Making connections between global production networks for used goods and the realm of production: a case study on e‐waste governance

Recent scholarship on waste within economic geography and global production network (GPN) studies has identified several unique characteristics of networks for used goods vis‐à‐vis ‘traditional’ GPN studies focused on production, exchange and consumption. However, in un‐bracketing GPNs to include analysis of post‐consumption activity, identifying how the distinct moments of production, exchange, consumption and disposal/recycling are related becomes a crucial task. Towards this end, I present a case study on the governance of e‐waste networks that draws upon discussions of performativity and Hudson's cultural political economy approach to GPNs. In my analysis, I demonstrate how multiple factors, such as ideological differences over how to handle e‐waste, the non‐standardized nature of used goods, as well as production factors such as design choices and planned obsolescence, all shape and disrupt efforts to standardize and coordinate resource recovery and hazard mitigation in the post‐consumption phase of electronic goods. Such analysis moves past the novelty of GPNs for used goods toward a more integrated understanding of GPNs as a whole.     

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.     

Ayahuasca healing beyond the Amazon: the globalization of a traditional indigenous entheogenic practice

Ayahuasca commonly refers to a psychoactive Amazonian indigenous brew traditionally used for spiritual and healing purposes (that is as an entheogen). Since the late twentieth century, ayahuasca has undergone a process of globalization through the uptake of different kinds of socio‐cultural practices, including its sacramental use in some new Brazilian religious movements and its commodified use in cross‐cultural vegetalismo practices, or indigenous‐style rituals conducted primarily for non‐indigenous participants. In this article, I explore the rise of such rituals beyond the Amazon region, and consider some philosophical and political concerns arising from this novel trend in ayahuasca use, including the status of traditional indigenous knowledge, cultural appropriation and intellectual property. I discuss a patent dispute in Unites States and allegations of biopiracy related to ayahuasca. I conclude the article with some reflections on the future of ayahuasca drinking as a transnational sociological phenomenon.     

New trade formations: precarity,pragmatic cosmopolitanism and long‐distance trade in the Caucasus

For many ordinary people responding to ongoing post‐Soviet precarity, domestic and transnational trade has become a common choice of livelihood. This article is about the small and medium sized traders who deal in cheap Chinese commodities in the Caucasus –particularly in Georgia and Armenia. It introduces the notion of ‘trade formations’ to account for the multiple ways in which cross‐cultural trade and microfinance practices, as well as stereotypes about national and regional groups and trading minorities, highlight the role of trust, reputation and everyday diplomacy in long‐distance commercial networks. While current trade networks are rooted in the cultures of trade practised under the Soviets, dispositions of pragmatic cosmopolitanism and defensive nationalism often determine who may or may not respond to post‐Soviet precarity by turning to transnational trade, embracing political and religious diversity, and overlooking hostilities, past and present.     

Sketches of identities from the Mexico–US border (or the other way around)

Abstract

For someone interested in studying the cultures and literatures of Mexico's northern border or those of the US Southwest, it is important to take into account that when trying to investigate the subjects or objects of study – human, textual, or visual – one cannot put aside the ever-present tension between national and regional discourses, nor overlook symbolic representations of those discourses. Consequently, this article proposes to sketch and reflect about some identities of Mexico's northern border that have been articulated from different perspectives and inscribed in literary texts and national and international cinemas. It will also reflect on cultural production from and about Ciudad Juárez at the turn of the 21st century and how that cultural production dialogues with different symbolic representations.     

'Samuel Bronston's Latest Epic': Spectacle,Heterogeneity and Nation in the Critical Reception of El Cid (1961)

Abstract

Although El Cid is now regarded by many as a classic, the New York Times was heavily critical of the film on its initial release in the US. This essay examines the contexts that shaped the film's reception in the early 1960s, and demonstrates that, although the New York Times was often explicitly critical of the spectacle associated with historical epics such as El Cid, its film critics were actually more concerned with the ways in which these films threatened cultural distinctions between popular and legitimate culture. Furthermore, it demonstrates that, although the New York Times was critical of historical epics during the late 1940s and the 1950s, it became far more hostile in the early 1960s, when El Cid was released, a period in which Hollywood was facing competition from film-makers working overseas such as Dino De Laurentiis and Samuel Bronston. The essay will therefore illustrate that, while the stated objection of the New York Times critics was to the spectacle of these historical epics, the vitriol that these films received from these critics was due to the way in which they not only threatened distinctions between high and low culture but also between Hollywood and European national cinemas.     

The return of the Indian guide New formulations of the Indian guide at the end of the 20th century

Abstract

In the myth of the North American frontier defined as a place where two or more cultures interact, there is a set of characters who represent the capacity to move in both worlds and to build bridges between them. The translator is one and the 'guide' another. The figure of the 'Indian guide' – explored from white people's point of view ever since Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales – staged a large scale return at the end of the 20th century in North American (Canadian and American) novel and film, but now transformed by authors (generally Native American but not exclusively so) who view the history of the North American West from, as it were, the other side of the frontier line. This article will try to describe the new, rebellious, empowering characteristics of the Indian guide as represented in novels and films of the last 30 years.     

Home of the Brave,Frantz Fanon and cultural pluralism

Abstract

This article examines Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949, USA), a Hollywood social problem drama about anti-black racism, and the brief but vivid response to the film presented in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Fanon enables a rethinking of some of the film's most central assumptions and the discourses upon which the story relies. At the same time, Fanon's response conveys information about his own biography and his perspectives on cultural representation generally. The article examines the film as a document that reveals competing claims about anti-black racism and, through Fanon's commentary, revisits the relationship between cultural pluralism and racial ideologies in the mid-20th century USA. The article explores the nature of Fanon's anti-racist commentary on the film as a form of 'cultural studies' that offers transnational historical insight and simultaneously provides ways of re-examining the national specificity of race thinking.     

Conflicts over knowledge transfer across the border: Korean international students and the conversion of cultural capital

It is common knowledge that international students are a major conduit of international knowledge transfer and that they become transnational managerial elites and highly skilled migrants. However, few studies show how this transfer occurs. Moreover, people often assume that knowledge transfer is a smooth process. Drawing on in‐depth interviews of former and current Korean international students and non‐migrant Koreans in the United States and South Korea, my study shows that knowledge transfer can, in fact, be highly conflictual. I argue that conflicts in the country of origin between international students (the transferors) and non‐migrants (the recipients) mediate knowledge transfer. I see the conflicts as struggles over the conversion of cultural capital from the Global North into local power and wealth, which reworks Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital for transnational social fields. In so doing, I develop a framework that links knowledge transfer and transnational social reproduction.     

Post/past-'Orientalism' Orientalism and its dis/re-orientation

Abstract

In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said articulated more a cultural filter than a cultural divide, through a catalog of historical documents on the west's representation of the east, enabling readers to share a vocabulary that has now become a part of American intellectual history. In the last quarter century Orientalism has acquired a 'symbolic value' that was at best present as a 'potential value', thus realizing itself; from its initial position as an object of cultural study it has now become a subject imbued with the agency to change perception and understanding. It has problematized Orientalism itself and associated issues of the new globalism, such as immigration, diaspora, boundary crossings, cross-border terrorism, mixed ethnicities, international and inter-racial adoptions, and travel. The article focuses on the new social, political and economic faces of the old Orientalist attitudes, and calls for a radical revision of history.