This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

In South Africa, race has been subverted by the fall of official apartheid. Specifically, the “invisibilization” of black others is overturned and white-black relationality problematized, thereby deeply troubling whiteness. However, the logic of race continues to reverberate through social relations against a global backdrop in which this category proves remarkably adaptable as purveyor of inequality. The end of official apartheid is not the end of the power effects of the apartheid discourse. The postapartheid field is a site of contestation (...) over previously normalized hierarchies, including over gender and class. Applying a discourse analysis to texts generated in research interviews with respondents who self-identified as women, white, Afrikaans-speaking, and middle class, this study finds attempts at re-securing race. First, the strategy of “elision and misattribution” seeks to recuperate apartheid's racial binaries to bolster present-day whiteness. Second, “intersectional shifting” of social markers aims at ameliorating the secondary status of femininity through the wielding of whiteness and middle classness. These strategies are complicated by affective practices. Particularly the social emotion shame holds transformative potential, but with a caveat. Shame brings self into relation with the other and the social and can usher white subjects into an expanded conception of being human, but only if acknowledged. (shrink)

This article considers the role of beauty in Costa Rican sex work. In the context of sex tourism, beauty operates as affective labour performed by sex workers, labour that is mediated by deeply contradictory understandings of race and nation. Theorising beauty as a form of affective labour means thinking about beauty as value, as something that circulates, can be exchanged and is ultimately relational. While Costa Rica's national mythology has long focused on claims to white origins, sex tourists identify (...) local women's ‘exoticism’ and non-whiteness as particularly appealing. Commercial sex does not simply depend on an imperial male gaze, but rather requires us to consider how particular national mythologies about race are linked to ideals of attractiveness in complex ways. I also explore how women experience and manage their sexual attractiveness to foreign tourists in their daily lives and work. (shrink)

South Africa's transition to democracy coincided and interlinked with massive global shifts, including the fall of communism and the rise of western capitalist triumphalism. Late capitalism operates through paradoxical global-local dynamics, both universalising identities and expanding local particularities. The erstwhile hegemonic identity of apartheid, 'the Afrikaner', was a product of Afrikaner nationalism. Like other identities, it was spatially organised, with Afrikaner nationalism projecting its imagined community onto a national territory. The study traces the neo-nationalist spatial permutations of 'the Afrikaner', following (...) Massey's understanding of space as political, produced through interrelations ranging from the global to micro intimacies, potentially a sphere for heterogeneous co-existence, and continuously created. Research is presented that shows a neo-nationalist revival of ethnic privileges in a defensive version of Hall's 'return to the local'. Although Afrikaner nationalism's territorial claims to a nation state were defeated, neo-nationalist remnants reclaim a purchase on white Afrikaans identities, albeit in shrunken territories. This phenomenon is, here, called Afrikaner enclave nationalism. Drawing on a global revamping of race as a category of social subjugation, a strategy is deployed that is here called 'inward migration'. These dynamics produce a privatised micro-apartheid in sites ranging from homes, to commercial and religious enterprises, to suburbs. Virtual white spaces in the form of Afrikaans media products serve as extensions of these whitened locales. The lynchpin holding it all together is the heteronormative, middle-class family, with consumption the primary mode of the generation of its white comfort zones. (shrink)

Agrifood scholars have long investigated the relationship between farm size and a wide variety of social and ecological outcomes. Yet neither this scholarship nor the extensive research on farmworkers has addressed the relationship between farm size and job quality for hired workers. Moreover, although this question has not been systematically investigated, many advocates, popular food writers, and documentaries appear to have the answer—portraying precarious work as common on large farms and nonexistent on small farms. In this paper, we take on (...) this question by describing and explaining the relationship between farm size and job quality for hired farm workers. To do so, we draw on data from two independently conducted, mixed-methods case studies—organic fruit and vegetable production in California, and dairy farming in Wisconsin—each of which offers a different set of insights into the farm size-job quality relationship. In both cases, larger farms fared better than or no worse than their smaller-scale counterparts for most job quality metrics investigated, though many of the advantages of working on large farms accrue disproportionately to white, U.S.-born workers. We explain that these patterns stem from economies of scale, industrialization, firm size itself, the dominant class identities and aspirations of farmers and their peers, as well as farmers’ and immigrant workers’ fears of immigration enforcement. (shrink)

In fall 1844, a party of colonists led by William Keil arrived at what was to become their new home, a gentle slope rising from the bank of the North River in Shelby County, Missouri, about forty-five miles west of Hannibal. One year later the utopian Bethel Colony had been laid out, houses were being added as fast as they could be built, and construction of a steam-powered gristmill was under way.The Bethel colonists were Bible Communists who found the (...) inspiration for their communal life in the book of Acts, which records that in the Early Church "as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds and laid them at the apostles' feet; and distribution was made to each as any had need"... (shrink)

Domestic violence is endemic across Latin America. It is legitimated by patriarchal Christian theologies and widespread gender inequality. Drawing on the work of women theologians and activists working in Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere, this article explores women's networks of resistance against violence. These include public and legal acknowledgement of domestic violence; the transmission of life-affirming values; pastoral support in the denouncement of violence; and the development of open and fluid household structures.

Depression is a widespread concern in the United States. Neuromodulation treatments are becoming more common but there is emerging concern for racial disparities in neuromodulation treatment utilization. This study focuses on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a treatment for depression, and the structural and attitudinal barriers that racialized individuals face in accessing it. In January 2023 participants from the Twin Cities, Minnesota engaged in focus groups, coupled with an educational video intervention. Individuals self identified as non-white who had no previous (...) TMS exposure but had tried at least one treatment for their depression. Results revealed that the intervention did not notably change knowledge or stigma about TMS, but attitudes surrounding traveling for treatment changed. Notably, barriers like affordability, frequency of treatment, and lack of knowledge persist. Participants expressed a desire for more information, personal connection, and a tailored educational approach. The study suggests a need for multifaceted strategies to reduce disparities, focusing on education, community-based resources, and policy interventions. Immediate actions that can be taken include the creation of a TMS education program focused on patient engagement and awareness about TMS. (shrink)

White matter tracts are known to be susceptible to injury following concussion. The objective of this study was to determine whether contact play in sport could alter white matter metabolite levels in female varsity athletes independent of changes induced by long-term exercise. Metabolite levels were measured by single voxel proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the prefrontal white matter at the beginning and end of season in contact and non-contact varsity athletes. Sedentary women were scanned once, at a (...) time equivalent to the Off-Season time point. Metabolite levels in non-contact athletes did not change over a season of play, or differ from age matched sedentary women except that non-contact athletes had a slightly lower myo-inositol level. The contact athletes had lower levels of myo-inositol and glutamate, and higher levels of glutamine compared to both sedentary women and non-contact athletes. Lower levels of myo-inositol in non-contact athletes compared to sedentary women indicates long-term exercise may alter glial cell profiles in these athletes. The metabolite differences observed between contact and non-contact athletes suggest that non-contact athletes should not be used as controls in studies of concussion in high-impact sports because repetitive impacts from physical contact can alter white matter metabolite level profiles. It is imperative to use athletes engaged in the same contact sport as controls to ensure a matched metabolite profile at baseline. (shrink)

In this article, Christi van der Westhuizen's sociopolitical contribution in her publication, Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa, is reviewed. In light of the official end of apartheid in 1994, South Africans are attempting to define a new identity. Van der Westhuizen's publication focusses on how the identity of white Afrikaans women, as both the oppressor and the oppressed, influences and contributes to the endeavour of a search for new identity. In deconstructing and re-imagining new (...) identity, Van der Westhuizen deconstructs the 'supporting scaffolding' of Afrikaner identity and examines the impact of white patriarchal hegemony that silences the voice of women, sexual minorities and black consciousness. The review concludes with the emphasis on the transformative role of shame, that is, the willingness to expose the false sense of goodness that we had of ourselves, as pointed out by Van der Westhuizen. In this regard, the recognition of the intersectionality of people's experiences becomes a key aspect of the endeavour of a search for new identity. (shrink)

The Mississippi River flows through American history and culture as a mythic waterway brimming with tragedy and hope, and awash in passionate ambitions and harsh realities. In 1953, a young Charles Dee Sharp traveled twice down the Mississippi to make a documentary film of it, taking black-and-white photographs of the river, its communities, and its people. While Sharp’s documentary never came to fruition, the striking images he captured survived as moving and evocative historical testaments to a lost (...) era, now collected in his new book The Mississippi in 1953. These images create a vivid portrait of America’s heartland a half century ago, and they are enriched with excerpts from Sharp’s original trip journal, intriguing anecdotes from the people he encountered along his journey, and an engaging environmental history of the river by historian John O. Anfinson. The Mississippi in 1953 offers an original and poignant look at the living artery of the American landscape and how it molded the United States into the nation it is today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 51-56 [Access article in PDF] KarraKarrawirraparri-River Red Gum-Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Vivonne Thwaites [Figures]Karra was a visual arts project devised for the 2000 Adelaide Festival in Australia. Its focus was the River Red Gum, quite justifiably an Australian icon, and once the most widespread tree in south eastern Australia. The project comprised an installation by three artists and a forty-page publication with essays (...) and visual material from many contributors.The intention of the project (which I developed and oversaw as curator) was twofold. First, I hoped that an examination of the River Red Gum from a number of points of view might help people connect with the tree itself, and more broadly with this place non-Aboriginal Australians so uneasily inhabit. Second, given the tree's central place in Australia's inland waterways, I wanted the art to help people consider the urgent problems facing this ecosystem, such as increased salinity, diminished water flow and environmental degradation. This subject had particular relevance for South Australians, as our state is so dependent on the Murray-Darling River system. For example, in February 1999 the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation published a media release on "Salt: Australia's Greatest Battle," declaring that we stand to lose a large fraction of our native biodiversity to salinity, and that native tress "remain the front line answer." [End Page 51]Behind the Festival Centre lies the River Torrens and the Adelaide Plains. Along the river are several gnarled old trees, River Red Gums, some of them predating white settlement and bearing the scars of Aboriginal timber collecting activities. The media was full of stories about the way these trees were still being cut down along the Murray further out, regardless of their proven value in filtering water and reducing salinity. The theme of the 2000 Festival was "The New Out of the Old," and it seemed that a project about the relevance of these beautiful old trees would help educate and inspire. We found the subject for the Festival project right in our own backyard.Once committed to the subject, research could begin. First up was the tree's Aboriginal history. The Kaurna people, original inhabitants of the Adelaide Plains, called it Karra or more fully, Karrawirraparri (literally 'redgum-forest-river'). The tree was central to their lives as source of food and shelter, and supplier of timber for shields and other implements. There are incised shields of Red Gum in the South Australian Museum, and delicate drawings of the tree by Jim Kite. The tree's place in Australia's white history can be traced back to explorer's journals where, variously named, it was described as a welcome sign of the presence of a watercourse. More recently it appears in the natural history writing of Eric Rolls and others (Rolls 2002). Ironically the tree's botanical name, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, originated in 1832, when a botanist admired and named a single specimen grown by monks outside Naples, Italy. The eucalyptus was already spreading in 1832.Early in the research it became clear that the Red Gum tree, and the complex set of natural and cultural interactions it engendered, could be seen as a symbol of human interactions with the land in Australia. The tree was much discussed and much loved by Australians, but also much abused. It seemed that bringing together different systems of understanding and representation of the tree could help contemporary urban Australians begin to understand their own connections to it, and to the land as well. This was the broader cultural agenda of the project.Preparing the art exhibition required a wide reading of literature. Les Murray's poem, "The Gum Forest," one of the greatest 20th - century Australian poems, was inspirational: After the last gapped wire on a post, homecoming for me, to enter the gum forest. (1998, 33) [End Page 52] [Begin Page 54]So too was Murray Bail's book Eucalyptus: By sheer numbers there's always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the... (shrink)

Building on their important findings in The Source of the River, the authors now probe even more deeply into minority underachievement at the college level. Taming the River examines the academic and social dynamics of different ethnic groups during the first two years of college. Focusing on racial differences in academic performance, the book identifies the causes of students' divergent grades and levels of personal satisfaction with their institutions. Using survey data collected from twenty-eight selective colleges and universities, (...) Taming the River considers all facets of student life, including who students date, what fields they major in, which sports they play, and how they perceive their own social and economic backgrounds. The book explores how black and Latino students experience pressures stemming from campus racial climate and "stereotype threat"--when students underperform because of anxieties tied to existing negative stereotypes. Describing the relationship between grade performance and stereotype threat, the book shows how this link is reinforced by institutional practices of affirmative action. The authors also indicate that when certain variables are controlled, minority students earn the same grades, express the same college satisfaction, and remain in school at the same rates as white students. A powerful look at how educational policies unfold in America's universities, Taming the River sheds light on the social and racial factors influencing student success. (shrink)

Over the course of the 19th century, several campaigns in African territories led by white European or North-American scientists, explorers, entrepreneurs, or military officials have been transposed into travelogues where different stages of imperialism and colonialist presences are portrayed. While most of the approaches to these writings tend to favor a post-colonial framework for the interpretation of the interactions depicted there, it is also possible to employ a critical apparatus modeled after the recent developments in the field of the (...) environmental humanities. In this essay, I discuss how Slavoj Žižek’s contributions to the debates around the ideas of nature, ecology, and global capitalism have the potential to deepen our understanding of colonial regimes of oppression, serving as a powerful tool to explore processes of world-making involved in the imperial projects developing over the course of the 19th century. To do so, I propose a close reading of several instances of the travel book Angola and the River Congo, by Joachim John Monteiro, focusing on the entanglements between the human and non-human agencies, vegetable landscapes and extractive transnational economies, and the articulation of racism and scientific projects in the Angolan territory. (shrink)

Inspired by and responding to Avtar Brah's ‘The Scent of Memory’, this piece attempts to reinscribe race into an auto-ethnographic narrative where previously whiteness was unmarked. It explores the dynamics of gender, race and class through the author's personal history as a white English woman and class migrant, and through discussion of the broader political and historical context of that trajectory. The discussion includes analysis of the impact of British Conservative politician Enoch Powell's infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in (...) 1968 on the author's white English working-class culture of origin in Wolverhampton, where Powell was a Member of Parliament. The article considers the speech's continuing ramifications in the twenty-first century and in more middle-class contexts, as evidenced by the recent evocation of the speech by historian David Starkey in discussion of the ‘riots’ of August 2011 in British cities. The personal history is reconstructed through a series of memory scenes that trace and retrace the author's experience and understanding of race and its intersections with class and gender; this is attempted in full cognisance of the constructed nature of memory, and of the performance of identity that autobiography entails. The piece draws on the work of the class migrant white French writer Annie Ernaux, with whom the author has been in dialogue since 1997. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 15.2 (2007) 177-179MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Reviewed byLise Vaugeois University of TorontoHildegard C. Froehlich, Sociology for Music Teachers:Perspectives for Practice (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007)Hildegard Froehlich's book, Sociology for Music Teachers, provides an important and much needed resource for undergraduate and advanced music education programs. Music students tend to see their interests and goals within a narrow framework, one that (...) is reinforced by the intensely personal nature of music-making as well as the material and psychological separation that inheres from our location in physically detached faculties of music. Froehlich's book provides a resource that directly addresses this tendency towards narrowness by inviting students to engage with sociological questions as they affect us personally, professionally, and in the context of questions much larger than ourselves.The book is organized into eight chapters, each of which explores a particular set of questions and introduces related studies and resources. She recommends that students actively engage with the material and provides suggestions for group discussion throughout the book. Each chapter introduces a comprehensive survey of related questions and the body of literature that investigates these questions. Thus, it can be used as the basis to structure an undergraduate course as well as a literature guide for graduate students.Undergraduate students are often resistant to exploring ideas beyond their [End Page 177] immediate conceptions of themselves as musicians and Froehlich addresses this resistance by discussing concepts about identity formation in the first chapter. Students are thus asked to consider a series of questions they can easily recognize as relevant to their own lives. She begins with the personal and the familiar and then brings in ideas that broaden the range of inquiry, gradually introducing concepts that challenge many of our assumptions about the meaning of music in different people's lives; the range of meanings possible within sounds and musical practices; the role of public education and various ways that music education functions within this larger system, and important questions about how we might conceive of ourselves as transmitters of extant cultural values or transformers of values and social relations.The chapter headings give an indication of the range of material introduced in her text: "The Performer and Teacher in You: A Matter of Identity"; "Teaching as Work: What Educational Sociologists Tell Us"; "Music Learning and Teaching as Socially Situated Acts"; "Music and Social Context: Macro, Micro, and Interactive Perspectives in Selected Texts on the Sociology of Music"; "Musical Meaning and Social Context: Thoughts by Selected Ethnomusicologists and Cultural Theorists"; "Sociology of Education: Major Theories and Their Connection to School Practice"; "Application of Sociological Constructs in Education to Music Schooling"; "Conclusion: You and the Big Picture." Each chapter gives a historical survey of the literature pertaining to the area of inquiry plus an introduction to contemporary writing. Competing discourses are introduced throughout.Froehlich's survey of disciplines that intersect with sociology is quite comprehensive. Amongst other disciplines, she includes foundational literature from musicology, philosophy of music education, sociology of education, and social psychology. The book is thus valuable as a resource for its bibliography alone. She also includes a glossary of terms, another feature that makes the book particularly helpful to undergraduate students. One writer I was surprised not to see included is Jacques Attali. His theoretical arguments on the relations of musical culture to economy provide a significant lens for considering the influence of music on social development and would have been an appropriate addition to the chapter on "Music and Social Context." I also missed work by musicologists and human geographers who have explored the role of race in music and music education.Related to these missing discourses, I have a major concern that is less a critique of Froehlich than an acknowledgement that this position has not yet been given sufficient consideration in our field, and to which Deborah Bradley refers as the "normative centering of whiteness."1 Froehlich bases her work on the assumption that her audience consists of a... (shrink)

This article explores the potential applications of feminist pedagogy to the lived experience of weekly preaching from the perspective of a young, white, cis female, heterosexual faith community leader. When privilege is both obvious, but authority is simultaneously presumed and challenged based on historical constructs of theological role and presentation of gender, the act of preaching becomes a site of resistance. This article then discusses the act of homiletics – the art of interpretive storytelling, history teaching, persuasive speech, and (...) spiritual performance – as informed by a feminist perspective. Does the pulpit present a bridge or barrier where gender is concerned? The physical act of preaching can represent an in-moment incarnating of a role, a historical step in a long-flowing river, and a psychological break point of self-erasure. This article posits that a thoughtful application of feminist pedagogy might dismantle these unspoken rules of the trade and create an opportunity for preaching as an act of resistance. (shrink)

In a period of high definition, photorealism, and postmodern deconstruction the experience of art making, its theory, and its art itself have drifted away from some understandable connection to the process of art creation as a connection to some psychologically deep inspiration. Abstract art as conceived and practiced by Wassily Kandinsky, which included in his later stage beyond representation or abstractions of representation jumbled gatherings of biomorphs with no connection to representation may be compared to the White Shaman rock (...) art panel with its gathering of seemingly abstract geometric images as well as transformed representational imagery, much like the related Fate Bell Shelter rock art and Three Rivers Petroglyphs. Kandinsky would claim his expressed abstractions are prompted by his psyche. The artist or artists of the White Shaman panel of the lower Pecos River operated under transformed consciousness and Shamanism. Kandinsky’s “unconscious, spontaneous expression” and “expression... of inner feeling” may be compared to the probably hallucinogenic connection to the other world in the White Shaman panel. Such connections and abstractions and transformations could be related to the “total theater” of Diaghilev and the contemporary rave dances in which consciousness is heightened by sensory overload. The cybernetic capacity of the computer age has worked in another direction and even “objectified” consciousness itself. (shrink)

In his essay, "Fine-Tuning and Multiple Universes", Roger White examines the extent to which a multiple-universe hypothesis lessens the ’surprisingness’ that our universe should be life-sustaining. White offers two main conclusions. His first conclusion -- that the existence of our world is not itself evidence for the existence of multiple universes -- is sound. However, his second conclusion is that, on the hypothesis that multiple universes exist, the further hypothesis of an intelligent designer does not lesson the surprisingness (...) that our universe should be life-permitting. This second conclusion, which would undercut most design arguments, is shown to rest on a mistake. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 12, 2013 (10:49 am) C:\WPdata\TYPE3202\russell 32,2 062 red.wpd 1 [For document sources and the pseudonyms used, see the entries in D.4 of the Malleson bibliography in this issue. The Wrst is under “Hemma Hos br”.z—zK.B.] 2 [Russell had given Malleson directions: “Festiniog is 3 miles from Blaenau Festiniog, along the road to Port Madoc; our cottage is a quarter of a mile from Festiniog, towards Port Madoc; the (...) inn, the Pengwern Arms, is at our end of the village. You would not Wnd our cottage on any map, but you might Wnd Bryn Llewelyn, a big house next door. Festiniog is on a ridge between two mountain streams, the Teigl and the Cynval” (24 Aug. 1948, ra3 596.200860). Find it at 52 57N32.17ON, 3 56N29.04OW on Google Earth.] 3 [Russell’s later secretary, Christopher Farley, attended the evacuated school.] russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 32 (winter 2012–13): 161–9 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ocuments THREE PORTRAITS OF BERTRAND RUSSELL AT HOME1 Constance Malleson i.w“bertrand russell at home” (1949) A ysage in ancient times once said that the best and wisest men love ythe ymountains and the sea. So it is perhaps not surprising to Wnd yEngland’s ygreat philosopher, Bertrand Russell, living in a little grey stone cottage on the side of a mountain and within sight of the sea. At a bend in a steep road, you suddenly come upon it: a typically Welsh looking place, for it is situated not far from the village of Llan Ffestiniogz—zin North Wales. It is small-scale country, this north-western corner of Merioneth: small steep hills; small glistening-green oak woods; small compact purple mountains (about 2,000 feet high). Ffestiniog village stands upon a ridge with a deep valley on either side; and a river, with white churning waterfalls, in each valley. From the grey stone terrace in front of Russell’s cottage, the whole Vale of Ffestiniog opens out to the shining estuary and the sea.2 The terrace has three tall, clipped, very prim looking bay trees; and all the cottage’s eight windows and two doors open out onto it; and Russell will tell you (with a lightly sardonic tone in his voice) that there were originally six trees, but that A.yS. Neill’s small scholars cut down three of them. (A.yS. Neill’s famous “experimental” school was evacuated here during the war.3 ) While Russell is himself an advocate of a very great deal of freedom in education, he thinks it is a pity if small children grow up without any knowledge whatever in their heads. At the western end of the terrace, the cottage has a projecting wing and it is January 12, 2013 (10:49 am) C:\WPdata\TYPE3202\russell 32,2 062 red.wpd 162 constance malleson 4 [B.yH. Liddell Hart (1895–1970). Conrad Russell recalled him visiting in “Shaking OT the Family Curse” (interview), The Independent on Sunday, 13 June 1999, pp. 16–17.] 5 [Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars of England Begun in the Year 1641, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1704). The copy is still in Russell’s library.] 6 [It was the unique Doves type that T.yJ. Cobden-Sanderson disposed of in this way in 1916. He died in 1923. Many Doves Press publications remain in Russell’s library.] 7 [1817–1857. Finnish book collector.] 8 [The book was on loan to Russell from Malleson. She later sent a wedding oTering of what is probably the same copy to the Editor and his wife.] 9 [One such stone jar, with a screw-on top, is in ra.] there that Russell’s own small son, Conrad, age twelve, has his bedroom. Its walls are covered with delightful, large, coloured, historical maps of the world; and it once happened that, when the famous military expert of The Times, Liddell Hart,4 was visiting Russell and holding forth about some very remote and little known place, Conrad piped up and corrected him... (shrink)

Este artigo tece considerações sobre antinegritude e a distingue do racismo, expondo a falsa universalidade do Social e do Humano: o racismo ocorre no Social entre os Humanos, enquanto a antinegritude continuamente expulsa os negros e a negritude dessas categorias modernas fundamentais cujas definições derivam da expulsão violenta. Para delinear a discussão, o artigo analisa dois textos paradigmáticos que se esforçam para lidar intransigentemente com a antinegritude, mas através da linguagem do racismo: George Yancey, Who Is White? e "The (...) Combahee River Collective Statement." O artigo conclui sugerindo a necessidade de um salto de invenção fanoniano e uma abrangente abolição. (shrink)

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies to explore the connections between narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, and colonial (...) narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement—an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity—I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Protagonist Aster’s neuroqueer refusal indexes the concomitance of the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that will, unless repurposed, continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics. (shrink)

In considering the historical treatment of Aboriginal Australians this paper will discuss the different spaces operating in Western Australia’s South West in the late 1920s and the government policies that fed into them. These are the Moore River Native Settlement that is located some 100 km north of Perth and White City, a carnival sideshow located at the bottom of William Street on the banks of the Swan River in Perth. The 1905 Aborigines Act and a provision (...) within that act known as the Proclamation of the Prohibited Area of Perth will be discussed. This will be done by comparing the ways that White City was seen by the government in the 1920s and how in recent years Northbridge has been regulated and discursively constructed. The intent is to look at how Aboriginal people have been treated over time and consider the social, historical and political forces that have shaped that construction. (shrink)

The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”—a precursor to “intersectionality”— was introduced in a social movement context by the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in pamphlet form in 1977. Addressing Black lesbians’ and feminists’ experiences of invisibility within white male-dominated New Left and socialist politics, male-dominated civil rights, Black nationalist, and Black radical organizing, and white-dominated women’s liberation and lesbian feminist movements, the CRC argues for an “integrated analysis and practice” of struggle against “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class (...) oppression” (CRC 1977/1981/1983, 210). I argue the CRC articulates and problematizes sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows racialized lesbian visibility and resists the tendency to “heterosexualize” women of color feminisms. I delineate three aspects of the concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”: its attentiveness to the phenomenological simultaneity of multiple oppressions; its synthesis of identity politics and coalition politics; its immanent critique of socialist concepts of class and class struggle. While some accounts of “intersectionality”—the now-predominant way of referencing the multiplicity of identities and oppressions—tend to reproduce a race-gender dyad (or a race-gender-class triad), the CRC notably articulates sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows lesbian visibility and thereby enables contemporary readers to resist the tendency to “heterosexualise” intersectionality—and women of colour feminisms more generally. (shrink)

The feminization of agriculture narrative has been reproduced in development literature as an oversimplified metric of empowerment through changes in women’s labor and managerial roles with little attention to individuals’ heterogeneous livelihoods. Grounded in feminist political ecology, we sought to critically understand how labor and managerial feminization interact with changing agricultural practices. Working with a local NGO as part of an international, donor-funded research-for-development project, we conducted semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation with over 100 farmers in Mid-Western (...) Nepal in 2017. Household structure and headship are dynamic in the context of male out-migration, pushing women to take on new agricultural duties and increasing household labor responsibilities. In this context, decision-making processes related to agricultural management and new cultivation practices illustrate ongoing renegotiations of gender and cultivation practices within and beyond the household. We contend that the heterogeneity of household power dynamics muddies the empowering impacts of migration and emphasize the importance of community spaces as a locus of subjectivity formation and social value. We conclude that FPE can illuminate complexities of power, space, and individual responses to socio-ecological conditions that challenge the current feminization of agriculture framework. (shrink)

Walt Disney’s movie, The Pagemaster (1994) begins on a dark and stormy night, with a young boy stumbling into an immense, gothic-styled library for refuge from the rain. Once inside, he is soon carried away by a tumultuous river of coloured paints, transformed into an animated characterization of himself, and thrust into an animated world of literature, where he battles Captain Hook, flees Moby Dick, and participates in other classic tales of adventure, horror, and fantasy. -/- Adults might understand (...) the film as a fanciful description of how they feel when reading a lively book. Although they would probably not imagine themselves tagging along with the animated characters like a 4th musketeer, they might very well claim that they enter a fiction through the viewpoint of one or more of the characters, experiencing, imaginatively, mental images of the sights, sounds, smells, and movements that the character would experience. Under this description, the reader would be forming multi- modal images that would correspond directly to what the literary characters are doing, thinking, and experiencing. When a fictional hero whips out his sword and slashes a rope in half, the reader might form a visual image of the hero’s determined face, an auditory image of the sound of the whizzing sword, and a motor image of an extended arm movement. I call such an imitative participation, by use of mental images in any modality, a simulation. -/- I suggest that this imitative experiencing of a fiction through the production of multi-modal imagery - a simulation - is not the only way in which readers might engage a literary text. In this paper I explore the hypothesis that readers might use their own bodily processes - those of the somato-viscero-motor system (SVM) for a non-imitative activity that I call a reinterpretation and that the reinterpretation might make a distinctive contribution to the reading process. As an example of a simulation and a reinterpretation, take the SVM experience of the reader’s breathing. A simulation would occur if the text describes a character who is taking deep breaths of air and the reader creates a mental image representing the experience of breathing. In this case, the reader’s mental image of breathing would stand for a property of the literary work - the fictional experience of breathing. -/- By contrast to the simulation, a reinterpretation would occur if the text describes a character who is gazing at long, wispy clouds that extend outward from a horizon and the reader uses his own experience of breathing to stand for the visual sense of looking at a long, continuous expanse of filmy white: the reader’s actual breathing would stand for a property of the literary work - the fictional experience of seeing. Breathing is not the same as seeing. This should help clarify the following definition. -/- I hypothesize that a reinterpretation occurs when the reader becomes aware of some component of the SVM system and reinterprets it as a property of the literary work that is not the same as that particular SVM process. The SVM experience is projected into the literary work. (shrink)

This study delves into the porcelain calligraphy and painting of the Ming and Qing dynasties, aiming to uncover the spiritual and cultural narratives encapsulated in these artistic expressions. During these eras, marked by the zenith of Chinese porcelain artistry, the incorporation of religious motifs was not merely decorative but a profound reflection of the prevailing religious beliefs, cultural norms, and aesthetic inclinations of the time. This paper conducts a deep analysis of the religious elements manifested in Ming and Qing dynasty (...) porcelain artworks, exploring how these elements articulate religious devotion, mirror cultural practices, and influence artistic transformations. Through detailed appreciation and interpretation of three exemplary cases—Yongle blue and white entwined flowers, Jiajing blue and white road Fu Yunhe large plate, and a blue and white seawater river cliff pattern three-legged furnace—this study reveals how these works serve as conduits for spiritual reflection and cultural transmission. Each piece not only embodies the religious and philosophical zeitgeist of its era but also highlights the dynamic interplay between art and societal evolution, thus underscoring the multifaceted roles ancient religious art plays in perpetuating cultural heritage, enchanting viewers with its artistic allure, and reflecting broader social transformations. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . (shrink)

In Polish historiography on radio in the Stalinist period, the official propaganda broadcast by Polish Radio is very often juxtaposed with the free and unbiased broadcasting of Radio Free Europe (RFE), which can create the impression that RFE was the only source of information in Poland and tends to diminish the importance of Polish Radio. In fact, both broadcasting institutions were crucial players in Cold War warfare, which was described by George F. Kennan in terms of Clausewitz's “fog of war.” (...) Indeed, both RFE and Polish Radio were listening to each other through the Iron Curtain because “white propaganda” (along with the intelligence obtained from political refugees) was one of the most important sources of information. The two broadcasting stations were more alike than we are willing to admit. For instance, the Polish section of RFE mimicked the post-war strategy of Polish Radio. While the latter pretended to be the continuation and successor of the pre-war institution, RFE's propaganda shaped the programme of Polish Radio for many years. Using this case study on RFE's attitude toward Poland's western borders along the Odra and Nysa Rivers, I show how these two opposing broadcasting stations functioned within an endless propaganda feedback loop. (shrink)

A fluent and accurate new translation of the dialogue that, all of Plato's works, has seemed to speak most directly to the interests of contemporary analytical philosophers. White's extensive introduction explores the dialogue's center themes, its connection with related discussions in other dialogues, and its implication for the interpretation of Plato's metaphysics.

Blended social impact investment transactions, in which multiple types of capital are combined to support attainment of social impact, are a pervasive, yet not closely examined, feature of the SII market. This paper seeks to describe and understand blended SII transactions through the lens of institutional theory. Specifically, we use the institutional logics theoretical frame to shed light on the implications of combining several institutional logics in SII transactions. Consistent with other SII research, we find that parties to blended SII (...) transactions combine financial/commercial and social welfare logics. However, in blended SII transactions, different combinations of these logics are enacted by different stakeholders in a multi-hybrid-logic structure. As such, we propose that blended SII transactions are hybrids-of-hybrids. We argue that it is this hybrids-of-hybrid characteristic that differentiates blended SII transactions from other forms of SII and increases the potential for significant logical misalignment and resultant conflict and contestation. From a business ethics perspective, blended SII transactions cast light on the critical and often unrecognized role that grants and concessionary capital frequently play in enabling SII in not-for-profit, charitable ventures. We speculate that this can distort understanding of SII with adverse implications at the transaction and field levels. (shrink)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo investigar a noção de corpo no pensamento do filósofo alemão Friedrich Nietzsche, mais especificamente a partir de uma leitura de alguns temas presentes na II Dissertação da Genealogia da Moral, basilares para se mobilizar tal noção. Dentre as questões elencadas encontram-se o papel da consciência, a memória, o esquecimento, o sentimento de culpa e a figura do criminoso que, partindo-se da leitura a que nos propomos, podem ser de fundamental importância para se pensar o (...) corpo em Nietzsche. (shrink)

Agonism emerged three decades ago as an assault on the overemphasis in political theory on justice and consensus. It has now become the norm. But its character and relation to core values of democracy are not as unproblematic today as is often thought, an issue that becomes more pressing as contemporary politics increasingly seem locked into notions of unrelenting conflict between “friends” and “enemies.” This essay traces alternative ontological roots and ethical implications of agonism, distinguishing between “imperializing” and “tempered” modes. (...) The former, exemplified in the popular Schmitt-Mouffe formulation, is shown to be fundamentally flawed in its failure to conceive politics in a fashion that does not allow the dynamic of friend–enemy to imperially trump appeals to democratic norms. In a world of insurgent white nationalism in democratic polities, this is no small fault. “Tempered” agonists, such as William Connolly and Bonnie Honig, offer ontologies where democratic norms can gain traction. Despite the admirable qualities of these alternatives, their formulations are nevertheless not fully persuasive. The difficulty lies in their underarticulated accounts of equality. I suggest an alternative formulation of agonism that embraces a central role for the idea of the moral equality of voice, a value that resides in the seam between notions of difference, resistance, and conflict emphasized by agonists, on the one hand, and the idea of fairness emphasized by notions of democratic justice, on the other. (shrink)

We agree with Penn et al. that our human cognitive superiority derives from our exceptional relational ability. We far exceed other species in our ability to grasp analogies and to combine relations into higher-order structures (Gentner 2003). However, we argue here that possession of an elaborated symbol system is necessary to make our relational capacity operational.

This chapter provides a critical reflection on an ethnographic approach led by a non-Indigenous researcher in partnership with an Indigenous community-controlled health organization, and a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous supervisors, advisors, critical friends, and mentors. The chapter explores the way the three interrelated principles of Indigenist research informed the study, as a critical reflection of the methodology’s achievement of a decolonizing research agenda. The flow of Maiwah provides a metaphor for the chapter’s diverse authorship. Maiwah’s tributaries, inlets, and banks (...) represent author voices at different points while the one River flowing represents coming together to form a broader collective story of the research that still respects the authors’ individual positioning. Maiwah’s flow also signifies the dialogical approach of the research – “tricky ground” for non-Indigenous researchers seeking to privilege Indigenous voices while remaining accountable to their own White privilege, particularly given that at its most basic level, research requires the “extraction of ideas” from participants. Yet, the flow of Maiwah also shows us the possibilities of research, where in this case, researcher and participants together cocreated new knowledge in support of their agendas. This process enabled both research outcomes and increased research capacity and confidence in the host agency and researcher. On this account, decolonizing research is perhaps more about relationship and devolving control over the process than it is about particular methods, and the respectful negotiation of epistemological meanings and representation of particular knowledges that can result. (shrink)

Recent downward trends in corporate giving have renewed interest in the factors that shape corporate philanthropy. This paper examines the relationships between charitable contributions, firm size and industry. Improvements over previous studies include an IRS data base that covers a much broader range of firm sizes and industries as compared to previous studies and estimation using an instrumental variable technique that explicitly addresses potential simultaneity between charitable contributions and profitability. Important findings provide evidence of a cubic relationship between charitable giving (...) and firm size and evidence of strong industry effects. The plus-minus-plus regression coefficient sign pattern for the cubic firm size model suggests that small and large firms give more relative to total receipts with lower giving ratios among medium size firms. One interpretation for this finding is that small firms are close to the communities they serve while high visibility creates a need for large firm philanthropy. Strong industry effects provide evidence of inter-industry differences in giving culture and/or different public relations requirements across industries. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.Increased interest in the experience of space in literature in recent decades has resulted in numerous commentaries on such topics as colonial space, geographical space, gendered space, liminal space, psychic space, and signifying space. (...) In fact, Con Coroneos suggests that Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”1 considers as many as forty different types of space.2Conrad studies have not been silent during this... (shrink)