National Global Imaginaries

"This paper examines the construction of transnational social spaces among Latin American migrants living in the UK in relation to their multiple connections with homelands and other European countries, especially Spain. Drawing on Bourdieu's forms of capital approach, it explores how transnational practices underpin the functioning of these spaces in relation to how civic, economic, institutional cultural and social capital are mobilized, converted and depleted. It highlights the need to move beyond conceptualizations of negotiating capitals across simple home-destination connections and instead acknowledge that transnational social spaces comprise complex linkages among migrants across more than one border with evidence of important linear moves via intermediate countries on their way to their destination."

"This essay examines how a recent fictionalisation of post-disaster life in Bhopal, Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People (2007), opens up perspectives on eco-crime, disaster, and systemic injustice on the level of genre. It begins by showing how the novel evokes private eye, noir, and spy genres in ways that present similarly hybrid forms of detective agency and legal subjectivity as a means of responding to the disaster's criminal dimensions. It then shows how this hybridity relates to the way Sinha plays off crime fiction's genealogical relationship with revenge tragedy both to disrupt the disaster's common real-world designation as 'tragedy' and to implicate readers in modes of active witnessing that probe legal-democratic failure. The essay concludes by discussing how these formal techniques shed light on the potential for interdisciplinary exchange between postcolonial ecocriticism and green criminology in relation to transnational crimes such as Bhopal."

"This article examines the hybrid cultural geographies of indigenous video with Donna Haraway's visual strategy of diffraction. Drawing on ethnographic inquiry, one particular video is explored from three different perspectives. First, a festival audience celebrates how the video represents place-based belonging, the joys of collective labor, and indigeneity. Second, a geographical analysis articulates the transnational circuits of advocacy and collaborative practices of knowledge production that shaped this video and its subsequent travels. Third, an extended conversation with the video maker about his target audience reveals a political intervention not visible from the first two angles of analysis. When diffracted, this thrice-told story about one video provides lessons about the potential for indigenous video to decolonize scholarly authority."

"his article examines The Boat as a coherent collection of stories that self-consciously takes up, in "Love and Honor," some central debates in Asian American literary studies: questions of cultural authenticity, authorial ownership, responsible representation of trauma, the selling out of the community by subsequent generations, and what constitutes Asian American literature and/or "ethnic literature." It argues that Le complicates the concept of ethnic literature through the middle stories of the collection by imbricating the ethnic with the cosmopolitan, two concepts that are usually viewed in opposition, to arrive at the idea of "refugee cosmopolitanism" in the final story, "The Boat.""

"In a reconsideration of the role of the postcolonial in the twenty-first century, the article focuses on contemporary issues that have involved what can be characterized as the politics of invisibility and of unreadability: indigenous struggles and their relation to settler colonialism, illegal migrants, and political Islam. It is argued that while none of these fall within the template of the classic paradigm of anticolonial struggles, they all involve postcolonial remains from the colonial past as well as prompting political insights that show the extent to which postcolonial perspectives continue to offer the basis of transformative critique."

"This article begins by describing how the figure of the human has been thought in anticolonial and postcolonial writing-as that of the rights-bearing citizen and as the "subject under erasure" of deconstructive thinking, respectively. The essay then goes on to show how the science of climate change foregrounds the idea of human beings' collective geological agency in determining the climate of the planet, a move that makes the other two figures not redundant but inadequate to the task of imagining the human in the age of the Anthropocene. The article ends by arguing the necessity of our having to think of the human on multiple and incommensurable scales simultaneously, keeping all the three figures of the human in disjunctive association with one another."

One of the most intriguing questions in both stylistic and rhetorical analyses relates to determining textual effect on readers, aesthetic or otherwise. Whether the power of the text is directly associated with the role of the text producer and his or her intentions, the linguistic, paralinguistic, extralinguistic and situational context of the text, the background and socio-cognitive expectations of the reader, or a combination of some or all of these factors (or other factors) is a question that is still the subject of stylistic and rhetorical analysis today. This article is a further step in this direction. It attempts to investigate one dimension of textual effect, namely uniformity in reader reaction to an argumentative poem entitled Dinner with the Cannibal, by focusing on the roles that genre and metaphor play in ideologically positioning readers. It argues, on the one hand, that literature is the dominant genre in this hybrid literary-argumentative poem, channelling the readers' initial interpretations almost exclusively in the interest of more traditional literary interpretative approaches. On the other hand, and more importantly, it focuses on the role that metaphor, as a cognitive link between text producer and reader, plays in the construction of an extremely controlled, uniform interpretation of the argumentative dimension to the poem. The overall effect of the way genre and metaphor function in this argumentative poem, it is concluded, is highly ideological.

""Home" to more than 150,000 children from the 1870s until 1996, the residential school system was aimed at "killing the Indian in the child" and assimilating First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white settler society. It was, in short, a genocidal policy, operated jointly by the federal government of Canada and the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches. Children as young as four years old were torn from their families and placed in institutions that were chronically underfunded; mismanaged; inadequately staffed; and rife with disease, malnutrition, poor ventilation, poor heating, neglect, and death. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse was pervasive, and it was consistent policy to deny children their languages, their cultures, their families, and even their given names. While some children may have had positive experiences, many former students have found themselves caught between two worlds: deprived of their languages and traditions, they were left on their own to handle the trauma of their school experience and to try to readapt to the traditional way of life that they had been conditioned to reject. Life after residential school has been marred for many by alcohol and substance abuse, cycles of violence, suicide, anger, hopelessness, isolation, shame, guilt, and an inability to parent. First Nations leader Phil Fontaine catalysed the struggle for redress in 1990 when he stunned Canada by speaking about his residential-school experience. The second major catalyst was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) of 1991-1996, which broadly exposed the horrors of residential schools to Canadians and called for a public inquiry. By the early 2000s there was a growing number of lawsuits, most notably the Cloud and Baxter class actions. In 1998, following RCAP, the federal government issued a "statement of regret" for physical and sexual violations and established the Aboriginal Healing

"In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time."

"Sustainable development needs to be tackled at all governmental levels. Moreover, policies need to be integrated, horizontally and vertically. This article studies the efforts of subnational governments and their strategies towards vertical policy integration. Four cases are compared: Quebec (Canada), Flanders (Belgium), North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and North Holland (the Netherlands). The assumption is that their approaches are determined by their degree of autonomy, which involves their competences within their own borders (self-rule) and their influence on national decision making (shared rule). The findings, however, show that degree of autonomy does not shape the subnational governments' stance towards vertical policy integration for sustainable development. Rather, it is influenced by other factors, such as political dynamics. The analysis also puts forward that the degree of self-rule of subnational governments has a large influence on the content of sustainable development policies, not only at the subnational, but also at the national level."

"Justice occupies a special place in the pantheon of virtues. For the ancients, it was often conceived as the master virtue, the one that orders all the others. For Plato, justice had exactly this overarching status. A just individual, he tells us in The Republic, is one in whom the three parts of the soul-reason, spirit, appetite-and the three virtues associated with them-wisdom, courage, moderation-stand in the right relation to one another. Justice in the city is precisely analogous. In the just city, each class exercises its own distinctive virtue by performing the task suitable for its nature, and none interferes with the others. The wise and rational part does the ruling, the brave and spirited part does the soldiering, and the rest, those lacking special spirit or intelligence but capable of moderation, do the farming and the manual labouring. Justice is the harmonious balance among these constituent elements."

"This article presents a blueprint of a feminist agenda for the twenty-first century that is oriented not by the telos of gender parity, but instead evolves as an 'immanent critique' of the key structural dynamics of contemporary capitalism - within a framework of analysis derived from the tenets of Critical Theory of Frankfurt School origin. This activates a form of critique whose double focus on (1) shared conceptions of justice; and (2) structural sources of injustice, allows criteria of social justice to emerge from the identification of a broad pattern of societal injustice surpassing the discrimination of particular groups. In this light, women's victimization is but a symptom of structural dynamics negatively affecting also the alleged winners in the classical feminist agenda of critique. The analysis ultimately produces a model of social justice in a formula of socially embedded autonomy that unites work, care, and leisure."

"Critical examination of stories originating in everyday individual experiences of oppression as reenacted in Theater of the Oppressed and as articulated in the speech performances of participatory budgeting meetings shows how the rhetoric of oppression operates either to reproduce or to transform historically established cultural practices. The application of theories of mimesis, performance, representation, experience, and frame analysis helps explain how cultural patterns counter Theater of the Oppressed's proposals, simply providing a cathartic release, and how public participation in budgetary meetings is effective in producing social change. Um olhar crítico das experiências individuais com opressão re-encenadas no Teatro do Oprimido e articuladas nas falas de residentes nos distritos do orçamento participativo mostra como as retóricas de opressão opera para reproduzir ou transformar as práticas culturais estabelecidas históricamente. O uso de teorias de mimesis, performance, representação, experiência e analisis de ponto de referência social ajuda em compreender como os padrões culturais agem contra a proposta de transformação social no Teatro do Oprimido, providenciando nada mais que uma liberação catártica, e exemplifica como a participação pública no orçamento do governo é mais eficaz em trazer mudanças sociais."

"This essay brings into dialectical consideration the relationship between postsocialism and posthumanism in China through the life story of Marxist humanism from the global 1960s to the present across Eastern Europe, France, and the United States. It especially foregrounds the American counterpart to the irruption of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe and the humanist controversy in France during the 1950s in the now marginalized work of Raya Dunayeskaya, which brought Marxist humanism, feminism, and antiracism into a powerful interarticulation. The essay argues that postsocialism is not a discreet formation affecting only previously or actually socialist countries and that, when seen through the lens of Marxist humanism, to which American ethnic studies can be considered heir, the condition today in China and globally is resoundingly not posthumanist."

"In Canada as in other (post)colonial settings, courts have been facing the challenging task of redefining both substantive aboriginal legal rights and evidentiary rules that now look ethnocentric. Recent litigation has shown that while rights claims made by indigenous collectives are difficult to make and sustain in court, the newly revived doctrine of the Crown's inherent 'honour' can work for aboriginal peoples precisely because the Crown's honour is, as it were, self-acting. But the neo-medieval discourse of the Crown coexists, in the text of Canadian courts, with discursive practices that enact a contemporary, pluralistic, socially aware form of judicial anthropology. These two wholly conflicting representations of the Canadian state live happily side by side in current Canadian judicial discourse. This easy eclecticism stands in marked contrast to the difficulties and embarrassments experienced by aboriginal leaders testifying before judges. The close judicial scrutiny of aboriginal claims contrasts with the tolerance of major epistemological contradictions in the state's discourses about itself."

"This article argues that the status of migrant subjects is characterized by a loss of communication rights and locates the instances where this loss is most visible. It investigates the process of silencing and immobilization of migrants and the particular forms it takes for female migrants through the disenablement of communicative acts. In this process the detained migrant loses her status as an interlocutor, irrespectively of the instances and processes that allow her-or demand of her-to speak. The state of exceptionality assigned to detained migrants is supported in the criminalization of migration laws and securitization, which together with widespread policies of incarceration in the West have become the antipode of the fundamental principles of free movement and expression. Silence and immobilization constitute the 'standard' rather than exceptional conditions of people on the move that shadow them across every step of their way, geographically, politically, culturally, legislatively, socially."

"Mediated representations of gender, ethnicity and migration play an increasingly important role in the way these categories are understood in the public sphere and the private realm. As media often intervene in processes of individual and institutional communication, they provide frameworks for the production and consumption of representations of these categories. Thus media - in their production, representations and consumption - need to be analysed, not only as reflections as pre-existing socio-political realities, but also as constitutive elements in the production of meanings of the self and the Other. This special issue includes a number of articles that examine the articulations of gendered ethnic identities and of gendered citizenship as these are shaped in media production, media representations and media consumption."

"This article examines the role of poetry in illuminating and challenging the meaning of citizenship in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is located in the north of Pakistan and is internationally considered as forming part of Pakistani Kashmir. Ali discusses how poetic performances constitute a critical public arena for protesting political dispossession and for nurturing a postsectarian, religious harmony in the region. The article also complicates our understanding of the state, as several of the poets in Gilgit work for the local government. From this overlapping position as local inhabitants and state officials, they seek to create spaces of poetic reflection that can help reshape the state as well as society in Gilgit-Baltistan."

"This article explains the effects of ethnic nationalism on Anglophone and Francophone migration. The rise of Québec ethnic nationalism in the 1960s dismantled the cultural division of labour, which created new opportunities for Francophones but threatened Anglophones' traditional dominance over the Québec economy. This had negative consequences for Anglophones but positive outcomes for Francophones, which in turn accounts for differences in migration patterns. Drawing from the internal colony model as well as migration and exit-voice theories, and using ecological census data, micro-census data and election panel data, I find that the key variables that increase the likelihood of Anglophone out-migration either do not explain Francophone out-migration or have opposite effects. This is because ethnonationalist policies decreased the economic return particularly for well-educated, higher-earning, professional Anglophones in Québec, while increasing the economic position of Francophones and in particular well-educated professionals."

The relationship between globalisation and national identity is puzzling. While some observers have found that globalisation reduces people's identification with their nation, others have reached the opposite conclusion. This article explores this conundrum by examining the relationship between globalisation and people's feelings towards national identity. Using data from the International Social Survey Program National Identity II () and the World Values Survey (), it analyses these relations across sixty-three countries. Employing a multilevel approach, it investigates how a country's level of globalisation is related to its public perceptions towards different dimensions of national identity. The results suggest that a country's level of globalisation is not related to national identification or nationalism but it is related negatively to patriotism, the willingness to fight for the country and ethnic conceptions of membership in the nation. An examination of alternative explanations indicates that globalisation has a distinct impact on national identity.