“Ill‐natured comparisons”: Racism and relativism in European representations of ni‐Vanuata from Cook's second voyage

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries     

Made in France? The (re-)invention of ‘Mai 68’

Abstract

Whenever young people protest, references to the French ‘Mai 68’ are quickly made. For nearly 50 years, former activists and journalists have turned events in the Latin Quarter in Paris into the main symbol for the potential of youth to pressure governments. Western European politicians and scholars easily index ‘Mai 68’ as the positive core of ‘European Memory’. French accounts during the historical moment initially emphasized, however, the global experience of student unrest. Such interpretations understood mobilization in Mexico, Poland and Nigeria as sharing one horizon of expectation and turned worldwide anti-authoritarian student unrest into an interpretive frame. With the unfolding of events in France, the French narrative shifted from a globally experienced present to a nationally framed ‘évènement’ of the past. This shift from lived experience to memory turned the student mobilization into a succession of French historical events coined ‘les évènements de mai-juin 68’. The commemoration of French events as a paradigmatic case sidelined mobilization in other European, Asian, African and Latin American countries. Meanwhile, this nationalization gave way to a pacified Franco-centred narrative which could be juxtaposed to the European memory scale whilst neglecting its internal contradictions stemming from the diverse European and global peripheries.     

Foreign Jews in the western Alps (1938 – 43)

Abstract

This article examines the question of policy towards the Jews in the Italian occupied zone of southern France from 1940 to 1943. It develops the argument that in the World War II the Alps constituted a clearly demarcated geographical area that for Jewish refugees from all over Europe promised shelter and safety. A number of ‘exemplary cases’ (for example that of Angelo Donati) as well as an unpublished document relating to the case of ‘residence forcée’ in St Martin Vésubie, provided the opportunity for comparing different interpretations of Italian attitudes towards the Jews in those years.     

Dendrochronology on material from medieval Oslo

The dendrochronological material from Oslo discussed here was collected through archaeological excavations in the period 1970–6 on the sites ‘Mindets tomt’ (Lidén 1977) and ‘S?ndre felt’ (Schia 1987).     

Marvell as libertin: Upon Appleton House and the Legacy of Théophile de Viau

Abstract

This paper argues for a ‘libertine Marvell’ as heir to a line of intellectual and poetic influence stretching from the atheist philosopher Lucilio Vanini, through the poets Théophile de Viau and Marc-Antoine Gérard de Saint-Amant, via their English translators Charles Cotton, Thomas Stanley, and Thomas Fairfax, to Marvell’s poem Upon Appleton House. It argues that Upon Appleton House captures the libertine spirit of Théophile more faithfully than Stanley and Cotton’s largely sanitised versions. Conversely, French libertine poetry and thought of the 1610s and 1620s are seen to provide the best context for understanding the ‘vitalism’ of Marvell’s garden poems, as well as their unusually divagating observational style.     

Blood,Mud and Futility? Patrick MacGill and the Experience of the Great War

Despite a growing body of detailed studies of key aspects of the Great War, there remains a dominant image of the war as a major tragedy in which the idealism of a generation of young men was exploited by their incompetent and callous elders and out of which there emerged a profound disillusionment and rejection of past values. Such an interpretation rests on the evidence of a small, and untypical, number of ‘soldier-writers’. By exploring the contemporaneous writings of a relatively unknown figure, Patrick MacGill, this article offers an alternative perspective that recognises both the well-known horrors of the Great War but also the persistence of certain ‘heroic’ values that have been misleadingly obscured by the well-known retrospective accounts of the war.

Résumé:?Malgré de nombreuses études détaillées sur la grande guerre, une image domine qui présente le conflit comme le tombeau des idéalismes et dont ne sortiraient que la désillusion et le rejet des valeurs du passé. Bien des éléments de cette interprétation dépendent des écrits de quelques auteurs atypiques. Une lecture de Patrick MacGill permet de voir en son contexte la persistance des valeurs héroïques de la grande guerre souvent minimisées par la suite.     

Cool nothing: Dom Sylvester Houédard’s coexistentialist concrete poetics

ABSTRACT

This article concerns the concrete poetics of Dom Sylvester Houédard, which I define using a term from his 1963 article ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, ‘coexistentialist’. Houédard's concrete poetry has sometimes been criticized for an anachronistic avant-garde quality, because of its non-semantic use of written language, and its associated air of intermedia experiment. But the term ‘coexistentialist’ has various connotations which allow us to interpret Houédard's work as highly responsive to its cultural moment, and to the unique theological tradition from which it emerged. These connotations include: the relationship between early and mid-twentieth-century modern art and literature; existentialist philosophy, especially the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre; Marshall McLuhan's theories on modern communication and ecumenical dialogue within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. After presenting an outline of Houédard's poetics related to these themes, I analyse some of his concrete poems or ‘typestracts’, produced between 1967 and 1972.     

The Language of Irony (Towards a Definition of the Poetry of Cavafy)

Abstract

The first time André Gide heard the name of Cavafy was during his visit to Greece, in April 1939. He was talking to Dimaras, Theotokas and Seferis when the conversation turned to the poet of Alexandria. Gide asked what kind of poetry Cavafy wrote. ‘Lyrique’, Dimaras replied. ‘Didactique’, corrected Seferis. Later on Dimaras read ‘The City’ to the group. After the end of the reading Gide turned to Seferis and said: ‘Je comprends maintenant ce que vous vouliez dire par le mot didactique … ’.     

Eric W. Pasold,O.B.E.

Abstract

This article examines the clothing of the rural poor in seventeenth-century Sussex, considering what men and women wore, what their clothing was made of and where they got it from, drawing on a broad range of documentary sources including legal depositions, probate material and overseers’ accounts. As would be expected, the clothing of this social group was primarily functional, reflecting limited budgets and arduous working lives. But we can see in the choice of fabric colour, trimmings and accessories that men and women were concerned about their appearance and could achieve a measure of social display, at least in their ‘holiday’ clothes. The ways in which the poor acquired their clothes were complex, involving them in overlapping spheres of production and distribution, which included home production and shop-bought ready-to-wear, all accommodated within a range of economic survival strategies.     

Show solidarity,live solitarily: the Nazi ‘New Europe’ as a ‘family of peoples’

Abstract

This chapter first investigates how the German Nazis used the term ‘European solidarity’ and demonstrates that the term meant political loyalty between European ‘peoples’ (Völker) in National Socialist discourses. Second, assuming that the Nazis’ objective in showing solidarity with or demanding loyalty from other nations was to increase strength in what they believed to be a conflict with ‘international Jewry’, it examines the logic of the Nazis behind including other European countries into their own camp in that conflict. It will be argued that the Nazis developed a sense of belonging with non-German Europeans based on three ideas: (1) the racist myth that all Europeans belonged to the ‘Aryan race’; (2) a Europe-wide consensus of the extreme Right on anti-Communism, antisemitism, and anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist worldviews; and (3) the existence of cross-border relations within Europe which led to shared experiences. The article draws on primary sources as well as on secondary literature about National Socialist concepts of Europe and about transnational academic, cultural and social relations in the National Socialist sphere of influence.     

Léo Lévy, À la vie,Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 2013, 153pp., 15€, ISBN 978 2 86432 731 8

ATTALI, J., Verbatim Vol. III, Part 1 1988–1989, Part 2 1990–1991, Fayard Livre de poche, 1998, Part 1 485 pp., Part 2 483 pp., 50F. each, ISBN 2 213 59424 4

AUBRAC, R., The French Resistance 1940–1944, Nazan Pocket Archives, 1997, 197 pp., 60F., ISBN 2 85025 567 X

CAILLAT, M., René Payot. Un regard ambigu sur la guerre, Georg Editeur, 1998, 479 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 2 8257 0605 1

CHALINE, J.‐P., La Restauration, PUF, 1998, 128 pp., 42F., ISBN 2 13 048836 6

DUPEYRON, N., Etre flic aujourd'hui, Editions Corlet‐Marianne, 1998, 200 pp., 90F., ISBN 2 85480 917 3

GIASONE, C., Paris occupé: 14 juin 1940, 24 août, Grancher, 1997, 176 pp., 195F., ISBN 2 73390 572 4

HABIB, D., Journaux et Gazettes français et étrangers de la Révolution à la Commune conservés aux Archives nationales, Centre historique des Archives nationales, 1998, 253 pp., 240F., ISBN 2 86000 257 X

HUNT, J., The French Revolution, Routledge, 1998, 128 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 0 415 17885 1

LE QUILLEC, R., La Commune de Paris: Bibliographie critique 1871–1997, Boutique de l'Histoire, 1997, 426 pp., no price indicated, ISBN 2 910828 08 5     

Guada-narco-lupe,Maquilarañas and the Discursive Construction of Gender and Difference on the US–Mexico Border in Mexican Media Re-presentations

This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence, ‘narratives of eviction’ and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward ‘others’. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically, ‘woman as anonymous, replaceable body’; ‘woman as victim of the border city’; ‘Guada-narco-lupe’; ‘woman as dependent appendage’; and ‘othered Mexican’; to illustrate that the production of knowledge about gendered subjects is a political and discursive practice embedded in national ideologies. Mexican media representations present a rich palette for thinking about constructions of gender and difference along a raced, sexed border. An investigation of the unequal and essentialist elements present in specific newspaper articles offers a fresh perspective on the socio-spatial aspects of particular discursive strategies and their role in underpinning dominant textual images.

Guada-narco-lupe, Maquilarañas y la construccíon Discursiva de Género y Diferencia en la frontera entre los Estados Unidos y México através de representaciones en la media Mexicana. A través de un análisis de tres artículos este ensayo investiga las maneras en que la prensa mexicana funciona para construir la diferencia y el género en relación a la frontera México-Estados Unidos. Yo discuto que la violencia discursiva, las narrativas de evicción, tanto que los silencios están involucrados en la construcción de mujeres como objetos sexualizados y débiles, y la construcción de Mexicanos como ‘racializados’, atrasados, y diferenciados a través del método de análisis de discurso de un periódico mexicano. Para llevar a cabo este análisis, yo elaboro varios momentos discursivos, específicamente, ‘la mujer como cuerpo reemplazable y anónima’; ‘la mujer como victima de la ciudad fronteriza’; ‘Guada-narco-lupe’; ‘la mujer como apéndice dependiente’; y‘el mexicano diferenciado’, para ilustrar que la producción de conocimiento sobre los sujetos géneros es una practica política tanto que discursiva arraigado en las ideologías nacionales. Las representaciones de los medios mexicanos presentan una pallete amplia par reflexionar sobre las construcciones de diferencia y géneros por la frontera norte, la cuál es a frontera ‘racializada’, y sexualizada'. La investigación de los elementos desiguales y esencialcitas colocados en varios artículos de la prensa mexicana provee una nueva perspectiva sobre los aspectos socio-espaciales de estrategias discursivas específicas y el papel que juegan estos aspectos en sostener imágenes dominantes textuales.     

Political Parties and Women’s Success in Municipal Elections in 2005 in Montérégie and Montréal (Québec,Canada)

ABSTRACT

We examine the impact of political parties on the success of women and men candidates in the 2005 municipal elections of Québec’s two most populous regions, Montérégie and Montréal. We built the dataset by requesting documentation from each municipality separately. This original dataset supports our two hypotheses. First, we demonstrate that the presence of political parties did not affect the difference in percentages of votes obtained by women and men candidates. No matter the gender, candidates affiliated with a political party obtained more votes than independent ones. Second, we find that gender did not affect contributions. No matter the gender, the presence of political parties and the candidates’ affiliation had a positive impact on their contributions. Québec conforms to findings in the U.S. literature: women and men candidates, under similar circumstances, are equally likely to obtain votes and contributions.     

Lapita before Lapita: The Early Story of the Meyer/O’Reilly Watom Island Archaeological Collection

ABSTRACT

Seventeen years before the first excavation at the archaeological site of Lapita (New Caledonia) in 1952, two men of the cloth met and exchanged artefacts, notes and ideas to produce some of the earliest analyses of what later became known as Lapita pottery. Otto Meyer (1877–1937), a Sacred Heart Missionary stationed on Watom Island, described chance finds of ‘prehistoric pottery’ in 1909, following these with more systematic excavations. Patrick O’Reilly (1900–88), a Marist Father associated with the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, drew on Meyer’s work, his own extensive bibliographical knowledge and his observations during a one-year mission in the region in 1934–5 to present part of the collection in France, laying the ground for further theories. The publication, interpretation and curation of the Meyer/O’Reilly collection represents an exemplary journey through the history of Pacific archaeology and the emergence of the Lapita paradigm. We consider the context of Meyer’s encounter with O’Reilly, the ideas both men advanced in analysing the collection and the site, and how these resonated during the development of Pacific and Lapita archaeology throughout the first half of the 20th century.     

Europe as a nation? Intellectuals and debate on Europe in the inter-war period

In 1933, a number of European intellectuals among whom Paul Valéry, Johan Huizinga, Julien Benda, Hermann von Keyserling, met in Madrid and in Paris to discuss the identity and history of Europe under the initiative of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. During the symposia, the participants try to define a common European narrative beyond national differences, and some of them evoke the idea of a European ‘homeland’ or ‘nation’, as already advocated in those years by Gaston Riou (Europe ma patrie, 1928) and Julien Benda (Discours à la nation européenne, 1933). Salvador de Madariaga for example calls for a ‘European nationalism’; Georges Duhamel presents ‘Mother Europe’ as an opposing force to growing patriotism; Julio Dantas hopes for a ‘européenité’ as opposed to the individual ‘national’ feelings. What is the reason for insisting so repeatedly on those concepts, when trying to overcome the dangers of nationalism? This paper analyses the different formulations adopted by the participants in the symposiums to describe their idea of a European ‘nation/homeland’, and tries to identify the specific aspects and historical implications of these concepts.     

The Shroud of Turin and the singlet oxygen fallacy

Abstract

This paper is critical of certain of the claims made by Allan A. Mills in his 1995 paper in ISR (‘Image formation on the Shroud of Turin: the reactive oxygen intermediates hypothesis’). It also refutes the notion that the negative image which appears on the Shroud of Lirey–Chambéry–Turin was produced as a result of the actions of a species of reactive oxygen (specifically singlet oxygen) as described by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas in their recent publication, ‘The second Messiah’.     

‘I am not a feminist but…’: women’s activism in post-1991 Albania

Abstract

This article examines the shape organized women’s activism took in Albania after the fall of the communist regime. It also analyses how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system, the relationship between media and feminism and the new alternative spaces of women’s activism and feminist resistance to gendered power relations. The analysis follows the longue durée of the fraught relationship of debates around feminism during and after the fall of Communism starting with the communist top-down ‘women’s emancipation model’ as well as the lack of bottom-up women’s activism, the post-1991 neo-liberal frame and the generalized post-1991 stigma about ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘feminism’, along with the need to resist post-1991 hierarchical gender regimes.     

Fighting the Risorgimento: foreign volunteers in southern Italy (1860–63)

Abstract

Between 1860 and 1863 hundreds of men from all over Europe volunteered for service in the wars of southern ‘brigands’ on behalf of the exiled King Francis II of Naples. In an attempt to correct the often biased interpretation of this involvement (that was attributed simply to a thirst for adventure, romanticism or even psychological disorder) that coloured the accounts by Italian patriots, this essay suggests the need for fresh consideration. It develops three lines of inquiry that focus respectively on the strong impact of Italian Unification on conservative and Catholic opinion and the ways in which these sources portrayed the struggles of the southern insurgents, the clumsy efforts made by the Neapolitan government-in-exile to recruit volunteers and organize armed expeditions against the former kingdom, and the so-called ‘white international’ in which the warriors of the counter-revolution were depicted as combatants in conflicts that were both civil wars and at the same time episodes in a much longer international ideological struggle. In this context, the significance of foreign involvement in defence of the Neapolitan Bourbons takes on a significance that goes far beyond its poor military outcome.     

‘Fashioned from Nature’

Abstract

This paper examines the situation of the male draper in terms of his relationships to textiles and female customers between the 1870s and the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on accounts of shop work produced by men employed as drapers and drapers’ assistants, the essay highlights the ridicule levelled against men who sold textiles, their work with fabrics and clothing, as well as the service they provided for an almost exclusively female clientele, being widely derided as unsuitable labour for a man. Analysing three first-hand accounts of the draper’s lot — H. G. Wells’s discussion of his years as a draper’s apprentice in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934); William Paine’s Shop Slavery and Emancipation (1912), based on the injustices experienced by drapers’ assistants; and the diary of a Bond Street draper, Charles Cavers, posthumously published as Hades! The Ladies! Being Extracts from the Diary of a Draper (1933) — the essay shows how social constructions of masculinity framed the draper’s work, particularly the handling of fabrics.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.