“This Greater Issue of Light against Darkness”: Sereno Edwards Bishop,Missionary Religion,and the Hawaiian Islands, 1827–1909

The history of nineteenth‐century missions provide a fruitful field to explore the development of religious thought and practice in a secular setting. This article shows how the religious views of the clergyman and educator Sereno Edwards Bishop, born in Hawai‘i of American missionary parents, were shaped by his childhood among the mission community in Hawai‘i and by his American college education. These instilled in him a liberal approach to theology that was informed by a spiritually alert sense of Hawaiian geography and environment. Contrary to the notion that he cast his faith aside in addressing matters of wider social and political importance, Bishop emerges as someone who thought critically about mid‐nineteenth‐century Protestant Christianity, grounding his perspective on politics, society, and natural history in Hawai‘i according to his religious principles. Given Bishop’s specific intellectual and cultural heritage, it is difficult to subsume his perspective within broader narratives of American expansion; rather, both Pacific and mainland American elements shaped the thought of such mission‐descended figures.     

Four Decades of “Discreet” Charismata: The Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia 1863–1900

For some years, the historiography of Australian Pentecostalism has been dominated by the belief that Pentecostalism came to Australia in 1909 through the agency of Sarah Jane Lancaster who had, in turn, been influenced by news of overseas events. There had, apparently, been little or no influence in the Australian context by such groups as the Catholic Apostolic Church, which formed in Britain in 1835, in the wake of Edward Irving's proto‐Pentecostal theology. Although members of the Catholic Apostolic Church arrived in Melbourne in the 1850s, the general view was that they had by then abandoned their earlier pursuit of the charismata. In 2012, I argued (based on a limited sample of evidence) that the adherents of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Australia both taught and practised the charismata throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. This evidence is contained in the Angels’ Report Books, located in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Since then, the Bradford collection has been fully digitised, thereby allowing a comprehensive review of the Catholic Apostolic Church's charismatic activity and further evaluation of the Lancaster hypothesis. The significance of this research is that it allows a considerable re‐framing of the pre‐history of Australian Pentecostalism, demonstrating that the Catholic Apostolic Church taught and practised glossolalia, prophecy and divine healing through the last four decades of the nineteenth century.     

“I found the truth in Foot Locker”: London 2011, Urban Culture,and the Post‐Political City

The article begins with an overview of what is implied in the notion of the “post‐political” before looking closely at post‐political interpretations of the 2011 London riots. It presents a critique of the restricted sense of political subjectivity in such accounts. It demonstrates how participation in the riots and their aftermath may be seen as indicative of an embryonic form of urban politics that works with and against the post‐political city. This discussion is illuminated by an analysis of the discursive space of London hip‐hop which reveals an ironic, complex and reflexive dialogue about identity, justice and politics that is far removed from the caricature offered by “strong” interpretations of the post‐political subject. This is then linked to readings of the post‐political city that place a welcome stress not only on the evacuation of the political dimension from the city, but also on the opportunities for the re‐emergence of the proto‐political.     

The Crisis of the “Disadvantaged Child”: Poverty Research,IQ, and Muppet Diplomacy in the 1960s

In the early 1960s, the US federal government deemed poverty to be a national crisis, and actively intervened to solve this problem. My question for this article is how did preschool education become a key site to remedy this crisis? Government interventions were a combination of poverty research, racialized politics, and child development. I show how the discipline of early childhood education cohered around the term “disadvantaged child”, in turn influencing the War on Poverty policies, including the basis of Head Start preschool education. During this same decade proponents of Sesame Street—with private funding, along with extensive testing mechanisms by consultants—argued that the television could reach more children, therefore be more cost effective. This paper investigates how surplus populations became determined and demarcated, as early as three years old. I question how televised preschool taught “affective skills” and proper social relations during times of political crisis.     

“Under the Blood” at Azusa Street: Exodus Typology at the Heart of Pentecostal Origins

This article intends to analyse the spirituality of the Azusa Street Mission with a view to achieving two things. Firstly, I will draw attention to an emphasis that seems almost wholly ignored in studies of early Pentecostalism: the blood of Jesus. Secondly, while drawing attention to the considerable prominence of this Christological‐soteriological motif within the discourse of Azusa Street, I will seek to find a context for it that might help to explain it. This context will be explored in biblical, spiritual, and racial terms.     

Patrick O’Farrell and the Irish History Wars, 1971–1993

While Patrick O’Farrell's achievements as an historian of the Irish and of Catholicism in Australia are well recognised, little attention has been paid to his significance as an historian of Ireland. This article takes his two major Irish monographs, published in 1971 and 1975, and considers how they influenced leading Irish political historians of the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, the article examines the crisis created for historians by the Northern Ireland Troubles. It demonstrates that the work of O’Farrell, which called into question the primacy of politics and of the nation state, helped open up new avenues for the analysis of Irish culture and identity. Yet, at the same time, such an approach challenged the republican reading of Irish history as a struggle against colonialism, and thus O’Farrell's work attracted severe criticism.     

“Fraudulent” Citizens of a Small Town: Occidentalism in Turkey

Abstract: By looking at the electoral politics in a small town in Turkey, this article aims to illustrate how the political scene is polarised with counterpoised representations of East and West, alongside Occidentalist aspirations. The division supplies a set of ready‐made explanations regarding “backwardness, poverty and corruption”. However, although different frameworks are employed in line with the political orientations of respective parties, particular political demands and courses of action are systematically dismissed. The poor and the repressed are hardly listened to. Yet worse, they are “explained” in advance by the antagonistic pair of the East and the West. This article is an ethnographic exploration of how their demands fall in neither side, and how attending them could challenge the existing political realm.     

John Breuilly: ‘Eric Hobsbawm: nationalism and revolution’

This article considers how Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) connected the concepts of revolution and nationalism, analysing this in relation to his biography, his politics and his work as a professional historian. It traces major changes in Hobsbawm's understanding of revolution and nationalism as he, the political world and the ways of writing history all changed over the course of his long life.     

‘Time of Troubles’: Arnold J. Toynbee's twentieth century

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) has long been neglected or discounted by scholars of international relations and historians of international thought. Yet his contributions to International Affairs, as well as his Surveys of international affairs and his A study of history demonstrate both his capacity for acute interpretation of contemporary events and the depth of his learning about past international societies. This article examines his analysis of mid‐twentieth century international relations, that ‘Time of Troubles’ which he believed would only be escaped through a recovery of ‘creativity’ and profound change in the ways in which world politics were practised. It explores the foundations of his approach to the field, demonstrated both in his Surveys of international affairs and his twelve volume magnum opus, A study of history, as well as his essays in journals. It analyses his diagnosis of the causes of our contemporary ‘Time of Troubles’, in the light of past episodes in world history Toynbee thought analogous to that present condition of international relations. And it traces his retreat from political solutions to the challenges faced in the twentieth century and his movement towards religious responses as a putative alternative. It concludes by arguing that Toynbee deserves recognition, not simply as a pioneering world historian or a controversial interpreter of the politics of the Middle East, but as an acute commentator on the international relations of a troubled age.     

“It's not like your home”: Homeless Encampments,Housing Projects,and the Struggle over Domestic Space

Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti‐homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions of home. While housing projects in Fresno are based on a model of privatized and surveilled apartments, people who lived in local encampments often asserted alternative notions of home grounded in community rather than family, mutual care rather than institutional care, and appropriation rather than consumption. Meanwhile, local officials viewed such alternative domestic spaces as non‐homes worthy of destruction. Rather than valorizing domestic struggles above public or institutional struggles, this article seeks to move beyond geographic binaries to more holistically approach the politics of US homelessness.     

“It's About Time You Came Out”: Sexualities,Mobility and Home

Abstract: Helping redress the dominance of metropolitan narratives upon which much literature on sexuality is framed, this article interprets the narrative told by a “white” 16‐year‐old man living in regional Australia. Our aim is to investigate the intersections of migration and homemaking in sexual subject formation. Finding a place to call “home” can be a complex process for young men born in regional Australia and not conforming to the social formations of a “normal guy”. This young man's narrative expressively reveals the fluidity and spatiality inherent in processes of negotiating sexual subjectivities. His story provides telling insights into how migration and mobility change his understandings of home and of self by making possible a third‐space configured by neither the gender norms of his hometown nor the “gay scene” in Sydney.     

Conservatives,the Constitution and the Quest for a ‘Representative’ House of Lords, 1911–35*

This article presents a new interpretation of Conservative attitudes towards house of lords' reform in the early 20th century. Coinciding, as it did, with the introduction of universal adult suffrage, the campaign to reform and strengthen the second chamber has traditionally been understood as a reaction against democracy. Conversely, this article, emphasizing the politics rather than policies of reform, argues that many Conservatives sought to establish a legitimate role for a second chamber within the new democratic settlement and that the campaign for reform is, consequently, better understood as a constitutional means of ‘making safe’, rather than resisting, mass democracy. The account sheds new light on how the impulse behind reform was frequently rooted in a commitment to democracy, how reform commanded the support of a wide cross section of the Conservative parliamentary party, and why the reform campaign had folded by the early 1930s. In doing so, it reframes an important episode that helped close the long‐19th‐century tradition of constitutional reform in British politics.     

Undoing Nature: The John Muir Trust's “Journey for the Wild”, the UK,Summer 2006

Abstract: I take as a point of departure for a discussion of the idea of nature the John Muir Trust's much publicised Journey for the Wild which took place in the UK during the summer of 2006. My objective is to explore how, at the same time that the “wild” was performed as a political category through the Journey, replicating the binary nature/society, prevalent norms of nature that depend on that binary, including, ironically, those of John Muir himself, were “undone”. I work with Judith Butler's (2004, Undoing Gender) ideas of “doing” and “undoing” gender and what counts as human, and her link between the articulation of gender and the human on the one hand and, on the other, a politics of new possibilities. Taking her argument “elsewhere”—unravelling what is performed as “wild” and what counts as “nature”—and using as evidence the art of Eoin Cox, the actions of journeyers, extracts from their diaries and from Messages for the Wild delivered to the Scottish Parliament, I suggest that the idea of a working wild points towards more socially just political possibilities than a politics of nature defined through a binary.     

“And They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love”: Exploring the Role of Christian Love on Maloga Mission, 1874–1888

This article investigates the power, and the politics, of Christian love on the Australian settler‐colonial frontier through the case study of two evangelical missionaries, Daniel and Janet Matthews, during their time at Maloga Mission (a non‐denominational mission to the Aboriginal people of the Murray River which they founded on its northern banks in 1874). Whether protested in private missives, professed in public tracts, or proclaimed to their assembled audiences, Christian love played a vital role in the both the secular justification, and the sacred sanctification, of the Matthews' mission. Yet in practice, the operation of this emotion was complex. Through an exploration of the role of Christian love in the life of Maloga mission and its missionaries, this article will show how the intricacies of its formulation, expression, reception, and reciprocation make this a crucial if often overlooked concept for the study of mission history, and specifically, in this case, the study of nineteenth‐century settler‐colonial missions.     

“An auxiliary,not an usurper”: John Saunders,Temperance, and Secularisation

In his influential account of the political history of early colonial Australia, Michael Roe identified the temperance movement of the 1830s–1840s as a pivotal factor in the secularisation of Australian culture and institutions. The belief system that drove the movement, he argued, was not traditional Christian doctrine but a “new faith” of “moral enlightenment.” In this article I test the validity of Roe's claim, drawing on the work of a more recent generation of historians and sociologists who have argued for more “porous” and “reciprocal” accounts of concepts such as reason, religion, the Enlightenment, and the secular. Its focus is on the writings and activities of John Saunders, whose endeavours on behalf of the temperance cause were such that he was described by his contemporaries as the “life and soul” of the society, the “father” of the movement, and the “apostle of temperance.” It examines the role played by key Enlightenment motifs such as improvement, optimism, reason and cooperation within the rhetoric of Saunders's writings and the reasoning that informed his actions, exploring the various and complicated ways in which he articulated the relationship between evangelical religious conviction and the quest for the common good.     

“Solidarity is our weapon”: Social Mobilisation in Scotland in the Contest of the Post‐Political Condition

The consensual climate of the post‐political order has been recently disrupted in Europe. The mass protests staged in different European countries and the resurgences of the extreme parties in response to the multiple European crises witness the “cracks” in consensual politics. While much of the scholarly attention has been drawn onto the socio‐political implications of large‐scale upraises, the contribution of bottom‐up sub‐national groups to the “return of the political” has been under‐researched. Therefore, this article focuses on sub‐national grassroots groups as instances of the “properly political” (Swyngedouw 2009, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33[3]:601–620). It is contended that these groups, by putting in place acts of solidarity, are “agonistic” political forms, containing in nuce the potential to counteract the post‐political order and to shape a new politics. To interrogate this argument, the article reports the findings of a case study analysis involving four grassroots groups based in Scotland.     

Hobbes on the supernatural from The Elements of Law to Leviathan

Hobbes's unusual religious views in his classical work, Leviathan, are often seen as a product of his attempt to reconcile Christianity with his philosophical materialism. Yet given Hobbes's materialistic view in his earlier works too, this explanatory framework alone is not sufficient for grasping distinctive features of Leviathan. This article remedies this lacuna by paying close attention to an understudied aspect of the development of Hobbes's religious theory from The Elements of Law to Leviathan: his treatment of the supernatural and, particularly, of matters of faith known by supernatural revelation as opposed to natural reason. I argue that over time Hobbes developed an epistemological analysis of supernatural revelation and refined his argument about the sense in which matters of faith are supernatural and about the extent to which they are found in the Bible. It was not materialism per se but the more sophisticated analysis of the supernatural in Leviathan that enabled Hobbes to admit the sphere of the supernatural to a much smaller extent than in De Cive and to discuss in detail what he sees as a matter of faith and beyond the scope of philosophy in De Cive.     

Refusing to be Toured: Work,Tourism, and the Productivity of “Life” in the Colombian Amazon

Starting from the contention that exercising a “right to tour” is predicated on the work of producing tourability, I examine how tourability itself is a contested process involving relations of land and labour. Examining the current “resource boom” of ecotourism in the Colombian Amazon, I use an analysis of work and capital accumulation to unravel a seemingly small act of refusal by the community of Nazaret that has barred tourists’ entry to their land. I argue that this act of refusal opens up space for critically examining the relationships of land and labour, especially through the production of “life”, in the accumulation of tourable places in contemporary global capitalism. Engaging literature on both tourism studies and land politics in the Amazon region, I contribute to the scholarship on tourism and work while examining how Indigenous landscapes are being made productive towards the ends of capitalism.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.