Calling Out the Persistence of Racism

In this issue New Political Science begins a new tradition, printing an extended review essay of the book that received the Michael Harrington Book Award at the most recent American Political Science Association Meeting. The Michael Harrington Award is given for an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarships can be used in the struggle for a better world. In 2011, the award went to Michelle Alexander for her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Color-Blindness. Sanford Schram, a member of the award committee, has contributed the below review.     

Making historical preservation in Chicago: discourse and spatiality in neo‐liberal times

This article examines an underground but emergent neo‐liberal initiative in US cities, historic preservation. A focus on Chicago's programme highlights this as a complex cultural project. The focus is on how narrativists of this programme use imagined mental spaces in discourse to constitute a programme‐ and neo‐liberal‐supporting cultural content for common consumption. The results suggst that this neo‐liberal programme offers elaborate renditions of spatially infused heroes, villains, victims and unmistakable forces that function as cultural frame. This constituting, the study concludes, is crucial to bolstering assertions about the importance of this programme and the need for neo‐liberal restructuring     

A Pacific Sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand Connection, 1941–2

Abstract

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging.