Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror

This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with realism in its cynical disregard for stated intentions and insistence on the primacy of inter-state rivalry. It contains a theory of the postcolonial state as part of a wider international system based on class-conspiracy, wedding imperial interests to those of an indigenous elite, with little concern for preserving liberal norms of statehood. Hence we consider some forms of conspiracy theory a layperson’s theory of the capitalist state, which seeks to explain history with reference to global and domestic material forces, interests and structures shaping outcomes, irrespective of political actors’ stated intentions. While this approach may be problematic in its disregard for intentionality and ideology, its suspicion of the notion that the ‘War on Terror’ should be read morally as a battle between states and ‘non-state actors’ is understandable – especially when technological and political-economic changes have made the importance of impersonal economic forces driving towards permanent war more relevant than ever.     

Paradoxes of (dis)empowerment in the postcolony: women,culture and social capital in Ghana

Women’s empowerment discourses in Africa involve contradictory desires from women on one hand and society at large on the other. This article argues that the traditional validation mechanisms for women’s identities are crucial avenues for analysing both the conceptions and experiences of empowerment. Drawing on primary ethnographic data, I analyse paradoxes in women’s empowerment discourses in postcolonial Ghanaian societies, where neoliberal discourses thrive side-by-side with collectivist–socialist cultural ideals. Using an example of social capital, gained largely through mothering, I suggest that, because women’s relationships with capital are structured by local socio-cultural and global economic structures and relations, the theorisation and application of the concept of empowerment need to recognise the complicated relationships (with capital) that women negotiate on a daily basis.     

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.     

The Connotation and Logic of Embellish and Vilify in the Seventeen Year’s Literature Critic

Embellish and vilify is a normal standard in the seventeen year's literature critic. Embellish often means mistakenly embellishing the figures of the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeois, the feudalism and the Kuomintang reactionaries and US imperialism in literary works. On the other hand, vilify indicates vilifying the figures of peasant mass, soldiers of PLA, the CPC members and the new society etc. Firstly, the distorted embellished and vilified criticism exerts important effect on literature itself and the certain scope of writing is disciplined; therefore literary narration becomes a type of “passive narration”. Although the embellished and vilified criticism is against the historical and art reality, from the logic of politics, its application has certain sense of inevitability and rationality. Secondly, there exists logic in aspect of national cultural psychology. Finally, there is logic of emotion. The criticism pattern of embellishing and vilifying still has real warning function in the existing literature criticism practices.     

论创造性思维的重要性及其培养途径

提高全社会的创造性思维能力是当代中国在全球化时代全面加强理论创新、科技创新进而提高国际竞争力的重要任务。创造性思维的四个行之有效的培养途径是：保持反思与批判精神、正确对待思维异质性、扫除思维死角和正确对待非逻辑思维。     

马克思《博士论文》思想内涵探析——对自我意识觉醒与宗教批判的实质评述

《博士论文》作为公认的马克思终生思想的历史开端,是其早期的重要思想理论成果。马克思在进行相关理论研究时,主要是对德谟克里特和伊壁鸠鲁的自然哲学进行一定的对比,从而能够分析出他们之间的差别。伊壁鸠鲁的自然哲学理论更加能够促进自我意识觉醒,同时也能够实现对宗教的批判,在继承德国古典哲学自我意识并赋予了其以现实性的同时,拿起"否定"武器对德意志基督教进行了深刻批判。     

Haunted by the Lady Novelist: Metafictional Anxieties about Women's Writing from Northanger Abbey to The Carrie Diaries

This paper argues that the development of the identity of the professional woman writer as a ‘lady novelist’ in the mid-eighteenth century has had a lasting and detrimental impact on the status of women's writing that lingers through to the present, particularly in the critical discourse surrounding chick lit. The first part of this paper discusses the figure of the lady novelist and traces her centrality to criticisms of women's writing from the eighteenth century through to the twenty-first. The second part of this paper then examines the haunting presence of the lady novelist in the metafictional works of seven representative women writers: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), and Candace Bushnell's The Carrie Diaries (2010). By drawing a through-line that connects these texts, I argue for a renewed understanding of the ways in which Western women writers from the eighteenth century to the present are unified by a pervasive anxiety about being a ‘lady novelist’.     

在批判中创新——马克思主义哲学中国化进程的回溯与展望

马克思主义哲学在中国的传播、发展,与中国革命、建设、改革紧紧相连。中国马克思主义者秉承马克思主义哲学的批判精神,弘扬马克思主义哲学的理论批判、实践批判与自我批判精神,在批判中创新,以推进马克思主义哲学中国化进程的深入发展。科学发展观的提出,开辟了马克思主义哲学中国化的新境界。     

女性主义文学批评的走向——谈性别诗学的建构前提

对于女性主义文学批评的理论未来而言,性别诗学的建构具有十分重要的意义。本文围绕女性主义文学批评逐步走向理性与成熟、逐步实现诗学的转换、强化个性的文学写作方式与批评理念、逐渐改善女性的生存状况与文学现状、跨学科研究等方面,阐述了建构开放多元的性别诗学体系的必要前提,从而对女性主义文学批评的发展走向进行一些前瞻性思考。     

Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.