‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833

This article explores abolitionist treatments of East Indian slavery in the 1820s. It argues that rather than resulting from a lack of information or a conception of the qualitative difference between East and West Indian slavery, ambivalent and muted abolitionist responses to this issue prior to 1833 were conditioned by the wider imperatives of the anti-slavery campaign. Abstentionist substitution of ‘free-grown’ East India sugar for morally tainted West Indian produce, together with wider economic arguments about the equalisation of the sugar duties and the potential of India to provide a free labour alternative to the West Indian slave system, marked points of intersection between abolitionist and East India economic interests that relied on the assumption that labour in India, however cheap, was fundamentally ‘free’. As a result, rather than engaging with the various forms of slavery in India, abolitionists focused on discursively distancing them both from sugar production and from their campaign. This response suggests that abolitionist ideology was intersected by pragmatic political, economic, and discursive imperatives that precluded the universal application of humanitarian anti-slavery ideals.     

“It May Be Her Eggs But It’s My Blood”: Surrogates and Everyday Forms of Kinship in India

This ethnographic study of commercial gestational surrogacy in a small clinic in western India introduces the concept of “everyday forms of kinship”—kinship ties as the product of conscious everyday strategy, and, at times, as a vehicle for survival and/or resistance. The surrogates’ constructions of kinship as a daily process disrupt kinship theories that are based solely on biology. So, too, do they disrupt the patrilineal assumptions made in studies of Indian kinship. Kinship ties instead find their basis in shared bodily substances (blood and breast milk) and shared company, as well as in the labor of gestation and of giving birth. By emphasizing connections based on shared bodily substance and by de-emphasizing the ties the baby has with its genetic mother and the men involved in surrogacy (the genetic fathers and the surrogates’ husbands), the surrogates challenge established hierarchies in kin relationships—where genes and the male seed triumph above all. Simultaneously, by forming kinship ties with the baby, the intended mother, and other surrogates residing with them, surrogates in India form ties that cross boundaries based on class, caste and religion and sometimes even race and nation. By focusing on the notions of blood (shared substance) and sweat (labor) as basis for making kinship claims, this study both extends anthropological literature that emphasizes the non-procreative basis of kinship and feminist works that denaturalize kinship ties and make visible the labor involved in forming kinship ties and maintaining a family.     

The Politics of Space and Culture in Santiago, Chile’s Street Markets

Recent discussions of contentious politics have focused on struggles in and over space and place. This article builds upon these concerns by using ethnographic, interview, and documentary data to analyze the spatial politics of street market vendors in Santiago, Chile. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s concepts of perceived, conceived, and lived space as well as ideas drawn from research on space and protest, I show how street market vendors build upon spatial routines, a sense of place, political alliances, and scale jumping in their self-defense strategies at the local, national, and international scales. The findings illustrate Lefebvre’s argument that the advance of abstract space (constructed by dominant economic and political elites) provokes resistance by groups who defend and seek to reconstruct lived space.

The Department of Literature and the Department of English: Transforming Aspects of ‘English Studies’ in South Africa

Abstract

This article begins with a brief survey of the different manifestations of ‘English studies’ at various South African universities, demonstrating the lack of clarity regarding the roles and responsibilities of the ‘English Department’: should it teach literature in English, or should it teach the English language? Such inconsistency makes the ‘Department of English’ as it currently exists unable to contribute towards the intellectualisaton of African languages (Alexander, 2005) and the transformation of South Africa's universities, particularly with regard to the use of African languages for learning and teaching. The article thus proposes that the ‘Department of English’ and the ‘Department of Eiterature’ should be separated. The former should take its place alongside other language departments and, at English-language universities, be primarily responsible for English language teaching and support (for those students to whom English-medium instruction presents a barrier to learning). The latter should pursue literary studies – not only ‘literatures in English’, but also texts in translation – a pursuit that calls attention to the potential for dialogue between literary texts across linguistic, ethnic, and national divides.     

The Legacy of ‘Solidarity’: Class,Democracy, Culture and Subjectivity in the Polish Social Movement

The sociological debate on the nature of Solidarity, and its legacy for social mobilization in today's Poland, are assessed through secondary research as well as primary research on Polish social movements in 1995–2001. The three classic interpretations of Solidarity (class, democracy and nation) are discussed, and two conclusions are reached to overcome the ‘class versus intellectuals’ dispute. First, against cultural and political interpretations, a class interpretation is appropriate although not exclusive and not in a classic Marxist sense. Second, a fourth element, subjectivity, needs to be added to understand the rare combination of egalitarianism and individualism in Solidarity. The class and the subjective elements derive from the double nature of Polish society: industrial and ‘vocationally’ (not factually) totalitarian. The implication is that social mobilization in Poland can be expected primarily in labour activism and marginal cultural movements.     

Presence of ‘America’ in Religious Circles of India

The paper shows how ‘America’ gradually became present in the Religious Circles of India after the arrival of Swami Vivekananda in America in 1893. Swami Vivekananda is the first individual who not only succeeded in introducing Hinduism, Vedanta in particular, to America and the West, but also in introducing what he considered to be the best aspects of American scientific and material culture to India. The bridge which Swami Vivekananda built and opened between America and India continues to be travelled by the saints, mystics, and religious leaders of India and the philanthropists, spiritual seekers and scholars of religion of America and the West even today. This modern re-synthesis of the material and the scientific with the Vedanta has been beneficial to both countries and cultures.     

‘The Rule of Men Entirely Great’: Republicanism,Ritual, and Richelieu in Melville’s ‘The Two Temples’

Abstract

This article explores the complex and multifarious reasons behind Herman Melville’s decision to refer to the English playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 work Richelieu, or The Conspiracy in his 1854 diptych ‘The Two Temples’. It responds to a critical consensus that has seen the reference merely as a sarcastic attack on William Macready (whose rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest was the nominal cause of the bloody 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York), by contextualizing the play within traditions of antebellum American Anglophilia. By using a combination of new critical work on Anglo-Americanism and anthropological ritual theory, I show how Bulwer-Lytton’s play was significant to Melville’s artistic development. In particular, I demonstrate how the play influenced his increasing engagement with republican and theatrical forms of expression that emphasized the importance of filial relationships between America and Britain in a period of increasing hostility between the two nations.     

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism,Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

Abstract

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular.     

Culture instead of politics: negotiating ‘Otherness’ in intercultural educational activity

Programmes based on intercultural encounters with the ‘Other’ place culture and cultural difference at their centre. ‘Cultural discourse’ has even been defined as a new epistemology and praxis that plays a key role in the process of recognition. In the light of these assumptions, this study used ethnographic field work to examine the ways culture was employed by Palestinian and Jewish students who took part in an intercultural programme in a large academic institution in Israel (2006–2010). The findings reveal two major discursive practices that were used during the meetings: individuation and collectivisation of culture. Individuation was used mostly by the Jewish group and served to emphasise the particularity of the participants. Collectivisation was used mostly by the Palestinian group and served to emphasise the particularity of the group. The different ways both practices used culture served to position majority–minority rhetoric outside national political contexts. Thus, by revealing the way power relations were discursively re-produced by the use of culture, these findings problematise the role and authority given to culture in encounters with the ‘Other’.     

‘Tumult and Silence’ in the Study of the American Slave Revolts

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars of the American slave revolts were concerned primarily with what the revolts revealed about the character of slavery and those who resisted it. Recently, in a shift in perspective that has not been fully appreciated, several historians have used the methods of micro-history to focus attention instead on the process by which stories of the revolts were composed. The emphasis of this new approach on silences in the historical record accounts for its immense interest to the historical profession, as well as for its profound limitation as a contribution to our understanding of American slavery.     

‘The Realm of Maiden Beauty’: Spectres of Slavery,Rebellion, and Creolisation in the Landscape of Cable’s Louisiana

Using a creative interdisciplinary method of enquiry, this article seeks to exorcise the spectres of revolutionary creolisation embedded in George Washington Cable’s 1880 novel The Grandissimes. It probes, in particular, the secreted traces of the Creole diaspora triggered by the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and attempts to peel back the manifold layers of ideological occlusion embedded in the (ostensibly white, Anglo-American) narrative frame of Cable’s omniscient narrator and his protagonist Joseph Frowenfeld, which suppress the connections between inter-American identities across diverse, revolutionary, creolistic worlds in Louisiana and the Gulf South. Unlike other studies examining traces of the Haitian Revolution in The Grandissimes, which tend to focus on the parallels between fictional and historical figures in Cable’s southern romance, this article dissects the subtle allusions to the revolution and the attendant diaspora found in the plantation infrastructures and the urban landscape of Cable’s Louisiana. In so doing, it demonstrates how Saint-Domingan migrants affirmed and reinvigorated the cultural landscape of the ‘Creole’ South and ‘circumvented’ the ideological spread of ‘Americanness’ at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, and during successive moments thereafter.     

When ‘exile’ becomes sedentary: on the quotidian experiences of ‘India-born’ Tibetans in Dharamsala,north India

Waltraud Kokot and her coauthors stated ‘ … . despite a necessary focus on transnational networks and movement, ethnographic studies of diaspora must also not neglect the realities of sedentary diasporic life.’ Taking such a call as my point of departure, this article explores the quotidian experiences of ‘in exile’ specific to a subgroup of Tibetans in Dharamsala, north India, who have for a couple of decades at least described themselves as the ‘India-born’. Secondly, it particularly attends to the sensory domains of these Tibetans' local/Indian experiences and in turn highlights the geo-affinity that they ambivalently feel for the place where they are at once native and exilic. Demonstrated in the article are the ongoing processes through which individuals, feeling marked by the displacement of the nation to which they belong, realize their Tibetan attributes in the context(s) they in varied ways perceive as ‘Indian’.     

‘We've Also Become Quite Good Friends’: Environmentalists,Social Networks and Social Comparison in British Columbia,Canada

Social networks influence social movement recruitment and individuals' ongoing participation in social movement organizations. In this article, we use a qualitative approach to explore the meaning of social networks for environmental movement participants in British Columbia, Canada. Our analysis draws on interviews with 33 core members of the movement. Environmental group participation creates multiplex social networks, encompassing work, leisure and friendship. Social movement networks are conduits for information exchange among environmental groups and they amplify the political power of individual participants. Ties to government workers and forest company management are more intense – based on frequency of contact – than ties to forestry labour or First Nations groups. However, forestry workers and First Nations are viewed more positively than government or forest company management. This illustrates how the intensity of social network ties can be distinguished from the subjective meanings attached to them by network participants.     

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically ‘translated’ sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, ‘transformed’ so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something ‘of Hawaiian’ and not ‘of white capitalists’. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making ‘sustainability’ an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.     

The question of India’s North-East identity and solidarity

The question of India’s North-East identity and solidarity has been a subject of debate among scholars, academicians and others. Apologia to a collective North-East believes in the existence of North-East identity and solidarity. Against the apologia’s stands are the critique who rather brushed aside North-East collectivity and questioned the clubbing together of the region as one entity. This article highlights some of the contrasting views of understanding India’s North-East, and takes the issue further by proposing to call these contending paradigms as the ‘apologists’ and the ‘sceptics’. We further argue that despite their apparent ‘antithesis’, both paradigms are related.     

What Really Happens in Kobylians’ka’s Land,and Why It Matters

Since the publication of OlTia Kobylians’ka’s novel Zemlia (Land, 1902), the consensus of Ukrainian critics and scholars, both non-Soviet and Soviet, has held that the novel’s central event, and the element of the plot offering the main challenge to interpretation, is the murder of a young peasant by his brother. Attentive reading, however, reveals that the murder is constructed in the novel as a deed whose perpetrator remains unknown. Readings of the novel as an illustration of social or psychological causation in human affairs corresponded to the predispositions of populist critics of various periods. Readings more respectful of the text, and more in keeping with Kobylians’ka’s oeuvre as a whole, need to acknowledge that the world-view consistent with the novel is one that despairs of demonstrable causes. Narrative voice and implied readership in Land are managed so as to exclude the construct of an omniscient narrator authorizing a final, knowable version of past events. Instead, the novel may be seen as reflecting upon the irrationality of diverse models for explaining human behaviour. Common-sense social and psychological notions of causality are found inadequate to explain the murder in Land, as are racial determinism, accident, divine intervention, and the Nietzsche-inspired model of humankind as divided into strong and weak, free and enslaved.     

‘Repertoires of Contention’ in Movements Against Hydropower Projects in India

Applying Charles Tilly's notion of ‘repertoires of contention’, this paper discusses strategies and modes of protest carried out by the movements against hydropower projects in India. It compares the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save Narmada Movement) in Madhya Pradesh and the Shramik Mukthi Dal (SMD; Labour Liberation Party) led mobilisations against hydropower projects in Maharashtra. It explains the more dramatic repertoires deployed by NBA as opposed to moderate and pragmatic movement repertoires of SMD. The paper concludes that the differences in ideology, organisation and cultural–historical legacy of the two organisations, as well as their different modes of interaction with the state, are the causes behind different contentious repertoires deployed by them, which resulted in different trajectories and outcomes.