云上吃茶大吉岭

或许远离都市真就是医我的药。在爪哇老木屋里吃着晚餐,不远处的白衣侍者正逐级而下,把石阶上那一盏盏黝黑的铜油灯点亮。在风里,那火焰像一簇簇小旗一样摇曳。我从来没有这么清晰地记得《吉檀迦利》里的句子：“我收到这世界节日的请柬,我的生命得到了祝福。”     

Sexuality And The Social Body Between The Wars

Books reviewed in this article:
Carolyn J. Dean, The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, And Other Fantasies In Interwar France     

The Tortoise or the Hare? Incrementalism,Punctuations, and Their Consequences

In this article, we contrast the long‐term consequences of incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. We test what the impact of each of these types of policy change is on long‐term budgetary outcomes for the American states. Policy scholars have applied both theoretical approaches to the study of budgetary spending as an extension of policymaking. Given the two contrasting paradigms of policy change, we develop the following line of inquiry: Does punctuated equilibrium create a different budget in the long term than incrementalism? We address this question through an analysis of American state budgets because the U.S. states provide a rich variation in both budgetary outcomes and political institutions. We use budget data from all American states across all government functions for the period between 1984 and 2009. We find that, first, state budgets and budget functions vary in their degree of punctuation and, second, the degree of punctuation in a state's budget function corresponds to smaller long‐term growth. Additionally, the kind of spending matters: allocational budget categories are more likely to exhibit punctuations.     

Reinforcing the NPT

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd reaffirmed Australia's commitment to realising a world free from nuclear weapons. Arguments are presented here that this aim cannot be achieved until the framework of international law and international governance has been substantially strengthened. A more productive aim at the present time would be to fortify the Non-Proliferation Treaty with a ‘no first use’ declaration by the nuclear-weapon states, so that the non-nuclear-weapon states can rest secure in the knowledge that nuclear weapons will not actually be used again, pending the day when they can safely be discarded entirely.     

Cultural Reproduction and “Minority” Sexuality: Intimate Changes among Ethnic Akha in the Upper Mekong

This article explores sexuality and its role in cultural reproduction amongst Akha, a minority group living in the mountainous reaches of southwest China, northern Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Burma. For many minority peoples in the region sexuality has been a marker of cultural difference within trajectories of nationalist assimilation. In northwest Laos, Akha sexuality is currently a focusof intense interest as infrastructure development, increased interactions with lowland populations, and targeted state and donor-funded health programs are dramatically altering Akha lifestyles. Whether by conscious design to intervene insexual lives, or through the numerous ways that affective domains merge withmaterial aspirations, social structures shaping Lao Akha sexuality are being “re-formed” through engagement in processes of modernisation. As a result, sexuality remains central to ongoing ethnic marginalisation and evolving vulnerability to health threats.     

The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing: Undecidable bodies,mobile identities,and the deconstruction of racial boundaries

Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing, is a psychological drama centering around two fair-skinned women. One, Clare Kendry, passes as the White wife of a financially successful racist; the other, Irene Redfield, is a ‘race woman’ living in upper Manhattan during the era of the Renaissance Harlem. Clare and Irene are undecidables, neither White nor Black, fluid subjects traversing the boundaries of race—passing. Passing is an act of insinuating oneself into forbidden spaces by jettisoning former identities. It is as much a transgression of spatial boundaries as it is of racial boundaries. In the novel Clare passes by merely crossing from Black space into White space, and along the way shedding a Black identity for a White one. This paper examines the mobility of identities across racial geographies and how this movement destabilizes notions of race and of raced spaces.

We encounter the world in our bodies, and through our bodies' most exquisitely sensitive sense, our skins, we take the world into ourselves. We have made and remade a world where nearly every experience is shaded and shaped by the color of those bodies, the tones of those skins. (Jane Lazarre Lazarre, Jane. 1997. Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, Durham: Duke University Press.  [Google Scholar], Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: memoir of a White mother of Black sons, 1997, p. 94)