THE SOVEREIGNTY OF MODERN TIMES: DIFFERENT CONCEPTS OF TIME AND THE MODERNIST PERSPECTIVE

Given World and Time is a collection of essays that summarizes much of the recent work on the theory of time, including cultural, political, and social conceptualizations of temporality. The grounding narrative of this collection, roughly stated, leads from the German and German‐Jewish ideas of a temporality of crisis developed in the 1920s, to the French poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s, and concludes with the American syntheses of the 1980s and 1990s. Methodologically, the book weaves together different historical narratives with a new emphasis on their temporal dimension, all seen from the perspective of critical theory and recent cultural critique. However, it is interesting to point out that the majority of the articles do not challenge the classic critical tools of modernism, in spite of the frequent reference to poststructuralist critique. The volume editor has also not acknowledged more recent work that treats similar topics and themes through the application of a radical political critique, most significantly the work associated with biopolitics and the so‐called theological turn.     

From the Mountains to the Sea—Ki Uta ki Tai: Ecological Enclosure,Interconnection, and Subjectivity in the Commons

This paper explores the ways in which the affective and material dimensions of the commons come together to produce commoner subjectivities. Threats of enclosure can draw attention to the ways in which subjectivity reproduction is dependent on an environment which enables embodied acts of care. Using the example of the East Otago Taiāpure and Waikouaiti Mātaitai, a form of customary fisheries management in New Zealand, this paper illustrates the limitations of the institutionalised commons in its capacity to create an effective caring and protective space. Historical colonial transformation of the landscape and contemporary industrial activities have resulted in an “ecological enclosure” of the area, threatening the health of the ecosystem and its ability to encourage Māori subjectivities, specifically, kaitiakitanga, a relational responsibility to care for the physical and social environment.     

Spatial segregation and class subjectivity in Turkey

Drawing on ethnographic research in an upper-class district in Turkey, this article examines social and spatial experiences of young low-wage service workers who travel daily back and forth between their homes in low-income neighbourhoods and their jobs in gated communities, upscale shopping malls and corporate offices. The paper argues that the significance of upper class districts or gated communities for urban inequality lies not in the sites themselves, nor the lifestyles of their elite inhabitants as commonly treated in the literature, but rather in the ways in which they relate to the outside and outsiders. Within this framework, the paper analyses the district’s effect on urban spatial segregation and urbanites’ sense of place in society. While resentment and reaction to inequalities and upper class customers are prevalent in young workers’ narratives, workers’ class subjectivities are also marked by a sense of mobility and liminality between the upper middle classes in their work district and their families, friends and neighbours back home. This sense of socio-spatial ‘in-betweenness’ is reinforced by being young, hence a sense of temporal liminality between youth and adulthood. The study contributes to the understanding of urban inequality at the intersection of spatial, emotional and temporal experiences of urbanites.     

‘You just have to be smart’: spatial practices and subjectivity among women in sex work in London,Ontario

Social science research on the relationship between space and sex work, specifically among women in street-based settings, demonstrates the spatialized nature of risk and how different forms of civic and legal governance contribute to their socio-economic marginalization. However, these studies rarely consider the women’s spatial practices and gendered subjectivities beyond the sex trade, which is problematic because sex work is not their singular life activity or the only impetus for their spatial movements through the urban landscape. Using social mapping and interview data from 33 women in sex work in London, Ontario, this article explores how our participants navigate the spaces where they work and live alongside those regarding health care, social services, violence and places they avoid. Findings reveal that the women traverse diverse spaces as they access health services, especially for crisis issues that necessitate travel to hospitals located beyond the inner city. The spaces used to access social services and those they avoid (i.e. to not be emotionally triggered or under police surveillance) overlap significantly, which presents unique challenges for our participants who depend upon these services for their socio-economic survival. The theoretical contributions these data make to the feminist geography literature on gender and space are discussed, particularly with respect to the issues of nomadic subjectivity and the relationality between city spaces and marginalized bodies.     

Turkish–Dutch mosques and the formation of moral subjects

This article explores how mosque spaces become everyday sites of ethno-religious subjectivation for immigrants and citizens originating from Turkey in the Netherlands. I argue that the symbolic and material constructions of mosques as simultaneously moral and moralizing spaces undergird the production of ethno-religious subjectivities through mosque-centered everyday practices. The articulation of Muslimness to Turkishness at mosques in culturally specific and gendered ways is crucial for the formation of a particular modality of the Turkish–Dutch self as moral subject. The ensuing incorporation of practices and activities that are deemed ‘secular,’ i.e. ‘cultural’ or ‘recreational’ to mosque services engenders a creative tension between the sacred and profane conceptions of mosque space. Mosque administrators and their congregations concur that recreational activities and quotidian accessibility to mosques are essential to the long term survival of Turkish–Dutch alterity, for mosques are spaces where children and youth are exposed to the performances of Turkish-Islamic morality and subjected to collective social control. However, the diversification of mosque services does not always sit comfortably with the meaning and use of mosques as sacred sites proper within a secularized framework. A creative tension between mosques as serene and pure spaces of the sacred and mosques as impure and immoral spaces of the everyday arises, as a result.     

The Politics of the Evicted: Redevelopment,Subjectivity, and Difference in Mumbai's Slum Frontier

In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class‐based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market‐oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non‐governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power‐laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno‐religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession.     

The Buddhist Ineffable Self and a Possible Indian Political Subject

ABSTRACT

It is well known that the sovereign, the cakkavatin, in India is the one who turns the wheel of dhamma. What is not so well appreciated is that the Buddha’s dhammachakkapabbatana, the turning of the wheel of dhamma and the attainment of nibbana, can be read as a political act, involving the emergence of a political subject. It will be seen that the 4th Century AD Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu’s vijnanavadin notion of the Ineffable Self (anavilapya atman) helps us unravel the epistemological underpinnings of the political subject in consonance with the revolutionary act of turning the wheel of dhamma. Seen in this light, we can better appreciate B. R. Ambedkar’s attempt at treating Buddhism as the “Revolution” against the Brahminical “Counter-Revolution,” something whose implications unfold almost daily in India’s political struggles. What can be called (in academic-speak) Buddha’s “pluralist non-essentialist framework,” even a convergence of sorts between Buddha and Spinoza, does not necessarily exclude the notion of a revolutionary political subject. This opens up the possibility of reading Buddha's notion of the turning of the wheel of dhamma alongside more recent ideas of revolution as another turning and churning.     

Girls,consumption space and the contradictions ofhanging out in the city

Geographers have effectively examined girls' reactions and resistances to adult control in public space, but the ways that girls learn about and reinscribe social differences like race and class through ‘hanging-out’ practices in public, urban space have yet to be sufficiently explored and theorized. Therefore, in this paper I consider the normative productivity of girls' spatial practices, as well as girls' resistances to adultist space. I examine the case of consumption space and focus on how girls utilize, create and reproduce myriad social identifiers as they hang out in public, urban space. Consumption space and consumerism dominate the urban spaces and hanging-out practices of teenagers, and while girls complain about the ubiquity of consumption space, girls' public social-spatial activities inevitably involve consumption space. Therefore, consumption's symbols and spaces are central to the normative production of girls' identities like class and race, and of social difference more generally in urban space.     

(Im)Mobilization and hegemony: ‘hill tribe’ subjects and the ‘Thai’ state

In the mountains of northern Thailand the constraints and restrictions placed upon ‘hill tribe’ people and their bodies are often counter-posed to a legendary past where people could move freely across borders, where refuge in the mountains represented freedom from oppressive state powers, and where highlanders could come down from the mountains and integrate. This paper explores how highland subjects have been transformed as the emergence of the Thai state has imposed concrete and regulated boundaries demarcating Thailand, and a Thai people. Building on historical narratives in which the freedoms of the past are counterpoised with the closely governed present, I present a more complex and contradictory picture of the national subjects in Thailand. I discuss the citizenship movement, in which activists have been fighting for citizenship status for highlanders through a strategy that seeks a place for highland people within hegemonic discourses of the nation-state and belonging. The citizenship movement establishes a new ‘Thai hill tribe’ subject position, formed in opposition to its constitutive outside—the ‘non-Thai hill tribe’. And as highlanders find new ways to fit with the hegemony of the nation-state, both more fixed and more mobile subject positions open up as Thai-ness and its ‘others’ are redefined.     

‘Many Nice People’: the nation‐state,post‐Fordism,and the policy norm of flexible ethnic relations in Estonia

This article uses historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to ask how policymakers interpret historical, political, and economic factors to construct inter‐ethnic communities that would bring security and economic growth to an enlarged European Union (EU). Focusing on post‐Soviet Estonia's ethnic integration policy, the article argues that ‘flexibility’ applies not only to post‐Fordist, individualized subjects, but also to relations between subjects of different nationalities that policymakers want to form organically in service sector employment. The article explains how this policy construction emerged in light of Estonia's historical trajectory from 1991 to 2001 and demonstrates how it conceptually resolved the fundamental tension between the territorialized nation‐state and deterritorialized global capitalism. A visual media campaign entitled ‘Many Nice People: Integrating Estonia’ captured the essence of this construction, which obscured how the Estonian nation‐state marginalized minorities while integrating into the EU.