Gathering Of Scholars Research Articles

History and Perspectives of the Left

The formal title of this three day public conference at the University of São Paulo, August 13–15, 2003, was “History and Perspectives of the Left,” but the infratext for this gathering of scholars, analysts and activists from four continents—Europe, Africa, North and South America—was what are the lessons from the experience of the Left in government elsewhere that the new leftist government in Brazil and its leading party—the Workers Party (PT)—should keep in mind? This was underscored in the formal introductions and welcomes of the sponsors: the PT's Fundação Perseo Abramo, the French Socialist party's Fundacion Jean Juares, the University of São Paulo and the office of the PT mayor of São Paulo, Marta Suplicy. As her secretary for international relations, Keld Jakobsen, stressed: this is the first time that the Brazilian left has the opportunity to govern their country and it is important that they do it well. For that reason, it is also important that they learn from other experiences of the left in government.

The Evolution of Public Participation GIS

(1998). The Evolution of Public Participation GIS. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems: Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 65-66.

Slavery, Rebellion, and Revolution in the Americas

To acknowledge the 200th anniversry of the bourgeois-democratic French Revolution is to be mindful not only of its worldwide impact on emergent or would-be emergent nation-states in the 18th-centuryWestern world but also of its equally chain-shattering tripartite cry of liberte, egalite, and fraternite on Africans held in bondage by France and other established, emergent, and would-be emergent Western slaveholding states. In a similar vein, we are reminded of the 1983 gathering of scholars at Stanford University to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of Aptheker's seminal book, American Negro Slave Revolts. During that conference, scholars examined papers built around Aptheker's 1943 position as expressed in the book that discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American Negro slaves (Aptheker, 1987 [1938], p. 374). In 1976, the author moved beyond his 1943 position to emphatically posit that resistance, not acquiescence, is the core of history (Craton, 1982, p. 11). Resistance, not acquiescence, characterized the key ingredient that brought on the Haitian Revolution of 1791. Coming in the wake of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution was profoundly

Western Canadian Literature

D O N A L D G R E E N E University of Wisconsin Western Canadian Literature My qualifications for speaking to a scholarly gathering about western Canadian literature are rather like those of the journalist who was commissioned to write a piece on Chinese philosophy and did so by reading the encyclopedia articles on “China” and “philoso­ phy,” and then putting them together. I spent the first thirty-five years or so of my life in western Canada; I have always been an incurable addict of literature: the combination of these two facts will have to serve as my credentials. Though just what do con­ stitute acceptable academic qualifications for setting up as an expert in “western Canadian literature,” or even “Canadian literature,” is hard to say. I suppose the primary one would be a conviction that there is a Canadian literature worth consideration by a serious literary critic. This is still not a universally accepted proposition. True, one important critic, Edmund Wilson, recently addressed himself to the subject of Canadian writing, though most of Wilson’s devotees, among whom I include myself, would not maintain that this is one of his more successful critical forays.1 As I read Wilson’s book, I kept wondering when he was going to answer the despair­ ing cry that young Ernest Hemingway, then a reporter on the Toronto Star, long ago uttered in a letter to Wilson, begging for some literary news—“You don’t know anything in Canada!”2 But no answer was forthcoming. It is true also that courses in “Canadian literature” are regu­ larly offered in Canadian universities, and even one or two American *A paper delivered at the Second Annual Meeting of the Western Literature Association, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 1966. *0 Canada! New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966. 2Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1952), p. 116. 258 Western American Literature ones, and that a scholarly periodical entitled Canadian Literature was established some years ago, and seems to be flourishing. The theory is, perhaps, that if you keep saying loudly and frequently enough that there is a Canadian literature, one will magically materialize. I don’t think, however, that this method ever pro­ duced much success when tried on American literature: surely much more was accomplished in prodding American writers toward an international rather than a parochial standard of competence by the indefatigable barbs of Mencken, who could never be cajoled into calling tripe, however hundred-percent American, anything but tripe. Canada, alas, has never had a Mencken; it is hard even to conceive of a Mencken subsisting in the English-speaking culture of Canada, dominated by Toronto, “that sanctimonius ice-box,” as Wyndham Lewis, who spent some traumatic years there, called it.3 But the London Times Literary Supplement’s reviewer of Wilson’s book4 is not yet convinced. “With all the will in the world,” he says, “it is hard to believe one would want to read these [French-Canadian] novels if one were not deeply interested in the Canadian problem,” and again, “WT ith the exception of Morley Callaghan, they [English-Canadian novelists] are more interesting as sociological reporters than as writers. Had we but world enough and time, no doubt we should read Mr. MacLennan and the others” — but the reviewer makes it clear that he, for one, hasn’t. He is not alone. I should begin by outlining some basic facts about Canadian geography and history that most Americans are only vaguely aware of.5 Apart from the French-Canadian enclave in Quebec, there are no important geographical or cultural differences between the 8In his significantly titled roman a clef, Self-Condemned (London: Methuen, 1954). The nearest thing to a Mencken that Canada ever produced was a magnificently scurrilous and witty prairie journalist by the name of Bob Edwards, whose paper, The Calgary Eye-Opener, flourished in the early years of this century and is still remembered with gratitude by a few surviving old-timers of the prairie. Around the beginning of the decorous Mackenzie King era in the 1920’s, it was decently interred, and its name is not spoken by the...

Studying Latin America: The Views of an “Old Christian”

Latin Americanists must be prepared for sudden shifts in the winds of circumstance. Less than ten years ago a gathering of scholars at the Newberry Library in Chicago lamented the lack of support for their disciplines, and drew up an impressive list of tools and monographs needed to advance the field. Presumably the specialists returned to their campuses refreshed by this heady and cathartic experience of thinking adventurously, but they found no change there in the attitudes of their university administrators or the majority of their colleagues, who still believed that Latin America was an area of peripheral value; the professors were not discharged, of course, for they had tenure, but the promise of the early flurry of Latin American area developments that had occurred in the 1940's was not fulfilled.

Was the Collapse Inevitable?

In this concluding lecture I wish to express my thanks for the excellent papers presented at this carefully prepared and in many ways unique conference. In one who grew up, now more than half a century ago, under the reign of Francis Joseph and who has always retained some emotional loyalty to those years of his own youth and his own student days, who went to war in 1914 under the black and yellow flag of the Austrian monarchy—in such a person the fact that here in faraway Midwestern America the problems of the long defunct monarchy are being discussed with a sense of actuality in an international scholarly gathering by men of diverse ideologies and nationalities arouses a feeling of satisfaction and some melancholy.