National Global Imaginaries

"Through readings of Cherríe Moraga's book of poetry and prose The Last Generation and memoir Waiting in the Wings, this essay argues that Moraga's refusal to ascribe to any notion of ideological or political purity-whether normative or queer-regarding reproductive sexuality indexes the dual nature of racialized, gendered, and sexualized power in the contemporary moment. That is, Moraga's complex identifications as butch and mother, queer and nationalist confounds any categorical definition of radical politics or recalcitrance to power. In the wake of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a new mode of power emerged that constitutes surplus as both surplus labor-produced out of the conditions of exploitation-and surplus existence-produced out of conditions of devaluation. In this new capitalist configuration, Moraga's very inconsistency can be read as a condition of "crisis.""

Outlining the terms of a 'new sexual contract', Angela McRobbie traces the trajectory of feminism and 'sophisticated anti-feminism' across the last two decades of political and cultural change.

"In this post-universalist era, the idea of providing guidance for culturally different communities and individuals is rightly condemned as imperialist. Yet this very recognition of cultural limitations ironically encourages further Eurocentrism: fearful of making imperialist claims about political life that apply to all, many contemporary theorists carefully qualify the reach of the problems they examine and the applicability of the normative theories they propose. How may this vicious cycle be truncated? The emerging field of comparative political theory joins postcolonial studies, feminism, and subaltern studies to suggest that more sensitively calibrated forms of inclusion may deparochialize our political thinking, without replicating the homogenizing universalism of earlier centuries. Painfully aware that they are situated within the privileged cultural frames of the modern West, comparative political theorists identify their struggle in terms of understanding differently situated others amid power disparities created by colonialism, American hegemony, and the global flow of capital."

"Scholars with Foucault in their arsenal have long understood how neoliberalism is more than simply political and economic policies that advocate universalizing market principles partially through deregulation and privatization. They realize that neoliberal policies also presuppose neoliberal selves-selves that consciously and reflexively see themselves as balancing alliances, responsibility, and risk through a mean-ends calculus (see Brown 2006, Cruikshank 1999, Harvey 2005, Rose 1990). David Harvey (2005:42), among others, argues that shifts from liberal economic policies to neoliberal policies are necessarily accompanied by relatively successful efforts to promote new conceptions of what it means to be an individual and an agent. This literature has largely focused on how selves are now expected to discipline themselves according to neoliberal logics and, in particular, how people should take themselves to be a bundle of skill sets which navigate responsibility and risk in a world that putatively operates always by market principles (Cruikshank 1999; Freeman 2007; Maurer 1999; O'Malley 1996; Rankin 2001; Rose 1990, 1996; Urciuoli 2008). The self is not only a bundle of skills from this perspective, the neoliberal self is also a bundle of alliances with an underlying goal of multiplying skills and alliances as much as possible. Yet the current moment has revealed precisely how unrealistic this vision of the self is-out of necessity, alliances must be cut as well as nurtured. The global economic crisis has required new interest not just in how neoliberal rhetorics are used to discipline selves, corporations, and nation-states, but also the ways in which neoliberalism shapes disconnection. In this special issue, we focus on this less explored area in which neoliberal perspectives are re-imagining the self-how the neoliberal self is expected to manage alliances as they end."

"In recent years, there have been numerous calls for the field of trauma studies to expand beyond its European and North American origins. It is especially important, as the insights of trauma theory are extended to a wider range of geopolitical sites and conflicts and into resistant fields such as law, that critics attend to the ways in which the discourse of trauma travels, how it is used or resisted in specific national or local contexts, and with what cultural and political effects. To explore these issues, I offer a case study of Australian responses to the Stolen Generations in human rights, law, and literature-fields in which trauma theory has significant purchase. The term "Stolen Generations" refers to children of mixed descent who were removed from their Indigenous mothers and communities with the aim of assimilating them into white Australian culture. Children were sent to institutions run by churches or government missions, where they received limited education and were trained as domestics or station hands. Removal typically curtailed the children's relations with Indigenous family and culture, since they were prevented from speaking their language and participating in cultural traditions. Many children faced difficulties integrating into white Australian society; they and their mothers often experienced lifelong feelings of loss."

""Narrative tolerance" has encouraged an historiographic preference for witness accounts within European cultural institutions. Often, however, narrative authority continues to work beneath a blandly affirmative surface. Questions of reliability aside, is a witness-based history even able to fulfil the necessary task of narrating Europe's political identity?"

"The discrediting of the category of race in post-war European societies did not abolish racism: officially endorsed cultural relativism perpetuated Eurocentricism while dismissing racism as the pathology of the individual. Critique of culturalism is, however, to be distinguished from the new wave of anti-multiculturalism, argues Alana Lentin. Ostensibly aimed at the illiberalism of multiculturalism's "beneficiaries", the latter expresses intolerance of "bad diversity"."

"The aim of this article is to test a widespread belief among Brazilian legal scholars in the area of social rights, namely, the claim that courts are an alternative institutional voice for the poor, who are usually marginalized from the political process. According to this belief, social rights litigation would be a means (supposedly "a better means") of realizing rights such as the right to health care, since supposedly both the wealthy and the poor have equal access to the courts. To probe the consistency of this belief, we analyzed the socioeconomic profiles of plaintiffs in the city of Sao Paulo (Brazil) who were granted access to specific medications or medical treatments by judicial decisions. In this study, the justiciability of social rights has not proven to be a means of rendering certain public services more democratic and accessible."

"This paper aims to demonstrate how intersectionality provides an important conceptual tool to analyse practices of cultural production in ethnic minority media. In the context of the digital age, media are increasingly central as systems of representation of identity, culture and community. However, research examining how ethnic minority media become engaged in struggles of power is rare. Few works have paid attention to the ways in which race and gender operate in tandem to produce and maintain the unequal distribution of power in the mediascape of countries of post-colonial immigration. This paper juxtaposes gender studies and ethnic studies in order to analyse the representation of gender in ethnic media, with a particular focus on journalistic practices."

"The paper argues that earlier literary designations-in this case, "South African literature"-have begun to be subsumed under a generalized category, postcolonial literature or literary studies. It is a category that has been given definitional purpose in North Atlantic literary and cultural institutions and is in danger of settling into orthodoxy: an orthodoxy that is somewhat removed from the palpability of human experience in any particular postcolony. An example is to be found in the treatment by influential postcolonial critics of Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, whose concern with the ache of history is made subservient to the intricate abstractions of continental philosophy. If the "post-" paradigm wishes to retain purchase in contemporary times, it needs to establish a greater congruence than is current between a language of generality and its object of study, that is, the literary work."

"Habermas' universal pragmatics continues to draw significant attention from sociologists seeking a viable balance between poststructuralism and traditional critical theory, while at the same time becoming increasingly recognised within formal political circles worldwide. A number of social theorists and philosophers, however, have taken Habermas to task with respect to how much his 'theory of communicative rationality', the driving force behind universal pragmatics, in fact actually steps away from epistemological foundationalism as Habermas intends it to do. This paper explores parallels between Habermas' particular notion of human reason and rationality (i.e., communicative rationality) and that expressed within connectionism, today's dominant paradigm in the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI), created as an alternative to the classical AI view of 'mind as computer'. Given the homology, I argue, the practical shortcomings of connectionism may indeed lend unique and compelling weight to those claims that Habermas' system of thought is foundationalist, despite Habermas' efforts."

"This article asks how the international order can be renegotiated with rising powers. Negotiating understood as a process of socialization is the focus of the article. However, given non-Western states' recent practice of powerfully permeating the existing Western order, it is difficult to explain this process by means of neorealist, constructivist, or liberal socialization. Respectively, they presuppose that some states are already socialized while others need to be adopted into the club of socialized members. In contrast, this article suggests the notion of reciprocal socialization. It explains how rising powers are socialized into the order, while reshaping it when they enter. Two conditions need to be fulfilled to accomplish a socializing process that reflects the reciprocal influencing of states of the Western security community and non-Western veto-players; these are employing "small informal groups" and "personalized interactions." Their application can be viewed in informal operational rules which are, in turn, capable of governing the renegotiations."

"This article examines news reports of the second-wave feminist movement during its most active political period (1968-82) in British and American newspapers, and specifically focuses on the ways postfeminist discourses were constructed and deployed. While most accounts of postfeminism relate to American cultural texts from the 1990s to the present day, they ignore (or are unaware of) the ways such discourses were constructed before this, or in different cultural contexts. In this article, I argue that postfeminist discourses are evident throughout the 1970s, during the height of the second-wave feminist movement, and that many of these discourses differed between the countries as a result of unique socio-cultural contexts, and the ways the women's movements evolved. That postfeminist discourses emerged early on indicates the extent to which patriarchal and capitalist ideologies contested feminist critiques from an early stage, demonstrating that notions of feminism's eventual illegitimacy and hence its redundancy were not constructed overnight, but took years to achieve hegemony."

"Since the establishment of UNESCO, the organization has engaged in the protection of cultural property during armed conflict. Recently, however, an increased incidence of intentional cultural property destruction and looting has been observed during such conflicts. This article, therefore, evaluates UNESCO activities relating to the protection of cultural property during armed conflicts. It finds that the ineffectiveness of the measures employed is largely due to a lack of adjustment to the nature of contemporary conflicts and to changes in the profiles and motives of the perpetrators. Further problems, such as the slow operation and implementation procedures of the organization and its lack of pre-emptive actions, are also addressed."

"Structured around the idea that there is a non-linguistic and cross-cultural, possibly biological, basis on which the understanding of pictures rests, this essay looks at the ways whereby images in documentary films challenge the notion of cultural difference. Drawing on Said's Orientalism [1978] and its impact on the basic assumptions of anthropologists, the essay stresses Said's relevance to documentary film theorists, and discusses the work of visual anthropologists and filmmakers influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the phenomenology of perception. Discussion suggests that the kind of knowledge disclosed by revelatory films represents an important answer to one of the fundamental epistemological issues that Said does not take up in Orientalism, namely the question of the materialization of an "authentic human encounter" not subjugated to the dead book. The essay implies that we should have no objection in principle to the self/other dichotomy when it is used intelligently."

"It is commonly recognized that Jean-Luc Nancy's efforts to elaborate a conception of 'the political' are based upon Heidegger's thinking of die Tecknik, even as they seek to overcome the difficulties that beset Heidegger's own politics. But few have noted that Nancy also seeks to critically engage Carl Schmitt's conception of das Politische, according to which there is a metaphysical and practical need for a sovereign decision on friends and enemies if effective political community and law are to be possible. This article argues that recognizing that Nancy seeks to overcome Schmitt's conception of the political throws into high relief his failure to address the actual subject matter of politics. In the end, Nancy remains too metaphysical to engage with the political."

"Although the number of Brazilians in Canada is still small, this group has increased significantly in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is mostly a consequence of a rise in the rate of violent crimes in Brazil and of Canada's immigration policy, which attracts people who have a high level of education. It is also a consequence of the fact that the most popular choice for Brazilian emigrants, the United States, is becoming less attractive for a small, but growing, number of individuals. Instead, these Brazilians are finding in Canada the security, stability, and acceptance that they believe they cannot obtain in the United States."

"Ernest Gellner died in Prague, the city of his childhood, in 1995, leaving a colossal intellectual legacy: some twenty books, two of them posthumous; a mass of articles, scholarly or journalistic, many of them provocative and polemical; all displaying his distinctive, scintillating intelligence. Gellner's range across topics and disciplines was remarkable and yet his thought displays considerable unity. [1] Its foundations are most fully laid out in the second of the posthumous works, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (1998). Reconstructed from manuscripts by his son David, this is a work of synthesis: the closest Gellner came to an intellectual autobiography. It brings together philosophy, anthropology, and an interpretation of the Central European context of his upbringing, by juxtaposing the ideas of his lifelong bête noire, Wittgenstein, with those of Malinowski, a figure whom Gellner greatly admired, and whose work helped inspire his own turn from philosophy to anthropology."

"This article investigates racial melancholia as a comparative literary device in Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823) and Hugh Clifford's Saleh (1904). Racial melancholia refers to the process whereby racial self-knowledge becomes a site of psychological trauma for colonized subjects. In both novels, the European educations of Ourika, a West African girl, and Saleh, a Malay prince, lead to their development of racial melancholia and their eventual deaths. European education is blamed as the cause of this deadly melancholia. Yet both stories have different moral centres: one uses racial melancholia to argue for a universal humanism, while the other asserts that cultural difference is fixed and unchangeable. This article draws on psychoanalysis, race theory and postcolonial theory to analyse the charged symbols of racial melancholia and European education across the Francophone and Anglophone colonial empires."

"This essay analyzes the cultural functions of Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in postcolonial popular culture. Focusing on the case of Canadian film production, I begin by contextualizing Canadian film as a postcolonial site of globalized popular culture, characterized by 'technological nationalism'. In this context, I consider three Canadian films that adapt Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to represent globalization. David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) borrows from Frankenstein and Marshall McLuhan to critique new media in the 'global village'; Robert Lepage's Possible Worlds (2000) quotes from the Universal Frankenstein film; and Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot's The Corporation (2003) uses Frankenstein as a recurring analogy for the modern corporation. This essay signals a starting point for a more interculturally and transnationally comparative investigation of how Frankenstein adaptations provide a powerful repertoire of representational devices for a postcolonial theory of globalization"