Bourgeois Myth versus Media Poetry in Prime-time: Re-visiting Mark Frost and David Lynch's Twin Peaks

This article explores IVIark Frost and David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks from the perspective of the two dominant world-views it dramatized. The world-view based in bourgeois myth can be described as employing significations that are always present in naturally and mythically transcendent terms. The other world-view is generated by media poetry, which is a virtual mode of signification that re-mediates linguistic/audio/visual phenomena with contingent capacities for meaning. That generative potential for signification is an aspect of all media use, but media poetry specifically highlights and exploits the capacity of new multi-media to enhance “poetic” possibilities for meaning-making. This may occur through either the actual use of virtual media, through a critical ambiguity with regard to official ideologies and formal/generic con-straints, or through thematic content that destabilizes fixed meanings/representations and entertains possibilities for alternative significations. The article makes the case that the adolescent characters in the show specifically embody the productive world-view inherent in media poetry, and the “poetic” challenges they present to adult, mythic society allow for the continual re-mediation of any and all bourgeois myths. Those adolescents, especially Laura Palmer, embody cultural meanings that refuse ideological codification; that is, that can still become. Twin Peaks, as the article demonstrates, is a striking example of media poetry since it was aired on prime-time network television; it still deserves attention for the stunning ways it remediated the mythic nature of American, middle-class society.     

Strangers and Others: From Deconstruction to Hermeneutics

Abstract

It is not clear that "cultural recognition" should be a central goal of leftist politics. The idea that cultures have value simply by virtue of being cultures seems absurd, so it might be better to talk simply about eliminating prejudice and stigmatisation.     

Who is this we that gives the gift? Native American Political Theory and The Western Tradition

Abstract

The allocation of self-determination rights to minority groups is a highly charged issue around the world, but the difficulties are particularly acute in the case of indigenous peoples within the white settler states. While liberal multiculturalism offers a ‘solution’ to this ‘problem of diversity’ through a system of differentiated citizenship rights, this comes only at the expense of excluding dissenting voices from the intercultural dialogue. Through an engagement with the multi-faceted critique of liberal multiculturalism advanced by Native American political theory, the limits of the recognition paradigm are identified, and the possibilities offered by a reconstructed Proudhonian federalism are described.     

Nano‐Industry Operationalizations of “Responsibility”: Charting Diversity in the Enactment of Responsibility

The Collingridge dilemma—the problem of reacting to emerging technology either “too early” or “too late”—is one that is readily recognized by developers and promoters of nanotechnologies. One response can be found in the rise of a discourse of “responsible development” in the science and innovation policy landscape. While a number of commentators have discussed the potential of such initiatives, it remains unclear how responsible development is actually being configured “on the ground,” in private sector nanotechnology. This paper addresses this question by analyzing empirical engagements in Europe and the United States in order to map industry operationalizations of “responsibility” in these contexts. We show that a number of different articulations of “responsibility” are present, including as a response to public lack of trust and perceived public pressure, and as the management of risk. We close by relating these findings to the theoretical literature on responsibility, other contemporary accounts of the ways in which responsible development can be operationalized, and the possibilities that these articulations of responsibility may open up.     

高校高学历女教师角色压力及疏解

作为“传统的现代女人”,高校高学历女教师有着强烈的自我发展需求、主体意识和成就动机,但在沉重的学术压力面前她们更容易出现职业倦怠;作为“现代的传统女人”,未婚的高学历女教师往往面临“结构性剩余”的境地,已婚的高学历女教师则在事业与家庭之间做着“鱼与熊掌”的艰难选择。多种角色压力归根到底是由于传统社会期待与现代价值追求的冲突,疏解这些压力要全社会共同努力,推进社会性别文化的良性发展,高学历女教师也要对自我作理性认知,提高对不同角色的适应能力。     

Veni,vidi, vici: postcolonial studies comes of age

This review article offers a critical assessment of Ato Quayson's Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), engaging in passing with a debate between postcolonial theorists that appeared also in 2012 in the New Literary History (43.1 & 2). It posits that the History presents postcolonial literature, and indeed postcolonial studies, as much too settled fields, a view clearly at odds both with their genesis and with that reflected in the essays in NLH.     

African indigenous ecology control and sustainable community livelihood in southern African history

Abstract

Based on sources for African Indigenous Ecology Control and Sustainable Community Livelihood in Southern African history this article argues that political independence in the Southern African region has altered the historiography of the region and the African continent as a whole. Black Africans are now looking to the past for inspiration to constitute the foundations of sustainable livelihoods using their own indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and resources. The indicatives of the African Renaissance also demand that we draw on the significance of the control by pre-colonial African communities of their ecosystems. Existing testimonies show prosperity among pre-colonial African communities in the region. The argument is that, in order to restore the historical achievements of Africans in the region, IKS should form a constitutive part of education.     

Ubuntu. The missing link in the rights discourse in post-apartheid transformation in South Africa

ABSTRACT

A human rights discourse has been central to both the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa and the country's post-apartheid transformation. But in the drive to extend constitutionally mandated social and economic rights to all South Africans, the approach has had shortcomings. The current neo-liberal economic policy framework constrains policy choices and, in some instances, restricts fair adjudication of rights by the courts. The revival of notions of African Renaissance and indigenous ethnophilosophies, notably ubuntu, which shares the primacy of human dignity of a rights discourse, offers new perspectives. This article looks at the limitations of the human rights discourse and at how ubuntu, as a principled basis for judicial decision making, can contribute to the evolution of the rights discourse in South Africa and lead towards greater realisation of constitutional rights for all.     

The role of mathematics and scientific thought in Africa: A Renaissance perspective

ABSTRACT

This article examines the centrality of mathematics and scientific thought in the sociocultural, human and intellectual development of a sampling of African societies. Evidence is presented which refutes the theory that Africans had no ‘intelligible sense of numeracy’ before contact with the West, and demonstrates that the propagation of this myth was part of the larger colonial project to marginalise and ‘other-ise’ African knowledge systems. Tracing Africa's early contributions to mathematics and scientific thought forces a shift from the standard Western-based approach to pedagogy in this field. It renders a subject that is perceived and presented as alien to African culture, more accessible to African learners. And ultimately, acknowledging the long history of mathematics and scientific thought in Africa is a step in foregrounding African epistemologies in knowledge production, human and social development and towards the realisation of the African Renaissance.     

Knowledge free and ‘unfree’: Epistemic tensions in plant knowledge at the Cape in the 17th and 18 th centuries1

ABSTRACT

This article utilises the same epistemic objects, particular indigenous medicinal plants of the Cape region, to explore the gamut of epistemologies in contested, dynamic tension in the early Cape Colony: That of the frontiersman, the Khoikhoi, the Sonqua or Sankwe, and the slave. Drawing on a transdisciplinary set of literatures, the article puts Africana studies, the study of indigenous knowledge systems, and social studies of science and technology in wider conversation with each other, and argues for the adoption of an epistemic openness, methodologies which ‘braid’ seemingly separate strands of social history and differing knowledge practices, and cross-border collaboration among scholars of African and African diasporic knowledges. The findings and interpretation suggest new ways to view the ‘multiplexity’ of early indigenous southern African botanical, therapeutic and ecological knowledges, as well as the necessity for rethinking both the construction of colonial sciences and contemporary concerns about indigenous knowledge, biosciences and their 21^st century interaction.