María Zambrano amongst the philosophers. An introduction

ABSTRACT

As the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) came to an end, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who had opposed the military rebellion which initiated the war and remained loyal to the democratically elected government were forced into exile. Amongst them was the philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991). While little known to an English-speaking readership, she represents a unique voice engaging with some of the fundamental problems of our times. Her life was marked, like that of her contemporaries Benjamin, Husserl, Arendt, Pato?ka, Adorno, Lacan, Derrida and Blumenberg by the crisis of modernity culminating in the two World Wars. Her work is part of the same philosophical debates, currents and problems facing the Europe of her time. The aim of the volume María Zambrano amongst the philosophers, introduced in this article, is to focus on the links between Zambrano’s thought and a wide range of themes and ideas associated with these other European thinkers. A summary of Zambrano’s main philosophical concepts and preoccupations is also offered to help the reader situate the translated anthology of texts by the philosopher included in the volume.     

Lo que le sucedió a María Zambrano: Dulcinea

Don Quijote is constantly present in María Zambrano’s works, especially in the years of exile. Along her career, Zambrano wrote many essays about Cervantes, in which she reflects on love, always about the character of Dulcinea. One of these essays, significantly titled “Lo que le sucedió a Cervantes: Dulcinea,” raises the lack of love as the most important topic in Quijote, and discusses from this point of view the ideal image of Dulcinea contradicted by the carnal Aldonza.     

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.     

From the Absent Mother to the Oppressive Mother to the New Mother in Lucía Etxebarria's Un milagro en equilibrio

This article examines the transformation of maternal and paternal images that occurs in Lucía Etxebarria's 2004 novel Un milagro en equilibrio. Sandra Schumm argues that the novel engages and transforms the postwar archetype of the “absent mother.” Using Schumm's study as a springboard, my article takes this argument further by showing how Etxebarria rewrites a second maternal archetype, the “oppressive mother,” a figure that symbolizes patriarchal values and the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women. At first, protagonist Eva Agulló characterizes her mother, Eva Benayas, as one of these oppressive mothers, a characterization that Etxebarria has also employed in her two most famous novels to date, Amor curiosidad, prozac y dudas and Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes. Un milagro en equilibrio marks a change in Etxebarria's treatment of mothers because, as the novel progresses, Agulló questions and then complicates this portrayal. The Benayas that emerges is a complex woman influenced by personal, familial, and national conflicts. Conversely, Agulló's father comes to assume more culpability for family abuse and dysfunction as Agulló associates him with Francoism. This reassessment of maternal and paternal roles demonstrates Etxebarria's own evolution in maternal representations as it dialogues with and recreates previous works such as Ana María Moix's 1969 novel Julia and Ana María Matute's 1959 Primera memoria and 1969 La trampa—three foundational novels that also employ tyrannical maternal figures. In rejecting the oppressive mother role she had assigned to her mother, Agulló rewrites a long history of maternal figures associated with the Francoist regime in many postwar narratives by women.     

On Academic Foucauldian‐dramaturgy and Modernity in Melanesia

This short paper offers a critical reflection on the uses of Michel Foucault's ideas and the notion of ‘modernity’ which mark a current trend among so many ethnographers of Melanesian life‐worlds. Through the examination of several ethnographic cases I show the limitations of these usages and, correlatively, advocate a more mindful epistemic regard for the cultural realities and the processes of transformations of Melanesian life‐worlds in the present‐day world‐historical context.     

The reader of confession in María Zambrano

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is an attempt to understand the concept of ‘confession’ as a literary genre in the works of Spanish philosopher María Zambrano. Firstly, we will try to understand confession within Zambrano's most relevant philosophical concepts, in particular her study La confesión: género literario y método [Confession. Literary Genre and Method]. Secondly, we will offer reinterpretation to confession in dialogue with theories of Reception by Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss, and other authors like St. Agustin, Rosa Chacel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Miguel de Unamuno and Michel Foucault. Finally we will highlight the performative aspect of confession as something that is truly relevant to Zambrano’s theory. Zambrano understands confession as a method that can bring people's experiences closer to knowledge, and therefore a method that can change life. In this context, we propose that the reader of confession plays a fundamental role in understanding Zambrano’s conception.     

“Ill‐natured comparisons”: Racism and relativism in European representations of ni‐Vanuata from Cook's second voyage

Landes’ anthropological theorizing, highlighting the connections between race, gender, sexuality and class, expressed an Eastern European Jewish female praxis well-established by the late 1920s and early ‘30s when Landes began her research career. Landes’ changing Jewish identification through her life resulted from gendered aging and the reformulation of Jewish racialization processes in the U.S. Her late life reflections are evidence of what Susan Watkins calls ‘gendered late-style’ as well as Jewish conceptions of time as anti-linear and counter-normative. I investigate how her Jewish socialist Yiddish-speaking family background inflected her interpersonal and professional networks and her writings on anti-racist, class and gender-based themes.

Abbreviations: RLP: Ruth Landes Papers; NAA: National Anthropological Archives; SI: Smithsonian Institution; RBP: Ruth Benedict Papers; ASC: Archives and Special Collections Library; VCL: Vassar College Libraries     

Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter

The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of first-wave feminism, Donoghue explores the nature of female friendship through her unfortunate attachment to a troublesome woman with a duplicitous nature and her resentful husband. Considering the game of perspectives displayed in the narrative as propositions for the coexistence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards the understanding of the implicative dilemmas characters have to unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores, as these have been defined by constructivist epistemology and, more specifically, within the framework of constructive psychology.     

The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

Democratic ambivalence in post mortem

Pablo Larraín’s trilogy of films has broken new ground in Chilean cinema by offering a new perspective on realities of the Pinochet dictatorship, the outbreak of the coup, and the dissolution of Pinochet’s power. This article explores Larraín’s use of banality, which, I claim, realizes a democratic ambivalence that is latent in historical representation and History proper. Rather than accusing Larraín’s films of conservatism or apathy, I argue that these films seek to destabilize the known categories of identification: a radical gesture against any form of establishment. Paying particular attention to Larraín’s aesthetics, I claim that the radical gesture of Post mortem (2010) lies in its innovations at the level of mise-en-scène and editing. Drawing on philosophical insights in Jacques Rancière’s and Gilles Deleuze’s writings on historical representation and ambivalent representations, I argue that Larraín avoids conventional forms of historical fiction and Latin American political cinema.     

‘Unfortunate Jews’ and urban ugliness: crafting a narrative of the 1391 assault on the jueria of Valencia

On 9 July 1391, a mob assaulted the Jewish quarter of Valencia, killing and forcibly converting its inhabitants. This attack, one of many across Spain that summer, is much debated as a turning point in medieval Jewish history, but little attention has been paid to the role of the urban government. This article shows how the city council of Valencia shaped its narrative of the assault to further its goals for urban reform. In 1391, the Valencian council was in the midst of a reform initiative informed by the principles of Christian urban planning in Francesc Eiximenis’ Regiment de la cosa pública. The jueria was seen as an impediment to reform. The council’s retelling of the 1391 attack shifted responsibility onto the Jews and the jueria itself, considered a block to public order in the city. This laid the groundwork for the council’s solution: the removal of the jueria from Valencia.     

Historiographical Foundations of Modern International Thought: Histories of the European States-System from Florence to Göttingen

Summary

The foundations of modern international thought were constructed out of diverse idioms and disciplines. In his impressive book, Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage focuses on the normative idioms of natural law and political philosophy from the Anglophone world, from Hobbes and Locke to Burke and Bentham. I focus on parallel developments in the empirically-oriented disciplines of history and historiography to trace the emergence of histories of the states-system in the Italian- and German-speaking worlds, from Bruni and Sarpi to Pufendorf and Heeren. Taking seriously Armitage's remark that ‘the pivotal moments in the formation of modern international thought were often points of retrospective reconstruction’, I argue that the historical disciplines supplied another significant intellectual context in which the modern world could be imagined as ‘a world of states’.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 2. April 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 2 Front cover NIGERIA'S IGBO JEWS Between images of the Star of David and menorah, Habakkuk Nwafor's front door in Nigeria's capital bears the proud notice, ‘I AM A JEW’. The leader of Abuja's Tikvat Israel Synagogue, Nwafor is an Igbo, a member of Nigeria's third largest ethnic group, numbering over 30 million people. Seated outside his Abuja home, he holds a copy of William Miles's Jews of Nigeria: An Afro‐Judaic odyssey (2013), a book about Nwafor's family and religious community. On its cover is a photograph of his son becoming a bar mitzvah. For at least a decade prior to its publication, Igbo Jews offered their own written religio‐historical narratives, but Miles's was the first book about Igbo Jewry composed by a Western academic. From 2,000 and 5,000 people, most of whom are Igbo, practice Judaism throughout Nigeria, though a much larger number self‐identify as Jews even while practising Christianity. Igbo self‐identification with and as Jews dates back to the 18th century, but concretized during and after the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), in which at least one million Igbo died in the failed bid for Biafran independence. The civil war and its disastrous consequences initiated a still‐ongoing period of intense questioning among the Igbo concerning their history, present predicaments, and future prospects. Igbo Jewish identity presents a challenge. Igbo Jews consider themselves part of world Jewry, but are not yet integrated with, nor represented in and by, Jewish institutions/associations around the world. Igbo Jewish identity also poses the truth question, as Igbo oral religio‐historical claims are examined and questioned by researchers and scholars using academic lenses. Back cover Lesbos in the frontline An olive branch with one hand outstretched in aid of a fellow human being, as drawn by illustrator Georgie McAusland. In the course of 2015, Skala Sykamnias, a tiny, sleepy fishing village and tourist idyll on the island of Lesbos, Greece, became a gateway to Europe for more than 200,000 refugees. In this issue, Evthymios Papataxiarchis analyzes how the European refugee crisis impacted his fieldwork site. The rescue of refugees involves several theatres of operation, ranging from the frontline centred upon the sea and the beach, to backstage revolving around the reception centres further inland. This attracts a multitude of volunteers, activists and humanitarian organizations from all over the world, becoming a focal point for world media. A swirl of political, ethical, and material elements, both local and transnational, now focuses upon the locality. The massive welcoming of reugees, however, is full of contradictions. With diverse actors enacting what are often dissonant ideals and strategies, what might appear from the outside to be a humanitarian act, is in fact more complex. Humanitarian structures raise several issues, such as local concerns about sovereignty, the authenticity of ‘disinterested’ motives, the nature of ‘solidarity’ and the role of the NGOs. From the local perspective this is a ‘generative moment’: at the centre of huge human and material flows, the local community is falling apart whilst to the incoming it represents freedom. Skala has become a mini theatre of conflicts that echo wider debates on the political future of Europe. In this capacity it captures a decisive moment in 21st‐century European history.     

El Caballero de Dios y la muy noble reina: María de Molina's patronage of the Libro del Caballero Zifar

This article analyzes the political discourses on chivalry and gender in Libro del Caballero Zifar and provides textual evidence in support of the theory that María de Molina was an original patron of this anonymous work from the cathedral school of Toledo. Using the portrait of the queen in the prologue as a point of departure, this study explores the intertextuality of Libro del Caballero Zifar and contemporary royal chronicles, elucidating the manner in which the political discourse of the former supports the political propaganda of the latter, ultimately creating a legitimizing discourse for María de Molina's rule as queen of Castile-León at the turn of the fourteenth century.     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

Zambrano’s poetic reason in the light of Frankfurtian Critical Theory

ABSTRACT

María Zambrano's biggest contribution to intellectual history is, without a doubt, her poetic reason; her unique attempt to overcome the limiting coordinates of the framework of rationality established by the Enlightenment. Having spent forty-five years in exile, the relevance of this Republican thinker has only been acknowledged in recent decades. Since then, the political content of her early work, as well as her engagement with the Republic's cause prior to and during the Spanish Civil War are well known. Nevertheless, although Zambrano still wrote some political books after the Civil War, most notably, Persona y democracia (1958), the political component of her thought after this period has passed largely unnoticed. This article intends to take a wider approach to Zambrano's political engagement by exploring the political significance of her poetic reason. Here I contend, first, that poetic reason, far from being an isolated attempt at developing an alternative rationality, is actually in line with the critique of instrumental reason proposed by the Frankfurt School and, second, that, in fact, there are meaningful parallels between poetic reason and Frankfurtian Critical Theory. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explore such parallels and their significance in revealing the political dimension of Zambrano's thought.     

Creating Space for the Successor: The Discourse Strategies of Pro- and Anti-GM Factions Regarding the Future of Agriculture in New Zealand

A struggle between different forms of food production for the future of agriculture space has been occurring in many regions of the world. Drawing on the literature of the geography of food and the theory of productive worlds, we propose that the discourse strategies deployed by competing actors should be considered part of the set of conventions that guide productive activities. Two examples of discourse strategies are outlined: the use of articulation to position a desired outcome within a historically resonant discourse in order to gain legitimacy; and the maintenance of a strategic tension between isomorphism and differentiation such that a stance is perceived as a credible choice. We describe and map the impacts of these discourse strategies as they were deployed by anti- and pro-genetic modification groups in the struggle to become the “natural” successor to New Zealand's conventional agricultural heritage. The shifts in discourse positions of the two protagonists highlight the increased hybridity and regional complexity of the worlds of food and the battle for agricultural space.     

El exilio interior y sus máscaras: Voaxa e Carmín de Esther F. Carrodeguas

Abstract

In Santiago de Compostela, La Alameda is a place frequented by students and tourists. The passerby discerns within the crowd a statue of two small women, arm in arm, dressed in bright colors and wearing extravagant make up. “As dúas Marías,” Maruxa and Coralia Fandiño, were two sisters who were brought up in a family of anarchist leaders of the CNT. With the arrival of the civil war and the dictatorship, the illusion created by the government of the Republic and the drafting of the Statute of Autonomy was soon transformed into silence and reprisals. The Fandiño men managed to flee, but the women remained in the house and were victims of torture and rape. Their only defensive mechanism was the solidarity between them and the embracing of madness. Thus it became a daily event in Santiago: at two o’clock in the afternoon, Maruxa and Coralia went out for a walk, dressed in bright colors and flamboyantly make up to compliment the students. Voaxa e Carmín by Esther F. Carrodeguas recreates one of those walks. This article will focus on how the inner exile of the protagonists is revealed, that is, their loneliness, their fear, their isolation, through the strategies of the theater of the absurd, and the metatheater. These resources include the use of the mask, the exchange of roles and the repetitive language.     

Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret: Sexual Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women's Year Conference

In a widely read memoir, a Bolivian union militant signals the moment of her alienation from the nongovernmental organisation tribune of the United Nations’ 1975 International Women's Year (IWY) conference in Mexico City by describing her dismay when she encountered a group of women clamouring for sexual rights, reiterating a persistent narrative about a trade‐off between sexual rights and other forms of social justice.
Drawing on feminist performance theory, this article examines the political performances of three central figures at IWY – Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Betty Friedan and Mexican theatre director Nancy Cárdenas – to explore the ways that political performances rooted in distinct scenarios, or historical contexts, generated a confusion of meanings around campaigns for sexual rights.     

Guada-narco-lupe,Maquilarañas and the Discursive Construction of Gender and Difference on the US–Mexico Border in Mexican Media Re-presentations

This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence, ‘narratives of eviction’ and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward ‘others’. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically, ‘woman as anonymous, replaceable body’; ‘woman as victim of the border city’; ‘Guada-narco-lupe’; ‘woman as dependent appendage’; and ‘othered Mexican’; to illustrate that the production of knowledge about gendered subjects is a political and discursive practice embedded in national ideologies. Mexican media representations present a rich palette for thinking about constructions of gender and difference along a raced, sexed border. An investigation of the unequal and essentialist elements present in specific newspaper articles offers a fresh perspective on the socio-spatial aspects of particular discursive strategies and their role in underpinning dominant textual images.

Guada-narco-lupe, Maquilarañas y la construccíon Discursiva de Género y Diferencia en la frontera entre los Estados Unidos y México através de representaciones en la media Mexicana. A través de un análisis de tres artículos este ensayo investiga las maneras en que la prensa mexicana funciona para construir la diferencia y el género en relación a la frontera México-Estados Unidos. Yo discuto que la violencia discursiva, las narrativas de evicción, tanto que los silencios están involucrados en la construcción de mujeres como objetos sexualizados y débiles, y la construcción de Mexicanos como ‘racializados’, atrasados, y diferenciados a través del método de análisis de discurso de un periódico mexicano. Para llevar a cabo este análisis, yo elaboro varios momentos discursivos, específicamente, ‘la mujer como cuerpo reemplazable y anónima’; ‘la mujer como victima de la ciudad fronteriza’; ‘Guada-narco-lupe’; ‘la mujer como apéndice dependiente’; y‘el mexicano diferenciado’, para ilustrar que la producción de conocimiento sobre los sujetos géneros es una practica política tanto que discursiva arraigado en las ideologías nacionales. Las representaciones de los medios mexicanos presentan una pallete amplia par reflexionar sobre las construcciones de diferencia y géneros por la frontera norte, la cuál es a frontera ‘racializada’, y sexualizada'. La investigación de los elementos desiguales y esencialcitas colocados en varios artículos de la prensa mexicana provee una nueva perspectiva sobre los aspectos socio-espaciales de estrategias discursivas específicas y el papel que juegan estos aspectos en sostener imágenes dominantes textuales.