Contesting Ideologies: Deconstructing Racism in African-American Fiction

Baillie's article is concerned with how African-American fiction seeks to define and shape an aesthetic in opposition to racial ideologies as diffused through science, education and popular culture. In an examination of Count Joseph de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-5), it traces the construction of racialized discourse in nineteenth-century America. Baillie examines Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) in terms of Morrison's engagement with nineteenth-century racial theory and its implicit presence within ideologies of beauty and American popular culture of the 1930s. Through the figure of Shirley Temple, Morrison shows how the African-American community's internalization of cinematic images of beauty can lead to a psychosis that leaves identity fractured and the racial self all but erased. As well as reading The Bluest Eye as both a critique of scientific racism and as an historical novel in sustained debate with the cultural hegemony of the 1930s, Baillie examines its significance as a text in dialogue with the social and political milieu in which it was written. Here, The Bluest Eye becomes an intervention into the affirmative aesthetic of 1960s Black Power politics and its extreme proclamations of racial pride rooted firmly in black lower-class expression. She discusses the Black Power movement's appropriation of Frantz Fanon's theories and argues that Morrison's own articulation of a black identity eschews the nationalism of Black Power, and instead finds its focus in the political contestation of ideologies through the expression of African-American art forms. The Bluest Eye is an oppositional narrative that draws on western forms and yet privileges African-American vernacular as a counter-balance to language as a vehicle for ideologies of beauty and scientific racism.     

两岸投资争端解决机制的制度创新及其完善

投资争端解决机制是《海峡两岸投资保障和促进协议》（简称《两岸投资协议》）中体现两岸特色的重要制度创新之一。相较于传统双边投资协议中的投资争端解决机制而言,两岸投资争端解决机制除了引入两岸私人投资争端解决方式,还规定了投资者与投资所在地一方投资争端的协调、协处和调解等多元化机制,实现了单方规定的协议化和国际实践的两岸化,从而有效降低了两岸投资争端的“泛政治化”风险。未来,应进一步完善两岸投资补偿争端的调解程序,确保调解协议的法律约束力和执行力。     

连横《台湾通史》论析：基于学术史的考察

连横一生以搜集、记录、整理、保存、研究台湾历史和文化为职志,著述颇丰,尤以《台湾通史》名世。纵观《台湾通史》的出版史和相关研究的学术史,实与近代以来中国历史进程相契合,其独特的学术价值和现实意义也逐步彰显。20世纪90年代以来,海峡两岸的《台湾通史》研究均进入新的发展阶段,无论视角还是视野、方法还是理论,特别是在学术性或学理性上,都有显著的推进和拓展。     

大陆学界台湾史研究的宏观检讨

台湾史是一门兼具学术与政治意义的新兴特色学科。中国大陆的台湾史研究,从学科建设的角度来说,属于中国历史学的分支学科。从研究史的角度,对于60多年来大陆学界台湾史研究成果做一宏观性的检讨,具体分析各个不同时期台湾史研究的特点,剖析唯物史观与“台独”史观论争的典型事例,提出新的研究问题,展现新的研究趋向,将有助于推动台湾史研究的深入拓展。     

Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender,race, and sexuality

This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness.     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

The Body as Situation: A Darwinian Reading of The Second Sex

Challenging the influential view that the chapter on biology in the first volume of The Second Sex is exposing scientific myths in severe prose, in the view of this paper, the chapter is as much about scientific facts as it is an intriguingly open-ended dialogue between phenomenology and science. Beauvoir’s consuming epistemological and scientific preoccupation with the category of biology is analysed in a bid to advance a new, naturalist–feminist conception of Beauvoir’s theory of natural history. The analysis unravels the theoretical edifice, with its tensions between Beauvoir’s selective but brilliant appropriation of recent discoveries in evolutionary biology and genetics and certain deliberate rejections and omissions of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Contrary to Beauvoir’s intentions, she ends up conflating the term biology with, in particular, reproductive physiology, and perpetuating the ill-fated division between body and psyche. In contributing to a reformulation of an empirically grounded approach to the embodied mind and situated body, this paper debates some promising insights from contemporary neuroscience and primatology. These insights are critical to theory development, based on a non-anthropocentric stance and non-dualistic understanding of the mind–brain continuum and the body as a situation.     

Canadian Concerns of a Different Kind of Brexit: Britain’s First Application to the EEC and Canada’s Commonwealth Appeal

Recent debates on Brexit have made several attempts to connect the current situation with Britain’s first attempt to gain entry to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961. In both 2016 and 1961, questions were raised about what role the Commonwealth would take and how the relationship with Britain would adapt to their then-entry and current exit of a union with Europe. This article seeks to examine how Canada reacted to Britain’s decision to enter the EEC and sheds light on the vociferous opposition it raised within the Commonwealth. Using both British and Canadian cabinet minutes and Commonwealth memoranda, the article follows the Canadian campaign against British entry to the EEC and its fervent defence of the Commonwealth as an economic-focused community. Ultimately, the Canadian-led protest against British entry into the EEC derived from a fear that Britain would drift from the Commonwealth towards Europe, leading to the complete dissolution of the economic bonds that tie the community together.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">The Daily Show with Jon Stewart</Emphasis> and Audience Attitude Change During the 2004 Party Conventions

The intention of this analysis is to examine The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s coverage of politics and assess the persuasive power of the program’s unique brand of humor. Evidence from a content analysis of The Daily Show’s “Indecision 2004” coverage of the Democratic and Republican Party Conventions shows the program’s humor was much harsher during the Republican Convention than it was during the Democratic Convention. While the humor in both conventions was heavily based on self-deprecation and the exploitation of conventional political stereotypes, the ridicule of Republicans focused much more on policy and character flaws. Humor pointed toward Democrats, on the other hand, tended to focus more on innocuous physical attributes. Analysis of panel data collected by the National Annenberg Election Survey during the 2004 national party conventions shows that exposure to The Daily Show’s convention coverage was associated with increased negativity toward President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. These relationships remain significant even when controlling for partisan identification and ideology. Attitudes toward the Democratic ticket, John Kerry and John Edwards remained consistent.     

Last Thoughts on <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Last Intellectuals</Emphasis>

Over twenty years ago my book The Last Intellectuals put into circulation the phrase “public intellectual.” The term unexpectedly enjoyed great success. It encapsulated a new division between a professional or academic intellectual focused on his or her specialty and an intellectual orientated to a larger public. The former tend to disappear into the university, while they latter write for the educated public. In the twenty years since its publication, my book has been sharply challenged. Moreover the emergence of African-American and women intellectuals, and well as new developments such as Internet, have possibly undermined my thesis. Yet these phenomena amount to revisions, not refutations, of my thesis. Moreover the role of intellectuals in France and Germany suggest that the same process of academization is taking place in other advanced industrial nations. What is called for is not nostalgia or its opposite, a celebration of everything that happens, but a consideration of the real shifts that affect the lives and work of intellectuals.