Postmodern Experience Research Articles

Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Teresa Heffernan . Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth-Century Novel. University of Toronto Press. 2008. 224. $50.00 Reading through an opposition between 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' Teresa Heffernan considers the role of what she calls 'post-apocalyptic' thinking in the twentieth-century novel in English. Her introduction explains her focus on the end of Endings in narrative and the implications of that shift for four very large topics: 'The End,' 'History,' 'Nation,' and 'Man.' Each is subdivided into two chapters to address the topic in terms of modernism and postmodernism respectively. 'The End' focuses on 'Characters in Search of an End' (Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury) and 'Viral Endings' (DeLillo's White Noise). 'History' focuses on 'Modernism and the End of the End of History' (Ford's The Good Soldier) and 'Futures That Have Not Been: Postmodernism and the Limits of History' (Morrison's Beloved). 'Nation' focuses on 'Apocalyptic Communities: The European Nation, Islam, and Hinduism' (Forster's Passage to India) and 'Unveiling Nations' (Rushdie's Midnight's Children). 'Man' focuses on 'Anti-Apocalypse and the New Man' (D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse) and 'The 'Fag End' Again and the New Woman' (Carter's Nights at the Circus). The conclusion briefly discusses 'The Return of End Times' (Derrida's suggestion contra Michel Houellebecq's Elementary Particles that announcements of the End of Man may be premature). Despite these large, even heady topics, the discussion in each section consists mainly of literary readings of the eight texts just mentioned, and these readings are the best thing about this book. They are intelligent and sometimes venturesome as, for example, in the challenge to conventional readings of Beloved. The ingenious organizational strategy allows the author to exfoliate (or in some cases to wander far) from the literary text into a range of issues as wide as the author wants to make it, sometimes to world political news, sometimes to a background theory. This kind of organizational strategy is valuable in an era when methodological change is so urgently required. And in her literary interpretations [End Page 365] Heffernan shows signs of the important ability to write in a personal voice. I particularly appreciate the genuinely interdisciplinary qualities of the book. The title claims incorrectly that she covers 'the Twentieth-Century Novel.' She uses novels originally written in English, a tradition that has not been a hotbed of interest with regard to postmodern experiment and adventure. Very occasional references outside English-language novels do not make up the deficit. Confinement to English may explain the lack of definition concerning the key terms, modern and postmodern, which Heffernan uses as if their meaning were settled and were not highly contested and divergent, depending on where 'modern' begins (1400? 1750? 1900?). To pose this question of definition compromises the value of those terms in making a case, and the terms do seem to function mainly as a way of providing a divide in each part, leaving undefined what is at stake in the general shift it implies. In conducting her argument, Heffernan cites her authorities (e.g., Kermode, Kant, Connor Cruise O'Brien, Derrida, Fukuyama, Spivak) as if citing them carries the point and nothing is required of her. Once we get a brief reference to a theorist or interpreter, the discussion leaves the relatively clear discussion of a literary text and rambles in ways that are sometimes pleasing but rely far too heavily on passing allusions to theories whose relevance is not explained or shown. Her choice of sources is sometimes perplexing; for example, she claims to discuss 'Postmodernism and the Limits of History,' yet does not cite a single discussion by any of those who currently write on that topic (Ankersmit, Berkhofer, Jenkins, Munslow, White, and even - full disclosure - the present writer); instead she opts for the highly compromised Fukuyama. Or she touches on the question concerning Christianity as a source of history but without appearing to be aware of the Ur-source on this topic is Karl Löwith's Meaning in History. Nobody can read everything, but everybody has an obligation to cover...

Not Just a Detective Novel: Trauma, Memory and Narrative Form in Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Summary This article argues that Peter Høeg's “detective novel”, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, contains many elements relevant to postmodern and postcolonial experience. Smilla, the main character, who seeks answers to the death of a young Inuit boy in Denmark, encounters, in a profound way, the complexities of postmodern subjectivity, blended with postcolonial issues of identity formation and the power imbalances extant in any colonialist system. The journey of self-discovery Smilla undergoes in the narrative is the real “detective story”, and cannot be untangled from the wider political story of Danish colonialism of Greenland, and the encounter between the two cultures. There is no neat “answer” to the problems of colonialism and the hybrid identities formed out of it. At best the future belongs to a continued and traumatic “Middle Passage” where past and present interchange so thoroughly that any journey towards a teleological future or “closure” is one fraught with trauma and suffering.

Attuned Listening in Ricardo Piglia’s Plata quemada

This article argues that Ricardo Piglia’s novel Plata quemada should be read not simply as a postmodern experiment in polyvocal narration but as a collage of sounds of all kinds, of which voices are but one, and which should be experienced “musically.” An attuned listening is proposed as a way to approach the text. This listening is modeled on the Lacanian psychoanalyst who seeks to attend to the articulations of the analys and without imposing his or her ego onto the process of analysis. This approach to the novel does not close itself off through guilt, defensiveness, emotionality, or narcissism, but rather attends to the form of the text rather than interpreting its content. By attuning our reading to the complex and intimate music that makes up a novel, we can begin to understand the ways that form renders intelligible complex social formations and subject positions. This offers a reading of the novel that it is attentive to its formal and technological interest in addition to its political concerns.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth‐Century Literature and Theory

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Making Time: Narrative Temporality in Twentieth‐Century Literature and Theory

The Post-Modern Shift

As in other parts of the world, a deep sense of displacement, insecurity and cultural crisis has been provoked in Southeast Asia by the capitalist transfor mation of local economies and the erosion of relatively secure traditional social and value systems in the wake of globalisation. New forms of religiosity have arisen in response to the challenges of a new and increasingly post-modern way of life. In this special issue we explore how the innovative features of new forms of religiosity reflect people's changing personal and social needs under the condition of an increasingly urbanised and globalised life experience. Some of the defining socio-cultural features of the modern and, more so, the post-modern experience include a profound sense of social isolation or lack of community, a growing individualism and consumerism, heightened exposure to cultural difference through the electronic media and increased human mobility, together with an unprecedented degree of cultural and reli gious self-awareness at the level of local society. These factors can generate a perceived need for strengthening local traditions, while also seeking to adjust and adapt these traditions to the demands of greater global interdependence and a more self-conscious sense of identity. Peoples attitude towards local traditions, however, is not shaped by cultural factors alone. The revitalisations of local religious identities that are currently taking place in many parts of Southeast Asia are also pragmatic and strategic responses to a growing sense of disenfranchisement which stems from the misappropriation of local material resources and from assaults on local systems of moral and political authority by the nation-state or by multinational capitalism. In this special issue, the contributors, thus, seek to shed light on the revi talisation of local traditions and the emergence of new forms of religiosity while paying particular attention to the processes of social change in which these new forms of religiosity are embedded. In contemporary Southeast Asia, a sense of cultural crisis and fragmentation has been felt with particularly acuteness, generating demand for innovative or transformative ideas about a

<i>Documentation: A History and Critique of Attributions, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Documentation: A History and Critique of Attributions, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis Emily Drabinski Documentation: A History and Critique of Attributions, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis. By Robert Hauptman. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008. 240 pp. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-7864-3333-9. It has been said that if you open any serious knitter's closet, a dozen unfinished sweaters will come tumbling out. Somehow, it's the edges and seams that are the hardest to complete. Documentation—footnotes and endnotes, maps and graphs, works-cited lists, and so on—is the scholar's sleeves and collars, tidied up largely at the behest of editors and their incessant deadlines. Robert Hauptman seeks to shift the ancillary and the marginal from the closets to the center of book history in this lively scholarly monograph. Hauptman begins by making his case for giving documentation our attention. He opens his text with a brief discussion of why we cite, locating the reasons for documentation in six admittedly "sometimes mutually exclusive purposes," including "acknowledgement, attribution, tracing, validation, protection against accusations of misconduct, and tangential substantive commentary" (7). He [End Page 501] grounds the process of documentation in contexts of both history and meaning. Hauptman briefly traces documentation's history, beginning with the call to hail one's predecessors in the oral tradition and taking its story up to the increasingly specialized citation requirements of contemporary scholarly publishing that plague particularly the sciences. With these overviews in hand Hauptman examines documentation thematically, exploring eight aspects, including commentary and its role in Talmudic scholarship and medieval texts, the purpose of marginal notes (both published and those made by readers in their own copies of texts), the place of maps and illustrations in texts, and the histories of citation systems. The book is amply illustrated, and the pages reproduced from the Book of Hours and Diderot's Encyclopedia beg for an edition in color and on fine paper, the better to display documentation systems that sometimes reach the level of art. Hauptman covers a lot of territory here, displaying a remarkable breadth of knowledge both on the subject of citation (he marshals a broader range of documentation scholars than the reader would have thought exists) and on the history of literature in general. In this relatively brief volume Hauptman evokes Eliot, Coleridge, and Joyce; David Foster Wallace and Jacques Derrida; Isaac Newton and the benzene ring of Friedrich August Kekulé. Hauptman's engaging embellished history of documentation is nevertheless forged around a solid scholarly account. He often becomes emotionally engaged in his subject, for example, bemoaning the demise of the footnote at the hands of cost-cutting publishing houses and calling the advent of Web-based bibliographies a "barbarism" (125). Simply because documentation often appears neutral doesn't mean Hauptman has to be. Hauptman saves the bulk of his criticism for postmodern experiments with documentation. He pays special attention to Jacques Derrida's Glas, a book that deliberately plays with font styles and text placements in order to call into question the structure of printed texts themselves. Calling this "a type of madness" that "succeeds admirably, to the point of total confusion" (101), Hauptman resists the postmodern tendency to shift and play with structure. Ultimately, Hauptman's scholarly affections are reserved not simply for the structures of documentation themselves but for the order they impose. While the contemporary reader might balk at his wholesale dismissal of postmodernism and other trends, Hauptman succeeds in opening a conversation that, prior to Documentation, would likely not have taken place at all. [End Page 502] Emily Drabinski Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus Copyright © 2009 University of Texas Press

Os olhares dos acadêmicos de cinema da UFPEL sobre os espaços urbanos: um estudo de recepção

The research aims at observing the circumstances of reception of a documentary film about urban spaces produced by film students of the Federal University of Pelotas/RS (UFPEL). The theoretical and methodological view focuses on the reception these spaces on the perspective of interculturalities (García Canclini, 2006a) and the reconfiguration of the meanings of urban life (Martín-Barbero, 2005). Data were collected in six interviews with these students. The central objective is to observe how their cultural practices are articulated in the urban spaces, from their postmodern experience in Latin America. Key words: reception and production, urban spaces, cultural studies.

Of Other Places: The Garden as a Heterotopic Site in Contemporary Art

According to Michel Foucault, a heterotopia is a site where the differentiation between a location and its temporality is related to theoretical and societal concerns that challenge the notion of history, location, and subjectivity. Contemporary artists such as Stan Douglas and Hew Locke utilize the garden as heterotopic space for intervention in their work in order to investigate and challenge linear notions of time, space and subjectivity. Stan Douglas examines the historical and social underpinnings of the community gardens in early nineteenth century Northern Europe, otherwise known as the potsdamer schrebergärten, and recreates the tableau of the garden in his piece, Der Sandman. Similarly, artist Hew Locke draws upon the art of the topiary and creates an assemblage topiary sculpture, titled Black Queen, where found objects are utilized to recontextualize the concept of the garden topiary as a site of a postcolonial experience. This article investigates the way that nature, in this case the garden, is utilized and represented in contemporary art. By analyzing and applying Foucault’s lecture, “Of Other Spaces” and definition of heterotopias to the work of artists such as Douglas and Locke, the paper aims to illuminate the connection between site and subjectivity, and the multiplicity of meaning that results from the garden as being the quintessential site of postmodern experience.

From Archetype to Stereotype: a Postmodern Re–reading of the American South

This study proposes an approach to Southern culture as a perpetually re–written/re–read text that survives by successive re–contextualizations of its fundamental patterns. Relying on fictional and non–fictional representations, the paper follows the trajectory of the plantation as an epitome of the South from the status of archetypal model to that of stereotype, showing how the latter ironically acquires the power of the former, and becomes the very source of misconceptions or simplifying perceptions. Ultimately, as we are going to show, this shift is part of the continuous process of negotiation supported by the basic human need to assimilate otherness and define ourselves in relation with it. In order to illustrate this negotiation, the paper examines a number of contemporary Southern writers, who, by re–reading/re–writing the heritage of their native region, and projecting it into new forms of expression meant to accommodate post–modern experiences, attempt to reconcile a double crisis: of their own identity against the background of their native region, and of their native region against the background of contemporary history.

At Play: Matthew Jocelyn’s Production of The Liar by Pierre Corneille

The notion of shattering the comfortable complicity between audience and performers is not new, but a recent production at the Stratford Festival took the idea in some refreshing and provocative directions. The play at issue, Pierre Corneille’s comedy The Liar (Le menteur), might seem an unlikely candidate for postmodern experimentation. It is rarely performed in English – unlike the plays of Corneille’s comic successor, Molière (who reportedly decided to become a playwright after seeing Le menteur). In the hands of the Toronto-born-and-raised, France-based director Matthew Jocelyn, however, Corneille’s seventeenth-century classic became a thoroughly modern theatrical enterprise.

The Post-Modern Student

The differences between present-day post-modern students and educators from older generations require changes in educational approach, but also challenge post-modern trends. Students' postmodern experiences may lead them to seek individuality among diverse sources of identity, seeing knowledge as a throwaway consumption good, and education promotes flexibility and “edutainment.” However, professional education trains people for structured managerialist organisations and the accumulation of shared professional knowledge. Social work education needs to be reframed as a process of emergence in which educators and students work jointly to create knowledge and identity in their professional area. To operate in an increasingly complex and changing society, students need to create a strong professional identity and learn how to transfer knowledge and values from one situation to another. In this way, social work education connects with the Danish managerial concept of “chaos pilots” in which students are prepared to deal with cultural and social change.

Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955-1964) (review)

Reviewed by: Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955-1964) Stacey Prickett Mark Franko , Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer and Studio for Dance (1955–1964), Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6744-2 Mark Franko's Excursion for Miracles focuses predominantly on Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer and their Studio for Dance in New York City, offering fresh insight into the emergence of American postmodern dance between 1955 to 1964. Although absent from the dance history canon, at least in the UK, their influence extends to the European avant-garde, exemplified by their former dancer Pina Bausch. Drawing on critical theory and ethnographic research from his time performing in Sanasardo's company, Franko aims to 'shift emphasis from Judson Dance Theatre as the only site of innovative choreography for that period' (xiv). Evocative readings of evening-length performances reveal diverse representational strategies out of which a new type of political voice emerged, divergent from the danced expressions of social consciousness of the 1930s and postmodern experiments of the 1960s. Excursion combines multiple methodological strands in historical recovery and analysis. Densely packed with photographs and extensive primary source material, the book moves back and forth chronologically and thematically, facilitating its use for undergraduate and postgraduate students. Chapter 1 [End Page 169] locates Sanasardo and Feuer within the larger dance community and detailsthe vibrant artistic environment of their studio. An evocative account of Laughter After All (1964) comprises Chapter 2, revealing a multi-disciplinary and highly theatrical collaboration, tracing the transformation of eclectic inspirational sources into surreal and at times maniacal actions, juxtaposing absurd and dark imagery. Deeply personal reflections are peppered throughout, taken from Franko's interviews with Sanasardo, Feuer and some of their dancers. Another aspect of Sanasardo and Feuer's legacy is seen in their unique work with children, explored in Chapter Three. In Dust for Sparrows (1958), a haunting duet with Feuer, ten-year-old Judith Blackstone tentatively walks downstage with her eyes shut, moving ever closer to the abyss beyond the stage. The young dancers who worked with the company appear as mature beyond their years, performing in roles which were uncharacteristic for their age. Parts of Chapter 4, 'Unexploded Bombs: Formal Reduction and the Libidinal Aesthetic', would be challenging for those uninitiated in the Frankfurt School of critical theory, Marxism and post-structuralism. A 'diagrammatic mapping' (p. 105) of three New York locales referenced in dances frames theoretical discourse on diverse political issues: the representation of women, expression of gay male identity, alienation and reification. The gems of historical research expand to consider Martha Graham's celebrity status and Paul Taylor's infamous Seven New Dances (1957). Franko clarifies the record in terms of Taylor's prescient use of an everyday gestural vocabulary seen in later postmodern dances. The last chapter, Five Theses and a Coda pulls together the multiple strands, followed by some of Sanasardo's essays and a chronology. Although their choreography has had minimal exposure, Franko's readings and contextualisation of Sanasardo's and Feuer's work situates them at the vanguard of an alternative postmodern aesthetic generally taught as emerging years later. Copyright © 2006 Society for Dance Research

THE RETURN OF THE SOCIAL

This article is concerned with the social exclusion agenda in contemporary French cultural policy, exploring the relevance of aspects of postcolonial theory to an understanding of that agenda. The tensions involved in recent attempts to evolve policies addressing interculturalism, integration and “emergent” cultures (such as hip‐hop) while also staying true to the French republican tradition of universalism are illuminated by France’s problematic relationship with its colonial past. They are also shown to be related to a wider movement of post‐industrial, postmodern experimentation with aesthetic forms, from video and computer art to street arts, free parties and electronic dance music.

Paradigms of paranoia: the culture of conspiracy in contemporary American fiction

The recent popularity of The DaVinci Code and The Matrix trilogy exemplifies the fascination Americans have with conspiracy-driven subjects. Though scholars have suggested that in modern times the JFK assassination initiated an industry of conspiracy (i.e., Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Area 51, Iran-Contra Affair), Samuel Chase Coale reminds us in this book that conspiracy is founda-tional in American culture - from the apocalyptic Biblical narratives in early Calvinist households to the fear of Mormon, Catholic, Jewish, and immigrant populations in the 19th century. Coale argues that contemporary culture - a landscape characterized by doubt, ambigulty, fragmentation, information overload, and mistrust - has fostered a radical skepticism so pervasive that the tendency to envision or construct conspiracies often provides the best explanation for the chaos that surrounds us. Conspiracy as embodied in narrative form provides a fertile field for explorations of the anxiety lying at the heart of the postmodern experience. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Don DeLilio's Underworld, Toni Morrison's Jazz and Paradise, Joan Didlon's Democracy, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, and Paul Auster's New York City Trilogy are some of the texts Coale examines for their representations of isolated individuals at the center of massive, anonymous master plots that lay beyond their control. These narratives remind us that our historical sense of national identity has often been based on the demonizing of others and that American fiction arose and still flourishes with apocalyptic visions - in the very marrow of its narrative bones.

Family, kinship, memory and temporality in the age of the new genetics

The new genetics has now become an integral part of contemporary biomedicine, promising great advances in alleviating disease. Like any scientific endeavor, beliefs in the new genetics tend to give new meanings to people's lives and therefore have significant implications for people's lived experience. Drawing on fieldwork in the USA and research in various literatures, the aim of this article is to explore the role the new genetics plays in mainstream American society as revealed in people's narratives of their families’ medical histories. An anthropological analysis of these narratives illuminates multilayered cultural meanings of genetic inheritance and the role biomedical conceptualizations play not only in explaining disease etiologies and treatment, but also in addressing concerns that bear on the postmodern experience of family, kinship, choice, memory, time-space, relatedness, sociality and immortality.

A.S. Byatt and the heliotropic imagination

A.S. Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance attracted international acclaim in 1990, winning both the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. In her long and eminent career, Byatt has steadily published both fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which has not, until now, been given full critical consideration. Enter Jane Campbell's new book, A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, a comprehensive critical reading of Byatt's fiction from The Shadow of the Sun and The Game, published in the 1960s, to A Whistling Woman (2002). The book begins with an overview of Byatt's writing and, drawing on her interviews and essays, sets forth the critical principles that inform the novelist's work. Following this introduction, a chronologically structured account of the novels and short stories traces Byatt's literary development. As well as exploring the ways in which Byatt has successfully negotiated a path between twentieth-century realism and postmodern experiment, Campbell employs a critical perspective appropriate to the author's individualistic feminist stance, stressing the breadth of Byatt's intellectual concerns and her insistence on placing her female characters in a living, changing context of ideas and experience, especially in their search for creative voice.

The late "invisible hand" in Design

This text aims to discuss the effects of the cultural logic of late capitalism in the field of Design, both on its professional and educational aspects - on the inception and production of projects, regarding questions that guide the fragmented subject, also owner of fragmented visions, inserted in the logic of the society of the spectacle, of image strength, which produce and proceed to the world of culture, art, technique, and human imagination. This article aims to emphasize the formation process of the designer, amidst the power of merchandising, and as a symbolic producer of product value, immersed in the characteristic fragmentation of the post-modern experience.

Diaspora, cultural practice and syncretic visuality

This paper offers an investigation of the relationship between diaspora, cultural practices and the field of visuality studies. Since the groundbreaking work of Edward Said, there have been ample studies on the formation of a colonial Western gaze which has objectified people living in the non‐West, indigenous populations in colonised or formerly colonised nations and migrant groups in Western societies. More attention needs to be given, however, to the visualities produced by these very subjects. Such visualities demonstrate transculturation and autoethnography in the context of global visual politics and are often a contestation of both colonial and exclusionary nationalist visualities. This paper specifically explores the syncretic quality of visualities produced by subjects of the postmodern diasporic experience—in this case, the photographers Hou Leong and Yean Leng Lim who have experienced the Chinese diaspora in the Australian context. It argues that such syncretism is produced through an intercultural mixing of visual regimes and that diasporic visuality often exhibits an ironic and critical dimension (i.e. a critical syncretism) that challenges norms of nationalist subjectivity and culture.

Et Tu, Fair Use? The Triumph of Natural Law Copyright

Since its advent in 1841, the fair use doctrine has been hailed as a powerful check on the limited monopoly granted by copyright. Fair use, we are told, protects public access to the building blocks of creation and advances research and criticism. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom about fair use. Far from protecting the public domain, the fair use doctrine has played a central role in the triumph of a natural law vision of copyright that privileges the inherent property interests of authors in the fruits of their labor over the utilitarian goal of progress in the arts. Thus, the fair use doctrine has actually enabled the expansion of the copyright monopoly well beyond its original bounds and has undermined the goals of the copyright system as envisioned by the Framers. Specifically, the Article first analyzes the anti-monopolistic impetus for federal copyright protection and reflects on the original understanding of copyright as epitomized by a series of early cases on the rights of translation and abridgement. The Article then examines the impact of the fair use doctrine on the copyright monopoly and progress in the arts. All told, the Article calls for a serious reassessment of the role of fair use in the infringement calculus, especially in an age where networked computers and malleable digital content has enabled new forms of artistic and post-modern experimentation.

New Zealand as Middle Earth: Local and Global Popular Communication in a Small Nation

The shift of the research gaze from First World concerns and research questions to the different imperatives of a small nation such as New Zealand enables scrutiny of many conventional assumptions made about globalizing processes, children's evolving public spaces, and commodified culture. New Zealand provides an invaluable site to explore the processes creating the postmodern cultural experiences of globalized popular communication. Children in New Zealand respond as joyously as children in San Jose and Sheffield to the pleasures of global popular communication, but we argue that the global can only be tracked in the ways it emerges in a variety of local/ities. Researching the particular experiences of children in a small South Pacific nation also highlights the range of challenges faced by public intellectuals in a period of rapid global technical, economic, and cultural change.