Singular Moment Research Articles

Althusser’s Dramaturgy and the Critique of Ideology

An important part of the new interest for the work of Louis Althusser (1918–1990) has focused on his interpretation of “materialist theater,” as proposed in a famous essay from 1962. This is, in fact, hardly separable from discussing again the “pragmatic” reading of his theory of subjection and subjectivation in terms of interpellation and counterinterpellation offered by Judith Butler as early as 1997. In this essay, “performative” dimensions of Althusser’s critique of ideology are presented as a singular moment of crystallization within an open trajectory, leading from the discussion of theater as politics to the conceptualization of politics as theater. In the middle lies an enigmatic possibility of actively dislodging the voice of power from its concealed place of enunciation.

Political Narrative and Symbolism in the Feast of the Pheasant (1454)

The Feast of the Pheasant, held in Lille in 1454 to launch a planned crusade by the duke of Burgundy to recapture Constantinople, has long been regarded as a singular and extravagant moment of 15th century spectacle. However, the Feast was also an important opportunity for Duke Philip the Good and his court to put forward a political narrative that could stress themes of ducal primacy and independence without openly contesting the legal subordination that made the duke of Burgundy a vassal of the French king. This article explores several instances of how that political narrative was crafted at the Feast, and how it demonstrates the ways the ducal court was seeking to advance political arguments that fell outside the language of feudal obligation to implicate other forms of legitimacy. As such, the Feast should be seen as part of the larger effort by the Burgundian polity to advance arguments for dynastic independence.

Whitman’s Atlantic Noise

Christopher Hanlon, “Whitman’s Atlantic Noise” (pp. 194–220) This essay considers Walt Whitman’s “A Word Out of the Sea,” from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, for its aural qualities—acoustically twittering birds, the hissing “undertone” of the ocean, for example—linking the poem to a wider antebellum interest in the electronic noise of telegraphy. I argue that this poem’s auditory effects bring Whitman into discussion with many others during the 1850s and 1860s who were interested in the sonic qualities of telegraphic noise quite apart from the words those noises encoded. Calling upon an array of cultural documents including songsheets, poems, fiction, and technical commentary, I suggest that “A Word Out of the Sea” condenses a singular moment in American intellectual life wherein the widespread deployment of telegraphic technology honed much interest in the interplay of sound and meaning. In this way, “A Word Out of the Sea” helps further current discussions over the resonance of nineteenth-century information technology among U.S. commentators (including poets), first-generation users who were less constantly focused than we might suppose upon the epistemological ramifications of the telegraph as a harbinger of unthinkably efficient, global communication. In many other ways, these observers of the telegraph were just as struck by the telegraph’s ontological properties, and especially the kinds of sounds it generated.

Hiroshima and two paradoxes of Japanese nuclear perplexity

For the Japanese people, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 are singular moments of holocaust which have produced collective memories so powerful that repeated attempts by Japanese policymakers to introduce or even discuss a nuclear deterrent have been severely contested and sanctioned. Even so, Japan’s enduring rivalries with nuclear-armed China and North Korea have produced a powerful conviction among Japanese policymakers that US extended nuclear deterrence cannot be given up. Thus, two of the most pronounced paradoxes of the nuclear age are (1) the social construction of Japan whose people are simultaneously “allergic” to nuclear weapons but who do not wish to have it “treated”, and (2) successive Japanese governments which are forced to endure the “nuclear allergy” but which also will not be rid of the “allergens”. This paper develops a theoretical account of the discourse of “nuclear allergy” and thereafter explores more fully the paradoxes of nuclear allergies which must never be treated and allergens which must never be expelled.

Unbecoming individuals

800x600 According to the received wisdom in Melanesian ethnography and elsewhere, Christianity is “unrelentingly individualistic” (e.g., Robbins 2004: 293). In this article, drawing upon the notion of “dividual” or “partible personhood” of the New Melanesian Ethnography and implicit in the classic Van Gennepian model of rites of passage, I revisit Louis Dumont’s, Kenelm Burridge’s, and Max Weber’s authoritative conceptualizations of Christian personhood. I seek to demonstrate that in the early Christian church and the later Protestant Reformation of Luther and Calvin, the person, whether human or divine, qualifies instead as a dividual—a kind of agent radically distinct from the canonical “possessive individual” of Western political and economic discourse. Following Dumont, Burridge, and Weber on close reading, I argue that the seeming “individuality” of Christian persons consists merely in singular moments of overarching processes of elicitive detachment, gift-transfer, incorporation, and reciprocation whereby the constituent parts of total or overall dividual persons are transacted. Christian “individualism,” in short, is nothing less than an instance of dividual personhood and agency, fundamentally distinct from the possessive individual of modern secular society. Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:Table Normal; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Times New Roman,serif;}

Western Landscape Photography: Then and Now

Rachel McLean Sailor explores the history of photography and its role in place-making in the West, while engaging examples of contemporary photography that “can respond anew to a singular moment, and a singular place, while simultaneously encompassing the deep history of its subject matter medium, and the cultural history of all who have attempted such representations in the past.” Readers are guided through a number of photographs from the past as well as contemporary examples from the Oregon Historical Society's exhibit, Place: Framing the Oregon Landscape. This exhibit essay touches “on the many ways that the artists in this exhibit are responding not only to place, but also to the histories of landscape and how photographic styles and conceptual approaches have rapidly transformed in America from the 1840s to today.”

Leaving Lohāchāra: On circuits of emplacement and displacement in the Ganges Delta

Abstract In this paper I focus on the disappearance of the small island of Lohācharā. Once situated in the Indian part of the Ganges Delta, the island fell prey to drawn-out processes of coastal erosion. Later it rose to fame as being the sunken home to India’s – or the world’s – very first climate refugees. Based on fieldwork among displaced and resettled islanders, I engage with the past of the island and its inhabitants. In doing this I show that the displacements resulting from the island’s erosion do not mark a singular moment of victimisation or loss, but are better to be understood as instances in a broader pattern of repeated losses, enforced mobilities and arrivals. I call this a circuit of displacement and emplacement. Framing an overall sense of the past among islanders, it also helps to understand the experience of erosions itself. The latter translated into multiple displacements by islanders-turned-squatters who had to move repeatedly with the receding coastline. While many islanders managed to secure resettlements on a nearby island, the sense of instability associated with repeated losses continued to permeate the present. I show that islanders’ fear of new rounds of erosion is great, as is the widespread mistrust. The newly emplaced lands emerge thus as endangered either by hazardous waters or by volatile party politics. While the sinking of Lohācharā is certainly not reducible to climate change, it helps to critically engage with the role of islands within current debates surrounding it. I argue that the recent preoccupation of climate change debates with small island states overshadows the suffering entailed in the sinking of marginal islands elsewhere. Moving through a set of glimpses into pasts not forgotten, I conclude that the point is not whether the territory of a state is threatened, but rather how threatened the state of the citizenship is among islanders.

Brain-machine interfaces as a challenge to the “moment of singularity”

Ray Kurzweil predicts that artificial intelligence will equal and then surpass human intelligence in the not-too-distant future, in what he calls the “moment of singularity.” Advances in brain/machine interfacing (BMI) may be viewed as a challenge to this futuristic prediction. BMIs strive to instrument human brains with unlimited memory, calculation, and communication abilities, which provide a competitive edge to human brain power versus artificial intelligence. This paper makes a case for a hybrid human/robot that merges the brain function with artificial intelligence components, and prevents the “moment of singularity” from ever occurring.

Mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest, civic society and participation in Chile

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 865–880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. “Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496–505.] and to consider the spatial–territorial dynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. “‘In the Heart, There's Nothing’: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory.” Transactions of the IBG 38 (4): 572–585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students' understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper shows that although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. “Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope.” Space and Culture 11 (2): 81–92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year's in-depth qualitative research, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youth subjects caught between parents' experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs, status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments of modern historical ‘events', as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least in contexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.

Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’ Grindr

Grindr is a popular location-based social networking application for smartphones, predominantly used by gay men. This study investigates why users leave Grindr. Drawing on interviews with 16 men who stopped using Grindr, this article reports on the varied definitions of leaving, focusing on what people report leaving, how they leave and what they say leaving means to them. We argue that leaving is not a singular moment, but a process involving layered social and technical acts – that understandings of and departures from location-based media are bound up with an individual’s location. Accounts of leaving Grindr destabilize normative definitions of both ‘Grindr’ and ‘leaving’, exposing a set of relational possibilities and spatial arrangements within and around which people move. We conclude with implications for the study of non-use and technological departure.

Re-Entering the Sporting World: China's Sponsorship of the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO)

Prior to the 2008 Olympics, China's most sustained support of an international multi-sport event came in 1963 when it contributed significantly to the financing of and then dominated the medals table at the inaugural Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), held in Jakarta. GANEFO is a singular moment through which to understand politics and sport in the 1960s. This article is a consideration of China's role in GANEFO, and the West's response to China's involvement. It explores the ways in which China used the event to navigate issues of international and regional geopolitics, and considers the diplomatic and sporting corridors within which GANEFO resonated. GANEFO was a platform through which geopolitical tensions were revealed, and China engaged in propaganda campaigns directed at the West and positioned itself to win allies among the decolonising countries of Asia and Africa – astride the artificial boundary that separated the Second and Third Worlds. China's interest in and the West's response to GANEFO reflected the ways in which anti-communist Cold War politics were conflated with racialised, post-colonial discourses and tension between Second World powers.

Counter-Memory, Heterochronia, and “History Painting” (After Géricault): Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics

This essay examines the disruption of linear time in experimental forms of “history painting” as represented by Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics (2001-2005). It analyses how the aesthetics of heterochronoia—multiple temporalities—play a crucial role in the development of a new understanding of the politics of “history painting.” As Schmidt’s work reveals, a radical conception of history exists outside the “singular moment,” and in dialogue with heterogenous visual cultures (news media, art history, advertising). In attempting to understand the import of Schmidt’s work, this essay considers his methodologies for creating a heterochronous mode of history painting, particularly his anachronistic engagement with the work of Theodore Géricault and the iconic history painting, The Raft of the Medusa. Unlike previous critical responses to Schmidt’s work, this paper argues that (after Géricault) the artist’s use of investigative “journalistic” methodologies for SIEV-X—On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics do not generate an aesthetics of exposé but rather an aesthetics of “fictionalization.” This aesthetic is defined by the recalibration of documentary and speculative data as a means to reconceive the landscape of the perceptual. The findings of this research demonstrate that the use of disparate fragments—or data—to visualize otherwise diminishing historical events underpins contemporary history painting’s capacity for advancing a distinct economy of affect that circumvents the limitations of the news media and its “monopoly on reality.”

English

The phenomenological understanding of religion begins within the ambit of the ontotheological. That is, the relationship between the mortal and the divine is in essence, one of the sharing of a spiritual form of Being. The ‘mode of Being spiritual’ is the factical manifestation of the spirit-Being. That which we are a vehicle for, the breath of life and consciousness becomes conscious for us through the immanence of history. Each event in our own lived time has within it the kernel of the meaning of existence proper. Each moment as spontaneously occurring is thus kerygmatic, or potentially through a reflection of a phenomenology. It is Heidegger perhaps more so than any other phenomenologist who begins this task of represencing the essence of the historical as the momentary existence of the factical. Yet what is this facticity? If the study of Beings can be read as the hermeneutics of facticity, cannot the Being of Beings recur through reflection on the moment of irruptive singularity, the sudden call of the anxious, the realization of the hopeful? It is Heidegger’s reading of Paul and Augustine, respectively anxious and immanent and then aspirational and affirmative, that provides the textuality for our discussion. Key words: Phenomenology, Religion, Facticity, Onto-theology, Hermeneutics, Being.

Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing by Christopher Hager (review)

Reviewed by: Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing by Christopher Hager Travis M. Foster (bio) Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. By Christopher Hager. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.) Say you're an archivist, and you've been given a box of letters written, you soon come to realize, by enslaved men and women in the antebellum South. After celebrating the gift, what do you do? Where do they go? Do you file the letters in existing subject-specific boxes: those labeled "Slave Religious Practices," for instance, or "Slaves in Kentucky"? Or do you sort them by author, cataloged into categories marked off by names previously unknown? The former, of course, highlights the letters as part of a larger collective history, instances gesturing toward experiences repeated across multiple lives. The latter marks the documents as exceptional, fragments of singular lives and singular moments of composition. In his remarkable Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, Christopher Hager advances the latter option. For him, to treat the letters as distinctly authored documents—as vital instances of composition, expression, and literacy—is to transform them from artifacts into narratives and to, in turn, expand the range of modes through which the documents might speak across time. Hager's interventions are methodological and recuperative as much as historical and critical. He aims "to broaden literary studies (to manuscripts in addition to printed works, marginally literate writers in addition to the well-educated) and inspire new modes of interpreting historical sources" (4-5). A frequently cited and published letter written by Maria Perkins to her husband provides an ideal case study. In the letter, Perkins describes her master's decision to sell her and her children: "I write you a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader onmonday court day and myself and other child is for sale also . . ." (55). Where previous editors and writers ignore, apologize for, or rectify the letter's imperfections and idiosyncrasies, Hager applies close reading methods, interpreting them instead "as reflections of Perkins's experience" (63). He notes, for instance, that Perkins begins the letter fastidiously, editing her own writing in a way that indicates self-conscious composition over a period of time. By the letter's end, however, she seems to speed up, misspelling words she's already spelled correctly, running out of room as she comes to the end of a line. Moreover, this change in the nature of composition matches a change in the letter's content, which transitions from "an epistolary mode of outreach to her husband and toward a diaristic mode of private reflection" (67). By attending to the letter with such care, Hager approaches something we might otherwise miss in the historical record: [End Page 124] Maria Perkins's private life and rich interiority, indexed here by spelling, handwriting, and self-corrections. While Hager thus suggests the potential value of close reading to historians, he also encourages scholars in my discipline, literary studies, to expand what we typically take to constitute the body of nineteenth-century African American literature. He makes this point effectively when he proposes a new category or genre of autobiographical writing, the "enslaved narrative," written from within the immediacies of slave experience rather than, as with slave narratives, from the perspective afforded by time, distance, and freedom. Such a literary approach to slave manuscripts subtly alters the history of slavery and emancipation. Take, as just one instance, the history of racial belonging and African American community formation. Here such collectivities emerge inductively rather than deductively, shifting even within a single document, and they therefore take form in modes far more provisional and dynamic than scholarship typically allows. In chapter 4, "The Written We," Hager analyzes how men and women, slave and newly free, represented their own affiliations, belongings, and companionships. In particular, he examines the shifting first-person plural in the writing of William B. Gould, who began his diary five days after his self-emancipation during the Civil War and kept it through three years of service in the U.S. Navy. Hager reveals a...

Should chelation therapy be abandoned?

The year 2013 marks a new era in understanding the clinical importance of low-level xenobiotic heavy metal intoxication on human disease, and the efficacy and safety of ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid (EDTA) chelation for athero sclerotic disease. It is, therefore, the singular worst moment in over 50 years to consider abandoning this therapy. At present, in the face of emerging data, the use of chelation therapy still remains controversial. The US FDA approves chelation therapy only for the treatment of heavy metal poisoning and toxicity – such toxicity is defined by levels higher than those associated with clinical illness in epidemiological studies. Complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, however, utilize chelation therapy for a wide spectrum of clinical conditions, including cardiovascular diseases. According to the 2009 National Health Statistic Report, approximately 111,000 adult Americans received chelation therapy annually [1]. If an average of ten infusions per patient were received, the out-of-pocket costs might be as high as US$200 million. Yet these are likely bare minimum estimates. The American College of Advancement in Medicine, the leading organization of chelating physicians, estimated that over 500,000 US adults underwent chelation treatments each year, with 800,000 patient visits and significantly higher total out-of-pocket costs [2]. US surveys convincingly demonstrate that, in spite of the controversy over chelation therapy, or perhaps because of it, the use of chelation therapy has increased over the years. There are no clear data that identify which diagnoses – vascular or nonvascular – are being treated. EDTA remains the most commonly utilized and certainly most controversial chelation agent. This compound was synthesized in 1935 and extensively used for lead poisoning after the second world war. The first report that suggested new potential uses of EDTA chelation was published in 1955 by Clarke et al. [3]. While studying medical therapies for lead intoxication, the authors observed that EDTA chelation improved circulation in patients with known Natalia V Solenkova & Gervasio A Lamas* Editorial

Introduction: International Relations and the ‘Death of God’

Friedrich Nietzsche�s proclamation of the �Death of God� has come to function as something akin to a heuristic device in International Relations (IR) signifying the shattering of metaphysical and ontological certainty in European (post)modernity. According to Chris Brown, Nietzsche�s declaration is commonly believed to signify a �crisis in thought� which constitutes a �genuine danger� insofar as it risks �the collapse of the foundations of the old world order�.1 Roland Bleiker notes that such a crisis is deemed by many to be symptomatic of the loss �of a generally accepted worldview that provided a stable ground from which it was possible to assess nature, knowledge, common values, truth, politics � in short, life itself�.2 This forum seeks to interrogate the substance and consequences of the claim that �God is Dead� in the context of global politics, and specifically its implications for IR theory, contemporary political violence, and questions of ethics and responsibility.3 Before providing an overview of the points of synergy, agonism and divergence in the papers, this introduction will offer some contextualising remarks relating to the metaphysical, conceptual and historical parameters of the �Death of God�, marking its emergence in European political thought and provisionally mapping the terrain of its pertinence to contemporary IR. While the claim that �God is Dead� can be traced to Hegel,4 as F. Thomas Trotter notes the �striking � and problematic � shape of the term belongs, of course, to Nietzsche, who gave [it] extended expression.�5 He explains that the claim represents not a singular moment of rupture with a recent God-fearing past, but rather the culmination of an increasing scepticism towards revealed religion in Europe. God, he suggests, had been �attacked� and �out-flanked� in Europe over the course of several centuries, from Copernicus, through the Philosophes, culminating �

Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963 by Peter Gatrell (review)

Reviewed by: Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963 by Peter Gatrell Carl Bon Tempo Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963. By Peter Gatrell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 278 pp. $90.00 (cloth). Peter Gatrell, one of the premier scholars of twentieth-century European migration and population flows, turns his attention to World Refugee Year (WRY) in his latest book, Free World? Most histories of post–World War II refugee affairs only passingly touch upon WRY, an effort in 1959–1960 by noncommunist member nations of the United Nations and a variety of NGOs to publicize and to solve the world’s refugee problems. Gatrell seeks to fill this gap. He believes that WRY was a singular moment, one that reveals much about the place of refugees in politics and culture, the state of humanitarianism, and the meanings of citizenship, as well as its antithesis, statelessness, in the late 1950s. Free World? begins with two introductory chapters. Gatrell first outlines the political, economic, and social forces that produced refugee flows and shaped the politics of refugee affairs in the late 1950s. Not only do the usual suspects—the Cold War, World War II, decolonization, [End Page 493] and demographics—come under discussion, but Gatrell also contends that consumption, tourism and travel, and technology were equally important. In chapter 2, he outlines the pressing refugee problems in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, making the important observation that most experts understood that the refugee flows in the latter two regions were incredibly troubling, even if the public did not. The book’s heart is in chapters 3 and 4. While WRY originated in Great Britain with two political journalists, the cause found favor at the United Nations. Quickly, an astonishingly large number of non-communist governments (among communist nations, only Yugoslavia pledged to help) and NGOs—both humanitarian and religious-based—joined the effort. Gatrell carefully traces the politics behind each country’s and the major NGOs’ participation. He concludes, quite correctly, that motivations and expectations for WRY were complex and multilayered—and varied by nation and organization. While this chapter too often reads like a lengthy laundry list, the research in primary and secondary sources is immense and Gatrell avoids being trapped in a single nation-state, as most accounts of WRY are. He offers, then, a truly international history. Chapter 4 uses the same approach to interrogate what Gatrell calls the “presences and absences” of WRY, by which he means the ways in which the campaign was pursued by its organizers, national governments, and NGOs. Gatrell is concerned not only with the rhetoric surrounding WRY, but also with the images, publicity, and popular culture that WRY participants generated to help the cause (p. 141). Gatrell makes the important point that while participants believed their efforts demonstrated the interconnectedness of the modern world, the WRY campaign just as powerfully illustrated the distance between refugee advocates and the refugees themselves, who were blank canvases upon which their supporters projected and reaffirmed their ideals of consumption and citizenship. This fascinating discussion of the links between consumption, images of refugees, and citizenship does nothing less than remove WRY from the musty corners of immigration historiography. In two concluding chapters, Gatrell judiciously assesses WRY’s short- and long-term effects. WRY was more effective at raising money than it was at resettling refugees, though it did have some considerable success helping the hard-core living in European camps. Equally important, the campaign raised awareness of the refugee problem. Gatrell notes that this awareness did not last long, which leads one to question its depth in the first place, a point the author could have addressed by referencing public opinion polling. In the long term, Gatrell argues that [End Page 494] WRY helped set the stage for other significant campaigns—designed to end hunger, curtail torture, and encourage development—that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, the author does not quite prove a strong connection between WRY and these other broadly humanitarian campaigns, but rather notes “similarities” (p. 234) or that WRY “coincided” with other efforts (p. 226). Gatrell additionally could...

OS PIONEIROS E SEU LEGADO NA CONSTRUÇÃO DA ARQUEOLOGIA DO MARANHÃO

This article discusses the history of archeology and the role the pioneers of Maranhao in the construction of knowledge about the past. To this end, two moments that will be addressed characterized the trajectory of the discipline: Description Period (XVII – XIX), which produced the most significant reports on indigenous peoples of the state, inexhaustible source of inspiration and knowledge about the local past and period Description - Qualifier (XX), which were recorded and described the main archaeological sites observed in different regions of Maranhao. Moreover, it was characterized as a singular moment in the history of archeology of Maranhao because the pioneer character of some researchers to address current issues such as the protection and preservation of archaeological heritage for future generations, knowledge socialization and education and research.

Two to tango: an analysis Brazilian-Argentine relations

Two to Tango: An Analysis of Brazilian-Argentine Relations (SARAIVA, Miriam Gomes. Encontros e Desencontros. O lugar da Argentina na politica externa brasileira. Belo Horizonte: Fino Traco Editora, 2012)The Federal Republic of Brazil seeks to form a Latin American community of nations through the economic, political, social, and cultural integration of the peoples of Latin America. So declares the opening paragraph of Article IV of the Fundamental Principles of the Brazilian Constitution of 1988. At first glance, one has the impression that this provision represents a focus of Brazilian foreign policy along with issues such as autonomy, human rights, self-determination, and others in the same Article. The reality, however, is quite different, with the cited text reflecting a time of change when the Brazilian political class was reaffirming its readiness to establish relations on a new footing with its neighbors, especially Argentina.This repositioning of the Brazilian state in relation to Latin America indicated a willingness to finally overcome Brazil's historic rivalry with Argentina and strengthen the integration process between the two countries. However, due to the lasting image in the public consciousness of binational competition - an image constantly cited as the explanation for the tensions and crises of Mercosur - there was not sufficient political will to overcome the burden of the history between the two nations.The core of this problem lies in the way the Brazilian state was formed, a process characterized for more than a century by latent confrontation with Argentina over Brazil's regional dominance and international ambitions. The history of this relationship is the topic of Miriam Gomes Saraiva's book Encontros e Desencontros: O lugar da Argentina na Politica Externa Brasileira (Friends and Rivals: Argentina's Role in Brazilian Foreign Policy), which analyzes the development of Brazilian foreign policy vis-a-vis policymakers' perspectives on Argentina starting with Brazilian independence and ending with the government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.Such a long timeframe requires delimitations either that are formal and periodic or that are defined by singular moments relative to the whole. In this book, the story is divided into three phases: distrust and estrangement (1822-1978), distrust and rapprochement (1979-1990), and cooperation and tension (1991-2003).The first part of the narrative underscores how a sense of rivalry was present even at moments when certain Brazilian governments expressed an intent to establish some kind of rapprochement with Argentina. These efforts led to periods of relative cordiality between the two countries but did not produce concrete results capable of establishing new parameters for relations in the Southern Cone.This first phase was marked by disputes over the delineation of national boundaries during the first half of the nineteenth century, due especially to Brazil's support for Uruguayan and Paraguayan independence from Argentina. During this period arose the Argentine belief in Brazilian imperialist intentions in the region and a consequent simmering dispute for regional dominance. In Brazil, meanwhile, there emerged a fear of the establishment of an alliance between Argentina and other countries in the region.During the Paraguayan War this rivalry was put aside in the name of common interest, thereby ushering in a period of cordiality between the two countries, although their international alignments remained very different. While Brazil drew closer to the United States to establish a strategic alliance with this emerging power, Argentina remained closely tied to England and as a result grew politically and economically stronger.Suspicions remained during the period from the Proclamation of the Republic in Brazil to 1950. Saraiva describes this time as a period of pronounced tension and rivalry against a backdrop of official detente based on a mutual understanding of the need to maintain regional peace. …

A Sound “Almost Human”: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses

.Tony M. Vinci A Sound “Almost Human”: Trauma, Anthropocentric Authority, and Nonhuman Otherness in Go Down, Moses F aulkners Go Down, Moses (1942) is a novel haunted by more than the ghosts of the dead. Not only do the enduring traumas of slavery, the exploitative violence of the American Indian Wars, and the threat of WWII frame the intersecting chronicles of the McCaslins and Beau­ champs, but animal spirits stalk the deep woods, and human and nonhuman machines disturb the entire county ofYoknapatawpha. Contesting Judith Bry­ ant Wittenberg’s claim that Go Down, Moses is “a distinctly anthropocentric novel” (51), in this article I argue that Faulkners concentration on the im­ brications between human and nonhuman subjectivities in Go Down, Mo­ ses provides reason to read the novel as a nonanthropocentric, and possibly even an antianthropocentric, work. Aligning “the human” with male white­ ness, Faulkner challenges anthropocentric values by situating the recognizable tropes of the ghost, the animal, and the android as ethical categories that blur the boundaries ofhuman subjectivity and make possible an intimate proximity between human and nonhuman otherness via trauma. Faulkners ghosts har­ ness elusive traumatic energies and express them as dislocated images or voices from the past, allowing for an unsettling engagement with cultural atrocities, typically those experienced by marginalized figures not considered “human” enough to be traumatized. Marked by their conspicuous lack of human lan­ guage, the animals in Go Down, Moses become powerful mediating figures, enabling interaction between personal loss, cultural atrocity, and metaphysi­ cal possibilities. Perhaps most provocatively, Faulkner delineates economically and sexually exploited slaves and ex-slaves as android figures who exist only in the white imagination as unaffected beings capable ofperforming rudimentary work but incapable of experiencing trauma or understanding the socio-politi­ cal dramas in which they perform. These animal-machines carry burdens that not only lack expressive outlets but are linked semiotically with the technologi­ cal forces of trains and automobiles in the novel that threaten to eradicate the natural and the spiritual, enabling the dominant culture to displace the anxiety caused by their own atrocities onto those whom they victimize and oppress. These nonhuman categories fall into a semiotic system in which they blur and intertwine, becoming “a field ofdistinctions, differences, proximities, voids, 23 24 Tony M. Vinci A Sound “Almost Human”: In Go Down, Moses enigmas, wonderments, uncanny twists, and possibilities that” expand the defi­ nition ofthe human subject in Go Down, Moses from a discrete individual into a complicated network ofbeings in the continual process of becoming-with oth­ erness (La Capra 174). Through this experimentation with other-than-human characterizations and relations, Faulkner disrupts traditional geographies of the center and the margins and, in doing so, accesses traumatic energies that have been subsumed and oversimplified under the rubric of anthropocentric humanism. As Minrose C. Gwin argues, Faulkner recognizes the inability to heal trauma; thus, his negotiation of the traumatic in Go Down, Moses seeks to sustain engagement with the “open wound”—personal and cultural experi­ ences ofabsence and loss that cannot be closed but must be addressed perpetu­ ally through the “witnessing to and a listening for the incomprehensible” (32, 21). As the complex psychological and cultural after-effects of the traumatic are deeply idiosyncratic and can never be traced directly to a singular moment or cause, these wounds—their symptoms and sources—are difficult to locate. However, according to Gwin, unruly traumatic articulations can be navigat­ ed indirectly: “trauma necessitates articulation, but that articulation may be obliquely directed through sites displaced from the wounded one” (22). While Gwin does not address specifically how Faulkner’s text performs this maneuver of displaced articulation, I suggest that he employs the ghost, animal, and an­ droid as relays to the incomprehensible elements of the traumatic. In this way, trauma is not suppressed or rejected in the narrative; rather, by never situating it solely within the framework of the known and accepted, Faulkner fosters an ethic of radical openness that is free to resonate in both the interstices and imbrications between human and nonhuman subjectivities and, consequently, engages the traces of trauma that reside there. To clarify Faulkners treatment of the nonhuman as a means to cross cul...