‘Thinking of the land in that way’: indigenous sovereignty and the spatial politics of attentiveness at Skwelkwek’welt

Grassroots Secwepemc attempted to stop the expansion of Sun Peaks resort on a site for Indigenous knowledge. I attend to the practice of Indigenous knowledge related to the confrontation and assert that Indigenous sovereignty and identity were outcomes. To make this argument, I investigate the space made for emotion, affect and intuition in the performance of Indigenous knowledge. From a relational materialist position, these more-than-representational forces play an important role in epistemology, ontology, ethics, and subjectivity. Identity therefore materialized in three ways related to feeling(s). As a result of their attunement to these forces, the Secwepemc understood that (non)humans underpin their material being and placed the collective on the political horizon. Furthermore, the practice of Indigenous knowledge encouraged an identity characterized by “attentiveness” to feeling(s) and to the activity of feeling itself. From the perspective of the struggles of subjugated knowledge, I also contextualize the attentiveness at the core of Indigenous knowledge practices as part of a more-than-representational and decolonizing spatial politics.     

“实证”观念与当代中国史学

“实证”是当代中国史学进程中一个含义复杂的主题词,它既显示了当代中国史学一种富有成果的发展方向,又折射出其面临的种种问题与困境。20世纪80年代,对实证观念的批判确立了历史研究的“主体性”,开启了历史学研究范式的多元化;90年代,关于历史学“客观性”与“人文性”的争论,触及学科发展的内在动力问题。可能为当代中国历史学的新发展进一步提供观念前提。     

世界遗产:现代人类中心主义的实证

面对全球性的生态危机,人类中心主义遭到种种质疑,现代人类中心主义应运而生。现代人类中心主义的产生与可持续发展战略的提出不仅具有时间上的相关性,而且具有相同的问题背景,二者的价值取向有着惊人的一致。只有自觉地坚持现代人类中心主义,人类才有可能有效地实施可持续发展战略,实现真正意义上的可持续发展。现代人类中心主义在实践上的全面落实是一个相当长的历史过程,在当前历史条件下,世界遗产为现代人类中心主义提供了实证,并可望成为实现现代人类中心主义的典范。     

From Domus to Polis: Hybrid Identities in Southey’s Letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822)

ABSTRACT

Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White with his Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters—the “familiar stranger”—at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as home-interpreter calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay “Domus and the Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.     

语言景观研究进展：地方主体的空间实践

本文以地方主体性理论为切入点梳理语言景观相关文献，以构建主体为分析框架，从“国家”、“私人机构”和“多元主体互动”三方面综述语言景观的研究。不同主体通过空间实践达到规训、表达、压迫和抵抗等目的，而语言景观则是这些实践的中介和结果。自上而下的语言政策表现为国家作为主体对地方的规训；反之，由个体作为构建主体的语言景观是主体表达自我和抵抗他者的实践。流动性较强的地方，多元主体通过语言景观互动构建地方性，其语言景观是资本、文化和权力多重力量作用下的实践过程和结果。过去语言学视角的研究只关注单主体的空间实践，未来采取跨学科研究可进一步探寻多主体互动过程与结果，更全面地发掘语言景观在地方构建中的作用以及构建的地方意义。     

Crucibles of power: Forging copper and forging subjects at the Moche Ceremonial Center of Huaca Colorada,Peru

An analysis of copper production, architectural construction, and feasting rites as interrelated ritual activities at the Late Moche site of Huaca Colorada suggests that power asymmetries were embedded in a distinctive relational ontology and sacrificial worldview. Power was exercised not by alienating communities from their means of production or excluding the majority lower class from the diacritical symbols of power. Rather, the manufacture of copper items enabled subjects to directly contribute to Moche rites of regeneration and social reproduction; the skilled metamorphosis of copper into finished objects paralleled and symbolically reinforced the ritual re-formation of bodies and political subjectivities at Huaca Colorada. Ultimately, an examination of copper production at Huaca Colorada as a ritual of bodily transformation sheds light on the culturally specific structures of power characterizing the greater Jequetepeque region during the Late Moche Period.     

The decolonial subject and the problem of non-Western authenticity

It is argued in this paper that some decolonising strategies in the study of global politics are precluded by the problem of non-Western authenticity. I question the idea of an identifiable non-Western geo-cultural context that could significantly reconstitute what already is a post-Western subject. I claim that in most cases the asymmetrical encounter between the colonised and the coloniser has fundamentally and extensively redefined human subjectivity in a way that largely negates decolonial emancipatory projects. This is the result of the all-encompassing penetration of Western coloniality (in its political, economic and cultural representations) into the spaces of pre-colonial or uncolonised forms of subjectivity. I draw from Frantz Fanon’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories to argue that attempts to recover non-Western forms of self-identification are useful albeit illusory psychological mechanisms to stabilise hybrid postcolonial subjectivities rather than an actual restoration of non-colonial and purified forms of existing in the world. I suggest that an effective anticolonial politics of resistance will necessarily entail the understanding of post-Western subjectivity in terms of psychological ‘hybridity’ rather than decolonial ‘authenticity’.     

The Paradox of Subjective Truth

Abstract

This paper focuses in part on Jan Assmann's interpretation and refutation of Carl Schmitt's very well-known secularization theory that all significant modern concepts of the state are secularized theological notions. It will be demonstrated that Assmann attempts to counter Schmitt's conception of modern secularization by suggesting that Mosaic monotheism inaugurated a revolution by theologizing the political. By briefly exploring Assmann's interpretation of Egyptian religion, it will be argued that a conception of the political as distinct from the theological characterized the political form of ancient Egypt. This leads to a discussion of Assmann's argument that Schmitt's conception of the friend/enemy distinction should be understood as an aberration of the political form of ancient Egypt and therefore viewed as a category of political illegitimacy. In order to illustrate this, attention will first be drawn to Assmann's distinction between primary and secondary religion. This is followed by a discussion of Assmann's notion of the structural transform of the political by theology, which then moves specifically into his argument for the intellectual origins of Schmitt's concept of the political. It will be attempted throughout this paper to bring conceptual clarification to Assmann's notion of theologization by relating it to the question of political theology currently taking place in France and the English-speaking world. Towards the end I offer a number of criticisms of Assmann's notion of theologization.     

Remediating the Editor

Abstract

Writing and editing interfaces have profound implications for the subjectivity of human writers and editors, and hence the conditions of digital scholarly knowledge production. The extent to which the cultural inflections of such interfaces reflect the social, political, and technical contexts of their production emerges from a consideration of Author/Editor, the first software program dedicated to editing Standard Generalized Markup Language, and its provenance in Canadian literature, publishing, and cultural nationalism. The design of editing environments to negotiate tensions endemic to socialized and networked scholarship is increasingly crucial as reading and consumption merge with writing and production.     

Una mujer desnuda,de Lola Beccaria: Espacios y escrituras del cuerpo

This article discusses the applicability of postfeminist discourse to contemporary Spanish cultural production. Incited by the apparent confrontation with traditional feminist thinking, postfeminist theories are thought to be an obstacle to the rights of women in contemporary societies. Bearing in mind such complications of the term, our essay questions the recent criticism that postfeminism has received in the last few years and tries to elucidate how its implications affect the progressive development of the achievements of previous or simultaneous feminisms. Such discussion is presented in this essay through the study of the narrative texts of Lola Beccaria and La Fura dels Baus, who respectively present in her novel (Una mujer desnuda, 2004) and their film (Fausto 5.0, 2001) features of the feminine subjectivity in collision with the masculine gazes of the discourses that partake in the construction of the feminine characters.