Mansfield Park and Political Theology

ABSTRACT

This essay examines Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in the light of classical understandings of political theology. It does so by placing the novel in its Anglican and Erastian contexts as well as by showing that it belongs to a lineage of English prose fiction, whose famous names are Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, which also had theopolitical interests.     

Capture Life: The ‘Document-Monument’ in Recent Commemorations of Hugo Chávez

The recent passing of Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela from 1999 till 2013, produced a juncture in the nation's imaginary that immediately sparked numerous and diverse commemorative practices. This article explores this sudden demand for a coherent and enduring memory of the late president by analysing different official postures and commemorative strategies. These are initially placed in the context of key historiographical tropes of the Bolivarian Revolution, and then analysed in light of such tropes. Specifically, the discussion identifies a thirst for ‘documents’, used in the broad sense proposed by Jacques Le Goff, which converged on the presidential body, the social body and public space as potential stimuli for memory. In this context, the initial possibilities of embalming Chávez's body, free tattoos of his signature and its use to decorate government buildings, appeal to the archive as a source of authority and as the commencement of history, as Jacques Derrida has it, while extrapolating the president's signature as a mobile and reproducible image of power to seek the eternal presence of the ‘líder eterno’ (eternal leader) as an anchor for political unity.     

"Give the ladies a chance": gender and partisanship in the Prohibition Party, 1869-1912

In the nineteenth-century Prohibition Party, American women ascribed new gendered meanings to party work traditionally performed by male partisans, and also drew upon their gendered roles as women, mothers, and wives to create new partisan strategies. This article investigates the political culture that sustained a remarkable departure from traditional Democratic and Republican practices, and further explores why women's contributions to the Prohibition Party declined in the early-twentieth century. In so doing, it traces how gender and gender roles shaped the meaning of party and politics, and elucidates the interplay between institutions, constituencies, and policy during one of America's most tumultuous political eras.     

No longer good girls: sexual transgressions in Indian women's writings

Indian women's writing in English has long depicted Indian women as victims of society, whose rights are routinely exploited and whose welfare and happiness are commonly sacrificed for the good of their families and communities. The literature has often depicted the women as complicit, accepting and upholding the definition of a good woman as one who is faithful, virtuous, self-effacing and obedient. This definition is also one the women instil in their daughters, thus reinforcing this code of ethics. This article observes that there is a tide running contrary to this and that there is a new breed of women in twenty-first century Indian literary fiction in English: women who are single and married, working and non-working, middle and upper-middle class and wives and mothers, who are no longer prepared to be ‘good girls’. These women knowingly, thoughtfully and successfully defy societal conventions to have pre and extramarital affairs, divorces and even custody battles for children, without shame, guilt, dire consequences or even societal condemnation. This article argues that these writings represent a quietly radical departure from the conventional depictions of the roles, expectations and morals of middle-class urban twenty-first century Indian women.     

Analyzing Hotspots of Crime Using a Bayesian Spatiotemporal Modeling Approach: A Case Study of Violent Crime in the Greater Toronto Area

Conventional methods used to identify crime hotspots at the small‐area scale are frequentist and employ data for one time period. Methodologically, these approaches are limited by an inability to overcome the small number problem, which occurs in spatiotemporal analysis at the small‐area level when crime and population counts for areas are low. The small number problem may lead to unstable risk estimates and unreliable results. Also, conventional approaches use only one data observation per area, providing limited information about the temporal processes influencing hotspots and how law enforcement resources should be allocated to manage crime change. Examining violent crime in the Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, for 2006 and 2007, this research illustrates a Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling approach that analyzes crime trend and identifies hotspots while addressing the small number problem and overcoming limitations of conventional frequentist methods. Specifically, this research tests for an overall trend of violent crime for the study region, determines area‐specific violent crime trends for small‐area units, and identifies hotspots based on crime trend from 2006 to 2007. Overall violent crime trend was found to be insignificant despite increasing area‐specific trends in the north and decreasing area‐specific trends in the southeast. Posterior probabilities of area‐specific trends greater than zero were mapped to identify hotspots, highlighting hotspots in the north of the study region. We discuss the conceptual differences between this Bayesian spatiotemporal method and conventional frequentist approaches as well as the effectiveness of this Bayesian spatiotemporal approach for identifying hotspots from a law enforcement perspective.