Ordinary culture in a world of strangers: toward cosmopolitan cultural policy *

The image of Zwarte Piet, as part of Dutch Sinterklaas celebrations has caused heated debate in the past decade, which has polarized tensions between the ‘Dutch’ and ‘strangers’. This article argues that the debate cannot be resolved within a framework of a methodologically nationalist cultural policy. Building on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, I argue that a cosmopolitan framework for belonging is not only a normative but also a policy imperative. Cultural policy should recognize our shared global belonging, rather than building a national polis predicated on difference that sets us apart. However, a methodologically cosmopolitan cultural policy cannot be a blanket approach to replace or undermine national frameworks. It should embed the nation in a cosmopolitan public policy to accommodate cultural and religious diversity under globalization that has irrevocably eroded the illusion of a national unity.     

清代伊克昭盟长城沿线“禁留地”诸概念考释

清初陕北边外禁留地承自明代烧荒形成的隔离蒙汉的黑色地带。乾隆八年,双方在边外五十里一线划出有形界线,称黑(牌)界,该谓附会于烧荒形成的黑色地带,是汉人对边外自然景观记忆延续的反映。黑界以内,伊克昭盟各旗汉族移民的耕地范围并不相同,使得黑界与移民垦殖北界之间形成宽窄不一的土地,由此衍生出当时文献未言,却实际存在的所谓黑界地。牌界地是指边墙与牌界之间的土地。伙盘地是移民定居和租耕之地,具有不连续分布的空间特征。白界地一称晚出于民国绥远编纂的文献,实为牌界地的异写,其产生可能与牌借地、白借地称谓有关。陕绥双方对诸称谓的不同书写,反映各自从己方利益和地方本位的角度,对重构清代鄂尔多斯南缘汉族移民垦殖史的不同表达和现实立场。     

Preservation potential of charcoal in alkaline environments: an experimental approach and implications for the archaeological record

Charcoalified plant material (usually wood) has been described as being inert with a high preservation potential. Although usually black on both the outside and inside, the physical and chemical properties differ as a function of temperature and time of exposure to a heat source. Post-depositional processes however may exert additional affects on charcoalified material and introduce bias into the archaeological record. This work explores the influence of alkaline conditions, often encountered in the soil environment, on the preservation potential of charcoalified material. Charcoal, experimentally produced at different temperatures, was exposed to a number of solutions of potassium hydroxide and calcium hydroxide with different pHs, to simulate exposure to alkaline soil conditions. Under these conditions chemically mediated physical interactions occur resulting in fragmentation of the charcoal samples into (very) small pieces the size of which depends upon the initial temperature of charcoalification. Moreover further interactions result in a decrease in reflectance relative to samples not exposed to alkaline conditions. Although experimentally driven the potential for physical loss of charcoal from a particular site coupled with the reduction in (expected) reflectance of any resident material, has important implications for any conclusions drawn regarding the archaeological record.     

近50年来我国的美国黑人史研究

中国学近50年来对美国黑人史的研究可分为三个时期。20世纪50—70年代,美国黑人史研究在中国成为一个研究热点,取得一批重要成果,但不可避免带有政治化的倾向。80年代,黑人史研究略显沉寂,处于承上启下阶段。90年代以来,取得很大的进展,研究的领域和深度都有所拓展和深入。但总的看来,我国的美国黑人史研究还远未成熟,尚处于起步和奠基阶段。     

Holocene fire history of black colluvial soils revealed by pyrolysis-GC/MS: a case study from Campo Lameiro (NW Spain)

The colluvial soils of Galicia (NW Spain) are records of Holocene environmental change. In spite of the omnipresence of charcoal fragments in these soils, the effect of fires on the development of the Galician landscape and the potential role of past societies are poorly understood.     

NOSTALGIA AND (PRE-)MODERNITY

This article argues that, in the fourteenth century, there was a wave of nostalgia that was provoked by extreme structural change: this was a moment of demographic catastrophe (with famine and plague), endemic warfare, economic fluctuation, intensified urbanization, and intellectual and spiritual novelties. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have assumed that nostalgia and modernity are intimately connected. Given these framings of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon, this article seeks to explore the implications of premodern nostalgia. It begins by setting out the arguments for the intertwining of nostalgia and modernity. Some have argued that modernity brings a sense of rupture and that this produces nostalgia. Others, relatedly, have argued that modernity seems to speed up our experience of time and that this produces a nostalgia for a slower-paced and more predictable past. I juxtapose these arguments with evidence of fourteenth-century outpourings of nostalgia across a range of contexts in England, Italy, and France. I analyze examples of nostalgia in political contexts (both radical and reactionary), nostalgia for apparently lost economic orders, nostalgia for a lost set of chivalric values, and nostalgia for disrupted social orders. I then suggest that these fourteenth-century manifestations of nostalgia were actually produced by precisely the features of the period that are usually deemed to be exclusive to modernity: it was rapid, rupturing structural change that provoked nostalgic regret. Nostalgia, then, would seem to indicate that there are features of the fourteenth century that might be deemed modern. However, rather than simply trying to therefore push back the moment of the birth of modernity, I argue that nostalgia is indicative of the problems of periodization. The presence of nostalgia across epochs—these echoes across the webs of time—suggest that lines of periodization, birthing moments, need to be treated with extreme caution. And it is appropriate that such a reminder should come from a phenomenon such as nostalgia, which is, after all, about resonances and echoes across time—resonances that are amplified, distorted, whispered even, but that all challenge and complicate any straightforward sense of either linear or cyclical time.     

The Abeng’s Call: The Articulation of Place and the International in Black Power Print Production

This article engages with radical Black Power print production in order to examine the articulation of Black practices of place-making and Black internationalist spatial politics. These spatial politics and practices are developed through engagement with the Jamaican Black Power newspaper Abeng which was produced at the height of Black Power activity on the island in 1969. The paper draws on Black Geographies scholarship to demonstrate that Abeng represented a material and discursive means through which subaltern practices and places of resistance in Jamaica were enacted in opposition to and excess of plantation spatialities and regimes on the island. The carving out of such subaltern places allowed for the articulation of transnational imaginaries and translocal solidarities with similarly aligned communities and struggles across the diasporic world. The Abeng newspaper was again central in crafting these imagined Black internationalist geographies and coeval praxes of transnational solidarity.     

“Stuck In-Between”: Placing the Underdocumented Youth Movement in Georgia

This paper draws on participant-observation and a series of focus group interviews with TPS and DACA youth in Northeast Georgia to understand youth activism emerging from their positionality of being “stuck in-between”. “Stuck in-between” captures the liminal legal status of DACA and TPS, denotes the feeling of “stuckness” in mixed-status multigenerational families, and foregrounds the profound ways in which place and race intersect with legal, social, and ideological practices of inclusion/exclusion. Underdocumented youth form multiracial coalitions, guided by Black geographies of the region, to challenge imperial borders that criminalise and (re)produce categories of vulnerability. This place in-between shapes underdocumented youth understanding of the world, informed by, rather than in competition with, Black radical visions of themselves and of the place of the US South.