Transnational Forces Research Articles

Mao’s Steeltown: Industrial City, Colonial Legacies, and Local Political Economy in Early Communist China

This article examines the construction of industrial cities in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949-) by focusing on Anshan—a major steel city in Manchuria (Northeast China) that had been constructed by the Japanese prior to 1945. I demonstrate that the PRC industrial cities embodied the nature and limits of the new socialist regime’s vision of industrialization. The early PRC overwhelmingly focused its resources on heavy industry, which translated into the financial and bureaucratic superiority of industrial enterprises to city governments. The early PRC industrial cities drew from not only the Soviet urban-planning model but also the legacies of pre-revolutionary regimes, even including imperial Japan. The construction of industrial cities was driven by negotiations among various actors including city officials, enterprise managers, and domestic migrants. Building on the multi-layered local, national, and transnational forces, the industrial city of Anshan was a microcosm of the early PRC.

Simple and convoluted trauma stories

ABSTRACT The volume edited by Ron Eyerman and Giuseppe Sciortino offers a major contribution to cultural trauma theory. The chapters include much that is highly original and insightful. However, there are also a few gaps and weaknesses that need to be addressed. First, the editors and contributors start from a very narrow definition of colonial power relations, and hence, of decolonization. This leads to a preference for simple trauma stories at the expense of the more convoluted trauma stories offered by nations such as Great Britain and Germany. Second, the book misses the crucial point that the persistence of a trauma of decolonization has very little to do with the suffering of colonial repatriates. And third, not enough attention is being paid to transnational forces that have shaped the collective memory of modern nations.

Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Communists in the Transnational World of the Comintern before the Great Purge

The Comintern represented in the international relations of the inter-war period a transnational global force. It has been rightly described as an organisation with political program ambitions extending beyond national boundaries. Its sections were active in most countries of the globe. The involvement of the Comintern with the Baltic states and the activities of Baltic communists in the transnational framework of the organisation has remained almost unexplored. This article deals with the period from 1918 to 1935 and looks at the Baltic communists’ activities in the Comintern before the Great Purges in the USSR.Estonian and Latvian Communism grew out of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, Lithuanian Communism out of Polish Social Democracy and the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. At the time of the Comintern’s I Congress, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Bolsheviks had congregated into the national sections subject to RKP(b). The Soviet Balticum Project and the founding of the Comintern were reasons for a part of the Baltic bolsheviks belonging to the national sections of RKP(b) to declare that they had formed independent communist parties. The annulment of the Brest peace treaty in November of 1918 and the subsequent emergence of the Estonian Workers’ Commune, Soviet Latvia and Soviet Lithuania-Belarus Republic, or in other words, the soviet project’s duration in the Baltic provinces of the former Russian empire proved to be short-lived. The peace treaties between Soviet Russia and Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania signed in 1920 which became the foundation for the emergence of three independent states evoked sharp disagreements and demoralization in the ranks of the Baltic Bolsheviks. One part of them saw the Soviet Russia’s agreement to the peace treaty as treason, while the other justified the act with a comparison to the Brest peace treaty: Considering the existing power relationships and the Comintern-led international revolutionary movement, the peace agreements reached by the Soviet government are temporary and they will certainly encounter the same fate as the Brest peace treaty. The Stalin-led Peoples’ Commissariat of Nationalities played a decisive role in making it possible that bolsheviks of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian extraction were among the founders and afterwards in the leadership of the Comintern as a transnational organization. A similar role played the Zinoviev-led Peoples’ Commissariat of Nationalities of the Union of the Commune of the Nordic Region. In the first of these Commissariats worked Mickevičius-Kapsukas, Alexa-Angaretis, Gailis and Pöögelmamm, in the latter Anvelt and Giedrys. The Latvian bolshevik/communist Stučka was a part of Lenin’s retinue, while his countryman, one of the most transnational Balts in the Comintern and the top level of AUCP(b), Knoriņš, was allied with Stalin. Becoming members of the Comintern, the Baltic communists declared that the leadership of the revolutionary movement in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would belong wholly to the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian communist parties. Ties to the Comintern were justified as follows: the communist party as an independent organization forms a direct tie with the Comintern; having gained the recognition of the Comintern, the communist party joins as an independent member the transnational union of communist parties and starts with the internationalism of the working class, which allows the globalization, together with Soviet Russia/Soviet Union, of the results of the October Revolution. The question of what were the Baltic communists’ relations with the RKP(b) received this declaration as answer: the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian proletariat can proudly point to traditions and cooperation that has connected them to the Russian proletariat. Having joined the Comintern and directing from Soviet Russia / Soviet Union illegal communist activity in their homelands, the Baltic communist leaders remained members of RCP(b)/AUCP(b) and were in their actions subject to the direction of both that organization and of Comintern. They declared that they did not recognize the bourgeois Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and would greet the day when the bourgeois order was ended in these countries and union with Soviet Union took place. A role played here also the rhetoric about the internationalism of the working class and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The latter was to be achieved by taking part in the Comintern’s transnational campaigns. Among such campaigns were the peace movement, the fight against social democracy, the creation of joint and peoples’ fronts etc. The varied ideas and wishful thinking of the Baltic Bolsheviks came to an end with the start of repressions in 1936—1937 or the Great Purge.

Saving Our Empire from the Bolsheviks: The British Fascisti from a Transnational Perspective

ABSTRACT This article adds to the emerging field of transnational studies on the far right by focusing upon the overseas exploits of Britain’s first explicitly fascist movement, the British Fascisti (1923–1935). The perceived threat of a Bolshevik uprising led the BF to champion the British Empire in their rhetoric and actions. The main focus of this article is upon the movement’s expansion to 1920s Australia, through the medium of cricket, where they formed branches and caused scandal in equal measure. Included in the discussion is the neglected ‘story’ of how a small fascist group came to prominence in Australian high politics. Australia became a key addition to the movement’s quest to be a transnational force. Furthermore, the Fascisti in Australia represented one of the earliest transnational endeavours by a fascist movement – years before Italy’s abortive Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalita di Roma and more than a decade before Nazism’s mercifully short-lived ‘new order’ in Europe. Using contemporary national and local newspapers from Britain and Australia, as well as the Fascisti’s own publications, this article documents the efforts of the British Fascisti to be a transnational movement though a focussed, yet strangely neglected, case study.

Mineral and mineralogy in late Qing China: translations and conceptualizations, 1860s–1910s

ABSTRACT This article critically examines the translations of two terms – mineral and mineralogy – in modern China. The last decades of the Qing dynasty (1860s–1910s) witnessed a transition in the terminological usage of the Chinese equivalents of mineral and mineralogy from jinshi (metals and rocks) and jinshi xue (a study of metals and rocks) to kuangwu and kuangwu xue. A scrutiny of this transition raises questions regarding not only the exchanges in scientific knowledge between China, the West, and Japan since the nineteenth century, but the changes in the understanding of natural things in China. This article locates the translation of the terms within the scope of cultural translation and the history of science. It sheds new light both on the confrontations between languages and knowledge systems, which led to the re-conceptualization of natural things in China and Japan, and on the interplay between various domestic and transnational forces that shaped the intellectual landscapes in China. Through the confrontations and interplay, mineralogy eventually projected minerals into the domain of science and modern science claimed the authority over understanding these natural things.

“We’re all here for the money”: solidarity and divisions in a worker-owned company

ITAS, a Croatian machine tool company, is arguably the best-known example of worker ownership in all the countries of the former Yugoslavia. In the context of rising commodification of everyday life, I trace how blue-collar workers in ITAS discussed their salaries. I reveal divisions among them, despite great similarities in their predicament as a group and as individuals. Workers used the generational division as the main emic concept to make sense of the relationships on the shop floor. I offer a reflection on their perception of belonging to different generations with different interests. I show how talking about “old workers” and “young workers” was tied to a host of other social factors, such as attitudes towards labor, historical experience of dispossession, and relationship to space and mobility, which did not neatly map onto the generational division. Everyday discussions on the shop floor correctly described differential inclusion of workers of different generations into the labor market, which broadly reflected transnational forces at work in the global market for metalworking. However, constant focus on divisions in everyday discussions prevented workers in ITAS from engaging in political work that could harmonize their interests across generational and other lines.

Structuralism and Human Development: A Seamless Marriage? An Assessment of Poverty, Production and Environmental Challenges in CARICOM Countries

The article examines the current human development experience of CARICOM nations focusing on the interconnected challenges of poverty, production and the environment that show continuing uneven development. Using an extended structuralist framework based on international political economy dynamics, it incorporates organizational dynamics and domestic politics, especially the role of rents in influencing productive and inclusive development. In this way, the article examines the 2016 Caribbean Human Development Report (CHDR) and finds evidence that human development, proxied by expenditures on education and healthcare, has decoupled from productive capability evinced by decreasing industrial output. We concur with recent critiques of the human development paradigm (HDP) that it has ignored a productionist view of development and thus limits the scope of development policy to bring about broad production transformation. By and large, structural heterogeneity also represents a challenge in CARICOM countries. Linked to questions of development finance, we find that the CHDR’s analysis of environmental concerns offers a narrow instrumentalist view and further marginalizes a deeper understanding of CARICOM countries’ asymmetrical relationship with transnational forces in the global economy. This contribution offers an integrated approach showing continued peripheralization and helps identify structural, socio-political and technical drivers that underpin the region’s complex development challenges.

Not home-made: Historical and contemporary social policy dynamics in Cameroon

Social policy development trajectories in post-colonial sub-Saharan African states deviate from those in highly industrialized countries. Recent research endeavours established broad patterns of global interdependencies dating back to colonialism. This article contributes to these efforts by presenting a case study of the dynamics animating social policy development in Cameroon. It examines the progressive evolution of global determinants and their impacts on Cameroon’s welfare system over three periods: (1) decolonialization and post-colonial restructuring in the mid-20th century, (2) structural adjustment in response to the 1980s’ debt crisis and (3) the contemporary era of market liberalization driven by accelerated economic globalization. The research draws on a mixed-methods approach involving a document analysis and a survey administered in 400 rural households. Findings indicate that horizontal interdependencies were predominant in the establishment phase of Cameroon’s national social insurance scheme, but eventually gave way to vertical interdependencies in the 1980s. Recent efforts to advance economic liberalization represent a return to horizontal transnational forces, given the growing influence of multinational corporations on the country’s social security landscape. The study reinforces existing research insights in showing that, unlike social protection in the global north, social policy dynamics in Africa tend to actively contribute to the marginalization of underprivileged groups.

The Global Diffusion of the #MeToo Movement

AbstractWhy is the #MeToo movement very active in some countries but not in others? What factors encourage the transnational diffusion of digital feminist activism? Although transnational forces are important, we argue that domestic political opportunity structures play a more significant role than transnational influences in the country-level diffusion of #MeToo. We collected 35,211 global tweets and used Bayesian statistical modeling to test the implications of our theory. Our findings support the idea that as a country better protects its citizens’ political and civil rights and civil liberties, individuals in that country are more likely to engage in the #MeToo movement.

Transnational Corporate Governance: The State of the Art and Twenty-First Century Challenges

This chapter explores corporate governance as a subfield of corporate law, which was traditionally embedded in a country’s legal-economic culture and to a large degree reflective of historically grown structures of industrial development, corporate ownership and specific levels of market regulation. Mirroring the rise in importance of the idea of shareholder wealth maximization as a firm’s definitive performance measure, corporate governance rules have been aimed at meeting the ‘market expectations’ of investors who could inject as well as remove crucial financial assets into their countries’ corporate actors with the ease of a mouse click. In this context, corporate governance began to push against and, increasingly, grow beyond the confines of nationally specific cultures and historical experiences of corporate law, to become, instead, a hotly contested, transnational regulatory field of competing visions of firms’ institutional and normative infrastructure in search of creating the most advantageous conditions to attract capital in volatile markets. This shift occurred at the same time that regulatory transformations in Western post-industrial societies since the early 1980s had begun to significantly shift public service provision and state-organized frameworks for old age security guarantees, access to health services or education to the sphere of the market. Today’s corporate governance laboratory is a transnational force field, fought over by a host of different state and non-state actors, including national governments as well as international organizations such as the United Nations or the OECD, but also by private actors such as institutional investors, ranging from banks to hedge funds as well as semi-public expert committees, think tanks and consultancies. Meanwhile, following, on the one hand, the two financial land-mark crises in 2001 and 2008/09 and, on the other, the simultaneously growing pressure on corporations from human rights, gender equality and environmental groups, the corporate governance debate again appears to be shifting. This time, the diversity of issues discussed under the corporate governance rubric points towards a wider and more comprehensive engagement with the firm’s purpose and functions, but also with its societal obligations and responsibilities as part of a wider, more broad-based, critical engagement with capitalism. Given the crucial role of firms as the residual claimants of a wide-ranging retreat of the state from its role in guaranteeing and providing a wide range of social functions, corporate governance is a telling mirror for the transformation of public and private power in our age and its transnational nature has to address the twenty-first century challenges unfolding in a globally intensifying, competitive economy of intertwined markets, sourcing streams and distribution patterns on a planetary scale.

Supplying Allies: Political Economy of Coalition Warfare

Abstract We outline a framework for understanding variation in cobelligerent resource coordination of money and material. An important feature of coalitional resource procurement is the role played by private firms and market forces. These shape the processes by which cobelligerents facilitate acquisition and distribution. At times, cobelligerents rely on themselves or the unilateral provision of resources from a major power supplier. At other times, cobelligerents pool their resources and create international institutions to coordinate the purchase of material. Our framework demonstrates that to understand the means by which coalitions supply themselves and, in turn, create wartime efficiencies in money and material, one must account for both classic determinants of alliance politics—namely the distribution of power between allies—as well as domestic and transnational market forces that can constrain or enable coalition members’ ability, individually and collectively, to procure war inputs.

Introduction. Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies: Defining the Subfield

This introductory article argues for making food central to a praxis of cultural studies in the transhispanic world and the importance of inserting Hispanist voices into the arena of food studies scholarship more broadly. Articles in this Special Issue illustrate that foodways of the transhispanic world are heterogeneous and conflicted. Yet, food discourses allow us to study how people think with food, using it to mark identities, to establish power relationships and to dispute them. Articles in this collection demonstrate how transnational forces condition the food cultures and discourses of this context. They also highlight culinary nationalism and the inextricable links communities and nation-states construct and sustain between food and national cuisines from within and outside of nation-states or state-less nations. Both critical frameworks, the transnational—which engages imperial expansion, neocolonialism, globalization and migration—, and the national—in which foodways change in the context of intercultural encounters, are essential to understanding food cultures and their discursive and textual forms in this context.

Struggling bodies at the border: migration, violence and HIV vulnerability in the Mexico/Guatemala border region

The Mexico–Guatemala border is the site of significant movement of people whose principal destination is the USA. The first step, to cross Mexico, is considered as one of the most dangerous routes in the world for undocumented migrants. For some male migrants and displaced persons from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, initiating sex work in the Mexican border city of Tapachula has become a way to earn money to survive during the trip northward – providing funds to keep traveling and decrease the danger of being killed or kidnaped by organized crime groups. Non-injected drug use during sex work with men and/or women is a common praxis for this purpose, and is linked to HIV risk activities such as unprotected sex. Our study is based on ethnographic fieldwork with observation and interviews and within a relational approach understanding the processes subject/structure, sociopolitical/cultural and global/local, not as oppositions, rather as linkages visible through actors’ points of view and praxis. The productions of politics and cultures related to structural vulnerability to HIV infection are embedded in local and global borderization processes where legal and illegal transnational forces, states’ frameworks and social groups play a linked role. The economies of structural, symbolic and direct violence affect migratory patterns, institutional interactions and social and cultural relations with the local population. In this context, social representations and praxis about unprotected sex and drug use are the locus of struggling bodies at the border.

Chinese international students in a Canadian private secondary school: becoming flexible citizens?

ABSTRACT This study employs the notion of ‘flexible citizenship,’ to examine how national and transnational forces and discursive logics mediate Chinese international secondary school students’ educational routes and life trajectories. It draws upon a larger ethnographic research programme that followed 11 Chinese students in a Canadian international secondary school across a period of 14 months. Our current findings affirm that neoliberal logics mediated by (trans)national cultural forces shape how participants navigate their lives. In employing flexible citizenship as a lens, we seek to support more comprehensive understandings of Chinese international students as agentic and socially regulated citizens-in-the-making in their transnational routes. More comprehensive understandings, in turn, elicit pedagogical insights on how study abroad might better support the education and wellbeing of (Chinese) students studying internationally.

Where Cowboys and Indians Meet: A Southern Cheyenne Web of Kinship and the Transnational Cattle Industry, 1877–1885

Abstract Between 1877 and 1885, a Southern Cheyenne chief named Stone Calf gathered a coalition of Southern Cheyenne women and men, cultural intermediaries, ranchers, missionaries, and U.S. soldiers together in northwestern Indian Territory. Bound by kinship, gendered labor, economic opportunity, and political necessity, this alliance negotiated the transnational cattle industry’s access to the environmental resources of the Southern Great Plains. Using these powerful ties, Stone Calf’s coalition successfully shaped both the cattle industry’s expansion and displaced the Office of Indian Affairs’ influence in the region. By recognizing Stone Calf’s coalition as a powerful transnational force, this article illuminates both the weight of kinship and Indigenous participation in a globally interconnected world.

How Educational Policies Are Adopted in Developing Countries: The Case of Ghana’s Proposed Public-Private Partnerships in Education

The literature on public-private partnerships (PPPs) generally concurs that its entry in the education sector is fairly recent, particularly in developing countries. Also, there is little empirical evidence to prop up the claims about its efficacy in addressing the challenges it is purported to address in the education sector- cost-reduction, efficiency, accountability, and quality. And finally, the exponents for their promotion in developing countries are largely neoliberal-oriented transnational actors. However, not much is known about how they are adopted, especially in developing countries where policy-making is often shrouded in secrecy. To add to our illumination the politics involved in the adoption of PPPs in education, this paper examines the PPP policy to be piloted in Ghana. Specifically, it explores how the policy was either internally or externally motivated, by analysing the texts of the three Education Strategic Plans (ESPs) and relevant publications related to some transnational actors. The findings indicate that the PPP policy was the outcome of the synapse of domestic incremental and systemic policy-making processes and the mechanisms of globalisation (transnational forces). However, the role of transnational actors in shaping the PPP policy appears to be greater than any rational internal processes deduced from the ESP documents and outside of them. For the sustainability of the policy, it is, therefore, important the transnational actors, who are directly involved in promoting the policy but depends on external support, work on maintaining good relationships with their network of sponsors, to ensure the continual inflows of resources to execute the policy.

Examining the influence of transnational discourses on Chinese international secondary school students’ academic learning

ABSTRACTIn recent years, increasing numbers of Chinese international secondary school students have come to study in Canada. Upon arriving in their international context, their academic studies are influenced by socio-economic and cultural forces circulating between the home and host spaces of China and Canada. This paper delves into the economic, cultural and social rationalities behind eleven Chinese international secondary school students’ distinct ways of learning in transnational contexts. My study was guided by Ong’s [1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press; 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] notion of cultural logics and critique of neoliberal discourses by examining how sociocultural forces/rationalities in transnational contexts governed eleven Chinese international students’ learning goals, characteristics, needs, and preferences, as well as how global-scale neoliberal cultural logics played a dominant role. This ethnographic study not only problematises the dominance of neoliberal discourses and Western cultures in daily teaching and learning, but also gives educators and policymakers insights into how to support academic studies and language learning of Chinese international secondary school students by considering the aggregated effect of multiple transnational forces.

The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States by Ann Taylor Allen

Reviewed by: The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States by Ann Taylor Allen Elise Leal The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States. By Ann Taylor Allen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. iv + 304 pp. Cloth $78. In this deeply researched and elegantly written monograph, Ann Taylor Allen describes how the growth of the kindergarten in Germany and America from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries produced a transnational women’s movement that reshaped early childhood education. As Allen explains in the introduction, most scholarship on kindergartens, along with feminist histories generally, are framed in national terms. Histories of the kindergarten are additionally problematic in that they are often presented as stories of German Sonderweg (special path) or American exceptionalism. Arguing that such nationalistic frameworks obscure “the transnational forces that shape cultural and social history,” Allen’s book charts a different scholarly course by situating the kindergarten within its entangled history of international expansion (2). By focusing on how the movement developed “through dialogues across national borders,” Allen demonstrates the significance of the German–American relationship to kindergartens while also uncovering its feminist [End Page 141] identity (57). She shows how female reformers used the kindergarten’s educational philosophy and gender psychology—particularly the idea purported by founders Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel that early childhood education was uniquely suited to women—to seek professionalization opportunities and achieve personal autonomy. Kindergartens thereby gave rise to a network of feminist activists dedicated to “the broader movement for women’s rights, educational innovation, and social reform” (2–3). Although barely 200 pages of text, Allen’s book covers an impressive amount of ground, beginning with an overview of Fröbel’s vision of using kindergartens to inculcate virtue among the poor and expand women’s educational roles. German exiles from the 1848 revolution transmitted this vision to the United States, where middle-class women embraced kindergartens as a form of social activism. Female reformers like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody began conferring with German women who supported Fröbel, such as Baroness Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow, to learn about kindergarten teaching methods. By the turn of the century, this collaboration evolved into a transatlantic sister-hood of professional kindergarten teachers—called “kindergartners”—who worked to found the institution on a mass scale in response to the problems of urbanization and industrialization. Simultaneously, new debates about child psychology and shifting patterns of professionalization for women produced divergent institutional structures. German female kindergartners resisted integrating into public schools due to male dominance over the teaching profession. Consequently, German kindergartens became part of state welfare systems, while women’s roles were redefined as a form of social work. In contrast, women dominated the teaching profession in the United States, which helped facilitate the kindergarten’s absorption into American public schools. However, the price of integration was loss of formal leadership roles for women, just as German kindergartners feared. These immerging differences placed increasing strain on the German–American relationship and contributed to the ultimate dissolution of this transatlantic collaboration during World War I, a loss that Allen views as “among the most devastating results of the war” (180). With more than thirty years of expertise in the field, Allen grounds her monograph in extensive primary source research from both German and American archives. She does an excellent job of anchoring discussion of ideological and methodological shifts within the movement to a series of historical actors, creating a compelling narrative that brings the work of female kindergartners and their male supporters to life. Her theme of how kindergartens provided new opportunities for women’s professionalization and self-actualization is one of the greatest strengths of the book and serves to convincingly prove her argument that [End Page 142] the kindergarten was an inherently feminist movement. The question of broader impact, however, received less attention. Throughout the book, Allen asserts that the kindergarten supported “broader campaigns for women’s rights,” and even claims that “this movement laid the foundations for feminism in the twentieth century” (6, 193). While the ideological connection is apparent, it is slightly unclear how kindergartens...

Influence of transnational economic alliances on the IFRS convergence decision in India—Institutional perspectives

This study contributes to the literature on global governance by highlighting the importance of not losing sight of the nation state as an important player in the transnational governance arena. Specifically, literature on global (accounting) regulation devotes a great deal of attention to the roles of organisations and agencies with transnational remit (such as global standard setters, donor agencies) while often downplaying the significant impacts of the more traditional cross- country links forged through economic relationships and resource dependencies between national and transnational institutional fields. This was specially noted in the case of the indirect influences of the US’s decision to delay IFRS convergence. While being interpreted as an indirect source of influence, such a decision played a very significant role on the convergence negotiations in India. The study shows how the US influence was channelled through Japan with which India has significant trade and economic relations and, most importantly, holds a joint forum specifically to discuss convergence issues. The consequences of India’s links with countries such as US and Japan in the decision-making process provide a vivid indication of the important roles of cross-governmental relationships in the global governance arena, and also question the position of transnational organisations as pervasive powers in such governance. The study’s findings clearly demonstrate that the pursuit of full IFRS convergence strongly favoured by the transnational forces was invariably challenged in the Indian context by the influences of powerful nation states advocating a more cautious approach.

Indigenous Poetics and Transcultural Ecologies

Abstract This article outlines a transcultural fluctuation between indigenous poetics from Australia and South America in order to respond to some of the most pressing concerns in contemporary ecocritical discourse. I propose that we might turn to indigenous knowledge systems not as part of a reactionary, antimodern form of Romanticism, but as an alternative, syncretic understanding of the contemporary, in which the past is partner to the present in the formation of future possibility. I outline key features of Indigenous Australian and South American thought, including the centrality of language and poetics in the maintenance of country, before outlining an Indigenous philosophical poetics that spans the Australian and American continents. Indigenous knowledge systems, while to some extent understandable with generalized terms such as “The Dreaming” or “Pachamama” (“World Mother”), are thoroughly localized conceptions of much more extensive, transnational forces.