Personal Alliances Research Articles

Broker's Position in Patronage Bonds as a Form of the Middle Class in Farming Communities in Rural South Sulawesi

As an important element driving the creation of a shift in the pattern of patronage bonding relationships in the current era, the broker's contribution to this shift lies in its dual role, namely as an intermediary between patrons and clients in patronage ties. This role has become increasingly visible since rural areas have been opened up by various interests and activities of farmers in accommodating social change in rural areas. This study aims to analyze the existence of brokers in patron-client ties in rural South Sulawesi, as well as the existence of the middle class behind the existence of a broker in this bond. This study uses a case study approach. The data were obtained through elaboration of in-depth interviews, participant observation and documentation. The results of the study show that the intensity of brokerage activities in vertical and horizontal positions is a form of the middle class in rural areas. In a vertical position, the role is as a comprador or intermediary for the interests of patrons and clients in business activities and political activities, while in horizontal ties, it is present in the activities of personal alliances and revessible relationships that mediate the interests of patrons and clients. In its position as an intermediary on both sides, it seems that the role of the broker is no longer considered as an unofficial or pseudo group but has become a demand for the needs of the community because its presence is a real manifestation of the existence of differentiation and social mobility in the countryside.

Kalinago-European Alliances in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean

Thomas ‘Indian’ Warner is described as a figure who brokered peace between the Kalinago and the Europeans. However, the influence of Warner’s actions when compared to retaliatory measures taken by Europeans against him and the Kalinagos, and the longevity of alliances suggests that the intermediary role often attributed to him is exaggerated. Examining Warner’s voluntary and involuntary association with his Kalinago roots, and his resistance and peace efforts with the Europeans improves our understanding of the nature of Warner’s personal alliance with the Kalinago as well as the Kalinago’s broader alliance with the Europeans. This research examines these complexities to highlight how his presence and absence in the turbulent seventeenth century of Caribbean history influenced his alliances and broader connections.

INSTITUTIONS OF PUBLIC POWER AMONG THE MANCHU-MONGOLIAN PEOPLES OF EAST ASIA IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (PART 1: IMPERIAL POLITICAL ORDER)

In his article, the author, relying on the works of Russian researchers of the East Asian region, attempts to characterize the public-power institutions of the Manchurian-Mongolian peoples in the early twentieth century. Remaining in the shadow of China, these peoples have accumulated considerable experience of statehood, which in different historical epochs allowed them to create powerful powers that conquer each other and neighboring countries. However, at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, power relations were exposed to some factors, as a result of which the political landscape of the region changed significantly. Among these, the author, first of all, highlights the Chinese colonization carried out in relation to the ancestral Mongolian lands when it was impossible to resist this on the part of the Qing emperors, who were once guarantors of their inviolability. Chinese administrative-territorial units with central subordination are created on the territories of ancestral principalities, and the vymorochnye possessions are transferred under the direct control of the provincial administration. Manchuria, as an ancient patrimony of the ruling imperial house, also turns out to be divided into three provinces, and the same fate awaits Inner and Outer Mongolia. Traditional military institutions, having proved their ineffectiveness in the fight against the Europeans and the Japanese, are being disbanded, and new formations are being created in the national regions of "Outer China", designed to protect the border from a possible attack, and to keep dependent territories subordinate to the central authorities. Trying to follow the spirit of the times and, at the same time, solving the defense problem, plans are being hatched for grandiose railway construction in the studied space. However , it began in the autumn of 1911 the Xinhai Revolution led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the actual rupture of the personal alliances that held the national regions of the North of the Qing Empire in unity with the metropolis. Thus, the problem of the legitimacy of the central government of republican China in the eyes of the Manchurian-Mongolian peoples was generated, which led the country to the actual disintegration and formation of new national states in the Manchurian-Mongolian historical and cultural space.

A Renaissance Marriage: The Political and Personal Alliance of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga, 1490–1519, by Carolyn James

A Renaissance Marriage: The Political and Personal Alliance of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga, 1490–1519, by Carolyn James

Gift-exchange in the Amarna Letters:A Concise Study of the Letters from the Great Kings

In this article, we will look at the concept of reciprocal gifts and gift-exchanges in the corpus known as the Amarna letters. In order to observe reciprocity in the Amarna letters, we will ascertain the presence of a return gift for every present sent, as well as the idea of reciprocity in the repetition of said structure of gift-exchange. In the Amarna letters, we bear witness to an important network of contacts established between Near Eastern nations of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BCE. The geographical extent of the Amarna letters leaves no doubt about the central part played by the Egyptian kings of this period within the political, economic and social context of the great powers of the Near East. This study will focus on the gift-exchanges within the Amarna letters, taking into account the contextual differences between Egypt and each of its main partners: Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, Hatti, Arzawa and Alashiya. We will also consider diplomatic or interdynastic marriages as occasions for gift-exchange, as well as tools used to establish and maintain political and personal alliances between the kings

Even his friend said he's bad: Children think personal alliances bias gossip

Children learn about other people through gossip. Although gossip can be a valuable and efficient way to learn about others, evaluating gossip's credibility requires understanding when people may be biased, and using this information to update the truth-value placed on the gossip. For instance, people may be motivated to improve their and their friends' reputations (or to worsen their enemies' reputations). Therefore, testimony that cuts against these social motivations may be more credible. Here, in four studies with 3- to 13-year-old children (total N = 860), we examined (1) children's expectations about the type of gossip people were likely to spread about friends versus enemies, and (2) children's ability to discount testimony that is in line with a speaker's social biases (e.g., negative testimony about a friend). We found that children expect speakers to say nice things about their friends, and mean things about their enemies. And, children were less likely to endorse potentially biased testimony, though the strength of their ability to avoid endorsing biased testimony varied based on the domain of testimony. Overall, these studies suggest that children expect a speaker's testimony to be systematically biased based on her relationships. Our results underscore the importance of tracking and using relationships when evaluating testimony, because relationships have immense power for helping us effectively make sense of an ambiguous world.

The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest

The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest Jack N. Rakove (bio) Jeff Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Xiv + 274 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Xiii + 865 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Of the making of many books about the Constitution, there is no end. But contrary to the wisdom of Qohelet (the Hebrew writer better known from the Septuagint as Ecclesiastes), when we discuss the Constitution—its creation, history, and interpretation—we reject the proposition that “much chatter is a weariness of the flesh”.1 In these two quite different books, Jeff Broadwater and Michael J. Klarman carry us back to the origins of the Constitution. Broadwater offers a quasi-biopic approach focusing on the famous friendship of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, arguably the most celebrated personal alliance in American political history. His book can be read as one more riff of Founders’ chic, a genre that Joseph Ellis (a great narrator though less reliable analyst) has most profitably exploited. Klarman manifestly does not worship with that cult. The Framers’ Coup is a far more ambitious work. It presents a comprehensive, thoroughly researched (by a platoon of twenty-four law students and two staff assistants) history of the adoption of the Constitution, from the “critical years” of the mid-1780s through the ratification of the first ten amendments, later known as the Bill of Rights, in 1791. Klarman’s conception of a “coup”—a point to be discussed in some detail later—hardly accords with the heroic account of the Framing/Founding that still dominates the conventional narrative. Equally noteworthy, Klarman casts himself as a latter-day Beardian, a neo-neo-Progressive historian who emphasizes the play of interests far more than the articulation of ideas. Sharing the advocatory voice of legal scholarship, Klarman wants to disabuse his readers of any un-critical loyalty—or ingrained “veneration,” to evoke a venerable moral from Madison’s Federalist 49—to the Constitution itself. [End Page 216] In nearly every conventional story of the adoption of the Constitution, Madison still stands primus inter pares. Neither Broadwater nor Klarman disputes that judgment. However one assesses Madison’s victories and defeats at the 1787 convention, no one contributed more to the task of fashioning a strategy of constitutional reform, or did more to set the Convention’s agenda, via his seminal memorandum on the “Vices of the Political System of the U. States” or through the Virginia Plan that launched the business. Equally important, Madison’s twenty-nine contributions to The Federalist, especially the celebrated Tenth and Fifty-first essays, provide the foundation for the prevailing belief that the United States still inhabits a “Madisonian constitution.” True, some efforts have been made to dislodge Madison’s authority. In her great book on ratification, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (2010), the late Pauline Maier made a bold move by making George Washington the pivotal figure. She offered a view, not from Madison’s study at Montpelier, with its vista of the Blue Ridge, but from Washington’s verandah at Mount Vernon, rising high above the Potomac. In A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003), Max Edling provides a predominantly Hamiltonian account that privileges the needs of national security and the experiences of the Continental Army. William Ewald’s projected biography of James Wilson is expected to make a bold claim for the greater influence of the Scottish immigrant to Pennsylvania.2 But at least since Charles Beard first emphasized Federalist 10 in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), Madison has been our preeminent authority. Because Jefferson’s role in the adoption of the Constitution is more modest, Broadwater takes a certain risk in his dual-biographic venture. We can speculate whether the Constitution would have looked different had Jefferson and John Adams attended the Federal Convention, rather than fulfilling their respective diplomatic missions in Paris and London respectively. But we recall Jefferson first and foremost...

Meta-analysis of the alliance-outcome relation in couple and family therapy.

This article reviews meta-analytic evidence for the alliance-outcome relation in couple and family therapy (CFT), with implications for clinical practice. We begin by describing the unique features of CFT alliances and their measurement, followed by two case descriptions. We explain that due to the systemic context of CFT, each patient's personal alliance with the therapist affects and is affected by other family members' levels of collaboration. Because family members often seek help when they are in conflict with one another, "split" alliances are common, as are problematic within-system alliances, defined as the degree to which family members agree on the nature of their problems and value participating in therapy together to achieve shared goals. In our meta-analysis of 48 studies with 40 independent samples, we used a three-level random effects model (Ns = 2,568 families, 1,545 couples, and 491 effect sizes) and found r = .297. In another analysis with seven independent samples and 31 effect sizes, the split alliance-outcome association was also significant, r = .316, indicating that the more split or unbalanced the alliance, the poorer the outcome. Moderator analyses showed that alliance-outcome associations did not differ for couple versus family therapy, but correlations were significantly stronger in samples with younger problem children, older adults, proportionally more male youth and adults, and when the families voluntarily sought help (as compared with involuntary or mandated families). The article concludes with research-informed strategies for building and sustaining strong systemic alliances in CFT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

THE CLEOPATRAS AND THE JEWS

ABSTRACTThis paper explores a variety of evidence for relations between Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, and her Jewish subjects. In the first part of the paper, the focus is on the profoundly negative portrait of the queen in the works of Josephus, with particular attention to Cleopatra's alleged antipathy to Alexandrian Jews in Josephus'sAgainst Apion. Analysis of Josephus's evidence confirms, I argue, that his case against the queen does not stand up. The second part of the paper offers a detailed consideration of other evidence, epigraphic and literary, which, I suggest, confirms a picture of the queen as continuing the policy of her predecessors with regard to the Jews of the Ptolemaic kingdom, by participating in the long-established practice of extending royal support and protection to Jewishproseuchai(places of prayer). While the evidence does not permit definitive conclusions, it suggests that Cleopatra looked to particular Jewish groups – as to others – within Egypt for support and in this, followed a path taken by Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III. Finally, a few details in Plutarch'sLife of Antonymay also suggest the queen's political and personal alliances with individual Jews, in Egypt and Judea.

The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier

Reviewed by: The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier Anthony Bradley The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats, by Adrian Frazier , pp. 312. Dublin: Lilliput Press. 2016. €20 (paper). Anyone who has read the poems of W. B. Yeats, or knows anything about his life, knows that he fell in love with Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish nationalist, when he was a young man; proposed marriage to her several times over the course of almost thirty years; that she did not requite his passion; and that Yeats wrote some of the finest love poems in the language, ranging from the adulatory and mythologizing to the accusing and embittered: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery. …" The conjunction of sexual desire and political nationalism in her person was typically transmuted in Yeats's poetry into a powerful erotic nationalism, so that even when a poem (such as "Easter, 1916,") appears self-evidently to be about something else, in Frazier's compelling and persuasive reading, it is really all about Gonne. The Adulterous Muse is a highly readable and even sensational book, replete with political imbroglios and sexual intrigue, well paced and expert in its narration, and impressive in its lightly worn scholarship. Frazier has tapped into French archives that feature fascinating newspaper and magazine articles about Gonne and her adulterous lover, Lucien Millevoye, in 1890s Paris. Of the three main players, we presumably know most about Yeats, thanks especially to R. F. Foster's biography, but by focusing on his relationship with Gonne (offering illuminating and original readings of Yeats's poems about her), Frazier manages to shed new light on his artistic and emotional life. Maud Gonne has remained a more opaque figure, despite her autobiography A Servant of the Queen (1938), and several biographies. Whether she is admirable or not depends on your leanings in Irish politics—yet even one sympathetic to her activism might wonder about her emotional life beyond the near-fanaticism of her dedication to Irish nationalism. Frazier shines a light into Gonne's private life that illuminates her relations with both Yeats and Millevoye, who is not well known (unless you have reason [End Page 150] to be familiar with late nineteenth-century French politics, and the Boulangist movement of which he was a ranking member). Frazier recovers Millevoye as an important personage in Gonne's life—after all, he was her first lover and the father of two of her children—whose political convictions reinforced her own. Frazier summons up the ambience of the time in France, its nationalism, its anti-Semitism, its politicians and their mistresses, its duels, its antiparliamentary threats ending with a whimper in the grim farce of General Boulanger's suicide. As well as running a salon on behalf of Millevoye, Gonne simultaneously performed as a muse figure for the young Irish nationalist Yeats, who saw in her the incarnation of romantic Ireland. That role, Frazier says, she "worked … for all it was worth." As with Millevoye, there was in her relationship with Yeats the combination of an intense personal alliance with a political allegiance to a revolutionary national ideal. She was an actress on occasion—notably in the first performance of Yeats's and Gregory's Cathleen Ni Houlihan—and in real life histrionically played the role of Yeats's muse. "[T]hey all write about some woman in their poetry," says that unchaste Penelope, Molly Bloom, in her early morning soliloquy as she briefly fantasizes about becoming the muse for Stephen Dedalus, who has just departed the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street after having a cup of cocoa with her husband. (Earlier in the day she had had an adulterous encounter with Blazes Boylan.) It still comes as something of a shock to recall, as Frazier's wicked title prompts us to do, that when Yeats first met her, both of them in their early twenties, she was already the mistress of the married Millevoye, and that she kept Yeats in the dark about this for a long time, and combined leading him on, as it were, with dark hints about tragic...

Byzantine tragedy in Restoration England: Joseph Simons's Zeno and Sir William Killigrew's The Imperial Tragedy

AbstractThe history of the Byzantine era is rich in dramatic potential, and was extensively exploited by writers of continental Catholic school and college drama in the early modern period. However, it was hardly ever drawn upon within Tudor and Stuart professional drama. One exception to this rule is Zeno, written by Joseph Simons SJ, freely adapted by Sir William Killigrew and printed in 1669 under the title The Imperial Tragedy. Killigrew's play is also unusual because plays written and performed in the English Catholic colleges on the continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were very seldom acknowledged, printed or adapted on the English mainland.The adaptation suggests a personal relationship between the two playwrights. Simons was attached to the London court at this period as Jesuit Provincial; Killigrew, a courtier, appears to have been on friendly terms with Simons in the late 1660s, and to have wanted to pay him a compliment by adapting his play. However, he printed it anonymously, not mentioning either Simons's name or his own. It is likely that he did this because Simons was a controversial associate: not least for his influence over the future James II, whom he converted to Roman Catholicism. Killigrew appended a tantalising title page to his work, suggesting that there was more to his anonymity than mere modesty, and came clean about his authorship to the semi‐private audience with which he also shared his revisions: an audience which included at least one individual with a pronounced interest in religious toleration.At this time, the gift of books could cement literary and personal alliances, and manuscript circulation could define friendship and patronage networks. The two surviving copies of The Imperial Tragedy annotated by Killigrew give us something in between: a case study of how an author's previously printed material could be personalized by religiously sensitive manuscript additions for an inner circle.

LITERARY SISTERS: DOROTHY WEST AND HER CIRCLE, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

LITERARY SISTERS: DOROTHY WEST AND HER CIRCLE, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE. By Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2012. xiv + 200 pp. $72, cloth; $24.95, paperback.The subtitle of Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem may seem like a misnomer. Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis's book is an account of the creative and personal alliances that Dorothy West (1907-98) and her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson (1906-95), forged that extended well beyond the New Negro movement and their well-documented friendships with peers such as Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman. However, by taking what they describe as a national, global, and multidisciplinary approach to the Harlem Renaissance (2) and placing their subjects' relationships with their fellow black writers in conversation with those with white, often upper-class British and American women, such as theater director Cheryl Crawford and agent and producer Elisabeth Marbury, Mitchell and Davis undermine the enduring assumption that black women writers of this period were more socially segregated and provincial-and less queer-than their male counterparts. The men were not having all the fun while the women (besides Hurston) were worrying about respectability in their Harlem salons. This book invites readers to think about West and Johnson and their work in interracial contexts not determined by the dynamics of patronage.Mitchell and Davis acknowledge the challenges West and Johnson pose to biographers. Johnson was an extremely private woman who withdrew from public life after her marriage in 1933, granted no interviews, and (unlike West) showed no interest in asserting her place in Harlem history. Mitchell's edition of This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem (2006) fills in many of the gaps in Johnson's life and gives context for Johnson's depiction in this volume. Understandably, West dominates the book; Johnson effectively disappears after her engagement. As much a challenge as Johnson's reticence is West's self-mythologizing, especially regarding her family's financial circumstances and social standing among Boston's black elite.An early chapter on Pauline Hopkins traces a geohistorical lineage for West and Johnson and provides not only a valuable history of black intellectual Boston but also an innovative context for their careers. Hopkins's family background, which Lois Brown's comprehensive biography Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Daughter of the Revolution (2008) demonstrates, is a history of black Boston; it provides the cultural context for West's depiction of what Adelaide M. Cromwell calls in The Other Brahmins: Boston's Upper Class, 1750-1950 (1994) the Black Brahmin society in West's novel The Living Is Easy (1948). West rather implausibly claimed not to know her fellow Harlem writers, including The Crisis editor Jessie Fauset and novelist Nella Larsen, and she never admitted to any author's influence on her work; Mitchell and Davis read Hopkins's lifelong singlehood and discreet, sexually ambiguous lifestyle (42), as well as her nonheteronormative representations, as models for West's own life and work. Rather than emphasizing a predictable commonality with Fauset and Larsen, Mitchell and Davis detail Hopkins's deep roots in Boston history, her early career in the theater, her founding and editing of The Colored American Magazine (1900-1905), and her representations of Boston in novels such as Contending Forces (1900) and Of One Blood (1903) as a professional and artistic backdrop for their portrayal of West. Mitchell and Davis argue that, facing sexism, professional hardship, and political marginalization, Hopkins's solution, and one that Dorothy West was to follow, was to single-handedly create her own audience, primarily of women, through intellectual relationships, literary and artistic organizations, and the two magazines she edited (67). …

On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature

In Dialogues, Deleuze contrasts French and Anglo-American literatures, arguing that the French are tied to hierarchies, origins, manifestos and personal disputes, whereas the English and Americans discover a line of flight that escapes hierarchies, and abandons questions of origins, schools and personal alliances, instead discovering a collective process of ongoing invention, without beginning or determinate end. Deleuze especially appreciates American writers, and above all Herman Melville. What ultimately distinguishes American from English literature is its pragmatic, democratic commitment to sympathy and camaraderie on the open road. For Deleuze, the American literary line of flight is toward the West, but this orientation reflects his almost exclusive focus on writers of European origins. If one turns to Chinese-American literature, the questions of a literary geography become more complex. Through an examination of works by Maxine Hong Kingston and Tao Lin, some of these complexities are detailed.

The Context of the Stewart–Prevost Correspondence

Summary The correspondence in this issue of History of European Ideas has not previously been published. It is the surviving part of the epistolary exchange between Dugald Stewart and the Genevan professor and man of letters Pierre Prevost (1751–1839) from the 1790s to the 1820s. To this are added several closely connected letters to and from their associates. This correspondence is striking evidence of the republic of letters continuing to flourish in the aftermath of the French Revolution, illustrating the transmission of works, the role of go-betweens, the provision of letters of introduction and the formation of intellectual and personal alliances. Not least, the letters tell us much about the ideas of those involved, and about the formation, development, and relation of these ideas to published works. This is particularly significant for Stewart, most of whose letters and papers are lost.

Editorial

After five years, I am handing over the editorship of the journal to Tony Warnes. I am delighted with his appointment since he was an energetic and successful Reviews Editor of Ageing and Society between 1987 and 1997 and has supported the journal in many other ways. As chair of the British Society for Gerontology between 1995 and 2000, he was very active in establishing international and multidisciplinary links, and I am sure that his continuing commitment, contacts and wealth of knowledge (evident indeed in this edition) will serve the journal well.Last year I presented a paper at the Third International Symposium on Cultural Gerontology held in Visby, Sweden. For this, I reviewed the 117 articles that were published in volumes 17 to 20 of Ageing and Society (Bytheway 2002). Including a variety of surveys (but excluding national census data), the 117 articles draw upon interviews with approximately 22,500 older people and include the quoted words of about 490 (many of whom are introduced to the reader with pseudonyms and personal descriptions). In this respect, I feel that older people have a real presence in the journal and that this has generated valuable insights into later life in a range of contrasting societies. That said, it is also true that the vast majority of contributors to the journal are based in, or linked to, universities and only a very few make any reference to their own sense of age or to any personal alliance with organisations of, or representing, older people.

The Philadelphia Navy Yard: From the Birth of the U.S. Navy to the Nuclear Age (review)

After two hundred years of operation, the naval shipyard at Philadelphia closed in 1996. A significant Philadelphia institution, the yard's importance to the U.S. Navy ebbed and flowed over the years, and its survival, in a continuation of the history of its establishment, often relied more on political [End Page 810] and personal alliances than on naval utility. The history Jeffery Dorwart conveys in this well-researched and extensively illustrated account is not why the navy yard was closed but "why it had taken so long to do so" (p. 4). Though located a hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean, up the Delaware River, the Philadelphia yard did have a continual selling point: the surrounding industrial infrastructure and the supply of skilled laborers in the Delaware Valley.

Grappling with the Character Issue

Over long term, American national politics has followed predictable trends. Initially centering around character and personal alliances in 1790s, and gradually shifting to a politics of party loyalty in midnineteenth century, it has continued this ebb and flow over time, focusing us now, at turn of century, on the character issue above all else. In this political environment, it is not surprising that there has been a burst of character studies about America's founders. In same way that we are currently trying to pierce mystery of our presidential contenders-poking and prodding their pasts in search of underlying motives and character flaws-these popular historical studies rummage through founders' life stories in hope of exposing their innermost desires and explaining their fates.

Slander, Renaissance Discourses of Sodomy, and Othello

Slander, Renaissance Discourses of Sodomy, and Othello Robert Matz* “I think you think I love you,” Iago tells Cassio, who because of his fight with Roderigo and Montano has just lost the love of his general Othello. 1 How do we understand the exchanges of love in Othello that encompass not just male-female bonds but male-male bonds as well? And how do we understand these bonds of love, too, as they are involved in the ambiguity, uncertainty, betrayal, and accusation that Iago’s comment implies: “I think you think I love you”? In this essay I want to consider the ways in which Othello puts at stake not only the regulation of desire between men and women, but also between men. I want to argue that the regulation of male same-sex desire reflects on male political relationships, since this desire cements these relationships but may also be invoked—accusatorily—to disrupt them. I also want to consider how the accusation of illegitimate male-male desire intersects with other forms of desire in the play that are subject to similarly ambivalent construction as the products of conflicted and transitional social forms. For what Foucault calls the “utterly confused category” of sodomy indeed confuses, or rather fuses, a number of relationships in Othello that cross boundaries of gender, race, and status, and that the play at once represents, gives play to, and regulates. 2 While much fine work has explored the construction and regulation of female sexuality in Othello, less has focused on male-male desire in the play. 3 Sexuality has primarily been read in terms of male-female relationships, thereby sustaining the assumption that only heterosexual desires exist. 4 However, the object of a consideration of male-male desire in Othello, and in Renaissance studies more generally, should not be to identify the “homosexual” in the text. Rather, this desire needs to be understood together with the institutions that support, solicit, and regulate it, and in terms of the particular social contexts that determine the way it is represented. In these aims, I follow historian Alan Bray and the developing work of queer theory in Renaissance studies, in two important assumptions: first, that the realms of the sexual and the social are not cordoned off from one another, and, second, that the early [End Page 261] modern period recognized no distinct homosexual, or therefore heterosexual, identity. While “sodomitical” relations were condemned, sodomy was a category that could proscribe more acts than sex between men (such as adultery, bestiality, and witchcraft), and it was a sin to which all—not a distinct minority—might succumb. Moreover, the condemnation of male-male “sodomitical” sex existed in an uneasy overlay with high praise for male-male friendships. 5 The anxiety about sexuality in Othello may be understood within this framework. Just as marriage is a public, social institution that within the early modern period increasingly depended on the idea of the private affection of husband and wife, so, as Bray has argued, did the primarily male public institutions of Renaissance England function through personal alliances of affection. As Bray argues, “friend” (or “lover”) was a term that in the Renaissance included and frequently overlayed political and affective alliance: to be a powerful man’s “bedfellow” was to have a most valuable political access—and honor. 6 The highly praised alliance of friendship was frequently eroticized, yet what kept (or did not keep) the celebrated closeness of friendship from appearing to be the sin of sodomy was not the degree of physical contact, but the appropriateness of the relationship. Just as in marriage desire should follow proper alliance and social status, so too in male friendship. One’s political enemies or men seen as social climbers (Bray’s example is Francis Bacon) could be called sodomites. Sodomy was not a category; it was an accusation. But, as Bray also argues, by the more socially mobile late sixteenth century, almost any political relationship might be vulnerable to this accusation. 7 As the structures of feudal vassalage gave way to bourgeois marriage, so too did the social institutions that most completely legitimated male-male desire. Thus reading Othello within the history provided by...

The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word

Thucydides, the patron saint of Realpolitik, continues to be read in many fields outside of classics. Why did his History succeed in setting the pattern for future scholars where Hereodotus's earlier Histories failed? In this fascinating study of the construction of intellectual authority, Gregory Crane argues that Thucydides was successful for two reasons. First, he refined the language of administration: Who was in charge? How much money was spent? How many people were killed? Second, he drew upon the abstract philosophical rhetoric developing in the fifth century, one in which the state and the public, rather than the family and the individual, stand at the center of the world. Ironically, it was through deeply personal alliances that aristocratic Greeks had defined themselves and exerted power. Thucydides's discursive practice was therefore fundamentally incompatible with his ideological goals.

Toward a More Comprehensive Analysis of Philippine Politics: Beyond the Patron-Client, Factional Framework

Thirty years ago, a theory of Philippine politics emerged that until now remains the most influential among academics and is widely adopted by journalists, diplomats and other observers of the Philippines. Its argument, in brief, is that Philippine politics revolves around interpersonal relationships — especially familial and patron-client ones — and factions composed of personal alliances. I refer to this as the patron-client, factional frameworkpcf, for short). It deserves to be influential; after all, patron-client and other personal relations are indeed significant in Philippine political life. These are also important features in many other countries; hence, thepcfframework developed for Philippine studies has contributed as well to comparative political studies.