‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

Good Iranian,Bad Iranian: Representations of Iran and Iranians in Time and Newsweek (1998–2009)

This article analyzes the ways in which Iran and Iranians are represented in Western news media sources. Through detailed textual analysis of articles in Time and Newsweek between 1998 and 2009, it demonstrates that journalistic representations of Iran and Iranians are not simply efforts aimed at describing the real Iran, but rather form the basis of what Said refers to as a powerful “community of interpretation” that often reflects and reproduces certain xenophobic stereotypes of non-Western foreign subjects. While some shifts in Western media representations of Iranians have occurred in the thirty years since the revolution, the underlying ontological assumptions of these representations have remained remarkably durable. That is to say, the dominant representational discourse found in these newsmagazines depicts the political behavior of Iranians on the basis of essentialized notions of Persian and/or Islamic civilization, while very often emphasizing the taken for granted superiority of the West. Earlier Orientalist discourses focus on the difference of non-Western foreign subjects by denigrating them as fundamentally anti-modern and incapable of political, cultural and economic development without Western intervention. This article presents an unmistakable discursive pattern in American journalism whereby certain Iranians are incorporated into Western civilization by virtue of their embrace of a Western modernity.     

The Love Wars: Parisian Struggles (1962–68)

Studies of the 1960s continue to be dominated by the focus on the annus mirabilis of 1968. Given the traditional emphasis on key dates in French history—1789, 1848, 1871, 1936—the concentration on 1968 is understandable, but it is has had the regrettable effect of largely neglecting the early sixties. Consequently, this article examines the social/cultural changes that occurred in student dormitories of the Paris region between 1962 and 1968. These six years witnessed changes that comprised increasing tolerance of political activities and of hedonistic pleasures, resulting in the expansion of personal freedoms. Adult society—including Communists, Gaullists, and university administrators—was much less repressive and more tolerant than many students and radicals expected or believed. Historians and other observers have often pointed out that the first decade of Gaullist Fifth Republic witnessed the economic ‘modernization’ of France. Just as significantly, social and cultural mores also changed during this period.     

Memes,masculinity and mancession: Love/Hate’s online metatexts

Since it first aired in 2010 on Radió Teilifís Éireann, Ireland’s national public service broadcaster, Irish crime drama series Love/Hate has enjoyed record audience ratings. However, while serious TV critics and the show’s producers have praised it as a complex and incisive commentary on crime in Ireland, the more participatory online cultures of the Journal.ie, Twitter and Facebook have constructed a distinctly less highbrow set of discourses around the show. This analysis of the Journal.ie’s Daily Edge recaps demonstrates how participatory Laddish humour and what Jean Burgess refers to as the “vernacular creativity” of memes have functioned to prioritise a cohesive set of engagements with Love/Hate that are underpinned by fantasies about the recuperation of male power. Moreover, by creating a sense of “in-groupness” around the series, the Daily Edge and its tertiary texts have produced a heavily gendered sense of consensus about who “we” in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland are.     

(Sick) Love and the Older Woman in Marcel Prévost's L’Automne d’une femme

Marcel Prévost, a prolific novelist, journalist, and academician, is best known for works such as Les Demi-Vierges (1894), which demonstrates how Parisian society and education corrupt young women, and Les Vierges fortes (1900), which, according to Louise Lyle, “develop[s] the concept of the secular, self-perpetuating community of female educators only to explode it as an empty ideal” (60). In his 1893 novel, L’Automne d’une femme, Prévost focuses not on virgins but on the older woman, telling the story of forty-year-old Julie, who has languished for over twenty years in an arranged marriage to Antoine Surgère. Despite having the natural ability to ease the suffering of others, Julie shows no interest in nursing her husband when he falls ill, though she eagerly cares for the daughter of one of his colleagues, Claire Esquier, and the son of another associate, Maurice Artoy, who is all too eager to reciprocate when Julie's feelings for him become something more than maternal. Unbeknownst to Julie, however, Maurice and Claire once dabbled in a youthful romance that neither forgot. The glue that holds this tangled web of relationships together is illness, a theme so pervasive that the verb souffrir and its derivatives are employed no fewer than 137 times, along with myriad other terms related to pain. Prévost's creation of a veritable culture of illness in which love cannot possibly flourish for the woman in her “autumn” might be said, in fact, to feed into the Decadent vision of woman as dangerous and corrupting.     

Socialism,Antifascism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Intellectual Dialogue (and Discord) between Andrea Caffi and Nicola Chiaromonte (1932–1955)

Summary

This article reconstructs the personal and intellectual friendship between two cosmopolitan intellectuals: Andrea Caffi (1887–1955) and Nicola Chiaromonte (1905–1972), who met while in exile in Paris in 1932. After a brief recapitulation of their previous biographies, and an overall presentation of their participation in the revolutionary antifascist group ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ (GL) in the thirties, this article provides a detailed analysis of their dialogues and disagreements in the forties and fifties on the topics of socialism and revolution, antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, utopia and history. Particular attention is devoted to their contribution to the debates in the antifascist journal of GL (published in Paris, 1932–1935) and in the radical journal of Politics (published in New York, 1944–1950). Examined closely, the friendship between Caffi and Chiaromonte appears as a sequence of convergences and divergences, understandings and ruptures, which reflect the tensions and lacerations of the European civil war and its post-war legacy (intertwined with and overlapping the cultural Cold War). Looked at again from a distance, however, it reveals a fundamental intellectual unity—a profound apolitical affinity in a century of radical politics which had fed wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes.     

寻找最真实的自己——Eat,Pray,Love

伊丽莎白·吉尔伯特(Elizabeth Gilbert),具备小说家与新闻记者的双重身份,于2006年发表了《美食、祈祷、爱》(Eat,Pray,Love)。这部记录她离婚以后心路旅程的作品,高居《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜很长时间,先后被翻译成三十多种文字。本书作者拥有现代女性梦想的一切——丈夫、房子、成功的事业。然而,就像很多人一样,她发现自己很迷惘,于是作者开始思索女人的人生价值到底在哪里。这是一本作者为自己而行走、为自己而探寻的旅程写成的一本书,叙述了她在意大利、印度、印尼三个不同的国度寻找自己的旅程。作者用一年的时间,在意大利的美食中追寻快乐、在印度的宗教中理解忠诚、在印度尼西亚找寻平衡,三个地方,对应了作者对自己天性中三个方面的审思,也对应了有趣的书名——《Eat,Pray,Love》(美食、祈祷、爱)。最终作者在巴厘岛邂逅了新的爱情,获得了身心的平衡。     

“If I were hungry,I would not tell you” (Ps 50, 12): Perspectives on the Care and Feeding of the Gods in the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

In the Hebrew Bible, sacrifices are described as food for Yahweh and thus the sacrificial system corresponds with the general Ancient Near Eastern system of the “care and feeding of the gods” At the same time, human-divine commensality is problematized in narrative texts such as Judges 6 and 13, where the burnt offering is stressed as the only and necessarily different way the deity may consume food. Finally, some passages, such as Psalm 50, quoted above, explicitly reject the notion that sacrifices and offerings should be required as sustenance for Yahweh since he is the creator and owner of the world and everything in it.

This article offers a survey of various views on sacrifice as food for the deity in the Hebrew Bible and discusses these views in their Ancient Near Eastern context. It is suggested that the main understanding of sacrifice as meal in the Hebrew Bible is one that emphasizes difference through commensality and stresses the incompatibility of the human and the divine sphere through the social locus of the meal.     

Love: A Common Word between Evangelicals and Muslims?

Abstract

This paper analyses the responses of Evangelical Christians to "A Common Word between Us and You." While many Evangelical leaders warmly welcomed the initiative and have subsequently been involved in various dialogues and conferences, others were more sceptical and refused to take part. This latter reaction refects a general lack of trust in some parts of the Evangelical movement engendered by concerns over Muslim approaches to law, freedom of religion and conscience, the treatment of apostates under shari'a and restrictions on Christian mission in Muslim countries. The debate between these two groups has been sharp and at times acrimonious, refecting deeper tensions within the Evangelical community. Drawing on recent books, articles, blogs and the author's own observations at an international dialogue conference, this paper highlights the tensions and examines some of the underlying causes.     

Geography,Race, and Nation,in Agostino Codazzi's Transatlantic Experiences (1793–1859)

Through the analysis of Agostino Codazzi's experiences in the Atlantic, this article aims at underlining the strong connection between Latin America and the Italian peninsula in the nineteenth century as well as his role in the emergence and development of geography. An officer in the Napoleonic army in Italy and later an exile in Latin America, Codazzi mapped the territories of Venezuela and New Granada (Colombia), arose from the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy, thusly contributing to the building of the new nation-states. The analysis will focus on a collection hold in the National Library of Turin, which is part of the material produced by the Chorographic Commission of New Granada between 1851 and 1859. This material will allow us to understand the Atlantic as a space of mutual connections and interdependencies between Europe and Americas in the elaboration and development of modern disciplines and sciences, such as geography, as well as in the construction of national imageries.     

Communications,Qajar irredentism,and the strategies of British India: The Makran Coast telegraph and British policy of containing Persia in the east (Baluchistan)—Part I

Qajar irredentism brought Persia to make some advances in Baluchistan in the 1830s and 1840s, but in early 1860s, the continuation of this advance was threatened by one of Britain's main imperial interests and needs: the Indo-European telegraph line, which was to cross the Makran Coast overland. Persia sought to use this need for getting British recognition for its claims over Baluchistan. This put the British under pressure, for they did not wish to alienate Persia, through whose territories the line was to pass. The British government tried to appease the Persians with a simple declaration that the telegraph would not affect their claims and by taking the telegraph away from disputed territories. One major thing was faulty in this “solution,” for it was the British who decided which territories were “disputed” or “undisputed,” not the Persians.     

Water and Salt (I): Yājñavalkya's Saindhava Drstānta (BĀU II 4,12)

Indo-Iranian Journal -