Dissimilar twins: residue of 1947 in the twenty-first century

In this article Meenakshi Mukherjee traces the impact of the Indian partition of 1947 on the creative writing, films and intellectual life of India and Pakistan.     

Prison Decayed: Cinematic Penal Discourse and Populism 1995–2005

The increased populist and punitive turn in criminal justice policy in the United Kingdom over recent years has led to punishment becoming politicised, harsher and more ostentatious. The role of media and popular culture discourses of prison is rarely examined in this account. Adopting a Foucauldian discourse analysis of prison films released over the past 10 years, this article explores the prison film as one important element of the discursive regime. It seeks to investigate what representational practices are at work, how they limit the meaning of prison and prisoners, and how this may contribute to debates about the nature and aim of prison in contemporary society. It argues that several discursive practices exist in cinematic representations of the incarceration that strengthen support for the use of prison. The explicit and recurring depiction of violence in most prison films over the past 10 years, while appearing to offer evidence for prison reform, does the opposite. This paper suggests that discourses around the futility and inhumanity of incarceration are scant, replaced by scenes of prison violence; rape and death appear, which appear to exist purely for the pleasure of the spectator: a generic feature of the prison film. Secondly, prisoners are largely constructed as an inhuman other: a danger to society and deserving of harsh punishment. Consequently, the discursive regime of prison in cinema over the past decade constructs prison as not only necessary, but as the only process for crime control and reduction.     

印度的腐败及其治理

印度拥有问责制政府、独立司法和独立媒体,却不能有效地遏制腐败。究其原因,一是高额的竞选支出滋生政治腐败,二是政府职能错位导致腐败蔓延,三是社会碎片化加剧腐败,四是"危险的稳定均衡"使腐败难以根治。为了治愈这一痼疾,印度政府和社会努力从制度设计入手,创立《预防腐败法案》和《信息权利法案》,同时依靠各类反腐力量,推动公共机构、独立媒体、民间反腐的兴起。印度的这些做法对我国治理腐败具有一定的借鉴价值。     

Looking at Muslims: the visibility of Islam in contemporary French cinema

ABSTRACT

Tarr analyses the representation of Islam in five feature films made since 2006 that centre on the changing identities of Muslims in contemporary France. She locates the films within the context of the rise in Islamophobia in France following 9/11 and anxieties about immigration and terrorism, but also in relation to France's troubled postcolonial history and French republican ideology. In particular, the French notion of laïcité (secularism) has given rise to active hostility to any public expression of religious or cultural difference, particularly on the part of Muslims. Cinematic representations of Muslims, and particularly of the children of migrants from the Maghreb, have, therefore, since the mid-1980s, been treated with caution in order not to alienate mainstream Franco-French audiences and to facilitate the second generation's integration into French society. However, the five feature films addressed here—two mainstream popular comedies, Mauvaise foi/Bad Faith (2006) and L'Italien/The Italian (2010), and three independent, low budget, auteur-led, realist films, Dans la vie/Two Ladies (2008), Dernier maquis (2008) and La Désintégration/Disintegration (2012)—offer new narratives that challenge fears of Islam by foregrounding the protagonists' negotiation of their Muslim identities in a French context and, by implication, argue for the integration of Islam as a legitimate referent of French identity. However, their construction of Islam does not extend to positive representations of young veiled women, and they thus still risk confirming the oppressive majority view that certain practices associated with Islam, such as the wearing of the veil, are incompatible with the secularism of the French Republic.     

宋元成都地方文献的历史地理学价值——以《蜀祷杌》、《锦里耆旧传》、《岁华纪丽谱》为例

本文以《蜀椅杌》、《锦里耆旧传》和《岁华纪丽谱》三本书为例,分析了宋元时期成都文献的历史地理学价值。《蜀祷杌》和《锦里耆旧传》记载了前、后蜀成都历史城市地理,四川历史游乐地理、历史灾害地理（地震,水、旱灾等灾害）、历史军事地理（王建取西川,后唐灭前蜀、宋灭后蜀的进军路线）和历史政区地理。《蜀祷杌》还记载了“芙蓉城”的得名由来。《岁华纪丽谱》记载了成都市历史游乐地理。三本书有一定的历史地理学价值。     

印度反腐败机制及其效果

印度长期以来一直面临着腐败问题的困扰,而且发展到现在腐败问题愈发严重,如今在印度腐败已经成为一种"生活方式"、"生活机制"。腐败给印度带来了非常严重的不利影响,为此印度政府无论是在立法还是在机构设置上都采取了许多措施。不过,由于受到低效的法律体系、公务员体系、民主体系、传统文化以及种姓制度等制约,印度的反腐败工作长期停滞不前。对印度腐败与反腐败的理性分析与思考,对我国反腐倡廉建设具有一定的借鉴意义。     

Moderate Machiavelli? Contrasting The Prince with the Arthashastra of Kautilya

Abstract

Max Weber was the first to see that the writings of Machiavelli, when contrasted with the brutal realism of other cultural and political traditions, were not so extreme as they appear to some critics. "Truly radical ‘Machiavellianism,’ in the popular sense of that word," Weber said in his famous lecture "Politics as a Vocation," "is classically expressed in Indian literature in the Arthashastra of Kautilya (written long before the birth of Christ, ostensibly in the time of Chandragupta [Maurya]): compared to it, Machiavelli's The Prince is harmless." In this article, contrast Machiavelli's writings to those of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.E.) and question why Machiavelli omitted the harsher aspects of political domination such as spies, assassination of enemies, and torture. Could it be that he was afraid to tell a prince about the harsher characteristics of tyrannical rule? If so, why?     

Positive about Equality: The Public Sector Duty under Threat

This article seeks to demonstrate what is at stake in the Coalition Government's review of the public sector equality duty introduced by s. 149 Equality Act 2010. It does so by setting the duty in the context of other legal developments at home and abroad, especially the evolution of the role of ombudsmen in the UK in promoting equality and human rights, and the reform of court processes in India to decide social rights claims. It suggests that any attempt to dismantle the duty on ‘red tape’ grounds would be unfounded and retrograde step for the larger task of creating a more equal society.     

Diving into the Wreck: Aesthetic Spectatorship at the Fin-de-siècle

Abstract

The popularity of films like Titanic betokens a massive shift in the nature of aesthetic spectatorship in our time. The contemplative, distanced viewer who is able to judge from afar the spectacle before him or her, has been replaced by a more proximate, involved "kinaesthetic" subject whose body is stimulated as much as his or her eye. This is evident not only in mass culture with amusement thrill rides and the return of what has been called the "cinema of attractions"; this new spectator can also be discerned in avant-garde culture, as shown by the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists which caused such a stir in London and New York. This spectator is especially attracted to simulacral scenes of destruction and catastrophe, in which he or she is virtually immersed. If aesthetic judgement is to be a model for its political counterpart, as has been argued by theorists like Lyotard and Arendt, it cannot do so on the basis of this aesthetics of violent immersion.     

Tristees tropes: post-modern anthropologists encounter the other and discover themselves

Modernists have represented the world and its history as divided into ‘medieval’ (or traditional) and ‘modern’, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, and claimed that they will bring about humanity's ‘emancipation’ from the medieval. I argue that the world which modernists wish to bring into existence, far from entailing the erasure of the medieval, as claimed, involves the complex rearticulation of the medieval. Vital to the modern is not just the secularization of a previously sacred realm, upon which scholars have concentrated, but the sacralization of the mundane, pointed to by Foucault. The agent of modernist emancipation is a hypostatized sovereign Agent. The medievals engaged in certain practices which were supposed to embody a transcendent God in the human world and lead them to a celestial paradise. the moderns, silently transposing that god intoa foundational reason, assert that its manifesation in enlightened institutios will take them to a utopia which is none other than the surreptitious imporatation of the medieval paradise on earth. Imperial progresses and religious processions were, I argue, the foremost paractices by which medieval polities embodied the transcendent and attained to heaven. Modern polities, While treating them as mere ‘rituals’, have sublimated those very practices into an abstract material progress emanating from the economic practices of the entire nation represented as a vehicle on the move. Developed countries represented themselves, after recovering from World War II, as already moving at a fast clip and as living in a productionist and consumerist utopia. Underdeveloped countries like India, considered medieval, were represented as only beginning to move. They were to transfrom themselves into modern utopias through central planning andmassive projects such as dam building.     

The limits of India’s ethno-linguistic federation: Understanding the demise of Sikh nationalism

From 1984 until 1993, the Indian state of Punjab witnessed a sustained insurgency by Sikh militants campaigning for a separate sovereign state. This insurgency was ultimately defeated by the overwhelming use of security force that officially resulted in the deaths of 30,000 people. By the mid-1990s, a ‘normalcy’ had returned to Punjab politics, but the underlying issues which had fuelled the demand for separatism remain unaddressed. This paper examines critically the argument that India’s ethno-linguistic federation is exceptional in accommodating ethno-nationalist movements. By drawing on the Punjab case study, it argues that special considerations apply to the governance of peripheral regions (security, religion). Regional elites in these states struggle to build legitimacy because such legitimacy poses a threat to India’s nation and state-building. In short, India’s ethno-linguistic federation is only partially successful in managing ethno-linguistic demands in the peripheral Indian states.     

A Many-Cornered Thing: The Role of Heritage in Indian Nation-Building

Abstract

India is a large and extremely diverse multination state that is constantly faced with the challenge of maintaining its unity. In the past two decades the Hindu nationalist movement has become a significant factor in Indian politics, and has systematically leveraged heritage to create communal tensions. This has resulted in short-term political gain, but is also tied to longer-term goals of establishing a homogenously Hindu state in South Asia. This article argues that instead of being in decline, this movement is actually progressively expanding, and that the case of Ayodhya is only one part of a much larger programme in which heritage academics play a significant role, and that their collective actions will be pivotal to the future stability of the country.