Hall Of Mirrors Research Articles

Desires and History: Historical Representation in Frances Burney’s Edwy and Elgiva and Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald

Seeking to encounter the sheer excess of the Romantic investment in the past, Stephen Bann sorts out many images reflected in a “hall of mirrors” in his study Romanticism and the Rise of History. Within his “hall of mirrors,” Bann represents novelists, painters, sculptors, museum curators, and inventors, reflecting and refracting senses of historicity (9). Playwrights, however, are not included, an omission I would like to address in this discussion of two Romantic‐era historical dramas, Edwy and Elgiva (1790) by Frances Burney and Ethwald (1800) by Joanna Baillie. Both Burney and Baillie choose to represent, historically, subjects that, if written about at all, were camouflaged in the Gothic codes of incest and homoeroticism. Working in a visual medium—historical tragedy—they represented highly prohibited subjects and issues particularly off‐limits to women, indicating a crucial need for representation. As women, Burney and Baillie may have identified with the restraint put on these subjects. The condition of femaleness, like subversive sexuality, was almost incapable of shaping its own meaning in a present time frame, but an historical representation offered possibility.

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. By Laura A. Lewis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+262. $22.95.

<i>Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico</i>. By Laura A. Lewis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+262. $22.95.

Book Reviews: Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

Book Reviews: Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

Escape from Germany: Disappearing Bodies and Postmodern Space in Christian Kracht's Prose

Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson claims, has brought about transformation of reality into (125). This apotheosis of the visual has, according to Martin Jay, led not only to a visual hypertrophy but also to the denigration of sight (543, 546). Certainly the most concise if not renowned account of the frenzy of the visual, Jean Baudrillard's genealogy of the image, employs the relationship of a map to a landmass to illustrate how visible signs have severed themselves from their referents such that they themselves now pass for reality itself. In effect, the difference between cartographic abstraction and the actual territory it maps disappears such that we are left with only a hyperreal world of simulations. Along with this triumph of illusions over their referents, the cartographer's object of study, the terrain itself, has also vanished from view. In spite of the existence of lingering vestiges of reality, Baudrillard insists that the dominion of images is complete and unassailable. Even the most violent provocations like hijackings or armed robbery-forms of agency designed by a few individuals to strike at a locus of and rematerialize the real-are nostalgic and ineffectual, for what they seek is nowhere to be found (Simulacra 20-21). Primarily concerned with establishing the structure and function of simulacra as globalized systems of domination, Baudrillard provides no answers for his readers as to how to orientate themselves in a world that is both spectacular and vanishing before their eyes. The hall of mirrors is an endless labyrinth without an escape hatch. While simulacra have played deceptive tricks on the mind and the eye, postmodernity has instigated others to embrace iconoclasm, blindness, and disappearing acts as guidelines for re-orientation and agency. Jay cites Jean-Francois Lyotard as identifying in absence, nothingness, and formlessness the possibility of accessing a postmodern sublime (573-84). Lyotard's anti-ocularcentrism refrained from reconciling the split between senses and what makes sense and instead suggested that the wandering de-materialized body constituted the precondition for negotiating the continuously shifting phantasmagorias of the (Jay 584, 586). With an eye on the abject body in contemporary art, Hal Foster proffers the view that critical responses to postmodernity have not necessarily jettisoned the body's materiality but rather have locked on to corporeal sites and conditions that espouse formlessness and non-being (149). From this perspective, putting the broken boundaries of the material body on display rejects the simulacrum's knack for whitewashing the real and staging its own virtuality. In Foster's engagement with Julia Kristeva, the abject-any phantasmic substance that is both foreign and intrinsic to the subject and that must therefore be expelled in order to preserve the subject's integrity-can exceed modernism's ability to sublimate the abject's blurring of borders and obfuscation of identities (Foster 153, 165; Kristeva 207). Under the sign of postmodernity, the abject has proliferated and intensified such that it proves capable of shattering the illusions of the simulacrum and arriving at the real.1 The abject can also backfire and obliterate the body entirely. In this case, the corpse occupies a position of radical negation where power cannot penetrate; but this comes at the price of pushing agency into the realm of nihility (Foster 166-68). While Lyotard and Foster advance divergent approaches for grappling with the simulacra, both make convincing cases that the eye is no longer reliable; the fight against the simulacrum must transpire in and on the material body. This quagmire-the body as a site of domination and resistance within the apotheosis of the visual-figures centrally in the narratives and public personae of Christian Kracht. Take, for example, his incendiary pronouncements from late September 2001: Ich mochte ein haben, ein radikales, islamisches Bilderverbot (Reents). …

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico, by Laura A. Lewis

<i>Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico</i>, by Laura A. Lewis

A House is not a Home: Gender, Space and Marquesan Encounter, 1833–34

In August 1833, a party of American missionaries with their wives and children took up residence at Taiohae on Nukuhiva, one of the three islands that comprise the northern group of the Marquesas, only to abandon their station eight months later in April 1834. This paper looks at the journal records of those few months and considers the pressure that cross-cultural encounter placed on American notions of gender and the domestic ideology that underwrites it. Desperate to make a home in an alien land, the missionaries oversaw the construction of a residential compound but, as the months progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the walls they built were not secure. Far from being a place of respite, the compound was continuous with the native landscape and an indigenous sexual culture the missionaries could only register with disgust. Despite the best efforts of the female missionaries to model Christian family life, the peculiar domestic architecture of the mission dwellings formed not the desired proscenium between savage and civil but a more disorienting hall of mirrors in which Marquesan concepts of sexuality and space dissolved the distinction between public and private on which American notions of gender depended. Accordingly, the fate of the Marquesan mission allows us to revisit many of the critical commonplaces that circulate around women and Pacific missionary endeavour.

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

In Hall of Mirrors, Laura Lewis aims to depict the institutionalization of caste hierarchies in colonial New Spain in order to highlight its inherent contradictions. Ostensibly (and legally), New Spain’s society was separated into two groups—Indians and Spaniards. Africans and all racially mixed peoples (primarily castas) were clustered with the Spaniards, who enjoyed authority over everyone. Of course, that was the ideal. The reality was that colonial blacks, natives, and Spaniards had their own distinct perceptions and uses of power.Lewis selects witchcraft as the instrument to explore the functioning of caste and its paradox of power. Here witchcraft is taken to mean some sort of diabolical activity. It is the province of Indians and appears to include most forms of hechicería, magic, and nahualism. The notion of witchcraft itself hearkens back to the Spaniards’ Judeo-Christian background, and they were quick to blame untoward events on the devil. Never fully comprehending traditional culture, they attributed the Indians’ practice of witchcraft to otherwise inexplicable occurrences. Whether Indians considered themselves witches is not certain. It is known that native specialists were well versed in the various therapeutic and toxic properties of North American flora and fauna, they used these substances when called upon, and they had been mediating the supernatural long before the arrival of the Spaniards and Africans.In the colonial era, supernatural specialists were most often called upon to cast or counteract spells, perform divinations, and concoct love potions of one kind or another. Hall of Mirrors is dense with examples of Indians’ expertise in witchcraft. It is particularly relevant that Indians were not subject to prosecution by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; by default, they may well have been the only members of colonial society safely able to engage in witchcraft.But Indians were just one aspect of the caste structure: blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos were essential to the mutual articulation of power between Spaniards and natives. Indeed, the real subject of the book is caste itself, which was determined by lineage and the vagaries of culture. With caste as leitmotiv, Lewis finds a great divide in societal structure and practice, which then frames her discussion. On one extreme one finds what she refers to as sanctioned behavior, which favored Spaniards, subordinated natives, and preferenced castas as go-betweens who extended Spanish influence. On the other extreme was the unsanctioned behavior of Indians and their facility with witchcraft. In this circumstance, castas affiliated with natives and ultimately compromised Spanish authority. But power was reciprocal and anyone’s prerogative.Thus Lewis finds individuals in all social groups who made recourse to witchcraft to gain power over someone else, whether it was to attract a lover or recover stray cattle. The means by which the goal was accomplished entailed engaging casta intermediaries who sided with one group or the other to promote their advantage. She also highlights the stereotypes: Indians and their incapacidad, their passivity and femininity, their proclivity to the subversive; blacks and blackness were associated with bellicosity, violence, and the devil itself. Men tended to form pacts with the devil, and women were inclined to diabolic service. The product is a colonial litany of pejorative labels for just about everyone, if it can be said that casta categories were as sharply defined and rigid as indicated. The caste hierarchy served to keep each group in place, and judging by the continuity of patterned activities, it surely worked.The supreme value of Hall of Mirrors, though, rests in its array of examples that afford a rich, textured view of life in and around Mexico City. It concerns primarily ordinary people and their relationships, their apparent concern about love, sex, and vitality, abuse, personal and material loss, Catholicism, and so many other things. These stories are a welcome complement to an already very interesting book.

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico (review)

Reviewed by: Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico by Laura A. Lewis Elizabeth Emma Ferry Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico. By Laura A. Lewis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. In Hall of Mirrors, Laura A. Lewis has given us a richly textured account of social differentiation and power in colonial Mexico. By looking at the ways in which social categories were interpreted and debated in the context of judicial accusations of witchcraft and other transgressions, she has shown how the Spanish administration attempted to fix coherent social categories and to assign to those categories standards of legitimate (in her words, “sanctioned”) spaces and activities. She also suggests ways in which individual actors negotiated their own positions within these categories in imaginative and sometimes quite effective ways. Dr. Lewis uncovers the details of colonial judicial proceedings with particular focus on the politics of colonial power and the system of social categorization known as casta. She defines “casta” as similar to the term “raza,” also used at the time, in that it “linked social qualities to blood or ancestry” (p. 24), but without raza’s negative connotations of Jewish- or Moorishness and unlike raza, linked to a sense of inclusion based on kinship and other sorts of claims. At the same time, each caste — including Spaniards, Indians, blacks and the interstitial mulatos and mestizos — had its own positively or negatively charged attributes and these attributes were understood as inherent, at least to some degree. Lewis begins her argument by asserting that: the politics of caste involved two trajectories of power, which mirrored each other and were inextricably intertwined. The first set of patterns…privilege[s] Spaniards and Spanishness while subordinating Indians and Indianness, and [turns] blacks, mulattoes and mestizos into mediators who extended Spanish authority….The second set of patterns indexes the world of witchcraft, a term which described state-censured sets of moral violations…including trysts and pacts with the devil…[and] popular forms of sorcery and “black magic” (5–6). Lewis refers to these two sets of patterns as “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” domains of political and social action and devotes the rest of her account to tracing the ways they are linked and separated in the accounts of judicial proceedings. By foregrounding the spatiality of difference in colonial Mexico, Lewis provides a new perspective on the ways the Spanish state managed conceptual categories of difference and the subjects seen to belong to and transgress these categories. As in Europe and colonial North America, the theme of witchcraft in colonial Mexico was deeply interconnected with the politics of gender. Lewis shows that in Mexico it was simultaneously tied to the politics of caste, for instance in the discursive practices that feminized Indians and their witchy behaviors (pp. 57–63). In the cases she examines, accusations of witchcraft very often become an index of unsanctioned behaviors and the flouting of colonial authority, particularly by women and by Indians in collusion with those from other castes. This fact appears to be equally well accepted by judges, claimants and defendants (though used by them in very different ways). By approaching historical information with an ethnographer’s eye, Lewis deepens our understanding of how casta was negotiated in the courts of New Spain. She makes knowledgeable suppositions about how these categories were enacted in everyday life during the period, without ever succumbing to a facile trust in the accounts given in court. She further shows how the politics of caste intersected with that those of gender, occupation and other forms of social differentiation and how these politics were enacted spatially in terms of sanctioned and unsanctioned domains that were seen as simultaneously metaphysical and geographic. The book is divided into two parts, the first treating the “sanctioned” domain and the second the “unsanctioned,” though Lewis also readily acknowledges the interrelatedness of the two. After considering the relationship between casta and raza in the colonial context, she goes on to address the relations between Spaniards and Indians (Chapter 2) and of mestizos, mulatos and blacks (Chapter 3) within the sanctioned domain of work, domesticity, markets, and so on. Chapter 4, a pivotal point in the argument, addresses...

:Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

:<i>Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico</i>

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. By Laura A. Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003 xiv plus 262 pp. $79.95 cloth/$22.95 paper)

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. By Laura A. Lewis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003 xiv plus 262 pp. $79.95 cloth/$22.95 paper)

Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. xiv+262, £69.00, £17.50 pb.

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The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919-1933

PART I: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE, 1918-1929 1. The Hall of Mirrors: Peacemaking in the West 2. Distant Frontiers: Peacemaking in the East 3. Revolution from the Left: The Soviet Union and the Post-War Settlement 4. The Primacy of Economics: Reconstruction in Western Europe, 1919-1924 5. The Primacy of Nationalism: Reconstruction in Eastern and Central Europe 6. Revolution from the Right: Italy, 1919-25 7. The Geneva Dream: The League of Nations and Post-War Internationalism 8. New Dawn? Stabilisation in Western Europe after Locarno 9. Faltering Reconstruction: Cracks in the Locarno Facade 10. Troubled Waters: Uncertainties in Italy, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union 11. Faltering Internationalism: Disarmament and Security after Locarno Conclusion: Europe Reconstructed? PART II: THE HINGE YEARS, 1930-1933 12. The Diplomacy of the Depression: Economics and Foreign Policy 13. Beyond Europe: The Manchurian Crisis 14. The Poisoned Chalice: The Pursuit of Disarmament Conclusion: The Hinge Years Appendices Select Bibliography

Main principles and practices in leader development

Purpose – Aims to present a conceptual framework for understanding how leaders develop.Design/methodology/approach – The arguments are derived from the assumption that leadership, like many other human manifestations, is a function of a given potential, relevant motivation, and ongoing developmental processes. It is argued that three developmental psychological principles are essential for leaders' development, i.e. experiential learning, vicarious learning, and the suitability of certain developmental aspects to relevant critical periods.Findings – These developmental principles, along with Schon's modalities of learning and reflections (“follow me”, “joint investigation” and “hall of mirrors”), serve as a conceptual framework for discussing main implications and practices related to developing leaders.Originality/value – Leaders' development is a process that occurs continuously in an organization. Many organizations attempt to confine it artificially to courses and supplementary training. This limits t...

The image of the other: Friend, foreigner, patriot?

The paper explores the imagery and constructions of alterity in the contemporary world. The image of the other is at the same time the image of ourselves, mostly through the metaphor of the ?stranger.? This ?stranger? represents the unknown, so he/she occasionally provokes fear and resentment, if only for appearing physically different in the ?mainstream? culture. This paper traces the genesis and development of certain modernist ideals (including the need to postulate the existence of others as strange and potentially threatening). The apparent lack of comprehension for (cultural, ethnic, racial) others is just a symptom of the much deeper disorder - in the quest for rationality, the meaning of simple human communication seems to be forgotten. Just like in a hall of mirrors, the images that people encounter are basically the images of them?selves - only they have been distorted through nationalist or racist rhetoric. Using the examples from theory (anthropology, feminism, cultural studies) as well as from specific cultures (Brazil, South Africa, former Yugoslavia, France), and following on the works of scholars like Kristeva, Linke and Balibar, the author demonstrates the logic behind the need to exclude others, as well as the fact that all of these attempts will eventually back?fire. For we cannot exclude others if we do not at the same time exclude ourselves.

Escape from the Hall of Mirrors: Commentary on Paper by Jody Messler Davies

The author suggests some ways in which this important paper contributes to the relational perspective on clinical work. In particular, the analyst's role in owning participation in the struggle for the position of the doer, the “bad one” is seen as crucial to shifting out of the negative symmetry in which each person feels done-to by the other. Davies's crucial identification of the dynamic whereby the child must own all of the badness for the parent helps to clarify how repetition works in the analytic dyad. Whereas the repetition may be understood in terms of the complementary relation of doer and done-to, the owning of responsibility for participation is associated with the space of thirdness, the alternative. This author sees the Davies paper as a seminal contribution to the effort to unpack the mystification that projective processes foster, that are concretized in relationship rather than merely in the individual psyche by forcing the other to bear the toxic identity while denying it in the self. Davies's work illustrates how the intersubjective third can be reestablished by the analyst's careful ownership of hatred and also makes clear that the issue is recognition of what cannot really be hidden, except by reproducing mystification in the analytic process. This author also notes that Davies has provided an important redefinition of what has often been misunderstood as disclosure.

The Hall of Mirrors in Small, Large and Virtual Groups

Philosophy, literature, mythology and psychoanalysis present the double face of mirroring. In this paper we examine the conditions for benevolent mirroring and the types of destructive one, focusing on the ‘hall of mirrors’ concept of Foulkes and Anthony. We also analyze the possibilities for mirroring in the large group and the virtual environment.

Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination by Philip Shaw (review)

754 Reviews contains interesting discussion of 'Infant Joy' and 'Infant Sorrow'.) In discussing the Spectre and the Emanation, Connolly makes a case for seeing the word 'Emanation' as implying blood, and so meaning a bodily state, normally a female one. Here and in the last chapter, 'The Eternal Body', Connolly drives towards her thesis, which, stated in the preface, only now becomes apparent: that is, in dialogue with feminist criticism of Blake, to see the body as paradigmatically male, androgyny always assuming the male body (there is no discussion of the hermaphrodite in the book) and the resolutions towards union and reunion of bodies being homosexual in character. She draws here on Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave 2000), which makes an interesting study to read in tandem with her own, though she finds Blake's homoeroticism a little less usable forfeminism than Hobson does. Though Hobson's evidence, as opposed to his background information, is not necessarily convincing, it should be said that he and Connolly have put together, independently, a strong case for revaluing Blake's composite art in the light of the homoerotic, which must be given further treatment, and which will dislodge some older models of Blake. Connolly's work most certainly convinced this reader, both in detail and intuitively,with her range of evidences and detailed textual knowledge. University of Hong Kong Jeremy Tambling Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. By Philip Shaw. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. xiv + 26opp. ?45. ISBN 0-333-99435-3. Written and visual representations of the Battle of Waterloo are such obvious (and major) subjects for cultural study that it is surprising that this is the firstsubstantive examination of the matter. On the field of Waterloo an epoch of history was violently terminated and the post-war epoch abruptly began. Tourists streamed to the site of the battle and recorded their impressions; poets sought to philosophize history (Byron and Scott, Southey and Wordsworth, even Coleridge). Wellington himself tried to fixthe image in a classic text (oddly omitted from this study). By gathering together diverse sources Philip Shaw creates, as it were, his own illuminativepanopticon , or a hall of mirrors which encircle the event from every viewpoint, and in which the mirrors reflect each other as much as the event itself (Southey and Byron, for instance, in their diverse 'pilgrimages' to Waterloo, or Leigh Hunt and Wordsworth in their differing use of Milton). The panopticon reveals, in fact, that there was no all-seeing eye (not even Wellington's or Bonaparte's eye of command). Waterloo is not transparent history but a field of ideological conflict in which even ideology itself has opacities that in Zizek's words conceal a 'traumatic social division which cannot even be symbolised' (p. 32). One does not even know what it is one thinks one knows. That is an epistemological issue, and this is a literary study. It is therefore con? cerned as much with formal issues (especially genre) as with questions of knowledge. The form writing the battle takes itself determines how the battle is read. Writers, in this respect, are not mere products of material circumstance or discourse but active makers of form. For instance, Shaw examines in detail how Scott develops an in? terplay between 'romance' and 'history' in poetry and prose and compares his 'epic' treatment of the battle with Southey's Spenserian 'pilgrimage'. Or, in Wordsworth, Shaw is concerned with the way the Pindaric and the Horatian, the public and the private, shape his use of the Ode. (Marvell's 'Horatian Ode' might have been revelatory here.) What unites many accounts of the battle, however, is the writers' desire to express its transcendent or sublime qualities (above 'the fury and the mire' of hand-to-hand conflict) and, thereby, to fashion a sense of the nation in triumph, an ideal embodiment somehow raised above the dark presence of post-war economic de- MLR, 99.3,2004 755 pression (in the material field) or the despair of that minority of writers (most notably Byron) who were disenchanted by the 'crowning carnage'. Brief review necessitates simplistic summary. It is unfair to the flexibilityof Shaw's nuanced and highly...

Reviews of Books:Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico Laura A. Lewis

Reviews of Books:Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico Laura A. Lewis

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico

The Partly Cloudy Presidency

Written against the backdrop of jingoistic patriotism, the “War on Terror” marketing slogan, and the draconian neoconservative agenda currently dominating American cultural politics, the author seeks to police the crisis of these wayward times through a series of narrative collages that intersect with and comment on our current historical conjuncture. Deploying quotes from and engaging in dialogue with voices from popular culture as a means of critiquing the false hall of mirrors that has become the Bush administration’s prevailing model of “truth” in post-9/11 America, the author’s words stand as a resounding alternative to the unquestioning voices of appeasement currently dominating mainstream corporate media.