MANDATING AS A POLICY ISSUE – THE DEFINITIONAL PROBLEM*

Mandating of state policies by agencies of the federal government and of local government policies by both state and federal agencies has emerged in recent years as an important policy issue. This conceptualization of mandating behavior offers a typology based upon (1) substantive aspects of the mandate; (2) the method by which a mandate is imposed; and (3) the mode of application. Problems associated with different types of mandates suggest multidimensional effects of intergovernmental relations on state and local policy formulation and Implementation.     

Contesting Identity: Politics of gays and lesbians in Toronto in the 1970s: Identidad en Conflicto: políticas de gays y lesbianas en Toronto en los años 1970

This article explores a particular moment in the history of Toronto's gay movement politics when the movements' ideological perspectives on the nature of gay and lesbian identities and associated spaces shifted dramatically from the so-called liberationist stance of the mid-1970s to the so-called ethnic minority approach of the late 1970s. This occurred within the context of a particular series of events that prompted gay activists to rework their conceptualization of gay and lesbian identity in order to be recognized as legitimate participants in certain pivotal, public proceedings. Far from being a well-thought-out and deliberate shift in political strategy, the ‘minority’ argument was, in many ways, a reflexive and unexamined response to unanticipated circumstances. Toronto's gay activists, in representing gays and lesbians as a minority fundamentally altered meanings associated with both gay and lesbian identities and with the spaces dominated or controlled by gay and lesbian interests.

Este artículo explora un momento particular en la historia de las políticas del movimiento de los gays de Toronto cuando sus perspectivas ideológicas sobre la naturaleza de identidades gay y lesbiana y sus espacios respectivos cambiaron dramáticamente, desde la llamada ‘perceptiva liberacionista’ de los mediados de los años setenta hasta la llamada ‘perspectiva de las minorías étnica’ de los últimos años de los setentas. Esta cambio ocurrió dentro del contexto de una serie particular de eventos que incitaron a los activistas gay a revisar sus conceptualizaciónes sobre su identidad gay y lesbiana con el fin de ser reconocidos como participantes legítimos en ciertos procesos públicos. Lejos de ser un cambio bien planeado y deliberado en la estrategia política, el argumento de la ‘minoría’ consistía, de varios maneras, en una repuesta no reflexiva no examinada a circunstancias inesperadas. Los activistas gay de Toronto, al representar a los gays y lesbianas como minorías, alteraron de manera fundamental los significados asociados tanto a las identidades de gays y lesbianas como los espacios dominados o controlados por intereses de gays y lesbianas.     

Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles

Abstract

The article introduces and contextualises this special issue on ‘Ways of Seeing Early Modern Decorative Textiles’, which comprises a series of essays that draw on the activities, research findings and insights of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network, ‘Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500–1700: The Case of Decorative Textiles’. Critically evaluating the results of the network’s findings, the paper situates them within a broader investigation of the role of decorative textiles in shaping the experience of domestic interiors in the past and present, and explores new ways of reading such objects in the context of the household. It examines the historiography and current range of approaches to the study, interpretation and exhibition of historic textiles, and analyses the insights offered by bringing together different disciplinary and professional perspectives. It argues for the key significance of these textiles for both historical and modern perceptions of the domestic interior and for the importance of collaborative, cross-disciplinary approaches to researching them in order to understand how they functioned in the early modern period and to inform new directions for their display and presentation in the present.     

Spreading fear,communicating trust: writing letters and telegrams during the Panic of 1873

Abstract

This article analyses how journalists and businessmen used and perceived the Atlantic cable following the failure of New York banking house Jay Cooke & Co. in September 1873, an event which sparked stock markets panics in Vienna and Berlin. It is argued that while bankers successfully used telegraphic cables to communicate intelligence such as price information, letters proved superior as a medium for establishing personal trust, as the case of New York banker George Opdyke shows. Journalists, too, were critical of the telegraph’s performance, blaming the paucity of information available on the technology’s supposedly inherent deficiencies. This criticism, it is argued, was ultimately based on the ‘imagined reception’ of cables by their senders, as well as on the persistence of earlier imagined uses of telegraphy. These, I argue, continued to inform contemporary expectations of telegraphy’s performance.     

Écrire la mort, écrire l’amour dans La Part secrète de Carol Bernstein

La Part secrète (1999) is the second text by Carol Bernstein, an American writer living in Paris, the first having been Le Rival invincible. This latest text exemplifies several contemporary discourses, addressing issues of disease, trauma, biography and autobiography, parentage, and testimony. Although at the crossroads of so many current debates, to date it has not attracted any critical studies. Faced with this lack, due perhaps to the brevity and apparent, but misleading, simplicity of this story, I first consider the text as a narrative about illness, relying primarily on Susan Sontag’s study Illness as Metaphor as well as Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. I then show that via writing the narrator manages to work through his feelings of loneliness, to overcome the lies that surround him and to inscribe himself within his family history. This second part of the article, which analyses the redemptive power of writing to rise above the ravages caused by an unnamed disease, is however only a fragment of the exposition because this act of writing is probably not in fact that of the narrator. It could be that of his daughter, usurping her father’s identity in an act of ventriloquism. Finally, I consider the daughter’s motivations in order better to understand how the writing of La Part secrète illuminates in a disturbing way the father-daughter relationship.     

Digital Technology and a Community Framework for Heritage Rock Art Tourism,Makgabeng Plateau,South Africa

Using digital technologies in the process of collecting and documenting oral heritage allows previously marginalised voices to feed into heritage and historical narratives for rock art heritage tourism. Literary heritage narratives have tended to dominate the dissemination of information on African heritage, whereas African cosmologies and oral traditions are the intangible values of place that attract visitors to heritage sites. In the Makgabeng, oral heritage narrated through stories, songs, dances and poetry and collected using digital technologies will help preserve African values threatened by the onslaught of Western ones, especially through written European languages and social media. The Makgabeng Community Rock Art Project re-values the role of elders in sustainability of heritage tourism initiatives and the integration of a community structure as a sustainable “ready-made” framework to heritage management in Africa.