Unsettling Settler Belonging: (Re)naming and Territory Making in the Pacific Northwest

Names can act as daily reminders of a colonial presence. To unsettle Settler origin stories, we strive to reveal the legacy of (dis)possession rooted in naming. As case studies, we consider the attribution of the name Salish Sea, the naming of the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Georgia, and the delineation of national boundaries during the San Juan Water Boundary Dispute. We use these examples to demonstrate the unsettling potential of (re)naming practices. To conclude, we suggest further areas for praxis and research that are situated in a broader context of naming practices.     

The Politics of Memory: History,Biography, and the (Re)-Emergence of Generational Literature in Germany

The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers is the father of a discourse on the spiritual consequences of the Holocaust. First addressed as the Schuldfrage (the question of guilt) by Jaspers immediately after the Second World War in his famous Heidelberg lecture, it has reappeared in various forms in German life and letters. Post-unification Germany has witnessed the valorization of the German experience of the Second World War. This ongoing re-evaluation has its antecedents in the generational literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s (by authors such as Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, and Peter Henisch) was often embedded in a left-wing critique of the establishment, recent contributions to this growing genre (by Marcel Beyer, Stephan Wackwitz, Wibke Bruhns, and Ulla Hahn among others) speak to the issue of collective identity and transgenerational family trauma outside distinct left- and right-wing interpretations of National Socialism. The current writings on the life during the Third Reich (filtered through the experiences of discrete generations) are a confluence of historical writing, memorial literature, biography, and fiction. They are closely related to the discussions that W. G. Sebald initiated in his 1997 lecture series on the silence of German postwar literature with respect to German suffering. The subsequent debate on how to bring closure to this “German suffering” was intensified by Günter Grass's widening of the concept of German victimization beyond the air war controversy in his book Crabwalk (2002). As Grass distinguishes clearly between the various post-World War II generations (and their different perspectives on historical events), the question becomes whether these recent writings will bring about a final so-called “zero hour” in German postwar history.     

The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)

This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of labor that tends to over determine Blackness within critical theories. Two visual fields help me with this counter read: William Gerrard De Brahm's 1757 “Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia”, as well as Julie Dash's 1991 images of the porous indigo‐stained hands of former slaves who worked indigo in the film Daughters of the Dust. While these two images oppose one another, their visual conventions enable a break with colonial and humanist scopic regimes like “Black labor” that tend to subsume multiple and intricate processes into the governing logic of labor.     

(Re)defining the Euroregion Concept

The INTERREG-A, the largest of the Community Initiatives, has been supporting the cross-border cooperation (CBC) in European Union (EU) territory, over the past 19 years, thus contributing to redraw a new political map of Europe, by reducing the barrier effect and reinforcing common development strategies. During this period, several new partnerships and institutions have been established, creating networks that connect a wider range of local and regional actors into the CBC process, on both sides of the borders. Some of these entities have gradually started to call themselves Euroregions, based on non-rigid criteria, even though, in some cases, they lack legal personality and operate on an informal basis. Moreover, it was recently approved by the European Commission the possibility to establish European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation, with legal personality, in border areas, to overcome the obstacles to the CBC process. Therefore, in this article, we propose a new CBC typology which looks at the concept of Euroregion in a geographical perspective, supported on different criteria and adapted to the present-day reality of the European border territories.     

(Re)assembling Communities

This article seeks to bring together studies of community from both the New and Old Worlds and examine their various strengths and weaknesses. Whilst applauding many of the recent developments, particularly the emphasis on communities as the outcome of practice and agency, I suggest that there are three specific difficulties present in the current studies of community: an underlying subtext which supports modern political notions of community as a timeless form of sociality; a prominent anthropocentric vision of community as the province purely of human beings; and a failure to fully embrace the role of affect and emotion. By rethinking communities as assemblages, this article seeks to build on the firm foundations constructed in the last 15 years to present new possibilities for taking this important concept forward.     

(Re)introducing Wiley Rutledge

With the rarest of exceptions, when Supreme Court Justices leave the Court, they are soon all but forgotten. ¹ Constitutional law is unrelentingly presentist, so closely intertwined with politics and society that sitting (or recently departed) Justices necessarily speak to the issues more directly than those from another era. If that were not enough, being forgotten is virtually inevitable for those whose careers are short. One of those men was Wiley Rutledge who served from February 1943 until his death at age 55 from a cerebral hemorrhage, six and a half years later. Until John M. Ferren's recently published and marvelously researched Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court , ² Rutledge even lacked a true biography. ³ That has been a shame, because the two dominant themes of Ferren's book show that Rutledge is worth knowing: He was a good man and a good judge. Indeed, on what probably was the most fractious Court in American history, ⁴ Rutledge was the sole member both personally liked and intellectually respected by every other member. ⁵     

Re(ge)ndering Gender(ed) Studies

McAuslan, Ian and Walcot, Peter (eds) Women in Antiquity Archer, Leonie J., Fischler, Susan and Wyke, Maria (eds) Women in Ancient Societies: ‘An Illusion of the Night’ Hawley, Richard and Levick, Barbara (eds) Women in Antiquity: New Assessments Richlin, Amy (ed.) Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome Sorkin Rabinowitz, Nancy and Richlin, Amy (eds) Feminist Theory and the Classics Reeder, Ellen D. Pandora: Women in Classical Greece     

(Re)assessing Parliamentary Policy Impact: The Case of the Australian Senate

A recent article in this Journal suggested that assumptions about the legislative influence of the Australian Senate may overstate its de facto power. Stanley Bach indicated that compromise with the Senate was relatively rare, and pointed out that most successful Senate amendments were government amendments. This paper provides an alternative view. We suggest that legislative influence is more subtle than Bach acknowledged, and that it is necessary to dig deeper in the data to fully understand the Senate's role. We therefore supplement his analysis in two ways: (1) through tracking the ultimate outcome of government defeats in the Senate; and (2) through analysis of two case study bills. We find that in confrontations with government the Senate ‘wins’ the great majority of the time. This shapes government behaviour in the chamber, such that many government amendments actually respond to non-government concerns. The most important element of Senate influence is therefore ‘soft power’– exercised through negotiation – backed up only in extremis by the ‘hard power’ of government defeat. This holds important lessons for the study of legislative influence more broadly, as well as demonstrating the true power of the Australian Senate.