The William James Foundry 1817–1843: An Exposé of Local Metallurgical Enterprise

Abstract

It is a traditionally held view that slavery retarded industrial enterprises, and as such any form of metallurgical industries/activities, for example, would be alien in a slave society. Recent research has, however, indicated quite clearly the technological capacity of slave societies, noting that technological innovations including technical enterprises were evident in slave societies and thus challenges the 'incompatibility thesis' that slavery retarded economic development.     

Brazilian Horrors Past and Present: José Mojica Marins and Politics As Reproductive Futurism

Director José Mojica Marins is both the mastermind and actor behind Zé do Caixão, an icon within Brazilian popular culture and an international cult sensation. Marins encountered numerous conflicts with Brazil’s military dictatorship, and after producing the first two films of an intended trilogy, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the third film, Embodiment of Evil, was not made until 2008. Throughout this trilogy, Zé do Caixão kidnaps, tortures, and murders scores of victims, effectively mimicking the human rights abuses that occurred under the dictatorship. He advocates liberation from the oppression of traditional morality while reinscribing its rhetorical raison d’être: purpose through procreation. The popular appeal of these films, their political intentionality, and their production during and after the dictatorship allow for an analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Marins in his attempt to both shock audiences and instill in them a counterhegemonic consciousness. Despite the radical agenda at work in Marins’s films, I will argue that this trilogy is conservative in its rhetorical framework, serving as an example of Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism, wherein political legitimacy is contingent upon procreation.     

Korounkorokalé revisited: ThePays Mande and the West African microlithic technocomplex

In 1992 and 1993, the author reexcavated the rockshelter of Korounkorokalé, located in the heart of the Pays Mande. Evidence from this reinvestigation supports the idea of a long-term recurrent occupation of this site by peoples possessing a conservative quartz microlithic tradition for at least 5000 years. Seemingly aberrant “recent” first millennium AD dates from similar sites in the region are reexamined in the light of the Korounkorokalé sequence. It is argued that some isolated groups of Sub-Saharan peoples maintained a hunting-gathering lifestyle as recently as the mid to late first millennium AD. Oral traditions among modern Savanna groups, which refer to the presence of “little peoples” at their first colonization of the region, are used to support this argument. A new model for the peopling of West Africa is presented based upon a long-term autochthonous presence south of the Sahara.     

Fractured bodies and diseased societies: medicalizing Quebec in Cité libre

This essay seeks to rationalize and explain the evolution of medical rhetoric in Cité libre by looking at trends in the journal's use of tropes of illness and disease. Through a combination of broad content analysis and close readings, it contrasts how individual metaphors create the impression of a sickening nation and the manner in which these metaphors collectively, albeit paradoxically, act as a national allegory of cure for mid-twentieth-century Quebec's social ills in general, and specifically for its pathological inferiority complex. By examining how the journal uses medical metaphors and specifically how the writers employed the trope of the body politic to illustrate Quebec's national failings, the essay demonstrates how Quebec challenges the rhetorical stability of the age-old metaphor as it attempts to solve, but also creates, problems within Quebec's articulation of its own nationhood.     

Elite theory and neo‐elite theory understandings of democracy: An analysis and criticism

Paieto and Mosca, the original elite theorists, in addition to combating socialism developed a new analysis of and set of norms for democratic societies. Some democratic theorists counter‐attacked while others tried to incorporate parts of elite theory into their understandings of democracy. ‘Neo‐elite’ theorists, however, have returned the compliment and tried to turn democratic theory into a sub‐branch of elite theory. In my re‐examination of the work of Pareto and Mosca and criticism of neo‐elitism, it is argued that although neo‐elitists may appear to be more sympathetic to democracy than were Pareto and Mosca, they make less of a contribution to the understanding of democratic government and their work has a greater tendency to give democratic forms an oligarchic content.     

Paouté and Aiaouez: A New Perspective on Late Seventeenth-Century Chiwere-Siouan Identity

A fine-grained spatial and temporal analysis of relevant seventeenth-century French documents reveals that from circa 1650 to 1685 the two terms principally associated with the Ioway, Aiaouez and Paouté, were consistently applied to geographically distinct branches of that tribe. The conflation of these two terms after circa 1700 is the product of both changes in the contact-period cultural landscape and the manner in which it was defined. This conclusion has importance for the use of these accounts as analogues for reconstructing Oneota tradition social organization and highlights the value in applying contemporary theoretical perspectives and analytical techniques to ethnohistoric data.