Difference

Speaking in particular of Oceanic societies, my intention is to reverse the gestalt of Le totemisme aujourd'hui to foreground the role of difference as a fundamental condition of the possibility of society – difference between as well as within societies. I take the point that difference is not just an historical circumstance but that it is indeed a positive value. Accordingly, differentiation is not so much a natural process as it is a cultural intention.     

The ethico-politics of homo-ness: Beckett's How It Is and Casement's Black Diaries

In recent years, Beckett studies has taken an ‘ethical turn’ as critics have given increased attention to the status of the Other and otherness in the writer's oeuvre. How It Is, a key text for these critics, was written as Beckett was reading the newly published Black Diaries of Roger Casement, a volume that contains homoerotic content long considered scandalous for the Irish republican icon and yet offers a remarkable vision of social relations structured around sameness or what Leo Bersani calls ‘homo-ness’. Reading Beckett's novel alongside Casement's diaries reveals the significance of How It Is for thinking an ethico-politics that depends neither on the ideological foundations of the nation-state nor on critical perspectives that emphasise the primacy of difference, but rather on a fundamental reorientation of sociality. In this regard, Beckett's anti-redemptive narrative may be considered a work of penetrating utopian writing, which nonetheless reminds us of the hazards of utopian thought.     

Bradley Holt,Thirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the relationship between more radically open conceptions of democracy and the recent "return of religion" as the return of distinct, particular religions. The radical democracy of figures such as Derrida, Badiou, and Hardt and Negri is found to be not radical enough to be open to the particular religious other. Derrida's "religion without religion" does violence to the particularity of concrete religious traditions, Badiou appropriates Paul's universalism while abandoning the particularity and difference in his conception of collective identity, and Hardt and Negri advocate a "politics of love" while severing that love from its ground— namely, God. I then show a way of rethinking both society and Christianity so that Christianity finds a place in society and society makes room for Christianity. A radical Christianity devoid of self-privilege and triumphalism provides a model for an intersubjectivity of love in which the other really comes first. Paul's radical conception of membership in the body of Christ accomplishes precisely what radical democracy fails to do: it allows for heterophony as well as polyphony, and incoherence as well as commonality. It is only when church and society allow the possibility of incoherence and heterophony that they are truly open to the other, and it is only when they are truly open to the other that they satisfy the demands of a truly radical democracy and radical Christianity.     

Reimagining Alterities: The Formation of Identities through Memory,History, and Place

Anthropologists have firmly established the need to attend to the paradoxes of mobile cultural and symbolic forms—these portable imaginaries of belonging or exclusion—during periods of transnational crisis and restructuring. In this article, I examine how formations of selfhood and otherness have come to public visibility in the context of globalization. My review of recent anthropological publications scrutinizes the range of possible methodological approaches to social identity practices, both in the past and present. Although contemporary scholars seek to refine anthropological insights on the plausible linkages between identity and alterity, the reliance on select methodological frames produces corresponding limitations in research focus and interpretative acuity.     

Revolutionary possibilities of love in a time of disaster,decolonisation, and diffraction

Representations of love appear across many disciplines and discursive fields that are and should be in conversation with geography. It is imperative that geographers engage in formidable but worthy tasks to distil diverse renderings of love into the regenerative interventions we urgently need. Those interventions require geographically minded interpretations of love to drive radical research, pedagogies, policies, and practices in ways that have direct and indirect effects across the life course and life worlds. Such labours are mediated by state and law, by intersectional relations, or by neuroscience, and involve asking how love underwrites critical infrastructures—of place (making), care and entanglements, colonialism, and human-nature relations in the Anthropocene and posthuman—that lead to the flourishing futures we seek. Rich geographical studies oriented to those tasks still face charges of flattening difference. This commentary picks up one aspect of this agenda: a blind spot in geographical research relating to the ethical imperative to love based on benevolence. Instead, I champion the revolutionary possibilities for geography to inform policies, pedagogies, and practices by using a love based on alterity aligned with social weight, reasserting accessible science as an effective driver of social and system transformative changes. Specifically, I argue for a regenerative socio-political analytic of love in a time of disaster, decolonisation, and diffraction.     

Imperial modernity,national identity and capital punishment in the Samarcand Arson Case, 1931

ABSTRACT. This article draws upon the fascinating and little known 1931 Samarcand Arson Case involving the possible execution of adolescent white female inmates at a juvenile reformatory in North Carolina. Marked by nationalist discourses, the spectacle generated by this case indicates much about how white New South advocates construed national life and sought to construct a white ‘civilised’ collective identity, defending their region from Northern charges of Southern barbarism and asserting their place within the imperial politics of American nation building. The decision not to execute any of the sixteen defendants was informed by a series of interconnected ideas about sexuality, national danger, ‘civilisation’ and ‘race,’ suggesting that the presumed ‘legal chivalry’ extended to the young defendants was not a simple matter of gender bias, but involved a nuanced set of reasons related to negotiations of national belonging through racialised alliances.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

This review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.