Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

This article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.     

Complicating hetero-normative spaces at school formals in New Zealand

The school formal in New Zealand constitutes a rich site of analysis for researchers interested in gender and sexuality performances. As a social space, the formal both shapes bodies and is shaped by them. In this article, we explore the school formals of three different types of schools: a single sex girls’, a single sex boys’ and a co-ed. high school, all from an urban centre. Using the theoretical tools provided by poststructuralism and queer theory, we conducted a discourse analysis of observations conducted by the first author at two school formals, interviews with staff and students and interviews with peer researchers. We demonstrate how same-sex practices do not necessarily map onto queer bodies, masculinity onto ‘male’ bodies or femininity onto ‘female’ bodies. Such fluidity challenges the rigid heterosexual/homosexual and masculine/feminine binaries so that schools are more inclusive of gender and sexual diversity.     

Ethnic/National Identity Incrimination in and through Social Constructionism

Social constructionism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular, are well-known for their anti-essentialist understanding of identity. Hence these discourses have theoretically been utilized for understanding social identity construction and for deconstructing identities. However, I claim that social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory may have the as yet non-theorized operation of detecting and combating wholesale indictments of identities. This operation helps us diagnose how ethnic identity and affect become incriminated as supposedly inextricably intertwined with racism, chauvinism and related pathologies. Yet interestingly, instead of unveiling and critiquing the new hegemony of blanket indictment of ethnic identity/affect, social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory have been used to incriminate identity as such. The present article interprets Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory against the grain to chastise the tendency to declare ethnic identity/affect as the new enemy. It shows how such new, hegemonic incrimination aspires to fill the empty signifier of peaceful coexistence with otherness, yet runs the risk of effacing otherness. The article concludes with an example of a reconstructive alternative.     

The evolution of Chinese film policy: how to adapt an instrument for hegemonic rule to commercialisation

Since the 1990s, the Chinese political leadership has gradually embraced the commercialisation of the film sector and has turned the liberalisation of entertainment content production into a strategy for generating legitimacy. This article traces the evolution of Chinese film policy from its Communist origins to the present day, and reveals that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at the same time, has never desisted from using film production to establish hegemony in a Gramscian sense, and that these efforts have even been intensified over the last decade. The second part of the article scrutinises how the CCP’s mechanisms of control and ideological guidance have been adapted to commercialisation and, based on personal interviews with Beijing film producers in 2006 and 2007, investigates the extent to which the intensified efforts of adaptation since 2003 have been able to persuade the private sector of film production to participate in maintaining CCP hegemony.     

D/developments after the Meltdown

Abstract: Part of what makes the current conjuncture so extraordinary is the coincidence of the massive economic meltdown with the implosion of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, and the reappearance of US liberal internationalism in the guise of “smart power” defined in terms of Diplomacy, Development, and Defence. This essay engages these challenges through a framework that distinguishes between “Development” as a post‐war international project that emerged in the context of decolonization and the Cold War, and capitalist development as a dynamic and highly uneven process of creation and destruction. Closely attentive to what Gramsci calls “the relations of force at various levels”, my task in this essay is to suggest how the instabilities and constant redefinitions of official discourses and practices of Development since the 1940s shed light on the conditions in which we now find ourselves.     

The disciplinary effects of communicative planning in Soufriere, St Lucia: governmentality, hegemony and space-time-politics

Communicative planning initiatives are being increasingly implemented across both the North and South of the globe. Influenced by Habermas' theory of communicative rationality, this form of planning concentrates upon consensus building between different signified interest groups. The paper explores how communicative planning in the eastern Caribbean country of St Lucia disciplines people's conduct from the perspectives of Foucault's concept of governmentality and Laclau and Mouffe's theorization of hegemony. Linking the latter to an analysis of Massey's non-bounded conceptualization of the local, it is argued that, as geographers, we may do better to concentrate less upon the deterministic effects of common styles of government and more upon the moments which bring their themes temporarily and spatially into being. In doing so, some initial steps are made toward proposing the concept of space-time-politics, drawing upon Wittgenstein's work on 'aspect-seeing'. In concluding, I argue that we should not see terms such as 'consensus', 'empowerment' and 'the local' as pre-existing moral justifications for political action, but instead as the product of relations of space-time-politics.     

女性工作场所的身份认同与阶层生产——以某高校食堂为例

本文在劳动过程理论和女性地理学研究的理论成果上,对学校食堂进行研究,分析两种类型女工在工作场所的分工等级与认同机制。首先,劳动过程理论的意义在于解析了资本主义在发展过程中,如何制造服从的员工和稳固的分工等级关系;但是本文研究表明,当部分女工没有被完全纳入生产的中心环节时,她们进入工作场所之前的性别身份就起到了重要的预设作用。籍此,本文试图推动社会-空间作用双层机制研究,尝试推动微观空间尺度内自我身份在劳动过程中认定与生产的理论建构。     

Performing Development in Street Markets: Hegemony,Governmentality, and the Qat Industry of Sana’a,Yemen

Abstract: A legal drug commonly consumed in Yemen, qat is often a flashpoint over development and business practice. Qat markets are sites for exploring the interaction between cultural economic practices surrounding qat production, urban politics, and broader questions of development in Yemen. Given the weakness of the Yemeni state relative to other institutions, this context is particularly helpful in theorizing localized forms of governance. Using interviews with various members of the qat industry in Sana’a, Yemen's largest city, this paper discusses the spatial and discursive strategies of qat vendors as they seek to produce and regulate their economic spaces. Central to this discussion is an exploration of Laclau's framework of hegemony and Foucault's ideas of governmentality, in the context of struggles for control over economic space playing out on the streets of Sana’a.     

Science as propaganda: Swedish scientists and the co-production of American hegemony in Sweden during the cold war, 1953–68

This article takes a close look at how the United States used the funding of scientific research in Sweden as a hegemonic and propaganda tool in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that non-aligned Sweden functioned just as much as a node in the international science network set up by the Americans after the Second World War as did the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries. These funds were awarded mainly to an elite network of prominent Swedish scientists. The article sheds interesting light on the controversies of such funding in Sweden during the cold war and adds important knowledge about Swedish–American relations during the cold war. The article argues that this Swedish scientific elite co-produced US hegemony in Sweden by actively seeking out American military funding and by making use of it. It also argues that US funding was intended to portray the United States as an altruistic patron of science in the world and thus serve American propagandistic purposes as well.     

NEO‐LIBERALISM,CULTURE AND POLICY

This article looks at the hegemonic process of neo‐liberal globalisation and its implications for culture in general and cultural policy in particular from a critical perspective. A consideration of its ideological features is a necessary supplement to the economic analysis of neo‐liberal globalisation. Ideology mediates economics and culture. As it is used here, the concept of “ideology” refers to how dominant power relations and inequalities are legitimised by distorted representations of reality at various levels. While these include abstract theory and professional expertise, it is argued that everyday language and “common sense” exemplify the operations of ideology most profoundly in securing consent to prevailing and otherwise questionable arrangements. Culture is now saturated with a market‐oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining. The general argument is illustrated with several examples drawn from across the range of lived experience and institutionalised structures, especially in the arts and broadcasting. The logic of the annual European Capital of Culture competition is also discussed with reference to the neo‐liberal framework for urban regeneration. Specifically, the experience of Glasgow 1990 and the plans for Liverpool 2008 are addressed in this regard.