Pedaling Power: Bicycles,Subjectivities and Landscapes in a Settler Colonial Society

Abstract

Mobilities across contested terrains are key to the formation of settler societies. This paper explores how safety bicycles were drawn into the Australian settler project at the turn of the twentieth century, just as the six independent colonies were federating into the Commonwealth of Australia. As recently imported objects, bicycles afforded settler men unprecedented mobility across remote landscapes that had not been smoothed by the infrastructures of the ‘old world’. In those years of national formation, bicycles were received as objects that could fill ‘empty’ land with people, things, activities and stories, at the same time as they generated masculine, settler subjectivities. A practice approach to settler mobilities helps to tease out the entanglements between bicycle ‘overlanding’ and two fundamental imperatives of settlerism: transforming indigenous places into settler places and creating ‘nativised’ settler subjectivities.     

经济思想中的意识形态探析

经济意识形态是指以经济思想、经济学说的形式表现出来的意识形态,是一种表达特定阶级或社会集团的切身利益的观念体系,为特定社会集团的经济利益提供直接的辩护。经济学不是纯科学,它摆脱不了意识形态的属性。当代最典型的经济意识形态是西方经济学相关理论。＂经济全球化＂、＂新自由主义＂、＂低碳经济＂等经济概念都是西方垄断资本代言人制造出来的话语,包含意识形态的陷阱,我们应该慎重对待。     

阿黛拉·奎斯特解读——《印度之行》妇女形象初探

对《印度之行》中的妇女形象 ,评论家的态度截然相反。有些人认为妇女体现了福斯特精心创造的“基督教人道主义者”的形象 ,有人却认为“福斯特经常把妇女视作敌人阵营中的一部分”。奎斯特小姐这个微不足道的小角色 ,评论家对她较少关注甚至出现误读。本文从女性学角度出发 ,运用拉康 ,克里斯蒂娃的精神分析的理论 ,试图解读奎斯特小姐的形象背后所隐含的意义 ,揭示福斯特对女性世界的探索和他复杂的男性观。     

《尤利西斯》的“异域幻象”与乔伊斯的爱尔兰文化观

乔伊斯的意识流名著《尤利西斯》的主题——对爱尔兰民族文化的批判除了体现在对主要人物形象的塑造上,还体现在对作品中诸多异族形象的描写上。本文拟从形象学角度出发,结合文本,分析《尤利西斯》中的异域形象及其产生的时代背景,揭示其与乔伊斯的爱尔兰民族文化身份建构之间的关系。     

Conservative twist and challenges for Peru and Latin America: civilizing crossroads in a context of epochal change (reflections in process)

ABSTRACT

The paper takes stock of the WSF experience and the running out of steam of the pink wave in Latin America. It is written from the perspective of radical feminism in the region to interrogate the interrelations between the multiple systems of power formed by patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism and their impact on people’s lives, arguing that feminist struggles for sexual and reproductive rights, for the right to decide, for a secular state that breaks the religious tutelage over women’s bodies, along with many kinds of other struggles, demand not only recognition but also the defence of diverse ways of life and visions of the world. In these struggles, the paper claims, it is fundamental to expand the epistemological and social space and to recover other cultural matrices and frameworks of meaning.     

Revisiting histories of anti-racist thought and activism

ABSTRACT

This piece reconsiders histories of anti-racist thought and practice, including the linkages between anti-racisms and other traditions of liberatory thought. We argue that anti-racism should be understood as a strand in radical thought linking internationalism, institutional critique and street activism, in the process interfeeding with other social movements. The traditions of anti-racist thought discussed in this special issue exemplify these cross-cutting influences.     

Elephant empire: zoos and colonial encounters in Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Whereas zoological gardens and animal collections in North America and Western Europe are well researched from historical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the history and legacy of these modernizing institutions in Eastern Europe. To bridge this gap in scholarship, I investigate the traffic in exotic animals to this region with a focus on a particular species. Historically, elephants have been considered prime symbols of the power and triumph of the colonial empire, and were thus often the jewels of colonial animal collections across Europe. In this article, I explore how the colonial origin of elephants as both big game and charismatic megafauna translates into a geopolitical context without direct overseas colonies, in order to trace the material links between species, race, transnational commodity networks, and structures of identity formation. Based on archival and bibliographic research focused on the Poznań Zoo in years 1871–1945, this article offers a critical analysis of the role of elephant performance in zoos, circuses, and travelling shows in mediating and mobilizing imperial longings. From this vantage point I suggest that studying public zoos in Eastern Europe offers a unique insight into a physical presence of colonial imperialism (via traffic in exotic species) in an area without overseas colonies, through a site where modernist models of citizenship, nationhood, and Europeanness are forged at the interface between science, education, and transnational politics. Given that zoos were crucial for the development of the biological perspective in the West, I posit a reconfiguration of zoos as ‘contact zones’ and primary sites for colonial encounter within the empire from a semi-peripheral perspective.     

‘That unit of civilisation’ and ‘the talent peculiar to women’: British employers and their servants in the nineteenth-century Indian empire

Domestic servants across the British Empire were instrumental in constructing colonial domesticity. In metropole and colony, they marked the physical boundaries of the house and family and the categorical boundaries of class, gender and racial difference. However, in colonial India, the gender and racial status of Indian servants, relative to both their colonial employers and their metropolitan counterparts, disrupted the dynamics of dependence that structured metropolitan employer/servant relations and identities. Despite efforts to dutifully ‘civilise’ households according to a ‘British’ standard, the day-to-day reality was one in which ambivalence and uncertainty towards servants were commonplace among colonisers and where servants participated in the creation of a way of life that was specifically colonial, even while it sought to preserve and proselytise ‘Britishness’.     

Sensing Through White Gloves: On Congolese Objects in Swedish Sceneries

ABSTRACT

The article discusses collectibles acquired by Swedish missionaries and military officers active within the ill-reputed Congo Free State (1885–1908). Objects are approached here not primarily as tokens of Congolese material culture but as traces of a transnational cultural history and as points of entry to a critical museology. Drawing on case studies of collections I discuss the ways in which artifacts have been selected, joined and charged with new functions and meanings on their voyage between hands, narratives and genres.

In focus are five examples of objects that, analytically, have worked as what Roland Barthes (1980) calls punctum: the detail that disturbs and fascinates by force of seeming ungrammatical in relation to the larger context of which it forms part. By adding material to the Barthian concept I want to stress that such analytical impulses may be evoked by all senses. During an inventory of Swedish Congolese collections, when the historical state of stored museum items as untouchables could temporarily be broken, their multisensory material presences proved able to challenge textual discourses, serve as alternative witnesses and demonstrate hidden significances of ethnographical museums and collections.