Education for nonkilling creativity: a reconstructive–empowering approach

ABSTRACT

Paige (2002) affirmed that a ‘nonkilling society implies a disciplinary shift to nonkilling creativity’. Creativity is indispensable in the search for peaceful alternatives for the positive transformation of conflicts, inherent in human relationships. Creativity can help individuals to think and act peacefully, to find different alternatives to obstacles and problems, to face daily life challenges, and to be happier people. This article presents the Reconstructive–Empowering (REM) approach of peace education as a concrete proposal for implementing a nonkilling paradigm shift in education that facilitates the formation of a critical, active, creative, and peaceful nonkilling citizenship, capable of promoting social transformations toward a killing-free world.     

Nothing wasted: engaging values and the imagination. How can working with feminist speculative fictions enthuse and engage students with social justice and sustainability in an age of austerity?

In the context of contemporary higher education, post white paper, ‘Students at the heart of the system’ [BIS, 2011. Students at the heart of the system [online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf, (Accessed 5 Feb 2014), in which funding and commodification of learning and of students dominate university mission statements and agendas, it is crucial that we collaborate with our students to engage imagination and critical faculties with issues of value, and of social justice. Teaching and researching contemporary feminist speculative fictions and feminist critical practice offer a priceless opportunity to make a difference, to challenge the intellectual impoverishment that this new austerity brings with it. Learning and teaching research into threshold concepts and signature pedagogies combine here with feminist critical practice in a discussion of teaching two speculative fictions which engage criticality and values: Atwood [Atwood, 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese.) and Hopkinson [Hopkinson, 1996. A habit of waste. Skin folk. New York: Aspect, 183–202] each of which critiques flawed societies using tropes of waste, and rejection of difference. Each suggests recovery from damage done in the name of austerity, and imagines futures for the critical imagination, social justice, self-worth and agency.     

Loss and Longing: Emotional Responses to West Indian Soldiers during the First World War

Abstract

This article traces the place of black soldiers within British military history from the 18th century to the eve of the First World War. It shows how during the war, attitudes to and representations of West Indian volunteers reflected anxieties surrounding white male efficiency.     

Literature,trauma and the African moral imagination

Trauma theory claims to represent a ‘new mode of reading and of listening’, but its Eurocentric roots lead to the question of whether or not this approach is relevant in postcolonial contexts. This essay makes the case that engaging trauma theory through African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, mostly because of what it does for the former. African social thought, expressed through its writers and critics, allows us to refine and address crucial problems in trauma theory, including questions about the representation of trauma and strategies for trauma healing. African writers' deployment of images such as the railroad, which is closely linked with discourses of trauma and of modernism, illustrates how their works can reframe trauma studies from an African perspective. An appreciation of the continent's traumatogenic contexts, of writers' cultural resources and strategies for speaking to those contexts, and of the intrinsically transformational impulse of the African moral imagination, suggests that African literatures are grounded in the types of imaginative ‘re-membering practice[s]’ that promote recovery and healing from the destructive effects of trauma.     

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes,Sembene's machines,Mda's epistemological redness

In Chinua Achebe's book of essays Hopes and Impediments, he asserts that Nigeria's failure to ‘develop’ and ‘modernise’ like Japan is because of a ‘failure of imagination’. Yet for many Africans, modernity is a tainted ‘gift’ because it was introduced into the African continent along with European colonial capitalism which simultaneously caused an ontological crisis of self. Although many Africans want to ‘catch up’ with the West, how is it possible when Western technological superiority was equated with white racial superiority? Achebe declares that, as Africans ‘begin their journey into the strange, revolutionary world of modernization’, literature should function as guide. Hence, I examine Ousmane Sembene's novel God's Bits of Wood which depicts Africans laying claim to ‘race-less’, ‘language-less’ ‘machines’. But does (Western) technology change culture? Can African culture appropriate technology to form a dialectical African modernity? If so, what role does ‘tradition’ play? In Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, we witness the emergence of a traditional modernity made possible by a dialectical epistemology.     

Imagining the law and the constitution of societal order in Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker＇s 1965 ＂Crime and the Great Society＂ address

Legal scholar James Boyd White has challenged both lawyers and rhetoricians to imagine the law as an enterprise of language. In contending that members of the legal profession should see law as an activity of speech and imagination occurring in a social world, he has urged lawyers to view the legal profession as an interaction of authoritative texts and as a process of legal thought and argument instead of thinking of law as a technical system of regulations and applying its rules in a mechanical way. By asking members of the legal professional to consider law as rhetoric, White has encouraged them to recognize the socially constitutive nature of language, which runs contrary to a perspective of law as machine or, rather, the law as only a mechanistic system of rules and regulations. His ideas have inspired the ＂law and literature＂ movement, which has motivated other scholars to analyze the texts of judicial opinions, for example, according to White＇s theories. However, this essay takes White＇s concept of imagining the law and applies it public address and, specifically, to the 1965 ＂Crime and the Great Society＂ speech given by former Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker. Chief Parker＇s address reveals a vision for the City of Los Angeles in which Parker, himself, asks his audience of citizens and civic leaders to share for advancing a specific agenda for law enforcement＇s role in society.     

Understanding complicity: memory,hope and the imagination

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the thorny issue of complicity with wrongdoing under conditions of systemic political violence, such as authoritarianism, totalitarianism or military occupation. The challenge of dealing with collaborators – those who colluded with the apparatus of repression or who benefitted from its existence – is central to subsequent processes of justice and memory-making. This paper proposes several arguments. Firstly, it claims we need to think about complicity and resistance not dichotomically, but as a continuum of locations individuals can occupy. Secondly, these locations are influenced by the agents’ positionality within the social world, each agent being situated at the intersection of several axes of distinction: class, gender, racialisation, and religion, among others. Thirdly, to understand complicity we also need to draw a connection between individual’s experience of time and their actions: temporality is experienced from within a social position, through the interplay between memory, imagination and hope. Positionality thus affects one’s memories and self-understanding, the scope of one’s imagination, as well as the type and intensity of one’s hopes. Therefore, individuals’ capacity to build on the past to imagine a future, to invest emotionally in the future and act accordingly are interrelated aspects of their experience, which will influence how they navigate the muddy waters of systemic wrongdoing, more or less complicitly. To give concreteness to these three theoretical arguments, the paper discusses several forms of complicity with violence during the Vichy Regime in France.     

Deictic use as a threshold for imaginative thinking: a Peircean perspective

This investigation traces the ontogeny of the use of “I” and how its symbolic use promotes imaginative thinking. Peirce's triadic system is contrasted with Vygotsky's binary system to highlight the import of Thirdness in characterizing the ontogeny of person deictics within conversational roles. Person deictics, such as “I”, are first indexes. Later when their social function/meaning is apprehended, they serve as symbols as well; still later they are used psychologically in self to self monologues, and acquire distinctive interpretants when used unconventionally. Early indexical uses of “I” are non-symbolic – “I” referring to self only absent recognition of conversational roles. “I” is employed symbolically when its referent shifts and when its invariant meaning (speaker) is apprehended. Person deictics enhance the emergence of imagination when the symbolic use transcends their inter-psychological regulation through human to human conversation to their intra-psychological function in self to self discourse. Extension of functional roles (speaker/listener) to dolls/puppets (in representational play scenarios) constitutes an extended use of the symbolic function because inanimates cannot assume conversational roles; and such use triggers the association of different interpretants to the category of deictic use. The symbolic use of “I” as speaker facilitates apprehension of self as object, which is a major determinant of when in ontogeny children extend the use of person deictics from Dynamic to Final interpretants.     

The Moral Imaginary of Discourse Ethics

Abstract

The central claim of this essay is that Habermas' pro gram of discourse ethics fails to establish the necessary immanent connection between the universality of discourse ethics and the quasi-transcendentalism, which is supposed to provide its ground. Habermas' attempt to avoid the spectre of subjectivism leads him to develop an understanding of universalism that hinges on a critical error, the confusion of subjectivity with ethical sub stance. Using Castoriadis' theory of the imagination to illuminate this failure, I demonstrate the way in which Habermas' moral theory of discourse inadvertently harbours a moral-imaginary horizon, a pre-political kernel which undercuts its capacity to serve as a universalist ethic.     

走向文明的批评：现实与诗性之间——论埃·威尔逊的批评观

美国20世纪著名文学和社会批评家埃德蒙·威尔逊以不辍笔耕的半个世纪向公众展示了他独特的文学批评观.从早期的批评代表作品《阿克瑟尔的城堡》到后期的《走向芬兰车站》,威尔逊坚持认为文学批评是对一个民族文明发展轨迹的综合把握,这种综合是指文学批评的诗性、社会性和公共性的统一.只有这样,文学批评才能保持长久的生命力,才能更为有效地完成诠释文本、触动公众和服务社会的使命.