‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.     

Why Do We Ask “What If?” Reflections on the Function of Alternate History

The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced "allohistorical narratives" out of fundamentally presentist motives. Allohistorical tales have assumed different typological forms depending upon how their authors have viewed the present. Nightmare scenarios, for example, have depicted the alternate past as worse than the real historical record in order to vindicate the present, while fantasy scenarios have portrayed the alternate past as superior to the real historical record in order to express dissatisfaction with the present. The presentist character of alternate histories allows them to shed light upon the evolving place of various historical events in the collective memory of a given society. In this essay, I examine American alternate histories of three popular themes—the Nazis winning World War II, the South winning the Civil War, and the American Revolution failing to occur—in order to show how present–day concerns have influenced how these events have been remembered. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that alternate histories lend themselves quite well to being studied as documents of memory. By examining accounts of what never happened, we can better understand the memory of what did.     

Land reform in South Africa and the colonial present

This paper develops Derek Gregory's concept of the ‘colonial present’ by demonstrating how the colonial present in rural South Africa in general and around land reform in particular has conditioned land reform outcomes. My development of the concept departs from Gregory's in two key respects. I argue first that, by viewing it in relation to the geopolitics of capitalism, it can be applied to places beyond the immediate influence of US military power; and, second, that social forces which might begin to undermine the colonial present should be examined. My empirical materials draw upon primary research on the emergence of government-sponsored partnerships between restitution beneficiaries and agribusinesses in northern Limpopo. I use the materials to argue that partnerships have emerged given white farmers’ near-monopoly on skills and the persistent power of traditional leaders, two features of South Africa's colonial past whose importance today is suggestive of a colonial present.     

Trans/national knowledge production through difference: dilemmas of doing research on veiling in Amman,Jordan

Abstract

This article examines some dilemmas I experienced while doing research on fashionable veiling in Amman, Jordan. My fieldwork experience and the knowledge I co-produced with the participants were shaped by each layer of my identity as a Jordanian, Muslim, non-veiled woman, with a particular classed, spatialized Ammani heritage and affiliation with western feminist academia. The article engages with the implications my positionality had on my insider-outsider status and the knowledge the participants and I co-produced. I argue that the research setting, while fraught with difference, constituted a site for transnational solidarity and knowledge production. The participants and I had divergent understandings of, and aspirations for, Jordanian Muslim femininity shaped by our varying positions within the Global North-Global South. I argue that we practiced solidarity by collaborating and co-constructing a transnational site to unpack and defend their viability. I found that our collaboration was not fuelled by a shared sense of injustice and did not produce a shared outlook on Islam, Jordanianness or femininity. Rather, it created a site where we were able to emphasize our divergent sense of these paradigms as women positioned differently within the trans/national, cultural, and religious spaces we shared.     

Border historicity and ethnographic rupture: Pirates,Korean Kings and borderlanders in transnational Tsushima Island,Japan

Tsushima’s community festival commemorates Tsushima’s admirable borderland diplomacy in the pre-modern East Asian politics. This indigenous historicization in performance, nevertheless, fails to resonate with ethnographic reality: anthropological fieldwork revealed that local culture differs considerably from postcolonial ritual imaginings and historicity, illuminating a discontinuity between the past performed and the present observed. A rupture exists between borderland imagery as a coherent Japanese state boundary and the ethnographic reality of an uneven liminal frontier between Korea and Japan. In order to make sense of the ethnographic ruptures, this article constructs the border-centric ethnohistory through the lens of and experiences of the border, defying a state-centric past. I de-essentialize border-state relationship, accentuating border spontaneity and contingency between and beyond the power of sovereignty – a paradoxical Janus-faced process of contradiction and negotiation. I argue that it is Tsushima’s historical metamorphosis that stands out in history, not its subjugation to the power of either state.     

Gravestones and Monuments in the Maritime Cultural Landscape: Research Potential and Preliminary Interpretations

Thousands of memorials around the world commemorate maritime disasters and death. In addition to commemoration, memorials provide insight into the conceptual landscape of maritime peoples. Types of maritime memorials, locations where they can be found, and the limitations of memorials as archaeological artefacts are discussed. Data from 18th- and 19th-century English and American maritime memorials are used to make preliminary interpretations regarding Anglo-American maritime beliefs. Based on this I argue that memorials are a valuable source of data for maritime cultural landscape studies, particularly for what they reveal about maritime belief systems.
© 2006 The Author     

DĒMOKRATIA'S POSSIBLE DISCONNECTION: UNTIMELY ANTIQUITY,TEMPORAL OUTSIDENESS,AND HISTORICAL FUTURES OF POLITICS*

This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia’s projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of Nachleben (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. Dēmokratia challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. Dēmokratia’s possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities.     

Memory of the Body,Temptation of Space

In this essay I examine the possibilities of approaching the phenomenon of memory from the point of view of space. Drawing on Edward Casey’s Getting Back into Place and on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the spatialized lived body, I attempt to show in what way memory can be said to belong to places. My inquiry ends with a discussion of Paul Ricoeur’s proposals on the narrative dimension of human space, which, I argue, allows us to consider why a building or a city may be said to produce a sensed duration by and through inscribing it in the durability of their materials and, at the same time, in human histories.     

Wilful Design: The Sampler in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This article recovers the cultural significance of the sampler in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that this mainstay of female education models a circular shape of development in which the young girl painfully revises earlier experience; the subject is conceived of as perpetually reworking herself without obvious linear progression. Though this article is situated against canonical works of Victorian fiction, it focuses primarily on actual samplers to argue that these pieces of childhood embroidery should be recognized as a form of life-writing. After establishing the conventions of the sampler, I turn to an apparently anomalous example that exemplifies the temporal and affective patterns ingrained by the pedagogical exercise of sampler sewing. My central artefact is an autobiographical sampler from the needle of a 17-year-old Sussex girl named Elizabeth Parker. Currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this textile from 1830 recounts Parker’s childhood experiences in service, and the horrors of physical abuse and sexual assault that led her to contemplate suicide, all compressed into 46 lines of cross-stitch. I argue that the sampler as a pedagogical tool resists the Bildungsroman’s model of the self as formed through temporal progression towards self-contained adult agency. Instead, the sampler materially and thematically enforces the recursive temporal dynamics of conversion.     

Bernard Lamy,Empiricism, and Cartesianism

Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) is frequently included among the Cartesian Empiricists of the second half of the seventeenth century. He has also been described as an Augustinian who dabbled in Cartesianism. While acknowledging that there are both empiricist and Augustinian elements in his thought, I argue that it ought not be forgotten that there are central components of his philosophy that are both anti-empiricist and in opposition to Augustine. My aim in this paper, though, is not (merely) critical; I hope to show that Lamy provides us with one more example of the diversity present among the various thinkers labelled as ‘Cartesian’.     

The Clash of Epochs: Traditional,Modern, Postmodern,and Evolutionity

Several authors have written about the clash of civilizations and have described it as the main form of conflict in today’s world. My thesis is that the clash of epochs is far more fundamental. It is the hitherto insufficiently noted ground on which different forms of conflict can take place. The clash of epochs, in the form of a conflict among traditional society, modernity, and postmodernity, has led the West to be internally torn apart and increasingly incapable of withstanding new emerging challenges. I argue that to reverse this trend, the Western world has to reconstruct itself again as a civilization. It needs to rediscover the value of its classical moral and intellectual traditions. This should be not merely a return to the past but a creative return that will initiate evolutionity—a new evolutionary epoch, which would replace modernity and postmodernity.     

THE PAST IS EVIL/EVIL IS PAST: ON RETROSPECTIVE POLITICS,PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY,AND TEMPORAL MANICHAEISM

One of the most remarkable phenomena in current international politics is the increasing attention paid to “historical injustice.” Opinions on this phenomenon strongly differ. For some it stands for a new and noble type of politics based on raised moral standards and helping the cause of peace and democracy. Others are more critical and claim that retrospective politics comes at the cost of present‐ or future‐oriented politics and tends to be anti‐utopian. The warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing politics directed at contemporary injustices, or strivings for a more just future, should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of a politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. We should refuse to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present‐ and future‐directed politics. I argue that retrospective politics can indeed have negative effects. Most notably it can lead to a “temporal Manichaeism” that not only posits that the past is evil, but also tends to treat evil as anachronistic or as belonging to the past. Yet I claim that ethical Manichaeism and anti‐utopianism and are not inherent features of all retrospective politics but rather result from an underlying philosophy of history that treats the relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding “transtemporal” injustices and responsibilities. In order to pinpoint the problem of certain types of retrospective politics and point toward some alternatives, I start out from a criticism formulated by the German philosopher Odo Marquard and originally directed primarily at progressivist philosophies of history.     

Tek Down Nelson! The Struggle for Repair in Barbados

In this article I explore how the decommissioning of the statue of Lord Horatio Nelson captures some of the ways justice is envisioned within Barbados. I ask: How does the decommissioning generate more attention to the reparations question? How is repair and sovereignty conceptualised through the performances that animated and structured the event? What do these performances suggest about the Barbadian geographic-historical foundation? I engage theorists of Black geographies and Black studies to work through the above questions. I do close readings of the performances featured in the ceremony, to illuminate how the decommissioning gestured to a range of histories and struggles that are punctuated by political transformation. My reading draws attention to how the statue's removal builds on regional demands for reparations and Barbadian struggles for sovereignty, which I argue are complementary aims.     

Visibility as concealment: Informal football matches and wealth disparities in rural Jamaica (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Every weekday evening men from Black River (a coastal Jamaican town) and the nearby communities of New Town, Logwood, and Spring Park play ‘pick‐up ball’ (informal football matches) together. Some of the players are wealthy and well educated and are respected in the communities. Others are unemployed, dependent upon relatives, wives, girlfriends, or cash‐in hand employment opportunities for subsistence. My presentation proceeds from the question: why do these groups play football together? I argue that men of higher socioeconomic status aim to counteract disparities in the economic sphere with competition in the social sphere. By visibly mixing and competing with men of different socioeconomic statuses, wealthier men aim to conceal these disparities. My work proceeds from an understanding of Jamaica as a country with significant and growing inequalities of wealth and class. By looking at the social lives of higher class men in Black River, I argue that these men aim to negotiate potentially volatile socioeconomic conditions through competition and ‘strategic socializing.’ In a sense, these men aim to conceal socioeconomic disparities by making themselves visible as individuals.     

English and French national identity: comparisons and contrasts*

ABSTRACT. The English and the French are both former imperial peoples, and to that extent they share certain features of national identity common to peoples who have had empires. That includes a ‘missionary’ sense of themselves, a feeling that they have, or have had, a purpose in the world wider than the concerns of non‐imperial nations. I argue that nevertheless the English and the French have diverged substantially in their self‐conceptions. This I put down to a differing experience of empire, the sense especially among the French that the British were more successful in their imperial ventures. I also argue that contrasting domestic histories – evolutionary in the English case, revolutionary in that of the French – have also significantly coloured national identities in the two countries. These factors taken together, I argue, have produced a more intense sense of nationhood and a stronger national consciousness among the French than among the English.     

Postmodernism and the Revival of Socialism as Critique

Socialism as a political philosophy confronts many theoretical and empirical challenges in our contemporary world. Some thinkers consider it obsolete and others aspire to reformulate it by couching it in a more pragmatist idiom. My aim here is to show that the salient features of socialism, those that are worth preserving, presuppose the indispensability of critique and reflective subjectivity in a sense that goes beyond pragmatism. To develop my argument for a socialist theory that can benefit from postmodern challenges without surrendering its critical force, I review some recent ideas in the socialist discourse and I contrast them with Cornelius Castoriades's theory of socialism. I conclude by defending the possibility for a new articulation of the socialist project, one that takes into account past failures as well as the shortcomings of current socialist trends.     

Counterfactualism,utopia, and historical geography: Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt

Though counterfactual histories are treated with suspicion by some historians, they can be both useful and politically progressive. In fact it is possible to argue that counterfactual historical geographies might even be utopian. Though this seems counter-intuitive (how could alternative histories imagine a better future?), both histories and utopias encourage a kind of popular historicism, a sense that things have been (and could be) different. Whether this makes counterfactual fictions utopian depends on how you define utopia. Recent critical re-appraisals of the concept have suggested that we might think of it as a process, an ongoing critique of the present, not as an end in itself. Counterfactual histories can be utopian because they encourage a critique of teleology and determinism; their geographies can also be utopian because they remind us that spaces are multiple and open. A close reading of Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt (2002), a novel that describes a world without Europe after a more virulent version of the fourteenth-century plague kills everyone west of Constantinople, demonstrates that counterfactual historical fictions present an unequalled opportunity to reflect upon the practice of history. The novel also suggests that counterfactual historical fictions also allow for a critical evaluation of the nature of space. The paper concludes by demonstrating the value of counterfactual fictions through their representations of history, and of spaces of movement, multiplicity, and agonistic encounter.     

Reassessing the ‘Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry

This article examines both recent scholarship in the field of Victorian religion and conviction alongside new research on secularization that have cast doubt on an older historical narrative about the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘triumph’ of the secular. My discussion challenges the emergence of an alternative narrative of crisis that focuses on the ‘crisis of doubt’ rather than the ‘crisis of faith’. In particular, it answers the recent work of Timothy Larsen who argues that many past (and some present) approaches to Victorian religious culture have overemphasized doubt at the expense of considering enduring forms of Christian religiosity. By reappraising the career histories of the radical secularists (notably, Annie Besant) that Larsen uses to support his thesis, I test some of the key assumptions and conclusions of his influential account. My analysis questions the positioning of faith and scepticism as polar opposites and the usefulness of the idea of ‘crisis’ when examining either belief or doubt. Changes in individuals' convictions and practices might be better seen as part of their life-long quest for an all-embracing morality.     

Between Utopia and Tradition: William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball

ABSTRACT

William Morris, author of the famous nineteenth-century utopian novel News from Nowhere, thought it both possible and desirable to develop a utopian vision that could be affirmed by many individuals. However, Morris also recognised that achieving such utopian unity was not easy. There is, at least potentially, something personal about utopian visions; they are shaped by idiosyncratic desires that cannot be shared. Through a reading of Morris’s A Dream of John Ball, I argue that Morris offers a temporal solution to the problem of utopian unity. The central characters in the text, medieval priest John Ball and a nineteenth-century socialist agitator, come to recognise their shared adherence to the same image of a new society. This is achieved through the mediation of tradition: Ball and the agitator overcome their differences by committing themselves to disappointed hopes elaborated in past struggles that have been handed down to the present. Morris’s articulation of utopia and tradition—the sense that visions of the future can be made shareable through reference to the past—offers the possibility of a transtemporal solidarity of utopians and the bringing together of the dreams of a plurality of individuals.