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Smith, Richard G; Doel, Marcus A
doi: 10.1068/d226tpmid: N/A
The paper comprises two readings of the work of Jean Baudrillard. The first, by Richard Smith, locates itself amid the polarization of debate between Marxism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism, which he claims is both ill-judged and unproductive. In contrast to this standoff Smith argues the case for a ‘transgenic’ or ‘transversal’ post-Marxism by demonstrating that the oft-repeated claims for an ‘epistemological break’ between an early, Marxian Baudrillard and a later, postmodern Baudrillard are not borne out by the evidence. Rather, Smith foregrounds the continuity of Baudrillard's work by highlighting how an antagonistic entwining of the semiotic and the symbolic structures Baudrillard's oeuvre. Crucially, Smith suggests that the possibilities of post-Marxism will only come into clear view once the semiotic logic at the heart of ‘the general political economy of the sign’ is freed from the Utopian mystique of symbolic exchange. In the second series of readings, Marcus Doel engages with the spacing at play with Baudrillard's and Smith's texts in an attempt to demonstrate that they are perpetually turning against themselves. By way of a series of angled, slanted, curvaceous, and suspended readings drawn from Althusser, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lyotard, Doel deconstructs Smith's post-Marxism in order to affirm the irreducible, aleatory drift of Baudrillard's spiralling texts.
doi: 10.1068/d201tpmid: N/A
The relationship of space and time has become a vexed issue in accounts in the postmodern metropolis. Rich and enlivening accounts use spatial categories to describe the interrelationships of elements of the city—moving from historicism to geography, to gloss Jameson's development of cognitive mapping. Postmodern geographies utilising the ideas of cognitive mapping show marked similarities with the accounts of time and space describing classical and medieval arts of memory and the Romantic writings of Flaubert on Athens. However, spatialised accounts of the city often seem to replicate problematic divisions of space and time that also underlay historicist accounts and merely invert the latter's priorities. The work of Bergson offers key insights into how this division occurred and a sense of temporality that may be lost in spatial metaphors. This is a sense of difference and alterity that we trace in the work of Proust and argue can be brought to inform the urban theatre of memories through a careful reworking of ideas suggested by de Certeau and Derrida. In this paper we take the case of Athens, bringing together East and West, ancient and modern, original and copy, as a grounding to discuss these issues. We suggest a sense of time- space as both fragmented and dynamic; a sense of the historical sites as creating instability and displacement in collective memory.
Butz, David; MacDonald, Kenneth I
doi: 10.1068/d276pmid: N/A
In 1923 W Heffer & Sons Ltd published Servant of Sahibs: A Book to be Read Aloud, an autobiographical account of Ghulam Rassul Galwan's service, from 1890 to 1901, with English and American adventurers traveling through Kashmir and Central Asia. The focus of the book on Rassul Galwan's growth through colonial labor, combined with the authenticity imposed on him and his account through a number of textual and editorial devices, allows the book to be read credibly as a text that aids the colonial establishment in utilizing a discourse of Native authenticity in support of a somewhat discredited discourse of benevolent colonial labor relations. We begin by introducing the sociopolitical context within which it was useful for such a book to be published, sponsored and described as authoritative by the colonial establishment. In the second main section, we describe the ways it was a useful authenticating text, arguing that the interplay between Rassul Galwan's narrative and the introductory and editorial comments fulfils three attributes of a convincing piece of ‘Native authenticity’: to identify what the text is meant to authenticate, to establish the author's authenticity as a Native voice in terms acceptable to a Western audience, and to tell the appropriate story in a way that sounds authentic to a Western ear. In the third section we demonstrate that Servant of Sahibs cannot be understood as unproblematically accommodative either to colonial constructions of trans cultural labor relations or to the notion of Native authenticity. Without necessarily crediting Rassul Galwan with intent to resist, we argue that the accommodative text he helped create contains within it a tactical alternative to the very discourses it ostensibly naturalizes. This, we suggest, is characteristic of cultural products of transcultural contact zones, as well as of public transcripts of accommodation more generally. We end the paper by examining briefly (a) the possibility that Rassul Galwan's major theme of growth through colonial labor is informed less by satisfaction with his subservience to colonial masters than by interests only tangentially related to the field of domination which he is ostensibly addressing, and (b) the editor's apparent willingness to include Rassul Galwan's tactical disruptions and thus potentially recuperate those disruptions into colonial discourse.
doi: 10.1068/d231tpmid: N/A
The author considers the politics and poetics of belief and disbelief in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain and France, with particular reference to the mythologies and controversies about the location and nature of Timbuctoo, a city widely believed to be the hub of a fabulously wealthy African trading system. Like other episodes in the history of European exploration, from the quest for the North-West passage to the search for the source of the Nile and the races to the North and South Poles, the scramble to reach Timbuctoo was sustained by intense international rivalry and spawned a widespread speculative discourse involving politicians, scientists, scientific patrons, explorers, and journalists. Drawing on recent work on the social history of truth, the author considers how and why different geographical descriptions of Timbuctoo were deemed credible by the scientific communities of London and Paris. Judgments about ‘new’ geographical information were influenced, if not determined, by a complex and shifting rhetoric of adjudication in which moral assessments about the character and status of rival claimants loomed especially large. When the French explorer René Caillié claimed the prize of the Paris Geographical Society as the first explorer to reach and return from Timbuctoo in 1828, his achievements sparked an acrimonious debate between British and French geographers that raised fundamental questions about the purpose of African exploration and the nature of geographical truth. Of central concern were the legitimacy of disguise as an exploratory tactic, and the importance of physical courage and bodily comportment in assessing an explorer's scientific credibility and moral authority.
doi: 10.1068/d207tpmid: N/A
Focusing on a small group of natural historians working in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I argue that the relations between travellers and their fieldsites are particular, complex, and multivalent. In opposition to the suggestion that the writings of all Euro-American travellers during the Age of Empire’ were determined only by a single, superior, and colonising representational economy, I assert that encounters with foreign lands were as important in the formation of travellers' ideas as the theories and preconceptions brought with them from Europe. Although it is argued that the more bombastic rhetoric of the travel texts of European, and particularly British, travellers in Argentina were in part influenced by British financial and technological dominance in Argentina in the 19th century, the importance of other sources of inspiration are also drawn, including the landscapes and natures of Argentina themselves. Focusing particularly on the writings of William Henry Hudson, the prominent Victorian natural historian, the paper lays out the significance of the Patagonian landscape in the development and vindication of his ideas about nature and the human self—summarised in Hudson's theory of ‘animism’. Hudson's combination of Darwinian and eugenicist theories of evolution with Argentine-government-inspired ideas of social development are also noted. In conclusion I argue both for the need to pay attention to the sociocultural and historical processes that engender discourses on particular places and natures, as well as the importance of acknowledging dispersion and multivalence within such discursive formations.
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