Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

Briefly Noted

We asked Jerry Rhodes, former top executive at CRC (now Acadia) and a leader in opioid treatment program management, what he thinks of methadone as a medication to be used in primary care to treat opioid use disorder (OUD), as some people — including former Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Michael Botticelli — recommended last year (see ADAW, July 16, 2018). “I take issue with that,” said Rhodes. “Methadone is a dangerous drug in an unregulated environment,” he told ADAW. Buprenorphine is prescribed this way, but “buprenorphine is a relatively safe drug, and methadone isn't,” he said. A veteran of many battles over methadone, including the near‐elimination of opioid treatment programs, Rhodes told ADAW that “you don't give unfettered access to methadone” to patients with OUD. “Be careful what you wish for” is his advice. This has the potential to cause harm, he said. “Only people who don't understand the history of its utilization would recommend this.”     

The impossibility of loving: blanchot,community, sexual difference

This paper aims to clarify Blanchot's notion of community and his practice of communism through, first, an account of his involvement in the Events of May 1968 and, second, an exploration of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot reads a short novel by Marguerite Duras, which recounts the tropisms of a brief relationship between a young woman and a homosexual man. As I show, Blanchot's affirmation of what he calls “the impossibility of loving”, which emerges from his reading of Duras, is linked to what he calls “worklessness [désoeuvrement]”; that is, the active process of loosening or undoing that contests any attempt to establish a community around a shared essence. I will claim that it is by attending to the relationship to worklessness that one might attend to what Blanchot calls the “spaces of freedom” that open around us: to those happenings which are not enclosed by prevailing determinations of the social space. A further aim of this paper is to address the concerns of Jacques Derrida, for whom Blanchot's writings on community betray what he calls in Politics of Friendship a “schematic of filiation”, in which the relation to the brother is the privileged model for the relation to the Other. I also provide an account of Blanchot's negotiation of Levinas's account of the relationship between ethics and eros as it is presented in Totality and Infinity.     

Mallinckrodt donates hand sanitizers to all OTPs

Mallinckrodt, a pharmaceutical company that makes methadone and buprenorphine for opioid treatment programs (OTPs) as well as many other medications, started out making hand sanitizer for its own plant employees when the pandemic began this winter. It wasn't long, however, before the company recognized that OTPs needed hand sanitizer — like everyone else, they were unable to get it. So last month, the St. Louis–based company started distributing it — for free — to all OTPs, not only its customers.     

Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism

Charles Tilly’s work on repertoires of contention and social mechanisms was pathbreaking. In this article, I argue that his understanding of both concepts overlaps with social-theoretical work informed by the philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. There is no evidence that Tilly was influenced by pragmatism, but I argue that the overlap is substantial enough that large portions of his oeuvre can serve as illustrations of the explanatory power of pragmatist social science—and that Tilly’s theorization of mechanisms in particular would have been even stronger had he engaged pragmatism directly.     

Joseph Mainzer (1801–1851) and the Popularisation of Choral Singing in Britain

Singing master Joseph Mainzer came to England in 1841 as a political refugee from Germany. Through his music schools, his textbook Singing for the Million, and his journal Mainzer's Musical Times (today The Musical Times) he contributed significantly to the popularisation of choral singing in Britain. This essay takes Mainzer's political background as a starting point to investigate the complex relationship between refuge and artistic production. It is argued that the latter was deeply informed by the former. Mainzer not only transferred choral traditions but also a politicised concept of popular culture which started to take hold in pre-revolutionary Vormärz-Germany. The case study is integrated into the larger framework of Anglo-German cultural relations and political refuge in mid-nineteenth century Britain.     

Vygotsky's Stage Theory: The Psychology of Art and the Actor under the Direction of Perezhivanie

This article reviews Vygotsky's writings on arts (particularly logocentric art including the theater) and emotions, drawing on his initial exploration in The Psychology of Art and his final considerations set forth in a set of essays, treatises, and lectures produced in the last years of his life. The review of The Psychology of Art includes attention to the limits of his analysis, the mixed Marxist legacy that is evident in the book, the cultural blinders that affect his vision of the relative value of different artistic productions, the content of what he elsewhere refers to his “tedious investigations” into extant views, and the gist of what he considers to be the essence of art. Attention to his late work falls into two areas: Emotion in formal drama and emotion in everyday drama, each of which involves perezhivanie, roughly but incompletely characterized as emotional experience. The article concludes with an effort to situate Vygotsky's writing on art and emotion both within his broader effort to articulate a comprehensive developmental psychology of socially, culturally, and historically grounded individuals and social groups, and within scholarship that has extended and questioned his work as his influence has expanded beyond the clinics of Soviet Moscow.     

Contexts of Faith: The Religious Foundation of Walter Ong's Literacy and Orality

As priest and teacher, Walter Ong never separated his religious sensibility from his scholarship. Writing often about religious topics, he tells how he came to the fundamental insight (first articulated in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue; Ong, 1958b) through his theological studies of the biblical Hebrew culture. Other aspects of his communication studies bear the mark of his religious vision, one sharing common elements with the theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings he introduced to an American readership in the 1950s. Other religious influences on Ong's work range from his study of Thomistic philosophy and theology in the seminary to his literary studies of the religious poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.     

Gouldner's theoretical method and reflexive sociology

Conclusion There is a further, more substantial proof that Gouldner, somewhere in the deep metaphorically of his thought, recognized the digression of his sociolinguistic phase. It turns out that the Culture of Critical Discourse did reappear one more time after its repression in The Two Marxisms. In the book on Marxism and intellectuals, left unpublished at the time of his death, CCD reenters in a crucial chapter The Origins of Marxist Theory in the New Class. How and where it reappears is most telling.In The Future of Intellectuals one of the most objectivistic sections is Thesis Eleven, The Alienation of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia. Here, still in the sociolinguistic phase, Gouldner tried, it seems, to answer the troubling question of his New Class theory. How, if CCD is classicist and thus deeply flawed, is the New Class to be a source of revolutionary change? He offers two answers: one, CCD is radicalizing partly because... it experiences itself as distant from (and superior to) ordinary languages; and, two, because intellectuals are structurally blocked with respect to their ascendency to power, status, and the fulfillment of their interests. In other words, the New Class is a source of critique, hence, change because it is alienated, by its discourse, and its structural location. It is crucial to note, however, that Gouldner provides no comprehensive discussion of the nature and effects of that alienation, which is left as a presumably self-evident potential tied to a property (CCD) and a structural effect — two very objectivistic explanations. This theme is picked up in the chapter in the book on Marxism and intellectuals. Here Gouldner provides a full account of alienation. After a very brief discussion of CCD (now presented as dynamically interacting with the second alienating effect, career blockages), Gouldner says: Alienation, then, is a statement about the Subject's failure to have acquired the power and control over his world — including the means of production — inherent in the very notion of the Subject. It is a grievance about the constraint to which the Subject has been exposed. Alienation would not be problematic without the premise that man is and should be a Subject, that persons should control their activity.... The aim of such a Subject, then, is not simply self-control and self-development; he also seeks domination over the object world. The Subject reenters, now capitalized, as if to make up for lost time. Even though, in the same place, Gouldner warns of the humanistic imperialism of this view of the alienated Subject, it is quite clear that the same process is at work here as in The Two Marxisms. Though presenting a superficially balanced appraisal of the subject in its objective context, of critical, voluntaristic Marxism against deterministic objectivist Marxism, Gouldner's prose decidedly favors the revolutionary potential of the Subject. Control over human activity, even domination of the object world, is, virtually, an inherent right of the Subject — a conviction that, Gouldner regrets, loses salience with the emergence of Scientific Marxism. It might be too harsh to interpret the sociolinguistic phase as an objectivistic digression. If Gouldner's work is taken as a whole, it could, more fairly, be said that his Reflexive Sociology was, among other things, an attempt to overcome the limitations placed on social theory by its weddedness to the classical, subject-object dichotomy. Though, from one point of view, he remained within the terms of that debate, from another he employed his own dichotomizing method in an attempt to transcend it. If he was, himself, and for good reasons, on the side of critique, the subject, and voluntarism, this does not mean that he ignored the object world. Whether or not his solution prevails remains to be seen. But it is evident that a problem which today is debated widely among social theorists, was tackled by Gouldner a full generation before Foucault, Bourdieu, and Giddens took up this same question. Such was Gouldner's genius. He left a rich legacy precisely because he trusted his own individuating impulses, personal experiences, unique aptitudes and all of the fainter powers of apprehension, and thus could often see what needed to be seen, and say what needed to be said, long before the rest of us.     

The relational element in Charles Tilly's recent (and not so recent) work

In his recent work, Charles Tilly has elaborated a systematic, relational approach to the study of large-scale social and political change that he has applied to a range of substantive processes, ranging from migration to democratization. In this essay, I introduce the basic concepts of his perspective and illustrate their appeal to network analysts.     

Becoming a Social Worker: Chris' Account

Chris Murray, a young African-American male, admitted on a scholarship to a social work masters program, reflexively explores his negotiation of difference in dialogue with an Australian female social work educator twice his age. Standpoint theory and the concept of intersectionality are used to frame Chris' experiences at a private northeast US university after achieving an undergraduate degree in his southern home state. His initial access to university came through military service. Chris was interviewed by the author as part of her international study project examining social work students' experience of diversity in the classroom. The open-ended interview was designed to allow self-identity of difference. Chris ethnographically recounts to a stranger a subjectivity statement of who he is in relation to studying social work. Chris' story works the hyphen between the binary of subjectivity and objectivity through the particulars of his personal history and world-view and his expectation that I as a social work educator share his seeking of social justice. His detailing of what moved him to become a social worker and contextual complexities negotiated along the way connect to wider discourses on how agency and structure play out in lived experience in seeking social justice.     

Edward Gibbon Wakefield,England and 'ignorant,dirty, unsocial, . . . restless,more than half-savage' America

Abstract

Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually credited with devising a new, 'rational' system of colonization, propounded in a series of books and articles between 1829 and 1837. Certainly, this is what his contemporary champions would have us believe but, rather than identifying what he propounds as an entirely new way of understanding colonization, it is more correct to characterize Wakefield's system as a careful decoction of existing ideas, practices and proposals trailed in earlier 19th-century British writings on the Cape, Australia, Canada and America. Published in London in 1833 and New York in 1834, England and America consequently represented a particularly selective reading of contemporary British writings on America, a highly-coloured portrayal of the country designed to demonstrate how emigration and settlement was better not conducted, and a striking contrast to his own, idealized vision of how colonies should be peopled.     

Mystification as an Artistic Strategy in Milan Kundera's Work

ABSTRACT

Using close reading of Kundera's texts, Jan ?ulík argues that many arguments in Milan Kundera's literary works are deliberate provocations. Kundera's approach is undoubtedly related to post-modernism, although he used his mystification techniques long before the arrival of postmodernism, as early as in the Stalinist 1950s when he published fake quotes from Lenin in official Stalinist publications. In Jan ?ulík's view, it is the purpose of Milan Kundera's systematic use of false facts, distortions and disrupted logic to warn his readers against against the unreliability of words and human communication. Kundera seems to argue that the world in its complexity is basically unknowable and the only thing that is left for us is, in despair, in our ignorace of what is going on around us, to carry out pranks.     

Misogyny and Modernity:

This paper argues that what Roussea sees as the modern pathology of "social problem" of dependence is both symbolized and manifested by what are, in Rousseau's eyes, the vices of modern women. Women manifest in microcosm what Rousseau sees as the failings of modern civil society at large. Thus, a major requirement of Rousseau's solution for the modern pathology in The Social Contract is the subjection of women. Despite this clearly misogynistic attitudes, Rousseau's treatment of women is instructive for feminist thought, and useful as an interpretive tool for understanding his larger political theory.     

Property,wealth, and social change: Piketty as a social science engineer

This paper applauds the vision and originality of Piketty's Capital and Ideology. We draw attention to the distinctive methodological perspective which he adopts, which we liken to call “social science engineering.” This allows a problem oriented perspective on long‐term global social change which sidesteps siloed disciplinary debates in social science and history about the meaning of modernity, the rise of capitalism, the formation of social groups, and the primacy of nations. We bring out how his theory of property permits him to take forward his overarching insight that economic growth leads to wealth accumulation. This, therefore, challenges long standing sociological perspectives by insisting that modernity is a conservative, rather than a revolutionary and transformative process. We build on this essential contribution by noting some areas where his work can push forward even further, notably that his focus on shifting relativities obscures qualitative historical changes, and more particularly means his analysis of the 20th century is not as provocative as that of the 19th century.     

Polarization and convergence in academic controversies

Not many years ago both anthropology and political science experienced internal disputes—in the first case over the publication of a book accusing a noted anthropologist of endangering indigenous subjects and in the second over the nature of the field. While the first led to polarization, the second produced a partial convergence and modest reforms. This article examines the two processes and seeks the key mechanisms that produced those differences, closing with a call for broadening the study of contentious politics to cover non-public controversies like the ones examined in this article.

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Why Care about Scientific Controversies?

Since Kuhn claimed that scientific controversies are not always settled by means of rational evaluations of the intrinsic merits of competing theories, the view that the history of science should be recounted by examining the background of scientific controversies and how these controversies came to be settled has become a real heuristic maxim for the historian of science. We take issue with this view by arguing that controversies are not relevant by themselves but only insofar as one can make something out of them. Two important questions then arise: what did one come to learn from a given controversy and what came out of this apprenticeships. We compare Pauline Mazumdar's and Alfred Tauber's approaches to the history of immunology and argue that only the latter addressed these questions. In so doing, he was able to show the extension in which modern immunology is an outcome of Metchnikoff's success in correcting Haeckel's “fundamental biogenetic law”.     

Charles Tilly,German Historicism,and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science

This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.” The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time” and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical.