‘Oxford in the bush’: the founding (and diminishing) ethos of Rhodes University

Over the years, many members of the Rhodes University community have proudly claimed their university to be a kind of transplanted Oxford, while others have viewed this claim as pretentious – hence the derogatory label ‘Oxford in the bush’. This article explores the connections and comparison between the two institutions. In the early twentieth century, both universities strongly identified with the British imperial cause; and for decades Rhodes University regularly celebrated its symbolic association with the historical figure of Cecil Rhodes, who also happens to be one of the most commemorated figures in Oxford. There was also a shared ethos, as both laid stress on a style of education that was character-building, a prerequisite for which was a strong grounding in the classics. There was, too, a cultural affinity between Rhodes and Oxford, exemplified in the strict segregation of the sexes, the importance attached to sporting achievement, and a tendency to engage in frivolous activities. The article goes on to show how over time the Oxford tradition at Rhodes came to be challenged and undermined, especially from the late 1960s onwards.     

Did Cecil Rhodes Really Try to Control the World?

A twentieth-century American historian claimed, in a posthumously published book, that Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner plotted to take over the world by establishing secret societies, conniving with key British politicians, various lords of the realm and influential publicists. The Rhodes Scholarships are supposedly but one example of the long hand of their cabal. That both Rhodes and Milner favoured imperialism, and believed the world the better for inculcated British values, there can be no question. But were they conspiracists, as alleged? Or are the accusations based too much on suspicion and circumstantial evidence to be taken seriously?     

So many Glasgows: From ‘personality of place’ to ‘positionality in space and time’

This paper investigates place and positionality in the regional novel against a background of evolving trends in geographical scholarship of place and placelessness. In re‐examining the representation of Glasgow in the urban regional novel, it proposes that a qualitative difference exists between rural and urban epistemologies which relates to the profoundly temporal essence of ‘cityness’. Aspects of both multi‐dimensionality in urban time‐space and of the city as the locus for working‐class oppression are reviewed in the context of a selection of urban imaginings.     

Integration and the negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’: the case of British Arab activists

Immigrant-receiving societies are increasingly emphasizing the need for immigrants to integrate into mainstream life. In Britain, this trend has manifested itself in ‘social cohesion’ discourses and policies. Discussions about social cohesion have often focused on the residential patterns of immigrant and minority groups in British cities, with the assumption that residential patterns are an indication of social integration. Integration, however, is also a socio-political process by which dominant and subordinate groups negotiate the terms of social membership. We explore the ways in which British Arab activists conceptualize their membership in and responsibilities to their places of settlement; we also consider how they reconcile notions of integration with their connections to their places of origin. Our study participants speak of the need for immigrants to participate actively in their society of settlement, but they reject the idea that integration requires cultural conformity or exclusive loyalty to Britain. Their definition of integration as a dialogue between distinctive but equal groups sharing a given place provides a normative alternative to social cohesion discourses.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism,neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part One: From ‘knowing’ fetus to ‘confused’ child

The inability of the child to represent his or her own interests as a legal subject (by definition), and the continued interest of the state in the child as a futurity or resource locks the child in an eternal pas de deux: the child continually approaches the possibility of ‘personhood’ but never achieves it. In the past 40 years, in western nations the child's legal personhood has been simultaneously invoked and constrained: through a growing array of persons and organizations that, as an exteriority, purport to ‘best represent the child’; and through an ever more finely gradated mapping of the child's interiority—which filters the child's voice through a range of interpretive theories, and mechanisms. In this myopic and hyperopic reading of the child, the child's voice disappears. This paper is the first of two examining the relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. In the case law explored around fetal rights and custody issues in the United States and elsewhere we find a paradoxical situation where the ‘fetus’ is granted a more authoritative voice in terms of what it ‘wants’ than is the child, whose wishes are perpetually called into question. Together these papers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual. They highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child whereby neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport to speak for the child mobilize their own political interests.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

Feminism and its ‘other’: representing the ‘new woman’ of Bangladesh

This essay examines women's oppression and organizing against gender violence in contemporary Bangladesh through the lens of television. I argue that the telefilm Ayna (The Mirror, 2006), written and directed by popular film actor and women's rights activist Kabari Sarwar, offers a window into the changing social and economic landscape of contemporary Bangladesh and the complex negotiations of power and inequality across gender, class and community. Furthermore, it offers an opportunity to unpack the social messages underlying development and modernization initiatives, the new kinds of alliances as well as dependencies engendered by them, and their multiple and uneven consequences. An investigation of the representations of competing and contradictory notions of women's subjectivity and agency in this telefilm allows us to understand how these intersect with shifting notions of local/global patriarchies, feminist solidarity and women's empowerment in Bangladesh today. Further, this essay illuminates the disjunctures between representations of the ‘new woman’ circulated through development and certain feminist advocacy narratives with women's lived realities of oppression, and survival.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

‘I am Tower of Hamlets’: enchanted encounters and the limit to art’s connectivity

‘I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are’ (2011–2012) was an artwork by Argentinian artist Amalia Pica, and involved a pink-granite sculpture touring around different homes in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets for one year. This paper offers a geographical investigation into the type of encounters and relations created by this artwork. Rather than assume the progressive role of such art encounters, the paper casts a critical eye on to the actual forms of association that they foster and the normative social logics they may perpetuate. In doing so, it suggests that while enchanted, ‘meaningful’ encounters did occur between participants and the sculpture, these occurred within a pre-existing art community, something which compounded problematic class boundaries. Thus, the paper utilises this artwork to identify how encounters can be meaningful whilst maintaining embedded social and cultural divisions. It concludes with a discussion on the relationship between art and the geographies of encounter.     

Tibetan livelihoods and the ‘Great Development of the West’:Modernization,pastoral resources,and the ‘urban future’ of the grasslands

1.Introduction Rural livelihoods in Tibet2 have,during the last fifteen years,undergone fast and profound processes of economic transformation and state-led modernization,both in the TAR and the Eastern parts of the Tibetan plateau.Local life styles have changed at a pace rarely seen in an area where people subsisted,until the late 1990s,almost entirely on nomadic mobile livestock production.New local socio-economic structures with peculiar characteristics have emerged.They include the decline of traditional livestock-based (mobile) pastoralism;the emergence of a ‘post-pastoral’ economy based on the extraction of medicinal fungi for Chinese and international markets;and the emergence,often from below,of new arrangements governing rangeland access and usage.     

Coffee Shops and Cigarettes: On the ‘Return’ to Tehran of Young Diasporic Iranians

This essay explores the experiences of a young community of diasporic Iranians living and working in Tehran during the years 2007–2009 when the author lived there. Through analysis of the lived experiences of this group, the article highlights a unique experience that is often absent from current discussions of “diaspora.” In the preliminary research, a redeployment of often taken-for-granted concepts such as “home” and “abroad” are proposed and a conceptualization of migration and diaspora that problematizes stasis and movement is reconsidered.     

From the Body of Christ to Racial Homogeneity: Carl Schmitt's Mobilization of ‘Life’ against ‘the Spirit of Technicity’

This article traces the semantics of “life” and “vitality” in Carl Schmitt up to the 1930s. It shows that Schmitt deploys these vitalist elements against the modern “spirit of technicity” in his attempt to combat the lack of substantial ideas in modern politics. However, Schmitt himself cannot escape a fundamental political relativism. There remains an unstable tension at the heart of his thought between the quest for substance and the quest for order. The latter is relativist because it is a quest for order as such, any order. Although Schmitt's semantics of life and vitality is not drawn from a biological register, it adopted a völkisch meaning in 1933. Anti-Semitism becomes a form of life and racial homogeneity fills in for substance. The article concludes that, while there are good reasons for criticizing the modern “spirit of technicity,” Schmitt's critical model is fundamentally flawed.     

Children,Work and ‘Child Labour’: Changing Responses to the Employment of Children

This article examines the ways in which the problem of child labour has been perceived and addressed, from the beginnings of social concern about these issues until the present, with illustrations from The Netherlands and Indonesia. National and international responses to the problem of child labour reflect a number of assumptions which are almost completely at odds with the views and the preferences of children themselves. Paradoxically, powerful lobbies in some of the world's wealthiest countries – which cannot enforce, and in some cases are beginning to relax, their own child labour laws – are trying to insist that the developing countries tighten and/or enforce their laws, under the threat of various forms of sanction or boycott. These increasingly active threats make it highly inadvisable for any exporting country to acknowledge the existence of children's employment at all, for example by protective legislation or other efforts to promote the improvement of children's working conditions.     

Anton Dumitriu,the ‘Axiomatic Culture’ and the ‘Crisis of the West’

Anton Dumitriu (1905–92) was a Romanian philosopher and logician who attempted to develop the more or less consistent theory of an ‘axiomatic’ tradition, referring to culture and civilisation in the ‘East’ (defined actually as Far East) vs. the ‘West’ (mainly Europe, both Western and East-Central) especially in the inter-war and post-war periods. Dumitriu's essays on Romanian culture or on Eastern vs. Western culture as published in his book Eleatic and Heraclitic Cultures (1987) will make the object of this study. This work is a revised version of his East and West (1943). It should be noted that most of the material discussed here is actually still available only in Romanian since Dumitriu's work on Logic is already translated into English, but his musings on culture and civilisation are available only in Romanian and are, consequently, almost unknown outside the country. This study attempts to make up for that and also to connect Dumitriu's views on culture and civilisation or East and West both to earlier Romanian views and currents in defining culture as well as to contemporary general European trends, while also taking into account the context of the Communist regime in which the second edition of his book was issued.