‘Thinking of the land in that way’: indigenous sovereignty and the spatial politics of attentiveness at Skwelkwek’welt

Grassroots Secwepemc attempted to stop the expansion of Sun Peaks resort on a site for Indigenous knowledge. I attend to the practice of Indigenous knowledge related to the confrontation and assert that Indigenous sovereignty and identity were outcomes. To make this argument, I investigate the space made for emotion, affect and intuition in the performance of Indigenous knowledge. From a relational materialist position, these more-than-representational forces play an important role in epistemology, ontology, ethics, and subjectivity. Identity therefore materialized in three ways related to feeling(s). As a result of their attunement to these forces, the Secwepemc understood that (non)humans underpin their material being and placed the collective on the political horizon. Furthermore, the practice of Indigenous knowledge encouraged an identity characterized by “attentiveness” to feeling(s) and to the activity of feeling itself. From the perspective of the struggles of subjugated knowledge, I also contextualize the attentiveness at the core of Indigenous knowledge practices as part of a more-than-representational and decolonizing spatial politics.     

On the Side of Light: Performing Morality at Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials

Abstract

In Rwanda, numerous memorials have arisen to remember the 1994 genocide and its victims. This paper considers the effect of the national genocide memorials on Western tourist visitors, in the context of research on ‘dark tourism’ and Western attitudes toward death and the dead. It draws on the idea that, in a Western context, viewing the remains of violent death can be a kind of ‘soft murder’, and on the concept that the act of witnessing violence creates a community of witnesses implicated in that violence. Western visitors to Rwandan genocide memorials therefore form a community, and their responses are guided by a set of community rules regarding behaviour and experiences during and after the visit. These rules, this paper argues, are rooted in pressures to assert oneself as a properly moral individual through performing morality in a morally ambiguous setting.     

Hidāyat’s Libidinal Hell: Persian Fiction and Inscribing the Demonic

The prominent modern Iranian author ?ādiq Hidāyat (1903?51/1281?1330 sh.) was arguably the most observant expositor of the contortions within the inner world of Iranian demonology during the first Pahlavī period (1921?41/1299?1320 sh.). Through an investigation of his many interbellum titles, such as “Zindah bih Gūr,” “S.G.L.L.,” and “‘Alavīyah Khanum,” the purpose of this paper is to flesh out Hidāyat’s role as a demonographer, meaning someone who inscribes the demonic in his works. It is argued that Hidāyat’s uniqueness was located in his ability to allow the demonic, “the world as it is before the human imagination begins to work on it,” to interact with man at his most nihilistic moment. As such, it is unsurprising that recognition of the demonic was often simultaneously the moment when the voice and visage of Nature itself became apparent.     

Thinking the other,thinking otherwise: Levinas’ conception of responsibility

ABSTRACT

Probably no other philosopher described the encounter with the other (human being) in a more radical way than Emmanuel Levinas. This led him to a new interpretation of responsibility as origin of all our ethical obligations towards others. He put into question a philosophical tradition of thought he accused of taking the ego as sole origin of all foundation of meaning. In this paper, I begin by outlining Levinas’ criticism of the occidental tradition of thought to explain the place of the other in his writings. I go on to explicate Levinas’ peculiar understanding of ‘responsibility for the other’. I will show how important it is in Levinas’ work not to isolate the question of responsibility from the question of justice. Finally, I examine what other capabilities would be required in order to act in a responsible and just way.     

Thinking about the World Bank’s “accordion” geography of financial globalization

Two “flagship” World Bank reports, entitled The Long March—A Reform Agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean In The Next Decade (1997) and the World Development Report, 1999–2000 (2000), are the subject of this paper. Both publications attempt to come to terms with the policy and practice of structural adjustment in the context of a new geography of global finance. This paper argues that the geographical imagination employed in both World Bank reports is the product of a dominant statist geographical imagination that struggles to explain contemporary developments in the geography of money. The paper starts with a brief discussion of the Mexican peso and debt crisis, and the World Bank’s practice of structural adjustment. Through an interrogation of both World Bank papers, thought is then given to the purchase of territorialized state-based mappings of the global economy. The paper wraps up with a brief conclusion concerning the explanatory salience of scale.

Internationally mobile capital is here to stay. Growing trade links, new communication technologies, and increasingly sophisticated financial products are making national borders more porous to financial flows. The challenge facing policymakers in developing countries is how to navigate through this financially integrating world (World Development Report 1999-2000, 2000: 85).

[W]hereas the horizons of the world of money and finance are global and deterritorialized, the political imagination seems wedded to territorialism and the borders of the nation state (Leyshon &Thrift, 1997: 290).

     

Fiction and memoir of Britain’s Great War: disillusioned or disparate?

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.     

‘The vandals at home’: Antonio Cederna’s denunciation of the devastation of Italian cities in the postwar period

Writing for the influential magazine Il Mondo, Antonio Cederna relentlessly denounced the projects and works that endangered Italy’s historical and landscape heritage in a period – the 1950s and 1960s – characterized by processes of change that were as intense as they were disordered and contradictory. The battles he waged against the danger of Italian cities being tampered with by those whom he called ‘the vandals at home’ had a significant impact on urban development. In addition, his discourse left a deep and enduring trace in Italian journalism, urban planning and historiography. This article focuses on the early period of Cederna’s journalistic activity: it delineates the core features of his denunciation, paying as much attention to its contents as to the form and manner in which it was expressed, and it assesses the outcome and legacy of his press campaigns both on a material and a political-cultural level.     

Let’s meet at Baiae: a journey of 2000 years to the edge of Europe

Since Antiquity, seaside resorts have figured among the most popular sites of leisure and tourism on the European continent. In many ways these sites clearly expressed and supported converging trends in European culture and society. Spa resorts brought together visitors from a range of nationalities in a shared culture of health, pleasure and recreation. This contribution aims to explore how the Mediterranean spa resort of Baiae in the Bay of Naples functioned as a significant cultural setting where visitors and local actors shaped, experienced, discussed and shared cultural values in a changing world throughout the ages.     

‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law’: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s

This paper analyses two critiques of the jurisprudential basis of settler colonialism in Australia published in the early Victorian periodical press. Review articles in the North British Review and Fraser's Magazine in the 1840s deployed claims of legal sophistry to dispute the fiction that Australian colonies were settled, rather than conquered, and that the country was a terra nullius. By examining the politics and rhetoric of each article, the significance of legal ideology for both literature promoting colonization and humanitarian critiques of colonial policy is assessed. Through a combination of discourse analysis and intellectual history, the North British Review article is read as fusing Scottish Enlightenment concepts of social evolution with the rhetoric of sensibility to defend the existence of Indigenous rights to land and to argue for the degenerative implications of colonial social practices. Similarly, the Fraser's Magazine article offers an epitome of the place of law in colonial policy-making by invoking utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to law to rationalize doctrines of sovereignty and jurisdiction, minimizing legal protections for Aborigines while maximizing the legal powers of colonists. By tracing the use of jurisprudential rhetoric in reviews published in two leading metropolitan journals, the paper offers evidence that the literary sphere contributed to the emergent culture of colonial legality.     

Gladstone’s Land: the changing face of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile

SUMMARY: This paper presents the results of recent archaeological research into the building known as Gladstone’s Land on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The aim of the research was to examine to what extent historical fabric had survived in light of extensive historical intervention. The building is a surviving example of Edinburgh’s Old Town urban architecture, which is characterized by tall structures with a shop front and densely occupied residential spaces. The paper presents evidence of the development of the building from the 16th century to its conservation in the 20th century. This development involved the replacement of formerly timber elements in stone and the creation of ornate painted interiors. The history of the building and the archaeological evidence embedded within it offer evidence of the life and changing architectural trends of Scotland’s capital. It also adds to our current understanding of heritage practice in the 20th century, raising issues of authenticity and the social construction of visitor-oriented heritage.     

‘Germany’s salvation’: Carl Schmitt’s teleological history of the Second Reich

Although Schmitt’s enthusiastic conversion to National Socialism is well known, his short history of the German Kaiserreich, published in 1934, remains neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This article contextualizes Schmitt’s narrative through the National Socialist conception of history and its accompanying teleology leading to the formation of the Third Reich. By placing Schmitt’s historical text in conversation with his earlier Staat, Bewegung, Volk, this article argues that Schmitt appropriated the history of the Kaiserreich to construct liberalism as a social pathology which could only be cured through the ‘concrete state theory’ he outlined in Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Furthermore, this article argues that Schmitt’s history relied heavily on propagandistic clichés of the Third Reich and thereby functioned as a rhetorical legitimation of Hitler’s rise to power.     

Thinking Transition ‘From the Outside’: An Analysis of the Film De L’argentine by Werner Schroeter

The present article concentrates on the analysis of the film De l’Argentine/De la Argentina/For example Argentina (Werner Schroeter, France/Argentina, 1983–1985) as a way of access to a number of specific problems concerning the process of Argentinean democratic consolidation. It is a film that was only screened in Argentina for the first time in 2013, after a copy was found at the French Cinémathèque. Like other films produced in the context of dictatorship and democratic transition, Schroeter’s film has tended to think Argentina ‘from the outside’, that is, with a view marked by strangeness. These are documentaries which reflect upon physical and temporal distances, but, not the least, through cultural and ideological remoteness. On the basis of an analysis framed within Documentary Theory and the Sociology of Culture, this article seeks to make a contribution by way of an original perspective on a political film which, as far as we know, has not been addressed yet by Film Studies.