Broader Historical Framework Research Articles

The ‘Cultural Burden’: regional film policy and practice in England

This article looks at the development of film policy and practice in the English regions. It asks: how has the ‘territorialization’ of film policy and funding affected regional modes of film production? And further, how is film as a cultural practice manifested in contemporary regional film production? The article is divided into two sections. The first outlines the development of regional film policy and practice from the 1970s, paying particular attention to the model of regional filmmaking that emerged from the film workshop movement and the changes in regional film policy instituted by the New Labour government since 1997. After this broad historical framework has been established, the second section analyzes regional film policy and practice through a case study of the East Midlands region. It is argued that, while ideas concerning cinema as a cultural practice are still present at a rhetorical level, commercial interests have become ascendant in regional film funding policy, restricting the space for creative autonomy that once defined regional production sectors.

Guerra en Šarq Al’andalus: Las batallas cidianas de Morella (1084) y Cuarte (1094) (review)

Reviewed by: Guerra en Šarq Al’andalus: Las batallas cidianas de Morella (1084) y Cuarte (1094) Óscar Martín Guerra en Šarq Al’andalus: Las batallas cidianas de Morella (1084) y Cuarte (1094). By Alberto Montaner Frutos and Alfonso Boix Jovaní . Saragossa, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, 2005. ISBN 84-957-36-0407. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 345. € 15.00. Although Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043-1095), or El Cid, was a real historical figure, much about him remains shrouded in mystery. By carefully reconstructing two of his most famous battles, this study not only makes evident the military skills of this legendary hero but also situates his importance in late eleventh century politics within a broader historical framework. The volume consists of two parts, each written by a different scholar. In spite of this, the book remains consistent throughout in terms of theme, research method, and conclusions. In the first part, Alfonso Boix Jovaní deals with the battle of Morella, fought in 1084 when the Cid was serving the Muslim ruler of Saragossa, Almutaman. The battle was preceded by a campaign by the Cid in eastern Spain, followed by the attack on the castle of Morella that was its centerpiece, and the subsequent rebuilding of a fortress nearby for tactical purposes. These actions prompted a counterattack by the King of Aragon and Almundir, the brother of Almutaman and lord of Lerida-Tortosa. Scholars have struggled for some time to make sense of this campaign, a process made difficult by the failure to identify the location of the fortress rebuilt by the Cid, which, according to a later Latin source, bore the name of Alolala. After a thorough and detailed analysis of the philological, geographical, archaeological, and military evidence, Boix confidently places the fortress north of Morella, near the town of la Pobleta d'Alcolea. Being sure of the fortress's location is important, Boix argues, because its site demonstrates that it was not simply a location for carrying out raids, but part of a strategic plan by the Cid and the king of Saragossa to launch a sustained campaign against the Kingdom of Tortosa and its coastal areas in eastern Spain. The battle of Morella, then, can be seen as a crucial step in this strategy. Alberto Montaner Frutos's study offers a thorough reconstruction of the famous battle of Cuarte in 1094, where the Cid, as lord of Valencia, defended the city against the Almoravids, Berber Muslim invaders from North Africa, and the Andalusians. His reconstruction was accomplished by sifting through a number of different sources, often containing conflicting versions of what happened. The author sheds light on the preliminary logistics of the battle, but, interestingly, goes beyond the siege and the subsequent frontal and lateral counterattacks led by the Cid, to subtly argue that this tactic was, in fact, part of an effective psychological campaign of deception intended to convince the Muslim besiegers that a relief column from Castile had arrived to help him. [End Page 556] The last sections of the book consist of an evaluation of the different medieval sources that deal with the battle, pointing out how they describe division among Iberian Muslims with respect to the Almoravid invaders, with some favoring them and some seeing them as a menace. Montaner closes his study with a detailed evaluation of the geopolitical and historical importance of the battle of Cuarte. It stopped the advance into Iberia of the Almoravids, he concludes, but also reinforced the Cid's reputation as a great warrior and added to the myth that already surrounded him. Although it was written by two separate authors, this book offers a consistent study of two of the most important battles in the life of the Cid. Both authors use sound philological, historical, and geographical tools to give readers a scholarly volume that brings to life in rigorous fashion not only the military tactics used in these two crucial battles, but also the underlying geopolitical, historical, and ideological motives that caused them to occur. Their uncovering of the different agendas in the primary sources that narrate the events, and their exhaustive overview and...

The informalization of urbanity

It is more appropriate to commence an investigation of informality as a way of life in African contexts within a broad conceptual and historical framework. In other words, it makes some sense to study processes of informalization at the juncture at which the colonial imperative sought to transform the lives, institutions and practices of subject peoples. Formal engagements with and discourses on African urban spaces ought to move beyond mere formalisms in order to address how non‐formalized spaces and actors remake themselves. This is a crucial dimension in the examination of African urban formations. In addition, it is useful to imagine the typical African city as struggling between the pressures of postcolonization (and in some cases, decolonization) and the tendencies inherent in certain forms of vernacular globalism. Also in this article, the question of globality and its different kinds of relationships to the typical African city are highlighted in various ways.

A Rebel Against Hermeneutics: On the Presence of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

A Rebel Against Hermeneutics: On the Presence of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Carsen Strathausen (bio) Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. 180 pages. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0804749159 $17.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0804749167. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Lob des Sports. Trans. Georg Deggerich. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005. 175 pages. 14,97 Euro. ISBN: 3518416898. Stanford Comparative Literature Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is one of the most prolific writers in the Humanities today. He has authored about 20 books (more are forthcoming) and edited even more than that. He has published hundreds of academic essays and at least as many journalistic articles and reviews. Writing primarily in German and English, his work has also been widely translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian, and several other languages. This prolific record poses serious problems for the traditional review essay. On the one hand, it seems illegitimate and counter-productive to limit the discussion to just one of Gumbrecht’s works, while, on the other, it would be impossible to do justice to his entire oeuvre. Mindful of this dilemma, the following review concentrates mostly on his latest book in English, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey, yet also makes frequent reference to his forthcoming In Praise of Athletic Beauty (Harvard UP, 2006), which has already appeared in German under the title Lob des Sports. This contextualizing approach mirrors Gumbrecht’s own: Production of Presence situates his recent publications in the broad historical framework not only of his previous works (in chapter 1), but with regard to the “pre-history” of metaphysics as well (in chapter 2). His survey account of Western metaphysics focuses on, among other things, the subject-object split that emerged during the Renaissance period (or “Early Modernity”) and became increasingly established through Descartes and 19th century positivism. His major aim is to highlight the fact that although “Hermeneutics” as a philosophical discipline only developed in the early 19th century, “interpretation” had already been, for many centuries, “the predominant — and soon afterward, the exclusive — paradigm that Western culture made available for those who wanted to think the relationship of humans to their world” (Production 28). But the price for this (exclusive) reliance on interpretation has been a “loss of world,” meaning that “we are no longer in touch with the things of the world” (Production 49). “What meaning cannot convey,” Gumbrecht argues, is the “effect of presence” or what he also calls the “presence effect.” And yet, he repeatedly emphasizes that his recent project about the “production of presence” is not simply “anti-hermeneutical” nor is it directed “against interpretation” in general (Production 2). Rather, he seeks to challenge “the enthronement of interpretation as the exclusive core practice of the humanities” (Production 52; emphasis in the original). For those familiar with Gumbrecht’s work, this position presents a slight — but important — shift away from his radically anti-hermeneutic rhetoric during the 1980’s and early 1990’s, when he was still eager to bid “A Farewell to Interpretation,” as indicated by the title of an essay of his from 1994. A former student of the reception theorist Hans-Robert Jauss and well trained in the art and history of interpretation, Gumbrecht broke with his “doctor-father” well before he went to Stanford University in 1989. Gumbrecht himself has “interpreted” his rebellion against Jauss as a strong oedipal reaction that led him to denounce everything the father stood for: hermeneutics, meaning, and, above all, interpretation. Starting in 1985, Gumbrecht and his collaborators instead began to advocate “Schrift” (“writing”) as one of the key-terms for their own “non-” or “post-hermeneutic” form of literary criticism. They conceived of “writing,” however, less in the Derridian sense of “differance,” but primarily in terms of its physical properties as the material basis for modern communication. The overall goal was to break free from the confinement of interpretation forever caught in the endless circle of presence and absence, signifier and signified, meaning and non-meaning that sustains both deconstruction and traditional hermeneutics. This was indeed a breaking free, but where was one to go? To the letter proper, that black mark on a white surface traditionally charged with...

Afro-Mexican History: Trends and Directions in Scholarship*

This article surveys the development of a relatively new and vibrant subfield in Latin American History, mapping out the major stages of its evolution and signaling key intellectual debates. While much of the scholarship on Afro-Mexican history has been produced in the last thirty-five years, this article aims to contextualize these writings within a broader historical framework. This process shows more clearly the various independent and interdependent tracks that exist within the study of Mexico's black population.

De Quincey, Malthus and the Anachronism-Effect

READERS HAVE LONG BEEN PERPLEXED BY THE QUESTION OF DE QUINCEY'S place in literary history. A writer whose works traverse five decades, from some juvenilia and an early diary written in 1803, to his death in 1859, he is most often taken to be a minor, late Romantic, out of step with the times, an ineffectual dreamer, whose preoccupations and voice betray an allegiance with the older generation of Lakeland writers. (1) Alina Clej, on the other hand, pushes him the other way, and across the Channel: for her, De Quincey is a pre-emptive modernist, a precursor to a European tradition of avant gardistes. (2) He is rarely read, or indeed taught, as a Victorian writer, despite the fact that his work overlaps with the major writers of the Victorian canon. (3) Moreover, unlike other writers of such longevity, little critical attention has been paid to stages in his own development. His erratic publishing tactics, his notorious habits of revision and recycling, have thwarted attempts to identify changes across the body of work, and even the most historicist of his critics tends to respond by reading him synchronically, as though all his writings are of the same moment. (4) We have accrued little sense of 'late' or 'early' De Quincey. It is as though De Quincey is always late, or belated, and sometimes even early. Grevel Lindop's fine new edition, which organizes the works on chronological principles, provides much scope for revisiting these questions and understanding the writer's specific relation to his times. As the works are laid out in terms of publication dates, and where unpublished, composition dates, we can now read across De Quincey's works, from early to late, see patterns of repetition and revision, the clustering of thematic interests, and plot the work against a broad historical framework. The sheer expanse of his disciplinary interests is eclectic: from astronomy to ancient history, from religion to economics, from poetry to parliamentary politics. But striking too is his modishness, his marked responsiveness to the latest ideas and intellectual trends, evident especially because many of his essays take the form of reviews of recently published works. The new edition allows us to see De Quincey's works as an idiosyncratic, but nonetheless capacious record of the intellectual preoccupations of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It is the inclusion of his political writings in the new edition, however, that locks the work emphatically into narratives of social and political history of his time. Many of these writings are reprinted here for the first time, since De Quincey's nineteenth-century editors deemed them, paradoxically, too ephemeral for republication. For modern readers the political writings are problematic for another reason: it is the shrill voice of political reaction that they reveal that disconcerts us, reverberating uneasily beside the received view of De Quincey as the gentle dreamer. As recently as 2000, Daniel Sanjiv Roberts has proposed the downplaying of the later political writings, as unrepresentative of the real De Quincey. (5) The new edition, however, invites us to return to these questions and ask again just who, where and above all when is the real De Quincey. These questions are particularly complicated because there seems to be something about De Quincey's own work that resolutely defies location in particular historical moments. By this I mean not the quality of transcendence that he makes the center of his own literary theoretical disquisition, the Wordsworthian Literature of Power adumbrated in his essays on literary criticism. (6) Rather I mean the peculiar way in which his works seem to slip backwards or forwards in time; not out of time, but out of synch with time. Paradoxically Grevel Lindop identifies this as the characteristic feature of his work--as though the authentic voice of De Quincey is the voice of the anachronist. In this essay, I wish to pursue the question of the anachronism-effect in De Quincey's work. …

Policy alternatives in reforming energy utilities in developing countries

This paper examines the policy alternatives faced by developing countries in their endeavor to preserve and develop their electricity and gas systems, two service-oriented industries which—along with oil—provide the bulk of energy supply both in developed and in developing countries. Even in very poor countries, industrially generated energy is indispensable for carrying out most economic activities. Therefore, governments traditionally recognize that the supply of gas and electricity entails a fundamental public service dimension. The Introduction presents the case for reforming of energy utilities, discusses in general terms the pros and cons of privatization, and attempts to locate the reforms in a broader historical framework in which developing countries’ governments faced characterized by increasing financial hardship. Section 2 constitutes the core of the paper. It reviews the main features of gas and power sector reforms in the developing world and analyzes specifically the cases of five semi-industrialized countries in Latin America and Asia. Section 3 (Concluding remarks) briefly evaluates the country experiences reviewed above and indicates a few policy lessons which can be learnt from them. The main conclusion is that, in a long-run development perspective, full-scale privatization of gas and power sectors in developing countries entails significant risks, and therefore a flexible policy approach is preferable to a rigid commitment to extensive liberalization.

A Good Judge of Character?

A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912. By Cathy Boeckmann. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 2000. 238 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Judgments of character can be the most political judgments of all. And yet the most common judgments of character—the most personal, the most everyday—are most political precisely when their reliance on a politics of character is least visible. The arena in which character has been most visible as a political concept, however, is the arena of national character. In Anglo-American political theory, at least since Hobbes, the concept of character has been a key term for imagining the reach of the public over the private sphere, the reach of the nation over and into the citizen. But as postcolonial and postnational critics have been keen to suggest, perhaps the question of character, particularly the question of national character, is no longer relevant in an increasingly postnationalist frame. Indeed, as Emily Apter among others has observed, in "the postnational 'beyond,' the category of national character fails to figure prominently, if at all." 1 Perhaps the reign of character has passed, residually relegated to conservative polemics of personal accountability and liberal universalizations of cultural difference. Perhaps the phantom of national character has become less relevant as a subject of political analysis, even a red herring of sorts in the study of transnational and global circuits of power and subject formation. But I suspect that it has not. Character continues to be a powerful term in the most everyday strategies of reading, representing, [End Page 325] and performing personal identity, and remains so because of its naturalization, because of its increasing invisibility as a political category. Indeed, as Cathy Boeckmann's richly informed and theoretically astute book, A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912, reminds us, the concept of character is perhaps most relevant, most resourceful and galvanizing, in times of its own invisibility, in times in which it no longer appears to be in question at all. Appraising the American subject's approximation to and incorporation of national ideals has long taken shape as "a question of character." And yet the question of character, the reflexive question which asks what kind of semantic and performative resources have made the concept of character such a privileged mediator of national identity in the United States and beyond, is asked with surprising rarity. It is difficult to imagine another key concept which has done so much hard and politically vexed work throughout the history of the United States. From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siècle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character has had a very long and checkered rhetorical career giving shape to the individualistic terms of American national identity. It is thus surprising that, at a time when interrogations of many of the central discursive bearers of national, racial, gender and class identity have so reinvigorated American studies, such a productive—and often nefarious—concept has received such scant attention, even as the object of a simple genealogical stocktaking. After a generation of post-war sociological and literary accounts of the "American character" (Riesman's The Lonely Crowd perhaps the most influential among them), Warren Susman's influential essay in Culture as History on how the "modal concept" of character organized both techniques of self-mastery and modes of public presentation in nineteenth-century American culture was one of the first to critically assess the concept of character within a broad historical framework. 2 And while Alan Trachtenberg has more pointedly suggested in The Incorporation of America that character "has not received the critical attention that it deserves," 3 such critical attention continued to take shape only as the scattered, incidental, or methodological remarks on character by scholars pursuing other topics. More recently, however, such scattered remarks have given way to a developed body of scholarship on the...

ZIONISM IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

A discussion of historical phenomena always involves discussion of the time dimension: The interaction between a given phenomenon and its place on the continuum of time is a historical question of cardinal importance. Zionism as a historical phenomenon raises questions pertaining to time: When did Zionism begin? Why did it emerge at the time when it emerged? Could it have appeared earlier or later? These questions define Zionism as a time-dependent historical phenomenon, the understanding of which is contingent upon insight into the broader historical framework within which it arose.

Kwame Ture in the Scales of History “a Legacy of Lessons”

promising either. In addition to this broad historical framework, my assessment of the lessons and living legacy of Kwame Ture is unavoidably conditioned by our mutual encounters in the Movement and the philosophy (Kawaida) and political practice of my organization Us (Karenga, 1998). Emerging in the 60's as an organizer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Kwame epitomizes the contours, questions, challenges and struggles of our times. His work of over three decades mir-

Social Constructionism, Discourse, and Psychology

This paper serves as an introduction to social constructionist approaches to psychology. It outlines the arguments which have prompted a shift away from empiricism in the social sciences. Harré's (1992) distinction between behaviourism and the first and second cognitive revolution is used to provide a broad historical framework to develop contrasts between mainstream empiricist psychology and constructionist approaches. The central claim is that theories of meaning are embodied in theories of science, and that we need a new (constructionist) theory of science to underpin a psychology which takes the meaningful nature of human activity as its object of study. Finally, the paper introduces discourse analysis as a methodology which can sustain a constructionist, post-empiricist analysis.

Making sense of civil service reform: Policing, politics and power in Eugene, Oregon during the great depression

In February 1936, a vice scandal rocked the town of Eugene, Oregon, U.S.A. Evidence was produced to show that local police had allowed gambling and prostitution to continue contrary to law. Within a year, civil service rules had been introduced at the Eugene Police Department. These rules ‘reformed’ policing by breaking the direct links between police and ward politicians. By accessing a range of primary source materials including newspapers, oral histories, census data and crime statistics, and, by situating the ‘scandal’ within a broader historical framework, this article explores the ways in which civil service reform might best be understood.

Citizenship, Poverty and the Real Will

The paper analyses the concept of citizenship in the work of Bernard and Helen Bosanquet against the backcloth of a broader intellectual and historical framework. The discussion then addresses three issues in relation to citizenship: class, markets and poverty. Each concept is introduced through the medium of T.H. Marshall's ideas on citizenship. Marshall's ideas are taken as broad markers for the discussion of the concept in the post 1945 era. The discussion of each concept is then analysed in relation to the Bosanquets' theories. The basic conclusion is that many of the Bosanquets' analyses and answers are both inappropriate and antique, however they do highlight certain intrinsic difficulties which are still very much part of twentieth century states.

The Computer and Technical Communication

The first section sketches a broad historical framework in which to understand the emergence of the computer and the profession of technical communication and sets the stage by concluding that the computer is both a part of the technological milieu which needs technical communicators and a tool which communicators can use. Then comes a brief review of computer applications in terms of numerical, nonnumerical, and communication applications and dumb, clever, and intelligent program functions. Then the author argues that advances in computer science will narrow the gap between writing computer programs and documenting them to the point where technical communicators in the software field will be programmers. The final section suggests that computing technology will give technical communicators professional autonomy comparable to that currently enjoyed by doctors and lawyers.

Excavations at Portchester Castle, Hants 1966–1968: Third Interim Report

SummaryThe area-excavation towards the centre of the fort has shown that well-defined traces of occupation exist, ranging from the Roman period to the early nineteenth century. The nature of the Roman occupation, though still uncertain in many aspects, is becoming much clearer and can now be divided into phases tentatively linked to a broad historical framework. Early in the fifth century settlement of Germanic type appeared, with which was associated a gilded bronze disc of apparently sub-Roman form. Then followed more regular Saxon occupation, beginning in the late fifth or early sixth century and probably continuing to the eighth or ninth century. The late Saxon period provides a very detailed picture of a hall with its ancillary buildings, land boundaries, and rubbish-tipping area, all of considerable potential significance on more than a local scale. The later periods are more sporadically represented, but interesting correlations can be made between the archaeological evidence and contemporary documentary and graphic accounts.To understand the internal landscape of the fort more clearly it is evident that much more of the central area will have to be fully excavated and this will occupy most of the effort throughout the next five seasons' work. At the same time it is planned to continue with the investigations of the Priory and the Castle, and to devote some time to the outstanding problem of the defences.