Cultural networks between Portugal and Brazil: a postcolonial review

This paper aims to study notable examples of transatlantic transmissions of norms, beliefs and values that have revised the sense of a Luso-Brazilian community in a global world. The so-called Atlantic Civilization understood before as essentially Anglo-Saxon, takes a new shape when seen by the South Atlantic. If the historical relationship between Portugal and Brazil was one of colonial containment, since the nineteenth century those bilateral relations have passed through a process of reconciliation and networking – first through a mutual acceptance, then through the establishment of common international goals. On the one hand, this networking between Portugal and Brazil has occurred through public symbolic demonstration and the commemoration of a common culture; on the other hand, this networking has evolved through cultural connections – music, literature, and cinema, – all of which serve to validate a postcolonial review. Cultural connections that have survived the proverbial test of time have proven to be valuable in assessing the evolving relationship between Portugal and Brazil. Therefore, the Brazilian conscientiousness of its importance in the regional and world sphere involved the preparation of a Brazilian cultural diplomacy that recognized the political desire of diplomacy between Portugal and Brazil – a diplomacy that is largely demonstrative of the importance of soft power in a world of global networks.     

Cultural policy in France’s overseas: permanence of colonial logics and the potential for creole resistance

France's overseas territories have received greater political autonomy these past three decades. In the Arts sector, the centralised government as well as local governments have developed many cultural policies. Yet, a close examination, through postcolonial lenses, reveals that these policies are imbued with a colonial logic and that colonial patterns are being maintained. These policies hide and deny processes of creolisation that represent a potential for resistance and emancipation.     

Ontological security and the limits to a common world: subaltern pasts and the inner-worldliness of the Tablighi Jama’at

ABSTRACT

In this article, the often conflictual intersection between transnational dimensions of religious social formations and narratives of global governance and national security is interrogated. Concretely, the article examines how the relation, between the transnational activities and commonalities actuated by the Islamic revivalist movement Tablighi Jama’at and the perception that it hosts and nourishes extremist elements, both activates and makes manifest efforts at attaining ontological security. At the heart of the analysis is hence the question of where to locate the limits to the common world as it finds embodiment in contemporary expressions of global governance and transnationalism. By critically engaging the possibility of incorporating the many voices of being human into a singular and all-encompassing framework of human existence, the article moreover builds and expands on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorising of ‘subaltern pasts’ and relates it to the seeming need of selfhood to strive towards wholeness, that is, for subjectivity to be securitised. It is, as a consequence, suggested that the identity formation that emerges through Tablighi Jama’at’s comportment, and the controversies that surround it, must be understood as a manifestation of the limits to what narratives of globality might accommodate. By claiming this, the article confirms and furthers extant reasoning on the incomplete and fractured relation between the possibility of a common world and the intrinsic silence of the subaltern within the realms of the international and the global.     

(UN)DOING HISTORY: A CASE FOR EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALTERITY

This article addresses two primary tensions that currently beset medieval history. The first concerns a contentious debate within the field regarding the relative merits of two interpretative approaches: that which seeks to situate the Middle Ages within a narrative of continuity wherein aspects of the medieval bear some relationship of familiarity with the present and that which accords a radical alterity to the past that instigates moments of historical rupture. The second tension concerns the fraught relationship between history as a site of knowledge production with some proximity to engaging and producing truth and history as constructed, wherein its purported object of study, the past, is not an ontological fact but a cultural artifact. In this instance, what we witness is less a debate among scholars within history than an amorphic anxiety about history. This article makes a case for engaging the radical alterity that confronts the historian of the Middle Ages. It does so, however, cognizant of an ontological impasse: if alterity is attentive to difference, a difference that resists translation into modern knowledge regimes, then what does it mean to engage it historically—that is, through a temporal structure that would have been foreign to the very period of study?     

'As solid as the Rock'? Place, belonging and the local appropriation of imperial discourse in Gibraltar

Although imperialism is firmly on the geographical agenda at present, rarely does the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar feature, even though it is the only remaining formal colony in Europe. Seized in 1704, Gibraltar has come to stand as a symbol of British imperial resilience, a status encapsulated by the phrase 'as solid as the Rock'. The paper explores how such a place-based imperial discourse has served to marginalize the civilian population and yet, paradoxically, has been appropriated locally to articulate a distinctive sense of belonging. More generally, the paper considers how a surviving colony such as Gibraltar, with its apparently loyal population, complicates postcolonial categories, periodizations and assumptions.     

Unstable properties: British Columbia,aboriginal title,and the “new relationship”

In the span of a few years, Premier Gordon Campbell transformed himself from a strong political critic of Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia to their apparent champion within a “new relationship.” The subsequent sudden collapse of Campbell's alliance with First Nations is a window into federal‐provincial relations, constitutional change, Aboriginal political organization, and the consequences of decisions made more than a century ago. Drawing on Nietzsche, we argue that Campbell's intentions, either to control or support Aboriginal peoples, were almost irrelevant; our focus should be on the “will to power” and efforts to stabilize power through territory. As a result of the collision of Aboriginal political mobilization, the expansion of natural resource development, and a series of court decisions, the unresolved nature of Canada's territorial claim to most of the land that is now British Columbia has finally reached a point where it can no longer be ignored, either politically or legally. However, the province lacks the legal authority to recognize or deny Aboriginal title, leaving the provincial government and indigenous peoples in British Columbia equally held hostage by the federal government.     

Towards a de-Occidentalist perspective on Israel: The case of the occupation

First fleshed out in German romanticism, Occidentalist discourse expresses a regressive, conspiratorial, and anti-cosmopolitan critique of “Western” modernity. In a process mirroring the Orientalization of the Jews in Europe, the Jewish State in the Middle East underwent a process of Occidentalization – a phenomenon most apparent in depictions of Jewish diaspora nationalism as a form of European settler-colonialism. In order to illustrate the research agenda of de-Occidentalizing Israel, two approaches are applied to the example of Israel's occupation: An analysis of preexisting theorizations of Israel's territorial expansion after 1967 points to Occidentalist motifs like the systematic dislocation of Israel from its particular era and region, the neglect of Palestinian resistance, and the failure to develop a regionally comparative perspective. In contrast, a de-Occidentalist recontextualization of Israel as a postcolonial state in the Middle East points to intriguing parallels with other cases of postcolonial state expansion like Syria's protectorate over Lebanon and Morocco's partial annexation of Western Sahara.     

Representing Science that Isn’t: Harvest as Science Fiction Theatre

Abstract

Engaging with the difficulty of plausibly staging scientific developments that have not yet been realized (or even those which might never occur), Manjula Padmanabhan’s 1997 play Harvest relies upon science fictional developments in two technologies, communications and medicine. Rather than merely working around them, Padmanabhan’s play makes use of the challenges inherent in staging a fictional future, calling both representation and power into question. In so doing the play exemplifies the increasing openness of science drama to science fictional ideas.     

Reception of the Easter Rising in British and American little magazines

This article examines the reactions of writers and readers to the Easter Rising in five British and American little magazines. The New Age, The Egoist, The Little Review, The Masses and The Phoenix have been chosen due to their links with Irish writers and culture, and because they were established periodicals that published over several years. Little magazines have been described as counterpublic spheres, in which oppositional opinions could be given voice against the conventional narratives of the mainstream. Though the politics of these journals was extremely divergent, collectively they operated as discursive spaces for a range of alternative voices. The reactions published in these journals give us a sense of the interaction between modernism and the Easter Rising in its immediate aftermath.