Historical Discontinuity Research Articles

The Postcolonial Time That Remains

Sovereign authority to establish the colony of South Australia was given by Letters Patent (1836), signed by King William IV. The Letters Patent made explicit provision for the recognition and protection of Indigenous rights and interests in traditional lands and waters, establishing the basis for a peaceable and respectful interaction between Indigenous and settler societies. However, the preexisting sovereignty of Indigenous peoples was not respected and these written orders were ignored by the South Australian Company in its executive action to establish the Province of South Australia. Accordingly, the potential for development of positive forms of intercultural social relationship remained unrealized in this region, as was also the case throughout the Australian colonies. This essay reflects upon the transformative force of this unrealized potential, which remains immanent within the trajectory of Australian history. It makes use of Agamben's conceptualization of time and exigency in The Time That Remains (2005) to theorize directed processes of historical discontinuity. We analyse colonial sources of contemporary Australian society, with a renewed attention to those aspects of political recognition and positively shared social life that were always possible but never came to pass into history. We argue that the experience of time and temporality in the ‘messianic mode’ enables new understanding of the problematic ‘time of the now’ and recreates possibilities for the communal invention of postcolonial futures that respond properly to ongoing and contemporary Indigenous practices of sovereignty and nationhood.

Reconciling Replicas: The Second Coming of the <em>Duyfken</em>

Until recently, history as written by the ‘victors’ has been nothing more than repeated efforts to capture a certain slant of truth in order to (re)territorialise the position of ‘white’ dominance in this country. The re-enactment of historical events can be instrumental in the re-presentation of this privileged history. The re-enacted landing of the replica ship Duyfken in August 2000 was marked by an important shift in attitude for at least one of the leading protagonists in the event. In this respect, this particular re-enactment has offered some interesting ways of viewing history/ies in a postcolonial context and for appraising the concept of reconciliation. This essay considers three aspects of the re-enactment: the introduction of a historical discontinuity in Australian ‘race’ relations through the cultivation of a certain type of cultural intimacy during the journey; the (hi)story behind the re-enactment and some reflections on historiography; and, subsequently, an analysis of how the event of the landing could imply an expanded expression of reconciliation, potentially freeing it from its current constraints.

Companion to Empire. A Genealogy of the Written Word in Spain and New Spain, c.550–1550 by David Rojinsky (review)

Reviewed by: Companion to Empire. A Genealogy of the Written Word in Spain and New Spain, c.550–1550 by David Rojinsky Vicente Lledó-Guillem Rojinsky, David. Companion to Empire. A Genealogy of the Written Word in Spain and New Spain, c.550–1550. Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2010. 300pp. This book constitutes a history of writing in Spain and New Spain in the Pre-Modern and Early Modern Periods. Specifically, the work focuses on the relationship between writing and empire, which are understood as textual culture and territorial expansion respectively. David Rojinsky adopts a post-philological perspective in which historical discontinuity and the rejection of mythical origins are the focus of our attention. In other words, the author rejects the notion of historical linear continuity across the different writing practices manifested over the thousand-year period in question (550–1550 AD), and there is no sort of search for a unique and mythical origin of the language, as would be the focus of a traditional historical analysis. According to this post-philological line of argumentation, the only continuity of the language would lie in the permanent relationship between writing and imperial power. Clearly [End Page 365] underscoring this lack of continuity, the author explains that even the concepts of writing and imperial power do not show a constant meaning in the different contexts and epochs under consideration. Rather, their meanings are constantly in a state of flux. The main theoretical bases of the book are Michelle R. Warren’s Post-Philology and the Foucauldian genealogical re-interpretation of Nietzsche’s wirkliche Historie. Chapter One deals with Latin writing in the Iberian Peninsula and its ideological function before 711, mainly in the Etymologiae, sive Origines and Historia de Regibus Gothorum, Vandalorum et Suevorum by Isidore of Seville. Rojinsky explains how writing and the multiple meanings of imperium were used both to support the new Romano-Gothic, political and religious unity in the Iberian Peninsula, and to oppose the threat of the Byzantine Empire. The chapter ends with an analysis of the relationship between grammatica and imperium in the Visigothic law-codes, and their influence on the Pre-modern Period in Spain. Chapter Two explains how the written word both in Latin and in the vernacular were crucial to the functioning of the new centralized monarchies that appeared in the West in the thirteenth century. Jiménez de Rada uses the Latin language in his historiographical works to underscore the historical continuity with the Hispano-Gothic origins and to make the rest of Europe aware by using Latin, the international language. However, with Alfonso X, Castilian is used to show this historical continuity and to support a central monarchy in Castile. Rojinsky pays particular attention to the Siete Partidas, as a pragmatic example of language planning in which the alliance between vernacular writing and political power is very clear. This vernacular code of law homogenized the municipal fueros, opposed regional fragmentation and the power of the aristocracy, and became the fastest way to administer the newly-conquered territories. In Chapter Three the author follows Benjamin’s advice of taking a quotation from the past out of its original context and placing it in the present of the historian so that there can be a dialectal confrontation between modern interpretations and the so-called original meaning. David Rokinsky places Nebrija’s famous quotation “siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” in the context of Nebrija’s philological corpus in Latin and in Castilian. This way the author demonstrates that although imperio referred to power in the quotation mentioned above, the statement was part of a rhetoric to promote the Castilian right to rule the world. Chapter Four analyzes how alphabetic writing in Latin, Castilian and Nahuatl was used to support ideologically the expansion of Christian culture in America. By focusing [End Page 366] on Martyr D’Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo, Decades (1516), the author explains the use of the Classical trope of the Golden Age in America, as well as the topic of the peoples without writing and the noble savage. The author indicates that with the contrast between alphabetic writing and other forms of writing, and between writing and...

Patterns of Population Structure for Inshore Bottlenose Dolphins along the Eastern United States

Globally distributed, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) is found in a range of offshore and coastal habitats. Using 15 microsatellite loci and mtDNA control region sequences, we investigated patterns of genetic differentiation among putative populations along the eastern US shoreline (the Indian River Lagoon, Florida, and Charleston Harbor, South Carolina) (microsatellite analyses: n = 125, mtDNA analyses: n = 132). We further utilized the mtDNA to compare these populations with those from the Northwest Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean. Results showed strong differentiation among inshore, alongshore, and offshore habitats (ФST = 0.744). In addition, Bayesian clustering analyses revealed the presence of 2 genetic clusters (populations) within the 250 km Indian River Lagoon. Habitat heterogeneity is likely an important force diversifying bottlenose dolphin populations through its influence on social behavior and foraging strategy. We propose that the spatial pattern of genetic variation within the lagoon reflects both its steep longitudinal transition of climate and also its historical discontinuity and recent connection as part of Intracoastal Waterway development. These findings have important management implications as they emphasize the role of habitat and the consequence of its modification in shaping bottlenose dolphin population structure and highlight the possibility of multiple management units existing in discrete inshore habitats along the entire eastern US shoreline.

The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity by Edmund S. K. Fung

Reviewed by: The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity by Edmund S. K. Fung Leigh K. Jenco (bio) Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). xv, 319 pp. $90.00 (cloth). In this book Edmund S. K. Fung synthesizes an enormous range of intellectual materials generated during China's Republican period, dating primarily from the May Fourth period (1915-1923) to 1949. Fung argues that intellectuals of this era confronted the same crisis of modernity with which intellectuals, in both East and West, continue to wrestle today. These Republican conversations, he claims, provide the foundational vocabulary through which contemporary Chinese elites debate the direction of their society. Fung masterfully and carefully surveys both Chinese- and English-language scholarship to provide one of the most comprehensive and richly detailed pictures of these intellectual debates available in English. He carefully examines positions and thinkers that have been strangely overlooked in much academic work on the era, but that played decisive roles in shaping ideologies of the time. These include the Chinese "humanism" of the Critical Review Group (pp. 70-72); Chen Xujing's "total Westernization" thesis, which prompted Hu Shi to revise his views on cultural radicalism (pp. 46-60); and the political thought of the "Warring States School," which vested Chinese salvation in a revival of Qin-era concern for national security and military capacity (pp. 120-126). The broad scope of Fung's analysis belies his somewhat simplistic organization of thinkers and debates into an inadequate (and sometimes unhelpful) liberal-conservative-socialist trichotomy. He draws repeated attention to how thinkers and themes continually reappeared in diverse conversations, transcending the very labels he uses to describe them. As Fung effectively argues in Chapter 1, the Westernized radicalism of Chen Duxiu and other May Fourth thinkers betrays an unexpectedly conservative resistance to cultural pluralism and historical change, possibilities embraced by the so-called "conservative" thinkers examined in Chapters 2 and 3. His discussions therefore enable readers to draw connections between themes, thinkers, and materials usually thought of as isolated or distinct. For example, in Chapter 3 Fung points out that conservative impulses in China were not opposed to modernity but in fact saw tradition as an important part of modern development. One of the strongest elements of the book is Fung's discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 of the statist elements of liberalism and related ideologies in China. Rather than interpret Chinese liberals' emphasis on the need for strong state power as an aberration or misinterpretation of "true" liberalism, Fung uses the work of political theorists such as Stephen Holmes to show that extreme individualism did not necessarily always win out over socialist economic policies and strong nationalist states within such liberal thought (p. 140). By pointing out European precedents for these broader possibilities, Fung succeeds in his task of situating these intellectuals within global rather than merely "Chinese" conversations about modernity. He does, however, miss an opportunity here to reverse the gaze and to portray Chinese liberal thought as an independently significant contribution to global liberalism, not simply one of its many interpretations. The one flaw of the book is its failure to examine Marxism in China, at least in terms of addressing how Marxism transformed the landscape through which past and contemporary intellectuals debate the "modernity" mentioned in the book's title. Fung avoids this topic because, in contrast to many of the other intellectual debates the book brings to light, it has been so well-covered elsewhere (including by Fung himself). The importance of drawing attention, as Fung does, to the role played by non-communist elite discourses in modern Chinese intellectual history cannot be overstated, especially given their relative neglect among historians of China. In a book, however, with a title promising examination of "the intellectual foundations of Chinese modernity," it is not entirely obvious how Marxism "is outside the scope of [the] study" (p. 5). By the end of the book, for example, the author himself declares the "ultimate" triumph of Marxism and Mao Zedong thought over "all other schools of thought" (pp. 255, 262)—implying a historical discontinuity that troubles his depiction of a continuous, "ongoing conversation" between...

Chipped Stone Technology and the Colonization of the Aleutian Archipelago

Recent research has refined our understanding of the origin and development of the human occupation in the Aleutians through examination of tools and cultural features. Chipped stone technologies, defined by both tools and debitage, can also be used to identify historical and sociopolitical changes based on which technologies are used and how much they are relied upon. Herein, assemblages from recently excavated sites in the western and central Aleutians, dating to ca. 3000 B.P. and 6000 B.P. respectively, are compared to assemblages in the eastern Aleutians, dating between 3000 and 9000 B.P to evaluate whether the record suggests historical continuity or discontinuity. The changes in chipped stone tool manufacture through time that are highlighted by this analysis reveal evidence of population expansions and interactions that occurred in the Aleutians prior to 3000 B.P. Based on the presence of certain technologies, historical continuity is established among the eastern, central, and western Aleutian sites.

History as transition: Brecht's Historisierung in Straub/Huillet's Not Reconciled (1965), and Angelopoulos' The Hunters (1977)

ABSTRACTBrecht's concept of the Historisierung (the process of historicizing the represented processes) epitomizes the author's will to represent history in a dialectical way that would challenge the continuum of history. In privileging historical discontinuity over continuity, Brecht aspired to identify the contingent and fluid aspects of history that did not treat the historical mistakes of the past as aberrations, but as the product of certain contradictions that can also be identified in the present. This article discusses the employment of Historisierung effects in certain films by Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet and Theo Angelopoulos and analyses the ways they complicate historical representation. In particular, I focus on the formal elements that destabilize the linearity of historical representation. In a bid to understand why these films frustrate the structuring of time, I analyse these films under the rubric of the post-Brechtian and suggest that they share Brecht's favouring of showing history as transitional, without sharing his forward-looking politics.

The ‘revolution’ of 1911 revisited: A review of contemporary studies in China

Reviewing the last decade of Chinese-language scholarship on the 1911 Revolution, this article suggests that we should view the Revolution in richer ways, rather than simply focusing on the political event on 10 October 1911. By contextualizing the revolution in its world, this article argues that it is necessary to view 1911 in its own terms and in global perspective in order to articulate historical continuities and discontinuities beyond 1911. How did, does, and will the spirit of modern revolution function and reshape the mental landscape in China’s past, present, and future? The revolution is considered here to be not only a transhistorical source of transformation but also part of the restructuring of social life and ideals. Revolution has become the ontological ground of China’s modern society. The meaning of the spirit of revolution lay in providing the Chinese people with a space of hope, where they could transcend current disappointment and discontent, and pursue political, economic, and cultural visions to fundamentally change their world. For individuals, revolution offered a means of meeting personal needs; for the nation, the revolution has meant the unending pursuit of ‘standing up, enriching up, and strengthening up’.

Quantifying the lag time to detect barriers in landscape genetics

Understanding how spatial genetic patterns respond to landscape change is crucial for advancing the emerging field of landscape genetics. We quantified the number of generations for new landscape barrier signatures to become detectable and for old signatures to disappear after barrier removal. We used spatially explicit, individual-based simulations to examine the ability of an individual-based statistic [Mantel's r using the proportion of shared alleles' statistic (Dps)] and population-based statistic (FST ) to detect barriers. We simulated a range of movement strategies including nearest neighbour dispersal, long-distance dispersal and panmixia. The lag time for the signal of a new barrier to become established is short using Mantel's r (1-15 generations). FST required approximately 200 generations to reach 50% of its equilibrium maximum, although G'ST performed much like Mantel's r. In strong contrast, FST and Mantel's r perform similarly following the removal of a barrier formerly dividing a population. Also, given neighbour mating and very short-distance dispersal strategies, historical discontinuities from more than 100 generations ago might still be detectable with either method. This suggests that historical events and landscapes could have long-term effects that confound inferences about the impacts of current landscape features on gene flow for species with very little long-distance dispersal. Nonetheless, populations of organisms with relatively large dispersal distances will lose the signal of a former barrier within less than 15 generations, suggesting that individual-based landscape genetic approaches can improve our ability to measure effects of existing landscape features on genetic structure and connectivity.

Euclides da Cunha na Amazônia: descontinuidades históricas nos modos de ver e narrar a floresta

The article examines how the discursive, social, and political processes that nationalized the Amazon gained firm footing during Brazil's First Republic. It is argued that Euclides da Cunha's texts on the Amazon see the forest and narrate its story in a way that differs from the travel accounts of nineteenth-century naturalists, above all foreign ones. Drawing inspiration from Latin American cultural studies, the article reinforces the argument that there is a historical discontinuity between the romantic foreign travel literature of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth-century writings of Euclides da Cunha.

The Changing of Central Asian Traditional Communities by the Cultural Succession and Discontinuation

In the history of central Asia the frequent changing of ruling dynasties could be interpreted as political discontinuity, in other side social and cultural tradition from the past appeared in the areas of intellectuals and knowledge systems could be considered continual factors which guarantees cultural continuity of central asian communities by the beginning of 20th century. Cultural Heritages from Persian, Arabic, Mongolian, Turkish and Russian dynasties delivered to the society of present central asian countries and these cultural heritages and historical vestiges could be the standard to decide social & historical continuity or discontinuity.

Foucault's Concept of Power and the Global Discourse of Human Rights

This article carries out a Foucauldian analysis of the global discourse of human rights. In the spirit of Foucault's genealogy it identifies a historical discontinuity in the development of human rights between the Cold War period, when human rights were a heavily contested concept, and the late modern world in which human rights are becoming a form of global standard whose validity is less and less questioned. Using Foucault's understanding of the way power is exercised within discursive structures and knowledge/power configurations, the article argues that in the late modern world human rights constitute a global norm with reference to which agents are evaluated and increasingly evaluate themselves. Power may be exercised over those forms of agency that do not conform to this norm by other agents, and at the same time, we witness more and more situations in which there is no such coercion and yet agents find it necessary to alter their behaviour and declare their adherence to human rights. The article also seeks to extend Foucault's framework in order to explain the emergence of the global human rights discourse. It thereby complements a Foucauldian analysis with a political economy approach which, it is argued, helps us enhance the Foucauldian framework which suffers from the separation of discourses and politics from the economy.

Immigrant Life Histories as a Heritage Resource for Civic Engagement

It is a truism that, since its foundation, the United States has been a nation of immigrants (Brettell and Hollifield 2008:1; Cohen 2007: 33.). Thus, accounting for national history and the history of immigration have usually paralleled each other. What needs further explanation, however, is the valuation of immigration as national heritage. Behdad (2005) notes that historical amnesia plays a large part in the representation of the heritage of U.S. immigration. There has, in fact, been an historical discontinuity between the value ascribed by established populations to an immigrant cohort at its time of arrival, and at a point later in its settlement chronology (Brodkin 1998). Repeatedly in the nation's history, some have been considered problematic to the idea of the nation at the time of their arrival (Behdad 2005:111-142), and later memorialized as model assets after their incorporation into the larger polity

Ein Kampf um Ordnung. Europa, die Steppe, die Leinwand und das Nichts

Analysing five Eastern European History films that in one way or another are set in the steppe, this essay suggests that there is an intricate connection between setting and narrative structure. The historical “Steppe” appears as a projection screen that invites a conversion of the historical material into myths of utopian, or dystopian, content. Thus, the steppe movies under scrutiny deal with “struggles for order” in a very basal sense: that is, for order as such versus existential nothingness. This mythopoetic potential of the steppe topos appears to rely on the established and densely connoted meta-narrative of East vs. West, while its actualisation seems to be provoked by an encompassing consciousness of historical discontinuity.

Born Out of the Creek Landscape: Reconstructing Community and Continuance in Craig Womack’s <i>Drowning in Fire</i>

What identifies a Creek work, in my mind, in addition to its authorship by a Creek person, is the depiction of geographically specific landscape and the language and stories that are born out of that landscape. --Craig Womack, Red on Red (20) In his 1999 monograph, Red on Red. Native American Literary Separatism, Craig S. Womack (Creek) explains the importance of understanding Native texts within their specific frameworks and traditions. He offers this approach as an alternative to reading American Indian texts within or in relation to pan-Indian or European/American canons. For Womack, this reading strategy must further engage the specific geographies of the lands in question. This tribally-specific approach is generally labeled tribal nationalism, though Womack opts for separatism as the subtitle to his text. (1) However, Womack is not solely a literary critic but also a novelist, and he offers Drowning in Fire (2001) as an example of the goals he lays out for tribal, and specifically Creek, authors. (2) This article analyzes Drowning in Fire, focusing on the reconstruction of Creek/ Muskogee identity in the specific landscapes of Oklahoma. (3) By reconstruction, I do not mean to imply artificiality or to foster an image of a lost culture attempting to define itself despite historical discontinuity. Rather, using Womack's own critical lens as offered in Red on Red, this essay examines his novel in terms of the way Creek identity, like all identities, is constantly produced and reproduced by its own cultural agents; at the same time, it is also constantly producing and reproducing its own cultural subjects. These reconstructions are always in-process, resilient, and adaptable practices that oppose images of vanishing or extinct Native communities. I also wish to recognize Womack's remarkably fluid reconstruction of culture and how it is affected by human connections to place. Because Oklahoma is the site of Creek relocation (from Georgia and Alabama, in particular) following the 1830 Indian Removal Act (a history I address in more detail later), one might expect it to serve as the site of exile, the temporary locus of an ongoing diaspora. However, for the characters in Drowning in Fire, as for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Oklahoma becomes a sovereign home. Muskogee connections to place and other species are integral parts of these open-ended reconstructions, core values that are reinforced through family stories that serve as lessons about how to dwell in place and in motion. These elements bear particular relevance to recent ecocritical moves to understand and articulate human and other-than-human migrations and diasporas. Reflecting the fact that the Creek Nation has historically been a confederated one--that is, it has included and welcomed individuals, families, and even whole communities from other tribal, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds in a broad-reaching alliance--the Creek community presented in Drowning in Fire is racially inclusive. It is also notable that Womack imagines this community to have been historically welcoming and accepting of what would today be termed queer relationships. Womack's work, then, further informs ecocritical studies of naturalized concepts of gender and sexuality. Throughout Drowning in Fire, contemporary Creek identities are understood through Creek stories, especially those describing human relationships to land and water and to plant and animal species. In Red on Red, Womack explains: [T]his study will employ the term traditional Creek life rather than precontact and postcontact culture. I acknowledge that the very term is problematic, especially in the way it is sometimes perceived as dealing only with the past. I wish to posit an alternative definition of traditionalism as anything that is useful to Indian people in retaining their values and worldviews, no matter how much it deviates from what people did one or two hundred years ago. …

Ein Kampf um Ordnung. Europa, die Steppe, die Leinwand und das Nichts

Analysing five Eastern European History films that in one way or another are set in the steppe, this essay suggests that there is an intricate connection between setting and narrative structure. The historical “Steppe” appears as a projection screen that invites a conversion of the historical material into myths of utopian, or dystopian, content. Thus, the steppe movies under scrutiny deal with “struggles for order” in a very basal sense: that is, for order as such versus existential nothingness. This mythopoetic potential of the steppe topos appears to rely on the established and densely connoted meta-narrative of East vs. West, while its actualisation seems to be provoked by an encompassing consciousness of historical discontinuity.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Neglected Social Psychology of Institutional Racism

Teaching and Learning Guide for: The Neglected Social Psychology of Institutional Racism

L'Oeuvre au Noir : The Shadow Economy of Kosovo's Independence

The article analyses the nexus between illicit economy, violent conflict and peacetime politics in Kosovo. It examines political agendas, client interests and transnational criminal activities, taking into account the interaction between local and international actors involved in peacebuilding. While making sense of emerging trends and regularities, the analysis identifies dilemmas and challenges that counter-crime strategies have to address in Kosovo. The contention is that elements of historical discontinuity are discernible but the global economy remoulds traditional structures, and grey and black market profits give organized crime a formidable opportunity to emancipate itself from the role of service provider, often allowing direct intervention in the management of political violence and in crafting the state-making project.

Joyce, Ireland, Britain

Reviewed by: Joyce, Ireland, Britain Gregory Castle (bio) Joyce, Ireland, Britain, edited by Andrew Gibson and Len Platt. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. x + 243 pp. $59.95. History has proven to be less a nightmare than a boon for Joyceans in recent years. Though critics have acknowledged the historical significance of Joyce’s texts at least since T. S. Eliot first noted that Ulysses made sense of the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,”1 the last twenty years or so have seen the development of a decisive historicist trend in Joyce studies. For Andrew Gibson and Len Platt, however, important studies of Joyce and history by scholars like Robert Spoo and James Fairhall remained frustratingly theoretical and for that reason missed the “Joycean lesson of specificity” (6).2 The essays in this volume are meant to overcome this tendency toward abstraction by employing a form of historical analysis the editors call the “London method” (17). Though they confess that, aside from themselves, there is no “London school,” they describe “a certain set of intellectual and scholarly habits that feature in the work that London Joyceans tend specifically to do” (17). These habits cohere as a more or less materialist method in which “the relation of theory to history and text” is altered (18). The practitioners of this method do not claim to offer an “accessible, final truth” (19). Indeed, they are interested primarily in the “possibility of establishing certain limits to interpretation” (19). What this generally means is a greater emphasis on the particulars of historical context, though as some of the essays demonstrate, discussions of historical abstractions are not excluded. For example, Finn Fordham’s genetic approach to Finnegans Wake uncovers Joyce’s “ironization of universal history” and his “critique of how universalization appeared in flawed attempts to justify imperialist policy” (199). In Fordham’s view, the “[t]ranshistoricism” of Joyce’s texts is precisely the effect of a continuity between particularities across time (202). This is not Hegelian totalization but a kind of “[t]ransepochal pattern hunting” that results in a “mockery of universalization” (203, 209). The London school appears to have learned the lessons of Michel Foucault, for while it “aims at exactitude,” it is also “attentive to the possibility of historical discontinuities, ruptures, breaks” (19). Just as often, though, Joyce’s texts give evidence of surprising historical continuities and connections, as is evident in Wim Van Mierlo’s essay, which argues that “Joyce’s high notions of exile” were part of a long history of emigration in Ireland, from voyaging saints like St. Brendan to the “heyday of the Celtic Tiger” (180, 195). In this context, [End Page 577] self-exile is not a heterodox gesture but part of a general “Irish consciousness” (181). Anne Fogarty offers a different vision of continuity in her lucid analysis of the political subtleties in Joyce’s “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” She argues against the common conception that Parnellism is a “backward-looking romantic nationalism” (105). By looking at newspaper treatments of Ivy Day, specifically the debates over the symbolic value of the ivy leaf itself, from 1892 to 1902, Fogarty demonstrates that the “cult of Parnell,” through the tension created by (in Pierre Nora’s terms3) archive memory and cultural memory, was an effective site of “ongoing political debates” (111). The “‘thwarted dialectic’ of Parnell’s politics” (116), nicely illustrated in the ambivalence of Joe Hynes’s recitation of “The Death of Parnell,” contributes to the enigmatic historical continuities of Joyce’s story. Fogarty is quite right to insist on context, despite the “provisional” nature of historicist readings (104). My concern, though, is that analysis of context can become an end in itself. This seems to be the case in Steven Morrison’s discussion of Joyce and Lord Byron and John Nash’s analysis of Shane Leslie’s reviews of Ulysses.4 These essays are absorbing but less for what they say about Joyce than what they say about Leslie and Byron’s biographers. The potential problem with the “London method” is that it comes perilously close to insisting on the priority of historical information. The editors may claim...

Playing in the dark/ playing in the light: Coloured identity in the novels of Zoë Wicomb

Zoë Wicomb's three fictional works – You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), David's Story (2000) and Playing in the Light (2006) – all engage with the question of a South African ‘coloured’ identity both under apartheid with its racialised discourse of black and white, and in the context of the postapartheid language of multiculturalism and creolisation. This essay examines the representation of ‘colouredness’ in Wicomb's writing in terms of the two different conceptions of cultural identity that Stuart Hall has defined: an essential cultural identity based on a single, shared culture, and the recognition that cultural identity is based not only on points of similarity, but also on critical points of deep and significant difference and of separate histories of rupture and discontinuity. The politics of South African ‘coloured’ identity in Wicomb's works reveals a tension between, on the one hand, acceptance of the complex discourse of colouredness with all its historical discontinuities, and, on the other, the desire for a more cohesive sense of cultural identity, drawn from a collective narrative of the past. In David's Story the possibility of an essential cultural identity as an alternative to the unstable coloured one is considered with reference to the history of the Griqua ‘nation’ in the nineteenth century. And in Playing in the Light the alternative to colouredness is examined with reference to those coloured people under apartheid who were light enough to pass for white and crossed over, reinventing themselves as white South Africans. The essay approaches coloured identity through the lens of postcolonial diaspora theory, and more specifically, diasporic chaos theory.