“If in Truth You are Odysseus” – Distrust and Persuasion in the Odyssey†

When Odysseus decides in the course of the Odyssey finally to reveal his true identity to a few chosen characters, he regularly meets with deep scepticism. The depth of this distrust is to no small degree owed to the unusually long duration of Odysseus’ absence and the concomitant loss of familiarity. With the typical skill of a versatile narrator, Homer subtly brings out the nature of the psychological gap in each case and shows the means by which it can eventually be overcome. The paper addresses the salient points and main characteristics of the relevant recognition scenes and ends by suggesting an explanation for the feature that some of Odysseus’ interlocutors tend to suppress his name for some time while others do not.     

‘The miserable remnant of this ill-used people’: colonial genocide and the Moriori of New Zealand's Chatham Islands

Genocide scholars have not engaged with the killing of the Moriori people of New Zealand's Chatham Islands by two Māori iwi (tribes). New Zealand historians who have discussed Moriori have not used the paradigms and language of genocide studies. This article argues that Moriori were victims of genocide, and that their experience both challenges and deepens how colonial genocide is understood. Narratives of colonial genocides that assume the destruction of an indigenous people by a colonizing power are inadequate for understanding events on the Chathams, as are genocidal frameworks that assume perpetrators must be state actors. The colonial role was important but indirect: the encounter of Māori with Britain and Australia provided the physical and ideological tools that made the Moriori genocide possible. Māori behaviour on the Chathams diverged from tradition, with the racial tropes, destructive behaviours and justification for invading the Chathams all acquired through the colonial spread of British people into Polynesia. More recently, the use of imported imagery and politicization of the Moriori experience has revealed the consequences of successive generations’ failure to properly remember or even identify the genocide.     

Splitting Urban Waters: The Politicisation of Water in Barcelona between Populism and Anti-Populism

The current literature on remunicipalisation is focused either on theoretical concepts (e.g. right to the city, commons, return of the political) or on the “insurgent” actors involved in this process, overlooking the counter-politicisation of the economic agents and the resulting struggles for power and legitimation. This paper examines, by means of an interpretative qualitative methodology and by critically engaging with Ernesto Laclau’s approach to populism, the complexities of the ongoing dialectic of populist and anti-populist antagonism between socio-political actors and private companies, with a focus on the discourse on remunicipalisation of water in Barcelona.     

‘Las Indias del Pirú en lo alto de España … ’. Relaciones entre la Nueva corónica de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala y los qeros coloniales

It is proposed that there is an iconographic and epistemological relationship between some drawings in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno and the images recorded in several colonial wood vessels (qeros) which circulated widely during the time that Guaman Poma was writing his letter to the King of Spain. This connection shows that the work of Guaman Poma was not an isolated or singular act in the colonial context and that both communicative and creative processes, that of the Nueva corónica and that of the qeros, formed part of a process of shared colonial semiosis through which Andean societies maintained a certain autonomy in the production and circulation of their own discourses. Secondly, the article discusses the epistemological tension that results from the coexistence of different narratives (European and Andean) that used their own temporal and spatial categories to account for new colonial conditions.     

Ductility-Equivalent Viscous Damping Relationships for Beam-to-Column Partial-Strength Steel Joints

This paper seeks to contribute to the development and improvement of displacement-based design procedures, proposing improved ductility-equivalent viscous damping relationships for steel moment-resisting framed structures with dissipative beam-to-column partial-strength joints. These relationships can be used directly in procedures like the Direct Displacement-Based Seismic Design (DDBD) that uses effective stiffness, ductility-equivalent viscous damping relationships, and period-displacement relationships in a performance-based design approach. To this end, a finite element model of a steel beam-to-column sub-assemblage, characterized by an extended end-plate, is developed in ABAQUS. The model, which is validated against monotonic and cyclic experimental data obtained in previous research, is employed to carry out non-linear time-history (NLTH) analyses, using real records scaled to target several levels of ductility demand. A procedure is then proposed and applied to determine the ductility-equivalent viscous damping relationships of the sub-assemblages. The equivalent linearization technique is applied to the non-linear responses obtained in the NLTH analyses, using an elastic single degree of freedom structure and the elastic displacement spectra. The influence of joints mechanisms and of the dynamic characteristics of the structure in the equivalent viscous damping is investigated, and an expression for ductility-equivalent viscous damping is proposed. The proposed expression represents a clear improvement in relation to the existing expressions available in literature.     

Los adioses (1954) de Juan Carlos Onetti: procedimientos para alcanzar la sugerencia y el énfasis en el significado como nouvelle

Based on a presentation of the production of nouvelles in Hispanic America and its current study, in which the permanent academic and critical interest in Juan Carlos Onetti's Los adioses (1954) stands, this article raises and discusses the procedures used by the author to achieve a narrative that by its nature of nouvelle refuses the explicit in exchange for the suggestion. Among such procedures are the character of the narrator, the ellipsis, and a language of conjecture and doubt. With all of those procedures Onetti builds an open and multiple text in which his major emphasis during the writing process lies in the development of the meaning of the text, instead of just narrating the story, as proposed by Henry James in various prefaces to his nouvelles.     

Topoiesis de los dispositivos de registro del texto literario

ABSTRACT

Never before have the layout, the text format, and support been as important as they are today. Studies reflecting on the relationship between the meaning of the literary text and its form have rapidly increased. This kind of study has focused mostly on the history of the reading process and the history of the book as well as on the possibilities of new technologies in the literary field. However, none of these approaches has reached the point of creating a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of the relationship between the message and its channel. This work is intended to propose a methodology of analysis based on some concepts such as peritexts (Genette) and visuo-graphic zone (Cárdenas).     

International Heritage Tourism in Rwanda: Paving Over the Past at the Musanze Caves

Through a case study of the Musanze Caves, this paper describes the impact of Rwanda’s heritage tourism industry on archaeological resources. The paper outlines Rwanda’s tourism industry and describes how it privileges ‘natural heritage’ above ‘cultural heritage’, a situation which is negatively impacting upon archaeological sites such as the Musanze Caves. To create the Musanze Caves tourism experience there has been significant non-archaeological excavation and construction in the caves, which has damaged regionally significant archaeological remains that date from 1000 CE to the present. Furthermore, the Musanze Caves tourism experience does not incorporate extant archaeological information into the presented narrative, which is instead based on ‘natural heritage’ and adventure tourism. This situation is damaging rare resources that might help construct new historical narratives to replace untenable colonial and pre-genocide ones, and is generally unhelpful in communicating the knowledge that we do have about the region’s history.     

Living with everyday environmental risks: giving a voice to young people in the design of community-based risk communication programs in the city of San Luis Potosí, México

Risk communication programs (RCPs) can contribute to the improvement of community health in marginalized settlements by improving health-related information and practices. Yet, there is a need to include young people's concerns in the design and implementation of RCPs. This study analyses young peoples’ risk perceptions in the city of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, using visual methods such as drawings and photography. Research was conducted with 74 students from two deprived urban neighborhoods. Results indicate that the use of visual techniques enabled them to identify environmental health risks such as unhealthy sedentary habits and the exposure to hazardous items. We conclude that visual methods may help young people to critically reflect on everyday elements in their environment that affect their well-being. By giving them a voice in a reflexive way, visual methods may engage young people as key multipliers in the awareness raising process, and promote their sense of everyday agency.