A Feminist Network in an Artists’ Home: Mary and George Watts,George Meredith,and Josephine Butler

This interdisciplinary, historicist-feminist paper (combining literary and art historical perspectives as well as an awareness of historical context and an application of recent feminist theory) explores the feminist affiliations of the Victorian artists Mary and George Watts, focusing specifically on their close friendships with the writer and women’s suffrage supporter George Meredith and the women’s rights worker Josephine Butler. It introduces the Wattses’ own anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnership before investigating their relationships with Meredith and Butler through a reading of Mary Watts’s unpublished and hitherto untranscribed diaries (which record their interactions) as well as a discussion of George Watts’s paintings (particularly his portraits of Meredith and Butler in his ‘Hall of Fame’). This paper thus offers an unprecedented insight into the Wattses’ personal and professional relationships as well as their progressive socio-political positions, reclaiming them as early feminists who were part of a wider emergent feminist community. This paper’s discussion of the Wattses, Meredith, and Butler provides new perspectives on the connections, works, and views of these public literary, artistic, and feminist figures as well as the ways in which they supported and promoted the women’s rights movement that escalated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus offers a fuller understanding of these figures as well as of the rise of early feminism in the Victorian period.     

“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control,Self‐valorisation,and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

There are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker “resistance” in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self‐governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of “self‐valorisation”, we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management’s control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments.     

In Search of an Invisible Culture in David Plante’s American Ghosts and Robert Cormier’s Fade

David Plante’s American Ghosts (2005) and Robert Cormier’s Fade (1988), autobiographical narratives about growing up in southern New England in French Catholic neighborhoods called Little Canadas, both employ the trope of invisibility to convey the ethnic community’s lack of presence, agency, or permanence within an englobing American culture that progressively erodes the foundations of its cultural otherness. Both texts hinge upon cultural erasure. In Plante’s memoir, in which he seeks to gain access to his cultural past, his childhood self is haunted by the ghosts of his Indian forebears and his adult self, by the ghosts of his parish. These supernatural beings who shuttle between absence and presence signal the loss of cultural memory and identity that assimilation engenders. Cormier’s novel chronicles the effects of invisibility on three “faders” representing first-, second-, and third-generation French Canadians in New England. A metaphor for the progressive loss of ancestral heritage in the adopted land, Fade offers a portrait of the gradual disintegration of Frenchtown from its heyday in the 1930s to its dissolution in the 1960s.     

Making a Life: Getting Ahead,and Getting a Living in Aboriginal New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographically grounded examination of the intersections between work, employment and identity for Indigenous people living in a country town in far western New South Wales, Australia. It argues that work, employment and labour are locally deployed categories that meet mainstream discourse in a precarious fashion and, that this disjunction has clear material and ideological repercussions. For most Aboriginal people in Wilcannia, you are who you are, not by virtue of what you have ‘become’ in any economic, professional or educational sense. Who you are is not a becoming, it is established at birth. These genealogical forms of being through kinship see a construction of self which in many ways is at variance to the standard ‘autonomous self‐regulating individual’ (Sennett 1998:215). This sense of self, for most, is not determined by engagement in the capitalist division of labour; indeed, the greater the engagement in the capitalist economy, the more problematic and fraught a sense of self and of belonging can become.     

‘A Cunning Skill Did Lurk’: Susanna Perwich and the Mysteries of a Seventeenth-Century Needlework Cabinet

A seventeenth-century embroidered cabinet belonging to the Los Angeles Museum of Art includes a rare detail — a coat of arms. This essay explores the likelihood that the maker of this cabinet, as established by its coat of arms, was a member of the Perwich family, who ran a girls’ school in Civil War-era London, and the possibility that the cabinet was made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy and subject of a 1661 biography published shortly after her untimely death. This essay discusses connections between Perwich’s life and the cabinet’s needleworked illustrations, revealing that the cabinet illustrates the Book of Ruth. Cabinets and caskets with their many compartments can be seen as metaphors for the compartmentalisation of the lives of late seventeenth-century Englishwomen who were excluded from many male-dominated physical and intellectual spaces in the aftermath of the English Civil War but who, nonetheless, created and meaningfully embellished personal objects in their own spaces.     

周恩来赴印度三次规劝十四世达赖喇嘛

西藏和平解放后,1956年4月成立了西藏自治区筹备委员会,着手进行民主改革。西藏上层分裂分子大为恐惧,在西康地区发动武装叛乱。1956年11月,印度邀请十四世达赖喇嘛参加释迦牟尼涅槃2500周年大会。国外敌对势力和流亡的西藏上层分裂分子包围达赖,鼓动"西藏独立",策反随行官员,致使达赖和随行官员思想混乱并滞留印度。1956年底,周恩来在访问印度期间与达赖进行了三次谈话,阐明了党的方针政策,教育随行官员和达赖的家人,争取印度总理尼赫鲁的支持,为达赖最终安全返回西藏起到了关键作用。     

‘An entirely new land’? Italy’s post-war culture and its Fascist past

Scholarship has for decades emphasized the significant continuities in Italian culture and society after Fascism, calling into question the rhetoric of post-war renewal. This article proposes a reassessment of that rhetoric through the analysis of five key metaphors with which Italian intellectuals represented national recovery after 1945: parenthesis, disease, flood, childhood and discovery. While the current critical consensus would lead us to expect a cultural conversation characterized by repression and evasion, an analysis of these five post-war metaphors instead reveals both a penetrating reassessment of Italian culture after Fascism and an earnest adherence to the cause of national revitalization. Foregrounding the inter-relation of Italy’s prospects for change and its continuities with Fascism, these metaphors suggest that post-war Italian intellectuals conceived of their country’s hopes for renewal, as well as its connections to the recent past, in terms that transcend the binary division favoured in many historical accounts.     

‘On a nos mots à dire’: Kanak Women's Experience of Bridewealth in Lifou

Bridewealth in Lifou cannot be discussed on its own; rather it should be considered within the plurality of ceremonial acts which are needed to legitimize a marriage as customary. What do these transactions mean? Where does women's agency lie? Through a longitudinal analysis of ethnographic materials from my fieldwork in Lifou, Loyalty Islands, I consider how Kanak women are engaged in and perceive these ceremonial and cultural processes through a declared women's perspective that highlights their ability to make autonomous choices in an open ended historical context. I argue that it is a case of ‘positive agency’. I emphasize that local categories (june hmala and wenehleng) which define specific moments in this process can be subsumed under the anthropological term ‘bridewealth’. Further, I examine the meaning of money in bridewealth and the fact that the monetary contribution keeps increasing, raising local concerns about the need to regulate the amount circulating in marriage exchanges and its dispersion. Furthermore in Lifou there is no indication that the assembling of the bridewealth by the grooms implies a commoditization and (later) exploitation of women.     

France - History and Story

Although the career of Thierry de Martel, one of France's most illustrious neurosurgeons, would seem primarily of interest to historians of medicine, his life and self‐inflicted death can be inscribed into different contexts. De Martel can be considered representative of what Jean Touchard calls ‘l'esprit des années trente’, a spirit both of malaise and revolt which prompted many among the First World War generation to seek new political and intellectual alternatives to replace what they deemed the morally bankrupt ones of the Third Republic. Both because of his connections with Parisian literary and political circles, and the paradoxical nature of his ideological itinerary between the wars (encompassing both proto‐fascism and Germanophobia), de Martel's case is particularly interesting. This biographical portrait of a previously unstudied ‘nonconformist’ in turn serves as a prism through which to view the ferment of the interwar period.     

Eugenics,Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe

This article uses the fifty‐year career of Paul Popenoe as a lens through which to examine the North American eugenics movement. Popenoe, a leading advocate of compulsory sterilisation in the 1930s, became a celebrated marriage counsellor in the 1950s, famous for the Ladies' Home Journal feature ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ The ease with which Popenoe metamorphosed from a champion of sterilisation to an expert on marriage was made possible by, and helps to reveal, deep ideological affinities and organisational connections between eugenics and marriage counselling in the United States.     

Italian identity: Catholic responses to secularist definitions,c.1910–48

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.     

Intertextual geopolitics and La Carte et le territoire: a cautionary tale for UNESCO and the repas gastronomique des Français?

ABSTRACT

La Carte et le territoire features a France in decline, saved, entre autres, by attracting foreign tourists with ‘heritagised’ French food. Eight days after the novel won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, the repas gastronomique des Français was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (ICH). Considering Houellebecq’s use of tropes of culinary heritage alongside the French ICH bid reveals parallels in their manipulation of culinary heritage to create globally marketable products. Yet the motivations and ramifications of the ‘gastrodiplomacy’ in the novel and in the French state’s arguably neo-imperialist initiative differ tellingly. Houellebecq’s novel brings into cautionary focus how responding to perceived geopolitical imperatives by creating narratives of cultural heritage can instead eradicate the conditions of renewal upon which it depends and limit cultural diversity. The instrumentalisation of food heritage by a global corporation, national government and UNESCO—an ostensibly benign supranational institution—risks creating new conditions of global competition. However, comparing the novel and the narratives surrounding the repas gastronomique des Français nonetheless suggests that representations of food—like language—can exceed authorial intention, and the gastronomic miscegenation that is strategically missing from Houellebecq’s novel and elided in the ICH bid may yet continue to feed French food heritage.     

Can the Subaltern Woman Run? Gender,race and agency in colonial missionary texts

This article challenges the contention that it is not feasible to trace the agency of subaltern female subjects in colonial documents without at the same time distorting and even violating that very agency. Taking as its prism a letter written by a male Danish missionary chronicling a young Pariah woman’s escape from missionary control in early 20th-century South India, it argues that while a search for authentic, autonomous agency is a highly dubious endeavour, relinquishing attempts to recover the acts and interventions of persons at the bottom of social hierarchies is equally problematic. Suggesting a reading ‘along as well as against the grain’, the article tracks the ways in which the subaltern woman’s agency has been simultaneously recorded and denied, and argues for the necessity of probing both the possibilities and impossibilities presented by this type of a source.     

Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

ABSTRACT

In pursuit of a novel perspective on legacies of empire in the present, this introduction addresses prominent debates related to post-imperialism, collective memory, and the construction of historical knowledge, while also reviewing recent trends in post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman studies. First, I examine the insights and limitations of ‘memory studies,’ ultimately proposing a more capacious model of post-imperial ‘ambivalence.’ I then recapitulate Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach to historical knowledge in order to anchor the signal conceptual contribution of the volume, ‘textured historicity.’ This discussion is followed by a meditation on the role of metaphors in conceptualizing post-imperial legacies and a roster of the most common metaphors for post-imperial legacies. Finally, the introduction briefly summarizes the volume’s constituent essays and the rubrics that unite them.     

A conception of the self in the later middle ages

This paper presents a conception of the nature of the individual self in the late middle ages, involving the stance from which the ‘I’ beholds the world (in this case, one newly more autonomous from the corporate/ecclesiastical world view), and the manner in which the self (‘I’) apprehends itself (in this case, self-apprehension involves sensing that one's essentially public face is ‘being seen’ as standing out from the group by others, as well as knowing oneself via ‘reflections’ from others). A theme of ‘seeing’ the world from a more autonomous standpoint while ‘being seen’ as a more separated psychic entity is discerned, which is in keeping with an emphasis on vision in this age, discerned by other researchers. The paper bases its case partly on examination of the arguments and evidence cited by other researchers who have studied the self or individuality in the later middle ages.     

A conception of the self in the later middle ages

This paper presents a conception of the nature of the individual self in the late middle ages, involving the stance from which the ‘I’ beholds the world (in this case, one newly more autonomous from the corporate/ecclesiastical world view), and the manner in which the self (‘I’) apprehends itself (in this case, self-apprehension involves sensing that one's essentially public face is ‘being seen’ as standing out from the group by others, as well as knowing oneself via ‘reflections’ from others). A theme of ‘seeing’ the world from a more autonomous standpoint while ‘being seen’ as a more separated psychic entity is discerned, which is in keeping with an emphasis on vision in this age, discerned by other researchers. The paper bases its case partly on examination of the arguments and evidence cited by other researchers who have studied the self or individuality in the later middle ages.     

Western plague literature,the Irish Famine and Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond

This article places Castle Richmond, Anthony Trollope’s controversial Irish Famine novel, within the context of Western plague narratives as outlined by recent plague narrative scholars and by René Girard in his seminal 1974 essay “The Plague in Literature and Myth”. By demonstrating Castle Richmond’s conformity to a very particular cluster of attributes found in Western plague literature, this article helps expand our reading of Trollope’s novel, a work that is otherwise often seen as an incoherent failure. This article proposes that Trollope used Western plague discourse to structure and organise his response to Ireland’s Great Hunger. I contend here that we see in his novel’s construction the scaffolding of Judaic, Greco-Roman, Medieval and Renaissance plague narrative traditions, traditions that follow a predictable pattern of transgression, punishment, near social collapse, atonement achieved by expelling or sacrificing a scapegoat or scapegoats, followed by the restoration of an improved social order. This line of reasoning encapsulates Castle Richmond’s overt logical structure. Yet, this article goes on to argue that there are numerous ways in which Trollope undermines the logical “inevitability” and the “divine ordination” of the Famine which his use of Western plague discourse implies.     

Australian ‘left’ and ‘right’: (Social composition and ideological integrity)

Political self‐identification and interest in politics are used in this paper to define ‘left’, ‘centre’ and ‘right’ affiliation within the Australian public. Detailed political attitudes of these three groups are then analysed. The Australian ‘left’ is half the size of the ‘right’. It is, however, much better educated and much more ideological. Its political attitudes are twice as coherent as the attitudes of the ‘right’. The left's ideological congruence partly results from the better education of its affiliates. However, the difference in ideological congruence of the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ remains quite great even when the impact of education is statistically eliminated.     

The body politic and “political medicine” in the Jacobean period: Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique

ABSTRACT

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building an argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations.