Rafael Pinedo’s Trilogy: Dystopian Visions and Populist Thought in Argentina’s Turn-of-the-century Narrative

The three short novels written by Rafael Pinedo (Argentina, 1954–2006) before his untimely death are increasingly attracting the attention of academic researchers, not only because of their complexity but also because of their take on Argentine politics and ideology. The following article analyzes how these novels operate within what Tom Moylan defined as a critical dystopian narrative. By narrating each story as a future world in agony, where all social interactions are described with a militant pessimism, the novels envisage the consequences of the populist’s policies grip on the country’s social and cultural environment. I argue that Plop (Casa de las Américas Prize 2002), Frío (Finalist for the 2004 Planeta Prize), and Subte can be read as a trilogy since they propose a radical thought experiment about the limits of the social and cultural practices of populist policies, as well as a mise-en-scène of its hijacking and betrayal of utopian values. The article also underlines how, despite its pessimistic tone, the novels offer a glimmer of hope by returning to basic concepts of community and empathy.     

Narratives in Anecdotes,Memory and Interlocutors: An Early Engagement with Neville Alexander’s Story

In this article, I present a story about South African Marxist and activist-scholar Neville Edward Alexander. As historians, social scientists and intellectuals embedded in the humanities, a part of the job we have awarded ourselves or that we assume to be part of our disciplinary reasoning, our intellectual orbit, is to bring to life the periods that, and the people about whom, we reflect. This we do through writing and telling stories, often constructed with a “moral message” of sorts. In these acts of writing and story-telling, objectivity plays a disputed and a precarious role, and misrepresentations could be conscious or unwitting. The lack of objectivity in bringing to life the period and the people we talk about in our stories, in our exaggeration and our understatement about what we have read, about what we have heard, and then about what we write, is part of an academic’s narrative. These human traits of exaggeration and understatement can lead to historical error. In this early exploration of seeking answers to the questions, “Who is Neville Alexander?” and “What can we learn from his writings?” I offer two anecdotes about the man. My proposition is that overcoming historical error does not rest exclusively with factual verification. It has to factor in an appraisal of the ideological intention or even political wish of the people telling the stories, in written texts and orally, and of the interlocutors’ context that we recover in our historical studies. In writing this preliminary sketch of Alexander, I take a detour into higher education issues, particularly the field of doctoral studies, and I paraphrase some of the concerns that have been raised by Alexander. I conclude this introductory study with some thoughts on Alexander’s contributions to social change, to “race,” and to language policy and multilingualism.     

Multiple environments: South Indian children’s environmental subjectivities in formation

This article explores the formation of South Indian children’s (11–15 years old) environmental subjectivities based on five months of qualitative fieldwork with children in their school and non-school lives. By doing so, this paper aims to widen the scope of the existing literature on children’s environmental subjectivities, which so far focused on separate aspects of children’s lives such as environmental education, social relations or children’s life courses. To do so, I use [Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press] concepts of field, habitus and cultural capital along with a non-teleological notion of environmental subjectivity and insights from wider geographical literature on the formation of subjectivities. The paper shows how children’s environmental subjectivities are constituted by and partially constitute the material environments and fields in which children live, their cultural capital and habitus, their movements through their life course and their environments and a wide range of practices through which children experience their environments.     

Exhibiting Cultures: Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Museums occupy many roles which are influenced by wider circumstances and changing conditions. This study deals with the case of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and the manner in which it is used to promote nation building in a multi‐ethnic and relatively newly independent state. In addition, it serves a political purpose and acts as an economic resource. The Asian Civilisations Museum illustrates some of the recent trends affecting the museum sector as a whole and also the particular challenges facing such institutions in a country like Singapore with its many distinctive qualities.     

Indian Objects,English Body: Utopian Yearnings in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Focusing on the representation of Indian shawls and Indian tea in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, this article has two aims: first, it argues that the novel creates its ideology of domesticity and proper femininity through the creation of a readable object world. It is evident that one of the consequences of the empire was to Indianise its English subjects, thereby making them more cosmopolitan and making the English home a monument to imperial Britain’s success in the global system of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. These links then brought together the materiality of the empire and the Victorian preoccupation with material culture, constituting an imperial culture based on domestic interiority, visual and tactile pleasure, and political economy. Second, the article attempts to show how the ambiguities that enter the text along with these foreign objects unsettle the status quo established by the novel’s middle-class ideology and propose utopian alternatives to it through a mobile, boundary-crossing female body and a more porous domestic setting. These alternatives are entirely speculative, incomplete, and restrained, but significant nonetheless, precisely because they turn this ideology’s emphasis on the middle-class female body inside out, so as to recompose this body and its habitual spaces in new ways.     

Malaysia’s role in two South-East Asian insurgencies: ‘an honest broker’?

The conflicts in Thailand’s southern border provinces and Mindanao have not only posed a challenge to the Thai and Philippine governments, but have also affected the respective governments’ relations with Malaysia. From a comparative perspective, this article aims to illustrate how a complicated web of interactions between domestic and international factors has not only shaped domestic decision-making, but also influenced how states interact with one another in regard to the conflicts, which has resulted in a mix of cooperation and contention. It is argued that despite past downturns in bilateral relations, various developments have paved the way for Malaysia to play a role in the current peace processes in Thailand’s southern border provinces and Mindanao. However, Malaysia has been able to accomplish more in Mindanao’s peace process due to several favourable conditions, including the Philippine government’s openness towards third-party involvement, regional security concerns and politics that have been less polarised until 2016.     

Buried in a Head: African and Asian Parallels to Aesop’s Fable

There is a strange story among the fables ascribed to Aesop. It was preserved by Aristophanes and tells about the lark, who was born before the creation of the earth and had to bury her dead father in her own head. This article investigates Indian, Arabic, and North and West African parallels to this story. The analysed texts share several specific details, and the motif ‘buried in a head’ lying at the base of them is found worldwide only in a few areas of Eurasia and Africa; so there is most likely a historical connection between the examples.     

Symbolic Reparation,Heritage and Political Transition in South Africa’s Eastern Cape

This article first examines the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendation of symbolic reparation for apartheid, and its effect on South African heritage. Second, it considers the relationship between public history and civic nation building in South Africa, as well as problems in trying to develop an inclusive public history through museums. Case studies drawn from Grahamstown and Mthatha in the Eastern Cape are explored as examples of the redevelopment of the old and establishment of the new public history as part of the negotiated transition.     

Stexit?: South East Asian pluralism,statelessness and exclusive identities

In a time of Brexit and Trump, when exclusive national identities are taken for granted, South East Asia's longstanding patterns of inclusive identity and interethnic networks merit our closest attention. However, much of anthropology and related scholarship has viewed ideologies of exclusive identity as normal rather than contingent. This scholarly emphasis has made the negotiation of diversity seem improbable and even detrimental to certain peoples, particularly those in ‘minority’ slots who may in fact need such negotiation the most. In this article, the author triangulates anthropology, South East Asia and the evolution of human society in relation to questions of stateless peoples and the lingering potential of civil pluralism.     

British Assessments of Tipu Sultan’s Hill Forts in Northern Mysore, South India, 1802

Hundreds of early modern forts dot the South Indian landscape, but more is known about their art-historical aspects than how these fortifications were built, maintained, and used. The latter aspects are examined in a comparative analysis of six Mysore hill forts, using East India Company surveys that were prepared in 1802 shortly after British forces took command of these installations from Tipu Sultan’s garrisons. These highly detailed inventories show that the hill forts were poorly maintained, inadequately supplied, contained relatively few garrison buildings, and, from the British perspective at least, were inadequately armed to mount a successful defense. At the turn of the century, these forts were functionally obsolete, ill prepared to serve as supply depots, and strategically valuable only to quiet local populations and deny the use of such places to potential enemies.     

Industrial Warriors: South Korea’s First Generation of Industrial Workers in Post-Developmental Korea

This study analyses the skills upgrading programmes of South Korea’s first generation of skilled workers, focusing on their political and social trajectories from bulwarks of the developmental regimes up until 1987, to a “labour aristocracy” of regular workers employed mainly in large companies in heavy industries in South Korea. The term “labour aristocracy” highlights how the “regular workers”, employed mostly in monopolistic large enterprises in heavy industries, have better wages, job security and other social benefits than “non-regular workers” and other regular workers employed in small and medium companies. It argues that these “Industrial Warriors” were the product of the Korean developmental state’s creation of an egalitarian social contract, and that the political and social trajectories since then must be seen in its totality. This is necessary because it manifests the profound change in Korea’s political economy from state-grassroots synergistic developmentalism to neoliberal industrial capitalism, wherein having a regular job has become a substantial asset in an era of non-regular employment. This study contributes to the literature on the political economy and to sociological discussion of the Korean developmental state that continues to this day and is far from over.     

Japan’s strategic interests in the South China Sea: beyond the horizon?

Japan has a national interest in the South China Sea issue. Although its direct commitment is ultimately limited in a material sense due to a lack of military capabilities, as well as political and constitutional constraints on the Self-Defense Force, Japan has maintained its firm stance to uphold international maritime rules and norms, and nurtured strong diplomatic relations and conducted maritime capacity-building programs with the South-East Asian states, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. These actions contribute to consolidating the rule of law at sea and provide those claimant states an opportunity to withstand pressures from China. Given the Trump administration’s unclear South China Sea policy and South-East Asia’s strategic uncertainty, Japan is becoming a key player in maintaining regional maritime stability in East Asia through diplomacy.     

Beyond Orientalism: When Marceline Desbordes-Valmore carried Saʿdi’s Roses to France

This article follows a thread of translation and intertextual dialogue, taking us from the thirteenth-century Persian poet Sa?di to the nineteenth-century French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. It reads Desbordes-Valmore’s poem ‘Les roses de Saadi’ (1860) with the two passages from Sa?di’s Golestān from which it was inspired, shedding new light on the poem’s metapoetic subtext. The original Persian text is compared to two French translations that were circulating at the time when Desbordes-Valmore was writing. This analysis of the Golestān’s reception forms the basis for the argument that Desbordes-Valmore recast in secular terms Sa?di’s discourse on poetic language, emphasizing the continuity, rather than difference, between her concerns and Sa?di’s. The case of Desbordes-Valmore thus reveals a forgotten facet of nineteenth-century French engagements with Middle Eastern culture: one of identification and literary influence, which existed alongside the processes of “othering” for which the period is better known.     

Antifascism,anticommunism, antipolitics: delegitimation in Berlusconi’s Italy

Abstract

Post-1994 delegitimizing discourses borrowed a lot from antifascism and anticommunism, which they updated to fit the new historical circumstances. Yet, with the events of 1992–94, the role, credibility, autonomy, and boundaries of the Italian political sphere entered a crisis, and this turned arguments about politics and antipolitics into new instruments of delegitimation. This article analyzes how delegitimizing traditions survived the end of the Cold War, and how they interacted with the new issues generated by Tangentopoli. Section 2 describes Berlusconi’s anticommunism, nurtured by the persistence of pre-1989 memories, but also by three present-oriented arguments: the fact that the communists had been able to survive the end of communism; their being professional politicians; and their statism. Section 3 deals with antiberlusconism, which is also composed of three threads: antifascism; the refusal of the ‘spirit of the Eighties’; and moralism. The final section of the article connects post-1994 delegitimizing discourses with the conflict between two opposed solutions to the crisis of the political, both fraught with contradictions: Berlusconi’s offer of less politics; and the conviction of the left that the correct answer was not less, but good politics.     

‘Confusion,Heaven and Honour’: Being Chinese in South Africa

Abstract

This review article investigates the state and development of overseas Chinese studies, in both its global and South African context. It points to the common difficulties related to research in this field and indicates how these have been addressed. It argues that only since the latter half of the twentieth century, both the reading population and publishers in South Africa, have become more receptive to the voice of the ‘other’. While comparatively little work has been published on the Chinese in South Africa, the three major works that have appeared reflect on a little known but integral part of our multicultural society. A brief outline of the range of work done on this topic provides the context for a closer assessment of the most recently published sociological study.     

From Populism To Protagonism (and Back?) in Bolivarian Venezuela: Rethinking Ernesto Laclau’s on Populist Reason

Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason, now over a decade old, is one of our generation’s most nuanced contributions to debates on political community and social change in the era of mass democracy. Against critiques of populism as illiberal demagoguery, Laclau’s conceptualization emphasizes the discursive nature of power and politics and considers populist sequences as radical democratic openings in an era of consolidated global neoliberal capitalism. This article considers the shifting terrain of democracy – from liberal, to populist, and finally to protagonistic forms – in the context of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. I argue that despite Laclau’s important contributions, the formulations of power that underlie his populist reason are symptomatic rather than critical of contemporary liberal politics. The article offers an analysis of Bolivarian Venezuela that emphasizes popular experimentation with protagonism as an expression of democracy based in grassroots collective autonomy and direct democracy over the representation and managed development of the modern state.