Unifying Myth Research Articles

A Battle or a Conversation: Imagining Africa and Its Diaspora in Beyoncé’s "Black Is King" and "Lemonade"

In her visual albums "Black Is King" (2020) and "Lemonade" (2016), pop artist Beyoncé engages with audiovisual representation as a way of "rewriting" existing narratives of Blackness and re-presenting the African diaspora and the African continent. The albums navigate a contentious space in which feminist empowerment mingles with sexual objectification and conservative gender roles, oppression is countered by hyper-capitalist consumption, African and Afrodiasporic cultures are mobilized or appropriated, and powerful counter-narratives are made in ways that can seem like hegemony reproduced. In this paper, I argue that a determinant factor of the ability to navigate those complexities is the notion of "community": its representation, its scope, and its tensions. Both formally and in content, Beyoncé and her co-creators’ audiovisual narratives stimulate a reflection on how to make the individual collective, the personal political, and how to unite disparity into “the Black diaspora” as a community and an addressee. Beyoncé’s Afrodiasporic projection requires strong authorship and the creation of a unifying myth. The ensuing narrative and profitability imperatives provoke the question whether Beyoncé’s visual albums can truly be sites for the envisioning of the African diaspora as a community marked by diversity, tension, and negotiation.

Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age ed. by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski

Reviewed by: Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age ed. by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski Siel Agugliaro Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age. Edited by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. [xlviii, 383 p. ISBN 9781527503939 (hardcover), £64.99.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Music has played an important part in the history of the term glocalization. After all, it is Akio Morita, the founder and CEO of Sony, one of the world's largest music and entertainment corporations, who receives credit as the inventor the word in 1990. The company's managers originally intended glocalization to signify the practice of diversifying global marketing schemes to better respond to the different cultures and social conditions existing in specific geographical regions. By 2008, this diversification strategy was so successful that the managers of Sony Music Entertainment [End Page 440] decided to trademark the expression "go glocal" as a business slogan (Wayne Visser, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business [Chichester: Wiley, 2011], 257–58]. In the same years, glocalization entered scholarly discussion. While its use was initially confined to the field of economics, the social sciences later adopted the concept to better understand how individuals acting and living in local contexts are affected by or respond to global financial or social forces. In spite of its historical origin in the music industry, the concept has found a relatively limited use in music studies, whereas cognate terms such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism are more commonly employed to examine the impact of the global circulation of ideas and musical products on specific cultural contexts. Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age, edited by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski, is the first collection on music topics to explicitly deal with the concept of glocalization. The book originates from two conferences held in 2014 and 2015 at the Academy of Music in Poznan, Poland, titled "Music from the Perspective of Globalization." The volume consists of fifteen essays, an introduction, and a conclusion, and is articulated in four sections. The first portion of the book gathers five chapters tackling issues of music and globalization from a theoretical perspective. David G. Hebert's opening essay describes glocalization as no less than "a defining aspect of the contemporary human condition" (p. 6) and examines the multiple roles assigned to music in this context, from its use as an omnipresent soundtrack of our everyday lives to the crucial significance for the music industry of data mining individual musical preferences by online services such as Amazon, Pandora, YouTube, and Spotify. In the following essay, cultural theorist Krzysztof Moraczewski indicates sound-recording technology as the preliminary condition for the current global dissemination of music and as the cause of the growing interaction between Western art music and "previously-oral music cultures" (p. 29) whose sonic products can be archived and preserved in time and space. In his contribution, David Kozel builds upon Jungian psychology to trace a parallel between the archetypal desire of the collective unconscious for unifying myths and the "nullification of differentiation and indigenousness" (p. 46) fostered by the global circulation of music. The two final contributions to the first section connect discourses on globalization with specific examples of composers. In the first, eminent Chopin scholar Mieczysław Tomaszewski considers the influence of Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian cultural heritage on the music of five nineteenth-century Polish composers (Staniszław Moniuszko, Juliusz Zarębski, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Karol Szymanowski) who were born and raised within the so-called Polish Kresy, a territory in Eastern Europe that was once part of the Polish state. In the second, Victor Nefkens draws upon philosophers Alain Badiou and Gianni Vattimo to "reframe" Richard Wagner's Gesamkunstwerk as an antitotalitarian aesthetic device, in opposition to Theodor W. Adorno's notorious conceptualization of Wagnerian music drama (and of leitmotifs in particular) as a numbing technique that, like modern advertising jingles, is designed to impair the audience's critical thought. The second group of essays focuses on four contemporary composers to consider the different strategies they have adopted to assert their...

Leviathans unbound: irrationalist political thought in interwar United States and Germany

ABSTRACTThis comparative ideological history considers why interwar America produced less prominent thought threatening parliamentarism and the rule of law than Germany. Despite different traditions, thinkers in Progressive Era America and Weimar Germany shared two commitments. Both scorned political parties and yearned for national unity. Both were also hostile to the restraints of legal formalism. Both efforts to deploy unbounded states to realize unity failed, but differently. Progressivism’s eclipse by World War I tempered confidence in democratic fulfilment and experts’ moral leadership. By contrast, appeals in post-war Weimar to national unity and the reliance on state authority – both integral to the search for constitutional legitimacy – radicalized amidst crisis thinking. Exemplary thinkers Carl Schmitt and Thurman Arnold agreed that crisis demanded transformative action based on unifying myths and administrations liberated from legal rationalism. Anti-liberal Schmitt aimed to destroy political heterogeneity and unshackle decree from statutory legality. Writing after Progressivism’s disillusionment, the New Dealer Arnold sought to use myth to conceal endemic plurality and employ law’s own irrationality to deliver to ‘technicians’ the discretion necessary for haphazard economic experimentation. Difference in timing helped make similar commitments develop differently in interaction with crisis thinking, and helps explain Arnold’s irrationalist defence of liberal democracy.

The Formation of Brazilian Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil by José Murilo de Carvalho

Reviewed by: The Formation of Brazilian Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil by José Murilo de Carvalho Natalia Brizuela KEY WORDS Natalia Brizuela, José Murilo de Carvalho, Brazilian Republic, National Imagery murilo de carvalho, josé. The Formation of Brazilian Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil. Trans. Clifford E. Landers. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2012. 189 pp. Ambitious in scope, José Murilo de Carvalho’s award winning The Formation of Brazilian Souls: Imagery of the Republic in Brazil begins by showing how there was no unified nor coherent Republican ideology that organized the passage from Empire to Republic in Brazil. He then moves on to focus on a study of the contradictory symbols that the newly proclaimed Republic constructed as the images of the nation-state. Working with and from a stunning array of materials, most of them iconographic, this book asks the question of the modes of construction and the needs of collective imagination for political ideology to coalesce. Political legitimization needs to reach popular social imagination through symbols, allegories, rituals, and myths. Thus, one of the most important observations in Murilo de Carvalho’s argument is that the proclamation of the Republic in Brazil lacked popular support because it was not the result of a revolution, a revolt, or even an uprising. What follows, after eloquently setting the stage for this dismembered Republic, is an investigation into how a collective spirit was built to uphold the new Republic through the use of imagery, often at odds with the Republican ideology itself. Murilo de Carvalho begins by describing the three types of Republican ideologies that competed to define the new Brazilian state at the end of the nineteenth [End Page 323] century: American-style liberalism, French-style Jacobism, positivism. Even if all three ideologies proposed a Republic, the Brazilian historian shows that there was very little, if any, shared ground between them. Furthermore, all three were cloistered within the cultured and lettered elites, which meant that all three competing ideologies had to produce and dispute each other over the images that would help consolidate a popular collective image of the Brazilian Republic. The United States and France were the two main models for republics for the Brazilian military and cultured elite, yet their symbols, as Murilo de Carvalho demonstrates throughout the book, are ill suited for the tropical setting. The first dispute for symbolic control over the proclamation of the Republic was to claim power over what Murilo de Carvalho calls its “myth of origin.” Ex post facto, the leaders of the radically different Republican ideologies proposed a liberal republic, a military republic, or a sociocratic republic. The myth of origin was inchoate, however, as the historian shows, since surprise was the only unanimous feeling in regards to how the Republic had come into being. Republics, classic or modern, always had a popular base for their existence, but this was not the case in Brazil, where it seemingly arose from one day to the next, with Republican groups, much less the common people, unaware that this major event was happening. Consequently, no single unifying myth of origin seemed to hold up. The remaining chapters of the book look at three aspects of all Republics, critically analyzing their doing or undoing in Brazil: the construction of the Republic’s hero, the Republic’s gendered symbolism, and its flag and anthem. Murilo de Carvalho shows how the symbols that worked—the choice of Tiradentes, the mythic leader of the late eighteenth-century rebellion, as hero; the impossibility of figuring the Republic as female, as had been historically the case; the popular desire and eventual choice of keeping the same national anthem as during the monarchy; and only slightly altering the previous flag—reveal that the Republic was indeed “incapable of creating a popular republican imagery” (151). At several moments, the book points to contemporary Brazil, suggesting that this chaotic and unpopular beginning for the Republic could help explain Brazil’s present. Written during the centennial “celebrations” for the proclamation of the First Republic, one wishes that Murilo de Carvalho would have taken the leap and developed further the relation between the then and the now. This...

The public and its possibilities: triumphs and tragedies in the American city

The public and its possibilities: triumphs and tragedies in the American city

Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (review)

Reviewed by: Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory James Gillispie (bio) Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. By Benjamin G. Cloyd. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Pp. 251. $37.50 cloth) Towards the end of the 1990s, James McPherson and William J. Cooper noted that amid the voluminous literature on the Civil War very little existed relating to the military prisons. Since then, the call for more work on this tragic, unromantic side of the war has been answered by historians who have published works about particular prisons and each sides' military-prison systems generally. Breaking with most other scholarship detailing Union and Confederate policies towards and treatment of prisoners of war, Cloyd explores Civil War prisons in popular memory over time, arguing that atrocity tales were first manipulated for various cultural and political purposes and then sanitized, allowing Americans to forget certain difficult historical realities in favor of more comfortable and unifying myths. Before delving into the mountain of postwar polemics related to the prisoner issue, Cloyd lays as his foundation the argument that both North and South were guilty of neglecting and mistreating prisoners during the war. Northern and southern officials, including Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, are condemned for their abusive and lethal policies towards prisoners. "The appalling death rates of Civil War prisoners," Cloyd contends, "resulted from a culture bent on destruction, and both North and South insisted on wreaking that devastation even on its unarmed captives" (p. 29). [End Page 422] Despite the blood on the hands of some in both regions, veterans and politicians shamelessly ignored historical truth to create an enormous body of atrocity propaganda between 1865 and the 1920s. In postwar writing and speeches Northerners and Southerners portrayed their own prisons as models of humanity while the enemy was depicted as treating unarmed captives with a level of brutality worthy of the Middle Ages. Northerners produced highly distorted images of captivity in the South in order to reaffirm their claims of moral superiority to the South and the Confederate cause. Southerners engaged in the very same distortions and exaggerations for essentially the same reasons. By the 1920s, a lot had been written about Civil War prisons but little of it was designed to do anything beyond glorifying one side and demonizing the other. That changed, according to Cloyd, after 1920 as writers became less concerned with assessing blame for mortality and suffering in Civil War prisons and increasingly argued that such were the tragic fortunes of modern war. While this certainly muted sectional animosity so long associated with the topic, it diminished the important lessons Civil War prison atrocities taught. By overlooking the historical reality of prisoner mortality to embrace the historical myth that it was nobody's fault, society was (and is) free to ignore, or worse, excuse atrocious behavior to cling to the cherished myth of American exceptionalism. That is the important lesson and warning of Civil War prisons. Several of the premises of the book are open to some serious question. The contention that post-1920 writing, especially about northern prisons, got away from blaming Union officials for excessive mortality and ill-treatment is suspect. Writing since 1920 has been less strident, but Union officials like Edwin Stanton and William Hoffman have been consistently criticized for abusing prisoners by both professional and lay historians. More critical is that the central theme of the book—that both sides treated prisoners atrociously—has been seriously challenged, at least in writing about Union prisons, by scholars such as Benton McAdams and Roger Pickenpaugh. Since these and other recent works undermine one of the foundations of [End Page 423] the book, they needed to be engaged. Ultimately, the book is a nice addition to the expanding literature on Civil War memory and popular culture. It is well researched and elegantly written. Its shortcomings, while not insignificant, should not overshadow the fact that it is the most comprehensive work to date exploring the connection between Civil War prisons and popular memory and will serve as the basis for future work in the area. James Gillispie James Gillispie, arts and sciences division chair at Sampson Community College...

Violence, State Formation, and Everyday Politics in Latin America

Violence, State Formation, and Everyday Politics in Latin America* John Bailey (bio) Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power. By Javier Auyero. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 208. $70.00 cloth, $22.99 paper. Rituals of Violence in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico: Individual Conflict, Gender, and the Law. By Astrid Cubano Iguina. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Pp. 209. $59.95 cloth. Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present. By Lessie Jo Frazier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Pp. 405. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper. Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America. By Angelina Snodgrass Godoy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. 250. $19.95 paper. Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002. By Marcos Palacios. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 315. $79.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Guatemalans in the Aftermath of Violence: The Refugees’ Return. By Kristi Anne Stolen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 280. $59.95 cloth. The books reviewed here address two important topics in studies on Latin America and the Caribbean: the origins and formation of the state in the nineteenth century, and the political uses and effects of violence in everyday life. Comparatists are increasingly focused on the significance of state weakness and the poor provision of security and justice as factors contributing to the low quality of democracy in the region.1 Also, the dual political and economic transitions beginning in the late 1970s were accompanied by significant upsurges in criminal violence, to the point [End Page 239] that delincuencia ranks as one of the top two issues cited in the 2007 Latino-barómetro report.2 Weak states and poor-quality justice amid a heightened sense of insecurity undermine public support for democracy. By the (good) luck of the draw, most of the works reviewed here deal with outliers in the sense of their atypical routes toward state formation (Chile, Puerto Rico) or of the degree to which violence marks their daily life (extreme in Colombia and Guatemala; comparatively less in Argentina). Outliers can provide interesting clues about violence, state formation, and everyday politics. Violence and the Origins of Modern States How important are the origin and first years of the state for its subsequent coherence and effectiveness? Students of path dependence argue that origins are critical for creating incentives to follow given paths, and that departures from these paths become less likely over time.3 It is surprising that most scholars, with few exceptions, focus on the 1870s as the starting point for their analyses of the origins of the modern state. Implicitly, they discount the importance of the extraordinary violence and instability of the wars of independence and their aftermath, or roughly 1810 to 1860.4 Related to path dependence, the bellicist theory of state origins suggests that interstate wars can have positive effects on the formation of effective nation-states.5 Oversimplified, the notion is that such wars force states to raise revenues and field an army, which requires competent bureaucracies that can extract resources and regulate behavior. Successful extraction and regulation also implies functioning police-justice systems. War making, especially when successful, can promote solidarity and patriotism, thus reinforcing the nation-building project. [End Page 240] Drawing on Charles Tilly and others, Miguel Centeno writes that “Latin American state power has always been shallow and contested.”6 Violence in the region has been more internal than interstate. Centeno contrasts “total war” in the European case with “limited war” in Latin America, finding that the latter is more likely to incur large debts, promote the development of a professionalized military with little popular participation, hamper the creation of patriotic symbols and unifying myths, and retard economic growth: “The most generalizable trend may be that limited wars rarely leave positive institutional legacies and often have long-term costs. Instead of producing states built on ‘blood and iron,’ they construct ones made of blood and debt. It is precisely this latter pattern that we may observe in Latin America.” For as Centeno goes on to emphasize, it is “not war in itself...

From Moscow to Madrid: Postmodern Cities, European Cinema

Mazierska's and Rascaroli's From Moscow to Madrid is a fascinating experiment in imaginary cartography, which explores the representation of cities in contemporary European cinema while drawing freely on film history, sociology, politics and cultural studies. The authors choose the postmodern discourse as a theoretical framework to analyze the complex psyche of modern European cities as it is filtered through the cinematic medium. Their cities are postmodern spectacles testifying to the death of God, to the collapse of any overarching and unifying myths and ideologies and to the ensuing fragmentation and diversification. Although the authors are fascinated by the scale of social, economic and political changes which orchestrated the shift from modern to postmodern city, they do not celebrate it but rather count the losses in sensibilities and examine the cracks in ideologies. What strikes in their account is sadness and nostalgia for some lost city which no longer has place...

Forging the Community: Explorations of Memory in Two Novels by Jesús Moncada

FORGING THE COMMUNITY: EXPLORATIONS OF MEMORY IN TWO NOVELS BY JESUS MONCADA Jesus Moncada's third novel, Estremida memoria, is?as the title suggests?an exploration of human memory. The narration revolves around the reconstruc? tion in the 1990s of certain important events which had supposedly taken place in 1877 in Mequinensa, the town of Moncada's birth. A fictionalized version of Mequinensa had already formed the setting for his firstnovel, Camide sirga, and provided a secondary setting and reference point in the second, La galeria de les estdtues.1 More importantly, explorations of memory are also a constant feature of these works. Moncada seems especially interested in the way that the people of close-knit communities construct stories?or even myths2?of themselves as a collective, using tools such as rumour, gossip, unfounded assumptions, autobiographical memory, selective amnesia, and the consensual creation of versions of events which may or may not be strictly accurate in their detail. In this article I concentrate on two of these three novels, Cami de sirga and Estremida memoria, mainly because the community of Mequinensa is the primary focus in each case. Although the two novels are separate entities, the common and internally consistent setting means that it is possible to talk about Moncada's fictional portrayal of the people of Mequinensa without drawing strict boundaries between texts. In many ways, the fictional re-creation of the real town of Mequinensa has been the most-discussed aspect of Moncada's work, resulting in commentaries which seem incapable of looking beyond this 'myth' of Mequinensa. In turn, this has led some critics to accuse Moncada of indulging in a conservative nostalgia which is out of step with the realities of contemporary Catalan life and culture.3 We can perhaps find an explanation for this criticism in the fact that, as George Wotton has pointed out, the current Western trend is to place the individual at the centre of art and literature and to marginalize social concerns: By placing the private and spiritual life of the individual at the centre and locating social and material life at the periphery, a distorted mirror image of social relations is produced in which the 'spiritual values' ofthe bourgeoisie appear to sustain the material edifice of society. Any writing which springs out of the social life of a particular group, 1 Cami de sirga,2nd 'Llibres de Butxaca' edn (Barcelona: Magrana, 1995); La galeria de les estdtues, ist 'Llibres de Butxaca' edn (Barcelona: Magrana, 1995); Estremida membria (Barcelona: Magrana, 1997). In page references below,Cami de sirgaand Estremidamemoria are abbreviated as CS and EM respectively. 2 See KathrynCrameri,'The Location ofMythin Camide sirgabyJesusMoncada', Journalof Iberianand Latin AmericanStudies,8 (2002), 41-54, fora detailedexplorationoftheroleofmyth in Cami de sirga.This studyofMoncada's use ofmythis intimately relatedto thepresentarticle on memory, but unfortunately thereis not space here to providespecificlinksbetweenthe two discussions.One overlappingaspectconcernsthetensionsbetweenconservatism and progressin Moncada's work(see the end ofthe presentarticle). 3 See Enric Bou, 'JesusMoncada: A World Saved by Literature',Catalan Writing, 10 (1993), 61-63; Isidor Consul, 'Geografiesmitiques', Lletra de canvi, 31-32 (1990), 8-12; Josep-Anton Fernandez, 'Es realment just i necessari:reflexions sobrel'estatde la critica',Lletrade canvi,24 (1989), 16-18; JosepM. Lluro, 'Tendencies de la narrativa catalanadels vuitanta',in yo-80-go: literatura, ed. byAlex Brochand others(Valencia: Edicions 3 i 4, 1992), pp. 113-39. 354 Explorations of Memory in Two Novels byjesus Moncada whether of gender, class or race or any combination of these, is automatically perceived as peripheral.4 According to Wotton, this kind of writing can constitute a threat to dominant ideologies because it 'emphasizes the real complexity of social life' and thereby 'recomplicates what ideology strives to simplify and fragments the unifying myths of national identity' (p. 213). My contention is that Moncada's novels participate in the process which Wotton has outlined, because they lay bare the mechanisms by which strong communities are forged, in both senses ofthe word. We are shown how the com? munity constructs collective memories of itself in order to provide a story of the town which will be handed on to future inhabitants. This process is clearly conditioned by the image the town already...

Adaptation: The Unifying Myth of Biological Anthropology

Adaptation: The Unifying Myth of Biological Anthropology

Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society (review)

Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Michael Herzfeld. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2001; 368 pp. Like many of us, the bread-and-butter of my teaching load is Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Yet, I find myself lavishing disproportionate amounts of time on my advanced classes, while my introductory lectures-occasionally emended in the course of preparing for advanced classes-are drawn from rapidly moldering notebooks originating in the misty recesses of my teaching assistantship. Textbooks in cultural generally follow the same pattern: issues like postmodernism, globalization and mass culture trail the ends of bedrock chapters in subsistence, kinship, marriage and ritual. Do the authors intend irony when they counterpose a section decrying orientalism to a neo-evolutionary account of hunter-gathering and transhumance? I don't know; I'm shopping for a new book. At the outset, I should say that Michael Herzfeld's Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society is not that book. Sure, I enjoyed a brief moment of hilarity picturing my students wailing over 350 pages of Herzfeld's dense, photo-free prose, but I don't think I'm courting controversy in suggesting that this is exactly the wrong book for an introductory class, a sentiment Herzfeld himself echoes (xi). That said, who is the intended audience? The book is drawn from a UNESCO project that culminated in two special issues of International Social Science Journal in 1997. In each of the 19-odd articles, contributors elaborated various issues puissant to contemporary, cultural anthropology, e.g., Arturo Escobar's and Development and Constance Classen's Foundations for an Anthropology of the Senses. From these, Herzfeld has crafted a single volume engaging these contributions around two, interrelated themes: 1) as the practice of theory (22) and 2) as the appraisal of common (19). Despite Herzfeld's dismissal of postmodernism (these days so de rigeur), the effort ends up being rather Deleuzean: Herzfeld's critical engagement places him in decidedly schizoid relationships with the original authors-agreeing, conjoining, dissenting, appropriating. The result is fascinating, but perhaps too difficult to pigeon-hole: too erudite for undergraduates, too elementary for graduate students, too parochial for non-anthropologists. Who is it for? Well, me, of course. Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society interrogates the structure and content of my introductory courses, dissolving the staid themes of my lectures only to rebuild them into a militant neither dismissing the past accomplishments of nor ignoring trenchant, contemporary critiques. It is-treading again on postmodern ground-a supplement to my introductory classes, an alembic from which I can call forth more competent lectures. Inevitably, then, Herzfeld writes, anthropology must occupy a ground that gives the lie to those who would claim that empirical scholarship and reflexive critique are mutually incompatible (21). This is an immensely productive enterprise. Of course, finding the middle between paired antinomies usually means excluding third terms. I will save those omissions-and my critical comments-for the end of the review. Herzfeld's third chapter, Histories, is, in many ways, stanchion to the chapters that follow. Despite the often-repeated claims of kinship with history, anthropologists have generally engaged in what might best be called anti-history, substituting hypostatic, paired opposites like tradition/modernity and pre-literate/literate for bonafide historical analysis. Of course, nation-states and many other entities have also propounded highly selective histories made up of traditions and unifying myths. How can a contemporary make sense of these conurbations of myth and history? …

Constructing a Common Language: The Function of Nuremberg in the Problematization of Postapartheid Justice

This paper analyzes the function acquired by the historical Nuremberg trial in the constitution of a specific discourse about transitional South Africa and about what should be done about the brutality of the past. This function is best described as mythical: emptied of content, Nuremberg was a blank slate on which all parties to the debate could write their conflicting representations of the situation and their respective proposed solutions. The organization of fundamentally incompatible representations of reality around unifying myths such as Nuremberg was key to the production of visible consensus on the proper evaluation of the sociopolitical situation and the basic characteristics of the right course of action, and thus the appearance of effective state administration in a reconciled nation.

The Politics of a Country Culture

The Politics of a Country Culture

Museums and the crisis of concurrent identity populations

Latin America is a continent of people of many origins, indigenous,immigrant and mixtures of all kinds, especially in Argentina. For many years, Latin American history and museums tried to promote unifying myths of nationality. These days, new value is attached to the variety of social and ethnic identities of pueblos de identidad concurrente (here translated as ‘people whose identity flows from many sources’, or perhaps ‘multi‐cultural). The Latin American museum can take the special role of idenity‐revealer in such societies. In an epoch of apparently inexorable mass communication and economic globalisation, the museum, may be able to propose an alternative future.

Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West (review)

Reviewed by: Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West Dick Harrison Arnold E. Davidson. Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. x + 223 pp. Davidson begins with an overview of western Canadian fiction, “Re-inventing the West,” advancing a theory he then applies to selected innovative texts. His point of departure is the popular American western which “casts its tall, lanky shadow over the Canadian West,” but he reverses the normative tendency of the American example by characterizing [End Page 161] the absence of a Canadian frontier tradition not as lack or deficiency but as a literary advantage. Saved by history from the tyranny of a “received” story of their West, Canadians have access to multiple stories: “as authors dispense with in fiction the frontier they never had in fact, they free themselves and their readers into a play of textuality and intertextuality.” They are thus free to “re-invent” the West, parodying and subverting the narratives that have defined “West” and, like the Coyote of the title, drawing into question the authority of all narratives, including their own. The Indian trickster god stands as a symbol of their narrative strategies and the world they create: multiple, ambiguous, elusive, fictive, and indeterminate. While Davidson’s explicit focus is on how his authors have “inverted and subverted the basic tropes, metaphors, ideologies, gender contracts, and racial hegemonies” of the classic western in order to tell a different story of a different West, he makes it clear that they are also deconstructing the Eurocentric, patriarchal master-narratives that pervade both Wests. Beneath their practice of “unnaming” he detects an amorphous search for a myth of origins, but he does not trace that search systematically. If his authors found such a unifying myth, of course, they would lose the freedom he claims as their distinction. As Davidson goes on to analyze the postmodern and postcolonial characteristics of selected novels, his theory effects a certain revision and updating of the canon, extending from Howard O’Hagan and Sheila Watson to Beatrice Culleton and Thomas King. O’Hagan’s Tay John is pivotal to his argument that the decentering fiction of the Canadian West has long been receptive to a play of textuality. Published in 1939, the novel is unexpectedly postmodern in its undermining of European history and myth and its self-consciousness about “the fictive quality of all versions of reality.” Davidson provides a resourceful, insightful, and lucid explication of the novel’s narrative and textual ambiguities and the tensions between the story told and untold, between naming and unnaming, utterance and silence. His readings of Watson’s The Double Hook and Robert Kroetsch’s Badlands similarly stress their postmodern indeterminacy and parodying of the quest myth and attendant symbols of transcendence in male narrative. In his sections entitled “Feminist Revisions” and “Native Affairs,” Davidson argues that Canada’s decentering and multiple tradition has [End Page 162] produced non-frontierist dialectics between white and Indian, male and female. With reference to the long-standing prominence of women writers in Canadian literature, he contends that the literary gender war Jane Tompkins describes in her West of Everything “had no particular relevance for Canadians.” Women writers, he says, have nonetheless created the most striking reversals of the western formula; some, such as Anne Cameron’s The Journey, by merely executing a gender reversal of male patterns of violence and domination; others, such as Aritha van Herk’s Judith and The Tent Peg, by challenging patriarchy in more complex ways. Davidson offers a persuasive Lacanian analysis of van Herk’s castration imagery as a strategy for resisting the law of the fathers by dephallicizing the penis. Davidson contends that in Canadian fiction the typical symbolic role of the Indian has been as natural alternative rather than antagonist (a generalization that has to be applied very selectively before 1970) but acknowledges that any concept of “Indian” is “a construct that serves white interests.” White writers such as W. O. Mitchell (The Vanishing Point), Peter Such (Riverrun), Philip Kreiner (Contact Prints, People Like Us), and Joan Clark (The Victory of Geraldine Gull) may struggle gamely to privilege the Native “other” but can achieve only “an...