Panaméricas Utópicas: entranced and transient nations in 'I Am Cuba' and 'Land in Trance'

This Chapter looks at two political films, Land in Trance (Glauber Rocha, 1967) and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), which address the subject of the nation through the enactment of trance. Rejecting all forms of naturalistic account, both films adopt a series of anti-realist devices, such as poetic language, synecdoche, personification, parable and allegory, as a means of expanding the concept of the nation beyond territorial borders and conveying the meaning of revolution through the film form rather than its content.

Paraméricas Utópicas: entranced and transient nations in "I Am Cuba" (1964) and "Land in Anguish" (1967)

This article examines the astonishing similarities between two political films, Land in Trance (Glauber Rocha, 1967) and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). Both address the subject of revolution through the enactment of trance. Both reject all forms of naturalistic account, adopting a series of anti-realist devices, such as poetic language, synecdoche, personification, parable and allegory, as a means of expanding the concept of the nation beyond territorial borders and conveying the meaning of revolution through the film form, rather than its content. Because there is no evidence that Glauber Rocha had seen I Am Cuba before he shot Land in Trance, these coincidences are treated as an intellectual 'transit' between film-makers whose art was fuelled by cinephilia and the belief in the reality of the film medium.

I and I: immunity to error through misidentification of the subject

Abstract I argue for the following claims: [1] all uses of I (the word ‘I’ or thought-element I) are absolutely immune to error through misidentification relative to I. [2] no genuine use of I can fail to refer. Nevertheless [3] I isn’t univocal: it doesn’t always refer to the same thing, or kind of thing, even in the thought or speech of a single person. This is so even though [4] I always refers to its user, the subject of experience who speaks or thinks, and although [5] if I’m thinking about something specifically as myself, I can’t fail to be thinking of myself, and although [6] a genuine understanding use of I always involves the subject thinking of itself as itself, whatever else it does or doesn’t involve, and although [7] if I take myself to be thinking about myself, then I am thinking about myself.

The Victoria Falls 1900-1940: Landscape, tourism and the geographical imagination

This article is about the politics of landscape ideas, and the relationship between landscape, identity and memory. It explores these themes through the history of the Victoria Falls, and the tourist resort that developed around the waterfall after 1900. Drawing on oral and archival sources, including popular natural history writing and tourist guides, it investigates African and European ideas about the waterfall, and the ways that these interacted and changed in the course of colonial appropriations of the Falls area. The tourist experience of the resort and the landscape ideas promoted through it were linked to Edwardian notions of Britishness and empire, ideas of whiteness and settler identities that transcended new colonial borders, and to the subject identities accommodated or excluded. Cultures of colonial authority did not develop by simply overriding local ideas, they involved fusions, exchanges and selective appropriations of them. The two main African groups I am concerned with here are the Leya, who lived in small groups around the Falls under a number of separate chiefs, and the powerful Lozi rulers, to whom they paid tribute in the nineteenth century. The article highlights colonial authorities' celebration of aspects of the Lozi aristocracy's relationship with the river, and their exclusion of the Leya people who had a longer and closer relationship with the waterfall. It also touches on the politics of recent attempts to reverse this exclusion, and the controversial rewriting of history this has involved.

Self-centred memories: the reminiscence bump and the self

The self-memory relationship is thought to be bidirectional, in such a way that memories provide context for the self, and equally, the self exercises control over retrieval (Conway, 2005). Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the life span; instead, memories peak between ages 10 and 30. This reminiscence bump has been suggested to support the emergence of a stable and enduring self. In the present study, the relationship between memory accessibility and self was explored with a novel methodology that used generation of self images in the form of I am statements. Memories generated from I am cues clustered around the time of emergence for that particular self image. We argue that, when a new self-image is formed, it is associated with the encoding of memories that are relevant to that self and that remain highly accessible to the rememberer later in life. This study offers a new methodology for academics and clinicians interested in the relationship between memory and identity.

Autobiographical memory and the self in a case of transient epileptic amnesia

Transient epileptic amnesia (TEA) is characterized by deficits in autobiographical memory (AM). One of the functions of AM is to maintain the self, suggesting that the self may undergo changes as a result of memory loss in temporal lobe epilepsy. To examine this, we used a modification of a task used to assess the relationship between self and memory (the IAM task) in a single case, E.B. Despite complaints of AM loss, E.B. had no difficulty in producing a range of self-images (e.g., I am a husband) and collections of self-defining AMs in support of these statements. E.B. produced fewer episodic memories at times of self-formation, but this did not seem to impact on the maintenance of self. The results support recent work suggesting the self may be maintained in the absence of episodic memory. The application of tasks such as that used here will further elucidate AM impairment in temporal lobe epilepsy. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Autobiographical memory and amnesia: using conceptual knowledge to ground the self

A case of retrograde amnesia, PJM, elucidated the relationship between self, episodic memory and autobiographical knowledge. Results from a variety of measures including the I Am Memory Task (IAM Task), where memories are cued by self-generated self concepts, demonstrate that PJM has a coherent, continuous sense of self, despite having lost episodic memories for an 18-month period. Her use of conceptual autobiographical knowledge, in episodic tasks and to support aspects of identity, shows how autobiographical knowledge can support the self when episodic memories are inaccessible. These results are discussed with relation to current neuropsychological models of self and memory.

Remembering and imagining: the role of the self

This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories (AMs) around periods of self-development ( [Rathbone et al., 2008] and [Rathbone et al., 2009]) would also occur when imagining future events associated with the self. Participants completed an AM task and future thinking task. In both tasks, memories and future events were cued using participant-generated identity statements (e.g., I am a student; I will be a mother). Participants then dated their memories and future events, and finally gave an age at which each identity statement was judged to emerge. Dates of memories and future events were recoded as temporal distance from the identity statement used to cue them. AMs and future events both clustered robustly around periods of self-development, indicating the powerful organisational effect of the self. We suggest that life narrative structures are used to organise future events as well as memories.

J. L. Austin and literal meaning

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning.

Student teachers’ perceptions of reading and the teaching of reading: the implications for teacher education

This article reports on research which identified perceptions of reading and the teaching of reading held by trainee teachers and the impact on my provision as a teacher educator. It found that students’ past and present experiences of learning to read and being a reader influenced their perceptions of what reading is and of what it means to teach reading. As a teacher educator, I am not able to give students long experience of seeing children becoming readers, but I am able to give them richer experiences of reading in personally and culturally relevant contexts. This has implications for the nature of subject knowledge required by a student teacher of reading and the curriculum and practice of teacher education.

Geo-Engineering to Confine Climate Change: Is it at all Feasible?

Paul Crutzen (2006) has suggested a research initiative to consider whether it would be feasible to artificially enhance the albedo of the planet Earth to counteract greenhouse warming. The enhancement of albedo would be achieved by intentionally injecting sulfur into the stratosphere. The rational for proposing the experiment is the observed cooling of the atmosphere following the recent major volcanic eruptions by El Chichon in 1984 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991 (Hansen et al., 1992). Although I am principally not against a research initiative to study such a potential experiment, I do have important reservations concerning its general feasibility. And its potential feasibility, I believe, must be the key motivation for embarking on such a study. Here I will bring up three major issues, which must be more thoroughly understood before any geo-engineering of climate could be considered, if at all. The three issues are (i) the lack of accuracy in climate prediction, (ii) the huge difference in timescale between the effect of greenhouse gases and the effect of aerosols and (iii) serious environmental problems which may be caused by high carbon dioxide concentration irrespective of the warming of the climate.