Antiquarian Intelligence

Abstract

A survey was carried out of the stone types of the south porch of Gloucester Cathedral, repaired in 1992. Although very little of the medieval fabric remained, much information emerged about the types of stone used in the 19th century, and the building materials of the original south porch could also be established. The work formed the basis of most present knowledge about the past use of stone at Gloucester Cathedral.     

Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-masculinity

Our article builds upon the insights of recent critical geographic inquiry that has examined the involvement of geography in a multitude of power relations, and in particular the processes of European imperialism and colonisation. The focus of this article, however, is the involvement of the discipline of geography in the constitution and maintenance of a hetero-masculine nationalist discourse. We focus our analysis on articles published in the New Zealand Geographer, but suggest that such hetero-masculine nationalist discourse exists also in the works of geographers writing about other nation-spaces. Our purpose is to draw geographers' attention to the constitutive effects of banal practices in geographic scholarship. We draw upon Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to argue that the articulation of nationalist narratives is an endemic feature of the contemporary nation/state, and one that forms a particular discursive order that situates author, text and reader in an assumed national and hetero-masculine landscape.     

Tracking tuberculosis in the past: the use of genealogical evidence

A series of mutations of tuberculosis, present in the 1990s among elderly persons in the Province of Quebec (Canada), is interpreted as the outcome of a suite of three episodes of high mobility. The most recent is the rapid urbanization of the 1950s. In the 1840s exceptional mobility was a feature of frontier settlement and exploitation of timber. Unusual mobility in the 1750s and 1760s was associated with wartime conditions of the British conquest of Quebec and re-settlement of Acadian refugees. The scenario was developed from cartographic analysis (using geographic information systems), genealogies of the human hosts, and molecular genetics of the bacterium.     

Art and Impowerment: Levinas,Nietzsche, and the Ethics of Literary Discourse

This article draws on the profound affinities between the thought of Levinas and Nietzsche to argue that aesthetics plays a major role in Levinas's ethical philosophy. As in the case of Nietzsche, who called himself “the first tragic philosopher,” aesthetics gives reference to the tragic, yet affirmative content of Levinas's ethics. For both, what Levinas calls the “alterity,” or otherness, of art and literature is located not in an ontological or conceptual “beyond”—in a “spiritual” dimension “which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute”—but in the “interstices” of language, in the “between times” (entretemps) of its modes of temporality: which can only be accessed by way of “the tragic” in art. Alterity signifies not a privileged, interpersonal dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but points to the complicity between the West's concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplified by the Holocaust. The artwork for Levinas is at once temporally diachronic and spatially diasporic, a region of impowerment that is precisely lacking in the expressive or imaginative empowerment normally attributed to the artwork, but which demonstrates a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fissures and hidden pathways that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.