Agents Subject Research Articles

“This tale is of my making”: empowering voices in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

Andrea Levy’s The Long Song takes readers to pre- and post-Emancipation Jamaica through the voice of July, an old black woman who in the final years of the 19th century reminisces about her past. July is an intrusive narrator who throughout the narrative flaunts her control over her tale and sometimes calls attention to what is left unsaid, so that the horrors of slavery are mainly conveyed in her silences, while her humorous perspective articulates a story that focuses on the survival and agency of black subjects. This article analyses The Long Song in relation to other slavery fictions published in Britain in recent years and against the background of the 2007 bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. For all the lightness of its tone and the role of humour in the novel, the imaginative archaeology of The Long Song has a serious agenda: it recreates the historical past of the black British characters who populated Levy’s earlier fiction as it explores the interweaving of European and African lives that the slave trade produced.

‘Unrest among the Negroes’: the African Blood Brotherhood and the politics of resistance

This article focuses on the impact of the Bolshevik revolution and Irish national liberation struggles on the black radical tradition in the US. Between 1919 and 1922, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) published a monthly journal, The Crusader, which attempted to forge a very specific race/class politics in the US. The Crusader shaped its powerfully articulated vision of black liberation through its trumpeting of the Russian revolution and the Irish anti-colonial struggle. If reparative history is a history which stresses the dialectical nature of ‘race’ and colonialism and the importance of recognising the agency of black subjects in transforming the politics of resistance, then the ABB is key to understanding the complex formations around race and class in the US in the early twentieth century.

Stealing the Road: Colonial Rule and the Hajj from Nigeria in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract This article focuses on the attempt of the Nigerian colonial administration to regulate and control the movement of Nigerian Muslim pilgrims during the interwar period of the early twentieth century. The article will seek to show how the efforts of the Nigerian colonial government to control the Hajj in the 1920s and 1930s highlight not only the issue of Islam in Nigeria, but also the interaction among British colonialism, Islam, and the agency of colonial subjects on a broader scale. The article draws heavily upon Nigerian colonial primary sources as well as the broader scholarship on the Hajj in Africa. In so doing, the article highlights the complexity of colonial agendas as well as the success of colonial subjects in asserting their own personal, economic, and spiritual sovereignty in the face of colonialism.

‘Who Filled His Heart to Do This?’ Conceptual Metaphors of the Self in the Book of Esther

This essay responds to Carol A. Newsom's recent call for finer-grained studies of particular formulations of the moral self and agency in biblical and related Second Temple texts in two ways: first, drawing on cognitive linguistic research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, it highlights the embodied metaphorical quality of all forms of self-conception and self-representation; second, it examines the network of conceptual metaphors of the self in the Hebrew text of Esther, especially as they speak to questions of subjective agency. Although the book of Esther draws several of its conceptual metaphors from other Hebrew biblical texts (e.g. the heart as self, the self as fillable, the self filled with wine, the self filled with heat, heat abating or dissipating from the self, etc.), it deploys them in such a way as to call into question any delusion of self-control and agency on the part of its royal patriarchal subjects, Ahasuerus and Haman. Instead of affirming agency, these metaphors conceive of the self as easily manipulated and unsettled, thereby revealing a highly insecure subjectivity that is never fully in possession of itself.

Voluntary initiation of movement: multifunctional integration of subjective agency.

This paper investigates subjective agency (SA) as a special type of efficacious action consciousness. Our central claims are, firstly, that SA is a conscious act of voluntarily initiating bodily motion. Secondly, we argue that SA is a case of multifunctional integration of behavioral functions being analogous to multisensory integration of sensory modalities. This is based on new perspectives on the initiation of action opened up by recent advancements in robot assisted neuro-rehabilitation which depends on the active participation of the patient and yields experimental evidence that there is SA in terms of a conscious act of voluntarily initiating bodily motion (phenomenal performance). Conventionally, action consciousness has been considered as a sense of agency (SoA). According to this view, the conscious subject merely echoes motor performance and does not cause bodily motion. Depending on sensory input, SoA is implemented by means of unifunctional integration (binding) and inevitably results in non-efficacious action consciousness. In contrast, SA comes as a phenomenal performance which causes motion and builds on multifunctional integration. Therefore, the common conception of the brain should be shifted toward multifunctional integration in order to allow for efficacious action consciousness. For this purpose, we suggest the heterarchic principle of asymmetric reciprocity and neural operators underlying SA. The general idea is that multifunctional integration allows conscious acts to be simultaneously implemented with motor behavior so that the resulting behavior (SA) comes as efficacious action consciousness. Regarding the neural implementation, multifunctional integration rather relies on operators than on modular functions. A robotic case study and possible experimental setups with testable hypotheses building on SA are presented.

A tale of two statues in Astana: the fuzzy process of nationalistic city making

In the summer of 2009, statues stood leaning in a yard, beyond Independence Square in Astana. The situation was incongruous and constituted an enigma: Why were these monuments left alone in shambles? This paper argues that nationalistic city making is more of a resource for people involved in patron/client relationships and a contingent outcome, rather than a planned strategy. This case study, drawing on evidence gathered through qualitative methods with artists and urban-planners, hence reveals a paradox: in Kazakhstan, there surely is a state incentive to produce nationalistic symbols, but in the absence of a mid-term strategy, city-planners and the people they work with improvise in order to answer local authorities' demands, and use this opportunity to advance their own interests. Hence, the political production of space is considered a fuzzy process, contingent on the agency of multiple subjects, and treated as an outcome of Foucauldian “micro-physics of power.” But even though it is erratic, it still creates the built environment which will be reacted upon by citizens. Finally, this sociopolitical perspective on nationalistic urbanism demonstrates that Astana's scenery is a fuzzy “landscape of power” instituting an erratic Kazakhstani regime, based on the political economy of symbolic goods.

Changing the Subject

Source criticism has been a pivotal method of historical research, routinely evoked as the necessary (if not sufficient) foundation of professional history in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. This article explores the epistemological context of source criticism, outlining a continuous if versatile focus on subjective agency as a motivating and formative problem of historical methods in Scandinavia throughout the 20th century. Towards the turn of the millennium, however, theories about discursive formation of identities and about entangled agencies of humans and non-humans have configured the nature of subjects, past reality, and historical knowledge differently. In a state of methodological multiplicity, rather than being foundational, source criticism has become one among other methods.

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.

Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one's ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what life holds in store. The authors also suggest that a proper understanding of agency's potential power within a life course necessitates moving beyond the domain-specific expectations more typical of past sociological work. Using the Youth Development Study, the authors employ a scale of general life expectations in adolescence to explore the potential influence of a general sense of optimistic life expectations in addition to the traditional approach on a range of important outcomes.

Differences, Borders, Fusions

ABSTRACT In the context of Dewey's account of habits and conduct, we understand will to refer not to the subjective agency of an autonomous person or to any kind of a priori capacity of human reason or spirit but to habitual interactions in the interdependence of people with their social and natural environments. For Dewey, this claim suggests that in the absence of transcendental guidance or a socially independent inner and given moral conscience, human natures are grounded in indeterminate freedom. People's defining qualities and characters are formed in particular histories of social and environmental interdependence and the habitual conduct that develops in these embodiments. We may say that human predispositions and sensibilities form specific commonalities that are fluid in the sense that they are always available for transformation and “transvaluation” and constitute only finite, mortal interconnections with multiple lineages of temporal formation. I accept these claims by Dewey as I develop the thought of this article in two sections on differences, fusions, and borders. I want to show the ways differences and fusions happen compatibly. As we come to understand them they allow us to see dimensions of borders in contexts of interdependence, interaction, and intersection. In this understanding we will be predisposed to think of commonalities and identifying characteristics as thoroughly social.

A ‘Return’ of the Subject in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

In postmodernist fiction, subjects are typically portrayed as fragmented. While subjective agency in postmodernism is possible, it occurs only at the price of self-fragmentation or even selfdissolution, as famously exemplified in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Now, as I suggest here, after decades of postmodernist irony and insecurity, contemporary literature is again focusing on portrayals of stable forms of subjectivity within a social community. To describe this new kind of subject, I draw on Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of the subject as ‘receiver’ and show how Zadie Smith’s White Teeth engages with these ideas.

Parallel processing streams for motor output and sensory prediction during action preparation.

Sensory consequences of one's own actions are perceived as less intense than identical, externally generated stimuli. This is generally taken as evidence for sensory prediction of action consequences. Accordingly, recent theoretical models explain this attenuation by an anticipatory modulation of sensory processing prior to stimulus onset (Roussel et al. 2013) or even action execution (Brown et al. 2013). Experimentally, prestimulus changes that occur in anticipation of self-generated sensations are difficult to disentangle from more general effects of stimulus expectation, attention and task load (performing an action). Here, we show that an established manipulation of subjective agency over a stimulus leads to a predictive modulation in sensory cortex that is independent of these factors. We recorded magnetoencephalography while subjects performed a simple action with either hand and judged the loudness of a tone caused by the action. Effector selection was manipulated by subliminal motor priming. Compatible priming is known to enhance a subjective experience of agency over a consequent stimulus (Chambon and Haggard 2012). In line with this effect on subjective agency, we found stronger sensory attenuation when the action that caused the tone was compatibly primed. This perceptual effect was reflected in a transient phase-locked signal in auditory cortex before stimulus onset and motor execution. Interestingly, this sensory signal emerged at a time when the hemispheric lateralization of motor signals in M1 indicated ongoing effector selection. Our findings confirm theoretical predictions of a sensory modulation prior to self-generated sensations and support the idea that a sensory prediction is generated in parallel to motor output (Walsh and Haggard 2010), before an efference copy becomes available.

Wants: A Core Humanistic Construct

SYNOPSISThe aim of this paper is to develop the construct of wants as a core concept for Humanistic Psychology and the broader psychotherapeutic field. Drawing from existential and phenomenological thinking, the paper argues that ‘wants’ convey a greater sense of subjective agency than ‘needs’, and are more encompassing of immediate desires than ‘goals’. Wants can be understood as existing in a hierarchy: with lower-order wants established as a means of achieving higher-order wants. Wants can also be seen as synergetic, dysergetic and independent of each other; and either effective or ineffective means of achieving higher-order wants. As a fundamentally socio-cultural concept, wants can be seen as forming a potential bridge between psychological and social understandings.

Of Trains and Relativity: Einstein and Perspective in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding

From the opening sentences of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, nickname of the train was the Dog. Its real name was the the train that acts as a central image in the stories of the Fairchild family has a multiple existence (91). Officially named the Yazoo-Delta, the train is nicknamed the Yellow Dog by the local community. What you call the train depends on who and where you are. That the identity of the train is relative to the person viewing it foreshadows the story of a near-fatal train incident told and retold by Fairchild family members according to their differing viewpoints. The train incident does not simply furnish the occasion for various characters to pass along a good story; it signals the novel's engagement with the dramatic revelations of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and the resulting focus on perspective. Einstein often used an example involving a train to introduce relativity to lay audiences, explaining that a traveler on the train and an observer on the embankment would see two flashes of lightning differently, with the observer seeing the flashes simultaneously and the traveler seeing them in sequence. The theory not only provided a scientific basis to the subjectivity of perspective, it extended this subjectivity to time, previously thought to be a constant. Welty's train story builds on the insights of Einstein's train story to show that one perspective is not better than another and thus to expose the faulty privileging of perspectives based on race or social status. The result is a fictional exploration of relativity's implications both for Welty's time and for the novel's historical context. Writing in 1945 about a white aristocratic southern family in 1923 may seem more like nostalgia than exploration. Critics from Diana Trilling in 1946 forward complain about Welty's overly positive depiction of the family members, who are oblivious to the outside world and to the African Americans who serve them. More recently, scholars have argued that the novel is instead critiquing the family's nostalgia by exposing it as highly constructed. (1) My reading of the novel's engagement with relativity extends this line of thinking by dramatizing how Welty highlights the subjectivity of any perspective regardless of the race or class of the viewer. Each character's story of the train incident is limited by the character's physical location and, more dramatically, by the character's location in time, a location not shared because time is relative. Although the family members retell the train story to reify the power of the family hero, George, the piling on of different perspectives undermines the story's validity and the Fairchild family's power. (2) The family may ignore the perspectives of the African Americans in their midst, but the novel's attention to subjectivity challenges the valuing of a perspective because of the subject's social status. The implications, however, extend beyond the microcosm of this one family. That Welty also includes a train story told by a photographer and an outsider to the community allows her to test the implications of relativity by placing it in conversation with the discourse of photography. Photography's ability to capture a moment in time and thus document its subject without bias may seem to give it a claim to objectivity. In Delta Wedding, though, photography simply provides one more perspective as even the selection of a subject to photograph involves the photographer's subjective agency. In wielding modern technology the photographer's status may at first seem superior, but, for Welty, neither his camera nor his outsider status brings his perspective closer to objective truth. Welty's use of relativity to undermine the privileging of perspectives based on status certainly explains its presence in the novel, but Delta Wedding's investment in exploring relativity takes on greater weight when we consider that when Welty was writing the book in 1945 questions of who owns the truth were fought by armies. …

Can the Subaltern Woman Run? Gender, race and agency in colonial missionary texts

This article challenges the contention that it is not feasible to trace the agency of subaltern female subjects in colonial documents without at the same time distorting and even violating that very agency. Taking as its prism a letter written by a male Danish missionary chronicling a young Pariah woman’s escape from missionary control in early 20th-century South India, it argues that while a search for authentic, autonomous agency is a highly dubious endeavour, relinquishing attempts to recover the acts and interventions of persons at the bottom of social hierarchies is equally problematic. Suggesting a reading ‘along as well as against the grain’, the article tracks the ways in which the subaltern woman’s agency has been simultaneously recorded and denied, and argues for the necessity of probing both the possibilities and impossibilities presented by this type of a source.

Muslims Renegotiating Marginality in Contemporary Ethiopia

AbstractEthiopian Muslims have only had access to public space and opportunity for religious self‐definition and collective influence since 1991. During little more than two decades, how have they advanced subjective agency within the political constraints of the current government, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front or EPRDF? This article addresses that question by backgrounding the history of Islamic expansion into Ethiopia, tracing Muslim engagement with Christian political elites over several hundred years, till the latter part of the 21st century. After the deposition of Haile Selasse in 1974, the DERG assumed power and in the name of a socialist agenda, suppressed all religions from 1975–1991. DERG socialism has been replaced by EPRDF pluralism, yet the structural constraints of the latter have weakened the efforts of Ethiopian Muslims to find their rightful place in the public square. Abetted and assisted by overseas immigrant communities, in both Western Europe and North America, Ethiopian Muslims continue to contest securitization and marginalization by the state, even as they struggle with regional, national and transnational issues that impact all Muslim identity politics in the second decade of the 21st century.

Masculinity, Makeovers, and the Ethics of Consumption in Japanese Films for Young People

This article examines three recent Japanese films for young people—Kyō, koi wo hajimemasu (Today, I Will Fall in Love), Paradise Kiss, and Runway Beat—that employ a common narrative strategy whereby interior development of the female protagonist is matched by a process of transformation through consumption, in the form of a makeover. The films code consumption as morally good in that the female protagonists, following this transformation, achieve some degree of subjective agency and find meaningful positions in their social worlds. Nevertheless, an examination of the process of transformation and of the depictions of the young men who initiate and control the transformations reveals that these films convey a problematic ethics of consumption.

Masculinity, Makeovers, and the Ethics of Consumption in Japanese Films for Young People

This article examines three recent Japanese films for young people— Kyō, koi wo hajimemasu ( Today, I Will Fall in Love ), Paradise Kiss , and Runway Beat —that employ a common narrative strategy whereby interior development of the female protagonist is matched by a process of transformation through consumption, in the form of a makeover. The films code consumption as morally good in that the female protagonists, following this transformation, achieve some degree of subjective agency and find meaningful positions in their social worlds. Nevertheless, an examination of the process of transformation and of the depictions of the young men who initiate and control the transformations reveals that these films convey a problematic ethics of consumption.

The Voice of Jacob: Entextualization, Contextualization, and Identity

To analyze discursively mediated interpersonal social action we differentiate two kinds of “textual” phenomena. Using an Old Testament example, we delineate an interactional text , “what is (socially) done” in-and-as the events and encounters of everyday life. Such texts are perhaps even consciously conceptualized and represented in strategic subjective agency, in memory of “what happened,” and, to be sure, in literary depictions. We can contrast this with a denotational text , “what is (in effect) said” in-and-by the totality of means for organizing communicated information, in which minutiae of form--the “how” of saying what one says--and the orderliness of its emergence are key. Our task thus becomes to understand how the organized unfolding--the entextualization --of “what is said” in language and its penumbral cultural codes comes to project into its own contextualization , that is, to count as “what is done” in the way of intersubjective socio-cultural coherence and consequentiality for the participants in an interactional encounter. Working out an extended--if banal--example of a dyadic conversation, we show that by invoking the semiotic qualities of the most determinative of such projections, that of full-blown ritual action, a properly analyzed denotational text of even an everyday encounter by degrees dynamically figurates the interactional text that gradually comes into being as the consequence of interpersonal communication, in the instance giving rich and mutually interpretable identities to the participants.

Masculinity in Japanese Sports Films

This paper considers three recent Japanese sports films for young people, Feel the Wind (2009), Oppai Volleyball (2009) and Dive!! (2008), which employ a common sports film script to explore the ways in which masculinity is constructed, expressed and evaluated through participation in sport. Through depictions of masculinities that achieve subjective agency and acceptance by peers despite a lack of competence or victory in sport, these films disrupt the established relationship between masculinity, competence and dominance, and endorse non-normative models of masculinity. They also reflect the tensions between a desire for agency, social constraints and expectations, and the dominant ideology of masculinity. In so doing, they help to illuminate the ways in which gender is negotiated in relation to contemporary social and political conditions.

Impacting policy discourse? An analysis of discourses and rhetorical devices deployed in the case of the Academies Commission

Academisation of the English secondary school system has been extremely rapid and represents significant changes to the governance of the English school system. However, there has been a relative scarcity of attention to the rationales, rhetorics and discourses underpinning the academies programme. Seeking to address this gap, a poststructuralist discourse analytic lens is applied to 63 written submissions to the Academies Commission from a range of stakeholder groups, in order to map the different discourses and narratives drawn on in relation to academies and academisation. In setting out the various discourses identified, a cluster of discourses and rhetorical devices that produce the British education system as ‘in crisis’ are given especial attention. It is argued that these discourses provide the rationale and legitimisation for radical policy intervention as exemplified by the academies programme. The findings also provoke discussion concerning potential subjective agency in the promotion or otherwise of particular narratives and ‘conceptual emblems’ that inform the field of educational policy.