The Persian Presence in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry: A Taxonomy

This study employs keyword searches of literary databases such as Literature Online (LION) in an attempt to map the image of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry as it was molded by a proliferation of thoughts and ideas in a variety of contexts. Completeness is not possible, of course, but the article aims to identify and explore some of the major categories within which the image of Persia was formed and disseminated in the nineteenth-century. The scope of the study is not confined to a corpus of poetic works that were written specifically on or about “Persia,” but takes account of a broader range of poems, and attends to the structure, texture and variations of the presence of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry.     

近代日本文学家的“东力学”——以芥川龙之介为中心

美国著名文学批评家爱德华·W·萨义德在《东方学》一书中提出了在西方实际上一直存在着与“先进的西方”相对的“落后的东方”,也就是所谓的“东方学”式的“二元对立”思维方式。它在西方国家以东方国家为对象大力推进殖民政策的过程中,已成为一种霸权话语。日本是一个东方国家,但是它在比西方国家落后几十年的状态下学习西方,并发展到以中国大陆为主要对象推进殖民政策。从日本近代文学家当时关于中国的言论当中也可以看出有类似于萨义德提出的“东方学”的思维方式。因篇幅的关系,本文试图通过借鉴萨义德在《东方学》里所提出的观点,重点围绕芥川龙之介这位作家,深入探讨他对中国的一些言论。     

Martin Amis,neo-Orientalism,and hubris

This article puts forward a reading of Martin Amis’s 2008 book The Second Plane with an emphasis on its cultural politics. It reconsiders Amis’s book from a distance of almost a decade in light of recent global developments, including the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, the resurgence of acute Islamophobia in Europe and the US, and Tony Blair’s public acknowledgement of the shortcomings of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With these factors in mind, the essay argues that it is possible to detect in Amis’s book early warning signs of how the West’s relationship with both Islamism and Islam would develop in the period following its publication. Drawing on William Connolly’s work on tragedy and Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, the essay argues that The Second Plane ought to be read as advancing a hubristic ‘neo-Orientalist’ cultural and political agenda which today threatens to lock much of the world into an ongoing cycle of recrimination and revenge. Against this, a case is made for an appreciation of the complex circumstances which give rise to suicide terrorism and for a sense of history largely absent from Amis’s writing on the subject.     

Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is ‘irrational’ marks particular cultures as ‘Other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to ostensibly ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.     

Crisis,challenge and choice: recent theoretical trends of anti-modernism and Western studies in Chinese history

During the last three decades, so-called “postism” (a Chinese non-professional, invented referent to postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism) has powerfully criticized and challenged the hegemonic ideology of the long-standing Euro–American centralism and the authoritative discourse of modernism in Western intellectual and academic circles, albeit it with various different resonances in Chinese and other non-Western societies. By tracing the trajectory of Western conceptual ideas from classical “rational” interpretations of history, this article tries to construct the inner connections and evolution between these conceptions and ways of thinking, and to summarize their impacts on and reactions from the field of Chinese historical studies. This article suggests that these new trends have definitely cast light on macro ideological and perspective concerns but have been less fruitful in concrete historical studies.     

George eliot as a type of European intellectual∗

The article examines the developments that made the legend of an Asian migration into Europe part of mainstream historiography during the eighteenth century. It was believed that the Norse god Odin was in fact a historical person, who had migrated from Asia to with the north of Europe with his tribe. The significance of this legend to how medieval poetry was received and debated in England has received little attention. The study falls into three sections. The first will trace the significance of the Odin migration legend in discovering Germanic cultural origins. The second section examines the impact of the legend on philological studies, primarily in establishing a new category: the Gothic (i.e. Teutonic/Germanic) poetic tradition. The final section will focus on the debate between two of the most important eighteenth-century pioneers of vernacular poetic tradition: Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton. Their discussion over whether the Asian foundation of Germanic (and thereby English) tradition had paved the way for later Arabian influences is instructive, as it shows how Eastern “others” were negotiated in the discovery of cultural and national roots.     

In search of the physical: George Adam Smith's journeys to palestine and their importance

By any standard, George Adam Smith's was a remarkable career. Having established a reputation for himself as the first minister of a new congregation of the Free Church of Scotland in the west of Aberdeen, where he consolidated his liberal evangelical pulpit between 1882 and 1892, Smith went on to become a foremost Old Testament scholar in the Free Church College in Glasgow (1892-1910) and Principal of Aberdeen University (1910-1935). More than one student of the period has linked his name with that of A.B. Davidson and W.R. Smith, succeeding them as one of Scotland's leading Old Testament scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.     

Gorgobad: reflections on a German-Australian family biography

This article continues the focus on German-Australian militarised modernities through the Second World War to the present day. It draws on the author’s own family history, beginning with the memories evoked by her grandparents’ house in northern Sydney, built between 1950 and 1953. Named ‘Gorgobad’, Persian for ‘place of the wolves’, it resonates with a family history that involves German colonial investments in post-First World War Iran, the global geopolitical upheavals of the Second World War, which drew her family into separate histories of refuge, British imprisonment and deportation and, finally, building a new home in Australia. The essay asks pertinent questions about the entanglement of hegemonic racialised orders in Europe with the very racialised orders of the grounds on which Gorgobad was built.     

Performing ‘Oriental’ masculinities: embodied identities among Vietnamese men in London

The young British-born Vietnamese are a largely unrecognised group in society and are generally not considered part of multiethnic Britain. A key characteristic of their racial positioning has been the very specific forms of hegemonic gendered labelling shaped by discourses of Orientalism. These Orientalist discourses subject Vietnamese men to pernicious stereotyping linked to ‘passive’ and effeminising forms of ‘subordinate’ masculinity. The ethnic and gendered dimensions of male Vietnamese youth experience are further compounded by the intersecting processes of social class and urban geographies which provide a distinct range of identity outcomes; these are particularly acute for working-class men living in highly urbanised areas. This article explores how young Vietnamese men subvert Oriental labels and stereotypes by using a range of unexpected, creative and ‘spectacular’ manipulations of hair, dress, style and comportment. I argue that Vietnamese men negotiate and perform ethnic masculinities through conscious and strategic forms of agency which entail everyday mundane forms of ‘risk’. The article draws upon primary data from in-depth, narrative interviews and participant observation.     

Bridging East and West: Muslim-identified activists and organisations in the UK anti-war movements

Divisive Orientalist discourses and practices, mobilised in the 'war on terror', have been resisted through collaborative political projects designed to contest and close gaps between East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim. Through interviews with Muslim-identified and other British anti-war activists, this paper traces the making of a 'new bridge between the East and the West'. It then goes on to examine the limitations of this political model and describe the search for political relationships that would mobilise Muslim identities in more subtle ways and speak past rather than against contemporary Orientalism.