Cultural politics and the racial cartographics of human origins

Discussions about human origins, both scientific and pre-scientific, have frequently been freighted with the cultural politics of race relations and questions about human equality. In one way or another, maps have played a critical role in these enterprises by presenting in visual form narratives of human genesis and patterns of human ancestral lineages. In this paper I discuss how a sequence of cartographic representations of human beginnings have transacted racial power from the middle ages to the present day.

The New Face of Global Hollywood: Black Hawk Down and the Politics of Meta-Sovereignty

This paper uses Ridley Scott’s 2001 film blockbuster Black Hawk Down to examine the claim that popular film is the ‘newest component of sovereignty’. While the topic of the film – the 1993 UN/US intervention in Somalia – lends itself to straightforward politicisation, this paper is equally interested in the film’s production history and its reception by global audiences. While initial reactions to the film focused on its ideological commitments (e.g. racism, collusion between Hollywood and the Pentagon, post-11 September patriotism), these readings continually posed an imagined ‘America’ against ‘the world’. This paper argues that Black Hawk Down is not about sovereignty as traditionally conceived, that is, about national interest shaping global affairs. Rather, Black Hawk Down articulates, and is articulated by, a new and emerging global order that operates through inclusion, management and flexibility. Drawing on recent theoretical debates over this new logic of rule, this paper illustrates how Black Hawk Down invoked much more diffuse, complex and deterritorialized categories than national sovereignty. In effect, Scott’s film goes beyond traditional notions of sovereignty altogether: its production, signification and reception deconstruct simple notions of ‘America’ and ‘the world’ in favour of what Hardt and Negri call ‘Empire’, what Zizek calls ‘post-politics’, and what we refer to as ‘meta-sovereignty’.

The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability:Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World

Going against both the naive techno-optimist of ‘greening business as usual’ and a resurgent ‘catastrophism’ within green thinking and politics, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability offers an analysis of the causes of unsustainability and diminished human flourishing. The books locates the causes of unsustainability in dominant capitalist modes of production, debt-based consumer culture, the imperative for orthodox economic growth and the dominant ideology of neoclassical economics. It suggests that valuable insights into the causes of and alternatives to unsustainability can be found in a critical embracing of human vulnerability and dependency as both constitutive and ineliminable aspects of what it means to be human. The book defends resilience, the ability to ‘cope with’ rather than somehow ‘solve’ vulnerability. The book offers a trenchant critique of the dominant neoclassical economic ‘groupthink’, viewing it not as some value-neutral form of ‘expert knowledge’, but as a thoroughly ideological ‘common sense’. Outlining a green political economic alternative replacing economic growth with economic security, it argues economic growth has done its work in the minority, affluent world, which should now focus on improving human flourishing, lowering socio-economic equality and fostering solidarity as part of a new re-orientation of public policy. Complementing this, a, ‘green republicanism’ is developed as an innovative and original contribution to contemporary debates on a ‘post-growth’ economy and society. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability draws widely from a range of disciplines and thinkers, from cultural critic Susan Sontag to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, contemporary debates in green political thinking, and the latest thinking in heterodox and green economics, to produce a highly relevant, timely, and provocatively original statement on the human predicament in the twenty-first century.

Animal maiming, intimacy and the politics of shared life: the bestial and the beastly in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England

The everyday lives of many farm workers in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England were intricately and often intimately bound with the lives of animals, the ebb and flow of human life being inseparable from that of animal life. Farmyards, fields, folds as well as barns and stables were all spaces where animals transcended being the mere instruments of capital to instead being obvious co-constituents of the rhythms of existence. Living and working in such close proximity meant that the ‘species barrier’ was crossed and intimacies developed in everyday agricultural practices. Still, the relationship was based upon, if not reducible to, the workings of capital: the animal enrolled as a form of embodied capital, the labourer engaged by the farmer to act upon the animal. And in such relationships intimacies are mirrored by violences: the keeping captive, slaughter, and – occasionally – abuse. In this formative period in which the discourses and policies that continue to inform animal welfare were first formulated, the declining economic and material fortunes of farm workers when juxtaposed to farm animals’ fortune as increasingly ‘cosseted capital’ gave a particular charge to these abuses. Farm animals, and especially horses and cattle, so it is shown, were subjected to a series of violences. Many cases of animal maiming parodied tenderness in their brutality, whilst other attacks on the sexual organs of animals represented complex statements about the ways in which agrarian capitalism regulated all culture. Analysing the changing relationship between humans and animals therefore also helps us to better understand how capitalism mediates – and is mediated by – the non-human as well as the human, and how it defines cultural relations.

Angels with dirty faces? European identity, politics of representation and recognition of Romani interests

The contradiction between acknowledgement of cultural differences and their accommodation in public has been a constant theme in studies of diverse societies. This review essay discusses five volumes that grapple with questions of Romani inclusion and the problems Roma face across Europe. The volumes under review point to problems faced by Romani communities and analyse the various legal, political and social challenges that situation of the Roma poses to institutions of contemporary societies. The essay reviews the challenging nature of the status of Roma as we move away from the one-sided towards more reciprocal relationship engagement of state with society in general, and the multiply excluded groups, in particular. The essay finds that the role Roma play in these relationships is either over-, or under-estimated by the literature, largely as a result of limited opportunities to acknowledge and, in effect, accommodate Roma who are rarely understood as actors in their own right.

Symmetrical Solutions, Asymmetrical Realities: Beyond the Politics of Paralysis

The historic significance of the Good Friday Agreement and its role in ending organized political violence is acknowledged at the outset. The article then goes on to probe the roots of the political paralysis built into the architecture of the Agreement that are predicated on a misplaced political and cultural symmetry between the “two communities.” It is suggested that the institutionalized relationship between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. facilitates a cross-party, populist, socio-economic consensus among the nationalist and unionist political parties on the welfare state, taxation and maintaining the massive British subvention to the region. This in turn allows them to concentrate on a divisive culturalist politics, i.e., on antagonistic forms of cultural and identity politics over such issues as flags, parades, and the legacy of the “Troubles” which spills over into gridlock into many areas of regional administration. The article argues for a much broader understanding of culture and identity rooted in the different, if overlapping and interdependent, material realities of both communities while challenging the idea of two cultures/identities as fixed, mutually exclusive, non-negotiable and mutually antagonistic. It then focuses on the importance of Belfast as a key arena which will determine the long-term prospects of an alternative and more constructive form of politics, and enable a fuller recognition of the fundamental asymmetries and inter-dependence between the “two communities.” In the long run, this involves re-defining and reconstructing what is meant by the “Union” and a “United Ireland.”

The Politics of Observation:Radical Psychiatry and Social Documentary

How did the counter-cultural aims of Radical Psychiatry coincide with those of documentary filmmaking in the 1960s? Where the forms and structures of new approaches to the documentary necessarily complicit in promoting the clinical and anti-clinical practices, and wider political agenda, of Radical Psychiatry? How did the documentary deal with the ethical, aesthetic, and audience-related issues associated with filming personalities and environments associated with Radical Psychiatry? How did Radical Psychiatry and the documentary shape postwar discourses on trauma, especially within conflict and post-conflict (PTSD) contexts? What is the legacy of Radical Pschiatry today, and how has it been explored by contemporary documentray film?

This article addresses these question by examining a range of documentaries dealing with the radical and 'anti-psychiatric' ideas and methods of figures such as R.D.Laing, David Cooper, Jan Bastiaans, Timothy Leary, and Franco Basaglia. Films analysed include Peter Robinson's Asylum (1972) and Psychiatry and Violence (1973); Ah, Sunflower (Klinkert and Sinclair, 1967); Anatomy of Violence (Davis, 1967); Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Robin Clarke, 1967), W. R. - Mysteries of the Organism (Makavejev, 1971); Raymond Depardon's San Clemente (1980) and Urgences (1988); and Louis van Gasteren's trilogy Now Do You Get it Why I am Crying (1969), The Price of Survival (2003), and There is No Plane to Zagreb (2012). 
The article concludes with a discussion of Nicolas Philibert's Every Little Thing (1997) within the context of the French documentary tradition and the film's more immediate subject - the famous clinic at La Borde established by Jean Oury, and associated with the methods and theories of figures such as Jacques
 Lacan, Francesc Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, and Félix Guattari.

Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory in Ireland

The year 1916 witnessed two events that would profoundly shape both
politics and commemoration in Ireland over the course of the following
century. Although the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme were
important historical events in their own right, their significance also lay
in how they came to be understood as iconic moments in the emergence
of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Adopting an interdisciplinary
approach drawing on history, politics, anthropology and cultural
studies, this volume explores how the memory of these two foundational
events has been constructed, mythologised and revised over the course
of the past century. The aim is not merely to understand how the Rising
and Somme came to exert a central place in how the past is viewed in
Ireland, but to explore wider questions about the relationship between
history, commemoration and memory.