Performing curiosity: re-viewing women’s domestic embroidery in seventeenth-century England

For many in seventeenth-century England, curiosity became an intellectual and physical means of exploring natural and artificial wonders and categorising tangible and intangible things. For well-off Englishwomen, “curious work” had a more specific meaning. It described a specific type of pictorial, decorative embroidery, usually learnt in school and practised in the home, possessing moral agency and functioning as an indicator of status and wealth. Although recognised for their exuberant use of extravagant materials, these embroideries have proved challenging to appreciate and understand. This paper re-situates these “curious works”, placing them within the changing concept and practice of curiosity in early modern England by using an object-based evidence approach combined with an historical archaeology methodology. Viewing these artefacts through the “lens of curiosity” provides a new perspective on these embroideries as the outcome of the performance of the feminine curiosity and thus the equivalent to the masculine project of curiosity.     

A Science Journalist’s Perspective

A critique of papers in the session on Archaeology and War.

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Résumé  Une critique d’articles concernant la session portant sur l’archéologie et la guerre.

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Resumen  Una crítica sobre los trabajos de la jornada sobre arqueología y guerra.

     

Indian Objects,English Body: Utopian Yearnings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Focusing on the representation of Indian shawls and Indian tea in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, this article has two aims: first, it argues that the novel creates its ideology of domesticity and proper femininity through the creation of a readable object world. It is evident that one of the consequences of the empire was to Indianise its English subjects, thereby making them more cosmopolitan and making the English home a monument to imperial Britain’s success in the global system of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. These links then brought together the materiality of the empire and the Victorian preoccupation with material culture, constituting an imperial culture based on domestic interiority, visual and tactile pleasure, and political economy. Second, the article attempts to show how the ambiguities that enter the text along with these foreign objects unsettle the status quo established by the novel’s middle-class ideology and propose utopian alternatives to it through a mobile, boundary-crossing female body and a more porous domestic setting. These alternatives are entirely speculative, incomplete, and restrained, but significant nonetheless, precisely because they turn this ideology’s emphasis on the middle-class female body inside out, so as to recompose this body and its habitual spaces in new ways.     

‘Dissidence’ in Holocaust Memorials in Literature: Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (Chladnou zemí)

Abstract

Established Czech precedent has made the town of Terezín an important literary symbol of Holocaust memory, used in the 1960s to construct myths of Czech innocent victimhood. Jáchym Topol’s novel, The Devil’s Workshop (2009), returns to the theme with great originality, avoiding such myths by using a compromised first-person Czech narrator, who is involved in setting up ‘dissident’ commemorative museums at Terezín and in Belarus. These draw on documented accounts of real atrocities for their authenticity. Competitive in national terms, commercialized, and ethically compromised, they are finally, arguably inevitably, silenced. Topol’s ‘truth-telling’ is discussed in the context of Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of committed Holocaust literature, Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of museums as commercialized constructions of nationality, and Timothy Snyder’s historical account of the killings in Eastern Europe; the ambiguous pessimism of his novel stands up well to criticism and, it is argued, has lessons even for historians of the Holocaust.     

Translocational Irish identities in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012)

A rural-urban exodus subsequently followed by overseas migration has characterised geographical movement in Ireland. While Irish women have outnumbered men in their diaspora, physical and symbolic identification with Ireland has been decisive to the polemic of Irish female migration. This article explores how real and symbolic contradictions in Irish women experiencing displacement are reflected in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012). Using translocational positionality as an intersectional research framework, the article reveals the importance of spatiality in the ‘life writings’ of a particular situational subject and its major role in identity construction processes. Furthermore, this article relates the individual biography to the collective and complex construction of identity of Irish women abroad in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis sheds light on many unvoiced experiences shared by female migrants and discloses key aspects of Irish migration that result in a problematic gendered relation with the land still unresolved.     

Rural children’s role in buffering household poverty through ganyu (piecework) in Zambia

In Zambia, the ways in which social change intersects with rural livelihoods to increase children’s workload and commodify their labour are poorly understood. In this article, changing patterns of rural children’s work are seen as necessitated by their evolving household roles and contributions in an increasingly rural cash-based economy. Drawing on child-focused qualitative research in rural Lundazi district in Zambia, it is explored how children use a traditional labour practice called ‘ganyu’ (piecework) to ameliorate poverty. The infiltration of the cash-based economy, amplified by the Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes, a predominantly adult-centred traditional informal socio-economic levelling mechanism of ganyu, and its evolution into more cash-oriented transactions increasingly involving children are discussed. Although ganyu has largely been seen as characterized by exploitative labour relations, the empirical findings from this research indicate the complex ways in which the practice is empowering children and their families. The resources accrued through ganyu are vital for both personal and household well-being. The findings of this study have important implications to rethink not only contentious issues of child labour but also dominant narratives of childhood that fail to take into account children’s lived experiences as situated in local, social, economic, and cultural contexts.     

Latitudinarianism,secular theology and Sir Thomas Browne’s influence in George Mackenzie’s Religio Stoici (1663)

This article revisits George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh’s Religio Stoici (1663) which is often acclaimed as the first in a venerable series of imitations of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1642) as well as a possible influence for John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682). By contrast, this articles returns to the charged contemporary atmosphere that prevailed in Scotland in 1663, following the controversial re-establishment of Episcopalianism the previous year. Combining an instinctive epistemological scepticism with an audacious and polemical anticlericalism, Mackenzie’s tract attacked dogmatic intolerance and denominational exclusivity and instead advanced a courageous, solitary and very public plea for peaceful religious practice.     

On the Side of Light: Performing Morality at Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials

Abstract

In Rwanda, numerous memorials have arisen to remember the 1994 genocide and its victims. This paper considers the effect of the national genocide memorials on Western tourist visitors, in the context of research on ‘dark tourism’ and Western attitudes toward death and the dead. It draws on the idea that, in a Western context, viewing the remains of violent death can be a kind of ‘soft murder’, and on the concept that the act of witnessing violence creates a community of witnesses implicated in that violence. Western visitors to Rwandan genocide memorials therefore form a community, and their responses are guided by a set of community rules regarding behaviour and experiences during and after the visit. These rules, this paper argues, are rooted in pressures to assert oneself as a properly moral individual through performing morality in a morally ambiguous setting.     

On Not Reading The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service

This essay focuses on Garnet Wolseley’s controversial war instruction manual, The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service (1869). While the Pocket-book’s contribution to discussions of reading and soldiers’ education has carved out a significant place for it in Victorian military history, in its day it was constantly contested and undermined by contradictory representations, as a book much talked about but little read. This essay is an exercise in tracing these eccentric reception histories, as an acute reminder that books may well have vibrant intellectual lives without actually being read. To examine the literary and material circulation of the Pocket-book in the late nineteenth century, it draws on archival research in the Macmillan Archive and Wolseley’s private papers to discuss the genesis of the text not just as a compendium of information but also as an object that is handled, carried, and exchanged. I juxtapose these considerations with episodes in the representation of the Pocket-book: in an anti-war pamphlet; an anonymous satirical drawing found in Wolseley’s personal scrapbooks; and in Kipling’s short stories about British soldiers in colonial South Asia. In all of these, the Pocket-book is characterized as a dubious, even dangerous text – one that was neither read, nor should be. The examples demonstrate three of the different trajectories through which the Pocket-book emerged as an unread book in the Victorian imagination: through encouragements not to read, rejection, and misappropriation.     

Moderation and religious criticism in William Cartwright’s The Ordinary (1635)

Building on the recent revival of critical interest in the drama of William Cartwright, this article explores the politics of religious moderation in his 1635 play The Ordinary. I situate the concept of moderation in Caroline England in relation to recent historical work on the subject, examining how Cartwright treats the subject in his poetry, where he argues that religious extremism inhibits the proper articulation of moderate politics. I then consider religious criticism in The Ordinary, suggesting that it attacks aspects of Puritan and Arminian theology alike. Although he ranges over a number of topics, Cartwright is particularly concerned with the way in which religious innovation is undermined by economic unfairness, incompetence, and greed. The play shows how Caroline comedy engages with polemical culture in subtle and sophisticated ways.     

Revisiting History’s Cenotaphs: The “Common Man” and Ethics of Commemoration in Conflict Archaeology

The aphorism that victors write history routinely stirs up debate about the epistemic underpinnings of conflict histories. This is as true of analyses of the most publicized of modern wars as it is of studies of little documented conflicts in the distant past. Nowhere, however, are source discrepancies as tangible as in the records of resistance movements in feudal and colonial societies. Archaeologists working in such contexts thus have a chance to adopt the ‘common man’ as a subject of research not only to balance the record, as it were, but also on ethical grounds with a view towards commemoration.     

Performing ‘Oriental’ masculinities: embodied identities among Vietnamese men in London

The young British-born Vietnamese are a largely unrecognised group in society and are generally not considered part of multiethnic Britain. A key characteristic of their racial positioning has been the very specific forms of hegemonic gendered labelling shaped by discourses of Orientalism. These Orientalist discourses subject Vietnamese men to pernicious stereotyping linked to ‘passive’ and effeminising forms of ‘subordinate’ masculinity. The ethnic and gendered dimensions of male Vietnamese youth experience are further compounded by the intersecting processes of social class and urban geographies which provide a distinct range of identity outcomes; these are particularly acute for working-class men living in highly urbanised areas. This article explores how young Vietnamese men subvert Oriental labels and stereotypes by using a range of unexpected, creative and ‘spectacular’ manipulations of hair, dress, style and comportment. I argue that Vietnamese men negotiate and perform ethnic masculinities through conscious and strategic forms of agency which entail everyday mundane forms of ‘risk’. The article draws upon primary data from in-depth, narrative interviews and participant observation.     

Scotland’s Electoral Geography Differed from the Rest of Britain’s in 2017 (and 2015) – Exploring its Contours

The rapid expansion in support for the Scottish National Party (SNP) between the 2010 and 2015 general elections substantially changed the country’s electoral geography, as again did its relative decline at the next election in 2017. At that last contest, however, the SNP won many seats with fewer than 40% of the votes cast, a situation very different from that in the rest of Great Britain. That difference – which had a considerable impact on the formation of a government in June 2017 – came about because of the nature of the competition in individual seats.