350th Anniversary of Les Passions de l'Ame

1999 marks the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Descartes' final work: Les Passions de l'Ame. This short paper commemorates that event and discusses the circumstances contributing to its origin and the questions which it still raises for neuropsychology three hundred and fifty years later.     

“Back in the heartland”: Seamus Heaney's “Route 110” sequence in Human Chain

This essay foregrounds the increasingly significant role translation has played in Seamus Heaney's compositional and creative practices since the 1970s, and how it functions as a means of displacement and route into imagined homecomings. It offers a detailed analysis of the sequence which occupies a central position within Human Chain, in which Heaney HeaneySeamusStations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975. [Google Scholar] attends to and seeks to reconcile once more the different “voices of my education”, that of originary familial/parish culture of Mossbawn and Bellaghy, and that acquired at St Columb's College and Queen's University that furnished him with rich linguistic and cultural assets, but sentenced him also to a “migrant solitude” (“The Wanderer”, Stations). “Route 110” illustrates the enduring effects of both bequests, as Heaney takes scenes and motifs from Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI, which details Aeneas' experiences on his descent into the seventieth year, Heaney takes readers with him on a road back to pre-Troubles Northern Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, stopping off initially at Smithfield Market, Belfast, in order to pick up a “used copy” of the Virgil that will become his guide. What he subsequently assembles is an album of snapshots of his youth, part of his legacy to his newly-born granddaughter.     

Changing tides of industrial democracy: Red Clydeside and the UCS work-in as political heritage

ABSTRACT

Drawing on labour history, critical heritage studies and sociological literature on the entrepreneurial city, this article focuses on the cultural legacy of the famous 1971/72 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) work-in apropos Glasgow’s historical reputation as ‘Red Clydeside’. In doing so, the article considers the dispute’s continuing importance as a political resource for present-day debates about workers’ rights, Glasgow’s post-industrial identity, the rise of populist demagoguery and the future of Britain’s industry more generally.     

Book reviews

Ian McLean, White Aborigines. Identity Politics in Australian Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. x + 204 pp., 9 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–521–58416–7. £40.00.

Ákos Moravánszky, Competing Visions. Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867–1918, Cambridge, Mass. & London: MIT Press, 1998. xvi + 508 pp., 32 col. and 312 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–262–13334–2. £29.95.

Andrew Piersenné, Explaining Our World, London and New York: E. & F. N. Spon, 1999. xii + 252 pp., 50 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–419–21940–4. £45–00.

Simone Abram, Jacqueline Waldren and Donald V. L. Macleod (eds.), Tourists and Tourism: Identifying with People and Places, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997. xii + 245 pp., 4 figs. ISBN 1–85973–905–9. £14.99.

Martin Cooper (ed.), Laser Cleaning in Conservation: An Introduction, Oxford: Butterworth‐Heinemann, 1998. xii + 98 pp, 43 col. and 11 b. & w. illus. ISBN 0–7506–3117–1. £40.00.

Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai, Architecture and Independence. The Search for Identity—India 1880 to 1980, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxii + 347 pp., c. 750 b. & w. illus. and figs. ISBN 0–19–563900–6. £20.00.     

Reconciling custom,citizenship and colonial legacies: Ni‐Vanuatu tertiary student attitudes to national identity

Nation‐building remains a key challenge in Vanuatu. From the origins of this new nation in 1980, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu. The survey identifies areas of common attitudes towards nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni‐Vanuatu. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings suggest that there remain some key areas of strong association between socio‐linguistic background, and attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites towards regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity.     

The Saga of the ‘Second industrial divide’ and the history of the ‘third Italy’: Evidence from export data

The idea of the Third Italy has achieved an iconic status in geography. It has come to represent one of the main geographical manifestations of the so‐called second industrial divide between Fordist mass production and flexible specialisation. Yet the idea has received limited critical attention since acquiring its elevated status. It deserves to do so, because it involves confusing a localised model of economic development with the economic character of a larger geographic region. Examining province level export data for the years 1985, 1991, 1995 and 1999 for both total exports and two key sectors using exploratory spatial data analysis, provincial rankings and LISAs (local indicators of spatial association) suggests that the export‐based homogeneity and dynamism of the Third Italy can be exaggerated. Italy's urban hierarchy, particularly the centrality of Milan, continues to play a significant role in the Italian economy. Common use of the term ‘Third Italy’ confuses an economic process with a specific geographical configuration.