National Global Imaginaries

"This paper develops a critical engagement with 'cosmopolitanism' and specifically the geographical imaginations it implicates. It does so in order to work through some of the geographical closures in the new cosmopolitanism literature and, further, to suggest alternative - more uncertain and speculative - spatial imaginations for modes of living together with radical alterity. The paper is written in the context of the wealth of recent literature that has sought to recuperate cosmopolitanism as a progressive political philosophy and imagination. Part of the paper's intervention, however, is to suggest that mechanisms and political imaginations for living together might in fact gain much by stepping out from cosmopolitanism's conceptual shadow. First, the paper argues that implicated within much of the new cosmopolitan literature is a planetary consciousness that has a long historical antecedence in western thought. The paper stresses the problematic textures of the planetary geographical imaginations embedded within avowedly cosmopolitan discourse, arguing that the 'cosmos' of cosmopolitanism is no geographically innocent signifier. It is in fact tethered to an imperial Apollonian gaze that cannot help but rekindle ancient Greek notions of formal order and beauty, Pythagorean beliefs in a universe of harmony, and their realization in western liberalism and particularly US Cold War imperialism. Second, drawing upon postcolonial re-readings of the planet and critical geographical mobilizations of place, the paper suggests alternative, less certain, and less avowedly 'cosmopolitan' imaginations that have the capacity to engage difference in non-assimilatory terms. Cumulatively, the paper is an attempt to answer one simple question: what difference does it make to think geographically about cosmopolitanism?"

"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."

"Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these 'internet scandals' impacting politics in the semi-authoritarian political environment? To address this and related questions, I juxtapose two case studies of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. Drawing on the findings, I argue that Russia's ruling elites are presently very much capable of managing these outbursts of public outrage. Mainly with the help of the powerful state-controlled television, public anger is very swiftly redirected towards lower-level authorities and foreign, supposedly hostile powers."

"The paper reflects on the tension that the process of sensing a nation brings to the formation of a post-colony in Southeast Asia. The "aesthetic" in this context creates forms of sensibility of the "national," rendering it present in the world and endowing it with certain identity-effects. On the other hand, it also posits an exceptional singularity, at once discriminating against subjectivities that resist to be contained within the national project and achieving the distinction of autonomy. This process foregrounds moments of finitude, improvisation, and intimacy, aspects of the aesthetic that are central to the crafting of the national and its art."

""Post-neoliberalism" or "after neoliberalism"' is a term that is associated with forms of governance that emerged in the mid-late 1990s with the Third Way and social investment states in the UK, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The post-neoliberal state combines features of both neoliberal and social-democratic welfare policies; significantly, it has introduced changes in areas conventionally noted by feminist scholars as having bearing on the lives of women, such as, in public-funded childcare, and women-centered approaches to governance. The core question posed in this paper is: is the post-neoliberal state also a feminist one? Based on a critical review of recent literature, the analysis focuses on the gender implications of post-neoliberal policies in four domains of society and polity: production-reproduction, the public-private, political participation, and the machinery of the state. The paper argues that whilst gains made by some women in these domains are noteworthy, the more fundamental ramifications of the post-neoliberal state are in the changing landscape of gender relations in these countries."

"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."

Sub-state nationalist parties of the industrialised West occupy different positions along the left-right political spectrum. Despite the similarities of their political agendas, these parties adopt different ideological identities. This paper seeks to exp

"This article presents recent empirical research into emerging literature in English from four African countries. Employing ethnographic research methods to interrogate the current state of emerging writing in English from Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, the research recognises the creative writing medium of 'short stories' to capture contemporary concerns of Africans living in the nations noted above. The short stories in this research project are newly sourced and are treated as data per se from which we are able to question the idea of emerging writing in English in these countries being 'beyond the postcolonial'. In essence, the article presents data which suggest a shift from the classic postcolonial text to new, contemporary texts highlighting fresh departures in theme, genre and use of Englishes. The article demonstrates how the emerging writing captures and represents a sense of the zeitgeist of Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya respectively. This article presents distinctive scholarly arguments for the use of interdisciplinary enquiry (ethnographic methods to interrogate the field of literary studies) as well as presenting substantial new empirical data to support the notion that writing in English from former postcolonial countries is less indicative of the classic postcolonial text."

""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 late-20th-century convergence of post-structural, postmodern and postcolonial theories has engendered a critical discourse network that privileges hybridity. These accounts contend that it (re)inscribes the agency of minority subjects, destabilizing hegemonic discourses, but, paradoxically, hybridity has become a stabilizing trope for - as well as the dominant way to read - the postcolonial novel. This essay discusses three postcolonial novels that "disidentify" with this master narrative of postcolonialism: Maryse Condé's Heremakhonon, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. When reread as performances enacted between the "posts", these novels suggest that hybridity can expose the systemic violence of colonial rationality."

"This article uses the lens of development discourse to shed light on subaltern politics of citizenship and rights claims in contemporary India. It argues that battles for development entitlements allow subaltern subjects to meaningfully inhabit and simultaneously alter the contours of legal citizenship, which they have been formally granted by the Indian constitution, but, in effect, denied. Subaltern claims on citizenship, articulated from a position of subordination and difference, not equality, and through specific idioms, contest and radically transform the generic and universal slot of personhood that liberalism provides - one that is rational, secular, sovereign and individualistic. Their citizenship claims draw upon multiple discourses, extending well beyond the law, mixing morality and materiality, ethics and politics, and traditional and bureaucratic languages of power, and thereby muddy the very distinctions on which modern citizenship rests. Subaltern struggles over development, thus, force us to reconsider hardened, normative ideas of legal citizenship and to widen the scope through which we look at and think about rights claims, justice, personhood and, indeed, the state in the neoliberal era."

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 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."

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.

"This paper contests the cosmopolitan consensus in contemporary Marxism that Marx and Engels's vision of capitalism was 'global' and that nations are essentially 'cultural' constructs. It contributes to a wider project arguing that nations are material by taking a closer look at Marx and Engels's writings on free trade and protectionism and, in particular, at Marx's notes on Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy (1841/56). This examination shows that Marx and Engels had a keen understanding of the economic roles of states, national and imperial, and thought about free trade and protection in geopolitical terms. Though Marx aimed his characteristically caustic wit and forensic critique at List's contradictions, silences, and hypocrisies as a bourgeois thinker, he accepted that nation-states played economic and geopolitical roles in a capitalist world and that developmental states were possible, indeed necessary. The ground for these arguments is prepared by outlining the centrality of the economic roles of states in the development of modern capitalism and by showing how the recent revival of Marxist accounts of capitalist geopolitics is hampered by a purely economic, non- or anti-statist conception of capitalism."

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.

"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."

"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 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"