Affluence,Poverty and the Idea of a Post-Scarcity Society

The ‘end of nature’ and the attenuation of tradition, associated with accelerated modernization on a global scale, increase the need for conscious reflection on many aspects of life formerly considered to be givens. Thus in developed and developing countries alike, new questions of personal choice and ethics form the basis for a kind of life politics which is different from — and supplements, but does not replace — the longer-established practice of emancipatory politics, concerned above all with issues of social justice. This essay invites us to consider how life politics can generate new strategies to reduce inequality and alleviate poverty.     

The politics of Antarctic minerals: The Greening of white Australia

On 22 May 1989 the Australian Government announced that it would not sign the Antarctic Minerals Convention that had been concluded in June 1988. Australia had been a strong supporter of the minerals treaty approach to regulating Antarctic mineral development. This case study in Australian foreign policy examines four well known approaches to foreign policy making in order to explain Australia's volte face on the minerals treaty. It is concluded that domestic politics best explains Australia's decision and that students of Australian foreign policy need to pay more attention to the domestic determinants of the policy making process.     

Postcolonial positioning and Japanese imperial affect in interwar Dada prose poems

Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan’s mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces’ skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations – not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents – isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou’s sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials.     

The archaeology of the Eastern Sahel,Sudan: preliminary results

This paper reports the combined preliminary results of the Italian Mission to Kassala and the joint University of Khartoum/Southern Methodist University Butana Project. Both groups have been carrying out extensive survey and test excavations in the Southern Atbai of the East Central Sudan, between the Atbara and Gash Rivers. This work has led to the recognition of a previously unknown culture area and ceramic tradition which spans about 5000 years and, at its peak, probably covered about 100,000 sq. km east of the Nile. This ceramic tradition, the Atbai Tradition, is associated with the development of large villages (over 10 ha) during the 4th millennium bc.

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Résumé Le présent article rapporte les résultats préliminaires combinés de la Mission italienne à Kassala et du projet Butana entrepris en commun par les universités de Khartoum et Southern Methodist. Ces deux groupes ont réalisé des reconnaissances archéologiques extensives et des sondages dans le sud de l'Atbai, dans la partie centrale orientale du Soudan, entre les rivières Atbara et Gash. Leur travail a mené à la reconnaissance d'une civilisation et d'une tradition céramique auparavant inconnues qui durèrent quelque 5000 ans et qui couvraient à leur apogée environ 100,000 km² à l'est du Nil. Cette tradition céramique, la tradition Atbai, est associée au développement des grands villages (de plus de 10 ha) au cours du 4^e millénaire avant notre ère.

     

Scripture beyond Common Sense: Sentimental Bible Study and the Evangelical Practice of “the Bible Reading”

This article examines the Bible study method known as the Bible Reading, which became popular among a segment of conservative evangelicals in the late nineteenth century. Scholars have closely identified it with the Common Sense approach to Scripture and have attributed its popularity to a conservative response to attacks on this approach. This article argues, however, that the Bible Reading is best understood as a devotional exercise that should be examined independently of these controversies. Exploring the devotional aspects of the Bible Reading nuances the standard portrayal of evangelicals in this period as being reactionary in their use of Scripture. In particular, it sheds light on the use of sentimental Bible study in the revivals of the late 1850s as well as the transatlantic holiness movement in the decades that followed. Ultimately, it argues that the exercise's popularity was due not simply to changes in the Bible's cultural status, but to changing conceptions of the Christian life.