Socialist Perspective Research Articles

1930년대 중국의 統制經濟論과 근대 인식

The article aimed to focus on the significance of the discourse of controlled economy that had been popular over the intellectual milieu of China in 1930s. The article pursued to overview the intellectual trend in that period, in particular, investigate various moments and points for its emergence within the context of the perception of modernization.BR In 1930s the world encountered a great deal of demand for the reformation of capitalism, which was closely connected to the formation and the spread of the discourse of controlled economy in China. The contrast between the crisis of the Great Depression by the United States of America and the celebration of the Five-year plan by the Soviet Union defined the characteristic of the discourse of controlled economy in China as contemporary reaction. The foundation of the Nanjing Government strongly involved in the formation of the discourse. The political circumstances since introduction of the government and the outbreak of the Manchurian Affair further complicated the discourse. The Principle of People’s Livelihood, a prototype of the Chinese non-capitalist modernization, played a significant role for the discourse of controlled economy to broaden its ideological scope by its being converged with the discourse, and the practice of Principle itself also became expanded and deepened by it.BR The article particularly emphasized that the discourse of controlled economy enabled related discussions for a subjective pathway to the modernization of China grounded upon the periodic circumstance of 1930s. Here, I argued that the implication for the discourse of controlled economy lay in the fact that it sparked the alteration of the discourse of modernization itself. Such qualitative change in perception further conditioned the intellectual trend in 1940s along with non-capitalist scope. There are three connected clues in terms of the acceptance to the discourse of controlled economy: First, the socialist perspective in Chinese intellectual milieu was rather gradually underscored via the structure of the discourse of controlled economy. Second, there had been formed a wide agreement with mixed economy as a result of subjective acceptance of the discourse. Three, there occurred politico-intellectual divergence according to the subjects, and accelerated the political changes in 1940s. The discourse of controlled economy in China not only reveal the intellectual significance of 1930s, but it also allow us to glimpse the characteristic of the Chinese Revolution in the twentieth century. More studies on the topic are anticipated.

Harold Laski's International Functionalism: A Socialist Challenge to Federalism

ABSTRACTHarold Laski argued for international functionalism from his distinctive socialist perspective. He opposed the existing international system based on the principle of state sovereignty. He also criticised the international federalism proposed as an alternative to the existing system. Although Laski began to devise and present his functionalist case in the 1920s, the circumstances of the following decade led him to adopt and adapt some Marxist ideas and to place less emphasis on functionalism. During and after the Second World War he reconsidered the possibilities for international functional organisation. Although fragmented and undeveloped, his functionalist theory was innovative. By the end of the 1940s he had expressed it in a variety of publications as he reflected on the international conditions of that decade. Unlike what is probably the most well-known functionalist case of the early to mid-twentieth century – that of David Mitrany – Laski's argument bears affinities with the later neofunctionalist theorists. Laski's functionalism was underpinned by the critique of sovereignty which made his political philosophy distinctive. Reasons can be detected for the changes in his attitude to and emphasis on functionalism.

Marxismo y nación: Mariátegui en el exilio latinoamericano en México

<p>A cincuenta años de la muerte de José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930) un sector de la intelectualidad latinoamericana de izquierdas que se encontraba exiliada en México emprendió nuevas lecturas sobre su obra. Los nombres de los argentinos José Aricó (1931-1991) y Oscar Terán (1938-2008) y del boliviano René Zavaleta Mercado (1937-1984) se anudan en esa comunidad de lectura que se forjó en revistas de intervención política, jornadas de discusión académica y producción de libros. Se trata de tres destacados intelectuales que partieron de una perspectiva que privilegió un análisis del problema de la nación en clave socialista. En este trabajo se analizan sus contribuciones a ese campo.</p>

Cultural Hegemony and Longevity on Power in Cameroon: An Analysis from a Socialist Perspective

This article tries to adapt socialist and Marxist reading grids to the Cameroon case. It draws on the neo-Gramscian literature leaving aside concepts unsuited to the realities of the country. It offers the analysis axis harmed/profiteers who contrasts with that of proletarian/bourgeois in the literature. However, it notes that the client/owners paradigm remains the nodal point of neo-patrimonial relations. The article emphasizes the concept of “mass consciousness” to that of “legal consciousness” or “class consciousness”. It leads to a conclusion similar to that of Gramsci’s according to which the political system resists to the revolutionary commitment of harmed people in Cameroon thanks to the trenches built in social organizations under the influence of the hegemonic culture of profiteers.

Das Massaker von Paris

In the light of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, this essay seeks to analyse and understand the objective conditions and power relations within the capitalist world system as they have unfolded since the end of the Soviet Union. Its specific point is to understand the role of the leading strategies and practices of imperialism and of socalled „political Islam“within these conditions and power relations. The main strategies aim at fostering bonapartist, fascist and right-wing ideologies at home, in the dominant imperialist countries that is, and structurally reactionary/„Islamist“ ideologies in the periphery to, both, strengthen the leading factions of capital in the imperialist centres. The essay claims that the only viable option for the left is to remain independent of and in active opposition to the strategies of imperialism. Furthermore the left will have to take up the fight against creatures such as the Islamic State that were provided a fertile ground and nurtured by imperialism. It also concludes that the left has to defend and engage its own independent democratic and socialist perspective countering both the powers of imperialism in the centres and reaction in the periphery.

The Life, Music, and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal

The Life, Music, and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal

Revision of Marxist Thought in Global Socialist Perspectives

Marxism gives a common background to both school of thoughts either capitalism or socialism. Marxism is also known as scientific socialism because of its practical validity. Marxism believes that the downfall of capitalism is inevitable according to its own process of dialectic feature. Communism is an extreme limit of Marxism whereas socialism is considered to be a transitional phase of capitalism and communism. The failure of both classical capitalism on the one hand and communism on the other together with the successful achievements of socialism in various countries are sufficient evidences to rationalize the practical validity of socialism in global perspectives. In this context, particularly evolutionary socialists have sufficiently contributed to replace the deficiencies of Marxism in global socialist perspectives.

Bridging Indigenous and Socialist Perspectives: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Weaving together a great diversity of worldviews is replete with obstacles and dangers, especially in a polarised †settler colonial world like North America, where terminology is highly contested.1...

The Communal idea in the 21st century

Preface List of contributors Introduction: A Difficult Question, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Yaacov Oved and Menachem Topel PART I: RELEXIONS AND THORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 1. General Thoughts about the Communal Idea, Amitai Etzioni 2. Developmental Communalism into the Twenty-First Century, Donald E. Pitzer 3. Theorizing Intentional Community in the Twenty-First Century, Lyman Tower Sargent 4. Contemporary Communalism at a Time of Crisis, Graham Meltzer 5. Commune and Community: a Socialist Perspective, Yiftah Goldman PART II: THE DIVERSITY OF CHALLENGES 6. Communes and Communities: History and Perspective, Yaacov Oved 7. Historical Perspectives on Participation, Gyorgy Szell 8. Community: Greatly Needed but Hard to Achieve, Timothy Miller 9. Communal Aspects of Contemporary Life, Shulamit Reinharz 10. In the Collective Interest: Job Quality, Chris Warhurst and Katherine Trebeck PART III: A MULTI-SIDED PRAXIS 11. The Communal Idea in 21st Century Australia and New Zealand, Bill Metcalf 12. Renewing Traditional Communality, Menachem Topel 13. Christian and Messianic Jews' Communes in Israel: Past, Present and Future, Rami Degani and Ruth Kark 14. Gender, Power and Equality: Women's Roles in Hutterite Society, Yossi Katz and John C. Lehr PART IV: A CRITICAL TEST: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE KIBBUTZ 15. The Reciprocal Relationship between Feminism and Communal Life, Michal Palgi 16. Kibbutz Education: Characteristics, Changes and Future Relevance, Maria Folling-Albers 17. Kibbutz: Survival at Risk, Eliezer Ben-Rafael Epilogue Bibliography Index

Freedom Budget: The Promise of the Civil Rights Movement for Economic Justice

Civil rights leaders and organizers animated by socialist perspectives were a key element in all that happened in the civil rights movement, from 1955 to 1968. These included A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—central figures in the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organically connected to the Washington March was a document to which all three were committed, The Freedom Budget for All Americans, advanced in 1966. It promised the full and final triumph of the civil rights movement, to be achieved by going beyond civil rights, linking the goal of racial justice with the goal of economic justice for all people in the United States. This was to be brought into being by rallying massive segments of the 99% of the American people in a powerfully democratic and moral crusade embracing the civil rights movement, the labor movement, progressive‐minded religious communities, students and youth as well as their elders.

The Political Theatre of David Edgar: Negotiation and Retrieval (review)

Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt. The Political Theatre of David Edgar: and Retrieval. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 313. $99.00. Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt's meticulously researched and clearly argued book offers a timely and refreshing way of looking at a dramatist whose socially work over four decades has established him as one of most accomplished and influential political playwrights in Britain. One of post-1968 brood of dramatists that includes Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, and David Hare, David Edgar started his writing career with an unflinching socialist perspective and an alternative view of theater as very locus of political struggle and social debate. So many years later, Edgar still remains most prolific and resilient of his generation. Edgar's work, which has long been a source of public controversy, draws a fair share of vigorous criticism from both ends of political spectrum. His passion for dynamics and complexity of contemporary political situations, combined with his readiness to tackle urgent, controversial social issues, has provoked much-needed public engagement and social dialogue in a nation where collective activism is being reduced to an issue of private conscience. Reinelt and Hewitt's book, third full-length study of Edgar's work to be published, extends far beyond a modest introductory survey of development of a radical political idiom in Edgar's drama. A successful combination of exhaustive research and argumentative zeal, volume is designed to revitalize and provide a rich, interactive perspective to the aspect of Edgar's work that is sometimes considered passe (11). As aptly chosen subtitle, Negotiation and Retrieval, indicates, primary focus of volume is on perseverance and vision of playwright committed to celebrating quotidian human gestures of re-engagement with politics and failed political initiatives (4). What further distinguishes this monograph on Edgar from previous work is its collaborative approach, combining disciplines of political philosophy and theater studies. Janelle Reinelt is a renowned theater scholar who has published extensively on contemporary British political theater, while Gerald Hewitt specializes in philosophy and political science. Interdisciplinary collaboration, which integrates different epistemological assumptions of individual disciplines, is not always easy and productive. Reinelt and Hewitt's collaboration, however, works very well. Following from Michael Oakeshott's definition of politics as attempt to rearrange and change established social arrangements, they apply this rather flexible but fundamental notion of politics to micropolitical dimension of theater and performance. As authors rightfully note, Edgar's work offers the most comprehensive articulation of major political questions (1). Making extensive use of contemporary political theories from Chantal Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Kenan Malik, and Will Kymlicka, just to name a few, book stimulates and facilitates diverse intertextual readings of Edgar's oeuvre. It provides some creative ways in which political theories and terms can be put to work in reinvigorating Edgar's literary texts. A case in point occurs in chapter 4, where Destiny (1976), one of Edgar's earlier plays, is linked up nicely with Playing with Fire (2005) and Testing Echo (2008) through Balibar's important notions of ethnos and demos. As this interdisciplinary approach reveals that Edgar's individual are firmly grounded in specific sociopolitical contexts, it also underlines that his texts have continuously thrived on most fundamental and sometimes inexplicable political questions. Thus book persuasively argues that most of Edgar's are problem plays instead of thesis plays (16), countering a critical tendency to denounce Edgar's politics as peripheral and even dogmatic. …

Literature and the Late-Victorian Radical Press

Literature and the Late-Victorian Radical Press Abstract: Amidst a larger surge in the number of books and periodicals published in late- nineteenth-century Britain, a corresponding surge occurred in the radical press. This counter- cultural press that emerged at the fin de siecle sought to define itself in opposition to commercial print and the capitalist press, and was deeply antagonistic to existing political, economic, and print publishing structures. Literature flourished across this counter-public print sphere, and major authors of the day such as William Morris and George Bernard Shaw published fiction, poetry, and literary criticism within it. Until recently, this corner of late-Victorian print culture has been of interest principally to historians, but literary critics have begun to take more interest in the late-Victorian radical press and in the literary cultures of socialist newspapers and journals such as the Clarion and the New Age. Amidst a larger surge in the number of books and periodicals published in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, a corresponding surge occurred in the radical press: as Deian Hopkin calculates, several hundred periodicals representing a wide array of socialist perspectives were born, many to die soon after, in the decades surrounding the turn of the century (226). An independent infrastructure of radical presses, associated with various radical organizations and editors, emerged as an alternative means of periodical production apart from commercial, profit- oriented print. i Literature and literary discourse flourished across this counterpublic sphere, and major authors of the day published fiction, poetry, and journalism within it: in the 1880s, for example, William Morris spent five years editing and writing for the revolutionary paper Commonweal, while George Bernard Shaw cut his teeth as an author by serializing four novels in the socialist journals To-Day and Our Corner. Still, until recently, this corner of late-Victorian print culture has been of interest principally to historians, who have mined the radical archives in search of the origins of the socialist revival, the Labour Party, the internecine conflicts of the British left wing, and so on. ii In recent years, however, literary critics have begun to take more interest in the late-Victorian radical press and the rich literary history expressed within it; not only William Morris, but other major literary contributors, such as Edward Carpenter and Dollie

Economic Crisis from a Socialist Perspective

The crisis in capitalism today is not, or not yet, a crisis of capitalism. Whether it evolves into a crisis of capitalism – when the system itself is in question for significant numbers of people – depends on three factors. The first is the extent of the economic meltdown now underway, and the mass suffering, resentment, and opposition it provokes. The second factor comprises the policies undertaken to contain and reverse the crisis, their effects, and their public perception. Finally, how socialists assess the crisis in capitalism and intervene in it will also help determine whether it becomes a crisis of capitalism. Appreciating the difference between crises in and of capitalism is, we shall argue here, crucial for socialist strategy. Crises within capitalism are mostly endured; sometimes they are also managed by changing capitalism’s form. For example, in the US today, a serious crisis in a “private” sort of capitalism (relatively less state intervention and control of productive property and markets) provokes a change to a “state” form (relatively more state intervention). Similarly, when crises overtake relatively state-interventionist forms of capitalism (as happened in the US, the UK, and many less developed economies in the 1970s), “solutions” often entail change to more private forms of capitalism. Socialists thus need to distinguish their critique of capitalism, per se, from the repeated critiques of each form of capitalism (especially during their crises) by partisans of the other. Otherwise they risk being absorbed – usually by partisans of state interventionist capitalism, but sometimes by the partisans of the private form of capitalism. Then their distinctive contribution, a critique of capitalism that rejects both its forms, is lost and the prospects for a socialist transformation reduced.

John McGahern: Memory, Autobiography, Fiction, History

This article, a contribution to a special issue on the modes and meanings of life writing, discusses John McGahern's rural autobiographical novels. It focuses on their genre, their reception, and their critical import in relation to Irish twentieth-century history and its revisioning. It is first of all noted that the novels' evident basis in the writer's life, and their location in specific places (precisely identifiable by a knowledgeable reader), accounts for their reception by many reviewers and critics as a quasi-documentary record, able to supplement or displace ideas about rural Ireland associated with de Valeran nationalism. Particular attention is paid to the representation in The Dark and Amongst Women of childhood trauma: namely, abuse at the hands of patriarchal authority. Such abuse was prevalent in the Ireland about which McGahern wrote, but impossible to acknowledge publicly (though it has recently been intensively discussed): the banning by the Irish censor of The Dark, at the time of its original London publication in 1965, is an emblematic instance of that repression. The narrative strategies by which McGahern registers and makes manageable the reality of trauma are considered in the context of this collective repression and recovered memory. The article concludes by taking up some points made by Joe Cleary in a recent critique of naturalism in late twentieth-century Irish writing, including McGahern's. A comparison is drawn with Raymond Williams' Border Country, which deploys the socialist perspective Cleary evidently desiderates. It is argued that the terms of such a perspective are already present in the life-world of the young Williams, as they were not in that of McGahern. Moreover, if there is a degree of authorial self-limitation in McGahern, this may be a condition of the particularly intimate response his work elicits from readers; and hence of what Irish President Mary McAleese referred to at the time of McGahern's death as its 'immense contribution to our self-understanding as a nation'.

Gramscian Thought and Brazilian Education

In the history of Brazilian education, it is only since the 1980s, during the redemocratization of Brazil, that proposals for public education in a socialist perspective have been presented. The past two decades have been marked by a growing interest in Gramscian thought, mainly in the educational field, making possible the elaboration of proposals for public school organization in Brazil. However, intellectuals and pedagogues in Brazil have confused the Gramscian ‘unitary school’ with what is known in Brazil as the ‘polytechnical school’, a vague idea of education which is attributed to Marx and taken up by Lenin in the course of the Soviet Revolution. The two conceptions of education differ because of the varying historical contexts in which Marx, Lenin and Gramsci lived and developed their thinking on the roles of State and school. These fundamental differences have been overlooked during the diffusion of Gramscian thought in Brazil, causing confusion in the understanding of the ‘unitary school’ and the ‘polytechnical school’.

The Pilgrimage Topos and the Problem of Modernity: A Transatlantic View of Selected Hispanic Texts

Góngora's Soledades can be used as a base from which to examine failed pilgrimage as a recurring topos in Latin American texts which confront the Baroque legacy of frustrated modernity. Carpentier's 'El camino de Santiago', Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and Vallejo's 'Trilce LXV' constitute a sort of progeny of this Gongorine topos, contrasting in their different relation to the messianic. While Góngora, Rulfo, and Carpentier present historical repetition as a form of paralysis, Vallejo presents the frustration of historical progress in equally graphic terms, but also offers hope in his engagement with possibility from a socialist perspective. His poem suggests the 'weak Messianic power' of which Benjamin writes, one which engages the future without a pre-established teleology, locating pilgrimage instead in the collective and open space of human potential.

Introductory Notes on Theodore Allen's “Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective”

He made proposals. We Carried them out. –Bertolt Brecht Theodore Allen's magisterial two-volume work of US labor history, The Invention of the White Race, is the product of three decades of empiric...

A Portrait of the Artist as an Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre de Barry Humphries (review)

Reviewed by: A Portrait of the Artist as an Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre de Barry Humphries Veronica Kelly (bio) Paul Matthew St Pierre. A Portrait of the Artist as an Australian: L'Oeuvre Bizarre de Barry HumphriesMcGill-Queen's University Press. xxviii, 364. $49.95 This devoted account of the international profile of Barry Humphries since 1952 minutely documents the originality and fecundity - one might say the enormity - of the Melbourne maverick's creations. Paul Matthew St Pierre provides invaluable checklists of Humphries' performances on stage, film, television, and sound recordings; and as an artist, novelist, autobiographer, poet, preface writer, comic book scriptor, and song librettist. While Humphries' performative impact is illuminated, it is rather the literary output of an artist who the author considers 'has always been primarily a writer' which dominates this study. Despite its textual bent, the book places Humphries within the major twentieth-century performative traditions of Dada and music hall. 1950 s Melbourne Dada saw the youthful Humphries exhibiting a gumboot full [End Page 400] of custard under the title 'Pus in Boots.' Or so runs an item of local folklore, whose absence from St Pierre's account suggests that either he has not encountered documented traces of this 'event' or, more likely, that it exemplifies the superstar attracting the ben trovato of urban legend. St Pierre analyses the prankery, masquerade, kitsch-addiction, and multilingual punning of Humphries' foundational Dadaism. Particularly cogent is the placing of his subject within the practices and ethos of music hall, citing a cohort of inspirations and colleagues including Tommy Trinder, George Robey, Eric Idle, Max Miller, Chaplin, and Cecily Courtneidge. The author is genuinely admiring of Humphries as an 'Australian, ' while missing some of the cultural and political specificity in which this international career should be read. Exuberant 1970s nationalism both created Les Patterson and ennobled Edna to Dame status: but the lofty personage and social programs of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (who knighted Dame Edna and sanctified the Yartz in national life) are not examined. St Pierre is unsure in placing Humphries within the specifically Australian traditions of impersonation, physical comedy, and Melbourne-type social satire. Here is a major cultural and performative articulation against which Humphries consciously defines himself while drawing on many of its practices and energies. St Pierre startlingly claims his hero/ine as 'not a political satirist,' but if 'political' is tendentiously restricted to critique from radical or socialist perspectives the description retains some validity. The powerful, the rapacious, the malevolent, and the fanatical are fairly safe from Humphries' attentions. One cannot imagine him, like the brilliant impersonator Max Gillies, donning a fat suit as Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone (in his sketch 'Amanda-tory Detention'), or assuming the role of his turbulent nation's ethical conscience, as Mrs Evita Bezuidenhout (Pieter-Dirk Eys) does for South Africa. Rather, Humphries' peculiar genius for Theophrastan classification fabulates autonomous personalities who appropriate the limelight from their creator. The audacious social masquerade of Dame Edna (formerly Mrs Norm Everedge of Moonee Ponds), the vulgarian belchings of the Yartz Minister Les Patterson, and the Bakhtinian somatic excesses of the virginal colonial Candide Barry McKenzie, are major creations enduring in print and visual media. Particularly, his masterpiece is Sandy Stone; he of the hottie, dressing-gown, and slippers, whose Beckettian monologues transcend suburban satire to lay bare the poetry and pathos of the human condition. Dame Edna may be the most notorious of Humphries' creations, but in Australia at least, Sandy is the most enduringly beloved. St Pierre devotes him considerable coverage, hailing 'Sandy Agonistes' as 'the greatest Australian poem and song of the twentieth century.' St Pierre's main interests, as stated, are textual. Humphries is seen as 'a singularly important comic writer, a daring postmodern generic deconstructionist, a Dada prankster in language, and a master of grotesqueries.' [End Page 401] The author's own writing style is rife with translingual puns, Dada etymologies, and neologisms, such that homage frequently collapses into overkill. 'Even the name "Sandy" seems to contain a phonemical death clause, the "Sandy Claus(e)" "sand + die," when in fact it proposes another clause, like a codicil in a will, "sans + die," ("without dying"), or...

Homo Economicus, Political Economy and Socialism

Abstract Neither the critique of capitalism nor the search for socialist economic alternatives can avoid an explicit engagement with values. This entails rejecting homo economicus, which acts as a basic building block for both neoclassical economic theory and the defense of the market economic order. Socialists have much to learn from three recent literatures: on the ethical limitations of the market, endogenous preferences and the social determinants of superior economic performance — all based on an explicit rejection of the homo economicus assumption. None of these literatures is unproblematic from a socialist perspective, but there is much that is useful and much more that can become useful with an appropriate critical engagement. Institutions and processes that promote socialist values such as cooperation and solidarity are a crucial part of both the transition to and the maturing of a more participatory and coordinated economic system.

A Picture of the Big Apple

n section York, U.S.A., of Mandela's Earth and Other Poems, Wole Soyinka sculpts verbal portrait of New York City and projects an image of United States. He adopts an overtly ritualistic approach and refuses to take any definite ideological position. Maxim Gorky's representation of NewYork in The City of Yellow Devil foregrounds Marxian image of money as universal whore that corrupts all, and is basically critique of capitalism from solely socialist perspective. So are Vladimir Mayakovsky's poems about US. On contrary, in O. Henry's New York, capitalism is conceived of as politicoeconomic system with human face and guarantee of personal freedom. Brendan Behan's New York is celebration of friendliest, the greatest city on face of God's earth, and the wonder of world (13, 12). What appears contemptible and despicable to Gorky, Soyinka, and Mayakovsky about New York is perceived by O. Henry and Brendan Behan, both humorists, as spice of life. The approach adopted by Soyinka rather suppresses humorous. Whatever differences do appear in diverse portraits of city, one thing stands out clearly: New York is great. It does not matter that some of writers try vainly to hide fact. The city leaves strong impression on their minds, which is why they care to write about it. Rapturously enamored of city, Brendan Behan's wife likens it to a fancy fair and considers anybody who is not impressed by its skyline either half blind or simply liar (Brendan 13). Broken down into five units and conceived as an initiation rite, poem York, U.S.A. takes form of travelogue. It reads like Soyinka's covert retort to Joseph Conrad's Heart ofDarkness and similar colonial texts about Africa. It is extremely difficult, if not indeed impossible, to determine what part of picture represents poet's direct experience in US and what part derives from books and other sources of information about country. Aptly titled Initiation, first unit takes poet-protagonist through airport rituals. Its first stanza introduces most of problems discussed in poem. The aircraft noise, disordered echoes of feet of disgorged passengers walking away from plane, multilingual queues, COLOR CODES signs, tight tunnels, and duty-free shops coupled with huge billboards initiate poet into menace of noise, history of genocide, slavery, and other forms of methodical madness that