Coetzee’s stones: Dusklands and the nonhuman witness

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a counter-narrative parody of first-personal reports of violence in Dusklands. Such collections of nonhuman witnesses further disclose the longer temporality of ecological violence that extends beyond the text’s represented and imagined casualties. Linking the paired novellas of Dusklands, which concern 1970s America and 1760s South Africa, the essay finds in Coetzee’s strange early work a durable ethical contribution to South African literature precisely for its attention to nonhuman claimants and environments.     

Official Language Policies in Multilingual Societies: Evidence from the United States,South Africa,and Canada

This paper explores the resonance between Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands and McCarthy’s fifth novel Blood Meridian through a discussion of how scenes of violence are represented and rationalised in these two texts. Where Coetzee is impatient of realism and preoccupied with history as a discourse, McCarthy’s narrative seems photorealistic in its evocation of the real, but this effect is destabilised by stylised formal features and the trickster figure of Judge Holden. It is shown that in Coetzee’s egocentric protagonists the desire for detached power over others is expressed in the fantasy of an unchallenged gaze that conveys a broader anxiety about authorship and the writing of history, while in McCarthy’s text the narrator’s contextualisation of the characters’ violence against a harsh and indifferent desert environment limits psychological insight and underscores the impernanence of any historical record. Holden and Jacobus Coetzee, finally, are shown to be akin in enabling the metafictional reflections of these two novels.     

The aesthetics of minor intimacy: precarious attachments and queer feelings in the autobiographical fiction of J. M. Coetzee

This essay offers a new perspective on the queerness of the encounters between self and other in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction. It attends to the dynamics of openness and reservation, immediacy and mediation, desire and longing played out between Anya and Señor C in Diary of a Bad Year (2007) and John and his female cousin, who is represented by the characters Agnes in Boyhood: A Memoir (1997), Ilse in Youth (2002), and Margot in Summertime (2009). Building on Lauren Berlant’s notion of minor intimacy—which asks us to pay attention to encounters without a canon and to desires too elusive for heterosexual conventions— it offers a framework for uncovering modes of attachment in Coetzee’s autobiographical fiction that do not obey the strictures of the couple form. I draw on queer studies on intimacy and phenomenological studies on emotions and embodiment to explore the modes of attachment between self and other.     

Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee

This article develops a framework for reading the maroon in literature, drawing on the maroon’s historical and contemporary significance in the Caribbean, as well as its continuing resonance for writers and thinkers. The maroon’s separateness or withdrawal, I argue, is characterized by a spatial distance that also engenders a challenge to the authority and temporality of the colonial regime or the apartheid state. I turn to Alejo Carpentier and J.M. Coetzee to offer readings of their novels through the lens of marronage, analyzing their protagonists’ flight, labor, and “idleness” as newly legible dimensions of resistive waiting. The strategies of marronage encourage new readings of the formulations of freedom and unfreedom, resistance and refusal in the literary texts, and create a “line of flight” between the Caribbean and South Africa.     

Priorities for International Co-operation with Libya: A Development Perspective

This article provides a development co-operation perspective on the challenges facing Libya during its post-Qadhafi transition. Four key areas for international co-operation are outlined: peace, reconciliation and justice; governance and public administration; economic diversification; and migration. While concrete initiatives in all of these areas depend on Libya’s domestic security situation, they need to be part of a long-term, holistic strategy for one of the most fragile and conflict-affected countries in North Africa. Assuming that Libya’s domestic power-brokers decide that a modern, prosperous country is what they want, patient and committed international support can help turn Libya into a success story.     

Contemporary art on the current refugee crisis: the problematic of aesthetics versus ethics

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on contemporary artworks outlining the current refugee flow from the Middle East to the West, namely to European countries together with the US and Canada. Drawing primarily on Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of ethical art versus aesthetics, I explore how various journeys of refugees in its many forms have been represented in the contemporary art scene. My aim is to concretize the theoretical debate surrounding the ‘political’ engagement of critical art on the issue of refugee representation through various prominent artworks and art practices starting with the well-known image of Alan Kurdi’s and Ai Weiwei’s replication of this image in his artwork. I will analyse when and in which configurations aesthetics and ethics can be found in contemporary art on the issue of the ‘refugee crisis’. I argue that art on refugees can be grouped into two primary categories that I define as ‘human condition assessment’ and ‘agency empowerment’. As such, I demonstrate in practice how contemporary art on the current refugee crisis both employs and moves beyond the ethical subject matters by challenging abject victimhood as well as the ideal of egalitarian art for the underrepresented and thus assumingly voiceless, depoliticized refugees.     

Neo-settler colonialism and the re-formation of territory: Privatization and nationalization in Israel

In this article we critically analyse the production of Israeli territory vis a vis the ongoing transformation of land and planning policies from ones based on pure nationalism to those purporting neo-liberal logic. Unlike the existing literature ? including the most recent critical body of knowledge on planning, resource management and public policy in Israel ? we contend that this transformation must be understood within the framework of settler colonialism. Our main argument is that the growing dominance of neo-liberal policies, expressed in the form of new public management, privatization of space, planning and territorial management, is bound up with Israel’s settler-colonial politics. Based on our detailed study of the dynamics of the privatization of space in Israel, we conceptualize the interplay between centralistic-national territorial management and new public management, free market-driven, privatization-prone, liberal planning and land policies as neo-settler colonialism. This concept focuses on the symbiotic relationships between these two vectors, with the latter providing a new mechanism of colonial control.     

China-Japan Relations in the Post-Koizumi Era: a Brightening Half-decade?

The tenure of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001–2006) was vexing for China-Japan relations. As such, the five years since Koizumi left office, particularly the change in Japan's ruling party, were initially expected, and sometimes perceived, to realize a half-decade of recovery and reconciliation in Sino-Japanese ties. While tensions did decrease, “icebergs” blocking improvement in relations have not completely thawed, and may harden again. Competition for political and economic influences and interests in the same region, concern over one another's future security posture and relations with Taiwan, territorial disputes, misunderstanding about the other's historical sensitivities and feelings of distrust, occasionally manipulated by nationalists, still pervade the relationship. Therefore, though there is mutual desire, indeed a necessity, for cooperation on many issues affecting both countries, this typically couples with a disconcerting or anxious feeling towards the other's intentions that results in competitiveness. There are deep roots to this need/fear complex.     

Intercepting Disgrace: Lacuna and “Letter to John Coetzee”

ABSTRACT

This review article examines two palimpsest rewritings of J. M.Coetzee’s canonical but controversial novel, Disgrace (1999). Both rewritings are by women: Lacuna, a novel published in 2019, is by a white South African woman, Fiona Snyckers, and “Letter to John Coetzee” takes the form of a short story by Michelle Cahill, a woman of color living in Australia, published in Cahill’s collection Letter to Pessoa (2016). The article uses Cahill’s coinage of “interceptionality” to discuss how dominant narratives may be disrupted and subverted, particularly when it comes to representing gender-based violence in the arts. It concludes with a discussion of South African artist Gabrielle Goliath’s exhibition, “This song is for … ” (2019).     

Obama’s Pivot to Asia and Its Failed Japan-South Korea Historical Reconciliation

Since the 1980s, Japan’s war memory has strained its relations with South Korea and China, to a less degree, the USA. Two of the thorniest issues are the comfort women and the US atomic bombing of Japan. Before the Obama administration announced its policy pivot to Asia in 2011, both Japanese and American leaders were reluctant to make amends for the past acts of their countries. However, in 2015, the Japanese conservative Prime Minister Abe reached an agreement with South Korea that “finally and irreversibly” resolved the comfort women issue, thus achieving a historic reconciliation between the two countries. In 2016, then President Obama visited Hiroshima to commemorate the atomic bomb victims. Then, in December 2016, the comfort women issue resurfaced in Japan and South Korea relations, indicating a failure of the reconciliation. Why did the USA change its policy on historical issues involving Japan? Why did Abe and the South Korean President Park Geun-hye settle the comfort women issue? Why did Obama visit Hiroshima? Why did the reconciliation fail? In this article, I propose a rational choice theory to answer these questions. Applying the proposed theory and relying on available evidence, I argue that the settlement of the comfort women issue and Obama’s visit to Hiroshima are important components of Obama’s pivot to Asia to balance China’s rise. The reconciliation failed mainly because it did not resolve the historical justice issue promoted by the human rights norms. I discuss some implications for reconciliation in Northeast Asia.     

从对俄政策调整看日本周边外交的困境

日俄关系在日本的周边外交中占有重要位置,近年来日本试图通过调整对俄政策彰显外交的自主性,改善周边外交状况,推出了一些新的政策措施。首先,日本建议绕开领土问题,扩大与俄罗斯的经济合作,为两国关系的彻底改善,也为最终解决领土问题奠定基础。其次,提出日俄在争议领土从事"共同经济活动"的建议,旨在与俄罗斯在争议领土进行"共同"开发,获得俄罗斯默认日本对争议领土具有主权权利,以便打开日俄关系的大门。第三,日本试图通过调整对俄政策改善周边关系,维护日本在周边外交中的有利地位。但是,日本的对俄政策依然受到内外因素限制,俄罗斯不会轻易在领土问题上让步,日本国内舆论也不可能支持政府在领土问题上让步,日俄之间也不可能在领土问题上达成共识,日俄之间的经济合作也很难脱离政治环境而有所扩大,特别是在日美同盟的框架下,日俄合作具有局限性,日本的周边外交仍然陷于困境之中。     

Turkey’s economic rapprochement towards Syria and the territorial conflict over Hatay

This article addresses the Justice and Development Party’s economic rapprochement towards Syria since 2002. While, the literature tackling the Turkish economic foreign policy has mainly focused on the reasons behind the rise of Turkey’s trade, this study argues that Turkey’s economic policy contributed to the alleviation of the Hatay issue, a historical territorial conflict that marked bilateral relations for long decades.     

Frontier Vigilantism? Australia and Contemporary Representations of Australian Antarctic Territory

This article considers the way in which recent commentators have represented Australia's relationship with Antarctica including current and future challenges. While successive Australian governments from the 1950s onwards have sought inter alia to develop and protect the country's southern oceanic and Antarctic interests, concern has persisted about the activities of other parties. The signing of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty helped to ensure that the territorial status quo prevailed with regard to the Australian Antarctic Territory. The entry of the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) into force in 1994 created new opportunities for further expressions of sovereign rights in this region. While mindful of the evolving legal geographies affecting Antarctica, our paper asks a series of questions about this relationship with the far south: how has Australian national identity been informed and influenced by Antarctic engagements? Will UNCLOS actually weaken the Antarctic Treaty System? Finally, do contemporary Australian pronouncements on the Antarctic hint at anxieties reminiscent of the 1950s? We conclude with a warning that nationalistic evocations may well unsettle a delicate balance concerning the Southern Ocean and disputed ownership of Antarctica.     

The modern ordinary: changing culture of urban living in Egypt's traditional quarters at the turn of the twentieth century

Having experienced social and political structures of the nineteenth century Europe, western-educated Egyptian elite used public institutions to force new legislative structures and procedures that ruled out traditional housing forms and spatial systems. This essay detects direct and indirect impact of these changes that informed the spatial change of modern living in Egypt in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It offers analysis of socio-spatial practices and change in ordinary Cairenes’ modes of everyday living, using social routine and interaction to explain spatial systems and changing house forms during the first quarter of the twentieth century. In doing so, the essay utilized archival documents, accounts, formal decrees and novels of the time as well as conducting survey of house forms and spatial organizations in Old Cairo.     

The Stories Nations Tell,in Three Voices

Abstract

An examination of the role of history in the South China Sea is dangerous ground. Contemporary discussions about sovereignty and jurisdictions in the Sea have become so politicized as to obscure historical insights. This essay considers the role of history in the South China Sea through the lens of three recent works on maritime Asia. While the Robert Kaplan’s 2014 book offers an abstract account of rising states and ancient rivalries, the two other works by Bill Hayton and Bernard Cole offer more compelling explanations of the role of human agency in shaping the region’s claims. The comparison of these works yields a commentary on the South China Sea disputes, and on the methodologies employed by those who study this consequential sub-region and its maritime past.     

AN ETHICS FOR WORKING UP?: Japanese Corporate Scandals and Rethinking Lessons about Fieldwork

ABSTRACT

Almost forty years after Laura Nader's initial rallying call for anthropologists to “study up,” research on power holders and elite individuals and institutions still constitutes only a small fraction of ethnographic work. In addition, many of the methodological and ethical issues specific to studying up remain under-examined. Most discussions of methodological and ethical dilemmas in anthropology to date have assumed a power differential that favors the anthropologist. What happens when the power vector points in the other direction? Through the retelling of dilemmas faced when dealing with a very powerful and prominent field subject, I set the stage for a broader examination of the often taken-for-granted ethical and methodological norms of contemporary anthropological fieldwork. While pulling apart the intertwined narratives of a corporate scandal and a corporate-sponsored women's soccer team, I attend to the ways that studies of those in power often de-center commonly held assumptions within anthropology about the primacy of participant observation, the importance of rapport, the question of for whom we write, and the need to protect subjects’ anonymity. Underscoring the analytical utility of attending to the process of ethnography, rather than just its products, this essay aims to raise some questions about the ethical and intellectual responsibilities of anthropologists, specifically those questions that arise when one studies up.     

Teaching “Narratives of Slavery” in Charleston,SC – Slavery Central

This essay describes a graduate course entitled “Narratives of Slavery” taught in Charleston, SC in spring 2014, in which I sought to recenter the dominant (national) discourse on slavery by stressing the local and insisting on our (the class’s) implication with the structures of things past, both the physical structures of the city of Charleston, and all of the legal, financial, historiographical, and ideological structures of the Atlantic World that continue to shape our contemporary reality. The course attempted to critically analyze the process and the consequence of narrativizing slavery – how we write slavery into (and out of) being; how we use narratives of slavery for the purpose of abolition and emancipation; what happens when we write particular narratives of slavery; what gets written out of the history of slavery when particular narratives become dominant; how contemporary narratives of slavery feed into and compare with historical accounts; how historical accounts feed into historical fiction, and how all these things play out in the postcolonial here and now of the American South in the age of Obama (and anti-Obama). In addition to offering a set of critical readings of texts, notably Zakes Mda’s neo-slave narrative Cion, the essay also presents some of the students’ thoughtful and moving responses to the texts and to Charleston’s evolving memorial landscape. The essay’s claim that we must read and discuss slavery and race in ways that do not reify or ossify either of those two terms was given even more urgency by the horrific mass shooting of 17 June 2015.     

From Socio-nature to Spectral Presence: Re-imagining the Once and Future Landscape of Johannesburg

What distinguishes the global novel from other kinds of boundary-crossing narrative? And why are there so few examples of this genre from South Africa, a country of such salient worldwide interest? This essay reads Mark Behr’s 2009 novel Kings of the Water as a conflicted attempt to globalize South African literature, specifically the farm novel or plaasroman. In contrasting the complexity of the work’s South African setting with its under-developed representation of San Francisco, it traces Behr’s problematic relation to conventional thinking on global émigré fiction. The essay concludes that Kings of the Water is a timely case study in the ethical challenges of locational fixation, one that through its narrative configuration questions the dominance of the transnational paradigm.     

马克思物质变换思想视阈下的新时代绿色发展探析

马克思物质变换思想是马克思主义生态思想的重要内容,主要内涵包括三类范畴:自然界、人与自然界关系以及人类社会。随着世界绿色发展道路的形成与发展,我国的绿色发展理念进一步贯彻落实,但在践行绿色发展实践中我国依然面临许多突出问题。步入新时代,我国应当基于马克思物质变换思想,在当前从自然界、人与自然之间、人类社会的物质变换现状出发进行具体分析,探索解决我国绿色发展实践受阻和生态困境的现实问题,坚持用马克思物质变换思想推动新时代绿色发展,并立足本国国情,走出一条服务于国家新时代绿色发展之路。