Transnational Dialogue Research Articles

Philosophy of Sport in Germany: An Overview of its History and Academic Research

In Germany, philosophy of sport is still a young discipline which developed in the 20th century as a result of the growing significance of sport in society. Whereas the academic discussion in Germany which took place in the founding phase of the discipline in the early 1970s had much in common with that conducted in the Anglo-American academic community thanks to such integrative figures as Hans Lenk and Gunter Gebauer, who hosted the international conferences held in Germany by the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport (PSSS)1 in the early 1980s and the 1990s, the transnational dialogue abated almost completely in the following years.2 As a consequence, philosophy of sport in Germany underwent a development of its own and acquired its own profile. The specific characteristics of German philosophy of sport are not rooted so much in any cultural particularities of sport practice, as is the case for bicycling in the Netherlands or hunting and cricket in England, for example, but rather in regional philosophical traditions established by such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Plessner, Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel.3 In order to give the reader an overview of the historical development and current status of research in philosophy of sport in Germany, relevant exemplary publications will be presented in the following and treated firstly in terms of their genesis, secondly in the context of current trends and tendencies, thirdly from the perspective of differences and commonalities between the German and the Anglo-American academic discussion, and fourthly concerning status and degree of institutionalization. Lastly an outlook on future developments will be given.

Editor’s Preface. The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism

Political cinema is about the absence of the people. This paraphrase of Gilles Deleuze could serve as an epigraph to this volume.' Avant-garde Catalan cinema thematizes not just the lack of visibility of a people but, more significantly, makes of such absence and silence a powerful cinematic trope with which to counteract the political vacuum created by late Francoism. The essays collected in The Invisible Tradition present instances of an urgent critical reengagement and symptomatic reading of these singular and littleknown cinematic interventions.The social and political imaginaries of Francoist Spain created a singular instance of dislocation in the Catalan filmic avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The commitment to avant-garde practices, emerging out of a tradition dating back to the 1920s in the Catalan context, pushed the envelope of political possibility by establishing an elective affinity and an affective transfer between the political and the aesthetic. By addressing this productive double enunciation through a transnational lens, this special issue hopes to shed new light both on European peripheral cinematic avant-gardes and on the aesthetic articulation of political dissent. The films of the Barcelona School and of Pere Portabella bear the mark of their circumstances and put those circumstances to work by appropriating them conceptually and cinematically. Late Francoism proved to be an unstable and complex political conjuncture that challenged the use of straightforward cinematic narratives and called for a reimagination of the cinematic medium as an emancipatory practice.The conjunctures of Barcelona's cultural milieu were not without complexity either. Felix Fanes - whose contribution is the first article in Catalan to be published in Hispanic Review - teases out the implications of Pere Portabella's collaborative, interdisciplinary, and conceptual understanding of the cinematic medium by paying close attention to the legacies of the prewar Catalan avant-garde, still traceable in the Barcelona of the '60s and '70s. By foregrounding the centrality of Joan Brossa, a poet, visual artist, magician, and early-cinema aficionado, as a link between the historical avant-gardes and the emergence of Catalan conceptualism, Fanes situates his early collaboration with Portabella within a genealogy that begins with Miro, runs through Dau al Set, and culminates with the avant-garde politics of the Grup de Treball. Likewise, the influence of the avant-garde musician and conceptual artist Carles Santos brings to the table an emphasis on the materiality and discontinuity of film, together with a fascination with the role of labor in the artistic process, which we have come to regard as intrinsic to Portabella's distinctive filmic style. Dialogue, collaboration, and mixed media may have begun as characteristics of the Catalan avant-garde milieu, but in Portabella they were formalized into aesthetic choices.Rosalind Gait pushes the contextualization of the Barcelona School further by situating it within a transnational dialogue between critical theory and the political avant-garde, in its turn immersed in the aesthetic and political debates surrounding the events of 1968. The reconfiguration of an alternative cinematic culture would champion linguistic renewal over party alliances, and oppose both the legacy of neorealism and the hegemony of the NCE (Nuevo Cine Espanol) in favor of an elective affinity with the Italian Gruppo 63 and, to a lesser extent, the French Tel Quel. Thus the political impurity and the transnational conversations in which these films engage belie the isolationism of the Francoist cultural milieu, where being Spanish fundamentally meant not being European. Gait's research inextricably links the fate of European leftist cultures to the ascendancy of a critical theory that, via Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco for instance, championed a transformation of art cinema, and to which the filmmakers of the Barcelona School fully subscribed. …

Coast and Spooks: On the permeable national boundaries of British television

Two contrasting BBC series – a geography/leisure programme and a spy drama – are examined to establish the strategies used to construct national discourses. It is suggested that the articulation of such discourses includes a necessary openness, corresponding both to an intensified BBC policy to represent social diversity and the implications arising from the specific genre or television format. For Coast, initial claims for the coast as a defensible national boundary line have been undermined. The programme has come to recognize the coast as a permeable location of exchange and migration. It has shifted towards a version of the coast in terms of diversity rather than as a symbol of national integrity. Spooks, by contrast has moved away from an initial scepticism concerning the elitist role of MI5 in defending the nation as anxieties about terrorism grew during the last decade. Nevertheless, like Coast, there has been a necessary transnational dialogue as much as there has been a concern to defend national boundaries.

Disorienting the Furniture: The Transgressive Journalism of Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Drawing on the journalistic prose of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the U.S., this article breaches cultural, national, and geographical frontiers by comparing the discursive gestures through which Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman re-appropriate for themselves the canonical genre of essay-writing to advance their feminist agendas. By undermining the presuppositions underlying so-called feminine publications of their time, both women carry out an intriguing disarticulation of the classic private/public divide that empowers their female readers to conceive of female subjectivity in new and innovative ways. Almost a mythic figure in the world of Latin American letters, Alfonsina Storni has achieved world renown as Argentina’s most famous “poetess of love,” thus obscuring her substantial contributions to Argentinean periodical literature. Even though Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become one of the most influential figures in the history of American First-Wave Feminism, that reputation is largely founded on her feminist fiction and her book Women and Economics, while her journalistic accomplishments have received considerably less attention. The transnational dialogue between these two writers conjured up in this article unearths this more or less neglected corpus to reveal the ways in which both subverted traditional definitions of gender through a transgressive use of discursive spaces heavily coded as “feminine” by patriarchal ideology.

Organizing the "Unorganized": Varieties of Transnational Trade Union Collaboration and Social Dialogue in Two Indian Cities

Organizing the "Unorganized": Varieties of Transnational Trade Union Collaboration and Social Dialogue in Two Indian Cities

Rumours from around the bloc

In the past two decades, an increasing number of young women have taken the tools of media production into their own hands; feminist zines have evolved into a medium for transnational dialogue, community building, and networking. In focusing on the Plotki Femzine (2006, 2007), a Central and Eastern European (CEE) feminist print and online zine project, we use the theoretical framework of “rhizomatic media” to problematize existing scholarship on feminist zines. Much of this scholarship sees zines as venues that construct a sense of “authenticity” through the use of the autobiographical voice and an outright rejection of mainstream media practices. Considering the rhizomatic processes of alternative knowledge production in Plotki publication, we draw on post-structuralist gossip theory to examine the Plotki Femzine as a site of feminist discourse. In particular, we show how the Plotki Femzine builds cross-border collaboration and “spreads rumours” of a feminist kind.

Transjudicial dialogue and constitutionalism: a risk or an opportunity for democracy?

- After briefly explaining how constitutional dialogue works and has mostly been elaborated, together with how it is encouraged and made possible by some of the institutional characteristics of the judiciary, this paper addresses a specific issue: the link between the position adopted by the courts with regard to this practice and the different kinds of legitimisation which they refer to, whether democracy or constitutionalism. Legitimacy may be based more on democracy, with the idea that national sovereignty is its almost exclusive source, or on the idea that, in matters of rights, universal standards may or must pass through different democracies. As usual parlance is of course about "constitutional democracies", it reconciles the potential opposition between the two aspects. However, globalisation, with the challenges it sets towards national sovereignty, is strengthening this opposition, pushing it toward the one or the other aspect. Courts and especially constitutional courts are thus becoming the places where decisions are made about the ambivalence between the risk of de-nationalising national constitutional law and the opportunity to take part in creating new cosmopolitan forms of law and universalising a constitutional protection of fundamental and human rights. Two possible answers to this ambivalence are highlighted by focusing particularly on the example of two national constitutional courts, that of South Africa and that of the United States, starting from their different attitudes towards involvement in the constitutional dia- logue. Their different, even opposite, ways of approaching transnational dialogue lead to paradoxical results.

“Find their Level”. African American Roots Tourism in Sierra Leone and Ghana

In many "developing" and post-conflict African nations, cultural tourism has been touted as a vital source of foreign exchange revenue for jumpstarting national devel­opment. This trend has led to a scramble in Africa by African state officials seeking to "package" their nations in order to attract the patronage of Diasporan "returnees"— descendants of the Middle Passage who travel to Africa in search of cultural and historical "roots". This situation is further complicated by the fact that the planning and execution of national "packaging" frequently bypasses the ordinary citizen. Thus the official agenda of these nation states is sometimes at odds with the aspirations of local citizens and pan-African sojourners. Moreover, this trend has contributed to considerable conceptual slippage and, consequently, vociferous debates over the meaning of and criteria for asserting Africanness. In other instances, these conjunc­tures have transformed and enhanced received notions of African identity. An ethno­graphic comparison of a developing nation (Ghana) and a post-conflict nation (Sierra Leone) can both deepen and complicate our understandings of this emerging pan-African phenomenon and its attendant possibilities and limitations. We consider how these complimentary and conflicting interests, beliefs, and practices converge to shape novel modes of pilgrimage, nationhood, transnational dialogue, and globalization.

A Response to Leadership for Social Justice: A Transnational Dialogue

A Response to <i>Leadership for Social Justice</i>: A Transnational Dialogue

When National Actors Become Transnational: Transjudicial Dialogue between Democracy and Constitutionalism

In this paper, after briefly explaining how constitutional dialogue works and has been elaborated for the most part, and the way in which it is encouraged and made possible by some institutional characters of the judiciary, a specific issue will be addressed: the link between the courts' position toward this practice and the different kinds of legitimation that they refer to, democracy or constitutionalism. Legitimacy may be based more on democracy, with the idea that national sovereignty is its almost exclusive source, or on the idea that, in matters of rights, universal standards may or have to pass through different democracies. Of course we usually speak of "constitutional democracies," thereby reconciling the potential opposition between the two aspects. However, globalization, with its challenges to national sovereignty, is strengthening that opposition, and pushing it toward the one or the other aspect. Thus, courts and especially constitutional courts become the place for decision-making on the ambivalence between the risk of de-nationalizing national constitutional law and the opportunity to take part in the creation of new cosmopolitan forms of law and universalization of constitutional protection for fundamental and human rights. Two possible answers to such ambivalence will be highlighted by focusing particularly on the example of two national constitutional courts, that of South Africa and that of the United States, starting from their different attitudes towards involvement in constitutional dialogue. Their different, even opposite ways of approaching transnational dialogue, lead to paradoxical results.

LEGISLATION

Much has been written on the increasing significance of domestic courts in the international realm. However, the role of the Turkish constitutional judges in determining and orienting the relationship between international law and Turkish domestic law has rarely been subject to legal analysis. Literature on the involvement of the Turkish judges in transnational judicial dialogue is also almost non-existent. As far as the existing Turkish literature is concerned, much of the contemporary writing on the subject tends to focus on the hierarchical position of international agreements in the Turkish legal order. This paper intends to fill an important gap in the scholarship by providing an analysis of the decisions of the Turkish Constitutional Court (TCC) and by illuminating the TCC’s role as implementers or non-implementers of international law, and the scope of their participation in transnational judicial dialogue. Relevant sub-questions concern the extent to which the stance of the TCC’s judges may or may not alleviate concerns of the international community on the rule of law in Turkey, and whether their engagement in international law is substantial enough to limit and moderate the excesses of different political forces, including those in power, engaged in the domestic power struggle.

«La circulation des idées» : Translating European Abolitionism

Translation was central to the propagation and universalization of British abolitionist ideas at the time of the Vienna Congress when the European Declaration on the slave trade was forged. Yet transnational dialogue could not overcome differences between nations. The use of ‘humanity’ and ‘civilisation’ highlighted European humanitarian beliefs, but the Declaration itself remained vague. And abolitionist translations were seen as imposing British wishes on Europe. Yet these ideas spread through an emphasis on international cooperation and multilingual publications.

Women and War in Contemporary Love Stories from Uganda and Nigeria

Women and War in Contemporary Love Stories from Uganda and Nigeria Sofia Ahlberg (bio) This essay puts contemporary women's short fiction from Uganda and Nigeria in conversation through the analysis of literary representations of love in the context of war. Proposed here is a mode of reading the love story by reflecting more generally upon narrative's relation to political turmoil, violence, and conquest. Addressing the underlying theme of love as a creative stimulus for self-expression, it explores the potential of women's love stories from Uganda and Nigeria to resist, and sometimes resolve, conflict. Though Nigeria and Uganda share similarities with regards to their social, cultural, and economic conditions, as well as their colonial histories, the extent of their literary output differs considerably. In comparison to Uganda where there has been a revival of literature only relatively recently, Nigerian writing has already altered the collective social body and even the land itself has been transformed under its influence. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Ugandan writers looked at in this essay write about issues concerning daughters confronting the challenges of a modern world. Theirs is an internalized narrative, one that acknowledges that social and political change begins from within the self and the ability to raise one's voice above that of the mainstream. Their Nigerian counterparts, by comparison, write from the point of view of the mother who struggles to keep together and shepherd her dependents in moments of disunity and national crises. When considered together, Nigerian and Ugandan texts occasion a rare possibility to discuss the shifts in African women's writing in times of Civil War and regional conflict. The concerns shared by women writers from both countries point to the benefits gained from transnational dialogue, especially within equatorial Africa. However sober the writing from Uganda seems by comparison [End Page 407] to the more idealistic vision from Nigeria, all narrators considered in this essay stand out as women in control of their destinies, women of personal integrity and self-worth. By engaging in the cultural and socio-political transformation of Uganda and Nigeria as evident in the literature of some of their contemporary women authors, this essay aims to embrace a new vision of what constitutes love and how subjects express it. Though universal, the portrayal of love is far from inclusive. Buchi Emecheta gives voice to the erroneous belief that literary love is the domain of the West when she notes in her autobiography that as a young woman she equated England with romance and the typical Englishman with Mr. Darcy.1 As defined and informed by its chivalric, European origins, there is seldom an African presence in romantic fiction. Fiction, including romantic fiction, is monopolized not only by white authors, but by white, male authors, notes Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi in the preface to Gender in African Women's Writing.2 The overall aim here is not only to shift focus from the white, male world of fiction from last century to the black, female world of today (although this in itself would be a worthy pursuit considering the still disproportional weight toward Eurocentric, male authors in literature departments around the world), but to contribute to a new appreciation of the love story as a textual antidote to war. For the purpose of this discussion, the meaning of war is diverse, ranging from armed conflict in which women fall victim as civilians to women's own struggle or "war" for control over their bodies and their sexuality. In her discussion of Ama Ata Aidoo's novel Changes—A Love Story, Nfah-Abbenyi argues that the author's portrayal of love is political for many reasons, not least because it is informed by a cultural and socio-historical context beyond any individual's control.3 Similar claims can be made about the stories discussed in this essay with one significant difference. Politicized without doubt, love as narrated by Monica Arac de Nyeko, Doreen Baingana, SefiAtta, and Anthonia Kalu is also there for pleasure alone, as part of "the human condition," as Aidoo herself writes in the introduction of the recently published anthology African Love Stories.4 Paradoxically, however, it is precisely...

Fetishizing Dialogue and Commodifying Peacemaking

This paper assesses the ongoing dialogue and student exchangebetween the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and one ofthe most violent institutions in Iran, the Imam Khomeini Educationand Research Institute (IKERI). I will use this relationshipbetween theMCC and IKERI to examine the broader question ofinterreligious transnational dialogue and peacemaking.After a brief background of this somewhat “secretive” dialogue/student exchange, I will evaluate its effects. Of particular interestwill be the following questions: How do we responsibly shapeMuslim–non-Muslim dialogue for peace and understanding in aglobal context that is inevitably shaped by an imbalance of powerand representation? How are the acts of resistance undertaken bythe disenfranchised local/diasporic Iranian communities and thesustained systematic violence against them impacted by a peacefulfaith community such as the Mennonites? How does the absolutizationof “dialogue” coupled with self-proclaimed theologicalmandates effectively strip away the archives of violence from livingmemories and histories?What can examining the decade-longdialogue between the MCC and IKERI reveal about the mechanismsof perpetuation and dissimulation of imperial dominationand control? How can transnational interreligious interventions bethe nexus for infusing sensitivity and expecting accountability?I argue that a fetishization of dialogue and a commodification ofpeacemaking took place between the MCC and IKERI, resultingin the patronage of the sign systems of existing normative ideologiesof violence ...

Creating International Conference Submission and Review Guidelines to Facilitate Transnational Dialogue

Globally, nurses have much knowledge to share and the increased calls for conference presentation abstracts reflect this. However, a recent literature review revealed no guidelines for presentation submission and review processes for international nursing conferences. During the past decade, one conference, the U.S.-Russian Conference Cruise, has used evaluation data from each conference to shape its submission and review processes in a way that promotes transnational dialogue during the conference. The purpose of this article is to describe the challenges and evolution of designing submission and review processes that support the goal of a scholarly program of intercultural exchange.

Loge de la barbarie selon Gisle Pineau

This essay focuses on the model of Tout-monde (or Whole-World) developed in Gisle Pineau's 2005 novel Fleur de Barbarie. douard Glissant's theories, as developed in Tout-monde and Trait du Tout-monde, inform our interpretation of Pineau's novel. Like Glissant's, Pineau's Tout-monde is a totality that does not lead to totalitarianism, which establishes a series of links between international minor events that challenge the center/periphery model. However, Pineau adds to her Whole-World the crucial element of gender and sexuality absent from Glissant's theory. The study demonstrates how Pineau builds a feminist model of totality, in which women's bodies and sexual politics play a crucial role. Pineau, for instance, constructs a network of feminist intertextual relations by entering into a transnational dialogue with Hlne Cixous's texts and Josephine Baker's songs. Moreover, this essay shows how Pineau's novel extracts Guadeloupe from its peripheral status as Overseas Department by exoticizing the rural region of Sarthe, and by depicting Guadeloupe as a Cosmopolitan Center. Pineau calls her Tout-monde barbarie deconstructing the word barbare before reclaiming it as a pride.

A web of words: the great dialogue of southern literature

Richard Gray is known as both a leading European scholar in American literature and a leading international scholar of the literature of the American South. Through numerous examples drawn from southern literature, a historically conscious body of writing clearly in conversation with itself, Gray helps us to understand how any literary tradition involves an open conversation between its texts--a web of words that stretches from the local to the transnational.To read a southern story, poem, or play, Gray says, is to access a multitude of texts: surrounding, indwelling, echoing voices that exist within, and because of, a confluence of other voices. Gray first brings this idea alive by mapping the rhetoric of defeat across southern texts, with particular focus on those about the war in Vietnam. He then turns to another persistent topic in the great dialogue of southern literature: agrarianism and its viability as an alternative to globalism. Finally, Gray charts three different intertextual practices involving writings both within and outside the South. One involves a transatlantic dialogue between the fiction of Eudora Welty and European folktale; one a conversation between the indisputably southern William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, whose regional ties are more fluid and equivocal; and one the transnational dialogue on immigration and the changing ethnic makeup of the South.By talking, and listening, to many other writers, inside and outside the region, southern writers turn the intertextual space of their literature into a border territory. Their texts come to exist in an endless dialogue in which meaning is constantly being repositioned and redefined.

Research on transnational social dialogue and International Framework Agreements (IFAs)

Research on transnational social dialogue and International Framework Agreements (IFAs)

Organisational geographies of corporate responsibility: a UK-US comparison of retailers' ethical trading initiatives

Ethical trade, involving corporate codes of conduct for sites of production, has become a key means through which labour in retailers’ global supply chains is regulated. Yet, there is evidence to suggest that retail corporations vary markedly in their approaches to ethical trade and that such variation is shaped, in part, by the national-institutional contexts in which retailers are based. This article explores this insight by evaluating the distinct roles played by multi-stakeholder initiatives for ethical trade in the UK and USA. While the UK's core multi-stakeholder initiative, the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), encompasses retailers from a variety of sectors and takes a developmental and continuous learning approach to ethical trade, the US multi-stakeholder initiatives are focussed more on corporate accountability based on compliance monitoring exclusively in the clothing sector. Given recent organisational attempts to foster transnational dialogue between multi-stakeholder initiatives, though, we argue that the precise ways in which national-institutional contexts shape retailers’ ethical trading approaches are fluid and mutable. We contribute to the literature on the governance of global supply chains, retailer power and corporate responsibility by emphasising the political significance of national-institutional environments. However, in line with notions of relational economic geography, we understand these national-institutional environments as active and dynamic contexts, and accentuate the coalitional ways in which nationally based organisations evolve in their home countries and go on to shape broader transnational agendas for ethical trade.

History, Chinese Nationalism and the Emerging Sino–Japanese Conflict

Anti-Japanese popular nationalism is rising high in China today. Little evidence to date proves that it is officially orchestrated. Nonetheless, Chinese popular nationalism still has deep roots in the state's history propaganda which has implanted pernicious myths in the national collective memory. Fueling mistrust and exacerbating a mutual threat perception, popular nationalism could be a catalyst for future Sino–Japanese conflict over the Taiwan problem, island disputes, and maritime resource competition. The increasingly liberalized but often biased Chinese media, the role of nationalist sub-elites, and the government's accommodation have all contributed to the strength of anti-Japanese nationalism, which cannot be mitigated by bilateral economic interdependence. To rid bilateral relations of the negative historical legacy, the two countries need the vision and determination to remove nationalistic myths and promote a shared history through mutual critique and self-reflection in transnational historians' dialogues.