National Global Imaginaries

"This paper critiques recent research on innovation in the cultural and creative industries. In particular, this paper examines Paul Stoneman's idea of 'soft innovation' as a jumping off point for discussing theories of cultural innovation more broadly. Three critiques are advanced. Firstly, soft innovation is a theoretical perspective that has developed from neoclassical economics, and is therefore vulnerable to criticisms levelled at neoclassical explanations of economic behaviour. Secondly, the theory of soft innovation can be criticised for being contingently inaccurate: the observed reality of cultural industries and marketplaces may not reflect the theory's premises. Thirdly, because soft innovation defines the significance of an innovation in terms of marketplace success, it implies that only high-selling cultural products are significant, a difficult claim to substantiate. This paper concludes by arguing that our understanding of innovation in the cultural sphere can benefit from a multi-disciplinary approach grounded in the full gamut of human creativity."

"Much of the discussion of 9/11 has debated its historical significance, but it is equally important to explore the geographical dimensions of the wars that have been conducted in its shadows. Subsequent transformations in the American way of war have played a major role in the increased militarisation of the planet. Most attention has been focused on Afghanistan and Iraq as the principal theatres of the 'war on terror', but one of the characteristics of late modern war is the emergent, 'event-ful' quality of military, paramilitary and terrorist violence that can, in principle, occur anywhere. Vulnerabilities are differentially distributed but widely dispersed, and in consequence late modern war is being changed by the slippery spaces through which it is conducted. This paper explores three global borderlands to bring those changes into focus: Afghanistan-Pakistan (particularly the deployment of CIA-controlled drones in Pakistan), US-Mexico (particularly the expansion of Mexico's 'drug war' and the US militarisation of the border), and cyberspace (particularly the role of stealth attacks on critical infrastructure and the formation of US Cyber Command)."

"This essay aims to rethink historical difference in light of Walter Benjamin's formulation of mimesis and Frantz Fanon's phenomenology of difference. Divided into three parts, the essay engages Dipesh Chakrabarty's account of historical difference, considers how an understanding of mimesis might safeguard against some of the philosophical pitfalls within Chakrabarty's formulation, and revisits Fanon for an explication of a theory of mimesis and difference that may be the grounds for a renewed understanding of historical difference. The essay makes a case for the relevance of Frankfurt School dialectics for postcolonial problematics."

"This essay seeks to explain the persistent representation of affect and the senses in the cultural narrative of globalization. The author proposes that we are currently witnessing an epistemic shift from reason to affect, a shift that may be traced to the birth of free-market capitalism in the age of revolution (though it has only become fully hegemonic in the post-Soviet period of neoliberal globalization). This gave rise, she argues, to a new cultural discourse in which horizontal capital flow replaced vertical monarchical fiat as the principal vehicle for the definition of social order and the limits of knowledge. Through analyses of eighteenth- and twenty-first-century cultural texts, she posits that this new cultural discourse, germane to free-market capitalism, is best understood as epistemically governed by the affective concept of a "headless" feeling soma self-regulated by homeostatic principle-that is, a harmonious and nonrational self-governance-and no longer by a thinking mind governed by reason in a vertical relationship with a subject-body. If the current cultural moment of global capital and media has been repeatedly characterized as "posttheory," then this essay identifies a new social logic that has become visible but not yet critically apprehended in the era of unchallenged globalization. The author proposes a way to read that logic as ciphered in contemporary cultural media as an emotional aesthetics of social protagonism and politics."

"The meanings attached to "race" across the globe are myriad, particularly as anti-Islamic discourse once again links race and religion. Yet scholars lack a common terminology to discuss this phenomenon. This article hopes to expand critical race theory and scholarship across national lines. This critical examination of recent race-related scholarship provides scholars with empirical suggestions to uncover and document the different processes, mechanisms, trajectories and outcomes of potentially racialized practices that essentialize, dehumanize, "other," and oppress minority groups while imbuing privileged groups with power and resources in nations across the globe. Ten empirical indicators will allow international researchers to assess the particular situation of different groups in different nations to determine whether, and the extent to which, they are subject to racialization. Specifically, this paper calls for a unified terminology that can accurately account for and address race when and where it occurs and a global broadening of a critical comparative dialogue of racial practices."

"This paper explores software's pivotal role in the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism. The author theorizes Free Software as a new form of property that is infecting capitalism like a virus, challenging the system of private property central to its dominant logic. Free Software can be produced by developers working for free in peer communities or in profit-oriented firms. The author explores the conditions under which Free Software is produced through peer versus market-based production, emphasizing the implications for constructing the Free Software market and the digital commons. The author identifies actors' motivations, the organizational structure of production, and financial resources as three factors shaping these conditions. The author focuses on the case of Ubuntu, a Free Software operating system that is available free of charge on the Internet. Ubuntu is produced by Canonical, a Free Software, market-based firm, through an intriguing combination of market-based and peer production that both embodies and transforms capitalist practices."

"This article discusses three interrelated challenges related to conducting social science research in 'Internet Time'. (1) The rate at which the Internet is both diffusing through society and developing new capacities is unprecedented. It creates some novel challenges for scholarly research. (2) Many of our most robust research methods are based upon ceteris paribus assumptions that do not hold in the online environment. The rate of change online narrows the range of questions that can be answered using traditional tools. Meanwhile, (3) new research methods are untested and often rely upon data sources that are incomplete and systematically flawed. The paper details these challenges, then proposes that scholars embrace the values of transparency and kludginess in order to answer important research questions in a rapidly-changing communications environment."

"Nature and Eros is an integral educational process offered to graduate students at the California Institute of Integral Studies. This course was developed in response to the illusion, operative throughout Western industrialized culture, that we are separate selves living upon the earth. Across many disciplines we are awakening to the knowledge that we are living organisms intricately woven into the ever-evolving vibrant web of life. The central aim of Nature and Eros is to support a shift in our perception of this larger web and activate the lived recognition of our deepest identity as an inextricable part of cosmic evolution."

"This article draws on three ecofeminist theorists (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway) in order to criticize the dominant model of globalization, which oppresses humans and the natural environment, and propose an alternative globalization grounded in planetary love. Rather than affirming or opposing the globalization, planetary love acknowledges its complicity with the neocolonial tendencies of globalization while aiming toward another globalization, a more just, peaceful, and sustainable globalization. In this context, love is characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans)."

"Gramsci's writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci had been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist-technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the 'Gramscian tradition' as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost 20 years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci's contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and provide an analysis of Gramsci's writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of Gramsci's work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part I, I question the use of the notion of 'Gramscian tradition' made by its critics, and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In Parts II and III, I consider Gramsci's specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part II, I consider Gramsci's pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active i

"The notion that racial mixture is a central feature of Latin American societies has been interpreted in different, if not strictly opposite, ways. On the one hand, scholars have presented it as evidence of weaker racial boundaries. On the other, it has been denounced as an expression of the illusion of harmonic racial relations. Relying on 160 interviews with black Brazilians, we argue that the valorization of racial mixture is an important response to stigmatization, but one that has multiple dimensions and different consequences for the maintenance of racial boundaries. We map out these different dimensions - namely, 'whitening', 'Brazilian negritude', 'national identification' and 'non-essentialist racialism' - and discuss how these dimensions are combined in different ways by our interviewees according to various circumstances. Exploring these multiple dimensions, we question any simplistic understanding of racial mixture as the blessing or the curse of Latin American racial dynamics."

"Antiracism research often examines how stigmatized groups transform the meanings associated with their group. A complementary approach analyses the tactics that dominant and subordinate groups use to defend or advance their 'group positions' in situations that threaten the status quo. A case study of the proposed relocation of an Aboriginal child welfare facility to a rural Ontario township sheds light on both processes. Before rejecting the proposal, white residents and municipal councillors used delaying tactics, searched for race-neutral justifications, offered unsolicited advice, created new rules, and censured 'traitors'. The Native agency (and its few white 'allies'), guided by traditional decision-making practices, initially tried to provide 'neutral' information, stay positive, and emphasize common interests. When these tactics failed, they considered others before foregoing the opportunity to appeal to an independent tribunal. Ultimately, this case shows how laissez-faire frames and small-town dynamics can limit the choice and effectiveness of antiracist tactics."

"Folk conceptualizations of racism can be defined as ordinary people's understandings of the sources and persistence of racism. They function as equalization strategies - by denying the legitimacy of racism - and guide beliefs regarding antiracism strategies. I explore folk explanations of racism among black professionals in Brazil and South Africa by drawing on sixty interviews with members of these groups. In Brazil, racism is understood as an historical lingering, a product of ignorance, which will disappear with time and education. In South Africa, racism is viewed as more resilient, as a part of human nature and as a consequence of the competition for resources. These explanations of racism are closely related to the antiracism narratives that are salient in these two contexts: while Brazilian respondents affirm their belief in racial mixture and moral education, South African respondents are more uncertain about the possibilities of weaker racial boundaries in their country, relying on institutional constraints as their main antiracism strategy."

"This article explores how patterns of information supply on policy problems influence political attention. It advances two central claims. First, different policy areas are associated with distinct practices in monitoring policy problems: Some produce abundant, ongoing, and reliable information, while others yield scarce, sporadic, and/or unreliable data. Second, these variations in information supply are likely to influence political attention, with information-rich areas associated with a more proportionate distribution of attention, and information-poor areas yielding punctuated attention. The article tests these claims through comparing U.K. political attention to asylum and illegal immigration. Asylum is observed on an ongoing basis through bureaucratic data, court hearings, and lay observations, producing more constant and proportiate political attention. Illegal immigration is observed sporadically through focusing events, usually police operations, eliciting more punctuated attention. These insights about political attention may also help explain why policy responses may be punctuated or incremental."

"While few would deny that present generations have a moral obligation to preserve the environment for future generations, some theorists reject the existence of a legal duty in this regard. This article takes the opposite view. It argues that ample juridical as well as ethical social justice theory-contractarian distributive and reciprocity-based theories prominent among them-establishes that future generations have a legal right to a clean and healthy environment. But most helpful in ensuring intergenerational ecological justice, the author contends, is a respect-based theory of social justice which at its core honors the values that underwrite human rights law and policy inclusively conceived and embraced."

"For a century and a half cholera has been a stigmatizing disease. That the entire world was susceptible to it seemed merely to accentuate its association with Asia, and particularly with Bengal and its people. The recent epidemic in Haiti suggests that cholera still carries stigma. That stigma is the product of epistemic practices within an interdisciplinary and orientalist cholera science that took shape in the 1860s and 1870s, which have, without renewed scrutiny, prevailed largely uncontested until recent decades. Those practices involved an over-interpretation of the historical epidemiological work of John Macpherson by his colleague N. C. Macnamara. Recent research, recognizing the wide distribution and genetic instability of Vibrio cholerae, offers an alternative context for appreciating Macpherson's insights. This new program of interdisciplinary cholera research seems largely free of stigmatizing representations, but nor does it offer (or seek) a single and simple program of cholera prevention. The cholera case study invites reflection on the little-studied problem of epistemic accountability in interdisciplinary research, alerts us to questions of how disciplines are (and might be) made to cohere in policy-driven inquiries. The chief maxim is toward more explicit inclusion of the concept of multiple working hypotheses."

"Various scholars have addressed nationalism as a distinctive political ideology. The majority of them recognize it as a product of modernity and as inseparable from it. This article begins by accepting this view, identifying the spread of nationalism as part of a broader process of Westernization. However, the all-encompassing ideological dimension and common thread hovering above nationalism is identified here as modernism-that is, the sum of ideological discourses, artistic expressions and political practices gravitating around the 'need to be modern'. Modernist notions like 'progress', 'growth', 'advancement' and 'development' have been largely conceived within national frameworks and applied within a world of 'nation-states'. Moreover, given the selective ways in which ruling elites used the vocabulary of modernity, the very 'perlocutionary' effect of labelling opponents as 'anti-modern' often became a sufficient condition for their exclusion. The article discusses whether modernism can be identified as an ideology on its own and whether its triumph was indissociable from nationalism. It concludes that nationalism belonged to a broader modernist discourse that thoroughly accompanied the expansion of modernity"

"The ultimate result of globalisation is that as the world setting is compressed there is an intensification of consciousness towards global interests, such as selective ordering, running parallel with strongly influential autonomous interests of the nation state and regional concerns. However, as risk and security disproportionately motivate globalisation, dominant nation state interests (which are at the heart of what operationalises global hegemony) become the prevailing measure of global ordering. Attitudes to 'harm' converge around these sectarian interests from the local to the global. As such, the need to torture, it is logically and even 'legally' argued, to better ensure domestic security will, if consistent with hegemonic interest, bring about both domestic and global ordering as a consequence. This article argues that globalisation has created a number of paradoxes where global ordering and governance are dictated by the dominant political hegemony and rights become secularized, not universal. Those who seek to contest the views of the hegemony, such as terrorists, are placed outside the global order and international protection and thus are subjected to the one-sided appreciation of harm that has been constructed by the hegemony 1 M. Findlay, Governing Through Globalised Crime: Futures for International Criminal Justice (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2008), 8. View all notes in attempts at global ordering."

"The ruins of church-mosques, museums, and ancient cities inform material culture as allegories inform spiritual life, invoking forms of transcendence amidst the desacralised conditions of post-imperial modernities. Drawing on the work done by Benjamin, Jameson, and Koselleck to advance our understanding of the functioning of ruins in varying temporal contexts, this ethnography of ruins in the world after colonialism engages with the paradoxes generated by monuments in diverse urban spaces. Concentrating on the ethnographic sites of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul's Museum of Islamic Art, and the ancient city of Derbent in contemporary Daghestan, attention is drawn to the variability of the ruin as a site of political mobilisation across space and time and particularly in the service of a postcolonial agenda."

"This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates - and perhaps, reinvigorates - a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is - albeit in a qualified sense - revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of 'writing back' which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, 'writing back' is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision."