Necropenology: conquering new bodies,psychics, and territories of death in East Jerusalem

ABSTRACT

In theorising penal politics, this article investigates the marking of the colonised through an analysis of state violence over dead bodies. Delving into and describing the political scene in which the state – through its courts, law, military, and police – leaves dead bodies bleeding after death, withholds them in carceral refrigerators, and tortures their communities, uncovers what I define as necropenology. Developed from the voices of Jerusalemite families whose children were imprisoned after death, this paper argues that expanding spaces of carcerality, criminalising those who are already dead, and penetrating Palestinian spaces of mourning, illustrates new modes of penology, a necropenology. Necropenology conquers new bodies, psychics, and territories in life and in death through the performance of power that marks both dead and living bodies as disposable. Jerusalemite families articulate first-hand how this form of power strips control of one’s own emotions, inscribes indignities, and keeps the colonised as dangerous entities, always on trial in death and when dead.     

Multiplicity expanded: IR theories,multiplicity, and the potential of trans-disciplinary dialogue

ABSTRACT

Despite the seeming fragmentation of the field of International Relations (IR), a theoretical common ground – not yet clearly perceived in the field – may in fact exist. Justin Rosenberg suggests that existing IR theories can all be conceived of as theories of ‘multiplicity’. This article carefully considers this proposition. It is argued that we may indeed read many IR theories as theories of multiplicity. Yet, in so doing we need to recognize the wide range of – and the contested nature of – perspectives on multiplicity in the field. Crucially, this leads us to conceive of multiplicity in an expanded way, beyond Rosenberg’s notion of ‘societal multiplicity’. Developing this more contested and expanded notion of multiplicity has important implications: for how we perceive IR and its limits in the years to come and, crucially, for the kind of trans-disciplinary dialogues IR scholars will engage in.     

Putting women back in their place. Reflections on slut-shaming,the case Asia Argento and Twitter in Italy

ABSTRACT

Compared to racist and ethnicist discourses, literature on sexist discourses – both off and on-line – as hate speech is relatively underinvestigated. This is partly due to the tendency to minimise accusations of sexism and to reframe misogyny as ‘acceptable’ by constructing it as a form of humour. We decided to focus on slut-shaming, one of the most virulent forms of hate speech, which has always existed but was boosted by social media, becoming a stable low-cost ingredient of today’s rape culture. We propose to consider online slut-shaming as a form of ‘technology-facilitated sexual violence’, where digital technologies are used to facilitate both virtual and face-to-face sexually based harms. According to feminist analysis of sexual violence, this would be a matter of power rather than sex: sex would be the weapon, not the motive. We have tested this research hypothesis by focusing on the Italian reception of the MeToo campaign, triggered by Asia Argento’s denunciation. More specifically, two Different Twitter corpora produced within the same five months period were examined by means of a quantitative and a qualitative methodology.     

Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity

ABSTRACT

The global environmental crisis requires a grasp of how human society interacts with nature, but also, simultaneously, how the world is divided into multiple societies. International Relations has a weak grasp of nature treating it as external to the international – an ‘environment’ to be managed – while environmentalism has a planetary epistemology that occludes the significance of the international. How to break this impasse? While neither Geopolitics nor ‘new materialism’ capture the complex conjuncture of socio-natural and inter-societal dynamics, I argue that Justin Rosenberg’s theorization of the international as ‘the consequences of societal multiplicity’ provides a theoretical opening. If a materialist notion of societal is adopted, ‘societal multiplicity’ allows human-natural and international dynamics to be grasped together. Thus, climate change is not a problem arising exogenously to the international, but something emerging through international dynamics, reciprocally affecting the units, structure and processes of the international system itself.     

‘We Listen for What the Waves Intone’: Intertextuality and the Circum-Atlantic Poetics of Seamus Heaney,Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes

Abstract

This article argues that the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Natasha Trethewey and Kwame Dawes constructs the Atlantic space as an oceanic intertext. Utilising Joseph Roach’s notion of the circum-Atlantic, this article examines how Trethewey’s and Dawes’ intertextual engagement with Heaney highlights how the Atlantic rim retains ‘a memory imperfectly deferred’. Through tracing connections between the work of Heaney, Dawes and Trethewey it becomes apparent that, in addition to thematic preoccupations with the legacy of imperial racisms and colonial displacement, the writers share a similar set of motifs. These poets fashion watery interstices at the margins of the Atlantic – coastlines, bogs and flooded islands – as intercultural lieux de mémoire, resonant with memory and haunted by an intertextual poetics that evokes the chorus of ‘water-lost’ Atlantic voices. This article suggests that, although the Atlantic is fashioned as an agent of disconnection, violence and liminality, it also functions as a reminder of the deep time that joins the Atlantic regions and its archipelagos, with its layers of multiple temporalities and storied pasts.     

Visual representations of ethnic violence: an Indonesian portrayal

The horrific violence that has marred Indonesia's ‘transition to democracy’ raises numerous disconcerting questions; not least of which is how future interested actors or governments – central and regional alike – will tackle these atrocities in a historical framework. How should a series of historical events, such as the killing of thousands of Indonesians by Indonesians be (un)officially remembered? Two paintings that hang in Sambas, West Kalimantan's most prominent cultural centrepiece, the Alwadzi Koebillah kraton, are remarkable, for they give us a glimpse as to how local voices might attempt to possess the historical meanings and readings of Indonesia's recent ethnic strife. Perhaps one of a kind in Indonesia, these paintings boldly portray the bloody battles that took place in Sambas in early 1999, pitting the ‘courageous’ and ‘youthful’ Malays of Sambas against the ‘middle-aged’ and ‘treacherous’ Madurese. These depictions make it abundantly clear that, through this bloodletting, Sambas Malays awoke from their slumber in time to mobilise, to confront and to defeat their nemesis. As an ethnopolitical force, the glorious rise of ‘Malay’ is unmistakable. The broader political context in which these paintings were commissioned, however, invests them with greater significance. Only in a decentralised state, one distinct from the excessive centralism of the New Order, would the (semi) public display of these heroic memorials to local, i.e. non-national, violence be made possible.     

‘Cycles of disadvantage’ revisited: young people,families and poverty across generations*

ABSTRACT

One of Andy Furlong’s abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural ‘underclass’ can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor ‘cultures of worklessness’ explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural ‘underclass’, in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations.     

Actors,others, simulacra: a Deleuzean minority report on the early modern Dubrovnik stage

ABSTRACT

A playwright in the minor and marginal culture of renaissance Ragusa, Marin Dr?i? (1508–1557) has often been compared to Shakespeare, despite the obvious impossibility of influence in either direction. There is however an aspect of Dr?i?’s legacy which has received a scarce critical interest in Croatia, although it could also be discussed along the lines of Shakespeare studies: early modern Dubrovnik acting practice, culture, and style. Dr?i?’s actual and meta-theatrical treatment of acting will here be interpreted through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘One less manifesto’. In this essay, Deleuze expands his notion of ‘the minor’, arguing for a kind of acting practice that would rely on variation, movement, becoming, and a perpetual linguistic deformation, forces that hinder absorption into the discourse of ‘the major’. I will further suggest that Marin Dr?i?’s exposure of the anti-theatrical prejudice of his contemporaries – clothed in a mock-version of Genesis and elaborated in the prologue of his comedy Uncle Maroje – could be read as an exemplary inversion of Plato’s method of argumentation that makes a Deleuzian case for the actor as the ultimate, troubling Other, the simulacrum of true being, a promiscuous and metamorphic kin of marionettes, animals, and women.     

‘We Were All Involved’: The ‘Great Violence of 2008–2012’ on the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez Border

Abstract

This article discusses El Paso–Ciudad Juárez residents’ experiences of the ‘Great Violence of 2008–2012’ in the border region between the United States and Mexico. As a result of the Mexican government’s ‘war’ on organised crime, launched by President Felipe Calderón in 2016, the region saw a wave of violence that created mayhem, thousands of deaths, and a vast sense of insecurity among the border community. The physical sites border residents had access to – or were denied entrance to – had a fundamental significance for their everyday existence. By the same token, the refusal to succumb to spatial restrictions, or claiming space for oneself despite ongoing atrocities, served as an empowering way to deal with the threat of violence. Drawing on 54 interviews and 22 written testimonies, the article claims that the intersection of spatiality and agency is central in conceptualising experiences of security/insecurity caused by the violence. It argues that spatial strategising provided tools with which the various parties involved exercised their agency in imposing, coping with and countering violence. The discussion concludes by problematising the intersecting issues of agency, involvement and complicity as broader ethical and epistemological questions invoked by the study of violence.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.     

A strange lobster tale of self-sacrificial transversality: or,transversal poetics flourishes in the spectral ether of Deleuze,Bataille, and Shakespeare

ABSTRACT

Written from the perspective of Transversal Poetics, this essay involves an exploration of the theory’s various selves in the context of a self-immolating spectacle staged at London’s New Globe Theatre by the theory’s progenitor, Dr. Bryan Reynolds. The essay outlines the history of this scandalous affair, which was inspired by the work of Rodrigo Garcia (Accidens: Matar Para Comer), Deleuze and Guattari, and George Bataille. Transversal Poetics travels with Reynolds to London and is shocked and appalled by the lurid transgression that unfolds on stage as Reynolds is hung on a massive hook and then dismembered for the adoring crowds. Exploring the complexity of its own reactions to this new initiative by Reynolds – and his attempt to conceive an ‘offspring’ with Bataille through a highly questionable and outrageous Deleuzian approach – Transversal Poetics is itself subtly transformed. It casts a powerful light on the urban milieu surrounding the New Globe (Southwark, the City of London) as it brings the era of neoliberal financialization to a close. A lobster-city that combines both ‘central place’ and the ‘maritime’ qualities (as identified by Christaller), London turns out to be the perfect location for the demolition of the Deleuzian taboo against the sacrificial.     

Conjuring up traditions: atmospheres,eras and family Christmases

Despite some macro level concern with the concepts of tradition and ‘detraditionalization’, sociologists for the most part have paid relatively little attention to the everyday realities of family traditions as they are experienced and narrated in people's lives. Based on a qualitative study of ‘Family Backgrounds and Everyday Lives’, this article explores people's experiences and narratives of family Christmases, and examines how traditions are conjured up and evoked in multi‐dimensional, embodied, emplaced and sensory ways. The article argues that in recognizing and conjuring up family practices and happenings as ‘traditions’, people create a vivid and potent sense of generational eras, atmospheres and family styles. These have a moral currency that matters – sometimes quite profoundly – in people's lives, and are the subject of debate and negotiation between, as well as within, generations. Christmas traditions, it is argued, are central in the constitution of eras not least because they enable the bundling up of time – past, present and anticipated for descendant generations – into packages of generalized ‘time out of time’, characterized by distinctive atmospheres, and around which memories can coalesce and about which stories can be told. These atmospheric eras – more than broad or macro understandings of ‘tradition’ – are central in how generational dynamics and personal family histories take shape, and how memories are ‘indexed’ in and through time.     

Qur’anic education and non-confessional RE: an intercultural perspective

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the reported experiences of Muslim students that regularly shift between Muslim ‘supplementary education’ (including its traditional confessional focus on learning to read Arabic and then memorise and recite the Qur’an) and mainstream school education (including its ‘inclusive’ form of religious education’). The aim has been to better comprehend how these students make sense of this dual educational experience while negotiating the knowledge, skills, and values that are taught to them by two often seemingly disparate institutions. A further aim is to place our findings within the growing field of intercultural education. Though both types of education are often thought to be distinct and oppositional – the former as non-confessional and ‘modern’, the latter as confessional and ‘outmoded’ – both English and Swedish students were able to identify a degree of symbiosis between the two, particularly in relation to the process of memorisation. Thus, it became increasingly clear to the researchers that Muslim student reflection on their participation in both traditions of education had an intercultural dimension in the sense of encouraging dialogue and discussion across educational cultures prompting new knowledge and understanding. This article lays out some of the evidence for this conclusion.     

Bandits,Militants, and Martyrs: Sub-state Violence as Claim to Authority in Late Antique North Africa

Fourth Century North Africa was a site of intense religious and political conflict. Emerging from a period of persecution and newly legitimized by the Roman state, the Christian Church immediately fractured into two competing camps. Now known as the Donatist schism, this fracture was the result of competing claims to religious authority between two camps of bishops, but the doctrinal debate at its core precipitated a specific form of violence: attacks on clergy and property perpetrated by roving groups of militant bandits. Known as circumcellions, these bands acquired a perverse reputation for religious zeal, a desire for martyrdom, and what their opponents described as the ‘madness’ and ‘insanity’ of their violence. Here I analyze sources produced by both Donatists and Catholics to trace patterns of circumcellion violence. I draw on borderland theory and research on non-state violence to argue that such acts were not mad, but rather the result of strategic efforts to consolidate religious and political power. In this, Donatism and the sectarian violence that accompanied it provide important insights into how banditry and peasant rebellions can serve as alternate sources of social and political power, avenues through which heterodox movements challenge the power state and religious hierarchies alike.     

Pessimism of the will,optimism of the intellect: endings and beginnings

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for the need for an ‘optimism of the intellect’ – in the form of the need for cultural studies – in the face of a growing ‘pessimism of the will.’ It illustrates the value of cultural studies by considering three contemporary problematics: post-truth, polarization and consent.     

Disinformation,performed: self-presentation of a Russian IRA account on Twitter

ABSTRACT

How disinformation campaigns operate and how they fit into the broader social communication environment – which has been described as a ‘disinformation order’ [Bennett & Livingston, (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139] – represent critical, ongoing questions for political communication. We offer a thorough analysis of a highly successful disinformation account run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency: the so-called ‘Jenna Abrams’ account. We analyze Abrams’ tweets and other content such as blogposts with qualitative discourse analysis, assisted by quantitative content analysis and metadata analysis. This yields an in-depth understanding of how the IRA team behind the Abrams account presented this persona across multiple platforms and over time. Especially, we describe the techniques used to perform personal authenticity and cultural competence. The performance of personal authenticity was central to her persona building as a likeable American woman, whereas the performance of cultural competence enabled her to infiltrate American conservative communities with resonant messages. Implications for understanding disinformation processes, and how some aspects of the hybrid media system are especially vulnerable to hijacking by bad actors are discussed.     

Diffusion of Variegated Neoliberalization processes in Euro-Mediterranean policies: a strategic relational approach

ABSTRACT

Recent contributions to the study of neoliberalism have made considerable advances in transcending the dichotomy between understandings of the concept either as an ‘ideology’ or as a monolithic ‘structure’. In particular, the Variegated Neoliberalization (VNLT) approach has proposed an understanding of neoliberalism that relies on a path-dependent moment (i.e. the ‘uneven development of neoliberalization’) which is then followed by a path-shaping moment (i.e. the ‘neoliberalization of regulatory uneven development’). Such a perspective allows us to understand both systemic and contingent tendencies in neoliberalization processes across different geographies, transcending the socially constructed North–South divide. However, the VNLT approach has encountered a number of critiques, particularly in relation to its treatment of agency. In order to transcend these critiques and propose a more nuanced understanding of ways agents reflexively and recursively interpret and deepen – or refrain from deepening – neoliberal norms, I turn to the Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA) proposed by [Jessop, B. (2001). Institutional re(turns) and the strategic – relational approach. Environment and Planning A, 33(7), 1213–1235]. Through the SRA, it becomes possible to pinpoint both instances of ‘structured coherence’ and ‘patterned incoherence’ resulting from agential reflexivity in different contexts of neoliberalization. I will therefore turn to cases where these two patterns can be observed in the context of Euro-Mediterranean policies – that is, Morocco’s ‘structured coherence’ due to its internalized and deepening neoliberalization, and Egypt’s ‘patterned incoherence’ as a result of its still uneven development of neoliberalization.     

Translatio Vampyri: Transamerican Vampires and Transnational Capital in Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos

Abstract

‘As an act of disruption’, writes Emily Apter, ‘translation becomes a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history’. The vampires in Guillermo del Toro’s film Cronos (1993) reveal similar ‘disruptions’, ‘repositionings’,and translations. Del Toro’s reinvented vampires embody on the screen – even as they are caught within – transnational webs of storytelling and neoliberal capitalism. Cronos dramatizes the transamerican exploitation of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) at the same time as it visually remakes the hemispheric and transatlantic filmic/literary trope of the vampire. Del Toro’s neo-gothic recreations, and socio-economic commentaries, ‘translate’ the vampire from a European backdrop of bloodthirsty counts and ruined castles to a globalized Mexican metropolis full of bustling streets, middle-class life, and grimy assembly plants. That translation reveals and disrupts the vampiric logic of modern transamerican economies.     

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,modalities, pathways

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.