Ambiguous Legacy Research Articles

Rural Vulnerability and the Ambiguous Legacy of Capitalism

Rural Vulnerability and the Ambiguous Legacy of Capitalism

Decolonising the social sciences

This article unpacks some complexities of ‘decolonising’ in Ireland, a complicated semiperipheral ‘mixed colony’, in which rhetorics, logic, and grammar are simultaneously colonial and decolonial, interrupting and complicitly reproducing divisive and dehumanising colonialities of knowledge and being. The global call to decolonise academia invites Irish social scientists to confront significant social divisions, economic precarities, and epistemic erasures. I present ‘decolonial repair’ as a doubled figure of return and mending, engaging the decolonial work of double translation: centring anti-colonial thought and enacting horizontal dialogue. Facing partly obscured colonial wounds that remain difficult to countenance, a doubled repair re-approaches transformation via renewed engagements between non-Occidental demands for decolonisation and ambiguous legacies of extraversion. Unpacking elisions, complicities, and precarities of Irish social science, this article teases out what ‘decolonising social science’ might entail in a semiperipheral, white(ly) post-colony. In keeping with the scope of this journal and the defining role of sociology in the social sciences, this article focusses on sociology as a lens for discussing the broader, constitutive elisions, turns, and complicities of Irish social science. The broader aim and hope is to help unpack some of the challenges, projects, and pitfalls involved in this Special Issue's focus on ‘decolonising academia’.

Egyptian Popular Culture in Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine

Abstract During the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, Palestine was an integral component of the audience for the new forms of “colloquial mass culture” that emerged in Cairo. Early Egyptian recording artists, theatre troupes, and the giants of interwar Egyptian popular music—Umm Kulthum and Muhammad Abdel Wahhab—regularly appeared and were warmly received in Palestine. Egyptian performers did not come to Palestine to affirm or reinforce its Arabism. They came because they earned substantial fees for their performances and because they had large and loyal audiences there, some of whom were Jews. The presence of both Arabs and Jews at concerts or in movie theaters did not necessarily mean that they liked each other. Neither did they dislike each other as a matter of principle. This ambiguous legacy was manifested in the political uproar over the naming of streets in honor of Umm Kulthum and Abdel Wahhab in Jerusalem, Ramle, and Haifa in 2020. This was not an indicator of Arab–Jewish coexistence, and it did not represent a conciliation with terrorism. It was a phenomenon in which spectators and fans (and detractors) read themselves into the meanings of the work of artists.

The Recovery of Human Dignity in Protestant Christianity and Its Ethical Implications

Human dignity, in the Protestant traditions, was generally formulated in reaction to Catholicism. Initial assessments of human dignity were less than enthusiastic and framed soteriologically and contingent on God’s saving grace. In contrast, by the middle of the 19th century, human dignity in Protestant theology emerged as a positive anthropological affirmation with significant political consequences. To illuminate this evolution within the Protestant world, this paper provides a narrative sketch that: (1) orients initial notions of human dignity with reference to the ambiguous legacy of Martin Luther; (2) describes how substantial engagements with minority or marginalized populations in the 19th and 20th centuries around the world—including South Africa, India, and the USA—led to a revision and expansion of human dignity; and (3) exhibits the affirmation of a robust understanding of human dignity in Protestant traditions around the world. The argument is both (a) expansive because it highlights developments toward the positive embrace of human dignity across a wide geographic range while also remaining (b) limited because it merely argues that the Protestant traditions universally affirm human dignity, while also acknowledging that frequently there are limits to the performance of that affirmation based on matters of race, nationality, class, and gender.

Ambiguous Legacies, Contested Futures

Ambiguous Legacies, Contested Futures

Telling ruins: the afterlives of an early post-independence development intervention in Lake Victoria, Tanzania

ABSTRACTIn the early 1960s, three pilot agricultural and settlement schemes were set up along the shores of Lake Victoria in the north-western region of Tanzania with the involvement of Israeli development agency Agridev. One of these sites was Mbarika, where the experimental project ran for three years and had mixed results before being discontinued by the young Tanzanian government. This article explores the story of that scheme and its long-term legacies some 50 years on. Unpacking the representational and material ruinations that outlived the project's official timeline, we examine the memories and rumours that continue to haunt the site to this day and their entanglement with successive development experiences and shifting political ideologies. Through interviews, ethnographic observations and archival research, we shed light on the complex, deeply ambiguous legacies and ‘afterlives’ of a development intervention set between expectations of modernity and a sense of exclusion.

Challenging the colonial legacy of/at Macquarie

AbstractMacquarie University takes its name from a man known simultaneously as the founding father of Australia, its greatest colonial administrator, a key inspiration for Australia’s egalitarian ethos, the military strategist who authorised the Appin Massacre, and committed civiliser of the uncivilised native peoples of Sydney who established the first institutions aimed at educating Aboriginal children by separating from their families, culture, and language. This article explores Macquarie’s ambiguous legacy and considers how it is mobilised to promote the university. It discusses how the university community might engage with the “Macquarie legacy” and take responsibility for its implications for Macquarie University. Decolonising this particular university must involve much more than simple renaming—although even that would be far from simple. Transformation of the institution into a partner with Dharug and other Indigenous groups must involve uncomfortable and ultimately transformational reflection and action on the purposes, processes, and outcomes of education, on the nature and purposes of partnership, and more generally on the nature of decolonising transformations.

Dwight L. Moody in Ulster: Evangelical Unity, Denominational Identity and the Fundamentalist Impulse

The American evangelist Dwight L. Moody visited Ulster on three occasions – 1874, 1883 and 1892 – and his modern, respectable version of revivalism offered a welcome alternative to the ambiguous legacy of the 1859 Ulster revival. Moody stimulated an outpouring of interdenominational activism and may have contributed to a fundamentalist impulse amongst Evangelicals. His legacy in Ulster, as elsewhere, was to energise Evangelicals but at the expense of weakening the ability, perhaps even the desire, of church members to adhere to denominational principles. In that sense, both so-called ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘modernists’ in Northern Ireland in the 1920s were Moody's heirs.

Populism, Constitution Making, and the Rule of Law in Latin America

The article explores the effects of populist polarization in creating strong and long-lasting institutions based on the rule of law. It focuses on politics and not on the political economy of populism or of natural resource extraction. The first section briefly explains how we understand the contested notions of populism and the rule of law. The second focuses on the paradigmatic case of Juan Peron's first two administrations (1946-1956) to explore the ambiguous legacies of populist inclusion for the creation of long-lasting demo-cratic institutions. The third section focuses on how Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa appealed to the un-bounded will of the people to convene participatory constituent assemblies. The last section focuses on Ecuador's post-populist succession. Different from Evo Morales that was ousted by a coup, or Nicolas Maduro that killed democracy, Lenin Moreno, who was Correa's former vice-president, abandoned populism, ditched his mentor, and used a referendum to clean the state and political institutions from Correa's allies. Appealing to the people directly, his administration assumed exceptional powers to name new authorities of control and accountability. His institutional reforms however might not last because they were based on the exclusion of Correa and his followers. The conclusion explores the reasons why actors continue to use laws instrumentally making it difficult to create long-lasting institutional arrangements based on the rule of law, and hence on the possibility of deepening democracy.

Looking Backward—Fondly: Personal and Professional Texts/Contexts Derived from Knowing Lyman Tower Sargent for Forty Years

Lyman Tower Sargent has had a personal and professional impact upon me. I cannot separate the effects of reading his work from engaging with him as a mentor—and more. Hence, this piece will focus on personal and professional texts and their contexts. I revisit Sargent's “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia,” an essay he contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981). I include passages from my novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: A Fake Memoir which describe protagonist Sondra Lear's relationship with Thurston Howell III, interactions stemming from my longstanding association with Sargent. I describe a prominent male scholar's positive—almost utopian—influence on what I am here calling a retrospective autobiographical portrait of the professor as a young woman. This piece emphasizes that a festschrift contribution is about reciprocity between author and honoree.

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

The Moving Parts in Michèle Magema's Body of Work

After the #fall

On March 9th 2015, Chumane Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town, threw a bucket of shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, prominently sited at the main pedestrian entrance to the university. A month later, following concerted protest action by the student-led social movement, #RhodesMustFall, the statue was removed. In this paper I situate the Rhodes statue and the events of #RMF into historical relation with the broader memorial and symbolic landscape of the Groote Schuur estate, the landscape of which the University of Cape Town forms a part. I argue that an imperial legacy is deeply inscribed in this landscape in architectural form, the organization of space, forms of the gaze, and embodied habitus. The University of Cape Town upper campus was conceived in terms of two architectural tropes, the idea of the Temple-on-the-hill, and the idea of the site of prospect. These, in turn, derive from Rhodes Memorial, slightly further up the slope. In this context, the Rhodes statue was the most obvious materialization of a more generalized coloniality, which remains a part of the ambiguous legacy of the Groote Schuur estate and the University of Cape Town.

The role of spatial planning in transitioning to circular urban development

ABSTRACT Circular development necessitates the socio-ecological transformation of our urban systems. It requires that “wasted” resources are looped; the ecological regenerative capacity and adaptive capacity of urban systems are developed. The end result will be healthier urban ecosystems, with low levels of resource consumption and wastage. Spatial planning potentially has a crucial role to play in the delivery of circular development. However, it has an ambiguous legacy, demonstrated by London, Paris and Amsterdam. It will need to go beyond the allocation of temporary spaces for circular experimentation, if it is to enable the transition. It will need to intervene in markets to provide space for low-value, circular activities and enable the localised looping of resources within city-regions. It should support infrastructure needed for circular actions and ensure urban form continues to support circular systems adopted. Finally, planners can generate demand for circular activities and products, through conditions placed on new developments.

The Ambiguous Legacy of the Balkans War Crimes Tribunal

[T]he historical record remains bitterly contested in the former Yugoslav lands, and none of the tribunal's findings has promoted reconciliation.

Celebrate Suffrage

2020 marks 100 years of women’s suffrage in the U.S. Considering this anniversary and the Christian presumption in favor of democracy, this essay invites readers to honor all those who worked for women’s suffrage in two specific ways. First, it invites them to tell the whole truth about the movement, both its many moments of grace and its moral failures. Second, it encourages readers to make the connection between this ambiguous legacy and ongoing forms of voter suppression in the U.S. and then to celebrate suffrage by finishing the fight for it.

Antonio da Noli and the Discovery of Cape Verde: A Legacy in Dispute: Italy, Portugal and Cape Verde

This study aims to shed some light on an ambiguous, historical figure of Modern European and African history, Antonio da Noli, who lived during the 15th century. Various sources presented Antonio da Noli as the “discoverer” of Cape Verde, although other versions of history indicate the Venetian Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto and the Portuguese Diogo Gomes as the possible discoverers of this Atlantic archipelago. Additional sources defend that Cape Verde was first discovered by African and Arab populations before the arrival of the Portuguese navigators. This study, through a historical analysis of primary sources of the same navigators here considered, as well as secondary sources of Italian, Portuguese and Cape-Verdian authors, aims at presenting how some of the historical dark points of the life and maritime adventures of Antonio da Noli have been used by three fundamental historiographical traditions, each with different political objectives: the Italian, the Portuguese and the Cape Verdeans. The conclusion is that Antonio da Noli and the discovery of Cape Verde left an ambiguous legacy which until today is in dispute between nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism.

1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music

Slavonic and East European Review, 97, 1, 2019 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK & PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH Long before the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union had questioned the notion that 1917 might constitute some kind of single, decisive rupture, whether in historiography or history itself. In particular, historians have come to see the October Revolution as an expression of Russia’s broader experience of modernity, revealing continuities between Imperial Russia and what was to become the Soviet Union, disputing narratives of exceptionalism, and proposing affinities with models of social development arguably more characteristic of Western European countries.1 Literary scholars too had long grasped the significant connections between pre- and post-revolutionary instantiations of Russian modernism, even if these were often disputed by émigré authorities unable, or unwilling, to admit that the Soviet Union might have any claims on culture. Vladimir Nabokov, no less, offered a survey course at Cornell University in 1950 on ‘The Modernist Movement in Russian Literature’, which included Tolstoi, Chekhov, Blok, and even the nineteenth-century lyric poets, Fet and Tiutchev, yet pointedly avoided anything written in Soviet Union after 1917.2 Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College, Oxford, and Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. 1 See, for instance, David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, Basingstoke, 2000; Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930, Ithaca, NY and London, 2008; Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, Pittsburgh, 2015; Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Search for the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925, Ithaca, NY and London, 2002, and Matthias Neumann and Andy Willimott (eds), Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide, London, 2018. 2 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, London, 1992, p. 171, cited in Catriona Kelly (ed.), Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts, 1905–1940, London, 1999, p. xix. PHILIP ROSS BULLOCK & PAULINE FAIRCLOUGH 2 This was, though, an extreme position. More typical were those scholars who explored the continuation of the so-called ‘Silver Age’ well into the 1920s, or those, by contrast, who saw the roots of Soviet modernism in the pre-revolutionary era or even the fin de siècle.3 Intellectual historians were equally alive to the impact of pre-revolutionary thought on Soviet culture, not just in the form of the precursors of the Marxist-Leninist canon, but also as represented, perhaps more surprisingly, by the complex and ambiguous legacy of Nietzsche or Russia’s engagement with psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud and Jung.4 But what of music in this context, and how have musicologists conceived of the impact of the October Revolution? Superficially, at least, the notion of 1917 as a dramatic caesura is one that still continues to inform aspects of historical musicology. In part, this may be related to the very obvious fact that some of Russia’s most prominent composers left around the time of the revolution — most notably Sergei Prokof´ev, Sergei Rakhmaninov and Igor´ Stravinskii. Even if their motivations were very different, their collective stories nonetheless give the impression of a radical discontinuity. The fact that within Soviet Russia itself, it was the young Dmitrii Shostakovich who came to symbolize the cultural aspirations of the new state further corroborates this impression of a clear divide. Indeed, the whole history of twentieth-century music could be provocatively read through the binary oppositions seemingly represented by the pairing of Stravinskii and Shostakovich: Russia Abroad versus the Soviet Union; freedom versus tyranny; pure music versus musical meaning; modernism versus Socialist Realism, and so on. Such an account would, of course, be facile and reductive, yet is nonetheless often implicitly there in popular narratives, even whilst it has been comprehensively challenged in much of the academic literature. Staying with the biographical context for a moment, it is instructive to compare the story of Russian music with that represented...

Enoch Powell and the Conservative Party: Reflections on an Ambiguous Legacy

This article examines Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in relation to the Conservative party. Powell's speech created an additional challenge to a Conservative party already weakened by the loss of the 1964 and 1966 elections and by the failure of the newly elected leader, Edward Heath, to impress his authority decisively on the party. Powell had some parliamentary support but his real following was concentrated in the Conservative grass roots. Powell lost the support of the liberal-minded Shadow Cabinet; but after 1968 the Conservatives nevertheless moved to the right on the issue, especially after Mrs. Thatcher became leader in 1975. His speech has cast a long shadow as the party has sought to modernise in more recent times and to appeal to a more racially diverse electorate.

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Marx, discourse theory and political analysis: negotiating an ambiguous legacy

ABSTRACTThis article argues that ‘post-Marxist’ or ‘poststructuralist discourse theory’ represents a complex deconstruction of the Marxist tradition of social and political theory. Focussing on three ontological positions in Marx’s texts – the ontologies of human alienation, praxis, and production – the article shows how this approach repeats and transforms the rich tradition of Marxist thinking so as to elaborate a novel approach to social and political analysis. This claim is built around the idea that discourse is best conceptualized as an ‘articulatory practice’, whose elements are both linguistic and non-linguistic in character, and whose products are finite relational orders, including social institutions and economic processes. The result is (1) a shift away from economic determinism and class reductionism to a relational account of social and political forms; (2) the development of an anti-essentialist and anti-reductionist account of political identities, which emerge in a dialectical tension with incomplete processes of identification, and (3) a particular understanding of the subject and agency in political theory, which grounds a different account of political practices. The article also (4) sets out the methodological implications of post-Marxist discourse theory, which is focussed on the articulation of different logics of critical explanation, before (5) exploring the role of critique and normativity in this approach, which are conceptualized as continuous, immanent and complex.