European Imagination Research Articles

An Analysis of Islamophobia and the Anti-Islam Discourse

In the recent past, fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims inthe West have attracted increasing scholarly interest, a development that iscertainly commendable. Some important works have delved deeply intothe Western imagination and stereotyping of Islam and Muslims, amongthem John Victor Tolan’s Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam (1996)and Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002),Fredrick Quinn’s The Sum of All Heresies: The Image of Islam in WesternThought (2008), Matthew Dimmock’s Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammadin Early Modern English Culture (2013),1 and Sophia Rose Arjana’sMuslims in the Western Imagination (2015) ...

Colonizing Paradise: Landscape and Empire in the British West Indies by Jefferson Dillman

Reviewed by: Colonizing Paradise: Landscape and Empire in the British West Indies by Jefferson Dillman Linda L. Sturtz Colonizing Paradise: Landscape and Empire in the British West Indies. Jefferson Dillman. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2015. 264 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, references, index. $54.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8173-1858-1); $54.95 electronic (ISBN 978-0-8173-8804-1). Europeans and European Americans perceived the Caribbean landscape as a locus both of seductive splendor and of horrific lawlessness. Even in Columbus's first letters depicting the "New World," the Admiral depicted the American landscape as embodying both lush beauty and monstrous wilderness, often simultaneously (p. 11). By the end of the sixteenth century, according to Jefferson Dillman, Europeans saw the New World as a location where the struggle between the virtues present in an Edenic paradise battled against the kingdom of the Devil, and their representations of its geography depicted these conflicting views. Dillman argues that the earliest Spanish descriptions of the land provided the foundation for later English perspectives. His analysis of two maps of Jamaica published in the 1670s (pp. 91-4) is particularly effective in showing how cartographic images of pirate-controlled spaces publicized the lawless Caribbean, even before the adoption of large-scale enslavement of Africans. Diverging images, of paradise and hellishness, shaped subsequent European views of the Caribbean landscape. Over time, according to Dillman, English depictions of the landscape and its significance shifted. Characteristics of bifurcated Edenic paradise and locus of horror persisted, and the latter grew during the era when English settlers turned to brutal enslavement of Africans to cultivate their fertile sugar fields in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Added to these characterizations were new views of the landscape that encompassed a more "scientific" outlook: the cataloguing of once-unfamiliar plants in the published work of Sir Hans Sloane, the "bioprospecting" efforts of Europeans searching for exotic flora for commercially viable export crops (including medicines), and the establishment of public and private botanical gardens "that sought to create knowledge of and thus control over, a wilderness landscape" (p. 107). In Dillman's account, the Edenic landscape, once fallen, could be "recovered" through a cultivation of a "rational landscape vision" merged with "a Christian recovery narrative that placed the restoration of the West Indian wilderness to its God-given potential" (p. 107). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a shift toward picturesque artistic sensibilities among British visitors and colonists introduced a vision of the landscape that made the horrors of slavery as miniscule as the depictions of the enslaved in vast panoramas that highlighted soaring mountains, lush fields, and roaring rivers. In some accounts, the enslaved became [End Page 195] part of the landscape, as when William Beckford reported that "There is something particularly picturesque and striking in a gang of negroes when employed in cutting canes upon the swelling projections of a hill" (p. 165). Dillman presents a coherent narrative of how landscapes changed in the European imagination between 1492 and the 1830s before concluding with a short "epilogue" examining the images of the Caribbean represented in late twentieth-century tourist board marketing. Sometimes the narrative seems too straightforward. Fears about the natural world persisted for longer in the minds of Europeans and Africans alike, and hurricanes shape the narratives and demarcate time among modern residents of the Caribbean. The structure of the book is a bit funnel-like, starting with a broad geography of the Caribbean that includes all of the islands and even the mainland – with Columbus's encounter with the Orinoco River as emblematic of the first encounter – and a multinational European encounter with the Americas that highlighted the Spanish in the first generation of explorers. The book's focus quickly and deliberately narrows to the Anglophone Caribbean in the second chapter and maintains this concentration throughout the rest of the book. Dillman justifies this approach by pointing out that seventeenth-century Spaniards and English Puritans "shared discourses on the New World that included the aforementioned satanic epic and the theme of spiritual gardening" and claims that "the spiritual world of the sixteenth-century English traveler to the Indies differed little from his...

The Making of Asmat Art: Indigenous Art in a World Perspective by Nick Stanley

Reviewed by: The Making of Asmat Art: Indigenous Art in a World Perspective by Nick Stanley Maggie Wander The Making of Asmat Art: Indigenous Art in a World Perspective, by Nick Stanley. Canon Pyon, uk: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2012. isbn 978-1-907774-20-1, xiv + 249 pages, illustrations, map, notes, references, index. Cloth, us$110.00. In his latest book, Nick Stanley explores interactions between artists working in south Papua and international audiences. Rather than a study of the art itself, this book explores the notion of Asmat visual culture in European imaginations. The title, The Making of Asmat Art, does not refer to the technical process by which Asmat artists carve their famous sculptures but instead suggests how the international art market creates what we know as “Asmat art.” With this perspective, Stanley situates Asmat visual culture within a larger, international context while at the same time rooting these practices and interactions in a longer history. It is no surprise that Stanley is interested in the notion of Asmat art given his previous work that engages with collecting, display, and depictions of Asmat culture (Being Ourselves for You: The Global Display of Cultures [1998]; The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific [2007]). This type of engagement with Indigenous visual culture and the role it plays in international markets is significant because it moves away from notions that Indigenous art is static and somehow represents a “tradition” operating in spite of, or in opposition to, “modernity.” Instead, Stanley demonstrates how Asmat visual culture actively participates in dynamic processes of negotiation, trade, and power. The book is organized chronologically, tracing interactions between Asmat and Europeans from the days of James Cook’s eighteenth-century voyages to contemporary artists’ renderings of the famous carved shields from the region. The first four chapters explore missionary and anthropological interactions with the Asmat, as well as the region’s role in the international art market. Using journals and photographs from those early explorations, Stanley begins his study by asking how Asmat people have historically been depicted by Europeans. He is specifically interested in the process [End Page 220] of collecting Asmat carvings and other works for ethnographic displays in Europe, such as the British Museum’s collection from Lord Moyne’s explorations in the late 1930s. In chapter 3, “Museum Scholars and Collectors,” Stanley provides a brief historical overview of colonial authority in the region in order to contextualize the growing interest in Oceanic “ethnographica.” He discusses Simon Kooijman, a curator and scholar whose “collecting was always undertaken with a view to the creation of museum displays” (59), while Adrian Gerbrands was a curator whose aim was “not only to apprehend the cultural background of this art but also to gain an insight into the place and function of the individual artist in the community” (Gerbrands quoted in Stanley, 60). Stanley also highlights the design and structural changes in the art itself due to these market demands, such as new, filigree-esque designs which allowed the carvings to be more easily shipped overseas (50–51). In the late 1960s, the United Nations established a Fund for the Development of West Irian (fundwi). The money was intended to help stimulate a source of revenue for the region, and that source turned out to be Asmat carving. The primary audiences for this new market were museums and other cultural institutions, and artists began to work with those specific audiences in mind. This raised questions of quality and demanded that Asmat artists work according to international standards. Stanley states, “This desire to sustain standards and retain continuity with earlier traditional production was premised on the belief that not only would this sustain Asmat culture and self-confidence, but that it would commend the art to specialist purchasers” (102). In chapter 6, Stanley turns away from an international perspective and returns to museum practices in the Asmat region itself. He discusses the creation and management of the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Agats, explaining that its aim is to encourage dialogue between different communities as well as to foster a sense of pride in local visual culture (116–117). In chapter 7, “Consolidating...

Christian (Re)Encounters with Jews in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean

This essay considers how the reencounter between Christians and Jews over the course of the sixteenth century shaped the evolution of European attitudes toward Jews. It notes that, while 1492 marked an end to a long-standing era of Christian-Jewish relations in Europe, it also signaled an important shift toward new thinking about the once-familiar Jews. The combined effects of the absence of Jewish communities from most of Western Europe, the failure of Christian society effectively to integrate the Conversos of Spain and Portugal, and the expanded cultural horizons engendered by the Age of Discovery helped challenge and alter popular images of the Jews that had been inherited from the Middle Ages. The lands of the Muslim Mediterranean operated as an important stage on which the Christian reencounter with Jews played out, and travelers’ accounts of the Jews in these lands came to exert a powerful influence on the way in which the image of the Jew was recast in the European imagination. The discussion here seeks to expand on recent work on sixteenth-century Christian ethnographies of the Jews and to complicate some of our notions of the nature and development of Christian attitudes toward the Jews during the transition from the medieval period to the early modern.

Search engine imaginary: Visions and values in the co-production of search technology and Europe

This article discusses the co-production of search technology and a European identity in the context of the EU data protection reform. The negotiations of the EU data protection legislation ran from 2012 until 2015 and resulted in a unified data protection legislation directly binding for all European member states. I employ a discourse analysis to examine EU policy documents and Austrian media materials related to the reform process. Using the concept 'sociotechnical imaginary', I show how a European imaginary of search engines is forming in the EU policy domain, how a European identity is constructed in the envisioned politics of control, and how national specificities contribute to the making and unmaking of a European identity. I discuss the roles that national technopolitical identities play in shaping both search technology and Europe, taking as an example Austria, a small country with a long history in data protection and a tradition of restrained technology politics.

New Cultural Landscapes: Australian Narratives in Literature and Film

Australia. Terra Australis Incognita. Even before its oicial inding by Captain James Cook in 1770, the “land down under” already circulated in the European imagination. he giant mass of land necessary to balance a lat Earth (as antipodal to Europe) could only be home to a great many monstrous fauna and lora, as it was also the cultural counterpart to Europe. However, giant one-eyed monsters and sea serpents were not found by Captain Cook upon his arrival on Botany Bay, now part of Sydney. By declaring the land terra nullius, Cook ignored the many Aboriginal communities that had lived in Australia for over 75,000 years and such act has given way to one of the core elements in the development of Australian culture and history: the relationship between whites and Aborigines in the development of the nation.Also, the fact that the individuals transported to Australia as part of the First Fleet in 1788 were, for the most part, convicts (Australia had been established as a penal colony following the loss of the American colonies in 1776, which had been used for that purpose by the English crown) whose criminal records ranged from murder to stealing cheese. In fact, as Robert Hughes reminds us, in his thorough study he Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (1986), “[n]ever had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied” (1). he ignorance of the land combined with the sociological beliefs of Georgian England that there was a “criminal class” being established in Britain turned Australia, in Hughes’s words, into “a cloaca, invisible, its contents ilthy and unnameable” (1-2). he gathering of British rejects in a faraway place, so diferent from the landscapes of Britain and Ireland, did not mean the relationship to an idea of Britishness was simply severed. In fact, it took the irst inhabitants the best part of half a century for the acknowledgement and active development of an Australian culture that distanced itself, albeit slowly though not thoroughly, from its European origins (2). Literature has been in the core of the early Australian settlements from the beginning. In part of the introduction to the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), edited by Nicholas Jose, Elizabeth Webby reminds us that “[b]ooks arrived in Australia in January 1788 with Governor Phillip’s First Fleet, along with paper, ink, type and a printing press, though it was to be a few more years before the new British colony could boast a printer” (16). Next to the multiple travel reports that needed to be produced in order to both inform the British crown and feed the average British imagination, the irst forms of actual literature produced in Australia dealt with the longing of home, the strangeness of the landscape, its fauna and lora, the praise of the convict, and the contact (not always peaceful) with indigenous Australians. he image of Australia as a nation in which only the strong would survive (given the complete lack of material resources and the initial diiculty of establishing agriculture in the early colonies due to the harshness of the land) and, thus, where the British would have to adapt and become Australians, can be seen in one of the

Foundational essays as ‘mestizo-criollo acts’: the Bolivian case

ABSTRACTThis paper engages Alcides Arguedas’s ‘Pueblo enfermo’ and Franz Tamayo’s ‘Creación de la pedagogía nacional’, two key foundational essays of early 20th-century Bolivia, as ‘mestizo-criollo acts’ rooted in the debates on the ‘Indian problem’ as a racial obstacle to nation-building and identity formation. The paper contends that both essays actually conceal the presence of European wild men, and construct a reality influenced by their interpretation of books and visual representations entrenched in the European imagination. They thus create an insurmountable ambiguity: a self-exotization brimming over with metaphors that actually deploy European wild imaginary sources to explain its Andean roots.

Setting Oscar Wilde to Music

Depuis sa première en version concert à Los Angeles en 2011, l’opéra de Gerald Barry The Importance of Being Earnest d’après la comédie d’Oscar Wilde a obtenu un grand succès. À ce jour, ce n’est que la plus récente des très nombreuses œuvres musicales inspirées tant par les textes de Wilde que par sa vie. De son vivant, la capacité de Wilde à se mettre en scène, la création savamment orchestrée d’un personnage destiné au public, l’a maintenu sous le feu des projecteurs. Sa chute et le retentissement de ses procès ont suscité un intérêt toujours croissant pour l’homme et pour son œuvre : l’adaptation de Salomé à l’opéra par Richard Strauss en 1905 a lancé la vogue des adaptions musicales des textes de Wilde, alors que le personnage de l’artiste a continué à inspirer opéras ou comédies musicales. Ce qui semble frappant, c’est, après la mort de l’écrivain, la confusion, dans l’imaginaire européen, entre l’homme et l’œuvre. Cette étude se concentrera d’abord sur des œuvres inspirées par le personnage de Wilde, Patience de Gilbert et Sullivan, puis l’opéra Oscar du compositeur américain Theodore Morrison, œuvre dans laquelle Wilde est présenté comme héros et martyr d’un combat libertaire. Nous examinerons ensuite les œuvres que sa Salomé a inspirées, les opéras de Strauss (1905) et de Mariotte (1908) ainsi que la production d’Ida Rubinstein (1908), trois œuvres dans lesquelles, derrière les personnages mis en scène, se devine la figure de Wilde.

Who are the biggest cannibals?: Colonial literary reckonings with the dark European Other in the Pacific region

Abstract In the late nineteenth century European powers jockeyed for global prestige and lucrative colonies. Long-unclaimed tracts of Africa become imperial dependencies, Asian empires ceded ever more privileges and ports to foreigners who clamoured for free trade and special legal status, and German rule spread as far as the antipodes. But while the Kaiser harangued listeners about the threat posed by the ‘gelbe Gefahr’ (yellow peril), colonists in the far Pacific soon came to see the Germans themselves, and a motley cast of would-be European exploiters, as a far greater and more immediate danger to white settler dreams. Testimony to concerns raised by the European Other exists in the pages of neglected colonial newspapers, as well as in popular contemporary tales, like those published by the Sydney Bulletin. Two of these, ‘Castro’s Last Sacrament’ and ‘Dr Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant’, are the focus of this study and they afford, in miniature, veritable voyages to a heart of darkness on the colonists’ doorstep, and one decidedly generated by fertile European imaginations. A century before Edward Said, Albert Dorrington reveals through the antics of Castro and his peers the local operation of Orientalism, and the ways it masks and camouflages a peculiarly European heritage of imperial carnage and unbridled vengefulness. In the figure of Schwalbe, author Louis Becke provides a complementary dissection of the ‘white man’s burden’ and the much-vaunted trappings of scientific knowledge. The allegedly philanthropic white man is shown to be deeply self-interested and insatiable. He not only abets the horrors he claims to abhor, but he arguably surpasses them. Together these tales afford a damning revelation of unpalatable European motives as well as a bleak vision of humankind, irrespective of race or clime, as scarcely removed from a cannibalistic, and thoroughly barbaric state.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Congo Utopia

The pairing of Congo and utopia seems wilfully perverse in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism. The Congo Free State was the political outcome of a colonial discourse that represented Africa as the antithesis of civilization, a view subsequently reinforced by the sensational exposé by Edmund Morel and others of the regime’s own reliance upon coercion and violence. And yet, as this essay shows, the Congo has a long history as the object of utopian thought in fiction. Surveying this overlooked sub-genre of fantasy, I argue that the representation of the Congo by writers such as William Mayo, David Ker, William Le Queux, John Brisben Walker, and especially William Thomas Stead reveals not only the unique status of this colonial space in the European imagination but invites us to revisit the ideological underpinnings of colonial literature more generally.

Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora by Junaid Rana

Reviewed by: Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora by Junaid Rana Amitava Chowdhury Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press 2011) In Terrifying Muslims, Junaid Rana helps us to see how the political and socio-economic processes of neoliberalism have constructed a racialized figure out of the religious category of Muslims. Rana contends that such processes of racialization draw from a “global racial system” (25) that thrives on demonizing [End Page 380] the Muslim migrant as illegal, criminal, and as perpetrator of terrorism. The resulting Islamophobia creates a rhetorical universe which ignores all complexities and heterogeneity in the Islamic world, and proceeds to create a racial image of Islamic peril – the alleged quintessential “other” of modern democratic society. In Rana’s views, the racial system has been nurtured and strengthened in the post 9/11 world, but importantly, it has discernible earlier roots and continuities. Innovative, complex, and ambitious, the book is an important intervention in a neglected area of diaspora studies, namely the world of Pakistani labour migrants within the rubric of contemporary global economic system. It is hard to pin the book down to any disciplinary focus. Rather it touches on or responds to several inter-related disciplines, including anthropology, history, migration, transnational studies, race theory, and theories of globalization. Some may find such disciplinary promiscuity to be undesirable, but to me, this is one of the strongest elements of the book. The subject matter lends itself well to disciplinary transgressions, and reveals the limits of conventional disciplinary routes. Equally enterprising is Rana’s use of sources. Drawing mainly from ethnographic work carried out both before and after 9/11 in a variety of locations, including New York, Lahore, and Dubai, the book also delves into historical sources of Indian labour migrations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Alongside, Rana examines film and media resources to understand the process of racialization and the creation of cultural tropes of alienation. Theoretically, the work engages with ideas about neoliberalism, feminism, gender, and critical race theory, and stresses the intersectionality of theoretical currents. Geographically, the book is primarily on Pakistani migrants dispersed in the Persian Gulf, but the central focus on Islamophobia helps us to locate a coherent global process. Temporally, the book responds mainly to contemporary issues, but hinges on histories of indentured labour migration stretching back to the 1830s, and even earlier racial formations in Catholic Spain. The introduction to the book, “Migrants in a Neoliberal World” lays out the conceptual, theoretical and empirical framework of the work. In Part I, “Racializing Muslims,” Rana attempts to unravel the intersection of race and migration by engaging in an interdisciplinary analysis of both recent and distant history of Islamophobia under the sign of race and racialization. In Chapter 1, “Islam and Racism,” the author traces the logic that converts the Muslim into a category of race. Rather than a recent phenomenon, Rana contends that Islamophobia has deep roots in European imagination that saw “religion not just as a belief but as a level of human evolution.” (32) Citing evidence of exclusionary thinking in Catholic Spain, Rana offers the thought that a combination of physiognomic and cultural difference cast the figure of the Muslim as the ultimate other – a construction that was later on transferred and transposed across the Atlantic during Spanish colonization and afterwards. Based on ethnographic work done in Lahore and New York, the following chapter, “Racial Panic, Islamic Peril, and Terror,” seeks to expose the strategies that use the rhetoric of terror and peril to cast the Muslim as dangerous and as a racial category. Through the use of two examples of panic events, Rana goes on to argue that the “role of the racial panic is to intensify the categories of racialization within the racial formation.” (53) In one of the more creative chapters of the book, “Imperial Targets,” the third in the first part, Rana uses the miniseries Sleeper Cell, and the film Syriana to reveal how [End Page 381] visual culture contributes to stoking fear against multiculturalism through the use of “racial semiotics.” (77) Rana argues that “covert cultural...

Post- Ottoman Empire European imaginations of the image of the women of Maghreb

Post- Ottoman Empire European imaginations of the image of the women of Maghreb

The Antillean Jewel and the European Imaginary: The Language of the Unspeakable in Denis Diderot's Les bijoux indiscrets

In the mid-1700s, when Denis Diderot wrote Les bijoux indiscrets, the French modern nation-state was being actively imagined through philosophical and revolutionary discourse as distinct from the monarchical and feudal structures of the ancien régime. At the core of the emerging, transformative vision of Enlightenment thought lay knowledge produced by colonial and enslaved peoples, symbolized in the black female body that is positioned in Diderot's novel as disruptive of and yet central to European social, economic, and cultural norms.

The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment, by Peter H. Hansen

The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After Enlightenment, by Peter H. Hansen. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. x, 380 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Peter H. Hansen writes self is haunted by mountains, (p. 148) and he lures readers into his text with seemingly simple question of was to climb such famous peaks as Mont Ventoux, Mont Blanc, and Mount Everest. The answer, however, turns out to be anything but straightforward. His careful dissection yields complex insights into history of mountain climbing and identity making of modem man, not to mention debunking myth of solo ascents in process. The majority of Hansen's book focuses on place of Mount Blanc in Western European imagination and debate over could claim ascent. He argues that understanding political contexts helps explain Mount Blanc's symbolic and contested meanings over who was a question that is linked to notions of sovereign individual. Was it mountain guide Jacques Balmat scouted route in summer of 1787? Or local doctor Michel-Gabriel Paccard raced Balmat to top, later that same summer? Or should accolades go to Horace-Benedict de Saussure, a wealthy and well-connected intellectual, wrote about his scientific experiments on mountain after his ascent on August 3, 1787? Hansen persuasively explains that debate is more interesting than answer because shifting notions of agency and citizenship influence response. For instance, does a poor mountain guide possess faculties to process importance of what he does? If not, he can't truly claim title, for title only has legitimacy when rightly understood. Take Henriette D'Angeville for instance, first woman to climb Mount Blanc in 1838. In fact, D'Angeville was second woman to do so, but first, peasant Marie Paradis, climbed mountain for wrong reasons (notoriety). As D'Angeville put it, Mount Blanc had not been ascended by any woman capable of remembering her impressions (p. 172). D'Angeville's ability to communicate the force of will! (p. 173) required to get to top and what she felt once there was what made experience matter. In other words, one needed mental capacity, cultured background, and publications to own summit. Later, however, with democratization of Europe, and reclamation of local culture in twentieth century, both mountain guide and simple peasant would be celebrated as man and woman to summit. Mount Everest serves as another example of debates that arose. …

Marching to the canon: the life of Schubert's Marche militaire

Marching to the Canon examines the history of Schubert's Marche militaire no.1 from its beginnings as a modest piano duet published for domestic consumption in 1826 to its ubiquitous presence over a century later. Myriad performances by professionals and amateurs made it Schubert's most recognizable and beloved instrumental work. Its success was due to its chameleon-like ability to cross the still porous borders between canonic and popular repertories. This study of both its reception and impact offers a unique narrative that illuminates the world that enshrined its otherwise humble dimensions. After detailing the composition, publication, and reception of the original march, the book examines the impact of transcriptions and arrangements for solo piano, orchestra, band, and other settings. Contemporary to these versions was its symbolic manipulation during three conflicts involving France and Germany: the Franco-Prussian War and the two world wars. Multiple iterations created a performance life that made deep inroads into dance, literature, and film, and inspired quotations or allusions in other music. The work's creative uses are remarkably diverse, ranging from now obscure individuals to significant figures as varied as Willa Cather, Isadora Duncan, Walt Disney, and Igor Stravinsky. Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and the author of Neoclassicism in Music and the two volume Schubert in the European Imagination.

Cities (and regions) within a city: subnational representations and the creation of European imaginaries in Brussels

This article explores how sub-national institutions – representations from cities and regions – help create a European imaginary in Brussels. Political scientists and other scholars have noted the importance of these city and regional institutions, but have paid little attention to their physical form. Through a select set of case studies, this article analyses the vast impact that small-scale interventions in the use and re-imagination of select buildings occupied by the subnational institutions have on Brussels' urban form and function. Focusing on representations from German states, notably the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen, and including select other city and regional offices, the present article offers some first ideas of how the physical presence of these small entities transforms European Brussels. It asks how the selection, construction, reuse and restoration of buildings for the subnational institutions reshape the urban patterns of Brussels, how their architecture and external decoration contribute to the creation of a European narrative within the city, and how the institutional actors use Brussels' buildings in their print marketing and web presences constructing entangled European and regional identities.

Must Australia Always Be Imaginary?: Cartography as Creation in Peter Carey’s “Do You Love Me?”

Everything that is not loved will disappear from face of earth.-peter Carey, You Love Me?This is key thematic line oF Peter carey's 1975 short story you love Me? story is made up of numbered short sections, each with its italicized heading as if it were a type of report-a favorite sci-fi story form-and this report is narrated by a young man. heading is The Role of Cartographers, followed by this line: a few words about role of Cartographers in our present society are warranted (17). ongoing creation by Cartographers-the word is always capitalized-is essential; thus a key word in that line is present.The young male narrator then immediately moves on to describe annual Census. Census, which takes place during Festival of Corn, is meticulous: all possessions are piled outside of every house and counted. this makes people feel secure. need for security, to know what it is they possess, is also why Cartographers are so important, and young man is proud his father is one of them. But land is stubbornly enigmatic and parts of it, nether regions, are fading and disappearing image on an improperly fixed photograph (19). this upsets people.City buildings, buildings owned by multinational corporations iCi and Royal dutch shell, then begin to vanish, too, and finally so do people. As they disappear, people become murderously angry when they realize they're vanishing because other people do not love them enough. it becomes clear anyone and anything not sufficiently known and loved will evaporate like morning mist in glare of rising sun. final moment of story takes place in young man's lounge room after his father has vanished. His mother turns to him and says, with fear, you love me? (31)At this point, a few words about role of Cartographers in our present society are warranted. role of Cartographers is perhaps particularly resonant for non-indigenous Australians. idea of Australia began as science fiction, as a projection of european imagination based on scientific principles as they were believed at time, which was that there had to be a vast southern land to balance land masses of northern hemisphere.When ptolemy published his Geographia (ca. 150Ad), he proposed hypothetical continent of Terra Australis nondum cognita, south Land not yet known. terra Australis then remained a site of speculation and fantasy imagined by scientists, explorers, cartographers, and writers over centuries, as in 1572 map above (Fig. 1) in which imagined continent takes up nearly a third of globe. Here is an instance where map, or actually many maps, do literally precede territory. More importantly, these maps drive search for territory itself; they help bring that territory into being.these maps are part of process of creating Terra Australis Incognita in evocative phrase used by cosmographer Johannes schoner on a 1533 globe: Terra Australis recenter inventa sed nondum plene cognita (Southern land found recently but not fully known)-the process of bringing this imagined science fictional continent, this land whose existence is, for europeans, born of fantasy and speculation, into focus.Aside from well-known references to antipodes in works by writers such as Marlowe and dante, david Fausett has described an entire seventeenth century cycle of novels of imaginary voyages which enclose detailed accounts of utopias/ dystopias found in unknown southern continent. As Fausett says, the south-land was more than a real frontier; it was last major notional exterior, or generator of collective difference (175). He notes power of unknown south land as a literary device was not lessened by its partial discovery; indeed effectiveness of its use in political allegories seemed to be enhanced (177). …

Eric B. Song Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of CreationDominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation. Eric B. Song. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. vii+215.

<i>Eric B. Song</i> Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation<i>Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation</i>. Eric B. Song. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. vii+215.

“A King in Every Countrey”: English and French Encounters with Indigenous Leaders in Sixteenth-Century America

Beginning with Columbus’ 1493 report of kings among the “Indians,” European expeditionaries regularly perceived Indigenous leaders as kings during the first century of colonialism in the Americas. English and French narratives of the sixteenth century, following the models of early Spanish and Portuguese accounts, brought to light the existence of Aboriginal monarchs throughout the Americas, from the Arctic to Brazil and from New England to California. Popular compilations of travel accounts only cemented the trope in the European imagination. The ubiquity of such kings in early English and French colonial writing reveals the conceptual frameworks through which colonizers perceived the New World and the logic of the strategies they devised to conquer it. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, English and French views diverged, with the latter demonstrating a general reluctance to use the term “king” for Native American leaders. By contrast, English sources would continue to employ the vocabulary of kingship for this purpose into the nineteenth century.