Idle musical community: Dischord Records and anarchic DIY practice

Originally formed in 1980 to document the Teen Idle’s Minor Disturbance EP, Dischord Records has continued to document and support the local Washington, DC, hardcore punk music scene for over three decades through an anarchic Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic. Dischord’s DIY ethic affords a manner of music documentation, in contrast to production, and community formation that reconfigures the space of dominant commercial production and exchange. Dischord’s business practices, such as forming agreements with bands via handshake instead of legal contract, allow the label to resist consumerism and exploitation of both artists and audiences while fostering a creative space, where profit does not dictate the sound of the music or produce a commodified musical product. Ultimately, Dischord’s political potential is in its ethics to the extent that anarchic DIY practice constitutes a sort of inoperative community of circulation rather than production and profit. The implications of these practices relate to the ways in which music constitutes social and communal relations and its radical possibility of reconfiguring a space outside of commercial exchanges, whether in the political sphere or in the digital realm.     

Destruction,Narrative and the Excess of Uniqueness: Reading Cavarero on Violence and Narration

In this article, I critically engage Adriana Cavarero’s account of uniqueness via an analysis of her work on narrativity and violence. I suggest there is an ambivalence in Cavarero’s account of uniqueness: Cavarero argues both that uniqueness is susceptible to destruction, and that it cannot finally be annihilated. To make this clear I use Cavarero’s account to read a narrative offered by Miklós Nyiszli, of a woman who survived an Auschwitz gas chamber. I contrast this to Cavarero’s reading of Eurydice and Orpheus, arguing that the ambivalence in Cavarero’s account can be resolved by thinking an excess proper to uniqueness.     

Asakusa ‘Newtown’: the transformation of outcaste space in early modern Edo/modern Tokyo

This paper examines the historical transformation of urban outcaste areas into commoner neighbourhoods in early modern/modern Japan. Focusing on Tokyo's largest early modern outcaste community, an Asakusa area referred to as Shinchō (literally ‘Newtown’), the paper argues that a combination of factors, namely the historical processes of urbanization, status group consolidation, labour specialization, capital accumulation, and inter-status group network creation, created an elite stratum of neighbourhood residents who were reasonably well-integrated into the broader social and economic landscape of Edo by the late Tokugawa period. This movement towards desegregation in turn laid important foundations for the later administrative and conceptual incorporation of the Shinchō area into the broader metropolitan area. Wide-ranging entrepreneurial activities by members of this elite class in the early Meiji period further built on and propelled these changes although they also facilitated their eventual exodus from the community. Proto-capitalist development, however, while clearly capable of inducing an emancipatory effect for some key elites figures and while enabling the neighbourhood itself to become more closely identified with an emerging working class Asakusa, also worked to create a substratum of people subjected to a compounded form of discrimination that took place along both traditional status and newly emerging modern capitalistic lines.     

(Re)Embracing Islam in Neidi: the ‘Xinjiang Class’ and the dynamics of Uyghur ethno-national identity

This Xinjiang Class is a four-year, national-level boarding school program established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the year 2000. The overarching aim of the program is clear: the CCP intends to train a core group of young Uyghurs who have internalized the ideals of the Party. This article, which is based on interviews and regular interaction with over 60 graduates of the Xinjiang Class, casts doubt on whether the boarding schools have been effective in ‘interpellating’ young Uyghurs as compliant members of the Chinese Nation (Zhonghua minzu). This article contends that Uyghur graduates of the Xinjiang Class have instead embraced a non-Chinese ethno-national identity—an identity bound by Central Asian and Islamic cultural norms—and have largely rejected the Zhonghua minzu identity.     

Interventionism by Design or Failure: The Coalition and Humanitarian Intervention

The Coalition took office in 2010 in what seemed to be a relatively benign foreign policy environment. Since then, the international environment has become far more treacherous and the government has considered war on humanitarian grounds on three occasions. In light of the silence of early Coalition documents on humanitarian intervention, together with the two parties’ different positions on the issue, this article assesses the extent to which the Coalition has adopted a distinctive approach to humanitarian intervention. In so doing, it evaluates the relative importance of Conservative and Liberal Democrat traditions in determining the direction of Coalition foreign policy. The article also considers whether there are other, more pertinent factors driving foreign policy, and offers an explanation for its relative isolation from coalition tensions. It concludes by reflecting on the likely future of humanitarian intervention after the May 2015 general election.