Homework

This article explores how plays in the 1890s engaged with an aspect of evolutionary theory that had become particularly vexed—namely, the idea of gender essentialism: whether motherhood was the true calling for women; whether the bond with the infant was inevitable and instinctive; whether, as Shaw's teleological, progressive vision would have it, the woman's evolutionary role was to be the ‘life force’, selecting the superior mate for the continued improvement of the species. Considering this question can deepen our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in this period, and also usefully complicate the narrative often told about the figure of the New Woman in drama. Two plays of this period address particularly well the question of what is ‘natural’ maternal behaviour: James A. Herne's Margaret Fleming (first staged in 1890) and Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell's Alan's Wife (first staged and published in 1893).     

Launching a New Journal: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000

This article traces the founding and development of an online journal, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000 (WASM), which Sklar & Dublin began editing in 2003. A quarterly journal, a database, and a website, WASM publishes edited collections of primary documents and full‐text sources that focus on the history of women and social activism in the United States. The journal’s editors discuss their experience in launching the journal and reach out to scholars in the UK to expand the transnational and comparative dimensions of the project.     

Elizabeth and Her Mountain Garden

Abstract

In this essay the author suggests that Elizabeth von Arnim’s anonymous novel In the Mountains (1920) can be regarded as a modernist work, and is best understood in this context. The author indicates why von Arnim was intellectually and spiritually ready to develop her writing along these lines in the post-First World War era. This novel, like von Arnim’s early works—Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899 Arnim, Elizabeth von (1899), The Solitary Summer, London: Macmillan. [Google Scholar])—is written in the form of a journal; the title, also like those of her early works, points to a symbolic setting derived from nature. However, the narrator of In the Mountains no longer appears as ‘Elizabeth’, but remains mysteriously and completely anonymous. This device, together with von Arnim’s stylistically innovative use of structures and motifs derived from nature and music, as well as her manipulation of time, perception and memory, demonstrates her unique approach to modern writing in this novel, inviting comparison with contemporary works by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.     

Policy Matters

TOP-US O-GE SIT, USE LUN LEVA. HEL DEKA O-VIV-US GAN DA KOVI. IN UKI-US HUZI, ERS-MANI REVA. UD ZITA DA OGL ETO UVO BOVI. TATAT-US SEMI OF AVE SOMA

Above the dirty city, a white moon rises. Frost covers the dead garden and flowers. In their houses, peasants dream. I sit and watch these gray boxes. Hidden seeds of the future are sleeping.

Rick Harrison (translation of the original from the artificial language UNI)

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper?…?There is no escape from our interracial interdependence, yet our enforced racial hierarchy dooms us as a nation—the unmaking of any democratic order.

Cornel West (2001 West, C. 2001. Race Matters., , 2nd, New York: Vintage Books.  [Google Scholar], 9)

Dear George Bush: I remember racial profiling, and how all of these other constitutional violations have been used for centuries, especially against the African-American community, and that minority citizens and immigrants have been subject to some of the grossest infringements of civil liberties—the two words that uphold the very power of democracy—for a very long time.

Kristin Prevallet     

Rebel masculinities of star/director/text: James Dean,Nicholas Ray,and Rebel Without a Cause

Director Nicholas Ray is arguably most familiar to cinema culture as the American test case for la politique des auteurs, the influential mode of film criticism formulated at the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma after World War II. Ray was elevated to the status of film ‘author’ for a consistency of vision and style associated with rebellion. Yet, he was known in the film industry as an ‘actor's director,’ both for his background in theater and for bringing Lee Strasberg's ‘The Method’ to Hollywood after it had gained considerable cachet at the Actors Studio in New York since the 1930s. Although Ray was relatively unknown among the movie-going public, his films were (and still remain) recognizable for their male stars, including James Dean, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart. In this essay, I look at his most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955 Rebel Without a Cause, 1955. Film. Directed by Nicholas Ray. USA: Warner Bros. [Google Scholar]), to argue that Ray's reputation as a rebel auteur was as much the product of highbrow auteurist film criticism as the mass cultural persona of ‘rebel male hero’ that the film's star James Dean cultivated. As an actor, Dean was promoted at the vanguard of an innovative and experimental new performance style. Further, his star-performance text reveals a construction of masculinity that the film asks us to view as socially rebellious, which is retroactively linked to Ray. Both the film and the popular press form Dean's image constituted by his self-fashioned sense of authenticity, his non-normative sexuality, his highly publicized death, and the identification with an alternative family structure his role invites.     

Grrl explorers of the World Wild Web

Scholars in feminist rhetorical theory and linguistics have documented ways in which online environments reinstate patriarchal forms of control, leading to the continued online victimization of women. In this article, young women's resistance to a narrative of victimization is seen through the lenses of a feminist reconstructionist perspective and a gender diversity perspective (Foss, Foss and Griffin 1997 Foss Sonja Griffin Cindy Foss Karen. 1997 Transforming rhetoric through feminist reconstruction: A response to the gender diversity perspective. Women's Studies in Communication, 20 117 35  [Google Scholar]; Condit 1997 Condit Celeste M. 1997 In praise of eloquent diversity: Gender and rhetoric as public persuasion. Women's Studies in Communication, 20 91 116  [Google Scholar]). The author finds that grrls are best understood within a gender diversity perspective on rhetoric (Condit 1997 Condit Celeste M. 1997 In praise of eloquent diversity: Gender and rhetoric as public persuasion. Women's Studies in Communication, 20 91 116  [Google Scholar]; Butler 1990 Butler Judith. 1990 Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1st ed. New York Routledge [Google Scholar], 1997 Butler Judith. 1997 Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York Routledge [Google Scholar]). Grrls appropriate the frontier metaphor and engender masculine talk to communicate resistance and change. The author concludes that the rhetoric of young women broadens the scope of feminist rhetorical criticism and calls for a re‐visioning of feminist rhetoric.     

Tracing the voice: Pandita Ramabai's life through her landmark texts

‘The silence of a thousand years is broken’ exulted Rachel Bodley's introduction to Pandita Ramabai's feminist manifesto The High‐caste Hindu Woman, which was published in 1887 and sold 9,000 copies internationally within a year.1 Rachel L. Bodley, ‘Introduction’ in Pandita Ramabai, The High‐caste Hindu Woman (Maharahstra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1887, reprinted 1977, pp. i–xix (reference p. i). The 1888 reprint of the book in the United States mentions that it is the ‘tenth thousand’. View all notes Its author was instantly made into an icon in Western countries from the United States to Australia, to linger on in their collective memories, even as she was relegated to ‘silence’ in the social histories and discourses of India. This conundrum, pivotal to an understanding of her life and, I submit, rooted in her feminism, is still to be addressed. The numerous and informative biographies of Ramabai (23 April 1858–5 April 1922) have been located within two distinct paradigms: one projects her life, sometimes almost hagiographically, as a triumphant expression of the Christian impulse;2 Ramabai's Christian biographies in English include S.M. Adhav, Pandita Ramabai (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1979; Bodley, ‘Introduction’; Rajas K. Dongre and Josephine F. Patterson, Pandita Ramabai: a Life of Faith and Prayer (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1963; Nicol McNicol, Pandita Ramabai (Association Press) Calcutta, 1926; and Padmini Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati: Her Life and Work (Asia Publishing House) Bombay, 1970. Her best‐known Marathi Christian biography is Devadatta Tilak, Maharashtrachi Tejaswini Pandita Ramabai (Nagarik Prakashan) Nashik, 1960. View all notes and the other valorises her advocacy of women's education while sidestepping the issue of religion.3 Ramabai's Hindu (or non‐Christian) biographies include Tarabai Sathe, Aparajita Rama (D.P. Nagarkar) Pune, 1975, and K.S. Thackeray, Pandita Ramabai (V.R. Baum) Mumbai, 1905 (both in Marathi); and A.B. Shah, ‘Introduction’ in A.B. Shah (ed.), The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (Maharashtra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1977, pp. xi–xxxvi (in English). View all notes Both elide her feminism. Recent feminist scholarship on Ramabai has impressively interwoven multiple disciplinary and ideological strands, but tended to focus either on her passage to Christianity,4 Susan Glover, ‘Of Water and of the Holy Spirit’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1995; Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Silencing Heresy’ in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 1998, pp. 118–52. View all notes or her reverse gaze at the West during international travels.5 Antoinette Burton, ‘Restless Desire’ in A. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late‐Victorian Britain (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1998, pp. 72–109; Inderpal Grewal, ‘Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale’ in I. Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 1996, pp. 179–229. Kumari Jayawardena, ‘Going for the Jugular of Hindu Patriarchy’ in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (eds), Unequal Sisters, 3rd edition (Routledge) New York and London, offers a variation on Ramabai's interaction with American women, in terms of American aid to her educational project in India and its inherent tensions. View all notes The parameters of her life and of her feminism have rarely been clearly outlined.6 I have tried to do this in Meera Kosambi, ‘Introduction’ in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words: Selected Works (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 2000, pp. 1–32; and Meera Kosambi, ‘Returning the American Gaze: Situating Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter' in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter: ‘The Peoples of the United States’, 1889, M. Kosambi (trans.) (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 2003, pp. 1–46. View all notes In this article I propose to analyse her feminism by tracing her multiple ideological trajectories mainly through a discussion of some of her landmark writings, and then indicate the problematic of her representation of the highly troped ‘oppressed Indian woman’.     

Negotiating Female Morality: place,ideology and agency in the Red River Colony

By 1850 British women had settled in the Red River colony, a British outpost in what became the province of Manitoba, Canada, and where the Hudson’s Bay Company established fur trading posts. Through an analysis of documents concerning two unconnected lawsuits involving Countryborn women, it is possible to glean some understanding of how British women became agents of colonialism. Company authorities envisaged that White women would establish households predicated on Victorian patriarchal ideology that defined separate spheres for men and women. This article maps how White women stereotyped non‐White women as ‘Other,’ manipulated their symbolic role as mothers of the English nation, and used rumour to maintain a segregated settlement. It also explores the agency of these White women as they sought to establish a place for themselves through their struggles with one another, with First Nations and Countryborn women, as well as with the White men who ruled the colony.

The establishment at which we encamped last night, may be considered the boundary between the Civilized and Savage Worlds, as beyond this point, the country is uninhabited by Whites, except where a Trading Post of the Honourable Hudson’s Bay Company occasionally presents itself. ¹ [1] Hudson’s’ Bay Company Archives (HBCA) D6/4, Frances Simpson’s Journal, 5 May 1830. In 1830, Frances Ramsey Simpson was the eighteen‐year‐old English wife and first cousin of Sir George Simpson, the Governor of Rupert’s Land. View all notes     

Ada's Piano Playing in Jane Campion's The Piano

Since the late eighteenth century, when the piano first became available for the private home, numerous female characters in literature have demonstrated their skill on the instrument. In nineteenth-century British novels, the prevalence of piano-playing women reflected the contemporary social expectation that middle-class women display some level of competence on the instrument. Yet representations of women pianists in twentieth-century films such as Jane Campion's The Piano (1992 Campion. Jane, dir . The Piano . Australian Film Commission/CiBy 2000/New South Wales Film and Television Office , 1992 .  [Google Scholar]) reflect a persistent Romantic fascination with women's piano playing as a means of expressing authentic inner emotion, especially sexual passion. In this paper I provide an overview of existing historical scholarship on the significance of the piano in nineteenth-century British and colonial culture. In light of this cultural history, I examine Campion's feminist reworking of the Romantic ideal of the artist. Judith Butler's model of performative subjectivity enables us to see the constructed nature of the Romantic ideal of individual self-expression as deployed in The Piano. In Campion's film, Ada's pianistic performance functions as a literal metaphor for the constitution of her subjectivity in the Butlerian sense. Moving beyond a critique of the Romantic model of artistic self-expression, however, I read the central violent conflict of the film as a specifically Victorian collision between genteel feminine and Romantic models of musical performance, the locus of which is the body of the piano-playing woman—Ada.     

‘Politics’ and Academic Feminist Theorising: Reflections on Women's Studies in Asia

When invited by the organisers of the Asia-Pacific Non-governmental Organisation (NGO) Beijing+10 Forum to make a brief presentation on the question of academic feminists and the de-politicisation of feminist theorising, I asked myself: What politics? What feminist theorising? Then I remembered how close the links were between the history of feminism in academe—particularly in the form of Women's Studies—and the women's movement.2 Vina Mazumdar, ‘Whose Past, Whose History, Whose Tradition? Indigenising Women's Studies in India’, paper prepared for the International Conference on Women's Studies in Asia, Seoul, 18–21 October 2000 published in Asian Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2001, pp. 133–53; Carol Sobritchea, ‘Imaging the Future of Asian Women's Studies and Feminist Scholarship’, paper prepared for the International Conference on Women's Studies in Asia, Seoul, 18–21 October 2000; and Tita Marlita and E. Kristi Poerwandari, ‘Indonesian Women's Movement throughout History: 1928–1965’, paper prepared for the International Conference on Women's Studies in Asia, Seoul, 18–21 October 2000, are recent narratives of the development of Women's Studies and its ties to the women's movement in India, the Philippines, and Indonesia, respectively. View all notes Ah, that politics!     

Caring consumption as marketing schema: representations of motherhood in an era of hyperconsumption

What can representations of women's ‘caring consumption’ (Thompson 1996 Thompson, C., 1996. Caring consumers: gendered consumption meanings and the juggling lifestyle. Journal of consumer research, 22, 388–407. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489789.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) reveal about broad cultural understandings of the nature of motherhood? We study Canadian television advertisements to gain insight into the production of cultural schemas and the reproduction of beliefs about gender and motherhood. Employing an inductive qualitative analysis of portrayals of mothers and women who are not depicted as mothers, we find that the defining feature of mothers' consumption is a unidimensional depiction of control and caring for others, presented as self-evidently gratifying and fulfilling, in the absence of competing consumption goals. Mothers' identity emerges solely from successful consumer choices that benefit others. Such unidimensional representations of consumption stand in contrast to the consumption of women who are not depicted as mothers, who are found to engage in hyperbolic and indulgent consumption targeted towards self-gratification. We thus provide novel empirical data which show that depictions of consumption in mothers and in women not depicted as mothers are extreme in nature. Our findings provide support for, and elaborate on, the concept of ‘caring consumption’ by helping to make sense of media representations appearing within the conjunction of the contemporary marketing context of hyperconsumption, and the parenting/gender context of intensive mothering. By examining extreme consumption in television advertisements, we gain insight into features of maternal consumption ideals that may not be observable in everyday instantiations, such as the lack of mothers' consumption for self-benefit.     

‘The Worst Job in the World’: Reform,Revolution, and the Secret Rebellion in Florida's Cane Fields

Governments around the world are embracing guestworkers as a flexible labor force. The untold story of 1960s-era strike wave among Caribbean sugarcane cutters in Florida shows how the longest-running US guestworker program – the H2 Program – has functioned. The program, which began in 1942 and continues today, provided Florida's sugarcane industry with its sole source of harvest field labor, and became all the more important in the 1960s as the Cuban Revolution and the embargo that followed it caused Florida's industry to expand exponentially. Expropriated Cuban sugar moguls adopted the labor practices pioneered by the US Sugar Company, importing mostly Jamaican peasant farmers as temporary workers and deporting those who refused to accept their terms. Federal efforts to mitigate growers' exploitative practices only encouraged worse labor abuses. Cane cutters defended themselves with frequent strikes but deportations made insurgency's gains ephemeral.

‘No ebery ting wha got sugar a sweet’.

Jamaican proverb 1 1. Frank Cundall 1924 Cundall, Cundall. 1924. Jamaica in 1924: A Handbook for Visitors and Intending Settlers with Some Account of the Colony's History, Kingston, Jamaica: The Institute of Jamaica.  [Google Scholar]: 56].      

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

Out of Place: Black women academics in British universities

This article examines the experience of Black women academics in British universities. ¹ [1] An intended outcome of the study on which this article is based was the opportunity which it provided for the participants to reflect on their experiences in academia. Participants regarded the opportunity to discuss their experiences as therapeutic and cathartic. However, a number of the women whom we approached as possible participants were unable to take part in the study because they had been ‘legally gagged’. We were unable to unravel the specifics of these ‘gagging orders’; however, those who were unable to take part were seeking other routes through which they could explore their own ordeal. The names used in the article are pseudonyms. View all notes The background to this is the under‐representation of Black people at all levels of academia, particularly in senior posts. Black women in academia can be seen to be occupying a space that has historically been the preserve of the white middle‐class male. Within this space Black women are ‘space invaders’. The article explores this concept by reporting the findings from a study of Black women academics. The marginalization, tenuous position, lack of a sense of belonging and survivalist strategies are issues explored. Feelings of being excessively scrutinized and marginalized are common amongst the women. Issues of lack of progression, workload management, lack of opportunities, lack of support and access to resources are identified by the women and discussed. The article describes how Black women negotiate their experiences of work in academia and how they feel damaged by their experiences. The article concludes by making the case for institutional change in British universities.     

Turkish Women Architects in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Era, 1908–1950

This article examines the public status and educational background of Turkish women architects from 1908 to 1950. Writings on the history of architecture in Turkey, as in the West, have focused on heroic male figures. Key works produced before the late 1970s used data gathered mainly from Arkitekt, the first Turkish architectural magazine, whilst a second generation of Turkish architectural historians has preferred to investigate state and private archives. It is impossible to find a mention of women as architects in either bodies of work, although their contributions are indeed evident in the pages of Arkitekt. This article aims to fill some of these gaps in the highly gendered history of modern Turkish architecture by identifying and examining women’s work as architects in Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century. It also explores the relationship between the women’s liberation movement, the discipline of architecture, and modernization ideology associated with the Turkish Republic. It argues that women architects, who undertook important private commissions and were permitted to enter public competitions as anonymous entrants, did not encounter overt discrimination until the 1940s. Nevertheless, forms of indirect discrimination across the period served to silence women in the pages of the architectural press and to occlude them from key public commissions and offices.     

Transing the small screen: loving and hating transgender youth in Glee and Degrassi

The teen television shows Glee (2009-) and Degrassi (2001-) are notable for diversity in gender and sexuality representations. Glee represents a variety of masculine women and feminine men as well as gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters. Likewise, Canada's Degrassi franchise has portrayed non-heterosexual characters in significant and controversial ways. Its most recent incarnation, Degrassi (previously Degrassi: The Next Generation) is discussed in this article, alongside Glee, in relation to their recent inclusions of two transgender-identified teenagers bringing transgenderism to the fore of these programmes' discussions of gender and identity. As trans youth are highly vulnerable due to both systemic ageism and cisgenderism, it is not surprising that both detail narratives of discrimination and assault driven by bigotry and ignorance. Conversely, they also explore more positive aspects of the lives of young people, such as friendship and romance (even as these cause their own problems at times), also enjoyed by trans youth. As such, the themes of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ manifest in interesting ways in both of these televisual texts and guide this article's analysis. While challenging assumptions that trans lives are governed by negative emotional states, these representations continue to reify stereotypes, not only of transness, but also of boyhood, girlhood, race and their intersections. Both representations are grounded in material and emotional journeys (or movements) and the concept of the ‘moving body’ (Keegan, 2013 Keegan, C. M. (2013). Moving bodies: sympathetic migrations in transgender narrativity. Genders, 57. Retrieved from http://www.genders.org/g57/g57_keegan.html. [Google Scholar]) partly informs these readings. The privileging of certain modes of trans personhood and embodiment over less normative (unseen, unacknowledged, and thus invisible) ones is at stake in these representations, but they also lay the groundwork for diverse future depictions. By addressing this gap in research, this article elucidates how gender (diversity) is being constructed for consumption on adolescent television and its potential for (re)thinking trans/gender, identity, and embodiment for young people in contemporary Western societies.     

Revolutionary Mothers? Interacting Power Relations,Agency, and Social Change

In this article a theoretical discussion about intersectionality is carried out in dialogue with the ways in which battered and separated mothers deal with their children's situation and their relationship to their violent co‐parents/ex‐partners. In line with Connell's (1987) Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power. Society, the Person and Sexual Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.  [Google Scholar] argument that categories such as gender are shaped by several structures and that the social order is inherently instable due to historic “unevenness”, contradictions, and internal differentiation, it is shown how abused mothers both follow and undermine well‐established notions of childhood, gender, and parenthood when trying to tackle their situation post separation or divorce. What is furthermore shown is how their “doing” of age, gender, and kinship entails both dichotomization and neutralization. It is argued that constructions prominent in public discussions about children at risk—the intrinsic value of childhood, children's right to personal integrity, and need of safety and protection—serve as a resource when the interviewees argue against the norm prescribing contact between children and fathers post separation and divorce. Two established constructions of the child's best interests are set up against each other when the mothers try to undermine power associated with the father position. An empirically sensitive and actor‐centred intersectional analysis must be sophisticated enough to grasp such complexities if we are to be able to fully explore possibilities for social change.     

Olive Banks (1923–2006): an appreciation

This Appreciation of Olive Banks (1923–2006) draws upon her memoir published in Women’s History Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1999, pp. 401–410, and upon the author’s recollections of and correspondence with her. Born into a solidly working‐class family, Olive Banks overcame the disadvantages of her social class background and gender to become an internationally recognised Professor of Sociology, well known for her contribution to the developing field of the sociology of education and especially for her pioneering work on the history of feminism. Her contribution to women’s history was important at a time when the discipline was developing as an academic field of study in higher education in the 1980s in the USA and Britain.     

Landscape,revolution and property regimes in rural Havana

This article explores landscape as an expression of political change. It focuses on the radical transformations in landholding after 1959 and post-1989. Given that landscape is understood as a socio-cultural and political process rather than – as geographers commonly treat it – a cultural image fixed in place [Hirsch, 1995 Hirsch, Eric. 1995. “Landscape: Between Place and Space”. In The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Edited by: Hirsch, E. and O'Hanlon, M. Oxford: Clarendon Press.  [Google Scholar], this analysis examines how the political changes in Cuba are made manifest in Havana's rural landscape. It also looks at the ontological relationship to landownership particularly during the Special Period, and focuses on how property is conceptualised by smallholding peasants who belong to agrarian co-operatives.