Interdisciplinary Collection Research Articles

The cinema of Rithy Panh: everything has a soul

Over four decades of making films, director Rithy Panh continues to expand the possibilities of documentary filmmaking. His traumatic experiences of the Khmer Rouge’s dehumanising regime drive the creative impulse that makes him Cambodia’s most famous director. This interdisciplinary collection elaborates upon the global geopolitical concerns such as migration, exile, imperialism, and gender that Panh astutely implicates within the specificities of Cambodian history. Not only does Panh expose the role cinema plays in reifying structures of oppression, he also shows how it might also produce a measure of redemption.

Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas

Migration and Mortality is an edited collection on immigration, health, and the legacy of colonialism. The book is edited by Jamie Longazel, a political scientist who focuses on immigration law, and Miranda Cady Hallett, an anthropologist who researches migration. The two have assembled an interdisciplinary collection divided into four sections. Each section focuses on what the editors call the United States’ “parasitism,” examining the contemporary health consequences of migrant exploitation through the lens of the United States’ history as a “crucible of settler colonialism” (p. 2).The first section, “Haunted Humanitarianism,” examines how mainstream humanitarian discourses reproduce the Global North's “violent parasitism” (p. 13). Joseph Nevins explores how human rights organizations fail to challenge the root causes of violence against migrants: borders and migration restrictions. Nevins argues the limited ambitions of most human rights organizations fail to protect immigrants. Alicia Ivonne Estrada continues the section's focus on the inadequacy of Western institutions’ humanitarianism. Her chapter looks at the US media's failure to contextualize the life and death of Maya-K'iche’ migrant Hugo Alfredo Tale Yax within the frame of genocide. The final chapter in the first section, co-written by Marianne Madoré and Nicholas Rodrigo, examines the 2019 border security expo in San Antonio. They note the contradiction of the US Department of Homeland Security's rhetorical emphasis on humanitarianism at a tactical weaponry exposition. The three chapters in this section focus on the hypocrisy of Western institutions’ professed commitment to “humanitarianism.”The second section, on “Death and Dispossession,” examines US parasitism “on full display” (p. 14). Nicholas de Genova looks at mass death at the US–Mexico border. De Genova argues that rising mortality is the result of border militarization and US law. He concludes that these measures’ effect is to catch “illegalized” migrants inside the United States. as rich countries actively redraw “the global color line” (p. 87). In the next chapter, Deirdre Conlon and Nancy Hiemstra examine US migrant “detention economies.” In a detention economy, migrant well-being is sacrificed so local governments can raise “critical revenues” through confinement (pp. 113–16). Nathan Music and Linda McCauley, in the section's last chapter, examine the consequences of excess heat on H2-A migrant farmworkers, whose lack of protections echoes the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, the Bracero Program, and the “dark history” of slavery. This section assesses the ways US capital takes precedent over migrants’ health.The third section focuses on the “haunting presence of death” that lingers over migrants. The section begins with Daniel Stageman and Shirley Leyro's examination of mental health issues that manifest in undocumented migrants and detained immigrant children, including anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. The health impact of strict immigration enforcement is then the focus of Juan Pedroza and Pil Chung's chapter. They examine the Hispanic Epidemiological Paradox and the health impacts of deportation, concluding the “price of settling in the USA seems to have risen” (pp. 165–66). In the third section's final chapter, Noah Kline focuses on the effects of Georgia ending emergency Medicaid access for unauthorized migrants. Kline argues that Georgia's denial of emergency Medicaid is part of “bureaucratically orchestrated death” (p. 187). This set of chapters showcases valuable approaches for understanding the health impact of anti-immigrant policies.The fourth section—“Outsourced Suffering and Survival in the Americas”—focuses on the international impacts of the United States’ exclusionary policies. Jared Van Ramshorst examines “metering,” an initiative to limit the daily number of asylum seekers who enter the United States. Metering pushes refugees into Mexico, thus allowing the United States to “manage violence” by keeping asylees outside its territory (pp. 213–18). Amelia Frank-Vitale then examines deportees in Honduras, who are caught between the dangers of migration and of violence at home. Frank-Vitale argues these young Honduran men are “systematically devalued” and that migration is their only hope to reclaim “a meaningful life” (p. 232). In the next chapter, Karina Alma explores Nicaragua's sweet-lobster industry, focusing on one Afro-Indigenous community that faces “troubling” rates of workplace mortality. These workers, whose lobsters are sold to US consumers, are thus still vulnerable to the US “apparatus of power,” even though they never left Central America (p. 239). Finally, Abby Wheatley examines migrant agency in her chapter, “A Politics of Survival.” Wheatley draws on narratives to show how immigrants assert their “right to life, livelihood, and autonomy.” This section demonstrates how the United States externalizes the cost of its exclusionary policies.The epilogue, by Anna Babel, Hallett, and Longazel, ties the books’ main themes to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the rest of the collection, the epilogue connects individual stories to broader themes in history, theory, and politics. The editors and contributors of this book make a strong case for a multidisciplinary approach to assess the health impacts of migration.

Monica Tennberg, Else Grete Broderstad, Hans-Kristian Hernes (eds.), Indigenous Peoples, Natural Resources and Governance: Agencies and Interactions (London: Routledge, 2021)

As Indigenous Peoples around the world face new and increasing forms of extractive pressure in their traditional territories, what opportunities do they have to exercise agency and protect their interests in local resource governance processes? In Indigenous Peoples, Natural Resources and Governance: Agencies and Interactions, editors Tennberg, Broderstad and Hernes seek to broaden their readers’ understanding of Indigenous resource governance dynamics by showcasing a wide range of case studies from settler States in the circumpolar Arctic (Norway, Sweden, Russia, Canada) and Oceania (New Zealand, Australia). Throughout this interdisciplinary collection, the editors’ and contributors’ focus is on the diverse and evolving interactions between Indigenous Peoples, State actors, and extractive industry players, which are shown to vary significantly across geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts.

XAPI Made Easy: A Learning Analytics Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Projects

Learning Analytics provides plenty of pedagogical uses. However, the integration of learning analytics must be accompanied by different perspectives: technical, organizational, and pedagogical. At this point, there are still gaps, e.g., the need to connect the various stakeholders and support the systematic, structured, and sustainable process. This paper presents different approaches to making the learning data standard xAPI for interdisciplinary projects easier by working on other starting points. Starting with a basic infrastructure to support the interdisciplinary collection of definitions for the standardized data format, it continues with a graphical user interface supporting different stakeholders. A modular tool for quickly connecting programming IDEs with the vocabulary is also presented. Last, a connector is shown for easier multi-modal data management using virtual reality as an example.

Editor’s Introduction

Editorial| October 01 2022 Editor’s Introduction Mediterranean Studies (2022) 30 (2): 137. https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.30.2.0137 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Editor’s Introduction. Mediterranean Studies 1 October 2022; 30 (2): 137. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.30.2.0137 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressMediterranean Studies Search Advanced Search It usually falls to the editor to extract some overall theme from the interdisciplinary collection of articles for each issue. But the articles that make up Mediterranean Studies 30.2 announced their unifying theme without any such interference. In these articles, the Mediterranean appears as the work of human inhabitants who inscribe the region in all its variants on the ground it occupies. This is a view of the Mediterranean that takes the built environment as the primary text for the study of the region. Such a view emerged from Darryl Phillips’s comments on interdisciplinarity in Mediterranean studies during the 2020 MSA Congress Panel Discussion. In his presentation at that panel discussion, Professor Phillips recounted his own journey as a classicist from the Mediterranean text in print to the Mediterranean text on the ground, anticipating the direction of scholarship in the articles that would soon arrive in our inbox. Professor Phillips’s... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Spokane River ed. by Paul Lindholdt

Reviewed by: The Spokane River ed. by Paul Lindholdt Larry Cebula THE SPOKANE RIVER edited by Paul Lindholdt Washington University Press, Seattle, 2018. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. 296 pages. $24.95 paper. Who can tell the story of a river? Such a tale requires more than one voice. Geologists have their stories, as do Native peoples who live along its banks. Biologists see a river of interconnected life, while urban planners see a barrier to transportation and an urban amenity. Historians, environmentalists, and even lawyers have things to share. It is an interdisciplinary effort. It is to the credit of editor Paul Lindholdt that the anthology The Spokane River includes all of these voices and more. The twenty-eight chapters of the book include historical essays, policy reviews, poems, and personal experiences. The Spokane River begins as the outlet of Lake Couer D'Alene in Idaho. Over the course of its 111 miles, it rolls through the fertile Spokane Valley, plunges over a series of basalt cliffs in downtown Spokane, and snakes across ancient landscapes, gaining tributaries and volume until unites with the Columbia River beneath the waters of Lake Roosevelt. Its spectacular waterfalls are both the City of Spokane's most impressive sight and the reason for the town's existence. Yet, the river is not what it was. Dams turn long sections into slack-water lakes, some covered with algae blooms and dead fish in late summer. Houses crowd the banks in some places, and even where the river runs cool and clear, it carries heavy metals from long-ago mining operations and PCBs from paper plants. Signs warn anglers to limit their consumption of fish taken from the deceptively clear waters. Native voices in the book are strong. In the chapter titled "The River Gives Us Our Way of Life," Margo Hill of the Spokane Tribe recounts how her grandmother told her "the salmon hung from the horn of the saddle and stretched toward the ground" (p. 85). Her great grandmother Sadie Boyd made fish head soup, and when Hill would check to see what was cooking on her stove, she recounted: "Quite often I saw salmon eyes staring back at me" (p. 94). Fellow Spokane tribal member Barry Moses writes of the Spokane dialect of Interior Salish and how traditional names remind us of the Native uses and perceptions of the river. Lindholdt offers his own chapter, a biography of Lokout, brother of Qualchan and son of the Yakama chief Owhi. Born in the 1830s, Lokout's long life included stints as a linguist, a guide, a warrior, and finally a subject for photographer Edward Curtis in 1910. Other sections of the book focus on river history, efforts at environmental protection, The Expo '74 (Spokane's world's fair that reclaimed the banks of the river as a public park), personal essays, poems, and analyses of future threats to the Spokane River, including a loss of water and industrial contamination. The Spokane River is not only a superb book, it is a model for the kind of interdisciplinary collection that can be created around a common feature such as a river. The chapters are short, readable, and uniformly interesting. The book would work well in a college classroom. [End Page 216] Larry Cebula Eastern Washington University Washington State Archives Copyright © 2022 Oregon Historical Society

Medieval and Trans Ways of Being

Medieval and Trans Ways of Being

Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, edited by James Gregory and Daniel J.R. Grey

Reviewed by: Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century ed. by James Gregory and Daniel J. R. Grey Katherine Haldane Grenier (bio) Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, edited by James Gregory, and Daniel J. R. Grey; pp. xii + 282. London and New York: Routledge, 2020, $160.00. Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary collection of essays, uses ideals and expressions of union and disunion as a lens through which to examine the nineteenth century, focusing mostly on Great Britain and the United States. The editors, James Gregory and Daniel J. R. Grey, describe their book as exploring "episodes, institutions, sites and representations concerned with union, concord and bonds of sympathy, but also … moments of secession, separation, discord and disjunction" (1). These are broad themes which could encompass a wide assortment of topics, and indeed, the essays in this volume are varied. Their topics include marriage, political unions, jury trials, popular travel, church disestablishment, the administration of the 1834 Poor Law, and the selection of art for the Houses of Parliament. Such diverse topics can seem disjointed, and the book might benefit from a stronger elucidation of the connections which tie these essays together. Yet ideas in many of the individual essays do engage with each other in intriguing ways, and offer some valuable examples of the many ways that union and disunion played out in nineteenth-century people's lives and political structures. The collection is divided into five sections: artistic representations of union and disunion; transnational diplomacy between Britain and Europe; the politics of union and disunion in Great Britain; union and disunion in the United States; family division and union. A key argument that runs through these organizational divisions is that unions, even those that seemed the most stable, were subject to a constant process of contestation, negotiation, and redefinition. Gordon Pentland and Gary D. Hutchison demonstrate this point in discussions of the Anglo-Scottish union. Pentland's study of three Scottish political leaders during the nineteenth century shows the nuance with which they approached the political relationship with England and the impreciseness of simple characterizations of "unionist" and "nationalist" when applied to Scottish political thought of this era (108). Hutchison finds that the Conservative Party was more influential in Scottish governance and politics in this period than has been recognized, [End Page 144] and that their lack of success in electoral politics as the century went on led to innovative approaches to administrative reform of the union. Turning to the United States, Lawrence T. McDonnell provides another example that unity could not be taken for granted. While South Carolina politics are often considered to have been particularly cohesive in the 1850s, McDonnell's assessment of the legacy of John C. Calhoun shows how that unanimity was forged. South Carolina politicians in the 1850s were consumed by the effort to achieve cohesion within the various factions that emerged after Calhoun's death; whether or not that internal unity would lead to disunity from the North was not a sure thing. Other essays usefully remind us that elite politicians were not the only actors who helped to establish and maintain unions. Gregory examines an 1849 visit of 250 middle-class British excursionists to Paris, a trip which was intended to promote good Anglo-French relations after recent tensions. While the trip demonstrated the eagerness of many middle-class people to play a role in their nation's international affairs, it also opened a debate in the press about who should most properly represent British interests abroad. Rachel Egloff's contribution to the volume also examines ways in which Britons outside the political class endeavored to participate in international politics, in this case through literary activity. Rose Blaze de Bury, a British writer married to a French diplomat and the subject of Egloff's essay, was deeply interested in international politics and was concerned with strengthening Britons' understanding of the need for increased political unity in the German-speaking world. Egloff analyzes the textual strategies through which Blaze de Bury claimed authority as an expert in the "masculine" (87) world of "hard" European politics (89). Kim Stevenson and Judith Rowbotham investigate how...

Past and Present Colonialist Practices: Violence in Indigenous Communities

Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past and Engaging the Present is an interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays in which the authors raise awareness of past and current colonialist practices that continue to impact and shape Indigenous communities across the world. The editors of this volume thematically organized the essays into five sections to guide and expose the reader to different representations of violence within and against Indigenous communities. Trustworthy historic and academic sources serve as the foundation of each essay, as the authors deepen into topics that include captivity, enslavement, displacement, sexual violence, and death. This collection of essays highlights existing curricular and social gaps that have prevented the general community from understanding Indigenous communities’ crucial role and invites the reader to explore and inquire about perspectives that go beyond patriarchal ideologies and a Eurocentric mindset.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy ed. by Julia Gaffield

Reviewed by: The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy ed. by Julia Gaffield Dannie Brice The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy. Edited by Julia Gaffield. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780813937878. 280 pp. US$39.50 cloth. Julia Gaffield’s unearthing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence at the National Archives of the United Kingdom has prompted an interdisciplinary collection of scholarship framing the act of the declaration within an Atlantic context. While the scholarly study of Haitian independence has centered primarily on the Haitian Revolution, this volume is devoted to the documentation of the Haitian Declaration of Independence in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In an introduction addressing the book’s contributions and methods, anthology editor Gaffield and collaborator David Armitage, a British [End Page 193] historian, discuss the importance of new archival strategies on Haitian statecraft as scholarly sources continue to grow and reimagine the revolution and its effects in the independence period. The volume’s expansive scope spans historical materials on the declaration. It also offers literary references and political bibliographies focusing on diplomatic and commercial connections between and among Haiti, the circum-Caribbean, and the larger Atlantic from the pre-revolutionary era to the contemporary moment. For the first time, the document of the Haitian Declaration of Independence is examined from transnational perspectives. As a result, “its meanings and significance are now better understood than at any time since 1804” (10). Part 1, “Writing the Declaration,” sets the stage creatively for subsequent chapters. This section cogently elaborates on aspects of writing a declaration of emancipation during an era of colonial slavery that readers may not have considered before. David Geggus’s chapter, “Haiti’s Declaration of Independence,” and John Garrigus’s “‘Victims of Our Own Credulity and Indulgence’: The Life of Louis Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre” both complicate the contentious role of the declaration of 1803 and the official act of independence in 1804 in bringing about democratic ideals and republican rights in an emerging state. Drawing on letters from the signatories and leaders of Independence, Geggus’s work examines the textual production and radical development of the declaration in the aftermath of the revolution. Garrigus reconstructs a bibliography of Boisrond-Tonnerre, one of the authors, whose mixed-race status enabled him to write the final document in French in order to reach France and the outside world.1 This diplomatic tactic omitted from consideration the formerly enslaved people who fought for independence, and whose language was Kreyòl. If the Haitian declaration was distinct in political style, Deborah Jenson points to its poetic form, which encapsulated the violence of the war of independence on the people and the land. Her article “Living by Metaphor in the Haitian Declaration of Independence: Tigers and Cognitive Theory” sheds light on the role of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, referred to as the “author,” in instigating the famous language of the proclamation of independence, suggesting that the heroic image of Haitian independence is indebted to his inf luence. What has not been elaborated on thus far in scholarship, Patrick Tardieu argues in “The Debate Surrounding the Printing of the Haitian Declaration of Independence: A Review of the Literature,” is a comparative study of related documents: “Only by taking into account other printings from the time can we discuss the issue of manuscript versus printed version of the January 1, 1804, Acte de l’Indépendance” (62). Tardieu’s chapter on the [End Page 194] reception of the declaration in Latin America establishes the discussion for the second section of the volume. Part 2, “Haitian Independence and the Atlantic,” delves into the circulatory networks of the Haitian Declaration through discussions of its impact on the world stage and its domestic aims in the aftermath of the revolution in 1804 and 1806. Phillipe Girard’s multiarchival research, which focuses on international policies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Santo Domingo, traces the circulation of rumors and conspiracies of rebellion in Spanish colonies that inspired enslaved and free people of color to revolt, promulgating regional abolition of slavery decades after the document’s creation. Although the Haitian constitution had not indicated the intention of interfering...

Book Review: Moser, K., & Zelaya, K. (Eds.). (2020). The Metaphor of the Monster: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Understanding the Monstrous Other in Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing USA

This engrossing interdisciplinary collection, edited by French studies Professor Keith Moser and Central American literary scholar Karina Zelaya of Mississippi State University, explores numerous iterations- historical, literary, ecological, sexual- of the monstrous ‘other’. As such, the collection would be of interest and relevance to scholars from a host of disciplines: from international relations and security studies to environmental ethics and postcolonial studies. The work is divided into four parts, each featuring essays that correspond to a particular sub-discipline within monster studies: Part I (Ecological perspectives), Part II (Transgressive, Monstrous gender and Corporality), Part III (Teaching monstrosity in the (Post-)Modern World), and Part IV (Monstrosity in World Literature). This structure is particularly useful in helping the reader discern the unique contributions offered by each field to the analysis of monster metaphors.

Some Aspects of the Formation and Representation Prnciple of Interdisciplinary Collection in the Digital Space of Scientific Knowledge

Interdisciplinary thematic projects implemented by means of the electronic library "Scientific heritage of Russia" allow integrating objects of various nature (printed publications, archival documents, multimedia objects) into a single thematic resource and making it accessible to users. The approaches to the formation of interdisciplinary thematic collections in the digital space of scientific knowledge are investigated. Algorithms for the formation and presentation of a digital interdisciplinary collection are presented. The method of creation and presentation of virtual collections in the information environment of the electronic library "Scientific heritage of Russia". The main types of sections present in most projects are indicated. The main stages of the formation of an interdisciplinary collection in the digital space of knowledge have been formed and described, including the composition of the collection sections, sources for presenting collection materials, dispatching work with sources, the formation of metadata, the main types of sections, etc. An example of the application of the content formation methodology for creating an interdisciplinary collection is given.

People and forests at the legal frontier: Introduction

Across the globe, deforestation and conflicts over forests are taking place on a frontier of competing claims, narratives and worldviews, expressed through territoriality, normative orders, and forms of violence against people and nature. Policymakers have yet to find solutions that effectively address this crisis over human-forest relations in ways that are also equitable for forest peoples. This special issue responds to this challenge with an interdisciplinary collection of theoretical and empirically grounded studies that explore human-forest relations at the legal frontier. The authors explore how law affects the ecological, cultural and moral foundations of human-forest relationships, and the need to go beyond dominant economic and rights-based legal framings, towards developing further legal dimensions of socio-ecological relations for forest governance. The contributions as a whole highlight the importance of co-constructing laws that are culturally situated in local meanings of forest and interact with global, state and other local normative orders in decolonial, transformative ways. This opens the possibility of a new legal frontier for people and forests of multidimensional more-than-human forms of interlegality.

Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality ed. by Viktoria Tkaczyk et al.

Reviewed by: Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality ed. by Viktoria Tkaczyk et al. Graeme Gooday (bio) Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality Edited by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality Edited by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. That hearing norms are "built into all manner of audio apparatus, from telephones to stereo speakers" is one of many insights in this intriguing interdisciplinary collection (p. 11). Historians, having (too) long focused on technology's visual aspects, can surely benefit from understanding the configurational ramifications of the aural too. Testing Hearing helpfully turns our attention to consider how the power relations of listening and hearing are mediated by technologies. The topic of "aurality" is so novel that unlike its older lexical siblings—"orality" (seventeenth century) and "visuality" (nineteenth century)—it does not yet even register in the Oxford English Dictionary. Sympathetic readers might wonder whether the aural has already been sufficiently explored in the STS subdiscipline of Sound Studies, such as by editors Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld in Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford University Press, 2011). Yet the historicist volume reviewed here breaks new ground in focusing on the epistemic and politically charged issues of testing hearing. Accordingly, this collection is organized in an interconnected four-part structure: testing human hearers, designing, and calibrating teaching instruments, spatially managing the environments of sound testing, and testing beyond human auditory perception. In their introduction, Tkaczyk, Mills, and Hui show us how, over the last century and a half, a wide range of practitioners in music, medicine, and telecommunications have aurally tested many categories of people in diverse ways for multifarious reasons in ever more hi-tech enterprises. The editors anatomize modern aurality as the "co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures" (p. 2). In that context, testing is unavoidably a political technology since it "calibrates, disciplines, and normalizes individuals, groups, populations, materials, and technologies" (p. 6). So strongly do the editors take this new aural Foucauldianism that they claim somewhat elliptically: "Hearing no longer exists without audiometry" (p. 7). While they center modern aurality on the paradigm of "normal hearing," many readers would have welcomed an explanation of how this suppositional norm emerged as an expedient statistical construct of AT&T's telecommunications efficiency drives in the 1920s (p. 9). Among the chapters most likely to interest historians of technology is Mara Mills' piece, "Testing Hearing with Speech." This chapter documents U.S. physicians' less-than-successful attempts to turn the Bell telephone into a variable amplification device that could test its users' hearing capacity at the end of the nineteenth century. Mills demonstrates that the difficulties [End Page 618] encountered with early audiometers prompted clinicians to move instead to the spoken word in diagnosing the degree and nature of hearing loss in canonical screening tests. Similarly sensitive to the limits of technologized aurality is Sebastian Klotz's analysis of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898–1899; a broad battery of hearing tests revealed more about expeditioners' assumptions than the hearing capacities of their islander test subjects. Yet the ramifications of their 'Western' methods can subsequently be found operating at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and in the testing methods of German psychology. Further highlights from more recent times include Jonathan Sterne's study of competing epistemologies of sound in the construction of digital models of analog signal processors. As Sterne puts it: "Who gets to signal process and under what conditions is a central question of media theory, and the very question that is left aside at the moment of the listening test" (p. 181). Jennifer Hsieh's study of a state-run noise management system in modern Taiwan is equally insightful, revealing how this system "became a modernizing project that standardized the hearing of noise through an epistemology of testing" (p. 190). Especially revealing is Joeri Bruyninckx's examination of how pest control by ultrasound exploited knowledge of how many species' hearing range extended beyond the human. Similarly valuable in going beyond the immediately hearable...

Africapitalism: Rethinking the Role of Business in Africa ed. by Kenneth Amaeshi, Adun Okupe and Uwafiokun Idemudia

Reviewed by: Africapitalism: Rethinking the Role of Business in Africa ed. by Kenneth Amaeshi, Adun Okupe and Uwafiokun Idemudia Matthew C. Kolasa Amaeshi, Kenneth, Adun Okupe, and Uwafiokun Idemudia, eds. Africapitalism: Rethinking the Role of Business in Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. In Africapitalism: Rethinking the Role of Business in Africa, editors Kenneth Amaeshi and Adun Okupe, at the University of Edinburgh, and Uwafiokun Idemudia, at York University in Toronto, support the new economic philosophy of Africapitalism (a term coined by Nigerian economist Tony Elumelu, who wrote the book’s foreword). Attesting to the relevance of Elumelu’s contributions and ideas, Time magazine named him one of the world’s one hundred most influential people in 2020. This creative and well-written interdisciplinary collection of eleven essays brings African voices from around the globe to the fore. Africapitalism, a uniquely African approach to developing economies, involves the interconnectivity of stakeholders, social welfare, and communities. It seeks to maximize profits while improving employee, consumer, and national outcomes with a sense of community and patriotism. The authors begin by assessing African economies. Underdeveloped institutions and industrialization pose a problem as developed countries enjoy distinctive advantages. Combine this with the stunting effects of extractive exploitation and colonialism and the odds are against African economies. Meanwhile, the well-meaning international development community fosters aid dependence. The authors posit while parts of Africa have nurtured capitalist classes and growth, competition from capitalist metropoles necessitate a new approach. Enter the new paradigm of Africapitalism. The authors argue that entrepreneurs must take the lead by bringing South Africa’s Ubuntu philosophy to business, introducing principles of progress, prosperity, parity, peace, and place. Africapitalism critiques crony capitalism and corruption in [End Page 220] favor of longer-term views of building society, workforce, and market. Far from a social inevitability, they argue leaders can mold capitalism’s character. The attempt to bring this Africa-centered approach to business is ambitious. In many areas, regulation has proven more convincing than patriotism, but one can work with the other, as fighting corruption can combine with a business strategy and grow into a deep-rooted indigenous variety of capitalism and management. An especially compelling chapter is Amon Chizema and Nceku Nyathi’s discussion of Chinese investment in Africa. As overcapacity and market saturation at home bring Chinese businesspeople to Africa seeking resources and low-cost opportunities, results are mixed. Chizema and Nyathi note while some welcome Chinese no-strings-attached investment as a sign of respect, others question whether this reflects Africapitalism or mere business calculus. Chinese enterprises hire majorities of local laborers but managers and specialists hail from China. While Asian development states deftly required local co-ownership and technology transfers to accompany FDI, African governments seldom make such requirements. The treatment of China in Africa is more nuanced than alarmist warnings or fawningly laudatory reports that typify the topic. Other chapters show the dynamism of Africapitalism. Lyal White and Adrian Kitimbo provide a case study in “Good African Coffee: Adding Value and Driving Community Development in Uganda.” Significantly, the authors explain why so few businesses like it exist. Challenges seem insurmountable: cost of entry, access to credit, skilled labor, infrastructure, limited overseas connections, and stereotypical suspicion of African businesses plagued the project. Given these difficulties, the book’s thesis would be more convincing if it could provide more case studies highlighting the success of Africapitalism. Stella Nkomo puts Africapitalism in context in the last chapter. She acknowledges Africapitalism is more pre-paradigmatic ideology than mature theory. Nkomo predicts the path forward will not be easy as homegrown change requires asking “how to create something new, unfettered from what has always been positioned as the universal” (276). While the authors emphasize the diversity of sub-Saharan Africa and the need to look at different regions differently, the book nonetheless opens itself to criticism. Africapitalism has parallels in earlier continent-wide movements like African socialism. Africapitalism relies on Ubuntu, an influential South [End Page 221] African philosophy, but the authors assume Ubuntu applies across Africa. Can one approach apply to Nigeria and Malawi? Future research must assess Afri-capitalism’s generalizability. Although the book leaves questions unanswered, that is the...

Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies ed. by Yuan Shu et al.

Reviewed by: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies ed. by Yuan Shu et al. Yiwen Liu (bio) Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019. Ix + 295 pp. $72.00. Hardback. ISBN 978-988-8455-77-5. While transpacific studies has primarily focused on the cultural-historical and socio-political relationship between Asia and North America, ensuing scholarship—like Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (2017), Josephine Lee's Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (2019), and Rachel C. Lee's The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (2014)—has gradually expanded the field by including works of Pacific Islanders to further critique the ongoing aftermath of multiple colonialisms in the transpacific world. The volume Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson, continues this expansion of the field by emphasizing frameworks and contexts from inter-Asia cultural studies, decoloniality (via Walter Mignolo), and Oceania (via Epeli Hau'ofa). Born out of an international conference held in Hong Kong in 2011, this collection has twelve contributors from various academic fields, including English, Asia Pacific studies, history, Indigenous literary studies, and cultural studies. One major purpose of this interdisciplinary collection, as the editor, Yuan Shu, writes in the introduction, is to investigate "how to move beyond a simple negation of American exceptionalism and how to engage the Asia Pacific and Pacific islands in a productive way that would generate … new systems of knowledge production and dissemination" (1). Put differently, the editors find it inadequate to focus critique solely on US militarism itself; instead, this collection complicates our understanding of global power dynamics by foregrounding alternative relations in transpacific regions and enriching our imagination of a future oceanic community through Indigenous epistemologies. [End Page 512] The collection broadens transpacific studies through coverage of the non-hegemonic connections, flows, and memories across the Asia Pacific. Early scholarship in transpacific studies, such as Hoskins and Nguyen's Transpacific Studies (2014), was devoted to decentering nation-states by focusing on the movements of people, materials, and cultures, yet much of its discussion was primarily in response to the ways in which major powers (i.e., the United States, China, and Japan) have shaped the transpacific. While this was a crucial step for an emerging field, scholars have long been aware of the absent attention to the lateral relationships among minor places in the Asia Pacific. This collection answers this call partially by integrating Asian American studies and inter-Asia cultural studies. Viet Thanh Nguyen's chapter, "Memories of Murder: The Other Korean War (in Viet Nam)," for instance, analyzes how Korean cultural representations remember and forget Korea's involvement in the Vietnam War—a reinvestigation of America's military project from perspectives within Asia. While demonstrating that US imperialism is the originator of the unjust wars across Asia, Nguyen's chapter reminds us that contemporary memory politics in South Korea is inseparable from the country's sub-imperial position during and after the Vietnam War. Speaking to the collection's overall advocacy of reconceptualizing the notion of transpacific relations, Nguyen writes that "the oceanic is not only the space between the United States and elsewhere, but between Korea and its own elsewhere in Viet Nam" (192). The collection further expands transpacific studies by drawing attention to Latin America. Evelyn Hu-DeHart's chapter, entitled "Spanish Manila: A Transpacific Maritime Enterprise and America's First Chinatown," traces Latin America's long history in making the transpacific world by revealing that the history of commerce (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries) between Spanish colonized Mexico and south China is an indispensable but often neglected part of the later establishment of the US empire. Repositioning Manila's first Chinatown in the triangulation of Spanish Latin America, Chinese feudal regime, and Anglo North America, Hu-DeHart's chapter inspires scholars of borderlands, like myself, to nuance the roles played by port cities in the negotiation and transformation between multiple empires. This chapter is representative of the collection's consistent practice of decolonizing...

The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, and: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright

Reviewed by: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, and: The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Dale Townshend and Angela Wright JoEllen Mary DeLucia Angela Wright and Dale Townshend, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 1: Gothic in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 516; 16 b/w illus. $155.00 cloth. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, eds., The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Vol. 2: Gothic in the Nineteenth Century. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020) Pp. 541; 14 illus. $155.00 cloth. Defining the Gothic has been a perennial problem. Is it a literary genre, an aesthetic, or a style? As a historical marker, does it refer to the liberty-loving Goths of pre-Roman Britain, a medieval chivalric culture, or is it a negative definition of modernity? During the long eighteenth-century, Gothic was used as an adjective to describe architecture, political values, and, later, literary texts; in the nineteenth century, the term largely disappeared. In the twentieth century, Victorian studies adapted the Gothic as a “retrospective construct” (II:15)—a category used to group everything from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the Kelmscott Press’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer under the same umbrella. The Gothic’s search for a clear referent has had the sometimes frustrating but also liberating effect of evacuating the term of any clear meaning. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, the editors of the first two volumes of The Cambridge History of the Gothic, argue that instead of linking the Gothic to a historical period, discipline, or set of formal characteristics, we should understand it as a “mode.” Mode in these volumes means something close to a method or approach, an active means of both interrogating dominant histories and writing “counter-history” (I: 6). The discontinuities and the unevenness in the application of the term Gothic make the case for it as an approach or process. As Robert Miles argues, the Gothic might best be understood as “a temporal contrast . . . between the premodern world of ghosts (timeless, circular, repetitious, with porous boundaries between the self and other, this world and the next), and the empty, chronometric, homogenous time of modernity” (I: 449); or, as Tom Duggett persuasively suggests, “a zeitgeist term—a word in the process of becoming, through contestation and self-contradiction” (II: 105). One of the great strengths of Townshend and Wright’s turn to mode instead of form is that they are able to develop a truly interdisciplinary collection of essays, putting literature, history, art, architecture, and drama into conversation with one another. At the same time, the constraints of the linear history demanded by the form of a three-volume Cambridge History, with separate volumes dedicated to the long eighteenth century, the nineteenth century, and a yet to be published volume on the twentieth century, work against the Gothic mode itself. As I read, I sometimes wished that the essays were grouped in a non-linear fashion, interrogating instead of replicating progressive historical form. Despite these formal constraints, the collected essays provide a fascinating interdisciplinary and transnational look at the Gothic, which almost always begins its story with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764); those in eighteenth-century studies would find these volumes most useful as a means of building a counternarrative of our period’s influence, one that contests the aesthetic and philosophical tenets of the neo-Classical and Enlightenment impulses that still dominate understandings of the eighteenth century; in addition, the collection would aid eighteenth centuryists in responding to recent calls to think and teach beyond the traditional boundaries of period and [End Page 1012] discipline and track the echoes of issues central to the eighteenth century across periods and national traditions. With the third volume yet to be released, this review only considers the first two volumes, which are dedicated to the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they include an impressive forty-one essays from forty-two scholars writing from different disciplinary and national perspectives. In keeping with the Gothic mode, the essays are best read...

Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change eds. by Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle Gournay, and Robert Freestone

Reviewed by: Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change eds. by Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle Gournay, and Robert Freestone Nathan Burtch Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change. Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle Gournay, and Robert Freestone, eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. vii+488, color plate pictures, illustrations, maps; black & white pictures, illustrations, maps. $49.95, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8122-5114-2. A favorite part of teaching about urban planning for me is the topic of urban utopia: the idealized place in which a visionary uses design to create physical and social perfection along their predilections and idiosyncrasies. Cities and communities are formed by millions of decisions by individuals, institutions, and bureaucracies, working in concert or conflict, creating our quiet residential neighborhoods and cacophonous metropolitan regions. The concept of the urban utopia conceptualizes that a single vision can also produce place. If a place is planned to be just right, what are the implications of the place's inevitable change and evolution? Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change explores what happened to planned residential greenfield communities after the halcyon days, when the implementation of vision is faced with decades of economic, demographic, development, environmental, and cultural change. This volume, edited by Mary Corbin Sies, Isabelle [End Page 132] Gournay, and Robert Freestone, focuses on "iconic" rather than "utopian" communities, but many of the communities used as case studies have a direct connection to Ebeneezer Howard's garden city, among other utopian visions. The volume is not a census of all planned residential greenfield communities, but it compiles an impressive array of examples. In the course of nineteen chapters, the interdisciplinary collection of authors provides case studies of twenty-three different iconic planned communities. The chosen communities span the globe and include widely known examples in the Global North like Letchworth Garden City, Welwyn Garden City, Radburn, and Seaside, along with Global South representation in Menteng (Indonesia), Pacaembu (Brazil), and Soweto (South Africa). These twenty-three communities also provide a wide breadth of place typologies: low-density and medium-density, working-class and elite communities, purely residential and mixed-use, diverse and exclusive. While contributing authors used their own disciplinary and multidisciplinary lenses for methodological inquiry, the editors asked each to use a SWOT analysis with several questions in common to bridge a connection between case studies. Contributors worked to understand each community as a holistically planned place that links social dynamics with physical design. The editors note that their view of iconicity centers on places known by "widely circulated visual representations encapsulating their social and design tenets" (15), which clearly links to the coupled physical/social idealism of urban utopias. A strength of the volume is the inclusion of these specific visual representations that go toward the editors' definition of "iconic." A twentieth chapter has Gournay detail how "visual representations matter" toward making these communities iconic and recognizable as place (436). Images of the master plans of communities and images of residents using the physical place within the chapters and as included color plates provide iconic texture to the written analysis. Iconicity, while defined by visual representation within the volume, is also related to each community's spirit and sense of place. Gournay's solo chapter, and more amply R. Bruce Stephenson's afterword, connect the term "icon" to its religious roots. Many of the noted iconic planned communities, in their utopian roots, are attempts at building a metaphysical spirit into secularized space. These places are well argued as having sacredness imbued within them despite not being religious in [End Page 133] nature. This secular sacralization of place occurs through the power of visionary place: the goal of social enlightenment through physical and social planning as created by the visionary planners of these communities. This volume's focus on iconicity adds to the literature of not only planning and design but also sacred spaces and topophilia. Though the sense-of-place aspect of this volume is a pleasant emphasis, as the title implies a more consistent thread through the case studies is how these communities deal (or not) with change. Though an iconic place may suggest to the public at large a belief...

Extractive resource industries and indigenous community-based monitoring: Cooperation or cooptation?

This special issue is an interdisciplinary collection of papers that explores the many dimensions of Indigenous community-based monitoring (ICBM). The focus is on areas/sites in Canada, and to a lesser extent internationally, where Indigenous peoples have assumed a role in the monitoring of industrial activities. This collection provides the reader with an understanding of the current status and effectiveness of ICBM in advancing the territorial rights and interests of Indigenous peoples. Themes explored include ICBM contributions to Indigenous self-determination, jurisdictional and the politics of exclusion, issues regarding gender and racial identity, the roles of science and Indigenous knowledge within these efforts as well methods to sustain and implement strategies derived from ICBM programs such as impact and benefit agreements.

Strengthening International Fisheries Law in an Era of Changing Oceans, edited by Richard Caddell and Erik J. Molenaar

Richard Caddell and Erik J. Molenaar (eds.), Strengthening International Fisheries Law in an Era of Changing Oceans (Oxford, Hart Publishing) 2019, ISBN: 9781509923359, hardbound £91.80, xviii + 478 pp. Strengthening International Fisheries Law in an Era of Changing Oceans is an interdisciplinary collection addressing how the international legal framework for the regulation of fisheries can be strengthened to address the challenges presented by changing oceanic conditions and fisheries dynamics. Stemming from a project led by the Netherlands Institute for the Law of the Sea (NILOS) and the Utrecht Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law (UCWOSL), climate change and its impacts (both present and future) on international fisheries law (IFL) are at the forefront here, as well as key issues of fisheries management in light of scientific uncertainty, and the problems with compliance and enforcement that plague the fisheries sector.