LIBERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE CORPORATE PERSON

This article focuses on corporate personhood, the controversial argument, advanced particularly in the United States, that corporations are persons within the scope of the law and are therefore endowed with rights. Though often examined as a causal factor in the development of modern corporate power, in this article I argue that corporate personhood is more useful as a tool for understanding the problematic of liberalism and the transformations associated with the definition of persons under the liberal rule of law. To explain why, I focus on debates about corporate personhood in prominent legal and philosophical texts from the turn of the twentieth century. Highlighting the contingent production of ideas about corporate personhood, I show the ways that writers within the U.S. context rethought corporate personhood, which was traditionally a discourse about sovereign power, in terms of liberal rights as a way of promoting economic forms of government. By focusing on the problematic, we see the ways that corporate capitalism was never simply a set of economic relations, but also a way of organizing, ordering and intervening in life.     

The Empire Writes Back…Back: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Autogenic War

This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates – and perhaps, reinvigorates – a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is – albeit in a qualified sense – revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of ‘writing back’ which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, ‘writing back’ is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision.     

‘How much does it cost for reason to tell the truth?’ Salman Rushdie and his Confessional Critics

Abstract

The representation of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses by confessional postcolonial critics is based on a reading that asserts one truth over the rest. I focus in particular on commentaries by two influential postcolonial confessional Muslim reviewers in Britain: Ahmed Akbar and Ziauddin Sardar. Their readings are critically assessed by simultaneously exploring the views of secular postcolonial critics and Muslim modernists who read Islam outside the conceptual framework of orthodoxy, especially Mohammad Arkoun and Abdefatah Kilito. I examine the way in which confessional postcolonial critics have appropriated religious rationalism along with postcolonial vocabulary. In my last section I discuss the ethical limitations of the confessional critics’ readings of The Satanic Verses. In the light of Bataille’s theory of the relation between sacrifice and divine justice as well as Derrida’s reflections on religion, I suggest that the dismissal of Rushdie’s fiction by such eminent commentators is localisable not only in the perception of metaphysics as origin, but also in a strategic reconstruction of an unthematisable sphere of al‐Fitra; that is, the scholar’s actual or imagined birth‐in‐Islam: his experience of circumcision and absolute dependence on faith.     

Thoughts from Abroad: Theodor Adorno as Postcolonial Theorist

Abstract

This article shows that the work of the German Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno offers a surprisingly rich resource for postcolonial theory. Adorno's work addresses the world outside Europe more often than one might expect. But it is not so much what Adorno thinks as how he thinks that makes him a postcolonialist. Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics tracks particular phenomena to the totality of which they are a part. Everything, from the most innocuous details of everyday life to the Holocaust and imperialism, is linked to the world‐encircling, thought‐frustrating and violence‐inducing system of capitalism. But Adorno's characteristic negativity also makes him sensitive to that system's fallibility and its vulnerability to alternatives. The article therefore touches on the normative dimensions of Adorno's moral philosophy. Adorno's work commands attention because of its dialectical style of thinking, its consequent focus on capitalism's intrinsic violence, its belief that effective political action presupposes introspection and a moral capacity for empathy with others' suffering, and its attractive conviction that these aptitudes can be enabled by aesthetic experience. Accordingly, the essay concludes with a reading of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace. This article seeks to show that an Adornian postcolonial criticism is as concerned with the gratuitous longevity of capitalism and imperialism as it is inspired by the prospect of erecting a more just and egalitarian social order.     

Development as biopolitics: food security and the contemporary Indian experience

Development is concerned with the biological security and well-being of people, and so all development theory and practice are biopolitical in a fundamental sense. The paper argues that for development to be made meaningful, it needs to legitimate itself through the production of healthy bodies, which can be realized through food security, immunization drives, and housing schemes among others. A postcolonial democratic state like India makes an effort to protect its people from hunger and draws its legitimacy from the same. Yet at the same time, the supposed development of the nation implies a concurrent elision of the weak and the vulnerable. Drawing upon India’s experiment with food security, public distribution systems, and other similar schemes, the paper advances an idea of development that is not only inherently biopolitical, but also a compromise between the commitment to protect people from hunger and the need for working around international agencies. While doing so, the paper borrows from the theoretical vocabulary of Foucault, Agamben, and others to historicize the modernist idea of protecting citizens as well as the reality of deaths from hunger and development-induced displacement.     

Relational citizenship: Examining Taiwanese membership development through immigrant framing in public discourses

This essay unpacks how new immigrants and citizenship are framed in public discourse in Taiwan. Since the 1980s, Taiwan has experienced significant demographic changes. As a postcolonial, neoliberal capitalist democracy, imbued with Confucianism and collective interests, Taiwan provides an intriguing case for study. Through analyzing discourses of new immigrants, relational citizenship emerged as a strategy to anchor and authenticate membership in Taiwan. This challenges discussions on belongingness beyond the language of law, economics, and humanitarianism, to address interactions that occur between citizens and im/migrants as interdependent and relational partners. Although the concept of relational citizenship is culturally specific, it may also be applied to other societies and contexts.     

‘Beasts of Burden’: Productive Tensions between Haraway and Radical Animal Rights Activism

Coming from a critical animal studies perspective, this essay develops an urgent challenge to what Zipporah Weisberg describes as the ‘largely depoliticized approach within animal studies’ (2009: 5), with a focus on the work of Donna Haraway. Drawing on grassroots activist literature and practice, the essay analyses some productive tensions between animal rights perspectives and the work of Haraway, which centre on their different strategies for challenging the symbolic and material role of animals within biocapitalism. This approach reinstates the value of activist praxis to animal studies, arguing that it has the capacity to unsettle the positioning of animals as biocapital more successfully than Haraway's own ethical project. Due to being at the heart of debates between Haraway and theorists from within critical animal studies, vegan activism illustrates an animal rights practice that can work to undermine the structures that render animals ‘legitimately’ exploitable: despite Haraway's arguments to the contrary. The work of activists involved in the Hori-zone, a temporary eco-village established as a protest camp near the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, is used to explore how veganism can be used as a micro-sociological tactic to challenge the exploitation that pervades everyday life.     

The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers.     

A critical analysis of the Nollywood film Osuofia in London

This article analyzes Nigeria’s Nollywood film Osuofia in London [Ogoro, K. (Producer & Director). (2003/2004). Kingsley Ogoro Productions] to understand how the film synthesizes African and Western cultural identities via the prisms of hybridity and postcolonial theory. The paper uses a critical approach within the contexts of three tenets (African, Western, and hybrid) to read the film. The analysis resulted in five themes: African/folk belief systems and Christianity; traditional Igbo attire and English garb; African/folk music and Western music; African and Western food and drinks; and African/traditional medicine and modern medicine. The analysis indicates that unequal power relations and the forces of globalization are inescapable. Even though the protagonist, Osuofia, challenges the Western ideology, he reproduces it as well.     

What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation

Theorists of discourse have long recognised the complexities of attributing reported speech in textual circulation. Yet rarely does one follow words from an original speech event through their many re-entextualisations, and it has proved particularly difficult to capture such circulations between oral events, print, and online media. This article captures such movements by following the mediatised – and politicised – afterlife of a speech event that would normally be classified, in academia, as ‘a talk’. It begins with a talk on Russia, given by the author-anthropologist of this paper, that was (mis)reported in Russian by a Voice of America (VOA) journalist, then traces the resulting text's subsequent movement from the VOA website into the Russian fieldsite that the oral talk described. It explores how the tone and substance of debates over politics and representation were enabled, constrained, and otherwise shaped by the particular textual circulations made possible in digital media. As the text traversed online newspapers, comments forums, blogs, social media networks, and private-turned-public personal emails, it produced a body of commentary that was both directly and indirectly a struggle over representation. While substantive debates unfolded over ethnic and national politics, much of the online commentary concerned the expertise of the commenters weighing in and the expertise and identity of the anthropologist who had been cited. This essay argues that Russian commenters and posters were productively using the intertextual gaps offered by digital circulation, while minimising those gaps' increasing breadth and depth by attributing ‘original’ authorship to a discrete, stable person.     

‘TONY SOPRANO ON MANAGEMENT’

This article develops the concept of ‘alternative cultural tourism’ through an in-depth study of the Prague Fringe Festival (PFF). In doing so, it argues that existing approaches to cultural tourism often fail to differentiate between different forms of culture (i.e. alternative versus mainstream), whilst also interrogating the criteria by which festivals can be understood as examples of alternative cultural tourism. Utilising a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data, involving audiences, festival performers and workers/volunteers, it is asserted that the PFF brings together a diverse mix of cultures, and seeks to create a more participatory and engaging tourist experience. Additionally, its more egalitarian organising structure produces different kinds of work and social relations in the production of art and culture – particularly between various groups working within the festival, but also in the creation of different ideas about audience engagement, performer relations, and engagement with the local community (through the idea of the ‘festival participant’). The article concludes by briefly exploring the potential of alternative cultural tourism to provide more meaningful and sustainable models of urban cultural development.     

Carmen Goes Postcolonial,Carmen Goes Queer: Thinking the Postcolonial as Queer

Karmen Gei (2001) by Senegalese filmmaker Joseph Gai Ramaka is the first African adaptation of Carmen. The film garnered attention for its indulgent sexuo-erotic rhetoric and its reinvention of Carmen as a bisexual libertine. Most critical assessments of Karmen Gei have accordingly applauded Joseph Gai Ramaka's ‘daring’ and ‘innovative’ intervention into the political and heteropatriarchal landscape of postcolonial Senegal, a country with a strong, increasingly radicalised, Moslem majority and a nascent yet burgeoning homophobia. Yet the peculiar trajectory outlined in the title of my essay, whereby Bizet's Carmen travels to the African postcolony and gets queered by/in the postcolonial moment, grounds the queer in the postcolonial and asserts that the queer is organic to the postcolonial. More precisely, the postcolonial adaptation of Bizet's Carmen offers a theoretical template for rethinking the interface between the postcolonial and the queer by showing how Carmen goes effortlessly if not inevitably queer in the postcolony as a result of intrinsic postcolonial modalities of power, resistance and subjectivity.     

Academic Evaluation: Universal Instrument? Tool for Development?

Research agendas and academic evaluation are inevitably linked. By means of economic incentives, promotion, research funding, and reputation academic evaluation is a powerful influence on the production of knowledge; moreover, it is often conceived as a universal instrument without consideration of the context in which it is applied. Evaluation systems are social constructions in dispute, being the current focus of international debates regarding criteria, indicators, and their associated methods. A universalist type of productivity indicators is gaining centrality in academic evaluation with profound effects on the content of research that is conducted everywhere. Specifically, evaluation systems based on this type of indicators are sending negative signals to scientists willing to conduct research on contextualized agendas, particularly those negotiated with non scientists. On the basis of theoretical and empirical studies documented on the specialized literature and extensive personal engagement with university research policy in Uruguay, we argue that the consolidation of evaluation practices of alleged universal validity deteriorates and discourages a type of research which is undeniably important in developing contexts.     

Brain power: cruel optimism and neuro-liberalism in the work of Catherine Malabou

ABSTRACT

One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy?     

Urban Planning and the Spaces of Democracy: New York of the Great Depression in 42nd Street,Dead End,and The City

Abstract

Three New York films of the Great Depression and its aftermath, 42nd Street (1932, Lloyd Bacon), Dead End (1937, William Wyler), and The City (1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke), embodied a new political aesthetics in screening urban democratic spaces during moments of social breakdown. This article draws from urban and cinema studies, as well as from social and cultural theory (Lefebvre, Benjamin, Kracauer), to show how these films contributed to a discourse of urban planning and cinematic democratic aesthetics on the possibility of an egalitarian, inclusive, participatory community in diverse city spaces. The article argues that the reshaping of this cultural discourse, through the films’ emphasis on the conflicting material domains of the skyline and the slum, came at the cost of undermining the metropolis and, in The City, of limiting the urban spaces of democracy.     

The Aviation Paradox: Why We Can ‘Know’ Jetliners But Not Reactors

Publics and policymakers increasingly have to contend with the risks of complex, safety-critical technologies, such as airframes and reactors. As such, ‘technological risk’ has become an important object of modern governance, with state regulators as core agents, and ‘reliability assessment’ as the most essential metric. The Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature casts doubt on whether or not we should place our faith in these assessments because predictively calculating the ultra-high reliability required of such systems poses seemingly insurmountable epistemological problems. This paper argues that these misgivings are warranted in the nuclear sphere, despite evidence from the aviation sphere suggesting that such calculations can be accurate. It explains why regulatory calculations that predict the reliability of new airframes cannot work in principle, and then it explains why those calculations work in practice. It then builds on this explanation to argue that the means by which engineers manage reliability in aviation is highly domain-specific, and to suggest how a more nuanced understanding of jetliners could inform debates about nuclear energy.     

Introduction: Are We All Cultural Workers Now?

Introducing a themed section entitled ‘Are We All Cultural Workers Now?’, this article explores the relation between precarity and cultural work. It argues that precarity should be understood as an experience rather than a category that allows a mapping of transformations of social class. The article also engages with current debates on cultural work and questions the proposition that changes in this area presage more general shifts in the organisation and exploitation of labour. Finally the piece introduces the four articles that make up the themed section.     

At the Heart of Feminist Transnational Organizing: Exploring Postcolonial Reflexivity in Organizational Practice at World Pulse

This article extends research on transnational feminist networks (TFNs), organizations that bring women together across national borders for collective action. A case study of World Pulse, a TFN with online community members from 190 countries that aims to amplify women's voices globally, reveals the nonprofit organization engages in ongoing reflexive practices to negotiate tensions related to voice. Using the analytical lens of postcolonial reflexivity, two themes of reflexive practices were identified: speaking from within (direct and formal inclusion of members’ voices) and speaking for (staff displaying ethical consciousness around members’ voices). Questions TFNs can ask to promote reflexivity are proposed.     

The ASEAN-ISIS Network: Interpretive Communities,Informal Diplomacy and Discourses of Region

A network of think tanks—the ASEAN-Institutes of Strategic and International Studies and their researchers—have played a proactive and sometimes influential role in regional debates on Asian economic integration and security cooperation through informal diplomacy. This paper contributes to the literature on knowledge utilisation, specifically debates on the role of policy research institutes in policy-making. Paying attention to the debates and research on economic and security cooperation which preceded attempts at institutionalisation drives analytical attention to scholars, think tanks and others in the ‘interpretive community’ who were engaged in a long term learning activity to shape domestic and regional agendas and institutionalise discourses of regional cooperation.