Skuka and the Absurd in Gogol'’s Tale of the ‘Two Ivans’

The present article is devoted to an analysis of Gogol'’s last story from his Ukrainian cycle, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”; it makes use of canonical as well as innovative approaches to Gogol'’s tale in order to explore the significance of the epilogue to an interpretation of the story as a whole. The examination will encompass ideas on the temporal aspects of the narration, the philosophical concept of ennui/skuka, and the possible significance of the camera obscura as the setting for one of the key moments in the story. Whereas the camera obscura is the setting of the quarrel between the two main characters, the story ends with a manifestation of skuka from the narrator: how do these two elements relate to each other, and what do they suggest in terms of the possibility of reaching an all-encompassing interpretation of the ‘Two Ivans’?     

Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter: belonging and the transnationality of home in older age

ABSTRACT

Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter is a fictional account of a Chinese American woman and her mother, a first-generation migrant, who is negotiating dementia in later life. Analysis of diasporic novels can provide insight into migrant belonging, especially the emotional geographies of home and emotional subjectivities of ageing that are not commonly or easily elucidated even by qualitative interviewing methods. This article examines Tan’s construction of ageing as an intergenerational, cultural and emotional process, and highlights the role of storytelling as an everyday home-making practice through which the transnationality of home in older age becomes evident.     

Dowry in the absence of the legal protection of women’s inheritance rights

Review of Economics of the Household - The practice of dowry is often thought to be the root cause of the unequal treatment of girls in India, as represented by sex-selective abortion and female...     

Exploring the Potential of Shadow Controls in the Evaluation of Children’s Services

This article describes and presents a framework for an under‐used evaluation technique in the context of an evaluation of a programme for disaffected young people. Shadow controls—the use of expert judgement to estimate the success of a programme—are often dismissed in research design as an unreliable form of comparison, but can be useful in situations where there is limited scope for a control group or to enhance the causal inference attributable to non‐experimental evaluations. The exercise described uses a practice tool as a structure for making predictions about the situations of the young people on the programme, assuming they do not receive an intervention. These predictions (shadow controls) are then compared to outcome data for the young people at the end of the programme. The results of the exercise provide some important messages about the programme’s effectiveness and the potential for strengthening non‐experimental evaluation methods. The article also discusses how the method can usefully inform evaluations of social programmes and encourage agency and user collaboration.     

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.     

Exit,voice and loyalty in the course of corporate governance and counsel’s changing role

Striking changes in the norms and practices of corporate governance have occurred since the 1980s. Corporate directors have become more independent and diligent and institutional investors have become more activist. If we apply Albert O. Hirschman’s insights about the interactions of exit, voice and loyalty, we find that over-reliance on exit as the remedy of choice of shareholders failed to discipline and educate managers effectively. After the wave of hostile takeovers, the extent of management failure became apparent and the increased power of voice was an important factor in accelerating changes in conduct and norms. The new Team Production Model is useful in describing how public corporations are increasingly being governed. The model helps to explain why corporate boards should function as independent arbitrators among the corporate constituents that have invested in the entity. Mechanisms to increase stakeholder voice and loyalty can help the board function effectively and may increase both efficiency and fairness. The role of corporate counsel, as co-agent with corporate management, and having an independent fiduciary duty to the entity and not its management, is essential to assist the corporate board in meeting its obligations within the Team Production Model. Lawyers, as honest brokers with duties to the enterprise can play an important role in increasing stakeholder voice and loyalty.     

The nation’s body: disability and deviance in the writings of Adolf Hitler

This article takes its starting point in the Nazi ideology as it appears in the writings of Adolf Hitler, and discusses how disability and the body can be understood in the context of Mein Kampf. The article underlines how disability and bodily infirmities, alongside race, featured significantly in Hitler’s demagogic message. Although the overall image of disability was related to a sense of threat – and a culture gone wrong – Mein Kampf also contains a mixed interpretation of disability as a phenomenon, in which different and opposing disability narratives took part in the construction and the image of the body as a national property.     

Cohort Perspectives on Women’s Educational Attainment and the Timing of Parenthood in Ghana

This paper examines the effects of womens educational attainment on the timing of parenthood across successive generations of women in Ghana. Given the more enhanced career opportunities in recent years, we argue that the opportunity cost of parenthood may be higher for contemporary educated women, and as such, they are expected to delay parenthood for longer periods than their counterparts in the past. Using data from the 1998 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, we found that while higher maternal education associates with delayed parenthood, significant cohort differences were noticeable. Consistent with our expectations, the effect of higher educational attainment was substantially greater among younger women, indicating a longer transition to parenthood. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

‘ … half-sick of shadows’: figure and ground in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s imagination of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

This essay moves the category of the subaltern out of the exclusive domain of colonial historiography and resituates it in the context of contemporaneity. Taking my cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insistence on the dream of postcoloniality in the realm of the global, I examine two ‘empirical anomalies’ that redefine subaltern insurgency, cultivate democratic reflexes, and defeat the expectations of their moment and milieu. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital serves as a framing device to elicit the still-persuasive dimensions of Spivak’s landmark essay for our historical moment. While I remain unpersuaded by both his premises and his conclusions, his argument does throw Spivak’s interventions in the project of Subaltern Studies into relief. My method throughout, in the manner of Spivak and Paul de Man, is one of interruption and undoing; my aim is to delineate what Spivak describes as ‘the resistance fitting our time’.     

Polarization and the Limits of Politicization: Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral and the Politics of Cultural Heritage

Qualitative Sociology - This article examines a recent controversy over the Catholic Church’s registration of Cordoba’s iconic Mosque-Cathedral as official Church property in 2006. In...     

On the underestimation of migration’s income and poverty impact

In estimating the impact of migration on income and poverty, most existing studies have overlooked the fact that migration changes the size of the household. The ‘corrected’ impact that accounts for changes in household size is presented analytically and is estimated on the basis of data from nationally representative household surveys in Albania and Ghana. The analysis considers three poverty measures and four groups of migrant households: those with internal, international, internal and international, and internal and/or international migrants. The ratio of the corrected to the uncorrected impact on per capita income for Ghana (Albania) averages from 2.7 to 4.5 (2.5–3.8), and the ratio for the poverty impact averages from 2.6 to 4.4 (2.1–6.4). Thus, abstracting from changes in household size may result in a substantial underestimate of the impact of migration on income and poverty.

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.     

Prevalence of Problem and Pathological Gambling in Parkinson’s Disease

Pathological gambling (PG) has been identified in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) treated with dopamine agonists suggesting that dysregulation of brain dopaminergic activity may contribute to the development of gambling problems. The current study was undertaken to further establish the prevalence of problem and PG in patients with PD, identify any clinical correlates, and determine if psychiatric or substance use co-morbidity contributes to the increased prevalence of problem and PG. A cross-sectional survey of 140 serially recruited moderate to severe PD patients was undertaken utilizing the Canadian Problem Gambling Index, Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, Drug Abuse Screening Test, Beck Depression Inventory, Beck Anxiety Inventory, and Mini-Mental State Exam augmented by chart review, completed over an 8 month period. The 12 month prevalence of problem and PG in PD was 9.3% compared to 1.6% in the general population within a comparably aged sample. The increased prevalence of problem and PG in the PD group was related to dopamine agonist use and younger age, but not co-morbidity. Most subjects with problem and PG reported their gambling increased after being diagnosed with PD and starting treatment. The results suggest that brain dopaminergic activity is involved in the underlying neurobiology of problem and PG.     

A Bionian Approach to the Body and the Feminine in Cammell and Roeg’s Performance

ABSTRACT

This psychoanalytic study of Performance (directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970) explores the importance of the bodily, sensorial, and material aspects of a pivotal moment in the development of the protagonist’s sexual identity and considers how this moment has been conceived as being dependent on a certain containing function that is performed by a female character. Drawing on Bionian and post-Bionian theory, the article proposes that this containing function is fundamentally feminine. The feminine function of Bion’s concept of container is one that has been discussed especially in the theorization of the roles performed by the mother and the analyst. This article aims to investigate the importance of the bodily and the feminine aspects of the container as part of a psychoanalytic conceptualization of psychical growth as they present themselves in this film.     

Exploring the relationship between parents’ and children’s housework time in Spain

Intergenerational transmission has been successfully employed in economic research to explain the persistence of certain economic behaviors across generations. This paper evaluates the relevance of this transmission process in the formation of gender roles during childhood. In particular, we analyze the relationship between parents?? and children??s housework allocation patterns. We propose a simple theoretical model that predicts that parents with a strong adherence to gender to traditional gender norms??as proxied by their division of household labor??are more likely to allocate housework to children in a way that reflects stereotypes of men??s and women??s domestic tasks. The empirical application is carried out with data from the 2002?C2003 Spanish Time Use Survey. The sample restricts to two-parent households with at least one child aged 10?C17?years. We find a significant positive correlation between a more egalitarian parents?? allocation of housework and a less asymmetrical distribution of domestic chores between sons and daughters.     

Discussion of Green’s “Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the ‘Whiteness’ of Psychoanalysis”

This article is a response, in cinematic, historical, and autobiographical terms, to Emily Green’s “Melanie Klein and the Black Mammy: An Exploration of the Influence of the Mammy Stereotype on Klein’s Maternal and Its Contribution to the ‘Whiteness’ of Psychoanalysis.” The author attempts to open up Green’s analysis to a wide range of aesthetic, emotional, and political implications, moving between a consideration of the “passing” motif in Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life (1959); thoughts on racialization and trauma in psychoanalytic history more generally; and reflections on the author’s own experiences of racialization and collective disavowal in psychotherapeutic training.     

‘Black holes in the fabric of the nation’: refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of refugees in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, a novel which has been widely celebrated for its response to the refugee crisis of its contemporary moment. In a distinct echo of Salman Rushdie’s claim, thirty-five years earlier, that it ‘may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated’, Hamid’s novel similarly claims that ‘we are all migrants through time.’ Moreover, like Rushdie’s fiction, Hamid’s novel incorporates elements of magical realism: its protagonists escape their unnamed war-torn city through a ‘door’ that instantaneously transports them to Mykonos, and they subsequently travel through other such ‘doors’ to London and California. Their story is interspersed with a series of vignettes in which other migrants also find themselves magically transported across national borders. As well as considering the ways in which Hamid’s novel seeks to humanise refugees, this article considers the novel’s evocation of a world in which human beings – like capital, images, and (mis)information – have gained access to largely ungovernable networks of instantaneous travel across vast distances. It argues that Hamid’s novel is not just ‘about’ refugees but also constitutes a reflection on how they and their journeys are represented and mediated by actually-existing technologies.