Political Encounters Research Articles

A Politics of Encounter: Knowledge and Organizing in Common

want to begin with the relation of activism to academia not as a problem of the separation or conjunction between these realms but as a problem of practices and structures internal to both. We often assume that these are principally antagonistic and mutually distrustful fields, characterized by activist anti-intellectualism with regard to the academy and academic skepticism with regard to social change. This leaves us with the idea that we must bridge the two fields, which in turn tends to rely on innovative individuals to carry forth this task, a poor frame of reference that is more a reflection of the problems within each realm—the central figure of innovative individual—than a solu- tion. I'd like to move away from the idea of bridging, but also away from the categories of activism and academia altogether to think about organization and knowledge production. While these things can happen within activism and academia, there is no guarantee that they will. My thinking about the relation between knowledge and organizing comes from a collective organizational process that includes exposure to movements around the world, including and perhaps most importantly Zapatismo, but is primarily based on the work of the organization of which I am a part, El Kilombo Intergalactico. Based in Durham, North Carolina, El Kilombo is made up primarily of students, migrants, and African American members of our local community, who work toward the creation of dignified housing, the produc- tion of and access to healthy food sources, and cooperative self-employment. All organizational projects are created by and for the community itself. The concepts presented here come from our collective thought and work. Activism and Academia What issues internal to activism and academia impede organization and knowl- edge production today? A first problem might be thought of as the extraction of the individual from the processes of knowledge production and political action through the formation of the professionalized identities of academic

The Franks and the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs in the Early Crusade Period

This article analyses political and diplomatic relations between the Franks and the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs from 500/1106 to 570/1174. In the first part, I examine four Frankish-Nizārī encounters based on a close reading of Arabic and Latin primary texts. I argue that the Franks and the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs did not form political alliances before 544/1149. The Nizārīs became a powerful player on the Syrian political map after they founded a permanent “state” in the 530s/1140s in the Jabal Bahrāʾ. The Nizārī polity then posed a greater threat to the Franks, and by implication, could offer greater military support as an ally. In the second part of the article, I argue that European descriptions of the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs developed as a result of diplomatic and political encounters in the mid- to late-sixth/twelfth century. Furthermore, the earliest Frankish descriptions of the “Assessini” indicate a genuine interest on the part of their authors in obtaining accurate information on the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs.

Book review: Power Politics: Political Encounters in Industry and Engineering

Book review: Power Politics: Political Encounters in Industry and Engineering

The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world

This article encounters the politics of the encounter. It tries to reframe another way of thinking about progressive urban politics. It encounters Althusser, who wrote some of the nicest and profoundest lines on the encounter, and it encounters Lefebvre, with his notion of the urban as the site of encounters. It equally encounters the Occupy movement and in so doing encounters space, urban space, specifically a reworked conception of centrality. Althusser's proverbial rain rains ordinary urban rain, elements that have encountered one another because of a swerve, induced by encounters created by prior swerves, those that created, go on creating, new densities of connections ripe for further swerves. The clinamen strikes, rains rain so hard on the old order, on the old city, that the swerve has created a new world urban order, the plane of immanence for new encounters, for an aleatory materialism of bodies encountering other bodies in public. Such is the Occupy movement. People here encounter other people within and through urban space; the urban confers the reality of the encounter, of the political encounter, and of the possibility for more encounters. It becomes the site as well as the nemesis of the encounter, its positive, unifying capacity as well as its negative, demonic charge of dissociation.

Pedagogical and political encounters in linguistically and culturally diverse primary classrooms: examples from Quebec, Canada, and Gauteng, South Africa

Comparative research in multilingual urban primary schools indicates that the pedagogical and political goals of schooling may operate at cross-purposes. Classroom observations and teacher interview-discussions were conducted in classes for immigrant children in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where the language of instruction is French, and in classes in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa, where children from many different language backgrounds are taught in English. Two main themes emerged: (1) pedagogically, effective teacher–learner communication can break down when teachers are unaware of the roles that language and culture play in second language classrooms; (2) politically, efforts to assimilate learners into new socio-cultural/political contexts sometimes take precedence over sound pedagogical practice, such as drawing on the linguistic and cultural repertoire that learners bring to the classroom. This ongoing qualitative research underlines the importance of preparing pre-service and in-service teachers for the linguistic and cultural diversity they are bound to encounter in their classrooms, and of deepening their understanding of the influence of such diversity on the teaching–learning process.

Impossible Intimacies: Towards a Visual Politics of “Touch” at the Israeli-Palestinian Border

The West Bank Wall (or ‘Separation Fence’) constructed by Israel along much of its border with the occupied West Bank offers a potent visual signifier of the divisive, restrictive and intrusive ways in which the Israeli occupation touches the everyday lives of Palestinians. Consequently, the Wall has become a prominent site of representational concern in Arab visual culture. This article examines two particular visual representations of the Israeli-Palestinian border, Mona Hatoum’s sculpture ‘Grater Divide’ and Simone Bitton’s film Wall, in order to explore the complex politics of encounter and representation that circulate around the border in these works. In doing so, it seeks to establish a broader understanding of the ways in which discursive and cultural boundaries might be negotiated and crossed in the service of an interdisciplinary model of Arab cultural studies.

Practical knowledge and politics of encounter along the Lower Falémé River, Senegambia (c. AD 1500–1925)

Beyond the growing entanglement of African and European worlds, the Atlantic era also witnessed transformations in the economic institutions, political regimes, and social identities that inhered between African societies, such as those of the interior of Senegambia. This paper traces how such historical processes both emerged from and shaped the quotidian practices and encounters manifest in the production of earthenware pottery along the eastern frontier of Bundu, an Islamic Fulbe state (almaamate) that arose and grew to incorporate diverse Mande communities from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries. Drawing upon recent insights from ceramic ethnoarchaeology in Africa, an analysis of pottery production techniques (clay procurement and processing, shaping, decoration and firing) suggests that potters from distinct cultural traditions, but of similar class, began to share technical knowledge in spheres both public and private during Bundu's expansion. At the same time, patterns of pottery consumption point to the convergence of tastes, not only for imported European commodities, but also for the locally produced goods employed on a day-to-day basis by disparate communities within a fluid political regime.

The right to the city and beyond

One of Henri Lefebvre's last essays, “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, published in Le monde diplomatique in 1989, is by far one of his most enigmatic. The title alone says bundles; an atypically downbeat Lefebvre is on show, two-years before death, dying like his cherished traditional city: when the city loses its way, he says, when it goes astray, in a planetary metamorphosis. This article mobilizes Lefebvre's valedictory lament. It does so to problematize his very own thesis on “the right to the city”, especially in the light of recent bourgeois re-appropriation. The discussion tries to rework and reframe Lefebvre's celebrated late-60s' radical ideal, propelling it into the contemporary neo-liberal global context, negating it by moving beyond it, affirming in its stead a “politics of the encounter”. If a concept didn't fit, somehow didn't work, Lefebvre insists that we should always ditch that concept, abandon it, give it up to the enemy. So, too, perhaps, with the right to the city. The political utility of a concept, Lefebvre says, isn't that it should tally with reality, but that it enables us to experiment with reality, that it helps us glimpse another reality, a virtual reality that's there, somewhere, waiting to be born, inside us. A politics of encounter, I suggest, forces us to encounter ourselves, concretely, alongside others; it doesn't make facile, abstract rights claims for something that's now redundant in an age when planetary urbanization has become another circuit of capital.

Contingency and modernity in the thought of J.P. Arnason

This article argues that Arnason’s writings succeed in pushing civilizational analysis — most prominently developed by the late Shmuel N. Eisenstadt — in a much-needed direction. Coming from an action-theoretical background in which the creativity of actors is strongly emphasized, Arnason is critical of approaches within civilizational analysis that tend to downplay contingency within historical processes. Especially by focusing on the role of political power and imperial encounters, Arnason demonstrates how civilizational analysis can be further developed in ways that do not automatically assume the linearity and long-term persistence of civilizational paths.

Europe in motion: migrant cinema and the politics of encounter

The article focuses on the contested notion of the (new) Europe from the vantage point of migrant cinema. The aim is to explore how cinematic language offers alternative modalities of representation and subjectification in relation to migration, gender and identity. The emphasis of this analysis is on the politics of encounter: how the presumed strangers to Europe are figurations of Europe's othered self while also embodying the material practices of exclusion. The politics of encounter is explored in three films made by European filmmakers in which the main female character struggles to negotiate her identity in between colonial legacies and global terror, as in the British-Pakistani Yasmin (Kenneth Glenaan, UK, 2004), between transsexual and transnational politics, as in the case of the Iranian refugee in Unveiled (Angela Maccarone, Germany, 2005), or in between trafficked bodies and renewed citizenship as in the case of the Eastern European immigrant prostitute in The unknown woman (Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy, 2006). These visual and ideological commentaries participate in the redefinition or abolition of the notion of Europe by proposing the representations of the strangers within not from original and unexpected positions but by highlighting the transformation of the ‘European subject’ through the politics of encounter. The article furthermore raises questions about the agency of Muslim women who opt for religion in the midst of the self-professed secular Europe, explores debates on homophobia and the refugee's state of exceptionalism and offers a feminist reading of the phenomena of trafficking of women.

Carriages, coffee-cups and dynamometers :representing French technical cultures in the London Mechanics’ Magazine,1823-1848

British discussions of French technical culture have often assumed, if not explicitly stated, contrasting ‘national styles’ : centralized, state-oriented, theoretically driven, and institutionally supported work in France ; dispersed, individualistic, empirically driven, school-shy practice in Britain. In this paper I examine a spectrum of French-British technical interactions during the second quarter of the nineteenth century and ask whether such caricatures have any power. To make this study more concrete I consider representations of France, and of French technical culture, in one important British periodical and, by way of occasional contrast, in some British professional and academic institutions. From the late 1830s there was a notable increase in the volume of technical literature ; but here, I focus on a periodical founded in 1823. The Mechanics’ Magazine (MM) was edited and printed in London but it was read far more widely. Its readership consisted primarily of literate but disputatious mechanics. Defining themselves against the gentlemanly, status-conscious civil engineers, the literary activists of the MM celebrated democracy, discourse and dispute. Their gaze fell on France and on French figures, institutions, technical processes, textbooks and theories. France was a distant arena of mechanical politics. There, exhibitions (it said) pandered to the useless wants of the aristocracy – were there only Kings in France ? There, Protestant craftsmen had resisted Catholic oppressors. There, fledgling Mechanics’ Institutes struggled against despotism. But not all was caricature : France was the land of heroes, like Charles Dupin, or a workplace for skilled artisans ; through de Pambour, Poncelet and Morin it could be a source, selectively, of technical insight and theory – even if built upon the example of British engineering works. Such representations of French technical culture ‘from below’ complement existing accounts of intellectual, cultural, or political encounter ; and they provide some clues as to the mechanisms whereby elite technical literature from France was appropriated in Britain.

The Rise of a Global God-Image? Spiritual internationalists, the international left and the idea of human progress

For a period that endured so long it came to seem coextensive with Western modernity, durable barriers stood between those who sought political liberation and those who sought spiritual liberation. We are now emerging from that period. The barriers never operated in the same way or to the same extent in all countries, for much the same reason that ‘secularism’ differed in its effective meaning from country to country. But even in secularism's Anglo-European heartland the division between spirit and politics no longer feels self-evident. This shift cannot help but resonate throughout progressive politics. What we lack are conceptual means for illuminating the shift. The progressive spiritual–political terrain will hardly come into view if it is conceived only in terms of mutual concerns, or shared ethical values, or common campaign work. Pragmatic considerations must be grounded in conceptions of the current world process. Conceptions of the world process must be capable of generating new and fertile responses to many of the deep moral and metaphysical questions which become more insistent in times of rapid—not to say cataclysmic—change. Only in this way can ‘progressive social forces’, whether belonging to the tradition of the left or to spiritual and religious traditions, help to open up the human vista at a time when ‘progress’ is pursued nearly everywhere in its narrowest and most lethal forms. This article takes up these issues, emphasising the need for a reorientation of political thought in the face of a world scene stalked by apocalyptic anxieties. The best child of these anxieties may well be an internationally integrative structure which we can refer to as a ‘progressive global God-image’. Putting forward this idea as an interpretive key both to the possibilities inherent in the progressive spiritual–political encounter and to important aspects of the contemporary planetary situation, the idea is then illustrated by summarising the key claims of a specific group of ‘spiritual internationalists’. In conclusion I suggest that, in so far as the spiritual–political encounter is not joined, contemporary progressives of a spiritual and a traditional leftist kind will continue to represent two forms of ‘unhappy consciousness’. The option that beckons, meanwhile, is for each to discover in the other the resources they need to creatively respond to their own limitations.

Reading the Other: Ethics of Encounter

Most scholarly fields, at least in the humanities, have been asking the same questions about the politics of encounter for hundreds of years: Should we try to find a way to encounter an other without appropriating it, without imposing ourselves on it? Is encountering‐without‐appropriating even possible? These questions are profuse and taken up with intense interest in scholarship about the personal essay, specifically, which has often been credited as a philosophical form. Within debates about the ethics of the personal essay, the most significant concern is about the traditionally accepted relationship of the writer‐represented‐on‐the‐page. For example, the notable rhetoric and composition scholar, David Bartholomae, argues that students of what he calls ‘“creative nonfiction” or “literary nonfiction”’ (1995, p. 68) write ‘... as though they [are] not the products of their time, politics and culture, as though they could be free, elegant, smart, independent, the owners of all that they saw’ (p. 70). In other words, the personal essay, as a subgenre of creative or literary nonfiction, allows for the perpetuation of the fallacy that a writer can be ‘free’ of social influences, ‘independent’ of a society and of its politics, and ‘owners’ of their own perspectives and experiences—of those the writer expresses on the page, specifically. Consequently, if the writer is not conscious and critical of the social influences acting on him/her, if s/he believes the text to be the singular and uninfluenced production of his/her own self, then the topic taken up in the essay is tyrannized by the self‐centered (and dangerously un‐critically‐conscious) perspective of the writer. However, the personal essay also has its strengths as a philosophical form: in its privileging of skepticism; in its attention to complexity and complication; and even in its existence‐as‐evidence of some quality of its writer. Too, very often essays pay homage to works of other essayists, as in the case of Gass's ‘Emerson and the Essay’, instead of mowing down other works in order to establish its own reign. Despite these ethically responsible characteristics, though, I show, using Gass's essay about Emerson's work, that the personal essay continues to be devalued because of its reliance on and celebration of its transparent relationship to its author. In general, essayists don't complain in their work about the belief in this transparent relationship; they advocate it. Thus, my purpose is not to suggest that there is no relationship between the essayist and the essay. Rather, I will, in the latter half of the article, turn to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, which describes and enacts an approach to an other (writer/text) that does not hinge on the assumption that writer and text are in a transparent relationship to each other. I hope that in presenting this possibility for re‐thinking the essay (and its relationship to its writer), writers, scholars, and teachers of the essay—and even its opposition—will give it new attention and explore further the possibilities that it may provide for engagement, for encounter.

An Englishwoman's Workhouse is her Castle: Poor Management and Gothic Fiction in the 1790s

An Englishwoman's Workhouse is Her Castle:Poor Management and Gothic Fiction in the 1790s Scott R. Mackenzie The young unmarried woman in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction may be the most overdetermined character in all of English literature. She is always surrounded by a throng of themes, contests, anxieties, polemics, and proprieties. She has been asked, and often coerced, to represent domestic harmony, the aspiring middle class, patriotic sentiment, reproductive sexuality, and the community of taste and decency. Among her responsibilities are paternity, legitimacy, property, social relations, and the maintenance or overthrow of aristocratic privilege. She is endangered and dangerous, innocent and guilty, prudent and wasteful, modest and brazen. Her admirers call her proto-feminist, exogamous, and duplicitous, and her detractors charge her with the same. The young single woman is in fact double, or indeed multiple. She is, as recent critics have thoroughly established, a privileged locus for the identification and examination of collective anxieties. My purpose here is to add yet another determinant to the list that already encumbers our heroine. She is also very frequently the focus of anxiety about the poor. Debates about poverty acquire sufficient cultural prominence in Britain by the end of the eighteenth century to inflect most prose fiction of the period, and, most often, it is the young unmarried woman who carries the burden of figuration. She embodies the vulnerabilities of the poor and the dangers they pose, and from her fortunes we may generally derive ideological formations relevant to matters of poor management. Of course the relationship between poverty debates and fiction does not work in one direction only. The vogue for sentiment provided vocabulary and attitudes for talking about the poor. Indeed, sentimentalism arguably began as a mode of talking about (and sometimes to) the poor. The bleeding of sentimental language into political discourse is especially notable around the turn of the century, when philanthropic benevolence became more and more institutional and national and advocates of the poor formed alliances with evangelical activists such as [End Page 681] Hannah More and the abolitionist William Wilberforce. Sir Egerton Brydges, MP for Maidstone, writes in 1813, "Never before did I meet with a subject in which the driest details of business were associated with all the best furniture of a poetic mind; where the blaze of fancy, and the best emotions of the heart could throw the truest, the most philosophical, and most virtuous light on a complicated subject of artificial legislation."1 As prominent traffickers in sentimental language, novelists could hardly avoid comparing the attributes and experiences of unmarried women with those of the poor. When we compare representations of single women and paupers we will find striking similarities in the kinds of condemnation or sympathy, bitter or happy endings they receive. At the same time, radical and anti-sentimental writers like Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld contested the terminology proposed by sentimental authors but affirmed the urgency of the poverty debates. The French Revolution, the decay of parish governance, and the wage and food-price crises of the 1790s and 1800s forced most, if not all, representations of British nationality to reckon with the underclasses. Gothic fiction of the 1790s, I will argue, is especially dense with rhetorical and thematic echoes of the poor debates, and the reverse is certainly also true. My exemplary text is Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest, a work published in 1791. Radcliffe's work anticipated, and undoubtedly influenced, a remarkable portion of the topoi and attitudes that came to dominate poor-law discourse until around 1815. Her novels, and the gothic fiction of her era generally, are deeply involved not only with digesting fears about what was happening in France but also with sustaining a much longer cultural conversation about the poor in England. If sentimental fiction codified personal affective responses to individual examples of poverty and suffering, the first major wave of gothic fiction deals in personal and political encounters with collective bodies of the poor—figuring contests over regulation and discipline of the poor as battles between private subjects and mysterious, implacable mechanisms of coercion. Following Radcliffe's lead, both novelists and poor-law advocates...

Justice Excused: The Deployment of Law in Everyday Political Encounters

This paper examines the use of legal claims by government officials and citizens in everyday political encounters involving civil rights. Data come from 580 letters sent to the federal government between 1939 and 1941, and from the replies sent by the newly formed Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. In almost every case, the department refused to intervene and explained its refusal by making legal claims about federal jurisdiction. These legal claims masked the department's discretionary choices and thus helped depoliticize the encounters. Surprisingly, however, a substantial number of letter writers challenged the government's legal claims by deploying their own legal and moral arguments. The willingness of these citizens to challenge official legal pronouncements cautions against making broad generalizations about the capacity of ordinary people to respond effectively when government officials deploy legal rhetoric.

The One Thing She Would Not Do

The One Thing She Would Not Do Daniel Stern (bio) The imperfect is our paradise . . . - Wallace Stevens "So she says to me, all right, we're on - I'm game for anything - but there's one thing I absolutely will not do." Don't forget, this is Jay Florenz talking to me. Jay whose life with women - and money - has been the mystery, the irritation, and occasionally, the envy, of his friends for decades. For some reason he is telling me, openly, naming names, about the strangest sexual encounter of his life. And this is some life we're dealing with here! Rushing to Tangiers, on the tail of a stolen Veronese, being escorted to the airport at Madrid by the Guardia Civil because he had sold a Goya to a movie producer, all the while knowing that the Spanish government took the dimmest view of allowing the great Spanish masterpieces to leave the country. You may say, well, this was a commercial, a political encounter, but with Jay the female element is always lurking around the edges of his experiences. As it turned out, he had bought the Goya from a Spanish beauty whose grandfather worked for both Franco and the Republicans and was said to still be an excellent shot. A married Spanish beauty, as if I had to add that - there had to be something dangerous, something complicated, something difficult in all Jay's sexual and romantic liaisons. Oh, he's a Distinguished Professor of Art History now, covered with honors instead of kisses and money. But at the time we're talking about, Jay's was mainly a moment of stolen kisses and borrowed money. He was a hot-shot critic, making and breaking reputations in Art News and ArtForum, occasionally the New York Times on Sunday. But that had not yet translated into cash. When the eighties arrived and gave birth to a storm of art buying, Jay's expertise was much in demand. People who were pushing Jenny Holzer and Julian Schnabel needed a lot of academic backup to help hold up those heavy-duty prices that made the art market of the eighties such a scandal - at least, now, from the vantage [End Page 71] point of later years. You know, the way you can point out the similarity between Cy Twombly's graffiti and Tiepolo's scribbles around the periphery of the big altar pieces. That kind of thing makes a big buyer feel a lot more secure when he's writing out a check with more zeros than he'd planned on. Which is how Jay first met Shirley Schoenberg, the sister of the woman who would do anything except one thing. Have I mentioned Jay's integrity? The man would slip an Old Master out of a country that wanted to keep it - that was just business. But when it came to artistic judgments, I mean he was infected with integrity like a virus. He would make a comparison between a great master and a current artist only if he believed it in his soul and his art historian's intellect. Otherwise, he would shake his head and decline. He first met Shirley Schoenberg at an opening - where else? Shirley ran the seedy little gallery which bore her name, Shoenberg, not Shirley, almost far enough downtown to be called SoHo and not far enough uptown to be within scratching distance of Fifty-seventh Street. The opening, though, was at the Marlborough Gallery: Maurice Lowenfeld, Jay's buddy from his Paris adventure days was showing those giant canvases, almost empty, just brushed lightly with a woman's shape, or an automobile fender, but drawn and painted with the lyricism of an Ingres. "I would have loved it if this guy had walked through the doors of my gallery with one of these." This, to Jay who stood next to her gazing with that sad straight look of his at the painting. Whether or not she knew who Jay was at that moment is not clear. "Maybe she knew," Jay told me, "Or maybe not. It was the kind of impulsive thing Shirley was given to." And in Jay's ever alert...

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PERFORMANCE: THE INTERWEAVING OF POLITICS AND AESTHETICS IN INTERCULTURAL CONTEXTS

Dance performances in ceremonial and other intercultural political encounters in north‐east Arnhem Land strive to achieve several general goals: to achieve co‐presence through forms of participation; to engage total attention through a movement backward and forward between different levels of intensity or feeling; and to express something beyond what is represented. How are we to talk about participation? What are its critical components? What is its role in the effectiveness of performances? In locating the meaning of Yolngu dance performances in aesthetic experience—a modality of participation—the author explores the nature of this participation as a doing that accomplishes itself in the single act of its production and reception. Beyond symbolism and structure, referential meaning and exegesis, the force of performance is in the first instance itself, in its very actualization, in the responsibility it demands of performer and public to create the conditions of possibility for the social to realize itself, through a series of investments involving reciprocal recognition, engagement, commitment and accountability.

Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East 1570-1626 (review)

Reviewed by: Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East 1570–1626 Jyotsna G. Singh (bio) Richmond Barbour. Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East 1570–1626 Cambridge University Press. xii, 238. $80.95 In Before Orientalism, Richmond Barbour offers us rich insights into manifestations of theatricality in selected texts and contexts that relate England to the 'East': Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603); Marlowe's Tamburlaine; Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra; selected royal spectacles and civic entertainments (mostly Jacobean); and the travels and writings of Thomas Coryate. Moving beyond a typically Eurocentric perspective on Renaissance England, Barbour takes us on a journey from London's spectacles of the 'East' to the theatrical and political encounters of Thomas Coryate and Sir Thomas Roe in Moghul India. In his introduction, Barbour examines the 'cultural logistics' of England's eastern initiative. Overall, the author looks afresh at the theatrum mundi trope, while capturing the way in which it informs and energizes English constructions of the 'East.' Here Barbour draws on the familiar critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, as he cautions against focusing on 'the West's constructions of the East, while ignoring reversals, hybrid permutations, and offsetting triangulations of that dynamic.' At the same time, Barbour [End Page 407] distinguishes 'domestic constructions' of the 'East' from Europe's 'strategic and economic relations' that reveal more tolerance for non-Europeans. Richard Knolles's demonizing representations of Islam are the focus of the first chapter. Using a few passages, Barbour explores Knolles's emphases on the theatricality of Ottoman power as well as its 'slothfull and effeminate' attributes. Overall, Barbour offers a limited historical analysis of Knolles. Instead, he reads it more as a 'drama for English readers,' while linking the 'antitheatricalist and masculine discourses' to a 'proto-orientalist critique ... [of] eastern shows of opulence and power.' In the next chapter on 'Asiatic themes and trappings on the London stage,' Barbour's discussion of Tamburlaine covers many areas, ranging from humanist debates about rhetoric to Elizabethan 'politics of spectacle,' but without a consistent focus on the play's constructions of the 'East.' Neither does the author acknowledge recent work by Shankar Raman and others on the play's investment in discourses of discovery. The traditional, conservative reading of Antony and Cleopatra that follows is based on a binary opposition: 'Rome asserts itself as a place of discipline, premeditation, rationality ... [while] Egypt knows itself as a carnivalesque zone of excess, impulsive self-dramatization ... compelling eroticism, transcendence, deliquescence, death.' Thus, he precludes a more complex, dialectical perspective on the play's conflicts, which, since Janet Adelman's early work, has now become a critical commonplace. Instead, in his explorations of the 'topoi of orientalism' in the play, Barbour seems to overlook the more 'hybrid permutations' that he calls for in his introduction. The next, enlightening chapter explores representations of 'the East' in civic, courtly, and professional entertainments. While conflating classical and exotic themes, and frequently representing a 'fabulous, not empirical geography,' these spectacles reveal a tendency to convey 'Exotic splendor, not ethnographic precision.' Significantly, as Barbour demonstrates, these 'proto-orientalist' productions produce a 'haphazard ethnography ... despite the increasing contacts between English subjects and peoples overseas.' In chapter 4, Barbour examines the writings of an important but frequently overlooked figure, Thomas Coryate, whom he labels 'Britain's first modern tourist and travel writer,' since he went to India 'with no commitment to trade.' Here, Barbour shows us how Coryate's commodification of travel exemplifies an 'emergent attitude of modernism,' while also functioning as a 'logical extension of commercial Jacobean appetites.' The final chapter, on Sir Thomas Roe, offers an enlightening section on 'The London Company's discursive regime.' Here Barbour illuminates how the East India Company developed a novel system of surveillance - of information-gathering and record-keeping - that became a model for later forms of corporate control. In addition, we also see how Roe's eyewitness accounts of the Moghul Court's 'power on display' reveal the limits of self-aggrandizing, Jacobean self-representations. The fact that Roe is absent [End Page 408] from the Moghul emperor's memoirs is a telling detail that Barbour deploys in looking at English history...

Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000

Melani McAlister's exploration of United States cultural and political encounters with the Middle East since 1945 is indeed epic, providing a wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis of the “cultural logic” behind America's expansionist foreign policy. Focusing on American representations of the Middle East in novels and movies, discussions of ancient history and religion, and constructions of race, McAlister argues that those cultural texts helped to shape the U.S. debate over its national identity and over its hegemonic role in the world. She situates “the history of U.S. global power at the heart of the study of U.S. cultures” while giving “culture a central place in an analysis of the production and reproduction of U.S. power.” Rejecting models in which either ruling elites or policy makers and the public rationally determine the national interest, McAlis-ter emphasizes “the significance of cultural production in the making of interests.” Of course, tangible economic and geopolitical forces, and not cultural products per se, defined U.S. goals in the Middle East. But McAlister's warning not to assume that cultural texts “merely ‘reflect’ or ‘reproduce’ some preexisting social reality” is well taken. In addition, she perceptively goes beyond the orientalist model, advanced by Edward Said and others, to argue that after 1945 the United States offered itself as an “alternative to European power/knowledge” and political domination over the Middle East.

Telling Transitions At The Table: Re-Served Seats of Higher Learning?

This paper traces the transitions of first year students and other adults of the university as they partake in an intergenerational shared inquiry at a common table. My transformative research invites students, faculty, and staff to attend to (eat) and transform (digest) the moral and political encounters in successive becomings from their speaking positions at a common table. This dialogical partaking of words disrupts the market discourse of student as consumer and re-stories the university as a service organization where all organizational actors are consuming and being consumed. Eating together and telling transitions dissolve boundaries between service and knowledge, between students and other organizational actors, between serving and being served. To transform my writing into a service encounter, I re-present my research as the serving up of a multi-storied, multi-course meal at a common table. Bon appetit!