National Global Imaginaries

"This article discusses the relationship between multiculturalism and national identity, focusing on the Australian context. It argues that inclusive national identity can accommodate and support multiculturalism, and serve as an important source of cohesion and unity in ethnically and culturally diverse societies. However, a combative approach to national identity, as prevailed under the Howard government, threatens multicultural values. The article nevertheless concludes that it is necessary for supporters of multiculturalism to engage in ongoing debates about their respective national identities, rather than to vacate the field of national identity to others."

somewhat unexamined pedestal in the social sciences and the humanities. Within such narratives, transitional justice, as both a phenomenon and a conceptual tool, is regarded as inevitable and commonplace for anyone wishing to address the issue of past human rights violations. The article suggests that while the concept of transition, strictly speaking, is merely descriptive of processes of change and thereby assumedly a neutral signifier, it has been positively oversignified by various fields of study. The article also examines literary narratives that have political transitions as their foci, proposing that a literary theory approach to transitional narratives should not be dictated only by the privileged themes, forms and narrative structures of the normative narratives of transitional justice (such as truth commission reports), but be open to fictional narratives as having something valuable to contribute within the context of political transitions.

This article proposes aging black women's geographies as a critical forum to rethink human-spatial relationships in Brazil. It ethnographically explores aging black women's life narratives recounted while walking through their neighborhood in the city of Belo Horizonte. Their accounts of their lives in the neighborhood speak to racial, gender, and class positioning in Brazil and how these positions manifest in spatial configurations. However, their stories also reimagine the relationship between individuals, communities, and space offer counter-narratives to traditional concepts of geographic hierarchy, domination, and separation, suggested in ideas such as the 'favela'. The analysis shows how aging black women's geographies model possibilities for re-envisioning liberatory practices and environments.

This paper examines a convergence between Heidegger's reconceptualization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and some recent work in feminist philosophy on relational autonomy. Both view the concept of autonomy to be misguided, given that our capacity to be self-directed is dependent upon our ability to enter into and sustain meaningful relationships. Both attempt to overturn the notion of a subject as an isolated, atomistic individual and to show that selfhood requires, and is based upon, one's relation to and dependence upon others. The paper argues that Heidegger's notion of authentic Mitsein (being-with) rejects traditional notions of autonomy and subjectivity in favor of a relational model of selfhood. Ultimately, it provides a new point of entry into contemporary debates within feminist philosophy on Heidegger's thinking and defends Heidegger from certain feminist critiques.

In the 1980s a group of mostly younger historians, coalescing around Ranajit Guha, launched Subaltern Studies. Originally conceived as a project to be sustained over three volumes, it outgrew its original ambitions, and recently published its twelfth volume. The early volumes of Subaltern Studies made a big splash in Indian historical circles, but their influence beyond these circles was limited; as Dipesh Chakrabarty was later to observe, while any historian of India was obliged to be conversant with aspects of the history of Europe, and was almost certain to have read Hobsbawm, Rude, Furet, Ginzburg and others, the reverse was not true. However, partly due to the publication of a selection of essays from the first five volumes, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, and with a Preface by Edward Said, the readership and influence of this intervention in Indian historiography expanded greatly. This accelerated the process of members of the Subaltern Studies collective using their Indian material not only to ask questions of Indian history, but also to engage with questions of wider, and often philosophical, import.

Palace of the End is a dense triptych of monologues exploring alternative narratives - albeit based in real facts - behind the events and the headlines surrounding the war in Iraq. Borrowing its title from the former royal palace where Saddam Hussein's torture chamber was located, Thompson's docudrama is structured as a chain of monologues telling three real-life stories set in the context of the war in Iraq. The play conveys three unconventional interpretations of the realities of war: that of a young American soldier convicted for her misconduct at Abu Ghraib, the prison that stands as one of the most controversial symbols of the American-led Iraq invasion; a British scientist and weapons inspector who denounces what he understands as the false arguments given by his country's leaders for engaging in a distant war; and an Iraqi mother whose life was shattered firstly by Saddam Hussein's authoritarian regime, and later by the American first Gulf War. Each story is an enthralling and gut-wrenching reflection of one of the contemporary world's most studied and controversial conflicts. The play gives voice to three different kinds of war victims, insofar as their political subjectivities and their moral conundrums are concerned.

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child's Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author's Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but "mixed blood" from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true-more metaphorical and allegorical than factual-story about the desire on the part of displaced "new" world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of "passing," racial identification and transformation.

This article aims to analyse the strategic choices made by left-wing telenovela writers during the military regime in Brazil, their complex relationships with their employer, Globo Network, and the regime's various forms of censorship. The arrival of many critical cultural producers in the television industry during the authoritarian period in Brazil (1964-85) and the alleged close links between Globo Network and the military regime stirred an intense debate among the Brazilian intelligentsia. The participation of these cultural producers in the small-screen arena during the authoritarian period has been almost invariably considered by their detractors in terms of cooption/domination, or as a form of resistance by their defenders. The recent opening of the Censor Division Archives and the deluge of biographies, autobiographies and testimonials of key television figures during the authoritarian regime, have opened up new perspectives for examining Brazilian television history. Instead of the seemingly almost perfect harmony between the military regime and the television industry, as represented by Brazilian communication giant Globo Network, the present analysis focuses on some of the tensions, subtle struggles and spaces of relative autonomy within the telenovela field during the period of authoritarian rule in Brazil.

This paper explores the concept of Re-Orientalism by evaluating contrasting uses of the term, examining their implications and revealing the way they mark ongoing contestations over cultural legitimacy and authority. I explore some of the connections between Re-Orientalism and Graham Huggan's postcolonial exoticism and propose an inclusive working definition of Re-Orientalism that I put to the test in an evaluation of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Christopher Ondaatje's The Man-Eater of Punanai. I suggest that "Re-Orientalism" marks a re-orientation of discursive authorization symptomatic of deep anxieties over cultural legitimacy. At its most radical, I argue, such a re-orientation can prompt a profound revaluation of the position of the diasporic and national subject in ways that provoke productive dialogue between them; at its most reactionary, I suggest, it can work to deepen and entrench the differences generated by Orientalist discourse itself.

In his media ethics, Roger Silverstone was particularly sceptical of the idea that increasing mediaconnectedness in itself is set to improve our overall moral condition or to foster a cosmopolitan cultural outlook. In arguing that we need to go 'beyond connection', he raised the broader issue of the cultural condition that an intensely connected environment is establishing, and posed questions of the kinds of relatedness, the sense of belonging, the moral horizons and awareness of responsibilities that such a condition entails. This article takes an historical approach to these issues by considering how mediated connectivity may have been regarded, particularly in relation to the ideas of internationalism and cosmopolitanism, during the 1930s. Considering this earlier period of modernity - in which media technologies and institutions were emerging as significant shapers of cultural attitudes, but before they had achieved the ubiquity and the taken-for-grantedness of today - can, it will suggested, offer a useful perspective on our own globalized, media-saturated times.

In this essay, we examine the core narratives and rhetorical techniques that extremist groups use to explain their worldview. We show that extremists in North America as well as throughout the world, regardless of their political or religious background, demonstrate great similarities in their construction and deployment of narratives. We also identify key features of what we call "the root war metaphor" that characterizes extremist narratives and apply a schema for analyzing "narrative trajectories" to suggest a relationship between these extremist narratives and acts of violence. What we can learn from shared narrative elements among extremist groups may help answer questions about the relationship of words to violence as well as speculate about how core narratives may be used to construct more compelling stories to promote social justice.

Can Kantian cosmopolitanism contribute to normative approaches to immigration? Kant developed the universal right to hospitality in the context of late eighteenth-century colonialism. He claimed that non-European countries had a sovereign right over their territory and the conditions of foreigners' visits. This sovereign prerogative that limited visitors' right to hospitality. The interconnected and complementary system of right he devised is influential today, but this article argues that maintaining the complementarity of the three realms involves reconsidering its application to contemporary immigration. It situates Kant's Perpetual Peace within the context of debates about conquest and colonialism and argues that Kant's strict conception of sovereignty is justified by his concern in maintaining a realm of sovereignty that is complementary with cosmopolitanism and his prioritization of mutual agreements in each of the realms, particularly in a context of international power asymmetry. In Kant's time, European powers appropriated cosmopolitan discourses to defend their right to visit other countries and it was necessary to strengthen non-Europeans' sovereign claims. The strength and hostility of the visitors made limited hospitality and strong sovereignty act in tandem to keep away conquerors, expanding cosmopolitanism. Today, individuals from poor countries migrate to wealthier ones where they are subject to a sovereign authority that excludes them. Sovereignty and cosmopolitanism no longer work complementarily, but rather strengthen powerful state actors vis-à-vis non-citizens subject to unilateral rule. Maintaining the pre-eminence of the right to freedom, the article suggests that only through the creation of 'cosmopolitan spaces' of politics can we reproduce today the complementarity that Kant envisioned.

The critical fortunes of "the transnational" have swelled in recent years, as it has made its way from disciplinary buzzword to become the banner for a genuinely rigorous and self-reflexive kind of geopolitical criticism. Along that path to widespread recognition and application, transnationalism has confronted its own procedural hurdles as an interpretive and epistemological framework, conceding potential frictions within its contentions-frictions implicit in decisions about which identifications and experiences might legitimately be celebrated or resisted. It's a state of affairs neatly summarized by Sallie Westwood and Annie Phizacklea, who point out that we have "[o]n the one hand the continuing importance of the nation and the emotional attachments invested in it, and on the other hand those processes such as cross-border migration which are transnational in form."

Walt Whitman never saw most of the myriad places he name-checks in "Salut au Monde," in fact never traveled beyond North America. 3 That minor technicality does not stop him from envisioning them-"seeing" them, as it were-through the lens of his own mystical, abstracted vision of an America at once generalized

The aim of this paper is to examine and deconstruct the process of denying human rights protection to one group (children) on the basis that if this was done, another group (parents and teachers) could be construed as 'criminal.' In 2004 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that children's constitutional rights to security, equality and to be free from cruel and unusual treatment were not infringed when assaults made on them were made by a parent or caregiver. The Supreme Court upheld s. 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada which provides parents, teachers and those acting in their place with a defence that justifies assaults on children. The Supreme Court majority acknowledged that s. 43 'permits conduct toward children that would be criminal in the case of adult victims' but the distinction, on the basis of age, is designed to protect children by not criminalizing their parents and teachers. Rather than denying rights to some to save others from the fate of being construed a criminal is it not incumbent upon us to uphold an inclusive understanding of human rights and question the system that would so readily drop a vulnerable group from its' protection over fear of labelling those with the upper hand as criminal?

Over the past ten to fifteen years, feminism in China has been marked by three closely related characteristics. The first is the introduction of "Western" feminism with "gender" as the core of theory import. The second is the articulation of the "trouble" this import of Western theory has caused. Chinese feminist texts abound with terms such as trouble, difficulty, and clash, which are used to express worries about the consequences of this new orientation of feminism in China. They prove that the import of Western theory and the transition to "gender" as the basic category of analysis are not the logical and unquestionable developments some authors claim them to be. A third characteristic is the search for an identity for Chinese feminism in a global context. Chinese scholars, under the impact of Western theory, turn to spatial definitions of Chinese feminism vis-à-vis international feminism and adopt the notion of the "local" to define their place in the world. This essay highlights the "troubling" effects the import of "gender" has on feminist theory building in China and delineates the various and sometimes conflicting efforts Chinese feminists have made to restabilize feminist theory and identity. These include different translations and definitions of "gender," diverging outlines of the history of Chinese feminism in a global context, various definitions of the "local," differing visions of a regional "Asian" feminism, and more complex models that try to integrate conflicting perspectives. These responses demonstrate that contrary to its universalist claims, "gender" is a specific concept that finds support among particular groups of feminists only. This essay also tries to explain why Chinese feminists insist on the "local" as a site of theory building and identity formation even where they have acquired global horizons.

Mauricio de Sousa's beloved comic books are a staple of many Brazilian childhoods. Starting in the 1960s, his six-year-old characters began providing not only entertainment, but also a distinctly Brazilian representative in a market dominated by imports. Currently, these publications-several different comic books and strips-represent 70 percent of the children's market in Brazil, with over one billion issues sold, not to mention a large Internet presence. The characters' expansive commercial empire includes an enormous indoor theme park, videos, live theater, and over 3,500 consumer products (Mauricio de Sousa Produções [MSP], "Mauricio de Sousa: Cartoonist"). Thus it is not surprising that Mauricio is sometimes referred to as the Walt Disney of Latin America. He was awarded the Yellow Kid (a major industry award), and recognized by the Order of Rio Branco for his service to the country in 1971. The thirtieth year anniversary publication, Mauricio: 30 Anos, includes a number of interviews in which various well-known Brazilians stress the national nature of the themes found in the comics, their identification with the characters, and their pride regarding the success of the series (Editora Globo 16-18). In 2009, in commemorating the fiftieth year of Mauricio's career, the Ministry of Culture declared his first character-Mônica-a cultural ambassador ("Personagem Mônica").

This essay relies on the psychoanalytic literary theories of Peter Brooks and Julia Kristeva to examine the transferential relationship between the analysand-narrator and the analyst-narratee in the novel Restlessness. Van Herk uses typical conventions of the psychoanalytic talking cure to unsettle the common reader's desire for linearity and final meaning.

This essay both reflects upon ecocriticism's investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity and explores its theoretical discontents. Arguing for the necessity of bringing theory into praxis, the essay suggests that ecocriticism needs to cross the threshold between discursivity and materiality, experience and representation.

This essay considers the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs in the context of psychoanalytic trauma theory involving repetition, memory, temporality and narrative formation. The American response to the photographs, especially from military investigators, revealed their urgent investigative need to 'plot' and temporalise the event on an axis of idiosyncratic mistakes in judgement. The response among many Iraqis, however, was to encode the event as a repetition, a latent cultural memory in a longe dure of traumatic historical encounters between the Middle East and the 'West'. Psychoanalysis as a critical method is useful in examining the relation between repetition and memory and the compulsion to 'bind' the energy of individual and historical trauma by narrating, sequencing and organising. The challenge presented to the US Abu Ghraib inquiry team - and also to this study - is a uniquely digital one: an over-abundance of photographs in the form of digital media encoded with metadata. The military investigation's response was to time-stamp images to frame the plot sequence, followed by the clicking of the 'Save As …' button: a mnemonic act of re-naming, categorising, hyperlinking and culturally archiving the digital images in accordance with their role in the plot.