The Bengal Connection: Transnationalising America in The Namesake and The Tree Bride

Abstract

A reading is presented of The Namesake and The Tree Bride as diasporic novels that transnationalise the host culture by inscribing the ethnicity and history of Bengal on to the cultural topography of America. This interpolation is contextualised both in terms of the 'Bengal connection' — the now occluded saga of Bengal's rich commercial and intellectual contacts with New England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries — and the changing paradigms of immigrant socialisation from the melting pot to multiculturalism and beyond. The inference drawn is that the non-Eurocentric and non-Atlantic 'Bengal connection', which may be taken as emblematic of other such strands in American society, not only troubles monologic myths of 'Americanness', but simultaneously interrogates the sufficiency of the 'Atlantic' template as the marker of a multi-ethnic nation. A suggested alternative is Tagore's 'vernacular nationalism' that admits intrinsic otherness as integral to its conception of national identity.     

国际青年权益法的起源和发展

国际青年权益法的起源 可以说,任何国家的文明发展史事实上也是各国青年人争取自己的合法权益、反对成人一代制定的各种陋俗的斗争的历史,国际青年权益法就是在这两代之间的斗争与反斗争中孕育并初露端倪。早在１１５８年意大利的国王弗雷德瑞克·巴巴罗沙就曾批准过“学生阶层”的权利和特权,而学生的教育、思想自由、演讲、结社、集会、旅行等权利被正式得到任可并在整个欧洲盛行开来则是在中世纪时期,１３６５年,鲁道夫四世（ＤｕｋｅＲｕｄｏｌｐｈ Ⅳ）正式颁布《维也那大学联合会规则》,它其中就有这样的法律条款：学生代表有选…     

The couch and the clinic The cultural authority of popular psychiatry and psychoanalysis

This paper examines the discourse produced by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who wrote for non-professional audiences. As professionals who reached out beyond their professions, their writing raises questions about the authority they invoked. The two factions in this popular psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, staked out cultural authority using systematically different types of appeals. The psychiatric approach involved a ‘pure’ professionalism, invoking psychiatry’s similarities to medicine. The psychoanalytic approach involved an explicit dissociation from medical authority, and claimed a difference from medical expertise as a mark of intellectual transcendence. What becomes clear is that these standpoints were constructed through discourse as types of strategic positionings. Concluding notes address the idea that Antonio Gramsci’s labels of ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ are not only types of intellectuals; they are also stakes in the game amongst competitors for cultural authority. This insight is then applied to broader considerations regarding public intellectuals.     

The Insurgent Pedagogues: Bowles and Gintis In The Classroom

Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976, 340 pp. R7,20 (paperback).     

Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and The Radical Enlightenment

The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry. Joan R. Sherman (ed.).Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. 158pp. $29.95 and $12.95. ISBN 0–8078–2341–4.

Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and The Politics of Representative Identity. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. x, 314pp. $45.00 and $18.95. ISBN 0–8078–2323–6.

Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner. Barbara Ladd. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1997. xxi, 197pp. $30.00. ISBN 0–8071–2065–0.

Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Elaine K. Ginsberg (ed.). Durham: Duke University Press. 1996. £43.95 and £15.95. ISBN 0–8223–1755–9.     

The Spirit and the Flesh: The Rhetorical Nature of The Last Temptation of Christ

In this article I examine the rhetoric of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Using Kenneth Burke's (1962) concept of "consubstantiality," I argue that the film exceeds traditional notions of character–viewer identification by constructing a spectatorial dilemma that resembles the character's dilemma in limited but consequential ways. I then suggest that this dynamic may be why so many Christian viewers were drawn to a character they understood to be in conflict with the biblical Jesus.     

The journey of dually-involved youth: The description and prediction of rereporting and recidivism

Dually-involved youth refers to youth that are simultaneously receiving services from both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. The current study focused on a sample of dually-involved youth (N = 1148). The study examined the characteristics of dually-involved youth and reported and predicted the incidence of subsequent maltreatment and re-offending. We found that 8% of dually-involved youth had at least one arrest before entering child welfare system, 32% experienced new reports of maltreatment referrals subsequent to arrest, and 56% were charged with a second offense (i.e., recidivated). The court outcomes received in delinquency court were associated with both rereporting and recidivism. These findings support the development of a shared services model for child welfare and juvenile justice systems.     

“经验研究”与“理论研究”——古典社会学、心理学的诠释学意涵

当前中国社会学中的一个突出问题是,"经验研究"与"理论研究"两个阵营之间相互质疑。然而,从当代诠释学的角度则有"经验"与"理论"一致性的命题:经验是文本的类似物。这一命题原创性地蕴含在社会学和心理学的奠基者詹姆斯、涂尔干、弗洛伊德和韦伯的思想之中,而本文的主体部分即发掘这些古典思想的诠释学意涵。文章指出,基于这一诠释学命题的理论建构,在解决中国社会学中两个阵营对峙问题的同时,将文化自觉置于学科建设的基础位置。     

The Duchenne Smile and Persuasion

We investigated persuasiveness as a social outcome of the ability to produce a deliberate Duchenne smile in a role-play task and of a participant’s use of a Duchenne smile while persuading someone in a live interaction. Participants were tasked with persuading an experimenter to drink a pleasant and unpleasant tasting juice as well as not drink a pleasant and unpleasant juice while being videotaped. Participants’ deliberate Duchenne smiling ability was measured by asking participants to smile while acting out “genuine happiness” and also to mask imagined negative affect with a smile. Smiles in the deliberate Duchenne smiling task and the persuasion task were coded for presence of the Duchenne marker, and naïve viewers of the persuasion task made ratings of how pleasant they thought the juice was. Results showed further evidence that a sizeable minority of people can deliberately produce a Duchenne smile and showed that those with this ability are more persuasive. When persuading to drink the pleasant tasting juice, the correlation between the ability to produce a deliberate Duchenne smile and persuasion was partially due to the use of the Duchenne smile while persuading, but this was not the case with the unpleasant tasting juice. When persuading to drink the unpleasant juice, participants who could deliberately put on the Duchenne smile were more persuasive but their persuasiveness was not the result of using a Duchenne smile during the persuasion task.     

The Supreme Court and Race

The Supreme Court has attempted to redefine race relations for decades. This unfortunately turned into a quagmire from which it was able to extricate itself only by lowering the intensity of its moral rhetoric. In particular, the Fullilove case represented a welcome retreat from race-conscious social engineering.