All that we are – heritage inside out and upside down

Abstract

This article explores how the axis between heritage on the ‘inside’ and heritage on the ‘outside’ is imagined and produced, theoretically, politically and institutionally. It asks which outsider narratives are privileged and which are contained, and what the management of these boundaries inadvertently tells us about the politics and anxieties of the ‘inside’. It offers reasons for the pervasiveness of the border despite various initiatives to invite the outside in.     

‘Every household will be a micro-enterprise’: a youth micro-loan scheme’s role in restructuring Nepal

ABSTRACT

Lack of secure employment mobilized many young people into Nepal’s civil war and a decade of political opposition (1996–2006). As a result, both the post-war government and foreign donors invested in policies aimed to harness the productive capacities of young people in restructuring the nation. This article explores the theme of aspiration on the national and personal level and their convergence through a micro-finance program in post-war Nepal, the Youth, Small Enterprise, and Self-Employment Fund (YSEF). The national-level aspiration to make ‘new Nepal’ hinged on young people fulfilling their personal aspirations. I consider whether post-conflict pacification measures like YSEF can foster the sense of national belonging necessary by analyzing the challenges faced in instituting this loan scheme nationally and locally along Nepal’s open border with India. Analyzing YSEF’s institution from a borderland optic reveals assumptions inherent in peacebuilding intervention and limits YSEF’s ability to wholly accommodate its recipients. I suggest that the government’s attempt to bring marginalized youth into the ‘official’ economic fold through YSEF falls short in accommodating young people’s livelihood aspirations within their lived reality. Instead young people are creating pathways beyond state dependence.     

Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo,part I

Abstract

Italian historians have not yet seriously grappled with the emigration of twenty‐seven million Italians as an interpretative theme. This article reviews the methodological challenges to such an undertaking. Existing works suggests that ‘Italy‐outward’ research strategies, exploration of Italian connections to its ‘diaspora’, and attention to labor recruitment and militancy, and return migration are promising approaches. Since most interpretation of Italian migration still occurs within the histories of receiving nations, Part I also provides a review of the historiography on Italian immigrants in the English‐speaking world, to be followed in Part II by a comparable review of Italians living and working in France, South America and central Europe.     

At home in the city: everyday practices and distinction in international student mobility

International students have been overlooked in geographies of ‘home’, yet this paper demonstrates how international student mobility offers unique insights that can advance our understanding of ‘home’ and belonging in the city. Drawing on photo-elicitation and mid-point and return interviews with Canadian students, this paper explores the everyday home-making practices of exchange students in urban centres in the Global South. It focuses on the ways in which international students create a sense of ‘home’ and belonging in their host city and how insider knowledge gained through local everyday practices is converted into cultural capital. It contributes to the literature by considering how home-making practices are implicated in spatial and scalar boundary-making processes for distinction. By illustrating through participants’ photographs how students articulate ‘home’ using spatial and scalar markers, I examine how students tighten the spatial boundaries of ‘home’ to focalise and localise symbolic capital within the city. The findings further add to debates on im/mobility by demonstrating that students’ distinguish their relative immobility during the sojourn from the mobility of travellers and tourists to legitimise claims of belonging as ‘insiders’ and of place-specific capital. The paper then concludes by considering how students are ‘collecting homes’ for distinction.     

Italian history and gli italiani nel mondo,Part II

Abstract

Italian historians have not yet seriously confronted the emigration of 27 million Italians as an interpretative theme. Part II of this two‐part article studies Italian migrants’ experiences in France, South America, Switzerland and Germany, comparing ‘Latin’ and ‘Germanic’ receiving areas to the English‐speaking world discussed in Part I. A focus on these other sections of the Italian diaspora challenges some fundamental interpretations of historians of Italy about emigration: Italian migrations to these areas were neither limited to the late nineteenth century, sparked by the economic crises of those yean, nor a product of the ‘problem of the Mezzogiomo’. Italian historians have special opportunities to study return migration to Italy, and to interpret Italy's own evolution into a multicultural receiving country, by comparing it to the models of multi‐ethnic nations where Italian migrants once settled around the world.     

The (un)promised land: queer identity and South Africa’s post-apartheid urban landscape

Abstract

In this article, I explore the intersection of photography and contemporary urban topographies in the production of queer identity in post-apartheid South Africa. To do so I examine Thebeautifulonesarehere, a contemporary photo-collage portrait series by Kelebogile Ntladi, which attempts to queer representations of South African cityscapes to reveal the entrenched homophobia and the systematic rejection of queer subjects. Ntladi, inspired by their own experiences of counter-normativity and the omnipresent threat of violence they face as a result, took to the streets to walk through their home city of Johannesburg to photograph the urban and cultural landscape; these photographic prints were then used as the building blocks in the assembly and fabrication of imagined spaces in which they and their fellow queer citizens would be able to live without fear of violence, where they could move freely and without repercussion. Using the trope of the flâneur as a starting point, I draw on Walter Benjamin’s paradoxical experience of Paris: his writing of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’ and ‘the promised land’ of the flâneur exists in stark juxtaposition with his own complex experience of anxiety, dislocation and impending doom while living in the city while in exile during World War II. Ntladi’s personal experience of post-1994 Johannesburg echoes the paradoxical experience.     

Performative Chineseness and Culinary Tourism in Chinese Restaurants in Newfoundland,Canada

Abstract

This article explores Chinese culinary practice in Newfoundland by including a non-Chinese perspective in the sense of ‘culinary tourism’. As it is an open, multivocal, and incomplete system, both Chinese and non-Chinese participate in the everyday negotiation of Chinese foodways, shaping their different and sometimes conflicting understandings of Chineseness in response to various global or local socio-cultural circumstances. In this process, a diasporic Chinese identity is mutually constructed, while a creolized, cosmopolitan sense of being Newfoundlanders—based on shared culinary experience—also emerges.     

The Big Buddha of Hong Kong: an accidental Buddhist theme park

ABSTRACT

The Tian Tan Buddha is the core of a tourism site on Lantau Island, Hong Kong, around which a cable car ride, the Po-Lin monastery and its museum, and the village of Ngong Ping have come to comprise an eclectic set of tourism nuclei that ‘accidentally’ became the ‘Buddhist theme park’ of Hong Kong due to the spatial juxtaposition in an isolated site of these disconnected and even dissonant components built at different times by different jurisdictions. The first objective of this article is to explore the developmental process of a religious site into a theme park of sort through a lengthy process filled with contestation and manipulations. The history-dependent and erratic nature of this process validates the notion of ‘accidental’ theme park used here. It is shown that over time, the Big Buddha went from being a Buddhism-themed leisure site to being generally perceived and promoted as essentially a theme park through a process of partial Disneyization. The second objective is to examine how the ‘theme park’ is perceived by its visitors, more precisely how they see it after their visit and what first-time visitors expect from it beforehand. The first enquiry, performed through the analysis of TripAdvisor reviews, indicates that ex-post, the visitors typically describe having experienced a visit to a theme park. The second enquiry, performed by interviewing first-time visitors about to access the site, suggests that while many first-time visitors expect to visit a theme park as well, others, mainly Western tourists, are expecting a more cultural experience. The findings of the two inquiries are compared to each other and to the image of the site promoted by the local tourism authorities. The subdued political message of the Big Buddha and the degree to which it is discerned by visitors are also discussed.     

COMMUNITY AND THE ESTABLISHMENT OF SOCIAL ORDER ON THE CANADIAN FRONTIER IN THE 1840s AND 1850s: AN ENGLISH IMMIGRANT’S ACCOUNT

Abstract

This article draws on the letters of a young immigrant doctor, Francis Codd, who arrived in British Canada in the I84os. Many of the one million migrants, mainly of British and Irish origin, who arrived in Canada in the mid-I9th century, benefited from the availability of land and absence of social barriers to mobility. This enabled them to think and feel like citizens of the new country,in a way denied them at home. Francis Codd’s account throws light on the part played by the appreciation of nature and ‘wilderness’ in this process, as well as describing the beginnings of a new civil society and the development of ‘community’ institutions. However, at the same time as a ‘Canadian’ identity was being constructed for the white settler population, that of the indigenous population was accorded little recognition or respect.     

Circling the Square: Moving between Practical Politics and Eschatological Performance

Abstract

The article explores some dilemmas of current Western liberal democratic politics. It proposes that a necessary tension be held between practical politics and radical critique. It reviews the Christian prophetic tradition as a contribution towards doing that and argues for ‘eschatological performance’ as an appropriate way of re-reading this tradition in a contemporary pluralistic context. The article suggests that, to be useful politically, ‘prophetic imagination’ must retain its theological identity and questioning. It critiques the realist/non-realist philosophical framework for doing this, and suggests how responsibly prophetic political theology can be both fluid and critically realist in its outlook.     

Ultra-modern thoughts: political theology in Leo Strauss’s Philosophy and Law

A primary theme in Leo Strauss’s early work is how medieval Jewish and Islamic political philosophy, while influenced by Plato, differs from him in crucial ways. This theme is central to Strauss’s 1935 book Philosophy and Law. Philosophy and Law concerns the medieval ‘philosophic foundation of the law,’ which provides a rational justification of revelation. For Strauss, the foundation provides this justification by virtue of some difference it has from Plato. In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Strauss’s view of this difference. I suggest that, for Strauss, whereas Plato conceived of the legislator and his legislation, the foundation conceives of the sovereign and his sovereign laws. On this basis, I also suggest a solution to a perennial mystery of Philosophy and Law: Strauss claims that the medieval foundation reveals ‘ultra-modern thoughts,’ yet does not explicitly state the identity of these thoughts. I suggest that their author is Carl Schmitt.     

National Identity and Everyday Cultures in Contemporary France: Re-Constructing Frenchness through ‘Third Kind’ Representations of the Cités (1960–2000)*

This article examines the role played in France by the culture du quotidien (everyday culture) in establishing a more integrated image of the nation and identity. It suggests that since the 1960s, dominant media discourse in France, and artistic representations of the urban periphery, have often perpetuated an image of the cités as menacing spaces detached from the national community and emblematic of France's postmodern crisis. Focusing on everyday cultural creations about the Grand Ensemble in La Courneuve, it argues that the ‘ordinariness’ of the lives these creations convey, along with the residents’ cultural practices and their continuing sense of belonging, effectively treats geography, culture and history in a way that questions the standard externalising discourse about the cités. Despite their limits in terms of circulation, these cultural artefacts of a ‘third kind’ offer images that contribute to challenging the ‘banlieues myth’ and help re-construct a French identity perceived under threat. 1 ?[1] I express my gratitude to Dr Karima Laachir, Professor Kate Ince and Dr Jackie Clarke for their support, comments and advice, while preparing this article. I am also indebted to the challenging and inspiring contributions made by the participants of the ASMCF conference held in Manchester in September 2008. Finally, my thanks go to the inhabitants of La Courneuve who, like Dr Roger Amar, kindly accepted to discuss their views on French contemporary society.      

‘…to exercise in all loyalty,discretion and conscience’: on insider research and the World Heritage Convention

While research on the World Heritage Convention has expanded tremendously in the last decade, little attention has been directed towards the research published by a handful of what can be characterised as insider researchers. Within this context, ‘insider researchers’ refers to individuals working at or on behalf of the core international institutions implementing the World Heritage Convention, such as the World Heritage Centre, and thus conduct research on a system they are part of. Coding articles published in international peer-reviewed journals, this article explores the themes and topics tackled in these articles and addresses the strengths and weaknesses of insider research within the World Heritage context.     

‘If you can't beat them,be them!’ – everyday experiences and ‘performative agency’ among undocumented migrant youth in South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the challenges and coping strategies of undocumented migrant youth in Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on a theatre-based case study conducted with a core group of 10 participants the article shows firstly that participants’ lives are affected by emotional, legal and practical challenges such as loneliness, discrimination and fear. Secondly, the article develops the concept of ‘performative agency’ to illustrate how participants cope with and contest their challenges. Specifically, the article shows that the young people's theatrical performances draw on stereotypical notions of vulnerability and victimhood as a means to denounce the discrimination and oppression they experience. In public interactions with others, by contrast, the young migrants use performative agency to emphasise their strengths and positive attributes, thereby enhancing their integration in a hostile environment. The insights provided by this study can help strengthen policy responses to better support undocumented migrant youth in South Africa and elsewhere.     

CHILDREN OF THE STREETS: RESCUE,REFORM AND THE FAMILY IN LEEDS, 1850-1914

Abstract

Attempts to rescue and reform destitute, orphaned and street children - the ‘waifs and strays’ of the new urban environment - led to a proliferation of children’s homes and welfare organizations in the second half of the I9th century. Local studies enable us to build up a detailed profile of the individuals involved from a grass-roots level. Using a study of Leeds, this article sketches the motives and aspirations of, on the one hand, philanthropists and, on the other, of parents and children enmeshed in what was a complex and ad hoc system. ‘Welfare’ was not simply a rigid mechanism that was imposed on the urban poor; from a local perspective it can be viewed as a relationship, albeit an unequal one. The institution of the children’s home could provide an important strategy for family survival in a world of limited choices.     

Between universal spaces and unique places: heritage in Universal Studios Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case of Singapore's latest theme park, the Universal Studios Singapore (USS). While theme parks are commonly perceived as money-making entities providing entertainment to the masses, the study argues that heritage is an equally important dimension of a commercial theme park's development, identity and profile. As a heritage-rich environment, the USS is a tourism landscape shaped simultaneously by the forces of corporate heritage and local cultural considerations. ‘Glocalization’ – the interaction of global and local forces – offers a conceptual insight into understanding how themed environments are created and marketed as tourism destinations welcoming to all and yet distinctive to its community and locality. Caution, however, is also sounded as to whether an international attraction can or should ever be ‘too local’ at the risk of diluting its global brand name and broad-based appeal.     

Narrating feminisms: what do we talk about when we talk about feminism in Estonia?

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with women who identify as feminists in Estonia, this article explores how the stories we tell about feminism and its past influence the kind of theoretical and political work we are able to do. Zooming in on the story of the emergence of feminisms in postsocialist Estonia which has not been thoroughly researched yet, this article calls upon feminists in Estonia to reflect critically on how they conceptualize feminisms, while at the same time building a framework to think about local feminism within transnational feminist context. Starting from stories of how women became feminists in Estonia since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, I reflect on the gaps, chance encounters and tensions that my fieldwork revealed to narrate feminism differently, to bring forth new aspects of feminism in this context. In particular, I focus on two moments: the common imaginary of ‘real’ feminism as Western mass movement and the tensions between the local context and ‘Western feminism’. I complicate the narrative in the article through including interludes in between the main text to highlight how the incidents that happened outside and around the interviews shape my story of feminism in Estonia.     

The space between: using ‘relational ethics’ and ‘relational space’ to explore relationship-building between care providers and care recipients in the home space

Geographers and other social scientists have a longstanding interest in ‘geographies of aging’ focused on the provision of care to vulnerable older populations and the challenges and experiences of caregivers [Skinner, M. W., Cloutier, D., & Andrews, G. J. (2014). Geographies of ageing: Progress and possibilities after two decades of change. Progress in Human Geography, 1–24]. This qualitative research project explores strategies for relationship-building used by home support workers and older residents according to a ‘relational ethics’ framework, enacted in the ‘relational space’ of the home environment. This framework rests on four principles: engagement, embodiment, mutual respect and environment, and argues that ‘relationships’ between care providers and care recipients must be preserved as the real essence or heart of the health care experience. Two linked conclusions are drawn from the research: that the treatment of the environment can be expanded using a social geographic lens to capture the more active influence of ‘homes’ on relationship-building and second, the relational ethics framework is useful in the home care context to characterize and ground the importance of relationships in the home care domain and the importance of home care to foster aging in place for vulnerable older persons.     

Towards a history of emotion, 1562–1660

Abstract

This article examines uses of the word emotion during the seventeenth century, arguing that the term's meaning at this time was in flux. OED gives three principle definitions of emotion, the first as meaning ‘political turmoil or agitation’, the second as meaning literally ‘movement or motion’, and the third as meaning ‘strong feelings or passing’. I argue that a great many uses of emotion during the seventeenth century apply the word in the second sense to the physiological movements of humours. This being so, I suggest that in emotion's seventeenth-century uses it is possible to read a transition in the word's meaning. Through its frequent use with references to humours in motion, the word begins to take on the characteristics which would allow it to develop into meaning ‘feelings or passions’.