National Global Imaginaries

In examining the relation between Marxist historiography and the theoretical trajectories of postcolonial studies, the problem posed in Marxist theory under the name of 'the national question' remains decisive. This question is always emerging around the tensions generated between the logic of capital, the purified circuit-process of capital's self-unfolding, and the local conditions of its deployment, typically the modern form of the nation-state. I argue that the history of the prewar debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism, which was itself the fundamental locus for the development of Marxist historiography and theory in Japan, can be a suggestive source of clues for the explication of this relation. In examining the theoretical problems that inhere in this historical moment, I attempt to argue that the national question in Marxist theory can be forcefully renewed through a parallax movement with the question of the postcolonial, that is, the irreversibility of the history of colonialism inscribed in the form of the nation-state. In other words, the national question is not only a question of the levels and stages of capitalist development in given, apparently stable areas; it is also the question of how the logic of capital relates to the historico-epistemological production of 'the national' itself.

Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' emerged in and helped shape a specific moment in the development of literary theory in the US, and it continues to challenge Native American studies in significant ways. Spivak captures in Gramscian terms the dilemma that scholars and intellectuals from the colonized world face in positing their work as engaging in meaningful change of the conditions of colonization. Her reflexive approach becomes most meaningful for Native studies when the indigenous world is understood as featuring two forms of subalternity, one focused on economic depravation, the other more focused on the maintenance of the social and cultural forms of traditional cultural practitioners. The conclusion focuses on one place where intellectuals meet up with both these forms of subalternity, an Osage dance society. This is an example of one setting where subalterns and intellectuals can, in fact, meet each other and communicate.

This essay proposes the category of subalternity as a tool to adjudicate between the often conflicting claims of diaspora and indigeneity. Written in the context of two itineraries on the part of the author - one a combined lecture/tourist trip to Ecuador and the second a talk presented at a symposium on indigeneity and postcoloniality in Urbana-Champaign - the essay begins by tracking the various knowledge claims that arise out of the experience of travel. It goes on to record a travel narrative to an indigenous community in Ecuador in which many of the concerns of representation, language and political recognition that colonized communities face are raised. The essay then moves on to a discussion of the risks of unilaterally privileging either the claims of indigeneity or the claims of diaspora.

This essay asks how critical indigenous theory might intervene in the field of critical theory. What originates here that does not in other disciplinary phrasings and phases and cannot without doing some violence to the tasks indigenous critical theory sets for itself? It begins to answer this question by introducing a form of liberal governance - the governance of the prior - that critical indigenous theory illuminates. And it argues that rather than referencing a specific social content or context, social identity or movement, critical indigenous theory disrupts a network of presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves built upon this form of liberal governance.

This introductory essay addresses the conditions for possible exchange between subaltern studies and indigenous and American Indian studies. It highlights the special significance of Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' as an inaugurating moment of postcolonial studies in the US with important implications for those working in indigenous studies. Scholars in postcolonial and indigenous/American Indian studies share an interest in challenging the logics of colonialism and deploying incommensurability as a critical tool. However, the essay also points to tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies that derive from indigenous people's sense of living under ongoing colonial projects - and not just colonial legacies - and from postcolonial studies' over-reliance on models of colonialism in South Asia and Africa that do not necessarily speak to the settler colonies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Besides tracing the convergences and tensions that mark the relation between indigenous and postcolonial critical tendencies, this essay introduces the contributions to this special issue and seeks to prompt further dialogue that continues the project of interrogating subalternity.

Examination of the profiles and trajectories of 15 current or past leaders of the Brazilian Association of Black Researchers points to the emergence in Brazil of a new category of intellectuals who may be called "black organic intellectuals"-academics with the marks of black ancestry (such as dark skin) who have been directly or indirectly influenced by the black social movements and therefore do not resign themselves to racial prejudice and discrimination and racial inequalities. The active academic ethos that guides their professional behavior as university professors leads them to study these inequalities and to promote policies aimed at racial equality and the elimination of racism from Brazilian society.

Taking its cue from recent scholarship de-linking the idea of "modernity" from the idea of "the West", this article advocates the notion of "world literature" as the body of literature that has, in the last 150 to 200 years, registered and encoded the social logic of modernity. Building on Franco Moretti's postulation of a single world-literary system (structured not merely by difference but also by inequality) and on the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, the article traces some of the ways in which the local detail of peripheral modernity is represented in literary texts by Thomas Mofolo, Patrick Chamoiseau, Lao She, Rohinton Mistry, Ivan Vladislavic and others, demonstrating that there is no necessary contradiction between the ideas of the "universal" and the "local" or the "national", but that, on the contrary, there are only local universalisms (and, for that matter, only "local cosmopolitanisms"), which it becomes the task of readers to situate as completely as they can.

This paper is the result of a conversation, started in 2008, about the significance of the struggles for gender and sexual justice taking place in Latin America and more broadly of the challenges global justice and solidarity movements (GJ&SM) are articulating at various national and international levels. Two themes are explored throughout: the extent to which the current Latin American experiments with diversity, plurality, connectivity and mutuality, starting with the 'plural concept of gender and sexuality', challenge existing divides between gender, sexual, social and economic justice and the extent to which they simultaneously question the North/South divide. We also reflect on the problems and challenges that such approaches might present or encounter.

This article explores the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) and its attempts to translate international women's rights norms into national law, examining the problematic geographies of women's networks from local to global levels and showing how Ethiopia remains on the periphery of global human rights networks. In their campaign for legal reform to protect women against violence, activists had to show how the proposed reforms were 'African', as invoking international human rights risked dismissal as evidence of 'Westernisation'. Activists face practical difficulties, including lack of funding and technology, limiting networking beyond the national level. The article shows how the state shapes local activists' ability to form global connections. Legislation banning civil society organisations such as EWLA from conducting work around rights threatens to marginalise Ethiopia further from global human rights networks and norms. Local connectivity to the global is only partial, mediated by the power relations in which activists and the state are embedded.

Over the past decade, international development policy has paid increased attention to social reproduction. While this offers an improvement over past practices in which care work was all but ignored, these policy frameworks continue to fall short of feminist goals. One reason for this is the way that dominant economic representations of social reproduction continue to rest on a universalizing portrayal of the household economy and family life as mired in patriarchal tradition, which fails to capture the diversity of economic and affective arrangements in which reproductive labor takes place at the local level. In this paper, I develop an alternative conceptualization of economic and affective life that challenges dominant understandings of the distinctions between market and non-market activity, paid and unpaid labor, and work and intimacy to provide space for new feminist conceptualizations of economy and care that can capture the diversity of its sites and practices.

Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for 'common-sense' political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relations. As such, this article, informed by Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopower, contends that the global thrust towards sustainable development projects works to construct identities and discipline power relations with regard to gender and sexuality. Specifically, I argue that the disciplinary narratives and apparatuses of international sustainable development initiatives work to construct gendered identities and naturalise heterosexual relations. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on the discourses surrounding one of the most important international documents directed at informing national environmental policy, Agenda 21.

One of the foundational aims of this journal is to enable articulations of globalisation other than those conceived of within a narrow, economistic modality. The articles that comprise this special issue, in our view, make a timely and innovative contribution to the plurality of analytical insights that have been published in this journal since its inception. Further, this issue represents the first issue of Globalizations that, in its entirety, takes seriously the claim that gender matters to global politics and therefore to globalisation. Ideas about gender are thoroughly bound up in the processes of integration, fragmentation, economic restructuring, and im/migration that characterise the sets of practices and politics described by the short-hand of 'globalisation', and in various ways the articles in this collection interrogate these practices to enrich our understanding of their particular and more general effects.

A regular tourist destination since the early 1990s, Rocinha - the paradigmatic touristic favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - has seen the number of foreigners visitors grow considerably after the successful international release of City of God in 2003. In dialogue with the new mobilities paradigm and based on a socio-ethnographic investigation which examines how poverty-stricken and segregated areas are turned into tourist attractions, the article sheds lights on the ways tourists who have watched Fernando Meirelles's film re-interpret their notion of "the favela" after taking part in organized tours. The aim is to examine how far these reinterpretations, despite based on first-hand encounters, are related back to idealized notions that feed upon the cinematic favela of City of God while giving further legitimacy to it.

Until recently, northern Vietnam was believed to be a receiver or a loan culture of a unidirectional diffusion and migration from the advanced Chinese civilization. By the early 1980s, a new prehistory of northern Vietnam was becoming increasingly apparent. Yet, new discoveries by both Vietnamese and Western scholars possess existing biases. Interestingly, as a response to the above, today's Western scholars are attempting to "rescue" the "casualties" of nationalist history in Vietnam. However, it is not clear whether this new schema would only carve out a topic of expertise for Western historians or only further marginalize particular Vietnamese nationalist histories that did not necessarily constrain "independent histories".

This article draws on research at an eco/feminist peace camp set up to facilitate blockades against clear-cut logging in coastal temperate rainforest in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada in the early 1990s. The camp was said to be based on feminist principles and sometimes these were even articulated as eco/feminist principles. The slippage between these terms provides a focus for my discussion. Specifically the article explores the apparent paradox of the sheer vitality of this eco/feminist activism, and in particular its insistence on international connections, in contrast to the widely circulating accounts of the end of feminism, and especially the end of global sisterhood, which emerged in the early 1990s. Thus this article is also necessarily about how recent histories of eco/feminism, including tensions between theory and activism, are narrated. I take as a departure point references to the work of Vandana Shiva and the Chipko movement which circulated in accounts of the camp, and explore ways in which eco/feminists might read such utterances as more than evidence of a naive and problematic universalism. I situate eco/feminism's internationalism genealogically in feminism and eco/feminism and read this as a counter-narrative to the ending of global sisterhood. Through paying attention to various movements, back and forth, between Clayoquot and Chipko, Canada and India, and drawing on Anna Tsing's notion of 'friction', I offer an account of what has been at stake in disavowals of the possibility of reading Chipko as eco/feminist, and suggest the importance of a more generous reading of eco/feminists' attention to the Chipko movement.

This article considers the academic writings and activism of the major Continental feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti against the background of the growing religiously and racially biased anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. Special attention is paid to Braidotti's recent response to the post-secular turn in feminism. The article contends that Braidotti's work highlights and embraces the destabilising structural effects the intensified migration flows have on European identity. It argues that Braidotti charts new models of European subjectivity that would facilitate mutually affirmative and trans-formative relationships between those (self-)perceived as Western feminists and those positioned as immigrant women.

This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with partial or full 'dual occupation' of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, I present a rationale for constructing inquiry-based Holocaust education experiences. As Latvia, Romania and other countries have entered the European Union, the need for tolerant and open-minded citizens who have the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the common good has become more critical. Inquiry-oriented teaching of the Holocaust brings about essential democratic skills and dispositions, while simultaneously positioning students to investigate the complicated, nuanced and contested contours of the Holocaust, competing forms of propaganda and often spurious historiographical traditions. This kind of teaching is also responsive to the challenges these and other societies face when confronting other historical and contemporary controversial topics.

The failures of Western law in its encounter with indigenous legal orders have been well documented, but alternative modes of negotiating the encounter remain under-explored in legal scholarship.The present article addresses this lacuna. It proceeds from the premise that the journey towards a different conceptualization of law might be fruitfully re-routed through the affect-laden realm of embodied experience - the experience of watching the subversive anti-western film Dead Man. Section II explains and develops a Deleuzian approach to law and film which involves thinking about film as ''event.'' Section III considers Dead Man's relation to the western genre and its implications for how we think about law's founding on the frontier. Finally, the article explores the concept of ''becoming'' through a consideration of the relationship between the onscreen journey of the character Bill Blake and the radical worldview of his poetic namesake.

The black woman's body in the Americas, and in the global South more generally, vexes and makes visible different valences of labor: the production of commodities and the reproduction of bodies that become commodities. Situating her novel, Midnight Robber (2000), in a speculative future space allusively linked to Caribbean histories of maroonage and anti-colonial resistance, Nalo Hopkinson traces the relationship among the black woman's body, reproduction, production, and materiality. The physicality of bodies is productively linked to resistance against the coercive cybernetic strategies of the decentralized artificial intelligence network (the Nanny web) that biopolitically regulates the population on its new planetary home of Toussaint. In a final scene that promises investment in a material economy drawn from local resources and sustained by a proliferation of resistance narratives featuring a creolized figure who combines maroonage and carnival tactics, Midnight Robber imagines a new possibility for living that negotiates between Caribbean localities linked to material production and mobile, inter-planetary networks linked to discursive production.

This article probes a set of problems in the theory and practice of the postcolonial archive that has emerged as the author and her Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues have struggled to create a new media archive in rural northwest Australia. This archive does not as yet exist. If it existed as it is currently conceived, it would organize mixed (augmented) reality media on the basis of social media and operate it on smart phones. The smart phones would contain a small segment of the archive, which would be geotagged so that it could not run unless the phone was proximate to the site to which the information referred. This article argues that if "archive" is the name we give to the power to make and command what took place here or there, in this or that place, and thus what has an authoritative place in the contemporary organization of social life, the postcolonial new media archive cannot be merely a collection of digital artifacts reflecting a different, subjugated history. Instead, the postcolonial archive must directly address the problem of the endurance of the otherwise within-or distinct from-this form of power.