Ethnographic reflections on ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in two post-earthquake Italian cities

This article explores the politicisation of cultural heritage during the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake in Naples and the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. It begins by critically addressing the positions of Tomaso Montanari and Salvatore Settis, two prominent heritage intellectuals at the forefront of national campaigns to restore the damaged historic centre of L’Aquila. Both have been instrumental in shaping an ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in Italy that underscores the civic virtues of the nation’s cultural patrimony while simultaneously railing against its marketisation. Reflecting upon observations in L’Aquila, where locals involved in protests at government inaction have been scolded by fellow inhabitants for their lack of obeisance to cultural heritage, and drawing on longstanding ethnographic research in Naples, where heritage campaigns against redevelopment in the historic centre in the 1980s were later incorporated into an ambitious regeneration agenda, the article argues that this oppositional heritage discourse is not only premised upon idealist notions of collective identity but also, as a result of its attempts to legislate the boundaries of heritage citizenship and its disavowal of philologically incorrect relationships with historic centres, it ultimately provides tacit support to the very same neoliberal urban processes against which it claims to take a stand.     

‘Against the Tide’

This paper is an exploration of the attitudes and policies of key Australian ministers and officials towards decolonisation in the South Pacific through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Until the late 1960s, Australian governments generally favoured a very slow pace of decolonisation for the region, feared that many territories would never make viable nation-states and actively considered the bringing together of some of the colonial territories into larger entities. Consequently, for much of the 1960s Australian governments were engaged in the ultimately fruitless task of holding back the tide of decolonisation as it swept into the South Pacific.     

‘These new rights’: social security in the postwar Italian debate

At the end of World War II the Italian welfare system, which had taken shape under Fascism, was in need of a radical overhaul. Nevertheless, the wait for organic, structural reform dragged on for over two decades without arriving, even in the Sixties, at an efficient framework for the welfare state capable of dismantling the corporatist, familist one inherited from Fascism. This article reconstructs the debates on social security and social rights after World War II. Beginning with the interest that was sparked, even in Italy, by the Beveridge Report, I will investigate the meaning given to the expressions “social security” and “social rights” by politicians and technocrats engaged in trying to reform the Italian Welfare State.     

Going Against the Flow: Sinn Féin’s Unusual Hungarian ‘Roots’

Can states as well as non-state political ‘actors’ learn from the history of cognate entities elsewhere in time and space, and if so how and when does this policy knowledge get ‘transferred’ across international borders? This article deals with this question, addressing a short-lived Hungarian ‘tutorial’ that, during the early twentieth century, certain policy elites in Ireland imagined might have great applicability to the political transformation of the Emerald Isle, in effect ushering in an era of political autonomy from the United Kingdom, and doing so via a ‘third way’ that skirted both the Scylla of parliamentary formulations aimed at securing ‘home rule’ for Ireland and the Charybdis of revolutionary violence. In the political agenda of Sinn Féin during its first decade of existence, Hungary loomed as a desirable political model for Ireland, with the party’s leading intellectual, Arthur Griffith, insisting that the means by which Hungary had achieved autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire in 1867 could also serve as the means for securing Ireland’s own autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This article explores what policy initiatives Arthur Griffith thought he saw in the Hungarian experience that were worthy of being ‘transferred’ to the Irish situation.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

‘Safe spaces’ and ‘bad’ girls: ‘child marriage victims’’ experiences from a shelter in Eastern India

This article interrogates the politics of safety that underpin rehabilitative practices in a state-funded shelter run by an anti-trafficking NGO in Eastern India. It focuses on the experiences of a group of female adolescents, categorised as ‘child marriage victims’, residing at the shelter. The analysis of in-depth life history interviews collected over a two-week period in October 2014 reveals that the adolescents contest the legislative victimhood imposed on them. For them, their marriages and pre-marital relationships are an expression of romantic and sexual agency, in contravention of familial norms. In this context, the adolescents perceive the shelter as a punitive space and interpret their enforced stay for ‘protection’ and ‘rehabilitation’ as an extension of familial control and regulation of their lives. The protectionism-as-safety discourse rewrites their agency as victimhood and transforms the shelter into a site where everyday forms of gendered power inequalities within social relations in the household are authorised and reproduced by the state and NGO. The adolescents perceive themselves as ‘bad girls’ and adopt various strategies to insist on their rehabilitation into ‘good girls’ to secure release from the shelter often by enacting the ‘victimhood’ expected of them. This allows for unique expressions of agency in an otherwise constrained context but hinders relationships of solidarity with other residents. Overall, the article highlights the need to challenge the ways in which patriarchal norms continue to spatially govern and discipline the expression of female sexuality and agency through 'safe spaces' in India.     

Feminicide as ‘act’ and ‘process’: a geography of gendered violence in Oaxaca

Feminicide in Mexico is most notoriously associated with the serial deaths of women in and around Ciudad Juárez. A 2005 congressional investigation expanded, nonetheless, the geographical scope of feminicide, arguing that the phenomenon was present throughout the country. One location that was identified early on as also experiencing a high rate of feminicide was the state of Oaxaca, in the southern part of Mexico. Inscribed within this shifting geopolitical terrain, this article draws on an understanding of feminicide as both act and process in order to offer a critical portrayal of feminicide in Oaxaca. Beginning with a discussion of the profiles of feminicide in Oaxaca, the analysis moves out to explore the multifaceted processes that enable feminicide to occur. In so doing, we also explore how feminicide intertwines with other forms of social and political violence in Oaxaca. From an ethical-moral terrain, this article joins a broader movement in certain corners of feminist geography that is concerned with ‘making bodies count’ and the politics of witnessing acts of violence.     

‘Against the tide’: placing visual art in the Highlands and Islands,Scotland

Within a political context where Gaelic arts are recognised as integral to the configuration of a new Scotland, this paper focuses on the art and artistic practice of a community arts centre in North Uist, Outer Hebrides, and the art of internationally acclaimed Scots artist, Will Maclean, who has worked with this centre, with initiatives to commemorate the land struggle on the Isle of Lewis, and with Gaelic arts. Drawing, at the conceptual level, on ‘the idea of place as a political project’ (Gibson-Graham 2003 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. An Ethics of the Local. Rethinking Marxism, 15(1): 53–78.  [Google Scholar]: 35) and a narrative of resistance that suggests a differential rather than oppositional optic (Braun 2002 Braun, B. 2002. The Intemperate Rainforest. Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.  [Google Scholar]), I examine how art and artistic practice contribute to an aesthetics that works ‘against the tide’ and how, as part of this process, place is re-constituted.     

Colonising Italians: Italian Imperialism and Agricultural ‘Colonies’ in Australia, 1881–1914

The historiography of Australian imperialism before the First World War has often neglected a context wider than the relationship with Great Britain. Yet this era also implicated non-British governments and their emigrants. Despite their small numbers, Italian settlers are significant for highlighting Italy's empire-building and Australia's struggles for national and imperial unity. Italy's foreign policies after 1901 opened commercial opportunities across its diasporic networks, which included subsidising agricultural ‘colonies’ in Australia. The contemporary discourses of sectarianism and racism voiced before Federation articulated political and popular resistance against Italian immigrants. The rhetoric shifted after Federation as state governments examined the issue of land tenure for closer settlements (small agricultural farms), appealing to an argument about serving unemployed Australians before approving foreign settler schemes. The history leading up to two Italian projects in Western Australia and Queensland in 1907 allows reflections on Italy's diaspora colonisation and Australian responses to foreign imperialism.     

Italian regionalism or ‘Padanian’ nationalism — the political project of the Lega Nord in Italian politics

The resurgence of regionalist political parties has had a considerable, though variable, impact on contemporary European politics in recent decades and there are numerous examples of such parties across Europe. In Italy, there are several regionalist parties, however, it is the emergence in the last 15 years or so, of the Northern League (Lega Nord) (LN) political party, in the North of Italy, which has given a new impetus to debates about the significance of regionalism in Italy as well as across Europe. This paper discusses the different approaches to defining regionalism as well as the common features and driving forces of contemporary political regionalist projects. It then focuses upon the political discourses of the LN in order to discuss the ways in which the party resembles other regionalist projects, while having certain key, distinct and rather unique differences. This is because the LN's political project is not based in an area that has historic claims to nationhood. Instead, the LN has attempted to invent an ethnicity for the North of Italy (or ‘Padania’) in order to justify its political claims for the protection of the economic interests of the region. ‘Padania’ (which is the Latin term which refers to the basin of the River Po), has never ‘existed’ as an administrative or political unit but the LN has attempted to construct (and invent) a geography and a history in order to justify its territorial and political claims.     

One‐dimensional criticism: a Marcusean reflection on Habermas's critical theory1

This paper explores the metaphysical foundations of critical theory in Marcuse and Habermas's postmetaphysical alternative. It argues that Habermas's attempt to free critical theory from a normative conception of life‐activity deprives it of the conceptual tools required to accurately diagnose the fundamental structure of social problems today. It thus concludes that Marcuse's efforts towards specifying a life‐grounded foundation to critical theory must be renewed if the project of human freedom is to be advanced today.     

Spatialising performance: masculinities and femininities in a ‘fragmented’ field

While there are many self-reflexive accounts of ‘field’ experience, few researchers have explicitly examined how different places within the field shape gender performances and subsequently the research process. This paper spatialises the notion of ‘performance’ by examining how male and female bodies in particular places of the field are perceived both by researchers and participants as markers of gender identity. The analysis is based on fieldwork in Subhash Camp, a squatter settlement in New Delhi where the author and her research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with the residents. The fieldwork highlighted how the embedded power structures in different places of the field created encounters between different gendered bodies and, in turn, how different relationships between researchers and participants shaped the field ‘experience’. I suggest that the ‘field’ should not be understood as a homogeneous terrain, but as a fragmented collection of places, each constructing multiple gender identities in research, and each telling its own research story.     

The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism – Ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian

In 1995, Banal Nationalism set a new way to study nationhood. Away from the traditional concern with its historical origins (‘when’) and its substantialist features (‘what’), Banal Nationalism offered a systematic analysis of its reproduction (‘how’). Informed by social and discursive psychology, Billig pointed to the role played by familiar, unremarkable ‘little words’ (deixis) to explain the persistence and pervasiveness of the idea of a world divided into nations. The present article aims to expand Billig’s seminal study on the reproduction of nationalism, by incorporating an ‘everyday nationhood’ perspective, which attends more closely to human agency and contextual interaction. To give empirical substance to this move, the article relies on photo-elicitation group discussions and written essays collected in a vocational school in Milan, Italy, among an ethno-culturally diverse sample. By bringing the voices of people in as active producers of national meanings, the article offers a more complex picture of a world banally divided into nations. Both a national ‘we’ and a national ‘here’ emerge in fact as socio-spatially differentiated, fragmented and articulated at a plurality of scales, thus defying the logical linearity of banal nationalism, which unwittingly reproduces nations as singular, internally homogenous discursive entities. The article concludes by arguing for the need to complement the banal with the everyday in order to more fully capture processes of national reproduction in contexts of increasing ethno-cultural diversity.     

Churchill's ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech in Context: The Attempt to Achieve a ‘Good Understanding on All Points’ with Stalin's Soviet Union

More than 70 years ago, on 5 March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Westminster College in Fulton. The speech immediately attracted worldwide attention and proved to be highly controversial. Most contemporaries in East and West and the vast majority of subsequent historians interpreted the speech as Churchill's call for western resistance to Stalin's expansionist policies and the continuation of the wartime ‘special relationship’ between Washington and London. This article argues, however, that Churchill's speech has been misunderstood. When set in the context of Churchill's other pronouncements on world affairs during his time as leader of the opposition between 1945 and 1951 and in view of his vigorously pursued ‘Big Three’ ‘summit diplomacy’ with Moscow and Washington after he returned as Prime Minister in 1951, the ‘iron curtain’ speech must be seen in a different light. It becomes clear that this famous speech was not Churchill's sabre-rattling call for commencing or energizing the East--West conflict with the Soviet Union. Quite to the contrary, his speech was meant to prevent the escalation of this conflict and avoid the dangerous clash between the world's greatest powers that soon became known as the Cold War.