Substantive Chapter Research Articles

Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework by Reuven Snir (review)

Reviewed by: Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework by Reuven Snir Anna Ziajka Stanton Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework. Reuven Snir. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. 416. $113.20 (cloth); $37.72 (paper); $37.72 (eBook). In 2011, the International Journal of Middle East Studies convened a roundtable of scholars to survey the field of Arabic literary studies in the United States. The five brief essays that they produced reflect a sense of having arrived at an inflection point in the field’s history. Post-9/11 enrollment in Arabic-language courses at US institutions of higher education was at a record high (according to data collected by the Modern Language Association, it peaked at around 35,000 students nationwide between 2009 and 2013).1 The nascent Arab Spring movements had lent a youthful revolutionary cachet to the popular image of the Arab world abroad, inspiring a burgeoning interest in Arabic cultural production among American undergraduates and in the public sphere. Academic research on Arabic literature was tracking away from the sociological and philological approaches that had dominated in an earlier era to become increasingly theoretical in its orientations, as befitted its new disciplinary affiliations with departments of comparative literature rather than solely with area studies departments dedicated to the regional study of culture, history, and politics. Yet amid their general optimism about the state of Arabic literary studies in the American academy in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the essays in the IJMES roundtable also register a subtle anxiety: a concern that Arabic literature’s newfound cool would mean the wholesale abandonment of the more staid empirical methods that—with their attention to issues of canon-formation and literary form, their privileging of archival work aimed at situating texts within the material-historical conditions of their production—formerly gave shape and purpose to the field. As one contributor put it: “What exactly is the discipline of Arabic literature? Or what, in concrete terms, is the Arabic literary material we can work on?”2 Reuven Snir’s new book, Modern Arabic Literature: A Theoretical Framework, offers an answer to these questions that is unabashedly—even unfashionably—empirical in its approach. Arguing that Arabic literature can be profitably understood as comprising “one dynamic, autonomous literary system,” Snir’s ambitious goal is to map this system in its entirety, thus making possible “the comprehensive study of the diverse and multifarious texts that make up modern Arabic literature” (2). Such a systematic theory of literature is advantageous insofar as it allows Snir to present a picture that is simultaneously capacious and granular, invested in identifying the macrotrends that have defined the Arabic literary field since the nineteenth century and, in equal measure, in exposing the dialectical play of factors—internal and external, aesthetic and circumstantial—that constantly operate to “defamiliarize” these trends within a process-driven cultural space (3). In one chapter, Snir inventories an extensive corpus of literary texts, written in Modern Standard Arabic as well as various Arabic dialects, in order to propose six interlocking subsystems within which individual works circulate according to their canonical or non-canonical status, their intended audience of either children or adults, and their identity as either original Arabic creations or translations. Another chapter explores “the diachronic intersystemic changes” to Arabic literature that have resulted from the interference of foreign (predominantly European) literary traditions, and from the extraliterary pressures of religion and politics (100). The book’s final substantive chapter examines Arabic poetry, fiction, and drama as discrete genres linked to specific epochs in the field’s history, but also as composite categories whose “interrelationships and interactions” make them inherently resistant to efforts at temporal and typological classification (175). [End Page 681] In its avowedly egalitarian view of what constitutes Arabic literature, Snir’s book joins the company of Muhsin al-Musawi’s The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters (2015) and The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature’s volume on postclassical literature (2008) as the latest recent work of scholarship in English to challenge the foundational structures of Arabic literary studies in both the Western academy and the Arab world. A standard history of Arabic literature’s evolution after the rise...

Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil by Eve E. Buckley

Reviewed by: Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil by Eve E. Buckley Christian Brannstrom Eve E. Buckley Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. vxiii + 279 pp. Table, maps, photos, notes, references, and index. $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-1-4693-3430-2). Why, in spite of the actions of federal agencies through dozens of projects over the past several decades, does human suffering from drought in Brazil’s northeastern region persist? Why did recurring drought in the semi-arid sertão kill thousands through starvation and disease, and force thousands more sertanejos into work camps, or worse? Interpretations have coalesced around the “drought industry” view (p. 4), first articulated by Brazilian journalist Antônio Callado, who argued in 1959 that northeastern elites “industrialized the drought” and enriched themselves through dam, reservoir, and transport projects that federal agencies implemented during the twentieth century in response to recurring drought (p. 199). The perverse outcomes of the “drought industry” were noted by Anthony Hall in his classic Drought and Irrigation in North-East Brazil (Cambridge, 1978) and received attention from many Brazilian scholars, such as Darcy Ribeiro, who noted that drought aid reduced resilience of sertão inhabitants and “added a water monopoly” to the assets of powerful landowners (p. 40). Technocrats and the Politics of Drought is about federal bureaucracies and the “drought technocrats” (p. 3) who built dams, reservoirs, roads, and irrigation projects that failed to make discernable reductions in the vulnerability of rural inhabitants to drought. Eve Buckley’s book does not attempt to overturn the “drought industry” paradigm for the sertão; rather, the book focuses on the engineers and agronomists who ran the bureaucracy and supervised the work sites. Through her reading of institutional archives in Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and Fortaleza, especially correspondence between field engineers and agronomists with their superiors, Buckley aims to offer a “more complex and nuanced” reading of the “drought industry” by showing that engineers and agronomists “exhibited [End Page 219] genuine sympathy” for the retirantes (drought refugees) and showed “profound distaste for Brazil’s chronic inequalities” (p. 4). She argues that drought technocrats “were not … uncaring instruments of an industrializing state” but rather they “were misled by their naïve beliefs that science and technology could resolve problems that were political” (p. 6), meaning the unequal access to food, land, and water that produced drought vulnerability. Buckley provides national political context for understanding actions of the leaders of the drought bureaucracies, which evolved from the Inspectoria de Obras Contra as Secas (IOCS; Inspectorate of Works to Combat Droughts, created in 1909) to the Inspectoria Federal de Obras Contra as Secas (IFOCS; Federal Inspectorate of Works to Combat Droughts), and then Departamento Nacional de Obras Contra as Secas (National Department of Works to Combat Droughts; DNOCS) and the Superintendência de Desenvolvimento do Nordeste (SUDENE; Superintendency for Northeast Development, created in 1959). She focuses on the leaders of these agencies, their educational backgrounds, and their priorities. Special attention is devoted to Celso Furtado, the leader of SUDENE and one of Brazil’s most prominent twentieth-century intellectuals. Furtado viewed drought vulnerability as a symptom of social inequality and marginalization and supported land redistribution around reservoirs as a solution to the drought problem. The 1964 military takeover in Brazil sent Furtado into exile and criminalized the idea of seeking drought relief through land redistribution. The analysis of Furtado’s land redistribution plan for the sertão, the last substantive chapter in the book, complements an earlier chapter on early-twentieth-century public health knowledge of the northeast. A public health survey of the northeast led by Belisário Penna and Arthur Neiva in 1912, three years after IOCS was established in 1909, supported the argument that sertanejos’ suffering resulted from disease, illiteracy, and marginalization, not racial degeneration, as Penna and Neiva’s contemporaries argued. Penna and Neiva’s interpretation was not put into practice in the drought bureaucracies, which were focused on dams, reservoirs, and roads. The core argument of the book is not why the dam-reservoir program succeeded, but that...

Condescending Saviors: Union Substitution at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK)

“Condescending Saviors” identifies and analyzes multiple factors underlying the ability of Toyota Motor Corporation’s Georgetown, Kentucky plant to stymy unionization of production workers through sophisticated and extensive union substitutionism. Two key factors in this case study of its profoundly pragmatic long-term substitution are the meso-corporatist institutions by which it successfully embedded itself in Kentucky, and, critically, the trajectory of the United Auto Workers from business unionism to narrow enterprise unionism based solely on the interests of the auto companies. A contrast between the Kentucky Building Trades Council’s successful unionization of construction work and the UAW’s organizing failures places the latter in bold relief and argues against the popular reasoning that the UAW was simply the victim of events, the period, or TMMK’s location. It also exposes the insularity that has shielded Toyota’s plants and workers from all objective academic investigation. A final substantive chapter charts the stages of the UAW’s transition to enterprise unionism, decades of erosion of union democracy and concomitant organizing capacity, and thus offers a view of possible alternative developments. The historical and comparative method contextualizes these events within the larger framework of the shifting relationship between capital, labor, and the state in the second half of the twentieth century US. The similarities between the weak class struggle in the US and the defeat of Japanese working-class struggle overshadow any reliance on cultural differences. Thus, “American exceptionalism” and “Japanese uniqueness” are abandoned as frames that deny an important commonality of forces, and the specific working of meso-corporatism in the US. Investigating this puzzle using the arsenal of political science and, necessarily, the methods of the meticulous historian, yielded a new paradigm to better understand trade union decline. Identifying these factors required an in-depth understanding of Japanese and US union history since the nineteenth century; an extensive review of the history of industrial relations practices at Toyota’s earlier joint venture with General Motors in California; and the decades-long process of centralization of control within the UAW and its refusal to enforce the Constitutionally-required prohibition of competition between UAW-represented plants; all of which are further explored in working papers.

Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present by David F. Crew

Reviewed by: Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present by David F. Crew Tony Joel Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present. By David F. Crew. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. 274. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0472130139. From the Kaiser’s cumbersome yet imposing Zeppelin airships and the more threatening Gothas during World War I, to the Condor Legion’s obliteration of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, through to heavy Luftwaffe assaults during the early phases of World War II, Germany played a pioneering role in directly targeting—or terrorizing—an enemy’s home front population. Hermann Göring’s bombers had “sowed the wind,” remarked Royal Air Force Bomber Command chief Sir Arthur Harris in his postwar memoir Bomber Offensive (1947), and in time all Germans living in the Third Reich were to “reap the whirlwind” (52). The Western Allies’ bombing offensive, which gained momentum from February 1942 onward and continued until the final weeks of World War II, damaged or wholly destroyed over 130 German cities and towns. Statistics on the devastation caused by the bombing war against Germany are imprecise, but commonly accepted estimates include some 600,000 civilians killed, around 900,000 others wounded, and 7.5 million left homeless. Countless historically and culturally significant public buildings and artifacts were also lost. How all these “bodies and ruins” have been imagined and reimagined, particularly by German authors of local publications in the half-century following the war’s end, is the central focus of this new book by David F. Crew. Bodies and Ruins explores both textual and pictorial representations of the bombing war against Germany, but the role of visual imagery is given special consideration. Crew’s stated aim is to gain an understanding of “how authors of local publications tried to use pictures to create meanings and to tell stories” (8), and, furthermore, to search “for what were considered to be the ‘right’ stories and the ‘right’ pictures of the bombing war in local publications and picture books from 1945 to the present” (9). Crew’s repeated emphasis on local representations should not be misconstrued as a sign that this work restricts itself to a few carefully chosen case studies. On the contrary, a wide range of cities feature—some fleetingly, others more prominently—throughout this temporally and topographically ambitious survey of how Germans have imagined the bombing war through selected books and other media spanning seven decades. Bodies and Ruins is structured around six chapters, which follow a loosely chronological order while each is driven by its own thematic bent. Chapter 1, for instance, examines the “local master narrative” (10) established by (West) [End Page 195] German accounts in the immediate postwar period, whereas chapter 2 explores the “essential role played by images, primarily photographs, in these local publications” (10). Chapter 3 asks why “shock pictures” (of dead bodies) were not as prevalent as photographs of ruins. Chapter 4 probes how the themes of “mourning, denial, and celebration” were visually conveyed in picture books (again, limited to West Germany). Chapter 5 claims to focus on the anticapitalist/anti-Western Marxist interpretations of the bombing war promoted in the GDR. The sixth and final substantive chapter covers the post-reunification period, especially how the advent of the internet shapes and reflects ways in which Germans now attempt to remember the bombing war. Crew can be commended for attempting such an ambitious project, and for producing a thoughtful and at times thought-provoking account. While there is much to like about this highly readable work, it ultimately suffers from trying to do too much. A tighter focus—perhaps on a shorter time frame or fewer cities—would have enabled deeper analysis and greater clarity of argument. To cite just one frustrating shortcoming: there are periodic, vague references to the Cold War throughout the book, but it is unclear what function it actually serves. The early chapters concentrate on West Germany almost exclusively, so there is no comparative analysis. Then, suddenly, Dresden emerges as the main case study in the latter chapters. Again, however, no comparisons are made with West German...

Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien

Reviewed by: Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 by John O’Brien Richard R. John (bio) Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650–1850 john o’brien Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016 268pp. In Literature Incorporated, John O’Brien surveys the rise of the corporation in Britain and early America in the period between 1650 and 1850 from an unfamiliar angle. Most historical writing on the corporation in this period treats it as a legal entity. O’Brien shifts our attention to the realm of cultural artifacts. His goal—as he observes in a gloss of John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), whose writings he explores in his first substantive chapter—is to translate the “unconscious political-economic ideology” of the age into the realm of the conscious “‘idea’” so as to “render it available for critique” (11). Though O’Brien is not unmindful of cultural artifacts that originated in colonial America and the United States, and while he professes to be conversant with recent Anglo-American historical writing on the law, he is primarily concerned with literary texts and cultural icons that originated in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century Britain. Admirers of John Seelye, Leo Marx, John Kasson, and Judith A. McGaw, be forewarned. If you are looking for an analysis of the corporation in early American literature, as it is defined by the editors of this journal, Literature Incorporated does not fit the bill. Indeed, the almost exclusive focus on late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Britain makes one wonder if a project that had been originally confined to this topic had been recast at the behest of the editors at a university press to increase its likely readership. Joseph Addison’s tragic drama Cato (1712) and the notorious South Sea Bubble of 1720 receive prominent treatment; John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading empire, as described by Washington Irving in Astoria, and Andrew [End Page 491] Jackson’s veto of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, as analyzed by generations of historians, do not. Though land speculation fired the imagination of countless Americans while highly speculative ventures to buy and sell the national domain generated a large and often emphatically rhetorical literature, land companies go unmentioned; equally absent is any discussion of the literary response of anyone in Britain or America to canals, railroads, or factories. Specialists in American economic history who are interested in the literary dimension of the economic ideas of John Smith, Benjamin Franklin, or Alexander Hamilton will not find what they are looking for here either. Indeed, the only American figure to receive an extended treatment is Edgar Allan Poe—an unusual choice, given the theme. William Leggett is not in the index, and neither is Herman Melville. Following the lead of the literary critics Marc Shell and Mary Poovey and the economic historian Deidre McCloskey, O’Brien explores the relationship between cultural artifacts and economic phenomena. His primary target is neoclassical economics—with a second, implicit target being the economic history that neoclassicism has inspired. Sympathetic to Louis Menand’s critique of interdisciplinarity as a valorization of the existing disciplines as the only legitimate ways of knowing, he strives for a supradisciplinarity that deploys the methods of the literary critic to expose the metaphorical bedrock on which the discipline of economics has come to rest: “This book sees economics as a way of modeling the world that is more like literature than it is willing to let on” (8). McCloskey’s critique of the mathematization of economics is a particular inspiration: “Literary scholars take economic concepts to be in the first instance imaginative constructs, figures of speech that lend themselves to the same kinds of analysis as all other modes of discourse. That is the goal here” (9). The organization of Literature Incorporated is primarily chronological. Following an introduction that makes the case for the corporation as a literary metaphor, it consists of four substantive chapters that explore, respectively, the ideological significance of John Locke’s late seventeenth-century essays on money; the cultural ramifications of the South Sea Company’s collapse in 1720; the “problem of...

Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: A River Journey Through the Heart of North Carolina

Hispanic and Latino New Orleans:Immigration and Identity Since the Eighteenth Century Mitchell Snider (bio) Andrew Sluyter, Case Watkins, James P. Chaney, and Annie M. Gibson. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2015. 210 pp.; maps, diagrs., photos, notes, biblig., and index. $32.50 paperback (ISBN 978-0807160879) The city of New Orleans holds a special place in peoples' imaginations. Its history extends well into the past and includes a diverse and ever-changing collection of residents, workers, and visitors from various places. Hispanic and Latino New Orleans is an important contribution to those who are interested in its sometimes overlooked Latino/a residents or the impacts of Latino/a and Hispanic peoples in shaping the character and trajectories of the city. The authors are mostly geographers, and the chapters include a welcome engagement with diverse disciplines and methods that produce considerable demographic analyses, interviews that contribute on-the-ground perspectives, and historical descriptions of the past few turbulent centuries. Through eight chapters, the book methodically considers six 'groups' of Latinos and/or Hispanics: Isleños (those from the Canary Islands), Cubans, Hondurans, Mexicans, and Brazilians. Overall, the book adopts a fairly rigid structure wherein a particular group, Hondurans for example, are each treated in a stand-alone chapter. Each substantive chapter begins with an absorbing historical treatment that engages a particular group's first arrivals to New Orleans and then moves on to discuss the qualities, impacts, and anecdotal stories of the group in the 18th, 19th, and/or 20th centuries. It then gives a detailed analysis of the census data available for each group and critically analyzes the results of relevant censuses as well as the limitations and impacts of the census process. Regarding this latter point, in many chapters the book often engages with how the decadal censuses were altered to provide space for write-in responses that provide more detailed information about national origin and how this impacts our understanding (and fiscal allocations) to minority communities. Each chapter concludes with an analysis of a 'post-Katrina' world [End Page 199] detailing, for example, how Mexican and Honduran communities have grown in decidedly different ways, in different neighborhoods, with different subnational and transnational connections after Katrina. A final chapter on "Other Communities" discusses groups with fewer members such as Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, or Salvadoran communities. This last substantive chapter also provides compelling insight into the experience of the Garínagu, or mixed African and indigenous peoples who were expelled from the British colony of St. Vincent in the Caribbean to later settle mostly in Belize. In the introductory chapter, the authors place New Orleans and surrounding parishes into the national immigration context. Though there are fewer Latinos in New Orleans than many other destinations, the authors present a compelling history of this diverse group. They begin with interesting information from the 2010 census that indicates a much deeper history of Latinos in the area than often discussed which begins with the migration of Isleños to the city New Spain in the late 1700s. The combined implementation of historical narrative, analysis, and discussion continues in each chapter and winds its way through fascinating moments in history. For example, they discuss the impacts of the Louisiana Purchase and its impact on the geopolitical alignment of the city increasingly towards the Caribbean rather than toward Spain. They also consider the ascendance of Cuban expatriates in the city that helped solidify socio- economic ties with the island nation's sugar industry and promoted the influence of Cuban culture in New Orleans. The chapter 'Hondurans' briefly discusses the relocation of the United Fruit Company to New Orleans in the 1900s by Samuel Zemurray (whose family also funded the Zemurray Stone Center, Tulane's Center for Latin American Studies) and its funding of the violent army repression of labor strikes in Honduras which was concurrent with Honduran migration to the area. Similarly, The authors also discuss New Orleans' relation to the politics of the Mexican state, as it was twice the location from which rebellions were plotted and funded, first by Benito Juarez, then by Porfirio Diaz, both of whom would later serve as president. Despite these compelling instances, the...

New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble by Pamela Tyler

Reviewed by: New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble by Pamela Tyler Elizabeth Parish Smith New Orleans Women and the Poydras Home: More Durable Than Marble. By Pamela Tyler. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 225. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6322-1.) Pamela Tyler's subtitle captures the imperfections but resilience of generations of benevolent women, their long-lasting institution, and, ultimately, their city of New Orleans. With unrestricted access to the "voluminous" records of the Poydras Home, originally an orphanage and now a retirement community, Tyler sculpts a fascinating history of an institution's evolution to serve its community (p. ix). As the home celebrates its bicentennial, its women administrators have proved themselves time and again "both tender-hearted philanthropists and hard-headed businesswomen" (p. 64). Before readers meet the women behind Poydras, Tyler offers a brief overview of orphanages in the 1800s and 1900s, material that will likely surprise the popular audience she welcomes. The "grinding poverty" of the nineteenth century forced families to surrender children to orphanages, often with hopes of withdrawing them later (p. 2). As a result, "orphans" commonly had one surviving parent, if not two. New Orleans's Female Orphan Society thus provided broad forms of social support when it opened in 1817, and it continued to do so until developments such as social work and mothers' pensions in the early twentieth century changed attitudes about orphanages. The Anglo-American women who operated Poydras were among the city's social and economic elite. Tyler resists provincializing local history and connects their work to female reformers across the nation in the nineteenth century. What distinguished Poydras managers from their counterparts, though, was their institution's enviable financial stability, largely due to early gifts from Louisiana planter Julien Poydras. The able management of his legacies funded the home for decades, and Tyler stresses that business acumen and savvy legal maneuvering "became an essential part of the women's apparatus for success" while also "press[ing] the limits of gender propriety" (p. 28). Poydras's gifts, however, exposed the racism that runs as a tragic thread throughout the [End Page 411] institution's history. Endowed by "one of the largest slaveholders in antebellum America," the institution used enslaved labor and, after transitioning to caring for the aged, accepted only white women until late into the twentieth century (p. 30). Tyler's most substantive chapter concerns tensions between Catholic and Protestant women in the mid-1800s. Most administrators were Protestant, but the home accepted Catholic girls and hosted Sisters of Charity as staff members. In reoccurring episodes, though, religious disputes triggered "a breakdown of discipline" among residents and employees (p. 68). This contentious time in the institution's history, Tyler reminds us, demonstrates the insoluble ties between life in Poydras and the world outside its gates. Tyler's final chapters concern the period after 1960, when the institution rechristened itself the Poydras Home for Elderly Ladies. She supplements Poydras records with oral histories to carry readers through "the crucible of Hurricane Katrina" in 2005 (p. 172). Throughout the book, she maintains a tricky balance between honoring and critiquing the home, but she could further interrogate race in Poydras's more recent history. For example, Tyler notes that it was not until the 1980s that "the elderly" replaced "white Protestant females" in admissions, a long-overdue revision that warrants greater scrutiny (p. 167). Tyler introduces her book as "the story of an institution. … [and] the tale of a small coterie of New Orleans women, the unpaid board of managers of Poydras" (p. vii). The former is a success, sure to interest scholars of gender, childhood, reform, religion, and southern cities. Yet one wishes for more on the individual women themselves, akin to what Tyler accomplished in her book Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes: Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920–1963 (Athens, Ga., 1996). If the obstacle is a lack of sources, a discussion of these limitations would be of interest to readers and, in fact, affirm her portrayal of Poydras as a monument to women's uncelebrated work over generations. Nevertheless, Tyler successfully engages audiences in many venues. Elizabeth...

In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary by Mrinalini Chakravorty

Reviewed by: In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary by Mrinalini Chakravorty Alfred J. López Mrinalini Chakravorty. In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. xiv + 320 pp. If Mrinalini Chakravorty’s impressive new book In Stereotype were a Hollywood film, it would be Back to the Future. It is a bit jarring in 2014 to read a new book of literary criticism and theory that relies so heavily on the same 1980s and 1990s touchstones that defined my long-ago graduate career: Spivak, Bhabha, Said, a smattering of Foucault. (Very little from Derrida, who I take it must be out of vogue these days. Pity.) In Stereotype is strangely akin to the type of retro indie band of which a middle-aged academic such as myself might think: “Wow! These guys would have been huge in 1989.” This is not for lack of exciting new(er) postcolonial and globalization work; Vilashini Cooppan, whose hearty endorsement of In Stereotype appears on the book jacket, is only one of many in the field who have ensured that postcolonial studies remains viable in the global (or if you prefer, postglobal) era. In Stereotype, for better and worse, is not that kind of book. Its greatest strength is its close readings of some of South Asia’s most canonical Anglophone fictions: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, recent Booker-Prize winners Adiga’s The White Tiger and Ali’s Brick Lane. It is no small achievement, as this book does, to produce efficacious readings of fictions as massively overanalyzed and overstudied as these. This is especially true for its trenchant analysis of Rushdie’s Booker-of-Bookers winner; I did not imagine it possible to have anything both new and useful to say about Midnight’s Children in 2014, as Chakravorty herself acknowledges in her own chapter on the novel, which turns out to be one of her book’s several highlights. [End Page 373] What In Stereotype does not do is bring its subject fully into the global age. During most of the book’s six chapters this does not pose a problem, as its focus falls squarely within a mainstream postcolonial approach. And in fact In Stereotype’s opening salvo of questions in its inaugural paragraph is consistent with this approach, as only one of five even addresses the global: “What are the conditions under which cultures circulate or congeal globally?” (1). As a reviewer, though, I feel compelled to include the caveat that the book’s subtitle—“South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary”—is, if not misleading, at least more wishful than factual. And when it does necessarily cross into discussions of global terrorism and outsourcing, as in readings of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Bhagat’s One Night at the Call Center, it does not stray far from the culturally based analyses that have come to define late twentieth-century postcolonialism. Those wondering how, say, Bhabha might read Hamid will find one possible answer here. Those seeking, on the other hand, theoretical interventions that tend toward the more strategically political or economic—along the lines of, say, Arjun Appadurai or Saskia Sassen—will be better served elsewhere. It is almost as if Chakravorty’s editor at Columbia, having a terrific postcolonial manuscript but needing to broaden its appeal to readers interested in globalization, asked the author to add the relevant material, which is another way of saying that its relatively limited incursions into the global feel a bit tacked-on. But to return to what In Stereotype does well: for the many of us currently teaching postcolonial or world literature at the undergraduate level, Chakravorty has produced a tremendously valuable study. The book exhumes and returns to relevance a topic that many students—and instructors—had assumed we knew everything about, or believed no longer worth discussing at the college level. (Consider, for example, the fact that “stereotype” does not even merit an entry in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s reference text Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts.) In this regard the book’s first substantive chapter, “Why the Stereotype? Why South Asia?” serves as...

Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 by Aaron Stephen Moore (review)

Reviewed by: Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945 by Aaron Stephen Moore Philip C. Brown (bio) Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931–1945. By Aaron Stephen Moore. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. 328. $55. This wide-ranging, important study of technology’s role in Japan’s wartime empire will interest students of the history of technology under fascist regimes, its role in imperialist enterprises, and its place in the history of early-twentieth-century Japan. Those seeking to understand Japan’s “construction state” and its relations with East and Southeast Asian development in the post–World War II era will benefit by this examination of the antecedents. [End Page 1019] As opposed to portrayals of technology (typically conceived as artifacts) as progressive, Aaron Stephen Moore compellingly argues that technology (both ideas and artifacts) was important in shaping Japan’s regressive social order. Focused largely on Manchuria and Korea, he contends that technological and imaginative (non-rational) elements combined to shape and support Japan’s wartime enterprise, not just as material instruments of policy, but as key ideological and policy components. The Japanese adapted contemporary European and Japanese definitions of technology not only to produce new artifacts, but also to mobilize components of Japanese society (including mainland colonies) in support of empire. As presented here, technology constituted a subjective, even utopian, realm, not just an objective, rational force. “[The] technological imaginary represented something more than a politics of nationalism and technocratic planning. … [W]e also see the contours of another mode of power … based more on harnessing the creativity and vitality of human subjects than solely on repression and violence” (p. 9), a form of socially organic power that attempted to engage the creative forces of all levels of society in a harmonious whole that escaped the conflicts among elements of capitalist society. Constructing East Asia portrays political leaders, philosophers, social thinkers, engineers, and bureaucrats of the 1920s to 1940s interacting to create ideas and institutions that moved greater Japan in a generally consistent direction, even as proponents of different policies and projects disagreed with each other. In contrast to a long tradition of historical scholarship that presumes the preeminence of right-wing army officers and their imperialist designs, Moore takes these other actors seriously, analyzing how debates among them played out at theoretical levels and in specific projects such as the Liao River regional development scheme and the construction of two world-class dams, Fengman (near Jilin in Manchuria) and Sup’ung (on the Yalu River in Korea). Projects, Moore contends, were not only outcomes of emerging ideas about technology, they also were the sites within which new ideas and new bureaucratic structures converged to influence a larger trajectory of power relations. Each substantive chapter analyzes these themes through key examples. Chapter 1 is devoted to intellectuals’ evolving ideas of technology, primarily through an examination of Aikawa Haruki, a theorist. Chapter 2 takes up transformations in the thinking of engineers, focusing primarily on the career of Miyamoto Takenosuke, well known for his accomplishments in Japan as well as on the Continent. Regional planners are introduced to this mix of actors in chapter 3, which explores their work in Manchuria (the Liao River area especially), and massive dam construction in Manchuria and Korea (chapter 4). Discussions of political leaders and bureaucrats appear throughout these chapters, but one group, the “reform bureaucrats,” occupies center stage in chapter 5, especially the ideologue Mōri Hideoto. [End Page 1020] In the early chapters, Moore demonstrates the influence of socialist thought on opinion leaders, providing compelling examples of the political construction of “technology.” An epilogue explores links between these wartime developments and postwar constructionist trajectories. Throughout, Moore analyzes a wide range of historical sources: for intellectuals and theorists, their own books, articles, and speeches; laws and policy papers are used for understanding emergent policies and administrative structures; and archival records for specific projects. Certain kinds of data for Manchuria were inaccessible. (The author does not say so explicitly, but the subject of the Japanese control of the Chinese “Northeast” remains a highly sensitive issue; archives and libraries frequently...

Mexico’s Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867-1934 by Timothy M. James (review)

Reviewed by: Mexico’s Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867-1934 by Timothy M. James Joseph L. Scarpaci Mexico’s Supreme Court: Between Liberal Individual and Revolutionary Social Rights, 1867-1934. Timothy M. James. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. xvi + 168 pp., notes, selected bibliography, and index. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8263-5378-8). A good argument can be made that the French, American, Cuban, and Mexican revolutions shifted fundamental liberal thought in myriad ways. However, less is known about the legal and judicial systems that drove those social experiments. In this work, historian Timothy M. James seeks to understand why the 1917 Mexican Constitution did not immediately trigger labor and agrarian reform. The topic is unusual because Mexico is not particularly known for its constitutional jurisprudence. Although the Porfiriato era regularly ignored the protection of constitutional rights, little research has addressed why there was nearly a three-decade lag in implementing the full guarantees of the Mexican Revolution. Jurisprudential sources include the writings of jurists, legal professionals, and federal tribunal writings. In turn, they frame and grant protection to constitutional rights. James argues that constitutional social rights have been unduly focused on legislative versus judicial matters. In doing so, claims James, scholars “have failed to appreciate the many ways in which legal changes brought about by the judicial interpretation have been concealed by legislative continuities, or they have failed to register the way continuities in judicial interpretation could present an obstacle to the implementation of new legislation” (p. xii). In other words, to reduce the study of law (anywhere) to only legislation produces glaring oversight in the literature about the Mexican Revolution, and that means understanding how the Supreme Court foot-dragged in implementing socioeconomic rights. Behind the court’s resistance to social change are, not surprisingly, large Mexican landowners, key industrialists, shipping tycoons, and other stakeholders who sought to preserve the status quo (scholars interested in the current U.S. Supreme Court under Justice Roberts will note similarities). Constitutional procedures that protect individual liberal rights (called amparo in Spanish) take hold firmly in Mexico in the last third of the nineteenth century, and anchor the early period in the book’s subtitle (1867). James traces the institution’s history brings the reader forward to the beginning of swift economic reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas’ (1934-40) sexenio. [End Page 239] Four brief chapters and a conclusion frame this book. The work begins with the “Judicial Protection of Constitutional Rights during the Porfiriato” to set the stage for understanding the challenges of jurisprudence in Mexico. James approaches this period by sub-dividing them into four time frames and outlining key judicial acts that molded the use of amparo. Chapter Two, “From the Plan of San Luís Potosí to the Constitution of 1917,” describes, among other highlights, the relationship that Francisco Madero had with Emiliano Zapata. Mexico’s Supreme Court continued with its appointment of federal judges as it had done during the Porfiriato, and the appointments mirror the upper-class background of U.S. and European-educated Madero. Despite the 1910 Revolution, little substantive social and economic reform takes root in years immediately thereafter. Chapter Three hones in on a particular labor provisions (Article 123) and describes how the more unionized northern states were more successful in implementing labor reforms. Elsewhere, though, new labor provisions were thwarted by court rulings. The topic of the final substantive chapter is “The Third Revolutionary Court and Legal Obstacles to the Implementation of Article 27.” At the heart of this chapter is the implementation of the agrarian reform laws, which would have resounding effects throughout the nation if fully implemented. Alas, “the fate of an autonomous judiciary in the immediate post-Revolutionary period remained a prisoner to amparo’s nineteenth century evolution” (100). Three of the four chapters in Mexico’s Supreme Court were previously published, which begs the question of why an academic press –most of which are in dire fiscal straits—would print this book. The answer is plainly that most of them were published in obscure (for English-reading and non-legal scholars) Mexican law journals. This short tome...

Britta Martens Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal VoiceBrowning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice. Britta Martens. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Pp. ii+285.

<i>Britta Martens</i> Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice<i>Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy: Challenging the Personal Voice</i>. Britta Martens. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011. Pp. ii+285.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee (review)

Reviewed by: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee Caroline H. Yang (bio) Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937, by Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 228 pp. $23.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814752562. That 1896 is a defining year in the history of segregation and unequal citizenship in the United States is obviously common knowledge in critical race studies. What Julia Lee teaches us about the moment in Interracial Encounters is probably not: that the Chinese figured significantly in Plessy v. Ferguson as a crucial component in both the majority and dissenting opinions on whether or not segregation based on race—specifically, blackness—was constitutional. According to Lee, the discourse of what it meant to be Chinese was influential to the definition of what it [End Page 340] meant to be black, as both opinions adjudicated the placement of black bodies on a black–white racial binary through the figure of the Chinese. Naming the Plessy case as “the document that most dramatically reveals the ways that the figure of the Negro and the Asiatic were intertwined in this period” (42), Lee suggests in the rest of her book that 1896 was significant in not only instituting segregation but also inaugurating a particular brand of misreading. And this common misreading about the Plessy case has glossed over and continues to make invisible what she calls “encounters” between African Americans and Asians during this time, encounters wrought by the complexities of the historical moment following black emancipation and enfranchisement, as well as labor migrations from Asia. Interracial Encounters demonstrates that not accounting for the significance of Chineseness in how blackness was defined in the Plessy case had a critical role in how race was understood in the United States for much of the twentieth century. In this way, Lee’s close reading of the Plessy case speaks to her book’s methodological interventions. It shows the importance of literary studies in not just historical analyses of texts that have been read heretofore as concerning only blacks and whites but also Afro-Asian critique. As part of a vibrant and rising field of study that teases out Afro-Asian connections and disconnections, Lee’s book makes clear why many of its proponents are Asian Americanists whose approach to critical race studies is shaped by their understanding of the vicissitudes and contradictions of the Asian racial form in the United States. Quite simply, the reading practice developed in Lee’s book is original and insightful, and it brings to light figures and forms in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literatures that have often been rendered as insignificant nonpresence unrelated to other racialized figures. With a deep interest in writing a “historicizing project” (9), Lee points to a wide-ranging archive of minstrel show sheet music, political cartoons, and films, as well as literature, to explain that African Americans and Asians were the most rampantly compared minority groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also writes that the process of racializing the two groups was mutually constitutive and essential in the creation of the “fantasy of modern American identity” (21). Despite this, Lee argues that if and when they are remembered together in this period, they are seen as either antagonistic opposites or natural allies bonded together in solidarity based on shared experience of discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Against this way of thinking, Lee argues that we need to study not just the hegemonic ways in which blackness and Asianness became meaningful but also the ways in which African American and Asian American literatures contributed to and challenged the process of racial meaning making. [End Page 341] As such, save for one substantive chapter that explores the representations of African Americans and Asians in dominant popular culture from the Reconstruction period to the early twentieth century, all of the book’s chapters call attention to the formal strategies of literary texts by wide-ranging authors of color such as Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang. Lee’s focus on...

Kah Seng Loh, Edgar Liao, Cheng Tju Lim, and Guo-Quan Seng. The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 347p., with bibliography and index.

The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity KAH SENG LOH, EDGAR LIAO, CHENG TJU LIM, and GUO-QUAN SENG Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 347p., with bibliography and index.This book examines the history of the University Socialist Club (USC) at the University of Malaya (later renamed as University of Singapore) from 1953 to 1971 within the broad context of British decolonization, the global Cold War, and the making of the modern nation-states of Singapore and Malaya(sia). It is a timely product because the only substantive works on this important subject are a 1973 unpublished BA graduating thesis (Koh 1973) and the recent firsthand accounts in The Fajar Generation as edited by three former USC members (Poh et al. 2010). Moreover, it arrives at an opportune moment when the authoritarian politics of Singapore appear to be changing, with untold stories and alternative narratives being offered through a multitude of platforms to challenge the dominant state narrative of the Singapore Story as framed primarily by the elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew.It is to the credit of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS, Singapore) to have provided the four young scholars with initial financial support and moral impetus to explore new ground in Singapore history (p. 12). It would have been even better if ISEAS had seen the project to its fruition and publication through its own internal publishing unit. Similarly, the authors have registered their share of difficulty in getting access to local primary source materials, especially government records, and their fresh archival findings were mostly excavated from foreign archives instead of the National Archives of Singapore (pp. 38-39). How they overcame these obstacles is testimony to the tenacity and skill of the history writing of the authors as they have indeed succeeded in putting together a volume rich in details and analysis.The main body of discussion begins with the reluctant British approval for forming a political club within the nascent university as well as the Fajar arrests and sedition trial which elevated the USC to its iconic political status. This is followed by several chapters delineating its activities to mobilize students across campuses in Singapore as well as those in Malaya and even among the international student fraternity. It was a mixed record of collaboration and contestation due to personality issues and ideological differences. The discussion also touches on the important divide as well as connectivity between the English-educated and Chinese-educated student activists. An introspective critique is then developed on how the intelligence and security agencies (especially the Special Branch which later morphed into the Internal Security Department), under the trope of international Cold War and local fear of communism and communalism, had constructed a problematic information order which became a primary tool for the emasculation of left wing politics. The next segment deals with the USC's involvement in the battle to merge and form Malaysia, the various security crackdowns, and the fight for university autonomy. The last substantive chapter on Entwined Memories and Myths brings the story to the present day by surfacing the claims and counter-memories of various actors on both sides of the political fence in their old age. …

Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by Brian Steele (review)

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by Brian Steele Jeremy D. Bailey (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Role of government, Republicanism, American exceptionalism Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood. By Brian Steele. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Pp. 321. Hardcover, $99.00.) In Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood, Brian Steele argues that Jefferson's seeming contradictions can be resolved through a reconceptualization of the American nation in Jefferson's politics. Steele's book is ambitiously conceived and beautifully executed. It is nothing less than a stunning success. He divides his study of Jefferson and nationhood into six chapters: American Story, American Woman, American Public, American Character, American State, and American Union. The first substantive chapter sets the tone for the book by attempting to solve the creed vs. culture debate by showing what was distinctive about Jefferson's contribution to the argument for independence. Culture wins: "there is no generally applicable claim in the Declaration" (41). This argument will strike some (at least in my discipline) as going too far. Steele says that what made Jefferson's argument "distinctive" was not its rejection of Parliament's power over the colonies but rather "its historical argument about the experience that ultimately made Americans a distinct people" (24). The author argues that Jefferson perceived that it was not enough for one people to declare the causes that require them [End Page 560] to separate from another people—because "two peoples cannot become two overnight" (12). So Steele's Jefferson found his argument for expatriation in the "migration of original settlers to America" (25), an argument Jefferson derived by reversing (or extending) the application of tacit assent. This argument then enabled Jefferson to connect a historical people to a revolutionary principle. For Steele, it was both radical and "startlingly conservative" (49) at the same time. But theorizing "the people" requires more than connecting historical migration to the right of revolution, and in the next chapter Steele continues by examining Jefferson's view of republican women. The author adeptly compares Jefferson's treatment of Indian women with his criticism of women in Europe, particularly France. In Jefferson's view, both cultures upset the natural equality that women would otherwise enjoy. Indians forced women to work the soil, and the French allowed their aristocratic women to wander too close to political life, squandering their days amid the buzz of society. Each, in Jefferson's view, disturbed the gender roles dictated by nature but achievable only in republican civilization. It turns out that America was the only civilization in history that had placed women in their proper role of republican domesticity. The problem for Jefferson, as Steele notes, is that this argument presumed that the American idea rested on a contingent American notion of gender: Nature dictated that men and women be free from "artificial barriers to happiness," yet the "natural results of such freedom were clearly different for women and men" (88). Steele takes on more seeming contradictions in the following chapters. In Chapter 3, he argues that Jefferson's cosmopolitan belief that the world would one day become more republican rested on the premise that America was exceptional. This paradox rested in turn on Jefferson's assessment that Americans were uniquely able to resist tyranny whenever it would arise—meanwhile he expressed anxiety that things might get worse. This last point deserves special mention: Jefferson's sunny optimism derived from his confidence that Americans were unusually vigilant, but it was frequently clouded by his concern that such vigilance was unnatural to most people. Chapter 4 contains several important claims about Jefferson's conception of the public. For Steele, scholars have been led astray by Jefferson's comments concerning the "natural aristocracy" and by his turn to partisan organization. The first was subordinated to an educated and capable citizenry. But "the real problem was finding the public" (157). With [End Page 561] respect to the second, wards were better than parties, because "Jefferson's public would be engaged in maximum participation in and would express its legitimate voice through government at all levels rather than through extragovernmental organizations so celebrated in American mythology" (165). It is in this context that Steele treats slavery. There are...

Sentiment, Sense and Sensibility in the Genesis of Utopian Traditions

This essay focuses on Koskenniemi’s contribution to Realizing Utopia, the first substantive chapter of the book. In it, Koskenniemi locates the source of international legal and institutional projects purporting to bring about world government in an ‘oceanic feeling’ – a primordial sentiment of transcendental unity with the world. Following Freud’s analysis of the infantile nature of this sentiment in Civilization and its Discontents, Koskenniemi suggests that it invariably generates hegemonic utopias. My proposition complements this focus on the failing of uncritical utopianism with a focus on the weaknesses of uncritical realism, a realism that has given up on utopian thinking altogether. It may well be that ‘fundamentalist’ realism, no less than uncritical utopianism, accounts for the proliferation of mechanistic blueprints for the management of global problems, a phenomenon which Koskenniemi rightly laments. The observation that a certain kind of utopian thinking is objectionable need not generate an objection to all utopian thinking. The dialectic between hegemonic utopias and pluralistic utopias, a dialectic that I trace back to the book of Genesis, informs this proposition. In this manner, I further seek to complement while complicating the linear Enlightenment narrative of progress from religious to critical thinking. The paradox is the thinker’s passion and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.1

Revealing Hegemony, Again

Global Energy Security and American Hegemony. By Doug Stokes, Sam Raphael . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 280 pp., $30.00 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0801894978). The thesis of this book is that US “imperial grand strategy” (p. 12) since the end of World War II has involved constructing a “profoundly hierarchical” world order for the benefit of American national interests and transnational capitalism (pp. 2, 15). Because this is a grand strategy, the use of military force is an integral component, and because oil is critical to any country's national wealth, global energy security is a primary objective. The authors argue that although this is a hegemonic order, the entire world is not subjugated: The core capitalist powers benefit greatly from and thus consent to American hegemony. However, for the global South—specifically the oil-producing states—this strategy means persistent and unabated US military intervention through the use of and support for counterinsurgency activities which in turn result in the militarization of global South societies and an overall lack of basic human security. The introduction and the first chapter of this book expand on the thesis. The second chapter discusses how counterinsurgency has been the preferred method for stabilizing the global South and forcefully integrating oil zones into the capitalist international order. The third chapter discusses how the Persian Gulf has been the primary focus and how this area has become less attractive to the United States given the failure of US power in Iraq (p. 105) and the region's overall instability. Chapter 4 explores the US hegemonic strategy in regard to the Caspian Basin, while chapter 5 looks at stabilizing the Gulf of Guinea and West African energy supplies. Chapter 6 is the last substantive chapter, focusing on the Andean region of Latin America with a brief swing north through Mexico. Much of the introductory chapter and chapter 1 are devoted to stressing how the US-constructed world …

So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (review)

Patrick Anderson, So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and Morbidity of Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 208 pp. In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson turns performative lens on practitioners of self-starvation as they remake subjectivities using similar acts on different stages. From case studies of anorectics and starv ing girls of late 19th century, through artists of 1970s and 1980s, and contemporary hunger strikers in Turkish prisons and at Guantanamo Bay, Anderson demonstrates convincingly that refusal to eat is a productive act, one which he claims has potential to remake subjectivity of actor and circumscribe power of state. Part of what makes this book so compelling is that ability to choose not to eat is almost universally accessible (in afterword he addresses case of Terry Schiavo who was unable to choose whether to continue receiving sustenance or not). Choosing not to eat is potentially a radically subversive act that any of us could perform. Yet we do not usually choose everyday to eat or not-for most of us, we may choose what to eat but choice to eat is unmarked. This is not case for anorectics for whom choice is real and urgent. The first substantive chapter of Anderson's book deals with what he calls the archive of anorexia. He explores history of disease, feminist concerns, and more recent attention to in men and boys. Of his cases, is probably most familiar to a general audience-both because of its representation in popular culture and its prevalence. Anderson's reading of texts about is strongly influenced by Foucauldian notions of subject and he sees as emblematic of subjectivation (36), claiming that anorexia derives, concentrates, and facilitates its clinical and cultural power as a performance (38). He claims this is so because it is: a) durational-the refusal to eat must be continuously reproduced, b) it stages effects of ideological normativity on human body, c) it is mediated through representational forms-clinical and medical records, as well as journalistic accounts and pop cultural artifacts, d) it is defined by specularity-the body is subject to gaze of anorectic self and others. This disrupts commodity culture, both because of refusal to consume and because effects of make both men and women (men are important in Anderson's account) less capable of reproducing human subjects. Ultimately, anorexic bodies stop performing (51). Yet this does mean that is entirely destructive-it is also, in Anderson's account, a becoming. The second chapter of book Enduring Performance introduces Dr. Henry Tanner, who in 1880 staged a widely publicized 40 day fast in order to demonstrate restorative properties of abstaining from food. Anderson compares this with Chris Burden's endurance performances a century later. Both required active audience participants as witnesses to their emaciation. Tanner's fast was an empirical and experiential intervention in debates between practitioners of conventional and homeopathic medicine. Tanner's body, and witnessing of its emaciation, was a spectacle that in Anderson's words revealed these functions- seeing and being seen, consuming and being consumed-to be profoundly interwoven (73). Burden's first work involving fasting was staged while he was still a graduate student. Though he apparently expected Five Day Locker Piece to be an exercise in isolation (he lived in his campus locker for five days and nights), people were compelled to come and watch his performance, and his inputs and outtakes were measured, much as Tanner's had been. In this and in some of his later works, artist fasts, but audience is complicit in his starvation and ethical dilemmas-to intervene or to simply observe-trouble spectators and curators alike. …

Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization. By David Nelken, ed. (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011, 215pp. 60.00)

Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalisation starts with an introduction followed by a substantive chapter by David Nelken, one of the heavyweights of comparative criminology who, over the years, has built up an impressive oeuvre. The first substantive chapter is based on Nelken’s inaugural lecture given shortly after his appointment as G. J. Wiarda Professor at Utrecht in 2008. In it, he identifies, as a key criminological concern, the punitive turn that seems to be more or less global in scale. Likewise, David Downes discusses this punitive turn mainly but not exclusively evidenced by rising rates of incarceration. It is clear that not every country recently experienced such a turn and let us not forget that upturns can be followed by downturns and, when they happen, they bring a fair degree of academic excitement. As Downes argues, explaining such developments cannot be achieved via ‘positivistic formulae’ but through that blend of local knowledge and global perspective that he has applied so expertly for decades. The chapter ends with a demand for intellectual courage and comparative criminology’s imperative to be engaged—a point that comes through several of the contributions in this book.

"Juro al Deu aí somos nós": Some Notes on Gil Vicente's Jews and the Spanish and Portuguese Cancione[i]ros

"Juro al Deu aí somos nós":Some Notes on Gil Vicente's Jews and the Spanish and Portuguese Cancione[i]ros Luis M. Girón Negrón Para Joaquim Francisco Coelho, com todo o afeto e a admiraçao de sempre No discerning reader of Gil Vicente should be surprised by the vivid portrayal of Portuguese and Castilian Jews in his dramatic corpus. The father of Portuguese theater expanded beyond a purely ahistorical Christian typology, investing many of his Jewish characters with realistic touches that lend them sociological density and linguistic verisimilitude. Critics have already glossed some of the sociohistorical realities and personal artistic choices that bear on the impressionistic representation of Iberian Jews in the relevant Vicentine plays: Auto da Barca do Inferno, Diálogo Sôbre a Ressurreição de Cristo, Farsa de Inês Pereira, Juiz da Beira, Auto da Cananéia and Auto da Lusitânia. The scholarly literature on Vicente's portrayal of Jews in the Iberian peninsula can be succinctly reconnoitered. It was ushered by Celso Láfer's O judeu em Gil [End Page 243] Vicente: a perceptive literary study and the only book-length monograph on the subject. Paul Teyssier's magisterial La langue de Gil Vicente also devotes a substantive chapter to a "linguistic ethnography" of Jewish characters in the Vicentine corpus: i.e., an overview of linguistics features that set their dialogues apart as ethnically marked speech (199-226). Manuel Simões's synoptic overview of his Luso-Jewish typologies is briefer, but pointedly set up as a salutary critique of overtly apologetic readings. Scholarly treatments of the relevant plays have also broached Vicente's dramatization of Luso-Jewish culture with singular attention and insight; see, for example, G. T. Artola and W. A. Eichengreen, I. Révah, and Francisco Márquez Villanueva ("Os judeus casamenteiros") on the Jews in Inês Pereira; Anthony Lappin on the judeu in Barca do Inferno (Three Discovery Plays); Ronald E. Surtz, Teyssier ("Interpretação"), and Stanislav Zimic ("Nuevas consideraciones"; Ensayos y notas, 465-79) on the Auto da Lusitânia; and Márquez Villanueva (Orígenes y sociología 19-23) on the Castilian converso in Juiz da Beira. Aside from selective allusions to Ibero-Jewish realia, the evidence marshalled by most of these studies revolves around three main areas: (1) the artistic evocation of Judeo-Portuguese speech, (2) the representation of Portuguese Jews as transmitters of Iberian traditional poetry, and (3) Vicente's perceptive portrayal of Jewish casamenteiros. On the linguistic front, Teyssier highlights five Vicentine markers of Luso-Jewish identity in the speech pattern of his Jewish characters: 1. Their preference for the dipthong /OI/ over /OU/ in selected Portuguese forms. 2. Their recourse to a few semantic and morphological Hebraisms, e.g., azará (Hebrew ha-tsara "affliction, misfortune"), the construction of Portuguese plurals with the Hebrew ending -im and the other Hebraic calques in the Luso-Jewish nuptial blessing in Farsa de Inês Pereira. 3. The "singular" Deu instead of Deus. 4. The use of Portuguese forms chanto, guai, guaia, guaiado, lodo, enlodar to express sorrow, mourning, disillusion, etc. 5. The archaic forms shared with Vicentine peasant speech (samica, fago, fairey, trager, oyvo, pugeste, podo, enha, quiçaes, sicais, atá, etc.). [End Page 244] He also identifies some parallels for each of these, along with other subtle glimpses of Jewish realia (i.e., the references to comuna, adefina, the archaic sigoga, tamuld for Talmud and the usage of dom / dona in addressing each other), in the poetic characterization of Jews throughout the Cancioneiro geral (La langue 202-05). Scholars have also drawn attention to Vicente's portrayal of Portuguese Jews as oral transmitters of peninsular poetic lore. There are four poems sung by his Luso-Jewish characters rooted in Iberian traditional lyric and balladry. Two amatory cantigas are taught by a Jewish casamenteiro to a shield bearer in the Farsa de Inês Pereira: "Canas do amor, canas, / canas do amor. / Polo longo de hum río / canaval está florido, / canas do amor"; and "Pelo mar vay a vela / vela vay pelo mar?" There is also a Portuguese version of the Cidian romance "Búcar sobre Valencia" in...

Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place - by Scarpaci, Joseph L. and Portela, Armando H.

Scarpaci, Joseph L. and Portela, Armando H. ( 2009 ) Cuban Landscapes: Heritage, Memory, and Place , The Guilford Press ( New York, NY ), 216 pp. $30.00 pbk . This book sets out to consider how different social groupings have found meaning and agency in and through Cuba's landscapes. It seeks to bring the insights of cultural geography and landscape studies to a field of enquiry – Cuban studies – that could be usefully enriched by just such theoretical engagements. Cuba's rich social and cultural landscapes are, as the authors state in their introductory chapters, a crucial element in the formation of Cubanidad; and they all too often get buried beneath more overtly political interpretations. I had high hopes for this book then, not least as the authors are well versed and widely published on other aspects of Cuba. But I finished the book feeling that while a host of fascinating questions had been raised, relatively few answers had been given. The book appears to set itself up as an interdisciplinary cultural geography of Cuban landscape (mention is made of the likes of Cosgrove, Lefebvre, Duncan, and Gregory, for example). But the authors resolutely steer away from any such theoretical conversations throughout. There is no worked through discussion of the complexity of the terms used in the book's subtitle –‘heritage’, ‘memory’, and ‘place’– for example, even though geographers have been at the forefront of thinking through these terms in every case. Similarly, while much detail on the social and physical aspects of the Cuban landscape was given, and the accretion of such properties was rightly seen as a dynamic and contested process, both physical and human landscapes are used in the book primarily as ‘a mirror’ onto ‘what has transpired and what contributed to the visible consequences' [my emphasis] as the authors state in their Preface. I would have liked to see greater discussion of the mutually constitutive nature of social and natural landscapes (in particular when it is argued that the socialist government redefined the relationship between nature and culture), however, and their sometimes rather more invisible consequences. The authors' primary refrain is an important one nonetheless. The Cuban landscape is uniquely rich, as a product of its varied colonial and post-colonial experiences, and it has been an explicit part of many of the social and political struggles that constitute this history. Naturalising metaphors have been used to umbilically and desirously connect the island to the United States (one thinks of Seward's attempt to see Cuba as a literal by-product of the build-up of silt flowing out of the Mississippi provided by Louis Pérez, Jr). They have also been used to ensure that Cuban's knew their place (the authors themselves quote US Business writer Leland K. Jenks's early twentieth century comment that, in comparison to the vast material riches of silver and ore in other parts of the continent, such as Bolivia and Peru, Cuba was ‘a lemon not worth squeezing’ (p. 17)). Paying attention to just such naturalising metaphors offers a useful way to reconsider Cuba's developing race politics, and the interplay of discourses of race with ideologies of nationhood. In this regard, the authors approvingly quote Ortíz's famous notion of Cuban society resembling the Ajiaco stew, for example (though this too contains certain subtle, racist undertones – see, for example, Chapter 1 of La Lucha for Cuba by Miguel de la Torre, 2003). Thinking of landscape as text can be a useful way to draw out political inconsistencies. Where their particular approach to landscape is best put to effect, however, is in the final substantive chapter, which examines competing discourses in and around the idea of ‘information’. Here the authors consider the function of billboards in constructing an ideological landscape. And despite, again, some important silences – such as the way that this landscape is effectively overlooked by a large portion of the young, or at least reworked within their own more subversive forms of behaviour – the authors offer an interesting exploration of the way that a literally textual and metaphoric landscape became the centrepiece of a struggle that took place between the Cuban government and the American Special Interests building, with each vying to promote a particular vision of Cuba onto the symbolic space of the western end of the Malecón. This is a worthwhile book on an important topic. It is clear from reading it that there are substantial insights that a cultural geographical approach to the interplay of nature, culture, and social politics can offer. Such a possibility will be best realised, however, through a more in depth engagement with the tenets of that literature in light of Cuba's rich landscape history. Simon Reid-Henry 1