Readers-in-conversations: a politics of reading in literary geographies

While the role of readers in literary geographies has been theoretically acknowledged, the methodological practice of engaging with multiple readers is little and far between. This gap between theory and practice has perpetuated understandings of texts as static representations and of readers as passive and homogeneous. Such problematic notions urgently need to be contested and this paper is one such attempt. Using a case study of Singapore poetry and its resistance to state-driven landscape change, I engage with twenty-one Singaporean readers through an online, asynchronous forum to demonstrate the challenging but rich process of studying reader reception. In doing so, I show how the dynamic co-enactment of responses by multiple readers-in-conversations leads to both complementarities and clashes. This not only reveals a more nuanced understanding of the author–text–reader(s) interactions, but also points to an inevitable politics of reading present in the study of all textual representations.     

Governing the Bottle: Alcohol,Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India

Following a series of aggressive military campaigns across India, by the early nineteenth century, the East India Company had secured a more definitive political space for itself in India. However, in taking over the administration of the diwani, or administration and revenue collection duties in Bengal, the Company gained responsibility for the taxes that governed the production and sale of alcohol and drugs—the abkari system. The abkari duties represented an opportunity and challenge for the colonial state. What followed changed the social landscape of India as the Company developed a series of regulations to govern alcohol in both military and civil space. These laws quickly moved beyond earlier Mughal dictates on alcohol, revealing the state’s intent to mould society through taxation.

This article frames these colonial taxes on alcohol as a tool of governmentality. It argues that the state utilised the abkari department not simply as a means of generating revenue, but as a means of managing social relations and economic life in nineteenth-century India. It explores the path that the colonial state sought to forge between arguing for the ‘moral uplift’ of drinking populations and securing reliable revenue for Company (and later Crown) coffers. The laws themselves were often race- (and class-) specific, suggesting, for example, the pre-disposition of certain peoples to particular drinks. Moreover, the drinks themselves, whether toddy or ‘European’-style distilled spirits, were assigned a racial identity. While European observers viewed toddy as ‘natural’ and even beneficial when drunk by poor Indian labourers, in the throats of European soldiers it was labelled ‘dangerous’ or even lethal. Conversely, later Indian campaigners warned that ‘alien’ distilled spirits, such as whisky or rum, were completely foreign to India and that their introduction suggested a darker, less benevolent, side to India’s colonial rule. As such, these colonial controls on alcohol, and the debates that swirled around them, illuminate the ways in which the colonial state both understood and attempted to shape its subjects and servants.     

Fires at Neumark-Nord 2, Germany: An analysis of fire proxies from a Last Interglacial Middle Palaeolithic basin site

Few sites with evidence for fire use are known from the Last Interglacial in Europe. Hearth features are rarely preserved, probably as a result of post-depositional processes. The small postglacial basins (<300?m in diameter) that dominate the sedimentary context of the Eemian record in Europe are high-resolution environmental archives often containing charcoal particles. This case study presents the macroscopic charcoal record of the Neumark-Nord 2 basin, Germany, and the correlation of this record with the distinct find levels of the basin margin that also contain thermally altered archaeological material. Increased charcoal quantities are shown to correspond to phases of hominin presence—a pattern that fits best with recurrent anthropogenic fires within the watershed. This research shows the potential of small basin localities in the reconstruction of local fire histories, where clear archaeological features like hearths are missing.     

Is there a core national doctrine?

National doctrines are notoriously diverse, and often embody contradictory political values and criteria for membership. This article asks whether there is a ‘core’ national doctrine that connects republican, cultural, ethnic and liberal concepts of nationality. It considers two attractive candidates: one locating the ‘core’ in a doctrine about the political and psychological significance of pre‐political cultural identities, the other in the constitutional principle of popular sovereignty. After assessing the limitations of both, I sketch a different core national doctrine. This doctrine is constitutive and geopolitical, not constitutional or cultural. It has deep roots in the security concerns specific to the modern, pluralistic system of sovereign states, and prescribes in general terms the form that any community should take in order to survive or distinguish itself in that system. It says very little about the appropriate basis for such communities; the choice of political, cultural, ethnic or even racial criteria is left wide open. More than other versions, this ‘core’ is able to identify the common ground between cultural, constitutional, and other national doctrines. It also puts a sharp focus on the reasons why, historically, national and liberal values have been so hard to combine.