Contemporary Attitudes Research Articles

Guilt norms regarding historical violence and implications for intergroup relations in France

The present study examines how guilt norms regarding past French colonization in Algeria (one of the North African countries referred to as the Maghreb) are linked to collective guilt and other negative group-based emotions, contemporary intergroup attitudes towards immigrants of the former colonies and their descendants (French Maghrebians), and conciliatory behaviors. Seventy French students, with no past family relationships regarding colonization, answered questions measuring both injunctive and descriptive collective guilt norms for the in-group (what French people should feel and actually feel, respectively), as well as the injunctive guilt norms for two out-groups (what English and Turkish people should feel for their own country’s violent past). Results revealed strong injunctive and descriptive no-remorse norms for the in-group as well as an injunctive no-remorse norm for the English out-group. The Turkish out-group, on the contrary, was expected to feel particularly guilty for the Armenian genocide. Both in-group norms were linked to less expression of all negative group-based emotions and to less intention to compensate. Moreover, the injunctive, but not the descriptive, no-remorse norm for the in-group predicted more prejudiced attitudes and less signing a petition asking for apologies. Unexpectedly, the injunctive pro-remorse norm for the Turkish out-group predicted less intention to compensate, more prejudiced attitudes, and less conciliatory behavior. These results show that emotional norms in response to the colonial past of one’s nation may prevent people from feeling any negative group-based emotions and may contribute to upholding negative relationships with compatriots of Maghrebian (i.e., North African) descendants.

Recordkeeping and research data management: a review of perspectives

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore a range of perspectives on the relationship between research data and records and between recordkeeping and research data management.Design/methodology/approachThis paper discusses literature in the field of research data management as part of preliminary work for the author’s doctoral research on the topic. The literature included in the review reflects contemporary and historical perspectives on the management and preservation of research data.FindingsPreliminary findings indicate that records professionals have been involved in the management and preservation of research data since the early twentieth century. In the literature, research data is described as comparable to records, and records professionals are widely acknowledged to have skills and expertise which are applicable to research data management. Records professionals are one of a number of professions addressing research data management. However, they are not currently considered to be leaders in research data management practice.Originality/valueResearch data management is an emerging challenge as stakeholders in the research lifecycle increasingly mandate the publication of open, transparent research. Recent developments such as the publication of the OCLC report “The Archival Advantage: Integrating Archival Expertise into Management of Born-digital Library Materials”, and the creation of the Research Data Alliance Interest Group Archives and Records Professionals for Research Data indicates that research data is, or can be, within the remit of records professionals. This paper represents a snapshot of contemporary and historical attitudes towards research data and recordkeeping and thus contributes to this emerging area of discussion.

Making Sport History in the (Semi)Periphery: The Portuguese Perspective

Sport is one of the most important phenomena in Portuguese contemporary life. Yet, in the late twentieth century, there were more historical studies about antique clocks and potatoes than on sport. Portuguese historians ended up successively underrating its place in history, placing sport in a kind of scientific (semi)periphery, with political history becoming the core of the matter. Sport, however, is an extremely important element in any serious attempt to reconstruct contemporary history, popular culture and what it means to be Portuguese. This paper analyses the history of the Portuguese historical writing and academic research on sport history, also its emergence, development, and contemporary position in the historiography of a (semi)peripheral country, in a comparative way with the Centre. The concept of (semi)periphery is employ to describe both the situation of sport history in Portugal and the Portuguese (sport) historiography in the international context.

A Fraudulent Truth? Christian Damberger’s Vision of Africa (1801)

Two years after the publication of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799), the claim by a German cabinet maker/joiner, Christian Friedrich Damberger, to have crossed the African continent on foot over a period of 16 years, from the Cape of Good Hope to Morocco, made for an instant bestseller. After the narrative was unmasked as a hoax, however, critical reception was particularly vitriolic in Britain. This article analyses the reviews in order to determine why the hoax caused such outrage. It emerges that this narrative presents a direct challenge to Banksian notions of travel writing. Furthermore, its portrayal of Africa and its peoples tends to subvert contemporary attitudes concerning inter-racial relationships, the idea of ‘going native’, and, importantly, the slave trade. The article then asks what type of truth the narrative might be generating, if not a strictly factual one.

British Landmark Music Videos and the BFI National Archive

Pop promos combine the commercial and artistic extremes of moving image production, capturing and expressing cutting edge contemporary attitudes in succinct and stylish ways. They have been an integral part of the British moving image industry since music video became a viable industry in the early 1980s, yet their place in British film and moving image history remains largely unsung. The British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive holds a varied collection of music videos acquired from the promo industry, TV broadcasters, and individual filmmakers that spans from the mid-1970s to the 2000s. A largely unexplored part of the national collection, it is a body of work ripe for research. This paper outlines various curatorial approaches taken to develop and enrich the archive’s music video collection, including details about the ‘British Landmark Music Video’ collection, curated as part of the ‘Fifty Years of British Music Video’ project.This article was published open access under a CC BY license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Obsessional subjectivity in societies of discipline and control

Drawing on the work of the later Foucault, especially that concerning disciplinary power and bio-power, as well as Deleuze on the emergence of “societies of control,” this article traces the trajectory of obsessional subjectivity from its emergence as a firmly psychiatric category within a disciplinary matrix (i.e., monomania) toward its contemporary position within the bio-political sphere (i.e., obsessional neurosis and obsessive–compulsive disorder) in societies of control. It is argued—pursuant to Lacanian formulations—that obsessional neurosis simultaneously contributes to the efficacy of the workings of bio-power in imagining, vis-à-vis university discourse, a psychologized and psycho-biographical subject knowable and traceable, while also conferring an openness in being that would surmount the dysfunctionality inhering in repetitious thinking and doubt. The aim of this essay is to discern the structural dimensions of mechanisms of obsessional subjection as they implicate certain changing forms of power, and specifically that of our current predicament in the West, in a world where desire and the production of knowledge are governed through bio-power.

The special measures school and the ‘c’ word: A case study of the role of conformity, compliance chimera, and the power of community and context in a special measures secondary school in northern England

This article explores the relationship between capital and education through the experiences of a British secondary school following a grading by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills that placed the school into special measures, considering the underlying assumptions and inequalities highlighted and obfuscated by the special measures label. The formulaic and ritualistic manner in which operational and ideological methods of reconstruction were presented as the logical (and only) pathway towards improvement is examined in an effort to disentangle the purpose of the ‘means-to-an-end’ approach within prevailing hegemonic structures, requiring a revisit to contemporary positioning of Gramscian concepts of ideology through the work of Gandin. The decontextualisation of schools from their socio-economic environments is probed in order to expose the paradoxes and fluidity of resistant discourse. The ambiguities between a Catholic ethos, neo-liberal restructuring and the socio-economic context of the school and the greater demands to acquiesce to externally prescribed notions of normativity are considered as a process that conversely created apertures, newly formed sublayers and corrugations where transformation could take root. Unforeseen epiphanies and structures of dissent are identified and will enrich the narrative of existence and survival in a special measures school in an economically deprived northern town in the UK.

National Trauma and the Fear of Foreigners: How Past Geopolitical Threat Heightens Anti-Immigration Sentiment Today

This paper introduces a historical, macro-political argument into the literature on anti-immigration sentiment, which has mainly considered individual-level predictors such as education or social capital as well as country-level factors such as fluctuations in labor market conditions, changing composition of immigration streams, or the rise of populist parties. We argue that past geopolitical competition and war have shaped how national identities formed and thus also contemporary attitudes toward newcomers: countries that have experienced more violent conflict or lost territory and sovereignty developed ethnic (rather than civic) forms of nationalism and thus show higher levels of anti-immigration sentiment today. We introduce a geopolitical threat scale and score 33 European countries based on their historical experiences. Two anti-immigration measures come from the European Social Survey. Mixed-effects, ordinal logistic regression models reveal strong statistical and substantive significance for the geopolitical threat scale. Furthermore, ethnic forms of national identification do seem to mediate this relationship between geopolitical threat and restrictionist attitudes. The main analysis is robust to a wide variety of model specifications, to the inclusion of all control variables known to affect anti-immigration attitudes, and to a series of alternative codings of the geopolitical threat scale.

Africa and the Africans’ Care for the Poor and Needy in the New Testament: Good News for Contemporary Africa and the Africans?

This article entails a critical investigation of the attitude of Africa and Africans to the poor and needy in the New Testament and the contemporary attitude of Africa and Africans (especially leaders) to the poor and needy. The paper glanced through the scripture for what it says of the poor and needy and the various terms used for the poor and needy. It also examines the terminologies used for Africa and Africans in the New Testament and critically discusses Africa and Africans care for the poor and needy in the New Testament. The article further looked into African core values as it relates to the current attitude of Africa and Africans to the poor and needy. It draws a conclusion that the contemporary attitude is nothing but bad news as against the legacy of Africa and Africans in the New Testament.

The Long Reach of the Riots: Denying Racism, Forgetting Cronulla

ABSTRACT1Sydney’s 2005 Cronulla Riots marked a watershed moment in race relations between White and Arabic-speaking Australians. In this essay, I reflect on how the riots now sit in the public imagination and explore how certain narratives on the riots have produced a series of problematic silences, disownings, and forgettings. I elaborate six modes of denial and disavowal – modes of sidestepping and disowning the racism that underpinned the riot and more contemporary attitudes towards Muslim Australians. The paper is framed around six ‘modes’ of silence: (1) Always Elsewheres, Always Someone Else; (2) The Spectacular; (3) The Narrative of ‘Past-ness’; (4) Twisted Tolerance; (5) Slippery Humour; (6) Interpolation of Non-Arab Subjects into the White Project. Some claim that the Cronulla Riots were an aberration and many in the ‘Shire’ wish that attention would move on. After all, the riots were a decade ago and the ‘kids’ who participated have all grown up. There has been no trouble on the beach since. I suggest, however, that the riots have a much longer reach – culturally, geographically, and temporally – than is generally understood.

THE EAST INDIA COLLEGE DEBATE AND THE FASHIONING OF IMPERIAL OFFICIALS, 1806–1858

AbstractThroughout its relatively brief existence, the English East India Company's college in Hertfordshire was hotly debated in Company headquarters, parliament, and the press. These disputes are deeply revealing of contemporary attitudes to the inter-related issues of elite education, government, ‘Britishness’, and empire. Previously, historians interested in the relationship between education and empire have concentrated largely on British attempts to construct colonial subjects, but just as important and just as controversial to contemporaries was the concomitant endeavour to create colonial officials. On a practical level, disputes in educational theory made it difficult to decide on how to train recruits who would satisfy growing demands for transparency, accountability, and merit. Furthermore, on certain points contemporaries fundamentally disagreed about which qualities an imperial official should have. These disagreements reflected deeper uncertainties, particularly regarding the ideal relationship to be fostered between the Company, Britain, and India. In short, this debate highlights the tensions, anxieties, and ambiguities surrounding reform and imperial expansion in the early nineteenth century.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921Karine V.Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821-1921 Karine V. Walther. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.In Sacred Interests, Karine V. Walther, assistant professor of history at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Qatar, provides a well-documented investigation of relations between the United States and the Islamic world during the nineteenth century, and she convincingly argues that this period set the stage for contemporary American attitudes toward Islam. Walther asserts that popular perceptions of Islam were to a great extent shaped by American Protestant missionaries and denominations who combined religious and racial characteristics to depict Muslims as violent barbarians intent upon the destruction or conversion of all unbelieving infidels such as Jews and Christians. However, the conversion of Muslims to Christianity might provide a civilizing influence that would negate the Muslim tendency toward violence. The missionaries who were well connected to key figures within the American government viewed Muslims around the world as monolithic, although most contact with Islam in the nineteenth century concerned the Ottoman Empire. There were considerable lobbying efforts for American intervention in the Middle East to protect Jews and Christians, but, for most of the nineteenth century, American diplomats maintained a policy of nonintervention. However, this policy was altered by the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines. Walther devotes considerable attention to the Islamic Moros whose resistance to annexation provoked a brutal repression by the United States, although this brutality was rationalized as part of a necessary civilizing mission. Sacred Interests concludes with the post-World War One agreements that ignored Arab nationalism in favor of European mandates that continue to cast a shadow over the turbulent Middle East. Her book suggests that need to break away from nineteenth-century stereotypes and assumptions if they expect to understand the complexity of the Islamic world. The clash of civilizations concept continues to exercise considerable sway over American attitudes toward Islam.Walther begins her account with an examination of American support for the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks were Christians and Greece the birthplace of American democracy, and, thus, the Greek rebels deserved the assistance of the United States against the barbaric Ottoman Islamists. In seeking the intervention of the American government, religious lobbyists emphasized the atrocities of the Ottomans while the massacres committed by the Greek forces were ignored. American officials, such as James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, expressed sympathy with the Greek cause, but an official policy of nonintervention was maintained. A similar pattern was evident in the American response to the struggle of Bulgarian Christians and nationalists to achieve independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. Walther writes, Americans depicted Bulgarians as politically and religiously advanced Christians at the religious mercy of fanatical, violent, and despotic Muslim rulers (68). The focal point for American agitation in the region was the Christian missionaries and professors at Robert College, which was established in Istanbul as a bastion of American civilization within the barbaric Ottoman capital. Again, Bulgarian atrocities were ignored in favor of depicting Muslim savagery.Support for Bulgarian independence also came from the Russians who were intent upon spreading their influence into the Balkans. The Russians, despite pogroms against Jews, were considered part of Christian civilization and thus exempt from much of the missionary criticism leveled toward Muslim leaders. In fact, Walther argues that Ottoman officials were quite aware of the racial inconsistencies within American and European Christendom, pointing out European anti-Semitism as well as the suppression of Native and the lynching of blacks in the American South. …

“We must be ready every day, all the time”: Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Nuclear Anxiety and Fear of Death in American Life

am scattered in times whose order I do not understand, prayed Saint Augustine. storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts (244). He is not unlike the French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who observed in an interview twenty centuries later, develops a great anxiety... Cause you are always waiting, what's going to happen, what, what, what, what! It's what? ... It's all the time (The Decisive Moment). What they describe is the jumble of confusions-often exciting but equally often unnerving-that characterizes the experience of being alive.Precisely what it means to alive is a question that has sparked centuries of philosophical debate. A deliberately vague phrase, it is intended here to encompass a range of human experience, but most particularly the life of the mind. As Cartier-Bresson continues, Life changes every minute. The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute. Death is present everywhere, as soon as we are born. It is a dynamic, characterized by uncertainty about the future, that influences and shapes the stories we tell, the culture we produce, and the ways in which we respond to events within our lives and within our world. It is problematic, then, that uncertainty is so often drained out of historical accounts of lives, which are written with what the novelist and critic William H. Gass labeled a stubborn externality (263). The historian, Gass observed, follows the course of human behavior as the eye might follow sliding rocks, and never feels the avalanche, never gains admission to events, in the belief... that they have no inner life.In his work, American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety, Peter N. Stearns offers a compelling historiography of the place of fear in twentieth-century American life. As Stearns acknowledges, the connections he illuminates are possible, but they cannot be proved (89); however, his work is provocative, particularly in regards to what Stearns identifies as the role has to play... in explaining to ourselves (8-9). In American Fear, Stearns argues that fear is an urgent American policy and personal issue (9), and he advocates the important role that behavioral history and emotional history play in our understanding of significant (and probably distinctive) (8). Through the book as a whole, he explores how national reactions to the dread emotion [of fear], both in personal and in public life, have exhibited crucial distinctive features (3), which have made Americans more anxious and fearful than they were in the past. Within this broader argument, Stearns hypothesizes that Cold War fears and changes in responses to death heightened anxieties around mortality and grief, thus contributing to a climate wherein fear emerged as the dominant emotion (75). The nuances of the cultural changes Stearns identifies are further illuminated when considered through a life-writing lens and they grow particularly evident when viewed across the narrative of a celebrity life.As the most visible American life narrative of the mid-twentieth century, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life is an excellent source from which to draw out support for Stearns' claims. Examining how her image was connected to nuclear fears in the early 1960s and exploring the ways in which her life narrative intersected with contemporary American attitudes toward death demonstrate how celebrity life narratives act as repositories of cultural anxiety, wherein emotional phenomena such as fear play out. As such, they offer compelling evidence of those phenomena and a rich means of contextualizing them within American life.Life Writing and American CelebrityStearns attributes the rise in publicly expressed fear to changes in cultural attitudes toward the specialness of children, as well as attitudes toward grief and death, all of which had an impact at the level of everyday American life (82-87). …

“It's Almost Like They Were Happier When You Were Down”: Microaggressions and Overt Hostility Against Native Americans in a Community with Gaming

In this article, we use qualitative data from 100 Native Americans living in mid‐Michigan to document the changing nature of interactions between whites and tribal members. The community studied has seen significant changes in the economic and social position of the tribal community thanks to two decades of successful gaming operations. We find that, while Native Americans attest to positive changes in the community, many of which originate within the tribe itself, hostile and negative attitudes on the part of whites persist. Some of these contemporary attitudes are carry‐overs of traditional anti‐Native prejudice, while others reflect a reworking of old stereotypes to reflect new realities, while maintaining an unequal racial order. Hostile attitudes are accompanied by discriminatory behavior, often in the form of microaggressions. We suggest that, while old‐fashioned racism has not disappeared, modern racism is more subtle and complex. While contemporary Native Americans react to and resist racism in a variety of ways, modern racist attitudes and the microaggressions that accompany them serve to reinforce an unequal racial status quo and the maintenance of a racial hierarchy of group positions.

Indigenous People and the Miserable Failure of Australian Planning

Major changes in Australian law and significant research efforts have re-positioned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as important actors in planning. Yet, this has barely penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream professional community. Current requirements for professional competencies and planning curricula fall well short of preparing planners to productively engage with Indigenous people. The profession itself barely acknowledges the significant changes advanced in Indigenous studies and planning, and the new imperatives. This paper details the contemporary position of planning practice in Australia with regard to Indigenous people and considers the changes required to more justly engage with Indigenous rights.

Malaysia. Museums, history and culture in Malaysia By Abu Talib Ahmad Singapore: NUS Press, 2015. Pp. 328. Tables, Maps, Illustrations, Abbreviations, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

Malaysia. Museums, history and culture in Malaysia By Abu Talib Ahmad Singapore: NUS Press, 2015. Pp. 328. Tables, Maps, Illustrations, Abbreviations, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 48 Issue 1

A Mutually Gratifying Relationship: Goethe and Hermann von Pückler-Muskau

This paper presents the available evidence of meetings between Goethe and the travel writer and landscape gardener Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), including Pückler’s unpublished account of one of them, and charts their correspondence. Goethe thought Pückler’s Briefe eines Verstorbenen depicted an ideal art of living, and his laudatory review assisted the prince’s rise to literary fame, not least in Great Britain, where critical responses to the review shed light on contemporary British attitudes to Goethe. Briefe eines Verstorbenen also inspired some scenes in Faust II, and to a greater extent than hitherto recognized. For his part, Pückler was a lifelong admirer of Goethe, and his approach to his work as a park designer was imbued with Goethean principles.

ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ ВІЙСЬКОВОЇ ПОЛІТИКИ ТА ПОЛІТИКИ БЕЗПЕКИ В ЄВРОПІ НА ТЛІ «УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ КРИЗИ» 2014 Р.

The article touches upon the impact of the Russian aggression in Crimea and in Donbas region in 2014 on the European countries’, as well as the EU and NATO’s revision of their respective military and security policy. The role of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s contemporary position in Europe has been unfolded. The divergence of the foreign and security policy intercourse of the European states caused by geography, history and military factors has been analyzed. Thus, the article reveals the Central and East Europe’s rising focus on the Russian aggression in Ukraine and the impact thereof on shaping the subregional security policy. On the other hand, the states of West Europe pay way less attention to considering the conflict as an element of their security strategy. However, a series of divergences does exist within the East and Central European political elite when it comes to determination of their respective countries’ situation in the contemporary security map of the continent within the framework of the so-called “Ukraine crisis”. For instance, one can distinguish Bulgaria and Czech Republic as black sheep of the post-socialistic Europe when it comes to the general security and political course of the East and Center when it comes to the Ukrainian issue. The article as well shapes the background and the essence of Germany’s leading role in the common foreign and security policy of the EU. It is concluded that NATO should concentrate on its traditional military activity aspect and thoughtfully cooperate with the EU to succeed in resolving issues of the European collective security.

Philippine Literature in Spanish: Canon Away from Canon

AbstractWhy does everyone know Claro M. Recto’s name in the Philippines but almost nobody has ever read his works? Following Pascale Casanova as well as some postulates by Pierre Bourdieu and Itamar Even-Zohar, the article outlines the complex linguistic reality in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century and traces the origins of the current literary canon of Philippine literature, as well as its contemporary position both nationally and internationally. It also discusses how markers of literary prestige were supplanted by markers of political and patriotic prestige, thereby creating a literary canon based on an author’s contribution to the creation of a suitable ‘Philippine national identity’.

Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan by Félix Guattari

Reviews 279 point out that not all environmental reform is motivated by reverence for nature; proponents for green cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, were often driven by social reform and public health concerns. This debate will be familiar to scholars of environmental history in the United States, and Ford situates French attitudes toward the environment to contemporaneous movements in Europe and the United States. Of particular note is Ford’s ability to provide historical context for environmental rhetoric and research. She frequently reminds her readers that anxiety over the human impact on the environment is not unique to twenty-first-century society, and that state and civil approaches to environmental disaster in the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for contemporary environmental policy. In this way, Ford bridges the gap between past and present, creating a compelling and unique portrait of the emergence of contemporary French attitudes toward the environment. Ithaca College (NY) Rachel Paparone Guattari, Félix. Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan. Ed. Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015. ISBN 978-1-937561-20-8. Pp. 156. $25. This concise collection brings together eleven eclectic works in translation written by Guattari in the 1980s, alongside two critical essays authored by the editors of the volume. Chosen in light of their central theme, modern Japan, the eleven primary documents demonstrate a vast diversity in terms of scope, style, and length. Ranging from a one-page poem to a few short essays, the book also includes interviews with Guattari, as well as photographs of the French scholar taken by Keiichi Tahara. As explained by editor Jay Hetrick, Guattari traveled to Japan in the 1980s as a result of his growing disenchantment with politics and intellectual life in France. In his article, which would have better served as the editors’ preface for the book, Hetrick defends Guattari’s work against accusations of Orientalism by proposing a different nomenclature to define the French philosopher’s work: “critical nomadism” (138). Unlike many of his predecessors, Guattari did not attempt to “speak for” the Other in his works, but rather, he wished to encounter the Other and, through dialog with the Other, reach a better understanding of the mechanics of the world. The texts gathered in this collection are the result of such dialogs (hence the critical inclusion of three interviews), reflections resulting from a dialectical methodology rather than distant observation and Manichean comparisons between a foreign culture and one’s own. Furthermore, Guattari’s goal in these essays is by no means to“save”the Other from himself, or from his oppressive society; on the contrary, Guattari seeks to save the West from the pitfalls of capitalism by seeking alternatives elsewhere. In Japan, Guattari discovers that avantgarde architecture rejects the “cult of the norm” (15) by blurring the line between the inside and the outside, or through the use of revolutionary techniques such as “ruptures of symmetry” (82), “the fitting together or nesting of decentered forms” (83), or“abyssal openings”(84).Architecture is but one example of the kind of artistic liberation that has allowed Japanese artists to invent new forms and functions for both art and thought, as well as to decenter the subject by putting its place into question both spatially and conceptually. Furthermore, despite the influx of Western culture, ideas and consumer products, Japan does not seem to suffer from the “the wave of Judeo-Christian guilt that feeds our ‘spirit of capitalism’” (14), thus providing a potential resolution to the ills that ail the rest of the Integrated World Capitalism (138). Japan’s central role in the development of technology also explains Guattari’s interest. Guattari accurately imagined how new technologies would permit the greater subjugation of the labor force (particularly through tele-communications), and pondered how machines (computer programs for instance) would change the nature of discourse and enunciation.While a glossary of terms would have made this otherwise fascinating book much more approachable to a diverse audience, this collection will quench the curiosity of any reader interested in Guattari’s interpretation of Japanese modern dance, architecture, urbanism, avant-garde photography or plastic arts. Georgia Southern University Virginie Ems-Bléneau Jones...