“Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way”: imagination,agitation, and raging against the machine in Ali Smith’s Spring

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the third novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, Spring. Using Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics as a conceptual frame, I analyze Smith’s rendering of a Britain grappling with Brexit in times of transnational populism. As with Autumn and Winter, Smith’s prose is saturated with intertextual borrowings from pop and “high” culture, also interrogating the links between “nanoracism” and the “immunity and community” knot (Dillet). This paper reads Spring alongside Smith’s contribution to and advocacy of the Refugee Tales project regarding the diverse discourses surrounding migration, xenophobia, and indefinite detention. Smith’s writing traces the darkness of our populist present with its rhetorical and material violence, as well as the possibilities for creative response and resistance. I argue that her seasonal quartet to date and her work with Refugee Tales aesthetically and ethically defend the principle that human dignity, both individual and collective, rests on the ability to tell stories.     

Rejoinder

Abstract

Many of Mr. van Walt's criticisms are based solely on fabrications of his own making. For example, I am accused, twice, of referring to myself as a “scholar” and to my article as “scholarly.” I could find no trace of either. I am further accused of considering all Tibetan refugee accounts as “unreliable.” To be sure, I believe that one cannot base the study of historical events solely on refugee accounts, but that does not make all of these stories “unreliable.” After all, Dawa Norbu, a refugee himself, wrote in Red Star Over Tibet, “I never saw or heard of any case of misconduct by a Red soldier.” I would never argue that this statement was unreliable. We are further told that I refer to Tibetans as Chinese when in the second paragraph of my review I wrote, “… Tibetans [are] only one of 56 minority nationalities.” Chinese citizens yes, ethnic Hans no. A final example, although there are many more, is Mr. van Walt's attempt to attribute to me the opinion that

… the only importance to the Western academic world is that the situation in Tibet can teach us how to eliminate a “mystical religion” and that “it gives clues as to how Peking will integrate a capitalist Taiwan into a Communist China in the future”. (emphasis added)     

Farewell My Country? Hermannsburg,Gus Williams,and the Indigenised Heimatlied

This microhistory focuses on a little-known aspect of Indigenous musical life in the 1960s in the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission (now Ntaria) in Central Australia. I contemplate the possible meanings arising when Gus and Rhonda Williams translated the secular German Heimat- cum-Wanderlied [song of home-cum-wandering], “Ade du mein Heimatland”, [Farewell to you my homeland], into Arrarnta as “Ade pmara nukai” [Farewell my country], and “presenced Indigeneity” for a predominantly non-Indigenous, southern audience. I explore how a German song became “travelling culture”; how it was received and modified to suit both missionary and Indigenous purposes, in the process both expressing a vernacularised Arrarnta Lutheranism, as well as maintaining music’s vital role in Indigenous culture, including as a signifier of love of country. I further examine how the song could have a political meaning in the nascent land rights context of the day, as an assertion of attachment to country or “Indigenous Heimat” that could resonate back, across a cultural divide, with a non-Indigenous Lutheran audience.     

Debating Economic Democracy in South Korea: The Costs of Commensurability

ABSTRACT:

In the 2012 Korean presidential election, both liberal and conservative parties fought their campaigns on the slogan of “economic democratization,” marking a strong departure from past presidential elections and the growth-first policies of the then-incumbent conservative administration. Both parties pledged to tackle growing social polarization and the concentration of economic power by reforming the corporate governance of Korea's large, family-led conglomerates (chaebol), to the degree that chaebol reform itself became synonymous with economic democratization. This focus led to a series of heated exchanges among liberal-left reformers about the vision of economic democratization being promoted, with one camp favoring the creation of a “fair market” through the restructuring of the chaebol and another promoting the protection of the chaebol’s management rights over their affiliates as a desirable strategy for the creation of a Korean welfare state. This essay examines the long-standing tensions between these two liberal-left perspectives and argues that the capital-centric and market-based visions these camps promoted risk confining intellectual debate over the meaning of economic democracy within boundaries that serve dominant political interests.     

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.     

The system

Abstract

For me, the most splendid tribute to human dignity was something I saw on a mountain top in Peloponnesia. It was not a piece of sculpture or a flag, just the three Greek letters oxi meaning “no.”     

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.     

Book reviews

ABSTRACT

This essay looks at the figure of echolalia, the pathological repetition of someone else’s speech, to examine how Wicomb’s novel conceives of the formation of identity as an activity of speech in which the speaker is external to her own discourse. Speakers in this novel frequently disavow the agency and originality of their own voices as a way of distancing themselves from recent history. This disavowal of agency and culpability (“I didn’t vote for them,” etc.) paradoxically works to establish a subjective framework within which they can conceive of themselves as agentic individuals capable of social mobility through hard work. It ultimately argues that Wicomb’s novel offers an implicit rebuke to the politics of “the between” championed by many postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha. Moreover, Wicomb’s novel offers a formal response to a problem of subjectivity that has been too cleanly swept into the aesthetics of liminality and hybridity.     

The Mixed Temporalities of Transnationalism in Dreams of Speaking

This article explores the mixed temporalities inherent in Gail Jones’s treatment of transnational grief in Dreams of Speaking (2006). I examine the novel’s interests in modernity and temporality and show how the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, in the novel, creates grief that is shared across national boundaries. The novel explores the coexistence of the modern and the unmodern, and Jones exemplifies this in the spectral nature of grief; it haunts the two protagonists throughout Dreams of Speaking. This article reads the coexistence of modernity and the unmodern alongside the ways in which Japan unsettles Eurocentric notions of colonial modernity (with its insistence on shared temporalities of progress) by having been a colonial power as well as by undertaking substantial modernisation in the postwar period. I employ Harry Harootunian’s notion of “mixed temporalities” to show the transnational dimensions in the cross-cultural interaction this novel facilitates. I compare the novel’s treatment of the bomb, and of temporality, to Salvador Dalí’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954) and highlight the transnational sentiments in Jones’s treatments of the tropes of water and resonance.     

The rise and fall of “respectable” Spanish liberalism, 1808–1923: an explanatory framework

Abstract

The article focuses on the reasons behind both the consolidation of what I have termed “respectable” liberalism between the 1830s and the 1840s and its subsequent decline and fall between 1900 and 1923. In understanding both processes I study the links established between “respectable” liberals and propertied elites, the monarchy, and the Church. In the first phase these links served to consolidate the liberal polity. However, they also meant that many tenets of liberal ideology were compromised. Free elections were undermined by the operation of caciquismo, monarchs established a powerful position, and despite the Church hierarchy working with liberalism, the doctrine espoused by much of the Church was still shaped by the Counter-Reformation. Hence, “respectable” liberalism failed to achieve a popular social base. And the liberal order was increasingly denigrated as part of the corrupt “oligarchy” that ruled Spain. Worse still, between 1916 and 1923 the Church, monarch, and the propertied elite increasingly abandoned the liberal Monarchist Restoration. Hence when General Primo de Rivera launched his coup the rug was pulled from under the liberals’ feet and there was no one to cushion the fall.     

The Trouble with Newcomers: Women,Localism and the Politics of Surfing

ABSTRACT

In Australian surfing, localism is a practice through which surfers claim authority to protect their surf breaks and access to waves from newcomers and outsiders. While localism has been shown to be a central component of the cultural identities of men who surf, the relationships to and experiences of localism of women who surf have rarely been the subject of critical analysis. In this discussion, I build on Krista Comer’s use of “girl localism” to understand how effects of globalisation are experienced as place-specific by surfers. In this case, thinking about localism helps shift an analysis of how women surf from a sole focus on sex and gender, and away from cisgendered white women, to adopt a more intersectional approach that considers multiple aspects of women’s surfing subjectivities, and the ways these impact their surfing lives. Examining the politicised nature of localism in surfing reveals how women are affected by and complicit in surfing hierarchies, highlights how surfing is enmeshed in the settler politics of place in Australia and, suggests means by which surfers might make more ethical approaches to entering surfing places as newcomers.     

Obama's Pacific Pivot in US Grand Strategy: A Canadian Perspective

Abstract

This article explores the possible long-term trajectory of America's “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific and its implications for Canada's security policy. It shows that Obama's pivot represents the beginnings of a strategic choice on “selective primacy,” which, due to Washington's worrisome fiscal situation and push towards a more specialized force structure, promises to only deepen in the future. In the second half of the article, I examine how Canada will likely respond to America's more sustained strategic adjustment to the Pacific based on a reading of how the country traditionally adapts to American strategic preferences. The article concludes with some thoughts on an expanded Canadian effort at maritime diplomacy and the future of a Pacific-centric Royal Canadian Navy.     

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACT

This article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.     

The three colors of Novorossiya,or the Russian nationalist mythmaking of the Ukrainian crisis

While the annexation of Crimea boosted Putin's popularity at home, the Donbas insurgency shattered the domestic ideological status quo. The Kremlin's position appeared somehow hesitant, fostering the resentment of Russian nationalist circles that were hoping for a second annexation. In this article, I explore the term Novorossiya as a live mythmaking process orchestrated by different Russian nationalist circles to justify the Donbas insurgency. The powerful pull of Novorossiya rests on its dual meaning in announcing the birth of a New Russia geographically and metaphorically. It is both a promised land to be added to Russia and an anticipation of Russia's own transformation. As such, Novorossiya provides for an exceptional convergence of three underlying ideological paradigms – “red” (Soviet), “white” (Orthodox), and “brown” (Fascist). The Novorossiya storyline validates a new kind of geopolitical adventurism and blurs the boundaries, both territorial and imaginary, of the Russian state.     

Producing and Reproducing the 1992 Consensus: The Sociolinguistic Construction of the Political Economy of China-Taiwan Relations

Abstract

In the study of China-Taiwan relations, scholars view the so-called “1992 consensus” as essential to economic ties across the Taiwan Strait. However, such an argument overlooks the fact that the 1992 consensus was initially coined as a political formula concerning what “one China” meant. It was not until after 2008 that an economic logic was attached in a sociolinguistic way to the 1992 consensus by proponents of the 1992 consensus. Specifically, “1992ers” argued that China might sever cross-Strait economic ties should Taiwan reject the 1992 consensus. I thus argue that scholarly understandings about cross-Strait politics and/or economics are not unaffected by 1992ers’ interpretations. When 1992ers (re)interpret the 1992 consensus in economic terms, their discursive practices may change the intersubjective understandings about the cross-Strait political economy.     

Reflections on Schurmann's theory of the state

Abstract

Were Marx alive today he might be moved to comment on how quickly the next “revolution” materialized, that is to say, how quickly certain disciples of his, like Lenin and Stalin, substituted political organization and the power of the state for the proletariat as the agency of revolution. Perhaps Marx would recognize that the state merited more attention than he gave it, for in this century it seems clear that state power has functioned more autonomously than Marx implied in order to preserve capitalism, by ameliorating its fundamental contradictions; and to put off, even pervert, that socialist revolution which originally envisioned the proletariat assuming the central, world-historical role. In recent years Marxist critics have been filling this lacuna in Marxism with a profusion of writings on the role of the state in its absolutist, capitalist, and socialist variants. It was into this milieu that Franz Schurmann stepped with his Logic of World Power, containing within it a “theory of the state” that I find both interesting and flawed, a theory that offers much to the current debate on the role of the state, and yet one that has been largely ignored by Marxists and non-Marxists alike.     

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.     

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.