Bastardy and Nationality

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex law of illegitimacy in the nineteenth century and its relationship to questions of national belonging and subject-hood, thorough the use of a specific legal case study – that of Shedden v Patrick, a dispute over legitimacy and property which opened in 1804 and lasted until 1869. William Shedden was born in America of a Scottish father, who had married his mother, but after his birth. His claim that he should inherit the Shedden family estate in Scotland, as both his father's lawful son and a natural-born British subject, brought together a bewildering array of laws, as formal and informal partnerships in the former colony, together with the discrepant legitimacy codes of England and Scotland, were brought to bear on inheritance claims based on laws of nationality and domicile. Shedden's fight to prove his legitimacy led to the passing of the Legitimacy Declaration Act in 1858, but it also gave rise to a series of legal debates on the nature of personal status, and to the complex ways in which both personal legitimacy and nationality operate as legal fictions. Here I trace how the twists and turns of the case, in 1808, the 1840s and the 1860s, illustrate different facets of these debates on legitimacy and national belonging, and also their intersection with other lines of exclusion drawn around the legal identities of both family and nation. ‘Bastardy’ was a profoundly troubled category in the mid-nineteenth century, partly because it highlighted the difficulties of defining legal identity itself.     

The Evidence of the Conversation Piece

ABSTRACT

The picture discussed apparently represents a ‘snapshot’ of eighteenth-century family life. However, it is argued in this article that it is problematic to approach such visual material as if it can render direct evidence of a past, historical reality. This is not simply because art may distort or misrepresent its subject matter. Such an approach is also in danger of ignoring the potential evidence embodied in the representation itself – in this case, both a highly self-conscious ‘display’ of modern life and an historically meaningful act of artistic prowess.     

The Deathbed of Lord Palmerston

ABSTRACT

Lord Palmerston died on 18 October 1865, still prime minister at the age of eighty. He was given a state funeral in Westminster Abbey on 27 October. By that time his stepson-in-law, Lord Shaftesbury, had begun spreading the word to a half-believing, half-unpersuaded public that Palmerston had died ‘the good [evangelical] death’, confessing in his last moments not only his sins but his belief in a life to come for all penitent believers in Christ's atoning sacrifice. This article reviews the surviving evidence of witnesses at Palmerston's deathbed and attempts to reconstruct the meaning(s) which Palmerston and his attendants (both family and medical) placed on the rituals in which they participated during the final days of Palmerston's life. A particular effort is made to provide a plausible cultural and intellectual context to Palmerston's participation in these rituals. Palmerston, it will be argued, was a ‘religious believer’ but in a very different sense from that wished on him by the younger generation who stage-managed the event.     

What the ‘Third World’ means to me

Abstract

This essay offers an experience of how the author comes to understand the terms ‘Third World’ in a specific social, historical, and political context in Taiwan. For the author, his deepest understandings of the ‘Third World’ did not come from theoretical readings, but from several concrete personal experiences.     

Inside the ‘blackboard jungle’

Abstract

The 1950s saw a wave of depictions of threatening male working-class adolescents in English novels, films and cartoons. However, these texts must be contextualised not only as part of the well-documented 1950s moral panic about youth but in relation to the popularized psychological concepts of the ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ child and the increasing implementation of progressive educational ideas that artificially limited working-class pupils’ horizons. This makes this period not only another reiteration of the perennial moral panics about the rising generation that Geoffrey Pearson has documented, but an emergence of a new way of conceptualizing youth.     

Authors' Biographies

ABSTRACT

This article critically engages with a contemporary play, Aur Kitne Tukde, staged in the Hindi language in various cities and towns in India and Pakistan, about gendered violence during Partition. It unsettles the master narrative of ‘honour’, ‘martyrdom’, ‘choice’ and women's ‘agency’ on Partition. The article also highlights the significance of the play in breaking the silences around Partition in the theatre, which, as compared with other cultural and literary mediums, reaches out to a larger section of people in unique ways. It underlines how the whole production of the play was a process of traversing and sharing the journey and trauma of Partition not only for the actors but also for the audiences. The article also tries to problematize the whole question of violence and its representation.     

Reading Irish Women's Lives in Photograph Albums

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide a new approach to photography in Ireland by shifting focus from ‘art’ photography to the processes and practices of snapshot photography. In employing a new methodological approach to photography, it also provides a new way to examine women's history, exploring photography as part of the tactics women used in order to resist or assimilate state- and Church-led discourses of womanhood, which have often been characterized as both oppressive and hegemonic. In order to explore these themes in detail, this article examines the photography collection of Dorothy Stokes, the largest twentieth century amateur collection held by the National Library of Ireland. I situate Stokes's photographs between two traditions – ethnographic photographs of Ireland and ‘snapshot’ images of holidays and family. Stokes self-consciously made use of these two genres, but also disrupted them. Taking photographs and the making of photograph albums became ways for her to comment on Irish society and her place in the nation and to represent and constitute an oppositional private life.     

‘Envisioning the Past: Art,Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract

This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.     

Micro: global music made in J‐pop?

Abstract

This article tackles J‐pop as a result of diverse influences from Western music. Its strength stems from its capacity to ‘tame the exotic’, i.e. assimilate and recreate from styles that were uncommon for Asian cultures by integrating elements of rock, reggae, hip hop, etc and labelling these J‐rock, J‐reggae, J‐rap. This assimilation and indigenization process in J‐pop creation could be seen as a way to resist against competitors from other places of music production. The article also attempts to identify the specificities and assets of J‐pop in the music scene in general. It elaborates on J‐pop's coolness, and the reason why it could expand throughout East‐Asia. Pop music and pop culture flows in East‐Asia could be regarded then as a means to trigger a sense of community and togetherness through the consumption of pop culture products. Throughout the analysis on J‐pop, the article will rely on one musical example, Def Tech and Micro, as this artist tends to explore various musical genre and intermingles them, so as to create a specific style, coined ‘Jawaian reggae’.     

Disentangling the ‘Native’ Guide

ABSTRACT

This article explores the experiences of nineteenth and early twentieth century Indigenous and Euroamerican men who worked as guides in the Adirondacks for urban, upper-class sportsmen. It also examines entanglements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Adirondackers in work and family contexts. The results create a complex understanding of the term ‘Native’ there as outsiders combined the two inhabitants to describe their wilderness vacation. This article argues that scholars who study the history of Indigenous societies should consider rural and urban culture alongside ethnicity, class and gender as important categories of analysis, especially in the nineteenth century and later.     

Generations of 68Ers

ABSTRACT

The protests of ‘1968’ are a powerful symbol of generational belonging and central to Germany's collective memory. The so-called ‘68ers’ have been transformed into a mythical yardstick of what constitutes a generation. Yet few people thought of themselves in this way in the late 1960s: the idea of the ‘68er’ only emerged from complex and often retrospective processes of generational building, which this article investigates. It is shown that such age-related affinities were not confined to members of the West German Left. Two alternative generational narratives that emerged out of the late 1960s are examined in this piece: those of the West German moderate right-wing ‘counter-generation’ and of the ‘East German 68ers’. The antagonistic character of the West German events and the subsequent public projection of left-wing activists as a ‘generation’ mobilized their political contemporaries and led to a growing desire to collectivize their experiences in their turn. East Germany's ‘1968’, on the other hand, may have been far less iconic than the West German revolt, but former East German activists have also given their memories generational form, particularly since the 1990s. This article addresses these manifold processes of generation building to show that they have much to reveal about how activists—and those who observed them—made sense of the events of 1968 and about how different groups mobilized the idea of a generational experience politically to powerful effect in the years that followed. We are not dealing with a single and monolithic generation of 1968, but with more diverse communities of German ‘68ers’.     

In the ruins of truth: the work of melancholia and acts of memory

Abstract

This paper seeks to problematize and render inadequate the ‘truth’ of Truth Commissions, which have proliferated globally. It does so by questioning the relationship of ‘truth’ to ‘testimony’ by offering a critical account of their relationship to ‘trauma,’ on the one hand and by questioning the location of ‘testimony’ in relation to ‘resistance,’ on the other hand. Moving away from this ‘psycologistic register,’ the paper rehearses a re‐reading of Freud, which attempts to question the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholia, in his 1917 essay. Given this, a complex, psychoanalytic subject is constructed, whose psychic and social ‘work of melancholia,’ and ‘acts of memory,’ cannot be straightforwardly rendered in testimony or recollection, and is unavailable for nationalist appropriation. Empirical material is drawn from field work in Eastern Sri Lanka, on the after life multiple massacres that took place in the early 1990s, and is juxtaposed with Commissions of Inquiry into these events in the late 1990s.     

The great upsurge of South Korea’s social movements in the 1960s

Abstract

I intend to show the characteristics and limitations of South Korea’s social movements in the 1960s and examine its formative potentialities in the growth of social movements thereafter. Whereas the 1960s in the Western world is characterized by the surge of ‘new social movements’ and waves of upheaval in the Third World, it would not be the case of South Korea. The ‘subject’ of the movements looks similar, but the context and raised issues proved markedly different. Some old‐school left‐wingers who conceived the strategy of socialistic national liberation survived the emergence of new ‘liberal’ generations in South Korea’s 1960s. The structural crisis of Korea’s anticommunist ruling class caused by the democratization movements and the growth of nationalism at the turn of the 1960s instigated the military coup of 1961, which finally brought Yushin dictatorship in 1972. Although South Korea’s social movements remained isolated from the world through the ‘long 60s’, it may be viewed as a significant part of the division of the ‘liberal consensus’ in the American‐led East‐Asian bloc.     

Celebrity

ABSTRACT

Recent debates about the meaning and role of cultural history have focused on the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘society’. Some have taken this opportunity to position cultural history as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ explanations of human behaviour. In contrast, this article argues that ‘biological’ methodologies – particularly the perspectives of evolutionary psychology – can usefully contribute to the historical understanding of culture and social development. To this end, it outlines the fundamentals of Darwinist psychology, suggests options for interdisciplinary cooperation and uses the topic of interpersonal violence to explore the potential for uniting cultural, social and evolutionary psychological methodologies.     

Outside in: ‘accented cinema’ at large

Abstract

This paper aims to engage in a critical analysis of the concept of ‘accented cinema’ recently developed by Hamid Naficy to refer to the emergent genre of exilic/diasporic filmmaking. Naficy’s theorization of ‘accented cinema’ in particular and discussions around exilic/diasporic cinema in general will be challenged on the basis of the observation that the cinematic styles and thematic preoccupations associated with exilic/diasporic films consistently appear also in wide‐ranging examples of contemporary ‘world’ cinema that are often classified under the rubric of ‘national cinemas’. To illustrate this observation, the paper provides a parallel reading of three recent films – A Time for Drunken Horses (1999) by Kurdish‐Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi, Happy Together (1997) by Hong Kong director Wong kar‐wai, and Distant (2002) by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan – whose directors cannot possibly be considered as ‘exilic/diasporic’ in a conventional sense. Yet, it will be argued, the styles and thematic concerns associated with exilic/diasporic cinema manifestly prevail in all three films discussed in this paper as well as in many other examples of contemporary ‘world’ cinema. Departing from this observation, the paper will open up the new genre of ‘accented cinema’ to further questioning and suggest that unless the mutual entanglement between exilic/diasporic filmmaking and national cinema is disclosed, the notion of ‘accented cinema’ will not be sufficiently able to realize its critical potential.     

‘The Supposed Paradise of Pen and Ink’: Self-education and Social Mobility in the London Public Library (1880–1930)

ABSTRACT

Borrowing from prosopography, collective biography, sociology and genealogy, this article describes the ‘bookish’ workplace experiences of 90 chief and deputy public librarians to revisit debates around the upwardly mobile metropolitan lower middle class in the long nineteenth century. It finds that the border between the manual and white-collar classes was more easily (and enduringly) breached than previously supposed. It also suggests that those moving from the former group to the latter retained elements of their ‘working class’ origins and character across the late-Victorian period. These discoveries complicate historical assessments of the lower middles, but support sociological surveys that propose more fluid and open class borders from the mid-nineteenth century.     

Wrestling amid perplexity,committing amid unease: a critical introduction of Intellectual Inquiry

Abstract

While the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ has been influential in tourism research, the ‘counter‐gaze’ of the host communities and their imagination of the tourists’ places of origin have not been adequately addressed. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Langtang National Park of Nepal, and drawing on Simmel’s theory of sociation, this paper attempts a simultaneous analysis of the shifting images the visitors and hosts have of each other and how these images shape their experiences of tourism, and argues that a constant shifting of subjectivity between ‘reverie’ and ‘emplacement’ characterises the structure of tourism encounters.     

The Power and Function of Images in Northern Europe During the Migration Period

ABSTRACT

In the fifth and early sixth centuries, numerous objects in northern Europe were decorated in a particularly consistent visual style (‘Germanic Animal Style I’). This article argues that we should treat these images not simply as representations of cultural notions, but as an active part in the process of creating a shared elite identity, formed during a particular period of historical crisis.