‘Engineering for Boys’: Meccano and the Shaping of a Technical Vision of Boyhood in Twentieth-Century Britain

The construction toy Meccano was created in 1901 by Liverpudlian clerk Frank Hornby and reached its height of popularity during inter-war Britain. By focusing on the development of Meccano throughout the company’s publicity and within oral history testimony, this paper considers how the toy promoted engineering to shape a technical vision of boyhood. Hornby shaped this vision by building upon masculine ideals of self-improvement that were central to Samuel Smiles’ book Self-Help and Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts movement. This vision built upon a past of achievements in engineering, and with it Victorian values such as clean-mindedness and independence, to enable boys to prepare for a technological modern world. Hornby’s own career and influences also provided the model for boys to make a success of their lives through the later establishment of the Meccano Magazine (1916) and guilds (1919) to accompany the toy. Secondly, it shows how this vision has continued to endure through the use of Meccano as a scientific device and in memories of the toy.     

Identity and Otherness: Maghribi Images in the Historiography about Alfonso XI of Castile (1311–1350)

This work studies the information that the historiography on King Alfonso XI of Castile offers on the Marīnid dynasty of Fes. In spite of the confrontation between the two states in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for the control of the Strait of Gibraltar and the southern part of Andalusia, the Alfonsine texts (the Crónica del Rey don Alfonso el Onceno, the Gran Crónica de Alfonso XI and, to a lesser extent, the Poema of Alfonso Onceno) attempt to reconstruct the history of the rival sultanate through a verifiable and rigorous approach comparing with Arab sources from that period. In this regard, their ideological conception moves away from the usual stereotypes, which are generally negative in the way they portray the other, i.e. the Maghribi opponent. In contrast, Alfonsine historiography assumes the empathetic portrayal of the identity values of the rival as part of the task of the historian, and uses the history and deeds of the adversaries to highlight the victory of the Castilian monarch over them.     

Translation of ‘America’ during the early Cold War period: a comparative study on the history of popular music in South Korea and Taiwan

Abstract

The evaluation of the cold war influences played by the US on the rest of the world should not only be accounted economically and politically, but also culturally. In this paper we see the US influences on South Korea and Taiwan from the value‐laden concept of Americanization and through which we examine comparatively specific practices of domestic popular music development in these two countries. Setting this paper as a historical comparative study, we see the working of Americanization in relation to popular music as a value regime in which American is constructed as an ideal model imaginatively and discursively, which was made possible by economic, social and cultural forces in South Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on the Cold War period, circa 1950s to 1960s, levels and aspects of Americanization were therefore ways of translation, to use Said’s concept of traveling theory analogically; Anglo‐American music genres traveled to these countries to be incorporated contextually as new or trendy conventions of music‐making, which in turn helped form local music genres. The socio‐historical contexts of South Korea and Taiwan, with respect to the presence of American army forces, and similar postwar anti‐communist political forces, in nation‐building (north–south Korea, red China–free China antagonism respectively) are central to our understanding of the visibility of Americanization in different music cultures in these two countries. This paper will go into each country’s historical trajectory of music practices that took Japanese colonial influences up to the postwar time and then blending with Anglo‐American genres in indigenizing that eventually marked their different paths, as we comparatively reveal their institutional, political and national cultural conditions, which were necessary in shaping each country’s music‐making conventions, entertainment business, and consumption cultures of popular music – and that might implicitly inform tentatively the present rivalry between ‘offensive’ Korean Wave and ‘defensive’ Taiwanese ‘rockers’ in the globalization era.     

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.     

Alternative responses to ‘the modern dream’: the sources and contradictions of Rural Reconstruction in China

ABSTRACT

The title is supposed to be a paradox, as the two notions are opposed in Gramsci’s work: hegemony being the heterogeneous aspect of the dominating alliance in a given historical period (e.g. fascism), whereas the national‐popular representing the unified cultural resistance from below. The question mark thus refers to a short circuit of opposites, to an unexpected consequence of liberation itself, rather than to the domination of some new cultural industry, as the one Adorno had fought against. Not that cultural industries aren’t stronger than ever; but cultural studies have developed various strategies to critique them over the post‐war years. I want to argue here that the new amorphous world without transcendence and alternative (usually called ‘globalization’) puts the discipline in a more difficult situation. Is there a danger of cultural studies becoming an accomplice to such a new hegemonic culture of the global‐popular?     

‘Dad's Back’: Mapping Masculinities,Moralities and the Law in the Novels of Margery Allingham

Crime fiction was, in its ‘Golden Age’ form, a new product of the interwar middlebrow. It was a particular and very popular way in which conservative-modern problematics about the domestic and about human emotional relationships but also about criminality and the law were talked through. This article examines the novels of Margery Allingham as an exemplar of this genre with reference to her own professional and gender identity as well as the broader cultural context. Crime fiction was one of several kinds of crime (particularly murder) stories, both fictional and ‘real life’, which circulated between the official discourses of the law and middle-class culture. This discussion explores Allingham's treatment of masculinities and of sexuality. It argues that narrative techniques that used the Gothic problematized the interrelationships of morality, modernity and history, and also inflected the pleasures of leisure reading with wider ‘middlebrow’ concerns about the gendered status of the modern citizen and more diffuse cultures of punishment and social responsibility.     

‘The Talke of the Towne’: News,Crime and the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century London

This article reconsiders ideas of the public sphere in the seventeenth century, by focusing on how public opinion is shaped by the movement of information between media and between receivers. It contends that the scholarly preoccupation with a public sphere viewed exclusively in terms of politics obscures the fact that contemporaries did not distinguish between politics and subjects such as crime in their newsgathering. Examining the case study of James Turner, a burglar in the 1660s who became a cause célèbre in London and beyond, this article shows how crime news were eagerly exchanged, informing discussions and constructing public opinion.     

‘Not Just the Ideas of a Few Enthusiasts’: Early Twentieth Century Legal Activism and Reformation of the Age of Sexual Consent

In July 1885, a reluctant House of Lords was eventually persuaded to pass the Criminal Law Amendment Bill after three years of intense Parliamentary debate and prompted by W.T. Stead’s shocking expose of the Maiden Tribute scandal. The 1885 Act finally, and controversially, settled the age of sexual protection for young girls at 16 years but this threshold would be repeatedly contested over the next four decades. Moral campaigners continually sought to exert pressure on the Home Office to reform what we now recognise as a legal age of consent. But their contradictory demands to impose repressionist measures to punish young girls for sexual immorality while simultaneously lobbying for a more protectionist stance against sexual defilement made any legislative consensus impossible. This article explores and teases out the associated socio-legal complexities of such contradictions which, somewhat ironically, served as a stark rehearsal for the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1922. An Act which did no more than simply reiterate the 1885 determination that 16 years should be the age of consent, a provision that has endured well into the twenty-first century.     

‘The Charlatanry of the Learned’: On the Moral Economy of the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Germany

The notion of charlatanism is central to the social workings of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Starting with Johann Burkhard Mencke's famous treatise The Charlatanry of the Learned, this paper traces how accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of ‘charlatanry’ initially helped to produce the new species of the erudite ‘charlatan’. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture, this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct, offered a way of mapping the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts, the discourse of charlatanry allowed the creation of symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions as to the affiliation or non-affiliation to this recently forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific one. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific field. At first dominated by a critique built on courteous or bourgeois values, the scientific field later developed its own criteria of appraisal, such as authorship, originality, transparency, etc. Attracting the attention of a growing public sphere, the explicit verbalization of claims which were not related to the value system of a republic of letters primarily concerned with the production and distribution of knowledge finally led to a more implicit moral economy of science.     

Wartime Holidays and the ‘Myth of the Blitz’

Published histories of the British home front during the Second World War, both academic and popular, say little or nothing about civilian holidays; the implication is that for most people they did not exist. This article disputes that reading. Complementing earlier work on officially sponsored ‘Holidays at Home’, the article first looks briefly at 1930s holiday expectations, then summarizes government measures to restrain ‘unnecessary’ wartime travel. Using rail-travel statistics, memoirs and diaries, contemporary novels, local press reports, Mass-Observation and other surveys it shows that throughout the war large numbers of people took holidays much as they had in peacetime. This apparent contradiction is then discussed in relation to, for instance, ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘wartime’, the survival of class in Britain, the wartime economy and the debate on the ‘myth of the blitz’ view of civilian behaviour.     

‘Of lost fathers and broken sons’: Farish Noor on the politics of love and the new thought in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper addresses the polemical and intimate writings of one of Malaysia’s leading public intellectuals, Farish Noor. Straddling secularism and Islamism, Noor’s ideas are informed by a compassion that seeks to bypass monotheism and an ethnically informed nationalism. An advocate of a multiethnic and plural society, Noor does not merely reject Islamism; rather, his thinking seeks to reconcile and transcend what he perceives as a false dichotomy between a system of reason and a system of belief. The achievement of this transcendence is a fraught one for it sometimes seems that Noor involuntarily contradicts himself. To resolve this contradiction I turn to Gille Deleuze’s work, Pure Immanence, which, I argue, provides a key in‐road into understanding the complexivity of Noor’s thought, in particular his valorization of love and his canny and novel attempts to interpret what he calls an ‘other Malaysia.’     

Feeling at home in the “Chocolate City”: an exploration of place-making practices and structures of belonging amongst Africans in Guangzhou

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the shifts brought about by the emergence of Asia as a key player in global capitalism have led to countless Africans opting for Asian destinations as part of their trade and migration strategies. The implications of the constant ebb and flow of African entrepreneurs in Southern China and the transnational trajectories, connections, and practices they enable have been relatively understudied. This article focuses on place-making practices and structures of belonging surrounding those Africans living in (and circulating through) Guangzhou. Drawing on my fieldwork, I locate possibilities for place-making and belonging within transnational multiethnic microcommunities and highlight practices that have emerged from the assembling of transnational and translocal flows in residential clusters, community organisations, and religious congregations. I contend that the presence and intermingling of diverse transient subjects (both African and Chinese) nurtures “alternative imaginations” of self, place, home, and belonging that alter extant notions of national and cultural identity, ethnicity, and race in twenty-first century Asia.     

Travelling Without Risks? Itinerant Entertainers in the Duchy of Brabant and their Uses of Passports at the End of the Eighteenth Century

This article examines the uses of passports among itinerant entertainers travelling through the Duchy of Brabant. Making their living with public performances ranging from singing, making music, acting and puppetry to acrobatics and bear dancing, they travelled on a daily, weekly or monthly basis over short and long distances with their shows. Their high level of mobility met with multiple restrictions imposed by the authorities. Travellers with little or no means were often arrested for vagrancy or begging on the charge of having no fixed residence or a steady job. Passports could help itinerant entertainers preventing their possible arrest. This article addresses the question how ambulant entertainers made use of passports for their travels. To this end I used passport registers on the one hand and vagrancy files of arrested itinerant entertainers on the other hand. The passport registers (available for the cities of Brussels and Antwerp) provide insight into who applied for a passport. Meanwhile, the vagrancy files shed light on entertainers travelling without a passport or with invalid ones. As such, this body of sources provides us with an exceptional insight into the variety of uses of passports by itinerant entertainers in Brabant at the turn of the century.     

The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts,the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

Abstract

This essay recognizes that representations of the ‘Muslim woman’ as the Othered ‘object’ of the ‘Western’ gaze and the domesticated ‘object’ which the Islamic apologists strive hard to defend, are both constructions and false antitheses of each other. It seeks not the ‘truth’ regarding the Muslim women in the world of social reality but to examine how various representations of the women are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized. The essay proceeds in three stages. The first stage shows how the patriarchy mobilizes the Qur’an and the Hadith in order to construct the woman as the negative, the inessential and the abnormal of the man so as to exert complete subordination over her. However, the very act of attempting to mute the woman in Islam is the most strident proof that she is engaged in resistance against patriarchal control and the degree of resistance must be judged by the degree of patriarchal control. The second stage demonstrates how patriarchy operates in colonial and neo‐imperial landscape: it legitimizes the appropriation of Muslim woman ‘possessed’ by the Other (as exemplified by the orientalist seduction fantasy in William Dalrymple’s The White Mughals), but, haunted by the fear of rape and anxieties regarding the sexuality of the White woman possessed by the Self, it attempts to maintain strict control over her (as in the cases of Miss Wheeler in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and Private Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War). This struggle over the feminine body is perfectly in line with Islam’s hyper‐anxiousness to hide the female body and rigorously ensure monopolic possession over her. The third stage shows how Taslima Nasreen, a late‐20th century feminist from Bangladesh, speaks the unspoken and thereby attempts to subvert the normative representation of the muted women in her autobiographical novella, entitled āmār Meyebelā. In thus examining the representations of the Muslim women, this essay seeks an alternative ‘third space of enunciation’ and takes a distinct political stand located outside of the axis of the dichotomy of the ‘Western’ gaze and the construction of the Islamic theologians.     

The Last and Most Developed Naṣrid Palace in the Alhambra: The Alijares and Its Country Estate (Fourteenth Century)

The country estate (al-munya, almunia in Spanish) of the Alijares occupied grounds near the Alhambra and the Generalife, although it was higher up. It was constructed at the peak of the Na?rid dynasty's splendour, during the last stage of the reign of Mu?ammad V (r.1354–1359 / 1362–1391), after he had finished the Palace of the Lions.

The Alijares formed the last link in the chain in the stylistic development of the palaces of al-Andalus. When its founder decided on the features of the Alijares, he was in search of something that was completely innovative, as he had already undertaken work in the medinas of Granada and in the Alhambra that turned out to be a transformation of the architectural forms so far developed.

Life in the palace and the al-munya was cut short by sizeable earthquake in 1431, which coincided with a hard Castilian military campaign against the Kingdom of Granada. The consequences of the allegiance formed after the Na?rid defeat hindered the reconstruction of the Alijares, and so the royal buildings above the Royal Water Channel (Acequia Real) of the Alhambra were abandoned. Although time has erased many of the traces of the palace and its al-munya, we have extensive knowledge of its main architectural features, thanks to an analysis of all the available sources.     

Beyond the ‘feminization of masculinity’: transforming patriarchy with the ‘feminine’ in contemporary Japanese youth culture

Contemporary Japanese society has seen the emergence of aesthetically conscious young men who employ ‘feminine’ aesthetics and strategies as ways of exploring and practising new masculine identities. In this paper, I explore the significance of this emerging trend of male beauty by observing and analysing the expressions, strategies and intentions of those young men who have taken to aesthetically representing themselves in these ways. This cultural trend is often described as the ‘feminization of masculinity,’ echoing the gendered articulation of rising mass culture in terms of the ‘feminization of culture,’ which acknowledges aspects of the commercialization of masculine bodies in Japan of the 1990s onward. While this view successfully links important issues, such as femininity, beauty, and the gendered representation of the self in a broader context of capitalist culture, it does not sufficiently convey a sense of agency in the young men's lively practices of exploring and expressing new masculine values and ideals. Rather than viewing ‘feminization’ simply as a sign of commodification, I argue that these young men strategically distance themselves from conventional masculinity by artificially standing in the position of the ‘feminine’, where they can more freely engage in the creation of alternative gender identities. From this point of view, the use of the phrase ‘feminization of masculinity’ often implies a fear and anxiety on the part of patriarchy over the boundary‐crossing practice that seriously challenges the stability of gendered cultural hegemony. Moreover, such anxiety driven reactions easily merge with nationalist inclination, as those threatened tend to seek the consolidation of patriarchal/hegemonic order by eliminating ambiguities and indeterminacy in cultural/national discourse. I conclude that the cultural hegemony of contemporary Japan could better sustain itself by incorporating non‐hegemonic gender identities, which would allow it maintain an open space for critical imagination and effectively diffuse an obsessive and ultimately self‐destructive desire for transparency/identity.