Vagrant,Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations.     

Homelessness Regulation and Neoliberalism’s Imperial Past: The Janus Face of Anti-Homeless Urbanism and Tokyo’s Modern Socio-Spatial Development

Using historical ethnography and a systematic review of research on homelessness in modern Tokyo (1868–2019), I illustrate how imperial formations, or historically established asymmetrical relations of power, are bound up in homelessness regulation. I argue that the delegitimisation of unsheltered existence—seen in multiple policy fields across history—is a vessel for imperial formations that necessarily propagate anti-democratic limitations on rights and protections. Moreover, I advance that this continuous invalidation of the right-full existence of persons experiencing homelessness serves as a platform for paternalistic Janus-faced interventions co-constituted from corrective, compassionate, and middling ambitions. This research seeks to amend false dichotomies of a chiefly punitive past and a compassionate complex present, and redirects attention from presumed policy intent to the actual legal and social roots of urban injustice.     

在危机中开创生机:评武周时期的逃户措施及其意义

武周后期户口大量逃亡,对社会经济带来很大的冲击.武则天从深远和实际的利益着手,突破常规,改变逃户的法律地位,采取积极的诱导和安抚,且辅佐刑令的宽猛相济、灵活合理的户口政策,使逃户得以复籍安身.武则天的逃户措施,是一场重大和影响深远的社会经济改革.它不但化解了逃户问题所可能引起的危机,还从危机中为日益困难的财政创造生机.它的成功经验为日后朝廷制定逃户政策带来了重要的启示.更值得重视的是,它也是中国古代专制王朝从用严刑峻法取缔逃户,发展到以彻底修改法令正式承认逃户合法性的一个重要过渡.