A Witch-Doctor's Kit,from Magila,East Central Africa.

The long shared history and traditions of Spain and Mexico have given rise to similar stereotypes and folkloric figures. These relationships are often explained through myths that take the form of historical accounts. Here we will discuss some of these discourses to try to understand the relationship between two iconic figures that define similar customs and share a single name in Europe and America: El charro.     

Waging War on the Dead: The Necropolitics of Sufi Shrine Destruction in Mali

The destruction of Sufi heritage in Timbuktu used and abused heritage to assert sovereignty, terrorize the living, and repudiate materiality. Archeologists have not analyzed how necropolitics relates to the desecration of the dead and the torture of the living in Mali, where “bodies” are becoming prime stages for radical performances of sovereignty, ideology, and materiality. To understand how Sufi shrines are becoming prime ideological battlegrounds, we must consider the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead “bodies” and “spirits” of the saints being “slayed,” and acknowledge the relationship between the disturbance of the dead and postcolonial violence on the living.     

‘Home is home be it never so homely’: Reading Mid-Victorian Slum Interiors

This article considers representations of the ‘slum interior’ as complex cultural narratives produced by urban investigators of the mid-Victorian period, including Henry Mayhew, Thomas Beames and George Godwin. Much existing scholarship on nineteenth-century slum narratives has tended to emphasize the use of sensationalism, hyperbole and tropes of colonialism to describe the dire living conditions of the very poor, a feature particularly apparent in the works of the 1880s. By focusing on writings from the period 1849–1865, this article pays attention to earlier conceptions and projections of slum interiors which were conceived as not altogether abject or ‘other’, but as ambivalent spaces that both defied, and invoked, Victorian forms of domesticity. Through close readings of their textual and visual form, I show how the paradoxical and ambivalent spaces of the slum interior reconfigure in meaningful ways the conventional relations of domestic architecture, inhabitants and their objects.     

Book reviews

Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., ‘Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830–1930,’ http://vvomhist.Binghamton.edu.

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780‐1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Pp.xii + 228. $39.95 (hardback); $19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8071 2537 7; 0 8071 2600 4.

Timothy S. Huebner, The Southern Judicial Tradition: Southern Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 1999. Pp. xiii 4‐ 263. $45.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 252 0634 0.

Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Pp.xii + 316. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 6910 0130 8.

Joseph G. Dawson III, Doniphan's Epic March: The 1st Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). Pp. xii + 325. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 7006 0956.

Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). $45.00 (hardback); $18.95 (paperback). Pp.xii + 311. ISBN 0 8078 2436 4; 0 8078 4741 0.

Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Pp.xxi + 303. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 5202 0794 7.

Mark E. Neely Jr, Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). Pp.vii + 212. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 8139 1894 4.

John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo‐Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Pp. xiv + 239. $55.00 (hardback); $19.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 8139 1971 1; 0 8139 1982 7.     

Articulating minority nationhood: cultural and political dimensions in Québec's reasonable accommodation debate

Given their precarious position within larger states, national minorities cannot rely on federal governments to affirm their nationhood. Moreover, insofar as nationhood is predicated on a shared history, language and culture, immigrants place additional strains on the maintenance of national distinctiveness and the political claims that derive from it. In 2006–2007, following a series of confrontations over religious practices in the public sphere, Québec's provincial government appointed the Bouchard–Taylor Commission to investigate avenues for the accommodation of immigrant‐related cultural and religious differences. While it failed to generate policy, the commission did provide a discursive space for the (re)assertion of Québécois nationhood. Analysing the production of national identity in newspaper debates of the Bouchard–Taylor report, we offer an alternative to the ethnic–civic paradigm in nationalism theory. Rather than treat ethnic and civic as two separate ends of a single continuum, we conceptualise a relationship between two dimensions: one of culture and one of politics. We show that in contemporary articulations of Québec national identity, the prerequisites of political membership derive their meaning from a productive tension between blood‐based and adoptive conceptions of national culture.     

Economics,Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta since 1949

Empirically rich and historically illuminating, Gilded Voices contributes a new and important perspective to the growing field of scholarship dedicated to rethinking PRC cultural history beyond the conventional dichotomy of Mao-era state domination and Reform Era autonomy, By corroborating a range of historical source materials-from personal interviews, municipal archives, periodicals, and audiovisual recordings-Qiliang He constructs a convincing argument that market competition and pursuit of individual livelihood played a much larger role in early PRC culture than previously thought, a pattern that, He shows, continues in the Reform Era, rather than emerging after the Cultural Revolution as something new.     

Non-destructive provenance study of chert using infrared reflectance microspectroscopy

In this paper we explore the potential of non-destructive Infrared reflectance microspectroscopy (IRRMS) for the characterization of chert samples from 10 different geological outcrops in North America with emphasis on the Midcontinent. A principle objective of the project is to determine whether IRRMS analysis can provide a mineral-based signature for bedrock sources of chert artifacts. The technique utilizes a Bio-Rad Digilab FTS-40 Infrared spectroscope and microscope attachment that reflects an infrared beam off a chert specimen. Our findings indicate that spectral features from the molecules constituting minor and trace minerals in chert may provide sufficient characterization for chert sourcing.