Political Tract Research Articles

"The Same Nature as the Reindeer": Johan Turi's Portrayal of Sámi Knowledge

Sapmelaccas lea goit seammalagas dego bohccos. Soai haliideaba golgat lulas ja davas dan mielde go soai laveba ge golgat dal nai. Ja soai leaba arggit goappasagat. Ja soai leaba saddan argivuoda dihte ballat juohke guovllus. Ja dan dihte dal sapmi ferte orrut doppe gos ii oro oktage ieza olmmos go sapmi. Beare alla duoddariid alde son orosii vaikko alo jos bivasii--ja ealasii su garji--bohccot. Ja sapmi dovda dalkkiid--ja son lea juoida oahppan bohccos nai dovdat dalkkiid--ja sapmi lea bivvil ja deaivil. Son deaiva seavdnjadin nai ja mierkan ja guoldun--goit soames oassi samiin. Ja mii gulla cuoigamii ja viehkamii--dat lea su luonddu mielde. (50) (The have much the same nature as the reindeer. Both want to be on the move east and west in the manner that they are accustomed to. And both are sensitive. And because of their sensitivity they have been scared away from everywhere. And because of this, the today have to live in places where no one else is living besides Sami. The would live just up in the high mountains permanently if it were possible to keep warm up there and provide for their animals, the reindeer. And the know about the weather and have learned about it from the reindeer. And the are hardy and sharp-eyed: they find their way in the dark and the fog and the snowstorm--at least some do. And that which pertains to skiing and running is part of their being.) JOHAN TURI, secure in his identity as a Sami, confident in his experiences as a sometime herder, healer, wolf hunter, son of a teacher, and godson of a minister, assumed in his Muitalus samiid birra the authority to give an account of culture to the wide world. He chose to do so, not through the presentation of a single overarching narrative in the way of a work of fiction or an autobiography, not through the construction of a rhetorical argument as in a political tract, but rather, through the creation of a compendium of knowledge, organized around specific livelihood activities and life situations, presented as occurring over the course of a year or in conjunction with certain key crisis or life-cycle moments: birth, illness, marriage, death. In so doing, I argue, Turi seeks to characterize a complex and valued state that he describes as Sami luondu [Sami nature]--a way of being. This relies fundamentally on the acquisition, maintenance, enactment, and transmission of a particular body of knowledge. This knowledge in turn derives from and helps sustain a particular way of life: an evolving set of techniques for herding, hunting, healing, and human relations that Turi saw as critically endangered by the policies and social transformations taking place in early twentieth-century Sapmi. Crucially, includes the aesthetic perceptions and emotional predispositions that result from this valued way of life and its knowledge base. In short, I argue, knowledge for Turi is the life-blood of culture, without which the way of being would be irreparably lost. Turi's project in Muitalus is to present that knowledge so that his contemporaries--Sami and non-Sami alike--can take stock of it and come to understand its usefulness and sophistication. In so doing, of course, Turi also helped preserve that knowledge, fixing it in a textual form that can still be read and appreciated a century later as a record of traditions and as a snap-shot of cultural life in one part of Sapmi at the beginning of the twentieth century. In order to understand Turi's complex agenda, then, we should look carefully at the knowledge that forms the foundations of his text. In the following, I suggest six overlapping and mutually reinforcing ideals that I believe underlie Turi's characterization of knowledge and that are discernable in his presentation and the structuring of his book. Each of these six ideals is reflected in the passage quoted above and recur in various other instances throughout Turi's text. …

Blindness and Insight: Considering Ethos in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas

This essay considers how Virginia Woolf's personal and social anti-Semitism disrupts creation of a stable ethos in her political tract, Three Guineas. The article uses De Man's concept of blindness and insight to interrogate Woolf's own ideological blindness and forwards liminality as a frame within which to understand ethos in this work.

Iulius exclusus e coelis: Motive und Tendenzen gallikanischer und bibelhumanistischer Papstkritik im Umfeld des Erasmus (review)

Reviewed by: Iulius exclusus e coelis: Motive und Tendenzen gallikanischer und bibelhumanistischer Papstkritik im Umfeld des Erasmus Kurt Stadtwald Iulius exclusus e coelis: Motive und Tendenzen gallikanischer und bibelhumanistischer Papstkritik im Umfeld des Erasmus. By Peter Fabisch. [Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, Band 152.] (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. 2008. Pp. viii, 582. €65,00. ISBN 978-3-402-11577-0.) The question of who wrote Julius Excluded from Heaven (1513 or 1514) has, like many historical questions, no simple answer and a long history of dispute. Peter Fabisch takes up the matter anew to refute the contention, especially prevalent among Anglo-American scholars, that Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote it. Rather, it was the work of one whose politics were clearly Gallican; namely, the Venetian humanist in the court of Louis XII, Fausto Andrelini. By reattributing authorship to Andrelini, Fabisch fulsomely defends the findings of Carl Stange’s Erasmus und Julius II., eine Legende (Berlin, 1937). Part 1 of Fabisch’s study takes up the indications of Andrelini’s authorship. Among them is a letter that Andrelini wrote c. 1510 to France’s Queen Anne containing the chief complaints of the Julius: that Julius betrayed Louis’s faith by abandoning the League of Cambrai, that he was “ungrateful” for French support that yielded him success, that he was risking schism—a reference to his opposition to the Council of Pisa, which nine dissident cardinals convoked and which Louis abetted—and that he was manifestly unworthy of his office. Moreover, Andrelini had to have partaken of the other elements important to the dialogue, such as contemporary French conciliarist theories, popular Parisian comedies, the internal politics of the Council of Pisa and the Fifth Lateran Council—its officially sanctioned counterpart—and visceral personal animosity toward Julius. Erasmus, who is central to the second section, wrote nothing in his contemporary satires and letters comparably venomous or pro-French. Fabisch does not deny that most of Erasmus’s contemporaries attributed the Julius to him and that there is “something Erasmian” about it. There is also circumstantial evidence that points to him. However, none of this mitigates the indirect nature of the evidence and the contrived conclusions drawn from it. For example, it is far easier to find “Faustus Andrelinus Foroliviensis” in “F. A. F.”—the initials on the title page of early editions of the Julius—than to [End Page 555] figure how they pseudonymously refer to Erasmus. Even more significant, to assert Erasmus is the author is to disregard—and to have to rationalize—his repeated and consistent disavowals of any connection to the dialogue, which he criticized for its rashness and damage to his own reputation. Finally, concerning St. Thomas More’s claim to his having seen a draft of it in Erasmus’s own hand in summer 1514, Fabisch argues that this was most likely to have been a copy Erasmus made of Andrelini’s “Ur-Julius,” one that Etienne Poncher, bishop of Paris, showed him that summer. The final part is the “History of Indiscretion and Misdirection” surrounding the dissemination and publication of the Julius. Thomas Lupset, a one-time secretary to Erasmus, and Ulrich von Hutten are the agents of the dialogue’s transmission from Erasmus’s copybook, to Italy, and on to Speyer—the site of its first publication in 1517, according to Fabisch. By 1517, the issues that originally animated the satire were dead, but what made the dialogue live on were the Reuchlin Affair and the growing animosity toward Rome that Hutten was intentionally generating in German circles. Here Fabisch rightly notes that whatever the political ends of its author may have been, the Julius served the interests of those disseminating it. And, far from being a statement of humanist reform aspirations, the whole history of the dialogue shows it to be a passionate political tract. As far as settling the question of who wrote the Julius, what can be most assuredly concluded is that Fabisch has put the matter in dispute again where, absent some revealing new evidence, it will likely remain. Kurt Stadtwald Concordia University Chicago Copyright © 2010 The Catholic University of America Press

Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds Pauline Turner Strong (bio) Lisa Voigt. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg. 352 pp. 5 illus., notes, index. ISBN 978-0807859445, $24.95. This theoretically sophisticated volume by a specialist in Iberian literature demonstrates the value of a broadly comparative approach to imperial representation. Astutely addressing the scarcity of serious considerations of Portuguese and Spanish narratives in the voluminous English-language scholarship on captivity, Lisa Voigt connects Iberian narratives of captivity in the New World both to their Anglo-American counterparts and to early modern accounts of Christians taken captive by Moors and Turks. The results of Voigt's disciplinary boundary crossing are salutary for scholarship on the representation of identity, alterity, and experience in both the Iberian and English imperial worlds. Considerably more centered on Iberia than on England, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic includes close readings of the representation of captivity by three authors: the Peruvian historian el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Chilean soldier Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, and the Brazilian friar José de Santa Rita Durão. The three case studies are framed by theoretical and comparative discussions of the circulation of representations of shipwreck and captivity throughout the early modern world. Voigt is particularly interested in the "valorization of the captive's authority and knowledge" (24) in works that predate the Scientific Revolution and the age of the novel. The focus on early claims to the authority of firsthand experience makes Writing Captivity relevant to readers interested in many forms of biographical and auto biographical writing, not only captivity narratives. Voigt opens the book with a general consideration of the connections between accounts of Old and New World captivity—connections exemplified in visual imagery, tropes, and epistemological practices that "traversed linguistic, national, and imperial borders as fluidly as the voyagers themselves" (47). In a chapter that moves from the well-known captivity narratives of Hans Staden (in Brazil) and Cabeza de Vaca (on the Gulf of Mexico) to tales of Algerian captivity in the novels of Cervantes, Voigt is particularly interested in the [End Page 560] interplay between discourses of truth and strangeness. She argues persuasively that "true histories" of shipwreck and captivity played an important role in the early modern "reconceptualization of versimilitude and the marvelous" (49). Another important theme of Writing Captivity is the "transformative power of captivity and the empowerment of the transformed captive" (105). The authors of each of Voigt's central captivity narratives—a Peruvian mestizo, a Chilean creole, and a Brazilian exile—were not all captives, but each was familiar with the travails and power of the cultural mediator. Garcilaso de la Vega, a descendant of Incan nobles, included a narrative of the captivity of Juan Ortiz in his La Florida del Inca, published in Lisbon in 1605. Captured in Florida in 1528 by the indigenous chief Hirrihigua, Juan Ortiz was, according to Garcilaso, saved from torture and death by the intervention of the chief's wife and daughters. Taken under the protection of a neighboring chief, Mucozo, Ortiz served as an intermediary between the chief and Hernando de Soto when the latter arrived in Florida in 1539, eventually becoming a guide and interpreter for the Soto expedition. Also exemplifying the transformative and empowering nature of captivity is Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán's account of his "happy captivity" in 1629 among the Mapuche (or Araucanians) of Chile. A hybrid of personal memoir and political tract, Pineda's book-length manuscript (unpublished until the nineteenth century) contains numerous digressions, including examples of Spanish treachery and cruelty that Pineda viewed as key to the continuation of Mapuche hostilities against the Spanish. As a captive, Pineda came to construct what Voigt calls a "creole identity and authority" (172)—a process that involved destabilizing boundaries between the "civilized" and the "barbarous," followed by drawing new boundaries that incorporated...

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

Burying Culpability: The Killing Fields (1984), Us Foreign Policy, and the Political Limits of Film-Making in Reagan-Era America

The 'Court', the 'Country' and the Northamptonshire Connection: Watching the 'Puritan Opposition' Think (Historically) about Politics on the Eve of the English Civil War

This article is about how the puritan opposition thought about politics. It reads Thomas Ball's Life of John Preston not merely as a godly life but as a politick history — a political tract which uses an account of Preston's conduct during the late teens and twenties as a guide to how the puritan opposition should behave in the late 1630s. The local (Northamptonshire) milieu in which the life was both produced and read is reconstructed and the immediate political and polemical questions to which the life was addressed are delineated. The article addresses the use of history (here of the very recent past) to think about the present and immediate future; the connection between religion and politics, and in particular between politique and providential modes of political analysis in puritan political thinking; the valence of 'court' and 'country' as immediately contemporary categories of analysis; and the origins of English Presbyterianism as a 'moderate puritan' reaction against the populist (indeed republican) tendencies of the New England way, a sort of puritanvia media between separatism and Laudian prelacy.

The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures, Second Series: Papers from the International Conrad Conference, University of Pisa, Sept. 16th-18th, 2004 (review)

Reviewed by: The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures, Second Series: Papers from the International Conrad Conference, University of Pisa, Sept. 16th-18th, 2004 Todd K. Bender (bio) Mario Curreli, ed. The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures, Second Series: Papers from the International Conrad Conference, University of Pisa, Sept. 16th-18th, 2004. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2005. 315 pp. ISBN 8-84671-227-7 The 2004 International Conference, like the 1983 meeting, was graciously hosted by Mario Curreli and the University of Pisa to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the foundation of the International Conrad Society and its Italian branch by Ugo Mursia, Renato Prinzhofer, and Mario Curreli; the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Nostromo; and the eighteenth anniversary of the publication of "Heart of Darkness" in Italian translation. Needless to say, the assembled group of international scholars must be grateful for the delightful venue and high quality of the academic programs. Topics for sessions treated "Conrad and the Classical World," "The Centenary of Nostromo," "Conrad and Italy," and "Conrad and the Mediterranean." A short description of each of the papers which were presented is outlined by Curreli in his foreword, and twenty-three full texts follow, along with a substantial number of photographic illustrations of relevant material. All the articles are of substantial interest, although some are directed more toward the specialist, rather than the general reader. Taken together, the papers form a closely coherent whole and are of a high quality. All serious scholars of things Conradian will want to read this book. Zdzislaw Najder opens the topic of Conrad and classicism with a much needed summary of Conrad's schoolboy study of Latin and Greek, the classical texts he was expected to know, and the implications behind Conrad's references to names, tropes, plotting, allusions, and similar possibly derivative intersections between his English fiction and his Latin and Greek studies. Andrzej Busza elaborates the topic by discussing the nostos, the classical heroic return pattern, in The Rover. David Lucking treats the recurrence of the Orpheus and of the Narcissus themes in Conrad's stories. Yannick Le Boulicaut presents one of the most interesting intertextual arguments challenging the idea that the quests of Kaspar Almayer, Lord Jim, Martin Decoud, Tom Lingard, or Charlie Marlow are comparable to that of Odysseus or Aeneas. Le Boulicaut sees Conrad's treatment of the descent into hell as offering a Christian redemptive path quite unlike the classical hero's. Mario Curreli's broader examination of the role of myth in fiction, particularly the perilous journey and nostos pattern in Nostromo, makes a transition [End Page 93] between the papers which concern strictly classical elements and those which examine wider literary connections in Conrad's works. Sylvere Monod begins to broaden the scope of intertextual investigations presented with a study of Conrad's references to L'Albergo d'Italia Una and the "Inn of the Three Witches." In this section one of the most interesting arguments is made by Laurence Davies, who points out that the novel The Gadfly by Lily Voynich, now largely forgotten in the Western world, although prominent in Communist circles, links Latin America and Risorgimento Italy in a way which looks forward to Nostromo. Myrtle Hooper examines recurring tropes in the work of J. M. Coetzee and Conrad, while Mario Domenichelli performs a similar service for Ennio Flaiano and Elena Paruolo for Dacia Maraini. Jean M. Szczypien explains the relevance of the name, Zamoyski, in Polish history and the significance of red boots to Polish historical castes as reflected in Conrad's imagination. The difficult balance of history versus fiction, the degree to which a story is bound to tell the reader some important truth about human behavior, occupies Cedric Watts, as he challenges Terry Eagleton's negative view of Conrad's politics, concluding, "Nostromo is not a political tract but a work of intelligent entertainment" (113). The Italian ties to Conrad are explored more fully in Mario Domenichelli's work on Ennio Flaiano compared to Conrad; Michel Arouimi's consideration of parallels between Carlo Levi's Cristo si e fermato a Eboli and Conrad's characters who are doomed to live as alienated exiles; and Elena Paruolo's and Roberta Ferrari...

Native Americans and the environment: perspectives on the ecological Indian

Native Americans and the Environment brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars whose works continue and complicate the conversations that Shepard Krech started in The Ecological Indian. Hailed as a masterful synthesis and yet assailed as a problematic political tract, Shepard Krech's work prompted significant discussions in scholarly communities and among Native Americans. Rather than provide an explicit assessment of Krech's thesis, the contributors to this volume explore related historical and contemporary themes and subjects involving Native Americans and the environment, reflecting their own research and experience. At the same time, they also assess the larger issue of representation. The essays examine topics as divergent as Pleistocene extinctions and the problem of storing nuclear waste on modern reservations. They also address the image of the Indian and its use in natural history displays alongside a consideration of the utility and consequences of employing such a powerful stereotype for political purposes. The nature and evolution of traditional ecological knowledge is examined, as is the divergence between belief and practice in Native resource management. Geographically, the focus extends from the eastern Subarctic to the Northwest Coast, from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains to the Great Basin.

Burke’s “Revolutionary Book”: Conservative Politics and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Reflections

This essay explores the seemingly disjointed relationship between politics and aesthetics in Burke’sReflections on the Revolution in France(1790), questioning why the first articulation of conservative traditionalism would be announced in a shockingly new, experimental style. One of Novalis’s aphorisms suggests that Burke’sReflectionsinverts common assumptions about the relationship between politics and aesthetics: “Many antirevolutionary books have been written for the Revolution. But Burke has written a revolutionary book against the Revolution.” As Novalis observed, Burke’sReflectionsdefies the formal conventions of political prose; Burke outlines his defense of traditional British institutions in an idiom that approaches the excesses of modernist montage in its patchwork of genres. His unsystematic style juxtaposes and blends, often in seemingly incongruous ways, diverse literary genres and rhetorical forms: the legalistic-latinate idiom, the captivity narrative, the biblical epistle, the political tract, the gothic novel, enthusiastic prophecy, chivalric romance, and tragedy. While these disparate literary forms erupt unpredictably in theReflections,they do so in a fragmented, at times even grotesque manner, revealing what Burke himself admitted, that his conservative project is premised on an invented tradition devoid of all referential consistency and stability. In the face of an economy that was changing the very nature of value as such, Burke aesthetically revives fragments of tradition from the past and arranges them in an anti-utilitarian way that might conserve what he understood to be their pre-capitalist, non-relative value.

Refugee Sandwich: Stories of Exile and Asylum

R efugee Sandwich ought to be compulsory reading for every Canadian member of Parliament, and is recommended reading for anyone who votes in this country. Peter Showler has a careers-worth of experience working in all aspects of Canadian refugee law. It is a tribute to his immense insight that Refugee Sandwich is his chosen contribution at this point, the culmination of well nigh thirty years of reflection. The book goes right to the heart of the central problem of refugee law and policy here and elsewhere: positions on all sides of public discourse are entrenched, no one is learning anything new, innovation is stifled by a need to defend each corner. It is impossible to express any complexity in this atmosphere, let alone shed any light on the labyrinth which is refugee decision-making. Showler is an advocate. At a juncture when many advocates would have written a political tract, led a non-governmental organization, joined a think tank, or published a text, Showler has given us a work of what might be called ‘fiction’. It is a crowning achievement. Refugee Sandwich is principally comprised of thirteen stories told from and about different positions in Canada’s refugee determination process. We are introduced to lawyers and judges, interpreters and decision-makers, bureaucrats, refugees and claimants. Even the much maligned refugee protection officer has a voice. Heroes and villains are largely off-stage. Despotic regimes and genocidaires are condemned, but this is never the focus of the narrative. The people we meet are too complex for easy labels. Each story works its way around a sharp grain of truth, aiming at the oyster’s trick. Some are told in the first person, some with omniscient narration. Every pearl is not evenly formed, but then each bit of truth is not an equally attractive starting premise.

God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought by Jeremy Waldron

334 more, and Wills provided the decoration for the room where the governors met, and established the hospital as a center of art and a public attraction. The public came to its chapel each Sunday for baptisms , and Handel offered the first of many concerts there in 1749. Coram continued to visit the hospital to which he had given so much. Never wealthy (contrary to popular belief), he slipped into poverty. Ironically, friends set up a subscription to provide him with a pension. Coram died in 1751 and was interred in the hospital’s chapel. Ms. Wagner does not attempt to whitewash his faults; he was hot tempered and irascible , but the major efforts of his life served the public good. Anita Guerrini University of California, Santa Barbara JEREMY WALDRON. God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. xii ⫹ 263. $65; $22 (paper). In the 1999 Carlyle Lectures, Mr. Waldron argued that ‘‘we are not able to bracket off the theological dimension of Locke’s commitment to equality.’’In Mr. Waldron’s considered judgment, we should not even try. Thus God, Locke, and Equality represents a breakthrough in the understanding of Locke’s philosophy in general, and his Two Treatises of Government in particular. Mr. Waldron excels at spelling out just how his view of Locke as an ‘‘equalityradical ’’ advances scholarly conversation . Whereas John Dunne assumes Locke’s hierarchical faith in A. O. Lovejoy ’s ‘‘Great Chain of Being,’’Mr. Waldron reveals Locke’s near egalitarian belief in ‘‘Species . . . linked together, and differ[ing] but in almost insensible degrees ’’ (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). ‘‘The members of the laboring class,’’ C. B. Macpherson’s reading of Locke asserts, ‘‘do not and cannot live a fully rational life,’’ but, in Mr. Waldron’s words, Locke insists on ‘‘the fundamental adequacy of even the meanest intellect.’’ Mr. Waldron, correspondingly , refutes Macpherson’s narrow understanding of Lockean ‘‘property ’’ as tangible possessions: Locke’s concept, in Mr. Waldron’s highlighting of it, features life, liberty, and labor. The upshot of Locke’s forceful argument against Sir Robert Filmer, according to Mr. Waldron’s startling, yet persuasive , interpretation of the Two Treatises, is that ‘‘neither the rich nor civil society on their behalf is entitled to resist the poor when the poor attempt to seize their surplus goods for themselves .’’ Because Locke regards charity as more a right than a duty, Mr. Waldron continues, ‘‘Lockean government may have to be continually interfering to redistribute surplus goods from the rich to the most needy.’’ Thus, though scarcely separated from the state, on the one hand, and though obviously far from the state-affiliated brand of conservative Christianity now dominant in the United States, on the other, Locke’s Christianity feels spiritually communitarian (as distinct from temporally socialist). Mr. Waldron’s paraphrase of Locke’s notes on Romans 13:1–5, on obeying ‘‘the powers that be,’’ rings true. His summary of Locke’s notes on I Corinthians 7:20–23, about slaves obeying their masters, proves telling. Locke, in Mr. Waldron’s estimation, slips ‘‘some distinctly Lockean ideas’’ into The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)—for instance, freedom of worship for the slave population there. Mr. Waldron contests Lorenne Clark’s verdict that Locke’s theory displays ‘‘un- 335 equivocally sexist assumptions.’’ For more than six pages in the First Treatise, after all, Locke elaborates on the fifth commandment’s inclusion of mothers. Mr. Waldron’s ear for Locke’s ‘‘logic of contractarianism’’ hears Locke acknowledging women’s parental authority, their property, and even their marital partnership . As Mr. Waldron points out, Locke praised a 1696 sermon by Rebecca Collier and observed that ‘‘women had the honour first to publish the resurrection of the Lord of Love.’’ ‘‘The scriptural character of Locke’s writing,’’ Mr. Waldron admits, ‘‘might suggest that he is doing something different from philosophical argumentation .’’ ‘‘In fact,’’ however, ‘‘Locke is trying to give the world a lesson in the difference between arguing from scriptural revelation and simply assembling [as Filmer does] various verses and catch-phrases in an opportunistic political tract.’’ Against John Rawls’s conclusion that ‘‘citizens may not appeal to their religious convictions in...

Marxism and science fiction: A celebration of the work of Ursula K. Le Guin

In 1973, the newly-established journal Science Fiction Studies published a symposium on 'Marxism and science fiction' in its very first issue. (1) Thirty years later, the newly-established journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory published a similar symposium on 'Marxism and fantasy'. (2) One of the contributors to the earlier symposium, but conspicuous by her absence in the recent one, was Ursula K. Le Guin, who will be seventy-five years old this year. This is a reason for celebration, since it is also thirty years since Le Guin first published one of her best-known works of science fiction, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. (3) This is a remarkable work, contributing not just to the genre of science fiction, but also to the utopian political tradition, as well as to our understanding of the political philosophy of anarchism. While The Dispossessed certainly has a political 'message', it is not just a political pamphlet or tract that presents that message in a straightforward or simplistic way. Le Guin is a creative writer, in the strict sense of the term, and although her politics are certainly important to her, she never allows them to get in the way of her work as an author whose intention is to produce a work of literature: a work of art. As a result, and as the subtitle of the novel suggests, she possesses sensitivity towards the ambiguities and the complexities of human existence to a remarkable degree, especially insofar as questions of ethics are concerned. Ethics are a central concern for Le Guin. This is true in all her writings, including in her so-called 'children's' literature, The Earthsea Quartet novels, (4) which in fact deal with what might legitimately be considered to be 'adult' issues. While avoiding 'moralizing' and preaching simple solutions to serious moral problems, at the same time, in all of her work, Le Guin writes as a 'moralist': as someone who--in the manner of the ancient Greeks, the young Marx and anarchists such as Kropotkin--considers humans as being by nature ethical animals, and who, as a result, has an overriding interest in the ethical dimension of human existence. Le Guin wishes to stimulate and encourage her readers to think in ethical terms even if, in the end, it should transpire that they make substantive ethical judgements that are different from her own. Despite Le Guin's overt commitment to anarchism, the ethical vision that underpins The Dispossessed has a striking affinity with what, in recent times, has come to be known as 'ethical Marxism'. (5) Contrary to contemporary postmodernists, who follow Nietzsche and maintain that--whether we are talking about the natural world or the social world, science or ethics--the only order that there is in the universe is that which human beings themselves impose upon it, Le Guin maintains that in both science and ethics the world is intrinsically an orderly and not a chaotic place. She insists that the order that is to be discerned in the world is not 'one imposed by man or by a personal or humane deity.' On the contrary, there are 'true laws--ethical and aesthetic, as surely as scientific' which 'are not imposed from above by any authority, but exist in things and are to be found--discovered.'(6) This is the attitude of someone who has been strongly influenced by the philosophy of Taoism. (7) But it is also the attitude of someone who is a moral realist and a humanist, who holds views currently unfashionable amongst those who have been influenced by the philosophies of postmodernism and post-structuralism. These remarks indicate Le Guin's commitment to the idea that there is a universally-valid ethical order; a moral law that applies to all human beings; a law that is in some sense 'natural' rather than a purely social 'construction', and which is therefore discovered by human beings rather than made by them. In another of her essays, Le Guin tells us that what underpins her commitment to this ethical vision is the assumption, which she considers to be 'essential,' that 'we' human beings 'are not objects' but 'subjects'. …

Creating Reality Through Administrative Practice

Camilla Stivers’book, Bureau Men, Settlement Women, is being misread as a feminist political tract and overlooked as the resource that it is for the field of public administration. A review of the current literature of feminism reveals that Stivers’work, a historical study of the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, cannot be described by any version of feminist theory. Rather, her central concern is how the male-dominated Bureau movement pushed the field away from the model of the city as “home”—which developed in the women’s reform movement—and toward the idea of the city as “business.” A Lacanian psychoanalytic reading reveals a critical implication of her research: The women’s movement carried the potential to bring a balance to public agency discourse, one adequate for the new realities that the social problems of the day required. The administration as business model denies the achievement of this balance.

Sentiment and Space in Lydia Maria Child's Native American Writings, 1824-1870

Sentiment and Space in Lydia Maria Child's Native American Writings, 1824–1870 Laura L. Mielke In her 1824 children's book, Evenings in New England, Lydia Maria Child (then Lydia Maria Francis and writing as "An American Lady") includes the dialogue "Personification" in which Aunt Maria helps her nephew Robert interpret a personification of North America: a "young female, clothed in a robe all covered with stripes and stars, carrying a cap upon a high pole, around which an eagle is fluttering; and occasionally looking back upon an Indian, who is aiming his bow and arrow at a wild deer" (3). Aunt Maria, Child's alter ego, offers a straightforward interpretation: "[F]or several hundred years after America was discovered, it was inhabited only by Indians. Now the country is mostly filled by Europeans, and we look back to the savage state as to what we have been" (3). The tableau of America embodies the progressive narrative of history wherein the civilized European figuratively and literally takes the place of the savage Native American and neglects, or perhaps denies, the plurality of the young country. Forty-three years later, in A Romance of the Republic (1867), Child provides her audience with another tableau of America, drawing on common republican symbols such as the flag and liberty cap; however, this time the personification is decidedly interracial and intercultural: Under festoons of the American flag, surmounted by the eagle, stood Eulalia, in ribbons of red, white, and blue, with a circle of stars round her head. One hand upheld the shield of the Union, and in the other the scales of Justice were evenly poised. By her side stood Rosen Blumen, holding in one hand a gilded pole surmounted by a liberty-cap, while her other hand rested protectingly on the head of Tulee's Benny, who was kneeling and looking upward in thanksgiving. (440)1 Cousins Eulalia King and Rosen Blumen are the daughters of biracial mothers fluent in English, Spanish, and French and fathers of Anglo and Germanic extraction, respectively, while Benny is the child of freed slaves. Performed for the birthday of Mr. King, a Civil War veteran who lost a leg fighting for emancipation, this tableau celebrates what Child saw as the ideal outcome of the North's victory: a national family unified across race, ethnicity, and region through the diffusion of culture within a nurturing domestic setting. These disparate national tableaux, framing Child's long and varied career, depend upon radically contrasting definitions of national membership. Between 1824 and 1867 , Child's image of America shifts from a people [End Page 172] defined by their historical and geographic distance from noble but ill-fated savages to a multi-racial citizenry united by familial bonds. We recreate the contrast between these two "living pictures" when we read and teach the novel Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824), Child's earliest engagement with the Indian Question, alongside abolitionist writings such as An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), excerpts from Letters from New-York (1843), and A Romance of the Republic. Our focus on Hobomok and its dramatization of the succession of races, that is, causes us to miss the development of Child's often radical defense of Native American rights and the relationship of that defense to her arguments for abolition. In abolitionist writings from An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans to A Romance of the Republic, Child conjures moving domestic scenes such as the separation of families, the abuse of slaves at the hands of both masters and mistresses (supposed parental figures), and the creation of forced and improper sexual relationships. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Child spurs the sympathy of the reader by converting the slave from chattel to endangered child. Child's domestic-familial arguments on behalf of Native Americans also infantilize the group, but in slight contrast, reflect Child's attention to the endangerment not of bodies but of habitations. In a variety of genres, from short stories and children's literature to journalistic essays and a political tract, Child describes and analyzes Native American difference and Euro-American sympathy in terms of...

Multivariate Analysis and the Study of Style Variation

This paper investigates style variation in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and William Golding's The Inheritors using multivariate analysis, specifically, cluster analysis of the frequencies of frequent words. Baseline tests on a corpus including these and four other novels show that traditional authorship attribution techniques correctly distinguish all sections of each novel from all sections of the other five and correctly cluster all sections of each novel. They are also very successful in distinguishing the section of Nineteen Eighty-Four that purports to be a political tract by Emmanuel Goldstein from the rest of the novel. They are less successful in distinguishing the style of the final chapter of The Inheritors, where critics have argued that a sudden shift of point of view leads to a radical variation in style. The nature of this stylistic variation suggests a modification in the way that frequent words are selected for analysis - a modification that gives improved results for both novels and sharply distinguishes the final chapter from the rest of The Inheritors. A further test of the modified technique on an unusual section of The Picture of Dorian Gray suggests that it may be more widely useful in studies of style variation.

VIRGIL, VIGILANCE, AND VOICE: AGRIFOOD ETHICS IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

Some 2000 years ago, Virgil wroteThe Georgics, a political tract on Romanagriculture in the form of a poem. Today, as aresult of rising global trade in food andagricultural products, growing economicconcentration, the merging of food andpharmacy, chronic obesity in the midst ofhunger, and new disease and pest vectors, weare in need of a new Georgics that addressesthe two key issues of our time: vigilance andvoice. On the one hand, vigilance must becentral to a new Georgics. Enforceablestandards for food safety, food quality,environmental protection, worker health andsafety, sanitary and phytosanitaryrequirements, animal welfare, and appellationsmust be addressed. On the other hand, a newGeorgics must increase the range of persons whohave voice in the democratic governance of anew global agrifood system. New organizationsand institutions will be needed to accomplishthis task.

Of Natives and Rebels: Locating the Surrealist Revolution in French Culture

As the Surrealist group began to articulate a position of dissidence in opposition to bourgeois metropolitan culture, laying claim to a realm of primitive otherness proved to be integral to the process. In 1925, the Surrealists contributed to a political tract entitled La Rdvolution d'abord et toujours! which expressed support for the anti-colonial rebellion under way in Morocco since 1921.1 The authors describe themselves as des Barbares in a gesture of protest against France's military effort led by General Petain to put down the Moroccan uprising. This statement that was published in collaboration with the Clarte group marks the beginning of the French Surrealists' political engagement. The kind of citizens the Surrealists imagined inhabiting their barbarous kingdom made up a motley crew of dissidents, ranging from anti-colonial rebels, primitives, workers, children, and madmen, to women like Nadja.2 This curious configuration in which such characters as the

"Snug Stored Below": The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers

Due to the poor reception of Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Huntley, and Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown gave up the novel in the early 1800s, and began a short but infamous career as a Federalist pamphleteer. His 1803 political tract, An Address to the Government on Cession of Louisiana to the French, is an allegory of a nation exposed to duplicitous outsiders. The tract is a consummate example of Federalist propaganda, a fictional letter written by an imaginary French official, who claims that the United States, torn by factionalism and discontent, is ripe for the pickings. Brown draws from his experience as a novelist to invent a wild tale of an impending slave insurrection that awaits the final order from France. Published after the discovery of ex-slave Gabriel Prosser's plot to attack Charleston, the pamphlet further convinced Americans of the truth of their longstanding fear--the French were going to use a proxy army of disaffected slaves to attack the United States. (1) Brown's pamphlet was part of a larger nationalist discourse in the early nineteenth-century that increasingly came to view the racial divide in the United States as impassable. (2) Brown reiterates an ideology over which Thomas Jefferson brooded about in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1784. The differences between the two races were fixed in nature, Jefferson wrote, and to free the slaves without a plan for expatriation, to let ex-slaves live alongside their former masters, would fill those of African descent with ten thousand recollections ... of the injuries they sustained. (3) A plan for deporting free African-Americans to Africa became even more urgent after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807. Far from initiating the gradual death of chattel slavery by cutting off its lifeblood, the moratorium on the slave trade simply gave rise to a domestic slave market. In addition, new technology further strengthened the institution of slavery. Southern planters and northern investors purchased land and slave labor to take advantage of the cotton gin and a hardy upland cotton hybrid, and in the process, they created an internal slave trade far more productive and lucrative than the triangulation between Africa, the West Indies, and the United States. When James Fenimore Cooper began writing novels in 1819 the resurgence of slavery had already begun to define the limits, logic, and rhetoric of a democratic politics. Nationwide African-American resistance to an entrenched slave system led political leaders on a search for a mechanism that would both stabilize the planter's property in the South and neutralize the political agency of free African-Americans in the North. A group of prominent white citizens provided an answer in 1817, with the inauguration of the American Colonization Society. Taking Jefferson's theory of a fatefully segregated society to its logical end, they devised a plan to relocate free African-Americans to a new African colony. The American Colonization Society immediately became the key instrument of racial reform in the United States. By voicing a homogeneous American identity, it gave the nation an opportunity to resolve its central racial, and thus political, contradiction through the expatriation of African-Americans to Africa rather than amending the Constitution. (4) As a catalyst for a nationwide conversation about the relationship of race to constitutional liberty and citizenship, the colonization movement rehearsed a looming political debate about the future of slavery and democratic liberty in the United States. In 1819 Congress began to redefine the slave system, and after two years of strife between northern and southern representatives, they ended what had become known as the Missouri controversy with an ominous compromise. Admitting Maine into the union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, legislators completed the agreement by drawing a geographical line along 36[degrees]/30[degrees], a barrier that forced slavery south of the line and forecasted the coming of Civil War. …

The sweet trade revived

[First paragraph]Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger. ULRIKE KLAUSMANN, MARION MEINZERIN & GABRIEL KUHN. New York: Black Rose Books, 1997. x + 280 pp. (Paper US$ 23.99)Pirates! Brigands, Buccaneers, and Privateers in Fact, Fiction, and Legend. JAN ROGOZINSKI. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. xvi + 398 pp. (Paper US$ 19.95)Sir Francis Drake: The Queens Pirate. HARRY KELSEY. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, xviii + 566 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00)A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. CAPT. CHARLES JOHNSON (edited and with introduction by DAVID CORDINGLY). New York: Lyons Press. 1998 [Orig. 1724]. xiv + 370 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.95)The subject of piracy lends itself to giddy jokes about parrots and wooden legs, but also talk of politics, law, cultural relativism, and of course Hollywood. This selection of new books on piracy in the Caribbean and beyond touches on all these possibilities and more. They include a biography of the ever-controversial Elizabethan corsair, Francis Drake; an encyclopedia of piracy in history, literature, and film; a reissued classic eighteenth-century pirate prosopography; and an anarchist-feminist political tract inspired by history and legend. If nothing else, this pot-pourri of approaches to piracy should serve as a reminder that the field of pirate studies is not only alive and well, but gaining new ground.

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland or, fiction as an instrument of salvation in post-revolutionary America

When in 1798 Brown finished writing Wieland or, the Transformation, an American Tale, he sent a copy of the book to Thomas Jefferson, who was then Vice President of the United States. The fact that Brown intended his text to be read for the first time by such an outstanding figure of the nation shows that he had written the novel with a clear aim in mind. Retaking Jane Tompkins's reading of the novel as a work useful in the area of national politics, I will discuss that this text is firmly rooted in the historical background of post-Revolutionary America and that as such, it is a desperate warning note on the dangers lurking within the optimistic dream of a new society. From this point of view, I read Wieland neither as an expression of Brown's preoccupation with art and artifice, nor as a symbolic representation of the universal dark side of human consciousness, nor as a battle between Calvinist pessimism and the merits of Enlightenment idealism. Neither do I read it as a political tract, but as a post-revolutionary jeremiad which encapsulates a passionate analysis on some aspects of eighteenth-century American thought and culture. Consequently, the two different sets of components —Gothic elements and explorations of social, political and philosophical questions— are made to serve one main objective: the dissection of the American mission and of the happy assurances of national self-fulfillment endorsed by the Republican ideology.