfigure social reproduction in ways alternative to capitalist relations. In this intervention, I present reflections on three experiences – teaching Federici’s work, being a graduate student and precarious academic worker, and engaging in rich and meaningful friendships – in order to offer a consideration for how Federici’s centering of social reproduction can provide lessons for resisting the neoliberalization of the academy, taking care of each other, and cultivating alternative and more just social relations. Federici’s work gives principles for how to live and resist together, principally because of her centering of social reproduction and the possibility of crafting an alternative set of social relations. In this intervention, I question and advocate for relationships, accountability, and a critical politics of social reproductive labor as being essential to such a struggle.     

Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse: Fictionalizing the 1920s Cocaine Craze in German-Speaking Europe

Abstract

In the years following the end of the First World War, cocaine achieved unprecedented popularity in Europe, a development reflected in the number of novels dealing with cocaine use by writers from across the Continent. One such is Max Pulver’s Himmelpfortgasse, first published in 1927, which tells of a Munich-based intellectual torn between his respectable bourgeois existence and his cocaine-fuelled passion for a young Viennese painter. After a brief interlude in Berlin, the protagonist follows his new love to Vienna, but their relationship soon deteriorates. The plot of the novel is unremarkable, but its depiction of three separate cocaine-using cliques, each based in a different city and each with a distinct social position and political orientation, vividly illustrates the extent to which recreational use of cocaine spread across geographical, socio-economic, and ideological divides in the period in question. Moreover, the narrator’s essayistic reflections on the function, effects, and social practice of cocaine use allow for productive cross-reading with contemporary toxicological sources. Pulver’s novel also occupies a curious position in literary history. As well as being one of several European cocaine novels of the inter-war period, it shows substantial thematic and stylistic links to the treatment of cocaine in the writings of Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn dating to the previous decade. Himmelpfortgasse’s Expressionist elements add to its distinctiveness, but have probably also contributed to the novel’s relative lack of commercial and critical success.     

ET SI C'ÉTAIT PAR LA FIN QUE TOUT COMMENÇAIT? PEN BEFORE PLOT,OR TRESCH ON POE'S REVERSALS

This brief comment offers some reflections on John Tresch's “Compositor's Reversal.” Contrasting his approach with Gaston Bachelard's, I situate Tresch in the tradition of reading Edgar A. Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a riddle to be decoded. I suggest that Tresch's analytical emphasis on material composition practices rather than Pym's content opens up insightful ways of reading both Pym itself in terms of its composition, style, and narrative voice, and also Poe's well‐known programmatic Philosophy of Composition. The key achievement of Tresch's article beyond its engagement with Poe scholarship is its contribution to the study of writing practices and media studies more broadly. By demonstrating the tight connection Poe forged between natural theology and the material practice of typography, Tresch inserts the typesetting process as an important step in the historiographical trajectory between pen and typewriter. He shows that the mid‐nineteenth‐century context of natural theology marks a decisive difference in connotation between Poe's compositional play with questions of authorship and plausibility, of truth and appearance both described in and performed by his narrative, and later concerns with the apparatus and its potential for the production of an écriture automatique.     

Ema is by Nature a Political Animal: Politics and Capitalism in César Aira's Ema,la cautiva

Where much research focuses on comic and playful elements in César Aira's work, or on the forms of Aira's literature and its relationship with Argentine or Latin American literary tradition, this paper constructs a political reading of Aira's novel Ema, la cautiva. I consider the historical circumstances of the periods in which Aira set and published his novel (immediately prior to the culminating episode in the Conquest of the Desert in 1879 and during the military government of 1976–1983 when references to the Conquest of the Desert were utilised to justify the ‘dirty war’) to argue that, although Aira's ironic mode of writing makes the development of parallels between historical periods fraught with difficulty, the novel contains a latent critique of the military government, of the dirty war and of Peronist economic policies prior to the coup of 1976. Additionally, I argue that Ema, la cautiva contains a political critique of the arguments for the capitalist system at its inception and that the novel can be read together with the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore the development of capitalism and expose the apparent freedoms gained through it as allusive and as substitutes for a new type of subjection.     

The Conflict between Traditional Christian Churches in Ukraine as a Conflict of Identities: Where to Search for the Prospects of Reconciliation? A Reflection in the Light of the Theories of Paul Ricoeur and John Paul Lederach

Abstract

After the independence of Ukraine in 1991 there emerged or re-emerged four churches that derive their roots from ancient Kyiv Christianity. Those churches conflict with each other, the main cause of the split and tensions being the issue of cultural and social–political identities in the country. Such conflicting narrative identities have to be reconciled by the mutual recognition of their diversity when churches in Ukraine want to become a real force for transformation in society. Among the different models of the search for rapprochement in this article I refer to the theories of Paul Ricoeur and John Paul Lederach. According to the ethics of memory of Paul Ricoeur, traditional Ukrainian churches should abandon endless circles of melancholia about their losses and create new identities through the process of mourning. Because the tensions among traditional Christian denominations in Ukraine are not likely to be solved by institutional measures as history proves, churches should concentrate their efforts on working on social and relational platforms. Here I refer to the ethics of moral imagination of John Paul Lederach that envisions focusing the reconciliatory activities on locations of interaction between people that should finally contribute to the rapprochement.     

Ancients and moderns in medieval music theory: from Guido of Arezzo to Jacobus

ABSTRACT

Medieval discourse about both the theory and practice of music featured much debate about the views of moderni and antiqui from when Guido of Arezzo devised a new way of recording pitch in the early eleventh century to the complaints of Jacobus in the early fourteenth century about new forms of measured music in the ars nova. There was also a shift from a Boethian notion that practical music was a manifestation of cosmic music, towards a more Aristotelian model, that privileged music as sensory experience. That this could have a profound effect on human emotion was articulated by Johannes de Grocheio writing about music c. 1270 and Guy of Saint-Denis soon after 1300 about plainchant. Jacobus, writing in the 1320s, was troubled by this shift in thinking about music not as reflections of transcendent realities, but as sounds of human invention that served to move the soul. He argued that musical patterns should reflect a transcendent harmony that was both cosmic and celestial.     

HISTORY MAKING AND ETHICS—AN INTEGRAL RELATIONSHIP?

In this review essay, I examine the arguments made by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, with Anne Martin, in Big and Little Histories: Sizing Up Ethics in Historiography. While I find much to praise in this history, I also ask critical questions about the impact of non-Western ethics on historical writing, the role of ethics in historical writing generally, the need to further investigate the everyday lifeworlds of history makers in order to fully understand their ethical dispositions, and the relationship between the ethics of history making and engaged forms of historical writing. I conclude this review essay by offering some reflections on the interrelationship between history and memory and the ethics involved in both.     

Neoliberal expulsions,crisis, and graphic reportage in Spanish comics

ABSTRACT

In this article, after analyzing the comics industry in Spain in the context of the 2008 crisis, which reveals how small and medium publishers have adapted to new trends in consumption, I focus on the graphic novel Barcelona. Los vagabundos de la chatarra (2015) by Jorge Carrión and Sagar. This comic depicts the underworld of scrap metal collection in Barcelona, where mainly immigrant workers wander the streets, barely eking a living out of the detritus of consumerist society. It is an example of graphic journalism in comics, one of the most interesting developments in the genre in the past few years. It is also a novelty in Spanish comics because certain topics were far from common in the existing repertoire, which had been dominated by adventures, fantasy, and science fiction. Drawing on Verónica Gago's La razón neoliberal (2014) and Saskia Sassen's Expulsions (2015), I challenge conventional approaches to neoliberalism by focusing on neoliberalism from below, which is seen by Gago to point toward the emergence of a new historical consciousness of living in perpetual crisis.     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

In search of lost selves: Aidan Higgins' Scenes from a Receding Past

This essay makes the case for a fresh evaluation of Aidan Higgins' long-neglected autobiographical novel Scenes from a Receding Past. It argues that it is most fruitfully understood as a contribution to the phenomenology of personal identity and that many of its formal idiosyncrasies, especially its deviations from the standard formula for Künstlerroman, are a direct result of its preoccupation with general concepts of selfhood rather than a concern with society, or with the artist's role. I trace the genealogy of Higgins' innovative and unique form of realism in this work, and in the novel to which it forms a prequel, Balcony of Europe, to his attempts to escape the influence of James Joyce; and using the work of, amongst others, Paul Ricoeur, demonstrate how his fiction contributes to a new understanding of the relations between narrative, memory, imagination, and consciousness.     

Self,Consciousness and Agency in The Egoist

This article re-reads representations of the self and agency in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) by drawing new connections between the novel and Victorian psychological theory. Critical discussions of The Egoist and psychological themes have rightly stressed the many ways in which, in Meredith’s novel, impersonal forces, biological, physiological and ideological, threaten to obliterate any notion of the self as discrete and autonomous. Yet Meredith maintains a strong ethical investment in individual agency. Comparing metaphors of fluidity, used to describe the self and consciousness in Meredith’s text, with similar images taken from the work of G. H. Lewes and James Sully, I argue that Meredith presents the self’s plasticity as crucial to its individuation and potential autonomy, even while that same plasticity also underlines the self’s vulnerability to social and ideological forces which threaten its independence. Clara’s individuality and agency take on distinctive political significance by challenging oppressive gender norms. Yet the vulnerabilities and bewildering complexities of individual subjective life, expressed in Meredith’s extravagant extensions of psychological metaphors, mean that any one self’s moves towards greater freedom must be fraught with uncertainty. The final part of the essay draws new connections between the psychological imagery that I have been exploring and Meredith’s engagement with human evolution. Clara’s individuation and capacity for autonomous action give the lie to Willoughby’s pseudo-Darwinian schematisation of her identity, yet the relationship between self and evolution remains a serious and complex issue in the novel.     

‘A Just and Liberal Landlord’: Manliness,Work, and the Landed Gentleman in the Brontës’ Novels

The Brontës’ many striking depictions of landowners are rife with ambiguities, particularly as these characters are seldom presented at work in their traditional roles as landlord and magistrate. While the Victorian landed gentleman’s status was partially predicated on not having to work for money, both the new Victorian professional ideal and traditional conceptions of paternalist care affected the ways this class was viewed by middle-class commentators at mid-century. In the Brontës’ novels, traditional paternalist responsibilities are fused with aspects of the professional ideal in depictions of reformed landed gentlemen, but even this new, ideal figure is represented as unsatisfactory. In this article, I consider how landowners were written about in contemporary periodicals and how the Brontës engage with these expectations. The Irish tenant and landlord problem, which was covered extensively in the periodical press, shaped Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in a profound way, as the novel serves as an important, but until now overlooked, reworking of Maria Edgeworth’s representations of landowning masculinity in Castle Rackrent (1800). The Brontës repeatedly depict landowners retreating into the domestic sphere, which I argue forms an implicit narrative challenge to this figure’s social authority. This article opens up new ground for the examination of Victorian discourse on professionalization in relation to the Brontës’ works and a consideration of the ways in which this discourse was applied to landowners both in the periodical press and the Victorian novel.     

Religion,secularisation and nationalism in Quebec and the Basque Country: a comparative approach

This article analyses the relationship between religion, secularisation and nationalism in Quebec and the Basque Country using a comparative approach. I will first outline the ethnic‐religious origin of these nationalist movements. Second, I will examine the extent to which the ‘new’ secular and violent nationalism (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna and Front de Libération du Québec) that emerged in the 1960s was fuelled in its origin by a transfer of sacrality. Third, I will address an aspect that has led some theorists to view religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena, in which nationalism is construed as a religion of blood sacrifice. Fourth, I will examine another aspect that leads to this view of religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena, as the latter also provides a framework of transcendent meaning through an imaginary of continuity between the different generations. The article concludes with a series of general considerations on the relations between nationalism, secularisation and religion.