RESEARCH,NARRATIVE, AND REPRESENTATION: A POSTNARRATIVE APPROACH

Narrativism or representationalism is founded on the idea that historical narratives and representations are 1) true and indivisible wholes, whereof 2) the truth needs to be maintained, although a narrativist or representationalist whole cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, and wherein 3) the past is represented in a figurative sense. These fundamental aspects of narrativism have had a positive impact on historiography, but they are also the three reasons why narrativism has neglected historical research and argumentation. To remedy these problems postnarrativism has been evoked. It opts for presentation instead of representation, cutting through all the links between the past and the historiographical product. The product is not a narrative or a representation but a thesis, a proposal to see the past in a special way. The only element postnarrativism wants to retain of narrativism is colligation because it has an argumentative structure based on epistemic values. Postnarrativism leads to knowledge, built on the practice of warranted assertions instead of truth. My postnarrativism chooses a middle course between a strong narrativism and what I would like to call a “weak,” presentational postnarrativism. I agree with postnarrativists that more attention must be paid to argumentation and research. Moreover, I consider time a neglected issue in narrativism. Nevertheless, I don't want to give up the three above‐mentioned fundamental aspects of it. In my view the assumption of truth with regard to (figurative) representation needs to be maintained, but in a pragmatic, provisional form: a historical narrative or representation can be considered as true as long as it has not been replaced by a better one. Retaining truth and holism, but wanting more room for investigation and argumentation, requires that narrativism's role in historical research and history‐writing be revised. This implies the replacement of the usual research phase by a preparation phase, wherein, next to research, space must be reserved for so‐called writing activities. Preparation means the conversion of a germinal narrative or representation into an accomplished whole. Holism occurs in two representational forms: a narrative and a representation. In both forms, research concepts and the associated temporalities become visible under the surface of the narrativist or representational superstructure.     

ASSESSING (AND NOT ASSESSING) THE ITALIAN CONTRIBUTION TO HISTORIOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Edited by Giuseppe Galasso, one of Italy's most distinguished historians, this large volume seeks to convey the Italian contribution to historiography and political thought from the dawn of the Middle Ages into the present century, though it is overwhelmingly concentrated on the centuries since 1400. It includes six overview essays, but over 70 percent of its bulk consists of short articles, 108 in all, the vast majority on individual figures, and most of them five to seven pages in length. Whereas the approach, through individual figures, makes the volume especially valuable as a reference work, the approach also entails limitations making it hard to delineate and assess a distinctively Italian contribution. Readers must often connect the dots on their own if they are to discern the strands of a distinctive tradition. In his introductory overview, Galasso suggests a special Italian sensitivity to history, or capacity for the philosophy of history, but the suggestion is left vague and is followed up only in the most ad hoc way in the subsequent essays. The book offers little on how Italian idiosyncrasy might have either compromised or enhanced wider impact. Although the extent of Italian international interaction is well documented, there is little attention to reciprocity and the scope for synergy. Nor is there much assessment of the implications of changes in the valences of that interaction over the centuries, especially in breeding self‐criticism and sometimes compensatory myth‐making that might have further complicated the resonance of Italian offerings. But the volume demonstrates the richness of the Italian contribution and implicitly invites us to better encompass it, perhaps through comparative work and further research on multinational interplay.     

RECONCEIVING THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO TRANSLATION

Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times. This time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. If, as argued here, “the past” does not exist independently of the means by which it is known and represented, then the many different modes of historicity that human beings developed and deployed before the modern form of history became dominant cannot be measured against “the” past in an effort to compare their accuracy or adequacy in representing it. The concluding section of this article asks what we are doing when we write the history of those who did not share the presumptions of the modern discipline but who had their own mode(s) of historicity. What, it asks, is the character and status of the knowledge produced when we write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts?     

CHOOSING RESIDENCE,COMMUNITY AND NEIGHBOURS ‐THEORIZING FAMILIES’ MOTIVES FOR MOVING1

This article takes its point of departure from an ongoing research project that examines the connection between everyday life and choice of residence. The first component of this empirical study is an investigation of reasons given by families for moving out of Copenhagen to a commune ‐ Absalons Have in Trekroner – in a new suburban area close to the city of Roskilde (located approximately 25 km west of Copenhagen). The research examines the connection between this choice of residence and the everyday lives of the families, including why this form of residence ‐ the commune ‐ is attractive to them. What kinds of needs do the families have and how can the new residence fulfil these needs? This article examines these questions, first, by outlining a theoretical discussion of how to capture the connection between everyday life and residence. Here concepts such as “sense of place”, “the social construction and use of place”, “meaningful places”, and how place experiences play a central role are examined. Second, the article presents findings from an empirical study examining families’ choice of Trekroner and the commune Absalons Have.     

AMENITIES VERSUS LABOR MARKET OPPORTUNITIES: CHOOSING THE OPTIMAL DISTANCE TO MOVE*

ABSTRACT. A recent debate in the regional economics literature has focused attention on the motivation behind an individual's decision to migrate. Human-capital migration models emphasize labor market disequilibria whereas alternative (hedonic) migration models stress households’altered demand for nontraded goods. In this paper, we test the relative importance of these two possible motivations for moving between metropolitan areas. We use an intercity hedonic model to decompose wages into equilibrium and disequilibrium components. We then compare the separate influences of amenities and the disequilibrium component of wages on the distance moved between two metropolitan areas. Our findings indicate that both economic factors and amenity differentials are significant factors in explaining regional migration.     

REPRESENTATION AND IMAGES OF PEOPLE, PLACE AND NATURE IN GRENADA'S TOURISM

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to examine the visual images occurring in Grenada's place promotion materials. Tourism has become Grenada's principal source of foreign exchange and employment generation. With the increasing popularity of eco- and nature-tourism, the island has looked to this form of specialty tourism as a way to diversify its tourism product. Tourism is a uniquely visual industry; thus semiotics, the study of signs, was chosen for this study because of its ability to analyze the representations a tourist would encounter prior to reaching a destination or prior to participating in activities at the destination that would influence his or her expectations. Emphasis was placed on the images found in promotional materials and advertisements of Grenada to determine the mythology and ideology behind them. These images fell broadly into one of three categories: people, place or nature. Each category was represented as an 'other' that may be discussed in terms of dualities such as natural–artificial, exotic-familiar, and active-passive. The study concludes that images take on the myth of something different breaking the routine of the tourist's ordinary, daily life.     

PHOTOGRAPHS, SYMBOLIC IMAGES, AND THE HOLOCAUST: ON THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF DEPICTING HISTORICAL TRUTH

Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the "limits of representation." Nevertheless there are many photographs "showing" the Holocaust that have been produced in different contexts that bespeak the photographers' gaze and the circumstances of the photographs' production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as "evil." Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography (Benjamin, Kracauer, Sontag, Barthes) to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may—despite their abstract meaning—be able to depict historical truth.     

TO BUY OR NOT TO BUY: DETERMINANTS OF HOME OWNERSHIP AMONG GHANAIAN IMMIGRANTS IN TORONTO

Using information collected in a questionnaire survey, this study investigates the factors influencing the housing tenure of Ghanaian immigrants in Toronto. The study finds that Ghanaian immigrants have a low home-ownership rate compared to the Canadian-born population and other immigrant groups. This is partly attributable to the recency of their migration, their relatively low incomes, and their small household sizes. Analysis also shows that social and personal factors, notably the initial motives of the immigrants, their back-home ties, their desire for home ownership back home, and their intention to return there permanently, are critical in shaping their decisions with respect to home ownership in Canada.
Dans cette étude, nous examinons, à l'aide d'un sondage, les facteurs portant sur les modes de logement des immigrants ghanéens à Toronto. Nous démontrons que les Ghanéens sont propriétaires de leurs logements moins souvent que ne le sont les personnes nées au Canada ou les membres d'autres groupes d'immigrants. Le sondage révèle que la taille inférieure des ménages, les faibles revenus, et les dates d'immigration récentes des immigrants ghanéens sont parmi les causes principales de ce phénomène. L'analyse démontre aussi que des éléments sociaux ou personnels, tels les raisons initiales de l'immigration, les liaisons avec le lieu d'origine, le désir d'être propriétaire dans le lieu d'origine et l'intention ou non des immigrants de retourner au Ghana, sont d'une importance fondamentale lorsque les immigrants ghanéens prennent une décision à l'égard de l'achat d'un logement.     

SUCCESS,TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY‐FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY1

This essay provides a close reading of Saul Friedländer's exceptionally successful comprehensive history of the Holocaust from the theoretical perspective of Hayden White's philosophy of history. Friedländer's The Years of Extermination has been celebrated as the first synthetic history of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges the experiences of the victims of Nazi genocide. But Friedländer has not simply added the voices of the victims to a conventional historical account of the Holocaust. Instead, by displacing linear notions of time and space and subtly deconstructing conventional concepts of causality, he has invented a new type of historical prose that performs rather than analyzes the victims' point of view. Friedländer's innovation has particularly radical consequences for the construction of historical explanations. On the one hand, Friedländer explicitly argues that anti‐Semitism was the single most important cause of the Holocaust. On the other hand, his transnational, multifaceted history of the “Final Solution” provides a wealth of data that escapes the conceptual grasp of his explicit model of causation. Friedländer chooses this radically self‐reflexive strategy of historical representation to impress on the reader the existential sense of disbelief with which the victims experienced Nazi persecution. To Friedländer, that sense of disbelief constitutes the most appropriate ethical response to the Holocaust. Thus the narratological analysis of The Years of Extermination reveals that the exceptional quality of the book, as well as presumably its success, is the result of an extraordinarily creative act of narrative imagination. Or, put into terms developed by White, who shares Friedländer's appreciation of modernist forms of writing, The Years of Extermination is the first modernist history of the Holocaust that captures, through literary figuration, an important and long neglected reality of the “Final Solution.”     

不走寻常路,游省钱更能看美景的地方

<正>进入冬季以来,国内不少景区就势推行淡季票价,以大幅度的门票折扣吸引冬季客流。与此同时,景区酒店也适时推出淡季价,尤其是一些以往高达数千元一晚的五星级酒店,而今只需花上几百元即可豪叹,加上近期机票折扣,着实能省下不少银子。     

NOT QUITE AN UROBOROS: THEORY,POWER, AND POPULAR CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN

Katsuya Hirano's The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan offers an Althusser‐inflected analysis of the relationship between power structures and the economy of cultural production, with a focus on late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Edo. Hirano spells out his cultural assumptions, and then examines the cultures of parody, comic realism, the grotesque, and the changing relationship between the Meiji state and the body. This theoretical tour de force, however, raises many questions regarding its assumptions about the structure of the early modern Japanese polity, elided evidence, and interpretation. As such, it will stimulate ongoing discussion regarding the place of theory, and in particular of neo‐Marxism, in contemporary historiography.     

STATE, CLASS AND INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL 1: BACKGROUND TO THE BRASILIAN STEEL INDUSTRY

By 1980, the Brasilian steel industry had grown to be the eighth largest among the market economies. It is a largely state-owned industry, much of the expansion of which has been funded by international capital. The pattern of development has not been externally imposed, however, but rather reflects the changing balance of class forces within Brasil as policies oscillate between nationalist, populist limits on foreign investment and open, pro-development strategies that rely on foreign investment. Both policies develop their own contradictions, that are reflected in frequent military interventions.     

EXTERNALITIES AND PARTIAL TAX REFORM: DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO TAX ROAD FREIGHT (BUT NOT PASSENGER) TRANSPORT?*

ABSTRACT Externalities such as pollution and road congestion are jointly produced by the use of intermediate inputs by firms and the consumption of final goods by households. To cope with such externalities, policy proposals often suggest partial tax reforms. This paper uses a simple general equilibrium model to explore the effects of a reform of taxes on freight transport in a second‐best setting. The theoretical model shows that the welfare effect of higher freight taxes is positive, unless passenger transport is severely under‐taxed and the tax reform attracts substantially more passenger transport. Moreover, the optimal freight tax may be below or above marginal external cost. Budgetary neutral tax reform exercises with a numerical simulation model for the U.K. suggest that, under a wide variety of parameter values, higher freight transport taxes are indeed welfare increasing. The welfare gain of freight tax reform rises with the level of the passenger tax, but the optimal freight tax declines at higher taxes on passenger transport. Substantial net benefits of tax reform are obtained only under labor tax recycling of the revenues.