Political Urgency Research Articles

Seeing it Whole: Staging Totality in Social Theory and Art

Can, or should, social theory try to ‘see it whole’? This article explores some of the aesthetic, political and conceptual issues that arise when we pose the problem of representing social totality today. It revisits two influential assertions of theory's calling to generate orienting and totalizing representations of capitalist society: C. Wright Mills' plea for the ‘sociological imagination’ and Fredric Jameson's appeal for an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’. Mills and Jameson converge on the need to mediate personal experience with systemic constraints, knowledge with action, while underscoring the political urgency and epistemic difficulty of such a demand. The article contrasts these perspectives with the repudiation of a sociology of totality in the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. It explores this contrast through the ‘panorama’ as a visual practice and a metaphor for theory itself. Against Latour's proposal to reduce and relativize totality, it argues that sociology can learn from contemporary artistic efforts to map social and economic power as a whole. ‘Panoramic’ projects in the arts, such as Allan Sekula's and Mark Lombardi's, can allow us to reflect on sociology's own deficit of imagination, and on the persistence of the desire to ‘see it whole’ – especially when that whole is opaque, fragmented, contradictory. A live sociology can only gain from greater attention to the critical experiments with forms and methods of representation that are being carried out by artists preoccupied with the staging of social totality.

Fragments and Demons: A Strong Reading

Fragments and Demons: A Strong Reading MOSHE IDEL. Old Worlds, New Mirrow On Jewish Mysticism and TwentiethCentury Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336.MY REMARKS on Idel's book are written as a gesture of admiration. I have learned much from his book, which is filled with wisdom. Idel's book not only tells a fascinating history of reception- reception of Jewish mysticism and its sources in twentieth-century thought- but it also reveals genealogies of misinterpretations and hints at anxieties of influence in world of modernist Judaism. The book shows again how ambiguous and fruitful modernist perspectives on Judaism were. Modernist interpretations of Jewish tradition, far from being merely secular, opened critical viewpoints into depth of tradition and transformed theological figures and motifs into new textures of poetical and philosophical writing. To this modernist world German Jewish project of tradition also belonged. This cultural project, whose contributors include authors such as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Else Lasker-Schiiler, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Landauer, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, offered new and radical interpretations of Jewish tradition that were associated with political urgency -a critique of violence and Utopist views. These authors often dealt with possibility of transforming theological tropes- revelation and redemption, messianism, and eschatological concepts of justice- into new frames of poetical and political thinking. For many of them, Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and Gnosis served as an additional source for new thinking on human condition and possibilities of tikun (repair). In his book, Idel returns to examine this project of tradition and its legacies from a critical vantage point. His study reveals wisdom and failures, creativity and damages, beauty and cost that were and still are part of this cultural heritage.My remarks on Idel's book are echoes of learning. But writing of such remarks has its own logic. Remarks are inverted forms of dialogue; there is something unfaithful in writing remarks. Remarks are short, selective, and fragmented. They tear subject matter out of its context and bring it back, upturned and distorted. Remarks are fragile and weak, and yet they often offer a There is a notion of freedom, albeit a demonic one, in writing remarks. Here, nevertheless, a paradox is revealed. For Idel's book calls for such a reading. His book demands a strong reading of fragments and demons.THE FRAGMENT (A METHO-THEOLOGICAL REMARK)In introduction to his book, Idei reminds his readers of distortions involved in writing of Jewish history. All scholarship, he argues, is a product of a certain rearview or perspective of past, and thus, as every mirror does, it creates a distorted, limited, and fragmented picture of its subject. Idei wishes to present a different, more complex set of several (p. 1). He calls for reading Jewish history in plural, with multiple, perspectives. This will bring us, he asserts, to a more comprehensive treatment of Jewish past. A study of Judaism that is based on different methodologies and multiple perspectives could lead us to a less limited and less distorted scholarship than one influenced by traditional theologically oriented approach (p. 2) of Christian scholars. Idel's methodological decision is significant. He is, however, well aware that using a new set of mirrors instead of old set does not yet solve problem, namely, paradox of image. Rather, it reproduces it. The past remains in reflection, a mirror effect. All views of past are distorted, inverted images, fragmented representations of our own time.This paradox is reflected also in Idel's second, significant decision to devote his writing to what he calls the fragmenting trend (p. …

The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance Hildegard Hoeller Rachel Farebrother. The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. 219 pp. $99.95. Rachel Farebrother’s The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance is a book that fulfills its promises. Quite contrary to the form upon which it focuses, it guides the reader clearly, linearly, and compellingly through its central argument. By the end of our reading of the book, we can never think about Harlem Renaissance writing again without thinking about collage patterns and the “historical, aesthetic, and political burdens of these recurring patterns” (2). Looking at works by Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston, Farebrother borrows her key term from the visual arts in order to get at the prevalence of both ”fragmentation” and “synthesis” in these writers’ work focusing on “technical innovation,” the politics of such formal strategies, and “neglected, often transatlantic, connections between modernism and the Harlem Renaissance” (3). What makes the book even more interesting is that Farebrother sees collage also as a central trope in Franz Boas’s anthropological writings through which he understands culture not as a coherent whole but as an assembly of diverse fragments. His anthropological work, which influenced all writers considered here, then contributes to the use of collage techniques as well. Even this brief summary reveals the critical payoffs of Farebrother’s study: a connection of visual and anthropological vocabulary that allows her to investigate exactly how these three Harlem Renaissance writers used formal innovation as a way of responding to the questions modernism and anthropology raised for them about literary form and modes of reading, as well as about racial and cultural identity. After having read the introductory discussion of high-modernist visual arts, readers may still have collagist images by Benjamin Péret, Pablo Picasso, and Aaron Douglas in mind when Farebrother moves them to Franz Boas’s work and the central place collage occupies in his description and understanding of culture. In that sense the book works both linearly as well as through the juxtapositions that make collages work. While critics have, of course, noted the importance of Boasian anthropology for Harlem Renaissance writers, they have not performed the kind of close readings of his work that Farebrother presents. She is interested in showing how Boas’s critique of evolutionary models of race and culture is reliant on his definition of culture as a collage—an assembly of diverse elements and cross-currents rather than a linear development of discrete cultures and races. Boas himself saw the potential for his understanding of culture as a vehicle of social critique on notions of cultural and racial identity, but he was somewhat limited by his inability to relinquish the concept [End Page 727] of the primitive. Harlem Renaissance writers responded to Boas’s definition of cultures as collages by revising it so that it served their own aesthetic and political ends. Farebrother’s detailed attention to Boas’s writing—which she grants has none of the creative energy of Harlem Renaissance writers, and therefore has not received sufficiently close attention by critics—sets the stage for her exploration of the revisions and reinterpretations of Boas’s work in the creativity of Harlem Renaissance writing, which in turn gives his ideas an additional dynamism and political urgency. Farebrother’s wonderfully close attention to the ways in which Du Bois as editor subtly showcased, framed, and implicitly revised Boas’s writing in The Crisis—a critical focus she grants may appear “eccentric” to a reader at first sight—aptly sets the stage and tone for her sustained attention to Harlem Renaissance revisions of Boasian anthropology. Farebrother’s focus also provides a perfect segue into her illuminating discussion of The New Negro. If we see Locke’s anthology as a collage, she argues, we are better able to investigate the central tensions in the work among democratic inclusiveness, internal contradiction, and editorial control to shape a coherent whole. Her borrowing from the vocabulary of visual arts also accentuates the multiple genres and media the anthology employs. While an anthology may be understood as a collection, a collage functions through juxtaposition, and as Farebrother contends...

기술 수준조사 및 분석을 통한 SAR(합성개구면 레이다) 핵심기술 개발방안 연구

SAR(Synthetic Aperture Radar) has the ability to generate high resolution images regardless of a weather condition(e.g. visibility good or poor and day or night, etc.). SAR is considered as one of the most important powers and needs for the future since it has been utilized in a number of important military fields such as early warning, urban defense, missile guidance system, etc. Additionally there are many civilian demands and applications in aviation, traffic control, earth and space explorations, weather forecast etc. This days, the ability to acquire and analyze information is needed to cope with the urgency of global politics and international changes. In this paper, technical survey and development review for SAR systems are investigated to derive the core and immature technologies of domestic defense industry.

Who Says What: Election Coverage and Sourcing of Child Care in Four Canadian Dailies

Advocates have called for universal, quality child care in Canada since the 1970s, but the issue seldom appeared to acquire political urgency. The 2006 election campaign seemed different. The governing Liberals promised to devote billions to a nascent national program. The Conservatives promised parents a cash allowance for young children. Child care seemed to be emerging as a significant issue in a political campaign. How was ECEC written about before, during and after Canadian election campaigns? Who is quoted and how? Our project mapped articles about child care in four major Canadian dailies between 2000 and 2008. We found that coverage spiked in 2000 and 2005–2006—during federal elections. Coverage nearly doubled in 2005–2006 in all but one paper. Using content analysis, we compared coverage of child care and sources in the 55 days before the start of campaigning, 55 days of campaigning, and 55 days following the 2006 election. We mapped and compared who said what, and how about child care policy and related issues, in Canada. We found: (1) that newspapers’ ideological slants are apparent in their choice of sources and focus; and (2) that more importantly, despite ideological differences, political figures outnumbered activists, parents and child care providers. With only minor variations across the newspapers, the voices of parents and child care activists were marginal especially in the 55 days of campaigning.

Ricoeur’s Translation Model as a Mutual Labour of Understanding

Ricoeur has written about translation as an ethical paradigm. Translation from one language to another, and within one’s own language, provides both a metaphor and a real mechanism for explaining oneself to the other. Attempting and failing to achieve symmetry between two languages is a manifestation of the asymmetry inherent in human relationships. If actively pursued, translation can show us how to forgive other people for being different from us and thus serves as a paradigm for tolerance. In full acceptance that this will be impossible, Ricoeur uses the model of translation as a way of understanding European integration, with three aspects: translation, shared narrative and shared forgiveness of Europe’s history. These models provide a strong statement about tolerance and become even more significant through their conversation with the negativity that suffuses them. He draws on his knowledge of psychoanalysis to explain that the translator suffers through remembering and through mourning the loss of perfection; there must be acknowledgement of deficiency. This acceptance of imperfection and of limits to success is a key element in Ricoeur’s philosophy and is explored from the 1950s onwards in his study of negativity; denied by phenomenology and explored by Hegel. Negation is vital for understanding the world (this word means this, not that), but it can preclude us from access to meaning when it becomes negativity (this word has no meaning because it is different). Translation can provide the bridge to span the tension between the pathology of denial and different interpretations, and projection of evil into others, which I believe is at the heart of the perceived incompatibilities between Islam and the West. There is a political urgency to this enterprise, given the ‘othering’ of the Muslim world that has replaced the Cold War dichotomies between Communist as ‘other’ and the capitalist world. References to the Muslim as the current ‘other’ will be part of my discussion. As well as seeking to understand Ricoeur’s model of translation, we will examine whether his model works in a world where many speak no Arabic, Urdu or Farsi, or indeed whether it has any relevance for people who do not translate from one language to another.

Climate Change, Capitalism, and the Challenge of Transdisciplinarity

A new sense of urgency has grown among many scientists for policies to address climate change, resulting in unprecedented investments by scientists in public education and, in some cases, political activism. As climate scientists have investigated future climate scenarios—and potential social responses to environmental changes—they have become, ipso facto, social scientists. This article examines these changes to reflect on how they could reshape geography, a discipline that appears well positioned to advance transdisciplinary research. In light of the intellectual and political urgency of transdisciplinary climate research, why have we seen so little substantive collaboration across the science/social science divide? The answer, I argue, stems from differences between research in natural science, on one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other. These problems need not cause paralysis, but to address them they must be understood. The article attends to this challenge by reflecting on Albert Einstein's arguments concerning science and capitalism.

Hepatitis B control by 2012 in the WHO Western Pacific Region:

In 2005, the WHO Western Pacific Region adopted the hepatitis B control goal of reducing the hepatitis B surface antigen seroprevalence in children at least 5 years of age to less than 2% by 2012. Universal infant immunization with three doses of hepatitis B vaccine, including a timely birth dose, is the key recommended strategy. Measuring seroprevalence in children at least 5 years of age takes into account the period when the risk of acquiring a chronic infection is highest and provides an indicator that can be monitored in the short term, within 5 years of vaccine introduction, and which correlates strongly with the long-term consequences of hepatitis B. A time-bound supranational hepatitis B control goal was chosen to create a sense of political urgency for strengthening routine immunization services and improving access to delivery care as well as providing resources for hepatitis B vaccination. Consequently, the programme strategies selected are not stand-alone but also contribute to strengthening health systems. Independent certification of achievement of the control goal, hitherto used mainly for eradication goals, is planned for all countries. Early assessment showed that adopting the regional goal led to greater political commitment, with reduced inequalities in hepatitis B vaccination between and within countries. Previous declining trends in routine immunization coverage also show signs of reversal and there is major progress in providing timely birth doses. A similar approach may be relevant to countries in Africa and South Asia, that have a high hepatitis B disease burden faltering routine immunization and poor access to skilled delivery care.

Reflections on the Distribution of Wealth in Ottoman Ayntab

In contrast to Ottoman studies, the relationship between economic change and the distribution of wealth in the field of European economic history is an old question that has incited much debate since the 19th century. The main issue in the 19th century was whether industrialization/capitalism/economic growth was reducing or intensifying inequality; this was a question with obvi ous political overtones reflecting the clash between the liberals and their crit ics. While the political urgency of the question shifted to the developing world in the past century, Kuznets's hypothesis emerged in the 1950s as a more sophisticated argument about the industrialization process and has kept economic historians busy ever since. Kuznets argued that there was a positive correlation between the wealth gap and industrialization and urbanization in the early stages of growth; after a certain point in the process, the distribution of wealth began to improve. Fine-tuned versions of this hypothesis have been demonstrated to apply to England and North America, where the period after 1740 witnessed an intermittently accelerating increase in inequality; this trend was reversed roughly after World War I.1 Yet, the applicability of the hypothesis to other parts of the world, including other parts of Europe, remains a contested issue. While growth and industrialization under different circumstances do not appear to lead always to increased inequality,2 studies

Las huellas de la Guerra Civil: mito y trauma en la narrativa de la España democrática (review)

MORENO-NUNO, CARMEN. Las huellas de la Guerra Civil: mito y trauma en la narrativa de la Espana democratica. Madrid: Libertarias, 2006. 429 pp.Carmen Moreno-Nuno's Huellas de la Guerra Civil is an elegantly composed and theoretically inflected study of decidedly Spanish preoccupations that cleaved Peninsular Hispanism in the wake of what we know of as the (unfortunately coined) recuperation of memory. These concerns involve, among other issues, the complex relationship between history and in which selfconstituted ideological communities are invested with the power to articulate conceptions of the past, and how the judicial and executive organisms of the Spanish state can address the losses and injustices suffered by all victims of the Spanish Civil War (and the Francoist dictatorship). The contours of the historical landscape have shifted significantly against the at times rhetorically violent agitation of disparate voices sounding from multiple directions, each insisting on its own version of what constitutes the epistemes of the past. It is thus inevitable that Moreno-Nuno's beautifully written study is buttressed by a sense of political urgency - now both complicated and attenuated - associated with the first few years of the Spanish twenty-first century. If the contextualization of her readings refers us back to the immediate aftermath of 2000, with the first nonclandestine exhumation of a mass grave, Moreno-Nuno's close readings stand the test of time.The book posits the notion that fictional incursions into the memory of the war and the postwar period correspond to one of two (or sometimes both) historicoaffective approaches to reconstructions of a disastrous recent past: trauma and myth. The author makes a convincing case that four novels and one short story participate in the recuperation of memory, in effect prefiguring, even propelling, the boom that would land ten to twenty years after the publication of the texts that form the subject of this study: El siglo (1983) by Javier Marias, El pianista (1985) by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Luna de lobos (1985) by Julio Llamazares, El jinete polaco (1991) by Antonio Munoz Molina, and the short story Ucronia (1994) by Manuel Talens. Moreno-Nuno has chosen these works, she explains, because in them we find a deconstruction oflos mecanismos falsificadores del mito a partir de la representacion del horror de la Historia. En estos relatos, la representacion del mito coexiste con una representacion del trauma. . . . Todos ellos subvierten los discuros mitologizadores acerca del pasado que predominan en la Espana democratica, sacando a la luz la falsedad que acompana a la instrumentalizacion politica del mito. (97)An exhaustive arsenal of theory on myth and trauma is put to work in the first two chapters of the book, although such painstakingly deliberated coverage of these themes is indicative of the main weakness of Huellas de la Guerra Civil: repetition and discursive padding that delays, frustratingly, the sensitive and sophisticated analyses of the primary texts.It is in chapter three where the author shows us how disassembled appendages of myth (in this case the triumphalist rhetoric employed to construct upstanding Francoist functionaries) are reconstructed in the service of trauma narrative. Here Moreno-Nuno discusses Javier Marias's long-neglected novel El siglo, an autobiographically inflected work that features a Francoist informer (delator) as its protagonist. Moreno-Nuno prefaces the chapter with an informative summary of Marias's literary and personal biography. She argues that Javier Marias - after an early rejection of the Spanish Civil War as a subject of literary interest for him and his literary cohort (what by way of Marianne Hirsch we have come to think of as the post-memorial generation of the Spanish Civil War) eventually comes to embrace the war as the leitmotif of his fiction. …

Em busca do urbano: marxistas e a cidade de São Paulo nos anos de 1970

O presente artigo é um balanço da produção pioneira de intelectuais marxistas que, na década de 1970, procuraram entender os paradoxos do crescimento de São Paulo e, mais amplamente, ensaiaram as primeiras formulações de uma teoria crítica da urbanização na periferia do capitalismo. Agrupados em torno do Cebrap e da FAU-USP, a urgência política do momento, somada à ascendência da interpretação de Manuel Castells, levou-os majoritariamente a encarar a cidade como espaço de consumo coletivo e luta social em torno da reprodução da classe trabalhadora. Mas a descoberta empírica da cidade permitiu que o urbano fosse, ao fim, reconhecido não apenas como lócus mas como forma da expansão capitalista.

Spatial reification, or, collectively embodied amnesia, aphasia, and apraxia

The transformative powers of global capitalism presently dispossess and unsettle millions of people as well as comprehensively reshape the built environment on previously unseen scales of creative destruction. When the world is constantly dis(re)membered in ever new ways remembrance as a both individual and trans-generational complex of experience, memory, and knowledge loses significance in everyday life. Confronting rapidly transforming neo-liberal landscapes across the globe, critical scholars no less than dispossessed migrants find themselves in a memory crisis akin to the one observed as part of the context of the French Revolution and the profound transformations of European modernization. In the article, this collective crisis of memory-knowledge-politics is addressed through an engagement with the four concepts “reification,” “amnesia,” “aphasia,” and “apraxia,” the former elaborated through the latter three. Time-space disjunction and dislocation, irrelevance of memory, incapacity to combine, and inability to practice, equates passivity and obedience in relation to the havoc wrought upon masses of people and places. A core concern of the article is to articulate the four concepts in relation to built space and its role not simply as reflection of but rather as effecting and exacerbating the memory-knowledge-politics crisis. The article suggests that the memory crisis has political urgency in the particular sense that a radical politics against reification needs to be articulated in relation to an understanding of built spaces as collective mnemonic assemblages of memory-knowledge-politics, while also suggesting that spaces might be mobilized to topologically articulate past and present intersectional relations of forgetfulness-ignorance-power, and thus possibly be made to contribute to rather than deflect political consciousness and continued struggles for democracy.

Energizing historical materialism: Fossil fuels, space and the capitalist mode of production

In this paper, I present a theoretical argument that fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Despite sustained attention to distributional conflicts between international capital and energy rich nation–states, few historical-materialists have paid attention to the relations between fossil fuel and capital accumulation in industrial capitalist societies. In opposition to ecological economic notions of fixed thermodynamic “laws”, I first propose a dialectical conception of energy as embedded in dynamic social processes and power relations. Second, I review the historical importance of the energy shift from solar or biological sources of energy (muscles, wind, and water) to fossilized sources of energy (coal, oil, and gas). I then demonstrate how attention to fossil fuel energy forces a reexamination of the core insights of ecological Marxism and the political economy of nature. In the core argument of the paper, I reconsider the shift from biological to fossil energy as internal to the generalization and extension of capitalist social relations from two basic vantage points – (1) capitalist production based on wage labor; (2) the spatial conditions of capitalist circulation. I conclude by asking whether it is accurate to conceptualize capitalism as a “fossil fuel mode of production” and highlight the political urgency of a historical materialist perspective that takes seriously the importance of energy to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.

After '68: The Left and Twenty-First Century Political Projects

In broad terms '1968' still stands as a signifier of social and political radicalism. Workers' mass action and students' protests signal an age of powerful labour and politicised youth; the impassioned commitments of 'engaged intellectual' and citizen alike show a synergy between the life of the mind and activism; fierce philosophical debates illustrate the vitality of ideas; and the expansive critical vision and hope reaching throughout the social reveal an unrestrained radical imagination. In short, the very tumultuousness of the period expresses a political urgency and commitment seemingly profoundly distanced from contemporary apathy. But as with all representations, these sets of associations are as fictional as they are factual and the tendency to inflate and romanticise the meaning of '1968' is as obvious as its undoubted significance. Nonetheless, even beyond its disputed symbolic status as a moment of exemplary radicalism, '1968' is often--even if only implicitly--taken as marking an intellectual-political watershed. Dominique Lecourt, for example, argues that the French 'master thinkers' and political culture of the 1960s have been replaced by a pedestrian intellectual 'mediocracy' that is media-driven and acquiescent to a neo-liberal agenda, resulting in prosaic social analysis and abdication of politics. (1) This is broadly mirrored within wider Euro-American perspectives on the activist-intellectual vocation: arguably academics have retreated into the university as an insular domain, which is disengaged from practical social and political involvement; (2) and the work of intellectuals has moved from the legislative sphere towards a more abstracted interpretive function. (3) And although vital expressions of popular radicalism can be found within various forms such as anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist movements and protests, they are often seen as confined to mounting a reactive rearguard action against the hegemonic neo-liberal agenda. Perhaps most importantly, the contention that the utopian spirit able to imagine a progressive alternative beyond present constraints has been all but extinguished suggests that we are consigned to a sterile futurity of limited possibility. (4) The conditions of our present 'historical bloc' as a moment of extreme difficulty for progressive politics seemingly confirm the validity of such despondency. From one side the consolidation of the New Right and its neo-Conservative progeny has pushed re-distributive social agendas onto the defensive. And from another side, the 'sacralization of difference' (5) has served to reify, inflate, and isolate a series of identity-based claims to recognition that has appeared to erode much of the collective ethos central to forging and maintaining broad political coalitions. As such 'the market' qua 'the social' and 'identity' qua 'the individual' or 'group' would seem to confirm a liberal-democratic 'end of history'. A pressing question for the dissident, the uneasy, and the unconvinced alike is: 'What forms of politics are possible in times like these?' Swift reflection on this question is not particularly reassuring however. Many of the radical and oppositional political projects of recent and present times can be readily classified as based in proscriptions--anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic and so on. This begs a crucial question of the possibilities of positive political prescription. As Paul Gilroy asks of anti-racism, how does the elusive question of what we are positively committed to 'connect with the necessary moment of negativity that defines our political hopes?' (6) Perhaps more importantly, we may also ask what happens when we become mired in the 'necessary moment of negativity' to the extent that it becomes a political habitus in and of itself instead of a transitory stage en route to imagining, articulating, and pursuing political hopes? We may instead wonder 'What forms of politics might be possible in times like these? …

A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan (review)

Reviewed by: A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan Stephen D. Miller (bio) A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan. By Paul Gordon Schalow. University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. x, 219 pages. $49.00. Considering the amount of ink spilled in both Japanese and English on the topic of love in the imperial court of Heian Japan, it comes as a pleasant surprise to find instead here in Paul Schalow's work a study of friendship. One wonders, upon first reading the title of his work—A Poetics of Courtly [End Page 167] Male Friendship in Heian Japan—why no one else has approached the topic and why friendship has not been considered by more scholars. As a neglected category of study for Japanese scholars, friendship may have been ignored because it lacks the luster of love, the pizazz of sex, or the urgency of politics. Friendship seems to stand pure and tall, untainted by the complexities of the romantic heart and confusion wrought by carnal need. Those feelings one has for a buddy, a companion, or a confidant seem somehow ahistorical and acultural. Surely friendship must be a universal and timeless category known by all and to all. Surely we know what it is, and we don't need a full-on scholarly study of it, do we? But I am afraid we are not sure what it is, and we do need such a study, if for no other reason than to discuss the issues above. And in the work under review, Schalow does a fine job of laying the groundwork and opening the topic for discussion. He is not looking for what he calls "real-life friendships" (p. 1); instead he provides a "poetics"—a study of the "recurrent patterns of . . . [the] literary depiction" of friendship (p. 1). By giving very close readings to texts such as Wakan rōeishū, Ise monogatari, Kagerō nikki, and Genji monogatari, Schalow hopes to clarify "how Heian literature articulates the nobleman's wish to be known and appreciated fully by another man—or what may be termed the hope of transcendence through male friendship" (p. 1). He hopes to uncover "masculine experience as a subject of critical inquiry" (p. 3); and he does not ignore women, either: "Several of the narratives addressed in this study . . . depict female characters playing a central role as mediators in friendships between noblemen" (p. 3). In sum, the author's attention is primarily toward the mechanics of literature and the experience of friendship as it is depicted in literature. All this he does very well. I am concerned about two things Schalow does not do, both of which arise from the lack of a broader theoretical framework in which to place his observations about literary friendships: he neither explores the fluidity of the category "friendship" nor discusses the larger implications of his study. Schalow admits that "we cannot assume that friendship's manifestation in Heian literature should automatically be intelligible to people living in the present day . . . for its epistemological underpinnings are not necessarily our own" (p. 5). If this is the case, it would have been helpful to take a more comparativist approach in which the "underpinnings" of the category "friendship" (both ours and the Heian period's) are explored at the same time that meaning is excavated from the texts. As George Lakoff warns in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, "Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech."1 Schalow recognizes that "friendship" [End Page 168] as a category is neither acultural nor ahistorical, but without a theoretical framework for the concept, he has trouble characterizing the boundaries of friendship and the meaning we might derive from it. This is not a fatal flaw, but it does help to explain some of the book's shortcomings. Starting, as Schalow does, with Wakan rōeishū, a work compiled by Fujiwara Kintō in the mid-Heian period, is logical, as it allows him to look back historically from the end point of his timeline. The seven-poem se-quence entitled "Friends" that he analyzes is...

Response

16 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 whites-only suburbs exemplars of a depoliticized Happy Days? You get the idea. The struggle for racial justice burned across the post-World War II years. And that struggle goes a long way toward explaining how political activism of all kinds became an ever greater presence in the United States from the end of World War II right through the early 1970s. Without the struggle for racial justice and the models of political practice, resistance , and rebellion it produced in its many variants across racial and ethnic lines, the other political movements and modes of contentious politics of the era would have looked very different and likely would never have gained the kind of political and cultural traction they did achieve. Black Americans don't fit the Fifties imagery popular accounts tend to present—or that Whitfield outlines. If black Americans' experiences are taken seriously, the Fifties take on a different hue. And as historians place black Americans' presence in the post-World War II years more centrally, they should have a much easier time understanding how contemporary mass-media notions of the Fifties tell us more about how a certain kind of social order was culturally cast than about how Americans actually lived and experienced the era. Throughout the early Cold War years, black Americans found powerful ways to make their presence felt in die United States. They and their allies were able to break the racial order whites had cast in the decades following Reconstruction . That break had major cultural and social implications and it caused massive changes in American public policy. Americans' domestic struggles over racial justice were given political urgency and new cultural saliency by that other great postwar cause: the battle to address the communist challenge. That battle produced concerns about national identity that made racial injustice a more salient issue for political elites. But it also produced hot wars, internal hunts for subversives and spies, massive increases in the federal government's power and capacity, and a political struggle to define America's role in the world. As people in the United States and in most other nation -states around the world worked their ways through the new international Cold War order, factions in most every nation began to challenge the people, precepts, and policies that maintained and developed that order and the particular form the Cold War state took in their respective societies. Even the Soviet Union, with its barbarous Stalinist and brutal post-Stalinist internal political organization , had its factional disputes and cultural forms of resistance to the obduracy of its Cold War state. Given America's central role in the making, maintaining, and developing of that Cold War international order, Americans' relative unfamiliarity with the demands of a powerful domestic security state, and Americans' freewheeling, democratic political culture, it makes sense that Americans responded passionately and in great numbers to the demands of the Cold War. And those responses, it is worth remembering, did not begin with the Left's challenges to the Vietnam War. The John Birch Society, founded in 1 958, almost surely had more members than SDS ever did. Birchers met in small chapters all over the United States, petitioning, protesting, and organizing to impeach Earl Warren and challenge the patriotism of President Eisenhower and then Kennedy and Johnson. More direcdy, and successfully , they took on school boards and other local officials who failed to attack communism. Birchers were joined in their activism by myriad other selfidentified anticommunist grass roots activists. The Cold War produced an angry, highly organized, grassroots Right in the Fifties, and as numerous recent historians have recognized, those Rightists did not disappear in the Sixties—they regrouped and rethought their political practices (ironically, Leftists would do much the same in the 1970s—a topic for another day). The political ferment created by the frustrations, fears, and hopes of the Cold War clearly took on new shape and politicized new people as the war in Vietnam evolved differendy than had the civil war in China and the UN police action in Korea. And, yes, generational politics fueled by demographics and a host of other critical factors—some of which...

A Longitudinal Investigation of Intimate Partner Violence Among Mothers With Mental Illness

A Longitudinal Investigation of Intimate Partner Violence Among Mothers With Mental Illness

A Longitudinal Investigation of Intimate Partner Violence Among Mothers With Mental Illness

Severe mental illness, substance use, and intimate partner violence have emerged as major intersecting public health problems that adversely and disproportionately impact the lives of women in the United States. This longitudinal study investigated the demographic and clinical correlates of intimate partner violence in a sample of 324 mothers with severe mental illness. A secondary analysis of longitudinal data was conducted by using multiple logistic regression. Participants were part of a longitudinal, community-based study of mothers with severe mental illness, which was aimed at understanding how these mothers viewed motherhood. The women were interviewed initially at baseline (interviews were conducted between 1995 and 1996) and then about 20 months later at follow-up (interviews were conducted between 1997 and 1998). At follow-up the prevalence rate of intimate partner violence was 19%. Multiple logistic regression analyses showed a significant positive relationship between alcohol and drug misuse at baseline and intimate partner violence at follow-up, indicating that women with a co-occurring diagnosis of a substance use disorder (dual diagnosis) were more likely than women without such a diagnosis to report intimate partner violence. The number of lifetime psychiatric hospitalizations and the number of symptoms related to psychiatric disability exhibited at baseline were positively associated with intimate partner violence at follow-up, and age was inversely associated with intimate partner violence. Mental health professionals serving mothers with mental health problems need to be aware of and prepared to assess the significant correlation between these intersecting public health problems in order to influence successful interventions. Particular attention must be given to the special treatment needs related to dual diagnosis and victimization and the impact of these factors on this vulnerable population.

‘The wildernesse of Tropes and Figures’ Figuring Rhetoric in Leveller Pamphlets

The Leveller writings of the 1640s are directed at immediate political circumstances and agitate for specific political ends. They do so in a wide range of styles, some of them highly colourful and accomplished. The Leveller leaders themselves had very different educational backgrounds and formative literary influences. Yet almost throughout their writings there is a constant theme of hostility to rhetoric - a consistency which is not always to be found in Leveller thinking on apparently more central political topics such as the desirable extent of the franchise.The Levellers' own writings were part of the ferment of propaganda which spilled from the presses during the civil war period. Political urgency and polarisation heightened people's fears about the use of language and argument, and exerted a potentially transformative pressure on genres and their associated rhetorics.1 The fragmented nature of political discourse in post-civil-war England, combined with fundamental aspects of the Levellers' own thinking, prompted them to develop their views on knowledge, belief, and persuasion as they did. However, as I will show, the same factors also drove them to take a stance on these issues which could never quite be stabilised or made consistent with their own literary practice.IScholars of renaissance rhetoric rightly devote much attention to the formal framework of the art of rhetoric as it had been defined and refined since antiquity, and to the enormous role which rhetoric played in grammar-school as well as university education.2 We can, then, be fairly confident of the Leveller writers, various as their educational backgrounds were, having had some direct contact with the classical pedagogical tradition of rhetoric.3 That does not mean, though, that the word 'rhetoric' was always used in its technical sense. 'Rhetoricall' appears as a pejorative term in Leveller writing alongside 'scholasticall', 'sophisticall', 'syllogisticall', 'glosses', 'long set speeches', and so on. Almost anything that smacks of scholarliness can thus be bracketed with rhetoric. The Levellers critique genuine elements of rhetorical theory, but they also denounce 'rhetoric' in the general sense in which we often understand the word today.The Levellers were doing nothing new in criticizing rhetoric or its excesses. The principled objections to the aims and methods of rhetoric articulated in Plato's Gorgias and Phaedrus were impossible for later rhetoricians to ignore. Running through the rhetorical tradition, from Aristotle to the Roman and early modern rhetoricians, is a concern to adapt and defend rhetoric against Plato's critique. Two key strategies were involved in this critical defence. The first crucial problem for defenders of rhetoric was the problematic relationship between rhetoric and truth or virtue. From Aristotle onwards rhetoric was claimed as a necessary ally of truth in a less than ideal world where audiences could not be relied on to exercise pure reason; authors insisted that rhetoric could serve truth and virtue more easily than their opposites.4Anxieties about the use of rhetorical techniques to move the passions could also be stemmed by limiting the most emotive or figurative speech to appropriate contexts, and the development of the doctrine of 'decorum' or 'aptum' was the second key response rhetoricians offered to critics. Part of the rhetorician's art was to be able to deploy different styles in the appropriate contexts. The development of the genus humile, less vulnerable to criticism than the oratorical genus grande, can be seen as a response to this problem of context and decorum.5Thus arguments over style, in early modern as in classical writers, were not simply arguments for or against 'rhetoric', but arguments about decorum within rhetoric.6 Writers were not necessarily repudiating all rhetoric if they advocated a 'plain' style, characterised by its 'perspicuity'.7 Morris Croll demonstrated that the 'anti-Ciceronians' (Muret, Lipsius, Montaigne and Bacon in particular) espoused an 'Attic' style which they understood to be ancient, and modelled their prose on authors such as Seneca. …

The Business of Representing

Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market. By Katherine Sender. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 311 pages. $35.00 (cloth). The Ellis Island Snow Globe. By Erica Rand. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 360 pages. $22.95 (paper). In late 2005, film director Ang Lee's heavily hyped film Brokeback Mountain first screened in U.S. theaters. The film was an immediate success, garnering $32 million during the first month, winning the Golden Globe award for best picture and best screenplay, and winning the Academy Award for best director, best screenplay, and best original score. The film, based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx about two young cowboys who meet and fall in love in Wyoming in the summer of 1963, has received a great deal of attention in the popular press. Frank Rich, in the New York Times, called it "a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality."1 In Newsweek, reporter Sean Smith waxed passionately about the film, stating, "No American film before has portrayed love between two men as something this pure and sacred. As such, it has the potential to change the national conversation and to challenge people's ideas about the value and validity of same-sex relationships."2 Whether the film is as important as these reviews suggest remains to be seen, but the hyperbole of the reviewers does imply that the commercial success of Brokeback Mountain is in some way indicative of the film's ability to tap in to "authentic" gay culture. Indeed, much of the critical acclaim of this film assumes somehow that the film offers transparent meaning in terms of the relationship between the two men—the reviewers' positioning of Brokeback Mountain as an important intervention within "the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality" or as the first film to portray "love between two men as something this pure and sacred" suggests that the film was able to access, in some way, an "authentic" gay identity (which, apparently, could be depicted only by two heterosexual actors). The film's rendering of the complexities of gay male life in the 1960s United States—and cowboys, no less— [End Page 495] has inspired film critics to assume that after years of attempts to represent gay identity within commercial culture, finally someone got it "right." This idea, that commercial products allow us a way in to deep, "authentic" sentiment or action, is certainly not new. Commercial products, such as Hollywood films, are often imbued with a sense of political urgency—indeed, the consumption of such products often stands in for political action itself. With respect to gay, lesbian, or queer identity, commercial products that carry within them or signify political statements and commitments are often seen as transparently progressive, interpellating consumers who buy and use such products as active participants in struggles over GLBTQ rights and practices. Indeed, examining the trajectory of commercial images of gays and lesbians, one can see how consumer culture has gradually shifted gay acts to gay identity; products contain the "essence" of a personal identity. It is not so much, however, that commercial products reveal identity in some authentic way, but rather that commercial products produce particular identities as real and "authentic." In two recent books, Katherine Sender's Business Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market and Erica Rand's The Ellis Island Snow Globe, both authors explore this claim of politicized commercial objects; both books detail practices in visual and commercial culture that work to discipline and classify particular individuals as gay or heterosexual "identities." As much as Brokeback Mountain (partly) subverts the myth of the American cowboy through the inclusion of gay identity, other commercial forms such as advertising and souvenirs offer an opportunity to reflect on how the boundaries of consumer culture are policed and monitored in terms of sexuality. Each author adopts a very different strategy for presenting her arguments, and while both are concerned with consumer culture, they look...