THE INFLUENCE OF FEAR OF CRIME, GENDER, AND SOUTHERN CULTURE ON CARRYING FIREARMS FOR PROTECTION

This research examines the influence of fear of crime, gender, and a southern cultural tradition on the frequency of carrying firearms for protection against criminal victimization. Analysis of carrying guns for protection, as opposed to having them in the home or owning them for this purpose, is argued to remove some methodological problems plaguing much previous research. Fear of crime is not found to be a significant predictor of carrying; however, gender and cultural context do have predictable influences. Males and persons residing in a traditionally southern cultural context carried guns most frequently, compared to others, for protection against crime. One important finding is an interaction effect between gender and culture: southern culture levels the difference between genders by increasing female more than male carrying of a gun. Theoretical and research implications are discussed.     

DIS-GNOSIS : DISNEY AND THE RE-TOOLING OF KNOWLEDGE,ART, CULTURE,LIFE, ETC.

This essay was written in 2000, hence before 9/11, Dot.Bomb, the stock market crash and the War on Terror, each of which may well have modified and/or intensified elements in the configuration proposed below. In an earlier draft, the essay accompanied an exhibition of Disney-influenced art entitled ’Never Never Land’, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud. The exhibition was installed in 2000-2001 at art museums at Florida Atlantic University, South Florida University and Rutgers. The show featured work by Jim Anderson, James Angus, Markus Baenziger, Bonnie Collura, Rico Gatson, Arturo Herrera, Colin Keefe, Tommy Kenny, Mary Magsamen, Melissa Marks, Jason Middlebrook, Michael Minelli, Daniel Mirer, Takashi Murikami, Stephen Pascher, Daniela Steinfield, Gabriele Stellbaum, Brian Tolle and Type A. Drawing alternately on the critical literature and fairy tales, the essay examines the integrated and integrative logics of, on the one hand, the Disney business plan and, on the other, the trademark Disney modes of narration. A broad range of ‘disneyfied’ effects are proposed on everything from work, retail and consumer culture to contemporary art and architecture. I argue that these effects are underpinned by a figuration and positioning of both childhood and ‘innocence’ that is consistent across the entire spectrum of Disney products/texts and which is global in its scope and implications. ‘Dis-gnosis’, a neologism coined for this essay, is related, though not reducible to sibling terms like ideology, mauvaise, foi, amnesia and false consciousness. Dis-gnosis refers to the putative ‘knowledge’ effect produced by the strategies, logics and inferred purposes that form the objects of study.     

ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN J. M. COETZEE

This essay reads J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year in its historical context (the moment of the US war in Iraq, Abu Graib, Guantanamo and the apparent triumph of neoliberalism), while also probing the problems at stake in the practice of contextual reading and of taking the work as staging the opinions of the biographical Coetzee. The essay teases out not only the question of whether Coetzee should be seen as a public intellectual (the short but not entirely satisfactory answer is ‘no’), but also how the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ play out in his oeuvre and are helpful in pondering Coetzee's approach to questions of genre, censorship and authorship.     

REVEALING THE UNSEEN: TOURISM,ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Contemporary cultural criticism is increasingly recognizing the central place that tourism occupies in organizing interactions, both economic and social, between different peoples in the world today. In this paper, I take up the question of what role photography plays in determining the nature of touristic experience.By drawing on Martin Heidegger's account of modernity as the epoch of modern technology, I seek to articulate an understanding of touristic photography that goes beyond conventional critiques of its objectifying character and tendency to conform to predetermined semiotic markers. Instead, by considering the examples of the photographing of local peoples, and of attempts to photograph what I refer to ‘the unphotographable sight’, I develop an alternative perspective on both the dangers and the epistemic possibilities of touristic photography. Such a perspective, it is argued, allows us to move beyond the identification of photography with the ocularcentric discourses of Western modernity and towards a consideration of the possibilities of touristic photography as art. By foregrounding the role of photographic images in the production of memory and self identity, it is suggested that tourism can be understood in terms of what Michel Foucault refers to as the creation of one's life as a work of art. Finally, I argue that by attending to the limits of touristic photography, the potential to develop a new way of seeing may be fostered.     

Crime,in/security and mob justice: the micropolitics of sovereignty in Cameroon

Violent crime poses important challenges for quotidian concerns over security and safety by ordinary citizens in several Africa states. This is especially so in contexts where state security agents are perceived as highly corrupt and/or where African states seem unable to “protect” their citizens from violent crime. The widespread sense of anxiety over various forms of violent crime and state failure to guarantee protection for citizens generates a quest for alternative practices of safety-making that, in turn, evoke serious concerns over state power and sovereignty in Africa. Focusing on mob justice in Cameroon, this article argues that the political contextualisation of sovereignty must pay attention not only to the sovereign’s right to kill and let live, but also its responsibility to guarantee safety for those citizens it chooses to let live. The paper demonstrates that in Cameroon mob justice is an insurgent mode of social control or securitisation as well as a contextual expression of contested sovereignty directed at the state’s unwillingness or incapacity to contain dangerous forms of violent crime.     

GLOBALIZATION AND TRINIDAD CARNIVAL: DIASPORA,HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY IN GLOBAL CULTURE

This article is premised on the view that culturally, the periphery is greatly influenced by the society of the centre, but the reverse is also the case. This is a case study of the impact and implications for global culture of periphery-to-centre cultural flows. It is argued that the Trinidad carnival and the overseas Caribbean carnivals (e.g. Notting Hill, London; Caribana, Toronto; Labour Day, New York) are products of and responses to the processes of globalization as wellas transcultural and transnational formations. Carnival is theorized as a hybrid site for the ritual negotiation of cultural identity and practice by the Caribbean diaspora.     

RECLAIMING HERITAGE: COLOURIZATION,CULTURE WARS AND THE POLITICS OF NOSTALGIA

This article considers the discursive continuities between a specifically liberal defence of cultural patrimony, evident in the debate over film colourization, and the culture war critique associated with neo-conservatism. It examines how a rhetoric of nostalgia, linked to particular ideas of authenticity, canonicity and tradition, has been mobilized by the right and the left in attempts to stabilize the configuration and perceived transmission of American cultural identity. While different in scale, colourization and multiculturalism were seen to create respective (postmodern) barbarisms against which defenders of culture, heritage and good taste could unite. I argue that in its defence of the ‘classic’ work of art, together with principles of aesthetic distinction and the value of cultural inheritance, the anti-colourization lobby helped enrich and legitimize a discourse of tradition that, at the end of the 1980s, was beginning to reverberate powerfully in the conservative challenge to a ‘crisis’ within higher education and the humanities. This article attempts to complicate the contemporary politics of nostalgia, showing how a defence of cultural patrimony has distinguished major and minor culture wars, engaging left and right quite differently but with similar presuppositions.     

READING PIERRE BOURDIEU'S MASCULINE DOMINATION : NOTES TOWARDS AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF GENDER,CULTURE AND CLASS

This article analyses Bourdieu's late work on masculine domination, in the context of his wider theory of practice. It assesses the logic of his argument and focuses particularly on the wide-ranging case he makes for women's complicity with such gender domination, alongside their opposition to it. The question of whether Bourdieu's sociology is unacceptably pessimistic about the possibilities for social transformation is then considered, taking up certain key contemporary debates about his work. The final section draws on Bourdieu's rudimentary sketches from various sources for an intersectionalist study of gender and class, deriving ultimately from the uncompromising exposure of economic and social interests in Distinction. Using independent evidence, it traces some of the less-remarked consequences of women's entry into well-paid employment on the labour market: not least, the impact of their work on the class structure and the recomposition of domestic labour on a class basis.