“Clamoring Blood”: The Materiality of Belonging in Modern Ainu Identity

The tension between silence and vocalization, embrace and rejection, of Ainu ancestry has been a key factor in negotiating Ainu subjectivity since Ainu territories were colonized in 1869. As early as 1799, expressions of Ainu ethnicity were alternately cloaked and exaggerated as Japan vacillated between assimilation and segregation policies in eastern Hokkaido Ainu communities. Officially recognized as Japan's indigenous peoples in 2008, Ainu subjectivity has become increasingly politicized as the state and other stakeholders seek to define Ainu ethnicity for future legislation. Today Ainu belonging is frequently gauged by bodily metaphors of a vocalized blood. Cultural sensibility and blood are often conflated in Ainu discourses of identity: Ainu revivalists report that a sensation of “clamoring blood” (J: chi ga sawagu) inspires them to revisit ancestral memories and begin fashioning Ainu identities. Historically, intra-Ainu relations were not bound to blood but instead embodied in material expressions, such as invisible cords for women and crest-like emblems for men, symbols that enabled flexibility where needed. Since the twentieth century, the hyper focus on blood raises the specter of colonially imposed rhetorics of eugenics, assimilation policies, and specifically, the problem of race. Relatedness in the Ainu community is not exclusively defined by “consanguineal relations”; rather, a long history of adopting ethnic Japanese children and non-Ainu into Ainu families renders complex the question of identity. This article assesses how immutable notions of racial difference intersect with self-determination and current articulations of Ainu identity.     

论土地征用之公益目的性

公益目的性是土地征用制度合法性的基础 ,由于价值判断的多元性 ,对公共利益的理解千差万别。公共利益实际上并非纯粹抽象的概念 ,对其进行解释有可能性和现实必要性。我国应改变土地征用行为中由行政机关随意解释公共利益的制度设计     

Pacifying uncooperative carbon: examining the materiality of the carbon market

This paper scrutinizes how greenhouse gases are ‘pacified’ so that they can become tradable in the carbon markets. To advance the economization programme and other materialist frameworks, I argue that the existing literature does not pay enough attention to the diverse modes of carbon accounting and, in particular, carbon measurement – the most basic step – is overlooked and undertheorized. Drawing from the ‘critical metrology’ approach, I suggest that we need to take carbon’s diverse materialities seriously in the study of marketization processes. Some carbons are more cooperative than others. I, therefore, argue that it is important to conceptualize ‘pacification’ as a dynamic process that is mediated through materials of varying capacities as well as standards and technologies. The empirical case examined here concerns carbon measurement standards at coal-fired power plants – an ‘extreme case’ in the sense that coal is well-understood and relatively easy to measure. My findings indicate that, even for one of the most ‘cooperative’ carbons, measurement uncertainties are significant and pose challenges for the marketization of carbon emissions. While human actors work to cope with these uncertainties, the contours of the market are ultimately constrained by carbon’s materiality.     

The Sovereignty of Things: Nationalism and Its Materials in Mexican Photography (1920s–1940s)

The ubiquity of the artefact in Mexican photography needs to be understood as the locus of key originary concepts and as a point of purchase for metaphotographic reflexivity and not merely as an emblematic prop or decorative marginalia. The article discusses the way in which strategies of focus, composition and visualisation, along with the selection or ‘find’ of particular objects and materials, made palpable the abstractions of self‐hood and cultural singularity through the disclosure of form, light and texture. It considers how the practice of the close‐up itself became a cultural trope and how, paradoxically, the pursuit of sovereign objects and autochthonous production in modernist photography elicited a response that infringed visibility in favour of proximity.     

Introduction to queer circuits: Critical performance and digital praxis

This introduction situates the articles making up this special issue within four thematic clouds, positing queer theorization as broadly relevant for critically engaging with computational technologies and culture. These sub-themes offer suggestions for future queer inquiry and praxis and reflect key terms in performance studies and queer theory that have undergone transformation with the ubiquity of digital technology.     

Museums and Feminist Matters: Considerations of a Feminist Museology

This article speaks to a post-human feminist museology. It argues that considerations of a feminist museology would benefit from engaging with post-human feminist dialogues currently unfolding within academia. Dynamic political landscapes and global circumstances challenge dualist paradigms. Theorizations of museums are not exempt from these challenges. Critiques of androcentricity indicate that feminist theorizations have never fully centred on “the human”, but always already contextualized how we affect the world, and how the world affects us. Discussions in this article follow Barad’s agential-realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that shape our understandings in and of the world, and Haraway’s notion of diffraction that engages the material and re-tools recordings of object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that can be taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities possible. The article demonstrates that museological alternatives that emerge from conversations about entanglements not only aim to move beyond the paradigms they have been circling within for so long, but towards a re-thinking of museology and cultural heritage museums. Thus, considerations of a feminist post-human museology re-imagine museums as entangled becomings that make different possibilities possible.     

Materials and devices of the public: an introduction

Abstract

This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predominantly concerned with the fabrication of political subjects – we outline an approach that considers material engagement as a distinct mode of performing the public. The question, then, is how objects, devices, settings and materials acquire explicit political capacities, and how they serve to enact material participation as a specific public form. We discuss the connections between social studies of material participation and political theory, and define the contours of an empiricist approach to material publics, one that takes as its central cue that the values and criteria particular to these publics emerge as part of the process of their organization. Finally, we discuss four themes that connect the papers in this special section, namely their focus on (1) mundane technologies, (2) experimental devices and settings for material participation, (3) the dynamic of effort and comfort, and (4) the modes of containment and proliferation that characterize material publics.