Collecting for the cabinet of freedom: the parliamentary history of Thomas Clarkson’s chest

This article discusses a wooden chest used by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, to display samples of African natural resources and artefacts. It explores the role played by the chest during the 1788–1789 Privy Council enquiry into the slave trade, and suggests that the box (which is usually thought of as travelling showcase employed by Clarkson in public lectures and meetings) was in fact firmly embedded in – and spoke directly to – the 1788–1789 enquiry process. Its initial purpose was to conjure alternate cargoes in the minds of those debating the slave trade; to enable Parliament to visualise an Africa filled not with potential slaves, but with alternate resources, having a multitude of domestic and commercial uses.     

Pushkin’s America: A Survey of the Sources

A. S. Pouchkine, comme la plupart des russes éduqués à l’époque, avait certaines préconceptions de la vie en Amérique du Nord. Dans ses écrits de jeunesse on peut trouver certains stéréotypes empruntés soit à des sources littéraires soit à certaines opérettes. Cependant la vérité sur les conditions de vie dans les colonies françaises, espagnoles et anglaises du Nouveau Monde, l’intéressait non moins que leur écho romantique. Il est possible de déterminer assez exactement ce que Pouchkine savait au sujet de l’Amérique et de suivre à travers ses écrits, ses changements d’attitude.

Sa bibliothèque personnelle, cataloguée par Modzalevsky en 1909, nous montre qu’il avait de nombreux ouvrages sur l’histoire, la géographie et les coutumes des Amériques, surtout du nord. On peut aussi tenter d’évaluer ses contacts personnels avec certains officiers de marine et diplomates ayant séjourné au Nouveau Monde. Seule une évaluation solide de l’état exact des connaissances de Pouchkine peut nous permettre de juger correctement ses opinions sur la vie et la littérature des Amériques, que l’on trouve dans ses articles et sa poésie. Ses connaissances des conditions de vie, du commerce, de l’histoire et de la littérature américaines, basées sur les ouvrages de Cooper et de Washington Irving, étaient solides.     

At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.     

Stability of Men’s Interracial First Unions: A Test of Educational Differentials and Cohabitation History

Using the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, this study examines how cohabitation and education affect marital dissolution for White, Black and Latino heterosexual males (N = 1,395) in their first same-race or interracial union. This research suggests that a history of cohabitation, plans of marriage and education may help explain the divergent divorce patterns of interracial and same-race unions. Life table analyses and hazard modeling reveal that cohabitation and education have independent effects on marital dissolution, but neither explains the difference between interracial and same-race unions. Measures traditionally associated with divorce attenuate this difference. Subsequent analyses by racial union pairing suggest that Black men with White women and Latino men with Black women have significantly high risks of divorce.     

A sublimed experience of the rhetoric of Plato’s Republic

This article argues that Plato’s Republic promotes a public memory characterized by a sublimed experience of reason. The standard understanding of the meaning and value of the Republic is a product of processes of sublimation rather than a necessary conclusion drawn from the text’s propositional content. Key moments of the text illustrate this pattern of sublimation. The particular strand of arguments from the Republic addressed in this article invite readers to justify the use of deception, to forget the ethical implications of achieving and maintaining justice through deceit, and to identify with the ruling and deceiving class. Critical attention to this line of arguments offers an understanding of the symbiotic, rather than antagonistic, relationship between philosophy and rhetoric while allowing us to recognize the danger inherent in our willingness to rationalize the unethical foundation of the kallipolis.     

Hahn versus Guttmann: revisiting ‘Sports and the Political Movement of Disabled Persons’

Ludwig Guttmann, who pioneered the use of sport in the physical, psychological and social rehabilitation of paraplegic patients, argued that sport facilitates social reintegration, even asserting that: ‘an employer will not hesitate… to employ a paralysed man… when he realizes that [he] is an accomplished sportsman’ (Guttmann, 1976: 13). Disability activist Harlan Hahn, on the other hand, argued that participation by people with disabilities in sport is: an emulation of non-disabled standards; over-emphasises physicality in the assessment of humans; and diverts attention from the struggle for equality. Focusing on the Paralympics, this paper shows that disability sport is neither a panacea for social exclusion, as Guttmann would have it, nor a monolithic disabling institution, as Hahn would suggest—but rather an incredibly complex phenomena politically, socially and historically. It is argued that, whether essentially disablist or not, the Paralympics may make an excellent political platform for the disability rights movement.     

Setting the record straight: Tsvangirai’s memoir At the Deep End as a rival narrative

In this paper, an argument is put forward that through literary and political patronage Morgan Tsvangirai constructed a life narrative that is meant to challenge the ZANU-PF hegemonic discourse of demonisation that presents and depicts him as a political puppet to the British whose agenda is to effect regime change in Zimbabwe. He thus makes use of the book as a political and literary tool to set the record straight. It is further argued that different narrative strategies such as modesty topos, blended voices and historical archiving are used to position Tsvangirai as a political messiah in Zimbabwe, whose involvement in politics was not by accident but a fulfilment of his destiny, cause and calling. Therefore, memoir writing is seen more as an act of defiance and personal archiving for political gain than an interest in one’s personal history. Personal history is instead made to replace national history. The self is the nation and his story is the story of the nation.     

Mead’s Analysis of Social Conflict: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique

Because Mead entered the pantheon of classic sociological thinkers much later than Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, sociologists have unsurprisingly devoted much more critical attention to their ideas than his. Perhaps, nowhere is the lack of this attention on their part more glaring than in his explanation of social conflict. Mead views the emergence and resolution of conflict as taking place within the social act, in which either individuals or groups may be the acting units, and attitudes, roles, significant symbols, and attitudinal assumption operate as the common, key components. As far as the emergence of conflict is concerned, he accounts for it on the basis of insufficient differentiation of roles, non-meritorious allocation of roles, and adoption of self-centered attitudes on the part of the participants during their construction of a social act. As far as the resolution of conflict is concerned, he predictably explains it on the basis of their expansion of role differentiation, distribution of roles on basis of merit, and the adoption of other-centered attitudes. Despite that Mead’s explanation of the resolution and emergence of conflict is relatively consistent and offers many profound insights, it suffers from several irresolvable problems. All these various problems can be traced back to his decision to rest his explanation on his much cherished principle of “sociality,” rather than domination, and thereby, ultimately, his rejection of a radical interactionist’s perspective. Thus, it is now long overdue for sociologists to consider the merits of a new, more radical interactionism as a replacement for his much older and more conventional counterpart, symbolic interactionism.     

A Change of Heart: Iurii Klen’s “Adventures of the Archangel Raphael”

Iurii Klen, one of the leading Ukrainian writers of the thirties and forties, produced perhaps his best short story “Pryhody Arkhanhela Rafaila” [Adventures of the Archangel Raphael, 1948] in the last year of his life. This article is an analysis in the light of a discourse within modernism concerning tradition, and argues that it is a key to understanding the writer’s evolution. Although Klen rejected the militant Bolshevik avant-garde, during his years in Germany he was seduced for a time by fascist avantgarde attitudes and adapted them to a nationalist modernism before breaking with this current in the forties. Klen’s story demonstrates a rejection of the radical social and cultural experimentation of Bolshevism and Stalin’s rule. In its respect for the human values of the European heritage, it can also be read as a rejection of Nazism.     

China’s Non-governmental Microcredit Practice: History and Challenges

This paper provides a systematic assessment of China’s non-governmental microcredit practice. Based on survey results and existing key reports, this paper reviews the evolution and current situation, discusses the policy and legal framework, assesses the poverty outreach and social impact, and extracts the problems and challenges. This paper concludes with presenting some potential initiatives to address the key restrictive issues for sustainable development of the non-governmental microcredit sector.     

Russian refugees. A tragedy or the costs of imperial consciousness?

The author attempts to estimate migration of Russians from other republics of the former Soviet Union back to Russia, and factors causing this migration. The encouragement by many local authorities of anti-Russian feeling for political purposes is identified as a major cause of such re-migration. This is a translation of the Russian article in Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniia (Moscow, Russia), No. 9, 1992, pp. 59-64.     

The Last Rogue of History: Picaresque Elements in Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandriia

This article takes a detailed look at the way in which the Habsburg Monarchy’s policy towards Serbia subtly shifted between 1881, when the Monarchy forced a secret treaty of alliance on the Serbian government, and the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian War of November 1885. Gustav von Kálnoky, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, inherited a policy largely shaped by his Hungarian predecessor, Count Gyula Andrássy, which relied on controlling Serbia through the person of its ruler, the wayward Milan Obrenovi?. The Austrophile and highly unpopular Milan, however, was a disastrous instrument of Austro-Hungarian control, and by the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian conflict, by which point Milan was pleading to be allowed to abdicate, Kálnoky had come to the conclusion that this “personal policy” was a failure, and that the Monarchy was better off relying on the outright coercion of Serbia. The article reconsiders some of the key stages in this development, in particular Andrássy’s memorandum of 24 November 1885, and Kálnoky’s reassessment of the value of the secret treaty of 1881, which depended solely on the guarantee of the Serbian monarch and, as a result, threatened to become worthless without his presence on the throne.     

A note on the stability of Chen’s Lindahl mechanism

There are no general theoretical results on the stability of the Lindahl mechanism introduced by Chen (Econ Theory 19:773–790, 2002). We show that despite not fitting the requirements of the Milgrom and Roberts 1990 stability result for supermodular games, if the Chen mechanism induces a supermodular game, then the best reply map is a contraction. This gives us an easy to identify sufficient condition for dynamic stability of equilibrium.     

Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: A critique

Theory and Society -