Power tug of war: hegemonic and posthegemonic text control in Gustavo Sainz's Obsesivos días circulares (1969)

This article examines the novel Obsesivos días circulares (1969) by Gustavo Sainz from the point of view of the narrator's and characters' attempts to control the text. It analyses the distribution of influence on the text between the first-person narrator (Terencio) and one of the key characters (Leticia), and the changing locus of text control in the narrative line that includes Leticia. First, I examine Terencio's letters to Leticia and determine whether the text construct Leticia is created and manipulated through them. Secondly, I concentrate upon a section of Chapter 3 which appears to be a non-sequitur in the context of the narrative as a whole; it contains a vignette of a party where an apparently enigmatic exchange takes place between Terencio and Leticia. Finally, the article will address the changes in the narrator's character as a result of this encounter and the subsequent shift and split of the locus of text control between the narrator and one of the characters. Since the article explores various means of the distribution of text control, the theoretical foundation used here will include hegemonic masculinity and the relationship between hegemony and posthegemony in the context of text control.     

A Tale of Two Families: The Mutual Construction of 'Anglo' and Mexican Ethnicities Along the US–Mexico Border

In the American Southwest and along the US–Mexico border, 'Anglos' and Mexicans are often viewed as the quintessential 'others'. This ethnographic study problematises the Anglo‐Mexican opposition with ethnographic data from interviews with a Mexican farmworker family and an 'Anglo' farmer family of the EI Paso Lower Valley. I argue that 'Anglo' hegemony is not based exclusively on cultural separation but often involves hybridity (including 'Mexicanisation') and patron‐client relations entailing 'benevolent' paternalism. I show how the concept of 'Anglo' is a contested identity constructed through interactions between Mexicans and Euroamericans. Through this study of border crossings in situations of asymmetrical power relations, I advocate a 'complicit' anthropology that presents competing ethnic groups in their full complexity rather than as stereotypes or caricatures of their 'others.'     

Tlatelolco's Persistent Legacy: A Comparative Analysis of Three Mexican Novels

This article analyses how three Mexican novels, published between 1971 and 1999, respond to the effects of political violence on national identity. It focuses particularly on fictional representations of state-sponsored, politically motivated murder and on how survivors negotiate a social space forever changed by unsolved crimes. The article concludes that an important consequence of political violence is that it undermines the validity of systems of representation that once seemed capable of portraying the national community. Each of the three novels interpreted here adopts a different stance regarding literary language's relationship to its ever-changing sociopolitical contexts.     

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ABSTRACT

When the Assemblée Nationale Constituante (ANC) adopted the first French constitution, delegates composed 11 articles whose purpose was to guide and govern the behaviour of members in a future legislative assembly. Procedures in three of these articles required that a bill receive three readings during its progress through the assembly. Beginning with works of René Descartes (1637) and Galileo Galilei (1638), I located sources for procedures that guide and govern the work of law-makers, applying their reasoning to the process of legislation. I explain how investigators went about identifying variables that captured conditions of possible experience. Narrowing my focus to three articles in the 1791 constitution, I extracted variables pertinent to the three readings of a bill, along with the permissible range of values that the text of these articles assigned to each variable. An Excel 3D Surface chart presents procedural choices which were available to French delegates to the Assemblée Nationale Constituante, the body responsible for drafting the 1791 constitution. The Excel chart is based on arrays of variables and the values assigned from the text of these three articles; these are located in Section II Tenue des Séances et Forme de Délibérer / Conduct of Meetings and Form of Deliberation’.     

The question of “the black lesbian”: monstrous,ideal and fictitious postapartheid citizen

This paper calls attention to how “the black lesbian”—as a figure and an idea—is emerging as a model of the ideal postapartheid citizen. I argue that this figure is both instituted and undermined at the point at which the nation becomes vexed by its own limits. Within this symbolic politics, “the black lesbian” is staged as a traumatized victim. To track how black lesbians have become enmeshed in debates about defining citizenship, I revisit the rape trial that was initiated when the pseudonymous “Khwezi” made a rape complaint against Jacob Zuma. I examine how “Khwezi” and Zuma came to represent competing ideas about citizenship. Drawing on Berlant’s analysis of the crucial role that “official sexual underclasses” play in the production of “national symbolic and political coherence,” I argue that the trial evidences how “the black lesbian,” a simultaneously abjected and idealized figure, is produced and mobilized as a political resource in South Africa’s citizenship politics.     

Writing Roots in Post-Apartheid South Africa

What are the benefits and drawbacks of the popular practice of writing Alex Haley-style Roots narratives—and making roots claims more broadly—in post-apartheid South Africa? This article explores this question through special attention to two South African neo-slave narratives. The first, Botlhale Tema’s The People of Welgeval (2005), is a contemporary version of Haley’s classic that reveals the benefits of genealogical narration particularly in repairing individual trauma and addressing the vexing problem of land redistribution. The second, Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006), can be read as text that challenges both the literary model and the psychological and social projects I associate with Haley and Tema, as it foregrounds the gaps or cracks present in such acts of recuperation and focuses on a kind of pain than cannot be assuaged or made up for. I argue that, taken together, these novels concerned both with historical slavery in South Africa and its legacy in the democratic present help us to move beyond a longstanding “roots”/ “routes” dichotomy to understand what roles each term plays for individuals grappling with racial oppression and where, how, and why the terms fold into each other.     

Asymmetrical Regionalism: China,Southeast Asia and Uneven Development

Does the rise of China present a threat or an opportunity for Southeast Asia? One of the most revealing arenas in which this will be determined will be within the context of regional institution-building. For a region that is perennially associated with under-institutionalisation it is remarkable just how many initiatives have been proposed recently. Such institutions, may be important venues within which ‘asymmetric regionalism’ may be manifest and perhaps managed. The paper provides an assessment of this process through an analysis of China’s relationship with Southeast Asia. The paper initially provides a brief theoretical introduction which explains the relationship between regional development and its possible impact on inter-state relations. Following this I provide an analysis of the political economic and strategic dynamics that are shaping and being shaped by regional initiatives. Finally, I assess how successful ASEAN’s efforts have been to engage China via regional mechanisms has actually been.     

Trump the antisemantic,and the boundaries of populism

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider Donald Trump as an “antisemantic” president, and link antisemanticism to broader forms of populism. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism, I explore the political and discursive domains as intrinsically linked in the Trumpian moment. Second, I turn to a theory of the antisemantic, showing its difference from the Orwellian universe. Where the Orwellian model depends on the inversion of meanings, the Trumpian paradigm (“Truth isn’t truth”) attacks the foundations of meaning itself. In the Trumpian age the internet also acts as a dark multiplier, thinning out meaning through its distortions and profusion. As counterpart to these patterns, I show how the antisemantic rests on certain symbolic fixities, especially around boundaries and the “uber” symbol of the wall. I end with some notes on how to reconstruct a sense of accountability in meaning, and to think of boundaries that are transitive and generative rather than singular and walled.     

Blessed be Discord, 1910: Ricardo Flores Magón's Manifesto Mode

This article explores how Ricardo Flores Magón used images to transpose the graphic tradition of nineteenth-century Mexican political journalism into prose by deploying montage to craft both allegorical and prismatic images: while certain images are divorced from their original context and take on a new life, others, analogically related to a single idea, appear prismatically in fragments on the page. The affinities Flores Magón's writing shared with modernismo and the historical avant garde – as intensification of the former and precursor of the latter – have been a blind spot for literary history, to which this article attempts to restore the importance of his writing.     

“[A]ll just surface and veneer”: the challenge of seeing and reading in Ishtiyaq Shukri’s I See You

This article considers challenges posed to reading practices and hermeneutics by Ishtiyaq Shukri’s I See You. The content of the novel is at times didactic, and surface reading might seem an appropriate means of analysis, yet the form is experimental: it includes radio reports, characters’ reflections and journalistic work. The connection between these “documents” is not readily apparent, thus one is obliged to study the gaps between them to make sense of the text. Symptomatic reading might seem apposite, but the protagonist’s photographic work reveals the limits of this form of reading, too. I argue that Shukri’s text demands a process that interweaves symptomatic and surface reading in complex ways that require the reader to assess the ideological position from which s/he reads. The novel therefore draws attention to the ways in which reading, like seeing, is a political act.     

Planteamiento teórico y evidencia del desplazamiento gradual del Estado autoritario al Estado pragmático en México: la transformación de las élites

Analyses of political change in Mexico since the government shift achieved in July 2000 have been undertaken with a focus on the democratic political transition that led to the so-called alternation, that is, from the stance of a classical approach about State transformations that led from an authoritarian stage to democratization. Analytical approaches in Mexico concerning political change are focused on the undeniable democratic practice at the ballot boxes; however, the outcomes' transparency, the adoption of a new regime, and the procedural condition of the young Mexican democracy make it appropriate to consider this shift from the realist view of the exercise of power and major mechanisms for the establishment of élites' political-governmental decisions. Thus, pragmatism is put forward as an alternative political approach. This article intends to establish that political change in Mexico has gradually changed from its past condition as an authoritarian State to become a pragmatic State, favored by the advent of governmental technocracy, globalization, the market, the us hegemonic ideology, and the obvious involvement of corporate elites contained in State power institutions.     

Citizenship in an Eventual Euro-Democracy

The European Union is not (yet) a functioning democracy, but it has begun to develop some of the institutions of democracy. Among these is the practice of citizenship. This essay explores this uniquely democ-ratic status and how it would have to be modified in an eventual Euro-democracy. The EU's larger scale and limited scope, its more heteroge-neous socioeconomic composition, its multiplicity of (sub-)national identities and, above all, its restricted “stateness” make it difficult to develop an effective and significant Euro-citizenship. I offer six “mod-est reform proposals” that might help to overcome this difficulty. I conclude that we must not expect too much from Euro-citizenship. It is definitely not the panacea that will resolve the EU's rising legitimacy problems. What is required if the process of European integration is to shift from a logic of functional interdependencies to one of politicized exchanges is an even broader package of reforms not just in the scope of citizenship, but also in its forms of representation and its rules of decision-making.     

Problems with Power-Transition Theory: Beyond the Vanishing Disparities Thesis

What happens when established states and rising powers meet on the world stage? Is conflict inevitable, or can adroit foreign policies produce peaceful accommodation between jostling Great Powers? Traditional power-transition theory tends to predict conflictual outcomes of shifting power, but this finding does not square with either the historical record or public policy-maker’s own intuitions about how international politics works. In this article, I exegete a central weakness of extant power-transition theory—that is, its reliance on vanishing disparities in national power as an explanatory factor—in order to understand where the theory is failing and how best to proceed with a view to generating greater understanding of geopolitical shifts. Beginning from the starting point that social science theory should generate useful implications for ‘real world’ social and political actors, I argue that power-transition theory’s monocausal vanishing disparities thesis is problematic in three respects: practical, theoretical and empirical.     

Clase política y medios: explorando el fenómeno de la publicidad política encubierta en México

This work presents the results of a qualitative research that explores the phenomenon of political publicity on noncommercial television content, which has been growing since the electoral reform of 2007–2008. Since then, the acquisition of airtime for electoral advertising purposes, as well as the appearance of public officials on government advertising has been prohibited. The information was gathered through ‘in depth’ interviews, and analyzed through Strauss and Corbin grounded theory model, which allowed confirmation of the existence of covert political publicity, as well as to provide a definition of this concept and determine its causes, characteristics, and consequences. It was concluded that, despite the legal modification aiming to guarantee a more equitable political communication model and the eradication of airtime commercialization for electoral campaigning, this was not achieved due to structural conditions of the political system in Mexico and the relation between media and government, which impacts political communication, and extends beyond the electoral issue and its regulatory framework.     

Forming “affective communities” and narrative forms of affection: Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer

This article examines Arctic Summer (2014) by Damon Galgut, a biographical novel focused on a period in the life of British author E.M. Forster. My inquiry is concerned with narrative form and aesthetics that limn affiliations between the two authors’ creative and sexual sensibilities and struggles, and how forms of affective affiliations are forged through narration and narrative stylistics. I discuss critical responses to Galgut’s oeuvre and trends in South African literary production post-1994, to introduce ideas about his non-conformist creative impulses. I reflect on hybrid narrative form, generic ambiguities, and aesthetics to consider how affective affiliations are fashioned in Arctic Summer and beyond the boundaries of the text when compared to Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010). Leela Gandhi’s thoughts on “affective communities” inform my argument that the representation of sexuality and bonds of affection in Arctic Summer enables formal and nonconformist affinities across temporal and spatial registers.     

“Don’t Frack with Our Karoo”: Water,Landscape, and Congregational Song in Kroonvale,South Africa

There is a new environmental threat to the South African Karoo region in the form of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) for natural gas reserves buried deep underground. In this article, I use the issue of fracking in the Karoo to investigate the power of this landscape over its people and focus particularly on the question of how the cultural traditions of the Karoo would be affected. In contrast, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that landscape exerts a relatively weak power over its residents. My work serves as a critique of theories that see landscape as exerting only marginal influence over people. I argue that not only does landscape exert a palpable power over its inhabitants, but also that landscape affects the musical traditions of these residents and, ultimately, the configuration of the Karoo soundscape. To investigate this, I draw on my research of music in three churches with coloured people’s membership in the town of Graaff-Reinet and examine this tradition in the context of its surrounding landscape.     

Popular Culture, Power Relations and Urban Discipline: The Festival of the Holy Spirit in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

The Festival of the Holy Spirit was considered the most important religious celebration in nineteenth‐century Rio de Janeiro. I discuss the popular practices of music, dance and theatre during the festival. By merging European waltz and the African batuque, the heterogeneous public re‐created and re‐invented a number of new genres that are at the roots of twentieth‐century Brazilian popular music. The festival of the Holy Spirit allows an examination of elite strategies and municipal policies regarding popular culture. In this respect, it is remarkable how much political use the Brazilian Empire made of the festival of the Holy Spirit and how its revellers fought for their celebration.     

Ana Clavel’s “outlaw” desires in Las ninfas a veces sonríen

As a writer whose fiction is known for its transgressive themes and forms, it is no surprise that the Mexican author Ana Clavel has continued to revel in such contraventions in her novella Las ninfas a veces sonríen (2012). In this article I seek to examine how these, also new transgressions, materialize in the novella specifically within a queer framework. The queer showcases Las ninfas’ exploration of “outlaw” sexual desires as well as the fantastical and intertextual genre-bending. By defying heteronormative sexual normalcy, Clavel is seen to challenge certain “givens” within (Mexican) society, whether these be religious, moral, sexual, or cultural, and thus creating a fascinating representation of society’s particular fears, anxieties, and disavowed desires. In the context of the female character’s sexual experiences, transgressive queereness can be understood by making reference to various theories including those of Kristeva’s abjection/uncanny and Creed’s/Braidotti’s monstrous feminine, whereby the female is positioned in terms of an ambiguous oscillation between unthreatening object of male desire, monstrosity, and celebratory female sexual agency. Ultimately by thus delving into outlawed “no-deseos”, Las ninfas can be posited as a prime example of a Barthesian text of “jouissance” which disrupts the reader’s pleasurable reading experience.