Trade and culture: the United States

ABSTRACT

The US government has long held that cultural goods and services represent an economic sector like any other and should be liberalized. The American cultural and digital industries enjoy a strong competitive advantage and constitute a leading export sector. This US stance has antagonized many countries pursuing cultural policies. This has led the US government to soften its trade strategy and accept financial measures, as well as a broader array of ‘traditional’ cultural regulatory instruments. At the same time, the United States insists on the absence of restrictions in digital networks, through which cultural contents are to be increasingly distributed and accessed. Under the negative-list negotiating approach, whereby everything is liberalized save for specific exceptions, states parties to US trade agreements have secured a varying array of measures. However, only a handful, essentially industrial countries, have secured digital exceptions, the latter coupled with conditions raising questions concerning their applicability.     

Hardwood ash nixtamalization may lead to false negatives for the presence of maize by depleting bulk δC in carbonized residues

Among the multiple proxies for detecting maize in precontact economies is the use of δ¹³C analysis of carbonized residues from ceramic cooking vessels. Although maize horticulture was widely established in Eastern North America (ENA) by A.D. 1000, there are carbonized residues from ceramic assemblages after this date that lack the elevated δ¹³C values indicative of the presence of maize. This may be due to the true absence of maize, or other factors including the masking of maize. Prior experimental research by Hart et al. demonstrated that the addition of C₃ plants or consumers to two part mixes with maize can mask maize presence even when maize is the dominant ingredient. Here we investigate the effect of alkali processing of maize (nixtamalization) on δ¹³C using the widespread ENA process of boiling maize kernels with wood ash, a C₃ product, to create hominy. Our experiments test whether or not the process of hardwood ash nixtamalization can mask the presence of maize in adhering carbonized residues by depleting δ¹³C values, and whether there is a reciprocal δ¹³C enrichment effect on the hardwood ash employed in nixtamalization. Overall, there is substantial δ¹³C depletion of residues when maize is cooked with hardwood ash, and hardwood ash cooked with maize shows the reciprocal enrichment. Therefore, the depleted values after the adoption of maize may be false negatives due to the nixtamalization process.     

Leaky Borders and Solid Citizens: Governing Security,Prosperity and Quality of Life in a North American Partnership

The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States in March 2005, proposes a dramatic reshaping of the continent. This is no simple plan for the intensification of economic and security cooperation. The SPP is much more expansive and includes quality of life issues such as education, science and technology, the environment, and health. But what does it mean that there is an emergent concern with biopolitics, that is, with the lives and bodies of the region's citizens, at the trilateral level? How are these citizens being imagined in the new regional vision? What are the implications for states and sovereignty? This paper addresses these questions by turning first to the trope of “partnership” as it emerges in the SPP, and then to the ways that borders and population mobility are being construed. The discourse of “partnership” signals a new political rationality that is reconfiguring the relationship between the North American states, their markets and their citizens. The repercussions for citizens and citizenship are especially significant, and are most clearly apparent vis‐à‐vis border policies, as I discuss in the following section. While external borders are being hardened against most foreign nationals, mobility across internal borders is becoming more differentiated: more penetrable for some, and impassable for others. The SPP thus promotes a divisive and striated regional space that will help perpetuate the ongoing tensions around illegal immigrants and undocumented workers in North America.     

Border crossings and the remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies

This essay reviews the burgeoning literature on Latin America’s distinctive variant of the Cold War since about 2000. First, it examines a watershed of recent collaborations between Latin American area specialists and foreign relations scholars, which has dramatically transformed Latin American Cold War Studies. Then, it focuses on two of the more fertile veins in that scholarship: first, the notion that the region’s Cold War should be placed in a broader historical context, which scholars are increasingly referring to as Latin America’s “long Cold War,” and second, the long Cold War’s multivalent cultural dimension. If study of the Latin American Cold War has become something of a growth industry in the last 15 years, its leading edge may well be efforts to tease out the complex, power-laden cultural processes, relationships, exchanges, and institutional forms that antedated and shaped Latin America’s Cold War proper (c. 1947 to the early 1990s), and had consequences beyond the conflict’s denouement.     

Occurrence of Euowenia grata (De Vis, 1887) (Diprotodontidae,Marsupialia) from the Pliocene Spring Park Local Fauna,northeastern Queensland

Mackness, B.S., Black, K.H. & Price, G.J., 1.10.2014. Occurrence of Euowenia grata (De Vis, 1887 De Vis, C.W. [In Anon.] 1887. Untitled. The Brisbane Courier 9224 (44) (8 August), 6. [Google Scholar]) (Diprotodontidae, Marsupialia) from the Pliocene Spring Park Local Fauna, northeastern Queensland. Alcheringa 39, 000?000. ISSN 0311-5518

Ten specimens including several dentaries and maxillae, recovered from the Pliocene Spring Park Local Fauna, northern Australia, are referred to the diprotodontine Euowenia grata (De Vis). The fossils exhibit minimal dental wear and reveal new characters that are unrecognizable in the holotype. The remains represent at least three animals, effectively doubling the previous number of individuals known for this rare megaherbivore. The new records also provide a significant northern geographic range extension for the species and allow an assessment of intraspecific variation, sexual dimorphism and phylogenetic relationships for the species. Euowenia grata is most similar in morphology to the monotypic Pliocene diprotodontid Meniscolophus mawsoni.

Brian S. Mackness [deceased] and Karen H. Black [k.black@unsw.edu.au], School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, NSW, 2052, Australia; Gilbert J. Price [g.price1@uq.edu.au], Department of Earth Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia.