Cosmologies and Regionalisms from "Above' and "Below' in the Post-Cold War Americas: the Relevance of Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century

Drawing on a Polanyian analysis of the land question, this article aims to analyse both Western and Indigenous cosmologies of Abya Yalathe name that indigenous peoples give to the American continentto understand the relationship between human beings and land and nature. These cosmologies are at the heart of the way in which two distinct societies construct their regional space, one from above', the other from below', and they are therefore key to understanding today's climate change problematique. Following this nexus it is argued that, since the end of the Cold War, a new regional double-movement', unleashed by the quest for land and natural resources has been in the making. This is a superstructural or legal battle between Western transnational regime-making and a law that originated at the centre of the Earth'. The article explains both regionalisms and the dialectical interaction between them and demonstrates that Karl Polanyi's legacy remains relevant for the 21st century.

Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? and Other Questions of Value, Meaning and Identity in the Circulation of Janakpur Art

In this article, I examine the values and meanings that adhere to objects made by Maithil women at a development project in Janakpur, Nepal – objects collectors have called ‘Janakpur Art’. I seek to explain how and why changes in pictorial content in Janakpur Art – shifts that took place over a period of five or six years in the 1990s – occurred, and what such a change might indicate about the link between Maithil women’s lives, development, and tourism. As I will demonstrate, part of the appeal for consumers of Janakpur Art has been that it is produced at a ‘women’s development project’ seeking to empower its participants. And yet, the project’s very successes threaten to displace the producers (and what they produce) from their perceived qualities/identities as ‘traditional’ and ‘primitive,’ thereby bringing into question the authenticity of the ‘art’ they produce. The conundrum begs this question: can developing women produce primitive art?

Psychological Real Estate: Fractured Female Identity in the Victorian Novel

"Psychological Real Estate: Fractured Female Identity in the Victorian Novel" examines the use of domestic space in three Victorian novels, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862), and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2). Because Victorian gender identity was conceived of in spatial terms, this thesis explores how the three female authors use complicated domestic environments to engage the problem of conventional Victorian femininity. In the Victorian mindset, a woman's place is confined to the home, or private sphere; however, even the private sphere is intruded upon by public spaces. Expected to conform to the Victorian formulation of femininity in public spaces within the home, women had only their private spaces to cultivate the unique, individualistic aspects of their selves. This thesis explores the ways in which the female protagonists negotiate these gender encoded spaces to argue that because Victorian women had to maintain separate and often disparate identities within domestic space, their identities became problematically fractured. Additionally, in each of these texts, the authors use the failure or loss of the estate, the structure which rigidly upholds the gendered binaries, to expose the harm such fracturing identity formulation caused for Victorian society as a whole. This thesis concludes by examining the final residences of the female characters and arguing that the authors use these final private spaces to assert more feminist re-envisionings of their society's construction of femininity.

Mythologizing Greed and Betrayal in the Strait of Magellan in Juan de Miramontes' Armas Antarticas

Taking as a starting point Antonio Sanchez Jimenez's recent work on the myth of Jason in Lope de Vega's El Vellocino de Oro, this article examines the myths of Jason and Leander in Juan de Miramontes Zuazola's epic, Armas antarticas (1608-1609). After exploring the explicit allusions to the myths in the epic, I analyse an implicit reference to Leander in the portrayal of Tome Hernandez, the only survivor of the failed sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in the Strait of Magellan. As it turns out, Hernandez was rescued by the English pirate, Thomas Cavendish. In evoking the myth of Leander on the southern coast of Chile, Armas antarticas recalls Alonso de Ercilla's self-description in La Araucana (1569, 78, 89) as analysed by Ricardo Padron. However, I contend that the representation of Hernandez is best understood in comparison to Juan Boscan's Leandro (1543), the fullest and most widely disseminated Spanish version of the tale in the sixteenth century. Appealing to the Leander myth allows Armas antarticas to turn away from a focus on the role of greed in colonization. Yet shadows of Jason still lurk behind the portrayal of Hernandez, which raise other serious ethical questions for the Spanish Empire concerning piracy and loyalty as these play out in the Strait of Magellan. This essay shows that the poetic portrayal of Hernandez and Cavendish ends up exhibiting the same ambiguities associated with piracy as analysed by Daniel Heller-Roazen.