Imported sound, Imported Style

Drawing on Joseph Kosuth’s characterisation of the artist as an engaged anthropologist, Maet argues that nowadays we can consider visual artists, such as Xu Bing, Takashi Murakami and Shahzia Sikander, as artist-anthropologists who express and research how cultural imagination is affected by globalisation. First, in line with De Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, the author stresses the relativity of the cultural references that are present in their artworks. Because the considered artists cut across the divisions between different cultural expressions of art, he argues that they bring an enlarged modernisation process into view, called global modernity. Next, the article elaborates on the connotations of signifiers. The author maintains that Xu Bing, Murakami and Sikander play with forms of cultural expressions, as well as with the cultural connotations attached to them, and that in doing so they create a new cultural imagination. Finally, the discussed artworks are typified as balancing acts respecting different cultural influences. In reference to Papastergiadis, this is interpreted as an aesthetic cosmopolitanism and it is argued that the discussed artists respect aesthetic and cultural limits to enable this ethical stance.

Reviewed by: Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, and: Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women James Deutsch Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. By Timothy Rice. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii + 119, glossaries, references, 26 black-and-white photographs, 2 maps, music CD.) Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women. By Aida Vidan. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv +273, glossary, references, 1 black-and-white photograph.) In 1396, the last independent remnant of Bulgaria was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, and sixty-seven years later the Kingdom of Bosnia suffered a similar fate. For the next several centuries, until 1878, these two states—along with the rest of the Balkan Peninsula—remained under Ottoman rule, each absorbing some aspects of Turkish culture while also maintaining many aspects of their distinctive cultural identities. Indeed, so distinct are the differing cultures in this region that the word Balkanization was created to characterize the existence of small, often mutually hostile states. Because of its rich history and cultural influences, the folk music of the Balkans has been the subject of considerable scholarship during the past one hundred years. Two recently published books, intended for very different audiences, help shed additional light on the heritage and significance of the folk music and song from this region and will be of interest to ethnomusicologists and folklorists. Music in Bulgaria is part of the Global Music Series, edited by Bonnie C. Wade and Patricia Shehan Campbell, which provides volumes of case studies—some devoted to countries (e.g., Bulgaria, Ireland, Japan), some examining multinational regions (e.g., East Africa, West Africa), and some focusing on more specific districts or cultures (e.g., Bali, North India, South India). The aim of the series is to provide in-depth examinations of world music for students and teachers in a new format. Instead of text-books that survey the subject broadly, these case studies, authored by experts in the field and usually accompanied by a music CD, allow for more detailed and illustrative explorations. Having studied Bulgarian music since 1969, Timothy Rice, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, is one such expert. He has numerous publications on the topic to his credit, and, perhaps of equal importance, he has passed muster within Bulgaria. While attending a village dance in 1973, Rice was interrogated by a Bulgarian who demanded to know what he was doing there. Rice described the research that he, as an American with no Slavic ancestry, was doing but then was contradicted by the villager, who insisted, "You speak Bulgarian and you dance Bulgarian. Therefore you are a Bulgarian" (p. 44). Written in the first person, Music in Bulgaria offers a discerning tour of Bulgaria's musical landscape. Individual chapters are devoted to wedding music, the music of seasonal and religious rituals, the rise of professional folkloric troupes and ensembles in Bulgaria, the appropriation of Bulgarian music by foreigners (most notably illustrated by the melodies and choral music in the television show Xena, Warrior Princess), and the contemporary phenomenon of popfolk (a Bulgarian word for the new musical genre that combines elements of Greek, Macedonian, Rom, Serbian, and Turkish popular music with traces of Bulgarian traditional music). Rice writes clearly and insightfully, and his text is aided immensely by the accompanying CD, which contains thirty-eight tracks and roughly seventy minutes of music that is cited in the volume. Each track is accompanied by at least one listening activity, some of which may require a familiarity with the music (e.g., to identify the different sounds of the Bulgarian instruments—gaida, kaval, gŭdulka, and tŭpan—and then to note the additive meter of [End Page 501] 2+2+2+3). With the assistance of the instructor, these activities should be excellent learning tools. For several of the tracks, Rice assists the reader by providing both musical notations and lyrics (including both the Bulgarian and the English translation), though unfortunately not for any examples of popfolk. Knowing the lyrics of these songs (which Rice only summarizes) would have helped the reader better understand...

Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score has maintained exceptional cultural and clinical influence since its publication in 2014, remaining a best-seller and shaping public discourse on trauma. Its central claims - that trauma causes lasting neurobiological damage and that body-based treatments are uniquely effective - have been widely embraced but seldom subjected to systematic critical evaluation in peer-reviewed literature. This commentary synthesises the evidentiary basis for these claims as a counterweight to an influential narrative. It situates these findings within broader discussions of neuroscience framing, cultural appeal and evidence-based communication, underscoring the need for rigorous, balanced engagement with widely disseminated mental health narratives.

“The magnitude of the legal violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria” writes Jill Jarvis at the start of this book, “is such that only aesthetic works, in particular, literature, have been able to register its enduring effects” (2). Literature has the capacity to “register the traces of the disappeared in ways that provoke disturbance, unsettlement, pain, anger, and movement” (3); aesthetic works “move in an elusive, anarchival relationship to the power of the nation-state and its laws” (173). The introduction already offers a fine illustration of what Jarvis has in mind, as she deftly tracks the meanings and emotions echoing through Assia Djebar’s uses of cris, écris, and various cognates and homophones in the first pages of L’amour, la fantasia (1985), where Djebar describes how the French fleet, with an eye on something like “memory,” arrived not only with obliterating force but with painters and engravers ready to glorify its work. In Djebar’s literary world, other perspectives are restored, or imagined; the reader is asked “to submit to becoming a vessel for anguished, indecipherable voices that arrive, insistent and disturbing, from another place and another time—like ghosts” (22).Jarvis emphasizes at the outset that “postcolonial francophone memory, testimony, and trauma studies” continue to be “oriented by cartographies, textualities, and temporalities that implicitly center French experiences and narratives of decolonization” (13). Even “the ‘multidirectional’ memory paradigm,” though it has been very fruitful in recent years, has reflected a critical orientation in which wide-ranging vectors appear to lead back toward the French metropole, so that the “tangled knots” of memory that come into clearest focus also tend to be those located within or indelibly connected to French cultural spaces and public spheres, while aesthetic works addressed to other audiences or in Algerian and African languages other than French have largely fallen outside the scope of consideration. (13)Of course, if you—like Jarvis, and like me—work in “francophone literary studies,” perhaps outside France but in a French department or program, and if “French” has become partially detached from France but still means a specific language and its cultural materials, then you may hope that the “linguistic partitions” that come with the territory need not always “replicate a colonialist enterprise” (13). Nevertheless, Jarvis makes a strong case for the benefits of comparativism and multilingual materials, for anyone trying to vault away mentally from their own starting point.Jarvis’s principal example of an originally non-French-language text is Waciny Laredj’s novel Sayyidat al-maqām (The Wings of the Queen [1993], translated into French by Marcel Bois as Les ailes de la reine [2009]), whose testimonial force is investigated in chapter 4. It is perhaps in the first chapter, however, that her decolonial, multidirectional project is pursued most powerfully. “Remnants of Muslims,” reworking an essay that won New Literary History’s Ralph Cohen Prize, scrutinizes and contextualizes the use of the term Muselmann in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo sacer, placed in dialogue with Zahia Rahmani’s autofictional trilogy, Moze (2003), “Musulman” roman (2005), and France, récit d’une enfance (2006). Many of us, when reading Agamben’s text, must have been struck by the oddness not only of the term itself, reportedly used at Auschwitz to describe prisoners in the most abject state, but also by the way Agamben adopts it; yet few critics (with exceptions including Gil Anidjar and Fethi Benslama) have given this double anomaly the attention it deserves. Jarvis’s wide-ranging critique is at once dogged and imaginative, and makes it uncomfortably clear how recklessly Agamben deployed the term. The “ready ease” with which the “Oriental” is associated with suffering and lack of dignity, in Agamben’s work as well as in the histories and discourses on which he drew, “suggests that the word musulman already signified not-quite-living or not-quite-human when it assumed its new status as a camp epithet” (41). The juridical use of musulman as a category in colonial Algeria has particular importance here for Jarvis; she notes Patrick Weil’s point that for legal purposes, even Algerian converts to Catholicism were “Muslims,” an example that underscores how deeply racialized and hierarchical the term was in colonial usage, and how little it had to do with religious belief or practice.The chapter is eerily effective in bringing out strange reverberations and coincidences around imagery—and memories—of drowning, involving Rahmani’s father (accused of being a former harki), Primo Levi’s I sommersi e i salvati (1986; The Drowned and the Saved), and the massacre of “Muslim” anticolonial protesters in Paris in October 1961, at the time of the Eichmann trial—where the camp survivor and author Yechiel Dinur “referred to the ‘Muselmänner’ of Auschwitz just before fainting in the courtroom” (44). The capaciousness of the term memory as backdrop to this sort of comparativism is characteristic of much of the work done by those of us who write about colonial histories (and other histories) but are not primarily historians. A quick summary may risk making these juxtapositions and connections sound hasty or tenuous; behind them lie elusive questions about the relationship between individual and “cultural” memory, and about the historical transmission of worldviews across countries and cultures. Perhaps this is an advantage of the term anarchive, whose occasional usage in this book is influenced by Lia Brozgal’s recent work around the 1961 massacre: it avoids some of the problems of trying to locate “cultural memory” or track its dissemination, and conceives of literature (and film, and so on) as an oblique and unruly resource for memory, as much as or more than memory’s embodiment. But in any case, the details of Jarvis’s argument are compelling and carried me with her, supporting that foundational claim that literary texts like Rahmani’s—and, in turn, literary-critical work such as Jarvis’s—can cast new light on transnational histories and imagined temporalities that link and divide us.A more specific historical question raised by Jarvis’s terms of analysis is the precise role and relative importance of the legal system in colonialism. How far and in what ways did French law in the colonies, and in Algeria in particular, reflect, or help create, colonial ideologies? Did it serve colonialism consistently? To come at the issue from another angle, how important is the word legal in Decolonizing Memory’s opening assertion about the “[legal] violence exercised by the French to colonize and occupy Algeria”? Jarvis uses the word plaint repeatedly, perhaps because it can be a legal term (an accusation or charge), but isn’t always; and because in its more general sense, as a complaint or lament, it is, according to my dictionary, “mainly literary.” Perhaps, then, law is better understood here as a guiding theme than a conceptual or historical framework. At moments, nonetheless, I felt that the analysis would have been strengthened by more detailed consideration of the legal framework in colonial Algeria, and by providing more information about it for those of us who lack expertise in that area. Jarvis moots the possibility that “the French penal code was never designed to protect Algerian lives, but only to disappear and destroy them” (77), but she also notes that some of the texts on which she focuses attempted—albeit unsuccessfully, and without much hope of success—“to legally force the state to abide by its own codes and agreements” (68). At that point, perhaps there is more to say about the role that the Geneva Conventions played, or failed to play, but they are mentioned only very briefly. Later Jarvis quotes Fadhma Amrouche’s reflections on her mother’s precarious circumstances when, unmarried, she gave birth to Fadhma in Kabylie in 1886: “Avant la domination française la justice était expéditive; les parents menaient la fautive dans un champ où ils l’abattaient. . . . Mais en ce temps-là, la justice française luttait contre ces mœurs trop rudes. Et ma mère eut recours à elle” (Amrouche 25; “Before French conquest, justice was expeditious; family members led the offender into a field where they killed her. . . . But in those days, French law was fighting against these brutal customs. And my mother had recourse to it”; Jarvis, her own translation, 164). That story does not amount to a defense of French law and its discriminatory implementation in colonial Algeria, and does not undercut Jarvis’s substantive arguments around particular texts, but it does seem to call for a more complex account of law’s relationship to colonialism, and of the general notion of the “coloniality of power” (14). The word legal in Jarvis’s phrase “legal violence” is ambiguous, and productively so; but more light could have been cast on the gray areas created by this ambiguity—something Jarvis touches on in an interesting passage where she discusses the policy of traduction directe introduced in March 1956, which enabled extrajudicial military execution (81–82). There may be several reasons why euphemisms such as “corvée de bois” were commonplace in the French military (that notorious phrase is discussed here; it evokes Algerian POWs who were nominally sent on “woodgathering duty” and then shot in the back), but perhaps one is that even among those willing to carry out torture and summary executions, and who may have considered them ethically justifiable, there was a nagging sense that they were illegal.It is in the second chapter that the book moves closest to the institutions of law, as it focuses on a series of quasi- or para-legal texts dealing with torture during the Algerian war of independence—especially Gisèle Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir’s Djamila Boupacha (1962), the collection La gangrène edited in 1959 by Jérôme Lindon, and the pamphlet Nuremberg pour l’Algérie put together in 1960 by three FLN (Front de libération nationale) lawyers including Jacques Vergès. These texts and others like them gathered evidence of “French state violence against Algerians” (94) and “racial crimes” (78), and called for forms of legal redress—calls that were never met. This focus moves us away slightly from the central claims about the powers of “literature” and “aesthetic works,” but Jarvis places emphasis on the texts’ “unexpected, unsettling literary qualities” (68) and gives a persuasive account of ways in which they may instantiate, or at least help imagine, a form of “decolonial justice” (97).The third chapter pursues the themes of memory and imaginative testimony into post-independence Algeria, beginning with a verbal snapshot of the massive Martyrs’ Memorial in Algiers. The writer Yamina Mechakra, who is at the heart of the chapter, worked for decades “literally in the shadow of the monument, at Drid Hocine Psychiatric Hospital” (99–100); she lived in a small house on the grounds, practicing as a psychiatrist and also receiving treatment. Her writing was admired by her friend Kateb Yacine, and her first novel, La grotte éclatée of 1979, was acclaimed by Danielle Marx-Scouras in The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French of 1995 as “one of the most remarkable literary texts on the Algerian War” (515), but today it does not appear to be much read or remembered; and her second novel, Arris, published twenty years later, is largely unknown and unsung. It is “difficult to find, disorienting to read, and . . . largely disregarded by critics,” in the words of Jarvis (105), who tells us in a footnote that she needed to borrow a copy from a colleague. The limited circulation of Mechakra’s texts raises again those questions about cultural transmission that “memory” as a cultural category tends to evoke. By the end of the book, Jarvis wants to claim that “in a real way, literature saw the Ḥirāk coming [the Algerian protest movement that began in 2019]. Literature helped to call the movement into being” (173). That sort of assertion may be appealing to many of us in literary studies, but I am worried that it is incontrovertible only in a weak sense; there is an unsettling gap between this sort of notion of public impact, and the intimacy of literary-critical methods, however politically rich and however widely diffused the material on which they are brought to bear.The greatest strength of Jarvis’s work, in that chapter and across Decolonizing Memory, lies in her close and inventive attention to literary languages, in and beyond “literature,” and the intriguing web of connections she weaves around particular texts. Mechakra’s supervisor at work was Mahfoud Boucebci, who is best known among students of Algerian writing as one of the three friends to whom Djebar dedicated Le blanc de l’Algérie, a book (also discussed by Jarvis) that describes and commemorates his death, among many others. Boucebci was stabbed outside the hospital gate in June 1993, during Algeria’s “Black Decade.” Mechakra’s texts, like Djebar’s, are explored sensitively as “a site for mourning deaths that have no written place in history” (134), and Jarvis, in showing how Mechakra’s writing disrupts the Algerian state’s “teleological nationalist epic” (105), teases out “a recessed signifying network marked by the Arabic term shahīd” (111)—which sits with mujahidin among the religiously inflected terms used by the FLN, during the war and subsequently, to sanctify the work of anticolonial nationalism. The importance of the figure of the shahid to official “memory” in Algeria is evident not least in the Martyrs’ Memorial itself (maqam al-shahid), a structure, as Jarvis points out (107), that incorporates multiple elements including not only a military museum but an underground mausoleum dedicated to the shuhada, furnished with an open Koran and the sound of suras piped through speakers. (Among Jarvis’s many elegant translations from French, incidentally, I spotted just one slip: in her discussion of the typical invocations of nationalist martyrdom made by President Bouteflika in a speech in Sétif in 2012, his description of the city as “séculaire” meant something like “ancient,” not secular.)In many respects, French law and even colonialism are less important by this point in the book, and in the history; and perhaps Jarvis is straining too hard to pull different threads tightly together when, in the concluding chapter, she describes “the [Algerian] state’s war on civilians” in the 1990s as “a continuation of colonizing force in which ‘musulman’ ghosts now have a slightly different name—‘terrorists’ and sowers of discord” (179). But the broader point about the lingering ghosts of colonialism, and the intertwining of (somewhat) different histories, still stands. Despite its Islamic aspects and the eclecticism of its architectural and cultural influences, the Martyrs’ Memorial, built a full twenty years into the era of independence, seems to remind many people, starting with Algerians, of the Eiffel tower as much as anything else. The later chapters of this book, with their center outside France and outside the colonial period, not only bring home that the legal uses of musulman in the colonial period, Jarvis’s starting point, remain an important part of the story about the shifting relationship between Islam and politics in Algeria, as in France; they also remind us how knotty the projects of “decolonizing memory” and moving beyond Eurocentricity really are, in Algeria, France, and the many other parts of the world that were touched, or are touched, by European colonialism.

Only months after starting as KPFA’s music director, Charles Amirkhanian launched the radio show Ode to Gravity in March 1970. The evocative name referred to his 1968 experimental theatre piece that involved dropping objects such as a marble and car fender into a circle of spectators. The radio programme similarly released a range of avant-garde music and sound objects over the airwaves, reflecting Amirkhanian’s preferred title as KPFA’s ‘Sound Sensitivity Information Director’. Informed by analyses of archival broadcasts and other primary sources, this article frames Ode to Gravity as a conceptual extension of the 1968 piece and long-running ‘sound sensitivity’ experiment that sought to make sense of the contemporary musical landscape by collecting and propagating sonic data. Ode to Gravity’s consciousness-raising mission broadly, and the changes in content and presentation style over its twenty-five-year history specifically, add further texture to our understanding of post-war avant-garde impulses in music and sound.

The paper examines historical and cultural influences of African music traditions on African–American gospel and spiritual music. Gospel music is one of several African–American genres of sacred music developed during the 1920’s and 30’s when musicians combined elements of blues and jazz music with church hymns and spirituals. The paper examines scholarly investigations of the impact of African music traditions on the development of gospel and spiritual music in America. In addition, the paper will explore unique African and American cultural influences on specific vocal-style characteristics. The session will feature The Ohio State University African American Music Chorale, which will perform representative short examples of African–American gospel and spirituals. The chorale also will present a short concert of complete works immediately following the session.

Johannes Brahms was a consummate professional musician, a successful pianist, conductor, music director, editor and composer. Yet he also faithfully championed the world of private music-making, creating many works and arrangements for enjoyment in the home by amateurs. This collection explores Brahms' public and private musical identities from various angles: the original works he wrote with amateurs in mind; his approach to creating piano arrangements of not only his own, but also other composers' works; his relationships with his arrangers; the deeper symbolism and lasting legacy of private music-making in his day; and a hitherto unpublished memoir which evokes his Viennese social world. Using Brahms as their focus point, the contributors trace the overlapping worlds of public and private music-making in the nineteenth century, discussing the boundaries between the composer's professional identity and his lifelong engagement with amateur music-making. Within Brahms’s circle, there are many accounts of performances of instrumental chamber works in private homes, and such memories were often captured because they involved exceptionally able, often professional, performers. The banker and amateur pianist Rudolf von der Leyen (1851– 1910) recalled with pride that when Brahms visited him in Krefeld during the 1880s, the players were of such a high standard that ‘the first time Brahms played in our home (I think he played his A-major Quartet), after the first movement, he said in astonishment: “Heavens, one really has to concentrate and play well here.” Many such performances were also significant events in the hosts’ social calendars. In contrast, the private performance of song presented a more diverse picture and is less frequently accorded comparable significance. Singing was far less consistently professionalised and embraced an enormous variety of styles, technical demands and aesthetic meanings, within forms ranging froma single unaccompanied line to many pages. For a song composer as prolific as Brahms, this raises a number of questions: how did he negotiate this range? What technical and aesthetic expectations might he have held, both inside and outside his circle? And how might he have attempted to reconcile those considerations with the transition of the lied from home to concert hall, as exemplified by the career of his friend and colleague, the baritone Julius Stockhausen? In this chapter (Chapter 12), these issues are explored firstly in general terms, and then through the specific case of the Magelone-Romanzen Op. 33.

Sara Brill's new book develops her argument for understanding ‘shared life’ as central to Aristotle's ethics and politics. By focusing on this notion of shared life, she seeks to establish the connection between Aristotle's ethical, political, and zoological works in order to ground her emphasis on the essential animality of human society in Aristotle's conception. Her argument turns on a distinction between bios, a ‘way of life’ that we can choose or reject, and zoē, ‘life itself’ (3), and she is committed to establishing the generally unrecognized significance of the latter in Aristotle's ethical thought. The volume is divided into three parts. The first (‘Shared Life in Aristotle's Ethics and Politics’) concentrates on developing an account of Aristotle's concept of ‘shared life’ in the ethical and political works in such a way as to establish the importance of the zoological perspective. Here, Brill argues that shared life is at the heart of many of the central concerns of the Nicomachean Ethics, including his account of friendship. This is not simply sharing of goods or communal living: ‘Because living in its authoritative sense is perceiving and thinking, sharing one's life is sharing in perception and sharing in thinking’ (52). Brill finds a similar focus on shared zoē in the Eudemian Ethics, and the suggestion that our self-awareness and self-concern depend on the presence of others. She further develops her central claim: for all that Aristotle makes repeated assertions of human exceptionality, he also adopts a zoological framework of analysis that locates human friendship within the category of ‘animal attachment’, albeit as a special case. Human society is distinguished from animal society, but primarily as an intensification of the animal, rather than as a rejection of it. As Brill notes, setting up some of the critical analysis found in the third part of the book, her emphasis on community helps to highlight both its fragility and the consequences of exclusion. This is an idea she explains further in her analysis of shared life in the Politics: ‘if Aristotle's ethics show us the most vivid form of shared life, his Politics shows us the conditions of its destruction’ (92). Brill considers two extremes of shared life to be found in the Politics. Aristotle rejects communism for the sake of the philia that lies at the heart of a true community. His account of tyranny, meanwhile, can be understood as an analysis of a polis lacking a meaningful presence of shared life or the common good. The second part of the book concentrates on fleshing out the detail of the zoological perspective at the heart of Brill's argument by focusing on the zoological works in particular. She makes the sensible point that, while Aristotle's zoological works may be inaccurate in biological detail, they nevertheless help us to understand his own thinking about the nature and relationship of intelligence and life. Beginning with the History of Animals, Brill looks for the political in Aristotle's biological, and argues that he conceives of animal sociality in terms of its various manifestations of the political bond of a common task. It is within this context that we should situate even shared human life. This is not to say that humans are not to be distinguished from animals: what marks humans out is the fact that they can choose their way of life (bios). But this choice does not liberate them from the fact of their animality. For this reason, analysis of Aristotle's politics, and of the polis itself, should be informed by an awareness of his zoological sensibility. At times in the detail of Brill's own analysis, this zoological emphasis seems to fade into the background, but her central claim remains that human politics is an intensification of animal sociality, rather than a rejection of it. The third and final part presents an intriguing exploration of intersections between Brill's account of Aristotle's zoē-politics and modern critical theory (her volume is published in the interdisciplinary series Classics in Theory). She first addresses the connection between Aristotle's commitment to private ownership and his eugenics legislation, noting the double mean of tokos as both ‘interest’ and ‘child’. She is particularly interesting on Aristotle's concern with the threat of uncontrolled or excessive reproduction. She then turns to an analysis of Aristotle's account of – and ambivalence towards – the maternal bond as central to his understanding of human communities and, especially, friendship. The two chapters of Part III are particularly compelling; I look forward to seeing further approaches to Aristotle, and ancient philosophy in general, along these lines.

One of MacKinnon’s central claims is that pornography is not only words. Rather, pornographic speech subordinates and silences women. Using Austin’s speech act theory, Langton and Hornsby argue that pornographic speech has the power to silence women, thus depriving women of free speech rights. This silencing claim has attracted much philosophical interest over the past couple of decades. The chapter considers how we should understand the silencing claim by carefully dissecting the relevant literature. It further assesses the philosophical and practical tenability of the claim. The main philosophical lessons to arise from this chapter are as follows. First, even though some aspects of the silencing claim have pretheoretical plausibility, it remains to be established that pornographic speech is responsible for women’s silencing. Second, the silencing claim is often discussed by appealing to intuitive gut-feelings about specific cases. But (the chapter argues) this is not methodologically conducive to settling the matter.

This volume confirms that anti-Americanism is a heterogeneous set of biases and stereotypes that has remained particularly prominent among educated and bourgeois groups in Europe, a continent that has been exposed to American economic, political, and cultural influences at least since the late nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, though, this volume does not arrive at a coherent definition of the term. The attempt of the editors to distinguish between a “classical anti-Americanism” and one that was “radical” and “limitless” is not taken up by the succeeding contributions (p. 16). Undoubtedly, anti-American stereotypes could serve as a potential way to mobilize fears and aggressions to new ends. Konrad Jarausch's profound essay on “anti-Americanism as a projection” comes nearest to a comprehensive explanation by disentangling the idiosyncratic motives of both the European Left and Right in distancing themselves from America—ranging from a fundamental critique of capitalism to cultural fears about a U.S.-style, consumer-oriented modernity as a threat to the true culture of the Christian occident. Andrei S. Markovitz's astute essay is even more pointed: Anti-Americanism may offer an ideological glue for the European Union, one, however, that in recent years—as in the past—has shown an appalling connection with anti-Semitic tendencies.

Reviewed by: An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia Eugene Van Sickle An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia. By Marie Tyler-McGraw. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 264.) An African Republic is one of several recent works examining American efforts to colonize Africa in the nineteenth century. Tyler-McGraw contends that the study of the colonization movement provides insight into the meaning of "citizenship in a republic and race as a category" in nineteenth-century America (1). Tyler-McGraw's study adds to the literature by examining Virginia's role in the movement. In her analysis, the state of Virginia played a central part in the colonization movement as well as in the national discourse over the future of bonded labor in the United States. Virginia was central to the movement, Tyler-McGraw claims, because of its location between the North and South (3-4). As an Upper South state, Virginians understood the "interests of both sections" of the country (4); thus, Virginia offered the best hope in resolving questions about the status and future of African descendants in the United States (24-27). The methodology and interpretation of the African colonization movement and the American Colonization Society (ACS) in this work reflects current trends in the scholarship. Relying on vast collections of ACS and [End Page 112] state colonization societies as well as personal correspondence, An African Republic traces the movement's origins in Virginia as it gained momentum to become a national effort. Central to the formation of the ACS were events in Virginia such as Gabriel Prosser's Rebellion and the influence of revolutionary ideals. Slave rebellions combined with revolutionary era notions of citizenship provided the impetus for colonization as a solution to the contradictions exposed by the presence of free and enslaved African Americans. The interpretation places the movement in an antislavery context, suggesting colonization advanced emancipation towards the peaceful extinction of slavery (43). In the following chapters, Tyler-McGraw details the colonization program in Virginia, the reasons both black and white Virginians supported or opposed the movement, and the experience of American settlers who went to Liberia. The focus on Virginia adds to the scholarly discourse, though those specifically interested in West Virginia history may find little to interest them. What distinguishes this work from other studies of colonization in the nineteenth century is the section on women as colonizationists. The majority of studies merely mention women in colonization; Tyler-McGraw dedicates an entire section to their role in the movement. Broadly speaking, women participated in colonization for the same reasons they were prominent in social reform efforts such as temperance and antislavery. Activism in colonization gave women a chance to "engage the world of ideas and actions and to demonstrate their abilities" (86). Most contend that women's participation in reform movements was the only accepted means for them to influence the budding American republic. Tyler-McGraw contends, however, that women involved in African colonization sought to remake their society on a more personal and local level. Female supporters believed that "encouraging respectability, piety, and education in black families would enhance those qualities in their own white families" (84). The text concludes with a discourse on Liberians in Africa and America and how the colonization movement became a footnote to history after the Civil War. American social, political, and cultural influences on Liberia are well documented. Consistent with her goal of demonstrating Virginia's centrality to colonization, Tyler-McGraw focuses on the influence Virginia emigrants had on the development of Liberia, particularly because so many of them became leaders in the African republic. Their presence shaped the Liberian historical narrative in a way similar to that in which Virginians contributed to the American narrative. Despite the obvious connections between Liberia and the United States, the colonization movement has, as [End Page 113] the author points out in the last chapter, become a novelty in American history. Colonization was made moot by the American Civil War and became an afterthought by the end of the nineteenth century. This was due as much to American events as it was to the...

The global eminence of the United States is diminishing relative to non‐Western economic, political, and cultural formations. Despite its unprecedented military superiority, its compromised recent attempts to assert dominance through armed occupation and economic pressure underscore the growing importance of non‐Western cultures and political economics. Amid the proliferation and permutation of neoliberalism abroad—including alternative forms of capitalist development and political and religious self‐determination—American efforts to extend its hegemony in the Gramscian sense are opposed by national and transnational self‐assertion, states of insurgency, and capitalist competition. Dynamics of resistance and resurgence in various world areas rival and recast American political, economic, and cultural influence. Understanding these emergent processes, which portend the provincialization of America, will be pivotal for sociocultural anthropology in the twenty‐first century. Comprehending new developments will require fresh combinations of an anthropological perspective with comparative political economy, international relations, the ethnography of the state, geographies of cultural resistance, and networks of transnational, national, and subnational influence.

“Conspiracy theory”: The case for being critically receptive

This study aims to explore the utilization of local culture as a tourism marketing instrument through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach. The study was conducted by selecting literature from academic databases such as Scopus, DOAJ, and Google Scholar, using keywords such as “local culture,” “tourism marketing,” “destination branding,” and “cultural tourism” within the time span of 2014-2024. The results show that the integration of local culture in destination promotion significantly enhances tourist attraction and experience. However, challenges such as cultural commodification and overtourism need to be addressed to maintain cultural authenticity. The use of social media and digital technology plays an important role in increasing cultural visibility, but the potential for distortion in the delivery of cultural values remains an important issue. The involvement of local communities as custodians of cultural heritage proved essential in ensuring the sustainability of promotion balanced with the preservation of traditions. Therefore, future research is recommended to explore the social and cultural influences in maintaining the authenticity of local culture in tourism marketing..

PurposeThere is a growing debate and research stream on the influence of national culture on the type and nature of management control systems (MCSs) used by organizations in the country. A specific case is the management control of projects executed in a multicultural international environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe the findings of a study into the role of national cultures in controlling a project which a multinational undertook in four countries.Design/methodology/approachBased on project management control literature a theoretical MCS for international projects is developed. Subsequently, the influence of national culture on this system is discussed, using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Then the theoretical system is applied on the project the multinational case company executed in four countries (Austria, Finland, India, and Russia).FindingsA key finding is that different national cultures do require different types of control, but that this effect is neutralized by the culture of the multinational which is the same all over the world and which supersedes national cultures. This makes it possible to implement a standardized project management control framework.Originality/valueThe research yielded a conceptual project management control framework which in practice seemed to be useful for controlling not only the process and progress but also the product (end result) of a project in a multicultural environment.