‘My Dog is My Home’: multispecies care and poverty politics in Los Angeles,California and Austin,Texas

My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies homelessness and an engagement with feminist care theory, we bring relational poverty studies into conversation with critical animal studies to reject this framing of homeless lives as disposable and to trouble the idea of property as the fundamental basis for value. We problematize these notions by highlighting the insights gained from witnessing the entangled empathetic relationships forged between homeless humans and dogs. These relationships are not only a window into the political economic material conditions and discourses that reproduce homelessness and the animal-as-property. We conclude that studying these bonds offers a collective politics of multispecies mutuality, care, and love.     

My Experience as the Director Of the Dalai Lama Office in the 50s

TheGaxaggovernmentofTibetsetuptheDalaiLamaOfficeinBeijingin1952,oneyearafterthesigningof-theAgreementBetweentheCentralGovernmentandtheLocalGovernmentofTibetonthePeacefulLiberationofTibet.Theofficewascomposedofsixpeople,me(director),MandoGyamseLhomaDainzin(deputydirector),andfourofficeworkers.WeleftLhasaforBeijingtogetherwithaPLAofficerinTibet.Beforeourdeparture,theGaxaggovernmentdispatchedadelegationtoBeijingtoshowrespectfortheCentralGovernment.TheydecidedtogobywayofIndia,andasked…     

My Experiences in Nepal

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Reconstruction,Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865–1900

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867–68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.     

Cerebral Automatism,the Brain,and the Soul in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Neither literary critics nor historians of science have acknowledged the extent to which Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is indebted to late-Victorian neurologists, particularly David Ferrier, John Burdon-Sanderson, Thomas Huxley, and William Carpenter. Stoker came from a family of distinguished Irish physicians and obtained an M.A. in mathematics from Trinity College, Dublin. His personal library contained volumes on physiology, and his composition notes for Dracula include typewritten pages on somnambulism, trance states, and cranial injuries.

Stoker used his knowledge of neurology extensively in Dracula. The automatic behaviors practiced by Dracula and his vampiric minions, such as somnambulism and hypnotic trance states, reflect theories about reflex action postulated by Ferrier and other physiologists. These scientists traced such automatic behaviors to the brain stem and suggested that human behavior was “determined” through the reflex action of the body and brain—a position that threatened to undermine entrenched beliefs in free will and the immortal soul. I suggest that Stoker’s vampire protagonist dramatizes the pervasive late-nineteenth-century fear that human beings are soulless machines motivated solely by physiological factors.     

‘My Freind who Writes for Me’: Scribes and Scribal Relationships in the Letters of Seamen, 1793–1815

This article examines the use of scribes in letters of one group of men during a specific period: British Royal Navy servicemen below the rank of commissioned officer during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815. The letters of one such seaman in particular, Richard Greenhalgh, are unusual in that he himself could write, but preferred to have someone to write for him, as is shown by many references to ‘his freind who writes for me’. Contrasts between the scribe’s style of writing and that of Greenhalgh are noticeable, especially after Greenhalgh and his scribe were parted by being sent to serve on different ships. The letters also reveal the relationship between writer and scribe, and the writer’s family and his scribe. The letters contain messages to be passed between a network of family and friends on board ship and on shore, strengthening ties between them, vital in wartime to the morale of the seamen and for the reassurance of those at home. References found in other surviving letters demonstrate the use of scribes by different seamen, also seamen acting as scribes for shipmates, adding to knowledge of scribal culture among this social group.     

The Qadi,the Wazir and the Da‘i: Religious and Ethnic Relations in Buyid Shiraz in the Eleventh Century

Shiraz's importance as a Buyid political capitol during the late Buyid period has been mentioned but not thoroughly analyzed. This article attempts to understand Shirazi politics under the late Buyid Abu Kalijar (r. 415/1024 to 440AH/1048CE) by tracing the careers of three prominent figures in his court: the Ismaili propagandist Al-Mu'ayyad fi al-Din al-Shirazi, the Sunni Qadi Abdallah al-Fazari, and Abu Kalijar's Wazir Bahram ibn Mafanna al-‘Adil. Using material from a variety of different narrative sources, it becomes clear that all three individuals used their understanding of court politics and their connections to one or more factions, preferably military factions, to gain sufficient intimacy with King Abu Kalijar to present their own point of view and to exclude other individuals from doing the same. Abu Kalijar was able to maintain sufficient contact with a variety of different factions to prevent the kind of factional warfare that was evident in Baghdad in the same period. By tracing the political strategies of these three men, the article sketches the structure of Shirazi politics and highlights the inclusiveness of Abu Kalijar's court and its relative stability compared to the Baghdad court of the same period.     

My Tibetan Friends in Diqing

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Clarendon,Cavour, and the Intervention of Sardinia in the Crimean War, 1853–1855

The notorious arms trader Sir Basil Zaharoff is remembered as the archetypal ‘merchant of death’. During the First World War, he is alleged to have exercised a malign influence over statesmen in London and Paris. Recently released Foreign Office files now allow us to document Zaharoff's wartime activities on behalf of the British government as an agent of influence in the Levant. The new sources reveal that Sir Vincent H.P. Caillard, the financial director of the arms-maker Vickers, played a key role in making Zaharoff's services available to prime ministers Asquith and Lloyd George. While Zaharoff has often been portrayed as a sinister force, manipulating statesmen into pursuing his financial and political interests, the reality was the reverse. Zaharoff was a convenient tool of two prime ministers rather than a powerful political manipulator in his own right.     

Buttressing the West in the North: The Atlantic Alliance,Economic Warfare,and the Soviet Challenge in Iceland, 1956–1959

MICHAEL MCCORMICK. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300-900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxviii, 1,101. $60.00 (US). Reviewed by Warren Treadgold     

Masculinity, ‘race’, and family in the colonies: protecting Aborigines in the early nineteenth century

Much of British imperial society in the early nineteenth century was characterised by a reformulated sensibility of manliness and family. Integral to this sensibility was the notion of men's responsibility for dependants. However, the story of Charles Wightman Sievwright, appointed as Assistant Protector of Aborigines in colonial New South Wales, serves to demonstrate that a man's duty of care for very different, racialised kinds of dependants could be emphasised in conflicting ways by British settlers on the one side and by humanitarians on the other, under conditions of colonial expansion. Sievwright's story also encourages more explicit attention to both the tensions and the mutual intrusions between men's public and private roles within colonial society. Sievwright's own efforts as an active, humanitarian man in the political life of the New South Wales frontier were scandalously undermined by his failure to perform the role expected of him in his domestic, familial relations.     

Life in the kitchen: Television advertising,the housewife and domestic modernity in Britain, 1955–1969

The modern kitchen was emblematic of a cold war obsession with household consumer durables as a measure of national progress. Its roots lay in a largely American idea of the ‘new household’ and the modern housewife. The article explores how television advertising in Britain played its part in helping to promote these co-joined aspects of the cross-Atlantic domestic ideal. In pursuing this argument, the article emphasises the way American domestic ideals took distinctive directions in Britain. Contributing to this adaptation of American ideals was a range of home-grown influences that shaped the remaking of the post-war home and women’s social role.     

My First Experience in Tibet

IoncebeLievedTibetwasalandofmysteryandalmostinaccessible.1yearnedforachancetovisitit.Butthechancedidn'tcomeuntil1944.whenShengZonglian,whowasthenappointeddirectoroftheTibetOfficeoftheCommissionforMongolianandTibetanAffairs,invitedmetobehisEng-lishsecretaryShengoncetaughtintheuniversitywhereIstudied,andsolreadi-lyacceptedhisinvitation.Killingtwobirdswithonestonewasuppermostinmymind.Whileconsideringthisasachanceformetovisitthismys-teriousland,lplannedtoexploittheopportunitytogathermaterials…     

Regional patterns in the experiences and treatment of the sick poor, 1800–40: rights,obligations and duties in the rhetoric of paupers

Abstract

This article focuses on three individual paupers who wrote a series of letters about sickness to their home towns in Essex, Northamptonshire and Lancashire. While it would be wrong to claim that the rhetoric and strategies employed by the three writers are representative of all pauper writers, they are representative of those who wrote multiple letters to their parish of settlement and a detailed exposition of their writing can tell us much about sickness and its relief by communities in the last decades of the Old Poor Law. While sick paupers have largely escaped historiographical attention in a literature that has tended to focus on the elderly, widows, children and the unemployed able-bodied man, more detailed study of the life- and dependency-cycles of poor people is beginning to show that sickness was the pivotal experience of people on the margins and that sickness relief swallowed up a very sizeable chunk of poor law resources in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The strategies, thoughts and experiences of the sick poor are thus not just important in their own right, but also for what they tell us about the sentiment of communities towards the poor and the experiences of paupers in those communities.