Articulations Of Race Research Articles

Agricultural innovation and food security in Sub‐Saharan Africa: Tracing connections and missing links

AbstractGrounded in research carried out by researchers investigating different aspects of technological and institutional innovation in agriculture in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA), this special issue seeks to make a contribution to empirical evidence and literature on agricultural innovation globally. The contributors explore the relationship between technology, policy and public engagement approaches and wider concepts of technology development and governance, and collectively argue for a broadened perspective on innovation towards generating new ways of thinking that can ultimately improve upon existing practices in the quest for sustainable solutions to food insecurity. Overall, this is not a negative story. Instead of the now common despair about the abilities of Africa to meet it is own food‐security requirements, this issue presents articles which demonstrate how much is already in place, with reflections and suggestions on how such resources can be made to work together for the greater socio‐economic good of the continent Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discovery and prevention of attack episodes by frequent episodes mining and finite state machines

This paper proposes a framework that applies frequent episode rules, implemented by finite state machines (FSMs), to design a real-time network-based intrusion prevention system (NIPS) for Probe/Exploit (hacking) intrusion. This type of Probe/Exploit (hacking) intrusion is executed by a series of relevant actions that occur in some sequence. In frequent episode rules mining, data are viewed as a sequence of events, where each event has an associated time of occurrence; thus, such mining technique has significant effect on discovering sophisticated Probe/Exploit intrusion attacks. Prior to a devastating attack on a victim's computer, the hacker must gather information about the victim, and transfer instructions or files to the victim's computer. The proposed system could detect such abnormal episodes and repel hackers from the firewall before they are able to launch a deadly attack. In one network service (a corresponding port number), mine frequent episode rules from the log files of a commercial honeypot system, then refine the rules, which eventually constructs a finite state machine to protect the network service, according to the refined rules. During implementation and simulation, this study applied the framework focus on protecting a Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is the most important protocol in Microsoft's Windows Network. As confirmed in the experiments, this study successfully mined sophisticated intrusion episodes and demonstrated the efficiency of tracing connections by a FSM. The framework of intrusion prevention proposed in this paper can be modified straightforward to protect other network services.

URBANISM AND CITY SPACES IN THE WORK OF STUART HALL

This article considers the manner in which city life informs some of the writing of Stuart Hall. The city appears as an ambivalent site of both freedom and sequestration and reconfigures the ways in which we think about articulations of race, rights and identity. The article interrogates tropes of the urban in three of Hall's most well known pieces of writing over the last 30 years; the co-authored volume Policing the Crisis, the original ‘New Ethnicities’ essay and a more recent intervention that considers the nature of the multicultural. The spaces of the city in these works act as both the horizon of the political imaginary and the stage of political action in Hall's work. The article argues that a sense of urbanism is transformed from being the empirical realization of theoretical determinations of identity to becoming a constitutive feature in an understanding of the incommensurabilities of languages of rights and languages of the community in an understanding of racial politics that addresses the globalized metropolis of the twenty-first century.

Does organising matter? Tracing connections to environmental impacts in different housing estates

Much of the research on buildings and the environment is of a technical-economic nature. But so far, this has not led to any great changes in practice. This article brings organising into the research agenda: Does organising matter for the environmental performance of buildings? If so, how? This question is investigated by a comparative analysis based on an empirical approach. Two housing management practices and their buildings' energy and water performances are analysed relative to each other. It is possible to trace energy and water consumption levels to characteristic management styles (e.g., metaphors of 'caring' and 'emergency-driven'). The analysis shows that organising concepts, more specifically, characteristic management styles, matter for the environment. Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

The Anti-Chain Store Movement and the Politics of Consumption

This essay examines the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and 1930s in order to contribute to debates about the origins and nature of modern US consumer politics. It argues that this movement of independent merchants and their followers is best understood as an expression of populist antimonopolism. Opponents of the chains saw themselves as speaking for ‘the people’ and were virulently hostile to large aggregations of economic and political power. Concerned about the likely impact of chain stores on their communities, merchants lobbied their trade associations, wrote to their congressmen, and launched local grassroots campaigns. They also worked through the courts, securing anti-chain tax legislation in most states, and attracting the support of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis. The essay has a comparative dimension, comparing the anti-chain crusades of the 1920s and 1930s with the protests against ‘big-box’ retail which have proliferated in the US and elsewhere since the 1980s. Reflecting on the recurrence in the age of globalization of a form of protest historians once thought dead, the essay questions the assumption—deep-rooted in US historiography—that antimonopoly ceased to be a significant feature of the US politics of reform after the New Deal. Accordingly the final part of the essay traces connections between pre-New Deal anti-chain campaigners and post-New Deal consumer activists, noting the centrality of antimonopoly to the careers of leading consumer politicians of the post-war era, Estes Kefauver and Ralph Nader. Arguing that the anti-chain store movement of the 1920s and 1930s was constitutive of the modern US politics of consumption, the study concludes by considering the implications of the persistence of the antimonopoly tradition for current and future scholarship. It suggests that the study of the politics of consumption is still in its infancy, and that given the important role antimonopoly thought has played in the US politics of reform, the temptation to dismiss out of hand as necessarily futile and reactionary anti-chain store movements past and present should be resisted.

New Pragmatism and the Vocabulary and Metaphors of Scholarly Design Research

The pragmatism of Dewey, James, and Pierce is familiar vocabu lary to the philosophical, educational, social, and political landscape of North America. In its treatment of truth, action, values, and the theory-practice divide, it is particularly relevant to a range of fields including design. This pragmatist legacy is developed in Donald Sch?n's work, and Rittel's and Weber's metaphor of the wicked problems of planning and design?to suggest a distinctive disciplin ary vocabulary of design research and practice. Existing treatments of the relations between pragmatism and design disciplines such as urban and environmental planning, architecture, and interaction design highlight this expanded version. However, such treatments have not addressed how the neo-pragmatist account developed by Richard Rorty might enlarge design research. Combining particular readings of Dewey, James, and others with Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Derrida; Rorty offers an account which reinforces conventional pragmatist theses, but then looks beyond them in an environment where science and the humanities have equal claims to truth, mean ing, and representation. Reviewing existing treatments of these themes, including those in this journal, I trace connections between pragmatism and Horst's and Rittel's formulation of wicked prob lems and Sch?n's reflective practitioner. I examine the current use of Deweyan and new pragmatism in design fields, and suggest how Rorty's claims about redescription and vocabularies have some unex plored consequences for design research and scholarship. I close with some thoughts on how the expanded pragmatist approach might support the kind of epistemological and methodological perspective to benefit design scholarship.

Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts , and: Cuba on the Edge: Short Stories from the Island (review)

Flora Gonzalez Mandri. Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and Arts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. xii, 232pp.Mary G. Berg, Pamela Carmel!, and Anne Fountain, eds., Cuba on Edge: Short Stories from Island. Nottingham, UK: CCC Press, 2007. 238 pp.Yoruba soy,cantando voy,llorando estoy,y cuando no soy yoruba,soy congo, mandinga, carabali.Nicolas Guillen, Son 16Is Cuba a color-blind society? Or does race still exist as a legitimate category on island? Certainly color lines are blurry in Cuba, with 2002 census data contradicting figures provided by CIA Factbook and estimates of an Afro-Cuban majority (60 to 70 percent) suggested by several scholars of Afro-Cuban studies.1 The Cuban Revolution of 1959, whose tenets included a commitment to equality of all citizens, regardless of gender, race, or previous class status, was assumed to have corrected any discrimination that may have existed after Cuba achieved its independence from Spain slightly more than six decades earlier. After all, national hero and beloved poet Jose Marti had advocated racial equality as early as mid-nineteenth century, going so far as to promise that independent Cuba would reward black revolutionaries with full entry into political and socioeconomic spheres. Stock responses to allegations of racial tensions include proverb, Quien no tiene de Congo, tiene de Carabali, meaning that everyone has a drop of African blood and that precludes racism (Hernandez-Reguant 255).2 Yet a burgeoning scholarship on race and identity in Cuba makes argument that even though racial mixing is the principal signifier of Cuba's national cultural identity, myth of Cuban mestizaje can be utilized to erase still-existing tensions and divisions (Kutzinski 5).3 The unfortunate reality is that race-based discrimination still exists in Cuba, while argument about validity of racial divisions rages on, which makes particularly compelling emerging voices that comprise debate (Sarduy and Stubbs; Smith).4Gonzalez Mandri's contribution is distinctively different from other recent works by Fox and Sawyer, also investigations of race and culture in Cuba, despite sharing several primary sources with each.5 Much more centered on cultural expression, book demonstrates how contemporary Afro-Cuban women writers and artists engage in a historical dialogue with images of blackness, and especially women of color, that appear in Cuban letters since prior to independence. Throughout, Mandri traces connections among Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdes, Guillen's poetic oeuvre, Lydia Cabrera's El monte, and creative voices of Afro-Cuban women today. She argues that novel's characters embody sexist and racist mores of day, especially internalized racial hatred (a denial of blackness that leads to insanity) of eponymous heroine, against which younger artists like Belkis Ayon and Gloria Rolando set expressions of rebellion, empowerment, and pride. In contrast, negrista poetry of Guillen and Cabrera's ethnographic research explicating male-privileged Abakua traditions offer a legacy of powerful cultural knowledge, language, imagery, and symbolic codes (with which Excilia Saldana disidentifies, in sense of Jose Munoz) that enrich increasing body of Afro-Cuban women's work.Mandri opens with an initial introduction to me antislavery narrative generated in Domingo del Monte circle in first half of nineteenth century and me Afro-Cuban movement of 1920s to 1940s, both of which figure critically in her analysis of more recent cultural expression. Following is a comparison of mulatta image in Cecilia Valdes and Sergio Giral's 1990 film Maria Antonia, with a strong theoretical debt to Fanon.6 The next chapter, a detailed discussion of Cabrera's life and works, prepares reader to understand symbolic complexities of newer works to be studied. …

SARAH A. WILLBURN. Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings.

This lively and important study opens on a vision seen by a 'sister in the New Life', a Swedenborgian cult. This 'sister' recounts the formation of a new community in which fairies or 'fays' can 'move into a person's breast . . .[and] then clearing a space . . . begin to build their house' after which 'little baby fays would be born' (p. 1).Willburn traces connections between these and other such apparently marginal and eccentric practicescastral travel, table-rapping, mediumshipcand the models of individual selfhood found in liberal political theory and in the Victorian novel. Her study builds on a growing body of scholarship that reveals the widespread in£uence of occult practices on Victorian imaginings of community.

NSpace and GeoTime: A VAST 2006 Case Study

The nSpace and GeoTime visual analytic tools enable investigation and understanding of complex, ambiguous situations. nSpace is a system of systems supporting the whole analytic workflow. GeoTime provides insight into events and behaviors in time and space. Junior analysts used the analytic capabilities that these tools support to investigate the 2006 Visual Analytics Science and Technology contest data set and to produce an intelligence assessment report. Their work won first place in the corporate category. This article is a detailed case study describing how the nSpace and GeoTime tools created an analytical environment that enabled two novice analysts to examine a scenario, discover patterns, trace connections, assess evidence, visually represent meaningful hypotheses with associated evidence, track progress, collaborate with others, and then produce a final report. nSpace and GeoTime are developed in collaboration with analysts to support the investigation of large and complex multidimensional data sets.

Nietzsche and the murder of God

AbstractNietzsche's tortured relationship to the Christian God has received scant attention from commentators. In this paper I seek to map out the central lines a proper understanding of Nietzsche in this regard might take. I argue that fundamental in such an understanding is Nietzsche's profoundly corporeal moral vocabulary, and I trace connections between this vocabulary and Nietzsche's concern with cleanliness, his asceticism, and the notion of a sense of common humanity with others.

Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815?1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor, by Robert Lee

Reviewed by: Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815–1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor Hugh McLeod (bio) Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815–1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor, by Robert Lee; pp. xii + 235. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006, £45.00, $80.00. In this well-researched and forcefully written study of the Anglican clergy in the 600 parishes of rural Norfolk, Robert Lee focuses on their role as "managers" of the poor: as magistrates, Poor Law Guardians, administrators of charities, founders and managers of schools, political activists, and so on. It was through these roles, he argues, that they most often came into contact with the farm workers, their wives, and their children, who made up a major part of the county's population. While granting that the clergy were not a homogeneous body, Lee presents them as agents of modernisation—a modernisation that most of the poor disliked. The clergy in the nineteenth century tended, Lee suggests, to be hostile to rural traditions and pastimes that their predecessors had encouraged. Their schools, which promoted patriotism and deference to social superiors, encountered condemnation from radicals and apathy from many other parents who would have preferred their children to be out earning money. These clergy administered class-biased laws, seldom voicing any protest. They often lived in grandiose rectories that offered a blatant contrast to their parishioners' hovels. Anti-clericalism was rife, reflected sometimes in religious and political radicalism, sometimes in the threats, verbal abuse, or physical indignities that were visited on some of the clergy. Lee's style often resembles that of the counsel for the prosecution, and he has three star witnesses: Joseph Arch, the Methodist preacher and union leader, and Annie and Tom Higdon, the socialist and nonconformist teachers who were locked in a long drawn-out battle with the archconservative incumbent of Burston, the Reverend Charles Eland. But he also has a surprise witness in the form of "The King of the Norfolk Poachers," who had no discernible political or [End Page 518] religious agenda but was equally hostile to the clergy. His criticisms focused on their role in enforcing the Game Laws and on their affluent lifestyle and alleged preoccupation with money. While Lee attributes more weight than is justified to this particular evidence, it plays an important and innovative role in his argument. Going beyond the familiar attacks on the clergy by religious and political radicals, Lee has uncovered several episodes of conflict between the rural clergy and their parishioners. He recounts with gusto such tales as that of the incumbent who was forced to climb into his church with the aid of a ladder after it had been locked by a rebellious sexton supported by many of the local working class. Along with these anecdotes, Lee also provides valuable details, often backed by statistical data, on many aspects of the life and work of the clergy. He describes tithe disputes as well as conflicts surrounding church restorations and the introduction of organs and choirs. He shows how clerical magistrates could often be at the centre of controversy, though he also notes that the proportion of Norfolk magistrates who were clergymen fell from thirty-two percent in 1837 to seventeen percent in 1883 and five percent in 1908. (It has usually been assumed that trends of this kind were associated with a decrease in rural anti-clericalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, whereas Lee claims an increase: here, as elsewhere, it is a pity that he does not enter into more explicit dialogue with other historians in the field.) He demonstrates the key role of Anglican clergy in the establishment of rural schools—but he also criticises these schools for doing little to broaden the children's horizons—and he traces connections between clergymen and members of the gentry. His conclusion is that "Somewhere during the course of the nineteenth century, despite its ubiquitous involvement, the Church of England lost contact with rural society and lost its relevance to the lives of the labouring poor" (184). Lee's arguments that the clergy were central to the rural authority structure and that their secular roles were potential...

The Virtual Discourses of Pamela Z

Pamela Z is an American composer-performer and audio artist whose use of extended vocal technique and live, body-controlled electronic processing takes place in events ranging in scale from solo events in galleries to large-scale works that combine video, audio, and live musicians, singers, and actors. Her work raises important issues regarding transnationalism, Afrodiasporicism, and identity; acoustic ecologies; the articulation of race and ethnicity; and the place of women in technological media. The essay discusses several of Z's works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, in articulation with cybertheory; the aesthetics of popular and avant-garde music, voice, language, and poetics; intermedia and performance art; and contemporary technological practices.

A Tolkien Mathomium: A Collection of Articles about J.R.R. Tolkien and His Legendarium (review)

Reviewed by: A Tolkien Mathomium: A Collection of Articles about J.R.R. Tolkien and His Legendarium Sandra Ballif Straubhaar A Tolkien Mathomium: A Collection of Articles about J.R.R. Tolkien and His Legendarium, by Mark T. Hooker . Foreword by James Dunning . Morrisville, NC: Llyfrawr [Lulu], 2006. xvi, 275 pp. $24.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1411693708. This pleasantly eccentric volume is a collection of twenty-six mostly linguistics-oriented essays and notes by Mark T. Hooker, a retired professor of translation studies at the University of Indiana (Bloomington). Some of the entries are reprints from Beyond Bree, Translation Journal, and other Tolkienian and generalist venues; others are previously unpublished. Hooker's professional activity has mostly involved the Slavic languages, but he has also studied Welsh, and speaks modern Dutch. Because this breadth of expertise is somewhat unusual for Tolkienian linguists, most of whom come from the Old English/Old Norse quadrant, Hooker has a wide variety of things to say that have not been heard before. (If he also knew Finnish, he would be too good to be true; but alas, he is as imperfect as most of us.) Comments below will apply to those articles which particularly caught my attention; others readers' mileage will certainly vary. "What is a Mathom?", which opens the volume, explores the range of meaning between Old English mathum (treasure, gift) and Hobbitish mathom (antique object of obscure utility), visiting Beowulfian and Rohirric royal gift-givings along the way. This is an example of well-applied cultural linguistics, because it illustrates, with examples, the links between world-view and lexical meaning—showing that when one changes, so must the other. "Esgaroth" argues for a double origin of the secondary name for Lake-town. Besides "Reedlake," as attested in the "Etymologies" (published in Lost Road), Hooker suggests a Celtic-derived "water-enclosure." (Since we already have an Old English-Sindarin pun [Orthanc] in the canon, why not a Celtic-Ilkorin one?) In another entry later on, he uses the "Etymologies" creatively to defend a parsing of "Estel" (unfortunately misspelled "Estell" elsewhere in the book) as literally "first star," taking on the meaning of "hope" by connotation. [End Page 311] "The Linguistic Landscape of Bree" and "The Linguistic Landscape of Tolkien's Shire" trace connections (Celtic and Germanic respectively, for the most part) between Tolkienian and current European place-names, mostly in the U.K. Sometimes an incomplete acquaintance with Scandinavian languages handicaps Hooker here, as when on pages 23, 59 and 60 he misconstrues the lexical ranges, and the multiple derivations, of –holm and –ey in English names. (Tolkien, who wrote of the "monks of Ely isle," would certainly have known that Ely was derived from "eel island," not "eel district.") Hooker devotes an entire chapter to the Shire place-name "Stock," which he connects to English place-names, and eventually (via Ælfric) to sacred trees (and St. Boniface and Owen Glendower), concluding that "Stocc would, therefore, appear to be the OE name applied in pre-Christian times to a religious site" (77-8). I find this too great a weight for such a little syllable to support. Granted that Ælfric's "stocks and stones" were in fact sacred sites, it is also worth remembering that in more recent centuries "over stock and stone" (meaning the equivalent of something like: over hill and dale) is a folkloristic and literary commonplace found in the tales of the Grimms ("über Stock und Stein") and in Asbjørnsen and Moe's collection as well ("over stokk og stein"), and that Tolkien would have known it from both these sources. (Google also reveals the same couplet in nineteenth-century Swedish and Flemish poetry—in Gustav Schönberg's "Barndomsminnen" and Jan van Droogenbroeck's "De Brand," where it appears as "stock och sten" and "stok en steen," respectively.) "And why is it called the Carrock?" connects Beorn's rock, amusingly if not conclusively, to Welsh carreg and Castell Carreg Cennen with its associated legend of sleeping warriors, which Hooker then links to the dead men of Dunharrow. But it can be pointed out that sleeping underground warrior-bands and their leaders are dotted all over the legendary European landscape...

International Development and Assistance: Where Politics Meets Economy

Wolfgang Sachs in The Development Dictionary states that, 'development is much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models reality, a myth which comforts societies, and a fantasy which unleashes passions'. For over five decades, the term 'development' has been seen as the embodiment of the ideals of freedom, progress and equality, a banner under which all of humanity could unite, with the promise of a brighter future. Increasingly, however, the viability of development, whether one chooses to characterise it as concept, ideal or myth, is being questioned. We live in a world of excessive deprivation, destitution and marginalisation. And the presence of millions of refugees and displaced persons globally is but one manifestation of the problems that prevail in spite of, or some would say because of, development. This volume outlines the need for an integrated analysis of the links between development, social transformation, displacement, migration and humanitarianism. It addresses globalisation (championed by the development paradigm) as a transformational phenomenon, which has led to an unprecedented level of interconnectedness on a global scale but which, paradoxically, has also resulted in an increasing emphasis on the local, specifically in relation to perceived encroachments on national sovereignty. In this context, the chapters that follow trace connections between the process of the generation of refugees, the ability or inability of particular populations to move, and the concomitant tightening of national borders. Conversely, they also demonstrate the weakening of the primacy of sovereignty in the context of current norms of humanitarian intervention and analyse the efficacy of the delivery of humanitarian assistance given the extreme complexity of contemporary emergencies, the limits of aid agency co-ordination and questions relating to the political neutrality of humanitarianism. Significantly, several case-specific studies, ranging from Burma to the Sudan, thereby encompassing a range of geo-political regions, are incorporated in an effort to discourage perceptual bias. The work contained herein is especially pertinent in the aftermath of September 11th 2001 and governments' intensifying concerns about domestic security, which have resulted in a decrease in focus on the safety considerations of migrants. It is all the more relevant in view of the subsequent declaration of a 'war on terrorism' which has raised serious questions about state sovereignty, the global role of the United Nations and the shape of future humanitarian operations. International Development and Assistance: Where Politics Meets Economy brings together authors from across a range of disciplines, each contributing unique perspectives on the consequences of development and globalisation on the humanitarian system and provides a foundation for more informed debate about the disparities between the myth and the reality of the development process.

The Kuleshov Effect and the Death of the Auteur

The 'Kuleshov Effect' has long been regarded as being both of seminal importance in the development of cinema in the 1920s and yet also as being so ambiguous and difficult to interpret that it has almost become all things to all people. This article shall utilise the Kuleshov Effect as its own palimpsest to try to trace connections between Soviet montage cinema, the politique des auteurs of the French Nouvelle Vague and Barthes' essay on 'The Death of the Author'.

Blaise Cendrars 5 — Portraits de l'artiste

Sous la direction de Claude Leroy. (La Revue des Lettres Modernes). Paris — Caen, Minard, 2003. 251 pp. Pb €22.00. This, as the title indicates, is a book of portraits: self-portraits, portraits by the artist, portraits of the artist. Cendrars himself appears as the artist of self-multiplication, of mystification, the fugitive from identity who, however, cannot bring himself to leave the scene of the crime. The volume opens with a section on the autoportrait. Luce Briche, to whose memory the collection is dedicated, plumbs the Cendrarsian mirror: the baleful accomplice of Medusa, the place of self-dissolution, the mirror of self-confrontation must be outwitted by Perseus' alternative mirror of oblique reflections and scattered rays, and by the multiperspectival hide-and-seek of language. Jacqueline Bernard constructs a Chinese portrait of Cendrars, of a self continually re-metaphorized in his writing (autofiction). In the hands of Renaud Ferreira de Oliveira, Cendrars assumes the guise of the hunter whose ultimate goal is the ‘prise de conscience de cette réversibilité du regard, par laquelle celui qui croit viser le monde est lui-même visé par une Conscience’. The second section is devoted to Cendrars the portraitist. For Frédéric-Jacques Temple, Cendrars is an ornithologist, for Michèle Touret the group portraitist of his Foreign Legion squad, for Jean-Carlo Flückiger the one who finds an ever-available, hypothetical alter ego in Charlot. We then move on to Cendrars as himself the portrait. Jay Bochner traces connections between Cendrars and the agents of American bohemia and counterculture, while his fame in Brazil, as Maria Teresa de Freitas observes, revolves around the paradox expressed by Mário de Andrade: ‘Et, poète français, il m'a libéré de la France’. Myriam Boucharenc explores the intricate interwovenness of the lives of Cendrars and Soupault, with their little betrayals, and Fabrice Humbert ponders Louis de Calaferte's adoption of Cendrars as a spiritual father, despite the contradictions embedded in this relationship. Alexandre Castant's examination of Doisneau's images of Cendrars, as a contribution to the dialogue between the media, leads into the final section, Cendrars as a character in literature: Marie-France Borot reads Manuel de Seabra's Portuguese lieutenant Conrado reading Cendrars in war-torn Angola (Coneixes Blaise Cendrars?, 1984); and Claude Leroy concludes with a tentative, synthesizing typology — ‘chroniques romancées’, subdivided into ‘Cendrars sous son nom’ and ‘Portraits masqués’; ‘Fictions à clefs’, subdivided into ‘Collages’ and ‘Pilotis’; and, finally,‘Le Livre de Blaise’ (the legend of the forename) — followed by a répertoire. As an appendix, the volume includes two uncollected articles (Cendrars's pen-portrait of Doisneau which served as a preface to the latter's Instantanés de Paris (1925), and a preface written for Erich von Stroheim's novel, Poto-Poto (1956)) and a selection from Cendrars's unpublished epigrammatic thumbnail sketches of contemporaries (‘Épinglés’). It is the documentary value of this collection of essays which is most to be prized, and the variety of its angles of approach. Theoretical thinking about biography and autobiography is less conspicuous.

Contesting Race on Sundays: Making Meaning out of the Rise in the Number of Black Quarterbacks

This is a study of the process of racial formation; specifically how a rise in the number of Black quarterbacks playing in the National Football League (NFL) was interpreted in print-media articles. Analysis reveals a number of competing and overlapping interpretations, suggesting that sport is “contested racial terrain” (Hartmann, 2000). The contested nature and the tendency for these articles to express language and ideas borrowed from dominant American political ideologies indicate how important sport is as a site for the construction of race. Using Gramscian cultural theory, these interpretations, as well as narrative formations capable of assimilating this demographic shift within preexisting racial configurations, are discussed in light of changes in the articulation of race in the post-civil rights era.

War Minus the Shooting

July/August 2004 · Historically Speaking33 There Is No Perfect Design (2003). When I interviewed him, he stressed that histories of smaU things—be theypaper cups, paperbags, waterpitchers, or chairs—reveal the extraordinary that exists in the ordinary. Perhaps contemporary historians have a special responsibility to write histories of things, especially smaU and invisible things. Indeed, ifwe are to write of human power, we mustwrite notjust ofgreat and grandiose matters but ofvital and deadly microscopic things. Increasingly, as I argued in Dust, human fate turns on the atom, molecule, ceU, gene, and microscopic engineering. As a genre, the history ofthings (or the histories ofeverything) can be seen as a gatheringofsundryhistoriographical tribes. On one level, it appears to be an overflow from social history, particularly with its concern for domestic and everydayUfe. Italso can be conceptualized as a superabundance of cultural history, with its focus on the material things that determine human belief, behavior, and socialization. But I would argue this genre has another ofits sources in the recent expansion ofenvironmental and ecological history. Concentrating on the relationship between the natural and the historical, it directs our attention to the determining roles ofplants, animals, crops, land use, agricultural practices and technologies, along with the causative and elemental power of climate, soils, water, rivers, and fire on human landscape . Reconfirming the materiaUty ofhistory , environmental historians often propose an underlying and governing energy equation between all human and natural things and the importance of technology in transforming environments. Collectively, historians writing in this genre are revitaUzinghistorybyforgingnew, ifnotstunning, marriages offacts, anecdotes, ideas, concepts, and ideas. Their works proceed on fresh perspectives and unexpected connections. Theyhave atleast the potential to remove obtuse explanations and impenetrable historiographical debates from their narratives, aUowingvivid details, tellinganecdotes , precise connections, and keen wits to trump theory and ideology. Althoughnot always pure in practice and admittedlymore appropriate for certain subjects than others, the historyofthings moves us into everyday Ufe. Not forgetful of Cinderella among the ashes or the truism that not everyshoe fits everyfoot, historianswriting the history ofthings must utiUze a flexible causality. Tracing connections between crafts and classes and across landscapes and environments, this genre welcomes everything under the sun into its consideration. The history of things, to guess at its future, will not consoUdate itself into a formal school or an estabUshed curriculum. Its sources and motives are too diverse; its subjects and methodologies are too numerous, if not eccentric. Its embrace of novelty, no doubt, invites those who cherish cleverness and book sales over scholarship. Nevertheless , atthe same time, itwiU provide fresh topics and approaches. It will give a deserved place to the history ofscience, technology, engineering, design, and the landscape, which is fitting in this era ofmoral and social subjects . It wiU also leaven economic, business, family, local, and regional history. Negating abstract ideologies and uniform and governing explanations, it wiU stimulate our imaginations , enhance the flexibüityofour causalities , and meetJacques Barzun's prescription for good history by joining "Narrative, Chronology, Concreteness, and Memorability ."2 Finally, with its accent on details, precise connections, and contextual accuracy, the history ofthings will leave us, as any good narrative should, tremblingbefore the power ofthe common and ordinary, the smaU and invisible, to write human destinies. JosephA. Amato has recently retiredfrom Southwest State University where he was director ofthe CenterforRuraland Regional Studies andprofessor ofhistory. His Dust: A History ofthe Small and Invisible (University ofCalifornia Press, 2000) wasselected as afirst choice non-fiction book by the Los Angeles Times. He iscompleting On Foot: A Cultural History ofWalking (New York University Press,forthcoming in 2004). 1 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H.Jewett (Routledge, 2001). 2 Barzun's prescription is cited in Hugh Ragsdale, "Comparative Historiography ofthe Social HistoryofRevolutions : English, French, and Russian," TheJournalofthe HistoricalSociety 3 (2003): 357. War Minus the Shooting Nigel Spivey Late in 1945 the EngUsh writer George Orwell turned his journalistic attention to the phenomenon of international soccer. The Second World War had ended with formal peace agreements in the summer of that year. As part of a return to normaUty, the Soviet Union had sent one of its leading football clubs, the Moscow Dynamos, on a round of "friendly" fixtures with teams in Britain. The...

Desire and Anathema: Mimetic Rivalry in Defense of Plenitude

Rene Girard argues that human desire based on a fundamental experience of lack leads inevitably to mimetic rivalry and violence. In response, both secular and theological thinkers have tried to articulate modes of desire based on plenitude rather than lack. This article compares efforts by James Hans (from a secular perspective) and John Milbank (from a theological perspective) to define modes of desire based on fullness. While I affirm their objective, the article explores how arguments in support of desire based on plenitude get implicated in mimetic rivalry. I use political theorist William Connolly to trace connections between the fullness of desire and the urge to anathematize, rather than oppose, a rival position. I argue that affirmations of desire based on fullness must remain alert to the emergence of rivalry and violence in their course.

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Football, one of the central components of twentieth-century Bengali popular culture, has generally been neglected by historians as unworthy of serious academic enquiry. This article examines the way in which football as a societal mirror reflected the articulation of race and nation in colonial Calcutta in a period of clearest nationalist upsurge against colonial rule. It attempts to explain how football as a mass spectator sport came to represent a unique cultural nationalism of the Bengali people and to explore the character, pattern and forms of that footballing nationalism.