Death at St Bernard's: Anti-vivisection,Medicine and the Gothic

Displaying a Gothic fascination with the misapplication of science, Edward Berdoe's St Bernard's: The Romance of a Medical Student (1887) was one of a number of novels in the 1880s that repackaged the horrors of vivisection for public consumption. Although the novel can be dismissed as derivative, it departed from standard themes found in other anti-vivisection texts. Through the device of a hero struggling with the moral implications of science and the reckless treatment of patients, St Bernard's challenged the legitimacy of the teaching hospital. The present article moves debate about the Gothic, literature and science beyond well-known texts by Stevenson and Wells to examine how St Bernard's combined ‘the methods of science with the methods of romance’ and shifted the anti-vivisection narrative into the hospital. In locating the novel within anti-vivisectionist uses of fiction and late-Victorian anxieties about experimental medicine and the teaching hospital, the article explores the novel's relationship with other anti-vivisection texts and Gothic fiction, and examines what it says about scientific practices and mentalities. St Bernard's fashioned a very different hospital from existing representations to warn readers of how brutish students and cruel doctors tortured patients. In doing so, the novel recast the teaching hospital as an uncanny and dangerous place.     

Recounting,retrieving, rereading: approaches to the history of genocide

This essay, delivered at a conference that commemorated Primo Levi, asks about the continuing status of witnesses' testimony about the Holocaust and genocidal murder as their generation disappears. It finds their particular contribution to lie less in what they report than their claim to moral authenticity, as confirmed by their own suffering; and it points out the problematic aspects of subjective identification this may raise, especially by comparing witnesses' accounts with the alleged authenticity of Holocaust fiction. On the other hand, the limits of archival evidence, which are manifested almost as retrieved archaeological artefacts, are also highlighted, as are the difficulties of history centred on victims as collective protagonists. In the end, it is proposed, keeping witnesses present through continued re-examination and reading forms the historian's only recourse against the inevitable dilemmas of writing the history of mass atrocities.     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.     

Marring the Memory: The 1967 Vimy Ridge Commemorations and Canada-France Relations

Commemorating Canada's legendary April 1917 battle of Vimy Ridge has normally proven an emotive event of national importance, symbolic of shared Canadian and French wartime trials and given mostly to remembrance of Canada's war dead. Since 1936, the ridge has been graced by the massive Canadian National Vimy Memorial, for decades the site of impressive and solemn annual ceremonies. But Canada's 1967 50th anniversary celebrations of the battle – a showpiece of the national centenary celebrations – became mired in controversy. French President General Charles de Gaulle was deeply offended that Canada had invited Prince Philip to the event without consulting Paris. It was a stunning diplomatic blunder, especially since Canada's relations with France already were tense as a result of de Gaulle's tacit support for the cause of Quebec independence. Consequently, an opportunity to commemorate a signal event in Canadian history devolved into a fractious bilateral debate and led to a shocking and much-deplored French boycott of the ceremonies. This article adds to the history of commemoration as foreign policy and argues that the Vimy incident had major consequences on France–Canada relations and played a role in France's growing encouragement of Quebec separatists.     

Riforma e Rinascimento,Protestantism and Catholicism in Antonio Gramsci's writings on Italian history, 1926 – 35

Abstract

This article readdresses Gramsci's use of Italian history, focusing on his judgement that the Italian Renaissance marked the start of a specifically Italian course of historical failure because it led directly to the Counter-Reformation, the Risorgimento and Fascism. It shows that Gramsci's political strategy after 1923 – on the need for a mass socialist movement – informed his historical opinions. His view of a regressive Renaissance contrasted the dominant historiographical consensus that saw it as the start of European modernity. Gramsci conceptualized modern European history according to a Reformation–Renaissance dichotomy that also determined his general sense of culture. By contrasting Catholic Italy (whose Renaissance had failed to lead to a Reformation) with the Protestant north (whose general Renaissance had formed a harmonious couplet with the Reformation), Gramsci reveals that his single greatest debt as a historian was to Weber rather than Marx or Croce.     

Marie Corelli and the Value of Literary Self-Consciouness: The Sorrows of Satan,Popular Fiction,and the Fin-de-Siècle Canon

Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) presents a paradoxical test case for the practice of academic literary criticism. The best-selling work of fiction of the nineteenth century, the book was demeaned by Victorian critics and has been long ignored by criticism since. In spite of Corelli's recent mini-revival, the formally self-conscious properties of this work deserve further examination: the text insistently foregrounds the act of literary criticism and demands that the reader's attention is focussed on not only the content of the narrative but also the nature of the procedure of reading. Such a strategy allows Corelli's romance to participate safely in the kinds of literary transgressions enacted in the work of her since-canonized contemporaries such as Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde. The narrative mode warns against the production of the wrong kinds of readings of the narrative, inoculating its consumer against the corruption suffered by many of Sorrows's characters – and by the readers of the kinds of contemporary fiction Corelli seeks to warn against. As a consequence, The Sorrows of Satan, while exiled from the canon, shows itself to be surprisingly representative of the image of fin-de-siècle literary culture constructed by its afterlife. Like so many 1890s fictions, it is a work of art about the work of art, and dramatizes such by now familiar late-Victorian tropes as: decadence, moral relativism, debates over literary taste, realism, post-Ibsen drama, the sexual double standard, the marriage market, the New Woman, motherhood, hysteria and female pathologies, degeneration anxiety, mesmerism. The Sorrows of Satan's status as forgotten best-seller, a ‘great bad book’, asks difficult questions about the relationship between literary criticism and literary pleasure.     

The Authoritative Medium: George Eliot,Ruin, and the Rationalized Market

This essay analyses the competing dynamics that shaped the formation of market relations in mid-nineteenth-century Britain: abstraction and rationalization, on the one hand, and embeddedness and personalism, on the other. It takes as its central case the mid-century debates over bankruptcy reform, focusing in particular on two textual representations of ‘ruin’: the system of certificates classifying bankrupts according to their culpability of character, established in 1849 and abolished in 1861; and Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, with its account of financial and sexual ruin. I argue that the debates surrounding the character certificates' intervention in market relations, and Eliot's explorations of abstract and embedded or sympathetic modes of knowledge were part of a larger concern to negotiate the tensions produced by the contemporary impulse toward market rationalization. Eliot's mode of omniscient narration – her construction of a simultaneously interested and disinterested, authoritative and sympathetic narrative voice – represented, I suggest, a novelistic instance of a broader cultural fantasy that an approach to character representation could be found that would mediate the changing marketplace. At the same time, her narration of the story of debt through familial and sexualized representations highlights the way that the personal continued to pose a challenge to the establishment of market rationality. However, despite the generic distinctions that can be traced, I argue that their shared interest in character provides grounds for the project of reading across genres, and suggest that the cultural history of the Victorian credit economy requires attention to what different genres have in common, as much as how they have diverged.     

COLLINGWOOD'S WHALE,CHAKRABARTY'S CONUNDRUM,AND BRAUDEL'S BORROWED TIME

As R. G. Collingwood noted toward the end of his life, the physiologically limited “time-phase” of human observational capacity cannot but deliver a fundamentally anthropocentric and temporally myopic conception of the world as eventful, destructive, and devoid of larger, perhaps cyclical, regularities. Developing at around the same time, Fernand Braudel's project of a history of the longue durée of human interactions with the environment aimed to subvert the short time-phase of a history accessible to immediate human experience. Although Collingwood and Braudel aimed at a conceptual merger of natural history and human history, neither of them could have foreseen what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as their collapse into each other, which was effected by humanity's transformation into a geophysical force that produced massive, likely irreversible, and certainly long-lasting climate change. Looking at two very different examples of a rapidly growing body of literature on an extractivist orientation as a key factor in anthropogenic ecological transformations on both local and planetary scales, this review essay suggests that an “intra-active” (in Karen Barad's sense) view of human-environmental relationality might help us conceptualize forms of temporality that are capable of superseding Collingwood's anthropocentric “time-phase.”     

Italy's foreign policy toward China: missed opportunities and new chances

Abstract

This essay provides an account of the erratic and troubled history of the relations between Italy and the People's Republic of China since the 1950s. After reaching their highest point in the two years immediately following the Tiananmen events – when Italy, more than any other Western country, worked to break China's international isolation – they have considerably frozen for a long time. The reason has to be found not only in the crisis that, since 1992, has overcome the Italian political system, but even more so in the structural limits of Italy's economic foreign policy and in the lack of a coherent strategy aimed at promoting Italian goods in world markets that provide huge opportunities – opportunities mostly neglected by the political-economic Italian establishment. The Berlusconi government replaced this negligence with fear-mongering behavior and recurring and outspoken protectionist remarks of various centre-right leaders, who feared the potential damage caused by China's increased competitiveness (which represented, in their opinion, an unfair trade practice) to the national industry. Though too recent to say if it will bear fruit, Prodi has made a desperate attempt for Italy to make up lost ground by leading to China what has been emphatically defined ‘the greatest institutional and business mission ever organized by Italy’ just a few months after his comeback to Palazzo Chigi.     

An Experiment in Political Communication: The British Columbia Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform

The British Columbian Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform comprised a representative group of 160 randomly selected voters who were empowered to review the Province's electoral system and to decide if change was needed. It first met in January 2004 and issued its final report in December of that year. The Assembly has since been hailed as a democratic invention and attracted worldwide interest as a remarkable experiment in deliberative democracy. Its Terms of Reference required that it consult British Columbians. It did so via a series of public hearings held across the Province, and by establishing a website to publicise its purpose and to obtain public input. Hence, the Citizens' Assembly provides a case study or natural experiment that permits the comparative assessment of two very different forms of political communication – one traditional and the other a form of ‘e-consultation’, relying on newer information and communications technology. Based on published sources, as well as interviews with former members of the Assembly, this paper investigates the public input the Assembly obtained, and considers whether ‘e-consultation’– as is often claimed – does allow citizens to genuinely contribute to the making of public policy.     

Ghost hands,hands of glory,and manumission in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu

This essay corrects a critical blindspot in the study of Anglo-Irish literature through contextualising meanings of the hand as they appeared in the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). From stylised fetish object in ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’ (1863), to symbol of the author's presence in the text in Wylder's Hand (1864), to centrepiece of a dizzying referential system in ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (1870), Le Fanu's fiction demonstrates significant indebtedness to the legend of the ‘hand of glory’. Le Fanu used this rich reference point to express the terminal insecurity of the social masters who are not free, who are in fact themselves enslaved and stupefied for reasons beyond their control. With the spectre of Catholic resurgence in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, the impossibility of manumission from the hands that haunt functioned as a reminder of the weight of the past in Le Fanu's literary imagination.     

The Pillars of “Mahathir's Islam”: Mahathir Mohamad on Being-Muslim in the Modern World

Unlike his bourgeois economic nationalism or diplomatic posturing on behalf of the developing world, Mahathir Mohamad's encounter with Islam remains a largely understudied aspect of his 22-year rule of Malaysia (1981–2003). There is a marked reluctance to take seriously his pronouncements on Islam and engage with his representations of what being-Muslim should entail in the modern world. This essay takes the view that Islam, in fact, represents a significant component of the former Malaysian prime minister's political repertoire, and that an analysis of what may be described as “Mahathir's Islam” can provide a compelling alternative account of his momentous premiership. It argues that while Mahathir's engagement with Islam was fraught with contradictions and has produced a number of negative consequences that affect Malaysian society as a whole, his discourse also contained the ingredients of what Bellah and Hammond (1980) have famously described as civil religion. Mahathir's public representations of Islam – in particular, his championing of the individually responsible believer and interpretation of the message to the Prophet Muhammad as a this-worldly and pro-active “theology of progress” – can thus provide religious validation to the cosmopolitanism of the street that has helped underwrite the social peace of multi-religious Malaysia.     

In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall,Una Troubridge and their Dogs

How does attention to dogs open up understanding of the queer, and more specifically, the Sapphic, past? This article examines the forgotten enmeshments of lesbian and pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. It takes as its case study one of the best-known couples of Sapphic modernity, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and their dachshunds, Wotan and Thorgils. Bringing into dialogue scholarship on queer, trans and animal history, it traces the historical footprint of the dogs and considers how what this article calls the ‘canine archive of sex’ – a wide range of documents including show catalogues, newspaper reports, fiction and scientific writing – adds to understanding of the complexities of modern Sapphic history. Sapphic here is used to denote relationships between people assigned female at birth, some of whom may have transed gender norms and expectations. The article argues that the records of Hall's and Troubridge's involvement in the world of dog breeding expand understanding both of Sapphic modernity specifically and the intersections between histories of sexuality and gender and animal history more broadly. They reveal how gender norms, class privilege and racialised practices converged in modern pedigree culture, shaping canine–human relationships as well as the queer subcultures that formed around them.     

Albert Wendt and the Problem of History

Poet and fiction writer Albert Wendt has taken on the task of correcting colonialist representations of the Pacific from an insider perspective. This involves him in questions of historical record and modes of recording history. The role of memory becomes central to the artist transposing oral traditions into written forms. Trained as an historian, Wendt progressively blurs the boundaries between imaginative and factual, personal and public re/constructions, aware of the illusions of both nationalistic nostalgia for lost perfection and colonialist 'objective' encyclopaedism. History both liberates and traps; in the poem 'Inside Us the Dead' and novels Pouliuli and Black Rainbow , Wendt looks for a postcolonial dynamic between postmodern deconstruction and representational texts that can be seen in terms of de Certeau's ideas of tactics and strategies.     

What if Edward Abbey's “Monkey Wrench Gang” had Succeeded? The Ghosts of Glen Canyon Past,Present, and Future

Across the fiction and non‐fiction writings of Edward Abbey (1927–1989), the anticipated restoration of Glen Canyon on the Colorado River is a recurring theme. This article employs Abbey's polemic for the removal of Glen Canyon Dam to critique contemporary debates on dam decommissioning, water politics, and ecological restoration in Glen Canyon on the Utah–Arizona border. The endeavours (and fantasies) of Abbey's fictional quartet of eco‐saboteurs reveal his radical and anarchical imaginings on how to remove the dam, yet his non‐fiction works often suggest why Glen Canyon should be restored. The politicisation of Abbey's philosophy is explored through (1) organisational, institutional responses to the question of draining Lake Powell reservoir and decommissioning the dam, and (2) how the ideology of Abbey's fictional gang is recast—and plays out—in the actions of environmental activists. This article argues that Abbey remains an important voice in the battle to restore the Glen.     

White Parliament,Black Politics: The Dilemmas of Indigenous Parliamentary Representation

Australia's parliaments remain fundamentally white institutions. Since Federation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been poorly represented – or not represented at all – in the nation's State, Territory and Commonwealth legislatures. Today there remains an ambivalent assessment of the capacity for parliamentary representation to actually deliver meaningful change for Indigenous peoples. This article examines the complexities involved in Indigenous parliamentary representation, drawing on original interviews with current and past parliamentarians to examine tensions between party identification and indigeneity; between electoral and group-based representation; and between notions of a politics of presence versus the effective representation of a diversity of Indigenous interests. The paper concludes that while parliamentary representation is important in a symbolic sense, without structural transformation it will never be an adequate vehicle for representing Indigenous needs and concerns in the postcolonial state.     

Pakistan,Uranium and the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1970–1980

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assisted Pakistan with exploring the front end of the fuel cycle. Drawing on new primary sources gathered from extensive fieldwork in Pakistan as well as the IAEA's archives, this article sheds new light on the changing direction and performance of the Pakistani nuclear program during the 1970s, focusing on the exploration of uranium. The analysis highlights the competing priorities faced by the IAEA at this time – specifically, how to handle the increasingly politicized balance between technology diffusion and non-proliferation – and how this affected the Agency's support for the nuclear program in Pakistan, as the program was secretly shifting away from nuclear energy toward a weapons project.     

A Critical Note on ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’

Almost a decade ago, Fareed Zakaria published an article claiming that ‘illiberal democracies’, i.e., countries combining the presence of free and fair elections with the absence of constitutional liberalism, were on the rise in the present; and were beckoning as a new species of democracy in the future. In this research note, I revisit and reassess Zakaria's claim. On the basis of a simple conceptual critique – that it is logically necessary to treat the two components of liberal democracy as different attributes, conceptually independent of each other – I reach an equally simple empirical conclusion: illiberal democracies were not really on the rise in the 1990s and they have decreased rapidly in the 2000s. The latter finding even comes out using Zakaria's own, arguably flawed, conceptualization.     

TIME,NARRATIVE, AND FICTION: THE UNEASY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RICOEUR AND A HETEROGENEOUS TEMPORALITY

In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur confirms the relationship between time experience and how it is epitomized in a narrative by investigating historiography and fiction. Regarding fiction, he explores temporality in three “novels of time” [Zeitromane]: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Ricoeur perceives the temporalities as homogeneous; however, in my view, the novels contain at least three different temporalities. Mann seeks a new temporality by ironizing a romantic time of rise and fall and Woolf configures a time we can call the simultaneity of the dissimultaneous. In his analysis of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, Ricoeur explicitly dismisses a Bergsonian approach to temporality. In my opinion, Bergson defends a heterogeneous time that is apparent in Proust's novel.