Ideological Configurations Research Articles

Raízes sociais e ideológicas do lulismo

O artigo sugere hipóteses para compreender o realinhamento eleitoral que teria ocorrido em 2006. O subproletariado, que sempre se manteve distante de Lula, aderiu em bloco à sua candidatura depois do primeiro mandato, ao mesmo tempo em que a classe média se afastou dela. A explicação estaria em uma nova configuração ideológica, que mistura elementos de esquerda e de direita. O discurso e a prática, que unem manutenção da estabilidade e ação distributiva do Estado, encontram-se na raiz da formação do lulismo.

Imperial Reading?: The East India Company’s Lending Libraries for Soldiers, c. 1819–1834

Imperial Reading? The East India Company’s Lending Libraries for Soldiers, c. 1819–1834 Sharon Murphy (bio) Britain enjoyed unparalleled overseas expansion in the years between 1780 and 1830, consolidating her rule over India and parts of Canada, and developing or adding greatly to her colonial possessions in Australia, South Africa, and the Caribbean.1 During this same period, “a new cultural and social phenomenon known as ‘the rise of the reading public’” emerged, with readers avidly consuming the prose fiction that rolled off the nation’s printing presses.2 That this prose fiction, in particular the novel, crucially facilitated the spread of empire has been persuasively argued by theorists and critics who suggest that the form worked in complex ways to prepare readers to imagine and, hence, “accommodate” Britain’s imperial expansion. Works such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Mansfield Park (1814), it has been suggested, contributed to the naturalization of a sense of England’s cultural and military power, and promoted notions of racial identity that made a British Empire seem both inevitable and necessary to the reading public. This is not to say that writers like Daniel Defoe or Jane Austen self-consciously set out to promote imperial ideology in their writing, but rather that their works illuminated “the far from accidental convergence between . . . patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism.”3 Despite the attention that has been paid to the link between the novel and empire, critics have devoted strangely little effort to identifying the types of fiction that may have been read by actual soldiers or sailors, the British Empire’s most immediate agents. They tend to take it for granted that the [End Page 74] “reading public” lived and worked in the British Isles.4 Even Gauri Viswanathan’s pioneering study of the introduction of English literature in nineteenth-century India and how it facilitated imperial ideology focused on the colonized subject rather than the colonizer. Its analysis of “the Englishman actively participating in the cruder realities of conquest, commercial aggrandizement, and disciplinary management of natives” assumed that this Englishman was the producer rather than the consumer of the type of “knowledge that empowers him to conquer, appropriate, and manage” other lands.5 A crucial issue thus largely unaddressed by critics is what happened to the English text when it was read by an English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish man in a place such as nineteenth-century India; that is, by readers who were sustaining Britain’s imperial presence. Viswanathan contends that, for Indian readers, such texts functioned “as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state, [becoming] a mask for economic exploitation”: was this ideological effect in some way diluted, erased, or reversed when English, Scots, Welsh, or Irish were the consumers?6 A further issue that arises here is whether those responsible for overseeing “the imperial mission of educating and civilizing colonial subjects [in India] in the literature and thought of England” realized this mission could or should be extended to British soldiers; whether there was a recognition that this, too, might “in the long run [serve] to strengthen Western cultural hegemony in enormously complex ways.”7 This article will raise such questions by examining the East India Company’s decision to establish lending libraries for soldiers at its stations in India during the early 1820s and 1830s. Historians Peter Stanley and Linda Colley have provided tantalizing glimpses of this evidence, pointing out that, by the 1830s, these institutions contained works like Robinson Crusoe as well as “religious tracts in abundance.”8 As we will see, though, East India Company records provide real insights into the motivations and responses of those who established, operated, and/or used the libraries, as well as into holdings and borrowing patterns at some of the stations.9 Close study of the records thus enables us to understand conflicting responses to literacy and to fiction, without falling afoul of what has been called “the receptive fallacy”: that is, the way in which much literary criticism tries “to discern the message a text transmits to an audience by...

Virtual (Br)others and (Re)sisters

Recently, the Internet has become the focus of immense speculation regarding the social construction of identity and cultural “authenticity.” However, examinations of virtual communities such as blogs, multiuser domains, and chat rooms have largely ignored nonwhite, especially African American, virtual communities (VCs). Through participant observation, content analysis, and personal interviews, this article analyzes a VC dedicated to members of African American fraternities and sororities, generally referred to as black Greek letter organizations (BGLOs). Findings show that BGLO virtual authenticity is accomplished via (1) the making of “brothers” and “others” based on symbolic boundaries of exclusion and inclusion and (2) the deployment of themes of resistance based on emotions of both sufferance and success. Implications suggest that interrogations of how virtuality constrains and enables processes of “authentic” racial identity formation as well as configurations of racist narratives and ideologies can yield added insights regarding the raced character of structure/agency, symbolic boundaries, and the social use of emotions.

Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class by John Kucich (review)

255 Reviews ers with numerous illustrations and quotations from the original literature. In brief, Bursting the Limits ofTime will constitute, for a long time, a basic reference book and a rich source of inspiration. Works Cited Voltaire. Des singularités de la nature. Basel, 1768. Cuvier, Georges. Recherche sur les ossements fossiles. Paris: Deterville, 1812. Pasca l R ichet Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris • Imperial Masochism: British Fiction,Fantasy,and Social Class by John Kucich; pp. 270. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. $35.00 cloth. With the publication of this (his fourth) book, John Kucich confirms his reputation as one of the most original voices in the study of Victorian literature . In a recent keynote address, he spoke of “shadow-discourses,” discourses that have gone (or been allowed to go) “dormant” in the cultural imagination.The chief virtue of Imperial Masochism is that it succeeds in coaxing out of intellectual hibernation not one but two shadow-discourses—those of masochism and of social class—that have largely dropped out of recent studies of nineteenth-century British imperial fiction. He analyzes acutely the interweaving of these two discourses in the work of four nineteenth-century Anglophone writers—Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad—arguing that in the colonial fiction of all four, masochism “focused one particular conjunction more than any other: the relationship between imperial politics and social class” (1). Many postcolonial scholars have written about imperialism and its discontents—the anxieties, confusions, and ambivalences of the colonial subject—but Kucich’s approach is rare in linking the suffering of this subject to the category of class.The concepts of race, gender, and sexuality have served as lenses through which scholars have examined colonial literature, but class has largely been ignored as an analytical rubric. Lately, historians have tried to remedy the neglect of class in the study of imperial history—the best example being David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British SawTheir Empire—but, until Kucich, literary critics have been slow to explore this theme in the analysis of imperial literature. His book is thus a fresh and welcome development. Kucich has chosen to focus not on the predominant image of masochism— the Freudian model of sexual submission associated with the Oedipal stage—but on a“shadowy,” alternative masochism: the model, put forward by relational psychologists, of a narcissism linked to the pre-Oedipal stage of psychological victorian review • Volume 34 Number 2 256 development. According to the latter model, disruptions in the parent-child bond open a narcissistic wound in the child that finds its compensation in omnipotent fantasies of control over oneself and others. Kucich examines the metaphors generated by such masochistic fantasies, metaphors that, in latenineteenth -century Britain, often insinuated themselves into imperial narratives that glorified pain, victimization, and sacrifice.According to Kucich, the metaphoricity of masochistic fantasy received a class (usually middle-class) inflection within two discourses in particular—those of evangelicalism and professionalism—that often underwrote lateVictorian imperial narratives. He does not dismiss the heuristic usefulness of the concept of Oedipal masochism; indeed, he finds that in works of colonial fiction, fantasies of eroticized and non-eroticized masochism sometimes work together both to energize characters ’ relationships with one another and to galvanize the ideological configurations those relations embody. However, he asserts that pre-Oedipal masochism’s emphasis upon the relational (suffering as an imagined path to love and sympathy ) offers more diverse and nuanced interpretive possibilities than does the narrow emphasis on sexualized submission in Oedipal masochism that often dominates current psychoanalytical approaches to literature. Kucich argues that in the Scottish novels of the late 1870s and 1880s, Stevenson used bourgeois and anti-bourgeois doubles to disrupt the psychological economy of a pre-Oedipal masochism, thereby exposing the social incoherence of the Scottish middle class. In his South Pacific writings of the 1890s, however, Stevenson showed that through the self-martyrdom of a self-styled, evangelical anti-imperialism, he might overcome the psychosocial schisms that plagued the middle-class milieu of his earlier works. The chapter on Schreiner is the most controversial.There, Kucich contends that in both The Story of an African Farm and her later non-fiction, Schreiner...

Turkish Labour Confederations and Turkey's Membership of the European Union

The Turkish labour confederations have oscillated in their approach to the incorporation of their country into the European Union. This article explores the key question of how Turkish labour confederations have adapted to and evaluated the process of EU accession and what factors have affected their different trajectories. The research is guided by the question of how and why labour has either veered towards or away from Euroscepticism. The authors argue that although, to a certain extent, evaluations of economic policy, intra-organizational and ideological struggles and sectoral composition and differences can explain the stances expressed at the level of the confederations, it is ideological configurations, the nature of their relations with the state and the EU's attitudes to Turkish membership that largely influence the Turkish peak organizations' approach to the EU and accounts for the differences between the confederations.

Assessing the Stability of the Rule of Four on the U.S. Supreme Court

Most research on the U.S. Supreme Court treats the Rule of Four as a fixed agenda-setting norm to which justices faithfully adhere. In this paper, we investigate the stability of the Rule of Four and suggest that there are circumstances under which the Rule of Four is violated. We argue that these violations are tied to the degree of ideological heterogeneity on the Court. Applying an existing theory of institutional stability (Barbera and Jackson, 2004), we connect agenda-setting procedures directly to the ideological heterogeneity of the justices on a given Court. We investigate hypothetical ideological configurations as well as the 1937-2006 terms of the Court and find that the Rule of Four is rarely stable. Only when a majority coalition, considering an ideologically incongruent lower court decision, possesses high intra-coalition ideological homogeneity, is the Rule of Four stable.

The Pendulum Swings toward a Rising Sun

[ 188 ] asia policy The Pendulum Swings toward a Rising Sun T.J. Pempel In the late 1980s, when Japan’s economic boom hit its high point of “irrational exuberance,” the West seemed able to find plausible any tale concoctedbyanycharlatanwhohadspenttwoweeksinJapan.Foragluttonous and gullible West, alleged links between samurai swordsmanship and justin -time management seemed no less improbable than analysis of jujitsu as a guarantee that the “land of the rising sun” would dominate the 21st century. The popping of Japan’s economic bubble soon displaced that of triumphalist champagne corks. Global insouciance ushered in a wave of “Japan passing” that was combined with a love-hate fascination with a rapidly growing China that might be a new source of economic dynamism—or a perfidious military threat. Thesetwobooks,eachbyaforemostauthorityonJapan,markanewswing of the pendulum. Gone, each argues, is the Japan of the Yoshida Doctrine premised as it was on high economic growth and passivity in global affairs. “Checkbook diplomacy” and “free rides” on defense have been replaced by a Japanese foreign policy that is conspicuously more robust, more militaryfocused , and more nationalistic. Neither Kenneth Pyle nor Richard Samuels gives credibility to those who dismiss Japan and its foreign policies as irrational, passive, or lacking in strategic thought. Instead, these two authors present rich and compatible, though unique, portraits of Japanese strategic history, demonstrating the overarching rationality behind Japan’s shifting policies. Pyle, as the historian, devotes roughly two-thirds of his analysis to Japan’s policies during the Meiji period, the liberal 1920s, World War II, and the early postwar period, showing how Japanese elites adapted to changing external environments in the pragmatic pursuit of national wealth and power. Today, he argues, Japan is in the midst of yet the latest adaptation, this time to the new post–Cold War environment, where, particularly in East Asia, the challenges from a nuclear North Korea and a “rising China” provide the stimulus behind a resurgent Japan. Samuels’ sensitivity to historical roots plays out in his analysis of ongoing coalitional dances among domestic political competitors whom T.J. Pempel is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where from 2001 to 2006 he also served as Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies. The author of twelve books and over 100 scholarly articles, he is currently at work on a manuscript on U.S. foreign policy toward Asia. He can be reached at . [ 189 ] book review roundtable • japan rising & securing japan he sees as the key shapers of Japanese foreign policy. Samuels shows how new ideological configurations are today combining to produce what I have elsewhere called the “regime shift” that underpins Japan’s new grand strategy. While Pyle italicizes the underlying rationality of eventual Japanese security choices, Samuels teases out precisely how competing Japanese elites put forward alternatives that can offer equal, though dramatically different, claims to rationality. What shapes Japan’s choices, Samuels contends, are changing norms and identities and their power in the country’s ongoing policy discourse. In his words, “collectively held understandings of social life and national aspiration are not bequeathed by history but [are] forged and reforged in the crucible of political debate” (p. 187). As a consequence, Samuels places emphasis on how political entrepreneurs are now using these understandings to sell their own preferences for a post-Yoshida “Goldilocks consensus” that gets things “just right.” To even the most jaded Japan watcher, each book offers page after page of insightful nuggets on specific facets of Japanese power and strategy, including the enhanced influence of a new generation of Japanese politicians born after World War II. A major focus in both books is the U.S.-Japan relationship. There Pyle is more sanguine than Samuels. Pyle sees the alliance—albeit in a more symmetrical reconfiguration than at present—as the pillar for a stable Asian region and the pivot for a trilateral relationship among Japan, China, and the United States. Samuels, in contrast, underscores the open debate about the alliance now going on in Japan, noting that there are those who see the United States as posing “as great a threat to Japan as any hostile neighbor” (p. 151). Moreover, though neither says it so bluntly...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Religious Poetics: Congregationalist Models of Hymnist and Preacher

T n recent work on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's conception of poet figure, JLseveral critics have situated Aurora Leigh within context of Victorian sage discourse. Sage discourse, defined by John Holloway as expression of notions about world, man's place in it, and how he should live, appealed to Victorian writers as mode of expression because rapidly shifting dynamics of their age seemed to call either for new understandings of human significance or for recovery of values that were being lost.1 Thomas Carlyle set terms of sage discourse early in period: whoever else may forget this divine mystery [of Universe], he declared, the Vates, whether Prophet or Poet, has penetrated into it; is man sent hither to make it more impressively known to us.2 As gendered wording of Carlyle's (and Holloway1 s) definition reveals, Victorian sage discourse identified vates as a man. According to this configuration, only male poets and prose writers could claim visionary authority of an Old Testament prophet to critique Victorian culture and offer alternative world views. The ideological configurations of respectable femininity also discouraged women writers from participating in such public and authoritative discourse. Yet, as Thais Morgan argues in her introduction to Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourses: Renegotiating Gender and Power, women writers frequently critiqued and subverted patriarchal model of sage discourse by boldly entering the Masculine' world of socio-economic conflict, theological polemic, and sexual politics, despite risks associated with adopting Masculine' tone of authority.3 Margaret Reynolds and Marjorie Stone have each argued persuasively that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is just such revisionary, gynocentric form of sage discourse.4 Stone argues, for example, that while Aurora Leigh enters tradition of Victorian sage writing through representation of prophetic speaker and its vision of new social and spiritual order, it intentionally subverts authoritative stance of sage figures such as Carlyle by embodying

Η ΕΝΝΟΙΑ TOΥ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΚΟΥ ΧΡΟΝΟΥ ΚΑΙ ΟΙ ΠΡΟΣΕΓΓΙΣΕΙΣ ΤΗΣ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑΣ ΤΟΥ ΕΜΦΥΛΙΟΥ ΠΟΛΕΜΟΥ. ΖΗΤΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΕΘΟΔΟΛΟΓΙΑΣ

<p>Michalis P. Liberatos, Historical Time and the interpretations of the history of the Greek Civil War: the methodological problems</p><p>The idea of historical time is crucial from a methodological point of view as far as the study of political and social history are concerned. Especially about the history of the Greek Civil War, a period that convulsed public opinion and caused scientific interpretations overwhelmed by ideological and epistemological «burdens». The most important of them is the idea of a time constant, continual, without turnovers and breaks, that is time in the «common sense». This «time», according to its origins, self-determines its evolution, its «determination» explains all of the aspects and the historical stages and facts. This is the traditional assumption that change has always to be explained in terms of something fixed and unchangeable. As for the policy of the Greek Communist Party this notion of time provokes some historians to an explanation that associates this policy with the origins of its philosophical program and not with the «real history». This approach avoids to enquiry into the adaptation of this program to the demands of political relations in time, to counter policies and as a specification of social representations. It is mainly an unaltered policy that arises as the outcome of an assemblage of antecedent events that compose a passage of identities. Because of this domination of this notion of the «continuity» of time, the study of Greek Civil War reproduced the ideological configurations of the past. Therefore it has degraded very important aspects of historical reality, without giving adequate answers about them. These are the question of the deepest tasks of KKE and its strategy, the causes of the unscheduled creation of Democratic Army (ΔΣΕ) in the mountains, the role of the rival political powers, the extent of the possibilities of a negotiation, the relation between Greeks and the Great Powers. As the recent historical enquiries has showed —the edition of a book of Ph. Iliou signalled a new era in the interpretation of this period— a different methodological attitude is perhaps primarily useful on account of the errors it enables one to avoid, in particular in constructing the historical object. This article presents the implication between the dominant notion of «time», the difficulties in explanations and with the ability to overcome the epistemological «burdens» if is to be called into question the idea of historical time. This is important in order to break away from some presuppositions that are tacitly accepted by some historians. This new notion of time sweeps away the naively idealistic view of continuity, that traditional approaches have raised. Because it is history and the internal dynamic which carries evolution and not the historical unchanged «purposes».</p>

The organization of ideological diversity in discourse: Modern and neotraditional visions of the Tongan state

ABSTRACTIn current cultural anthropology, under the influence of postmodernism, considerable attention is given to the multiplicity of interpretive perspectives with which people contend in making sense of their daily experiences. In this article I examine diverse representations of the nation‐state in Tonga and other Pacific microstates. My focus is on the configuration of ideological diversity in the Tongan Magistrate's Courts compared with configurations of traditional and modern nationalist ideologies in other Tongan political domains and in other Pacific nations. Some contemporary anthropological accounts represent ideological diversity as plural, fluid, and rapidly changing. Other accounts of ideological diversity emphasize the oppositional structuring of ideas and the power struggle for ideological domination. I argue that it is useful to think of an ecology of ideas, in which multiple ideas move across discourse domains, becoming implanted in hospitable discourse environments, much as plants move into new environments.

Julia Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 254 pp.

One of the key narratives of political modernity is that of the emergence of human agency in constructing the social order, with theories of divine origins giving way to the notion of humans as lawmakers. While such narratives often center on the death of God and the wresting of sovereignty from monarchs, Reconfiguring Modernity reminds us that they also tend to establish another adversary: nature. Modernity is commonly thought of as a linear movement away from nature or as a dialectical overcoming of nature, which establishes human agency and freedom over and against nature. The prime example for Thomas is Maruyama Masao, a renowned political philosopher who attributed Japan's militaristic nationalism to its failure to establish the primacy of invention or human agency over nature. Thomas questions this conception of modernity based on an opposition between human agency and nature. It is not by negating or overcoming nature that modern political freedoms emerge, she argues. Rather political freedoms come of specific ideological configurations of nature (cosmos) and society (polis). Reconfiguring Modernity thus turns to the history of the idea of nature in Japanese political thought to reconsider the formation of modernity in Japan.

Post-Human Mimesis and the Debunked Machine: Reading Environmental Appropriation in Poe's "Maelzel's Chess-Player" and "The Man That Was Used Up"

The cultural and academic debates about the status of the human subject in an increasingly technological world may seem to have cooled slightly since the fin-de-siecle ferment of the 1990s, a time when 1980s hypotheses about cyberspace, cyborgs, and non-human intelligence could seem to be increasingly on the verge of realization.1 Nonetheless, in these first years of the twenty-first century, it has come to be increasingly accepted that, in some meaningful way, we are now in fact living in the age of the apost-humanw subject. This acceptance hardly implies unanimity, for there are still major disagreements about just what this might mean: for example, would the term serve mostly to describe a dominant ideological configuration, or does it instead describe a realm of practical possibility and lived experience in technologically advanced, late-capitalist societies? And in either of these cases, would this post-human condition be something to be welcomed as liberating and enlightening, or to be defended against as dangerous and illusion-fostering? These are some of the issues that N. Katherine Hayles took on in her 1999 study, How We Became Posthuman. There, Hayles examined the rise of the post-human view of subjectivity and embodiment as a successor to the bounded and centered subject of liberal humanism, a formation that the intellectual historian C. B. Macpherson had analyzed through the rubric of individualism. In Hayles s view, the emergence of the posthuman subject had replaced the liberal emphasis upon possessive individualism with the centrality of information and computation: the result was a new subject seen to be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines (34). As she wrote, this post-human subject typically presented itself as an

The Promise of Repentance. Prison Reform in Modern China

This article draws on a number of themes from my research on the social history of prisons in modern China (1895-1949).' It shows that before the advent of a communist regime, modern penological principles were widespread and a relatively sophisticated network of prisons was built according to international standards. However, prisons were not simply a transplant from the West. Prison reform was a multifaceted process linked to existing notions of crime, punishment and repentance. It was constrained by financial difficulties and had to adjust to complex institutional, political and ideological configurations. Although the language of reform was widely shared across the globe, the discourse and practice of the prison in China was characterized by specific local ideas and conditions: in particular, the prison was viewed as a new tool to pursue a Confucian notion of an ordered and cohesive social body governed by the rule of virtue.

Women and the American New Right

Abstract The American New Right is a complex ideological configuration that combines conservatism positions on social and economic issues. Like other critics of the Right, feminists respond to a web of discourses, policies, practices, and institutions related to “family values” and market fundamentalism. However, feminist scholars also intervene in conservative discourse and practice in unique ways by examining the roles of women and the meanings of gender on the Right, and by analyzing the intersectional consequences on the principal strands of the American New Right. We conclude with suggestions on future directions for feminist theory and research.

Challenges to Democracy in the Middle East

Many scholars have attempted to tackle the question of why democracy has seemingly failed to take root in the Islamic milieu, in general, and the pre dominantlyArab Middle East, in particular, while the rest of the world has witnessed the fall of"pax-authoritaria" especially in the wake of the demercratic revolution triggered by the failure of communism. Some view this resistance to the Third Wave, as being rooted in the Islamic cultural dynamics of the region, whereas others will ascribe it to the level of political development (or the lack thereof). An anthology of essays, Challenges to Democracy in the Middle East furnishes the reader with five historical casestudies that seek to explain the arrested socio politico-economic development of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the resulting undemercratic political culture that domjnates the overall political landscape of the Middle East.
 The first composition in this omnibus is "The Crisis of Democracy in Twentieth Century Syria and Lebanon," authored by Bill Harris, senior lecturer of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Haris compares and contrasts the political development of Syria and Lebanon during the French mandate period and under the various regimes since then. He examines how the two competing forms of national­ism, i.e., Lebanonism and Arabism, along with sectarianism, are the main factors that have contributed to the consolidation of one-party rule in Syria, and the I 6-year internecine conflict in Lebanon. After a brief overview of the early history of both countries, the author spends a great deal oftime dis­cussing the relatively more recent political developments: Syria from 1970 onwards, and Lebanon from I 975 to the I 990s. Harris expresses deep pes­simism regarding the future of democratic politics in both countries, which in his opinion is largely due to the deep sectarian cleavages in both states.
 The next treatise is "Re-inventing Nationalism in B􀀥thi Iraq 1968- 1994: SupraTerritorial Identities and What Lies Below," by Amatzia Baram, professor of Middle East History at the University of Haifa. Baram surveys the Ba·th's second stint in power (1968-present) in lraq. Baram's opinion is that a shift has occurred in B􀀥thist ideology from an integrative Pan-Arab program to an Iraqi-centered Arab nationalism. She attributes this to Saddam's romance with the past, on the one hand, which is the reason for the incorporation of themes from both the ancient Mesopotamian civiliza­tion and the medieval Abbasid caliphal era, and, on the other hand, to Islam and tribalism, that inform the pragmatic concerns of the Ba'thist ideological configuration ...

Theorizing the third way: New Labour and social justice

This article seeks to identify distinctive core elements in the ideological standpoint of New Labour. Whilst accepting that New Labour has absorbed theoretical aspects of a number of centre-left traditions, it is argued that an interpretative reconstruction of the resulting ideological configuration reveals it to be a departure from those established traditions. A reading of John Rawls's liberal theory of justice is used as a means of characterizing New Labour's general ideological approach; the implications are then traced through to the policy level and a correspondence between Rawlsian liberalism and New Labour's agenda is established. On this basis, it is argued that New Labour has adopted a 'social liberal' position, emphasizing procedural fairness over distributive patterns, which can be viewed as a departure both from traditional 'social democracy' and from the 'neo-liberalism' of the recent right.

Benabou's Family Epic: A Story in Perpetual Labor

Bénabou’s Family Epic: A Story in Perpetual Labor Robert Elbaz (bio) Between Writing and Memory Postmodernist conceptions of literature have laid claim to the inability of the text to come to terms with its own narrative objects. Thus, the text has come to be apprehended no more as a synthetic totality, as was presupposed by the Realist ideological configuration, but as an indefinite process of incompleteness, in that the narrative cannot see its own end, given that it consists of an endless productive activity. The writings of Marcel Bénabou, “the definitively temporary secretary of the OULIPO” (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), 1 pose from the start the question of their generic affiliation. There is no doubt that given their Oulipian literary dimension, they reinscribe the textual practices inherent in the post-modern text, to wit, fragmentation, deconstruction and suspension—the basic strategies so characteristic to the post-modern novel in general. Indeed, Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres and Jette ce livre avant qu’il soit trop tard, as well as his Epopée familiale —though in a less marked manner, 2 seem to be pure products of the Oulipian laboratory. They constitute, on the whole, metatextual elaborations on the activity of writing itself and its varied complex significations. But Bénabou combines as well another primordial dimension. For beside the self-reflexiveness of the writing activity in his books, (or should I say novels, though they resemble none), there is an autobiographical aspect, an attempt to recapture or rather (re)create a past without falling into the temptations or traps of the classical autobiographical (or biographical) narrative. However, for Bénabou, the question is how to reconcile an autobiographical project that manifests an irreducible socio-historical, ethnic, culturally and geographically determined identity with not only the tools and modes of expression that attempt to circumscribe it, but also with the activity of writing itself, which remains unsurpassable and at the forefront of the narrative experience. In this sense, his writings are doubly autobiographical, first and foremost the autobiography that involves the present of [End Page 47] writing and, second, the autobiography of that past the text attempts to relay in a most uncompromising way. For narration—and this Bénabou stresses time and again throughout his writings—cannot simply recover in a naive way the past that is presumably lying there waiting to be uncovered or recovered. That past is itself the product of the writing experience, and one cannot transcend this present of writing in order to get to that primary narrative content. This is why those memories at the bottom of the autobiographical venture are indissolubly connected to the very activity that seeks to render them. They are not only shaped by the writing experience; they simply have no being outside it. Au fond, tout mon embarras venait de ce que j’en étais resté à la vieille idéologie de mes vingt ans, qui ne concevait la littérature que comme dévoilement. Un livre n’a pas besoin d’être le reflet ou la transcription de quelque chose qui lui préexiste. Il est, tout simplement: on peut donc le créer de toutes pièces, sans crainte ni retenue, puisqu’il n’a d’autre justification qu’en lui-même. Pour contourner les obstacles qui m’avaient jusque là arrêté, il m’aurait fallu trouver un mode d’écriture qui ne risque ni de dévoyer ni de dévoiler son auteur. Une écriture en somme qui s’engendrerait elle-même. (P111) Hence the reason that the text concentrates mostly on the difficulties it has rendering those primary experiences. Autobiography, in contrast to the Western Rousseauist model, is limited in Bénabou’s case, and I believe in the case of all Maghrebian biographical narratives, to the ceaseless suspension of a story that perpetually fails to become a story for the simple fact that the narrative consciousness cannot let go of its problematic colonial past and tell it for what it was or may have been. The reflection of that past is caught repeatedly and obsessively within the linguistic meanderings of the narrative consciousness. For the...

Vietnam-China Relations since the End of the Cold War

There are two broad approaches to analyzing the dynamics of Vietnam-China relations. One emphasizes the historical memories that have conditioned and shaped the relationship. For some 10 centuries (from 3 B.C. to A.D. 1000), the Vietnamese were under the direct rule of the Chinese. During this long period, while the Vietnamese selectively assimilated much of Chinese culture, they remained intensely nationalistic. To the Vietnamese, the years of Chinese rule and domination are a reminder of Vietnam's weakness and vulnerability vis-a'-vis its huge neighbor. The second approach focuses on external forces and geopolitical considerations. The view is that, historical memories aside, Vietnam-China relations are essentially shaped by the conjunction of geographical proximity, changing ideological configurations, and the evolving nature of relations among China, the former Soviet Union, and the U.S. The two approaches are not necessarily irreconcilable. Indeed, the interplay of history and geopolitics contributes to the inevitable tension between the two countries. This interplay has the potential to be either constructive or destructive, depending on how the two countries choose to manage the relationship. To illustrate, the breakdown of Sino-Vietnamese relations from 1979 to 1991 can be explained by Vietnam's failure to maintain a balance in its relations with China and the former Soviet Union. When China cut off all economic aid to Vietnam in 1978 and Vietnam-U.S. negotiations to normalize relations broke down, Vietnam turned to the Soviet Union. As the late Nguyen Co Thach noted, the decision to join the Soviet-sponsored Council for Mutual Economic Assistance would not have been necessary had Chinese aid not been cut.1 But Beijing construed the move to mean Vietnam and the

Living with Anxiety: Race and the Renarration of White Identity in Contemporary Popular Culture and Public Life

In this article, Cameron McCarthy takes us to the terrain of the new dynamics taking place in the U.S. racial order at the end of the century. These developments are powerfully articulated in the aggravated representation of racial identities in popular discourses. Specifically, McCarthy alerts us to the new ideological configurations in our popular culture and civic life that foreground the dangerous expansion of identity politics into the white suburbs and the triumphant prosecution of middle-class morality in the discourses of popular culture and public policy. McCarthy describes a broad pattern of racial instability, racial recoding, and racial incorporation taking place in American society as we enter the twenty-first century. Drawing on the theories of identity formation in the writings of C.L.R. James and Friedrich Nietzsche, McCarthy argues that the contemporary electronic media—particularly, film and television—play a critical role in the production, coordination, and channeling of suburban resentment and retributive morality onto their central target: the depressed inner city.

Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?

Whether or not nationalism is an ideology is a question that can be illuminated by a study of its conceptual structure. Core and adjacent concepts of nationalism are examined within the context of liberal, conservative and fascist ideologies, contexts that respectively encourage particular ideational paths within nationalist argument, while discouraging others. Employing a morphological analysis of ideological configurations, it is argued that various nationalisms may appear as distinct thin-centred ideologies, but are more readily understood as embellishments of, and sustainers of, the features of their host ideologies.