Rooted in relative privilege: US ‘expats’ in Granada,Nicaragua

This article investigates how US citizens living in Granada, Nicaragua, negotiate transnational belonging. Best known for a revolution and covert US intervention, Nicaragua, and in particular, the colonial town of Granada, has become a popular site for settlers from the Global North. Similar to other cases of ‘lifestyle migration’, these migrants enjoy spacious homes, maids, and upscale restaurants in a country ranked second poorest in Latin America, and governed by none other than El Comandante Ortega himself. They do not sever ties with their homeland, and form strong attachments in their new land. Fieldwork conducted in 2016 reveals that despite their international mobility, cosmopolitanism does not characterize how these migrants belong in the world. Instead, they practice privileged transnationalism in which their economic, political, and cultural power relative to that of their hosts facilitates both their mobility and their comfortable sense of rootedness in their sites of origin and settlement.     

Ghostly fogs in a decaying empire: disoriented and melancholy experience in Russia’s metropole

ABSTRACT

This article explores the disoriented affective experience of urban modernity in the Russian imperial metropole: obsessive portrayals, by writers both famous and obscure, of St. Petersburg as a place of alleged power and intense modernity haunted by loss and feeling lost, by fragmentation and decay, by feelings of standing on shifting ground, vague disenchantment, and melancholy. With a mixture of concreteness and intangibility, this was an affective perception embodied in haunting fogs. Fog was a ubiquitous fact in the material city and an inescapable metaphor in the interpreted city. If imperial modernity represented confident knowledge and forward movement, fog represented uncertainty and disorientation, even the unrepresentable. Not least, fog embodied and nurtured anxious feelings about historical time: the experience of the modern as discontinuity, fragmentation, contingency, precarity, instability, and looming disaster. But fog also evoked dreams and possibilities of the unexpected. Fog disrupted epistemological certainties and historical teleologies. Fog disoriented the present and thus the future. As such, fog opened up vague visions of possibility and even a radical other. This essay itself seeks to disorient familiar understandings of St. Petersburg and its famous cultural ‘text’ to see through its fogs, and in fog itself, not only unstable images of a decaying imperial modern, not only the off-centred experience of that history at the heart of imperial power, but also images of vaguely imagined and unpredictable possibility. As such, this is a story that can reorient how we understand the revolution that began in St. Petersburg in 1917 and shook apart an empire.     

‘The Mexican’ and ‘The Cancer in the South’: Discourses of Race,Nation and Anti-blackness in Early Twentieth-Century Debates on Mexican Immigration

This article explores the flexible manner in which discourses of anti-black racism were employed within congressional debates on the proposed restriction of Mexican immigration at the end of the 1920s. I examine how both sides of this debate placed Mexicans within a particular historical narrative of race and nation, positioned in relation to a range of other populations, including Chinese and Japanese immigrants, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Within these narratives, slavery and the imagined negro problem were particularly salient, being frequently used to orient racial interpretations of Mexican immigrants as well as the manner in which they were positioned in relation to other ‘racial elements’. Imprinted with US histories of slavery, conquest and empire, these discourses offer insight into the ambivalent interrelationships of American’s multiple trajectories of racism.     

Picturing Empire and Illness

Reflecting on recent debates within cultural studies on non-Western modernities and ‘cultural studies in/of Asia’, this essay explores a cultural history of venereal disease (VD) in Korea under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). The colonial representation of and discourse on VD in Western colonial settings was often built around a missionary medical account of sin and disease and a colonial dialectic of white civilization and non-white backwardness. This essay draws attention to the colonial discourse on VD in the non-Western Japanese Empire and its East Asian context, which compels us to look into the colonial framing of disease and bodies in imperial contexts where ruler and ruled shared close racial, cultural and religious affinities and where colonial medical power did not stem from white hegemony and Christian religious authority. By using methods from cultural studies and feminist history, this essay uncovers and critically reads the Japanese colonial medical and popular cultural archives on VD that range from state documents to laboratory reports to patent medicine advertisements, in order to reconfigure Japan's colonial medical empire and its underlying, gendered assumptions. It clarifies not only the legal, military and institutional bases for the intense governmental control over VD, but also the cultural image, metaphor and knowledge of VD and the biomedical female body promoted by Japan's transnational patent medical industry in close collaboration with the colonial state. By doing so, this essay sheds light on the gendered epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism.     

Projections internationales ou détours vers le local? Les diplomaties identitaires des sikhs (Inde) et des Mohajirs (Pakistan)

Ethnic diplomacy can be characterised as a ‘popular mode of diplomatic action’. As such, it is an illustration of the privatisation of diplomacy, which may involve private actions sponsored by state actors or, on the contrary, private actions with a public outcome in the realm of foreign policy. By attempting to reach out to state actors, international organisations and global NGOs, ethnic diplomats articulate a cultural mode of transnational mobilisation. But these two dimensions of ethnic diplomacy, its ‘culturality’ and its ‘transnationality’, cannot be taken for granted and should be questioned thoroughly. Through this analysis, it appears that long-distance nationalists do not always succeed in transnationalising their activities and that they often end up re-locating themselves in exile. And more than ethnicity or cultural repertoires, it is the political culture of ethnodiplomatic organisations and their relations with the diasporic environments in which they evolve which helps to explain the outcome of these popular modes of diplomatic action.     

伊盟、伊合与中国中东人文外交

伊斯兰世界联盟与伊斯兰合作组织是泛伊斯兰主义制度化的产物,伊盟主要通过朝觐平台间接对伊斯兰国家政治施与影响,伊合则通过推进议题的方式直接对伊斯兰国家政治产生影响；我国历来重视发展与这些泛伊斯兰国际组织的友好关系,并取得了宝贵历史经验与良好的成效；在明确我国与泛伊斯兰国际组织开展人文交流与合作的资源优势、基本目标及其实现途径的基础上,探索我国对中东国家开展“全方位、多层次、宽领域”人文外交的应对之策,旨在进一步提升我国对中东伊斯兰国家的人文外交能力.     

New trade formations: precarity,pragmatic cosmopolitanism and long‐distance trade in the Caucasus

For many ordinary people responding to ongoing post‐Soviet precarity, domestic and transnational trade has become a common choice of livelihood. This article is about the small and medium sized traders who deal in cheap Chinese commodities in the Caucasus –particularly in Georgia and Armenia. It introduces the notion of ‘trade formations’ to account for the multiple ways in which cross‐cultural trade and microfinance practices, as well as stereotypes about national and regional groups and trading minorities, highlight the role of trust, reputation and everyday diplomacy in long‐distance commercial networks. While current trade networks are rooted in the cultures of trade practised under the Soviets, dispositions of pragmatic cosmopolitanism and defensive nationalism often determine who may or may not respond to post‐Soviet precarity by turning to transnational trade, embracing political and religious diversity, and overlooking hostilities, past and present.     

Elephant empire: zoos and colonial encounters in Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Whereas zoological gardens and animal collections in North America and Western Europe are well researched from historical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the history and legacy of these modernizing institutions in Eastern Europe. To bridge this gap in scholarship, I investigate the traffic in exotic animals to this region with a focus on a particular species. Historically, elephants have been considered prime symbols of the power and triumph of the colonial empire, and were thus often the jewels of colonial animal collections across Europe. In this article, I explore how the colonial origin of elephants as both big game and charismatic megafauna translates into a geopolitical context without direct overseas colonies, in order to trace the material links between species, race, transnational commodity networks, and structures of identity formation. Based on archival and bibliographic research focused on the Poznań Zoo in years 1871–1945, this article offers a critical analysis of the role of elephant performance in zoos, circuses, and travelling shows in mediating and mobilizing imperial longings. From this vantage point I suggest that studying public zoos in Eastern Europe offers a unique insight into a physical presence of colonial imperialism (via traffic in exotic species) in an area without overseas colonies, through a site where modernist models of citizenship, nationhood, and Europeanness are forged at the interface between science, education, and transnational politics. Given that zoos were crucial for the development of the biological perspective in the West, I posit a reconfiguration of zoos as ‘contact zones’ and primary sites for colonial encounter within the empire from a semi-peripheral perspective.     

Burmese Indians in contemporary Burma: heritage,influence, and perceptions since 1988

This article seeks to explore the current role, significance and influence of Burmese Indian minorities in post-1988 Burma as well as the perceptions the Burmese indigenous society and elite have developed on them since the colonial era. British Burma (1826–1948) witnessed a massive immigration of Indian communities that disproportionately dominated Burma's colonial enterprise. A strong resentment thus arose among the Burman Buddhist majority, illustrated by the rise of a popular ‘indophobia’ phenomenon. Paroxysmal expressions of the colonial original trauma were observed through recurrent pre-independence anti-Indian riots as well as a specific and enduring linguistic patronizing classification of the ‘Kalas’ by the Burmese language. Nationalistic administrative laws, enacted by the Burmese post-independence parliamentarian and military governments, furthered the downgrading and discrimination of Burmese Indians who remain however a visible minority today, with a manifest economic weight and a strong socio-cultural presence throughout Burma. In this paper, it will, however, be argued that after years of ‘Burmanization’ processes, Burmese old-age ‘indophobic’ sentiments have turned towards more ‘islamophobic’ tendencies, now explicitly targeting the Muslim communities of Indian origin, but that it remains difficult to evaluate their impact on Burma's current policymaking.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

DisPovertyPorn: Benefits Street and the dis/ability paradox

In this article, we offer a timely socio-cultural analysis, informed by a critical disability perspective, of UK Channel 4’s reality television series Benefits Street. Drawing on the work of Allen, Tyler, and De Benedictus and Jensen on ‘poverty porn’, we broaden their analysis to ask how dis/ability disrupts the ‘poverty porn’ narrative. We pay attention to the dis/appearance of dis/ability on Benefits Street and, in doing so, we also extend an analysis of how impairment labels function in people’s lives as socio-cultural categories that place limits on what labelled people can do and can be. We suggest that both the articulation and erasure of dis/ability are used as a form of narrative prosthesis to support the overarching story line that people on benefits are unworthy ‘scroungers’.     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.     

Insurrectional Politics in Colonial Southeast Asia: Colonial Modernity,Islamic ‘Counterplots’, and Translocal (Anti-colonial) Connectivity

Abstract

This article focuses on the idea of ‘colonial modernity’ to pursue a dual theoretical purpose: to interrogate the givenness of ‘modernity’ as an overarching and over-determining epistemological framework; and, secondly, to indicate how movements against colonial modernity were part of a ‘deep, global infrastructure of anti-colonial connectivity’. By examining a number of Islamic movements in the Dutch Indies and in British Malaya, this article seeks to map out some of the translocal spaces created and occupied by these movements, which linked North Africa to Saudi Arabia and to South East Asia. The focus on translocality speaks also to the existence and enactment of exteriorities to modernity. My deployment of ‘exteriority’ signals here certain historical, political, and cultural lateral relations among colonial spaces, through which the colonized generate and activate what June Nash calls ‘counterplots’ to colonial modernity.     

Peace in the Twenty-First Century: States,Capital, and Multilateral Institutions versus Positionality Arbitrage,Everyday Mobility,Networks, and Multi-verticality

The ‘long peace’ of the last 25 years has been marked by various debates on liberal-democratic peace, human rights, and cosmopolitanism. They are all linked with various forms of intervention—from development to peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention. This ‘interventionary system/order’ model has come under pressure from a range of different fronts. This article examines how peace and development may be rethought in a global framework if the previous version of a progressive framework (i.e. the liberal peace) is now being revised and intervention has shifted towards neo-liberal forms.     

‘Keeping the story alive’: is ethnic and racial dilution inevitable for multiracial people and their children?

This paper explores how multiracial parents with White partners articulate narratives of ethnic and racial ‘dilution’ and cultural loss in relation to the socialization of their children. In our broader study of how multiracial parents raise their children, we found that parents commonly spoke of concerns around dilution and generational change in relation to four key themes: the loss of cultural knowledge and diminishing practices that connected parents and their children to a minority ancestry; the embodiment of White‐appearing children and the implications of this for family relationships; the use of biological or genetic discourses in relation to reduced blood quantum; and concerns amongst Black/White participants about whitening and the loss of racial consciousness. Parental understandings of dilution varied greatly; some expressed sadness at ‘inevitable’ loss; others were more philosophical about generational change; and others still proactively countered loss through strategies to connect their children to their minority heritages. We show that despite growing awareness of the social constructedness of race and an emergent cosmopolitanism among these parents, discourses of genetics, cultural lineage, and the ‘naturalness’ of race continue to hold sway amongst many multiracial parents.     

Between the state and global civil society: non‐official experts and their network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45

This article stresses the need for a more rigorous scrutiny of the power structure in which an expert network produces its ‘expert knowledge’. It defines a pioneering multinational expert network in the Asia‐Pacific region in the interwar years as a prototype of an epistemic community, and examines how far it challenged the state‐centred and North Atlantic‐centred dominant structure of international politics, and became ‘global’. In this article I argue that this particular network largely reinforced the dominant structure. This meant that it remained inter‐national and colonial, and served the interests of the state/empire, neither becoming global nor advancing a universalist cause for the global civil society. The failure owes a lot to historical circumstances. Yet this case study also demonstrates that the structure in which the expert network produced specific knowledge is still dominant and that a constant scrutiny of the role of an expert network remains critical.     

Breast‐Feeding Advocacy,Risk Society and Health Moralism: A Decade’s Scholarship

This article reviews research published this century that engages critically with the mantra ‘Breast is Best’ and the associated expansion of official breast‐feeding promotion programmes. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of such studies published. They mostly explore experience in English speaking, industrialised countries (the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain) which are in some social and cultural respects dissimilar, yet where very similar developments and problems are detected in regards to breast‐feeding promotion. We highlight how this exploration of breast‐feeding promotion internationally has developed understanding of wider sociological themes. This scholarship, we suggest, has provided a powerful illustration of the relation between risk society (more particularly a heightened consciousness of risk) and the evolution of a code of conduct that regulates behaviour, that has been termed ‘health moralizm’. The article covers three themes: ‘Science, risk society, authority and choice’; ‘Public health policy and infant feeding’; and ‘Moralization and women’s identity work’. We conclude that the research discussed shows how the sociological imagination continues to shed light on the relation between private troubles and public issues. We also suggest one conclusion that can be drawn from this research is that official discourse and everyday maternal experience appear increasingly distant from each other.     

From cosmopolitan convergences to situated religious cosmopolitanism: The early spread of the Bahá’í Faith in Singapore and Malaya (1950–1975)

This paper contributes to the debate on cosmopolitanism by examining the spread of the Bahá’í Faith in Singapore and Malaya (1950–1975). The Bahá’í Faith is a significant case as its followers came to span the globe in 150 years. This paper probes into the relationship between the faith's transnational spread and its religious cosmopolitanism in three parts. First, I outline the inseparability of ‘world citizenship’ from Bahá’í teachings. Second, I trace its spread in Singapore and Malaya – a process that initially relied on serendipitous encounters between travellers and migrants, one that I call ‘cosmopolitan convergences’. Third, I explore the expansion of the Bahá’í Faith among Malaya's Semai tribe. Here, Bahá’í world citizenship became grounded in collective cultural practices, facilitating what I call ‘situated religious cosmopolitanism’. The connection between the contrasting populations discussed in this paper demonstrates the potential of grounding religious networks within normative cosmopolitan ideals and practices.