Way Of Life Research Articles

Enriching Children, Institutionalizing Childhood? Geographies of Play, Extracurricular Activities, and Parenting in England

Geographical research on children, youth, and families has done much to highlight the ways in which children's lives have changed over the last twenty-five years. A key strand of research concerns children's play and traces, in the Global North, a decline in children's independent access to, and mobility through, public space. This article shifts the terrain of that debate from an analysis of what has been lost to an exploration of what has replaced it. Specifically, it focuses on children's participation in enrichment activities, including both individual and collective extracurricular sporting, cultural, and leisure opportunities in England. The research reveals that middle-class children have much higher participation rates in enrichment activities than their working-class counterparts. Parents value enrichment activities in very similar ways across the class spectrum—seeing them as fun, healthy, and social opportunities. The ability to pay for enrichment, however, means that it is incorporated into, and transforms, middle-class family life in ways not open to working-class families. Nevertheless, support across the class spectrum for these instrumental forms of play that institutionalize childhood in school, community, and commercial spaces leads to calls for subsidized provision for low-income children through schools. The article thus traces the “enrichment” and “institutionalization” of childhood and draws out the implications of this for how we think about play, education, parenting, and class in geography.

Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater

Constantin Constantius Goes to the Theater Michael Fried A basic assumption behind the remarks that follow is that Kierkegaard's writings, especially Either/Or (1842) and Repetition (1843), contain long stretches that deserve to be recognized as among the most luminous and far-reaching adventures in esthetic thinking, reflection on the arts, in the entire nineteenth century. This is true, or so I contend, despite the fact that the esthetic as such is for Kierkegaard the least or lowest of what in Stages of Life's Way (1845)—a sequel to Either/Or—he calls three "existence spheres" (476; see also 440-443).1 The esthetic, he writes, is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical that of requirement, and the highest, the religious, the sphere of fulfillment, though of course the actual relationships among these, especially between the first two and the third, is anything but incremental (the crucial notion, of course, is that of a "leap of faith"). And in fact Kierkegaard's most original esthetic thinking, in the ordinary, not Kierkegaardi an sense of the term, sometimes lies elsewhere than in the esthetic existence sphere, where one might expect to find it. Thus in my book on Kierkegaard's contemporary, the German painter and draftsman Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), I try to show that Judge William's ethical reflections on marriage in part II of Either/Or, specifically his claim to the effect that the everydayness of a successful marriage—the absence in the latter of events that are essentially momentary (the absence of intensiveness, is how he also puts it)—defeats what he calls esthetic representation, [End Page 1019] amount to a marvelously original contribution to esthetic thinking in the ordinary sense of the term (Fried, Menzel's 141-166; see also Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II 87-184). Indeed I go on to relate those reflections to Menzel's thematization in numerous paintings and drawings of the subject of brickwork (another version of the everyday, one more or less identical item laid alongside another, in principle endlessly), which is to say that I suggest that Menzel in effect finds a way around Judge William's strictures (as regards the representation not of marriage but of the everyday). And I associate those strictures more directly with Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest (1896), which I understand as engaging explicitly with Kierkegaard's thought in the narrative's almost complete elision of more than six years of Instetten's marriage with Effi following their move from Kessin to Berlin, a transition that put an end to her affair with the practiced seducer Crampas, about which Instetten knew nothing. When by chance he learns of the affair he kills Crampas in a duel and breaks off relations with Effi, despite recognizing—it is hard to know how to put this—that the six-plus years of Judge William-style marriage that he and Effi have just experienced render his actions absurd, or at the very least mindl essly conventional and destructive. (I shall bring back Menzel briefly at the end of this paper.) Constantin Constantius's "report" in the first half of Repetition, however, takes place entirely in the existence sphere of the esthetic, so that it is without the inbuilt ethical "seriousness" of Judge William's reflections. (The second, shorter half mostly comprises letters from a young man to Constantius, who has been making a study of him; the subtitle of the book as a whole is "A Venture in Experimenting Psychology.") The pages I have in mind, fifteen or so in the Hongs' translation, begin with Constantius's ruminations about the naturalness of an as yet unformed young man's (any young man's) interest in the theater, which allows such a person—quite properly, it is implied—to imagine multiple existences. In Constantius's words, "the individual's possibility wanders about in its own possibility, discovering now one possibility, now another. But the individual's possibility does not want only to be heard; … it wants to be visible at the same time" (155). And beyond that, "in order not to gain an impression of his actual self," the hidden individual (the as yet unformed young man...

2, 6, heave! Sail training’s influence on the development of self-concept and social networks and their impact on engagement with learning and education. A pilot study

Introduction Youth disengaged with learning are at risk of not fulfilling their potential and often become very difficult to be provided with the social support necessary to remain active contributors to society. Similarly, disengaged youth who do return to study are more likely to fail and drop out greatly reducing the prospect of creating constructive productive community members (Henry, Knight & Thornberry, 2012; Kirjansson, 2007). Consequently there is a need to identify strategies to promote engagement with learning and education. One such strategy is the use of experiential education. Successful experiential learning is described by Priest (1993) as an approach to training and development utilising activities involving some form of perceived physical or emotional risk to bring about positive changes in individuals. Here learning is based in real world situations with both a social element and immediate consequences that in turn allows for future learning to occur (Wojcikiewicz & Zachary, 2010) Among many experiential learning proposals that might be useful to reengage students with education--such as sports, project-driven programs, outdoor education - this paper analyses sail training as one potential avenue to provide disengaged youth students with tools to pursue further learning. An experiential learning voyage aboard Australia's national sail training ship STS Young Endeavour requires youth aged 16 to 23 to live at sea in close confines with up to 36 other people they have previously never met, aboard a 33 meter tall ship for 11 days. During this time they engage in a number of experiential activities including; climbing a 30 meter mast, participating in teamwork activities such as sail-handling, conducting regular ship duties, steering the vessel and taking control of daily operations. 2,6, Heave! is a common call requiring all members of a sailing team to heave together to complete a task one person cannot accomplish alone. This becomes synonymous with the ethos of a sail training voyage which is - working together achieves more than working alone. Participants are also involved in a number of targeted debriefing scenarios which provide opportunities for both reflections on behaviours, feelings and attitudes, as well as how these informed thoughts can be related to life beyond the voyage. This paper shows how, by increasing opportunities to 2'6' heave together, sail training is likely to transform young people's lives in ways they could not imagine at first. We use the term experiential education rather than outdoor education in this paper as the ship and the marine environment appear to provide a context for the experiential elements of the program participants identified as being influential in their learning. Burns, Collin, Blanchard, De-Freitas and Lloyd (2008) argue engaging and connecting young people in the broader social life is one of the key issues for Australian contemporary society. The authors believe that engaged young people are better prepared to become healthy adults with a greater potential to contribute to the society. They affirm that "young people, who are provided with opportunities to participate, experience a better quality of life and contribute to creating and building better communities" (p. 4). In this paper we offer insights about a sail training experience from five young Australians who participated in a voyage with Young Endeavour and how this impacted their engagement with learning and education upon their return. We engaged in qualitative conversations both pre and post voyage, in order to have the participants reflecting on how their sail training voyage might impact their further involvement with education. By looking at behavioural, affective and cognitive aspects of the participants' engagement, we aim to provide a better understanding of aspects where sail training seems to be a potentially good strategy to reengage youth in education. …

Sustainable Lifeways: Cultural Persistence in an Ever-Changing Environment

Book review of Sustainable Lifeways: Cultural Persistence in an Ever-Changing Environment. Naomi F. Miller, Katherine M. Moore, Kathleen Ryan, editors. 2011. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Pp. 352, 73 illustrations. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 9787934536193.

HUMAN SECURITY AND THE ROLE OF NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTIONS IN THE ENFORCEMENT OF LANGUAGE RIGHTS POLICY IN SRI LANKA

Human security is about protecting people, however it has gone ahead of the traditional security definitions and focusing on evolutionary changes in the human security infrastructure. The arguments over human security are not new. Human security is a comparable undisciplined argument for a return to enlightenment liberalism. United Nations Commission on Human Security defines human security as the protection of “the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and fulfilment.” As such, this encompassing approach does not distinguish “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want” for individual citizens. This paper will explain 2 key points which are language rights as human rights in the Sri Lankan context and National Institutions. It is based on during the civil war the Sri Lankan citizens were not able to enjoy the language access efficiently therefore the innocent people were not able to express themselves in their own language and were treated as terrorists rather than the normal citizens of Sri Lanka.

K’lal Yisra·el in Conservative Judaism: A Personal Education

K’lal Yisra·el in Conservative Judaism: A Personal Education Elliot B. Gertel (bio) K’lal yisra·el, the ideal of unity and cooperation among the Jewish people, was brought home to me at an early age by various influences, but I could not have appreciated its importance and centrality to Jewish life without the literature and institutions of the Conservative movement. Indeed, I believe that my education as a Conservative Jew enabled me to appreciate and to savor aspects and experiences of Jewish life in ways that I would not have otherwise done. I was introduced to the concept of k’lal yisra·el by my parents and grandparents, who spoke of the importance and privilege of being part of the Jewish people and of having a Jewish State. My perspective was formed, as well, at the United Hebrew Schools in Springfield, Massachusetts (a community Hebrew school of some 600 students, consisting of the Orthodox and Conservative congregations—itself a rare model of k’lal yisra·el!), where our principal, Dr. Shimon Bakon, would explain to us the importance of of doing all we could to bolster, support, and encourage our fellow Jews, a special and unique extended family throughout the world. A couple of years before my bar mitzvah, I started attending Friday night services to look into Judaism and its meaning. Until his departure to his native Chicago, I was privileged to hear, from age 11 to 15, the sermons of Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner, whose preaching fired my soul, imagination, and intellect with an interest in making some sort of contribution to the Jewish people as a whole. [End Page 20] Dresner had a spiritual approach to Jewish peoplehood, paralleling what I would later learn was the Chabad approach, but influenced theologically by Abraham Joshua Heschel. He had grown up Reform, attended Hebrew Union College, and had then followed Heschel to the Jewish Theological Seminary after already contemplating the move. He married into a Frankfurt Orthodox family. While he rejected the Reform Judaism of his youth, he admired his childhood rabbi, Felix Levy, and worked with the organ and other trappings of “Liberal Judaism” at Temple Beth El in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he had cordial relations with the Orthodox director of the community Hebrew School. He did push for more opportunities for Conservative Jewish education, both formal and informal, but went along with the united Talmud Torah, which he had inherited. Like his teacher, Heschel, Dresner regarded the Jewish people as a spiritual entity, called to bear witness to God and to divine teachings by observing the mitzvot. He was open to ritual innovations, but regarded all Jews as bound by observance of the Sabbath and dietary laws. In his book on the dietary laws, he asserted what was a motif of all of his sermons—namely, that Judaism and its practices must be taken seriously “as a means of singling Israel out as a people set apart for the Lord’s service.”1 Dresner emphasized the importance of the State of Israel, and of the Jewish people as a whole, in a powerful and poignant sermon entitled “The Wall,” which he preached on the Rosh Hashanah after the Six Day War (1967). He spoke about the privilege of being able to approach the Western Wall, which, historically, “has called the people back to its origins. They felt a sense of oneness with every Jew in Israel and throughout the ages. All divisions were joined. The Oriental, the German, the American Jew, the educated [and] the ignorant, those in the exile and those in Israel, those who lived in the days of the Bible and of the Talmud and those who will live in the future—all were present, all became one, stood together before that Wall.”2 Dresner often suggested that the Jews as a people had always known the terrible evil of which human beings were capable, both because of their suffering in so many places and because of the word of their Scriptures: if people loved and obeyed God, there would be life and blessing, but if they “turned away to their own egos, then they would perish.”3 He preached that the...

Qualitative Life-Grids: A Proposed Method for Comparative European Educational Research

Drawing upon their large three-year mixed-method study comparing four English university sociology departments, the authors demonstrate the benefits to be gained from concisely recording biographical stories on life-grids. They argue that life-grids have key benefits which are important for comparative European educational research. Some of these advantages are common to all biographical methods; for example, they facilitate: nuanced understandings of the impact of education policies in different national contexts; more complex depictions of cross-national and withincountry variation and similarity; theoretical and conceptual developments based upon commonality and difference across national boundaries; and insight into the relationship between the macro, meso and micro levels for case-based approaches. Life-grids also have the advantage of being less resourceintensive than recorded and transcribed biographical interviews. They are an easier method for researchers to use and comparative checks for quality are simple and can be ongoing. The data generated is more conducive to comparison and designing the life-grid ensures that cross-cultural understanding and dialogue between researchers is inbuilt. The physical act of co-producing life-grids with participants builds relationships and knowledge of participants' lives in ways that can be useful to other aspects of data collection.

Youth and Video Games

Recent research suggests that video games and social media may influence youths’ lives in ways that deserve attention from psychologists, mathematics educators, and learning scientists. For example, positive effects on engagement, which can increase probability of mathematics proficiency, have been reported in the literature. We examine this issue with emphasis on the effects of video game play on youth learning and engagement; what features, attributes, and mechanisms of video games have been identified as most salient for these factors; and how scholarship in the domain might design more rigorous studies to determine the effects of video game play on learning, achievement, and engagement. We include a description of our work developing educational games for middle school youth struggling to become algebra-ready.

THE STORY OF A LIFE

AbstractThis essay explores the nature of narrative representations of individual lives and the connection between these narratives and personal good. It poses the challenge of determining how thinking of our lives in story form contributes distinctively to our good in a way not reducible to other value-conferring features of our lives. Because we can meaningfully talk about our lives going well for us at particular moments even if they fail to go well overall or over time, the essay maintains that our good must consist in something more than an accumulation of good discrete moments. Since persons have the capacities to reason, remember, and imagine, our good depends on a larger view of our lives that integrates its particular moments in a narrative. That narrative provides shape and texture to our lives. Storytelling serves to connect the events of our lives to each other, and to explain why the meaning and value of past events or features of our lives can shift as the life, and hence the story of the life, continues to unfold. The essay concludes that narrative enables us to see our lives in ways that support, encourage, or promote our self-concept and self-worth as agents who have controlling authority over our own lives.

Tribute to L. L. Waters

In Memoriam Long-time members of the American Society of Transportation and Logistics and readers of the Transportation Journal were saddened by news of the death of Dr. L. L. Waters at age 99 on September 8, 2012. To us, the sense of loss struck by Dr. Waters’ passing was sharpened by our decades-long direct acquaintance with him as a professor, a trusted and caring provider of sage counsel, and a friend. Before going further, we need to explain that the initials “L. L.” stand for “Lawrence Leslie.” Friends and colleagues commonly addressed him informally as “Les.” Infrequently, he would be identified formally in print as “L. Leslie Waters.” In virtually all other instances, ranging from bylines on published articles to title pages in books and entries on signatory pages and business cards, “L. L. Waters” was imprinted. Transportation was Dr. Waters’ primary area of focus during his service between 1948 and 1978 as a faculty member in the School of Business at Indiana University (IU). However, his teaching and research interests and expertise reached across much if not most of the wider sphere of business and economic subject matter. One manifestation of this was his teaching of business policy, the cross-functional capstone course for MBA students. As for his published research, the books, monographs, and articles that he authored and coauthored over the course of his career covered topics involving every mode of transport and extended beyond to migratory labor, manufacturing, trade barriers, executive compensation, taxation, and business management case problems. In essence, he was a true “boundary spanner” before the term achieved popular use. Current space prohibits unabridged recitation of Dr. Waters’ professional biography. However, a sampling of additional specimens of the breadth of his work is in order.

Entrepreneurship and being: the case of the Shaws

Our paper takes the case of John and Elizabeth Shaw, early nineteenth-century English hardware factors. The sources are almost 200 hundred letters written by the Shaws and their circle. Using these, two readings of the Shaws' experiences of creating a business are presented. The first is couched within a narrative structure of plotted stages and finds the Shaws starting, struggling to, and ultimately succeeding in creating a successful business. Here, their actions within a nascent industrialized economy can be described as entrepreneurial – they successfully pursued opportunity through founding an enterprise within economically and technologically auspicious environments. The second, more phenomenological reading, opens up for consideration the questionableness of their experience of ‘being in business’. Here the Shaws' understanding of themselves (as conveyed in personal letters) brings into question the academic tendency to emplot their story as one of the staged growth and profitability. Specifically, it resists attempts to ascribe to their experience entrepreneurial status, not simply because they did not think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but because the appearance of the business for the Shaws was woven with their lives in ways that belie the narrative direction and coherence that concepts like entrepreneurship give to it.

Suicide of a Superpower

Both a book of lamentation about the presumably collapsing American wayof life and a populist right-wing anti-establishment agenda of ethno-nationalistxenophobia, euphemistically referred to as “ethno-pluralism,” author PatrickBuchanan presents an alarmist message of doom and gloom about the fate ofhis country. He adopts this “master frame,” which allows him and the currenthe represents to mobilize anti-immigrant sentiments as well as politicalprotest in ways that limit vulnerabilities to accusations of racism or of beingantidemocratic (Rydgren 2004).1Buchanan starts his book by asserting that this generation of Americansis witnessing “one of the most stunning declines of a great power in the historyof the world” (p. 10). His thesis is that “America is disintegrating” and thatthe “centrifugal forces pulling [it] apart are growing inexorably. What onceunited us is dissolving. And this is true of Western civilization” (p. 7; my emphasis).The explanation he offers for this is framed within the context of theUnited States losing its Christian character, implying that non-Christians donot belong there; the breakdown of society’s moral, cultural, and social fabric,read as opposition to multiculturalism as well as to liberal values and policies;and the dying of the people who created this nation, which is now being overwhelmedby a rapidly increasing flow of immigrants and members of otherraces and ethnicities. Having rung the alarm, whether true or false, Buchananproceeds in the following eleven chapters to make his case, addressing sensitiveissues of religion, race and ethnicity, demography, multiculturalism, expansivegovernment, values of equality, and foreign relations – all of whichhe has something to say about in what appears to be some kind of an ideologicaltract ...

Safe-water shortages, gender perspectives, and related challenges in developing countries: The case of Uganda

The need for water continues to become more acute with the changing requirements of an expanding world population. Using a logistical analysis of data from 301 respondents from households that harvest rainwater in Uganda, the relationship between dependent variables, such as water management performed as female-dominated practices, and independent variables, such as years of water harvesting, family size, tank operation and maintenance, and the presence of local associations, was investigated. The number of years of water harvesting, family size, tank operation and maintenance, and presence of local associations were statistically significantly related to adequate efficient water management. The number of years of water harvesting was linked to women's participation in household chores more than to the participation of men, the way of livelihoods lived for many years. Large families were concurrent with a reduction in water shortages, partially because of the availability of active labour. The findings also reveal important information regarding water-related operations and maintenance at the household level and the presence of local associations that could contribute some of the information necessary to minimise water-related health risks. Overall, this investigation revealed important observations about the water management carried out by women with respect to underlying safe-water shortages, gender perspectives, and related challenges in Uganda that can be of great importance to developing countries.

Mastery, Authority, and Hierarchy in the “Inner Chapters” of theZhuāngzǐ

Mastery, Authority, and Hierarchy in the “Inner Chapters” of the<i>Zhuāngzǐ</i>

‘My Rainbow Family’—Discomfort and the Heteronormative Logics

Many consider Scandinavian countries to be tolerant and liberal with regard to homosexuality and same-sex parenthood. Nevertheless, heteronormative assumptions of ‘the normal family’ still dominate. The participants in this research project have grown up in rainbow families,1 and this article focuses on how they negotiate and work on heteronormativity and representations of ‘normal’ family life in ways that challenge and alter these assumptions. Their work reveals a continuum of practices ranging from concealment and non-disclosure to being very open and proactive in representing their families. In analyzing the data, I employ Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work on comfort/discomfort, and discuss the discomfort of working on the heteronormative logics. The 25 participants in this project come from Denmark and Norway, and range from 15 to 45 years of age (most are between 20 and 25). In interviews and written autobiographies, they spoke and wrote about their families, parenthood and their parents’ sexual orientation.

CAN PIKACHU SAVE FANNIE MAE?

I argue that Pokémon offers a demonstrative and constitutive moment of the financializaion of contemporary cultural life in ways that signal an intensification of finance, risk, debt and cognitive labour as global imperatives. I suggest that children's play with Pokémon cards can help us revisit tenacious debates within Cultural Studies over structure and agency by focusing on the social production of value (in this case, the way children produce common forms of value for their card collections) and how this is connected to economic value in an age of speculative capital. In particular, I argue that Pokémon emblematizes emerging trends in the way the financialized economy develops and depends on commodified social practices that offer resources for the development of financialized subjectivities and engineered forms of agency.

The Placement of Aortic Transcatheter Valve (PARTNER) Trial

Major advances in medicine have the curious property of simultaneously being the cause of both great excitement and great anxiety. Clinicians embrace the power of science to reduce human suffering and prolong life in ways that their forbearers could hardly have imagined. Patients, knowing little of the enormous theoretical and practical challenges to be surmounted in producing real medical breakthroughs, have been conditioned by the media to expect dramatic headlines in each morning's news reports as they sip their coffee. Healthcare payers and policy makers, reading those same reports, worry that consumers' enthusiasm for high-tech solutions to the chronic health problems of modern society is fueling a destructive growth rate in medical spending. Although cardiovascular medicine has no unique claim to technological innovation, the sheer number of patients affected with cardiovascular disease means that major technological advances addressing important clinical problems have measurable effects on the annual healthcare bill for the country. Over the last few decades, cardiovascular medicine has seen a series of remarkable, but expensive, therapeutic innovations evolve into guideline-endorsed standard care (eg, drug-eluting stents, implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, left ventricular assist devices). In each of these cases, the early dissemination phase of these technologies was marked by predictions that cardiovascular physicians, unable to restrain their enthusiasm for therapeutic novelty, would sink the national economy by adding billions of extra dollars to the already excessive annual healthcare bill. The apparent failure of such predictions to come true has left physicians increasingly inured to the voices of the Cassandras who make them. Administrative inefficiency and overuse of tests and therapies partially explain why the United States spends more than any other country on health care (17% of the gross domestic product at last accounting) but not why the spending continues to grow every year. Of the factors that account for the …

Violence Against Women and Asylum Seeking: Global Problems and Local Practices Applied to Guatemalan Women Immigrating for Safety

This paper, based on broader discussions surrounding gender violence and immigration in the U.S., provides critical information on the historical context of extreme violence against women and femicide plaguing Central American societies today. Drawing on experiences of precedent setting cases of Guatemalan women, the authors offer suggestions for culturally specific treatment of and support for women who seek asylum in the U.S. out of justified fear for their and their family members’ lives should they return to their country of origin. The arguments presented are predicated on the belief that women worldwide share experiences of myriad forms of male domination and gender inequality which, however, play out differently on their bodies and lives in ways that must be accounted for in our attempt to offer them appropriate care and assist them in creating the tools they need to change their circumstances.

Writing belief, reading belief: Adam Ashforth's Madumo: a man bewitched and Witchcraft, violence and democracy in South Africa

This article is impelled by the question: how do we as academics write (about) religious or spiritual belief? In a country like South Africa, and many other postcolonial societies, this is a question which demands address, as religious and spiritual discourses pervade public and private life in ways that they may not in more secularized European contexts. In particular, how do we write credibly, sympathetically, and yet critically, about beliefs which we may not share (in the case of this article belief systems referred to in official discourse as “traditional African”, and often more colloquially as “witchcraft”), but which constitute the day-to-day realities of life for so many people – in which issues ranging from love relationships, to employment, housing, families, sport, health and security are mediated through a complex system of spiritual practices, which often emerge in public discourse generally only in their negative or sensational aspects. And in so doing, how do we rethink, reread and rewrite the larger issue of the place of the religious or spiritual in postcolonial modernities. I take as my case study two fascinating texts by Adam Ashforth on the subject of “witchcraft” in Soweto: Madumo: a man bewitched (2000); and Witchcraft, violence and democracy in South Africa (2005).

The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée”

The revolution in France's colony of Saint-Domingue that began in 1791 led to the first complete abolition of slavery in 1793-1794 and to the creation, in 1804, of the independent black nation of Haiti. It also gave birth to a new kind of author: the colonial exile. (1) Violently ousted from their privileged positions, white plantation-owners used their command of literacy to cast themselves as victims of the upheaval that had forced them to flee. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Rousseau had cast themselves as defenders of the oppressed, and, in Rousseau's case, as victims of oppression in their own right; the colonial exiles of the 1790s insisted on their victim status, but did so in order to justify a system of racial hierarchy in which they had held superior status. They used their personal narratives not only to denounce the black insurgents who had destroyed their plantations but also to accuse the French revolutionary politicians who, in the eyes of these authors, had triggered the slave uprising through their utopian fantasies about human rights. Authorship, in these texts, became a mechanism for disseminating a new, more aggressive racism epitomized in a notorious passage of Francois Rene de Chateaubriand's Genie du christianisme, which asked, Qui oserait encore plaider la cause des Noirs apres les crimes qu'ils ont corareis? (2) Paradoxically, however, even as they defended slavery and racial prejudice, the exiled colonists of Saint-Domingue contributed to the development of a form of authorship that would, in the twentieth century, come to be associated with campaigns for human rights and for the right of colonial subjects to speak back to the metropole. These authors, together with their contemporaries who lived through the Revolution in France itself, were among the first in the French tradition to produce examples of what we can call witness literature--first-person accounts of extraordinary public events that had drastically affected their authors' private lives in ways that were assumed to be typical of the fate of large numbers of contemporaries--in French literature. (3) The growing interest in more recent examples of French witness literature, such as the texts of French Holocaust survivors, and in genres such as the testimonio in other languages, (4) suggests the importance of taking a more serious look at the witness literature of the revolutionary era, both as literature and as a source of historical insight. At the same time as they helped inaugurate the tradition of the author as witness to history, the memoirs by colonists from Saint-Domingue anticipated a uniquely Caribbean tradition of exile literature. As Martin Munro has written in his Exile and Post-1946 Literature, Haitian literature has a longstanding, sophisticated tradition of migrant writing, produced by authors driven from their homeland by the threat of violence. The writings of exiles from Haiti and from the Caribbean more generally, whether they mourn for an irrecuperable history or celebrate the beginnings of a new epoch, have shared an essential preoccupation with the effects of exile and displacement on groups and individuals, on historical consciousness, on memory, on sense of place and time, on culture, on language, and on the imagination in general, Munro concludes. (5) The authors Munro has in mind are, of course, twentieth-and twenty-first-century exiles of African ancestry, but his description can also be applied, paradoxically, to the writings of the Caribbean's first wave of exiles, the white colonists driven out of Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and especially to the remarkable text I discuss here, the anonymous manuscript Mon Odyssee. Authors from Saint-Domingue who lived through the revolt against slavery in France's most important colony make up a small but highly interesting subset of the revolutionary period's writer-witnesses. Despite the colonies' economic importance to France, the events there were by definition peripheral to the metropolitan experience. …