THE VERTIGO OF HISTORICAL ANALYSES IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD

In this anthology, Joan Scott reconfigures her understanding of feminist history and thus contributes to a long overdue theoretical discussion on how we can write feminist history in a globalizing world. She traces both the history of gender history and the history of feminist movements. Scott's main source of inspiration is the French version of psychoanalysis following Lacan. In a further development of her pioneering 1986 article, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” she points out that gender is neither a mere social construction nor a somehow biological referent (such as “sex”). Integrating the constructive criticism of her approach elaborated prominently by Judith Butler during the 1990s, Scott argues instead that gender is a historically and culturally specific attempt to resolve the dilemma of sexual difference. Sexual difference, for its part, is also far from referring simply to physically different male/female bodies. Sexual difference is, for Scott, a permanent quandary for modern subjects, a puzzle to which every society or culture finds specific answers. My reading of her book concentrates on two main questions that run like a thread through her considerations: First, how can we bridge the gap between a subject and a group? Second, how can we overcome binary oppositions and/or fixed categories and entities—a challenge that becomes even more important every day in a rapidly globalizing world. I broadly discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the pivotal role Scott ascribes to fantasy. Although the concept of fantasy is powerful and striking, particularly with reference to the concepts of “imagined communities” and “invented traditions,” coined by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, I find the Lacanian tone to be less convincing.     

Heritage studies and the privileging of theory

Heritage studies is yet to have a debate about its theorisation at the global level. Many of the core ideas that shape the field are rooted in the contexts of Europe and the USA and geographically rolled out in normative ways. This paper argues it is important we embark on pluralising how heritage is studied and theoretically framed, in ways that better address the heterogeneous nature of heritage, for both the West and the non-West. The themes of modernity, cities and international cultural policy provide evidence of why we need to better position the academic study of heritage in relation to the rapid geo-political and geo-cultural shifts now taking place.     

Towards Eurasia: remapping Europe as ‘upstart peripheral to an ongoing operation’

In order to heed the call in world literature studies to work against disciplinary Eurocentrism by refiguring both what constitutes world literature and how this is read, in this article I propose world literature as an archive of world-making practices and as an impulse for the articulation of alternative methodological approaches. This takes world literature from the postcolonial South as, following Pheng Cheah, instantiating a modality of world literature in which the need for imagining worlds with alternative centres to those determined by coloniality is particularly acute. A response to this is facilitated and illustrated by a reading of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from Russia (1930), and South African writer/activist Alex La Guma’s A Soviet Journey (1978). By drawing forward connections between the postcolonial South and the former Soviet Union, this complicates traditional colonial arrangements of the colonial ‘centre’ as cradle of civilisation and culture, as well as postcolonial scholarship’s cumulative fetishisation of ‘Europe’, by allowing a reshuffling of the co-ordinates determining ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ and a more nuanced grasp of ‘Europe’ simultaneously. These imaginative journeys destabilise ‘Europe’ as closed category and call forth Eurasia as a more appropriate categorical–cartographical framework for thinking this space and the connections and (hi)story-telling it stages and fosters.     

HISTORY OF HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A SLIGHTLY COSMOPOLITAN POINT OF VIEW

Under review here are three works of different formats and scopes, each addressing questions of theory of history and the history of historiography. First, the mature work of Ignacio Olábarri Gortázar, published by the University Press of Salamanca, where he is now an emeritus professor, collects pieces written over a period of fifteen years that deal with matters related to his field of research in social labor history and other methodological and historiographical issues. Second, Fernando Sánchez Marcos seeks to offer an introductory book on the most noteworthy theoretical and historiographical issues of the twentieth century. Third, the volume from Jaume Aurell (Spain), Peter Burke (England), Catalina Balmaceda, and Felipe Soza (both from Chile) is a general handbook of historiography addressed primarily to students. All have their strengths and weaknesses. The most striking weakness is a persistent limitation of the field of vision, which is restricted to a European/Western (Francophone, Anglophone) cultural universe.     

Hamashita Takeshi's research on regional Chinese history

ABSTRACT

Challenges to the historical rise of “Western-centrism” in non-Western countries are surfacing: the Japanese scholar Hamashita Takeshi, who supports a “regional concept of China,” is one of the strongest voices in this movement. Hamashita suggests that the theories of the “Asian economic circle” and the “tributary system” can be combined to form a theory of a “regional Asia,” thus reconstructing the perspective of research on Chinese and Asian history. The regional Asia model is a composite of the network model, maritime model, and the regional model. Based on the regional concept of China, Chinese history can be studied from various perspectives, such as China as a network, maritime China, and regional China; one can thus develop a long-term view on Chinese, Asian and global history from a spatial perspective, a peripheral perspective, and an Asian perspective.     

Preparing Geography,Earth and Environmental Science (GEES) Students for Employment in the Enterprise Culture

Maps and related graphics are important means of representing key issues in development education and related themes. This paper examines the use of world maps in materials used in teaching development in higher education and concludes that many are not 'fit for purpose'. Many of these maps create false connotations, which can lead to misleading understandings of key issues.     

Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe

Migration and border scholars have argued that the Europeanization and securitization of borders and migration have led to forms of population regulation that constitute a questionable divide between EU and non‐EU groups, as well as between different non‐EU groups. This paper argues that these processes have impacted not only centrifugally, on non‐EU populations, but also centripetally, on the “intra‐EU” divide regarding minorities such as Europe's Muslims and Roma. I explain how a de‐nationalization of the concepts and methods of migration and border studies—beyond methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism—sheds light on the under‐researched impact of the EU's external border regime on minoritized EU citizens. I introduce the notion of “evictability” to articulate this de‐nationalization and discuss the case study of Europe's Romani minority to show how contemporary forms of securitization further divide Europe bio‐politically along intra‐European lines.     

Mediterranean Struggles for Movement and the European Government of Bodies: An Interview with Étienne Balibar and Nicholas De Genova

The conversation between Étienne Balibar and Nicholas De Genova engages with the Mediterranean of migration as a multifaceted, productive, and contested space, which can represent a counterpoint to a deep‐rooted Eurocentric imaginary. Looking at the Mediterranean as a space produced by the mobility of the bodies crossing it and by the combination of different struggles, Balibar and De Genova comment on some of the political movements that have taken center stage in the Mediterranean region in the past few years and suggest that the most important challenge today is to mobilize a “Mediterranean point of view” whereby the political borders of Europe and its self‐centered referentiality can be challenged.     

THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL: ON THE SHARED METHODOLOGICAL LIMITS OF MODERNIZATION THEORY AND ITS CRITICS

This article argues that critical scholarship in historical studies has not overcome the methodological limits of modernization theory for failing to question the ontological principles that construct its object of analysis. I call these principles the “ontology of capital” and explicate them through Bourdieu's conceptualization of the field and capital. I argue that this ontology is established according to a distribution model in which social entities come into the analysis with the amount and value of the capital they hold. This model grasps all social relations in the form of competition, and actors and actions enter into the analysis only when they are involved in such relations. I then analyze Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey, which is written explicitly from a modernization perspective, to show how the principles of the “ontology of capital” operate in this text. The analysis focuses on how sociohistorical facts are constructed through selection and articulation of empirical evidence that become meaningful only on the basis of this ontology. The aim of this analysis is to show the ontology of capital that constructs the object of analysis in Lewis's text rather than the Eurocentric, teleological, and elitist character of his analysis of history that critics in recent decades have addressed as problems of the modernization paradigm. Based on this, I argue that for a productive critical approach, relational analysis, which characterizes critical scholarship in contrast to essentialism, also has to consider the ontological principles in a historical work to overcome methodological limits. The failure to interrogate this ontology leads to an analytical separation in critical scholarship between the analysis of historical reality and of alternatives to this reality. This separation not only produces a dehistoricized analysis of the present from a critical perspective, but also turns the alternatives into utopian models.     

The LGBT specter in Russia: refusing queerness,claiming ‘Whiteness’

Abstract

 

In Europe ‘homoemancipation’ has played a significant role in legitimating anti-multiculturalism and broader Islamophobia. Similarly, political homophobia in Russia plays a significant role in (re)defining the contested meaning of the nation after the demise of the Soviet empire. While acknowledging the repressive and violent impact of contemporary anti-LGBT legislation and public discourse on LGBT people, this essay analyzes how the discursive refusal to affirm non-normative sexuality is constitutive of an ethno-national project in post-Soviet Russia. This analysis goes beyond the Cold War binary of east/west that oversimplifies Russian political homophobia as in opposition to Europe. By doing so, it is argued that Russia is not just an illiberal state, but entangled in Eurocentric projects that define national (racialized) boundaries through sexual politics. Consequently, challenging political homophobia in Russia requires attending to intersectional strategies and approaches to sexual politics. An intersectional approach to solidarity will situate sexual rights within national and global ethno-national, racialized, and colonial projects.