The construction of an alpine landscape: building,representing and affecting the Eastern Alps,c. 1885–1914

Between 1885 and the First World War, German and Austrian alpinists talked of “opening up” the Alps in Germany and the Austrian Empire with a vast network of huts and paths. This article argues that this effort to develop the Alps arose from a series of relationships between people, objects, representations and affects which linked urban spaces of middle-class conduct to the alpine environment. Alpinists utilised media such as landscape reliefs and panoramas not merely to represent the Alps, but to inculcate a particular affective response amongst Germany's urban middle-class, or Bürgertum. Instead of a Romantic ideal of mountains as unknowable symbols of nature's power, these alpinists promoted a modern gaze which would see all, from the safety of a controlled, governable landscape. In doing so, alpinists legitimised their intervention in the Eastern Alps, developing these once unknown landscapes as a bürgerlich [bourgeois, or middle-class] cultural resource.     

“Middling” Chinese Returnees or Immigrants from Canada? The Ambiguity of Return Migration and Claims to Modernity

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” returnees who are not privy to the preferential treatment given to highly skilled returnees. They come to be considered as “foreigners” in their homeland because they have naturalised elsewhere. The paper also explores the double diasporic identifications of Mainland Chinese returnees from Canada; it highlights the tensions and fissures manifested in secondary diasporas, particularly in light of China’s growing prominence in international business, foreign diplomacy and cultural exchanges. The paper suggests that social encounters that marginalise such migrants in Canada are reproduced in China. The returnees navigate such encounters by mobilising their transnational affiliations to different national contexts.     

At the Edge of an Empire: Plague,State and Identity in New Caledonia, 1899–1900

This paper examines colonial discourses on race, environment and global identity that arose during an outbreak of bubonic plague in the French Pacific settler colony of New Caledonia between December 1899 and April 1900. The outbreak of plague brought to the forefront colonial anxieties over living on the periphery of empire, definitions of what it meant to be white, the health menace posed by peoples the dominant colonial society categorised as non- white, and the danger the plague posed to the salubrious island environment that had just begun to attract free settlement after the end of the penal colony four years previously. These discourses were linked by the threat, real and imagined, posed by the bubonic plague, intersecting with the ambiguous place held by the outlying colony within the webs of a modern global commercial community and the Pacific world.     

Existentialism as a Political Problem in Karl Löwith's Thought

The aim of this paper is to make a case for the claim that Karl Löwith's thought is predominately preoccupied with one major philosophic–historical problem that may be broadly labelled existentialism. This notion is usually employed by Löwith in order to grasp the various phenomena and developments within the European (or Western) history in the modern age. I claim that the meaning assigned by Löwith to the notion of existentialism is inseparable from its political consequences. In other words, I attempt to reconstruct the notion of existentialism in Löwith's thought primarily as a political problem. By advancing this argument, I am inclined towards the view that Löwith’s ?uvre deserves more careful reception from political theorists than it has yet received.     

Bakhtin,Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.