Pronominalism

An essay seeking to identify under a single rubric a thought line linking a succession of scholarly clusters who over succeeding generations have investigated the primordial role of the pronouns in social interaction, and in the creation and manipulation of cultural capital and hence in the acquisition and maintenance of personal identity or personhood.     

‘The Darroch affair’: Assemblage lines,components, and transformations

This article examines the underresearched role of lines and components in recomposing geopolitical assemblages. It does so by focusing on a single body at the middle of an event to show how its lines of assembling conditioned wider transformations. The event in question – the leaking of confidential diplomatic materials in July 2019 as part of the so-called “Darroch Affair” – opened a massive rift between governing and bureaucratic arms of the UK state. Set in the context of ongoing struggles to recode the transatlantic diplomatic assemblage (TADA) by US and UK governments, Sir Kim Darroch, British Ambassador to the US, was at front and centre of the resulting leaks imbroglio. Using assemblage thinking, I offer an alternative conceptualisation of Darroch's body as distributed across the TADA via structurally complex lines of assembling. I argue the historical trajectories of these lines accelerated assemblage recompositions as the excessiveness of events led to Darroch's body occupying more and more possibility spaces across the TADA. The article considers how the linear complexity of Darroch's body arose, and the consequences of the resulting recompositions of the TADA for its nested diplomatic worlds.     

Joan Barfoot's Exit Lines and the Pastoral of Old Age

This article traces the way in which Canadian author Joan Barfoot's novel Exit Lines draws upon the pastoral tradition in its representation of old age. Pastoral literature has traditionally encoded ideologies of age, and it is the inclusion of pastoral tropes that structures Barfoot's participation in the discussion of population aging currently taking place across disciplines and in the popular media. Pastoral writing is characterized by an acceptance of vulnerability and loss, and this provides Barfoot with an effective counterpoint to a contemporary culture of “positive” aging founded on an ethic of bodily control that alternately stigmatizes and masks the existence of decline and dependency in late life. The novel questions the way in which the rhetoric of crisis that characterizes discussions of population aging threatens to generate resentment against the dependent elderly, whom the novel depicts as vulnerable to exploitation by those who stand to profit from this “crisis.”     

族裔创业、市场竞争与双向影响——纽约唐人街巴士业发展历程探析

论文以纽约唐人街巴士业的发展历程为例,从族裔创业、市场竞争的角度,探讨了由来自中国大陆的新移民所创立的唐人街巴士业,与美国灰狗巴士业的竞争与相互影响。研究显示,唐人街巴士经历了行业发展与调整,保持较好的发展势头,而灰狗巴士依旧保持着行业的领先优势,占据较大的市场份额。外来移民的母国文化及其生活经验有助于他们在异域创业,参与移入国的市场竞争可以促进他们对移居地社会的适应,在一定程度上推动移居地社会的改变。同时。美国本土巴士企业及整个行业,也因为唐人街巴士的竞争而发生转变。跨国移民与移居地社会,通过商业竞争、双向影响而实现优势互补,推动了移民与移居地社会的共同发展。