‘The Island Blazed’: A Blinding Light and Tiepolo's Hound

This essay is primarily a study of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound as an affirmation of Caribbean, tropical, blinding light through an engagement with the life and work of Camille Pissarro. Conceived as such, the poem, I argue, proposes an “adamic” vision and imagination attuned with “Time” rather than “History” (the concepts are Walcott's), as well as an intensification of sensory-perception beyond vision. In order to better appreciate the historical and contextual relevance of Tiepolo's Hound, the essay provides first a general introduction to: (1) a nuanced understanding of light and its “otherness” emerging from modern physics; (2) some of the ways in which western capitalism and Cartesian perspectivism, as a hegemonic aesthetic and philosophical tradition in the West, have attempted to capture and control light and its “otherness;” and (3) the blinding quality of light in the tropical context, which repositions light as a force against any and all exploitative capitalist desires.     

“As Though There Was No Boundary”: the Shipshaw Project and Continental Integration

This essay reads Munro’s 2001 story collection as embodiment of her artistic accomplishment. Beginning with a 1952 internal Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reader noting “evocative and luminous phrases” in two of Munro’s earliest stories, it argues that such phrases have informed Munro’s fiction throughout her career. In Hateship, these phrasings are key to “Family Furnishings,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” “Post and Beam,” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and especially “Nettles.” There Munro structures her stories around “real facts in the making,” combining autobiographical facts and situations with her imaginative renderings of them. This collection reveals Munro at the height of her accomplished art.     

Dimensions of remapping: Heinrich Schiffers and his mental map of Africa

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Athenäum publishing house in Germany planned a revised and extended edition of Heinrich Schiffers’ (1901–1982) successful book Wilder Erdteil Afrika (English translation: The Quest for Africa). The bestselling author had published several monographs about Africa since the 1930s, and authored and edited numerous works after World War II. Nearly all of these works, whose substantial print runs are testament to their popularity, are characterized by an engaging combination of text, images, and cartographic material, creating narratives and mental maps about Africa, its history, and the colonial past. In his later writings, he stressed the importance of “relearning” with regard to Africa and struggled to remap the imaginative geography of Africa. In this paper, I examine the characteristics of Schiffers’ imaginative geography and the change in his writings and maps. I explore whether his concept of “relearning” was an epistemological decolonization or if there were any continuities found in his imaginative geography. In order to grasp the specifics of his thinking, his geography will be briefly compared with that of his contemporary, Frankfurt zoo director Bernhard Grzimek.     

„[…︁] mein Recht muss mir werden!“ Hermann Bahrs Tragikomödie Der Querulant (1914)

“[…︁] mein Recht muss mir werden!” Hermann Bahr’s Tragicomedy ­ Der Querulant ­ (1914). At the end of the eighteenth century, people who became notorious for their excessive engagement in legal proceedings started being labeled as “querulents” or “paranoid litigants”. The term “querulents” first appeared in the General Order of the Court for the Prussian States (Allgemeine Gerichtsordnung für die Preußischen Staaten) from July 6, 1793. From there on, the spectrum of juridical measures undertaken against the so-labeled litigators included classifying these persons as ineligible for legal action and psychiatric hospitalization. The paper discusses to what extent Hermann Bahr rearranges psychiatric and legal knowledge about this special type of the complainer in his tragicomedy Der Querulant, premiered in 1914. This concerns, first, the theatricality of the body and speech, secondly, the use of cultural techniques of writing and, thirdly, conflicting notions of justice. Therefore, the paper analyzes the aesthetic function of querulous behavior in the dramatic structure of the play from the point of view of both media theory and literary theory.     

When open data and data activism meet: An analysis of civic participation in Cape Town,South Africa

Municipal open data projects are motivated by a desire to democratize data access and knowledge production, strengthen transparency, and advance cities socially and economically. However, their effects and implications are insufficiently analyzed. This paper examines civic engagement in open data in Cape Town, South Africa, the continent's first municipal-level open data initiative. Findings reveal how local civil society organizations have been driving engagement with municipal open data as part of their recent turn towards technology and data-driven forms of public engagement and activism. This analysis highlights the important role of the “smart civil society organization”—occupying a position between the smart city and smart citizen—that is developing significant capacity to produce and share data about the city's informal settlements with stakeholders in government, the private sector, and wider society. Minimal engagement with or recognition of civil society efforts illustrates the limits to the city's philosophy of data openness, which is largely restricted to releasing selected government datasets to the public. The notion of “bi-directional open data” is developed here to characterize emerging possibilities for data openness between governments and the public. This may be particularly relevant for cities like Cape Town with a highly active, capable, and data-literate civil society.     

Tannery and Duhem on the Concept of a System in the History of Philosophy and History of Science

ABSTRACT

This article examines John Toland’s Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews (1714) by placing it alongside other elements of his engagement with Jewish history, Mosaic principles and wider “Hebraica” – specifically, an appendix to his Nazarenus (1718) and his Origines Judaicae (1709). Although Toland’s case for Jewish naturalization shows the strong influence of Locke’s case for political and religious toleration, and also of a general “mercantilism”, it is argued that one of its main characteristics is a philosophical naturalism, shown in its treatment of the human species as a whole. Furthermore, it is also argued that this same naturalism is evident throughout Toland’s engagement with Jewish history and Mosaic thought. Accordingly, when we “fold” these works into each other, we find each enhancing our understanding of the others – not just as examples of Toland’s treatment of “Jewish affairs”, but also as illustrations of a consistent conceptual materialism. To emphasize this, the article concludes by suggesting that the figure of Rabbi Simone Luzzatto, author of a 1638 plea for tolerance, provides an important clue in understanding the links between Toland’s political injunctions and the philosophical foundation on which they are built.     

Multiplying Labour,Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

Buenos Aires’ talleres clandestinos (clandestine textile workshops) are powerful sites of accumulation and resistance; a complex and communitarian migrant economy. The economy’s complexity is, however, masked by its spatiality, clandestinity, and the promotion of culturalist analyses that ignore intra-collective class differentials. This paper considers the “autonomy of migration” approach through the lens of “class composition” to explore the talleres’ contours. Witnessed in the talleres is a clear “multiplication of labour”, yet approaching this multiplication compositionally highlights the multiple examples of resistance and refusal immanent to the workshop economy. But this dialectic of control and resistance transcends the workplace, with the talleres one node in a wider, socially reproductive borderscape. By developing a framework that neither condemns nor celebrates economic structures like the talleres, but instead unpacks their antagonistic nature, the paper highlights the benefits of (a) analysing the autonomy of migration approach compositionally, and (b) further geographical engagement with autonomist thinking.     

A History of Chinese Immigration in the United States and Canada

The 2005 Québec novel by Nicolas Dickner (English publication, 2008) presents intertextual effects that become a reflection on writing. The novel is a voyage of self-discovery while offering connections to Melville, Joseph Conrad, the German “bildungsroman,” nineteenth century classic novels, twentieth century French existentialist essays, Anglo-Saxon seafaring sagas, Central and South American imaginative tales, “cric-crac” stories of Québécois “raconteurs,” subversive Canadian novels, adventure stories, detective narratives, comic books and computer-generated discourse. This complex mise en abyme of writing through interlacing genres stands as a metaphor for diversity and rootlessness in North American society.     

The Politics of Subjectivity in Vangelis Raptopoulos’s Urban Stories

In this article I offer a critical analysis of the spatial cultures of modern Athens through the urban portraits presented in three fictive stories by Vangelis Raptopoulos—“At the Bottom of the Sea” (Sto Vytho), “One-Way Street” (Monodromos), and “Long-Distance Call” (Yperastiko)—from his 1995 collection “In Pieces” (Kommatakia). I argue that by constructing first-person fictive narratives, written in confessional prose, Raptopoulos problematizes the notion of subjectivity in its varying relationships to modern urban and spatial cultures. My main focus is on the practice of subjective recitations of urban space in view of the narrator’s experiences of imaginative and physical spatial appropriation. I argue that these experiences and the fragmentary style, through which they are conveyed in the stories, are an incisive critique of the official planning practices of urban public space and prescribed practices of spatial mobility. By drawing on the critical-philosophical and critical-historical literature, with particular reference to Benjamin, Foucault, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, this article contributes to the broader critique of the politics of subjectivity in modern Europe.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

A theatre of machines: Automata circuses and digital bread in the smart city of Toronto

In this paper, the policies, projects, and promises of “smart” initiatives at the City of Toronto are evaluated, as they manifest through a technological convergence between local government services and an increased focus on citizen services through data-driven mediums. Through direct participant observation and formal interviews, a robust understanding of the internal institutional dynamics, the perspectives citizens in the “smart city,” and the operational disconnects in governance, policy, and practice has been gained. Our case study on the City of Toronto provides an account of how and from where these smart motivations for increasing a data-driven engagement with the public have arisen over the past several years. In doing so, we identify key characteristics that both enable and hinder the existing smart city in the forms of access to open data, the use of increased computational methods, and the engagement of public services through digital space as requirements for the future of participatory governance. We argue that instituting appropriate policies and engaging citizens to co-design and participate in the planning processes are essential to ensuring an inclusive, modern, and open smart city.     

Things Are How They Are Because of How They Got That Way: Thoughts from the Beach,on 50 Years of Geographical Analysis

The subtitle of Geographical Analysis is “An International Journal of Theoretical Geography”, yet in fifty years of publication little has been published in the journal that fits that remit. In this short commentary I reflect on the nature of theory and explanation in geography and call for more sustained engagement with these themes in the pages of the journal in the years to come.     

Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and Street Vendors in Ecuador

Abstract: Much of the discussion surrounding neoliberal urbanism has been empirically grounded in the North. This paper shifts the discussion south to focus on the regulation of indigenous street vendors and beggars in the Andean nation of Ecuador. Inspired by zero tolerance policies from the North, the cities of Quito and Guayaquil have recently initiated urban regeneration projects to cleanse the streets of informal workers, beggars, and street children. In this paper, I explore the particular and pernicious ways in which these neoliberal urban policies affect indigenous peoples in the urban informal sector. Grounded in the literature on space, race and ethnicity in the Andes, I argue that Ecuador's particular twist on revanchism is through its more transparent engagement with the project of blanqueamiento or “whitening”. I further argue that Ecuador's “refinement” of revanchist urban policies only works to displace already marginalised individuals and push them into more difficult circumstances.     

Between Radical Geography and Humanism: Anne Buttimer and the International Dialogue Project

This paper argues for a rediscovery and reassessment of the contributions that humanistic approaches can make to critical and radical geographies. Based on an exploration of the archives of Anne Buttimer (1938–2017) and drawing upon Paulo Freire's notion of conscientização (awareness of oppression accompanied by direct action for liberation), a concept that inspired the International Dialogue Project (1977–1988), I explore Buttimer's engagement with radical geographers and geographies. My main argument is that Buttimer's notions of “dialogue” and “catalysis”, which she put into practice through international and multilingual networking, should be viewed as theory‐praxes in a relational and Freirean sense. In extending and putting critically in communication literature on radical pedagogies, transnational feminism and the “limits to dialogue”, this paper discusses Buttimer's unpublished correspondence with geographers such as David Harvey, William Bunge, Myrna Breitbart, Milton Santos and others, and her engagement with radical geographical traditions like anarchism, repositioning “humanism” vis‐à‐vis the fields of critical and radical geography.     

Dithyrambs and Ploughshares: The Cycle of Creation and Criticism in Nietzsche's Aesthetics

Pairing Thus Spoke Zarathustra with On the Genealogy of Morality foregrounds tensions between artistic creation and critical interpretation in Nietzsche's work. From The Birth of Tragedy to his genesis of the concept, Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the real, or “what is,” in terms of a creative, form-giving force. We might therefore read Zarathustra—a linguistically experimental, richly allegorical, self-reflexive, modernist prose poem—as the pre-eminent, artistic mode of philosophical expression, at least for Nietzsche. But Zarathustra is followed by a sober Abhandlung (treatise), which professes a scientific goal of “getting to the bottom of things” by uncovering the contingency, origin, and fabricated nature of supposedly eternal, “given” values. These instantiations of Nietzsche-the-artist and Nietzsche-the-critic suggest art's “double” or contradictory nature—a nature that accents its kinship with philosophy. Zarathustra and the Genealogy, read together, hint that the destruction of idols—or de-constructive, critical interpretation more generally—is not just supplemental to, but a necessary moment within the aesthetic itself.     

On the Stickiness of Territorial Stigma: Diverging Experiences in Amsterdam’s Most Notorious Neighbourhood

In Western Europe, a select number of “ghettos” are at the forefront of public anxieties about urban inequality and failed integration. These notorious neighbourhoods at the bottom of the moral spatial order are imagined as different and disconnected from the rest of the city. This paper examines how residents in Amsterdam Bijlmer, a peripheral social housing estate long portrayed as the Dutch ghetto, experience the symbolic denigration of their neighbourhood. Interviews show that all residents are highly aware of the negative racial, cultural and material stereotypes associated with their neighbourhood. However, these negative stereotypes are not equally felt: territorial stigma “sticks” more to some residents than others and substantial inequalities are observed in who carries the burden of renegotiating blemish of place. Differential engagement with stigma depends on how residents’ identity and the materiality of their surroundings intersect with stigmatising narratives of place.     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.     

A Rejection of the Aramaic Origin of the Chinese Word for Monastery

Christopher Beckwith has recently devoted two publications concerning the origin of the word for “monastery” in East Asia. The proposed Aramaic origin has met with criticism from two eminent authorities, Laurent Sagart and Alexander Vovin. While the present article is not interested in the debate per se, here renamed the “Beckwith Controversy,” it is important to discuss in more detail Beckwith’s view about the Chinese word si 寺 (monastery), its origin, and its reconstruction. It is concluded that, although very imaginative in its conclusions, Beckwith’s argument is methodologically opaque and, therefore, should be definitely abandoned in favour of more plausible solutions.