Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko's Chihi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyô, playful words and ludic gestures

A slim and yet powerful novella, Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008) helped the author, Kawakami Mieko, launch her career in the Japanese literary establishment by winning her the Akutagawa prize. The novella revolves around a middle-aged single-mother, struggling to eke out a living for herself and her teenage daughter as a bar hostess in Osaka. The bond between them is severely tested under the pressure of the precarious living conditions in the post-bubble, neo-liberalist Japan of the 2000s. This essay explores the absorbing and affective aspect of the novella by drawing on Rita Felski's ‘positive aesthetics’ and Bruno Latour's concept of ‘nonhuman actors’. With a focus on the movement of affect/feelings, the analysis traces how ‘non-human actors’ of all kinds and shapes in the novella, from the female characters, chatty style of speech in Osaka dialect, the kanji used in them, the protagonist's obsession with breasts, images of Higuchi Ichiyô, to a carton of eggs, interact and connect in a way that make a difference, facilitating innovative life-adjustments as the narrative unfolds – the reading which should, in turn, enhance our understanding and appreciation of the text.     

警察职业态度激励训练

警察职业态度是警察职业行为的心向,会影响警察的行为方式。警察职业态度激励训练旨在培养警察的责任与奉献以及由此而生的满足感,包括认知协调、自我激励、众人激励、集体任务、角色迁移及模拟实景等项目。     

Consuming Spaces: Clive Barker,William Gibson and the Cultural Poetics of Postmodern Fantasy

A significant trend emerges in contemporary fantasy-what might be called 'heterocosmic fantasy', as opposed to an older but still vital tradition of 'epic' high fantasy. The narrative forms of heterocosmic fantasy accord with the defining characteristics of contemporary media (particularly the Internet and contemporary television programming, and the practice of 'surfing' both of these), but this form of fantasy also rehearses certain ideological modes of behaviour. In particular, it rehearses in textual form the illusory alterity, the management of potential social unrest, and the frenetic consumption of 'late capitalist' society.     

Who am I? How is my Soul Stirred?

The key mythology for landscape and identity today is that of nation. The nation dreams itself, escapes from its sobriety or cruelty, from its banality, in the adulation of national moments. Affect is powerful in these evocations of the international landscape as a level playing field. Nations all have anthems. This paper investigates the evocation of place as home, so as to honour not the unquestioned devotion of patriotism, but rather the interrogation of that devotion and its worthiness. Through personal and particular instances, in this case concerning Australian identity, the ethics of heartscape and soulscape are invoked in the hope that reflection might point us towards ethical alternatives.     

Affect and Fairness in Economics

A strained relationship exists between mainstream economics and ethics. Over the last decade, behavioral economists have strongly argued for the importance of fairness in motivating behavior, based on substantial experimental evidence. Two main approaches to the modeling of fairness have been proposed: the outcome-based inequity aversion approach, and the intention-based reciprocity approach. Both approaches have been quite successful in explaining the experimental evidence. Nonetheless, this paper questions the role that is assigned to fairness in these models and the way fairness is incorporated, using recent experimental findings concerning emotions and fairness perceptions. The analysis supports the view that feelings are important for justice, also from a policy perspective, and pleads for closer attention being paid to the functioning of emotional brain systems.

Bad math: calculating bodily capacity in Cassils’s Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture

This article reads Cassils’ 2011 durational performance piece Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture alongside the messy arithmetic of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse in order to ask after the place of measurement within theories of bodily capacity and living labor.     

Vitalism's after-burn: The sense of Ana Mendieta

This article considers the influential work of Ana Mendieta. Focusing on her siluetas series, Muñoz describes Mendieta's art as performing a modality of brownness that leaves resonant indentions on the world, what he calls vital materialist after-burns. Mendieta's after-burns are read alongside the poet's of Négritude and their investment in a critical élan vital that speaks to the historical precariousness of dispossessed people. The artist's work is explained as a meditation on a critical brownness that is theorized as the sharing out of the unshareable, the invaluable and the incalculable.?Mendieta's intervention is ultimately described as the work of offering a brown sense of the world in which singularities flow into a politically enabling common.     

Untimely Economies of Survival

This article takes the recent turn against hope in breast cancer activism as a point of entry into a broader examination of speculative economies of science that creatively imagine, materialize, and manage futures in the present. It argues that untimeliness – anticipatory, simultaneous, porous, and prognostic in its articulation – captures these alternate arrangements of life and action as they are mobilized in cancer research that hails healthy women as experimental subjects to participate in clinical studies.     

Close Encounters: Solidarity,Servitude and Postcolonial Feminist Affects and Affiliations

Abstract

This essay offers close readings of three texts that in different ways foreground the problems, possibilities and struggle involved in forging affective connections across difference between women: Kate Clanchy, What is She Doing Here? 2008, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, 1991a and Marlene Van Niekerk, ‘Labour’, 2004. The author argues that the incomplete and partial nature of affective moments represented in these texts signals possibilities for a cautiously redefined idea of affective feminist solidarity as it is mobilized in the intimacy of domestic spaces.     

This stillness,this lack of incident: making conflict visible in West Papua

This article examines how the ongoing conflict in West Papua between state security forces and Papuan independence activists is made visible in activist social media postings in their attempts to draw attention to the violence, abuses, and problems in Indonesia’s easternmost province. The use of social media may provide new avenues for raising awareness about the conflict and its consequences. However, a social media strategy that contrasts the innocence and justness of the Papuan people with the violence and barbarity of other Indonesian peoples and the state risks entrenching established tropes which may serve to discourage broader support for West Papuan pleas for justice and independence.