Negotiating German colonial heritage in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel

Abstract

Conceptualising heritage as a contested process of past-based meaning production in the present, this paper analyses the ongoing dispute over street names in Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel. In 1899, Berlin named two of its newly-built streets Togo Street and Cameroon Street. Togo and Cameroon had been proclaimed the first German colonies in 1884. By 1958, 22 Berlin streets had been named after African regions that had been colonised by the German Empire or after German colonial protagonists. In 2004, several NGOs called for the renaming of some of these streets, igniting a fierce dispute over the heritage status of the German colonial past. Drawing on guided interviews and document analyses, we analyse this debate on three levels, showing how the NGOs and their claims have been marginalised on each level. While the level of agency can be traced back to the different positioning of the actors in the political field, the levels of temporality and spatiality belong to the realm of ideas about the world and one’s place in it. By exploring the authoritative power of traditional notions of permanence, and of place and space, this paper seeks to bring temporality and spatiality into the focus of those studying heritage-making practices.     

Contests about Natural Law in Early Enlightenment Copenhagen

This article discusses the works of the first two lecturers on natural law in Copenhagen, Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer. Contrary to the existing scholarship which characterises their works as derivative of either Grotius or Pufendorf, the article argues that the character and significance of these works can only be grasped when understood in light of the local intellectual traditions which they built upon. Seen against this background, it becomes clear that Weghorst and Reitzer developed significantly different theories of natural law, disagreeing on such fundamental issues as the definition of law, the moral good, and the role of sociality in natural law. Following a tradition of Christian natural law in Kiel, Weghorst developed a theory of natural law fundamentally critical of the secularising theories of Grotius and Pufendorf, while Reitzer followed Pufendorf and his disciple Christian Thomasius in Halle. The article concludes by indicating how Weghorst’s and Reitzer’s works established the framework for discussions of natural law in the first decades of the eighteenth century, suggesting the need for further research into the significance of natural law for the early enlightenment in Denmark–Norway.     

Cleaning up down South: Supermarkets,ethical trade and African horticulture

Supermarkets in Great Britain have joined the country's Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) in order to demonstrate their commitment to social welfare and environmental standards in their supply chains. They have been particularly concerned to enforce ethical as well as food safety standards in the African horticultural industry, which has historically depended on cheap labour to produce high-value vegetables. The supermarkets' 'ethical turn' appears to signal an important change from forms of commodity fetishism that obscured exploitative relations of food production in the South. This paper, however, argues that in an era of high food anxiety for both retailers and consumers, ethical standards are themselves fetishized. It also shows how the effort to impose such standards on Zambia's horticultural export industry resembles the colonial 'hygienic mission', and faces a similar contradiction.     

Explaining Congressional Staff Members’ Decisions to Leave the Hill

The high turnover of congressional staff members can have a negative effect on the functioning of Congress as an institution. Though junior staff turnover is not considered a significant concern, the high turnover of senior staff members is problematic. Using data from a survey of staff members located in the Washington personal offices of House of Representatives members, this article investigates what factors influence the likelihood to leave congressional employment. Specifically, I explore how solidary, purposive, and material work incentives influence staff members’ plans to exit. The results of two different models—one for junior and mid-level staff members and one for executive staff members—indicate that purposive incentives, and material incentives that accrue for future employment opportunities, carry the most weight across both models. Current salary has a significant effect on executive staff members, but not on their lower-level counterparts. Following this analysis, I propose actions that congressional offices might take to retain staff.     

HLO1‐south: An Early Neolithic site in Wadi al‐Hilo (Sharjah,UAE)

Site HLO1 (Sharjah, UAE), situated in a particularly favourable geographical position, has provided an extraordinary range of anthropogenic radiocarbon dates, spanning before 8000 to Zero BCE. The Neolithic is represented by finds from the eighth to the fifth millennium BCE. Apart from the dated fireplaces, however, there are almost no typical artefacts of this period. Small stone structures appear to have been early Neolithic graves. A middle Neolithic grave consisted of a large rounded stone heap which was reused as a grave during the Late Bronze Age. The site is interpreted as a campsite of nomadic herders, used throughout the Neolithic period. After a break in the fourth millennium BCE, the site became a Bronze Age smelting site which continued to be settled until the Late Iron Age.     

Making and Mastering Violent Environments: Following the Infrastructures of Accumulation in Coastal Louisiana

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands have been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past several decades, with the greatest harm experienced by vulnerable populations (poor and racialised residents). It was not until 2005 that the state legislature responded with a much-lauded Master Plan tasked with integrating the construction of new flood control infrastructure with wetland restoration. Seeking to unsettle this initiative, we develop a historical-geographical materialist approach to follow the entanglements between infrastructural production and capital accumulation in Louisiana over the past several hundred years. In so doing, we present a two-fold argument: that the making and mastering infrastructural violence has always been part of the historical unfolding of the socio-spatial dynamics of capitalism; and that infrastructural development has played an integral role in this duality at every historical turn. The capitalist state, at both the federal and state levels, has played a vital role in producing and controlling this violence.     

Space-time geography of female live-in child domestic workers in Dhaka,Bangladesh

Live-in child domestic workers in Bangladesh often experience the surveilling power of their employer's gaze as a Foucauldian panopticon, which both disciplines and engages children in forms of self-discipline. I argue that female child domestic workers in particular have a form of ‘thin’ agency whereby they are severely restricted in their abilities to make independent decisions or to act to their own benefit. I ethnographically unpack the concept of thin agency by analyzing material, cultural, spatial and discursive constraints that both employers and female child domestic workers engage in their daily lives.