Stalin’s humanitarian government: class,child homelessness and state security in a historical perspective (1930s–40s)

Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.     

The image of ‘all good Italians’. The Eichmann trial seen from Italy

ABSTRACT

The Eichmann trial held in Jerusalem in 1961 marked a turning point in the international public’s collective awareness of the extermination of Jews in Europe. In Italy, the trial contributed to the mainstream narrative of the events that concerned the deportations of the Jews. The Italian case was mentioned in the indictment of the attorney general, Hausner, and in the deposition of the only witness present at the trial, Hulda Campagnano. In this article, our analysis of the trial’s reception in Italian newspapers and media shows that the Jerusalem reports, especially through misrepresenting the words of Campagnano, created the image of Italians as ‘good people’, who would help Italian and foreign Jews, against the wishes of the Nazis. At the same time, the responsibility of Italian Fascism for the anti-Jewish laws in 1938 and the role of Italians in the arrests and deportations of Jews since 1943 have been neglected.     

The refugee camp as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities

Analyses of refugee camps have criticised Agamben's conceptualisation of exception, understood as the juridical production of ‘bare life’ by the sovereign. They have emphasised the multiplicity of actors and exclusionary dynamics involved in the production of exception, as well as the politicisation of space. This scholarship has however stayed framed around an ‘exclusionary paradigm’. This article proposes a complementary way to move beyond Agamben's analysis of the camp by reconsidering the idea of a ‘zone of indistinction’ between exclusion and inclusion. It refers to Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, where many dwellers have a dual status of ‘refugee-citizen’. It analyses how the subject and citizenship are ambiguously constructed as simultaneously excluded and included – and not solely included through an exclusion. To explore these complex spatial dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, the analysis addresses the exercise of three forms of power – sovereignty, discipline and government – by focusing on the materiality of the camp and the practices of authorities managing space. These powers are ambiguously contributing to the inclusion of the camp and its dwellers in the territory of the Jordanian state, as well as in the neoliberal city of Amman, while maintaining the character of the camp as an excluded humanitarian and temporary space. Through this process, camp dwellers are recast not only as assisted subjects and beneficiaries, but also as autonomous and productive subjects, as well as entrepreneurs and consumers. This article therefore argues that the camp needs to be re-considered as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities aimed at creating a differentiation in the city.     

The historical origins of the vegetative state: Received wisdom and the utility of the text

The persistent vegetative state (PVS) is one of the most iconic and misunderstood phrases in clinical neuroscience. Coined as a diagnostic category by Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and American neurologist Fred Plum in 1972, the phrase “vegetative” first appeared in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul (circa mid-fourth century BCE). Aristotle influenced neuroscientists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Xavier Bichat and Walter Timme, and informed their conceptions of the vegetative nervous system. Plum credits Bichat and Timme in his use of the phrase, thus putting the ancient and modern in dialogue. In addition to exploring Aristotle’s definition of the “vegetative” in the original Greek, we put Aristotle in conversation with his contemporaries—Plato and the Hippocratics—to better apprehend theories of mind and consciousness in antiquity. Utilizing the discipline of reception studies in classics scholarship, we demonstrate the importance of etymology and historical origin when considering modern medical nosology.     

中国工业旅游发展评析:从西方的视角看中国

本从西方的视角，对世纪之交以来中国工业旅游发展的状况进行谨慎评析。探讨中国工业旅游发展独特的政经背景，以及从政务接待到商务接待的历史过程及其对工业旅游的影响。分析中国工业旅游之开发概念、价值观、供需和组织模式等多方面与西方传统产业衰落区兴起的工业旅游之不同点。初步探讨中国目前缺乏工业遗产意识的原因，以及中国工业遗产旅游开发的未来潜力。提出：中西不同的工业旅游开发模式对双方均有启迪，中西双方的学术交流也能推动中国对其历史尚短的现代工业化遗产之旅游价值的认识和实践。     

和歌文本解构及中译本的意象重构——以《源氏物语》桐壶卷和歌第二首为中心

《源氏物语》古本由散文体叙事部分与韵文体（和歌）抒情部分构成,散韵两部分密接不离,形成了独特的文体美,是古日本和歌文学向物语文学过渡的一种特殊体例。和歌作为整体文本构架间的肌质,将整部小说各部分有机的衔接、融合。由于和歌用典繁复、隐喻深奥,在其千余年的历史受容过程中歧义繁多。本文以桐壶卷和歌第二首为研究对象,从该首和歌的语义受容、文本解构,及不同中文译本生成的对比研究着手,旨在更好地阐释和歌在文本中的话语机能。     

浅析加拿大新移民法对华人的影响

加拿大的新移民法在 2 0 0 2年 6月 2 8日起开始生效 ,这一新法是进入 2 1世纪加国第一次对移民问题的立法。新法做了很大的修改 ,它将对约一百万名华裔社群 ,以及每年成千上万梦想移民加国的华人产生深远的影响     

Memory,history and the classical tradition

‘Memory’ is often confused and mistaken for myth; this is in turn connected with the widespread use of mistaking collective mythology and common myth for the idea of a ‘collective memory’. This essay discusses memory and history terminology in the context of the generic concept ‘classical tradition’. The case study explored here – the nineteenth-century Walhalla ‘temple’ near Regensburg in Southern Germany – is an attempt to discuss the classical tradition, focusing on archaeology and architecture rather than philology), within the parameters of the memory and history debate in contemporary historiography. The essay aims to develop the position of the iconic and symbolic importance of antiquity and the classical tradition in the memory and history debate as well as in historical writing. The concluding remarks emphasise the necessity of historicising tradition and its genealogies, conceptualised here as a tradition of legacies.     

The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands

From offshore border enforcement to detention centers on remote islands, struggles over human smuggling, detention, asylum, and associated policies play out along the geographical margins of the nation-state. In this paper, I argue that islands are part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention, a tactic of migration control. Island enforcement practices deter, detain, and deflect migrants from the shores of sovereign territory. Islands thus function as key sites of territorial struggle where nation-states use distance, invisibility, and sub-national jurisdictional status (Baldacchino & Milne, 2006) to operationalize Ong’s (2006) ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’. In sites that introduce ambiguity into migrants’ legal status, state and non-state actors negotiate and illuminate geopolitical arrangements that structure mobility. This research traces patterns among distant and distinct locations through examination of sovereign and biopolitical powers that haunt asylum-seekers detained on islands. Offshore detention, in turn, fuels spatial strategies employed in onshore detention practices internal to sovereign territory.