‘Black and’ Cause I'm Black I'm Blue: Transverse racial geographies in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

The aim of this article is to address how Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, points to different experiences of geographical scales and space that simultaneously complicate and reiterate the meaning of being black. Places, bodies and minds, as they intertwine, fluctuate, and ostensibly stay the same, play off each other in complicated ways in Morrison's novel. Drawing on anti-racist theory and from anti-racist and feminist geographies, this article examines Morrison's novel and characters in order to bring forth the links between the interrelated categories of race, racism, gender and place. It illustrates how material realities, corporeal differences and subjective understandings of place, race and racism are mutually constructed. It addresses how the meaning of being black in a white-dominated society, in The Bluest Eye at least, is illustrative of complex subjectivities that are situated in places, communities and nations that deny comfortable and coherent lived experiences.     

哈尔施塔特时光倒流七千年

依山傍水、湖光山色、山明水秀，这些都不足以形容哈尔施塔特（Hallstatt）的美。她外在的湖与山，有一种安静恬然的气韵，她的内在，却是一种历史、信仰与文明的交融，一种纯正淡定的欧洲气质，无法复刻，让人迷恋并迷失其中。曾经有人说：“一个人若爱你，就带他去哈尔施塔特；一个人若恨你，也带他去啥尔施塔特，他会因此而爱上你。”     

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD: HOW CAN REGIONAL SCIENCE CONTRIBUTE TO THE STUDY OF NEIGHBORHOODS?*

ABSTRACT We argue in this paper that neighborhoods are highly relevant for the types of issues at the heart of regional science. First, residential and economic activity takes place in particular locations, and particular neighborhoods. Many attributes of those neighborhood environments matter for this activity, from the physical amenities, to the quality of the public and private services received. Second, those neighborhoods vary in their placement in the larger region and this broader arrangement of neighborhoods is particularly important for location choices, commuting behavior and travel patterns. Third, sorting across these neighborhoods by race and income may well matter for educational and labor market outcomes, important components of a region's overall economic activity. For each of these areas we suggest a series of unanswered questions that would benefit from more attention. Focused on neighborhood characteristics themselves, there are important gaps in our understanding of how neighborhoods change – the causes and the consequences. In terms of the overall pattern of neighborhoods and resulting commuting patterns, this connects directly to current concerns about environmental sustainability and there is much need for research relevant to policy makers. And in terms of segregation and sorting across neighborhoods, work is needed on better spatial measures. In addition, housing market causes and consequences for local economic activity are under researched. We expand on each of these, finishing with some suggestions on how newly available data, with improved spatial identifiers, may enable regional scientists to answer some of these research questions.     

The emergence of NGOs in China and their transnational linkages: implications for domestic reform

In addressing the question of how China's rapid socioeconomic transformation is changing the nature of its international engagement we need to move beyond a traditional focus on state-centric analysis. Obviously a major stimulus for China's international engagement over the past 25 years of reform and opening has come from non-state economic activity. Growing economic interdependence, accelerated after China's accession into the World Trade Organization, provides the strongest argument in favour of a peaceful rise of China scenario in which both regional and global security are enhanced rather than threatened. Far less attention, however, has been given to the role and influence of Chinese non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their transnational linkages. I argue in this article that in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of China's ongoing process of reform and opening to the outside world we need to incorporate a civil society dimension into our analysis. This is of particular relevance to ongoing foreign policy debates over democracy and human rights promotion in China. Indeed, in the absence of a more detailed understanding of current developments taking place at the grassroots, international support for progressive reform runs the risk of undermining positive change from below.