‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.     

Something ‘Wyrd’ This Way Comes: Folklore and British Television

Outlining key elements of folk horror, this article discusses the influence of British 1970s television upon post-2000 folk-horror revivalists, arguing that television is of vital importance to social and cultural folklore. With reference to Mikel Koven’s ‘mass-mediated ostension’, this study brings together folkloristics and screen studies, and proposes ‘wyrd’ as a term to apply to eerie, hauntological media with folkloric themes. Supernatural tropes are examined alongside a case-study analysis of the BBC series Ghost Stories for Christmas to illustrate how folkloric content is represented on screen, and how the eerie atmosphere of 1970s television was created.     

Evolution of the Concept of ‘Extracellular Matrix’ in the Brain

The question as to whether an extracellular matrix exists between cells in the adult brain has been debated since the end of the last century. In the early years, zones containing neuropil and glial processes were mistakenly believed to represent this substance. But Golgi's discovery of the “perineuronal net” paved the way for future study of the true extracellular matrix. In the 1950s, application of histochemical techniques established the existence of interstitial material between nerve cells. Unfortunately the similarity between the pericellular distribution of this material and Golgi's “pericellular nets” was overlooked. The detection of an extracellular volume fraction in the central nervous system furnished further indirect proof for the existence of an extracellular matrix in the brain. However, the repeated failure of electron microscopy to reveal a substantial space between cell processes undermined the acceptance of the concept of “extracellular matrix” in the central nervous system. Nowadays this concept has, however, been firmly established.     

‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

This paper considers Oscar Wilde's ongoing interest in the image of a single brain cell as a souvenir of human autonomy in a world of matter. Taking a long view of Wilde's career that demonstrates the relevance to his literary work of his college interests in physiology and philosophy, this paper shows how Wilde's socialism can be explained by his uniquely aesthetic take on the brain. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the autonomy of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience, but writers whose work Wilde knew, like Ernst Haeckel, W.K. Clifford and John Tyndall, apply aesthetic vocabularies to their own discussions of cells. Their theories illuminate Wilde's representation of the cell as an aesthetic object. Wilde's art collaborates with science to reject action, as action is conventionally understood, without relinquishing beauty as his ultimate value. His discovery of beauty in matter that is beyond the pale of human experience, yet intimately and strangely constitutive of our experience, directs the senses to a new field of experience that values the molecular life the species holds in common, in which individuals and their actions matter less to the possibility of social change than does the necessity of pleasure.     

‘Please Tell Me Who I Am’: Resisting Media Representation of Arab Masculinity and Violence in Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies

In Wajdi Mouawad's play Incendies (2003), a photojournalist stands offstage, photographing a sniper who, it can later be deduced, is half-Lebanese and half-Palestinian by birth. The sniper sings along to Supertramp's ‘The logical song’ Supertramp. 1979. “The Logical Song.” Breakfast in America, CD. A&M. [Google Scholar], using his rifle as a guitar. But he refuses to allow the photojournalist to capture his silent image. The sniper shoots him, drags him onstage and verbally tortures him before he kills him. The sniper then uses the photojournalist's arm as a microphone and interviews himself in a rock star fantasy to reveal his biography. This scene is examined in detail to tease out the themes of listening and tracing origins and identities in war, exile and diaspora, and leads to questions about the role the media plays in the construction of Arab masculinity as both menacing and marginal. The article argues in conclusions that, as one of the leading voices in Francophone theatre today, Mouawad offers a new variation on engaged theatre, one that frames origins as a process rather than a matter of fact.     

‘Why can't I get married?’—Denmark and the ‘Twenty-four year law’

Jackson (2000) proposes a 'rematerialization' of social and cultural geography. He argues for the grounding of geographical analysis in the concrete world of actual physical objects. Examining the work of Jackson (2000) and Miller (1987, 1998) this paper interrogates this return to the physical. In particular, this paper argues that current articulations of physicality rely on a universal metaphysics of matter--positing matter as a universally undifferentiated conditionality. This reliance is problematic in that it signifies an essentialist dichotomy between the objective (the material) and the subjective (the textual). Also this dichotomy necessitates a linear dialectics of matter subjugating the material to the determinative action of form. In subjecting Jackson's notion of rematerialization to a critical philosophical reading, the aim is to disturb the unquestioned metaphysical implications of this return. Indeed it is to suggest that a rematerialization of social and cultural geography must account for the wayward expressiveness of matter--its representative and active capacities outside its relation with the subject.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

THE ‘LORD OF THE STONEMASONS’: PART I. THE ‘SWORD DEITY’ AT PETRA

Abstract

During the 2000 Season of the Brown University excavations of the so-called Great Temple at Petra, an elusive rock-cut figure (termed the ‘Sword Deity’) was discovered in the southern perimeter wall. Since then, the current authors have identified other such figures as belonging to this previously unknown type, which has similarities with the Greek herm. Based on a contextual analysis of these figures, it is proposed that the type may depict a protective deity or ‘lord’ of the Nabataean stonemasons, most likely Dushara. According to this interpretation, the stonemasons sought divine protection during their work by carving the image of the deity high in the rock faces. This paper sheds new light not only on the representation of Nabataean deities, but also on the role of religion in the daily life of the inhabitants of Petra and their relationship with the natural environment.     

‘… This strange eventful history …’: France and the Second World War

Direction des Archives de France, La Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Guide des sources conservées en France 1939–1945 (Archives nationales, 1994), 1217pp., 350F., ISBN 2 86000 235 9

Burrin, P., La France à l'heure allemande 1940–1944 (Seuil, 1995), 559pp., 160F., ISBN 2 02 018322 6     

‘This is disco-wonderland!’ Gender,sexuality and the limits of gay domesticity on The Block

Gay men have been positioned as arbiters of ‘desirable’ domestic style—a domestic imaginary epitomised through their presence as designers and participants on lifestyle television. This paper offers a post-structural critique, examining how the intersections of gender and sexuality shape the contours of, and public responses to, gay domesticity. I scrutinise one telling example: commentaries on the domestic design created by a gay couple on The Block, an Australian lifestyle-reality programme. Applying discourse analysis to the public reception of their design, I argue the acceptability of gay domesticity is proscribed by norms of sexuality and gender, and consequently gay domesticity must be understood in both normatively feminine and masculine terms. While the desirability of gay domesticity reflects a feminisation of gay men, it is also constrained by processes of masculinisation that associate gay men's domestic tastes with Playboy-style bachelor domesticity. Through bachelor domesticity, tropes of partying and seduction undermine traditional feminine homemaking and the heteronormative ideology of home championing privatised nuclear family life. Scrutinising the intersections of gender and sexuality thus reveals limits to gay domesticity, with implications for the cultural politics around mainstream acceptance of gay masculinity: gay men and their homes are welcome when they reinforce heteronormative ideals.     

‘This is Staffordshire not Alabama’: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth Immigration in Early 1960s Britain

In the 1964 general election, the English town of Smethwick outside Birmingham became infamous for the unprecedented way in which issues of immigration, race and racism entered British national politics. Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths captured the Smethwick seat in Parliament from long-standing Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker, aided by the slogan ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’—a watershed episode soon overshadowed by the rise of Powellism in the late 1960s. Debates between Griffiths, his supporters and his opponents in the early to mid-1960s about the local and national implications of ‘coloured’ immigration (particularly of Indian Sikhs) from the Commonwealth and the legacy of empire drew upon a densely entangled set of global reference points that went beyond a ‘multi-racial’ Britain being reshaped by its ‘multi-racial’, postcolonial Commonwealth. Racist rhetoric, as well as an increasingly assertive anti-racist activism by the Indian Workers' Association and other groups, turned to analogies ranging from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and racial segregation in the United States, as well as to protest techniques inspired by Gandhi in colonial India and African Americans in the civil rights movement. In Smethwick c. 1964, the global met the local, illuminating transnational flows of people and ideas about race and cultural diversity nonetheless contingent upon their time and place.     

“‘I just don’t ever use that word’: investigating stakeholders’ understanding of heritage”

Abstract

Understanding the value of heritage sites for diverse stakeholders requires both paying attention to the fields of power in which the sites operate and applying methodologies that are open to user-defined paradigms of value. In the U.S., official discourse often frames the value of heritage sites associated the deep Native American past as archaeological sites, an interpretation that is consistent with settler colonial ideologies. This narrative generally obfuscates connections between the heritage of the sites and contemporary peoples, and it effaces the history of colonialism and dispossession. A study of stakeholder-defined heritage at two contested sites in the central Midwest revealed both congruencies and conflicts among diverse constituencies’ articulations of the sites’ value. At Mounds State Park a proposed dam and reservoir ‘Mounds Lake’ project would inundate a large portion of the site. At Strawtown Koteewi, Native American tribes have made repatriation claims under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).The study also problematised the term ‘cultural heritage’ as it is understood and used by the different constituencies, particularly for culturally and historically affiliated Native Americans. It also highlighted the positions of the constituencies within the broader fields of power implicated in these contested sites.