Rhetoric Of Progress Research Articles

Non-Western Scholars, Bourgeois Virtues, and the International Scientific Community in the Age of Empire, 1870–1920

AbstractHistorians have long argued that science was fashioned as a bourgeois, Western cultural practice by the late nineteenth century, in ways that allowed its practitioners to exclude or distance themselves – through a rhetoric of endeavour, utilitarianism, and progress – from the more useless, ‘frivolous’ learning of aristocrats, women, or, indeed, native ‘informants’ in the colonies. This article examines the case of scholars from outside northern Europe and North America – Japanese literati, creole intellectuals, and Lebanese scholars – who managed to participate in the period’s Western scientific networks as peers. It holds that these men were able to establish epistemic credibility not because their lower rung in a political and racial hierarchy was ever irrelevant, but because their status as upper-middle-class professionals and their bourgeois habitus – their ‘civility’, and ‘manners’ – in some measure made up for it. The article reveals, rather than forthright ‘exclusion’ and ‘silencing’ of non-Europeans, complex epistemic hierarchies and geographies of knowledge. It exposes the mechanisms of epistemic inclusion and its limits in the period: the functioning of an academic community that was – in many, rather significant ways – also a social world.

‘When the house burns down’: displacement, precariousness and inhabitation

ABSTRACT Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban conditions of the present.

Development or dispossession? Exploring the consequences of a major Chinese investment in rural Cambodia

ABSTRACT China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is facilitating massive infrastructure investment globally. Yet little is known about the BRI's local impacts, especially in countries like Cambodia where regulations are weak and government enthusiasm for the BRI is high. This article examines a set of BRI-linked investments in rural Cambodia, involving five agro-industrial concessions and a sugar-processing factory. We explore how these investments interacted with the local political economy and land governance. We find that, despite being couched in rhetoric of opportunity and progress, the investments caused Indigenous and Khmer villagers to lose access to customary land and forest resources, with disastrous consequences for livelihoods and the environment. We invoke Tsing's ‘economy of appearances' to suggest that generation of speculative value is a key aspect of the BRI. This case confirms that ‘development’ of this kind can instigate and accelerate local dispossession, while failing to deliver on grandiose promises.

The XXV Años de Paz Española: the invention of a Francoist aesthetics of objectivity and the constitution of a new visual regime of history

ABSTRACT This article explores how the celebration of the XXV Años de Paz in 1964 served as the stage for a new national rhetoric of peace, progress and modernity that allowed the Francoist dictatorship to move away from its fascist past. Through its study of the exhibition España 64 and the movie Franco, ese hombre, this paper explores how the celebration put into circulation what I refer to as a Francoist aesthetics of objectivity – the visual strategies used by the state to create visible indices of progress through statistics and economics as signs of good governmental practice. I challenge this idea with my analysis of the curatorial narrative of the Spanish pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1964. Ultimately, this article argues that what took place during the year 1964 was a rearrangement of the national narrative surrounding the Spanish Civil War that allowed the dictatorship to fluctuate between its fascist ideological tenets and pseudo-liberal economic policies and combine them at will. Despite the alleged aperturismo of the 1960s, I propose that the values attached to the Civil War continued to be at the core of the ideology determining the creation and circulation of new national narratives that would constitute a new visual regime of history.

Anachronistic Progress? User Notions of Lie Detection in the Juridical Field

In recent years, progress in the field of lie detection has been linked to technological advances from classic polygraphs to neuroscientific brain imaging. In our empirical investigation, however, we found different notions of progress that do not comply with the popular understanding of progress as technological innovation. We follow the users of lie detection procedures in Germany in order to discern how they embrace seemingly old technologies and frame them in terms of novelty and improvement. We identify two notions of progress: one view of the polygraph in the juridical field as an instrument for procedural justice, and another view in which the device functions as a symbol of openness to improvements in the judicial system. These insights complement contemporary scholarship on lie detection by shining a critical light on the rhetoric of progress in relation to the promises of brain-based lie detection procedures. When analyzing the way polygraph tests are seen as progress, it becomes clear that the promises and hopes that are linked to this technology are of more relevance for its appraisal than its placement in time.

Industrial Soundscape between Fiction and Documentary Film in Italy’s Long 1960s

During the long 1960s, which includes the culminating phase of the “economic miracle” and the beginning of the protest movement in 1968, the industrial imagination took forceful hold of the collective mind of the Italian people. While corporate films adopted the rhetoric of industrial progress, feature films offered a negative view of industrialization and underlined its problematic aspects: the exploitation of the working class, class struggle, alienation, pollution, the role of criminal enterprise. In both cases music and sound profoundly influenced the representation of the industrial contexts. Corporate films had a tendency to extol the virtues of labor and industrial production and used music extensively to this end. The wide circulation of these films in this period encouraged a critical approach to industrial contexts from feature film directors: in their films music and sound offered critical readings during the industrial sequences: they posed questions, encouraged ironic or tragic reflection, or gave the sequences grotesque or sinister overtones. This article analyzes film music and sound options in feature films against a backdrop of corporate film communication in order to trace the history of industrial imagination in Italian cinema.

Krakus , Anna No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period (review)

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 362 Krakus, Anna. No End in Sight: Polish Cinema in the Late Socialist Period. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2018. xiv + 263 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.95 (paperback). Anna Krakus’s intellectually stimulating study of Polish cinema in the 1970s and 1980s brings into focus the political implications of narrative irresolution. The book explores a tendency among artists to avoid closures and argues that this inclination was directly related to the sociopolitical context of the late socialist era. Artistic strategies rejecting conclusions contradicted socialist ideology, which was purpose-based and assumed a teleological model of history that promised a utopian closure in the form of ‘pure Communism’ (p. 2). In this sense, Krakus argues, those strategies should be read as a political gesture, not merely as a passing artistic trend. At the centre of Krakus’s analysis is the notion of aesthetic unfinalizability, a term borrowed from Bakhtin but used in the book outside the theoretical framework of Bakhtinian dialogism. Unfinalizability refers here to openendedness encompassing multiple aspects of a cinematic work; it pertains not only to how a film ends but also to ‘all the openness that happens before an ending’ (p. 3). As such, aesthetic unfinalizability can manifest itself at both the structural level (e.g. in unresolved story lines) and the level of themes (e.g. in preoccupations with immortality). Krakus begins her investigation by discussing ‘poiesis and production history’ (chapter one). She explores how personal artistic processes and political concerns affected artists’ relationship with their works and how they translated into the open-ended nature of their films and texts. The chapter’s recurring argument is that the works of this period often feature alter egos who represent their authors’ struggles with endings and point to political demands of the time. The following chapters discuss themes of immortality and resurrection (chapter two), failed construction and broken-down monuments (chapter three), and stagnation and timelessness (chapter four). According to Krakus, death is often depicted in Polish culture of the late socialist period as inconclusive, which makes it an ‘aesthetically unfinalizable topic’ (p. 100). Authors of this period blur the distinction between life and death and reject death’s finality, often presenting those themes through unending and circular narratives. These motifs, Krakus argues, are a response to the political rhetoric that granted figurative immortality to certain leaders and ideas (p. 106), a response that aimed to ridicule the idea of the permanence of socialism but also expressed anxiety regarding a possible return of old Stalinist policies. REVIEWS 363 Monuments and unsuccessful construction, which are at the centre of discussion in chapter three, provide another set of examples of how aesthetic unfinalizability was used to oppose socialist ideology. Through their critique of political monuments and focus on failed building efforts, artists exposed false promises of socialism and countered its teleological foundations. At the same time, Krakus argues, they suggested the corruption of the building blocks of Poland’s political system and thus questioned whether the Polish People’s Republic belonged to the Polish people (p. 110). The last chapter points to the subversive aspects of unfinalizability by discussing cinematic and literary explorations of time. The main focus of this chapter is on works that erase differences between beginning and end and challenge temporal distinctions between past, present, and future. The goal of these experiments was to ‘capture the essence of time as nonteleological flow’ (p. 154). In the late socialist era, artists investigated the nature of time and depicted events during which time passed ‘towards nothing’ (e.g. standing in lines); in this way, they questioned the movement of time and embraced ‘timelessness and shapelessness’ (p. 154). Those ideas and thematic preoccupations, Krakus suggests, responded to the socialist rhetoric of progress and indicated its bankruptcy. For the most part, Krakus’s book concentrates on selected works of Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Tadeusz Konwicki, Krzysztof Zanussi and Wojciech Has. Krakus approaches these works from multiple perspectives, extending her investigation to such areas as film scores (pp. 142–44), script versions (pp. 113–14) and unmade projects (pp. 30–31). She skilfully foregrounds several...

What is New Technology and what Technology is New? Definitions of Emerging Technology in Policy Documents and Global Corporate Communication

[full article and abstract in Lithuanian; abstract in English]
 This article addresses the two-fold problem faced by the researchers of emerging technologies. First, the problem of definition: which term is appropriate to define new technologies; and second, what principles and methods are appropriate to classify a certain technology as new or emerging. Locally, this problem is also relevant, because the definitions of new technologies and the actual technologies are rarely discussed by Lithuanian researchers. To fill this gap, exploratory research has been conducted to compare definitions and the technological content of new technologies in international policy documents and the corporate websites of global corporations leading in research and development investments.
 Focusing on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commis­sion (EC), a policy document analysis showed that the term high technology, which dominated the discourse in the 1980s and well into the 1990s, has since been eclipsed by innovations and sustainable development, moving from an economy-centered approach to a focus on the qualitative aspects of technology development and its social impact. Within policy documents, various quantitative variables are applied to measure technology development at the level of regions, states or specific technological fields, such as the intensity of investments in research and development or the fields in which explosive growths of worldwide patents occur. However, a variety of methodological implications limit the use of this data to map the emergence and the potential impact of more specific technologies, rather than wide fields of development.
 The website content of globally operating corporations known for being the leaders of business investment in R&D shows that the corporate discourse focuses on a rhetoric of progress and global impact as the main driving force of technological development. Commercially prospective technologies, as presented on corporate websites, emerged in the following seven technological fields in 2017: pharmaceutics and biotechnology, software engineering, web technologies, social research, electronic engineering, telecommunications, and transportation. This method offers the advantage of analyzing both specific technologies and the broader technological fields they belong to. Also, in contrast to policy documents, the list of new technologies in the corporate context offers several significant insights into the interdisciplinary nature of technological development and the contribution of the major technological fields to overall technological development. Overall, the list highlights the ties between micro- (individual level) and macro-level (society and state) technological impact, the interplay of visible (end-user products) and invisible (inf­rastructure) elements of technological systems. The results reflect the specifics of commercial settings, where new technologies are at a stage of development following fundamental scientific research and preceding mass production and distribution of innovations.
 The differences between technology discourse in policy documents and corporate communication are reflective of a wider split into expert and public discourse, characteristic of the different aims pursued by the respective agents. Findings about the definitions and classifications of new technologies presented in this article may be applied for policy-making in the areas of science, technology and innovation management, research of the social impact of tech­nologies, and critical discussions of the ethical, legal, social and economic implications of technology development before their mass adoption.

Smoke and mirrors: a thematically based polemic of whiteness and the myth of desegregation in US school reform

ABSTRACTIn the USA, the dominant narrative surrounding the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination in American public education centres on the rhetoric of steady progress towards equality. While the nationalistic-based dominant discourse maintains that progress towards a desegregated, multicultural American school system steeped in equality and mutual respect continues, a more critical examination reveals that little, if any, true progress has actually been made. With the apparent resurgence of far-right leaning political administrations and figures dominating the global political landscape, there is an ever-pressing need to ensure that scholastically based counter narratives remain present in the global discourse. This paper will re-examine the rhetoric surrounding desegregation and educational equity in the context of three themes: (a) culture and class, (b) accountability, and (c) financial investment. It is argued that, the standard of whiteness has prevented little, if any actual progress to have been made. Suggestions for meaningful school reform are offered.

A new Europeanism before it is too late

This article argues that the traditional European narrative based on the rhetoric of progress, openness, ‘an ever closer union’ and the ever greater sharing of sovereignty has lost traction with a significant percentage of the European electorate, who are gripped by frustration, insecurity and disarray. It sketches the broad lines of a new Europeanism, arguably one that would be better equipped to deal with populism and identity politics. It makes the case for a ‘leaner Europe’, less bureaucratic and intrusive, but also more openly political and culturally grounded.

Rethinking the bottom of the pyramid

Drawing upon the decolonial theorizing from Latin America, this article examines the odd trajectory of globalization of the bottom-of-pyramid (BoP) approach. Rather than a future-oriented cosmopolitan business design aimed to overcome poverty challenges in the developing world, this article shows that the BoP approach rearticulates, within an era of neoliberal capitalism, the rhetoric of salvation and progress, which was inaugurated by the darker side of modernity over five centuries ago with the discovery/conquest of America. Analysis shows that the BoP approach has evolved through underinvestigated interplay involving the market-oriented and the warfare-oriented facets of US-led neoliberalism and the radicalization of the longue durée of asymmetric dynamics involving decoloniality, hybridisms, and the darker sides of modernity. The authors argue that the globalization of the BoP approach in emerging economies embodies not only the radicalization of global coloniality but also a potential transition toward a pluriversal world in which many worlds, knowledges, and histories could coexist.

ATTITUDES TO FUTURITY IN NEW GERMAN FEMINISMS AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION

Drawing on Clare Hemmings’ work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] (2008) and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their authors consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill (2010) and Antonia Baum’s Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead] (2011). I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists’ configuration of the self-empowered “individual.” Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative.

“Every New Land Demands Blood”: ‘Nature’ and the Justification of Frontier Violence in Hell on Wheels

This paper demonstrates how AMC’s TV show Hell on Wheels portrays the ideological force of nature to justify violence in frontier mythology. After a short look into the historical and ongoing relevance of frontier mythology in US culture, I will argue for its ideological reliance on nature. The following chapter will provide a theoretical background on social Darwinism, determinism, and scientism. I will then analyze how these relationships are examined in Hell on Wheels. First, as Thomas Durant’s social Darwinist monologue is paralleled with imagery that challenges the providential myth of Manifest Destiny, the show reveals that both ideologies equally replace human responsibility with a quasi-evolutionary rhetoric of inevitable progress. Second, the Swede’s deterministic notions of nature demonstrate the mythical power of the natural environment and evolutionary biology, which can easily assume Manifest Destiny’s divine authority as a justification for violence. Finally, the Swede’s and Reverend Cole’s discursive replacement of God with blood signifies a shift from religion to a redemptive scientism, in which science purports not only to explain but also to justify the violence of westward expansion. In these renditions, nature is variably utilized as the prime model for social behavior, as the ultimate victor over culture, and as the final authority whose imperatives are intelligible only through science.

The meat and veg complex: food and national progress in Australian print media, 1930–1965

Plain, British-derived cookery appeared increasingly old hat in 1950s and 1960s Australia. In contrast to the culinary novelties introduced by European migration and an expanding consumer economy, ‘meat and three veg’-style cooking symbolised the staid prewar past. However, the gastronomic ‘coming of age’ celebrated by post-war journalists, and its associated narrative of national cultural progress, had been rehearsed by prewar advocates of culinary reform. Columnists in 1930s, particularly in the newspaper ‘women's pages’, urged Australian culinary progress within broader debates on nutrition, population health, cultural development and national identity. This rhetoric of progress and maturation continues to influence perceptions of mid-twentieth century Australian food history.This article has been peer reviewed.

Canada and the Global Rush for International Students: Reifying a Neo-Imperial Order of Western Dominance in the Knowledge Economy Era

In a global knowledge economy, western nations compete for the best knowledge workers, while positioning English language and western education as superior. Drawing from critical theories of globalization, we argue that the international education field has become a site to maintain a neo-imperial agenda concealed by a neoliberal rhetoric of progress and economic expediency. Using Canada as a case study, we critically examine the global tactics of power and governance strategies in international education policy, as they influence and shape education and immigration policy within Canada. We illustrate how the OECD positions itself for global dominance in education and (re)produces the international education field using tactics such as rescaling, the policy cycle and ‘self-responsibilizing’ students. This process creates and maintains a global market for knowledge producers and expands the soft power of western nations.

Go out and play, but mean it: Using frame analysis to explore recent news media coverage of the rediscovery of unstructured play

A frame analysis was conducted on newspaper articles, news magazine articles, and the transcripts of broadcast segments on the need for and rediscovery of unstructured play that appeared between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2010. This time frame was selected to coincide with the recent revival of interest in play, both among scholars and the public. The eight frames that emerged from the coverage reveal that the spontaneity in play valued by children and endorsed by scholars is absent from recent descriptions by journalists of play. Journalists did not frame play as a respite for children from daily life, or an “interlude” (Huizinga, 1971, p. 21) undertaken to escape the real world. Play as portrayed through these frames must be productive – a “useful pastime” (Chudacoff, 2007, p. 222). Descriptions of play by journalists support the “rhetoric of progress” discussed by Sutton-Smith. Play is seen as the “optimal state of being for children” (Gentry, 2009, p. 14A), rather than something a child simply wants to do for fun. Few of the sources consulted by journalists favor letting kids go off in an unsupervised fashion. Kids can play, but only if they do so in clearly defined spaces and according to clearly laid out schedules.

1961 Exposition in Turin, Italy: engineers take command

The paper focuses on the exposition complex of Italia ’61 in Turin constructed for the centenary celebrations of the Unification of Italy in 1961 and hosting several exhibitions and an international exposition on labour. With its technical ultra-modern boldness and daring, the Italia ’61 Exposition aimed to express the new expansionist potential of the Italian economy, while at the same time leaving the city with a legacy of immediately usable infrastructures. The 1961 exposition chose, in the best tradition of universal exhibitions, to focus on the rhetoric of technological progress. Those who interpreted this message came from the professional and cultural traditions of engineering. Turin's post-war architectural culture had virtually nothing to do with the centenary exposition project, being relegated to exhibition design and hang only, the ephemeral elements of those structures. All the submitted projects conformed to the philosophy of the celebrations, which was an exaltation of expressionism in engineering. With a series of thinly disguised pedagogical intents, the exposition aimed to fulfil one of its main goals, making science and technology more accessible to all. This explains the great desire for space and constructions. Thanks to its architecture, the exposition was able to achieve these objectives. The buildings themselves made the exhibition, even more so than in the nineteenth century, literally becoming advertising hoardings.

The Paradoxical Discourse of Language and Silence in Some Contemporary North-American Texts on the Arctic

The Arctic has often been regarded (its various indigenous groups notwithstanding) as a desolate and silent void to be explored and defined by Euro-westerners, usuallyin terms of a masculine competitive ethos and an ethnocentric rhetoric of WesternEnlightenment and progress. Surprisingly, even many Norwegian arctic expeditionsof our own time tend to embody similar narratives of conquest and athletic prowess.Among contemporary North-American writers, however, this kind of discourse isprofoundly questioned, particularly by focusing on the problematic function oflanguage itself in our constructions of the Arctic. This article focuses on three North-American books in which the issue of the Euro-western linguistic appropriation ofthe Arctic, its natural environment as well as its peoples, is a major concern; they areall reflections on the issues of writing and silence with reference to the far north. Thethree books are: Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a NorthernLandscape (1987), Aritha van Herk's Places Far from Ellesmere (1990), and JohnMoss' Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (1996). Central in allof them is the following issue: how to make the wordless landscape or the alienculture speak from under, as it were, the enormous compilation of centuries of Eurowesterntext. The article discusses four major strategies by which these three booksattempt to counteract and subvert earlier Euro-western ethnocentric and monologicnarratives of the Arctic: by the inclusion of feminine and indigenous voices; by thelegitimation of the sensuous life-world of the Arctic itself; by the self-reflexivesubversion of the authority of the language of their own texts; and by the use of astyle of paradox and contradiction. By way of such techniques, the books above try to create more open, dialogic and pluralistic readings of the Arctic.

Daniel Compagnon. A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 334 pp. List of Acronyms. Notes. Index. Acknowledgments. $39.95. Cloth.

Daniel Compagnon. A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 334 pp. List of Acronyms. Notes. Index. Acknowledgments. $39.95. Cloth. Daniel Compagnon is no stranger to Zimbabwean studies, having previously co-authored Behind the Smokescreen with John Makumbe before the country fell into unprecedented crisis in 2000. His deep knowledge of the political developments and dynamics is fully reflected in this current book, which seeks to explain the route taken by Zimbabwe into crisis. Unlike authors unfamiliar with the evolution of nationalist politics along neopatrimonial and authoritarian lines which portended a future crisis, and who were thus easily blinded by the rhetoric of progress and cosmetic signs of Zimbabwe as a successful transitional state, Compagnon insists that the crisis was predictable to those who cared to look beyond myths of political stability and pretenses of economic rationality. In eight solidly researched and ably argued chapters, Compagnon manages convincingly to pursue his important thesis of a predictable tragedy. Introducing his book, Compagnon unpacks a catalogue of myths forged by the Mugabe regime and outsiders to cover the nakedness of absolutism, authoritarianism, and economic irrationality. One such myth: Mugabe created a democratic multiracial nation-state. Once one goes beyond the myths, the important question to ask, according to Compagnon, is not what went wrong in Zimbabwe, but why it took so long to plunge into crisis. He boldly states: Contrary to the view commonly held in the media and by some observers - that there was a sudden turn of events in 2000, supposedly reversing a previous trend towards democratization - the political system set in place at independence and throughout the 1980s was authoritarian in essence (8). A corpus of evidence amplifies Compagnon's thesis, beginning with the internal purging that took place inside ZANU while it was based in Mozambique; the use of the Fifth Brigade in the 1980s to engage in ethnic cleansing of the Ndebele-speaking people, code-named Gukurahundi (operation cleaning up the chaff), which left twenty thousand civilians dead; Operation Murambatsvina (operation clean-up) in 2005, which left more than seventy thousand people without shelter; and after March 29, 2008, Operation Mavhoterapapi (Operation how did you vote), which targeted all those who voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). These are among the most glaring cases of authoritarianism and violence. But Compagnon provides a chronologically and thematically detailed analysis of this phenomenon beginning with how ZANU-PF assumed control of the political arena (chapter 1); how Mugabe embraced violence as a cornerstone of his political survival (chapter 2); how civil society became an incubator for a credible opposition within a terrain dominated by political intolerance (chapter 3); how ZANU-PF and Mugabe muzzled freedom of expression and reduced the media to a batdefield (chapter 4); how the judiciary was subjugated by the executive (chapter 5); how Mugabe authorized a chaotic land reform that resulted in human tragedy (chapter 6); how ZANU-PF elites and their cronies assumed the class of state bourgeoisie through brazen plundering of die national economy (chapter 7); and ending with how the international community, SADC, and South Africa failed to save the people of Zimbabwe from ZANU-PF misrule and Mugabe's executive lawlessness and political debauchery. …

"A Bondage So Harsh": Acadian Labor in the French Caribbean, 1763-1766

At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, geopolitical equilibrium gave way to grotesque imbalance. Great Britain became a leviathan, acquiring Canada, several key islands in the Caribbean, Senegal in Africa, French possessions in the Mediterranean, in India, and on the East Indian island of Sumatra, while crushing Gallic pretensions to the Ohio Valley. Across the triumphant empire, news of the rout sparked rounds of drunken celebration among some, while others quietly speculated that Christ's millennial reign would soon begin. For Louis XV and his cast of ministers, however, defeat provoked sober reflection and hard-edged reasoning. Britain's newfound dominance demanded a rapid, inventive response. The integration of France's remaining overseas territories into a muscular, vibrant polity became the ultimate projet in a kingdom bursting with les hommes a projets.1Ensconced in the rhetoric of progress, the schemes that emerged from this hothouse of patriotism and personal ambition promised an extension of imperial authority unlike any France had ever seen.2 Few of these proposals ever came to fruition. This essay, however, examines two that did. The first, a colony on the Kourou River in Guiana, collapsed in spectacular fashion only months after its foundation in 1763. Disease and starvation killed thousands of migrants, sending destitute survivors fleeing to Europe or elsewhere in the Caribbean. The second, a smaller settlement on the remote northern coast of Saint Domingue, was constructed early in 1764. It proved a disappointment, lapsing into obscurity over the next two years. Most of its residents died or filtered to greener if equally fetid pastures in Spanish Louisiana. Both projects shared a unique trait. In a region where African slavery thrived as nowhere else, the settlements were manned, in full or in part, by an unlikely workforce: Acadian refugees.These men, women, and children had been through a great deal. During the mid-seventeenth century, their ancestors had been recruited to settle Acadia, a colony to the northeast of Massachusetts Bay. Along the tidal basins of the Bay of Fundy, the newcomers forged economic, political, and marital bonds with the local Mi'kmaq, traded with both Bostonian and canadien merchants, and built an intricate system of dikes to wall seawater from rich farmland near the shoreline. Government was weak. No seigneurial regime existed, rents went unpaid (and, generally, unmentioned) and the yeoman who could produce a legal title to his land was a rare find. Practiced with various degrees of devotion, Catholicism linked Acadians to each other, the Jesuit order, and the metropolis. Since the nineteenth century, generations have echoed (albeit in kinder language) Francis Parkman's characterization of the Acadians as a simple and ignorant peasantry, but new research has recovered a complex society-primarily agricultural, Catholic, and French, yet scored by multiple divisions of rank, wealth, and political allegiance.3 Such vibrancy meant little to Louis XIV. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht gave Acadia to the British, who named the province Nova Scotia and set up a garrison at Annapolis Royal to lord over two thousand Acadian subjects. Forty years of coexistence followed, during which the Acadians skirted oaths to Hanoverian monarchs, proclaimed political neutrality, enjoyed stunning demographic increase, and otherwise made themselves the bane of their new rulers. Like that of the Irish, the situation of these Catholics in a Protestant empire might have endured forever, had not imperial conflict intervened.In the fall of 1755, on the cusp of the Seven Years' War, a combined force of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers received orders from Nova Scotia's invasion-wary lieutenant governor to remove the entire Acadian pop ulation-fifteen thousand souls-from his province. They proceeded with brutal efficiency, capturing seven thousand civilians and chasing those who escaped deep into the wilderness. …