Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib1

This article presents a critique of prevailing left‐of‐center journalism and academic scholarship on the revelation of torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by United States military personnel at Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004. We argue that the resulting discourse suffers from a certain critical bankruptcy in its failure to think about the nature of imprisonment as such. This failure is an effect of two procedures: (1) a narrowing of the field of inquiry that relies on the metonymic reduction of imprisonment through and as the practices of torture, and (2) a reification of the prison that both relies upon and displaces the racialization of imprisonment as an institution of black spatial containment and social control. In response, we call for a renewed understanding of and appreciation for the singularity of racial slavery and its afterlife in future research on carceral formations in and beyond the US.     

The Shifting Ideological Currents of the Transatlantic Puritan Community in the Early Seventeenth Century

This article explores the ideological transfigurations which appeared when English Puritans relocated to New England. It does so by examining particular communications which took place between the Puritans of the “Great Migration” of the 1630s and their erstwhile associates in “Old” England. Though both sets of Puritans had seemingly much in common when they were ideological allies back in Old England, not least being an antipathy towards the Laudian ecclesiastical establishment of the late 1620s and 1630s, the movement to the colonial periphery of New England exposed previously unnoticed, or, at least, overlooked, ideological divisions. This article explicates one significant ideological issue upon which these Old and New England Puritans were divided: that of the appropriate relationship between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres of the polity.     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

DECEIVING HOPE

Abstract

In Jeremiah, irony permeates the ethical texture of hope. For poetics and power intersect the Utopian aspirations and images of the text no matter how one theorizes its multiplicity of voices and occasions.

A reader may well recoil in horror from the fantastic landscape of violence painted by the oracular tradition attributed to Jeremiah. Moreover, being horrified may indeed be the desired effect of the rhetoric. Thus, a reader may well seek (be led to) metaphorical relief and comfort within the restoration traditions (equally attributed to Jeremiah) that on the surface reverse the terrors of divine violence rhetorically unleashed on the Jerusalem community.

However, should it be so easy for the rhetoric of hope to assuage the terrors of doom? For such Utopian desire to succeed it must construct a symbolic landscape that rewrites the myth of Yahweh and Israel as well as lay claim to the right to do so in exclusion of all others. The restoration hope deceives and offers its own Utopian terrors.

For it must dispossess and destroy alternative myths of Yahweh and Israel with their adherents. Irony on irony generates. Indeed, the terrors of doom and hope serve each other. Explicit rhetoric of dispossession (oracles of doom) provides the metaphorical means to open a symbolic space for the “imperial” restoration desires of colonial elites. Thus, the rhetoric of explicit comfort sustains a subtext of ideological terror. Both doom and hope dispossess and repossess rights to the myth of Yahweh and Israel. It is a matter of where a metaphorical reader is placed or takes up their place within the symbolic landscape called Jeremiah.     

A Hierarchical Goal-Programming Approach To Environmental Land Use Management

A mathematical goal programming model is described for the purpose of normative policy evaluation of environmental land use management on the Texas Gulf Coast. The model's three-level hierarchy, linking statewide, multicounty, and local models, allows the explicit consideration of competing goals (policies) at different spatial scales. Microlevel impacts of macrolevel environmental policy decisions, and vice versa, can be assessed.     

FLEXIBLE FORM METHODS FOR MEASURING RENT GRADIENTS*

ABSTRACT We develop and demonstrate an empirical methodology for measuring rent gradients in the presence of consumers that have varying tastes for distance to the city center. We derive easily calculated measures of rent gradients, own price elasticities, and income elasticities. We demonstrate the ease of calculation of these functions, even in the presence of consumers who have nonidentical preferences. We also demonstrate how to test for bias in rent gradient estimation that arises from assuming identical preference functions.