The Origins of the Concept of ‘Palaeolithic Art’: Theoretical Roots of an Idea

This paper explores the origin and theoretical roots of the concept of ‘Palaeolithic art’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1895–1906). It identifies three main sources for this concept: the Western category of ‘art’, the idea of evolution and the notion of primitive. This article shows how the traditional conception of ‘Palaeolithic art’ is a particular case of the wider idea of ‘primitive art’, a category that was born as an attempt to harmonise the notion of ‘primitive society’ and the nineteenth-century bourgeois concept of ‘art’. Additionally, I discuss this traditional conception as the source of a number of ideas that have persisted in our way of interpreting Palaeolithic images until recently, including the understanding of prehistoric images through the lens of the modern notion of ‘art’, their interpretation in symbolic-religious terms and their formal definition based on the idea of naturalism.     

‘Tokens of Fritz’: Canadian Soldiers and the Art of Souveneering in the Great War

Abstract

This article examines the US Army’s role in the post-war refugee crisis in American-occupied Germany. American policy placed all responsibility for ethnic German expellees in the hands of German authorities. However, as the example of the Bavarian city of Würzburg illustrates, the expellee issue played a prominent role in relations between Americans, Germans, and refugees during the post-war and early Cold War periods. By outlining the synergistic relationship between these groups, this article proposes to integrate the social history of West Germany within the speci?c context of the changing security situation in Europe and American Cold War planning.     

Nationalism,Britishness and the ‘Souring’ of Australian National Art

This article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art.     

The ‘Ungallant Silence of the Historian’: Elizabeth Stone,Esther Owen and the Art of Needlework

This essay explores the challenges of authorship for two women authors of important needlework books during the 1840s. Elizabeth Stone authored the first British history of needlework, the Art of Needlework (1840), and Esther Owen wrote an influential pattern book, the Illuminated Ladies' Book of Useful and Ornamental Needlework (1844), but both women were powerless over their work when authorial mis-attribution and financial mismanagement hindered their efforts to engage in professional careers. Countless anonymous writers of needlework articles and guidebooks provided scholars with a treasure of textual artifacts that contain valuable cultural and historical information about women's lives, whether the women were readers, editors or writers. Yet the lack of specific bibliographical and biographical details about needlework books and their authors often frustrate adequate scholarly reappraisal. The tradition of anonymity and a general lack of respect for domestic women's art from publishers and contemporaries outside the woman's sphere created a dearth of archival material, and careless reviewers spurred mistakes and omissions that sometimes began as early as the first printing and continue from that moment until now. The careers of Stone and Owen serve as case studies of complications for women working in the writer's trade, and of problems encountered by scholars writing nineteenth-century women's history.     

‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde,Charles Ricketts,and the Art of the Woman's World

This paper offers a new examination of the influential women's magazine, theWoman's World (1887–90), and Oscar Wilde's editorship thereof. Previous studies have focused on the magazine's importance as a venue for promoting proto-feminist writing and for enabling Wilde to boost his professional cachet through editorial work, but the aesthetic aims and execution of theWoman's World merit further analysis. The Woman's World reveals how male artists negotiated aesthetics and Aestheticism between themselves within its pages, as well as how they presented it to the publication's assumed audience of women. This paper particularly centres on the magazine's role in establishing the professional relationship between Wilde and Charles Ricketts, later the designer and illustrator of some of Wilde's most important texts, while simultaneously considering how Ricketts's work furthered the artistic and intellectual instruction Wilde hoped to offer the magazine's readers. Case studies of several of Ricketts's illustrations demonstrate the types of visual reading that the Woman's World seemed to espouse, and which worked in tandem with the textual contents to encourage women to develop critical reading skills.     

‘‘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.     

‘New Art History’ vs. ‘Old History’: writing art history

Abstract

The three strange poems in English which constitute the section ‘Foreign Language Verse’ in Cavafy's Unpublished Poems present problems of authorship, interpretation and preservation. Who wrote them? What are they about? Why did Cavafy, who destroyed so much, trouble to keep them? The purpose of the present note is to provide plausible, if not definitive, answers to these three questions. The poems under discussion are, ‘Leaving Therápia’, ‘Darkness and Shadows’ and the untitled poem that begins, ‘More happy thou, performing Member’.     

Sandercock: ‘Expanding the language of planning’

In her book Towards Cosmopolis, to which this paper is an appendix, Leonie Sandercock outlines with insight, passion and sensitivity an emancipatory politics of difference and the ways in which a progressive planning, transformed from its modernist roots, can contribute to such a politics. It is in this context that she has developed the idea of what a planning curriculum should look like. But somehow, in discussing planning education, the forceful and imaginative thrust of her book seems to get lost in a rather narrowly‐based conception of what ‘planning education’, itself a multiplicity of practices, looks like these days and in homogenized images of the ‘planner’ which can easily be criticized.     

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.     

‘Unlocking the cage door’: the spatiality of counselling

This paper examines the spatiality of counselling, focusing on ideas about positions, boundaries and spaces emerging from practitioners' accounts. Counsellors describe counselling as a practice within which the relative positions of self and other are explored and negotiated. To that end, counsellors adopt a contradictory position in relation to expertise, claiming to be experts in not being experts. Counselling transgresses bureaucratic boundaries between different forms of care, and normative boundaries of secrecy. In their place, counselling works with spatio-temporal, confidentiality and ethical boundaries, which are simultaneously concrete and specific, fluid and illusory. These boundaries create spaces within which the interplay of reality and fantasy can be explored. These spaces can be understood in terms of processes of exteriorizing the inner worlds of clients and interiorizing external spaces including those made available by counsellors and counselling services. The spatiality of care associated with counselling strategically invokes binary distinctions, for example, between reality and fantasy, but also disrupts dualistic conceptualizations of space in favour of an understanding of space as simultaneously real, imagined, material and symbolic.     

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.     

The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

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.     

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.     

Crowded kitchens: the ‘democratisation’ of domesticity?

Building on previous work concerning the gendered nature of domestic space, this article focuses on the kitchen as a key site in which gendered roles and responsibilities are experienced and contested. As men have begun to engage more frequently in cooking and other domestic practices (albeit selectively and often on their own terms), this article argues that kitchens have become ‘crowded’ spaces for women. Drawing on evidence from focus groups, interviews and ethnographic observation of kitchen practices in South Yorkshire (UK), we suggest that men's entry into the kitchen has facilitated the expression of a more diverse range of masculine subjectivities, while also creating new anxieties for women. Specifically, our evidence suggests that family meals may be experienced as a site of domestic conflict as well as a celebration of family life; that convenience and shortcuts can be embraced by women without incurring feelings of guilt and imperfection; that cooking is being embraced as a lifestyle choice by an increasing numbers of men who use it as an opportunity to demonstrate competence and skill, while women are more pragmatic; and that kitchens may be experienced as ‘uncanny’ spaces by women as men increasingly assert their presence in this domain. Our analysis confirms that while the relationship between domestic practices and gendered subjectivities is changing, this does not amount to a fundamental ‘democratisation’ of domesticity with significantly greater equality between men and women.